Kent State University 

Special Collections and Archives 

May 4 Collection, Oral History Project 

 

Oral History Interview 

Kenneth “Ken” J. Hammond interviewed by Sean Schifano 

Friday, 27 September 2024, approx. 2:30–4:43 p.m. 

 

[NOTE: This transcript follows Chicago and APA styles in capitalizing “Black” and “White” as proper nouns denoting racial and ethnic groups. The first draft of this transcript was created using an automated speech-to-text process and subsequently audit-edited by the interviewer for accuracy, spelling, punctuation, vernacular, and editorial annotations. While timestamps generated during automated transcription have been kept for easier reference, occasional errors in identifying or separating speakers made it necessary to identify them manually. Those portions of the interview thus do not contain timestamps. For the same reason, timestamps that do appear are sometimes closely approximate rather than exact.] 

 

 

0:00:02 - Sean Schifano 

All right, this is Sean Schifano interviewing Ken Hammond on Friday, September 27th, at approximately 2:30 p.m. Do I have permission to record this interview, Ken? 

 

Ken Hammond 

Absolutely. 

 

Sean Schifano 

All right. So, as I was saying, I have listened to a previous interview you did with the Kent State Oral History Project in 2010, so I have some frame of reference for, for Kent State and your experience with it, your connection to it, and so what I wanted to try to do for this roughly hour is to backtrack over some of the same territory with a different emphasis—some of the same issues, but with a focus on your particular role, your particular feelings and experiences with reference to the events, since we have a decent record, I would say now, of what the events themselves were. Um. All right. So let’s, let’s start maybe by setting the stage a little before your time in Kent. You grew up in Ohio, from Cleveland, yeah? 

 

0:01:11 - Ken Hammond 

Yeah, I grew up in a suburb, y’know, until my senior year in high school, an all-White suburb, just outside the city of Cleveland—Warrensville Heights. Um. And, you know, had a very, very typical, or at least sort of archetypical, Midwest childhood, y’know, y’know, playin’ in the woods and runnin’ in the fields and stuff like that. Yeah, went to high school, graduated in 1967. Raised in the Methodist Church, but in a sort of liberal interpretation of the Methodist Church, which contributed to early involvement with civil rights, things like that, y’know, in the context of the mid-’60s. Yeah, so. My parents were—neither of my parents had gone to college. My dad had a—how shall we say?—complicated career. He, he was a musician back in the 1930s, played in one of the big bands, and then during the war [World War II] he was in the Army Air Corps teaching people how to fly. After the war he was a bush pilot flying hunters up into northern Canada and then, after he married my mom, he stopped doing that and became—he worked for the Automobile Association, AAA, for many years, and finally wound up working as the County Highway Engineer for Cuyahoga County, which is a county around Cleveland, so he, you know, had this—he did a lot of different things. He was a—I won’t say a jack of all trades, but he certainly had a variety of occupations. My mom was basically a housewife, except one month every year, the month of March. She also worked for AAA. That was the year, in those days, that was the year during which everybody’s license plate in Ohio got renewed. Everybody’s license plate in Ohio got renewed and she worked as a typist for AAA doing processing paperwork of people who were getting their license plates renewed. So that was an interesting—I had one sibling, my older brother, Bill, who was four years older than I, and yeah, that was—that’s youth. [laughter] 

 

0:03:48 - Sean Schifano 

So by the time, by the time you were out of high school and considering what you might do for college, you—would you say you were already identifying in some way as a left-wing activist or as someone who identified with the Left in, in American politics? 

 

0:04:08 - Ken Hammond 

Um. Not quite at that point. I got—I was interested in, um—a variety of things. I mean, I was very interested in history and politics in high school and that was already, that was already forming. Of course, y’know, mid-’60s in America was a semi-tumultuous time. Civil rights, as I say, through the Methodist Church. Our minister was active in civil rights and, you know, went on marches and went down to Mississippi at one point and things like that, and I was, I was dating his daughter, who later became my first wife, and—you know, so I had those kinds of engagements. But I was also my older brother was in Vietnam and, so you know I was keepin’ an eye on that situation, reading history about it and everything. I was already interested in Asia, China and things like that. But I was, I would say, at that point I was, I was sort of a left Democrat, you know. I worked in the summer of 1967—I was the youth coordinator for the Carl B. Stokes Campaign for Mayor of Cleveland. Carl Stokes was the first Black mayor of a northern city, elected in November of 1967, and I had volunteered for the campaign and, and wound up being put in charge, working with another fella on the youth mobilization, getting young people out to hand out leaflets and man tables and do things like that. So that was, you know, that was kind of a progressive side of the Democratic Party. But it was only after I got to Kent that I really had a fairly quick move to the left.  

 

0:06:06 - Sean Schifano 

And what year was that when you came to Kent?  

 

0:06:07 - Ken Hammond 

’67. I started there in September of ’67. 

 

0:06:10 - Sean Schifano 

OK, so straight out of high school more or less. 

 

Ken Hammond 

Yep, yep. 

 

Sean Schifano 

And, what brought you to Kent State specifically? Was it just the college that happened to be nearby, or?  

 

0:06:21 - Ken Hammond 

Proximity, yes. 

 

Sean Schifano 

OK. 

 

Ken Hammond 

I, I—when I was graduating from high school—I was getting ready to graduate from high school, thinking about college—I wanted to go someplace to study history and politics. My first choice was the American University in Washington, D.C. I also applied to Cornell because I was interested in Southeast Asia. I started reading about Vietnam, obviously, but also Indonesia and other things like that. Cornell had, and I would say has, the best Southeast Asian studies program in the country. So I applied there as well, and, for the heck of it, I applied to Columbia, and I applied to Kent and all that. And I got into—I didn’t get into Columbia, but I did get into both American and Cornell. But my parents, you know, were not wealthy, and so, um, we came to an agreement that if I would go to a state school in Ohio for the first two years, then I could try to transfer to either American or Cornell or even, by then, someplace else, but, you know, one of those, and that was—that’s what they could afford, and so that’s what I did. 

 

Sean Schifano 

So to return to the connection of this, this educational pathway to your, your emerging politics. Since you didn’t think of yourself necessarily right away as a member of the radical left of the ’60s, and that was something that you came more into contact with in college, did you—had you already, since you were interested in Asia, had you already started reading material on the transformations of China and of the Soviet Union?  

 

0:08:19 - Ken Hammond 

Not so much the Russian stuff, but, but definitely China stuff. Yeah, I was reading, you know, I was reading history. I was reading contemporary stuff, things about the Sino-Soviet split or about Chinese foreign policy, and of course in 1966, with the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in China, that was in the news a lot. I was such a geek that, you know, I had a subscription to, like, Time magazine, and uh. I was working in those days in a department store right at the eastern edge of Cleveland, a place called Shaker Square, and on the other side of the square was a bookstore, a lovely bookstore, that I used to go to and, you know, I picked up books there on Asia and China in particular. So I was interested already, but, but, y’know, thinking about it, but not yet really having fully developed ideas about it, you know, myself. 

 

0:09:31 - Sean Schifano 

OK. And so, so we’re now at the inflection point. You have just started at Kent, and you said very early on you came into contact with individuals and groups. One of these was the Students for a Democratic Society [(SDS)], the chapter at Kent State. Can you say a little about how you first came into contact with individuals and groups on campus that were connected to this and how it affected your, your politics, in the immediate context? 

 

0:10:01 - Ken Hammond 

Sure, sure. I mean, SDS does not come to Kent until April of ’68, so at the end of my, my freshman year. 

 

Sean Schifano 

OK. 

 

Ken Hammond 

But when I got there in the fall, you know, I wanted to, I wanted to start studying about politics, and of course, then as now, you go in as a, as a freshman, a first-year student, and there are requirements that you have to take—you know, that, that range of courses. A little science, a little math, a little, you know, whatever, social science and stuff, as well as the history and, and, and political science classes that I wanted to take. I was fortunate in that I enrolled in a—undergraduate, sort of, intro to American politics class taught by a professor, Peter Crossland, who was very liberal. He was a liberal Democrat, you know, and he was in the—he got elected to the state legislature, interesting fella. And, after the fall—Kent was still on a quarter system in those days, so there were three sets of courses in the—across the academic year. Um. When I finished the, the, the fall quarter, y’know, apparently, Professor Crossland thought that I was, I was doing OK, and he told me that if I wanted to, even though I was just a freshman, I could sign into his senior political theory seminar, and of course I wasn’t gonna to turn som’m like that down. So I did that. And when I got in that room, that’s really when the rubber began to hit the road, because the students in that class—um—were, were pretty interesting people. They were all people who were in one way or another connected with political activism at Kent, so they were a li’l—they were seniors or upperclassmen, they were a li’l, y’know, two or three years older than me. But I got in there and it was great. We read amazing stuff—Reinhold Niebuhr and, and, y’know, different political theorists of, of this stripe or that stripe. A little Marx. And I started reading on my own and talking to these guys and, and, and women. There was at that time a, an organization at Kent called the Kent Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the KCEWV, um. And every Wednesday from 12 to 1, they would hold a silent vigil outside the entrance to the Student Union, and, you know, I noticed that and would stop by and keep an eye on it, y’know. But as the, as the winter quarter progressed and the political theory class got more and more interesting and the conversations outside of class with these people, um—you know, it’s just—ya start down a certain path and, and, and to seem to lead from one thing to another. So at a certain point—I think after the new year, probably very early in ’68—I stepped across the line, you know. There was a, there was a, like a little rope, uh, thing, that that separated the people who were doing the vigil from the people who were standing around, many of whom were not particularly friendly, but I crossed the line and I started bein’ part of that, that group as well. And it was from that—then, you know, the conversations of course picked up even more so, and then, um. Towards the end of the spring semester in ’68, y’know, things were gettin’ pretty intense in the country. There had been uprisings in some of the cities, including Cleveland and Akron, in the Black communities, but also, of course, places like Newark and Detroit. Watts. So there was a lot of, a lot of, you know, growing agitation out in the larger society. And of course then in April 5th ’68, Dr. King is assassinated and whoa, that, you know—seemed like things were gettin’ pretty intense. The Tet Offensive in Vietnam had happened in February of ’68. You had the McCarthy campaign, you had Bobby Kennedy’s campaign goin’, lots of things goin’ on. And I noticed—I saw a notice for an organizational meeting for Students for a Democratic Society—I had no idea what the organization was, but it sounded—I was a student, and I was certainly for a democratic society, so I decided to go. And that was great, that was, that was—that was a turning point in my life because I met the people, most of whom were, were students at Kent, some of whom had been in the political theory seminar, some of whom I’d met in other contexts, a few I didn’t know from Kent but I got to know, and, and a couple of—fellas from the national SDS organization who were, y’know, helpin’ out, and what they said made a lot of sense. They gave me stuff to read—Port Huron Statement, things like that—and um. That was it, I decided I was joinin’ SDS and uh, and uh, that’s what I, that’s what I stayed with for as long as it lasted [chuckle], through, through June of ’69. 

 

0:15:52 - Sean Schifano 

So was that early membership of SDS at Kent composed of primarily political science students, or was there a substantial overlap between the membership and the students you had encountered in your political theory seminar or in the wider political science major?  

