A Postcard from Allison

On March 1, 2023 as I collected receipts for my 2022 income taxes, I rediscovered old family files of cherished photos from my childhood. Underneath these files at the bottom of the bin, and on its own, I found one single, old postcard. Looking at the addressed side, I quickly recognized the loopy handwriting addressed with my childhood nickname, Laurie. Focusing on the address, I was startled to read writing I hadn’t seen in 53 years. It was a February 22, 1970 postcard from Allison!

Memories flooded back as I read the postcard. Allison was inviting me to visit Kent State,

“Why don’t you come up for a weekend, Laurie. I’m sure you can train or bus both ways.”

Back in 1970 Allison’s postcard lifted me up from my mundane 9th grade life and I welcomed the opportunity to visit Allison where she was a freshman attending Kent State University. Over the next few weeks we planned for me to take a train to Kent, Ohio and visit Allison over the April 24-26, 1970 weekend.

53 years later it is amazing to have this postcard literally fall in my lap, especially since I had not seen the postcard or read it since 1970. And what a postcard! It included Allison’s music suggestions, her play list, reflecting those times when we were groovin’ to the best rock n roll ever.

Please read my account of that memorable weekend in April 1970 when I visited Allison at Kent State and hung out with her for the very last time.

Visiting Allison at Kent State

It’s April 23rd and Allison’s birthday. I’m in my bedroom in Pittsburgh. I am fidgety and sleepless as tomorrow I am going to visit my big sister at college, just the two of us together for the weekend at Kent State. She had been at Kent since the previous fall but this was my first solo visit to her, my first taste of teenage freedom.

My parents give me permission to skip junior high school that Friday to take the afternoon train from Pittsburgh west to Kent, Ohio. This was no small thing as the Krauses follow the rules and school is most important to them. It will be my first time traveling on my own.

The plan is for us to celebrate over the weekend together as my 15th birthday and Allison’s 19th occur in close succession. Going to plan, on Sunday our parents will meet us in Kent for a double birthday dinner, then I will join them for the return drive to Churchill, our residential area in Pittsburgh.

Ever since the previous autumn of 1969 when Allison moved out of the house at 18 to start college at Kent State University in the honors program, we sorely missed her energy and were all a little lost. Contact with Allison had been curtailed to weekly long-distance phone calls, infrequent letters in the mail and short visits when she was on break. Our family of four was now a family of three and none of us had adjusted to the new configuration yet.

My folks were struggling because their eldest child had grown up and left home. Although it was their dream to send their kids to college, having them walk out the door and leave was another matter.

My experience after Allison left for college was complicated by our family’s recent move from Wheaton, Maryland. Maryland had entered the 1970’s but Pittsburgh was hanging back by a decade or two. I wasn’t happy shifting back in time. On top of missing Allison and becoming the sole kid living at home, I felt on my own in an unfamiliar world, disconnected from my friends and our “with it” life back in Wheaton. Allison only made a pitstop in Pittsburgh, going straight to Kent after setting up her bedroom. I was jealous of her freedom.

Ah, but this morning I begin to feel the dream of what was before me for the weekend. How I was going to be set free from the confines of this uncomfortable new life, released from the repugnant, behind-the-times school system enforcing “no jeans” dress codes and the use of thick wooden paddles to punish students. The best I could hope for in Pittsburgh was to turn on my radio and if I was lucky hear the Beatles, Janis Joplin, Steppenwolf, the Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix, but only on FM. Today I was going to rejoin Allison, her friends and the rest of the Baby Boomers responding to the trumpets of tumultuous change, and a call for peace, blaring across the U.S.

The move to Churchill came about because Dad was transferred from his position in Maryland back to Westinghouse headquarters. Over the summer we returned to the same Pittsburgh neighborhood where we made our home in 1962, except this time to a new house just around the corner from our old one.

Instead of attending the now legendary Woodstock festival and grooving with more than half a million young people in upstate New York, Allison and I were packing our belongings, forced to leave our comfortable teenage world in Maryland and the buzz of D.C. Television and newspaper headlines around the world heralded Woodstock. We also learned that President Nixon was watching the festival intently, rattled by the size and peaceful energy of this monumental gathering. To my parents, it didn’t matter that their kids didn’t want to move back to Pittsburgh or that we wanted to attend the get-together of the century.

We were living through extreme events that August. Just a week before Woodstock, headlines blasted coverage of Charles Manson and the Tate-LaBianca murders. The press fed off the gory, chilling news of actress Sharon Tate’s killing, she and her unborn child and three guests brutally murdered in L.A. These tragic killings shook America to its core and the public was fed via TV and newspapers that it was the 60’s counterculture that prompted Manson’s murders. Parents were worried for the safety of their teenagers. This made an impression on me and Allison, and we began to understand cultural tensions that were gaining momentum at this time and would later touch our family in profound ways.

Before 1970 our parents were part of the “silent majority,” which meant they were inclined to go along silently in political matters outside of their personal lives. Nixon depended on this acquiescence. With two daughters and no sons, the Vietnam war didn’t touch our family directly but Allison and I were all in, wishing to protect our friends and our compatriots. Then on December 1, 1969, at President Nixon’s direction, the U.S. Selection Service instituted two lotteries to determine those who were to serve in the Vietnam war – the dreaded draft.

We saw firsthand how Allison’s friends, young men her age of 18, were forced to participate in the draft, mostly against their will. U.S. laws didn’t permit anyone under 21 to vote or even drink hard liquor yet they set up this lottery to send 18-plus year-old American boys to their deaths. Young men under 21 had no avenue to have their voices heard about Vietnam or participate in an election to vote against it. These lethal dichotomies struck us to our core.

That August from the crowds at Woodstock and in the streets across the country we saw how young people were sick and tired of taking this BS. Then with the Manson murders as their vehicle, the media and law enforcement vilified us and our counter-cultural world, calling us “dirty hippies.” Even at this young age we understood that there were deeper political forces working to scapegoat young people.

As we loaded our life into boxes and said sad goodbyes to our friends, Allison explained to me how this chapter ending was about more than just moving and leaving our peeps. She clued me in about the change taking place across the United States and in our own home. This was bigger than us. I could always count on my sister to shine a light on what really mattered. And it wasn’t just because she was four years older than me. She inherently understood things far beyond her sphere of knowledge and experience.

In Maryland, Allison and I had finally begun to find support, love and a closeness that we hadn’t felt elsewhere. Maybe it was because we were attending an experimental public school and thrived in the cosmopolitan atmosphere. Or it might have been the times and the people we were running with, but growing up in Wheaton was a high point for us both.

Now it is seven months later and I’m still licking my wounds. I am thankful this trip to Kent has arrived. The thought of a weekend with Allison is already lifting my spirits. It is a welcome change to be living life again, instead of waiting and counting the days.

I hear Mom remind me through my closed bedroom door, “Laurie, you better get a move on or we’ll be late.” I chuckle. With my parents involved, there is absolutely no chance of me arriving late for the train. Even though it takes only half an hour tops to drive downtown to the train station, they want to leave two hours ahead of time. Arriving early is a way of life for my family, at least 15 minutes with 30 even better. Closing my suitcase, I am stoked to get going and start my weekend of independence with Allison at Kent State NOW.

Driving downtown to the train station, Dad’s at the wheel of his forest green ‘67 Chrysler Newport with Mom seated across from him in the front seat. Each workday Dad drove a lengthy daily commute to his Westinghouse job. His car was just about the only place he was permitted to smoke cigarettes unabated. Called “the ashtray,” today it smells like cigarettes and Dad’s cologne, Old Spice. I’m in the backseat in my usual spot, sitting behind Dad, just outside his line of sight in the rearview mirror. L.B. (Lazy Bones) my dog sits in Allison’s spot at the car window across from me, looking out.

Who sat where in the car had been a source of family strife, especially since over the years as a family we spent so much time riding around together in this car. Until recently, Allison sat behind Mom. Even though Allison was away at college, I stayed in the same spot behind Dad – won from our long-fought turf wars for dominance. In the end Allison and I settled for an imaginary line down the center on the back seat and an oath, “You stay on your side, I stay on mine.”

Heading to the Parkway, we drive by our old house on Beulah Road. We lived in Churchill the first time from 1962 to early ‘67. That house represented so much to my parents. How they had made it on their own, fulfilling and living the American Dream. Working at Westinghouse, saving their money and being able to buy a brand-new home in the hillside of their coveted bedroom-community suburb.

Looking out the window of the car during our ride to the train station, the massive forest surrounding the Westinghouse Research Center flies by. Even though for years our house faced the fenced and heavily wooded green space surrounding the Westinghouse R&D facilities, none of us except Dad was ever permitted to set one foot on that property.

Driving on the Parkway we are lucky it is clear with no back-up traffic at the Squirrel Hill Tunnel. That’s the area of Pittsburgh considered the Jewish section. My parents were not interested in moving there, choosing instead Churchill with far fewer Jewish people in the mix. They wanted to buy new construction situated closer to the Westinghouse headquarters for Dad.

Coming into downtown, I see Pittsburgh’s emblematic steel mills and smoke stacks on the river. I gaze at the gigantic rust-colored structures with smoke and fire emitting from steel-mill activity along the banks of the Monongahela River. To me it looks more like industrial art until I remember all the pollution that freely pours out of the mill chimneys into the air we breathe. It creates the black “ring around the collar” on my father’s white business shirts.

Less than a half hour later we arrive at the train station in downtown Pittsburgh. As Dad parks the car, I’m already raring to go. I wait in line to purchase the train ticket that is my 15th birthday present and I’m beyond excited to take my pass to freedom. For my parents, this moment is bittersweet and their mixed feelings are written all over their faces. They’re happy to see me off yet they dread the return to the empty house this weekend. I think they are secretly wishing they could join me – at least that’s how Mom looks. Even though it makes no sense, they’re worried I’ll never come home again and will leave like Allison left. To me it seems they are holding on too tight. I remind them we’ll be together on Sunday for our birthday supper as I kiss and hug them both goodbye thinking, “I’m free.”

Boarding the train and the near-empty car, I select a seat by the window on the right facing west. As the train moves forward, I watch Pittsburgh’s steel mills that line the river valleys turn into farm land and forests of rolling hills. It is a three-hour trip west to Kent.

Ever since I can remember Allison admired Kent State and told us, “That’s where I want to go to college.” As youngsters in Cleveland during the late 50’s and early 60’s, on fair-weathered Sunday afternoons our family would take long drives through the beautiful countryside south, where Kent was located. Allison’s first choice for college had become a reality so here I am on a train, on my way solo to meet Allison living her college dream.

I remember the last time we were all in Kent in the fall of 1969 to take Allison to campus. With L.B. in tow, we drove to Kent State to move her into a dormitory to begin her studies. On the trip from Pittsburgh, Allison was bursting at the seams; she couldn’t wait to begin her adult life of independence and this new chapter.

Arriving on campus, we moved her belongings into Metcalf Hall located in an outer region of the Kent State campus. Allison wasn’t happy about being so far out or sharing a room with three other young women – she had never shared her bedroom before and treasured her privacy. Right after the holidays in the new year, Allison finagled her move to another dormitory room at the center of campus, a single in Engleman Hall. I will be staying with her there for the weekend, just the two of us in her dorm room.

I think about how grateful I am we began forging our peaceful sisterly bonds back in Wheaton. We attended an experimental public school system that mixed grades in classes, enabled free thinking and offered an open campus. I was in junior high but at John F. Kennedy High School, Allison benefited from a full-blown ‘60’s experiment with innovations in teaching, in particular fostering independence. In this fertile and positive environment, we found solidarity easier to nurture between us. We made peace with each other, leaving behind our family-taught ways of bickering and bullying.

Allison turned me on to pot a year earlier, but not without a lot of coaxing and negotiation. Over chats in our neighboring woods behind the Glenmont shopping center with friends my age who also had older brothers and sisters, we suspected our older siblings were smoking marijuana, and probably taking L.S.D. and mushrooms.

Among my friends, I was nominated to ask Allison to help us get some. I knew for sure she was getting high and we all felt Allison to be the most approachable among our siblings.

Not long after our conversation in the woods, I knocked on Allison’s bedroom door and she let me in. With Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? playing on her record player, an album we bought together, I asked her if she would turn me on. She was caught off guard. I told her I knew she was smoking marijuana, that I was asking for me and my friends, younger sisters of her friends, and that we would pay for it. Allison said she’d have to think about it and get back to me.

Days later, still not hearing back, I asked Allison if she had made her decision. In her room, away from our parents, she told me, “I’m not going to be able to help you.” I was crestfallen and really pissed, knowing Allison was my only shot.

I told her if she didn’t help me, I’d be forced to go elsewhere to score. That if I was busted or had trouble from a stranger, she’d get it from our parents, even worse than me. I told her I needed her experience and connections. She knew I was right and grudgingly acquiesced. Then, ever the negotiator, she insisted I go in with her on a water pipe she found at the smoke shop at Wheaton Plaza. Later that week we bought that pipe made of amber glass with a carved wooden bowl elegantly packaged in a box lined with cobalt blue fabric.

It felt like a sacred ceremony when Allison turned me on to marijuana in her bedroom. Adding water to the pipe, Allison’s eyes sparkled with anticipation and generosity as she filled the wooden bowl with keef, powdered hash composed of raw cannabinoids. One of the finest grades of marijuana available then, and probably still. Using the water pipe, we toked up together and I got high on the first try.

Speeding west on the railroad tracks, I remember how there are still issues to be navigated and healed but I am looking forward to getting stoned with my sister again.

As the Kent, Ohio train stop nears, I gather my suitcase and stare out the window anticipating our magnificent weekend. When the train slows to a stop, I step off into the center of town. As I stand on the sidewalk, the cars whizz by in late day traffic and I search faces of pedestrians for Allison. Her statuesque presence and electric energy are nowhere to be found. Over my shoulder I notice the Cuyahoga River and remember Dad’s stories about how just last summer the river caught fire, fed by decades of dumped toxic waste.

Then I see Allison rushing toward me, arriving out of breath and with a big smile and hug hello. “Sorry I’m late” she explains and adds, “I had a class and came here as soon as I got out.”

Even though it’s late April, we’re both still wearing our winter coats because spring has barely sprung. The weather is cold and damp with few lilacs nearing bloom. We walk together through town toward the Kent State University campus. Passing by the Kent Stage, the town cinema and night club, we see the movie Woodstock written on the marquee and smile. Allison shares, “Tomorrow night we are thinking of going to see Woodstock, the movie” and asks if I want to join her and her boyfriend Barry. You bet I want to go!

Woodstock was a big deal for us and just about every young person across the U.S. Nine months earlier in August of ’69, the outdoor concert was held in upstate New York over three days of peace, love and harmony set to the best rock ‘n roll of our generation. An audience of more than half a million revelers, people just like us, camped out in nature and immersed themselves in the intoxicating music. They all took care of each other and shared a deep sense of community and mutual support that would define the hopes of this era. Woodstock broke the ground for a period of peaceful self-expression that would be remembered for decades to come. But even though Allison had graduated high school and was 18 years old, she was not allowed to attend Woodstock. She had been grounded and forbidden by my mom.

It happened one day when Mom was unexpectedly home early from work. When she delivered clean, folded laundry to Allison’s unattended room she found what she considered “a rat’s nest.” It wasn’t dirty, just messy with her bed unmade, but this was unacceptable in our house. Mom decided to clean it up and discovered what no parent wished to find: pot, LSD, mescaline, our amber glass water pipe – and the clincher, birth control pills.

At 14, I was too young to consider Woodstock and never bothered to ask. That afternoon when Mom went into Allison’s room, I was home and heard it all from my bedroom next door. I waited for Allison on our front stoop, to warn her. When she came home from her job at the Hecht Company department store, she was struck and paralyzed by the news. She wanted to know all the details about how Mom went through her room and found everything. Taking a minute to gain her bearings, Allison courageously headed inside to face the music. Before Dad arrived from work that night, Allison had made a deal with Mom. She would not go to Woodstock and was grounded in exchange for Mom not telling Dad about her findings.

With Woodstock never to be for us, watching Woodstock the movie was the next best thing.

Even though it had been cold and damp from weeks of rain, on our walk across campus to Allison’s dorm I am enthralled to be in a world I had never experienced before. Young people older than me, long hairs and many more straights, dart about on campus, bustling off to their classes and getting on with their lives. I see Kent State has a large faction of jocks and straights but my eyes are trained on the freaks populating the campus, and there are many. My imagination takes off as I pretend I’m older and one of them.

Arriving at Allison’s dormitory, I enter her accommodations and drop my bag. In her new digs there is a small sink in the corner and I feel like we are in a Vincent Van Gogh painting. A poster of Odilon Redon’s Evocation of Roussel decorates her walls along with peace posters. Academic books, esoteric studies such as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, candles and tokens of peace are stacked high on her bookcase.

Later that evening Allison and I walk across the campus to hang out with Allison’s boyfriend Barry Levine at his dorm. Allison and Barry had fallen in love at Kent State that autumn and had become inseparable ever since. My parents and I had met with Barry several times and were very fond of his dry sense of humor, gentleness and how happy he made Allison. That first night, feeling all grown up hanging in the men’s dorm, I get high with my sister and Barry and feel part of it all. Even though I’m just 15 years old, I am grooving on the Kent State University campus as I play pool in my Landlubber bellbottom jeans and tie-dye t-shirt. Life is sweet!

Saturday night the wait line for the Woodstock movie winds around the block and it’s a peaceful and happy crowd. Allison doesn’t mention until afterwards how earlier in Kent folks standing in line for Woodstock had been attacked by unruly people cruising by in cars, throwing stuff at those waiting, getting ticket holders wet and freaked out as they yelled “dirty hippies.”

Woodstock does not disappoint. We’ve never experienced a movie like this before, and it’s not just because we’re high. This was a new kind of concert film that had just emerged as an artform, and it was out to the public in what seemed like minutes, too. Folks in the audience are standing up, dancing to the music and clapping along, and we join right in.

Woodstock spoke directly to our generation, capturing the groove of our age. It crystalized the magnificence of what a time it was, a time of peace, love and understanding. The music captured that promising energy and carried us in hope and solidarity for the future. We needed it later in our struggle when the cultural and political repression began to gain momentum. But that night with Allison and Barry, it was all inspiration; I will never forget it.

Celebrating Earth Day April 22, 1970

Waking up on Sunday in Allison’s dorm room, the dread has already set in. My great weekend escape from my parents’ home into college life is coming to a close too quickly. As I pack my bag for the return to Pittsburgh, Allison says it’s fine for me to take her April 24th copy of the Daily Kent Stater college newspaper, so I stuff it into my bag.

Around noon Mom and Dad arrive and our visit turns into a birthday celebration. On March 22nd I had turned 15 and last week, on April 23rd, it was Allison’s 19th birthday. We enjoy a loving birthday dinner together with the family and Barry at the Brown Derby, one of the best restaurants near Kent State.

For the Krauses this birthday dinner signified a rare moment of peace at the dinner table. Over the last few years, so many meals turned into a raging battlefield between Allison and Dad, especially over the Vietnam War and what Dad did for a living. Not so at our dinner together this night. Everyone is on their best behavior, desperately wishing to create loving memories of our family gathered together in peace.

Allison and Barry share their news. Their studies at Kent State have been a disappointment. They don’t want to continue their courses there for another year and have made applications to transfer to S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo, not far away. To them Kent State is behind the times, stifling and too regimented. Both have been accepted to attend so Allison and Barry are planning their sophomore year at S.U.N.Y. in the fall of 1970. My parents’ reactions are positive. They are okay with Allison transferring because they don’t want her to drop out of college.

After dinner we drive Allison and Barry back to campus and my weekend visit comes to a close. With my father at the wheel, we head back to Pittsburgh. It’s April 26, 1970 and it is the last time we see Allison alive.

That night back in my bedroom in the family home, I unpack my bag and settle in to read the Daily Kent Stater. On the cover is an amazing structure of a geodesic dome erected on the Kent State University Commons days earlier, for the first Earth Day. The article says it was built in homage to Buckminster Fuller, an American architect, designer, inventor and visionary. Fuller is now remembered as a wildly popular counter-cultural figure because of his early embrace of environmentalism and egalitarian futurism, but at the time he was at the height of his public fame yet marked subversive by the authorities. The Ecosphere at Kent State is an initiative led by Kent State architecture students hoping to spend the night inside their newly constructed dome, a structure built on sacred geometry. I’m fascinated by Bucky’s prescience but note that the dome was nowhere to be found by the time I arrived on campus.

Allison and I had separately honored the first Earth Day just days earlier on April 22, 1970 when young people around the world focused on protecting Gaia and developing strategies to heal our planet. Earth Day efforts were mostly ignored by those in authority wishing to maintain the status quo. They were wholly unsympathetic to these first activities in the environmental movement and coined the phrase “The environment is a dirty word.” Dirty indeed, especially with the Cuyahoga River on fire in Ohio and the first big oil spill in Santa Barbara taking place just months before.

Headlines were full of environmental disasters by the end of the 1960’s. The previous June the Cuyahoga River flowing south from Lake Erie caught on fire following decades of chemical and oil spills. Prior to this, millions of gallons of crude oil leaked from a blowout of an oil drilling platform off the Santa Barbara coast. Extinction threats were drawing public attention, including the bald eagle, the national symbol of the U.S.A., and of course the whales. In response to this devastation, former Wisconsin governor and senator Gaylord Nelson founded and inspired the first Earth Day in 1970 which galvanized over 2,000 universities and 20 million Americans across the country, as well as participants around the world. Kent State was one of the universities taking part.

Allison’s first Earth Day on her Kent State campus was far more eventful than mine. Even in Pittsburgh, my suburban junior high school had a mini teach-in but I opted to join adults and college students at a city-wide Earth Day event. Nearly a 1,000 residents of Pittsburgh gathered on Flagstaff Hill in Oakland, adjoining the Carnegie Mellon University campus. It was a teach-in filled with inspiring speakers, festive music and folks with tables hawking their grassroots causes, all of us honoring the EARTH. I learned a lot about what I could do as an average young person to fight the problems of environmental degradation, and this was long before these issues permeated popular culture. We honored Gaia that day.

Over the weekend Allison mentioned she had attempted to hear Ralph Nader, the keynote speaker at Kent State University on the first Earth Day. The Daily Kent Stater I am reading grabs my attention, “One of the first things Nader said when he stood at the podium in University Auditorium was: ‘Don’t you have a gymnasium here?’ He was addressing more than 1,500 students in a room that seats only a thousand. Those who could not fit in the auditorium waited in Wills Gym and listened to WKSU radio broadcast Nader’s remarks over the loud speaker. The whole evening smacked of poor planning and poor coordination. It was an embarrassment for the university and a cause for anger on the part of concerned students who wanted to hear the consumers’ crusader’s remarks in person… Police estimated that more than 4,000 persons who wanted to hear the speech by Ralph Nader in University Auditorium Wednesday night had to be turned away.” It was obvious that Kent State University wished to censor Nader and eclipse his impact.

