Those events are unfolding today in Los Angeles. Some of what’s happening now is unprecedented. No prior president has ever deployed the National Guard, over the objections of state and local officials, purely to quell civil unrest. The response was further militarized on Tuesday with the deployment of Marines.
We have seen a deadlier version of this story before: in 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio. That crackdown on an antiwar protest ended in bloodshed and horror. Most Americans today have forgotten Kent State. If we want to prevent another bloodbath, we should refresh our collective memory about one of our country’s darkest moments.
On April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon announced that he had ordered an invasion of Cambodia, extending the carnage of the Vietnam War. Students across the country had already been vigorously protesting the war. Now those protests exploded.
At Kent State, about an hour south of Cleveland, thousands of students took to the streets to denounce the Cambodia invasion. A fringe group burned down the campus ROTC building. Ohio Republican Gov. James Rhodes, facing a U.S. Senate primary the next week, called out the Ohio National Guard. The guard troops quickly occupied the campus. Some of them gassed, beat and bayonetted students.
On Monday morning, May 4, guard troops massed on a central campus hill. They attacked student protesters with tear gas. Most of the protesters dispersed. About 50 remained, taunting the troops and — from more than 80 feet away — throwing a few rocks. Behind that handful of protesters, numerous other students were crossing campus between classes and activities.
At 12:24 p.m., the guard opened fire, spraying bullets across the campus. Four students were killed. Another nine suffered severe gunshot injuries. No one, to this day, knows why the troops fired. In the days following the massacre, guard leaders tried to find, or fabricate, some justification for the shootings. But investigations never found any threat to the troops’ safety.
The words “Kent State” would eventually become familiar shorthand for appalling government violence against innocent people. In 1970, however, the public supported the troops. In a Gallup Poll taken the week after the shootings, 58 percent of respondents blamed the students for their own murders. Eleven percent blamed the National Guard. In liberal New York City, construction workers savagely beat a group of students who protested the massacre. President Nixon feted the workers’ union representatives at the White House.
The Kent State story had a grim sequel. On May 15, state and local police in Mississippi opened fire on nonviolent protesters at historically Black Jackson State College (now Jackson State University). They killed two students and wounded twelve others. The media and public largely ignored this second massacre.
Historical Parallels
What’s happening today in Los Angeles differs in important ways from what happened at Kent State. The president, not the governor, called out the National Guard, raising concerns about state sovereignty. The country is not at war. In L.A., local law enforcement has taken the lead in confronting protesters, not the guard. No one, thankfully, has died.
But we should heed the similarities. President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, like President Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War, is a legally dubious policy, undertaken in the name of “national security,” to feed a hawkish political base in a time of acute polarization. Trump, like Gov. Rhodes in 1970, has political incentives to appear tough on disorder, defuse opposition to an unpopular policy and distract the public from other policy failings. Now, as then, our ideological and policy divides have a strong racial valence — the strand that reaches from Los Angeles in 2025 to Jackson State in 1970.
The National Guard, now as in 1970, consists of civilian soldiers, many with limited military experience. Throwing such troops into a site of political tension should be a responsible leader’s last resort to quell violence. The Los Angeles protests today, like the Kent State protest of 1970, have been overwhelmingly nonviolent. Now, as then, sending in troops threatens to escalate rather than calm political tumult.
A constant across eras is public antipathy toward many protests. A 2023 YouGov poll found large majorities of Americans opposed to conventional protest tactics like temporarily blocking traffic, disrupting public events and occupying public spaces. Legislatures routinely score political points by proposing, and often passing, anti-protest laws. No wonder presidents across a 50-year span have felt emboldened to impose their excesses on the backs of protesters.
The Los Angeles Police Department’s condemnation of Trump’s L.A. crackdown is historically striking, even ironic. Law enforcement, when confronted with protests, frequently spends its energy exaggerating or inventing violent elements to discredit the protesters. Media reporting often exacerbates the misperception of protests as more violent than they are.
It's First for a Reason
Americans venerate the Boston Tea Party and other agitation of our founding generation. We celebrate the marches, sit-ins and freedom rides of the Civil Rights Movement. Protests set out to upset the status quo. They’re provocative, boisterous, even scary. They’re also as American as the Fourth of July.
Protest is especially crucial in this moment of creeping authoritarianism. Less than a year after voters re-elected President Trump, strong majorities oppose some of his policies, including aspects of his mass deportation scheme. The president, like all elected officials, must remain accountable to the people. When elections fail as a means of accountability, public protest becomes democracy’s essential line of defense.
If you need another reason to make sure the government doesn’t abuse protesters, how about the First Amendment? That cornerstone of our liberty protects not just the familiar freedom of speech but also the rights to peaceably assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Street protests combine all three of those First Amendment rights: Protesters peaceably assemble to speak out about their grievances against government policies.
The First Amendment gives protesters substantial rights. The government should not punish nonviolent protesters because other protesters, or other people adjacent to the protest, are committing violent acts. The government may not shut down a protest because violence is happening around the protest or at its fringes.
When a protest becomes pervasively violent — when it crosses a line to become a riot or an insurrection — law enforcement may step in to maintain order. Trump calls the L.A. protests an insurrection. They aren’t, by any available definition. An insurrection is what happened in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021. Of course, Trump encouraged, celebrated and ultimately pardoned those insurrectionists.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has shown little interest in making governments respect protesters’ First Amendment rights. At almost the exact moment of the Kent State massacre, the court began a rightward shift that has ground on for more than a half century. The increasingly conservative court has focused its First Amendment energy on the supposed free speech travails of wealthy political spenders, corporate advertisers, and conservative Christians. The court cares about one group of street protesters: anti-abortion activists.
The rest of us are largely on our own. For that reason, we should all stand up for our shared right to protest. That right protects us all, whatever our political beliefs, against government tyranny. What happened at Kent State in 1970 should move us to make sure it never happens again.
Greg Magarian, a law professor at Washington University, is author of a book about the contemporary Supreme Court and the First Amendment.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
