It’s a breezy Saturday morning in Kent, Ohio, a city of about 20,000 people built along the Cuyahoga River. A plaque near the river’s bank reminds visitors that, in 1825, Joshua and Rebecca Woodard hid six fugitive slaves who had arrived here on the Underground Railroad. The Woodards’ son would later run five of them to nearby Cleveland, where they could make their way to Canada and permanent freedom. The sixth, an infant child, was raised by the Woodards, not far from the town where John Brown dedicated his life to emancipation.
For all its abolitionist history, Kent is best known for the university that bears its name. During the school year, the Kent State population is about twice that of the city itself. And when I arrive at a cafe on Erie Street, it is filled with young people sipping blended coffee drinks and peering into their laptop screens. It is eight days before final exams—and exactly one week before the fifty-fourth anniversary of the Kent State shootings, when the Ohio National Guard killed four students at the scene of an anti-war protest on campus.
At the time, LIFE magazine said the shootings had made Kent State “a symbol of the fearful hazards latent in dissent.” Those hazards, captured in horrifying images from the scene, might explain why it took more than fifty years for an anti-war movement of similar scale—this one protesting Israel’s U.S.-backed assault on Gaza—to emerge. Yet Kent State organizers told me that, while their university’s legacy should offer a stark warning against campus repression, they are determined not to become a “symbol” of the present-day protests. Instead, they’re honoring the Kent State legacy by keeping Palestinians front-and-center in campus activism.
I immediately recognize Yaseen Shaikh, Camille Tinnin, and Magdalene Weiss-Vopat, three leaders of the Kent State student movement, by the keffiyehs draped across their shoulders. Last November, in Burlington, Vermont, three college students were shot by a forty-eight-year-old white man who had seen them wearing the Palestinian scarf. When the police arrived at his door, Jason Eaton opened it without a fight, telling the arresting officers, “I’ve been waiting for you.” Four months later, Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League—which is running a campaign to “fight hate” on college campuses—likened the keffiyehs to a Nazi swastika.
But these American students are no Nazis. I am here to ask them about their place in a new protest movement that, in just over two weeks, has seen more than 2,000 people arrested on campuses across the country. Police in riot gear have tackled unarmed students and faculty to the ground. The Speaker of the House threatened to deploy the National Guard. And at nearby Ohio State University, activists filmed armed officers on rooftops. That scene, in particular, evoked images of May 4, 1970, when Kent State students gathered to protest the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.
For Tinnin, Shaikh, and Weiss-Vopat, Cambodia and Vietnam are now textbook entries, far from the killing fields of Gaza. But as the May 4 anniversary approaches, they find themselves fielding more and more questions from reporters like me: Could the massive student movement of the 1960s and 70s offer lessons for today’s pro-Palestinian protests? Are they worried that what happened here in 1970 could happen on some other campus today? Are they planning a protest encampment themselves?
Although Kent State students have staged regular protests in solidarity with Gaza, the three I’m meeting today are determined to keep the focus on the ongoing killing and mass starvation there. “I’m really proud of [current] movement organizers for not letting the media establishment say that this is about them,” says Tinnin, thirty-one, a political science doctoral student. “Some argue, ‘This is Kent State, we need to center the right to protest.’ And I’m like, ‘we cannot divorce the right to protest from what we are protesting about.’ ”
Centering Gaza, where Israel’s attacks “undoubtedly” constitute genocide—according to Hebrew University Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg—is a key theme of the campus protest movement, which now includes more than a hundred student encampments globally, most of them in the United States. The New York-based community organization Within Our Lifetime issued a statement on April 27 affirming that the movement for Palestinian rights has been “engaging in mass protest and direct action for decades” but that “it was the steadfastness of the Palestinian people and their resistance forces who won the support of the global majority.”
That deference has earned the respect of Palestinians in Gaza, who have posted messages on social media thanking the protestors. But in the United States, mainstream media coverage has largely ignored the connection between the protests and the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. Instead, outlets like CNN have parroted lawmakers’ accusations that protesters are motivated by “antisemitism.” This one-sided coverage, activists argue, has enabled violent police assaults on the encampments, prompting warnings that officials are helping recreate the conditions that led to the Kent State shootings.
Samer Badawi
Students leave rocks as a tribute in the parking lot outside Taylor Hall where one of the students was killed in 1970.
