The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Kent State witness still fights against imperialist abuse
Mike Alewitz was already a seasoned anti-Vietnam War protest organizer 50 years ago when he witnessed four fellow students shot dead at Kent State University.
The demonstration by 1,500 students at noon on a sunny Monday was pretty much over. Students were throwing rocks — pebbles, Alewitz calls them — at three Ohio National Guard units. The guardemen assumed a shooting position, aimed their M1 rifles at the students, and used grenade-launchers to fire tear gas into the dispersing crowd.
Alewitz was gassed, washed his eyes out in a nearby building and returned. As a 19-year-old sophomore, he was chairman of one of the campus anti-war groups but had not organized this event. It was spontaneous, a few days after President Richard Nixon ordered bombing in Cambodia, following a weekend of rioting in which students burned down the ROTC building.
On Monday, the 50th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, Alewitz — a retired Central Connecticut State University art professor and noted political muralist, living in New London — didn’t travel to the campus but hasn’t left the movement.
Alewitz has spent a lifetime as a self-described Marxist and socialist, fighting a class system, a labor system, a capitalist system, a race system that he says must be overturned — all the more urgently now that we see the effects of the coronavirus crisis.
“I believe we need a revolution in the United States and I think that’s clearer today than ever before,” Alewitz said Monday afternoon as he prepared for an online slide show to commemorate the Kent State massacre. “The ruling class of the U.S. is sending us back to die and work in a pandemic...The species is faced with extinction and meanwhile for the super rich, this is just another chance to make money.”
As a Jewish kid from the suburbs of Cleveland, steeped in anti-war activism with a record of organizing early protests in high school — “we wore black armbands and we get beat up,” he recalls — young Mike Alewitz had missed the weekend uprisings to attend a socialist conference at Ohio State in Columbus.
Now, he was in a large parking lot as the guardsmen marched past, up Blanket Hill to a wooden pagoda, not far from the Victory Bell where the day’s events had started.
“When they got to the top of the hill, they turned and fired on the students,” Alewitz said Monday. “We were, most of the students, hundreds of feet away from them...You could barely see them, the distance was so great.”
He ran for cover. When the screaming ended, four students lay dead including Alewitz’s friend Sandra Lee Scheuer — a sometime protester who, that day, was just walking to class in that same parking lot. “She was studying to be a speech therapist and she was shot in the throat,” he said.
“I was just trying to absorb it,” Alewitz said Monday when I asked what he was feeling at the time, and how he felt now, at age 69, looking to a younger generation to take up the cause.
‘They’ve suppressed the history’
A photograph from that day shows Alewitz standing with his hands on his hips, a white armband around his jacket, watching as a student, wielding a black flag, jumps up and down in the blood of Jeffrey Glenn Miller, whose body had been removed.
A few weeks later the report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest cited that scene and other facts exactly as Alewitz tells them — and concluded, “The 61 shots by 28 guardsmen certainly cannot be justified. Apparently, no order to fire was given...The Kent State tragedy must mark the last time that, as a matter of course, loaded rifles are issued to guardsmen confronting student demonstrators.”
Alewitz believes the guardsmen were ordered to fire on the students as a way to quell protests nationwide. “They’ve suppressed the history at Kent and they’ve covered it up including government involvement in the shootings.”
He set out to leave campus for Cleveland, where he would start telling the story of what happened and step up the pace of protests on campuses nationwide.
“As I was leaving...we got stopped by vigilantes,” he said. “They had an M2 pressed against my forehead...Then a police car happened to show up and I was arrested but it saved my life, probably.” He spent that night in jail after violating the campus lockdown.
“When the shootings took place at Kent, that really was like throwing gas on the fire in terms of the strike,” he said. He never returned to college life at Kent, instead transferring to the University of Texas at Austin.
The movement was called the “antiwar university.”
“We went to the Army bases and distributed literature,” he said. “Back then, Fort Hood and Fort Sam Houston were open…We would drive on and we would just throw leaflets out the window.”
I was surprised to hear it was very well received. “There was a big antiwar movement in the Army,” he said, citing activism by G.I.’s.
‘Four of many millions’
Today, Alewitz calls himself the most censored artist in the world, saying most of his murals have been destroyed and some exhibits have been blocked. He’s spent the better part of the last year preparing his archives to go to the Tamiment Library at New York University, a center of radical left history.
He’s still angry about the massacre of course, but he said, “I view Kent as part of what has happened to working people internationally. It’s four of many millions who have been killed.
With people abusing the commemoration, as he sees it, the sweep of politics drives him more than memories of that day. “Mostly I feel anger at people who make war.”
And the picture remains mixed.
“We beat the most powerful ruling class that ever existed,” he said at the start of the video that aired Monday night. To this day, he told me, the American people remain antiwar, and that’s a triumph that prevents the United States from occupying foreign countries.
But he said, from his house where he can see the submarine base at Groton, the U.S. military remains massively too large and U.S. imperialist oppression remains intact. When I pointed out that base and nearby Electric Boat account for 25,000 jobs, he agreed and said he once worked as a machinist making armaments.
Those workers would rather make medical equipment, he insists.
Fighting to overturn the system is easier in 2020, Alewitz said, with so many movements having happened since 1970, and with so much technology.
But he added, “The stakes are a lot higher today...Even if we get through this pandemic, we’re still headed toward this carbon-based abyss.”
Now it’s in other people’s hands. “I’ve been an activist my whole life. Movements are led by young people and I believe they should be led by young people.”