Ken Hammond, Oral History

Recorded: March 24, 2010
Interviewed by Craig Simpson
Transcribed by Erin Valentine

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[Interviewer]: Good afternoon. The date is Wednesday, March 24th, 2010. My name is Craig Simpson, and we are conducting an interview today for the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project. Could you please state your name?

[Ken Hammond]: I’m Ken Hammond.

[Interviewer]: Okay. Where were you born?

[Ken Hammond]: Cleveland, Ohio.

[Interviewer]: And what years were you here at Kent State?

[Ken Hammond]: Ah, well, I came here as a freshman in the fall of 1967, and I was a full-time student through May of 1970. But after that, things were a little on and off. I finished my B.A. here, but not until 1985. But I wasn’t in Kent that whole time. I ended up coming back for that at the end.

[Interviewer]: So your primary years were ’67 through ’70 –

[Ken Hammond]: Really up through ’72. I moved to Colorado in I guess early summer of ’73. Yeah. So I lived in Kent from ’67 to ’73 with some brief interruptions.

[Interviewer]: What made you decide to come to Kent State?

[Ken Hammond]: Interesting question. Well, I grew up in Cleveland, went to Warrensville Heights High School. I was interested in studying government, political science, history, things like that. I developed an interest in Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia. So I applied to a number of schools. I applied to Cornell, and to Columbia, and to American University, as well as Kent. And I got into both Cornell and American. But my family couldn’t really afford the tuition and all that for those schools. So we had reached an initial agreement that if I would do two years at a state school in Ohio, we might be able to save the money so that I could at that point, if I was doing okay, transfer out to one of those other schools. In the end, I wound up just staying here in Kent, because of getting involved in other things. But, you know, Kent was the local state university, good school, especially good program in my area -- in political science -- in those days. I was happy to come here, but the original thought was that it would just be a two year thing.

[Interviewer]: Talk about the things that kept you here.

[Ken Hammond]: Well, the things that kept me here: I very quickly became involved in the political scene here. And by the spring of ’68 -- I started here in the fall of ’67 -- by the spring of my freshman year, I had gotten to know a lot of people in the area, both students and faculty, and gotten involved in the early stages of the organization of the SDS chapter here. By the fall of ’68, I was deeply involved in the radical political scene on campus, and all thoughts of going elsewhere sort of disappeared. This just became very much the scene that I was part of and identified with, so I was happy to be here.

[Interviewer]: What prompted you to join the protest movement?

[Ken Hammond]: Well, that’s of course, it’s a long process of evolution, I suppose. Of course, it was that time in the sixties: the Vietnam War was going on. I have an older brother who was serving in Vietnam. He was in the U.S. Navy on an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea. So I was very attuned to what was going on from that point of view. I had been somewhat involved in my high school, in Warrensville Heights, in civil rights activities. My senior year was the year that Warrensville Heights High was desegregated, and my girlfriend at that point was the daughter of the local Methodist minister, who was very active in all that. So I sort of started thinking about political stuff, and been reading and all that. The summer of 1967, before I came to Kent, I was a youth volunteer in the mayoral campaign of Carl Stokes, who was the first black mayor of Cleveland, elected that fall. And that too, you know, it just sort of drew me into political engagement.

But certainly when I arrived in Kent, I was not of a radical anti-war perspective yet. But that first year, from the fall of ’67 to the spring of ’68, things just developed. Some classes I took, some people I met, things I read, conversations you’re involved in, all that kind of stuff. In the spring of ’68, I had gone -- my high school girlfriend had gone on to Sarah Lawrence College outside of New York, and we happened to be in New York the weeks of the Columbia strike there, which was very exciting. All that process of learning about things was going on.

And I went to the organizational meetings for the SDS chapter here. I had started taking part in the peace vigils outside the old Student Center -- Student Union -- that the Kent Committee to End the War in Vietnam organized. It wasn’t a dramatic conversion, it was just more of a slow progression through that year so that by the end of my freshman year, I was very much looking forward to getting more involved in that stuff in the Fall.

And I went home for the summer, and had a job working, and doing all that kind of typical stuff. But I certainly felt by that point a very strong growing identification as being part of that radical community here. August of ’68 you have the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and that fired people up more. Martin Luther King being killed in April, Bobby Kennedy in June. It was just, all that stuff was kind of piling on, and that sort of propelled me along that line of development.

[Interviewer]: Yeah, my parents lived just outside of Berkeley at that time. They said it was almost like one thing after another.

[Ken Hammond]: You just had that feeling that the viability -- when I was coming to Kent I was very involved in mainstream Democratic Party politics with the Stokes campaign. And that was actually a successful endeavor, because he did win the election. But it seemed for the most part that, at least on the national level, that the ability to utilize the existing political structures wasn’t -- it just wasn’t doing the job. It wasn’t an effective way to address these, what we thought of as increasingly serious problems: stopping the war, ending racism, all that kind of stuff. So the appeal of a more radical and more systematic critique, for me, at that time was quite compelling. And that’s what drew me in that direction.

