Same As It Ever Was

“Students ended occupation of the ROTC building at Central Michigan University at Mount Pleasant and started meeting with faculty members to discuss plans for “peace week” this week. National Guardsmen were withdrawn from the University of New Mexico late Friday after a confrontation with students that sent 11 people to the hospital with bayonet wounds. 

This was reported in the San Bernadino Sun 10th May 1970

I learned of the bayoneting and found the news coverage just yesterday while looking at a post on ComicsGrinder. Henry Chamberlain wrote a post reviewing Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio. by Derf Backderf, a graphic novel on the protests at Kent State.

“On May 4, 1970 on the campus of Kent State University, four students were killed and nine others were injured when Ohio National Guard members opened fire on demonstrators protesting the Guard’s presence and the expansion of the Vietnam War.

The extract from the graphic novel included a frame showing a student being bayoneted while trying to escape through a window into a building. There she was half in and half out, being bayoneted.

How could it happen that National Guardsmen would stab students with bayonets?

And while doing that I came across this, a story that didn’t make the international news, about a predominantly black college:

“On May 15, 1970, two students were killed and 12 were wounded when police fired more than 100 rounds at protesters at Jackson State College in Mississippi.

And the reason I entitled this piece Same As It Ever Was, was because of this piece, also in the same issue of the San Bernardino Sun:

“The most serious situation developed about 11 p.m. EDT at the GWU campus, about half a mile west of the White House. A barricade of an overturned small truck, benches and other objects was set up at a busy intersection on the edge of the campus. When protesters started pelting police cars with rocks and bottles, officials responded with a heavy tear gas attack in one of the rare uses yesterday of the gas. The students, estimated at about 200, retreated into the campus, whose streets were full of others students and protesters followed by Civil Defense Unit policemen.