As environmental activists raised their voices across America on that first Earth Day in 1970, the Nixon administration and leadership at universities like Kent State took detailed notes on the young people who were making change. Although we were oblivious at the time, there is not vast documentation about the unprecedented level of surveillance of students ramping up in this period. Those in charge had also been busy infiltrating counter-cultural organizations to gather intelligence, spy on and harass those who dared to care about the environment. The CIA was driving much of this in their CHAOS program directed against young people and those who stood against war and for the environment, two issues often linked at the time. There was a burgeoning movement to confront corporations that polluted the Earth and the powers that be were not going to stand by and watch. Surveillance was the precursor to repression as environmental protests eventually led to demands for corporate accountability. Our actions were deeply threatening and in response the suppression of protest was nefarious and palpable.

Additionally, a seismic political event was taking place. Nixon had established the draft lottery, the first policy for compulsory service since WWII, essentially trapping young people to fight in the Vietnam War. This Daily Kent Stater reported Nixon’s announcement to end the deferments that had exempted those attending college, married students and workers – all categories that until this point provided ways to avoid the draft. This unwanted news reverberated across U.S. campuses, including Kent State.

Back then peaceful U.S. college students were trying to take every avenue to get out of serving in Vietnam, while President Nixon was finding every way he could to limit their ability to defer their service. The Daily Kent Stater reported: “The White House explained in a fact sheet accompanying the President’s message to Congress that as of Thursday, [April 23rd and Allison’s birthday] students already attending college, or junior or community college, or an approved technical school, continue to be eligible for student deferment. Those planning to enroll in the future, however, will not be eligible for student deferment.”

Reading my newspaper from the weekend visit with Allison, I savor the memories of our bittersweet slice of life together on campus that April weekend. At this point I have no idea what is in store for Allison and my family, or how what is about to happen will affect us for the rest of our lives.

—

READ MORE EXCERPTS to understand our view of what happened to Allison Krause in the May 4, 1970 Kent State massacre:

May 1, 1970 with Allison Krause at Kent State University https://bit.ly/3ViLlBm

May 2, 1970 with Allison Krause at Kent State University https://bit.ly/3Hy3vcv

May 3, 1970 with Allison Krause at Kent State University https://bit.ly/3Vv3oUN

May 4, 1970 with Allison Krause at Kent State University https://bit.ly/3ARaFoJ

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Arthur Krause’s Kent State Questions … STILL Not Answered

August 22, 2022 from the Allison Center for Peace

Watching the recently-discovered “Death of a Decade, The Kent State Story, Side 4“ described as “…the most comprehensive historical account (with authentic audio) of the events that led up to and included the May 4, 1970 shooting deaths of four student protestors at Kent State University. Side 4”

Viewing for the first time blew my mind more than 50 years later. I’d never heard many of these original Kent State recordings including official responses from Ohio National Guard General Canterberry, Kent State University President White and the extended recording of Arthur Krause, my father’s comment about Allison’s killing presented before the world press as I watched in our backyard on Tuesday, May 5, 1970:

From Arthur S. Krause, father of Allison, speaking for Allison immediately after the May 4, 1970 Kent State massacre from the Death of a Decade/KentState/Side 4, hear it at 16:30-18:20:

“She was deeply interested in helping people. She truly cared about people and life. On Saturday evening she called home to tell me there was some trouble in the business section of Kent. She said there was some property damage and she was against that. She was not involved in that but she felt they had to demonstrate; she felt they had to do this because there was no other way to express themselves.

She resented be called a bum because she disagreed with someone else’s opinion. She felt the war in Cambodia was wrong. Is this dissent a crime? Is this a reason for killing her? Have we come to such a state in this country that a young girl has to be shot because she disagrees deeply with the actions of her government?

I want something to be done. What I would like to see happen is that my daughter’s death and those of the other three children as well as the wounded not be in vain. I would like to see Congress investigate the situation and determine who authorized live ammunition to be brought against children by tired and frightened national guard. Also, who approved such an action?

Can Congress find out why our children can’t express themselves?”

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A Long-Awaited Reply

How a 37-year-old telegram to the President was saved from the dustbin of history

By Shane Harris, published on June 1, 2012 in the The Washingtonian.

September 8, 1974, was an especially chaotic day at the White House. That was the day that Gerald Ford, barely a month into his term as President, gave Richard Nixon a full pardon for any crimes he may have committed in connection with the Watergate scandal. Ford’s decision was widely criticized, and the White House was flooded with angry reactions from the public. One of them came from Arthur Krause.

Krause’s daughter Allison was killed at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, when National Guard members opened fire on students protesting Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia. Upon learning of the pardon, Krause went to a Western Union office near his home in Pittsburgh and fired off a telegram to Ford. It read, in part: “You pardoned Nixon because you believe he and his family have suffered enough. My wife and I lost our daughter Allison [ . . . ] due to actions and words of Nixon.”

Krause was of the opinion—one not shared by many Nixon historians—that the former President was personally responsible for the shootings. He wrote that Nixon had given the National Guard the “right to kill,” and he said the President and his senior staff had tried to block the convening of a federal grand jury. Ford’s pardon covered “all offenses against the United States,” not just those related to Watergate, so any hope Krause may have had for seeing Nixon prosecuted vanished with the stroke of the President’s pen.

Addressing Ford directly, Krause wrote, “Sir, you are less a man today than you were yesterday.” Krause signed the telegram along with his wife, Doris.

The telegram arrived at the White House, where normally it would have been answered by staff on the President’s behalf and then filed with other documents about the Nixon pardon. But Krause’s emotional message caught the eye of Roland Elliott, the White House director of correspondence, who thought it deserved more than a form-letter reply.

Elliott passed the telegram to George P. “Skip” Williams, an associate counsel to the President, with a note: “Hasn’t the Kent State case been reopened by Justice?” Elliott seemed to be hoping the White House could update Krause on whether the Justice Department had any new information on the events that led to the death of his daughter and three other students. Elliott put a red tag on his memo, indicating that Williams should give the question high priority.

But the question was never answered. And Ford never replied to Krause’s telegram. It was placed in a file of unanswered mail, and it sat there for the next 37 years.

The story would have ended there, if not for a meticulous, eagle-eyed archivist named William H. McNitt, who spends his days combing through thousands of pages of memos, correspondence, presidential schedules, and other documents at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. On February 15, 2012, McNitt was conducting what he calls a “systematic review of previously unreviewed portions of the collection” — the historian’s equivalent of panning for gold — and he came across Box 82 from the records of a staffer in the White House Counsel’s Office. Inside was a folder labeled “Unanswered Mail, September 1974 (1).” Most archivists pass over these orphaned records, McNitt says. But he opened the folder, and inside he saw Krause’s telegram. He immediately grasped its significance.

McNitt traced the path of the old document, which still bears faint pencil marks made by a White House staffer who underlined “my wife and I lost our daughter . . .” He followed the note from Elliott to Williams, and concluded that the correspondence must have gotten lost in the chaos surrounding the Nixon pardon. “Williams and the rest of the staff in the Counsel’s Office were overwhelmed with work,” McNitt says, “and never got around to responding.”

The Ford Library gave a copy of the telegram to The Washingtonian, and we got in touch with Laurel Krause, Allison’s sister. Reached by phone at her home in California one morning, Krause, who never knew her father wrote the telegram, welled up as the text was read to her.

“That’s my dad!” she said, delighted, and at the same time a little shocked and sad. At the time of the Nixon pardon, Laurel says she was working on the Hill, as an intern for Senator Ted Kennedy. She recalls that on the day a month earlier when the Senate interns were supposed to hear a speech from then Vice President Ford, he had to cancel, because he was being sworn in as president.

Laurel says that after her sister died, her father began to investigate the events of that day in May 1970. He has since died, but Laurel has continued the cause. She cofounded the Kent State Truth Tribunal, which has collected information and testimony about the shootings and has petitioned President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to reexamine the case.

Laurel’s father never heard back from President Ford. But as it happens, McNitt, the former President’s tireless archivist, may have some answers for the Krause family after all.

The question Elliott had asked about the Justice Department’s investigation is answered, McNitt says, by another collection in the library. It resides among the papers of another Ford-era official, J. Stanley Pottinger, who served as the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. Pottinger had also worked in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. In his records, McNitt found approximately 2,000 pages of documents about an examination of the shootings by both the departments where Pottinger had worked. The government almost certainly relied on that information to bring an indictment in March 1974 against eight National Guardsmen. A trial began in October, the month after Ford pardoned Nixon. A judge directed a verdict of acquittal in November.

And McNitt found something else. In those 2,000 pages are records of “a number of telephone messages to Pottinger from Arthur Krause concerning the investigation of his daughter’s death.” Maybe Krause’s insistence helped push the government to seek justice for Allison.

And so, nearly four decades later, Arthur Krause has some measure of response. It’s not in the form of a letter from the President, which we now know the White House felt Krause deserved. The response comes instead from a quiet, diligent archivist, who stopped to open an unremarkable box and sensed a moment in history, and a family in pain.

View the PDF for the full telegram.

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On May 4, 1970 Allison Krause Had the Nerve to Question Authority

May 4, 2019 by Carlos Jones

“Tell me how on earth could it be justified

for heartless men to have taken those innocent lives

and how many more tears do we have to cry

before our hearts are all wrung dry

leaving only us to ask the question why?

oh why?”  from the song, Truth & Justice (Kent State) by Carlos Jones

Good afternoon everyone,

My name is Carlos Jones. I am a musician. I live in Cleveland, Ohio – Shaker Heights to be exact. I’m here today at the request of the family of Allison Beth Krause, to speak for her as we commemorate the 49th year since that particular tragedy.

At first, when asked to do this, I questioned my qualification to do so, as some might – after all, I did not know her… I was not there. I was 12 years old at the time, doing the things that a 12 year old kid, living a quiet and comfortable life in the suburbs might do. Of course, I had been growing up in a time when the news of many horrors and tragedies brushed up against my budding awareness. I knew that people who tried to do good could be assassinated, taken out: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy’s deaths were all a part of my recent inventory of knowledge.

I knew about the ongoing legacy of slavery and the struggle for equality and civil rights, through which my parents and their ancestors had lived, and that so many were still living. And it was almost as if we were to accept those things as a matter of course. We were taught in school about the glorified wars of our mighty nation, and all of the heroes who helped to bring us to our status as a noble and benevolent overseer of the world. I knew about the war that was going on in Vietnam – well, what I was being told of it anyway.

There were those that were older than me, like Allison, that had questions…

From what I’ve learned of her; Allison Krause was a bright, warm, loving, caring, energetic, intelligent and free-thinking young woman who had the audacity to question the veracity of the things our government claimed to be the reason for sending thousands of our young men and women to a foreign country to never return, or to return broken in pieces, physically and mentally. She was a young woman, full of hope, full of life and promise, who had set out to further her education, to one day become a productive citizen and perhaps contribute to positive and peaceful change in our society – but she had questions…

She knew there was much unrest in the world and all around her…

She knew that there were things wrong with our country that she and her peers felt compelled to speak out against, and she also knew that there were some who took their protest to the extreme and perhaps in the wrong direction, or maybe even had a totally different agenda…

A young woman, who one day might have children of her own, that she would have to teach and guide and somehow shield from the tragic truth, until they grew old enough to discern that not all is what it seems or what you’ve been led to believe…

But that was not to be, we had men in positions of power determined to hold fast to the old way of doing things, and maintain the status quo, and saw those who wanted and demanded change as annoyances and rabble-rousers. We had a president who claimed that he was not a crook, and as it turned out, he was telling us the truth – he was worse. And because of heartless decisions made by men who saw these young people, your sons and daughters, as nothing more than bums, outlaws, and hooligans… well, no need to state the obvious – you know why we’re here.

It was beautiful day in May – unlike this one…

Allison Krause was exercising what she had always been told was her right, to protest what she felt (what she knew) was wrong, even while knowing that there could be consequences for doing such a thing – she could face arrest, retribution, brutality, perhaps even… death? No, they couldn’t possibly go THAT far, could they? She and her fellow students faced off against uniformed men with rifles, choking against clouds of tear gas.

That day – this day, in May, we were awakened to the cold hard fact that you CAN be murdered, in broad daylight, no matter WHO you are, by your own government for being disobedient, for being vocal, for being active, for being a protester. That day, a 12 year old kid felt the chill of that reality, and his childhood fell away as if shedding a skin, and he became aware that there was indeed, something terribly wrong, and there was no going back to any semblance of childlike innocence. I, like so many of you, was changed forever.

Her Father, Arthur, has long since passed, worn down in the remainder of his life by the obstinate and apathetic demeanor of a government with no pity and no remorse. Yet he fought all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to sue the State of Ohio, and had become a staunch advocate for the right to protest.

Her Mother, Doris, more recently passed on, lived out her final years carrying the weight of the heartbreak, sadness and loss, with no apology, no closure, no resolution whatsoever, except for a “statement of regret” and the mere token of a $15,000 legal settlement, which apparently is what a protester’s life is worth – well, according to those with the power to make those kinds of decisions. They were never able to experience any type of healing or relief from the devastation that haunted them for the rest of their lives.

We hear these words thrown about quite often; Truth, Freedom, Liberty, Justice “for ALL” (?) Pretty words, but what do they MEAN???

What is TRUTH? It would seem that we live in a time when truth is whatever the loudest voice says it is (or the ones with the most money). The concept of truth has lost its weight, its value. This is the age of alternative facts. We have to ask ourselves; has it always been this way?

And JUSTICE – now there’s a slippery one… as elusive as trying to grab smoke.

We’re led to believe that it is an absolute thing, but unfortunately we’ve seen and we have learned that it is NOT equal and it is NOT easily attainable.

Someone asked me recently; “why are we here?” And I answered without even really thinking about it; “I think we were put here to plant flowers”…

By that, I mean that it’s up to each person, who is inclined to do so, to try and add more Beauty to a world that is too often marred by ugliness, to shine more Light in times when the darkness threatens to surround and swallow us up, to Love more fearlessly and ferociously in a time when hatred rears its head and wants to divide us, to help each other Heal from our past hurts and hostilities, and try to become our better selves.

That is why I’m here…

I tried to think of what Allison might say if she were here today, had she been spared – I think she most certainly would be here, talking to you, instead of me.

Who am I to speak for her? The question is more; who am I NOT to? She is MY sister, and she is YOUR sister, maybe not by blood but by the common humanity we all share. It could have been anybody that day – your brother, your sister, the woman or man who would become your mother or father. The government-issued bullets that found their deadly mark that day were lethal, uncaring and indiscriminate, and brought only violence, pain and death.

So, I’d have to agree with Allison – FLOWERS ARE BETTER THAN BULLETS!!!

Carlos Jones – May 4th, 2019

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48 Years Later: What Allison Krause Shares

May 4, 2018, Kent, Ohio
A speech for Allison Krause, one of the four students slaughtered at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, written and spoken by Idris Kabir Syed at the 48th commemoration

This year marks my 28th commemoration. I have spoken only once for a student, Jeffrey Miller. In my younger years as a student, I thought that Jeff was the one who I had the most in common with—like him, I considered myself a young revolutionary who deeply believed in activism and civil rights. I didn’t realize how much I have in common with Allison until this year.

When Allison’s sister Laurel asked me to speak for her sister this year, I was honored and moved to tears. I realized immediately that she was entrusting me with something deeply important for her family. If there is one thing I have learned in my time working with the families of the victims of May 4th, it is that the trauma of that day lives on and has profoundly affected the families in myriads of ways, both negative and positive. My own family relationship with Kent State and May 4th (as both of my parents were on campus that fateful day) mirror this reality as well.

My relationship with the Krause family began when I was in high school. I worked for Allison’s cousin Marvin at Arabica coffee shop on Coventry in Cleveland Heights. I knew Marvin’s daughter, Allison’s cousin Jennifer and would run into her at Grateful Dead or Carlos Jones concerts and we had many mutual friends. When I went to Kent and got involved with the Task Force I met Doris, Allison’s mother, and was amazed at her grace. The first year that I met Laurel was for the 40th commemoration was not what I had hoped. It was my first year as faculty advisor when Laurel came to the last meeting of the Task Force before the 40th commemoration. In the parlance of today’s students, she was “aggro” and she let us know it. She demanded that the Task Force honor her family’s wishes and challenged us to not succumb to silencing their voices as she felt the University as a whole has done since 1970. I was stunned shocked into silence thinking we were trying to honor her and her family. I realized very quickly however, her concerns were completely valid, based in a historical relationship of trauma at Kent State University that is institutionalized here. It took me some time, but I discovered there was another, more appropriate term (which young people also use today) for Laurel, which is “woke.” Laurel is woke—woke in ways many of us don’t understand but need to recognize. I watched her tireless work with the Kent State Truth Tribunal, started by her and Emily Kunstler (daughter of the esteemed civil-rights attorney, William Kunstler) that year. That summer, I also watched countless video testimonies of people who had never quite felt comfortable sharing their story with the university, but opened themselves up to Laurel and Emily in ways that even surprised them. These stories are vital, and I hope that the University supports the efforts of the Truth Tribunal to continue to promote those stories being told. After the Obama/Holder/Perez refusal to re-open the Kent State case, Laurel then took the stories of her family and Truth Tribunal participants to the United Nations forcing the world stage to acknowledge America’s shame and murder. The Krause family is woke—whether Father Arthur, Mother Doris, Sister Laurel, or Cousin Jennifer—they were and are all woke in their own important ways. Today, I want to talk about how I think Allison was woke, and what we can still learn from her 48 years after her untimely murder.

Allison was not at Kent in 1968; she was finishing her senior year of high school in Maryland. She was against the war in Vietnam but by no means a “radical or revolutionary.” I don’t know if she knew of the killings at Orangeburg, or much of what was happening with BUS/SDS at Kent State University. The seminal part of that year seemed to be when she started to volunteer at St. Elizabeth’s Psychiatric Hospital. In the book 13 Seconds: Confrontation at Kent State, her mother remembers:

“’She used to help on a volunteer basis at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital there in Washington,’ said Doris Krause. ‘So few people could do it. She did it so well. As a mother, it was something I liked to see her do.” Allison would go off to St. Elizabeth’s, a mental hospital, and visit with the patients. Often she would play basketball with the men. They were patients that society had long for­gotten. They sat there in forlorn gloom, waiting for nothing, their eyes glazed, their lives a sea of silence. Some had not had visitors for as long as thirty years.’ Richard Jaworski would ask Allison to speak of her experiences at the hospital. She told the class that the inmates would let her shoot during the basketball games, leaving her undefended with the delight of her presence and interest. When a boy in class asked if it was not dangerous to work with the patients, she replied, ‘Love, they sense it. It calms them.’ The inmates were so grateful for her attention they never considered harm, she said.

‘One day Allison returned home unusually happy; her eyes were aglow and she could not wait to tell her mother the wonderful thing that had happened at St. Elizabeth’s that day. A man had spoken to her! A man who had never spoken to anyone else for the longest time had spoken to her. It was one of the most exhilarating moments of her life. She felt that she had personally accomplished this.’”(Esterhas and Roberts, 1970)

Allison started school at Kent State in the fall of 1969; her best friend was Bonnie Henry. She also met and fell in love with her boyfriend Barry Levine and they were together until her death the following spring. They attended the National Moratorium against the War in DC that November. While Allison attended one SDS meeting, with Bonnie and Barry, she was hardly impressed or convinced by their values and priorities. She was trying to understand the larger political atmosphere; again from 13 Seconds: Confrontation at Kent State,

“At Kent the academic atmosphere and Allison’s searching curiosity pushed her deeper into the world of books. She read Kafka, the present Tom Wolfe, and Catch-22. Slowly her reading began to widen into the current political trends. She and Barry shared a political­ science class that friends say absorbed her. When the Black Panthers emerged in controversy, Allison applied her energies to satisfying her need to know. She began to believe that political repression was real and it frightened her. ‘She wanted to go to Canada and open an art gallery after school,’ Barry said. ‘We wanted to go there because of the growing political repression that we felt was increasing in this country. Things like the Chicago Seven, the Panthers, and the ineffectiveness of the Moratorium all led to her feeling of the coming and existing repression.’…When Spring came, Allison expressed her desire for the woods…’I wish there was some place where we could go and walk, some place with trees and flowers,’ she told Bonnie. ‘Some place away’…Things seemed to be going marvelously for Allison on her nineteenth birthday, on April 23. She was set for the summer and for Buffalo in the fall and most important, she had Barry. Her fifteen-year-old sister, Laurel, came up to visit her on her birthday and the following Sunday Arthur and Doris Krause drove up. Together with Barry, they ate at the Robin Hood restaurant just off campus. ‘She was so happy to get out for a meal,’ Doris Krause said. It was the last time they were to see their daughter alive.” (Esterhas and Roberts, 1970)

There are many stories and photos of Allison on May 4, 1970. Many of them are horrific and terrifying. I do not want to focus on those today. The one I think about most often is how, as she climbed the hill by the pagoda, she tore her small piece of wet cloth to help another student suffering from tear gas, shortly before she broke down in tears asking why the guard was treating them this way. Even to the end, Allison wanted to help others, to let people express themselves, whether through art or voicing dissent, she wanted to stand up for what she believed was right, fair and just. That was the way she was, woke.

In preparing for the speech, I asked Laurel if there was anything I could say for her family. She told me instead to listen to what Allison tells me and speak that truth. I went and sat at the bell late at night on April 23rd, and asked Allison how she felt on what would be her 67th birthday. She said she was sad, confused, angry, but still woke, still standing for truth and justice. She asked me a number of questions: “How could there be so many school shootings in 2018 alone? How could our society be as polarized, perhaps even worse than 48 years ago? How can so many Black people be openly killed and so few people care? How can we still be at war in the Middle East, and why don’t we care about the casualties, refugees and destruction these wars have produced? What are we doing to our mother Earth? When we will we ever learn that “flowers are better than bullets”? “Ah well.” she told me, “It is up you, Laurel, Jennifer, Samaria, and Emma Gonzalez to tell them now. I hope they finally listen.” I asked her “What can I do?” She gently reminded me with a loving smile, “Go and walk in the woods, make art, spend time with your family and mine, try to heal the wounds, love, and we will talk again.”

Idris Kabir Syed, MFA, M.Ed.
Associate Professor and Faculty Advisor to the May 4th Task Force
Kent State University, Dept. Pan-African Studies

 

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My Name is Laurel and I’m Not a Ma’am

May 17, 2016 A college essay written by Kimberly March

When I first chose to write this paper on Laurel Krause, I was expecting it to be just like any other short research paper on a human being. Read up on their accomplishments, read some interviews, look up different articles, et cetera, et cetera. Little did I know that I would have the wonderful opportunity to sit down and have a phone conversation with Laurel herself. It was a quiet Sunday afternoon on May 1st when I decided to make the call – I had been mulling over the decision as to when to call since hearing back from Laurel. I was extremely nervous to call and make a fool of myself.