[Interviewer]: I’m going to ask you to paint in broad strokes here, but did you find your gradual progression was typical of a lot of Kent State students?

[Ken Hammond]: I think so. Certainly, it felt like this was something that, yeah, that lots of people were just sort of waking up to, sort of getting caught up in, I suppose you could say. Yeah, certainly, it didn’t feel like something -- I didn’t feel like it was, “Wow, these are such weird things. I wonder why I’m thinking this and nobody else is.” It just seemed like this was a growing -- it was a growing individual experience for me, but it was part of an expanding -- I hate to use the lingo, but sort of a scene on campus. Especially in the Fall, by the Fall of ’68, you’d go to meetings and there’d be sixty, eighty, a hundred, two hundred people, and everybody seemed to be going through very similar kinds of processes of figuring it out, of sort of an awakening or enlightening kind of experience that wow, this finally starts to make some sense, and it looks like there’s ways that this could be -- that the situations, the problems that we were seeing might be addressed.

[Interviewer]: I interviewed Professor Jerry Lewis a couple weeks ago, and he was talking about how oftentimes when May 4th is looked today, people just look at only that day. He talks about that the build up actually took place long before, and he cited the BUS walkout in ’68, and the Music and Speech incident in ’65. Could you talk about maybe your or SDS role in these?

[Ken Hammond]: Sure, sure. Well, I can talk about both. I think, right, there’s -- it’s possible for people to sort of see the May 4th events as kind of dropping out of nowhere, but they really only make sense in that kind of longer historical context. Really, even back before ’68, I mean, if you go back to ’65, ’66, there are just the beginnings, just the stirrings of either civil rights activism or anti-war activism on campus. And that builds up slowly for a while. But then, in the ’68, ’69 school year really accelerates. And I think that’s largely a function of the presence of the SDS chapter on campus -- the Students for a Democratic Society. What made SDS particularly effective at that point was this systemic critique -- the linking up of different issues, to say that poverty, and racism, and the war, and the whole counterculture, drug war thing -- that all these things were related. All these things were connected to one another, and that only by addressing the underlying connections and this sort of systemic nature of things could we resolve those problems. I think it was very compelling for people.

So in the Fall of ’68, for example -- mentioning the BUS thing -- one thing we were talking about was the war in Vietnam and the attacks that took place in black communities in the United States were sort of two sides of the same coin. So when, in October of ’68, the Oakland Police Department announced they were going to be here on campus to recruit for police officers, our argument was that, that shouldn’t be taking place. That the University should not be complicit, should not be a part of that process. And Black United Students, of course, many of them found themselves in agreement with that position, and we found ourselves in agreement with their positions. So when the Oakland recruiters came, both black and white students converged on the Placement Center , which in those days was in a little building over by Stopher Hall. Does Stopher Hall still exist?

[Interviewer]: Yes.

[Ken Hammond]: Okay. You never know, they -- so black and white students converged there, and we sort of had a sit it, and the Oakland recruiting visit was cancelled. That then became a huge controversy, because the University wanted to suspend students who they could identify as sort of leaders of that. All the black students walked off campus, and went and stayed in churches in Akron. In the end, the University was more worried about being perceived as racist than they were about anything else, and so they dropped all the charges, and they sort of let that go by. And that was portrayed by us, and I think widely perceived as a victory for the student movement.

That was unfortunately kind of the high tide of collaboration between Black United Students and SDS. At the time, many black militant organizations very much wanted to be on their own. They didn’t want to be working closely with white radicals, because a sense of sort of national identity, and separatism and all that was very strong. I think in many ways that was tactically unfortunate, but certainly politically understandable. After BUS -- after the Oakland Police action -- we never really managed to coordinate our activities very effectively from that point on. But, that did create quite a sense of energy and momentum, positive momentum, in the fall of ’68.

Then, in the Spring Semester of ’69, SDS was involved in putting together what we called "The Spring Offensive," which was a little grandiose terminology, but that was what we called it at the time. To focus on the war, focus on mobilizing first for President Nixon’s inauguration in January of ’69, and then for -- the annual by that point -- April march on Washington. The idea was sort of to ramp things up, to raise the level of militancy, to put out a more militant critique of the war. Not simply to call for ending the war, but again that idea of a systemic critique. To say that we oppose the war because of the war and because of the system that it’s a part of.

