Students carry a mock coffin symbolizing protesters killed at Kent State during a rally May 6, 1970, on the campus of Southern Illinois University.
“A nation driven to use weapons of war against its youth is a nation on the edge of chaos.”
— “The Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest”[1]
“How do you cover a riot?”
Bob Carr paused before answering, as if mentally unspooling memories of his 21-year-old self in the streets of Carbondale, attempting to make sense of what was happening around him.
“You tried to keep moving around, talking to people, piecing together small things to get a larger picture,” he said. “Is it perfect? No. Is it accurate? No. Is it directionally correct? Absolutely. That what I was striving for, to be as directionally correct as possible.”[2]
Directionally correct. It’s not a concept Carr picked up from the journalism courses he took at Southern Illinois University. But it served him well as a student journalist covering one of the biggest stories of his college years: the campus unrest of May 1970 following the shooting of anti-war protesters at Kent State University in Ohio. Directionally correct. Follow the action. Collect the facts as you go, and let the facts show you the way forward.
“You wanted to be in the middle of it, and you wanted to know what was really going on,” he said about surfing waves of riot and confusion in Carbondale. “You were kind of inside it.”[3]
Protests took place at a third of the nation’s 2,500 colleges and universities in the week after National Guard troops fired on Vietnam War protesters at Kent State, killing four and wounding nine. Some of the wounded were watching the protest from a distance. Two of the dead had been walking from one class to another. Students at more than 400 campuses declared themselves on strike as news spread across the country.[4] By the end of the month, it is estimated that 4 million of the nation’s more than 7 million college students had participated in a demonstration.[5] The President’s Commission on Campus Unrest found that most protests were peaceful; only five percent of campuses experienced violence.[6]
SIU was rocked by seven days of civil disorder, from May 6 until May 12. More than 500 people were arrested during the period of unrest,[7] and more than 1,000 National Guardsmen saw duty in Carbondale before calm returned.[8] University officials decided to close the school after a final march by 5,000 demonstrators surrounded the on-campus residence of SIU President Delyte Morris.[9] Violent protests also took place that month at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and the Chicago Circle campus of Northern Illinois University, but SIU-C was the only public university in Illinois to close for the remainder of the spring term.[10]
Decades later, student journalists who worked with Carr at the Daily Egyptian, the SIU newspaper, retain vivid memories of those seven days in May. Even if some of the precise details are muddied by the passage of time, the images and the feelings they invoke remain true to their experience.
Protesters push over wrought iron fence along the north side of Wheeler Hall lawn on the first day of conflict between students and security forces.
“I remember they had a wrought iron fence around this ROTC building, and I remember the fence going down,” said John Lopinot, who was a photographer for the Daily Egyptian. “It was a wrought iron fence with spikes on top of it, and I remember a girl getting stabbed by the fence, punctured in the stomach.”[11]
Steve Brown, a Daily Egyptian reporter, stopped for gas after leaving the newspaper when he encountered police officers who had engaged rioters earlier that night. “A squad car pulled up while I was getting gas, the windshield totally smashed out of the car. One of the guys in the car had this big bandage around his head, so he apparently had been in the car when somebody threw a brick through the windshield. I had a moment of ‘Yeah, I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ ”[12]
Photographer Ralph Kylloe, who shared protesters’ outrage about Kent State, followed a mob intent on committing mayhem inside an office building on the SIU campus. “I went in there, and even though one of the fire alarms had been pulled already, I pulled one of the fire alarms as well. Just out of stupidity. Just out of my own little desire to let everyone know I was unhappy.”[13]
P.J. Heller was a reporter for the Daily Egyptian that academic quarter. He “moonlighted” during the campus unrest as a correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat newspapers. “I have a funny memory of a reporter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat coming to my house and hanging out there drinking beer while the rest of us were all out covering the news,” Heller said. “He had brought his trusty gas mask with him.”[14]
Ellen Matheson Ramp’s hallmark moment came at a telephone booth across from a small, strip shopping center at the north edge of the campus. She had been sent to the area to report what was happening to the Daily Egyptian newsroom. Ramp, who had not covered any protests at SIU before that day, said she was unprepared for a large crowd of people filling the street, arms linked, chanting anti-war slogans and marching directly at her.
“I could hear them before I could see them,” she said. “They crested a little rise, and I thought, ‘Good lord.’ I observed them for a little while and got on the line to the paper. I don’t know if they could hear the big crowd coming or it was my excitement, but at that point, they said, ‘Get out of there and come back.’ ”[15]
Reporter Rich Davis said police couldn’t be counted on to differentiate between student journalists and student demonstrators.
“I was with an Egyptian photographer … and something happened,” he said. “It didn’t take much to get police to chase you – one student throwing a rock or a brick or taunting – but police, it may have been state police, started charging. I recall holding up our press passes to show them we were not just students, and the police kept coming. So, we took off running because we were pretty sure they weren’t going to recognize us as journalists.”[16]
Students who worked for the Daily Egyptian were supervised by Journalism Department faculty, all veteran newsmen who had come to SIU to pursue advanced degrees. They organized the coverage, dispatched the reporters and attempted to keep their undergraduate charges as safe as possible.
“I have often said that I did my best teaching during the turmoil,” said Lenny Granato, who had worked for United Press International before arriving at SIU. “Taking students into the streets was risky, but hell, journalism’s risky. We taught them little things like wear shoes you can run in and big things like never get between the police and the demonstrators.”[17]
In the beginning
It took only 20 minutes for President Richard Nixon to make college students apoplectic. That was the length of his televised address on April 30, when Nixon informed the nation that he had ordered U.S. troops into Cambodia in order to secure “the just peace we all deserve.”[18]
The announcement secured no peace on the home front. From Stanford University on the West Coast to Princeton University on the East Coast and on scores of campuses in between, students marched, sang, sat down, threw rocks, occupied buildings and stopped going to classes. ROTC buildings were burned or looted at Hobart College in Geneva, N.Y., the University of Maryland and Depauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, among other places.[19] And that was just in the first two days.
The Daily Egyptian of Saturday, May 2, carried a small notice at the bottom of Page 1 that a rally to protest American involvement in Cambodia had been scheduled for the previous night, May 1, starting at 10 p.m., too late to make the paper’s press deadline.[20] The Southern Illinoisan reported that an estimated 150 people gathered for the rally just north of campus in the parking lot of the former Moo and Cackle restaurant.
