Though a short film, at just twenty-eight minutes, MAY 4: OUR PLACE IN HISTORY is nevertheless an important document of a dark day in American history in general, and for the Baby Boom generation in particular.
It is about a specific moment of turmoil that erupted on a once seemingly innocuous college campus called Kent State University in the northeast Ohio town of Kent, thirty-five miles south of Cleveland, in the mid-spring of 1970. The Vietnam War had been an open wound on America for several years by that time; and although then-President Richard Nixon had campaigned in 1968 on a promise to end that war with honor, he then promptly reversed course on April 30, 1970 and sent tens of thousands of U. S. troops across the border into the tiny neighboring nation of Cambodia to supposedly destroy secretive Vietcong bases that were supplying the Communist insurgency in South Vietnam. This sent the nation in general, and educational institutions, including high schools, colleges, and universities, in particular, into a spasm of protest. It didn't take long for Kent State to become the center of turmoil.
On the night of May 2nd, angry students protesting the Cambodian incursion put the campus's ROTC building to the torch; and soon, that rage seeped off the campus and into the town of Kent itself, enraging the locals and spurring Ohio's neo-con governor Jim Rhodes to send in the Ohio National Guard in response. Then came May 4th, a Monday, in which there was a large-scale protest planned. That's when things got violent and ugly.
At 12:24 PM that day, for reasons that have never been fully disclosed to this day, National Guard troops opened fire on a group of protestors who had confronted them in an admittedly very raucous and arguably somewhat violent fashion. In the span of thirteen seconds, nine students had been shot, one of them, Dean Kahler, so badly that he was crippled from the waist down and bound to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Four others, William Schroeder, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, and Sandra Scheuer, lay dead. The massacre led to other outbreaks of angry student walkouts and demonstrations on other college campuses, and even high schools, from one end of the United States to another, and it also further polarized the nation in a way that, in almost every single respect, it has never gotten over. Only ten days later, two young African-Americans were gunned down at a dormitory on the campus of Jackson State University in Mississippi, thus pouring more gasoline onto a raging political and social firestorm.
Featuring interviews from several of the surviving participants of the 5/4/70 horror, including Laura Davis and Jerry M. Lewis, plus observations being made by legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone, and musician activist David Crosby, who witnessed Neil Young write the protest song "Ohio" in response to that day, MAY $: OUR PLACE IN HISTORY, a project of Kent State University itself as a way of acknowledging the school's responsibility for what happened, is one of many truly documentaries about this dark day in American history, a day that must always be remembered, and never forgotten under any circumstances.