As a part of that here at Kent , we had what we called the "Four Demands," which attempted to link those things up. And those were, if I can get them right now: ROTC, the Reserve Officer Training Corps, which was seen as a direct presence and recruitment mechanism for the military that was involved in the war in Vietnam; The Liquid Crystals Institute, defense contracting particularly sniper scope, night scope technology that was being developed there that was being seen as applicable to counterinsurgence activities in Vietnam and elsewhere certainly; then the law enforcement recruiting efforts, like the Oakland police; and then the Northeast Ohio Crime Lab, which was seen as part of the anti-countercultural offensive. Basically because that’s where people who got popped with drugs, that’s where they sent the samples for testing. So that was seen as part of that mechanism, sort of a cultural repression. Those four things, those were the Four Demands, to severe the University’s involvement with those four activities. That was supposed to be the core of the Spring Offensive here on campus, and then the actions in D.C. as sort of a link up to the national level.

So in the winter months, when you don’t want to be outside demonstrating, we did a lot of work in the dorms, speakers and things like that, to try to educate about that stuff. Handing out leaflets, and writing pamphlets, and doing all that kind of stuff. And that’s when we did Who Rules Kent?, which was a power structure analysis of how the University was embedded in larger systems of control within American society.

[Interviewer]: What was it called, I’m sorry?

[Ken Hammond]: Who Rules Kent?

[Interviewer]: Oh, okay.

[Ken Hammond]: There’s a copy of it here in the archive.

So, I guess early April, there was a march, there was a rally, I think right by the Student Center, then a march over to the Administration Building over on Front Campus. And the idea was we were going to present the Four Demands to the President, and ask him to deal with those. But they wouldn’t let us in the building, and this tussle developed at the front doors there. There was some pushing and shoving, and I think some punches got thrown. And as a result of that then, I think six individuals were arrested, suspended from the University, and subjected to criminal charges, although it took a long time for that stuff to work its way through. But, then it was as a result of that, a week or ten days later that there was going to be disciplinary hearings over at Music and Speech. That’s when we had a big rally, and we had a couple hundred people march over there to demand that those hearings be open to the public, because they were going to be supposedly closed. And that proved to be kind of a sucker punch for us, because when we got there, there were no hearings. Then we got up to the third floor of the Music and Speech building. Then we found that the building was sealed off, and they brought in the State police, and we had fifty-nine people that got arrested for trespass. More would have been, but a graduate student in Music at the time, a fellow named Carl Moore, who had a key to the elevator, shuttled people down and out, including me. So those of us who got out then of course got involved in bailing people out, organizing the legal defense stuff.

Yeah. So the BUS action in the Fall and Music and Speech in the Spring were kind of the high points, the major confrontational points that got a lot of publicity and a lot of attention and all that. But they both were expressions of that sort of more day to day organizing work that the chapter was doing of, as I say, doing leaflets, and going into dorms, and having speakers in, and all that kind of stuff. So it’s a combination. You have to work on both levels. You have to do the day to day talking to people, and trying to explain issues and things. Then you have those dramatic events that sort of everybody goes, “Woo,” and the ideas that that mobilizes people into a more activist mode.

[Interviewer]: It’s interesting you brought up the systemic critique of the SDS, because I think today students for example, when they’re doing research, they associate SDS exclusively with the war. Obviously that’s a big part of it, but I haven’t heard of really everything sort of linked together - political and social. I’m trying to --

[Ken Hammond]: Yeah. That’s sort of a pet theme with me, but I’m far from the only one to articulate that. But my view of what happens from the late sixties down into the -- by the middle of the seventies is -- that’s what made SDS different. And when that goes away, I think that that -- a lot of the way that politics in America have been since the early seventies is because of the disappearance of that systemic critique. After Kent and Jackson [State] , and the things that go on in the first half of 1970, there’s this immediate explosion of outrage and schools shut down across campus and all that kind of stuff. But then by the Fall of ’70, and moving on from there, the tide really drops, and drops fairly quickly. And that’s a combination of factors, some of which of course is that the Nixon administration really starts to back away from the war, and they start withdrawals, and they make progress Paris Peace Talks. By ’73, U.S. forces are out. By ’75, the puppet regime falls, and bingo, the war’s over.

That, of course, immediately takes down the level of political intensity. Of course, they backed away from the draft, and that was probably the most specific action that the government took that diffused a lot of it. Because that’s why there’s no anti-war movement today. We have two wars, and nobody really cares, because nobody’s getting drafted.

But I also think that the killings at Kent and Jackson, and other repression that was going on -- repression against the Black Panthers, and things like that -- sent a message to people, even to white middle class students at schools like Kent that this was possible, and that you needed to figure that in. You needed to think, “Okay, if I’m going to go to this demo, if I’m going to take part in this political movement, if I’m going to be out on the line on this activity, I might get shot.” And that’s a very different calculus. It’s one thing to think, “Well, I might get arrested for trespassing, I might get cracked on the head by a billy club.” You can roll with that. But getting shot? Little bit different. And I think that that made people evaluate their political involvement, their level of political engagement. And that what a lot of people did was move away from, “Let’s try to overthrow the system. Let’s try to change the whole thing,” to saying,

“Alright, look, I really think that there is serious problems in South Africa, so I’m going to get involved in anti-apartheid activism.”