 

0:16:09 - Ken Hammond 

Many of the people—and, and the seminar wasn’t big, y’know, we’re talkin’ maybe a dozen, fifteen people, som’m like that—but I’d say maybe half a dozen people out of the seminar wound up in SDS. Some were involved with other organizations. Ruthie Gibson, for example, worked with the Young Socialist Alliance, which was not SDS, it was a separate grouping. There was also the Student Mobilization Committee which was a growing, at that point, anti-war grouping. Some people were involved with that. That sort of replaced the, the Committee on the War in Vietnam. That faded away and other organizations started to grow, especially SDS. Um. But there were also people who hadn’t been in the political theory seminar. Jim Powery, who was an art student who was at Kent on a football scholarship—he was a, he had been a big high school football star in Ohio—he was at Kent. And, and a few other people. Um. Yeah, in the spring of ’68, I would say that SDS had maybe 30 people involved with it, and by the fall, our first meeting in September of ’68, there were over 60 people, and by the third or fourth meeting there were 200. So it, it—that stuff really took off in the fall of ’68. Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated in June. The police riot at, at the Chicago Democratic Convention in Chicago in August of ’68 had, had radicalized a lot of people and, and o’ course, the ongoing, the ongoing war in Vietnam, the horror of seeing that every day on your TV screen—uh, uh, y’know, more and more people just, just came to feel that this, this has, this has gotta stop, y’know. So, things—by the fall of ’68, things really began to accelerate. 

 

0:17:56 - Sean Schifano 

And so by the time—by the time the protests had begun in, on May 1st of 1970, my understanding is that it begins with a number of about 500 students, so it, it far exceeds the number of people in SDS specifically, um. Would you say that in its early days there were already deep tensions within SDS or between SDS and other politically active organizations on campus? 

 

0:18:23 - Ken Hammond 

Not in the early days. In the early days we did a lot o’ stuff together. You know, we were—SDS was, was a, a young organization. It didn’t have—uh, um—it wasn’t affiliated with an adult party. Like Young Socialist Alliance [(YSA)] was affiliated with the Socialist Workers Party, which was a long-established Trotskyist, uh, y’know, group. Um. And of course, Student Mobilization [i.e., the National Student Mobilization Committee, or simply Student Mobilization Committee (SMC), student affiliate of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam], they weren’t affiliated with a political party but there were an awful lot of liberal Democrats that were involved with them. SDS was kind of its own—its own organization. It had spun off from some, some old liberal trade unionist groupings back in the ’40s and ’50s, but it had—it was really its own, its own beast in a sense. But at first we all worked together. Black United Students [(BUS)], which was, y’know, the sort of, uh—civil rights presence on campus amongst the, amongst the Black students, worked closely with them. The tensions within SDS emerge in the spring of ’69, and that—that of course, that was true on a national scale, and it was also true at Kent. 

 

0:19:43 - Sean Schifano 

And was this generally true of other orgs like it? So for Young Socialists, was it generally a fairly cooperative or cohesive organization in terms of— 

 

0:19:48 - Ken Hammond 

Yeah, the other organizations didn’t, didn’t get into the—how shall we say?—the tactical differences that, that came to fracture SDS. Y’know, YSA I mean, as I say, it was affiliated with the Socialist Workers Party. That was a disciplined organization. They had their Democratic centralist thing, all that, so they, they had their own shtick. And The Mobe [sometimes “MOBE” or “The MOBE”; nickname of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, of which the National Student Mobilization Committee, or simply Student Mobilization Committee (SMC), was the student affiliate body] was a single-issue organization. You know, I’m sure that there were divisions of opinion within it as far as different things, but basically, they had a mandate, they had a task. They organized the April and the October mass marches in Washington and did the work in between to mobilize people to get out and, and do those things. They wanted to demonstrate the, the breadth and depth of opposition to the war. That was their thing, y’know. SDS, as it evolved, you know, became a—basically a revolutionary organization. We did not see political reform arising within the established, y’know, parties and all that as a viable path, y’know, that, that if there was going to be, as there needed to be, fundamental transformation in the economy, in the society and the political system, that was gonna require radical change. It wasn’t gonna be something that was gonna be sort of—incrementally gained. So, that set us apart organizationally, and sort of ideologically, I suppose you could say, but. What split SDS was the question of, um—what was the nature of the situation in the United States, at that time, and what should we be doing within that political context, within that political framework? And, and—some people within SDS came to believe that the country was in what they called a pre-revolutionary crisis, which is to say that the contradictions in America, the political, social, economic contradictions within America, were—had intensified to such a degree that a, a—the outbreak of revolutionary struggle was at least a possibility. And so the task was, to organize and work to precipitate that crisis and launch that outcome, that, that struggle. Others of us, and I was in the other grouping, did not see the United States as being in a pre-revolutionary crisis. Um. At best, at best, it might be in a pre-pre-revolutionary crisis. It was certainly in a crisis, but where that was going—we, we did not see that as, you know, we didn’t see ourselves on the threshold of, of revolution. It wasn’t, you know, late September 1917, y’know it was—I don’t know what [laughter], October of 1912 or something, y’know. I mean. Our view was that what, what we needed to be doing, was to continue the kind of political education work amongst students, amongst trade unions. We were working closely at that time, in our particular context, with the Hospital Workers Union in Akron. They were on strike, we were on the picket line and doing support work and all this kind of stuff to build a broad-based radical consciousness which could at some point, when contradictions did intensify to the right level, be used to, to, y’know, pop the process, to get, to get the, get the struggle going. But we, we—that, but that was nothing—that wasn’t anything that was in sight, you know. So that division that became—that’s a deep division, you know. One group thinks a single spark starts a prairie fire, we’re gonna to do this maybe next week, y’know. And the rest of us are thinking, we’re at least years, if not decades, away from this. This, this is a, a long, long, arduous—a protracted struggle, as some would say. 

 

0:24:45 - Sean Schifano 

So you’ve got an enormous range of viewpoints within SDS and then between SDS and other organizations. You have a very complex set of relationships and interactions—the civil rights movement, the emergence of the New Left, the anti-war movement, the Young Socialists and their particular concerns, along with the ones they shared with others. What roles did you specifically have within and among these, these organizations?  

 

0:25:17 - Ken Hammond 

Well. When I was in SDS, I was—my work was carried on within—within that framework. Um. So. We cooperated, collaborated with other groups, but—we had our own—projects. You know, there was a lot of—as we used to say, political education work. Going into the dorms to have discussions and debates. Y’know, you go into the common room in a dorm and get some people together and start talkin’ about stuff and other people would gather and sometimes it would get heated and sometimes it would be more fun. But it was a process. It was a process of bringing ideas out, talking about stuff. Um. We, of course, held rallies on different issues, we showed films, we had speakers come in. You do all that kind o’ stuff. And I, um—SDS, had a very [chuckle]—a sort of weirdly, almost schizophrenic approach to leadership. Um. We didn’t have officers, we didn’t have, um, a formal—leadership body. But, there was a steering committee that met on Mondays to plan the next week’s activities and prepare for the Saturday open meeting, the mass meeting, which was held in the Student Center, and those—fall ’68, as I say, those—we had 200, 300 people at those most of the time, and if we had an action, if you were gonna go have a demonstration, there could be 500 people that would turn out. Um. But, the core of people who effectively constituted the leadership was maybe a group of, I dunno, 20 or 30 individuals, and that’s who met at the steering committee, but the steering committee was open. Anybody could come to the steering committee, it wasn’t—you weren’t elected to be on the steering committee—so there was a process of self-selection. And, y’know—that’s as may be. Pretty quickly, a, a, a group kind of consolidated that was the effective leadership of, of the chapter. Um. Y’know, uh. And, and, and that group persisted, you know. Some people would show up for some things and not for others. Some people might be involved for a while and then have to go off and do other things or, y’know, whatever circumstances might change. But there was a core of people that, that came to the meetings and did the work. And that was it, y’know, typing leaflets, running the gestetner, the hand crank mimeograph machine, um—doin’ that kind of stuff. My role, I was—I went to the steering committee meetings. I was regular participant in the, in the steering committee meetings. Um. But I also—I got tasked—with a couple of, of more specific assignments. I wrote a weekly column for the Kent Stater, the, the campus newspaper, called “Bringing it All Back Home.” We were infatuated with Dylan lyrics in those days. Lots of posters and leaflets and stuff had, had lines from Dylan songs as their, as their headers. So that was the, that was the column’s title. And that ran. But the major thing that I did was to put together a sort of research project to look at the ties between the university and the larger social, political, economic environment. There was—there were a number of sociologists, G. William Domhoff—oh God, I can’t remember all the names right now, but uh—in the, in the ’50s and ’60s—C. Wright Mills, another one—who had done a lot of work on, um—elites in America, y’know. This idea—we have this, this mythology in America being a classless society. Y’know that, uh, we’re all equal and, and, uh, you know, maybe there’s some problems with that, but we’re workin’ on it, y’know. But that’s, y’know, that’s clearly not actually the case. So these guys have been lookin’ at power structure analysis, basically, is what they called it. And one o’ them—I think it was Domhoff—had written a book called Who Rules America? [(1967)] that laid out the, the, the infrastructure, basically, of elite, of the elite—the clubs they belonged to, the corporations they ran, the sort of, um—organizations, the inte—like the Council on Foreign Relations or something like that, that, that served as their, their coordinating—intellectual or whatever you wanna call it—infrastructure. So we thought, well, how does, how does Kent work, y’know? Let’s take a look at that. So we looked at the Board of Trustees of the university and the Board of Regents for Higher Education in the state of Ohio, which were the two bodies that were ultimately responsible for governance at Kent. So we looked into them and—what were their—what did they do, who were they? What were their jobs, what was their—position in life, y’know? And we found that they tended to be representatives of corporations. Especially the Regents on the statewide level tended to be tied into some o’ the major, major corporations. But even at Kent there were ties, for example, to the rubber industry. Akron was, y’know, twelve miles away and Goodyear and Firestone and Goodrich—all the big tire companies were headquartered there. And there were other, other links, y’know. Banks were involved, y’know, and it was classic, it was great. So we, we researched that through the winter of, of ’68 to ’69, and then wrote it up, and, and—we called it “Who Rules Kent?”—wrote it up into—I dunno, about a 35-, 36-page, uh—pamphlet. And then we started usin’ that to talk about, um—that, this—these things we were talkin’ about—imperialism and racism and poverty and exploitation, all—that wasn’t just som’m that was kind of out there in the vague distance, but that the university itself was connected up to this larger nexus of, of, of power and hierarchy. So that was a lot o’ fun. But that was, that was my baby. A lot of comrades worked on it, y’know, a lot o’ people worked on it, but, but it was—I wrote it, y’know. So that was, that was great, that was, that was a good piece o’ work. 

 

0:32:45 - Sean Schifano 

How long did it take you to write it, roughly?  

 

0:32:47 - Ken Hammond 

Oh, you know it was months. It was months. Spent a lot of time in the library. You know, these days you could produce som’m like that with the Internet, probably in a few weeks. 

 

0:32:57 - Sean Schifano 

ChatGPT can do it in five minutes. It won’t be as good. 

 

0:33:04 - Ken Hammond 

It won’t be as good. [laughter] It won’t be as good. And it won’t have the—it won’t have the clarity of analysis. [laughter] 

 

0:33:08 - Sean Schifano 

All right. So we’ve seen an emergence of more campus activism protests in response to the civil rights situation, to the war situation, to the general confluence of status quo politics, and then the response to them. Um. During your time there, what was the first major protest you knew of that got significant traction, or even perhaps traction beyond your expectations?  