Police moved in when protesters began tossing bricks at passing cars and dumping trash in the street. Straw from a construction site was used to build a fire, and windows of nearby businesses were broken. As police attempted to disperse the crowd, a tear gas bomb was thrown at them, injuring three officers. Meanwhile, SIU Security officers were dousing firebombs thrown at a building containing the office of Wesley Fishel, a key figure in the Center for Vietnamese Studies and Programs, whose existence on campus animated anti-war activists.[21]
Carbondale police the next day notified the FBI that 25 persons had been arrested in connection with the rally.[22] Police Chief Jack Hazel reported that the “majority arrested were out-of-town hippie people, and all arrested were hippie element.” Hazel stated that 50 to 100 “strange individuals, definitely hippie element,” were in Carbondale at the time. He attributed their presence to a planned rock festival that had been blocked at the last minute by a judge’s order.[23]
Hazel’s assessment was at odds with newspaper accounts. The Southern Illinoisan, quoting city police, reported that 16 persons had been arrested, all but two of whom had Carbondale addresses. The newspaper said the names of all but three were listed as SIU students in a student-faculty telephone directory.[24] The Daily Egyptian reported on May 5 that of eight detainees who showed up the next Monday for their initial court hearing, seven were SIU students.[25]
However, the lead headline in that morning’s Daily Egyptian was the real news: “Kent State confrontation, 4 students die.” Inserted into the article was bulletin that Student Body President Dwight Campbell had scheduled an emergency meeting of the Student Senate to consider joining a national student strike in response to the killings.[26] Jim Hodl was laying out the front page when alarm bells starting ringing from the Daily Egyptian’s wire service teletype machines. There was a general policy against running national news across the top of Page 1 in the student newspaper, but Hodl made an exception for Kent State. “I thought it was big enough,” he said.[27]
Reporter Win Holden said he didn’t learn about the shootings until he got to the Daily Egyptian newsroom on the afternoon of May 4. “There was a pall in that office. There were a lot of long faces,” he said. “I didn’t know what had happened. I thought the president had been shot or something. I didn’t have a clue, and then somebody told me that a student had been killed at Kent State.”
Holden said the enormity of the event didn’t hit him until the wire services transmitted the photo of an anguished Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of 20-year-old Jeffrey Miller, one of the four students killed. “And then we got the picture over the wire. And I remember staring at that and just being numbed … It was unbelievable.”[28]
That evening, a small group of Carbondale’s activists met at the Lutheran Student Center near campus to strategize their response to the day’s events. It would begin, they decided, with a rally on campus on Wednesday, May 6, in front of Morris Library.[29] The next day, May 5, the Student Senate endorsed the nationwide strike of colleges and universities. Student Body President Dwight Campbell called it “a life and death” situation. “What it boils down to is that we’re involved in a civil war,” he said. “There’s a situation of emergency here and everywhere.”[30]
We have a plan
Harry Hix and Lenny Granato had been strategizing on their own ever since police and students clashed at the end of January outside of Woody Hall, home of the Vietnamese Studies Center. The violence of that demonstration convinced both men that the young journalists of the Daily Egyptian soon would have to respond to more serious situations.
Their coverage plan relied on teams with pre-assigned responsibilities, or “beats,” in journalism parlance. “We got to talking and said if something comes up, we’re going to need photographers at certain places; we’re going to need reporters at certain places,” said Hix, the faculty managing editor. “We’re going to need someone who knows how to take information over the phone and can be trusted to rewrite it accurately. … Who are the people we think would be better for this?”[31]
Leonard “Lenny” Granato was a former UPI reporter who helped organize coverage of May 1970 riots.
Granato said two teams were organized to handle on-the-spot reporting, each consisting of two reporters and a photographer. Granato would supervise one of the so-called “street teams”; the other would be led by Nelson Brooks, a civil service employee who was photography manager for the Daily Egyptian. A third team would be reporter Bob Carr and photographer Ralph Kylloe, both of whom were the newspaper’s primary conduit to Carbondale’s radical community.[32]
Other students were assigned to specific locations around Carbondale where they could safely observe and relay information by telephone, such as the city police department and SIU Security Office, as well as student residence halls. Some students would remain in the Daily Egyptian building, where they would take information over the phone, assemble stories from notes and do other work necessary to publish the newspaper. Students would be rotated on the two supervised reporting teams so that fresh eyes and legs could be kept on the story. Wayne Markham, the student managing editor, and Hix would oversee editing and production functions at the newspaper office.[33]
Hix said the safety of students was paramount. He said the street teams were instructed to avoid getting too close to the action. Reporters were told to watch the back of photographers, who would be vulnerable when looking through the viewfinder of their cameras.[34] If physical danger were imminent, teams were to withdraw immediately. “I felt a personal responsibility for the safety of our staff members since they were students,” Hix later wrote about the paper’s coverage plans. “I did not feel that a reporter incapacitated through injury was of help to our coverage.”[35]
Harry Hix at the Daily Egyptian
It was a concern for safety that Hix said influenced what probably was his most controversial call – keeping women off the front lines of riot duty.
“The way I had been brought up, you didn’t assign women to do certain things,” he said. “I remember talking to one of the female reporters and telling her, ‘I’m sorry, but if I were your daddy, I would not want you out there, and I will not send you out there and then have to call him and tell him I sent you out there and got you hurt.”[36]
Reporter Marty (Francis) Milcarek recalled Hix’s reference to calling fathers but not that she as a female was ineligible for certain assignments. She was one of the students who worked the telephones and contributed to the stories that would appear each day of the Carbondale unrest under a staff byline. “At the time, I guess I felt good about the fact that I was helping write the final story,” said Milcarek, whose first job after college was with United Press International. “It did not stand out to me that I was not out there (in the streets), doing that (reporting).”
Granato drew on his experiences as a UPI correspondent covering urban riots in New York City and Plainfield, New Jersey. “He was mimicking that for our coverage of the riots, with people stationed at certain points along the streets,” Milcarek said. “I can remember him giving us huge things full of dimes so we could call at pay phones along the way as students were marching.”[37]
Hix said it was critical that students worked as a team. When and if trouble broke out, they were to first notify him or Granato and then begin their pre-assigned tasks. If they hadn’t been assigned a job, they were to report to the Daily Egyptian newsroom to be available as needed. “They bought into it, for which I am thankful,” Hix said. “As soon as something happened, they began calling in or trickling in and taking their places.”
Day 1 – Wednesday, May 6
It was beautiful day for a riot. Daytime temperatures in Carbondale that month already had topped 80 degrees, and humidity, a staple of Southern Illinois summers, had begun to stir from winter hibernation. Spring rains had given way to sunny, blue skies dotted with white, meringue-like clouds. On the wide expanse of grass in front of Morris Library, where the green lawn sloped toward classroom buildings about 600 feet away, an estimated 3,000 students assembled around a wooden platform perched on the library steps.
Speakers included Jackson County State’s Attorney Richard E. Richman. He was followed by Carbondale Chancellor Robert MacVicar, who the day before had declared a three-day period of mourning for the students killed at Kent State. Both men were heckled as they advised students to “keep their cool” and to respect university traditions of civil discourse.[38]
Student speakers were not in a conciliatory mood. “Everybody’s talking about violence,” said Nick Fera, a member of the Student Senate. “But the only people who talk about violence are the ones who are perpetrating it on us.” Bill Moffett, a SIU graduate student and spokesman for the Southern Illinois Peace Committee, the leading anti-war organization, blamed campus turmoil on the “police, the National Guard and the repressive apparatus of the state.” Student body president Dwight Campbell got a standing ovation when he took the stage. He told students not to “wait for people to get killed” before expressing their feelings. “Them cats don’t want flowers,” Campbell said of the slain Kent State protesters. “They want you to carry on the struggle where they left off.”[39]
A mock coffin was carried through the crowd and onto the platform, preceded by a banner that read “WE MOURN KENT STATE.” The rally’s final speaker, a young woman, was supposed to conclude by leading the crowd in a chant. For some reason, she hesitated, and Ray Lenzi, a former student body president who was part of the ad hoc strike committee, whispered in her ear: “Start chanting, ‘On strike. Shut it down.’ ”[40] Rally organizers had been following a carefully crafted script, but for the next several hours, events would unfold more like Newton’s Third Law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Thanks to a detailed chronology compiled for the SIU President’s Office by Max Turner, a university archivist and professor of government, the subsequent events can be timed to the minute. At 1:10 p.m., about half of the crowd in front of the library moved toward Lawson Hall, a classroom building on the far side of the lawn, where demonstrators marched through the first-floor hallway, pulling fire alarms and exhorting their fellow students to join them.