“I really think there’s problems with the position of gay people in America. I’m going to get involved in gay liberation.”

“I really think that, boy if we don’t solve this environmental crisis, we’re going to have big problems.”

And you get a lot of single issue, single constituency organizing, because people want to feel like they can actually change something. Really make a difference. At the same time -- I don’t mean to denigrate this activity -- but it’s not as threatening, and it’s not as dangerous as the stuff that was going on in ’68 to ’72 say. And I think that’s one of the key things about what happened here is that this is the point at which that message was most clearly sent, and this is the point after which the ability of the left -- the ability of the radical movement in the country to articulate a systemic critique -- goes away. And until that comes back it’s going to be difficult to reconstitute anything like what was going on at that time.

[Interviewer]: What was your role in SDS by the time we hit the ’69-'70s?

[Ken Hammond]: Well, of course by that year, SDS is gone.

[Interviewer]: Oh, it’s gone --

[Ken Hammond]: I get involved in the Chapter. As I say, I went to some of the earlier organizing meetings. Then from the Fall of ’68 through the Summer of ’69 I was very active in SDS. I took part in all the weekly meetings, and I took part in the open steering committee meetings that were held on Mondays. I went to a couple of the National Council meetings, one in Boulder in October of ’68, and one in Ann Arbor in December of ’68. I wrote the SDS column in the Daily Kent Stater in the spring of ’69, and I organized the research project and wrote the text of the Who Rules Kent? publication that we did. Did a lot of speaking. So I was pretty active. When the chapter was -- after Music and Speech -- the charter for SDS as an organization was revoked, and we never got it reinstated.

Then, of course, in the Summer of ’69, SDS as a national organization broke down. The Weathermen went one way, and other people split off in New England, and there was a group called Revolutionary Youth Movement that I was sort of affiliated with, and some of the folks from Kent -- a lot of Kent people went to the Weather-group. But another whole bloc of us didn’t. But some of those people, like Jim Powrie, had moved off out of state to Buffalo, and Billy Whitaker, who had been very active in ’68, ’69 was off to law school in Akron. So there weren’t a lot of us left here, in that ’69 to ’70 academic year.

We organized meetings and had speakers, but the turnout was much lower. We didn’t do any kind of dramatic confrontations that year, because we simply didn’t have the troops, we just didn’t have the numbers. There’s no point in trying to call a big demo and have fifteen or twenty people show up. So the level of activity was much lower for the ’69 to ’70 school year. And it was a tough time, it was kind of a depressing time.

Then of course, I think that that contributes to the way that things happened in May of ’70, because we didn’t have an effective organization that could step in and try to provide some leadership or some guidance. When the word went around, the night of April 30th, the morning of May 1st that there was going to be this rally at noon, that was organized by grad students in the History department. And nobody really knew what to do with it. There was all this anger and all this outrage. And you could get up and speak. I got up at the end of that rally and said a few words. But we didn’t have a structure to crank out leaflets, or to call a meeting, or even reserve a room for a meeting. We just didn’t have organizational capacity in place at that point.

Then as the weekend unrolled, and jeez, you know, we had the fighting downtown on Friday night, the burning of the ROTC building, and the Guard showing up. It just was not -- we called meetings, we had endless, endless phone conversations between different groups. Because you had Young Socialist Alliance, you had freelance ex-SDS people, you had the Student Mobilization Group, you had some of the Christians. You had all these clusters of people -- and of course we all knew each other -- so we’d talk on the phone: “What are we going to do?” “How do we get this under control?”

And there was a meeting Monday morning over at the Sub-Hub to try to figure out what to do. By that point, things were just snowballing. We tried to call for a student strike on May 4th. I was the idiot that got up and made that little call. You can hear on that recording that they put out in the Chestnut Burr, you can just barely hear, some people in the crowd started going, “Strike, strike, strike!” And then that just gets swept away when the guard starts saying it’s an illegal assembly and you have to disperse, and tear gas and all that stuff. So that for me sort of -- that moment on May 4th where it was just clearly, it was beyond control, that there was nothing that we could do -- that was rough, because what happened then happened in part happened because we didn’t have the capacity to manage it, to manage the situation.

[Interviewer]: Backing up just a little bit before May 4th, take us through those few days -- April 30th, May 1st, 2nd -- and what you remember.

[Ken Hammond]: Well, that was the Spring Semester of my junior year. I was working in a plastics factory up on the north side. I worked from three in the afternoon until nine at night, Monday through Friday, paying for school. I was married at that point. My high school girlfriend had left Sarah Lawrence [College] and come here, and we got married in December of ’68. We were living in married students’ apartments over in Allerton, and she was working as a waitress, I think, at that point, and also going to school. So we were both working and going to school. On the night of April 30th, I got off work, and I made my way home, and turned on the 11 o’clock news, heard about the invasion of Cambodia, and I thought, “Oh, man.”