Laurel Krause is the younger sister of Allison Krause, one of the young college students killed in the 1970 shooting at Kent State University. The massacre, performed by National Guardsmen, occurred at an anti-war protest held on campus soon after President Nixon announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. It is still, to this day, unconfirmed who gave the orders for the Guardsmen to shoot at the unarmed students, or if there was an order at all. No charges were brought upon anybody, nobody took responsibility, and nobody ever apologized for the tragedy. Arthur Krause, Laurel and Allison’s father, continued fighting for more information for the rest of his life, filing lawsuit after lawsuits all the way to the Supreme Court. The immeasurable trauma thrust upon the Krause family and the friends and family of all involved in the shooting was never resolved or given any type of closure.

However, I do not want to spend this entire paper focusing on the horrific things that happened because of the Kent State shootings. I want to focus on Laurel Krause, a peace-seeker/creator, activist, and friend. My first impression of Laurel was how humble she is – she was shocked that I chose her to write my paper about. I had no idea what to expect, and I could not have been more relieved to find that I was talking to a real person on the other end of the phone. One thing that she said to me during our two-hour conversation that eased my nerves was, “My name Laurel and I’m not a ma’am. I’m an anarchist trained by Howard Zinn and sister of Allison, but I am very much a, y’know, a human being and I’m right at the same place-level that you’re at. And I absolutely want to be that way.”

Laurel and I talked about a slew of different topics. The main topics I want to focus on are the overall idea of creating our own peace and the Allison Center for Peace, located on the Mendocino Coast in California. We talked about the government and how they have formed our society into a society that has lost hope. “Our world is a traumatized world…How is it serving them that we don’t heal this wound?” There have been so many government-led tragedies – the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State are only two. Laurel says, “I think the strongest card we’ve got is to actually live happily in peace. And let’s just get on with it.” The government will not give us the power to be able to foresee ourselves living happily. They will not allow us to heal the wounds of trauma that they have inflicted, because as soon as they do, they have lost some of the control they worked so hard to build. We then began talking about the Allison Center for Peace. This will be a peace destination – the Mendocino Coast location hopefully being one of the many across the nation in the future. A “peace capital”, of sorts, where the business of peace is examined and safe renewable resources and low radiation organic farming are present. Laurel graciously invited me to come out and visit the Center someday if I have the means, and I certainly intend on taking her up on that.

Laurel, along with the help of her co-founder Emily Aigner Kunstler and the rest of the dedicated team, started up the Kent State Truth Tribunal in 2010. “The Krause family founded the Kent State Truth Tribunal in order to reveal the truth and establish a clear and correct historical record from the collective voices of Kent State (TruthTribunal.org). The Tribunal is comprised of almost one hundred interviews with family, friends, survivors, and witnesses of the Kent State shootings, which will all be archived and available to be streamed on the Truth Tribunal website. Laurel told me that she has come to terms with the fact that she will not see justice for Allison in her lifetime – “I’m not a fool.” However, because she has documented everything, it will all be available for them when it is deemed relevant again.

There were indeed some deep conversation topics, but there were a lot of laughs and coinciding opinions and feelings of peace and happiness. Laurel and I had a great time speaking of the Goddess emerging and peace being possible if we find our own peace. We spoke of buffoons in politics and Howard Zinn coming through her in our conversation with positivity and light. I look forward to my next correspondence or phone conversation with Laurel, for I feel I have gained a wonderful new friend. It was refreshing to have a long-winded conversation with somebody as an equal on a level playing field. Although my instincts and respectful reflex will urge me to call Laurel ma’am the next time we speak, I will definitely make sure that I do not.

I close this piece with an uplifting point. “Change must come from the young people.” If young people in my generation do not speak up against the man and demand a better, more peaceful tomorrow, we will not get it. On the flip side, that means that as young people in this country and world, we have the power to make a difference. We have the power to mold our future. The government is not going to simply give us the peace and happiness that we want – so let’s create it. Let’s heal the trauma that has been inflicted on us and move on together. We have the means and we have each other. It is time that we take what is rightfully ours. It is time for peace.

References

“Laurel Krause.” Telephone interview. 1 May 2016.

“About Section.” Kent State Truth Tribunal. Web. 3 May 2016.

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Kent State Massacre at the 46th: What Remains

On May 4, 2016 at the 46th commemoration of the Kent State Massacre, Jennifer Schwartz stood for her cousin Allison Krause and offered this speech:

Another May 4^th parent has died since last we gathered to commemorate this event. Another mother has left us before the truth is clear and justice is served. My aunt, Doris Krause, Allison’s mother, passed away peacefully under hospice care and in the arms of her sole surviving daughter Laurie on January 17^th, just a few months ago. As she crossed over, she left behind decades of profound grief and struggle. Perhaps it is our world she now grieves. A world she taught her children to believe was just, civil, compassionate, and fair.

As I was growing up in Cleveland, my father, Doris’ nephew, used to council me, when I felt wronged by a friend or noted an injustice in the world, he used to say to me “Life isn’t fair.” And he knew. We all sat by feeling helpless as the Krause’s endured a very public grief, and extensive legal battles. Instead of receiving any formal acknowledgement of one of the gravest of misdeeds a government can inflict upon its citizens, they were subject to factually unfounded and prejudicial accusations thrust upon their daughter. In her eulogy for Aunt Doris, my cousin Laurie noted, “my mother lost a child. And that is perhaps the greatest burden of all. When we add to this how unnecessary Allison’s death was, the betrayal of it being carried out by a government meant to protect us, and the crushing pressure of the denial of accountability for now decades, I am truly astounded by the grace and fortitude with which Doris faced this legacy.”

Please join me in a moment of silence for Doris Levine Krause. May her memory be a blessing to us, may her struggle be released, may her quest for truth be carried forth.

I never met my cousin Allison. I was a little nine month old learning to walk and run when she was stopped in her tracks by an M1 bullet right over there in the parking lot. So I have always been looking for the truth myself, searching for accounts that would provide clarity and do Allison and May 4^th justice. It concerns me that this history be told and recorded accurately. Among the articles I have found was a 1971 piece, published in the National Review, by William F. Buckley.

Mr. Buckley noted that they found pebbles in her pocket. They called it evidence of her aggression, evidence of her crime. They called it evidence she wielded “missiles” of rock she had concealed in her pocket. Deadly? Really? That’s a sham. The classic, tawdry response: to blame the victim. What really had them shaking in their boots was not some rocks in the pocket of a college freshman with flowers in her hair, but that she wielded words of truth. She confronted their ethics, their judgement, and refused to accept President Nixon’s escalation of the war in Southeast Asia. She was one of many hundreds of thousands across the nation who took to the streets that weekend in May to protest. I could not be more proud of her. My cousin, Allison Krause, was a 19 year old honor’s student. Bright, compassionate, hard-working. She was killed that day as she raised her voice in opposition to a government that had gone morally astray. “They always point out that my daughter had gravel in her pockets,” said my aunt Doris, “that this was the rationale for killing her… why” she asked, “didn’t they throw gravel at her?”

For 46 years we’ve been parted from my cousin Allison. A lifetime! My lifetime. For 46 years we’ve sought answers. For 46 years the government’s been adept at denying culpability, avoiding responsibility and suppressing truth. For 46 years we’ve been lied to and brushed aside. We now know there was an order to shoot; we’ve heard it. Don’t tell us you were afraid for your lives with your loaded M1 rifles and your helmets and your high ground advantage. Don’t tell us you felt endangered when Governor Rhodes himself, your commander in chief, came to town to cheer you on and gave you carte blanche to “eradicate the problem.” For 46 years we’ve called for truth. My uncle Arthur led the legal battle for 10 years following May 4th. While we agreed to a settlement, we were not satisfied that truth was honored nor that justice was done. In a 1981 interview with J. Gregory Payne, my infuriated Uncle Arthur declared “We don’t want the damn money… we want the truth! We want the facts about how the four died. We aren’t afraid of the truth. We aren’t the ones who have been saying “no comment” for the past 10 years.” He went on: “I think we are all responsible for the killings at Kent. You can’t get away from the hatred being spread by national leaders during that time. That political period was one which bred hate and with Nixon and Rhodes fanning the fires you can expect killings as a result.” With all the hate speech going on these days by political leaders, I shudder to think what’s ahead, and like my cousin, I will not allow the hate to go unchallenged.

Allison Beth Krause was the cherished first of two daughters born of Arthur and Doris Krause of Cleveland Heights, Ohio. She smiles at me whenever I see her, there in a handful of black and white photos. The impish seven year old girl sits there in a white dress and patent leather shoes next to her little sister Laurie, in the front row of a family portrait taken at my aunt and uncle’s 1958 wedding. I long to reach into the photographs and take her hands and play with her, hug her, know her.

Back in those days in the early sixties, the Krause’s used to go on Sunday drives out in the country around Cleveland, often ending up at Kent, dining at the Robin Hood and enjoying the pastoral campus. Remarkably, at a very early age, Allison made her decision to attend college at Kent State University. She loved it here; she felt at home. She felt safe.

In a eulogy for my cousin, Richard Jaworski, one of her high school teachers at John F. Kennedy High School in Wheaton, Maryland, described her like this:

Constantly she was surrounded by boys and girls who came not only to tell her their problems, but to laugh with her and bask in her quick wit and charm. Allison possessed a rare trait. She could move among many groups of students and always exhibit tolerance for the views of each group in which she participated. When baited by adults, some young people responded with anger and bitterness, if not violence. Allison expressed a passive, stoic quality, as if recognizing the injustice of name-calling, as if realizing the illness of the person filled with hate.”

As she found her political voice in high school, Allison joined other students who were opposed to the war in Vietnam, especially as friends got drafted. As a teenager, Allison participated in anti-war demonstrations. She knew that as an American she had a right to freedom of speech and a right to engage in peaceful assembly.

She entered Kent State University in the fall of 1969 where she quickly made friends, earned high marks in her studies, and met the love of her life, Barry Levine, another young student from New York who shared her values. Together they assembled with others on Friday May 1st on the commons to raise their voices against Nixon’s decision to escalate the war and send more troops into Cambodia. She spent that first weekend of May with friends, doing schoolwork, enjoying the first breath of spring and becoming increasingly concerned about the military presence on campus, now occupied by the National Guard.

On that beautiful, warm spring weekend Allison spent time outside, socializing with friends and talking with some guardsmen among the blooming lilacs. I have heard different accounts of this story, some say Allison placed a flower in the barrel of Guardsman Meyers’ rifle, others say the flower was already there. What is certain, is that guardsman’s smiling face is absolutely beaming in the photographs that have preserved that moment in time, with Allison, the flower, his rifle, and the irony and release of tension they all felt in that moment, as human beings who were on opposite sides of a conflict. And when Allison witnessed that guardsman’s superior come along and reprimand him there for having a silly flower in his gun barrel, Allison responded,

“WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH PEACE? FLOWERS ARE BETTER THAN BULLETS!”

The next day Allison and Barry joined the increasingly tense voices on the commons as the students squared off with the heavily armed National Guard. In Payne’s May Day: Kent State, I found Barry’s accounting of these final moments of Allison’s life, which provides such insight into her character:

As we stood on the hill watching and waiting for the soldiers to make their move, Allison ripped in half the moistened cloth she had brought for protection against tear gas. Another dispersal order was given, yet no advance was made, so Allison felt safe in running a few yards to give a friend part of her already compromised cloth. She tore hers again and gave him half. It was a small gesture, but one that so clearly demonstrated her consideration and willingness to share. Tear gas was already being fired as she scrambled back to where I was waiting. We stood for a few seconds, watching the soldiers move out behind a screen of gas, before deciding to retreat with a crowd of students. As we began to retreat over the hill, I could see Allison almost beginning to cry. A few steps further she turned to me with tears rolling down her cheeks and asked, ‘Why are they doing this to us? Why don’t they let us be?’ A peaceful assembly was being violently disrupted, breeding anger in most of those being dispersed. However Allison did not feel anger, but rather disappointment and sorrow. Disappointment because the students were not given a chance to gather peacefully, and sorrow because of the violence she felt would ensue. Unfortunately these passive emotions were soon transformed into aggression, for as we retreated, a gas canister landed at our feet, exploding in our faces. It was at this point that Allison’s sorrow changed to anger and her strained tolerance turned to resistance. After a few seconds of recovery, Allison turned in her tracks and froze. She stood in the path of the pursuing troops screaming at the top of her lungs. Having been pushed too far, she now lashed back and I was forced to pull her along, fearing that the distance between us and the oncoming troops was becoming critical. Twice, before we reached the crest of the hill, she turned to speak her mind to these men. Each time I had to pull her onward. Upon reaching the top of the hill, she again turned, and with tears streaming down her cheeks, she screamed and yelled and stomped her feet as if all her yelling might stop these men. The hand drawn to her face holds a wet rag used to protect herself from the gas, and the other holds mine, with which I pulled her over the hill and into the parking lot, a safe distance from the troops. For several minutes we stood in the parking lot watching these men threaten us with their rifles. In response, we cursed them and threw rocks. When they left we followed, all the time screaming and yelling, and then they turned.”

None of the four dead or nine wounded were armed that day with anything truly threatening but their voices that challenged the state’s right to kill. State-sponsored violence against peaceful but vocal citizens was permissible in 1970. This precedent paved the way for continued ongoing police aggression across the country that is with us to this day.

While we commemorate this sad anniversary, let us understand that in the days that followed the Kent State killings, precious lives were lost at Jackson State as well. Yet Jackson State has not remained in the national memory in the same way that Kent State has. As Samaria Rice joins us here today, a courageous and outspoken mother standing up to the police who took the life of her son Tamir, we are reminded that while our Kent State students were murdered for their political beliefs, to this day American citizens continue to be targeted simply on the basis of their race. It was a feature of the killing at Jackson State that tragically and egregiously continues to this day. I would like to take this occasion to remember Jackson State, as well as to honor the life of young Tamir Rice. My cousin Allison would want us to do this.

My name is Jennifer Schwartz. I find pebbles in my pocket every time I visit Allison’s grave, carrying rocks with me to lay upon her headstone as a symbol of my remembering.

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Eulogy for Doris L. Krause, Allison’s Mom

January 25, 2016 from the Mendocino coast

Doris L. Krause, mother of Allison Krause killed in the Kent State massacre of May 4, 1970, peacefully crossed over on January 17, 2016 in the loving arms of her family

Eulogy for Doris L. Krause from her daughter, Laurel Krause

Last week while I was walking along the California coast near my home, I was called to my mother Doris Krause’s bedside by hospice caregivers informing me that her time was near. Mom had stayed in Pittsburgh, our family home, perhaps for the same reason I went very far away. We shared a tragedy in our family that broke our hearts and wounded our spirits but ultimately deepened the love between us in ways we might not have otherwise known. We have carried this wound for so many years but I arrived back home in Pittsburgh to experience a profound healing with Mom. I am moved to share our experience as we lay her body to rest.

It is well known among you all that our family has been troubled by my sister’s Allison’s killing by the US military as she protested the Vietnam War on her campus, Kent State University. What you may not know is the ensuing US government pressure and harassment of our family that affected every aspect of our life since May 4, 1970. The pain of losing my beautiful sister was unspeakable to me. I carry her loss with me to this day, as I do her immense, magnanimous spirit. But my mother lost a child. And that is perhaps the greatest burden of all. When we add to this how unnecessary Allison’s death was, the betrayal of it being carried out by a government meant to protect us, and the crushing pressure of the denial of accountability for now decades, I am truly astounded by the grace and fortitude with which Doris faced this legacy.

When my father Arthur passed away in 1988, my mother was left to maintain our now small family on her own, along with me, to honor Allison’s legacy.

We have walked a difficult path together but this week, all our troubles fell away. My mother and I loved each other without limit, and got beyond our lifelong hurt in losing Allison in such a painful, public way. All that mattered in our time together this past week was the love we shared, the joyful memories of growing up together, the laughter and the eternal bond we carry with us.

Mom and I found a way to let our mutual pain go. We expressed our deep gratitude to each other for sharing so much love, and most importantly, we found peace.

Mom shared with me that she was afraid to go to the other side but I was blessed to be able to walk her over and let her know about the welcome banquet being prepared in her name. That our beloved dog LB was ready to greet her and that my father Arthur and sister Allison had been waiting too long for her arrival.

At 90 Mom has been severely health challenged these last few years. As we walked together, I saw her leave her troubles and suffering behind. She went home to my father now gone 28 years. She has been able to embrace her daughter Allison, now gone almost 46 years and I watched and encouraged her. My sister had stood for peace and had died in its service. We have since been honoring her memory with our own commitment to peace. And as my mother left this world at my side, I saw for the first time … my mother at peace. And I know that she is now free.

Voiced at the graveside service of Doris L. Krause by Laurel Krause on January 19, 2016

Artwork by Roger Ballas

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Kent State Truth Tribunal Report to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, May 2015

________________________________________________________________________

 

         United States’ Compliance with the

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

Kent State Truth Tribunal

Response to Follow-Up Report

4th Periodic Report of the United States

from the

110th Session of the Human Rights Committee, Geneva

March 2014

________________________________________________________________________

Read this report at the UN webpage http://bit.ly/1cxCnbY

1 May 2015

I.    Investigate & Examine the Kent State Audio Evidence

Seeking a credible, independent and impartial investigation into the Kent State audio recorded on May 4, 1970 during the Kent State Massacre (Article 2 (Right to remedy); Article 6 (Right to life); Article 19 (Right to freedom of expression); Article 21 (Right to peaceful assembly))

II.   Reporting Organization

The Kent State Truth Tribunal (KSTT) was founded in 2010 upon the emergence of new forensic evidence regarding the May 4, 1970 Kent State Massacre. KSTT is an NGO focused on revealing truth and bringing justice to Kent State Massacre victims and survivors.

Less than a day before her unlawful killing at Kent State University, Allison Krause said, “What’s the matter with peace? Flowers are better than bullets”. On May 4, 1970 Allison Krause was shot dead by U.S. military personnel as she peacefully protested the American Vietnam War and stood for PEACE.

Representing Allison Beth Krause, 19-year-old Kent State University student protestor slain on May 4, 1970: Doris L. Krause, mother & Laurel Krause, sister.

III.  Related Concluding Recommendation of the Committee & the US Delegation’s Response:

At the US 4^th Periodic Review on March 13, 2014, two UN Human Rights Committee members addressed the submitted issues of the Kent State Truth Tribunal. Messrs. Walter Kaelin and Yuval Shany flagged the United States regarding the killing at Kent State in several expressed reasons including lack of accountability, concerns related to command responsibility, the use of excessive and deadly force by the military and law enforcement, and US investigatory practices when credible, forensic evidence emerges 40 years later.

The next day the US delegation offered:

We were asked about Kent State: In 1970 four students were killed, were murdered. Nine were wounded. In 1974 the US Department of Justice prosecuted eight of the officers involved in that. The Judge threw out that prosecution. There is nothing we can do now. Between double jeopardy and the statute of limitations, there is nothing we can do. We are aware that there are some who say there’s new evidence. We have looked at that new evidence and that new evidence does not make an unprosecutable case prosecutable.”

Even though the United States claimed Kent State was “murder and killing”, their recent April 1, 2015 response does not include any action taken with regard to the Kent State “unlawful killings”, as outlined in the March 2014 UNHRC concluding recommendations:

The party should ensure that all cases of unlawful killing, torture or other ill-treatment, unlawful detention or enforced disappearance are effectively, independently and impartially investigated, that perpetrators, including, in particular, persons in positions of command, are prosecuted and sanctioned, and that victims are provided with effective remedies. The responsibility of those who provided legal pretexts for manifestly illegal behaviour should also be established.”

The Kent State Truth Tribunal United Nations Reports:

February 2013 Kent State Truth Tribunal UN Submission ~ http://bit.ly/1f2X25i

October 2013 KSTT Shadow Report ~ http://bit.ly/1kBSjfa

February 2014 KSTT Final Update ~ http://bit.ly/1ezn0cG

March 2014 KSTT Addresses the UN Human Rights Committee ~ http://bit.ly/1dgliTW

After the US 4^th Periodic Human Rights Review at the United Nations, this tshirt design was created by artist Josh Starcher for the Kent State Truth Tribunal:

RECOMMENDATION: The United States must examine forensic evidence of expert Stuart Allen’s digital analysis of the Kent State tape and acknowledge his findings.

IV.  US Unlawful Killings Require Acknowledgement, Credible Investigation & Accountability

When the United States Delegation said, “In 1970, four students were killed, was murdered”, the long held US position that the killings at Kent State were simply a ‘civil rights’ matter was extinguished forever.

Now that the deaths at Kent State have been acknowledged by the State as murder, US authorities are required to treat the Kent State recording as evidence from a cold case homicide, and the tape must be credibly, impartially and independently investigated as noted in the United Nations Human Rights Council from the 26th session on the “Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, social and cultural rights’ mandate of the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions:

the obligation of all States to conduct exhaustive and impartial investigations into all suspected cases of extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, to identify and to bring to justice those responsible, while ensuring the right of every person to a fair and public hearing by a competent, independent and impartial tribunal established by law, to grant adequate compensation within a reasonable time to the victims or their families and to adopt all necessary measures, including legal and judicial measures, in order to bring an end to impunity and to prevent the recurrence of such executions, as stated in the Principles on the Effective Prevention and Investigation of Extra-legal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions.”

The requirement for effective investigation includes acknowledgement of new evidence in accordance with international norms such as the United Nations Manual on the Effective Prevention and Investigations of Extra-legal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions, U.N. Doc. E/ST/CSDHA/.12(1991). http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/executioninvestigation-91.html#11

V.   The Current Instituted History of the Kent State Massacre Confuses, Censors and Obfuscates the May 4, 1970 Unlawful Killings

Instead of examining the Kent State tape that emerged in 2010, the US Justice Department has refuted the provenance of the tape, ignored the new evidence, confused what was discovered, discredited the forensic expert and censored the 2010 forensic findings in the Kent State tape. This behavior echoes the tremendous effort on the part of the US government, Kent State University and US Justice Department to hamper and derail efforts for restorative justice to be achieved and Kent State truth to be known by the public since May 4, 1970.

Back in 1979, after nine years of civil litigation, where Kent State plaintiffs sued for wrongful death (the only legal option in the American judicial system), an out-of-court civil settlement was reached, including $15,000 paid by the State for the death of Allison Krause and a statement of regret signed by the Kent State shooters.

Rediscovered on September 2014, was the Kent State Civil Settlement Statement of 1979, authored and signed by the plaintiffs, which shared the sentiments of all harmed in the May 4^th Kent State Massacre. The Settlement Statement includes hard-fought-for recommendations to the US government that were patently ignored, never implemented and could have protected the lives of countless Americans.