 

0:33:38 - Ken Hammond 

Well—that’s gotta be—a joint action in October of ’68, um—between SDS and the Black United Students. [pause] In those days, Kent had a law enforcement training program that basically, um—y’know, educated people to become police officers. And, not surprisingly, police departments that were looking to recruit new officers would come to campus, to, um—to recruit. Well, one of the police departments that did that was the Oakland, California police department, which was—Oakland was the—was the point of origin of the Black Panther Party, and it was, really, the scene of—as close as, as things came in those days to an actual—I won’t say race war, but, but an actual—armed conflict between Black Liberation [Army (BLA)] forces—the Black Panther Party—and the repressive institutions of the state, the front line being the Oakland Police Department. That of course went on all over the country. Wherever the Panthers were able to establish themselves in a Black community, the police became—the local police became their primary antagonists. Although in some instances, Chicago being the best example, when they, when they assassinated Fred Hampton, the FBI of course gets involved in that as well. But, the Oakland Police Department were certainly headliners in the struggle against the Panthers and, by extension, against, y’know, the Black liberation struggle more broadly. So when it—when the word, y’know, passed around that the Oakland cops were comin’ to recruit at Kent, we were like, “No, they’re not,” and um. So SDS and Black United Students organized the occupation of the center where these interviews were supposed to take place. And so, um—y’know, went in there in the morning and, and we just stayed there, we shut it down. And at the end of the day, when we got word that the Oakland representatives had left town, we left, y’know? That really shook things up, because it was a—y’know, it was—we took over a building. It did not end with, y’know, the police coming in and beating people and dragging people and—y’know, it didn’t go like that. Which of course we were familiar with from the Columbia [University] struggle in the spring of ’68, y’know, everybody knew that that sort of thing could happen, but that’s not how it went down. But, over the following few days, the university made an interesting—decision and a tactical error, which was that they began to sanction and discipline SDS leaders, but not anyone from Black United Students. [pause] For obvious reasons. And the Black United Students were like, “No no no. You can’t treat us like that,” y’know. Um. “If you persist in sanctioning and disciplining SDS, but you don’t hold us to the same standard, you’re racist, and you’re treating us in a way that we don’t accept. So—stop it. Stop. There should be no prosecutions,” as it were, y’know. “Just forget it.” And the university, for a day or so, didn’t, didn’t respond to that. So—all the Black students at Kent—and there weren’t a huge number, but there were hundreds—left. They got together, they marched out the Prentice Gate—the main gate, the front gate off campus—got on buses, went to Akron, got put up by, by, of course, churches, the Black churches in Akron, and, and some, some not-Black churches as well. Um. And uh, and that, oh my God, you know, the university flipped out! Made the national news and, oh my God, you know, here—“Black Students Boycott,” y’know, it was great. And they caved immediately, y’know? They were like, “OK.” They dropped all the disciplinary stuff against SDS, and, and said, “Please come back,” and uh. And they waited—I gotta, yeah, I gotta give BUS a lot of credit—they did not just say, “Oh OK,” you know. They were like, “Well, we want to make sure that you’re sincere about this,” so, they waited a few days and then, of course, everybody, everybody came back. But that was, that was the first, uh, that was the first biggie. [laughter] 

 

0:39:12 - Sean Schifano 

[laughter] All right. Well, over the first two and a half years of these, these protests, before we get to 1970 and actually turn to the time around the shooting, um—were there any protests or other campus actions that you thought did get out of hand in any way? Clearly not to the same degree, but were there others preceding this that had already, as it were, intensified a situation that— 

 

0:39:43 - Ken Hammond 

Sort of ramped things up? Yeah. Well. There’s two—two kind of markers in the spring of ’69, neither of which rose to a particular—I wouldn’t say out of control, uh—but there were some tussles. Um. In, uh—I can’t remember now if it was late March or early April, I’d have to consult the, the, the, the docs—but, um. [pause] We had formulated what, what we called “The Four Demands”— 

 

Sean Schifano 

And the “we” is SDS here? 

 

Ken Hammond 

SDS, yeah. We had formulated “The Four Demands.” The—which were, end the ROTC program, the Reserve Officer Training Corps program, which we saw as the—the primary presence of the military on campus, certainly the most visible presence of the military on campus, doing their little drills and marches out on the common. We wanted that gone. We wanted the Liquid Crystals Institute [i.e, the Liquid Crystal Institute, established 1965] to be abolished, or, at least, to cease doing defense research, which basically is all they did, so—that would have been the end o’ that. They were—that was an organization that got a lot o’ money from the, from the Department of Defense, to develop, um—liquid crystal sensors, which were basically night scopes, the primary deployment of which was to assassinate [National] Liberation Front [a.k.a. Viet Cong] workers in villages in Vietnam. It was a way that the snipers could see at night and, and target and take out the people that they, that they wanted to go after. So we didn’t want that, obviously. We wanted to get rid o’ that. So there were those two that worked kind of on the military side. And then we wanted, o’ course, an end to the law enforcement program that had brought the Oakland police, or attempted to bring the Oakland police. That was the third. And the fourth was to abolish the Northeast Ohio Crime Lab at Kent, um—because that was where—you know, when you got pulled over for a broken taillight, supposedly, and the cops searched your car and they found a roach under the backseat o’ your Volkswagen, that’s where they sent it to analyze it and find out if it was marijuana so they could send you to prison for two to ten years, and we didn’t think that was a good thing either. So we wanted to get rid o’ that. So, ROTC, Liquid Crystals Institute [sic], law enforcement program, Northeast Ohio Crime Lab. Those were the four demands, get rid of those four things. We had—we organized a march, we had a rally, we read out the demands, we had people speak about that stuff and then we marched over across campus, not very far, to the administration building, because what do you do with demands? You present them to the institution. But o’ course, y’know, they knew what we were doin’, and so they had cops there, uh—to, uh—to block the door. And, our position was, “Hey, we’re students at this institution. We pay our tuition. We wanna present, y’know, a, a document, a grievance, to the administration. We’re comin’ in.” Y’know? And their position was—“You’re not.” [laughter] And that did, that did result in some—some pushing and shoving—a few fists may have been—involved—but it wasn’t, y’know—it didn’t degenerate into some total brawl. But, as a result of that, a few days later, the university issued, um—disciplinary notices to—I think six—yeah, to six SDS people, um—who they decided had, had, had—misbehaved sufficiently. Um. And then they announced that they were going to hold disciplinary hearings, and if, if those went badly, these students would have been expelled from the university. And we didn’t want that. So, a little bit later—I think it was, this was late April by now—I think it was like April 26, som’m like that—there’s a building at Kent called the Music and Speech Building, and for some reason—uh, they decided to hold the, the hearings in a, in a room, a classroom, in that, in that building, up on the, up on the third floor—which was the top floor. And we were like, “No,” y’know, “that”—“we’re not”—“that’s not happening.” So we had a rally and speakers and stuff, and then we marched over to the music and speech building. By that time there were groups of students who had decided that they were opposed to what we were doing, and, uh—mostly frat boys. And so, there was a group o’ them out front and—again, there was a little bit of tusslin’, a li’l back-and-forth. That was my first experience of, uh—of, of an actual fight—y’know, with somebody. I have no idea who that person was, but a li’l, ali’l back-and-forth. But then somebody noticed that one of the side doors to the building was open, so we all went around, went in, went upstairs and there was nobody there. But we went to the room that had been designated and, and sort of said, “Well, we’re here and this”—“nothing’s gonna happen here.” And then, um—the university called in state police. State police sent a couple hundred officers over. They kinda sealed off the building and, um—y’know, they were gonna come in and arrest people for trespassing, which again we thought was an interesting—call because it was a campus building, we were students on the campus, and y’know it seemed like it wasn’t appropriate. We did manage to get most of the people who had come into the building—a few hundred people had come into the building. There was a grad student in the Music Department who happened to have a key to the elevator, um—and so, he began to shuttle people down the elevator to a loading dock where they could—go away, y’know. They, they hadn’t sealed off that part of, of the building, and we moved a lot o’ people out—including myself, I went out that way—but we did have 59 people arrested. Um. [pause] There was some more—little bit more scuffling there, although there had been some scuffling on the way, and there was a door, a big metal door that got, uh—had some, some damage to it, that we had gone through. Um. But, y’know, so we had 59 people arrested. That was, y’know, the, the, the most, um—I guess, dramatic—outcome—up to that point, and, and, you know, that was—SDS was already starting to fragment and fall apart nationally, but that was like the last major action that the SDS chapter as the SDS chapter carried out. 

 

0:47:34 - Sean Schifano 

OK. With these protests and student actions going on, was there a general expectation that these would escalate further? Was it see—I mean, was it seen as being, if not inevitable then probable, that the next step would be additional actions that would probably lead to scuffles or some kind of physical altercation?  

 

0:48:00 - Ken Hammond 

Well, there were, there were deep divisions about this. By this time within the SDS chapter, the, the incipient split, what would become an overt split with the Weathermen in June of ’69—by April, this was already pretty advanced within our chapter. Our chapter, the Ann Arbor chapter and headquarters in Chicago of SDS—those were the three places where the Weather Movement really—developed. 

 

Sean Schifano 

And the Weather Movement, just to give a frame of reference, is? 

 

Ken Hammond 

The Weathermen. They published a document which presented their analysis, the idea that we were in a pre-revolutionary crisis. That was entitled, once again, a Bob Dylan lyric, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” [“Subterranean Homesick Blues” (1965)], meaning, “Duh, it’s obvious we’re in this situation, let’s go,” basically. So we just—we called them the Weathermen. That, that grouping was—had already defined itself within the chapter. Those of us who were not following that position, taking that position, began to coalesce around a group that was emerging nationally at that point, called the Revolutionary Youth Movement, and uh—but that split within the chapter was already there. So, those of us who advocated this sort of political education approach, our view, after the Music and Speech Building, was that this was a moment where, y’know, the repressive nature of the system had been exposed, blah-deh-blah, and that we should build on that and talk about it and use it to organize and build the organizations and things like that. The Weather people, their view was that we should sort of ignore what happened because we’re just White people and we didn’t face the same kind of oppression that people in, in, in the Black community or the Hispanic community did, which of course, was true, but they wanted to basically, yeah, try to find ways to escalate. Try to find ways to take the struggle higher, take the struggle further, which of course is what Weather does. After the national split in the fall of ’69—Days of Rage in Chicago [October 8–11, 1969], where they trashed part of the downtown, thinking, I guess, that that was going to trigger some sort of uprising, which it totally didn’t. Y’know, it was a stupid action, but—y’know—yeah, so there were different positions, but. At Kent the follow-up to Music and Speech was, first, tryin’ to deal with the fallout from those arrests—raising money for lawyers—y’know, mobilizing people to get people bailed out of jail, y’know, all that kind o’ stuff. And then, after school finished that year, the summer went by. By the fall of ’69, there, there’s a real drop in the level of political engagement on campus. A lot o—y’know, a lot of people—people don’t want to get expelled from school. People don’t wanna, y’know—they just didn’t want to deal with a lot of the adverse—the potential at least—adverse consequences. You know so, a lot of people who were sincerely against the war, in favor of a more, as we say, just and equitable society and all ’at. But, they were worried about their educations and their careers and their prospects. Of course, if you were a guy and you lost your student deferment, you could get drafted and get sent off to Vietnam, which happened. Um, y’know, so—the tide was out by the fall of ’69. So, at that point nobody was—in the context of Kent, nobody was particularly worried that things were gonna get—get too riotous or anything like that. But, there was a lot of—it does—that doesn’t mean that the, the feelings, the opposition to the war or the opposition to racism, or, y’know, the, the wish to establish something that didn’t involve, y’know, 20 percent of young Americans being in poverty, y’know. Those things, those feelings, those, those attitudes persisted, but people adjusted their behavior to a more cautious—mode— 

 

Sean Schifano 

OK. 

