April-May 1970: a Retrospective Diary of the Ohio State Riots
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April-May 1970: a retrospective diary of the Ohio State protests John Faulkner (1940- At the time of the events recorded here I was a faculty member at OSU with the rank of Instructor in the Department of English. Wednesday April 29 My classes (Critical Writing and Introduction to Fiction) this Quarter were scheduled by the department for early and mid-morning, which in Spring Quarter probably gave me a higher than typical percentage of conscientious students and which proved to have other advantages once the demonstrations began. This day I went back to my apartment for lunch but then returned to campus before three to attend an English Department Policy Committee meeting in a large Denney Hall classroom. After nearly an hour we were requested to evacuate the building. Outside on 17th Avenue young people--probably not all students--had blocked the street at one end. At the other, police were firing tear gas canisters, a few of which protesters threw back. I spotted one of my former students, a pleasant girl from Omaha, who appeared to be not a protester but an excited spectator. Later I heard that there had been an earlier incident near the southern extremity of the campus. Thursday April 30 Having completed my early classes, I was free for most of the day. Before class Patricia Jordan, a senior, a member of student government and a responsible young woman, mentioned that three places she had been last night had been tear-gassed. Off campus, I was told, the Columbus police had run amuck, gassing such unsubversive places as the United Christian Center and even fraternities. The effect, of course, was to involve many kids who would otherwise have remained spectators. Eventually Columbus’s volatile mayor, M. E. Sensenbrenner, would be silenced; all statements would be issued by his more prudent safety director, James Hughes, and, with the arrival of the State Highway Patrol and National Guard, the Columbus Police would be relegated to a minor role. Outside Denney Hall pedestrian traffic was heavy, and on the Oval (the oversized lawn a block away at the center of the OSU campus) were more people, mostly in clusters of spectators, than I’d ever seen there. Disposed around the Oval were State Highway Patrolmen, sinister in their gas masks, and National Guardsmen. One could walk into small, faint clouds of tear gas rising from the grass. The gas was doing in most of the flowers planted in profusion to celebrate OSU’s centennial. At the east entrance to Denney Hall I had seen an upside-down waste basket upon which was a paper cup, a bottle, and some kleenex with a sign reading “soda/wash your eyes.” 2 I had joined a faculty organization whose members were identified by green ribbons and whose purpose was to act as intermediaries whenever it might do good and to keep people from getting hurt (and maybe killed, it would appear in a few days) by intervening in dangerous confrontations. Its leaders were both from the English Department, Wally Maurer, a Canadian Dryden scholar, and Bob Canzoneri, the director of the creative writing program. Both were almost continually in negotiation with the upper administration. In the following week, I came to admire Canzoneri, especially, for his constancy in perceiving and responding to people as individuals. In heated situations, this was a rare discipline which I have ever since identified as one of the distinctive virtues of the practice of fiction. Having no extended instructions and only occasional small errands to perform, I spent an hour or so mostly just observing at one site, such as a building at which there was picketing, or another, perhaps a segment of the oval where someone might be addressing eighty to a hundred students. I had brought my camera with me thinking that later I would like to have some photographs of this extraordinary event, maybe a few to send to my father and step-mother who had visited Columbus only two weeks before. After a day or two I left it home, it finally having dawned on me that protesters might conclude I was some sort of evidence gatherer. To allow other Green Ribbon members to have supper with their families, I, being single, stayed on at campus until dusk. It was announced that a curfew had been imposed on campus and on a fairly wide area surrounding it from nine (I think) until seven a.m. Violators could expect to be jailed. I missed the national news that night but was told that the OSU protests had been covered, as they would continue to be until displaced by the Kent State shootings. Friday May 1st-Saturday, May 2nd Three kinds of protesters were involved in the coalescing leadership of the protests. One was a small women’s group. In 1970 they were negligible; as the decade proceeded they would not remain so. Larger and more vocal was a black protest group. One of its leaders who struck me as reliable in his dealing with us and responsible in persuading his marshals to keep black demonstrators within boundaries the Highway Patrol was setting was a freshman, Michael White. In his senior year, he would become Ohio State’s first black student body president, and he later was elected Mayor of Cleveland. Far the largest and least predictable group was the anti-war protestors, itself a not-very-organized coalition of groups and individuals having varied aims. In addition to these, as might be expected, there were people with more anarchic agendas and numbers of sensation seekers, not all of them OSU students. The revolution, of course, never really began until close to noon--too many people always had been up too late the night before. Still, after my long day Thursday, I was quite tired by late Friday afternoon. I drove back to my apartment, tried to get some impression how the network news programs were portraying events at OSU, had the easiest supper I could prepare, and went to sleep by quarter of eight. The phone rang around ten. The caller was Bill Gibson, an associate professor whose specialty like mine was Eighteenth-Century English Literature and who had been my closest companion in Green Ribbon activities. There had been, he said, a troubling incident: a police car, patrolling off campus 3 appeared to have been fired upon from a roof--or possibly it had only been hit by a rock. He couldn’t be sure. Anyhow, he thought we needed to have a few more Green Ribbon members on campus so that some could drive to sites of any further incidents. Could I come down to Hughes Hall, the Fine Arts building, where we had set up a center? Since I would be in violation of the curfew and had no idea whether policemen I might encounter would recognize my green ribbon, I was wary driving down, but I was not stopped. Shortly after I arrived, Bill and another member went out in a car with a large green ribbon tied to its antenna to see what was happening. When they returned he reported nothing much. At that, most of the remaining members, who’d been on campus all day, went home, leaving Bill and me to carry on until morning. Around one, he decided that it was time for another reconnaissance. The campus was deserted. However, when we turned north on High Street, we found a young hitch-hiker, standing utterly alone in the brightly-lighted street. Aware that he could be arrested just for being there, we stopped and picked him up. He turned out to be the son of an Ohio State faculty member on leave from the army. He had returned to Columbus that night, not only unaware of the curfew but of the protests as well. We drove him just outside the curfew area to Riverside Hospital where he would likely find a pay phone from which to call home for a ride. Then we cruised through empty streets a while longer before returning to Hughes. About 5:40 or so, just before the first light began to appear, we went out again. All was quiet until we spotted a female student walking warily east of High Street toward the campus. When we approached, she increased her pace and turned down a side street, so we trailed her at a distance to be sure she wasn’t stopped for curfew violation as she entered the campus. Soon we saw a couple of male students. They accepted our offer of a ride and, in telling us where they were headed, explained the appearance of these young people so early on a Saturday morning. They were members of a class in Ornithology, and their teacher, disregarding the curfew, had refused to cancel his scheduled dawn bird watch. On our way back to High Street, we spotted several more students, so we found a patrolman, identified ourselves, and shaking our heads at this idiocy, told him what to expect. Promising nothing, he reluctantly agreed that the kids were probably harmless. Upon our return to Hughes, Bill went home, and I stayed on alone for two or three hours more until a couple of Green Ribbon members I didn’t know showed up. Monday May 4 This day changed everything. The evening news, both local and national, led off with reports that a unit of the Ohio National Guard had fired on protesters at Kent State and had killed four. While its displacement of Ohio State from national attention was probably to be welcomed, that news made everyone aware of what could happen on a much larger scale here, where, though a couple of dozen people had been brought to the hospital, casualties so far had not been especially serious.