Kent State shootings: Ex-Long Islander recalls historic student demonstrations that ended with 4 shot dead by Guardsmen, including Plainview man

Saturday night, May 2, 1970, Bruce Meirowitz, a 19-year-old Kent State freshman from North Massapequa, was watching a movie in his dorm when a friend told him the campus was on fire.

President Richard Nixon's decision to invade Cambodia, which further entangled the United States in the Vietnam War, had prompted huge demonstrations around the nation. After days of protest on campus, "You could see flames coming up from Blanket Hill, or the glow of flame near the ROTC buildings," Meirowitz said in a phone interview this week, some 55 years later. He said he saw a marching phalanx of National Guardsmen, their bayonets catching the light.

Meirowitz was no activist, but he wanted to see the rallies close up. And he was upset that the authorities had imposed virtual martial law on campus. "The right to assemble was taken from us," he said. "We had no right to assemble in large groups."

Around noon on Monday, May 4, he was in a crowd of hundreds of student demonstrators when the Guardsmen began to shoot, killing four people, including Jeffrey Miller, 20, of Plainview, a fellow Long Islander and freshman he did not know. Meirowitz said students had yelled insults at the Guardsmen but that he never saw them throw rocks, as has been reported.

Newsday reported at the time that some of the Guardsmen were tired, having just rotated off a Teamsters strike in Cleveland.

"I heard a crack," Meirowitz told Newsday shortly after the shootings. "I thought they were firing blanks, but I saw the kids getting hit. I saw kids falling."

Meirowitz was near the front of the crowd of demonstrators, but when he saw the Guardsmens’ rifles, he moved to the side, he recalled. He ran into one of the dorms. "At this point, the crowd was dangerously agitated," he said. "They were screaming, ‘Murderers! Murderers!’"

When Meirowitz returned to his own dorm, he said he saw arrest warrants posted for the protesters and notices saying rooms could be searched for weapons.

"I came home and went to work at the beach," said Meirowitz, 74, who finished his degree at Buffalo State University, taught art in Shoreham-Wading River and served as a lifeguard on Long Island’s beaches for more than half a century. He and his wife now divide their time between Jensen Beach, Florida, and Newport, Rhode Island, where he is, he said, the oldest lifeguard in the state.

Shootings deepened divides

The Kent State shootings highlighted and deepened divisions in an already politically polarized country, as did Nixon's response to them.

Hofstra University historian Carolyn Eisenberg wrote in "Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia" that in public remarks at the Pentagon, Nixon contrasted brave American troops fighting in Vietnam with "those bums ... blowing up the campuses." She wrote that it mattered little to Nixon that blue-collar Kent State did not fit his narrative of "elite institutions catering to the alienated sons and daughters of wealthy Americans."

Nixon's comment — paired in the public consciousness with the photograph of a young woman shrieking over Miller's dead body, which circulated globally and ran in this newspaper — "consolidated a sense of outrage and victimization among students," she wrote.

Anti-war sentiment on campuses across the country had already been growing, galvanized by the stunning death toll in Vietnam, riots in cities and the election of Nixon, wrote Brian VanDeMark in "Kent State: An American Tragedy."

Nevertheless, in the days following the shootings, most Americans — 58% in one Gallup poll — blamed the students.

Two kinds of stories emerged about Kent State, VanDeMark wrote — The right saw the shootings as the "predictable and justifiable consequence of disobeying a lawful order;" the left saw them as "deliberate, murderous repression of dissent."

VanDeMark wrote that the shootings "radicalized moderate students and moved radicals toward violence." They also, just days later, played a role in New York City’s Hard Hat Riot, in which hundreds of construction workers, longshoremen and others punched and clubbed anti-war protesters. The riot’s organizer later visited the White House at Nixon’s invitation and gave the president a hard hat.

Long Island had its own divisions. Newsday reported that the night after Miller’s death, a Plainview-Old Bethpage school board meeting nearly turned into a stampede. Somebody pulled a fire alarm to interrupt a speech by a Kent State student who was with Miller when he died; a fight broke out when a man sitting near the student demanded he give up the microphone; and many of the 2,500 attendees left their seats. Police were called to restore order.

Meirowitz said the violence of the shootings accelerated Americans’ turn against the war. "You shot a bunch of college students, unarmed, on a college campus. What’s going on here?" he said.

He said he never attended a political demonstration again. Kent State, he said, had a lasting effect on him. "I have a visceral fear of government overreach and using the military on American soil," he said.

CORRECTION:  A previous version of this story included an incorrect photo of Jeffrey Miller.