Following the emergence of the new Kent State evidence, in 2012 Kent State University constructed a $1.1 million visitor center near the killing site. The visitor center exhibits are not factually accurate and whitewash US government complicity; the new Kent State tape evidence is buried, and when mentioned, criticized.

In 2011, forensic expert Stuart Allen was interviewed by CNN on his findings in the Kent State tape and until recently the interview was available to be viewed at CNN.com. This year Stuart Allen’s CNN Kent State interview was removed from the CNN website; watch the CNN scrubbed Stuart Allen interview on youtube.

Will we ever learn the truth of what happened at Kent State?

To date there have been no credible investigations into what occurred at Kent State. This is a terrible precedent. Americans still do not have access to true knowledge through credible investigation of what occurs when US law enforcement and the military kill civilians. The same, flawed US grand jury system only exonerates and protects the police and those in authority. There is no facility for redress in America. Instead victims and surviving families are encouraged to “move on” yet many survivors suffer from harassment by the FBI for many years to come.

RECOMMENDATION: In the coming days, the Kent State Truth Tribunal will be making application to the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Arbitrary and Summary Execution, Mr. Christof Heyns. Mr. Heyns was recommended by Ms. Maria Clara Martin, Chief Americas Sections at the UN in March 2014.

VI.  Truth Tribunals: A New Standard for Citizen-Organized Accountability in America

When the courts fail to bring justice to the injured and when governments prefer to neglect their role in such tragedies, families sometimes turn to alternative means of gathering the truth. After years of exhausting efforts to find out what happened on the day of Allison’s death, and failure to receive any meaningful recognition for the injury suffered by our family, we established the Kent State Truth Tribunal on the 40th anniversary of the killings. We felt the imperative to do this for our family and to come together with others to create an accurate historical account of what occurred at Kent State, also honoring and preserving the first person narratives of original witnesses and participants.

When young Michael Brown was shot to death by US law enforcement in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014, Allison’s family watched the efforts of the United States to investigation Michael Brown’s unlawful killing, especially noting the parallels between Michael’s killing and Allison’s.

First a State grand jury was instituted and at the conclusion, those in authority failed to bring criminal charges for killing and exonerated US law enforcement. We recognized the similarities in the government’s handling of the killings at Kent State. The results were almost identical with the State grand jury not capable of indicting the police officer that shot Michael dead. Those in authority in Ferguson and at the US Justice Department viewed the killing of Michael Brown through a ‘civil rights’ lens, outrageously ignoring the much more critical crime involved in Michael’s killing by US law enforcement.

Ever since August 2014, deaths of people of color, particularly young people, at the hands of US law enforcement, have been dealt with as civil rights issues, neglecting to hold anyone accountable for the State killing civilians. In America there is no recourse, nor any other judicial avenue, no possibility for redress for acts of State-sponsored murder.

It has become clear that accountability is impossible in the current American judicial system. Because of the flawed system and since the witnesses and participants of civilian death by US law enforcement at Ferguson (Cleveland, Baltimore and more) will not have their truth recorded, known or honored, we wish to offer the use of the Truth Tribunal methodology to enable a citizen-organized campaign for accountability in these situations.

RECOMMENDATION: The Kent State Truth Tribunal seeks direction and support from the United Nations in offering the facility of citizen-organized Truth Tribunals to those harmed by State-sponsored, unlawful killings in America. Our goal is for the KSTT and the United Nations to work together to bring restorative justice and accountability to the United States. How may we get started?

VII.  The Allison Center for Peace

Later in 2015 we will be inaugurating the Allison Center for Peace, a peace destination in America, creating an environment for the discussion and development of peaceful solutions, and focused on fostering peace in America.

As we form our center for peace in America, we invite the United Nations to become involved as a founding partner.

RECOMMENDATION: The Kent State Truth Tribunal wishes to explore an on-going relationship with the United Nations in the development of the Allison Center for Peace on the Mendocino coast of Northern California.

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Exposing Kent State 45 Years Later

January 11, 2015 from the Mendocino coast

A birthday blog for my father Arthur S. Krause on his 90th in this vintage review of I.F. Stone’s 1971 book, The Killings at Kent State, How Murder Went Unpunished

Our Allison was one of ‘Four Dead in Ohio’ … shot to death by US military personnel as she protested the Vietnam War on her Kent State University campus at noon.

Read the true story of Kent State, Jackson State and as you consider these facts, please realize that American leadership’s standard judicial remedy for the murder of civilians is to offer and institute the American grand jury system. Whether in 2015 or in 1970, official US grand juries continue to fail to enable truth, redress, accountability or justice for Americans, especially when American civilians are killed by US law enforcement.

A Harvard Crimson Book Review: I. F. Stone’s Exposing Kent State by Garrett Epps, February 16, 1971, full article

THE “forces of order” disposed of six students last May-four whites at Kent State and two blacks at Jackson State. Immediately after the shots were fired, in each case, the killers and the officials who dispatched them began covering up the crime and preparing to use the legal system to discredit and punish “ringleaders.”

At Jackson, the local police, the Mississippi Highway Patrol, and the authorities proceeded with coldblooded efficiency born of long practice, using well-established administrative practices to cover up the wanton murder of blacks. As soon as the troopers had stopped firing, the Scranton Commission reported, they calmly picked up and hid the shell casings lying on the ground. They then agreed on a story and stuck to it in their testimony before the Hinds County Grand Jury and their replies to FBI investigators. All of those interviewed denied shooting-a story so ridiculous that even the local grand jury, which found the murders justified, called their declarations “absolutely false.”

After further questioning, the Highway Patrol produced a few shells which it had forcehandedly saved-all were from city police guns. When confronted with this evidence, three Jackson policemen admitted that they had fired. However, neither the local nor the federal grand juries felt compelled to consider charges under the perjury or “false declaration” laws. Instead, they turned the shell casings over to the FBI. Before recessing, however, the county grand jury indicted a young black named Ernest Kyles for arson and inciting to riot.

The cover-up mechanism here was strong; it was roughly the same as that used by the authorities in Orangeburg, S.C., in 1968, after troopers there shot and killed three black students and wounded twenty-seven. Although nineteen policemen were indicted for the shootings, they were later acquitted, returned to duty, and promoted.

It seems unlikely that the Jackson State cover-up will be broken and the guilty punished-especially since the Nixon administration has given unmistakable notice that it is not very interested in pushing investigations into murders of blacks by whites upon whom it is depending for reelection (FBI agents interviewing the police in Mississippi did not bother to keep written records of the interviews-a standard practice intended to make preparing a case easier for local prosecutors).

Initially, the killings at Kent State and the after-math follow the same pattern: disorder breaks out, deadly force is called in to quell it, people are shot at random, evidence is suppressed, and a kangaroo tribunal returns indictments against the victims while clearing the killers. This is what happened during the summer and early fall at Kent: a grand jury cleared the Guardsmen, while indicting 25 students on charges of riot, arson, and unlawful assembly. The report-including a passage which stated that the responsibility for the shootings lay with the students, faculty, and Administration of the University-was published. It seemed likely that the students would be tried and sentenced and the matter forgotten.

BUT the analogy has broken down; for the victims at Kent were not blacks (whose murders are accepted as a matter of course by most of the white middle class), but-as the media never tired of repeating-the children of middle America, kids like the kids next door.

Liberal response was impressive-Ramsey Clark and Mark Lane, among others, came to Ohio to defend those indicted. The pressure has paid off in some partial victories for the Kent 25: two weeks ago, a Federal district judge invalidated the Ohio grand jury report and ordered all available copies burned because it might prejudice jurors if the case came to trial. Ohio State Attorney General William J. Brown is appealing the case and opposing a move to quash the indictments which followed the decision, but it now seems possible that most of the Kent 25 will get off.

I.F. Stone has written a book, The Killings at Kent State which illuminates some of the pressures which caused the shootings and the cover-up which followed. Moreover, he has published some official documents which reveal how the cover-up was effected-including an FBI report prepared in June which says “we have some reason to believe that the claim by National Guardsmen that their lives were endangered was fabricated subsequent to the event.” The book is partly a collection of pieces about the shootings which Stone wrote late last year for the New York Review of Books, with a special report by the Akron Beacon-Journal, a summary of the FBI report-never published before-and the text of the original grand jury report appended.

He also deals with Jackson State, but there he found less information to go on. The Justice Department and the media have taken less of an interest in Jackson: what happened there was established procedure. As Attorney General John Mitchell said last month: “The case is closed. The judicial process has taken its course.”

Stone has been around for a long time, and he can see through official lies and half-truths better than any other American journalist. He also has a large capacity for liberal outrage, and he finds plenty to anger him in the Kent situation. It is apparent that, from the decision to call in the National Guard until the publication of the Grand Jury report, the students at Kent State were victims of a cynical political system that counted their deaths merely as embarrassments or opportunities to entrench itself further in power.

Ohio Governor James Rhodes took over the handling of the Kent situation personally on Sunday, the day before the murders. The night before, students had burned the ROTC building on campus, slashing hoses when firemen came to put out the fire. Rhodes went to great lengths to demonstrate that he was hopping mad. He told a press conference that he had ordered the Guard to break up all assemblies on the campus, regardless of whether or not they were violent.

Pounding his fist on the table, he intoned, “We’re going to employ every force of law that we have under our authority. . . . We are going to employ every weapon possible. . . . You cannot continue to set fires to buildings that are worth five to ten million dollars [the ROTC building was valued at about $50,000] . . . . These people just move from one campus to another and terrorize a community. They’re worse than the brown shirts and the Communist element and also the night riders in the vigilantes [sic]. They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America. . . . There is no sanctuary for these people to burn down buildings. It’s over with in Ohio.”

Some of Rhode’s deep moral outrage may be explained by the fact that he was running for the Republican Senatorial nomination in a primary two days away. Anti-student measures were good politics and Rhodes seized the chance to show what a tough guy he could be by turning the Guard loose on the Kent students with orders to let them have it.

THE GUARD he was using to prove his point was a weapon with a hair-trigger. The Ohio National Guard is the barony of Gen. Sylvester T. Del Corso, a former Army Colonel with the habit of keeping his office clock four hours fast. Del Corso appeared on televised hearings of the Scranton Commission last summer, sporting a complacent smile and carrying a large rock and a length of steel pipe which he claimed students had thrown at his men. Corso had achieved fame in Ohio before Kent by denouncing Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes as a tool of black revolutionaries and Communists, and by blaming permissiveness and a Communist conspiracy for ghetto riots. His Guard was one of the few in the nation which routinely carried live ammunition, and it had standing orders to shoot back at snipers.

Before being ordered to Kent on May 2, the Guard units involved had spent four days on active duty fighting a wildcat strike. When the order came, one-third of the force was assembled and given a one-hour review lesson in riot control. Then the whole detachment piled into trucks and headed for the campus.

Rhodes and Del Corso had both made it clear that the Guard should not feel inhibited about their methods in breaking up student demonstrations. Students-all students-were the enemy. The Guard had no clear function on campus. It was there to punish the campus for being unruly, for being antiwar, for being young. It was there to garner a few points for an ambitious politician.

The Guardsmen shot, killing four and wounding [nine]. No one can make any sense out of the shooting; there was no sniping; the Guardsmen were neither in danger nor even surrounded; the number of rocks thrown was not large; and there was even plenty of tear gas-both FBI reports and the report by the Beacon-Journal make these facts clear. The only gun seized on campus that day belonged to a student taking pictures for the campus police. [Allegedly from Terry Norman, KSU student and FBI Informant/Provocateur]

The Guardsmen were acting on an ideology enunciated by Nixon, Agnew, and Del Corso. The students were the enemy, the American Viet Cong, guilty of the crime of being in the way. The Guardsmen had been given a focus for their anger, given live ammunition, and told to take care of the situation. No one can contend that they shot cold-bloodedly, taking out their anger like the hardhats. Undoubtedly they fired in blind, tired, nervous panic. But the shells had been loaded and the powder primed very carefully in Washington and Columbus.

Rhodes lost the primary the next day and went into seclusion, refusing to speak to reporters for three weeks. But the cover-up was under way before that. According to the FBI report, the Guardsmen got together and agreed to say that they had been in danger and had fired to keep from being overrun by students who wanted to grab their guns and bayonet them. The Beacon-Journal report explodes this flimsy story by quoting a Guardsman as saying, “The guys have been saying that we got to get together and stick to the same story, that it was our lives or them, a matter of survival. I told them I would tell the truth and I wouldn’t get in trouble that way.”

THE FBI reports also destroy the story, reporting that only one Guardsman was seriously injured in the action before the firing, and that “the Guardsmen clearly did not believe that they were being fired upon.” Photographs do not show Guardsmen crouching or seeking cover from rocks. And, the report says, “We have some reason to believe that the claim by Guardsmen that their lives were endangered by the students was fabricated after the fact.”

The Ohio Grand Jury that met to consider the shootings, however, was not programmed to accept these possibilities. It had one purpose: to exonerate the Guard. To have done otherwise, as Stone points out, would have been to condemn Rhodes. The political underlings accepted as a matter of course the Governor’s complicity in the killings and moved to prevent it from being known. Thus, the chief prosecutor read the FBI report but did not submit it to the Grand Jury. He also neglected to call a number of Guardsmen named in the FBI report who gave testimony contrary to the pre-planned conclusion that the Guard had been in danger. Another prosecutor later told the newspapers that the National Guard “should have shot all the troublemakers.”

The grand jury gave the expected whitewash, and the published report expanded considerably on its original mandate. It first dealt with the question of the Guardsmen (simultaneously deciding that a number of students should be charged with riot). The Guardsmen, it said, had “fired in the sincere and honest belief and under the circumstances which would have logically caused them to believe that they would have suffered serious bodily injury had they not done so,” and were “not, therefore, subject to criminal prosecution.”

The report then fixed responsibility for the four deaths on the university administration, which was “permissive”: even though SDS had been banned from the campus for more than a year, the Grand Jury made much of the fact that any other organization could be accredited to use University facilities without prior political screenings. The Administration had even, it charged, allowed a rock concert by “a rock music group known as the ‘Jefferson Airplane'” at which slide projectors had shown shots of the Guardsmen firing at the students.

THE SOLUTION the report proposed was designed to prevent any more Kent States: “Expel the troublemakers without fear or favor.”

The repressive mechanisms swung into action: the 25 were indicted, and tough new laws and rules were inaugurated to make pacification of students easier. One bill, the Ohio Campus Disorders Act, requires that an outside referee be appointed by the Regents of every State University with the advice of the local Bar Association. This referee would hear disciplinary cases of students arrested for-not convicted of-any felony or misdemeanor. He has the unrestricted right to expel or suspend students brought before him.

The Bar Association in Kent nominated Seabury Brown-the prosecutor who had said that “the National Guard should have shot all the troublemakers.”

This nomination was vetoed by the Regents; and it seems possible that the Kent 25 may not be jailed for the crime of having served as moving targets. But the machinery is being honed. Next time it will work better; and soon, it may be as ruthless and efficient everywhere as it is in Mississippi.

It would be satisfying to imagine that this book-thorough and remarkably well-documented, considering the haste with which it was assembled-could cause a public outcry; but it is impossible. Stone told a reporter last week that he did not expect much reaction to the book. “The war has made moral imbeciles of us all,” he said. Truly, six years of escalating war at home and in Vietnam have revealed clearly that our democratic institutions are a sick joke, and the realization has numbed us. We may be beaten to the ground before feeling returns.

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Kent State Massacre 1979 Civil Settlement Statement

Please READ the attached Settlement Statement by the Kent State University Students Wounded and by the Parents of the Students Killed on May 4, 1970 in Cleveland, Ohio offered and signed on January 4, 1979. StatementOfKentStateFamilies

---

Contents of Kent State Massacre Civil Settlement Statement:

A STATEMENT BY

THE STUDENTS WOUNDED AND BY THE PARENTS OF THE

STUDENTS KILLED AT KENT STATE UNIVERSITY ON

MAY 4, 1970

in

Cleveland, Ohio

January 4, 1979

A settlement of the Kent State civil suit has been reached out of court in an agreement mediated by Federal Judge William Thomas, and for this we are grateful.

The settlement provides for the payment of $675,000 in damages by the State of Ohio and for a signed statement of regret and intentions by Governor James A. Rhodes, Generals Del Corso and Canterbury, and officers and men of the Ohio National Guard.

We, as families of the victims of the shootings by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, May 4, 1970, wish to interpret what we believe to be the significance of this settlement.

We accepted the settlement out of court, but negotiated by the court, because we determined that it accomplished the greatest extent possible under present law, the objectives toward which we as families have struggled during the past eight years. These objectives have been as follows:

1. Insofar as possible, to hold the State of Ohio accountable for the actions of the officials and agents in the event of May 4, 1970 at Kent State University,
2. To demonstrate that the excessive use of force by the agents of government would be met by a formidable citizen challenge,
3. To exhaustively utilize the judicial system in the United States and demonstrate to an understandably skeptical generation that the system can work,
4. To assert that the human rights of American citizens, particularly those citizens in dissent of government policies, must be effected and protected,
5. To obtain sufficient financial support for Mr. Dean Kahler, one of the victims of the shooting, that he may have a modicum of security as he spends the rese of his life in a wheelchair.

The State of Ohio although protected by the doctrine of sovereign immunity and consequently not legally responsible in a technical sense, has now recognized its responsibility by paying a substantial amount of money in damages for the injuries and deaths caused by the shooting.

State officials, national guard command officers, and guardsmen have signed a statement submitted to the families of the victims of the shooting which not only expresses request and sorrow — eight years belatedly — but also recognizes that another method than the use of loaded combat rifles could have resolved the confrontation at Kent State University. The statement also asserts that better ways must be found for future confrontations which may take place.

The Scranton Commission which investigated campus disorders in the Summer of 1970 said that the Kent State Shooting was, “unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable.” The signed statement of the officials and the guardsmen at least now agrees that the shooting and killing was unnecessary, and now at least, the State of Ohio has assumed responsibility for the act.

We recognize that many others related to the May 4th event have also suffered during the past eight years – including Kent State University students, faculty and administrators, as well as Ohio National Guardsmen and their families. Indeed, we believe that some of the guardsmen on Blanket Hill on that fateful day also became victims of an Ohio National Guard policy which sent them into a potential citizen confrontation with loaded combat rifles. We did not want those individual guardsmen to be personally liable for the actions of others and the policy of a governmental agency under whose orders they served.

Yet the doctrine of sovereign immunity which protects the State of Ohio from being sued without its permission, made it necessary for us to take individuals to court. Only then did the State respond — furnishing more than two million dollars for the legal costs of the defense of officials and guardsmen and finally being willing to pay costs and damages of the victims of the shooting.

We want to thank those that sustained us in our long struggle for an expression of justice. More than 40,000 individuals made contributions of money for our legal costs, students and faculty members on many campuses, but particularly at Kent State University have furnished us effective support. The American Civil Liberties and its volunteer attorneys — as well as many other lawyers — have skillfully and devotedly served us throughout these years. The Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church has faithfully supported and coordinated our struggle from the beginning. We are grateful to all of them.

Because of the experience that we have had during the past eight and one-half years, there are other words, which we are compelled to speak. We have become convinced that the issue of the excessive use of force — or the use of deadly force — by law enforcement agencies or by those acting with the authority of law enforcement agencies, is a critical national issue to which the attention of the American people must be drawn.

President Carter, on December 6, 1978, in his speech on the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, said, “Of all human rights, the most basic is to be free of arbitrary violence . . .” He then noted that citizens should have the right to be free of violence which comes from governments.

We deplore violence in every form for any cause and from every source. Yet we believe the average American is little aware of the official violence which has been used across our land indiscriminately and unjustifiably. Twenty-eight students have been killed on campuses in the past ten years. A long but unnumbered list of residents in minority communities have been killed by police unnecessarily.

We find it significant that just a few weeks ago the United States Commission on Civil Rights held a consultation in Washington, D.C. on, “Police Practices and the Preservation of Civil Rights” in preparation for the conducting of hearings on the use of deadly force in selected cities. That is the issue with which we have had to be concerned. I tis an issue with which a growing number of citizens are becoming concerned.

Through our long legal and political struggle we have become convinced that the present federal law which protects citizens from the deprivation of their civil rights by law enforcement agencies or those acting with their authority, is weak and inadequate. It is a provision which is little used — but when it is used, it has little use. A citizen may be killed by those acting under the color of Law almost with impunity. The families of the victim of those shootings or killings have little recourse and then only through an expensive and lengthy process.

We believe that citizens and law enforcement must, in the words of the signed statement of the settlement, find better ways. We appeal for those better ways to be used not only on campuses but in cities and communities across the land. We plead for a federal law which will compel the consideration and use of those better ways.

We are simply average citizens who have attempted to be loyal to our country and constructive and responsible in our actions, but we have not had an average experience. We have learned through a tragic event that loyalty to our nation and it’s principles sometimes requires resistence to our government and its policies — a lesson many young people, including the children of some of us, had learned earlier. That has been our struggle — for others this struggle goes on. We will try to support them.

For Allison, Sandra, Jeffrey and William
For Peace and Justice
Shalom

Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Krause
Mr. and Mrs. Louis Schroeder
Mr. and Mrs. Martin Scheuer
Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Holstein
Mr. Dean Kahler
Mr. Joseph Lewis
Mr. Alan Canfora
Mr. John R. Cleary
Mr. Donald Scott MacKenzie
Mr. Douglas Wrentmore
Mr. Thomas M. Grace
Mr. James Russell
Mr. Robert Stamps

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To the United Nations: A Plea for Justice at Kent State

Editors Note: On October 10, 2013, the US Delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Committee requested a postponement due to the partial US Government shutdown. The US postponement request was for the United States 4th Periodic Review and the UN Human Rights Committee Secretariat agreed to the request, setting a new date for the US 4th Periodic Review in March 2014, with the exact dates to be determined. News response to the US postponement ~ http://bit.ly/H4M6qD

On February 9, 2013, the Kent State Truth Tribunal and Allison’s family submitted a list of issues to be considered by the United Nations, including Kent State questions to be asked at the United States’ Report on their Compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights before the 107th Session of the Human Rights Committee in Geneva, March 11-28, 2013.

READ the Kent State Truth Tribunal submission to the UN, HRC full document 130209_ICCPRKentStateFinalA

Kent State Truth Tribunal submission the United Nations, Human Rights Committee

Seeking an independent, impartial investigation into the May 4th Kent State Massacre (Article 2 (Right to remedy); Article 6 (Right to life); Article 19 (Right to fre

edom of expression); Article 21 (Right to peaceful assembly))

I. Reporting Organization

The Kent State Truth Tribunal (KSTT) was founded in 2010 upon the emergence of new forensic evidence regarding the May 4, 1970 Kent State Massacre. KSTT is a non-profit organization focused on revealing truth and bringing justice to Kent State massacre victims and survivors.