Then the next morning, the morning of May 1st, which was a Friday, started getting phone calls: going to be a rally at noon, on the campus, on the Commons at noon. So went up to that. That was what it was. Then the word, of course, went around in the crowd: be down on Water Street tonight, because things are -- people are mad. I went to work at three, I got off at nine, I went downtown, went down by Walter’s Café -- of course, the crowds were in the street -- hung around for a few hours, until about 11:30. I was there when the car tried to drive through the crowd, and that whole silliness went on with that.

But I was supposed to be leaving the next morning early, with my wife and with Billy Whitaker, to drive up to Buffalo. There was a conference going on up there with this Revolutionary Youth Movement Group, to talk about what the situation was nationally, and what we should be doing, and all that. It was very funny in retrospect. So I was supposed to go to this conference. So about 11: 30, I took off. I went home to get some sleep so I could leave in the morning. Just after that is when the cops showed up, and everything went crazy downtown. I wasn’t actually part of that, I missed that.

Then I was in Buffalo Saturday until Sunday morning, so I missed the burning of the ROTC building. You know, we were getting phone calls all the time, but I wasn’t actually here for those events. But as soon as we got up Sunday morning, we were like, “Why are we sitting here talking? We need to get back there and be part of what’s going on.” So we hopped in the car and drove back down. By the time we got here -- it was around noon time -- the Guard was on campus. We came up and walked around. Of course, we looked at the smoldering ruins of the ROTC building, looked at the Guard, kind of cruised around, then spent the rest of that day into the evening mostly at home on the phone talking to people -- again, all this process of trying to figure out what to do.

Then Monday morning, this meeting was at the Sub-Hub around ten, so Marilyn and I came up for that. That lasted maybe an hour, maybe a little more than an hour. Then we just went out to the Commons, and waited for people to assemble.

[Interviewer]: And do you remember what you said during your speech at the --?

[Ken Hammond]: Yeah. It was real short. What had happened was -- I think it was Tom Hayden had been at a rally at Rutgers on Sunday, and had issued a call for a national student strike. And basically that’s what I said. I got up and I said, “Tom Hayden’s issued a call for a national student strike, and given what’s been going on here, I think we ought to organize a strike committee, and we ought to try to move our activities into that.” And so I said, “What do you want to do? Should we have a strike?” And people who could hear me -- of course, we didn’t have any mics, we didn’t have a bullhorn, we didn’t have anything like that -- started chanting, started going “Strike, strike, strike.” But that was maybe a few hundred people out of a couple thousand people that were out there. And that was, again, right at the point where the Guard started putting the heat on us, so that just sort of dissipated.

[Interviewer]: And where were you when the Guard opened fire?

[Ken Hammond]: When they opened fire? Okay. Well, I started, I was right down by the [Victory] Bell housing. I was standing on top of the Bell housing when I do the thing, when I call for the strike. I’m the guy in Michener’s book -- the unidentified radical, he says -- standing on top of there. I’ve got this plaid flannel shirt on, you can tell [it’s] me in the picture. So from when they started coming across, I moved with the group that went south of Taylor Hall, down the hill, and then through the Prentice parking lot, down along where the fence use to be by the football practice field. Some people I knew, some people I didn’t know, but there were a bunch of us down there. So we were coming right up to that fence. Of course, the Guard units were just on the other side of that fence. But the hill was fairly steep right there, so we were kind of running up the hill and looking through the fence, kind of dropping back a little bit, then going up. And we were winging rocks over the fence at them and everything, nothing very effective. But that’s where I was standing, so I got to see -- Company D, I guess it is -- gather, and Myron Pryor go around and talk to each of them, tap them on the helmet, they’d pull aside the gas mask. And he shouted something in everybody’s ear. Then they were the ones, of course, who went back up the hill, and turned around, and fired down into the crowd.

When they started going off the practice field, back towards the hill, there was a gate in the fence, and we all funneled through that. So I was literally running towards the bottom of Taylor Hill, across the practice football field when they started firing. I was -- oh, I don’t know -- twenty, thirty feet from Jeff Miller when he got hit.

[Interviewer]: Really?

[Ken Hammond]: Yeah. And I just went flat. But I remember dirt kicking up, and realizing that they were actually shooting at us, being a little creeped out, to say the least. So I was out there. So I just lay flat and hoped they didn’t hit me. Then when it stopped, [I] got up in that little stretch of silence that there was, when everybody was just like, whoa. Then I started looking around.