Bricks from Old Main became ammunition for student protesters in May 1970.
A half-hour later, protesters had made it to Woody Hall, just west of Lawson, where windows became the target of rocks. Demonstrators entered the building and ripped out phones, overturned file cabinets and committed other mischief before being run out by campus security. At 1:44 p.m., all shifts of the Carbondale Police Department were called to duty. At 2 p.m., assistance was requested from the Illinois State Police. By that time, protesters had shifted their attention to nearby Wheeler Hall, where ROTC offices were located. Initial attempts to enter the building were repulsed by SIU police.[41]
Between Wheeler and Woody halls were piles of charred rubble surrounded by a wire fence. It was all that remained of Old Main, the university’s oldest structure, which had been destroyed by fire in June 1969. The university’s board of trustees had decided in April to have the debris removed and the site landscaped.[42] Now, workers were seen passing bricks from the ruins of the historic structure to demonstrators to use in their assaults against Woody and Wheeler halls. In another spot, the construction fence was pushed down, and more bricks and pieces of lumber wound up in the hands of protesters, who surged back and forth between the two buildings.
A large group of protesters rushed the Bursar’s Office inside Woody Hall, where Dean of Students Wilbur Moulton blocked the doorway. Moulton was struck in the mouth by a student.[43] Daily Egyptian photographer Ralph Kylloe described what happened next.
“That was the sort of thing that started it all off,” said Kylloe. “Then, all the students were ejected from the building, and the police were outside, maybe 50 of them in full riot gear – helmets, clubs and everything else. They called them batons, but they were clubs. One of the things I remember was one of the police grabbed a woman by the hair and just threw her to the ground. … One of the students picked up a 2-by-4 and threw it at the cop who did that and hit him right in the head and knocked him down … And then, bottles and stones and bricks started being thrown back and forth.”[44]
Chancellor Robert MacVicar talks to protesters while standing on the hood of a car.
Chancellor Robert MacVicar arrived around 2:45 p.m. and climbed on the hood of a parked car so that he could address the crowd of young people who pressed in from three sides, filling the street and the space between the buildings. John Lopinot’s photographs captured a stern-faced MacVicar pointing into the crowd, while students listened nonchalantly. MacVicar ordered police to withdraw at 3:15 p.m., and protesters immediately occupied Wheeler and Woody halls. Small fires were started in both buildings, but they were extinguished quickly by the student occupiers. Inside Wheeler Hall, Bill Moffett counseled students to not be destructive even as the ROTC offices were being trashed.
Moffett later met with MacVicar, Moulton and other officials outside Wheeler to present a list of demands. They included: removal of the Vietnamese Study Center and ROTC; amnesty for those arrested in previous study center protests; a statement condemning American involvement in Cambodia; and the disarming of campus police. MacVicar suggested holding a vote on ROTC; as for the Vietnamese Studies Center, he asked for proof of its ties with the CIA or military activity in Southeast Asia. When students continued to press their demands, Moulton commented, “There isn’t anything you can do with people like that.”[45]
Students occupy Wheeler Hall and the offices of the SIU ROTC program.
At 4:30 p.m., Jackson County Sheriff Raymond Dillinger requested that Illinois Gov. Richard Ogilvie order National Guard troops to Carbondale.[46] That was about the time protesters at Wheeler Hall got the idea of marching through the downtown business district. By 5:30 p.m., an estimated 1,000 people stepped north on Illinois Avenue, filling the broad street that also is designated as U.S. 51.[47]
“The images I have are of neither side knowing exactly what to do or how to do it or how they should act,” said Bob Carr. “The people who were marching didn’t think that the folks in authority or wearing uniforms had any clue as to what they actually were thinking or feeling. They didn’t feel violent; they were just outraged at what the country was doing. People in authority were saying, ‘Holy shit! Here come all these kids! They’re going to try to do terrible things, probably to me, and I’ve got to protect myself. I’ve got to protect my property, and I’ve got to protect the citizens of this town who don’t want any part of this. Communication? Not really.”[48]
Photographs never forget
Ralph Kylloe ran to the front of the line of march and began taking photographs. One of them became emblematic of the week of disorder in Carbondale. It shows a mass of people streaming down a hill with buildings of the SIU campus visible in the background. The marchers are young, mostly white and mostly male, although a few females and African-Americans are visible. Many of the protesters have locked arms and appear to be chanting or singing. Raised, clinched fists can be spotted here and there in the mass of people.
At the front of the march is an unlikely parade marshal – a young man known around Carbondale as “Anteater,” who walked his motorcycle down Illinois Avenue in advance of the crowd, a passenger tucked in behind him on the bike. The photo wasn’t published by the Daily Egyptian until May 12 when much of the turmoil already had occurred.[49]
Protesters break into Woody Hall on first day of campus disturbances.
The peaceful procession followed the usual Carbondale path of protest – north on Illinois Avenue (U.S. 51) to Main Street (Illinois Route 13), west to University Avenue and then south to campus. When protesters arrived back at Woody Hall around 6:10 p.m., another assault was made on the building. Finding the east entrance doors locked, a wooden street barricade from the Old Main demolition site was used as a battering ram.[50] Lopinot captured the whole sequence on film, with clear images of the students who bashed in the doors, but those photos were never seen outside of the Daily Egyptian newsroom.
Granato said there was a general policy against using photographs in which individuals could be identified doing something illegal, in order to avoid raising the interest of law enforcement. “During the coverage, we used girlfriends and wives to smuggle undeveloped film back to the DE so it could not be found on photographers and reporters who might get hassled and searched,” Granato said. “Once the film had been developed and the night’s pix selected, the unused shots were taken away from the DE for safekeeping.”[51]
Ken Garen, one of three principal Egyptian photographers, along with Lopinot and Kylloe, said the photo staff worried that authorities might try to confiscate film negatives and unpublished prints. “We as a group decided … that we would keep our negatives away from prying eyes and store them offsite,” he said. Students already feared that administrators might use photos to punish them, and Garen said photographers did not want their job of documenting events made even harder. “We felt that was the last thing we needed to have happen from our personal perspective – to have the worst fears of students realized,” he said.[52]
Bill Harmon, who took over as faculty manager editor from Hix that summer, said the photo policy continued under his watch – with the knowledge and support of Journalism Department Chairman Howard Long.