Sara Koopman, a professor in the School of Peace and Conflict Studies at Kent State and an expert on protest movements, says delegitimizing protestors as violent or hateful is an old tactic. During the 1970 protests at Kent State, “there was panic that students were going to poison the water supply with LSD,” she tells me. The “paranoia and fear-mongering” were so pervasive that, on the day of the shootings, the Ohio National Guard ordered soldiers to secure a wastewater treatment facility near campus.
First-hand accounts from two of the soldiers posted at Plum Creek Water Works, along with testimonies from dozens of other people who were in Kent that day, are available online as part of the Mapping May 4 project, an interactive web app that draws on oral histories collected in the university’s archives. Although many of those histories are echoed in the current protests against Israel’s war, Weiss-Vopat, a twenty-three-year-old Kent State student pursuing her masters in political science, says campus organizers have been careful not to use May 4 as leverage in their demands to university administrators.
She says the list of demands students submitted to university president Todd Diacon, which includes calling for a ceasefire and divesting from weapons companies, would have made sense to anti-war protesters in 1970. At the same time, she adds, activists on campus have tried to remain sensitive to the painful history at Kent State. By pushing university administrators to support an end to the war, “we’re continuing the legacy of those who came before us,” Weiss-Vopat says, “while also honoring the memories of the people who died.”
So far, that has meant focusing their efforts on securing a ceasefire call and meeting with the university’s chief financial officer to get information on investments that support weapons manufacturing. The students have sent a letter to Diacon asking for a response to their demands by May 3, a day before the anniversary of the shootings. Shaikh, a nineteen-year-old computer science student, says organizers are prepared to protest if their demands aren’t met by then, but that they aren’t using the annual occasion, which includes a commemoration honoring survivors and their families, as a “threat.”
If anything, he thinks the anniversary should encourage administrators to listen to the students’ demands. “The thing is, the university continues to use May 4 to bolster its name and to make some sort of claim about its values,” Shaikh tells me, “but it needs to stand by those values.”
An April 26 press release, co-signed by Shaikh, Tinnin, and Weiss-Vopat, connects the demands with those of the Students for a Democratic Society, which issued a similar divestment call in 1970. “As the stewards of this tradition of activism, we must do more than echo the past,” the release, which addresses university administrators, reads. “It is with this in mind that we ask you to stay true to the significance of May 4 and do more than pay lip service to their memories.”
The authors encouraged attendees at the May 4 commemoration to “display signs and symbols of solidarity with Palestine” while asking that they “pay respect to the people who lost their lives, and their loved ones, as well as those wounded.” Tinnin says students adopted similar tactics at last year’s commemoration, amid widespread opposition to an Ohio Senate bill that the American Civil Liberties Union dubbed the Higher Education Destruction Act. The bill, which is still being considered, “would force colleges and universities to ignore issues such as climate change, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs, or abortion,” according to the ACLU.
The stakes this year extend far beyond Ohio. “If we deliver a win here,” Shaikh says, “it sends a message to those cracking down on students that even Kent State can rise above.” Weiss-Vopat thinks campus repression across the country should also be a cautionary tale for Diacon. “We’d like the president to look at other universities and how they have mishandled the encampments and say, ‘we don’t want to end up like that,’ ” she says. “These other universities have kind of set the ground for the ones who haven’t had the encampments.”
While we were chatting, a fellow Kent State student eyed Weiss-Vopat’s keffiyeh and asked if she could come to the next protest. “Everybody’s welcome,” Weiss-Vopat responded. Later, she tells me that, “while there are campus organizations behind the protests, we don’t want people to feel like they have to be a member of this or that organization to participate.” Shaikh agrees. “Part of the strength of the current protest movement,” he says, “is that it’s a popular effort, represented by all parts of the student body.”
As universities across the country enlist armed police to quash student encampments, that kind of inclusiveness will be key to sustaining the Palestinian rights movement. After the Kent State shootings, it would take another five years of protest for the United States to exit Cambodia and Vietnam. In just seven months, Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, including its hospitals and universities, has been largely destroyed, and the majority of its population displaced. With conditions growing increasingly desperate in the besieged enclave, I ask Tinnin, Weiss-Vopat, and Shaikh how they think about activism in this critical moment.
Tinnin is “radically hopeful” that the movement will lead to Palestinian liberation. But ending “militarism and U.S. imperialism” will take time, says Weiss-Vopat. “It’s probably not something I’ll see in my lifetime,” she says, though she remains hopeful that the “narrative power” of Kent State’s legacy can help advance the student movement’s aims.
For his part, Shaikh says, “I need to believe that, if I do what I can, that there is a sense of providence, that the movement will continue to feed itself, that there will be a free Palestine and an end to injustice. That is something that I have to believe in.”