Student strike of 1970
| Student strike of 1970 | |
|---|---|
| Part of Opposition to US involvement in Vietnam | |
| Date | May 8, 1970 |
| Location | United States |
| Causes | |
| Methods | |
| Result | Political backlash |
On May 2, 1970, in the aftermath of the American Invasion of Cambodia, students burned down the ROTC building at Kent State University. On May 4, poorly trained National Guardsmen confronted and killed four students during a large protest demonstration at the college. On May 14 in Jackson, Mississippi, city police and state troopers killed one student at Jackson State College and a high schooler passerby.
Soon, more than 450 university, college and high school campuses across the country were shut down by student strikes and both violent and non-violent protests that involved more than 4 million students.
While opposition to the Vietnam War had been simmering on American campuses for several years, and the idea of a strike had been introduced by the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, which advocated a general strike on the 15th of every month until the war ended, the Kent State shootings seemed to provide the spark for students across the US to adopt the strike tactic.
On May 8, ten days after Nixon announced the Cambodian invasion (and 4 days after the Kent State shootings), 100,000 protesters gathered in Washington and another 150,000 in San Francisco. Nationwide, students turned their anger on what was often the nearest military facility—college and university Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) offices. All told, 30 ROTC buildings went up in flames or were bombed. There were violent clashes between students and police at 26 schools and National Guard units were mobilized on 21 campuses in 16 states.
For the most part, however, the protests were peaceful — if often tense. Students at New York University, for example, hung a banner out of a window which read "They Can't Kill Us All."
The protests and strikes had a dramatic impact, and convinced many Americans, particularly within the administration of President Richard Nixon, that the nation was on the verge of insurrection. Ray Price, Nixon's chief speechwriter from 1969–74, recalled the Washington demonstrations saying, "The city was an armed camp. The mobs were smashing windows, slashing tires, dragging parked cars into intersections, even throwing bedsprings off overpasses into the traffic down below. This was the quote, student protest. That's not student protest, that’s civil war."
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