My wife and I had a policy that we always split up when things got hairy, because we didn’t want to -- you want to be clear in those situations. But at that point, I immediately started looking for her, and I found her very quickly. Then we just had to figure out what we were going to do. We only stayed around a short while, because you didn’t know what was going down, and A) having just stood up and been the only visible speaker, and B) just being identifiable as having been in SDS and all that kind of stuff, I was a little concerned that there might be some immediate repercussions. So we got off campus, and got out of the area later on that afternoon.

[Interviewer]: Do you think that’s one of the reasons that you became one of the Kent 25?

[Ken Hammond]: Oh, sure. I mean, I was recognizable. Would have been insulting not to have been indicted, in some ways.

[Interviewer]: Talk about that. When did you find out that you had been indicted?

[Ken Hammond]: Well, you know, it wasn’t easy. [laughs] I don’t know, anyhow, if you’ve talked about that. I’m sure you have with some of the other 25, but --

[Interviewer]: Actually, you’re the first I think I’ve interviewed.

[Ken Hammond]: Oh, really? Okay, well, it was interesting. Immediately after May 4th, I went up to Cleveland. I stayed in Cleveland for a little while. And the FBI started coming around. They went and interviewed my parents and stuff like that. And I tried to keep a pretty low profile. It’s not like we were hiding out at that point. We stayed with my mother-in-law over on the west side for awhile. Then we decided to leave the area and go up to Buffalo. There was a group of comrades up there that we were tight with. Jim Powrie from here was up there, his brother Steve was at SUNY Buffalo. We knew people up there. Of course, we’d been up there for that conference on May the second already.

So we moved up to Buffalo , and we thought we would stay there for awhile, become part of the organizing work up there. We were up there for about a month, and then early in June, Jim Powrie was the last of the people from the Music and Speech incident to have his case come up for trial. And everybody else -- Jeff Powell, and Collin Neiburger, and Rick Erickson, and Howey Emmer -- everybody else had gotten, like, six months over in Ravenna, and we thought, you know, okay. So Jim and I drove down from Buffalo, and came over to Ravenna . He went into the courtroom, I stayed outside. And they gave him seven years, right, because this was after stuff, and they were not in a happy mood -- the cops, the judges and everything. And the attorney, Ben Sheerer -- who was one of the legal people, who helped the SDS out and stuff -- he kind of told me to make myself scarce.

From there I went off and spent the rest of the summer kind of semi-underground. I was up in the Thousand Islands for a while, then I was in the woods of central New Hampshire for a while at a place. We stayed at a camp in New Hampshire that had a lot of connections with the antiwar movement and all that stuff, and civil rights movement and everything. And a fellow named Carl Braden and his wife -- Carl and Anne Braden, who were long time civil rights activists in the deep south, and who had been in and out of court, in and out of jail, and their house was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan once and all that kind of stuff. They came and visited the camp, and we had dinner together one evening, and Carl Braden talked to me about the situation, and he basically told me that I shouldn’t be on the run. I should be taking the fight to them. It was a very moving moment for me, and made me realize he was right, and that I needed to come back.

So we did. We packed up and we came back to Ohio. That was at the beginning of September, and that was just when the Grand Jury was going into session. I sort of expected that I’d get subpoenaed and all that, but they never did. They never contacted, they never asked any of the lawyers about me or anything like that. I was staying over in Akron with Billy Whitaker and his family.

Then October comes along, and they issue the indictments, but they don’t say who got indicted. They never tell anybody. So finally, I went over with my wife Marilyn, and Billy Whitaker went along, and we took John Kifner, the reporter from the New York Times. I figured if you get the New York Times involved, you’re probably in a little safer position. And we went over, and we went to the office of one of the guys who was the prosecutor -- Perry something, what the hell was his last name? I can’t remember -- and said, “You got the indictments here?”

He said, “Nope. Go over to the Courthouse.”

So we went over to the Courthouse, and we said, “Am I indicted?”

And they were, like, “What do we know? Let me check.”

And they went back. Finally they came out, and they said, “Yeah, yeah, you’re indicted.”

I said, “Well, here I am.”

So we went in, and they booked me and all that stuff, and we posted bail, and I got right back out. But it was a really weird process, because they didn’t send out a dragnet or anything. They weren’t going out and actually arresting people. They sort of waited for people to come to them. It was strange, but so many things were.

Then I was one of the Kent 25. Got involved very quickly organizing the Kent Legal Defense Fund. We had some meetings down at JB’s, up on Water Street. That’s when Bill Kunstler was here. We had wonderful attorneys. David Scribner from National Council on Civil Rights came out, saved us all in many ways. That got all that started. Of course that went on for the next fourteen months until the December of ’71.

[Interviewer]: And then it was finally resolved?