Representing Allison Beth Krause, 19-year-old student protester slain at Kent State University on May 4, 1970: Doris L. Krause, mother & Laurel Krause, sister.

II. Issue Summary

On May 4, l970 members of the Ohio National Guard fired between 61 and 67 shots into a crowd of unarmed anti-war protestors at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, killing four and wounding nine students. For over 40 years, the government has claimed that the Guardsmen did not fire on command, and instead shot in self-defense after hearing sniper fire in the crowd.

In 2010, new forensic evidence emerged debunking this theory. The evidence consisted of a tape recorded by a Kent State student during the shooting. Though the original tape, known as the Kent State Strubbe tape, was destroyed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) in 1979, a bonafide copy of the tape was located in 2007 and was analyzed in 2010 by an internationally accredited forensic expert. The analysis, derived using state-of-the-art technology that was not available in prior investigations of the shooting, demonstrates that there was a ‘command to fire’ at the protestors. Moreover, the enhanced tape identified four pistol shots fired 70 seconds before the command as coming from an F.B.I. informant’s pistol to create the ‘sound of sniper fire.’ Although the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) received this new evidence, the Department declined to re-open its investigation of the Kent State shooting.

The victims of the Kent State massacre and their families have been unable to obtain access to meaningful redress. In 1974, federal charges against eight members of the Ohio National Guard of willfully violating the rights of the dead and wounded students were dismissed because, according to the judge, the government had failed to prove its case. In 1979 a civil rights settlement was reached with the issuance of a signed Statement of Regret and $15,000 for Allison B. Krause, one of the victims of the Kent State shooting. However, the settlement did not include an apology. Moreover, the federal charges and settlement were centered on civil rights and constitutional violations – there has yet to be a criminal indictment for murder. Additionally, as investigations of the shooting have thus far only been conducted by government entities, there has yet to be a credible, impartial, and independent investigation of the Kent State shooting. Moreover, the U.S. military has failed to address the use of live ammunition on college campuses and whether appropriate force was used on protestors at Kent State.

Failure to ensure justice and accountability for the Kent State massacre has set a precedent that the U.S. can continue to harass, abuse, and even kill protestors. Just ten days after the Kent State massacre, two student protesters were murdered by state police as they protested the Vietnam War on the Jackson State University campus. American authorities have stated ‘snipers’ prompted the firing of military weapons at student protesters, just as at Kent State University. Unfortunately suppression of peaceful assembly continues today. Since the ‘Occupy’ movement began in 2011, protestors have been labeled as ‘domestic terrorists’ by the F.B.I. and have been arrested in massive numbers for peaceful protests and assemblies. Until the U.S. conducts a credible, impartial and investigation into the Kent State shooting, and provides redress for victims and their families, protestors in the U.S. will continue to be at risk of being deprived of their fundamental rights without accountability.

III. U.S. Government Report and Prior Recommendations

Although the U.S. has not addressed the Kent State shooting in its periodic reports to the Human Rights Committee, it has professed support for the right to remedy, compensation for victims of crimes, and the obligation to conduct independent, credible, and thorough investigations into violations of rights, especially the right to life.

In 2010 and after two failed investigations, the United Kingdom finally organized a legitimate, impartial investigation into Bloody Sunday, a 1972 massacre that was strikingly similar to the May 4 Kent State shooting. The Bloody Sunday investigation overturned all prior examinations and admitted to wrongdoing by the State. At the time, the U.S. welcomed the publication of the resulting Bloody Sunday Inquiry report and expressed hope that “the completion of the independent inquiry’s work and publication of its report will contribute to Northern Ireland’s ongoing transformation from a turbulent past to a peaceful future.”

On the international stage the U.S. has called upon nations to uphold the rule of law and respect the right to peaceful assembly. This was particularly evident during the ‘Arab Spring,’ as the Obama Administration called for accountability when government officials suppressed speech and killed and injured protestors. What the Administration has preached abroad, however, is not always practiced at home.

IV. Other UN and Regional Bodies Recommendations

In November 2012, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) released a report conveying concern about the use of excessive force and undue restrictions on peaceful assembly in 11 countries, including the U.S. The report mentioned specific abuses with regards to Occupy Wall Street and recommended U.S. authorities ensure the right to free assembly, take efforts to limit the use of force by law enforcement officials, and ensure that allegations of police misconduct are promptly and thoroughly investigated. In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in December 2011, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression and U.N. Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association called on U.S. officials to “explain the behavior of police departments that violently disbanded some Occupy protests last fall” and reminded the U.S. government of its obligations under international law to “take all necessary measures to guarantee that the rights and freedoms of all peaceful protesters be respected.”

V. Recommended Questions

1. Given the new forensic evidence emerging in 2010 related to the murders at Kent State, for what reasons has U.S. Department of Justice chosen to refuse to conduct a new, independent, impartial inquiry into the killings?

2. What lessons have American leadership learned from the May 4th Kent State Massacre? Under what circumstances will deadly, lethal force and war-grade weapons be used against peaceful American protesters, including on university and college campuses?

3. What steps will the U.S. government take to ensure that protestors are allowed to protest and assemble freely, without fear of intimidation, arrest, physical injury or – more seriously – murder?

4. Will the United States conduct an impartial, independent examination of the Kent State massacre?

5. What steps will the U.S. government take to ensure that the F.B.I. does not violate the fundamental rights of protestors, including the right to life?

VI. Suggested Recommendations

1. Conduct a full, independent and credible investigation into the May 4th shooting and killing of 13 American protesters at Kent State University. Such an investigation must consider the new evidence and ensure that victims and their families have the right to be heard and given an opportunity to present evidence and testimony.

2. The U.S. government must ensure that all incidents involving the killing, injuring or unlawful use of lethal force against protesters are promptly and impartially investigated, the perpetrators held accountable, and the victims and their families are provided with adequate information on the investigation and full redress. This should include a criminal investigation and prosecution of perpetrators in addition to other legal remedies for violations of civil and constitutional rights.

Read the full document ~ 130209_ICCPRKentStateFinalA

Kent State Makes It to the U.N., Human Rights Committee http://bit.ly/1KTBGsI

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President Obama: Kent State 2012 Letter from Allison’s Family

May 1, 2012

President Barack H. Obama
The White House
Washington DC 20500

Dear President Obama:

Last week my mother Doris Krause urged me to write a personal letter to help you understand the May 4th Kent State Massacre from a mother’s perspective, one parent to another. Voicing my reluctance to write again, I said, “I’ve written to President Obama more times than I can count.”

But Mom insisted, “Laurie, I want you to write about our family and how we’re similar to President Obama’s family. Let him know what happened when Allison went to college at Kent State, how she was shot dead protesting the Vietnam War by the National Guard on her campus. How afterwards your dad fought for the rest of his days, for Allison’s death to ‘not be in vain’ and how, even today, we have lost every Kent State battle for truth about Allison’s death.”

My 86 year-old mother, Doris Krause, was born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, growing up during the depression. When she was 20 years old, she married my dad Arthur just as he returned from service in WWII. Art and Doris Krause had two daughters, Allison and me.

In September of 1969, my big sister Allison went away to college. Allison was a smart, beautiful, loving, funny freshman enrolled in the Kent State University Honors College. She was deeply in love with her boyfriend Barry and was popular on campus. Allison had a special quality nearly impossible to describe, a compassionate, gorgeous, full-of-life young woman that seemed to have it all.

On April 23, 1970, our family celebrated Allison’s 19th birthday together in Kent, Ohio, going out for dinner. It was the last time any of us saw Allison alive.

Ten days later, our family life and world were torn apart forever. We heard about trouble at Kent State, then that Allison had been hurt. Frantically we searched for information on Allison but all the Kent phone lines were cut. Hours later we heard that Allison was dead on arrival at the hospital, killed by National Guard bullets.

Mr. President, there were no officials from Allison’s school, the state of Ohio or the National Guard to help us at the hospital when we identified Allison’s body on May 4th. Instead, at the hospital where her body lay still, we heard men with guns mutter to us, “they should have shot more.”

The 10 years following Allison’s murder were filled with lawsuits from the lowest courts in Ohio to the U.S. Supreme Court. I was going to college yet remember the government’s staunch resistance to our lawsuits and the utter unwillingness to share evidence or any reports on what happened to Allison in the May 4th Kent State Massacre. In 1979, the court cases ended with a settlement based on civil rights. http://bit.ly/1qd9tTO

During my family’s pursuit of justice for Allison we were constantly hounded by the FBI. Our phones were tapped, threats were made to my father, agents took pictures of us where ever we went. This harassment finally culminated in my father being offered a bribe. In the presence of author Peter Davies, my father was told to name his price for dropping his case, “One million, two million?” It was made clear that the bribe was coming through the Ford Foundation, and if he refused it, his job at Westinghouse and our family’s freedom would be in serious jeopardy. My father was furious and obviously turned this down in no uncertain terms, but the threats had a chilling effect on us. Every facet of our lives was ripped apart by Allison’s death and the endless harassment by our government.

Since May 4, 1970, the U.S. government has never allowed the Krause family to know the facts or see the evidence related to Allison’s murder on her Kent State campus. The truth at Kent State remained buried until recently in the examination of the Kent State Tape. http://bit.ly/R4Ktio

The Krause family rejects Attorney General Holder’s refusal to open a proper, impartial, independent investigation into the Murders at Kent State. We agree with Congressman Kucinich on Kent State, demanding the 2012 Department of Justice disclose their full report leading to their decision to close the books on Kent State again. http://1.usa.gov/IDiv2q

Two years ago, I began phoning the Justice Department about the new evidence found at Kent State, as the statute of limitations never lapsed on Allison’s murder. Mr. President, AG Holder’s Department of Justice refused my calls and kept sending me to the civil rights division even though Allison died at Kent State.

Last week’s Department of Justice letters on Kent State do not mention the loss of life on that campus, continuing this government ploy to deflect murder by pointing to loss of civil rights. A violation of Allison’s civil rights turned into homicide when they fired the bullets that took her away from us. http://1.usa.gov/IN6RDu

On May 4, 1970, just after noon as students were changing classes and a protest was called, the National Guard shot live ammunition at Kent State students. Our Allison was more than a football field away at 343 feet from the guardsmen that shot her to death. Since then, we have never learned what Allison did wrong to meet such a tragic, violent end. Our original call for ‘Allison’s death to not be in vain’ has been scrubbed from the history of the May 4th Kent State Massacre.

Coming back to what Mom asked me write to you, President Obama, she shared how, “The First Family is almost identical to the Krause family.” If this happened to your family President Obama, how do you think you’d survive this onslaught?

Last week Allison would have celebrated her 61st birthday. With the 42nd anniversary of Kent State approaching on May 4th, we continue to stand for Truth and Justice for Allison. We hope no more American families will bury their young as we did after Allison’s unnecessary and unwarranted death, with zero accountability by the May 4th Kent State Massacre perpetrators.

Please do not allow another Kent State anniversary to pass without truth and justice for Allison Krause and her fellow murdered classmates Jeffrey Miller, Sandy Scheuer and William Schroeder.

No More Kent States,

Laurel Krause
Kent State Truth Tribunal

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28 Days for Kent State Peace

4/6/12 ~ Our third posting into 30 Days for Kent State Peace, a VIRTUAL PETITION to Pres Obama & AG Holder.

Our Plea: EXAMINE the New Evidence in the Kent State Tape. It is going on TWO YEARS since new Kent State evidence emerged yet we have NOT RECEIVED ONE RESPONSE from the Obama Administration.

The law is clear: the Statute of Limitations does not lapse for MURDER! Four Student Protesters were shot dead at Kent State University on May 4, 1970.

Examine the Kent State Tape Now!

In 28 days it will be the 42nd anniversary of the slaughter of Allison Krause, my sister who was one of four student protesters shot dead by the U.S. government on May 4, 1970.

In today’s post we’re taking a look at Arthur S. Krause, father of Allison. On 9/8/74 as President Ford ordered a FULL PARDON FOR PRESIDENT NIXON, Arthur Krause wrote & sent this telegram:

Dad’s 9/8/74 telegram ~

President Gerald R. Ford
White House
Washington DC 20500

YOU PARDONED NIXON BECAUSE YOU BELIEVE HE AND HIS FAMILY HAVE SUFFERED ENOUGH. MY WIFE AND I LOST OUR DAUGHTER ALLISON ON MAY 4 1970 AT KENT STATE DUE TO ACTIONS AND WORDS OF NIXON. HE COMPOUNDED THIS HORROR OF GIVING THE NATIONAL GUARD THE RIGHT TO KILL BY ORDERING MITCHELL, ERLICHMAN, DEAN, GARMENT, LEONARD, AND NORMAN TO COVERUP THE MURDERS AND MAIMING BY BLOCKING THE CONVENING OF A FEDERAL GRAND JURY. 20,000 OR MORE OUR SOLDIERS WERE KILLED AND THOUSANDS WOUNDED BY ILLEGAL CONTINUANCE FOR 4 YEARS OF THE VIET-NAM WAR. WE AND OTHERS WILL SUFFER THROUGH ETERNITY AND YOU PARDON NIXON WHO HAD NO REGARD FOR MORALITY, ETHICS, THE CONSTITUTION OR THE RIGHTS OF MAN. HAVE YOU BECOME A DESPOT WHO IS A PARTY TO THIS HORROR. YOU ARE COMPOUNDING HIS FELONIES AND ARE BURYING JUSTICE.

SIR YOU ARE LESS A MAN TODAY THAN YOU WERE YESTERDAY.

DORIS AND ARTHUR KRAUSE

President Ford’s full pardon signaled to our family that NOTHING would be done to expose the TRUTH in the May 4th Kent State Massacre.

When this telegram was re-discovered on March 1, 2012, we quickly realized it was the lowest, most desperate time in Allison’s parents’ fight to learn what happened at Kent State, as they also sought accountability for the murders & injuries.

In December 2010, the U.S. Congressional Record published our account of what happened on May 4, 1970 ~ A Day That Changed America! http://bit.ly/fgI0h2

Watch this amazing footage from an early news report on the Kent State Massacre & at the end, Arthur Krause speaking his truth. http://bit.ly/ArGfFl

Learn the DETAILS of what really happened at Kent State ~ That the FBI & Cointelpro provoked the Kent State Massacre, bringing it to successful conclusion, complete with a cover-up that has held over 40 years. http://bit.ly/HcliUa

We Seek Kent State Peace Now!

28 Days for PEACE at Kent State
Please STAND WITH US at the White House
https://www.facebook.com/WhiteHouse/posts/203316336445077
Join Us in Demanding Pres Obama/ Gen’l Holder
EXAMINE the Kent State Tape Now!

Kent State Truth Tribunal
http://TruthTribunal.org/
at facebook http://bit.ly/b0SlSY

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My Open Letter on Kent State to President Obama & General Holder

May 6, 2011

Dear Mr. President & General Holder,

My sister Allison Krause was killed at Kent State on May 4, 1970. I co-founded the Kent State Truth Tribunal with Emily Kunstler and we opened our doors for the first of three tribunals last year right around this time.

On May 1-4, 2010 we recorded, preserved and honored the stories of original participants and witnesses of the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970. It was a blessing that my mother Doris Krause, 85, was able to be present for the beginning of the Kent State healing.

As I returned to my home in California, I received word from Mom that the Kent State Tape had been examined for the very first time and a story was breaking in the Plain Dealer tomorrow, article here http://bit.ly/aM7Ocm That she had given a quote applauding the news of this long-denied order to shoot. That it had been analyzed and verified by Mr. Stuart Allen, a top forensic scientist (also Stuyvestant colleague of General Holder).

In October 2010 at the Kent State Truth Tribunal, we invited Mr. Allen to participate as a meaningfully-involved participant, to examine the Kent State Tape before our cameras. At KSTT-NYC, I received word that there was more than the command on the Kent State Tape. That Mr. Allen, in preparing for his KSTT testimonial, discovered a violent altercation recorded just 70 seconds before the national guard command to fire and ensuing barrage, 67 shots for 13 seconds. Read http://bit.ly/als1xB

As we opened our doors in NYC for our KSTT on October 9-10, 2010, and as a result of Mr. Allen’s shocking new evidence, Representative Dennis Kucinich, chair of the Domestic Policy subcommittee responded by immediately opening an investigation into the Kent State shootings. http://bit.ly/cO69Yx

Then the other shoe dropped. The Democrats lost the election and Rep Kucinich lost his seat as chair in the Domestic Policy subcommittee. http://bit.ly/hmM2SH

Looking back on my Kent State path, I was 15 years old when Allison was murdered. For nine years after, my family life and world were also blown apart forever, especially as my folks pursued justice for Allison in the courts. Mr. President, no one from the government ever came to help us, except for Senator Ted Kennedy, and now recently with Rep Dennis Kucinich.

Recollecting those horrible years, I remember my Dad entering the Kent State Tape into evidence in his lawsuits. Lots of folks called Dad Krazy Krause, he would not let this go. 40 years later, it was heartening to realize Dad knew that the tape held the key to the truth at Kent State. It has taken us over 40 years to be able to decipher and once in for all, hear the recorded sounds via Mr. Stuart Allen’s expertise and kgb audio software.

Mr. Allen verified the long-denied ‘order to fire’ at the unarmed students, and surprisingly discovered new evidence in the violent altercation between Mr. Terry Norman and students. Mr. Allen heard Mr. Norman’s later surrendered pistol shoot off four pistol rounds, creating the sniper fire claimed by the national guard. Mr. Norman was a consensual informant for the F.B.I. and working that day. More on Mr. Norman http://bit.ly/gSN9pP and http://bit.ly/994afB

Mr. Norman is one of many present that day, cogs in the wheel delivering four homicides on May 4, 1970 and crossing the line at Kent State, yet Mr. Norman’s actions directly connect the FBI with the command to fire. Mr. Norman’s actions prove the intent to create, as in instigate sniper fire 70 seconds before the guard shot. Now we understand the odd ‘Alright’ in the ‘command to fire’ order.

It is for this reason that I formally request you Mr. President examine the new evidence in this cold case homicide of Kent State. Furthermore I ask you to create an impartial and unaffiliated team to investigate the F.B.I. This is the same instruction I gave Congressman Kucinich.

From Wikipedia: Impartiality is a principle of justice holding that decisions should be based on objective criteria, rather than on the basis of bias, prejudice, or preferring the benefit to one person over another for improper reasons.

Mr. President and General Holder, please examine the new evidence in the Kent State Tape.

Sincerely,

Laurel Krause

P.S.   Recent writing on learning the truth at Kent State in 2010, also published at the request of Rep Dennis Kucinich in the 2010 Congressional Record: Truth Emerging in the Kent State Cold Case Homicides http://bit.ly/fgI0h2

*******

Laurel Krause’s 6/9/2011 video on the new Kent State evidence and our call for a Kent State Inquiry in 2011:

Arthur Krause’s response to the slaughter of Allison Krause, his daughter, May, 1970:

She resented being called a bum because she disagreed with someone else’s opinion. She felt that our crossing into Cambodia was wrong. Is this dissent a crime? Is this a reason for killing her? Have we come to such a state in this country that a young girl has to be shot because disagrees with the actions of her government?

In today’s snail mail letter, I also enclosed my father’s words & image:

Yesterday on the Internet I discovered Arthur Krause’s words from 1979 and wish to share them with you. Here’s a picture of united Kent State, May 4th folks at a press conference, taken at the end of their nine year search for justice through the judicial system.

Arthur Krause is the tall man in the back, smoking a cigarette & my mom Doris Krause sits in front of him. My father shared, “The thing that I hope people remember … is that it could happen to their child. I was like everyone else and then it happened to us.”

Arthur and Doris Krause carry on their lives ten years after the incident, but the pain and the lessons of the last ten years are evident. “I think we are all responsible for the killings at Kent. You can’t get away from the hatred being spread by national leaders during that time. That political period was one which bred hate and with Nixon and Rhodes fanning the fires you can expect killings to result.”

Krause, the parent who initially began the quest for justice in the Kent State case continued, “I knew what was going to happen; that justice would not be served, but I wanted to make sure that there was pressure applied. In the beginning the other families were not as believing that nothing would be done; I think they thought I was some sort of radical. But I can tell you that if you don’t stand up for your rights they will be taken away from you just like they were from Allison and the others.”

Arthur and Doris Krause have mixed feelings about the 1979 settlement. “We don’t want the damn money ~ we want the truth. If we had wanted the money I would have accepted the one and a half million dollar bribe I was offered to drop the civil suit, offered to me in the presence of Peter Davies in 1971.

We want the facts out about how the four died. We aren’t afraid of the truth. We aren’t the ones who have been saying ‘no comment’ for the past ten years.”

Arthur and Doris Krause hope the movie would generate more of the same hate mail they have received for the past ten years. “They always point out that my daughter had gravel in her pockets . . . that this was the rationale for killing her . . . why didn’t they throw gravel at her?”

“The political climate is very similar to that in 1970,” Krause added, “Kent State, 1970 means we no longer have our daughter, but it also means something to all Americans. Our court battles establish without a doubt one thing. There is no constitution. There is no Bill of Rights.” ~ Arthur S. Krause

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Allison Beth Krause Lives On

MendoCoastCurrent, May 4, 2011

Jennifer Schwartz on her cousin Allison Krause at the 41st commemoration of the Kent State Shootings, May 4, 1970

My name is Jennifer Schwartz and I am Allison Krause’s cousin and also among the first generation of our family who never met Allison.

What can I tell you about my beloved cousin? I was less than a year old when she was shot dead on May 4, 1970. Had she not been killed, I would most certainly have known her.

I have spent my life trying to right this wrong in my own way, trying to get closer to her, to know her, endeavoring to honor her and make Allison proud. So I thank you for inviting me here today to tell you some of what I have learned about Allison from books and published articles, from her friends, from our family and from my efforts at the Kent State Truth Tribunal.

Allison Beth Krause was the cherished first of two daughters born to Arthur and Doris Krause, living in Cleveland Heights. Although roughly 10 years older than Allison, my father Marvin Schwartz remembers many summers playing with the Krause girls. My Dad talks about Allison as a sweet, fun, clever, pretty and vivacious girl. Many of Allison’s friends in Cleveland still remember her from those days back in grade school.

In the early sixties, Allison’s family went for Sunday drives out to the country often ending up at Kent, dining at the Robin Hood and enjoying the pastoral campus. Remarkably, at a very early age, Allison made her decision to attend college at Kent State University.

Her father’s job at Westinghouse moved the family to Pittsburgh in the mid-sixties and then on to Wheaton, Maryland where Allison attended John F Kennedy high school. Many of Allison’s classmates were children of government employees, and with them Allison developed an active awareness of global issues and a well-formed understanding of American history, politics and civil rights.