“After the riots and all, some officials came to the newsroom, came to him (Long) and wanted all our outtakes of film and photos,” Harmon said. “He told them no. He didn’t have them; they had been spirited away, and they were not in that newsroom.” Harmon said Long had been tipped off ahead of time, and his instructions had been simple: “He said, ‘Get those negatives and those prints out of there.’ ”[53]
Garen said he and the other photographers did not avoid taking pictures of students or police behaving badly. “My view on it was that if they were in a public place doing a public thing, then it was my job and duty to record and report it, trying to do it in a fair way,” he said. “I think we all felt that way.”[54]
Lopinot said decisions about what pictures to publish ultimately rested with Harry Hix and Nelson Brooks. “I remember there were discussions about what to run and what kind of pictures to run because the pictures would do more damage to both sides than the stories would,” said Lopinot, who would have a long career as a photojournalist with the Palm Beach Post in Florida. “It was handled in a very professional manner.”[55]
An estimated 300-400 students entered Woody Hall after the entrance was breached and began ransacking offices of the Vietnamese Studies Center. SIU police moved into the building, eventually clearing it of demonstrators, who then gathered outside and continued to pelt law officers with rocks and other debris. Protesters and police then settled into a pattern of behavior for the next two hours. Police would charge clumps of students, who would scatter and then reform to continue the engagement.[56]
Ralph Kylloe was among the casualties of the long day of protest. The Daily Egyptian photographer went down under a policeman’s baton during one of the final charges. Kylloe said he was standing off to one side, taking photographs, when he sensed someone approaching him from behind. “I didn’t hear him, but for some reason or other, I felt an ax handle coming down behind me. It was an intuitive thing; I threw my arm up and he clubbed me in the head, but also primarily my elbow. I was out. That was it.”[57]
Lenny Granato said he and Nelson Brooks took Kylloe to the student health center to be checked out.[58] Lopinot later snapped a photo of Kylloe mugging for the camera with Ken Garen and Brooks in the Daily Egyptian offices. “We gave him an award,” Lopinot said.[59]
As night fell, security forces held the high ground around Woody and Wheeler halls, reinforced by members of the Illinois National Guard.[60] Students lined streets adjacent to the campus, many carrying bricks and pieces of lumber. The awkward standoff continued until after midnight.[61] At least 55 people were injured during nearly eight hours of protest, including 18 police officers. None of the injuries were serious. Nineteen persons were arrested. All were identified as SIU students, except for one Carbondale High School student, one student from Michigan State University and one former SIU student.[62] No one could imagine that it was only the beginning.
“I’m not saying the students didn’t do wrong,” Rich Davis said. “I think there were times when the students were looking to vandalize and were getting a thrill out of throwing rocks, whether they thought it was for a good reason or not. … At the same time, there were police who sometimes indiscriminately clubbed students. I don’t think the police were without blame either.”[63]
Soldiers of the Illinois National Guard arrive in Carbondale to help maintain order.
And in this corner …
Southern Illinois University had a formal plan to deal with civil disorder on campus. It gave the job of protecting educational assets to the university’s police department, a state-recognized law enforcement agency with full authority in any county where SIU owned property or had interests. Details of its riot control strategy were spelled out in a so-called “Operational Plan” for civil disturbances, which stated that the primary objective was to “maintain or restore law and order within the campus community, specifically, and to assist such maintenance within the community of Carbondale and environs.” The department was tasked to perform its mission with “the maximum effort while utilizing the minimum amount of force.”[64]
Personnel resources enumerated in the document show why SIU Security would need help to contain any large-scale unrest. The department had 45 sworn officers for a campus of 23,000 students, plus a 25-person student auxiliary called the Saluki Patrol. If even 5 percent of the enrollment went on a rampage (1,150 students), that would produce 16 rioters for each security officer. The city of Carbondale was in no better position; it had 24 officers for a population of 25,816 persons (excluding the campus). Combined, the ratio of lawbreakers to law officers still would be approximately 12:1 in favor of lawbreakers. The Jackson County Sheriff Department consisted of six deputies, plus the sheriff, which was not enough to appreciably improve the odds for law enforcement. Of the three agencies, only SIU security kept a supply of tear gas and smoke grenades on hand, although Carbondale police officers did carry mace.[65]
The university’s operational plan anticipated that Illinois State Police District 13 would be a major source of backup. The district had 123 officers, each with his own car and riot gear. The district also had a supply of gas grenades and gas projectiles. If further reinforcements were needed, three infantry companies of the Illinois National Guard could be tapped from armories in West Frankfort, Mount Vernon and Salem. The Carbondale armory, located about two miles from campus, housed a light truck company.[66]
Law enforcement did catch one break. Police agencies had planned to have extra manpower available during a large rock music festival set for May 8-10. Although a judge had pulled the plug on the music, both SIU and Carbondale police had cancelled all days off and had scheduled officers to work 12-hour shifts. Illinois State Police were on standby; troopers also were working 12-hour shifts in anticipation of a large influx of young people to the area.[67] All of them would be called upon as the climate in Carbondale worsened.
Day 2 – Thursday, May 7
Bob Carr wanted to see the headline before the newspaper went to press. He knew what he had witnessed. He knew what had happened. He wanted to make sure readers of the Daily Egyptian did, too.
Carr had returned to the newspaper office from the scene of rioting in downtown Carbondale. A peaceful sit-in had turned violent after police and the Illinois National Guard unleashed tear gas on thousands of people occupying the intersection U.S 51 and Illinois 13. As police pinched in on the crowd from three sides, National Guard troops advanced from campus, marching sidewalk to sidewalk in a single line, bayonets on rifles. The crowd scattered between the two forces through a milky haze of tear gas, accompanied by the sound of breaking glass and young voices raised in fear and anger.[68]
“I don’t remember the actual reason the police did open up with tear gas,” Carr said, “but I remember at the end of it, running back to the newspaper and saying, ‘What’s the headline you’ve got for the story?’ Someone showed me the headline, and I said, ‘That’s not it at all. Here’s what happened: Police gas crowd; then, violence.’”[69]
The day had begun peacefully enough. Classes at SIU were suspended, and at an 11 a.m. memorial service for those slain at Kent State, Chancellor Robert MacVicar responded to demands made by protesters the previous day. MacVicar told the 300 or so students attending the service at the SIU Arena that faculty committees would review the presence of ROTC on campus and would conduct a thorough investigation of the Vietnamese Studies Center. He also pledged to sign a petition to Congress and President Richard Nixon expressing concern about the use of American combat troops in Cambodia and urging a peaceful resolution to the conflict.[70]
Beginning at 1 p.m., informal discussion sessions convened at 17 spots around campus. Topics ranged from the constitutionality of the war in Vietnam to the alienation of students and faculty. Attendance was sparse. About 100 students sat on the lawn of the Home Economics building between Wheeler and Woody Halls – a staging ground for protesters the previous day – to debate violent versus nonviolent tactics. Helping keep watch on the campus were some of the 650 Illinois National Guardsmen dispatched overnight to Carbondale. Stationed just outside of town were 89 Illinois State Police troopers.[71]
Daily Egyptian photographer Ken Garen was the first to spot the National Guard. He was student teaching that academic quarter at Mounds Meridan High School in Pulaski County, south of Carbondale. Garen said he would drive to campus after school and shoot evening assignments for the newspaper.