 

Ken Hammond 

—let’s say. 

 

Sean Schifano 

And just, just in closing for this phase, did, did—you called it the Revolutionary Youth Movement” 

 

Ken Hammond 

Yeah. 

 

Sean Schifano 

Did that movement end up having a formal organizational presence on Kent State’s campus?  

 

0:53:06 - Ken Hammond 

Nah, not really. Um. RYM never became a, a, a formal national organization. It gets—it’s called that. Y’know, the Weatherman had written, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The guys that were kind of working on, on the alternative position, guys like Noel Ignatin, wrote a paper called “Towards a Revolutionary Youth Movement,” and then a little bit later, in the winter of ’69 to ’70, they wrote a second paper called, creatively enough, “Towards a Revolutionary Youth Movement II.” And that’s what we came to use as a sort of informal designation. We called it RYM, R-Y-M, RYM II. But that was never a—never became a national organization. Yeah. Or even, it wasn’t a formal organization at Kent. There were those of us who had been in SDS who were still there. Some people—the guys who got arrested, of course, they wound up doing six months in the county jail. Not the 59 [people previously arrested], but the six guys from the administration building, some others, you know, left town to go do one thing or another, y’know. But there were enough of us still on campus that, y’know, there was activism in the fall. We sent a big group to D.C. in October of ’69 for the mobilization march. Y’know, there were still things going on, but without SDS, the sort of radical core had, had kind of dissipated, and that winter, winter of ’69 to ’70, was definitely a low ebb compared to what had, had gone before. 

 

0:54:58 - Sean Schifano 

So general de-escalation by proxy, you might say, because of the various threats that students could face— 

 

Ken Hammond 

Yeah. 

 

Sean Schifano 

—if they, if they were in action, 

 

Ken Hammond 

Yeah. 

 

Sean Schifano 

Y’know, a kind of national turning of the tide in the aftermath of Dr King’s assassination, the fragmentation of SDS, all of these forces sort of coalescing in, in late ’69. 

 

Ken Hammond 

Yeah. Yeah. 

 

Sean Schifano 

Um. Well, let’s then move forward to the, the actual days and then day itself of the event. The protests leading up to the event, of course, begin on May 1st of 1970. As I said, my understanding of that is that this, this specific protest begins with about 500 students—please correct me if that’s mistaken, and um—and gets underway in response to President Richard Nixon’s declaration that there would be an incursion into Cambodia with the aid of South Vietnam. Is that a generally accurate summary?  

 

0:55:59 - Ken Hammond 

Yeah, yeah, I mean, the night of April 30th, Nixon goes on national television to announce the invasion of, of Cambodia, which was already underway. And, o’ course Cambodia had been a neutral country, and this, and this blows that all out of the water. But. Y’know, Nixon had been elected in 1968, in, in—I think in large part because he professed to have what he called a “secret plan for peace.” And I think that, that in that context of late ’69 into early ’70, many of the people at Kent, many of the young people at Kent, who kind of stepped back a little bit from the level of political engagement that they had taken up in the previous year, did so in part because they, they perhaps thought, “Well, maybe, maybe he does have a secret plan for peace, maybe the war will get wound down,” um. Y’know. And so there was, there was an element of that. But now here he is on national television announcing not a secret plan for peace but a public plan for war, y’know? And um, and people basically kinda flipped out, yeah, so, the next morning, the word went around campus that there was gonna be a rally at noon at the commons, which is this big open grassy area in the center of campus, and there’s a—on the on the east side, there’s side, there’s a hill, a ridge that runs through that forms kind of a, a, almost like a natural amphitheater, which in those days was, was largely a grassy hill. They’ve since planted lots o’ big trees there, it doesn’t look the same now, but, y’know, it was a place where people would go out—it was called Blanket Hill because a lot o’ people went to make out there and stuff. But at the bottom of that there was this funky little structure, a little brick thing, that had a bell that was the victory bell that was supposed to be rung whenever the Golden Flashes won a football game, um. Y’know, but that was there. And that was a convenient sort of focal point, because it was at the bottom of the hill, so, if people were sitting on the sort of arc of the hill, y’know, that was a good focal point. So, a, a group of graduate students in History—who called themselves World Historians Opposed to Racism and Exploitation. [pause] 

 

Sean Schifano 

A mouthful. 

 

Ken Hammond 

Do the acronym. 

 

Sean Schifano 

Yeah. [clears throat knowingly] 

 

Ken Hammond 

And, um—they called, they called this rally. And um—and people came—I think it was, I think it was considerably more than 500 people, but it was, y’know, a bunch of people sittin’ on the hillside. And um—various people said a few words and then they had a—they did a little political theater, which was that they had a copy of the Constitution and they said, “Well, Nixon has killed the Constitution, y’know, not only by carrying on the war that the Democrats started, but by expanding the war without any kind of congressional authorization or declaration or anything like that,” y’know. Constitution’s dead, so they dug a little hole and they buried this copy of the Constitution, very cute, um. And, they raised one demand, which was that the university condemn the invasion of Cambodia and call for the withdrawal of American forces from Cambodia and for ending the war in Vietnam. And they said, “Let’s come back”—“back here, Monday, at noon, for their response,” y’know. So that was—that’s how the Monday rally got called. And, and that was that, y’know? The rally was over, the Friday thing was over, and that was that. But, in the crowd, amongst the people who were there, the word—word went around, people talkin’ to each other, to go—as we used to say in Kent, “downtown,” Friday night, that night. Let’s go downtown tonight. “Downtown” meant North Water Street, which was the bar strip. Not that there weren’t bars in other places, but that was where there were a series of uh, of uh—establishments, some of which featured musical venues. There was a place called JB’s [224 North Water Street] that had a basement that was um—where bands played. Others were just—like, like Orville’s [266 North Water Street; popular nickname of Seaver’s Tavern, opened by Orville Seaver], were just drinking establishments—Walter’s, as it was also called [following assumption of ownership by the bar’s former night manager and second owner, Walter Horvath, after Seaver’s death in 1968]. And that’s where, y’know, often, people gathered on a Friday night or on a weekend night. In Ohio in those days, if you were 18, you could drink what they called “low beer,” beer that was 3.2% alcohol by volume. When you were 21, you could drink regular beer which was anything over, like, I dunno, 6% or som’m like that, but 3.2 beer, you could drink that when you were, you were 18. So, y’know. [pause] As they used to say, Kent State was a, a fountain of knowledge where thousands of students went to drink. Um. 

 

Sean Schifano 

[laughter] 

 

Ken Hammond 

Yeah. So, uh—that night—thousands of people were in the streets downtown. So much so, I mean, the bars were full, the sidewalks got full, people began to spill into the street itself, so much so that the street basically got blocked off. There were a couple of incidents where people tried to drive up the street and got mad and honked and tried to drive through the crowd and there was banging on cars and stuff. Um. Y’know, and um. People were pissed, people were angry, people were, uh—frustrated and, and, and, and, and, well, I, I, I would say, enraged, at, at what was goin’ on, y’know? Um. And so—that, that was the scene, there was a lot of millin’ around goin’ along, and, and that was what was goin’ down, until, ’bout 11:30—the cops showed up. And, um—they uh—and they came in riot gear, y’know, and they had, y’know, they had tear gas. And they made a serious—tactical mistake as well, which was that they ordered the bars to close—which meant that everybody who’d been in the bars, then they were in the street too. 

 

Sean Schifano 

[laughter] 

 

Ken Hammond 

And—y’had, y’had a lot o’, o’ pissed-off hippies, y’know, young people, y’know. But—it’s May, the NBA playoffs were goin’ on. They were in Los Angeles, so it was a late game, and they turned off all the TV sets, in the bars. So now you’ve got a bunch o’ drunk jocks comin’ out on the street as well, right? So, things—this is when things began to, to, to get a little—a little iffy, to say the least. The cops start shootin’ tear gas. People start throwin’ canisters back, and then people start pickin’ up whatever they can and throwin’ it. 

 

1:04:25 - Sean Schifano 

And this is in the late morning of the 1st? 

 

1:04:31 - Ken Hammond 

Eh, it’s around midnight, yeah, uh—of, uh—well now it’s midnight the early morning of the 2nd. Saturday. And then, y’know—some windows get broken, there’s a hardware store—I don’t remember all, y’know, all ’at stuff, but um. Y’know—and, and then there’s, y’know, more tear gas, and the cops and all this. And somehow, over, over the next couple of hours, the whole thing kind of flows down from Water Street to Main Street, turns east, goes up the hill, there—you’d have to know the geography—but up this long hill, over the crest of that, down the other side to where campus is, to where the Prentice Gate is, the main gate. And then the students just sort of roll onto campus. Well, in those days—lingering legacies of the Middle Ages—town cops couldn’t come onto the university campus—y’know? So the students get on campus, the cops are standin’ right at the edge, but they can’t come onto campus. And the university cops, they’re like, “We’re not goin’ down there.” So, it gets to be about 2 in the morning, and this weird incident happens. It’s an intersection, it’s, y’know, Main, and I think Lincoln are the, the streets that cross there. There’s a traffic signal there, and there’s some malfunction. Some guy is out in the intersection, up on a ladder, workin’ on the traffic signal, and, and some passing car bumps the ladder and falls down. The guy’s hangin’ on to the traffic signal, swingin’ there in midair. So suddenly everybody’s like, rescuin’ this guy off the traffic signal. The cops go over, they get the ladder, they get him down, people are clappin’ and cheerin’ and all ’at stuff. And then it’s like, the wind is out of the sails, everybody disappears, y’know? Students go back to the dorms. Cops go back to wherever cops go back to, and, and—y’know, people—everybody just trickled away. That’s, that’s—that wraps it up for, for, for Friday night, early Saturday morning. 

 

1:06:45 - Sean Schifano 

So it’s, it’s now morning of the 2nd. We’ve had a very eventful night, and uh—students sleeping it off, it sounds like. 

 

1:06:54 - Ken Hammond 

Well, yeah, I mean, it’s funny ’cause some people, even some of the people who were there, y’know, they go downtown, they help sweep up the broken glass, they help nail up the plywood on the windows that were broken, y’know. Y’know, it was just—one of those moments. But also people are on campus and everybody’s like, “Whoa, that was weird!” And, um—full disclosure, I’m not there on Saturday. Saturday, in Buffalo, New York, there was a, a working group meeting of, of RYM2, people associated with, with RYM2, that, um—four of us—is that right?—three or four of us, I can’t remember now—went to. We drove up together, drove up from Cleveland to Buffalo, and we’re there all day on, on Saturday and spent Saturday night there. So, I was not present for the events to take place on, on Saturday the 2nd, but—cer—[laughter] I’m certainly familiar with them. Um. Y’know, people were still flipped out about, about the war, and, of course, having had this confrontation and, and all this with the cops, nobody knew what was goin’ on with all that. This is when it gets, it gets even more complicated because the governor, who’s this conservative Republican with ties to organized crime, “Big Jim” Rhodes [i.e., James Allen Rhodes], uh. He’s campaigning, he’s tryin’ to run for the Senate, there’s a primary comin’ up just a few days later—in May, and um. He comes to town, and makes these inflammatory statements, y’know, based on the, the incidents of the night before, about students, these radical students bein’ worse than the Nazis and the Blackshirts and all this stuff and, “We gotta eradicate them,” he says, “from our society,” and—blah-deh-blah-deh-blah. And, um. That, that sort of ratcheted things up even further, y’know. People were not, not pleased about that. So. [pause] That evening, uh—y’know, people get together, people gather ’round the commons, and uh—y’know, a few hundred people, I guess—and then they start—they decide they’re gonna march around to the dorms, uh—to call, call people out. So they go around and they’re like, chanting, “Join us, join us!,” like that. And people come out o’ the dorms, and you wind up with probably the largest assemblage of the whole period. Certainly a couple thousand, maybe more than 2,000 people. 

