Category Archives: Politics

“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 National Guardsmen were withdrawn from the University of New Mexico late Friday after a confrontation with students that sent 11 people to the hospital with bayonet wounds.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.

A Proclamation

Whereas the common population of this sceptered isle was attached to answer the Lords Farage of a plea why they refused to serve — whereas it is ordained that any man and woman of the Queens’s realm of England, being able of body and below the age of sixty years, not living by trade or practising any specific mystery or having his own land about the tilling of which he can occupy himself, not being a servant to another, if he should be required to serve in a service considered fitting to his estate, shall be bound to serve him who so requests and shall take only the wages, liveries, rewards, or salaries which were in force, in the place where he should serve, in the sixty-fourth year of her Gracious Majesty or the average in the five or six preceding years. — Now the said common population was found guilty as charged, are required to till in the fields and raise crops from the earth as villeins nativus and shall to their home church by Tuesday 7 June for service, at the failiing of which to take the stocks for three days and thereafter be imprisoned.

Explanation

I based it on a text from a proclamation from the Middle Ages when most tenants were under some kind of mutual obligation with the landlord and not free to come and go and be tenants of whomsoever they pleased and in the period of disruption during the black death some tenants were arguing that they were freed from their obligation and so the Lords took them to court and the proclamation was that they were bound and they had to work in the Lord’s fields.