Forty nine years ago today. Never forget.

[onenote]

[kentuck]

1. I was on I-75 on my way to Detroit...

...and was driving past that area when the news came on the radio.

[Ohiogal]

2. My alma mater.

I was there in the mid 70s, after it happened, but it was still fresh in all our minds. I attended every year’s memorial when I was a student there.

I remember my mother didn’t want me to go to school there because she thought it was unsafe and had a lot of bad influences for her “impressionable “ daughter!

There was a statue in my dorm’s parking lot that had bullet holes in it. A very sobering reminder.

To this day. I feel sick about Gov. Rhodes ordering National Guard to shoot unarmed protesting students.

[llmart]

4. Kent always had the reputation of being a party school.

I didn't go there, but my two roommates and I used to go there on a weekend (we lived about 45 minutes from Kent) for the fun parties.

I remember this day as if it was yesterday. It was gut wrenching.

[Sneederbunk]

3. Went to my first anti-war rally after this happened.

[FM123]

5. Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders was a college student there when it happened

In her autobiography she describes the horror she experienced...

Another witness was Chrissie Hynde, the future lead singer of The Pretenders and a student at Kent State University at the time. In her 2015 autobiography she described what she saw:

Then I heard the tatatatatatatatatat sound. I thought it was fireworks. An eerie sound fell over the common. The quiet felt like gravity pulling us to the ground. Then a young man's voice: "They fucking killed somebody!" Everything slowed down and the silence got heavier.

The ROTC building, now nothing more than a few inches of charcoal, was surrounded by National Guardsmen. They were all on one knee and pointing their rifles at ... us! Then they fired.

By the time I made my way to where I could see them it was still unclear what was going on. The guardsmen themselves looked stunned. We looked at them and they looked at us. They were just kids, 19 years old, like us. But in uniform. Like our boys in Vietnam.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

6. I remember it very well.

Hard to believe it was so long ago.

I'm afraid it could happen again.