[Ken Hammond]: Yeah. December of ’71, they started bringing the "25" cases to trial, and they were unable to get any serious convictions. Of course by that time we had a liberal Democrat as governor, John Gilligan, and he was embarrassed by the whole thing. So when we got to about the fourth case -- they couldn’t get convictions, and even the Portage County judges were having problems with the cases -- the new Attorney General ordered the prosecutors to drop all further prosecution. It was like, December the 5th, or I forget exactly, but early December. Yeah, we went to court one morning, they got up and said, “It’s over,” and that was it. That was the end of it.

[Interviewer]: So the whole idea behind this whole legal battle is that people were essentially blaming the students and some faculty for the May 4 events?

[Ken Hammond]: Right. Yeah. The Grand Jury indicted the twenty-five -- all either students, or some young non-students, and one faculty member, Tom Lough.

[Interviewer]: Tom Lough.

[Ken Hammond]: Yeah. Tom Lough, a sociology prof[essor], because he had given a lecture in which he showed a diagram of how to make a Molotov cocktail. Even though nobody used Molotov cocktails to burn the ROTC building, they thought that was a problem.

The indictments were one thing, but the Grand Jury also issued a report in which they criticized the University -- especially the administration of the University -- for tolerating dissent and bad people like us and all this kind of stuff. Part of the problem, from a strictly legalist perspective, was that in the State of Ohio under statute, a Grand Jury can either issue indictments, or issue a report, but it can’t do both. So it was on the basis of that, as well as arguing that by issuing the report they were compromising the ability of the indicted people to receive a fair trial -- they were prejudging the guilt of those people -- that we took them into federal court up in Cleveland, and were successful in getting the report suppressed, but not in getting the indictments quashed.

[Interviewer]: And you were here at Kent State until 1972, you said --

[Ken Hammond]: Yeah. I came back to school in the Fall of -- not ’70 -- I guess ’71. Right, right. I started taking classes again in the fall of ’71, but I didn’t stay. It was still too crazy. I moved out to Colorado -- well, I lived in Kent . I was involved with the Kent Community Project downtown -- the record store, the bookstore, the natural food store, Wednesday free dinners and all that stuff -- through much of ’72 and into early ’73. And then, just had had enough. I was pretty burnt out after all of everything that had gone on, so in the Summer of ’73 moved out to Colorado, lived there for awhile, for about a year. Then I was in Massachusetts for a little while, and then wound up back in Kent in the Spring of ’75. I was here again, and I actually worked right here at the Kent State University Library for two years down in Acquisitions.

[Interviewer]: Really? You were in Acquisitions?

[Ken Hammond]: Yep. Marjorie was my boss. I can’t remember her last name now. That was when Alex Gildzen was the Special Collections Librarian, who lives in Santa Fe now. We email from time to time. And I was here then from May of ’75 until January of ’79, then moved out to Colorado again.

[Interviewer]: Were you involved in the Tent City incident?

[Ken Hammond]: Oh, yeah. I set up the first tent.

[Interviewer]: You did set up the first tent?

[Ken Hammond]: [laughs] Yeah. Which was -- it is interesting, because eventually I decided -- it was a great event, a great set of events around that. But when that came to an end, when it came time for everybody to get arrested, I felt that that was not the correct tactic at that point. So I didn’t stay in Tent City , I didn’t take the bust with everybody, because I didn’t believe that that was the best way to achieve the objectives that we were working for at that point. And that was okay. Alan Canfora and Chic and those people who sort of were most heavily involved in that, we disagreed about that, but that’s never been a problem.

[Interviewer]: You disagreed about -- ?

[Ken Hammond]: About the effectiveness of having a mass arrest. I liked the gesture -- the live-in as it were, the camp-in. That started, we had a march, a memorial march on May 4th that year. We went around, and I happened to have camping gear in the trunk of my car parked over in the visitor’s lot here. And Bill Arthrell and I actually it was, we were, like, “Let’s set up a tent.” So we ran down, we got stuff out of my car, and we ran up there while the march was going on, and when the march came to the site, we were ready to put up this tent. Then it just grew from that.

But, that was a symbolic gesture. As it went on, and people sort of got vested in the site and staying there, then the question became: at some point, the University’s going to come in and want to clear this, and what’s the best response to that? And the majority clearly felt that people should just take a stand and link arms, and stay and take the bust. I just disagreed with that. I thought that we could be more effective by pursuing other strategies, other approaches. I was very much in the minority at that point. That was okay. But on the other hand, I was able to help organize bail funds and stuff like that. So I did that. Got everybody out -- or not everybody, but got bunches of people out. And that was okay. But, yeah.

