Riots

On August 11, 1965, Marguette Frye was a young African American motorist was pulled over and arrested by Lee W. Minikus, a white California Highway Patrolman, for suspicion of driving while intoxicated. She was arrested in deeply impoverished African American neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. As a crowd of pedestrians gathered around the scene, you can the tension in the air with a knife. Violence soon erupted.

On October 21, 1967, some 100,000 protesters gathered at the Lincoln Memorial. After a brutal confrontation with the soldiers and U.S. Marshals protecting the building, hundreds of demonstrators were arrested. One of them was the author Norman Mailer, who chronicled the events in his book "The Armies of the Night," published the following year to widespread acclaim. Also in 1967, the anti-war movement got a big boost when the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. went public with his opposition to the war on moral grounds, condemning the war's diversion of federal funds from domestic programs as well as the disproportionate number of African-American casualties in relation to the total number of soldiers killed in the war.



In late April of 1970, the United States invaded Cambodia and widened the Vietnam War. This decision was announced on national television and radio April 30th, 1970, by President Nixon. He stated that the invasion of Cambodia was an attack to only the Viet Cong's headquarters in the territory.

On Friday, May 1st, one of the colleges who were anti war was Kent State University. They held an anti-war rally at noon in the Commons. Speeches against the war and the Nixon administration were given and they buried a copy of the Constitution to symbolize the murder of its rights because Congress had never declared war.

On the morning of May 4, a crowd began to gather beginning as early as 11 a.m on the campus. By noon, the entire Commons area contained approximately 3000 people. Across the Commons at the burned-out ROTC building stood about 100 Ohio National Guardsmen carrying lethal M-1 military rifles. Shortly afterwards, General Canterbury made the decision to order the demonstrators to disperse. A Kent State police officer standing by the Guard made an announcement using a bullhorn. When this had no effect, the officer was placed in a jeep along with several Guardsmen and driven across the Commons to tell the protestors that the rally was banned and that they must disperse. This was met with angry shouting and rocks, and the jeep retreated. Canterbury then ordered his men to load and lock their weapons, tear gas canisters were fired into the crowd around the Victory Bell, and the Guard began to march across the Commons to disperse the rally. The protestors moved up a steep hill, known as Blanket Hill, and then down the other side of the hill onto the Prentice Hall parking lot as well as an adjoining practice football field. Yelling and rock throwing reached a peak as the Guard remained on the field for about ten minutes. The Guard began retracing their steps from the practice football field back up Blanket Hill. As they arrived at the top of the hill, twenty-eight of the more than seventy Guardsmen turned suddenly and fired their rifles and pistols. Many guardsmen fired into the air or the ground. However, a small portion fired directly into the crowd. Four deaths and nine wounded.

On June 11, 1963, in Saigon, Vietnam, a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc immolated himself in a busy intersection. Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk from the Linh-Mu Pagoda in Hue, Vietnam, burned himself to death at a busy intersection in downtown Saigon, Vietnam. He set himself on fire because Diem, the leader of North Vietnam, eliminated all Buddhist from any political positions. Diem was Catholic and the Buddhists were angered by his intolerance for other religions.

David Halberstam, a journalist for New York Times- "I was to see that sight again, but once was enough. Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the aire was the smell of burning flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese how were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think... **As he burned he never moved a muscle never uttered a sound,** his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him." (1965:211)