Student unrest rocked Ohio State University in 1969, ’70
Protests intensified, led to clasheswith Guard, police.
In 1969, Blaine COLUMBUS—
Lilly was an English major at Ohio State University, trying to navigate classes, college life and the growing anti-VietnamWarmovement on campus.
The vivid memories of the unrest stick with him to this day.
He remembersoccupying what is now Bricker Hall to protest thewar. Police told Lilly and other demonstrators that they had five minutes to leave, or they’d be arrested.
They left.
“I felt like I chickened out,” said Lilly, nowan associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State.
The protests intensified. In late April 1970, anti-war riots in and around the Ohio State campus led to more than 60 injuries, including seven gunshotwounds, and close to 300 arrests.
Inspired by PBS’ 10-part series “The VietnamWar,” WOSU-TV’s “Columbus Neighborhoods” on Thursday night looks into how unrest during the Vietnam War led to protests and clashes on the Ohio State campus. In conjunction with the television program, The Dispatch spoke with people who experienced the campus unrest in 1969 and 1970 to explore howthewar and other issues polarized college campuses.
The Ohio State campus and surrounding neighborhoodswere racked with turmoil in April andMay 1970. Lillywas 20years old, one of about 45,000Ohio State students. He grewupin Hilliard when it was a small town, and he graduated fromthe old Hilliard High School.
The war wasn’t the only cause of the unrest that began that spring.
On April 29, students began boycotting classes with a student strike, protesting the university’s rejection of a list of demands presented theweek before. Specific demands included adding black and women’s studies to the university’s courses.
The demonstration was orderly for the first four hours. One student leader said about 5,000 students chanted and picketed university buildings.
Then it started to spiral out of control.
“We were down there at 11th and Neil, right in front of HamiltonHall,” said Lilly, now 68. “A bunch of highway patrolmenwere standing around in riot gear. They startedwalkingupthe street toward us.
“These three kids came up behind me, started kicking this guy,” Lilly said. One of the attackers kicked the man’s camera across the street.
“I ran,” he said. “It was obvious that the cops saw this happening. The tear gas started going off. They pushed us back upNeilAvenue.”
Protesters started throwing things at the National Guard, he said. “The cops were down toward High Street. Rocks were being thrown. I saw several kids knocked down by tear-gas grenades.”
Lilly said he and his colleagues were concerned about getting arrested and kicked out of school.
He also worried about what his fatherwould think.
Lilly’s father was a tooland-die maker at Fisher Body on Columbus’ West Side, but duringWorldWar II, he was an electrician’s mate in the Navy, serving on a large landing craft in the Mediterranean Sea.
“My dad was very much in favor of the war,” Lilly said, referring to Vietnam. “Several ofmy friends from HilliardHigh School died in the war. That changed my dad’s tune.”
Columbus Mayor M.E. “Jack” Sensenbrenner declared a state of emergency late on April 29 as police and demonstrating OSU students clashed. A curfewwas imposed, to run from 8 p.m. April 30 to 6 a.m. May 1.
Authorities estimated that 1,200 to 2,000 people participated in the rioting. Studentschanted,“Pigsoffcampus,” and “Pigs go home.”
ButLillysympathized with the National Guard.
“Most of the guys in the Guard didn’t want to go to Vietnam either,” Lilly said. “People were kind of chatting them up.”
He still has a red armband from that period. It says, “Bring all the GIshome now!”
Robert Darragh was a 24-year-old taking time off fromcollege. Heworked for an insurance agency to earn more money for school.
Now 71 and a Worthington resident, Darragh said heremembershearingabout a disturbance on campus on the radio. He went to see two friends who were Vietnam veterans on North 4th Street.
Theywent to the Student Union. Columbus police were out front, firing teargas canisters at the crowd, which was shouting and throwing rocks near High Street and 13th Avenue.
Darragh stopped to assist a blindmanwho had fallen, helping him into a building. Soon after, he felt something he had never experienced before.
“I thought Iwas hit in the back with a sledgehammer,” Darragh said.
“I was knocked off my feet, my hands across my chest,” he said.
A friend, a Green Beret, said, “Oh, you’ve been hit.”
But Darragh thought, “Hit with what?”
It turned out he was hit with a shotgun blast in the chest. Six others were also shot. It’s still unclear who shot them.
Darraghwas takentoOhio State’s hospital.
“I rememberthem rolling meover, this geyser of blood coming out ofmy chest,” he said. Physicians inflated his collapsed lung.
Darragh, who calls himself a semi-retired construction manager, said he was appalled by the demonstrators and the actions of police.
He also said his father was furious with him. “‘Why were you there?’” he said his father asked him.
“Iwas simply a spectator,” he said. “It was a life-altering experience.”
But he said he doesn’t regret being there. “I might have saved a guy’s life,” he said.
Bill Shkurti, whoretired in 2010 as senior vice president for business and finance at Ohio State, researched and recently wrote “The Ohio State University in the Sixties: The Unraveling of the Old Order.” He graduated fromOhio State in 1968 and enlisted in the Army’s Officer Candidate School.
He was in an artillery unit inGermany onMay 4, 1970, when the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four students at Kent State University. Shkurti remembered Ohio State, which had the largest ROTC in the country, as quiet when he was a student.
The demonstration that began atOhio State onApril 29 was fundamentally a revolt against the university itself, he said. When the students struck on that Wednesday, they picketed classrooms but didn’t disrupt class.
Then the demonstration began to erupt at Neil and 11th avenues. “You’ve got about 50 to 100 protesters and 2,000 milling about, watching,” Shkurti said.
Ohio Highway Patrol troopers were on campus. TheycalledColumbuspolice for backup. It was police who began firing tear gas to move the students. They also fired it at fraternities and sororities.
Ohio State’s president, Novice Fawcett, asked for the National Guard to help clear the streets.
Rebecca Zurava lived in the 1600 block of North High Street at the time. She remembers tear gas coming into her apartment.
Zurava, who now lives in northern Virginia, said she also remembers that the Oval was full of military equipment and troops.
“I was trying just to get to class because I was afraid not to go,” Zurava said.
More campus disturbances erupted on May 1, 1970, when the country learned thatU.S. forces had invaded Cambodia. Among the campuses in chaoswas Kent State, where students burned down the ROTC building. The Ohio National Guard then moved in.
Thefatal shootings atKent State onMay 4 changed the mood at Ohio State, Lilly said.
“My friend and I, it never occurred to us that the guns were loaded,” he said. “When the kids got killed at Kent State, it was hard to believe that actually happened.”
Lilly said he has never been so scared as he was then.
Ohio State shut downtwo days later, on May 6, after Ohio Gov. James A. Rhodes recommended it. The studentswere told toleave campus by noon the next day.
On May 6, protesters stormedOSUPresidentFawcett’s home and the university’s administration building. Protesters threwstones at firefighters trying to extinguish a blaze at Hayes Hall. Fawcett shut the campus down at 5:30 p.m. that day.
Once the campus closed, Lilly took a Greyhound bus to Pittsburgh to live at his girlfriend’s house for aweek.
The university reopened on May 19.
The campus turbulence rattled somewhowere serving in southeast Asia.
Russ Clark of Clintonville servedintheMarines during the VietnamWar. He was in Vietnam at the time of the Kent State shootings.
“Some of us at that time said ‘What is happening? Our nation is so deeply divided,’” Clark said.
“And I think those wounds, by the way, are still lingering, the wounds of the ’60s. I think we still feel some of those in our society.”
The Ohio State campus and surrounding neighborhoodswere racked with turmoil in April andMay 1970. ... The (Vietnam) warwasn’t the only cause of the unrest that began that spring.