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The tragedy at Jackson State never gained the traction the Kent State shootings did. The public was informed about the story due to significant coverage in major media. The investigations, grand juries, and trial continually returned the events to the public eye. Nevertheless, the episode did not gain a place in the nation’s public memory. Chapter 6 explores the twin processes of remembering and forgetting the shootings, especially the important role played by attitudes about race and its meaning in determining their course. Struggling to protect the memory of the Jackson State shootings, many people framed those who died as martyrs to the cause of racial justice. However, a white liberal preference for the student narrative, which allowed the negation of race, facilitated the nation’s public amnesia about Jackson State. A simplistic narrative of racial progress in which the shootings made a better future possible also facilitated the amnesia.

The conclusion returns to the Vietnam War era, focusing on the May 4, 1970 killing of students at Kent State University by National Guardsmen and its significance for conflicting understandings of democratic citizenship, patriotism, and war. Returning also to Langston Hughes’s poem, “Let America Be America Again,” it offers concluding reflections on the relationships between land, opportunity, patriotism, and legitimate exercises of government authority. It analogizes the closing of the American frontier and emergence of a cooperative understanding of citizenship in the progressive era to the present realities of a global civilization that has exhausted the available frontiers and must find the will to engage in cooperative global problem solving.

Although a decided majority of southern students were more conservative and less activist than students nationally, a distinct and embattled minority of antiwar dissidents on Dixie’s campuses mounted unprecedented protests. In so doing, they confronted the hostility of their peers, campus administrators, local officials, the southern media, and regional political leaders. Still, like antiwar students nationally, these protestors helped to keep the war’s agonies before the American people, to restrain the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and to convince local and national leaders that ending the war was essential to restoring domestic order and tranquility. This chapter examines the motives, actions, and influence of pro- and antiwar, white, black, and Chicano students in the South. Particular attention is given to student responses to the US invasion of Cambodia and the subsequent student deaths at Kent State University and Jackson State College in 1970.

Following the shootings at Jackson State College, students, police, government officials, and reporters fought for control of the story. Three primary narratives emerged. The first one accurately understood the shootings as another example of state violence against African Americans. The second sympathized with the victims, but emphasized their identity as students, linking the shootings at Jackson State and Kent State ten days earlier. A third counter-narrative, a racially infused account focused on law and order, blamed the young people at Jackson State for the violence. These narratives influenced the investigations, commissions, and legal proceedings, where the competing understandings had tangible stakes. A mayor’s bi-racial committee and the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest both demonstrated substantial understanding of the racialized causes of the shootings but had no legal standing. Alternatively, federal and county grand juries used the law and order narrative to demonize the students as criminals and justify the shootings.

This chapter delves into Richard Nixon’s notoriously passionate feelings about football, examining the ways in which it was at once an authentic, deeply meaningful experience for him and an inherently political means of polarizing the American public. Nixon invoked football and attended football games at strategic junctures throughout 1969 and 1970, sharpening his strategy to build a lasting political coalition, isolate the left, and cement Republican gains in Congress. Football, in this understanding, directly opposed everything disorderly and un-American. Yet it ultimately fell short and did not build a lasting electoral coalition.

Rallies were scheduled to protest the killings and the invasion; activist leaders announced support for a nationwide strike, black ministers met with their city council but received no answers. Demonstrations spread to colleges throughout the state and across the country, while Illinois students turned violent after an evening RU rally, breaking windows in several buildings. The strike began on Wednesday, with hundreds of picket lines across campus, the number growing throughout the week, so that by Friday the university was virtually closed, though Peltason refused to make the closure official. Ogilvie sent nine thousand guardsmen to the campus, calling for calm.

Bob Scott was governor during one of the most difficult periods in the 20^th century. His term coincided with black student activism, anti-Vietnam War protests, and school integration. North Carolina was the scene of building takeovers, marches, fire bombings, and riots. Scott responded by taking a tough law-and-order stance that offended many African-Americans and white liberals, but was popular among many white conservatives and moderates.

The end of the Illinois student movement came wrapped in the intertwined issues of the day, race and war, when first, a young black man named Edgar Hoults was fatally shot in the back by Champaign police, and then next day, President Richard Nixon announced an invasion of the sovereign state of Cambodia. Hoults was guilty of having an expired driver’s license, Cambodia of harboring North Vietnamese. Champaign community leaders demanded an explanation from police, U.S. congressmen demanded one from the president, and neither received satisfaction. Four days later Ohio National Guardsmen shot and killed four protesters at Kent State.

The final chapter reviews the main conclusions of the book and raises one more pathway, by Elaine Scarry, into understanding war through people’s experiences and curations Those who die in war can be interpreted and revivified by many people, groups, and institutions, each curating loss in its own terms. That there are many contenders for war memory and authority reflects a social institution that is highly decentralized in its sites, experiences and effects. To grasp this institution and the wars of our time requires gathering knowledge from locations ordinary and official, expert and everyday, profound and prosaic, literary, journalistic, and artistic—and on all sides of a war.