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.
studentactivism.net 
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March 12, 2010 at 5:10 pm
anteater
That’s definitely an issue that we’ve struggled with incorporating (by we I mean the UCI students making the call). Kent State gets a lot of attention because it was/is first, but you’re right that we shouldn’t ignore Jackson State. We already missed Orangeburg. The NorCal slogan of “We have decided not to die” takes on an even greater, and much more tangible meaning in this context.
We should also remember that the Paris student uprising in 1968 began around May 3; I know a lot of us are thinking in those terms already but that may be a valuable way to track our progress as we escalate.
March 12, 2010 at 11:11 pm
lecturerebel
Keep in mind that the legacy of Kent State is more than “four dead in Ohio.”
The administration’s justification for calling in the National Guard included citing unrelated actions from the night before May 4, 1970 (parties, off-campus actions, fires, broken windows). This reminds me of Chancellor Michael V. Drake, MD’s gross (in multiple senses) generalizations about recent actions: by equating nooses and bullhorns, swastikas and peace signs, Drake attempted to shame or frighten potential March 4 participants into staying away, and to divide students along lines with which they are familiar but not always on a first-name basis.
The investigation into the murders was, for the kin of the murdered, wounded survivors, and their advocates, never completed. There is a huge push this year to reopen the case (and to bring Neil Young (who wrote “Ohio” days after 5/4/1970 after reading press accounts) to Kent State on May 4, 2010).
These delaying tactics, and the successful framing of students for being at least in part at fault, must receive careful consideration as they haunt current efforts to dampen the clear manifestations of students’ energy and the complexity of their many and diverse demands, assessments, or simply screams, which they have the right to contribute to the so-called shared-governance model of California schools.
The following site, May 4 Task Force, is maintained by Kent State students and has information about the event, subsequent investigations, and plans for this year:
http://www.m4tf.org/
I know much less about May 14/15, 1970 at Jackson State and can only offer these two sites with little verification of their accuracy or usefulness for research:
http://www2.kenyon.edu/Khistory/60s/webpage.htm
http://www.may41970.com/Jackson%20State/jackson_state_may_1970.htm
In some ways, there were significant differences in the issues that drove students to manifest on the two campuses–and perhaps those at JSU are more pertinent to 2010 actions at UC and elsewhere. I believe that, regardless of the degree, each is inscribed in the other. In the end, imperialism of the subject and anything larger (and probably smaller) requires the violence of capital, race, and the nation-state to function. Does a public education system?