Daily Archive

There’s been a fair amount of “after March 4, what next?” talk around the internets this last few days, with the most common answer being “all sorts of stuff.” But some specific proposals are beginning to emerge.

One, out of UC Irvine, is a proposal for a new national day of coordinated action on May 4, the fortieth anniversary of the Kent State killings. (On May 4, 1970 National Guard troops on that Ohio campus fired on a crowd of student antiwar protesters at a distance of more than a hundred yards, killing two protesters and two passers-by. All four of the dead were Kent State students.)

Noting that broadly conceived days of action have brought in more previously uninvolved students than more narrowly targeted protests, the Irvine activists call for students nationwide to “hold funeral processions and silent marches this day; tell everyone to dress in black.”

One thought for Irvine activists and others to bear in mind while planning and promoting such an action — on the night of May 14, 1970, just ten days after Kent State, local and state police in Jackson, Mississippi opened fire on a dormitory building on the Jackson State campus, killing two students and injuring twelve.

The Kent State killings are far better known than those at Jackson State, but both are part of American student history, and our national amnesia about Jackson State is deeply problematic. Any commemoration of the one should make note of the other.

Idaho was one of the dozen-plus states that did not, as far as I’ve been able to determine, participate in the March 4 Day of Action for education, but its students have not been silent.

On February 25, some two hundred students at Idaho State University in Pocatello staged an on-campus protest against state budget cuts and tuition hikes, and yesterday several dozen ISU students made the 250-mile drive to the state capitol in Boise to rally and lobby legislators directly.

Eight members of the ISU student government joined the group in Boise, including the student government president. Next up for the Idaho students’ agenda is building their campaign into a statewide movement — students from two other public universities in the state participated yesterday, and the ISU folks are hoping to build on that in the future.