Thursday, December 16, 2010

Kent State remembered

No, it's not May 4, the anniversary, but this bit of an article quoting the man who took the famous photograph really got to me:

Excerpt: “They just started firing downhill…I thought these were blanks,” he said. “The way people were running and knocking each other over I thought, ‘This is a great scare tactic firing blanks because you could really hurt someone.’”

The student journalist put his 35 mm Nikkormat camera to his eye, heard a shot from a guardsman’s gun and watched as a bullet struck a metal sculpture that “exploded into a cloud of rock.”

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, that guy’s using live ammunition,’” he said. “I never took the picture. I let the camera hang around my neck. I thought, ‘Holy damn, that’s live ammunition.’ I thought someone was dumb enough to put live ammunition in it.”

And then he realized the worst. All of the guardsmen were using live ammunition.

1 comment:

Peggy said...

thank you for the link. It is still shocking to see this photo.