 

Sean Schifano 

Were you among them? 

 

1:09:38 - Ken Hammond 

No, no, I’m in Buffalo. I’m in Buffalo. 

 

Sean Schifano 

OK, you’re still, you’re still in Buffalo. OK. 

 

1:09:40 - Ken Hammond 

Um. But they come, you know, they come down over the hill—the camp—y’know, onto the commons, and they go right across the commons because on the far side of the commons—is the ROTC building, which is a little wooden barracks building that had been built back during World War II. Sat there all ’is time. It’s where they stored their gear. Um. But it was—it was the symbol, it was the physical incarnation o’ the presence of the military and the war on our campus. [clears throat] So they burned it down, and um. [pause] Y’know, OK— 

 

1:10:17 - Sean Schifano 

Was there any, um—for lack of a better word, nucleus to the people who, who burned it down? Was it, was it, um—semi-organized, in the sense that, that the people responsible for burning it down were of a general political or activist mindset? 

 

1:10:32 - Ken Hammond 

Well we can’t really talk about that. Um. But it gets burned down. And, and as this march is taking place, apparently the, the, the campus and town authorities decided that, uh—things were escalating, and so they got the authorization of the governor to call in the National Guard. And the National Guard was already mobilized, they were already out there, because they’d been working for two weeks to protect scab drivers f—during a Teamster strike, right? And the Teamsters, y’know, um, they—they can play rough, so, y’know—it had been a challenging time for these fellas. But now they’re deployed, they get sent to Kent, so. While the ROTC building is burning, the firemen come. [pause] Some individuals, uh—take axes off the fire trucks and chop up the hoses that they’re gonna use to, to—try to put out the fire, so, they can’t put out the fire, and, uh. Then—the National Guard arrives, and they start rollin’ onto campus, so, y’know, pe—that disperses the crowd, people leave and, and, and that’s the end of all that. The building burns down, pretty thoroughly. Um. And, and the campus is occupied by—uh—by the National Guard. And so, Sunday morning, by Sunday, we got up in Buffalo—those of us who were there were like, “We better beat feet back do-”—we got a call, couple calls that night, the night— 

 

Sean Schifano 

Saturday night? 

 

Ken Hammond 

—that was goin’ on, that, y’know, there—the ROTC building’s burning down and this and that, y’know, we thought, “Oh Christ.” So we made our way back down. Got back just about four hours from Buffalo down. So I think I was back—I was probably back in town by 11:30 or so. So. Y’know, campus is occupied, there’s, there’s soldiers everywhere and armored personnel carriers and helicopters flyin’ overhead, y’know, and all ’is stuff, it was pretty creepy. During the day Sunday, there’s this sort of surreal quality. People are walkin’ around lookin’, lookin’ at the ruins of the ROTC building, lookin’ at all the soldiers and the jeeps and all this stuff, y’know, and, um. That’s the day that, uh—Allison Krause puts a flower in, in one o’ the gun barrels, ’cause, y’know, the thing is, these boys, they were just kids like us. The National Guardsmen. They were kids like us, they were young men, didn’t wanna go to Vietnam, so they joined the National Guard, y’know? ’Cause if you were in the Guard you didn’t go to Vietnam. Now we send the Guard overseas, but in those days, that—they didn’t do that. So they, y’know, these were guys—they didn’t want to go to ’Nam, they joined the, joined the Guard, fine. Um. But they were just kids. They were, they were just kids like us. So, y’know, some o’ the young women would chat up these boys, and, and Allison put a—flower in this gun barrel and said, y’know, “Flowers are better than bullets,” and o’ course she’s one o’ the kids that gets killed the next day, so a little—y’know, foreshadowing, or whatever. Um— 

 

1:13:57 - Sean Schifano 

Now by the 3rd, you mentioned, that, that, previous to this, the university had had the largest gathering that it had had during this— 

 

Ken Hammond 

Yeah. 

 

Sean Schifano 

Of about 2,000+ students. 

 

1:14:12 - Ken Hammond 

Yeah, that peaked. That, that march on Saturday night, that was the biggie, that was the biggest thing. Almost that many people came out on Monday. Y—I always say around 2,000, but, it was well over 2000 on, on, on—for the ROTC thing. 

 

Sean Schifano 

And so by the—on the 3rd there had been a kind of ebb that then picks back up on Monday? Or— 

 

Ken Hammond 

Well, I’m not sure I’d say it’s an ebb, I mean, there was, there was no, um. I mean this is during the day. During the day—people are just out goin’ about their, their business, as I say, still lookin’ around, doin’ that kind o’ stuff. There’s not a rally or a gathering, it’s just people walkin’ around, lookin’ at—checkin’ things out, right. But Sunday evening, y’know, a group gathers. It’s not that big, because very quickly the Guard comes to disperse them. And at this point—this is the first time that, that the Guard uses physical violence, uh—bayonets. They bayoneted three or four kids, who weren’t moving fast enough. Um. Y’know, it didn’t—obviously it didn’t kill ’em or anything, but injured them, seriously. And, so that, y’know, that—that didn’t turn into a large demonstration, but of course everybody knew about it, it seriously pissed people off even more. So, we get to Monday, and. [pause] In the morning—there was a sense among some of us that, um—things were pretty, pretty tightly wrapped. And a group of people—again I’d say maybe 30 to 40 people, who had been involved in political—activities over the previous—two or three years, from all the groups, from the Student Mobilization [i.e., the Student Mobilization Committee (SMC)], from Young Socialists, from former SDS people, a bunch of us—we met around 10 in, in the Student Union, which is right next to the ruins of the ROTC building, and, um. [pause] Y’know we were like, “OK, what are we gonna do?” Some people—and I understand the impulse—felt like we should try to call it off—try to cancel the, the noon rally. But how ya gonna do that, y’know? It’s just— 

 

1:16:45 - Sean Schifano 

What did you feel?  

 

1:16:46 - Ken Hammond 

Well, I’m gonna get to that. It’s just, how y—the logistics of doing that, how ya gonna get the word out? How ya gonna say, “There’s no rally, please don’t come to the common”—it just wasn’t gonna happen in two hours— 

 

Sean Schifano 

Mm. 

 

Ken Hammond 

—or in an hour and a half, y’know? So my feeling was, this is going to happen, this rally is going to happen, people are going to show up. What we need to do is try to channel this into something a little more—constructive, right? Now [co-founder of SDS] Tom Hayden, one o’ the, y’know, radical left leaders in those days, uh—the day before, on Sunday, he’d been at Rutgers and gave a talk in which he called for a national student strike, right? So, some of us thought that what we should do would be, endorse that call and, and, and try to move to organizing a student strike at Kent. Basically, don’t go to your classes, let’s have education meetings, let’s have, y’know, rallies, y’know, let’s start to organize speakers and films and let’s, let’s turn this into an organizing opportunity—to, to rebuild, y’know, the movement and to work—towards our real goals and objectives. The, the emotional—outbursts from Friday night to, to Sunday night—fine, great, of course, people were enraged, people were—frustrated, and, and they, they lashed out, and they—y’know, they fought back. And that’s great, that was all fine, I don’t have a problem with that, but that’s not how you—bring about—serious change, y’know? It’s gotta be structured, organized, disciplined, move in a certain direction. So that was, y’know, obviously that proved to be a fool’s errand, but, uh—that was the idea, was that we would go to the rally and—call for the strike, and try to, try to move it in that direction. And indeed, that’s, tha—we went out there, and there were all these freakin’ people. And—for better or for worse, I got up on the, on that thing with the bell, on top o’ that, um—and, and tried to, tried to speak, but, we didn’t have any sound equipment. Of course the university wouldn’t let us use any, any of the equipment that normally we would’ve used for a meeting or something. So I’m yellin’, um—there is a, there is a, a recording of it where I have—my tinny little voice is going, “We should have a student strike!”, y’know. But, um. And, and, the people immediately around me, y’know, actually start chanting, “Strike, strike, strike!” You victory be hear it on the recording. But there’s, y’know, there may be a couple thousand people there, most of whom, they can’t hear what I’m sayin’, and, and, y’know. Plus, same time, Guard’s on the other side. They’re all lined up across the commons. Um. They send a jeep, with a fella with a bullhorn, who comes over and, and says, “This is an illegal assembly, you need to disperse,” y’know, “You’re ordered to,” uh, “to depart,” and, and o’ course, (a) it was not an illegal assembly, and (b) we weren’t fuckin’ goin’ anywhere. Y’know. So, people are yellin’ and, I mean, y’know, it was just—chaotic, and. [sigh] The idea that we were gonna somehow try to move that into—“Let’s form committees!” or something like that, y’know, just—that, that clearly wasn’t gonna happen. So then, they start comin’ at us. They’re firin’ tear gas, people start throwin’ the canisters back, people start movin’ out of the way. A large group moves off to one side, they’re out of the picture. The rest of us go up over this hill, down into a parking lot. The Guard comes after us over the hill. They go out onto this, open—what was a football practice field [i.e., Rockwell Field]. And then, that’s where they are. There’s fences around the other two sides of it. They’re like, “Well, we’re not goin’ anywhere from here.” Some of them, one group, um. [pause] They get down on one knee and they point their guns at the parking lot where the students are. Uh. [pause] Their officer, a lieutenant, Myron Pryor, he goes around, and s—and, and says something to each of them—I could see this, I watched this happen—says something to each o’ them, and then they d—they decide, the commander, uh—I forget his name right now—uh, he says, y’know, “Let’s go back. We’re gonna go back to the commons.” Y’know, “This group is dispersed. Let’s,” y’know, da-da. Canterbury. General Canterbury [i.e., Brigadier General Robert Canterbury]. He says, “Let’s do that.” So they, they all start headin’ back, and they go back up the hill, and most of them go on over the hill. But this one group, the same group that had pointed their guns at the parking lot and that Pryor had spoken to, they’re kinda, they’re kinda trailin’ at the back edge, and when they get to the top o’ the hill, they stop, they turn around, and they fire into the parking lot, y’know? Um. We’re in the parking lot, uh—I dunno, what is it, 120 yards away?—som’m like that. They’re on top of a hill, we’re at the bottom o’ the hill, and nobody’s—y’know, it’s not like the crowd is charging forward with pitchforks, I mean, we’re just—people are millin’ around. But. Uh, they fire 67 rounds in 13 seconds, and, y’know—four people are killed, nine others wounded. Some people, uh—Alan Canfora, for example, who had been wavin’ a black flag, was clearly targeted, he was hit three times. Um. Others, y’know, totally, totally random. Bill Schroeder [i.e. William Knox Schroeder], one of the guys that gets killed, ROTC cadet, uh—y’know, gets shot in the head. Uh. He was walkin’ between classes. So y’know, I mean it’s just this ridiculous—event. But, that was, uh—that, that’s what becomes, y’know, Kent State. So. Yeah. 

 

1:23:12 - Sean Schifano 

Well as you’re watching the National Guardsmen get down on one knee and, and effectively communicate the message that we’re ready to fire upon people if things don’t start changing, um—about how far away from you are—are you from them before the shooting actually began? 

