Kent State shootings: The 1970 student protests that shook the US

Fifty-four years ago, four students were shot by the National Guard during an anti-Vietnam War protest at Kent State university in Ohio – a tragedy that still resonates today. As these BBC Archive clips show, the events symbolised political and cultural divides across the US at the time.

On 4 May 1970, four students were shot dead by the National Guard during a Vietnam War protest at Kent State University. The shocking incident still resonates as a seminal moment in modern US history.

Warning: This article contains a video with images that some people may find distressing.

Immortalised in the song Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, which was released a few weeks after the event, the Kent State shootings provoked the biggest student strike in US history, which involved hundreds of campuses nationwide. The iconic photograph of a young woman screaming as she knelt over the body of a student was published across the national press, and came to symbolise the political and cultural divide in the US at the time. 

A new wave of student protests against the Vietnam War formed the background to the shootings. They followed an announcement in April 1970 by President Nixon that he had authorised the US invading Cambodia to fight the Viet Cong there, thus signalling a major widening of the US war effort. One of the protests against this took place on the Kent State university campus, Ohio, on 1 May. That evening, trouble broke out in downtown Kent, following an initially peaceful protest. There followed a violent confrontation between young people and the police, and some shops were vandalised.