Lost But Hopeful

It was 1960. In Greensboro, North Carolina, four black students began a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter. The event triggered nonviolent protests throughout the Southern United States. The clock ticked. Years passed. The DNA genetic code was broken. President JohnF. Kennedy established the Peace Corps. The infamous Columbus Day Storm struck the Pacific Northwest with wind gusts up to 170 mph (270km/h); 46 dead, 11 billion board feet of timber was blown down creating $230 million U.S. in damages. Kennedy was assassinated. 34 people die in the Watts ghetto riot. 32,000 people made a 54-mile "freedom march" from Selma to Montgomery. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. The Woodstock Music and Art Fair was held at Max Yasgur's farm. Richard Nixon was elected promising to end the Vietnam War. A demonstration was held to protest the Vietnam War at Kent State University.

The National Guard arrived late that evening where a large demonstration was under way. The campus Reserve Officer Training Corps buildingwas on fire while more than a thousand protesters surrounded the building and cheered. Thinking they were up against the strongest, well-trained,militant, revolutionary group ever assembled in America, even Governor Rhodes considered the student protestors " worse than the brown shirts and the communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes ... They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America."

The next day, just before noon, the Guard ordered the crowd to disperse. Most of them refused. Tear gas was used with little effect. And when it became clear that the crowd wasn't going to leave, a group of National Guard troops advanced with bayonets fixed. The protesters retreated and the guardsmen pursued. Many students left, but some stayed to angrily confront the soldiers, some throwing rocks and tear gas canisters. Fearing for their lives, some of fired at the students, an action The President's Commission on Campus Unrest concluded after the fact was "the indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable."

Perhaps, like some, you have the unique ability to listen to one story and understand another. But there are questions of consequence, consequences that can last a long time. The conversation will change as society experiences an unending set of crisis. The shootings killed four students and wounded nine. In response, the largest student strike in American history took place in May and June 1970, to protest the shootings and the American invasion of Cambodia. Over one million college students participated. If history taught us anything, it is that building a better the future is not about more controls, taller fences, or more effective leadership from the top; it is about people.

Building a great future will require heart, conscience, and emotional intelligence. Moving beyond addressing issues in the same old way, we will need to work together. Students began forming social movements that moved them from resistance to liberation. Today, student activists carry a sense of hope that things can and must be better.