The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
50 YEARS LATER
Schroeder affected witnesses he never met
The May 4, 1970, shootings at Kent State University are well known, but what happened there is not always widely understood, say three witnesses of he incident that claimed the lives of four students there.
Allen F. Richardson, Thomas M. Grace and Laura L. Davis never met William Knox Schroeder, 19, the Lorain man and Kent State University student who was shot and killed that day.
Yet Schroeder and the other students killed — Allison Krause, 19, of Pittsburgh; Jeffrey Glen Miller, 20, of Plainview, Long Island, New York; and Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, of Youngstown — remained part of their memories.
“They were all caring people, so it does put a face to the injustice of what happened.” — Laura L. Davis, witness
Setting the stage
Richardson, Grace and Davis described the sequence of events in the days leading up to May 4, 1970.
Kent State had student activism and rallies and political confrontations — but those were part of life at a lot of universities, such as Oberlin College and Case Western Reserve University, Richardson said.
On April 30, President Richard Nixon announced American units would assist South Vietnamese troops in “cleaning out” North Vietnamese and Vietcong fighters occupying areas along Cambodia’s border with South Vietnam.
Those against the Vietnam War saw that as an expansion of that war, when Nixon previously pledged to withdraw 150,000 troops.
“Nothing about what was going on was normal from the moment Nixon made that speech,” Richardson said.
That prompted a rally and “riot” on May 1, then the weekend arrival of the Ohio National Guard as Kent State’s ROTC building burned down, an unsolved arson.
Ohio Gov. James Rhodes made derogatory remarks about the students, many of whom had left for the weekend.
They returned May 3 to find the campus looking like an armed camp, complete with tents on the football field and jeeps patrolling the streets, and armored personnel carriers “all over the place,” Richardson said.
With more students back at school, organizers scheduled an anti-war rally for noon on May 4. A lot of people turned up to protest the presence of the National Guard, but the crowd swelled partly because a number of people were out going to classes or lunch, Richardson said.
Bill and Sandy
Schroeder was a unique person, yet his story was similar to those of hundreds, maybe thousands, of college students in 1970, said Richardson.
An Elyria Catholic High School graduate, Richardson went to Kent State for its journalism school. He would spend 40 years in that field, including working for USA Today in London and New York.
“Bill — never met him, I didn’t know him, but I’ve read about him so many times,” Richardson said. “And, my God, I had so many friends like Bill who were good athletes but smart, from working class
families, who joined ROTC to help pay their tuition.”
Richardson said he knew Scheuer from the dorms. They were among the rotating members of a dozen or so friends who would eat lunch together.
“What I remember about Sandy most was, she was not political,” Richardson said. “In fact, she was one of the most apolitical people that I knew. She was really one of these people that were dedicated to saving one person at a time.”
Her degree was going to be speech therapy.
“And the irony was that she was shot through the throat,” Richardson said. “Her larynx was lacerated by a bullet. If I would have walked straight up that hill — it’s still hard to say it. If I would have found Sandy there, I would have lost it. I don’t know what I’d be like today.
“I knew Sandy, and Sandy was, you know, she’s a special person,” he said. “I know everyone always says that about the dead, but she really was a special person. Bill, I feel like I would have known him like a second skin, like a brother, but never did meet him actually.”
Students, veterans
Grace, now 70, was shot
through the heel that day.
After a career as a social worker, Grace continued his education studying history, specializing in the American Civil War. He also is the author of “Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties.”
Grace said he did not know Schroeder on campus, but later met his parents, Florence and Louis Schroeder, and sister, Nancy Tuttle.
Even 50 years later, there tends to be widespread misunderstanding of student protests in the 1960s, that anyone in college was privileged and anyone who was not in college, was not privileged, Grace said.
Those at Kent State came from working class families in some of the most industrialized cities in the country, such as Cleveland and Pittsburgh, located around the university, Grace said.
The demographics of those fighting in Vietnam — largely blue-collar, working-class young men — were much the same as the students at Kent State, Grace said.
“So therefore it wasn’t unusual to have one son fighting in Vietnam and another son going to school at Kent State,” he said.
As veterans returned home from Vietnam, many used the G.I. Bill to go to school. By fall 1969 and spring 1970, 10 percent of Kent State student population were veterans, he said.
“So the day of the shootings, there were dozens of Vietnam veterans who came under fire by the Ohio National Guard,” Grace said. “This is something that the wider public is almost wholly ignorant of.”
Growing up, Schroeder was a model citizen, Eagle Scout and going to college as an ROTC student.
“And of course the wider public is almost wholly ignorant of the kind of students that were killed there,” Grace said. “And if they had been more mindful of the type of students that were shot — and Bill Schroeder is the poster boy for that — then they wouldn’t have been so free with the disdain and hatred that was often voiced about the students in May of 1970.”
Seeing Bill
Davis, then 18, was among the anti-war demonstrators, and when the shooting started, Davis said someone pulled her into a building.
A few minutes later she went back outside and walked up the access drive where Miller was lying.
From there, she walked to the left and saw a young man lying on the ground wounded, but still alive with his knees propped up.
“I will always, my whole life, be able to vividly remember his knees just weaving back and forth in slow motion,” Davis said.
The young man was wearing orange corduroy bell-bottom pants — Davis said she remembered that because she also owned a pair. Later she connected that detail to the identity of Schroeder.
Davis is co-creator of the May 4 Visitors Center, where she established an internship in Schroeder’s name.
“I felt his loss so poignantly because having seen him after the shootings when he was still alive, and then unfortunately he was one of the people who died as a result of his wounds,” Davis said.
She credited Lori Boes, the visitor center assistant director, with creating exhibits to show Schroeder, Miller, Krause and Scheuer were real people with real lives, not troublemakers trying to tear down the country.
“He was a good kid. They were all good kids,” Davis said. “They were all caring people, so it does put a face to the injustice of what happened.
“I’m not going to call it a tragedy,” she said, “I’m going to call it an injustice, and that’s something that people can learn from.”