“I remember driving into campus one afternoon when, unannounced, all of a sudden, the National Guard pulled up,” he said. Garen stopped long enough to snap some photos of the troops . Then, he ran to the Daily Egyptian offices on the far side of Thompson Woods to deliver the news.[72] By the next day, the presence of armed soldiers was part of SIU’s new normal.
National Guard troops fix bayonets on the campus of Southern Illinois University
“My desk at the DE was facing the woods,” said Rich Davis. “As I recall, I looked out the window, and I saw these Guardsmen coming through the woods. …You’re used to being on this campus where you have all these freedoms. Campus is your own little world, and here you have people from the outside coming in, and the world is turned upside down. It was a very uneasy kind of feeling.”[73] Students weren’t the only ones having that reaction. Harry Hix called it “disconcerting” to step outside the newspaper office and see a National Guard Jeep parked there, barbed wire wrapped around the front bumper.[74]
As they interacted with soldiers over subsequent days, the student journalists came to see the Guard troops more as peers than an occupying force. Many of the Guardsmen were the students’ age, and some were college students themselves before being activated for riot duty. Win Holden tried to put himself in the soldiers’ boots. “I wondered what god-awful conflict must have existed with those people, particularly after the violence erupted, and they were compelled to herd their former friends and classmates, and in some cases, hit their former friends and classmates. They had to be every bit as terrified as everybody else was, but in a totally different, bizarre, role-reversal way.”[75]
Jim Hodl recalled speaking with four Guardsmen one night at the newspaper office. “Basically, what they were doing was looking for coffee, and we had a coffee pot. We invited them in and were talking to them to get an idea of what was going on. We found out that the National Guardsmen, because of Kent State, were not issued ammunition. They had empty guns, and they were scared as hell. They figured if the students came at them throwing rocks, they couldn’t defend themselves.”[76]
Students were not as empathetic toward the state police, who were older and didn’t have a good relationship with students. “I had more fear of the state police, to be truthful with you,” said Rich Davis. “I didn’t trust them, and I don’t know why I felt that way. But I certainly feared them more than I feared the Guardsmen, even though they had shot and killed the students at Kent State. Some of the Guardsmen seemed to be very friendly, young guys.”[77]
A protest goes sideways
At 4:29 p.m. on May 7, the Springfield FBI office wired FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., with a status report on the situation in Carbondale. Besides updating details of the previous day’s violence – 17 arrests, $15,000 property damage, 9 Illinois State troopers injured – the communique ended on a hopeful note: “…campus quiet at present time, and no anticipated violence expected to erupt. …”[78] That was about to change.
A new group calling itself the “People’s Union” held a 6 p.m. rally on the Morris Library lawn, ostensibly to discuss protest strategy going forward. About 2,000 people attended.[79] Classes were to resume on Friday, and a student boycott was proposed, with picket lines set up in front of classroom buildings. But what really fired the crowd’s imagination was the idea of checking out large numbers of books from the library, then checking them back in immediately, thus clogging up the works.[80]
“This huge crowd in front of the library just surges in the building almost at once. They get in there, and they’re just grabbing books of the shelf,” recalled photographer John Lopinot, who was covering the rally for the Daily Egyptian. “Then I remember cops showing up … They came into the library with bullhorns, and they were saying, ‘The library is closed; please leave at once; do not check out any books.’ ”[81]
As security officers were clearing the building, Lopinot said a student who had nothing to do with the protest got caught up in the action. “He was trying to get out of the library. and the cops kept telling him, ‘Leave at once; leave the books.’ And he said, ‘These are my books; they aren’t the library’s books.’ I remember the cops suddenly beating the crap out of this guy. I was standing there shooting photographs the whole time.”[82]
Lopinot’s pictures from the library did not appear in the Daily Egyptian, but a photo of the student being clubbed by police was published in the SIU yearbook, the Obelisk, along with a number of other Daily Egyptian photos from the May riots.[83] “The editor of the yearbook was a friend of mine,” Lopinot explained. “Her boyfriend was one of my pals. She asked me for pictures, and I gave them to her.”
Expelled from the library, students decided to march into Carbondale and occupy the intersection of U.S. 51 and Illinois 13 in the heart of town. Their numbers grew as they walked, attracting people from student housing areas. It was an organic sort of gathering that Bob Carr said was typical of mass protests.
“To say you can organize or control more than 10 people at that time and in that place is foolish,” Carr said. “What I remember about that evening … I think there was a protest planned, and I think it kind of morphed into something like let’s go down and do something more aggressive like block this intersection.”[84]
A 10:32 p.m. teletype from the Springfield FBI to Washington, D.C., showed how much had changed since local law enforcement had reported all quiet. An estimated 1,500 demonstrators now blocked Carbondale’s main highway intersection, and state police had moved into town to reroute traffic around the mass of people sitting in the street. Carbondale Police Chief Jack Hazel and state police now described the situation as “extremely tense.”[85]
A crowd estimated at 2,500 people occupy the intersection of U.S. 51 and Illinois 13 in the heart of downtown Carbondale on May 7, 1970.
Teams of Daily Egyptian reporters and photographers watched the crowd from the periphery of the intersection. Lenny Granato and his reporters were north of the intersection behind a group of police. P.J. Heller and Win Holden were east of the intersection near the Illinois Central railroad depot. Steve Brown was west of the intersection by Holden Hospital, now Memorial Hospital of Carbondale. The Daily Egyptian staff wore armbands fashioned from bandanas so they could spot one another in the crowd and to use as protection from tear gas.
“It was a beautiful night,” Win Holden recalled. “The weather was just spectacular. I remember all of us meeting at the newspaper office early in the afternoon, and there was just a feeling. Everybody said something’s going to come down. It’s been building too much. … Harry was very uncomfortable. He was very concerned about our safety.”[86]
Hix wasn’t the only one who worried. “I think everyone at the DE was concerned about their colleagues’ safety,” P.J. Heller said. “There was little to distinguish us on the street from the other students, so we could just as easily have been arrested or tear-gassed.”
The crowd at the intersection grew throughout the evening until eventually numbering an estimated 2,500 people. Curious Carbondale residents, SIU faculty, town kids drawn to the excitement, all took their place in the throng. Among them was Jerry Grotta, a journalism professor who had arrived in Carbondale in 1967 from Idaho State University. Grotta knew something about crowds and protest; in 1968, he had covered the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as a “stringer” or freelancer for newspapers in Idaho.
“I didn’t see any violence of any kind,” Grotta said. “At the time, it was singing and chanting and slogans and all of that. It was a big rally.”[87]
According to newspaper accounts, student speakers addressed the crowd through a bullhorn, relating news about the class boycott planned for the next day. The crowd recited the Pledge of Allegiance and sang the opening lines of both “The Star Spangled Banner” and “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.”[88] Grotta said reports of communal wine and marijuana use were, if anything, understated. “I’d say there was pretty much a heavy cloud over the intersection,” he said.
