I had told Dorothy Fuldheim that
Kent was virtually an armed camp. Police guarded the site in full riot gear: helmets,
night sticks, guns, and cattle prods. Some even patrolled the site on horseback. This kind
of police presence was a frightful flashback of 1970. 1 kept thinking,
"This proves how 'popular' the gym is," if they needed a small army to protect
the site, Ms. Fuldheim echoed my sentiments, "They've got the bullets and they've got
the bulldozers. What can we do?"
Unfortunately, putting a gym on Blanket Hill was not all they
were trying to do. The Trustees were trying to rewrite history. In Orwellian fashion, the
University knew that "He who controls the past controls the future."
The week before, the new President of KSU, Brage Golding, had
issued a so-called "peace proposal"'urging that the gym be named not only for
the four slain students but for the Ohio National Guard as well! He stated coldly that the
Guard had suffered as much as the students and therefore deserved the same recognition.
In this nightmarish attempt to deny the truth, the Trustees
wanted not only to obliterate the site but to obliterate any memory of what it had seen.
1984 seemed less than seven years away.
I couldn't bear to go to the site unless it was to protest. But
Jo McDonald begged me to take her there. She had just been released from jail and hadn't
yet seen the destruction. Under cover of |
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night, we approached the fence
and saw the
bulldozers and mud glistening in the rain. "They've taken away our land," I
thought, "They've f'illed the campus with police and sent 330 of us to jail. They've
lied to us, harassed us, and made our lives miserable. Now they've taken away our hill.
What's left to fight for?"
Someone had answered that question before. "it wasn't the
land we were fighting for; it was the idea." It was the right to remember; it was the
Bill of Rights. You either have a right to protest in this country or you don't ...
period. So far at Kent State, they've said, "NO." In the age of Roots, people
are getting in touch with their pasts. Kent State is a part of our past that we can't
afford to forget. It is the Gettysburg of the student movement, the white man's Wounded
Knee.
I thought back and remembered the confidence and hope of the 194
arrests. I thought of September 24 and other protests and acts of civil disobedience. I
said to Jo, "Goddamit, some day we're going to return this hill to exactly the way it
was in 1970. Somehow, we're going to
stop that gym."
I remembered the chanting outside the County Jail,
"The People United Will Never Be Defeated." And Tony Walsh and I chanting,
"The People United Will Never Be Defeated."
The People United will Never Be Defeated ....
Someday that hill will look exactly,the way it did in 1970. |