Film tells story of Kent State unrest
ANNIVERSARY /
A witness to events leading up to the Kent State University shootings 47 years ago has produced a film to tell the story of those who were there when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a group of unarmed student protesters, killing four.
“The bus went past blanket hill,” said Daniel Miller, who was among about 100 students who had been arrested and were being taken to court on May 4, 1970, after the National Guard arrived in Kent to help put down anti-war protests.
“We couldn’t see the killing fields, but the bus stopped. We could hear the firing, the screaming. We heard on the radios that the National Guard had been shot by students. The guardsmen went into full rifle mode with guns on us.”
The documentary by Miller, a professor and filmmaker, tells the story of Kent State students who stood up against racism and the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ‘70s and the escalation to the deadly shootings on the northeastern Ohio campus. The film, “Fire in the Heartland,” will be shown Friday at the Kent Stage.
Personal accounts in the film come from Candy Erickson and her husband, Rick, who became leaders of the Students for Democratic Society; Bob Pickett, student body vice president in 1968; John Lewis, civil-rights leader and congressman; and Jerry Casale, art student and co-founder of the new-wave band Devo.
“The ‘60s are remembered as a particularly colorful decade,” said Kent SDS leader Jim Powrie. “It was also a decade of death. A decade that began with the assassination of Jack Kennedy, then later Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and then the kids at Kent. It seems that those people who were effective at changing the system paid a terrible price.”
On May 4, 1970, the National Guard shot 13 unarmed students in an act of violence that never has been fully explained. The four deaths sparked the largest student strikes and student protests in U.S. history, sweeping across 3,000 campuses nationwide and punctuated 10 days later by the shooting of African-American students at Jackson State University.
Miller was born and raised in Ohio by his mother, an art teacher and civil-rights activist, and he had a brother who fought and was injured in the Vietnam War. He attended Kent State from 1968 to 1970. From a young age, he marched with his mother during fairhousing strikes. At Kent State, he was involved in the Kent Committee to End the War.
“You could pull up and park by the student union,” Miller said. “It’s where the PanAfrican studies is now. There was a huge atrium and fireplace and couches and chairs. I would play guitar and sing war songs.”
In 1968, with the death toll rising in Vietnam, the public turned against the war. Peaceful protests turned violent on the Kent campus.
On May 2, 1970, an estimated 2,000 students converged at the ROTC building and burned it down. At that point, the Ohio National Guard flooded the city and campus.
James A. Rhodes, the Republican governor of Ohio at the time, is shown in the film calling the students “worse than the brown shirts. They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America.”
On the night of May 3, Miller was amid a mass of students who marched to the office of then-KSU President Robert White. A university representative told the students the president would address them that night.
“Students believed the president was going to come and talk to everybody on whether National Guard should be allowed on campus, and then the National Guard showed up instead of the president,” Miller said. “They had fixed bayonets and they launched tear gas; helicopters flying over head.”
His film recently was updated to include the aftermath of the shootings, continued anti-war protests at Kent State and the 1977 Tent City protest to prevent a gym being built on the May 4th site.