 

1:23:37 - Ken Hammond 

Well, I was, um—I was actually not, in the, in the heart of the parking lot. I was over—near the chain link fence, on the outside of the chain link fence, from where the, the football practice field is, uh—which is why I could see Pryor go around to, to talk to these individuals. So when they started moving back, up the hill and away, then that’s when I came around, and I was moving across the practice field, uh—y’know, towards the larger, the larger grouping of people, when the shooting started. So. The closest—I mean, when they were on the practice field, I was probably, maybe, maybe 50 yards away from them. When the shooting started, I was probably, maybe a couple hundred yards away from ’em. Y’know. ’Cause I wasn’t all the way at the base o’ the hill, which is where the parking lot was. I was still, maybe halfway across the—not the length-wise, but the, thee width-wise of the, of the football field. But there were—there were bullets hittin’ the ground. I mean, I went flat, o’ course, and—there was, there was shots kickin’ up—all around, y’know. So. 

 

1:24:59 - Sean Schifano 

And did you personally know or know well any of the victims?  

 

1:25:08 - Ken Hammond 

Oh yeah. Yeah, uh, uh. [sigh] [pause] Yeah, um. I knew—I mean, I knew several of them reasonably well, in the sense that I had seen them at meetings and rallies and things like that. But one, one o’ the four that was killed, Sandy Scheuer [i.e., Sandra Lee Scheuer], um—she was my freshman roommate’s high school girlfriend. So, when he came to college—when he came to Kent, she came to Kent, they were both freshmen at the same time as me. Y’know, they were still, they were still goin’ out ’n’ stuff, so I’d gotten to know her—two years earlier, y’know. Um. And uh—so yeah, so she was the one that I knew the best. I knew Sandy pretty well. But, y’know, I mean um, Jeff Miller [i.e., Jeffrey Glenn Miller], who’s another one that gets killed, he’d been at a lot of rallies and stuff. Alan Canfora, Tom Grace [i.e., Thomas M. Grace], who got shot, had been in SDS, um—had been with us when we protested at various things, y’know. I didn’t know them real well, but I certainly knew them, um. Yeah. Yeah. 

 

1:26:18 - Sean Schifano 

Do you know offhand how many of the victims you did not know from the meetings? Do you know how many who were—who, whether you—well, actually, whether you knew them or not, do you know roughly how many of the victims had not been involved in activism? 

 

Ken Hammond 

Well— 

 

Sean Schifano 

You mentioned—you mentioned a student just passing through the campus on his way to class. 

 

1:26:39 - Ken Hammond 

Yeah, he—yeah. Allison, Allison Krause, who was the one with the, the flower in the gun barrel. She was kind of an artsy person and, and she had, y’know, you might’ve crossed paths with her. I didn’t know her at all, but—I think, y’know, she probably knew—some o’ the people who were involved in the movement but, she was more in that, in that, y’know, peace-and-love hippie kind o’ mode. There were several of the people who were hit, uh—I mean, Bill Schroeder was killed, but some o’ the people who were wounded were also, uh—y’know, not—hadn’t been at the rally, but, classes had just let out, at like—I dunno, like 12:10 or something. The shootings happened at—12:21 I think is when it starts, um—when it—’cause it, it’s not very long. So people were, were, were, were—we were just walkin’ back and forth, y’know! Joe Lewis [i.e., Joseph Lewis], he was one. That poor guy, he, he was the one that got hit with a shotgun. Some yahoo up there had a shotgun, for some reason, and Joe’s the one that got—he got, he got peppered by that. He wasn’t hurt that bad, but, y’know. And, and a couple others. I’d say maybe of the 13 students who were shot, I would say—four or five at least were not, were not involved—y’know. 

 

Sean Schifano 

Just crossfire? 

 

Ken Hammond 

Yeah, just, y’know, bad luck. 

 

1:28:27 - Sean Schifano 

Mm. And um—and over the, the next, say, day, two days, um—what was your immediate emotional reaction? 

 

Ken Hammond 

[laughter] 

 

Sean Schifano 

I mean, how we—how, how, how did you, or were you able to process what had happened? Of course, this is hitting the news, I’m sure, almost immediately. 

 

1:28:45 - Ken Hammond 

Yeah. Well. Y’know. Nobody—expected, um—them to f—to, to shoot to kill with, with live ammunition. Nobody thought that was gonna happen. I mean, we were naive perhaps in that thought—but that’s, that’s what we thought. 

 

Sean Schifano 

Sure. 

 

Ken Hammond 

Um. So, I would say that there was an element of shock involved. I was, y’know, I was married at the time. My high school sweetheart and I had gotten married, Marilyn. And, um— 

 

1:29:20 - Sean Schifano 

This was the minister’s daughter. 

 

1:29:21 - Ken Hammond 

Yeah. And, and she was also, she was, y’know, one o’ the activists, a, a leading person in SDS and everything. We had developed a practice when, when things got—rough at a demonstration or something, of separating. There’d been an incident at Nixon’s inauguration when the two of us had been together and—she had been grabbed by a cop, and I jumped on the cop’s back and, um—he let her go, but he turned around and split my head with a billy club. So we decided probably it wasn’t a good idea to put ourselves in tactically vulnerable situations where emotions might cloud our—decision-making. 

 

Sean Schifano 

That seems, seems wise. 

 

Ken Hammond 

[laughter] Yeah. But that meant that, when the shooting stopped, my first concern was—where’s Mare, y’know? And uh—but we found each other pretty quickly, and she was fine, she was OK, o’ course. We stuck around for a little while—kinda becoming aware—of what had happened. But, I mean, I had just—I just got up and called for the student strike, I mean. [pause] Ya sorta felt like—if anybody was exposed—it might be me, right? And, plus, y’know, I mean, I’d been involved in stuff for years by that point. Y’know, obviously, certainly the authorities at Kent knew who I was, um—so you didn’t know what was gonna be happening, so. There was a house near campus, just a half a block off campus, that, that—some SDS folks, former SDS folks, lived at, so we went there, and—and, and—a number of people [laughter] went there. And, um—I mean, y’know, ya gotta, ya gotta put it in the context. I mean, they’d killed Fred Hampton [Marxist-Leninist activist, deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party, 1966–69, and founder and Illinois chapter chair of the Rainbow Coalition] in Chicago just a few months earlier. Y’know. Things were spinning out of control, and now they’re, y’know, we had just seen ’em shoot and kill—these kids on our campus. Who knew what was coming? Who knew what they would do next, y’know? So, um. [pause] We wanted to extricate ourselves from what was obviously gonna be a difficult situation, so, several of us who were there, um—[laughter], we got our hair cut. One fella who was there, Bobby Franklin, he, he knew how to, how to cut people’s hair, so he gave us all a nice—nice trim, so we didn’t look the way we had earlier in the day. And, um—then Mare and I got, got my car—we had this Volkswagen—and, um—and we left town. We headed back for Cleveland. They had a—they put roadblocks around Kent—uh—which we knew, we had heard that. We picked that information up. People had, y’know, police radios and stuff. So, we took the back roads, we, we, y’know—wove ways that we didn’t think there’d be roadblocks, and there weren’t. We got far enough out, went up to Cleveland, and um—went to Marilyn’s mother’s—home, uh—where we, where we stayed for a couple of days. And, um—y’know, things got weird pretty quickly. Uh. [laughter] My suspicions that I might be of some interest to the authorities were confirmed when the FBI showed up at my parents’ apartment. Uh. Showed up at my mom’s, uh, uh—place of work—it wasn’t license plate season, but, y’know, that didn’t stop ’em. Showed up at my dad’s office, y’know. Um. So, y’know, they were sending a little message. And, uh—so. [pause] There were—some Kent people, former Kent people, who had moved up to Buffalo. So, after a few days, we, uh—we packed up and, and, and went to Buffalo, and there’s a bunch o’ stuff that follows from that. 

 

1:34:10 - Sean Schifano 

Were these any of the same people you had visited in Buffalo before?  

 

1:34:13 - Ken Hammond 

Well, they were in the same cluster of people, yeah. 

 

Sean Schifano 

OK. 

 

1:34:18 - Ken Hammond 

Yeah. Yeah. [laughter] 

 

Sean Schifano 

Well, then—then the news reporting comes. 

 

Ken Hammond 

Oh yeah. 

 

Sean Schifano 

And—I’m sure you—you watched your fair share? Uh— 

 

Ken Hammond 

Sure, ya had to. 

 

Sean Schifano 

Was there, um—was there anything about it that you found—noteworthy, strange, problematic, disturbing?  

 

1:34:39 - Ken Hammond 

Well— 

 

Sean Schifano 

Apart—apart from the, apart from the—nature of— 

 

Ken Hammond 

Apart—apart from the reality of it? 

 

Sean Schifano 

Right. 

 

Ken Hammond 

I mean, it was all disturbing. Um. Y’know, it was—again, you gotta, you gotta, gotta put it in its context. Walter Cronkite, right, who was the guy that basically took out Lyndon Johnson, right? After the Tet Offensive in ’68, when Cronkite turned against the war, that’s really what brought Johnson down. Cronkite comes on the evening news, May 4th, 1970, and he’s like—he didn’t say, y’know, “What the fuck?” but, that was basically the message that night, was, “Look what’s happening,” y’know? “This is what it’s coming to.” And, a lot o’ the national media, um—that was it, it was, I mean. These were White kids, right? White, middle-class—as they like to call us—White middle-class students on this—beautiful Midwest college campus gunned down, y’know, by the forces of the state. Y’know, it flipped people out, and, um. So the national coverage generally—was pretty sympathetic. I mean, they treated it, of course—as a terrible tragedy, rather than as a political act, but, uh—y’know, but nonetheless it was very sympathetic. That—[laughter] I think the closer you came to a local level—although the Cleveland papers were pretty good, uh—but, y’know. Y’know, there were a lot of people in town in Kent—there’s always tensions between town and gown and all ’at stuff—there were people in town who lamented the fact that they didn’t shoot more, y’know. And that was, that was—and those reports, y’know those circulated as well, of course. Y’know, that’s, that’s, just the divisions that, that occur in a, in a society. But, uh—yeah, the, the, the coverage—I mean everybody was freaked out. For a while, y’know, the coverage, um—was pretty sympathetic, and then of course, y’know, things settle back down and, and—life, life goes on, and uh—for those who weren’t directly affected by it, Kent becomes—an event, y’know. Y’know, Neil Young writes a song about it and uh—and Neil was great. Neil was great. He did fundraising concerts for the medical fund, for the, for the kids that had been shot, the survivors, ’cause they had massive medical expenses. He donated all the royalties from that song, uh—from his part of the song—Steve Stills [i.e., Stephen Stills] wouldn’t do that—asshole. But, uh—y’know, uh—it, it, it, it, it becomes part of the flow, uh—of, of things. It’s the sort of thing that, that people know about, although they don’t necessarily know a lot about it. Um. But, even by the fall of, of ’70—y’know, much o’ the country has, has moved on, right? I mean there’s investigations and there’s reports. Uh. [pause] But if you’re not in Kent, if you’re not one of the people, again, directly affected by it, um—it’s amazing how quickly—things move into—y’know, this other—status, of being. [laughter] 

 

1:38:16 - Sean Schifano 

Mm. How quickly it’s sort of forgotten publicly or— 

 

1:38:22 - Ken Hammond 

Not forgotten, not forgotten. But—integrated, or, or, assimilated or, I dunno. It becomes just part of—of what happened. 

 

Sean Schifano 

Made sense of, would you say? 

