Kent State shootings, 54 years later: Remembering a campus tragedy WSB-TV Channel 2 [Video]

KENT, Ohio — Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming …

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Those words, following Neil Young’s mournful guitar lick that opens the 1970 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song, “Ohio,” documented a watershed moment in U.S. history.

“Four dead in Ohio,” marked its 54th anniversary on Saturday.

On May 4, 1970, in just 13 seconds, four students at Kent State University — Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder — were fatally shot when National Guardsmen opened fire. Nine others were wounded on the small campus. Fifty-four years later, in the Ohio town of Kent, the university held a series of events to mark the shooting, as it does every year.

In September 1970, five months after the shootings, the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest delivered to Richard M. Nixon a “Letter To The American People,” according to The Associated Press.

“This crisis has roots in divisions of American society as deep as any since the Civil War,” the panel wrote. “The divisions are …