As she found her political voice in high school, Allison joined the young people of those times who were against the ever-expanding war in Vietnam, and the draft lottery. She lent her voice to the calls for peace at demonstrations in Washington DC.

Allison’s father Arthur was a veteran of WW11. Back in the late sixties he was pro-Vietnam, like many of his generation. Allison’s sister, Laurel remembers many heated dinner-table arguments where she and her big sister objected to the war and nuclear weapons. It was a scene like so many other dining room debates back then.  From those debates, Allison knew: As an American she had a right to freedom of speech and a right to engage in peaceful assembly, all guaranteed by the first amendment.

Yet Allison was more than anti-war protester and advocate of civil rights. She was an active, caring person and was considering a career in a helping profession such as art therapy. My aunt Doris Krause recounts this story of Allison’s volunteer work at a hospital for the mentally disabled.  “She would go there at night and play basketball with them… and her biggest day that she had was when she came home and told us that one of the men had talked to her, and he hadn’t talked to anybody in a long period of years.  And she was so gratified by that.  So she had potential.  She was a smart girl and was just cut down.”

In the fall of 1969, Allison started college as a freshman here at Kent State. Her family had recently moved back to Pittsburgh, so Allison was still close to home. Allison lived in Metcalf Hall, and later Engleman, did well academically as an honors student, made friends quickly, and met another student, the love of her life, Barry Levine. Barry describes Allison as “a sweet, intelligent, loving, warm, intelligent, compassionate, creative, funny, intelligent girl.  As bright as they come.”

That fall, Allison traveled to Washington DC, like hundreds of thousands of other young people, taking part in a huge anti-war demonstration and peace rally.

In her last days, Allison reveled in the first Earth Day Celebration held on April 22, 1970. Buckminster Fuller erected a geodesic dome right here on the commons, just a few steps from Allison’s dorm. The following day, April 23^rd, was Allison’s 19^th birthday. Her family came in from Pittsburgh to celebrate, never imagining this would be the last time they would see her alive.

Allison assembled with others on Friday May 1st as she vehemently disagreed with the U.S. government’s decision to escalate the war and send more troops into Cambodia.  She spent the first weekend of May with friends, doing schoolwork, enjoying the first breath of Spring, but at night, running from the military and helicopters on campus, now occupied by the National Guard, the Highway Patrol, and campus and town police.

On Sunday afternoon May 3^rd, Allison spent time outside, socializing with friends and started talking with some guardsmen among the blooming lilacs.  I have heard different accounts of this story, some say Allison placed a flower in the barrel of one Guardsman’s gun, others say the flower was already there. What is certain, is that those moments have been preserved in several photographs. That guardsman’s smiling face is absolutely beaming in the pictures, there with Allison, the flower, his rifle, and the irony and release of tension they all felt in that moment, as human beings who were on opposite sides of a conflict. And when Allison witnessed that guardsman’s superior come along and reprimand him there for having a silly flower in his gun barrel, Allison responded, “What’s the matter with peace? Flowers are better than bullets.”

The next day Allison attended the peace rally at the Victory Bell at noon with her boyfriend Barry. She was unarmed. She was vocal. I do not believe that Allison thought her life might be in danger on her own college campus. Not in America. Surely there weren’t real bullets in those guns… But there were bullets and there was intention to kill protesting students.

My cousin Allison Krause was shot dead in the Prentice parking lot, roughly a football field away from the shooting guardsmen. A steel jacketed, armor piercing bullet fragmented on impact in her left chest, according to the autopsy. She died on the way to the hospital, in Barry’s arms.

Who was my cousin? I wish I could tell you, but as mentioned, I never met her. And still, I stand here to say we will never forget her!

We honor her memory by emulating her actions. Personally, in my professional life as an art therapist, in my volunteer work as a community organizer, as a mother of a little girl named Allison, as a peacemaker, as an earth-conscious consumer, as a citizen and active participant in government… in all of these actions every day of my life, I honor Allison, and all those murdered at Kent State on May 4th.

This time last year, I memorialized the 40^th Anniversary in the way I think Allison would have appreciated. With Laurel Krause, Emily Kunstler and the Kent State Truth Tribunal crew, we recorded and preserved the personal narratives of original participants and witnesses of the Kent State Shootings. The emotional healing that we witnessed during our four days together was immense. I encourage you to take a look at our project online at http://www.TruthTribunal.org.

In closing, I must tell you briefly about one powerful piece of  healing that is not viewable in the Kent State Truth Tribunal video archives. On the second day as I was greeting and checking in KSTT participants, a man, whom I later recognized from the photos to be THAT guardsman, the one with the flower in his rifle, came through the tribunal doors to share his truth & find his own healing. He did not want to film his story with us. And yet, he was there. Though he didn’t identify himself by name, he bravely told me that he had been among the guardsmen that weekend in 1970. I remember looking into his eyes as he spoke his truth to me for several long minutes. He simply came, as so many others did last year, to unburden himself, to try to heal his own wounds from Kent State and to connect with the spirit of truth.

Since last May, at KSTT NYC, I greeted and checked in the forensic scientist Stuart Allen, who is Keynote here today. Before our cameras, he examined the Kent State tape.  He verified an order to shoot and exposed suspicious additional gunshots. Listening to that recording, cleaned up by Mr. Allen’s state-of-the-art technology was gut wrenching.

The Krause family asks the federal government to open up an investigation into this new evidence, the Kent State tape. Because we understand, there can never be true healing without truth and justice.  We further encourage our government to issue a formal acknowledgment of the wrongs of Kent State on May 4, 1970… 41 years later, it’s time!

Finally, what I know in my soul is this… that none of the accounts that I have presented to you today can truly do Allison justice without justice being done. Allison believed in a just world.  She put her life on the line for it. Let us never give up in our pursuit of justice and healing at Kent State.

*****************

Watch Jennifer Schwartz’s 5/4/11 speech at the 41st anniversary of the Kent State Shootings ~

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Nuclear Power, Kent State & Arthur Krause

LAUREL KRAUSE, April 25, 2011

HERE WALKS my dad, Arthur Krause with Reverend John Adams and other protesters on his last trip back to Kent State. His daughter and my sister, Allison Krause, was slain at Kent State University in the student protest against the Vietnam war on May 4, 1970, a day that forever changed our family and civil rights in America … a day that changed America.

Approaching the anniversary of Allison’s killing, the energy from that time calls out with new evidence and the truth. Current events and the emergence of new evidence in the Kent State Strubbe tape http://bit.ly/1gcCCWo, demanding we as a democratic, just nation must re-examine what went down in the sixties, ending at Kent State on May 4, 1970 … when the state slaughtered protesters, a crime against man.

A remarkable cosmic signpost arrived on March 11, 2011 when a 7.1 earthquake struck Japan, creating a tsunami that came to our shores with the emerging Fukushima nuclear disaster. Very early that morning I awakened to a reverse-911 telephone call recommending those near water and inlets on the coast move to higher ground for safety from the approaching tsunami due at 7:23am, my account here http://bit.ly/gOovLw Article on the north coast tsunami and damage to the harbor in our community ~ http://bit.ly/gWy090

As I waited at higher ground from 7:00 am on into the afternoon, I realized how this world event had transformed humanity … the way we live together globally. Hours after that massive shake, we were shown on every level that what happens there, happens here as we are all connected on this third planet from the sun.

Most importantly, the nuclear event at Fukushima shows us the deeply polluting, over-reach of corporations, echoing George Orwell’s 1984 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Fiction from the 60’s now becomes commonplace reality in 2011.

General Electric, the developer of the nuclear technology used at Fukushima also conceived the overall design, organized the construction and manufacture of Fukushima’s parts. GE literally put together the concept behind and the ‘gears’ of the Fukushima nuclear reactor.

Yet following this tsunami in Japan and the nuclear alert created at Fukushima, GE’s first step was to protect their corporate interests and distance the General Electric, GE brands, claiming TEPCO’s majority ownership. Corporate-owned media machines backed them by never referring to General Electric as a player in this nuclear horror, following the same playbook as the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and the BP brand from last year.

GE continues to disassociate itself from Fukushima and in these actions, GE takes no responsibility for the nuclear plant they designed and built years ago, pointing the finger instead at their customer and partner TEPCO, another corporation.

We also see how the Corporatists eat their own, shown last week with BP bringing lawsuits against Transocean and the blow-out protector manufacturer. Each of these players, along with BP, are clearly responsible for the world’s worst oil disaster and how it continues to evolve ~ polluting, degrading and jeopardizing the eco-health of a large portion of planet Earth.

When will these offending corporations take responsibility and engage in the required significant remedial clean-up (as in making whole again) as well as thorough research or analysis of the eco-damaging event? When will we demand accountability and hold their feet to fire? To date that is nothing beyond a handful of lawsuits, pay-outs, fines and, yes, bonuses and awards in 2010 to Transocean for safety, of all things.

Lest we not forget newly-awarded energy contracts just signed by the US government and BP. Or the two TEPCO-directed nuclear plants to be built in Texas with $4B of tax payer-derived funds. All’s going great in eco-disasterville for Corporatists in America.

Back to Fukushima, the US nuclear energy lobby and US reactor manufacturers (top players, GE & Westinghouse-now Hitachi) without pause, continue skipping down the same development path, lacking proven safety procedures and offering not one innovative effort to safely begin bioremediating the nuclear disaster as it unfolds in Japan.

Just days after Fukushima began it’s radiation spew and without missing a beat, President Obama announced US commitment to continue to fund and develop new nuclear reactors as a key energy technology for our country. As their response to Fukushima, China, Germany and many other countries have placed moratoriums on new development in nuclear energy with Germany going a step further to begin de-commissioning every nuclear reactor there.

At my local supermarket a colleague whispered that the GE engineers, the guys that originally conceived of these water boiling nuclear reactors for GE, left the corporation quickly thereafter, quitting to become anti-nuke advocates. They realized the power unleashed in the technology they created, along with humanity’s inability to control or harness nuclear fission in a disaster scenario … like a tsunami.

Going back more than 40 years ago and related to nuclear energy, I remember heated arguments around the Krause family dining room table circa 1967-69. Allison, my sister, was 16-18 and I was 12-14. Dad was pro-Vietnam war, voted for President Johnson and worked in management at Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Because of this Dad was de facto pro-nukes. Allison was against the Vietnam war her friends were being drafted into and against the dangers of nuclear weapons as well as nuclear reactor manufacturers. I stood with Allison, Mom with Dad, as the nightly battles ensued.

Before Allison and I were born, Dad came home from WWII and he married my mom Doris. They moved to Chicago where he studied at Illinois Institute of Technology. His first job was at Westinghouse and it became his lifelong employer, common back then.

His employment at Westinghouse Electric Corporation was a big part of our family life. My folks first settled in Cleveland, Ohio. Then in 1963 we moved to Westinghouse headquarters in Pittsburgh, PA. From there we moved to Wheaton, Maryland with dinner arguments as Allison found her voice, progressing through high school.

Going back to 1967, the emerging counter-culture energies of the sixties were in high gear ~ like we have never really seen since. As a pre-teen, I looked up to my older sister by four years and we stood together as a united front against our parents, reflecting the generation gap back then.

TV news blasted widespread unrest, chronicling national protests as we watched bloody Vietnam warfare footage with body-bags of returning killed American soldiers. Many of the dead draft-age men had never voted for or against the war as the voting age was 21, changing to 18 in 1971.

Back then our folks, especially Dad was a lifelong democrat, supporting President Johnson’s Vietnam war. Allison locked horns with Dad about the war and how he made his living, his jobs at Westinghouse involved streamlining systems, progressing to creating the computerized shipping & tracking systems for shipping Westinghouse nuclear reactor parts worldwide.

Allison and most everyone her age back then was pissed off at the US Government. By 1968, Allison was protesting the draft and the war in Vietnam with all her friends … no one wanted to die for the war in Vietnam.  Male friends her age were required to participate in a lottery, being drafted into the war. To escape the draft, many peaceful folks enrolled in college or dodged the draft by going to Canada as it became impossible to get Conscientious Objectors status. If you drew a bad lottery number based on birthdate, you were forced to make some very serious decisions.

As the Vietnam war progressed and President Nixon was elected in ’68, Nixon grandstanded on his secret plan to end the war as he covertly full-throttled secret bombings in Laos and Cambodia that started early in his first term in 1969.

Stoking the embers of the Indochine wars and the war at home, President Nixon and his co-hort were working with the Huston Plan http://bit.ly/gIYTD1 taking aim at America’s younger generation like a enemy camp. At the end of the 60s, it had become open season on American youth against the war … a tsunami of persecution, including deadly harassment from the Nixon administration, the Dept. of Justice, the FBI, cointelpro … doing it the J. Edgar Hoover way with help from the Dept. of Defense. Check out this photo album on the folks behind the Kent State Massacre. http://on.fb.me/hFGAgK

Back to the Krauses, as mentioned there was a riff about how Dad made his living. Dad was a well-respected and forward-thinking manager at Westinghouse Electric. He loved his job and enjoyed fixing systems so our family was transferred to plants that needed his help. As a young kid I remember Dad’s work colleagues greatly respecting his contributions. Years later Dad would receive the coveted Westinghouse ‘Order of Merit’ for his superior and lifelong contributions.

In our home back then, my sister and I did not share that pride for our father’s work. We also knew that by-products from nuclear reactors contributed to the manufacture of nuclear weapons, something else we were wishing to eradicate. We felt the conflict around Dad’s activities and the income he provided at the expense of our safety on Earth and our environment. We knew it back then and brought it to his attention.

That wound between Dad and Allison never healed. Allison continued to protest against the war and for honoring our environment.

In a ruinous, forever-changing chapter for our family, Allison Krause became one of four students slaughtered by the US government on May 4, 1970 as she protested the Vietnam War, the draft and the military occupation of her campus, Kent State University. Allison stood for peace, saying on May 3rd, “What’s the matter with PEACE? Flowers are better than bullets.”

The day after Allison’s death, in our backyard Dad made his plea before television cameras and in TV sets across America. In Dad’s passionate and emotional speech, he demanded that Allison’s “death not be in vain’ as he recanted about Allison:

She resented being called a bum because she disagreed with someone else’s opinion. She felt that our crossing into Cambodia was wrong. Is this dissent a crime? Is this a reason for killing her? Have we come to such a state in this country that a young girl has to be shot because disagrees with the actions of her government?

As Dad learned his eldest child was murdered by the US government as she protested the Vietnam war, something he didn’t agree with, he fought back for Allison’s stolen life and civil rights ~ for the lives and rights of Jeffrey Miller, Sandy Scheurer and William Schroeder on May 4, 1970.

Within the year President Nixon’s men strongly encouraged my folks to stop demanding investigations, drop every legal inquiry, offering Arthur Krause bribes for millions of dollars and my father turned them all down. Just the same, our family was put under surveillance by the FBI for years, continuing to this day.

The Kent State law suits were heard in court houses all the way to the US Supreme Court and back over the next nine years. In 1979, Dad’s efforts settled at $15,000 with a plaintiff’s civil settlement statement and the ‘statement of regret’ was personally signed by each of the guardsmen that shot at Allison, along with their commanders ~ something Dad insisted on.

Dad fought for Allison’s right to protest and her murder at the hands of the United States government until the end of his days. Arthur Krause knew that the murders at Kent State 1970 were personal for us, yet important for all.

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Kent State: Truth Emerging in this Cold Case Homicide

Published in the U.S. Congressional Record on December 14, 2010, Volume 156, sponsored by Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich.

Laurel Krause, December 9, 2010

Arthur Krause walking the Kent State massacre site

The government crossed the line
in the killing of four young people
in the killing of our Allison
as she rallied against the war on May 4, 1970
A civil rights battle on U.S. soil in our times
Kent State is personal for us yet important for all

Arthur Krause knew the importance
of the Kent State Tape
My dad knew it held the truth
of what happened at Kent State
even though back in 1970
and until just recently
truth from the Kent State Tape was locked up
in a jumbled maze of analog antiquity
Dad passed away over 20 years ago
He knew the truth in the Kent State Tape

A patriot and WWII soldier
Dad believed the American dream
When Allison his firstborn
a freshman at Kent State University
was protesting the Vietnam war on her campus
He never anticipated the American apocalypse
our family would endure
at the hands of our government

Like Sandy, Jeff and Bill
our Allison was shot dead at Kent State
Homicide by national guard gunfire
Dad knew they got away with murder
at Kent State University
just after noon on May 4, 1970

Over the next ten years
Dad sought truth and justice at Kent State
demanding to know what happened to our Allison
Taking it to the courts yielded only
road blocks, cover-ups and threats
Every effort to uncover and face
the deadly inhumanity of Kent State
was completely thwarted

A series of seamless stonewalls
Never examining the wrongs of Kent State
No accountability for the killings of Kent State
Not one person or group ever held responsible
Not one apology uttered

Yet governmental claims were consistent:
There was no order to fire
The Guard reacted to sniper fire
The Guard felt under attack from the students

A government-fabricated pack of lies
that has now transformed
into the recorded history
of the killings of Kent State
That is … until 2010
and the examination of the Kent State Tape

40 years after the shootings
the Kent State Tape that Dad held so dear
that was evidence in his court cases
finally examined using
tools of state-of-the-art audio technology
unlocking the true record of what occurred
at Kent State on May 4, 1970

Sounds expertly analyzed by
world-class forensic scientist Stuart Allen
commissioned by the Cleveland Plain Dealer
to explore the Kent State Tape
for the very first time

Whether copy or original is moot
Truth is recorded in the Kent State Tape
A tape does not remember, forget or change its story
The Kent State Tape does not lie

At the Kent State Truth Tribunal in NYC
October 2010 with Stuart Allen examining
Hearing and unraveling the labyrinth of deadly sounds
including shots and national guard commands
and a violent altercation with FBI-paid Terry Norman
all contributing to the shootings at Kent State 1970

The government denied
orders to fire were isolated, heard and verified
orders of Guard, All Right, Prepare to Fire
orders of Guard, Fi-
with the last word of the deadly order stepped on
by a barrage of 67 shots over 13 seconds

At unarmed students changing classes at noon
At unarmed students more than a football field away
At unarmed students rallying against the Vietnam War
At unarmed students rallying against the military occupation of their campus
in a battle where American dissent was also slaughtered

Editors note: Entered into the United States House of Representative Congressional Record on December 14, 2010, Volume 156, sponsored by Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio at the request of Laurel Krause, whose sister Allison Krause was shot and killed as she protested the Vietnam War at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. Laurel is the co-founder and director of the Kent State Truth Tribunal.

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Krause to Congress: Examine the Kent State Tape

Laurel Krause, November 29, 2010

The government crossed the line
in the killing of four young people
in the killing of our Allison
as she rallied against the war on May 4, 1970
A civil rights battle on U.S. soil in our times
Kent State is personal for us yet important for all

Representative Dennis Kucinich
upon learning of the new audio truth
discovered in the Kent State Tape
Launched a Kent State congressional inquiry
and scheduled a hearing
Calling for swift examination of the new evidence
found in the Kent State Tape
Scheduling a Kent State hearing before Congress
before the Domestic Policy subcommittee
for Wednesday, December 1st, this week

Yet In these political times
with Congress soon adjourning for 2010
and our government’s concerted effort
to keep truth at Kent State covered up
Kucinich’s Congressional Kent State Hearing is
AT HIGH RISK OF CANCELLATION

Allison’s family asks all who read this
LET YOUR VOICE BE HEARD
Join our urgent Kent State Call-2-Action
Demand Truth at Kent State in 2010
Send a note to http://kucinich.house.gov/Contact/
Make a call to 202-225-5871
Send inbound calls to Representative Kucinich
HOLD the KENT STATE HEARING
this week, on Wednesday December 1st at 2 p.m.

Arthur Krause knew the importance
of the Kent State Tape
My dad knew it held the truth
of what happened at Kent State
even though back in 1970
and until just recently
truth from the Kent State Tape was locked up
in a jumbled maze of analog antiquity
Dad passed away over 20 years ago
He knew the truth in the Kent State Tape

A patriot and WWII soldier
Dad believed the American dream
When Allison his firstborn
a freshman at Kent State University
was protesting the Vietnam war on her campus
He never anticipated the American apocalypse
our family would endure
at the hands of our government

Like Sandy, Jeff and Bill
our Allison was shot dead at Kent State
Homicide by national guard gunfire
Dad knew they got away with murder
at Kent State University
just after noon on May 4, 1970

Over the next ten years
Dad sought truth and justice at Kent State
demanding to know what happened to our Allison
Taking it to the courts yielded only
road blocks, cover-ups and threats
Every effort to uncover and face
the deadly inhumanity of Kent State
was completely thwarted

A series of seamless stonewalls
Never examining the wrongs of Kent State
No accountability for the killings of Kent State
Not one person or group ever held responsible
Not one apology uttered

Yet governmental claims were consistent:
There was no order to fire
The Guard reacted to sniper fire
The Guard felt under attack from the students

A government-fabricated pack of lies
that has now transformed
into the recorded history
of the killings of Kent State
That is … until 2010
and the examination of the Kent State Tape

40 years after the shootings
the Kent State Tape that Dad held so dear
that was used as evidence in his court cases
finally examined using
tools of state-of-the-art audio technology
unlocking the true record of what occurred
at Kent State on May 4, 1970

Sounds expertly analyzed by
world-class forensic scientist Stuart Allen
commissioned by the Cleveland Plain Dealer
to explore the Kent State Tape
for the very first time

Whether copy or original is moot
Truth is recorded in the Kent State Tape
A tape does not remember, forget or change its story
The Kent State Tape does not lie

At the Kent State Truth Tribunal in NYC
October 2010 with Stuart Allen examining
Hearing and unraveling the labyrinth of deadly sounds
including shots and national guard commands
and a violent altercation with FBI-paid Terry Norman
all contributing to the shootings at Kent State 1970

The government denied
orders to fire were isolated, heard and verified
orders of Guard, Prepare to Fire
orders of Alright, Guard, Fiii-
with the last word of the deadly order stepped on
by a barrage of 67 shots over 13 seconds

At unarmed students changing classes at noon
At unarmed students more than a football field away
At unarmed students rallying against the Vietnam War
At unarmed students rallying against the military occupation of their campus
in a battle where American dissent was also slaughtered

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Kent State: Death of Innocence & the First Amendment

MendoCoastCurrent, October 5, 2010

Since the beginning of 2010, the Kent State Truth Tribunal has been focused on collecting and understanding the truth about the circumstances that surrounded the killing of four students and the wounding of nine others at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970. As new evidence emerges that supports the belief that the Ohio National Guard was following orders to shoot when they fired into a crowd of peacefully assembled students, we are reminded that this tragic chapter in American history has left an indelible mark on the civic freedoms that define this country.

One of the students shot was my sister Allison Krause and at the moment she died, Allison was protesting the invasion of Cambodia and the escalation of the Vietnam war at a noon peace rally on her college campus. Some of those shot were fellow protestors while others were students simply walking to class.

