• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 920 0

in the student union watching as blue capsules were pulled, like bingo balls, and the dates on them read, in the first Selective Service lottery since 1942, I sat silently at one of the tables with friends. I don’t remember any noise at all until the first date, September 14, was posted on the board, and a fist slammed on a table behind me. With each ball, a new boy was placed in a symbolic draft line; the first dates called marked the first to be drafted. We were all there together, hoping together, but this fist was my reminder that we were mostly hoping individually, hoping for ourselves or our brothers or our boyfriends. I know because I still know my brother’s lottery number, 116. 116. He was safe; he could continue college. The crowd at the student union dwindled at the end, the lucky and the unlucky both now knowing their places, if not their fates. The sense of unrest renewed itself after Christmas, after exams, but life on a Southern campus—even one known for civil rights and free speech and workers’ rights protests in the past—was still primarily life on a Southern campus.

But on May 4, 1970, at a protest at Kent State University in Ohio, four students were killed by young National Guardsmen who had been ordered there by Governor Rhoades. Campuses across the country caught fire, and Southern campuses, which had so far been relatively tame, caught fire as well. There was an article in one of the early issues of Ms. magazine that I remember as being titled “Click!” written by Jane O’Reilly. She writes about the moment you realize you might be a feminist. The example I remember is that your husband agrees to pick up the laundry at the dry cleaner, but—click!—you are the one who has to remember that it needs to be picked up. I had a click moment, a moment when I pushed aside my impotence. When I heard about the killings at Kent State, I ran into the common room to tell other students in my dormitory what had happened. One boy just looked up from his hand of cards and said, “They probably deserved it.”

Click! Who was this boy, who spent his afternoons playing cards, to say such a thing? He would do nothing to protest, and if I did nothing, I would—for all of history—be just like him. I might as well play cards or fiddle if this did not move me to action. Maybe I had stewed silently in the past, maybe because of my father or because of the faces of wounded soldiers I had seen in the hospital in Japan; maybe I was understandably conflicted about the tone of protests against our military instead of against our policies, whatever my reasons for inaction. But this was different. And in that moment I was different. I watched Allison Krause’s father on television, his face flat and sad and helpless. Why did they shoot her? Why did they shoot my daughter? You couldn’t hear that, I thought, and not be different.

That night we gathered, radicals and liberals and people who were simply leveled by what had happened in Ohio. There were a hundred, maybe more, filling the room. I stood against the wall and listened. The first to speak were voices of unrestrained anger—ugly rhetoric and talk of violence. The diatribes continued, each one besting the last. At times they didn’t even seem to be talking about Kent State at all. The Chicago Seven, Bobby Seale, everything was part of the rant. One fellow even pounded his fist against the wall and screamed, What about Albania? Albania? I edged toward the door. I wanted to do something, but maybe this was not where I needed to be. Then Forrest Read, an English professor, spoke. We were talking about Kent State, he said, and we needed to listen to the new voices in the room. The diatribes stopped or at least slowed. The nonviolent coalition prevailed, and I set to work. Going to meetings, putting up posters, handing out fliers, I was a worker bee doing whatever was needed. And in what seemed like minutes, the war protests that had been at the edge of campus life were now almost all there was of campus life. When the consensus was to boycott the remainder of classes in the semester—a protest,