Bob Carr said the only objective appeared to be to occupy the intersection for an indeterminant length of time. The FBI was told that demonstrators’ “demands” included the release of Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale, who was standing trial in New Haven, Connecticut, and amnesty for those arrested in the previous day’s demonstration in Carbondale. Neither demand was mentioned in newspaper reports or by journalists who were there.[89]
“I don’t think they were going to stay there all night,” Carr said of the demonstrators. “I think the prevailing feeling was if the police had just held back and kind of waited it out, people would have gotten bored and left, which is generally what happens in a rally situation.”[90]
Protesters block railroad tracks in Downtown Carbondale.
Many of those sitting in the intersection were unaware that shortly after 10 p.m., a group of about 100 protesters had blocked the nearby railroad tracks. With trains due to pass through Carbondale within a half hour, authorities decided not to wait any longer. Police and National Guard troops began a coordinated maneuver to herd the crowd away from the intersection.[91]
“The police kind of surrounded the area and blocked off all exits, except going back up to campus – there was no place to go but up to campus – and started throwing tear gas,” Grotta said.[92]
“It was palpable; you could not avoid it,” said Win Holden, who was with a Daily Egyptian photographer when the gas was deployed. “We were choking and gagging, and we couldn’t find any water to dampen these bandanas. We tied them around our faces. We kind of looked like outlaws.”[93]
This image of police deploying tear gas was scanned from a newspaper. DE photographers used a special high-speed film for night scenes.
Any organization, structure or purpose to the evening vanished once police started lobbing gas canisters and gas grenades into the intersection, and what had been a peaceful rally became a riot. “That’s when the thing really got ugly.” Holden said. “People picked up bottles and cans and rocks – there were mirrors broken off cars – and just threw them at the police and the National Guard.”[94]
Lenny Granato, who had been standing with his reporting team behind a group of police, said no warning was given. “When the police pinched in toward the intersection, our group of police turned around and gassed us, knowing we were the press,” he said.[95]
As police moved in, National Guard troops advanced up Illinois Avenue. Photographs taken by Ralph Kylloe show a gas cloud billowing up from the intersection, with streamers from canisters yet to hit the pavement frozen in the streetlights. Some of those fleeing the gas added to the chaos by breaking storefront windows as they ran. So many windows were smashed, said Jerry Grotta, that people later referred to the main business district as “plywood city.”[96]
Among the storefronts with broken windows were recruiting offices for the Army and Air Force. Illinois Central railroad officials reported that crossing gates in the downtown area were destroyed by rioters, and that multiple windows were broken in train coaches sitting at the depot, as well as a window in the depot itself. The southbound Panama Limited finally was able to pass through Carbondale after a delay of about an hour.[97]
Jim Hodl said rioters were selective about the stores they targeted. “The businesses that were roughest on students were the ones who bought the most glass,” he said. “University Rexall, although it had big windows in front, only had one cracked pane. Right next to it was a clothing store that charged unreasonably high prices for stuff that was clearly aimed at the student market, which was all boarded up. All the windows had been taken out.”
Nowhere to hide
Students fleeing the chaos of the streets did not find sanctuary in their residences. The Daily Egyptian received multiple reports of both city and state police tossing gas canisters into student housing located just off the main campus, both east of campus in the University Park/Brush Towers area and west of University Avenue. According to witnesses quoted by the newspaper, any congregation of young people spotted outside, even outside the place where they lived, was fair game, especially after a citywide curfew went into effect at 2 a.m.[98]
Students take shelter inside a home to recover from being gassed.
There were numerous reports of police firing tear gas into dormitories where students had taken refuge. In one instance, students trying to escape tear gas in the Stevenson Arms apartments allegedly were physically prevented from doing so by police. In another, a resident manager of the Pyramid apartments said Carbondale police helped evacuate the building after other city police officers had fired tear gas into it. Approximately 75 police and students were treated at Carbondale health facilities for effects of gas. Another 300 students reportedly were treated by volunteer medics from a drug crisis center located near campus.[99]
The Southern Illinoisan reported that a Volkswagon bus being used by the crisis center as a first aid vehicle was stopped by police and gassed. The manager of a restaurant on Illinois Avenue, J and B Southern Cafeteria, told the newspaper that he had patrons who were quietly waiting for the turmoil to subside when state police gassed the building. He said police obstructed exits and clubbed those trying to escape. Tear gas was felt by movie goers at the Varsity Theater on Illinois Avenue as well as people standing in line next door at the Dairy Queen.[100]
The Southern Illinoisan reported that gas canisters found in the streets of Carbondale were labeled “CS,” an abbreviation for 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile, the active agent what commonly is called tear gas. It produces a burning sensation in the eyes, skin irritation, coughing and respiratory distress if inhaled in large quantities.[101]
Daily Egyptian staff said police also used pepper gas, a newer type of riot control agent in 1970 whose active ingredient was Oleoresin capsicum, a concentrated oil extracted from chili peppers. Its primary effects are eye and skin irritation. Lenny Granato said that before leaving campus for the intersection, the National Guard had alerted reporters that state police had switched from tear gas to pepper gas.[102]
Whatever agent was used, it made a lasting impression on those it was used against.
“The experience of being gassed – that smell – I can almost taste it now” Holden said. “It was less of a smell and more of a taste. It was an oily thing that would sort of coat your mucus membranes and your nose and your mouth.”[103]
“It burned your eyes; it even made me cry,” John Lopinot said.[104]
After Granato and his team of students were gassed by police, they made it to a firehouse where they could wash out their eyes. They then were caught in the police sweep, which was intended to keep protesters from fleeing into residential areas. The crowd was forced south on Illinois Avenue to Main Street, then east to Washington Street and finally south again on Washington Street toward campus.[105]
“When we reached that point, a state policeman ordered us to turn south,” Granato said. “I could hear canisters popping and people shouting and screaming in pain, and it was dark down there. I identified myself and my student reporters and respectfully declined to take the students down that dark road. I suggested that he place us under arrest, and we would go quietly, but under no circumstances were we going down that road.”
Granato said state police eventually allowed the reporting team to walk further east. “We reached a restaurant that was still open and telephoned the DE to report we were OK. They called us in.”[106]
Rich Davis got the job of collecting his colleagues.
“They were at the Golden Bear Pancake House and needed to be picked up. So, another reporter and I went to get them,” Davis said. “I think the Egyptian had a big station wagon, but it had a big SIU emblem on the side. … We wound up driving through a crowd. I don’t know how many there were, if it was a few dozen or a hundred or two hundred, but they were throwing rocks and things at us. We didn’t get windows broken, but it was a little scary.”[107]
By the numbers
The FBI office in Springfield received three additional dispatches from Carbondale authorities about the second day of civil disorder. These were relayed to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., respectively, at 1:59 a.m., 4:53 a.m. and 2:55 p.m. on May 8. The first update reported that the National Guard commander had authorized his men at 10 p.m. to move against the intersection. The Guard fired tear gas at 10:33 p.m. and the crowd had dispersed by 10:35 p.m. Carbondale police reported rock throwing, glass breakage and looting taking place in downtown Carbondale at 10:50 p.m.[108]
All available Guard troops and police were dispersed throughout the city by 1:40 a.m. “Roving bands” continued to break windows, with “riot conditions” lasting until about 3 a.m.[109] Six hours later, the Carbondale city council declared a civil emergency and set a 7:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. nightly curfew. All taverns, liquor stores and places of amusement were ordered closed. [110]
Eleven state troopers, one Carbondale policeman and two Guardsmen received minor injuries from being hit by rocks. A total of 78 businesses were damaged to the tune of an estimated $30,000, mostly from broken glass. Arrests numbered 47. There was no estimate of civilian casualties, although Police Chief Jack Hazel advised “extensive use of tear gas did result in some inhalation injuries.” Two additional companies of National Guard were sent to Carbondale, bringing the total troop strength to 1,000. Illinois State Police also dispatched additional officers, boosting their numbers in the city to 120.[111]
None of the FBI teletypes mentioned the use of gas on student housing, businesses or against those administering aid as reported by the Daily Egyptian and the Southern Illinoisan.
