May 9: 100,000 in D.C.

More than 100,000 people protested in front of the White House in Washington DC on this date in 1970 in opposition to the war in Vietnam (and the secret air war in Cambodia and Laos), and in outrage at the killing of four unarmed students (three of them Jews) at Kent State University five days earlier. Hundreds of thousands of students on hundreds of campuses across the country demonstrated after the Kent State (and Jackson State) shootings. According to Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History, “The [Nixon] administration initially reacted . . . with wanton insensitivity. Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, whose statements were carefully programmed, referred to the [Kent State] deaths as a reminder that ‘when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.’” Nixon himself had talked of ‘bums’ destroying US campuses, to which Arthur S. Krause, the father of Allison Krause, one of the students shot dead at Kent State, stated on national TV ‘My child was not a bum.’”

“Flowers are better than bullets.” —Allison Krause