National Guard swarms student protesters

Kent State at UK, Part III

By Richard Becker

With the old Air Force ROTC building on Euclid Avenue a smoldering pile of ash and wood, on May 6, 1970, UK students continued their demonstrations against the university and the illegally expanding war in Vietnam. Nationally, the fallout from the murder of four students at Kent State University by the National Guard on May 4 was beginning to intensify. A number of colleges and universities experienced student unrest in the form of campus demonstrations, property destruction and pitched run-ins with local police and national guard units.

The media doesn’t support students

From the outset, both the Lexington community and the Kentucky press, which described students as violent and intent upon civil unrest, were solidly against the campus protests that took place on UK’s campus and throughout the country. Contemporary press coverage—particularly that of the Lexington Herald—reveals the negative biases against demonstrators that had reached near-universality in the early 1970s.

In an article on May 8, three days after the Board of Trustees refused to issue a statement condemning the Kent State shootings and the AFROTC building burned to the ground, the Herald sought to minimize the situation by calling the demonstrations at UK “more a determined outing than a confrontation.” It went on to describe the student protesters as “husky guys in University of Kentucky sweatshirts…with long hair and bell-bottom trousers.” (This depiction was appeared often in local press accounts–despite the visible leadership of Steve Bright, UK’s short-haired, tie-wearing student body president in glasses.)

In an editorial on the same day, the city’s other daily paper, the Leader, called on officials to use violence against the demonstrators, saying that “some students must be met with force.” But perhaps most egregiously, the editorial, in lamenting that “the [Kent State] students are dead,” noted the positive potential the shootings might have in chilling campus protest. The murder of fours students at Kent State, it hoped, would “serve the useful purpose of awakening other students…that they cannot keep pushing with violence without expecting violence in return.”

This type of press coverage established the public opinion climate in which demonstrators across the U.S. were forced to function; things were no different for antiwar demonstrators here at UK. The story of the unfolding localization of the Kent State story, according to most news outlets in Kentucky, was one of police and military reaction to violent students—not the other way around.

May 6: fallout from AFROTC burning

On the evening of May 6, the day after the burning of the AFROTC office building, some 600 students marched the six blocks from UK to Transylvania University where a rally was to be held. A contingent of National Guardsmen and state police accompanied the group of peaceful demonstrators and no violence apparently occurred that afternoon.

Governor Nunn, in concert with President Singletary, placed a curfew on the UK campus barring all people from the grounds of the university from 7 PM to 6:30 AM. The implicit motivation for this move was the burning of the AFROTC building the preceding night. However, by curfew time, a scant three guardsmen had arrived on campus to assist police forces in enforcing the curfew.

Gerald Becker, a senior at UK in 1970, remembers the state police marching on the peacefully-gathered protesters on the lawn between Buell Armory and the Student Center that week, some time after the burning of the building. He recalls a noon-time gathering on a sunny spring day with students eating lunch and conversing—not a group bent on violence or unrest.

According to Becker, state police suddenly arrived, “out of nowhere,” gathering in a line near the walkway that runs from the student center toward the Main Building and Buell Armory. Within minutes, the state police began marching on the crowd gathered on the lawn—a crowd no larger than one or two hundred people—swinging clubs and ordering people to disperse.

“Kent State was in the back of our minds,” he said, as the police began to march on the students. At one point, Becker said, the police began to pummel a student on crutches who was attempting—understandably at a slow pace—to follow the dispersal order and get away from the green to safety. Instead he was beaten by the police and later dragged away, presumably to be placed under arrest for disobeying police orders. “We were not hostile,” Becker says. “It was an overreaction [by the police], and they did more to incite the students than any speaker ever could have.” (Disclosure: Gerald Becker is the writer’s father, who was a student at the University of Kentucky at the time.)

Dale Chapman, a senior from Walton, KY also present for the UK protests was quoted by the Louisville Courier-Journal agreeing with Becker’s assessment. “The police have done more to radicalize students here in the last two days than the SDS (national campus organization Students for a Democratic Society) could have done in 10 years,” Chapman said.

Thursday May 7: a night at Lexington Theological Seminary

At UK, clashes between demonstrators and officials continued unabated. On Thursday, several dozen students were arrested, among them student body president Steve Bright. That night, close to a thousand students gathered near the law building on campus to hear the ruling on a university resolution to close the school. Guard troops and state police moved on the students in an attempt to disperse them once again. The students moved across Limestone Street and gathered on the lawn of the Lexington Theological Seminary for what was to be an extended, overnight stay.

In an interview this year, former student leader Guy Mendes recalled an incident that occurred that night on the lawn at the seminary. A “foolhardy” student who was a part of what came to be called the “sleep-in” at the seminary decided to, in Mendes’s words, “tempt fate,” crossing the street back to UK and stepping on the grass. What happened next has remained with Mendes to this day as an example of how much more tragic events at UK could have been. “Guardsmen came running from…the shadows” toward the seminary. One of the guardsmen tripped on a wire running the edge of the seminary lawn, loaded rifle in hand, and fell, the rifle pointed directly at the gathered students.

Mendes calls it “one of the most frightening moments of the week,” an event that brought chilling memories of the shooting at Kent State just a few days earlier. Had things gone the slightest bit differently, Mendes believes, there could have been shots fired in Lexington.

A May 8 article in the Lexington Leader reports that Lexington Theological Seminary students stood in support of the actions of UK students, particularly “the efforts of (SGA President) Steve Bright to represent and achieve student concerns” with regard to the presence of armed guardsmen and police on campus.

Friday, May 8: demonstrations end

The students left the seminary the following morning without any significant incidents. On Friday, several hundred students again gathered at the student center in defiance of a continuing campus ban on student gatherings. Bright reiterated his criticism of the governor, police, guardsmen, and the UK administration. The rally ended a short time later and with it, the demonstrations at UK came to an abrupt end.

Mitchell Hall, a former UK history student, in an article in the Kentucky Historical Society Register about the week of May 4 at UK, wrote that “perhaps more significant than the abrupt end of the protests was the large number of students who participated in the demonstrations during the most academically demanding week of the semester.” Indeed, the fact that the most politically active week in UK’s history coincided with what is arguably the most academically difficult time of a student’s school year is a testament to the dedication and the righteous indignation of the student demonstrators who put their academic careers and their names on the line to demonstrate against a government with which they disagreed.

Though the protests ended that Friday, May 8, the story does not end there. Court proceedings and university disciplinary hearings soon followed concerning the burning of the AFROTC building (and by extension, Sue Ann Salmon’s arrest for that burning) and a civil suit by Bright and others against the governor and the university calling for an injunction to ban loaded weapons on UK’s campus.

The final article in this series will consider those hearings and court proceedings as well as tell the stories of a specific few UK students who were an integral part of the tumultuous events at UK in May 1970.