When I was five years old, my family moved to Kent, Ohio. My father was an education professor at Kent State University and we lived there throughout my entire childhood. We were there when May 4, 1970 occurred; I was 9 years old at the time. My father was teaching at the university, but thankfully he didn’t witness the shootings.
These are photographs of a letter that my dad wrote to family and friends on May 6, 1970 reflecting on what happened on May 4. It doesn’t cover the timeline of events, and I’m not going to write about the timeline; you can look up the timeline and read about one tragic mistake one after another made from May 1 through the final terrible 13 seconds on May 4, 1970 that left four students dead and nine wounded.
This may be an unsual choice for a Love Thursday post, but it definitely is about love. It’s about a man’s love for the university that he works for. It’s about a professor’s love for the students that he teaches. It’s about a couple’s, a family’s love for the town in which they live. It’s about a couple’s love for freedom, for freedom of expression which has been so severely compromised. It’s about a family’s love of freedom which they have been robbed of due to what consists of martial law in the town, with nightly curfews and helicopters flying overhead each night, making sure the citizens aren’t breaking curfew. It’s about a 9-year-old girl who loves playing outside and is limited to sitting on the front porch with her family, the thwap thwap thwap sound of the helicopter blades the strongest memory she will have of those days. It’s about the girl, now a middle-aged woman, not being able to write these words without crying, who had a love for the town, the town that was torn apart. It’s about the girl with the firsthand knowledge of what that day did to the town. It’s about that girl who sadly knows that people actually did say that “more of them should have been shot,” who knows how that single event affected her family, of how innocence died on that day, that sunny, beautiful day in early May.
It’s a story of love and loss. It’s a story best told by my father in a letter that he wrote just two days after the event.
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This is a story of what happens when love is not included in decisions made. And a story of how people who do love react, how they try to pick up the pieces and move on. Their story doesn’t end there. A bit more, just a tiny bit, will be revealed in tomorrow’s Foto Flashback Friday, but May 4, 1970 was an event that seemed to change the very molecules of each member of my family and the family as a whole unit. And so many more people.
But we survived, as did so many others. With love. Because of love.
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Happy Love Thursday, everyone. Find more love at Love Thursday: Love Is All Around Us and Love Is All Around.
Posted in Love Thursday, May 4 1970, death, family