 

Ken Hammond 

Made sense of, or even not, but, but, uh—normalized, routinized, maybe, y’know? ’Cause then the next bad thing comes along. 

 

Sean Schifano 

Sure. 

 

Ken Hammond 

Y’know? Heh. 

 

1:38:44 - Sean Schifano 

About how long were you in Buffalo?  

 

1:38:51 - Ken Hammond 

Not long, uh. [pause] I think. We got up there probably mid-May until—probably ’til early June, a few weeks. A few weeks. And then. Heh. [pause] [sigh] One of—there was a lingering case from 1969. One o’ the people at the administration building, who hadn’t been arrested at the time with the other—with the six, who then did their six months in the county jail, um. But his case was still for some reason lingering in the courts—this guy, Jim Powery. Who was one o’ the people in Buffalo, he and his brother were, were at Buffalo. Jim’s case came up, in—I guess, late May. So Jim and I—uh, drove down, drove down to Kent, luckily in my car. Um. And what we thought was that, y’know, he’d go in and make a no-contest plea, and, um—y’know, maybe get—a fine or something like that. There’d been indications that maybe, um—y’know, there’d be no particularly dire consequences. So, we go in the courthouse—I don’t go in the courtroom, I’m sittin’ on a bench in the hallway. [pause] After not a very long time, doors open. Jim comes out, he’s in cuffs. Troopers are, y’know, carryin’ him, not carrying him, but you know, walkin’ him by his arms. And our lawyer, this guy Ben Shearer—doesn’t look at me, but as he’s walkin’ by, he quietly says, “I’d make myself scarce.” [pause] So. Apparently the local authorities in Portage County didn’t have much of a sense o’ humor at that point. They sent him up for seven years. Now, in the end he didn’t serve that. We got him out after about a year. But yeah, Jim had a, had a tough time with that. So that’s—that let me know that things were not probably gonna be settlin’ down anytime soon. So I went back to Buffalo, um—and Marilyn and I talked about it and—decided that we didn’t wanna—stay there because it was pretty exposed. I mean, this was, we were in a radical political community there. There was a bookstore, there was a decommissioned church that was serving as an organizing center. Y’know, it was, y’know, we weren’t like—out o’ sight. [laughter] But we decided maybe we oughta be. So. [pause] [sigh] Heh. Marilyn’s father was a Methodist minister, and a, a liberal, progressive Methodist minister, and he had gone to the Yale Divinity School, with—y’know, a cohort of, uh, of uh—other people who went on into—either the church, or, sort of biblical studies stuff, one of whom, uh—was at Yale, and taught at Yale in, in the, in a—I forget what the program was—Semitic Languages or something. He was a translator of Aramaic texts, and I think we’ve talked about him a little bit [prior to this interview], Marvin Pope, who did the— 

 

Sean Schifano 

Yeah. 

 

Ken Hammond 

—book of— 

 

Sean Schifano 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 

 

Ken Hammond 

OK. And they, that families had stayed real close and so Marilyn had been talking with her mother by this time—no, not yet, not yet, OK, anyway. Marilyn had been talkin’ with her mother and, um—Neva—that was her mom’s name—had said that she thought that, in New Haven, there was a group that might be able to help us out. And she talked to the Popes—uh, Marvin and Helen Pope, his wife, and they knew—some folks in New Haven, um. And then, so they got us connected up with those people. And this was an outfit that is called World Fellowship. Grew up in the 1950s as, y’know, one o’ these reactions against the Cold War. And they believed in what they called “Christian-Marxist dialogue.” Great. And the leader of that, the initial leader of that, was a guy named Willard Uphaus. Willard, back—during the McCarthy period, he’d actually gone to prison for a year [December 1959–December 1960] because he wouldn’t reveal—certain names [i.e., of guests at a World Fellowship Conference]. He wouldn’t name names, right? So these, these guys were fairly, fairly serious. They have a camp—outside of Conway, New Hampshire [i.e., in Albany, New Hampshire], a summer camp, World Fellowship Summer Camp, um—where they run educational programs, lectures, things like that. Some—kind of old-school hippied-out way, y’know, everyb—you go there and everybody takes part in preparing meals and doing the dishes and maintaining the buildings, all ’is kind o’ stuff, but. It’s set out in this big—estate-like—y’know, huge—territory, in the woods, and there’s, there’s the center, but then there’s all this territory. So they set us up—with a tent, a nice—y’know, a big, like—serious tent, not like, “Let’s go camping.” Nice tent—wooden floor, all ’at kind o’ stuff. Hidden away in the woods, right? That’s where we went. And we stayed there— 

 

Sean Schifano 

Wow. 

 

Ken Hammond 

—for a couple o’ months. Um. [laughter] Well it turned out that over the years—Christian-Marxist dialogue had turned into—this camp was kind of a summer camp—for the Central Committee of the Communist Party. [pause] So there were all these commies there! 

 

Sean Schifano 

Heh! 

 

Ken Hammond 

And, y’know, once they found out, they’re like—“Junior comrade!” y’know! I mean— 

 

Sean Schifano 

[laughter] 

 

Ken Hammond 

And when they found out that I’d actually read the first volume of [Karl Marx’s] Capital, they were like shittin’ themselves, ’cause they couldn’t even get young communists to do that, y’know? So, that was cool, y’know, I got to know some of these weirdos and that was fun. But then, a couple, Carl and Anne Braden, who were not communists, but radical activists in Kentucky—civil rights people—who’d gone through a lot of stuff—their home had been bombed at one point, um. They came to, to talk. Carl Braden sat me down one evening after dinner and he said, “Look”—“you gotta go back, you gotta go turn yourself in and turn this into a political event,” right? “Ya can’t let them get away with this stuff,” y’know? “As long as you’re runnin’, they’re winnin’.” [pause] [sigh] What’re you gonna say, y’know? So Mare and I talked about it, “All right.” We didn’t go back the next day, but, y’know, when s—when—at the end of the summer, um—packed up, drove back to Ohio. At that point I wasn’t even under indictment, y’know? So we went back and we, we stayed in the, in the—basically the attic of, of a friend’s place, a guy who’d been in SDS but was now in law school in Akron. 

 

1:46:58 - Sean Schifano 

Are we still in June or have we moved to July by now?  

 

1:47:00 - Ken Hammond 

Now i—now it’s September. 

 

1:47:01 - Sean Schifano 

OK. So close to the time of [indictment], but not yet. 

 

1:47:04 - Ken Hammond 

Yeah, well, October is when the grand jury report comes out and the indictments come out, so that’s when I get indicted. So I go and turn myself in and get to be on the front page of the New York Times. 

 

1:47:15 - Sean Schifano 

You know what day that was? 

 

1:47:17 - Ken Hammond 

Uh—October—I think it’s 21st—1970. So it’s in like the paper on the 22nd. Um. [pause] Yeah, John Kiffner was the Times reporter—New York Times. Yeah. Heh, anyway. 

 

1:47:36 - Sean Schifano 

A good way to make a public statement.— 

 

Ken Hammond 

Well, and— 

 

Sean Schifano 

—Get to be in the New York Times. 

 

Ken Hammond 

—and then I spent the next fourteen months under indictment. Became the lead plaintiff in Hammond versus Brown [323 F. Supp. 326 (N.D. Ohio 1971)]. Brown was the Attorney General of the state of Ohio. In federal court. Uh—Bill, Bill Kunstler, William Kunstler, who was one o’ the big radical lawyers, he came out and helped us form our legal defense fund. Um. Ramsey Clark, who was a former attorney general of the United States, signed on as one of our legal team. Um. Y’know, the, the, the trials were gonna be a big deal. [laughter] ’Til we got to ’em. [laughter] And they—they couldn’t get convictions. The first four cases came up, they couldn’t get a conviction. They led with their best case, which was this kid, Jerry Roop was his name. [pause] They brought him to trial in his prison outfit because he was already in the slammer for having sold heroin. Not a poster boy for anybody, y’know? He was one o’ the kids that took the axe and chopped up the fire hoses. Alright. Couldn’t get a conviction. Jury wouldn’t convict. They had a holdout, right? Next couple o’ cases, three cases. Couldn’t get a conviction. I’m number five. So—ironically enough, it’s Pearl Harbor Day, December 7th 1970—we go into—’71 by that point, ’71—go into court. The prosecutor gets up. Says, “Your Honor,” uh—“I’ve been instructed by the Attorney General to withdraw all the remaining charges on the grounds of lack of evidence.” [pause] Hammer down, we’re done. Well, it was totally political—right? The new governor, the guy that gets elected after Rhodes is out, John Gilligan. Irish Democrat from Cleveland—whose campaign for mayor I had tried to volunteer for back in 1968, and he wouldn’t put me on his staff, so that’s why I wound up workin’ for Stokes. Big mistake, buddy. 

 

Sean Schifano 

[laughter] 

 

Ken Hammond 

But, he’s a liberal Democrat and he’s got these kids that got shot at and some o’ them killed. He’s got—we, y’know, out of the 25 who were indicted, I think five were students who’d been shot. So first you shoot ’em, and then you indict ’em for gettin’ in the way of the bullets, y’know? Gilligan, he didn’t want this goin’ on, y’know? And I guess he thought, “Well, gotta let the wheels of justice grind away.” But then, they can’t even get a conviction? So he’s like, “Bag it,” right? Y’know, I mean—lack of evidence? Really? I don’t think so. But, that’s—that brought that—to an end. Big party that night. [laughter] 

 

1:51:01 - Sean Schifano 

Pearl Harbor Day and uh—Liberation Day for you. 

 

Ken Hammond 

Yeah. [laughter] 

 

Sean Schifano 

[laughter] 

 

Ken Hammond 

Yeah. 

 

Sean Schifano 

Well you’ve mentioned the chilling effect that the, the previous round of administrative and campus actions have had. In the aftermath of the shootings and the awareness of the indictments and the attempts at convictions, is there a similar chilling effect in terms of the response of students on campus in, in the, the rest of 1970, ’71, maybe even ’72?  