“Here’s what happened.”
The Daily Egyptian was produced in a World War II-era “barracks” found on many of America’s booming campuses in the 1950s and 1960s. It was a long, narrow, wooden frame structure on a concrete slab, with a low, pitched roof and asphalt siding tacked over fiberboard walls.
The building that once housed the Daily Egyptian as it looked in 2003.
The newspaper’s offset printing press and photography department took up one-third of the building. Next to that was the composing area, which contained layout tables, photo-typesetting machines and two Associated Press wire service Teletypes.
The “bullpen,” or newsroom, was in the front third of the structure. It was a cramped and cluttered workspace for 12-15 student writers, who cranked out stories on manual typewriters at desks reflecting a variety of styles and eras of office furniture. Nothing was new. It was the kind of place where reporters didn’t think twice about scribbling a telephone number on the wall for quick reference. A small corner of the newsroom was partitioned into an office for the managing editor. Opposite the office was a small copydesk in the traditional U-shape, constructed of battered, two-drawer metal filing cabinets topped with pieces of plywood.[112]
“We’re talking garage sale everything,” said Ellen Ramp. “I don’t remember a decent desk; there may have been one. The furniture was all plastic, Naugahyde, but none of that really mattered. … We were kind of anti-everything that looked OK because we had a special group of people and a special place, the old barracks.”[113]
Students could apply to work at the Daily Egyptian as freshman, but reporting positions generally went to juniors and seniors. Newcomers typically began in the composing room doing typesetting or page paste-up or assisting the nonstudent press crew in the back of the building. Many of the reporters in May 1970 had started at the newspaper during their first year in college.
Photographer Ralph Kylloe, one of the few Daily Egyptian staff members who did not go into the news business after college, described his cohorts as serious students who were focused on completing their degrees and getting jobs as journalists.[114]
Rich Davis, who would spend all his entire career in newspapers, offered a similar assessment. “They were real eager-beaver type people,” he said of his student colleagues. “They were the type of people you see when you get out into the real world, and you see these young reporters and they’re all gung-ho.”[115]
Two buildings of identical vintage and construction were adjacent to the Daily Egyptian. One contained offices for the Journalism Department and its faculty; the other had classrooms and a lounge.[116] It wasn’t the only cluster of so-called “temporary barracks” at SIU in 1970, which Bob Carr once wrote in an editorial made those parts of the campus look like a “cross between a concentration camp and a chicken farm.”[117]
This was where the reporters and photographers returned after their evening in the tumultuous streets of Carbondale on May 7. They encountered a different sort of pandemonium at the Daily Egyptian, that of a newspaper being made up on the fly and on deadline. “It was so chaotic because you had people scattered around, calling in reports,” said Wayne Markham, the top student editor, who with Hix was responsible for deciding what went in the paper and on what page. “I remember that being the big challenge – trying to sort through all this and kind of create order out of chaos.”[118]
As a couple of students banged away on typewriters, Win Holden said the young reporters took a moment to collect their thoughts. “Everybody was exhausted, shocked, hurting,” he said. “Harry was smart. He let all that play out. Even though we were on deadline, he let people process the information a little bit. Then, it was like somebody lit a match in the room, and the whole place went up and everybody was back to normal.”[119]
Holden said Hix acted like the conductor of a symphony as reporters began what Holden called a “brain dump,” spilling details of what they knew into the narrative soup. When the managing editor heard something he liked, Holden said he would pull out that bit and those banging typewriters would stitch the information into a cohesive account.[120] Hix said the students wrote nearly everything that appeared in the newspaper that week. “My recollection is that neither Lenny nor I wrote much,” he said. “We looked at the copy as it was being finished.”[121]
It was into this process that Bob Carr asserted his idea of what the headline should be: “Police gas crowd; then violence.” That’s what ran on Page 1 of the Daily Egyptian. Some staff members recalled that headline got pushback from local authorities who felt it focused too much on the police response instead of the actions that had provoked it. The Southern Illinoisan went with “Tear gas used to disperse crowd.”[122]
Hix didn’t recall a discussion of the headline in the newsroom that night. Ultimately, he said, he had to trust the students and their training. “I had to have faith in them,” he said. “I hoped that I established a situation with them where they proved to me their abilities, and when they had proved themselves to me, I would trust them until they proved otherwise.”[123]
NEXT: Seven Days in May, Part 2: Resistance
[1] “The Report of the Commission on Campus Unrest,” reprinted in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 October 1970. The President’s Commission on Campus Unrest was created by President Richard M. Nixon on 13 June 1970.
[2] Bob Carr, interview by author, telephone, Carbondale, Illinois, 17 September 2002.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Commission on Campus Unrest.
[5] Participation estimate from Kenneth J. Heineman, Campus Wars: the peace movement at American state universities in the Vietnam era, (New York and London: New York University Press, 1993); total college enrollment from Commission on Campus Unrest.
[6] Commission on Campus Unrest.
[7] SIU Security Office, n.a., report of arrests made during disturbances at SIU, 6 January 1971, Box 662, Student Dissent folder, President’s Office collection, Special Collections, Morris Library.
[8] Max Turner, “Chronology of Events Related to the Closing of Southern Illinois University,” C. Thomas Busch Collection, Box 5, Folder 13, Special Collections, Morris Library.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Brian Keith Clardy, “The Management of Dissent: Responses tobid. the Post Kent State Protests at Seven Public Universities in Illinois” (Ph.D. diss., Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 1999). SIU-C was closed by a vote of its board of trustees on May 15, effective through the end of the spring quarter on June 13.
[11] John Lopinot, interview by author, telephone, 13 September 2003.
[12] Steve Brown, interview by author, in person, 27 February 2003.
[13] Ralph Kylloe, interview by author, 30 September 2002.
[14] P.J. Heller, interview by author, by email, 10 September 2002 to 9 December 2002.
[15] Ellen Matheson Ramp, interview by author, telephone, 20 May 2004.
[16] Rich Davis, interview by author, 21 July 2002.
[17] Lenny Granato, interview by author, electronic mail, 24 August 2002 to 28 January 2003.
[18] “Nixon Orders U.S. Troops Into Cambodia to Hit Reds,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1 May 1970.
