It is not difficult to think of the end of the 1960s in symbolic or
apocalyptic terms. Despite Richard Nixon's pledge to end it, the war
in Vietnam dragged on and even intensified, with more extreme
bombing of North Vietnam than ever before. In 1970 the United States
invaded Cambodia and students across the country demonstrated in
despair. At Kent State University in Ohio, National Guardsmen, or-
dered to campus to quell demonstrators, shot and killed four students.
A National Student Strike followed in which thousands of high school
and college students across the country walked out of classes and
schools. Many college students never finished the academic year, as
administrators canceled classes and final exams in the hope of
avoiding more violence and parents insisted that their children return
home. At Jackson State University in Mississippi, police opened fire
on students, killing two more. The fact that police and National Guard
forces were now shooting students, as well as poor ghetto residents
and Black Panthers (see chapter 3), seemed to symbolize in the stark-
est terms the generational rupture and the fury that had been un-
leashed by the counterculture and by the student, antiwar, and Black
Power movements. Civil war did not seem a wholly inappropriate
image.

In Berkeley, site of the most famous early student protest, the Free
Speech Movement (see chapter 2), an attempt to create a community
park ended in violence and death the year before Kent State and
Jackson State. Hundreds of students and community residents had

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