 

1:51:33 - Ken Hammond 

Well, you use the absolute, correct term, which I suspect you may have encountered somewhere along the way—chilling effect. Um. One of the legal doctrines that we invoked in our cases was, um—in the federal case, the Hammond versus Brown—was the, the, the, the precedent of, of what’s called the Dombrowski case, Dombrowski versus Pfister [380 U.S. 479 (1965)], which was about the, the malicious use of prosecution to induce a chilling effect in civil rights, right. So that was actually a, a, a legal doctrine that we, that we invoked—it’s fun to hear you say that. Well yeah, I mean obviously, people—not just at Kent, I mean, y’know, after Kent, the spring of ’70, there was stuff all over the country. Hundreds of schools shut down and, and ROTC buildings were bombed or burned in a number of places. Students were killed in Mississippi ten days after Kent. A student was killed in Kansas later that summer, uh—at protests and stuff. I mean—the place went up big in the spring. And then—by the fall though there’s this—after-effect of, kind of, “Whoa,” y’know, on a much grander scale, but similar to what had happened after Music and Speech. People recalibrate their sense of risk, right? Because now we know that the risks—gettin’ expelled from school, who cares? Gettin’ your head blown off? We’re gonna take that seriously, right? So—yeah. My view is that—the downstream from Kent has two aspects—one of which, I would say, was good, in the sense that the effect that it has is good. Nothing that happened at Kent—the deaths, the woundings, all the other damage—none o’ that was good in any sense of the word. But the effect—some of the effect downstream, had a positive outcome, because—there was a lot of outrage on the part of White, middle-class parents. Because, such a number of the people who were killed weren’t even at the demonstration, y’know. It was like, “This could happen to your kid,” right? And, that changed a lot o’ the political complexion. I think that opposition to the war—not necessarily mass marches in the street, but people writing to their congressmen, people writing to the president, a lot—people writing letters to their editors, people contributing to organizations. There’s a lot of pressure that evolves, and I think that that leads over the course of ’70, ’71 to the decisions by the Nixon administration to take the negotiations in Paris seriously, and to, to try to get out—and to try to get out—at least have an agreement to get out before the ’72 elections, right? Which is what happens. Um. [pause] So in a sense, I think that Kent State—the killings, the shootings at Kent—are part of—I don’t want to say that that’s why the war came to an end, but they contributed to, in a meaningful way, ending the war in Vietnam, stopping the slaughter of millions of Vietnamese, letting the Vietnamese people go about their business, y’know? In that sense—again, I don’t wanna say, “It was worth it,” but it had a positive—some positive element. On the other hand—one of the things that had made SDS so important, that made that late ’60s period so important, was that there was a—what I like to call a systemic critique. That is to say that, we looked at—the war—or American imperialism more broadly, things like goin’ into Santo Domingo or the, the blockades of Cuba, things like that. We looked at racism, looked at poverty. We looked at, at—we were beginning to look at things like, like gender, y’know? Injustices of a wide variety. This was also the very beginning of the environmental movement. The first Earth Day is in—y’know, right around the time of the shootings, it was in April of 1970, April 21st. Um. [pause] We looked at all those things as connected, as interrelated, that they were all manifestations of a system, a way of doing things, which, for lack of a better—termina—y’know, terminol—term, we can call capitalism, right? That all these things were bound together and that you couldn’t—fix one in isolation without addressing all of them, which meant addressing the system. What was needed was, basically, fundamental transformative change. That goes away—in the early ’70s. People coming out of that period—the violence inflicted on the Black liberation movement, eventually the violence inflicted on even White, middle-class—kids protesting the war, sent a very clear message. This is what the state was willing to do. And I think many people made a—whatcha have to think of in many ways as a rational calculation, of uh—cost-benefit, y’know? In terms o’ their own lives. Not in terms of some heroic contribution to a mission. But they still felt these issues. And so we ha—we see a transition to—a period, a long period, that I think is changing now again—has been since, since 2016 really, but persisted for decades, of, of what I call, a single-issue organizing—or these days, it’s often referred to as, like, identity politics, this idea that, you see a problem—the environment, labor, gay rights, y’know, whatever it might be, and you’re like, “That’s wrong, that’s bad. I’m gonna devote my”—“my life, my time, my effort,” y’know, “to fixing it.” And that’s all good, those are all good things to be working on, that’s all noble, often selfless endeavor on the part of people. But it doesn’t address—the system that underpins all of those problems. And, I think, as we’ve seen, all of those problems persist, and they all—arguably, have gotten worse, y’know? Certainly at least some of them have gotten worse. There’s been improvement in various areas, but there’s been deterioration and backsliding in others. Roe v. Wade, whoa, y’know? So—that’s a negative outcome. And again, Kent State’s not the only reason for that. It’s not like, that happened because of this, but it’s part of that. It’s part of that—recalibration, that takes place, um—that, that weakens—oppositional politics, that weakens—the organizational drive for change. Um— 

 

2:00:02 - Sean Schifano 

A kind of siloing of the collective— 

 

Ken Hammond 

Siloing! That’s the other way to think of it, yes. Yeah. Y’know. And, and it isn’t, I think, often that people don’t understand that there may be connections between different things, but there’s such a reluctance, and it grows out of, y’know, Cold War anti-communism and a sense of—y’know, that, that the ’60s was a failure, y’know? That all the hope, “Oh, we’re all gonna,” y’know, “we’re gonna turn society into a big group hug.” That didn’t happen, y’know. And who wants to be the mug, y’know? And, and—my own view, and I, I, I—I talk about this in many different contexts, is that the things that, that—face us, the worst things that we face, are cynicism and passivity, which are of course interrelated. Nobody wants to be a mug, y’know? The Who, y’know, “Meet the new Boss, same as the old Boss” [“Won’t Get Fooled Again” (1971)]. “Don’t be a sucker. Only a sucker falls for that kind o’ stuff,” y’know? “Yes, I understand that things are corrupt, that rich people run the show, that, that power is abused, that the planet’s gonna burn. I understand all ’at, but I’m not such a dope that I’m gonna get swept up in tryin’ to fix things, tryin’ to change things”—the cynicism that you can’t do anything about it—y’know? That there’s—I forget the acronym, but y’know, that idea that there is no alternative. What is it, TINA, TINO, or whatever. There Is No Alternative. That, uh—as some people say, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, right? As long as those ideas prevail—that’s gonna be true. Y’know? I think that there’s a potential for that to change now. Bernie [Sanders], for—whatever his limitations may, may be, Bernie put the word “socialism” back into the political conversation, y’know? And lots of young people are, are—they don’t carry that baggage of the Cold War anymore. Y’know, our politicians today are tryin’ to ramp up new cold wars, as well as some hot wars, but, y’know, they don’t carry that visceral anti-communism that was stamped into us, y’know, for, for generations after World War II. So there’s—I feel, oddly optimistic these days, um—even with the horrors of Trump, uh. Because weirdly, y’know—a lot of people who think that they should be supporting Trump have the same critique. They just don’t know what to do with it. And—nobody’s been very effective—at communicating to them a different way. Y’know, so we fall into that same old great man leadership thing, even though he’s a fucking idiot, y’know, that, that, that we’ve seen over and over and over again in, in history. But, I remain, as I say, I remain sort of, cautiously optimistic—more optimistic than I was for decades, um—that the potential for positive change is, is, is out there now, in ways that it hasn’t been for a while. And that may be, y’know, again, that may just be naivete and delusion, but—it’s a comfortable delusion. [laughter] 

 

2:03:44 - Sean Schifano 

[laughter] Well, just in bringing us to a close, I have two sort of interrelated questions about the retrospective. I mean, so much of what I’ve, what I’ve wanted to touch on has been the experience from behind your eyes, as you were experiencing it— 

 

Ken Hammond 

Yeah. 

 

Sean Schifano 

—of course, as you remember it now, but as best you can, from the frame of, of experiencing it directly. Looking back at the, the Kent State shootings in retrospect, setting aside the willingness of the National Guard to fire upon students— 

 

Ken Hammond 

[laughter] Yeah. 

 

Sean Schifano 

—yeah I mean, putting that to the side for, for a moment, is there anything that you think in the lead-up to it, when that was not a conceivable outcome, is there anything within the lead-up to the events that, y’know, in retrospect, you think that the protesters and activists, including yourself, um—wish had been done differently?  

 

2:04:48 - Ken Hammond 

Yeah, that’s a, that’s a question that, that, that gets raised on a fairly regular basis. “If you knew what was going to happen, would you have done the things that you did?” And, o’ course, those kinds of counterfactuals, it’s hard to ever— 

 

Sean Schifano 

Sure. 

 

Ken Hammond 

—ever really resolve those. I would s—what I would say to that, is that I don’t regret anything that we did. The, the injustice, the wrong of the war, and of everything else that, that was involved, was so great, so grievous, so—just, completely—unjustifiable, that the things that we did, they were nothing, y’know? They were nothing. And—the bad conduct [laughter], to say the least, of the other side—doesn’t—doesn’t change that. In the face of evil—and I hate to put it in moral category terms—in the face of a system that’s, that’s unjust and doesn’t work right—but in the face of evil—to do nothing, of course, is to—be part of that evil. What one does—in the moment—is, is what you can do. I mean. Doesn’t mean that everything you do is the wisest, the best thing. Um. But—y’know, as I say, by, by, by Monday morning certainly, and even before that, many of us, those of us who were in a sense, I suppose you could say, more serious politically, more dedicated to the project—the big project—we understood that, that what had happened, y’know, Friday night, Saturday, Sunday—those were—comprehensible, understandable expressions of the rage and frustration that people felt. But—nobody got hurt, nobody was out blowing up buildings or—I mean, we burned one down, but that’s different, in a weird sense. We weren’t gonna hurt anybody. Nobody got hurt on their side, y’know. So—I don’t have any—I don’t have problems at the time, or in retrospect. I mean, it’s not som’m I go out and do today, but I don’t have a problem with those broken windows. I didn’t break any, but I don’t have a problem with the people who did. I don’t have a problem with the brothers and sisters who burned down the ROTC building. That sucker had to go. I got no problem with that. Um. Does that justify what was done to us? No. Y’know, they wanna indict people for som’m, fine, y’know, we’ll do the whole court thing, we’ll see how that goes. You don’t go out and shoot people two days later—who had nothin’ to do—like, I can tell you that no one who was shot on May 4th had anything to do with the burning o’ the ROTC building. Um. But, y’know, that’s—in a sense that’s neither here nor there. Uh. So no, I, I, I don’t regret it. If ya got in a time machine and went back, ya might—I might make different decisions, um—at that time, but that’s—that would be based on later knowledge, and that—you don’t possess that at the time. So you do the best you can. Doesn’t mean that everything you do is perfect or right, but you do the best you can, and, and there’s absolutely no point in tryin’ to—rethink it later, y’know? 

 

2:09:01 - Sean Schifano 

I think that leaves us with a clear and, and good epilogue. To, to wrap up, is there anything about the Kent State shootings that, as a, as a final note of conversation, that you would want people to know if you were thinking about it now?  

 

2:09:20 - Ken Hammond 

Well. [pause] [laughter] [pause] Agai—a couple—two sides really of, of it, or two ways of thinking about it. Y’know, as I say, I greatly appreciate Neil Young and his, his participation, his support, and the song lives on and, and uh—y’know, if anybody, if young people know anything about Kent State, they probably know that song. I’ve always had a problem with the song, in that, um—it’s pretty bleak, uh—and it’s. [pause] [sigh] [pause] In a sense, I feel it’s, it’s kind of defeatist. And it dovetails with the larger—problem that I have, thinking back about Kent, which is the tendency—the dominant tendency, the way that it’s almost always spoken of, as a tragedy. It’s not a tragedy, y’know? A tragedy—in Greek drama, a tragedy is—something that happens—generally something bad—that happens, as a result of a flaw in the character of the protagonist—right? Some weakness, some—disposition, that leads them into—an inadvertent, unintended—action that, that then has these bad consequences. [pause] That’s not what happened. It’s not a tragedy. It was an act of political repression, directed—at people who—didn’t deserve it, y’know? In any way, shape or form. And to treat it as a tragedy is to neutralize it, y’know? “Let’s hope a tragedy like this never happens again.” Well—let’s hope it never happens again, but it doesn’t happen because of tragedy. It happens because of power, and the maldistribution of power, and the maldistribution of wealth that underpins that power. And. [pause] Fighting to change that isn’t a moral flaw, it’s not a weakness. [pause] So I hate it when it’s talked about as a tragedy. We need to see it with a clearer eye and understand it as a, as a—a political event. That, that’s probably the thing that I would like to communicate to people. All the other stuff, all the details of what happened, I mean, that’s all interesting, that’s, that’s the raw material that, that, that the history comes out of. But the—I suppose the analytical conclusion that I would, that I would like to, to, to, to emphasize is, don’t think of it, y’know, as a tragedy. Remember that it’s a, it’s, it’s a political event, it’s part of a political struggle, it’s all about—it’s all about power. 

 

2:12:48 - Sean Schifano 

Thanks so much, Ken. 

 

Ken Hammond 

Sure. Sure. 

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