There's an arc to campus protests

A glance at Derf Backderf's meticulously researched graphic novel Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio seems right on time today.

This artist really did the work, in archives and interviews, to reconstruct the events of the Ohio college massacre on May 4, 1970. A barrage of gun fire from National Guard troops killed four students and maimed more in response to student protests. He tries to portray accurately what students, politicians, cops, and Guardsmen were thinking as the movement against the ongoing Vietnam war both intensified and shifted focus under ham-handed state repression. Overall theme: nobody really knew what they were doing!

Here are a few panels (click to enlarge):

Spring had come and students enjoyed the campus's grassy open lawn.

"Out of the bars and into the streets." During a boisterous evening in town on Friday night, some students interrupted a night of drinking and cruising to take common chants into the streets. The town police department had no idea what to do and bashed heads while intoxicated student rioters smashed store fronts.

The town called in the National Guard. No one seemed to know quite how to act in the aftermath.

Non-campus actors believed all sorts of myths about the mysterious campus activities. What had got into these kids?

For the students, their occupied campus was novel and insulting.

On Monday on campus, a small fraction of students reverted what they had been doing for weeks -- marching in protest. Students had a new target - the occupation of their turf by tired, frustrated, and uncomprehending troops. Many of the Guardsmen despised students they saw as privileged snots.

And so tragedy. A random crew of students were dead; all sides told their own stories. No one was punished. At the time, 58 percent of Americans thought the protesters had it coming to them.

I can highly recommended Backderf's reconstruction of Kent State events, much more detailed and nuanced than what I've offered here.

The book is not a great graphic novel because, for all the artist's efforts, all these characters seem to blend into each other, classic hippies in one stereotype and malevolent pols in another. He could probably have created a clearer visual experience with a lot of editing, but he's determined to report all the available historical strands and the result is not pictures which are easily understood. But this is a terrific effort to tell a complex story.

I got the book from the public library; I hope it is readily available in this moment.

• • •

A few observations from having lived similar events at UC Berkeley during attendance there from 1965-1969 and watching student protests over Gaza today:

• As at Kent State, most students can and do navigate around the edges of passionate protests, going about their lives. They may sympathize, but they are not there. The passionate activists are usually a small minority.

• Repression of campus protests draws a far larger fraction of students (and profs and staff) into the protests, for good and ill. College students, at least back then and likely still, come to think of campus as their place and broadly resent being invaded.

• This can create incentives among a small fraction of protesters to try to create a situation in which cops or others beat protesters' heads. I'm not saying that is all that goes on, but there are always provocateurs, some honest and some not.

• When under attack on campus, it becomes hard for protest leaders to keep the focus on the initial animating issue -- today the call for a Gaza ceasefire and for an end to US complicity in Israel's oppression of Palestinians. If the issue becomes mean cops, the movement is losing.

• Protest leadership demands teaching serious protest discipline. This is hard because the aim is to grow fast. And also, the power of campus protest is attractive moral creativity; apparent rigid automatons chanting only approved messages do not attract.

And we'd be a far worse country if students could never be moved by atrocity. So far, we seem to be that kind of country.