Like many college students at that time, the protesters at Kent State were fighting the draft and opposed the war in Vietnam. At this peace rally on May 4^th at Kent State, they were also protesting the Ohio National Guard’s occupation of their campus that had begun days earlier.  When the shots were fired, the U.S. government robbed the Kent State students of their right to exercise the First Amendment. It also sent a chilling message to young people across the country: If you protest against the government, you could be killed in the process.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution was profoundly devalued by this criminal act. This amendment prohibits our government from “interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a government redress of grievance.”

Until the truth about the Kent State shootings is known and laid bare before the public, the value and meaning of our First Amendment continues to be compromised. The words written and preserved in the Library of Congress have very little to do with citizen’s rights in America today.

Fast-forwarding 40 years to May 4, 2010 and with the help of heartfelt Kent State supporters like Michael Moore, as well as many present at the original peace rally at Kent, the Kent State Truth Tribunal began to record and preserve the truth, broadcasting our findings at MichaelMoore.com. The buried truth about Kent State and the continued cover-up that surrounds the Kent State killings has begun to unfold before us.

We now see how that the calculated acts of President Richard Nixon, Ohio Governor James Rhodes and the Ohio National Guard commanders seamlessly silenced and damaged the psyche of the sixties generation, robbing us of our civil rights. The consequences of their violent actions against students still reverberate today.

I was 15 years old on May 4^th 1970. Through the eyes of a teenager I felt the deeper personal angst and pain of losing my only sibling Allison as my family and our home was torn apart. Allison’s death and the harassment that followed will never be forgotten. When I lost Allison I was outraged but realized quickly that there was little that a 15-year-old could do.

My parents, Arthur and Doris Krause, pursued redress through the courts, seeking justice the American way. In each and every litigation the shooting guardsmen, along with their commanding officers, claimed there wasn’t an order to shoot ~ that the guardsmen reacted with their shots because they felt their lives were in danger, despite the fact that many eye-witnessed remembered clearly hearing an order to fire.  By taking this position and stating this under oath, the government forced everyone pursuing truth and justice in the Kent State killings to look for proof that an ‘order to shoot’ existed.

Back to the present, just days after we closed the doors at the Kent State Truth Tribunal at the 40^th anniversary of the killings in Kent, Ohio, important news was published by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Read it here: bit.ly/aM7Ocm The Plain Dealer arranged an examination of an audio tape recorded by a Kent State student from his dorm window ledge. Two, expert forensic audio scientists, Stuart Allen and Tom Owen, independently confirmed an order was issued to the Ohio National Guard. Mr. Allen found that the order “Prepare to fire,” can be heard on the audio cassette ‘as clear as a bell’.

As we turn our attention to the approaching Kent State Truth Tribunal in New York City on October 9 and 10 http://TruthTribunal.org/event , Mr. Allen will present this new evidence so that everyone watching at MichaelMoore.com can judge for themselves. We hope you will tune in to witness this important moment that will prove an order was issued, that the guards followed a command and that there was homicidal intent on the part of our government to kill unarmed, protesting students

We have invited the federal government to send an official to audit and witness our interview with Mr. Allen.

Additionally, we will be interviewing participants and witnesses of the Kent State shootings to hear and preserve their truth, as well as some notable guests with meaningful connection to the prelude and aftermath.

Daniel Ellsberg will participate in our first Skype interview at this KSTT in New York City.  You may remember that Mr. Ellsberg precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of US government decision-making about the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers.  He will be giving us background into the political context and key elements of the Vietnam war at the time of the killings at Kent State.

Mr. Lawrence Dowler, founder of the Kent State collection in the Yale Library where he was chief archivist (now retired), will share his truth on the collection he personally assembled, a collection revered to be the most extensive and accurate archive of the Kent State shootings.

You are invited to share in this important moment in history by watching our live broadcast at www.MichaelMoore.com on Saturday and Sunday, October 9 and 10, from 10AM to 5PM est.

You hope you’ll join us as we continue to uncover the truth at Kent State.

To learn more about KSTT and support our efforts, visit http://TruthTribunal.org

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Shining a Light on the Kent State Shootings of 1970

MendoCoastCurrent, August 12, 2010

This last weekend on August 7 and 8, the Kent State Truth Tribunal (KSTT) traveled to San Francisco to record and preserve narratives from west coast-based original witnesses to and participants in the 1970 Kent State shootings.

My sister Allison Krause was one of the four students killed at Kent State and our tribunal has provided an opportunity for me to follow in my father Arthur Krause’s footsteps and discover the truth for my family. My father, who for over ten years fought for justice in the courts, would add, “and not let our government get away with murder at Kent State”.

Throughout our recording sessions with the KSTT, I have felt the presence of Allison and my dad and I wanted to share him with you in this photograph, taken in 1975 at a candlelit memorial on the 5^th anniversary of Allison’s death. After we lost Allison, Arthur Krause made it his business—until the end of his life—to get the truth out about Kent State and this year I feel he is joining our call for truth at Kent State in 2010.

Our second KSTT session in San Francisco (our first was this year at the 40^th anniversary of the shootings, in Ohio in May) enabled us to see, hear and record critical details and first-hand observations. Our west coast participants, coming from vastly different walks of life, gave testimonials that provided greater insight and detail into the lead up to the Kent State shootings, the shootings themselves and the events that followed. A clearer picture is beginning to emerge about the 67 shots fired over 13 seconds by the national guard at unarmed students protesting the U.S. expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4th 1970.

For the first time at the KSTT, we heard from participants with military training and background shine a light on the mechanics of the shootings at Kent State and the factors that came together to create this egregious military action.

Take a look around today and you’ll see that the lessons learned 40 years ago had a pronounced effect in silencing a generation. Despite the perspective we now have as a nation that the Vietnam War cost us dearly, the spirit of protest has only diminished over the past four decades. I think back on the passion and social consciousness of my peers and the older kids I admired when Allison was at Kent and I can see how badly scarred this feisty, compassionate sixties generation eventually became. Pulling out weapons set aside to defend America and turning them on its children betrayed for many some of the basic social contracts we all took for granted. I believe those wounds have still not healed and continue to plague this country.

We learned about live ammunition and training procedures from a former member of the Ohio National Guard, stationed in the same shooting troop deployed to Kent State. This brave Guardsman from the sixties reported on the use of steel-jacketed, armor-piercing bullets—bullets designed to be used against tanks and structures. These deadly bullets were deployed against Kent State students that day, shooting into a peaceful assembly of unarmed 19- and 20-year-old college kids as they changed classes during lunch time and attended a peace rally on that Ohio spring day.

Howard Ruffner, a student at Kent State and a stringer for Life Magazine at the time of the shootings, arrived at KSTT-SF with a huge stack of photographs he took on May 4, 1970. As an independent observer that weekend, Howard told us he photographed whatever he found—chronicling the exact movements before, during and after the shootings.

Howard shared, “The worst thing that happened to the guard from my perspective is: they were being yelled at and given the finger. It’s hard to understand what would cause people, close to their age, to turn and fire at people, and willingly do so.”

He shared with us his firm belief that the shootings were planned and intentional. “I have no idea what caused that first shot unless it was a planned activity because they got to a marked place, there’s a dirt path between that corner [of Taylor Hall] and the pagoda,” Ruffner told us. “You wouldn’t even have to give an order if you wanted to make a plan, because it’s right there. You get to that place, turn, shoot.”

Ruffner went on to describe how he believed the Kent State students were specifically targeted by the national guard. “It had to be a planned event because of the soldiers turn[ed] in unison. The firing of the weapons and so many shots in such a very short period of time. The fact that they could turn and have specific targets in mind when they got to the top… Some of the guardsmen turned and looked back on occasion on the way up the hill so that by the time they got to that high point they knew who they were going to shoot at.”

Gail Ewing, the first Ohio National Guard to participate, bravely offered his experience from 1964-67, with the same unit involved in the shootings at Kent State 1970.

Sharing chilling, military detail Ewing commented, “We had no training for riot control. I was sent to Cleveland for the riots in 1966 and we were given tear gas grenades and live ammunition and put on guard duty with no instruction on when to load your weapon or when to use tear gas. They just passed it out and put us on guard duty.” This is not unlike the behavior of the Ohio National Guard troop on Blanket Hill at Kent on May 4^th.

Ewing added, “In terms of the decision-making, that order of live ammunition probably came from higher than local company commanders, it was at the state level or maybe even federal level,” confirming that government officials were directly involved in the killings at Kent State.

Linda Seeley, an activist witness to the events of May 4^th, provided a heartfelt look into the elements of fear utilized that day. Here’s her take on the aftermath of Kent State, “The idea that these people could get away with cold-blooded murder in the face of witnesses—hundreds, thousands of witnesses—and never have justice done, only have the innocent being[s] accused [as] perpetrators and only have the witnesses live in fear… There’s a key here to looking at ourselves as a society and what we can do, not only realizing what [we] can do, the power, but realizing how long a wound lasts.”

We’re still processing all of this new information and insight from the narratives we recorded and preserved in San Francisco, and I invite you to take a look at our findings to discover the truth for yourselves.

This image of Arthur Krause was forwarded to me just this morning. Seeing my dad gives inspires me to pursue our right to know the truth and fight for justice at Kent State.

I’m also drawn to a recent comment from a facebook friend on the relevance of what we may learn from Kent State:

Freedom of speech and the right of assembly must be protected. The ability of the government to preserve order is a necessity in a civilized nation. These two elements must be balanced, but it is incumbent on those who are armed to ensure that ONLY those who cannot otherwise be prevented from harming others be subject to potentially lethal violence.

Our San Francisco event also brought Lester Chambers of the Chambers Brothers to ‘share his truth’ on Kent State as his recording of ‘Time Has Come Today’ was at the top of the charts when the Kent State shootings happened. For us, he performed ‘People Get Ready’, expressing his wish to amend the words of this song to: “People get ready there’s a CHANGE a’coming!” Please listen and get ready for the change a’coming!

The Kent State Truth Tribunal, please visit www.truthtribunal.org

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Howard Zinn on Kent State & the Truth Tribunal

Editor’s Note: To learn more about the Kent State Truth Tribunal, please visit www.TruthTribunal.org

MendoCoastCurrent, January 28, 2010

Learned of Howard Zinn’s death last night. He had a heart attack while swimming in Los Angeles. His passing, my grief and our recent interaction prompt this recollection.

Howard Zinn has been a lifelong mentor, friend ~ an inspiration to me. He was my college professor more than three decades ago so I’m proud and blessed. He opened my mind and spirit to a better world, introducing me to Emma Goldman, anarchy and civil rights. With Howard’s help, I saw and believed in a more just, harmonious world.

It began when I enrolled in Dr. Zinn’s class at Boston University in 1973. He wrote of meeting my folks in his book You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train:

The Cambodian Invasion provoked nationwide protests, and on the campus of Kent State University, in Ohio, trigger-happy National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of unarmed student demonstrators, killing four of them, crippling another for life. A photo flashed around the world showed an unarmed young woman, her face anguished, bending over the body of one of the dead students.

On television I saw the father of one of the victims, Allison Krause, barely able to control his grief, pointing to the fact that President Nixon had referred to student protesters as “bums.” He cried out, “My daughter was not a bum!”

A few years later, when some visiting parents were sitting in on the introductory session of my course “Law and Justice in America,” I handed out the syllabus, which included as one of the course topics the shootings at Kent State. At the end of the session, one of the new students came up and introduced herself and her parents. She was Laurie Krause, the sister of Allison Krause. I recognized her father from the television screen and felt a pang of unease that their unspeakable grief was represented so matter-of-factly on a course syllabus. But they seemed to appreciate that the Kent State affair was not forgotten.

The spring of 1970 saw the first general student strike in the history of the United States, students from over four hundred colleges and universities calling off classes to protest the invasion of the Cambodia, the Kent State affair, the killing of two black students at Jackson State College in Mississippi, and the continuation of the war.”

Howard Zinn has been the only historian to understand and correctly depict the massacre at Kent State. He was appalled at our treatment in the judicial system over those nine years following the shootings.

Fast forward 35 years to early January this year ~ just two weeks ago ~ Howard and I exchanged emails on the Kent State Truth Tribunal, an event Emily Kunstler and I are organizing right now. We were seeking his participation in creating our truth forum on the Kent State Massacre, May 4, 1970.

This year at the 40th anniversary of the shootings, May 1-4, 2010, we invite everyone involved and affected by the Kent State Massacre to come forth and be heard. Our aim is to enable the sharing of 1970 Kent State personal narratives, document and record these stories as we weave them into a collective truth. ALL participants from that day include protesters, university employees, university students, national guardsmen, Ohio and federal servants, and those deeply affected.

So back to Howard: My last email from him led to his apology for being unable to attend in May and he shared this:

Laurie, learning and spreading the truth is the most important thing you can do to acknowledge what took place at Kent State. That was the essence of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and applies equally to our own history in the US.”

The Kent State Truth Tribunal invites your support and tax-deductible, charitable donations. If the Truth at 1970 Kent State matters to you, please join us here.

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Launching: 2010 Kent State Truth Tribunal

Editor’s Note: To learn more about the Kent State Truth Tribunal 2010, please go to www.TruthTribunal.org and pre-register to participate as well as support us with your generous donation. Thanks!

Allison asks for your help now

Winter 2010

The Kent State Truth Tribunal in 2010

We invite you to join us for the 40th anniversary of the 1970 Kent State Massacre.

If Kent State matters to you, please come to participate in the Kent State Truth Tribunal, early May 2010, at the Kent State University campus in Ohio.

The Truth at Kent State Calls to be Revealed in 2010

Inviting the extended family of the 1970 Kent State Massacre:

• All witnesses of the 1970 Kent State Massacre
• Kent State protesters or students
• Ohio National Guardsmen
• Ohio/federal government and public servants
• Kent State Univ. administrators/educators
• Local residents
• Families damaged by the killings
• Citizens that deeply care about the truth at Kent State
• Leading practitioners in consensus-building, truth and forgiveness

Please join us by traveling to Kent, Ohio and participating in early May 2010.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre at Kent State University in Ohio. On May 4, 2010 the Kent State Truth Tribunal will reveal the truth surrounding the murder of four young American protesters and the wounding of nine others on May 4, 1970.

The chief goal of the Truth Tribunal is to correct history as we record, document and honor the truth gathered from personal narratives of witnesses and participants from the original shootings. The truth of what happened at Kent State on May 4th 1970 will finally be available for all to hear, read, see and know. The resulting archive will be disseminated in published transcripts, streaming video and audio, film and through social media.

If the truth at 1970 Kent State matters to you, and you wish to become meaningfully involved in helping create, organize, fund and successfully reveal the truth about the killings and massacre, please let us know. With early May liftoff, we have a short fuse!

To join now, see the facebook event: http://bit.ly/7AKZl3 and facebook cause: http://bit.ly/4NoM4r There is also considerable writing on Kent State, Allison Krause and the Kent State Truth Tribunal here.

The Kent State Truth Tribunal invites your participation, support and tax-deductible, charitable donations. If the Truth at 1970 Kent State matters to you, please join us here.

Please spread the word by going to the Kent State Truth Tribunal facebook event, joining in and sharing it with your family, friends and colleagues.

Thank you,

Laurel Krause

sister of slain KSU student Allison Krause

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The Daily Kos on the Kent State Massacre

Editor’s Note: To learn more about the Kent State Truth Tribunal 2010, please go to www.TruthTribunal.org and pre-register to participate as well as support us with your generous donation. Thanks!

Kainah, The Daily Kos, May 24, 2006

At 12:24 pm on May 4, 1970, twenty-eight Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on the Kent State campus. When the shooting stopped, four students lay dead or dying while an additional nine had suffered wounds ranging from minor to life-threatening. The shootings had lasted thirteen seconds but legal repercussions would continue for nearly a decade.

In Part I, we look at Nixon’s curiously timed announcement of the Cambodian invasion and the May Day rally at Yale University. Part II examines the events of that weekend at Kent. Part III explores the events of Monday, May 4. Part IV deals with the immediate aftermath of the shootings. Part V looks at the various investigations following the shootings. Part VI examines the federal grand jury and criminal trial of eight guardsmen. Part VII concludes the series by examining the years of civil proceedings.

In memory of Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, Bill Schroeder, and Sandy Scheuer, join me in exploring the aftermath.

(First, let me apologize that it has taken three weeks to continue this series. The reaction to my May 4 diary was absolutely overwhelming and it left me emotionally and physically exhausted. This, then, is offered as a “bonus edition” in the series, dealing with the immediate aftermath. Part V will cover the legal aftermath. Now, on with the story…)

News of the shootings spread quickly across the country that May afternoon. The first reports claimed that two Guardsmen had been shot. Whether disinformation or a mistake, many heard this news and took it as evidence of the deadly intent of the student protesters. However, within hours, the truth of students shot and killed overtook the earlier rumors.  As parents and friends tried to connect with those in Kent, the phone lines jammed and then, in mid-afternoon, crashed. The inability to get accurate information in or out heightened anxieties. For four families, the incomprehensible news of the shootings would give way to the heartbreaking realization that their children were gone forever.

Sarah Scheuer was painting the house on May 4, her twenty-seventh wedding anniversary, when she heard news of the shooting. She immediately tried to call Sandy’s house but it took several hours to get through. When she finally did, one of Sandy’s roommates told her that she better come right away:  “Sandy’s in the hospital, but that’s all we know right now.” The roommate also told Sarah that Sandy’s wallet was still in the house. Sarah then called Robinson Memorial Hospital in Ravenna and asked whether there was a wounded girl, dressed in a red shirt and blue jeans, with no identification. The administrator she spoke with wasn’t sure but confirmed that at least one of the injured girls had no identification. Sarah and her husband, Martin, quickly left their home in Boardman, near Youngstown, for Ravenna. At the hospital, they asked about Sandy. A police officer overheard them and, assuming they’d heard the news, asked if they had come to identify the body. Still hoping there was a mistake, Sarah asked if the unidentified girl was wearing a gold ring with a blue stone. The policeman went into the morgue and returned to confirm that, yes, the girl was wearing such a ring. After the morgue had been cleared of the other dead students, the Scheuers were allowed in to identify Sandy.

Jeff Miller’s mother, Elaine, heard about the shootings on the radio as she drove home from work in Long Island. She decided then and there to make Jeff come home because it just wasn’t safe in Kent. At home, she called Jeff’s off-campus apartment. Although by this time in late afternoon, the phone system was severely overloaded, Elaine’s call somehow got through on the first try. The phone rang and rang and rang. Finally someone picked up. Elaine asked to speak with Jeff. The voice on the other end asked “Who is this?” When Elaine, annoyed by the question, replied, “It’s his mother,” the boy replied bluntly, “He’s dead.” Elaine began to shriek. Her husband-to-be, who had followed her home, found her in a heap at the end of her bed, still holding the phone and screaming incoherently. Later that night, Jeff’s father and brother flew to Ohio to bring Jeff’s body home. When shown his son’s body in the morgue, Jeff’s father initially refused to identify him. His face had been so badly damaged by the bullet wound, Bernard Miller simply couldn’t recognize him. After the shock wore off, he realized that, indeed, this was his son. Later, this event would be twisted by those who wanted to paint the student victims as worthless agitators deserving of their fate. “Did you hear,” the rumor mill asked, “that Miller’s own father couldn’t recognize him because he was so dirty?” Back in New York, the funeral director advised Jeff’s mother not to view his body because of the extensive damage. Still in shock, Elaine accepted that advice and regretted it for the rest of her life. Months later, the high school that Jeff attended (and where his mother and would-have-been stepfather worked) held a memorial service for him. A boyhood friend told the crowd:  “Like many of us, (Jeff) left for college confused, seeking answers and trying to legitimize his own existence. Now his search has ended. A National Guardsman’s bullet has brought him the final reality. Dust to dust – another statistic – why should the world notice?” He finished his eulogy with a poignant question:  “Jeff, friend, you as much as anybody typified the fact that we all march to the beat of a different drummer. Why didn’t you tell me it was going to be a procession?”

For several hours after the shootings, reports indicated that a “William Schneider” was among those killed. Back at Bill Schroeder’s apartment, his roommates waited for Bill to return. When the 5:00 curfew came and went without Bill appearing, his roommates got “that sick feeling” that William Schneider was really William Schroeder. Around 5:15, one of Bill’s friends got through to the apartment and he told Bill’s roommates that he had seen Bill after he was shot, but that he was just wounded. Bill’s roommate, Lou Cusella, then called the hospital to ask if William Schneider had been positively identified. The hospital said he hadn’t. The hospital urged Cusella to call State Senator Robert Stockdale, a professor at Kent State, who had been given the job of notifying the victims’ families. Stockdale asked Cusella if he would be willing to go to the morgue to try to identify his friend. Cusella agreed, reluctantly, and soon thereafter, a sheriff’s department car arrived to transport Cusella to the morgue. There, after being frisked, Lou was taken to a viewing room. Behind a pane of glass, Cusella saw Bill’s profile. “Oh god, it’s him,” Cusella told the officials. Later, Cusella called Stockdale to ask how Bill’s family had taken the news. “Not too well,” Stockdale told him. In fact, Stockdale had never called the Schroeders – or the Scheuers, the Krauses or Millers. Instead, Bill Schroeder’s mother, in Lorain, had heard the reports of a William Schneider dead. Her repeated calls to his apartment never got through. Then, at 4:00, someone from the Cleveland Plain Dealer called to ask if the family had a picture of Bill the newspaper could use. When Florence Schroeder asked why, the reporter quickly apologized, saying he must have called the wrong house, and hung up. When Lou Schroeder got home, his wife persuaded him to go talk to a neighbor, a Lorain policeman. The policeman assured the Schroeders that, if Bill had been killed, they would have heard by now. But, at 6 PM, the Plain Dealer reporter called again. This time, he said he had reliable information that William Knox Schroeder had been killed at Kent State. Minutes later, a Lorain police dispatcher called the Schroeders and gave them a number to call. The number turned out to be Robinson Memorial Hospital where they were put in touch with a hospital administrator who asked if Senator Stockdale had called them. When Florence said no, the administrator told her that Bill had “expired.” Florence Schroeder collapsed.