[19] Newspapers of May 1 to May 3 were examined for student reaction to Nixon’s decision to send troops into Cambodia. Newspapers checked included the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Chicago Tribune, the Evansville Courier, the Southern Illinoisan and the Daily Egyptian, all of which were available in Southern Illinois.
[20] “Cambodia triggers local rally,” Daily Egyptian, 2 May 1970.
[21] “16 arrested in rally against Cambodian action,” Southern Illinoisan, 3 May 1970.
[22] Teletype, urgent, author unknown, Springfield FBI to national FBI headquarters, 2 May 1970. Freedom of Information Act request No. 0991941, U.S. Department of Justice.
[23] Teletype, urgent, author unknown, Springfield FBI, 3 May 1970, Freedom of Information Act.
[24] “16 arrested,” Southern Illinoisan, 3 May 1970.
[25] “Eight demonstrators arrested,” Daily Egyptian, 5 May 1970.
[26] “Kent State confrontation, 4 students die,” Daily Egyptian, 5 May 1970.
[27] Jim Hodl, interview by author, by telephone, 9 February 2003.
[28] Win Holden, interview.
[29] Robbie Lieberman, Prairie Power, (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press: 2004), p. 173.
[30] “SIU Senate backs boycott of classes,” Daily Egyptian, 6 May 1970.
[31] Harry Hix, interview by author, by telephone, 20 September 2002.
[32] Granato, interview by author, via email, 24 August 2002 to 28 January 2003.
[33] Harry Hix, undated, memo outlining coverage plan for May 1970 disturbances, Daily Egyptian publisher’s file.
[34] Hix, interview.
[35] Op. cit.
[36] Op. cit,
[37] Martha Milcarek, interview by author, 28 February 2003.
[38] “Kent State, Vietnam protest draws 3,000,” Daily Egyptian, 7 May 1970.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Lieberman, Prairie Power, p. 176.
[41] Max Turner, “Chronology of Events Related to the Closing of Southern Illinois University.”
[42] Gene Peebles, assistant to the Chancellor, memorandum, 21 April 1970, Box 562, Old Main folder, President’s Office Collection, Special Collections, Morris Library.
[43] “Police, students clash; several hurt,” Daily Egyptian, 7 May 1970.
[44] Kylloe, interview.
[45] Op cit.
[46] Turner, chronology.
[47] Op cit.
[48] Carr, interview.
[49] “Confrontation,” photo page, Daily Eygptian, 12 May 1970.
[50] Turner, chronology.
[51] Granato, interview.
[52] Ken Garen, interview by author, by telephone, 17 September 2007.
[53] Bill Harmon, interview by author, 21 August 2002.
[54] Ken Garen, interview by author, by telephone, 17 September 2007.
[55] Lopinot, interview.
[56] “Police, students clash; several hurt,” Daily Egyptian.
[57] ibid.
[58] Granato, interview.
[59] Lopinot, interview.
[60] Turner, chronology.
[61] “Police, students clash; several hurt,” Daily Egyptian.
[62] “At least 55 injured at SIU,” Southern Illinoisan, 7 May 1970.
[63] Davis, interview.
[64] OPLAN – 1969, Security Officer folder, Box 617, President’s Office Collection, Morris Library.
[65] Law enforcement resources from OPLAN – 69; Carbondale population figures from 1970 Census of the Population, U.S. Census Bureau.
[66] Ibid.
[67] Springfield FBI, author unknown, teletype, marked urgent, 6 May 1970, Freedom of Information Act.
[68] “Police gas crowd, then violence,” Daily Egyptian, 7 May 1970.
[69] Carr interview.
[70] “Chancellor tells of three actions,” Daily Egyptian, 8 May 1970.
[71] Turner, chronology.
[72] Garen, interview.
[73] Davis, interview.
[74] Hix, interview.
[75] Holden, interview.
[76] Hodl, interview.
[77] Davis, interview.
[78] Springfield FBI to director, special agent in charge, teletype, 4:29 p.m., 7 May 1970. Freedom of Information Act.
[79] Turner, Chronology.
[80] “Police gas crowd, then violence,” Daily Egytian.
[81] Lopinot, interview.
[82] Ibid.
[83] Obelisk, 1971, Unveristy of Southern Illinois.
[84] Carr, interview.
[85] Springfield FBI to Director, author unknown, 10:32 p.m., 7 May 1970, Freedom of Information Act.
[86] Win Holden, interview.
[87] Jerry Grotta, interview, by telephone, 28 Feb. 2003.
[88] “Police gas crowd, then violence,” Daily Egytian, 8 May 1970; “The short life of the ‘peaceful’ People’s Union,” Southern Illinoisan, 8 May 1970.
[89] Springfield FBI, teletype, 10:32 p.m.
[90] Carr, interview.
[91] “Police gas crowd,” Daily Egyptian.
[92] Grotta, interview.
[93] Holden, interview.
[94] Ibid.
[95] Granato, interview.
[96] Grotta, interview.
[97] “Merchants ask SIU to pay,” Southern Illinoisan, 8 May 1970.
[98] “Dorms gassed by police in Friday morning fracas,” Daily Egyptian, 9 May 1970.
[99] Ibid.
[100] “Authorities explain policy on tear gas use,” 14 May 1970.
[101] “Authorities explain policies on tear gas use,” Southern Illinoisan, 14 May 1970; toxicity from “2 Chlorobenzylidenemalononitrile,” Science Direct.com, accessed 28 March 2020.
[102] Granato, interview; toxicity from “Capsicum Oleoresin,” ScienceDirect.com, accessed 38 March 2020.
[103] Holden, interview.
[104] Lopinot, interview.
[105] “Report on the conduct of police in and around Carbondale during the May 1970 disturbances,” Southern Illinois Chapter of the ACLU, 10 November 1970.
[106] Granato, interview.
[107] Davis, interview.
[108] Springfield FBI to director, author unknown, teletype, 1:59 a.m., 8 May 1970.
[109] Springfield FBI to director, author unknown, teletype, 4;53 a.m., 8 May 1970.
[110] Springfield FBI to director, author unknown, teletype, 2:55 p.m. 8 May 1970.
[111] Ibid.
[112] The description of the Daily Egyptian building is a composite based on interviews with former staff, a review of period photographs and an exterior examination of the structure, which last housed the SIU agricultural mechanization labs. The building was approximately 150 feet in length and 30 feet wide. It no longer exists.
[113] Ellen Ramp, interview.
[114] Kylloe, intervview
[115] Davis, interview.
[116] Daily Egyptian alumni interviews. These buildings no longer exist.
[117] “Old Barracks litter campus,” Daily Egyptian, 3 October 1969. Carr wrote a news article about the barracks that appeared on 1 October 1969. At the time, he wrote, there were at least 37 of the World War II-era buildings still in use at SIU. They had come from U.S. Army bases Camp Ellis, near Canton, Ill., and Camp Breckenridge in Breckenridge, Ky.
[118] Markham, interview.
[119] Holden, interview.
[120] Ibid.
[121] Hix, interview.
[122] “Tear gas used to disperse crowd,” Southern Illinoisan, 8 May 1970.
[123] Hix, interview.
The edge of chaos 