[Interviewer]: So, over the years -- you’ve obviously been halfway across the country -- have you still kept tabs on the events, or like the Memorial --

[Ken Hammond]: Yeah. I get back. My brother lives up in Cleveland, and my mom died in 2000, but until then she was living up in Cleveland. So I’ve been back bunches of times. In the eighties I came back -- well, through the seventies I came back pretty much every year. I was either living here, or even if I was in Colorado, I would come back. In the eighties it was different. I lived in China for about five years, so obviously I didn’t come back during that period. And then I was in Boston , and then I was in grad school. I was married and having kids. So I would get out here from time to time. I was out here in I think 1990 maybe, ’91 -- no, I didn’t get here in ’90, I got here in ’91, that was it. Because my youngest daughter -- oldest daughter was born April 21st of ’90, so I couldn’t come out that soon after. But then, by the mid-nineties, I sort of settled into coming every five years, and that’s sort of been the pattern with the SDS chapter, that we do a full reunion basically on the “0” and “5” years -- ’95, 2000, 2005, and now [2010]-- we have these big gatherings, and I always try to make it for those.

I’ve spoken a couple of times. I think I spoke maybe in 2000. I don’t remember which ones, but a few times. Then other times I’ve been through town, not for the reunions, but on other business, I always try to come by.

[Interviewer]: As a professor of history, do you feel that this event of May 4, 1970 is remembered in an accurate way today, or is there more that needs to be said?

[Ken Hammond]: Well, that’s a great question, because I have this sort of schizophrenic relationship with this particular event, because on the one hand, as a professional historian, one understands academic standards and practices and all that kind of stuff. I appreciate and endorse all that, and behave that way when I’m dealing with my own historical scholarship, which has nothing to do with the United States -- I’m a China historian. But when I deal with what happened here, I mean, it’s hard to -- I can’t wall it off. I can’t make it into a sort of objective thing. So, in my department we have a seminar that we teach, a graduate seminar called History, Myth, and Memory, and every time that it’s taught -- it’s taught on a two year rotation, so every other year -- I do a segment of the course about Kent, and about exactly that problem. That I’m an eyewitness, so I know what happened. But as an historian I recognize that you can assemble other eyewitnesses, who also know what happened, and we may not agree. So I can appreciate that intellectually, but this is something that obviously is too much a part of me as a person, as a consciousness, that I don’t try to be objective in that sense, because of course I think that I am objective. I think that what I saw and what I know is what I know.

So as I say, it’s kind of schizophrenic, and I kind of have to -- I’ve kind of gotten to be comfortable with that, that I have to deal with this in its own way. I talk about these events to my students. I’ve done some writing about it. Jim Powrie and I are working on a book about all this right now. I try not to be insanely polemical about it. But on the other hand, these are events that were not only dramatic in a macro-historical way, but were deeply passionate and deeply transformative in my own life, so it’s hard to sort of kick back from that.

[Interviewer]: Are there any other thoughts you’d like to share?

[Ken Hammond]: Well, the last few times that we have gathered here -- I think beginning in 2000, and then in ’05, and I know this year -- one of the things that’s gone on that has been interesting and sort of moving, but also perplexing, is that Alan Canfora and the people who have stayed local and young students that have come up here, have organized as part of the commemorative period, events or workshops, whatever you want to call them, where us now old geezers get together with young student activists of the present moment to talk, to exchange experiences or whatever. And that’s been very interesting, because of course something that I get asked when I speak about Kent, wherever that may be. Even I’ve talked about all this in China, and I get the same questions from the students in China as you get from people here, which is, Why isn’t there an antiwar movement today? Why are young people so not the same as that now? Why aren’t people rioting in the streets over the financial crisis, over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq , over one injustice or another? It’s not as though we live in a world full of justice and equality today. What’s with that? And it’s almost as if people expect us -- those of us of that sixties generation -- to be able to explain that. Or give them some magic formula that’s going to -- that they can, I don’t know, take the blue pill and suddenly everything, they’ll become radical activists.

And when we get together with these young people here, these are people who are active in things. But looping back to what we talked about a bit earlier, when you meet young activists today, they are largely activists about this or that. And that idea of a systemic critique, that idea of sort of seeing the task, seeing the mission as being truly fundamental change, radical in the literal sense of the term -- you need to go to the root of something -- that’s what’s missing. And I know that there are a myriad reasons for that. And as I said earlier too, one of them being that there’s no draft. That would focus people’s consciousness in a very different way, which is why if they can possibly avoid it, those in power will never reinstitute the draft, because it was the most effective mobilizing instrument that was out there.

But I just think that when we gather like this, the slogan here for many many years has always been, “Remember the past. Continue the struggle.” There’s a lot of remembering, and not so much continuing. I guess that now, those of us who were out on the hill that day, we’re getting old. I’m 60 years old, and I’ll keep coming to these as long as I can, but at some point we’re going to pass from the scene. And that point isn’t as far away as it used to be. And so I just, we sort of hope to find ways to seize the present moment, where things are so wacked, and specific moments, like the reunion here, as opportunities to reinvigorate or reengage or reignite some sort of passion about changing the world. Not just fixing a problem, but changing the world.

[Interviewer]: Ken, thank you very much for talking to me.

[Ken Hammond]: You bet. My pleasure.