Allison Krause’s uncle lived in Cleveland. In the early afternoon of May 4, he heard a report that there had been trouble at Kent and that his niece had been killed. He called his brother, Arthur, and relayed what he was hearing on local radio. Arthur immediately called his wife to get Allison’s phone number. Not wanting to alarm his wife until he could find out more, Arthur mentioned nothing of what his brother had told him. Meanwhile, Allison’s little sister, Laurie, was on her way home when a neighbor told her that KDKA, a local Pittsburgh radio station, was trying to get in touch with her family. When Doris, Laurie and Allison’s mother, called home a bit later, Laurie passed along the message. Doris called KDKA and a reporter there told her that Allison had been shot. Doris began frantically trying to get through to the hospital, with no luck. Eventually, someone suggested using a police band radio and they were finally able to get the emergency call through. Doris asked if there was an Allison Krause at the hospital and was switched to the hospital administrator. She asked her question again and received a chillingly blunt reply, “Yes, she was DOA.” (DOA=dead on arrival) Even that turned out to be disputed as Allison’s boyfriend, Barry, who rode with her to the hospital, swore she was alive when they arrived. The Krauses left for Ravenna in the early evening. At the hospital, reporters crowded around Arthur Krause seeking a statement. In his grief, Krause told the reporters:  “All I know is that my daughter is dead! I’m not on anybody’s side. We were so glad we had two daughters so they could stay out of Vietnam. Now she’s dead. What a waste. What a terrible waste.” He hesitated and then went on:  “I’d like to know who the boys were who shot my daughter. I’d like to meet them. They’re young, immature guys who joined the National Guard to stay out of Vietnam. They’ve got a miserable job to do.” The Krauses stayed at the hospital until an ambulance came to take their daughter’s body to a funeral home. The next day, an emotional Arthur would again speak to the media and his powerful words would be broadcast on all the national news networks:  “She resented being called a bum because she disagreed with someone else’s opinion. She felt that our crossing into Cambodia was wrong. Is this dissent a crime? Is this a reason for killing her? Have we come to such a state in this country that a young girl has to be shot because she disagrees deeply with the actions of her government?” (emphasis added)

The state of Ohio did extensive autopsies on all the students killed that day and, even though it went against the tenets of his Jewish faith, Arthur Krause decided to have another autopsy done once Allison’s body was returned to Pittsburgh because, even then, he didn’t trust any official report. After the second autopsy had been completed, her devoted family laid Allison to rest in a small Jewish cemetery in Pittsburgh. A few weeks later, they got a check from Kent State University for $514. It was a refund for Allison’s spring tuition.

Before the end of June, Arthur Krause had filed a wrongful death suit against Ohio officials, including Governor Rhodes and National Guard Generals Del Corso and Canterbury. When his lawyer asked Krause how much he wanted to sue for, Krause responded $1. For him, the lawsuit had nothing to do with money and everything to do with holding people accountable. Informed that federal courts required a certain dollar threshold before they would entertain the suit, Krause thought for a bit and then announced he would sue for $6 million. Asked later how he arrived at that figure, he said it represented $1 for every Jew killed in the Holocaust. (Three of the four students killed – Scheuer, Krause and Miller – were, by chance, Jewish.) By mid-September, the parents of Jeff Miller and Sandy Scheuer had also filed suit.

Meanwhile, all across the country, college students tried to understand what had happened. Their gut instincts, combined with what many had seen happen on their own campuses, convinced them that the students had been innocent and that the Guard had overreacted. The shock of the killings, however, was heightened for many when they called home that afternoon. Scared and upset, they heard their own parents denounce the students and proclaim that “they should have shot them all” or “they must have done something to deserve what they got.” This widespread attitude that blamed the victims for their fate only served to pull the generations further apart. A fog of grief and outrage descended. One report described how, in the weeks after the killings, the citizens of Kent would greet each other by flashing four fingers, signifying, “We got four.”  Bill Gordon, author of Four Dead in Ohio:  Was There a Conspiracy at Kent State would call the Kent State shootings “the most popular murders ever committed in the United States.”

Students, reacting to what they believed was murder, took to the streets to demand answers and to remember their fallen comrades. Memorial vigils occurred that night all across the country. Over the next few days, however, many campuses moved from quiet candlelight vigils to more direct action. A nationwide student strike was called and, by the end of the week, some 800 campuses had been shut down, affecting nearly four million college students. It was the largest such event in American history. Many students went home but others, fearing parents who supported the actions of the National Guard, wandered from friend to friend, searching for some place to hang out until their campus reopened. That first weekend, hundreds of thousands of students found that place in Washington, DC, where people from all over the country gathered to protest the killings and demand accountability.

The DC protesters that weekend included Jeff Miller’s older brother, Russ, who left for DC shortly after his brother’s funeral in New York’s historic Riverside Church. Thousands of young people gathered outside, waving banners with peace doves and blown up photos of Jeff lying dead on the pavement. One placard declared “WE THE PEOPLE MOURN OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS.” When police arrived with barricades, the wary youth stood back and then, respectfully, they helped the police set up a barrier to provide space for the hearse carrying Jeff’s body. Inside the glorious old church, the large crowd heard a series of distinguished speakers remember the 20-year-old none of them had known. NY Senator Charles Goodell told the crowd, “We pledge to do what we can to make this a meaningful death.” Dr. Benjamin Spock, the outspoken opponent of the war in Vietnam, also spoke:  “Young people…are willing to look at the terrible injustices that exist in the United States. They have the courage to act out their idealism. They put the rest of us to shame. To me, the most impressive thing of all this is that they cannot be intimidated. The more efforts there are at oppression, the more it opens young peoples’ eyes. (Jeff’s) death and the death of the other three at Kent State may be a blessing. This may do more to end the war in Vietnam than all the rest of us have been able to do in five years.” Rabbi Julius Goldberg noted that Jeff had been “killed by a fusillade of bullets labeled fear, panic, mistrust, war to end wars.” He admonished the crowd to “listen to Jeff’s brothers and sisters. We must give peace a chance.” Finally, when the service ended, six pallbearers carried Jeff’s simple hardwood coffin down to the street where the young, mostly long-haired mourners filled the street for a block in either direction. When they saw the coffin, the kids became silent and raised their hands in the peace sign. Later, Elaine Miller Holstein would say that she had no real understanding of how the memorial service came to be. She didn’t know who had arranged for the service to be held in Riverside Church. She had no knowledge of how so many VIPs came to speak at the funeral. She just remembered the kids outside. She knew that they were really the ones who had come to remember Jeff as a person, rather than as a symbol.

Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, Richard Nixon heard the news on May 4 and issued a statement supposedly expressing regret but really just blaming the students for their own deaths:  “This should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy.  It is my hope that this tragic and unfortunate incident will strengthen the determination of all the nation’s campuses, administrators, faculty and students alike to stand firmly for the right which exists in this country of peaceful dissent and just as strongly against the resort to violence as a means of such expression.” (emphasis added)

On Friday, May 8, Nixon held a press conference where, as expected, most of the questions revolved around the shootings. As he spoke to the press, students had begun gathering in D.C. for the massive weekend protest. When asked what he thought the students were trying to say with their protest, Nixon replied:  “They are trying to say that they want peace. They are trying to say that they want to stop the killing. They are trying to say that they want to end the draft. They are trying to say that we ought to get out of Vietnam. I agree with everything that they are trying to accomplish.” He added, “I think I understand what they want. I would hope they would understand somewhat what I want.” When asked if he felt the country was heading into a period of revolution and repression, he pointed to the pending demonstrations as evidence disputing this claim. “Briefly, this country is not headed for revolution. The very fact that we do have the safety valves of the right to dissent, the very fact that the President of the United States asked the District Commissioners to waive their rule for 30 days’ notice for a demonstration, and also asked that that demonstration occur not just around the Washington Monument but on the Ellipse where I could hear it–and you can hear it pretty well from there, I can assure you–that fact is an indication that when you have that kind of safety valve you are not going to have revolution which comes from repression.” In fact, by this point, buses had been brought in to surround the White House and, according to Alexander Haig, troops had been stationed in the basement in case students decided to attack.

Following the press conference, Nixon went back to his quarters where, apparently, he began drinking heavily. Unable to sleep, he began working the phones. As Army troops moved into position to protect government buildings from the demonstrators, Nixon made 47 phone calls in four hours, including eight to Henry Kissinger, seven to Bob Haldeman, and at least one each to Norman Vincent Peale and Billy Graham. While we still don’t know everyone he called, we do know that one of the calls went to DeWitt Wallace, founder and publisher of Reader’s Digest which had a well-deserved reputation of printing books and articles that “portrayed an America that was kindly, religious, self-sufficient, neighborly, and staunchly anticommunist.” A few days later, Wallace would commission James Michener to write Kent State:  What Happened and Why, a massive work designed to prove that what happened at Kent State was a tragedy in which no one was to blame. Michener’s high profile and solid reputation, combined with the marketing power of Reader’s Digest, gave the book wide circulation. For years, publishers approached about doing another book on the shootings would decline, pointing to Michener’s work as “definitive.” Unfortunately, however, like most of Michener’s works, he sprinkled fiction in with his facts. The result could more honestly be called a “nonfiction novel.” But Nixon got what he wanted and DeWitt Wallace was rewarded in 1972 when Nixon conferred on him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

To his dismay, Nixon discovered that even this mad round robin of phone calls couldn’t calm his brain. After finally giving up on phone calls, Nixon listened to Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto. When that, too, failed to bring peace, Nixon summoned his personal valet, Manolo Sanchez, and asked if he had ever visited the Lincoln Memorial at night. When Sanchez replied that he had not, Nixon decided to go sight-seeing despite the fact that it was now 5 AM. Without alerting his Secret Service detail, Nixon summoned a limousine and took off with Sanchez for the Lincoln Memorial. There, they found thousands of students hanging out on the steps, waiting for the next day’s protests. The students, of course, were stunned to see Nixon approaching. They stood by respectfully while the President clumsily attempted to engage them in conversation. Nixon talked about surfing and football and how travel would broaden their understanding of the world. Mostly, the students maintained a stunned silence. Finally, Nixon told the protestors to enjoy their time in D.C. but admonished them to keep things peaceful. He then left, with Sanchez still in tow, and went over to the Capitol. In the chamber of the House of Representatives, Nixon encouraged Sanchez to give a speech to the empty chamber while Nixon sat and listened. One can only imagine the thoughts running through Nixon’s head as he remembered his days in the House and the Senate. By then, however, the Secret Service had realized their most important person had gone missing. They tracked him down and brought him back to the White House where, referring to his talk with the students at the Lincoln Memorial, he said simply, “I doubt if that got over.”

A few days later, after seeing pictures of the students shot down at Jackson State, Nixon would say, “What are we going to do to get more respect for the police from our young people?” Later, Henry Kissinger would confide his belief that, that May, Nixon was on the verge of a mental breakdown. H.R. “Bob” Haldeman would suggest in his Watergate memoir, The Ends of Power that the shootings deepened the White House paranoia, thereby adding to the conspiratorial thinking that ultimately forced Nixon from office. For those of us who believe that the Nixon administration was not necessarily caught off guard by the shootings, this explanation sounds like another attempt to blame the victims.

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The Aftermath of Loss

Editor’s Note: To learn more about the Kent State Truth Tribunal, go to www.TruthTribunal.org. Please lend your support to our efforts for Truth & Justice.

A tribute to my sister, slain 1970 Kent State University student protestor against the Vietnam War, Allison Krause.

Becoming Galvanized by Laurel Krause & Delaney Rose Brown

Putting the finishing touches on my face, I looked in the mirror and had a funny feeling about the day ahead.  I saw a healthy, bright-eyed, intense 53 year old woman glancing back with excitement and dashes of hope and desirability in knowing a nice man had just called to ask me out on a date that afternoon.  I accepted the invitation and as I dashed around my place, I realized it had been a while.  It felt like today was going to be different and maybe extraordinary, perhaps even life-changing.

Feeling optimistic and energized, I walked outside onto my front deck to take in the warm, late morning California sunshine and the calming beauty of my view on the rural Mendocino coast.  I turned around to look at the sun and feel the winter mid-day rays shine on me.

Unsure if it was real or if I imagined it, I tried to focus my over-40 eyes; it looked like the lead Mendocino County Sheriff’s Deputy marching towards me from the gate.  Nearly two-dozen men followed behind like bees in a hive, some fiddling with the gate to take it off its track while others were coming through in vehicles and, most disturbingly, officers aggressively following the Deputy marching towards me.  It was hard to fathom why so many officers were coming at me and Manny, my small dog that Friday noon.

There I was, standing barefoot in a beautiful dress pretty with perfume, and all the grace of the day suddenly vanished.  I immediately felt raw with shock.

Grabbing the deck rail to steady myself, I moaned “Ohhhh shittttt!”

Then before my eyes, the officers morphed into a platoon of Ohio National Guardsmen marching onto my land through the gate.  A soundtrack played in my head and everything went fuzzy:

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,

We’re finally on our own.

This summer I hear the drumming,

Four dead in Ohio.

Gotta get down to it

Soldiers are gunning us down

Should have been done long ago.

What if you knew her

And found her dead on the ground

How can you run when you know?        –“Ohio,” Neil Young, CSN&Y

In that split-second, I was back at Kent State University in 1970 when the Ohio National Guard shot and killed my sister, Allison Krause, during the Vietnam War protests on campus.  My time was up, les jeux sont faits and now they were coming for me too.

This was the first time I flashed back and revisited the utter shock, raw devastation and feeling of total loss since Allison died.  Back in early May 1970, I remember hearing my first news of Allison from a neighbor as I arrived home from junior high that afternoon, “Allison has been hurt.”

As the emotions took over, I began to physically, mentally and spiritually re-feel the learning of my sister’s death at the doorsteps of our home.  I broke down and couldn’t maintain control of anything in our environment, myself included.  I watched the progression of events outside of myself, as a witness instead of really being there, and having this happen to my family and me.

Later in life I learned that I was born into this world, the child of Arthur and Doris Krause and little sister of Allison Krause, to integrate balance into my surroundings and live in harmony.  In following this life path, I have sometimes yielded to the signposts of life that pop up to offer guidance.  Other times I have shielded my view of them, denied them or ignored them altogether.  As I’ve aged, I have had this opportunity to come to terms with myself.

I’ve learned that until health, balance or resolution is achieved and harmony is found, the signposts only get stronger, or shall I say, fiercer…and they continue to revisit until the message is finally decoded and hopefully integrated.

Focusing on my breath, I buckled to the ground while painful emotions ran through me, returning me to the moment.  Here I was experiencing one heck of a signpost as the sheriff’s deputy steadied me on the deck of my home and flashed the search warrant in my face to snap me back to reality – they were here because I was cultivating medical marijuana.  They cuffed me and read my rights as I sobbed hysterically.  While the cops searched through everything in my home, I was arrested and taken to jail.

Whether I missed the date or stood him up that day, there was no doubt I blew it with my suitor.  But it was nonetheless true that this Friday in late February was personally unforgettable and life changing.  It wasn’t exactly the kind of day I had imagined earlier or would have even asked for, but sometimes we are simply receivers of environmental impact, having little control or power over circumstances.  As we navigate through key life situations, there are choices and decisions we must make and therein lies our power: how we manage and exert our essence.  The outcome of events largely depends on how we respond to the situation, hopefully by creating an opportunity for positive growth to take away from it.

Arriving back home that night to my ravished land, I found doors left open, the gate was thrown off its hinge and the inside of my home strewn with debris from the enforcement teams raiding my property. It was hard to believe that my land, a place I had personally toiled on and developed these past five years, felt so negated and exposed.  In the supposed safety of my beloved home, I was scared, ravaged and vulnerable.

It wasn’t until the second month following my bust that I put together the pieces and realized the telltale signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.  Even though the sheriff’s men didn’t pull their guns on me during the arrest, once I saw the guns in their holsters, I feared for my life.  As they marched onto my property, I believed they were going to shoot and kill me, just like Allison.

Back in that state of mind, I again felt the same pain I experienced losing Allison nearly forty years ago. This is how PTSD manifests. This was how I took care of myself back then, what I did at the onslaught of extreme loss on a personal and cosmic level.

Cricket, one of Allison’s friends from Kent State and a therapist, suggested one late night phone call after the bust that PTSD doesn’t ever go away.  She suggested that the best way to deal with the pain of PTSD was to make something good come out of the remembrance, the suffering and the pain.

That’s when I decided to make the bust something good for me, good for all.  It was my only choice, the only solution to cure this memorable, generational, personal angst.  My mantra became, “This is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

And it has been.

Recounting my bust six months hence, I continue to confuse my words.  I replace the sheriff’s deputies with national guardsmen.  At night in dreams I see the guardsmen marching through my gate in unison.  My bust triggered the post-traumatic stress I experienced from my sister being murdered at Kent State in 1970.  She was protesting against the Vietnam War, most specifically, the Cambodian Invasion along with Nixon’s verbal harassment of the protesting students, calling them ‘bums.’  My sister, Allison Beth Krause, was shot dead by the National Guard with dum-dum bullets that exploded upon impact, as she protested more than a football field away from her killers, the U.S. government.

Back in 1970 with my parents in the room where Allison laid lifeless, I watched from outside in the hospital hall.  I saw what used to be ‘her’ lying there.  I noticed that her spirit had already left, and everyone was a mess.  My parents identified her body and as we walked the halls in the hospital, we heard others murmur, “they should’ve shot more.”

Like any fifteen-year-old, my coping mechanisms were undeveloped at best.  Every evening, I remember spending hours in my bedroom practicing calligraphy to Neil Young’s ‘After the Goldrush’…artistically copying phrases of his music…smoking marijuana to calm and numb my pain.  Feebly attempting to come to terms with the loss of my sister, and like so many others, the loss of feeling safe in the United States.

Years later I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of what happened to Allison.  Over thirty years later to help alleviate the effects of this emotional disorder, which is commonly characterized by long-lasting problems with many aspects of emotional and social functioning, I began cultivating my own medicine, marijuana.

How ironic, I thought. The medicine that kept me safe from experiencing PTSD now led me to relive that horrible experience as the cops marched onto my property.  There was no getting away from it.  No matter how much medical marijuana I smoked, I couldn’t change the fact that my sister was killed and I had not healed from it. None of us had healed from it.

Right after my bust, I could barely put a sentence together, yet after a few days back home from jail, I got really mad.  As a medical marijuana caregiver/patient, I had the proper documents and made every effort to grow marijuana legally on my rural, gated property, and I ended up getting arrested.  How did this happen?

Two weeks later as I entered my ‘not guilty’ plea in court, I learned that the seeds of my bust were sown with nuisance complaints.  Mendocino County nuisance ordinances encourage anyone who doesn’t like his or her neighbors, to send anonymous letters to the Sheriff complaining of ‘foul odors’ and road traffic.  These anonymous letters are basically crafted templates to complain of fabricated nuisances…at least in my case.  Taking advantage of this ordinance, hateful residents in Mendocino County found a way to make trouble for their neighbors by criminalizing them, especially the newcomers to the community.

I moved to the Mendocino coast five years ago, when I purchased five acres of undeveloped land in a rural area next to an agricultural preserve.  It was the first and only property my real estate agent showed me in 2004, and there was no doubt this magical spot called me.  When I arrived, it felt as if I was summoned, and now it’s clear that Allison and Dad were those pulling forces.

I remember parking my car at the end of the dirt driveway and looking out, enchanted by the view and turning to ask my friend, “Is that the ocean?”  I knew it was.  I saw this awesome, remote landscape before me and was captivated by the beautiful ecosystem of life.  The rolling meadows extending miles to the sea with hawks soaring above the fields, searching for prey.  Mice sheltering in the grasses that feed the cows continually grazing as they wander their weekly path across vast acreage that I observe each day, intending to minimize my impact.

My neighbors however, did not share my enthusiasm for my active life here, and they quickly judged me as a ‘city slicker.’  I had somehow missed their angry sentiments when I decided to make my move to the coast.   But the fact remained that I had already sunk everything I had into creating this fantasy-come-true and with the the bust, I was thrown down an even deeper financial hole.  My dream was crashing in on me.

After my bust, sporadic harassment continued as neighbors pulled pranks, engaged in petty vandalism and pursued other childish haunting tricks.  As I watched with dread, I felt exposed, off-balanced…almost shameful.  Then I remembered the Kent State hate mail my family received for over a decade after Allison was killed. While there were many very supportive, loving people and notes that came forward, the hatefulness of those scribbled letters had tremendous resonance.  Over time, I learned that the letter writers’ issues and angst sent our way (and now at me again) had very little to do with us.  I now see it as a manifestation related to duality, polarization and prejudice…us v. them, conservative v. progressive, rich v. poor, powerful v. downtrodden.

The days following my bust crept by; I burrowed in and rarely left my land.  In an effort to heal, I opened myself up and dug deep into my essence, asking for divine guidance.  That Spring, I often created rituals at my firepit, beckoning for direction and instruction.  I was asking to hear how I could be of best service to all.  That was when I heard Allison and my Dad come forward.  They wanted me to get active…to do something important for them.

As I recovered, I noticed that I was decoding the signposts in my life easier and quicker than usual, with increased clarity.  I realized the persecution I was living through was similar to what many Americans and global citizens experience daily.  This harassment even had parallels to Allison’s experience before she was murdered at Kent State almost forty years ago.

I began to see the interconnectedness of these events.  Full circle, I saw how the enduring effects of Kent State continue impacting today through powerful reverberations  Unresolved energy and extreme disharmony of this magnitude continued to reappear, rerunning on similar themes from the past, becoming stronger and continuing to add more insult to injury until we make things right. It became clear that this is true on a personal level as well as in collective consciousness.

The universe had already begun to push me towards searching for the truth with the signposts and alarming events. I started to understand this wasn’t something I could simply run away from.  At a very deep level, there was unfinished business surrounding cause and effect of certain events in my life and I was encouraged to take a hard look at it.

One fateful day in early April, the telephone rang.  My friend Alan Canfora, a wounded student in the Kent State Massacre, called to invite me to speak at Kent State University’s 39th memorial event. Normally I don’t relish public speaking, yet I quickly accepted.

So I began tailoring a speech for the Kent State memorial with Delaney Brown, a young activist living in the area.  Through the process of writing Speaking Your Truth, we were compelled to learn more about the recently re-discovered audio tape that recorded the Kent State protest on May 4th, 1970.  On that day, a student placed a microphone outside his dorm room window to record the protests on campus.  A copy of a copy (at 4th or 5th generation), hidden away and unearthed from the Yale Library only two years ago in 2007, the original audio tape has never been studied, forensically examined or explored.  Listen to tape here.

Those among the community directly involved in the Kent State Massacre, agree this audio tape holds the key to unlocking the truth at Kent State.  This new information or ‘truth’ is critically important as it contains documented evidence of a recorded ‘Order to Shoot’ that has been continually denied.  With the discovery and proof of an order to shoot, we finally document the intent to kill and ultimately reveal the truth about what occurred.  This is the truth that was so long ago suppressed and denied as guardsman and government officials continually perjured their testimonies to support their cover-up.  The contents of this audio tape shall play a dramatic role in the history of the Kent State Massacre as well as our own individual, national and global perceptions of the event.

I realized I had to focus my energy on that tape and become involved in isolating the ‘Order to Shoot’ given by the Ohio National Guard, to finally learn the truth about Kent State.  As the Strubbe tape had never been explored or analyzed, I wanted to help make that happen and follow it down.

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