May 4 marked the 25th anniversary of the massacre at Kent State University in Ohio, where four students were shot dead and nine others wounded by Ohio national guardsmen. The students were protesting U.S. president Richard Nixon's escalation of the war in southeast Asia into Cambodia and the bombing of North Vietnam.

The following excerpts were taken from Militant articles covering the protests in response to the escalation of the war in Indochina and the slaughter at Kent State. The first excerpt is from a statement issued by the national campaign committee of the Socialist Workers Party and printed in the Militant.
 

Allison Krause, Sandra Lee Scheuer, Jeffrey Glen Miller and William E. Schroeder are dead - victims of the same capitalist government that has killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and more than 50,000 American GIs.

With millions of Americans mourning their martyrdom, a decisive new chapter is being written in American history.

Who is responsible for their murder? The individual most directly responsible is Richard Nixon himself. Nixon and his cohorts have created the kind of atmosphere where a National Guard commander can order his men to fire into an unarmed assemblage - because "we were out of tear gas." But while Nixon bears the central personal responsibility for the crime committed at Kent State University, his responsibility is not individual. He bears the burden of guilt as the principal political spokesman for American capitalism. The four Kent students fell victim to the same violence being directed against the people of Indochina.

Stop the war. Bring every single GI home. End all capitalist violence at home and abroad. Move toward a socialist society cleansed of barbarism - a society where for the first time freedom, justice and humanity will prevail.

MAY 5 - When President Nixon, with unmatchable cynicism, announced his decision to order the invasion of Cambodia, he unleashed a storm of antiwar opposition that will close down nearly every college and university in the United States, and has the potential for reaching millions more Americans not on the nation's campuses.

This phenomenal reaction to the escalation of the war in Indochina has been completely spontaneous. It is unprecedented in its scope. And both by its breadth and by its spontaneity it is qualitatively different from anything that has ever occurred before in the history of this country.

Of the close to 150 universities contacted by the Student Mobilization Committee as the strike movement was just getting underway at the beginning of the week, for instance, only one had no plans to call a strike....

One of the most striking indications of the enormous potential of this antiwar wave came in several mass meetings on Boston-area campuses where more than 15,000 students voted May 4 to strike and support a mass rally at the State House called by the Student Mobilization Committee to protest the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent massacre and to demand a statewide vote on the war.

Typical of the current surge of protest was the size of these mass strike meetings: 5,000 at Harvard; 2,000 at Boston University; 1,000 at Tufts; 1,800 at Northeastern University; 2,000 at Brandeis; 2,500 at MIT; 1,100 - two-thirds of the student body - at Clark University.

A mass meeting yesterday evening at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland voted on a strike that will shut down all campuses in the state of Ohio. Following the meeting, 3,000 participated in a midnight memorial march for the four Kent State University students killed by Guardsmen earlier in the day.

The millions of students who are participating in the actions today speak for millions of other Americans who in no way support Nix  
 
 
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