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out as well, but a friend of Kimball's punched him through the window. Such confrontations weren't unusual.
“There was this fairly well-organized and well-armed right-wing militia, the Minutemen type,” Kimball recalled. “They were mostly talk and mostly threats, but these guys had guns and they had a lot of influence”
Activists had to be careful whom they spoke to, said
John Naramore, then a 23-year old activist.
Protesters weren't always sincere and some were trying to discredit the activists' goals. Naramore, who later owned a printing business called Kansas Key Press, said people who were violent were often not trustworthy.
University Archives/
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"Who is this guy? Where did he come from and why is he always wanting to do acts of violence?" he said. "We have a march down Massachusetts Street and you've got somebody who wants to work window."
break windows. Were not attacking the merchants on Mass. What were trying to do is create awareness or show our dissatisfaction."
Rich Clarkson, then photo director at the Topeka Capital Journal, remembers how the journalism school's photo instructor Bill Seymour took pictures of student protesters.
"He was meeting agents at the Kansas Bureau of investigation to give them pictures to identify students," Clarkson said. "He was actually working with the police." Lawrence was burning, figuratively and literally. Fires were discovered almost every night. The Kappa Sigma house caught fire, the cause never determined. A rooming house on Indiana Street went up in flames. Gambles, a furniture store downtown, caught fire and flames burned 50 feet high, causing $200,000 in damage. Less than a week later, a bigger fire would shock the community and make all the others seem insignificant.
FIRE AND RAIN
It was 10:30 on the night of April 20. Jim Barnes, 21, and friends were grabbing a beer at the Bierstube, now the Bull, on Tennessee Street. They had just finished orchestra practice when a man walked into the bar and
said the Kansas Union was on fire. Barnes didn't believe him, but when he peered through a window so dirty it looked like frosted
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Professor John Wright's curfew pass for the third day of the state-imposed curfew. Being caught without a pass could mean jail time.
"It was the most beautiful fire you ever saw" Barnes said.
Stan Spring recalls watching from the safety of Potter Lake as the fire burnt the fifth and sixth
horses and the roof of the Union. Fire trucks arrived 15 minutes after the fire started, the flames already 30 feet high. Spring saw the firefighters unwind their hoses, but they weren't long enough.
to reach the top floors and lacked adequate water pressure. So the firefighters fed all the hoses up the inside staircases of the Union.
Spring and Barnes were among 2,000 students who saw the Union burn that night. Inside, valuable art was in danger, and students jumped in to help save it, including
David Awbrey
Jim Stratford, 22 at the time and now vice president of instruction at Pratt Community College.
"I remember going to it like hundreds of other students did, getting there pretty early on, evidently, and there were no barriers or anything, and going inside and seeing that the firemen were trying to drag hoses full of water; he recalled. "They were spraying water, but they were trying to drag hoses up the stairs, and I just pitched in to help them along with a lot of other people. I remember helping hand pictures down trying to get them out of the building."
- Wayne Propst lived just down the street from the Union and watched it burn from his balcony.
- "You couldn't help but see it. It lit up the whole street," said Propst, now a local artist.
By 2 a.m., the fire was finally under control, but not before it did an estimated $2 million in damage to a
many viewed as the social and political center of the campus. Police suspected arson. No one was ever caught, but theories still abound. Any time
"Any time
Chancellor Larry Chalmers
there's uncertainty, people's conspiracy theories crop up," said Monroe Dodd, then a Kansas staff member who would later become managing editor at The Kansas City Star. "And you don't have to be conspiracy crazy to think, 'Well, since we don't know, I wonder if it was the KU authorities who set the fire to make the freaks look bad? Or was it the freaks who set the fire? Or was it the Black Student Union? Or is it just some working-class guy in Lawrence who wanted to make the freaks look bad?' You can concoct all kinds of theory about it because there's no final committer of the act."
George Kimball, who was active in the street community, hung out at the Union and said he never under stood why anyone would have set it on fire.
no final committer of the act."
"There's no particular political motive to be achieved by this thing," said Kimball, now a prominent boxing writer who moderated a program this semester featuring boxer George Foreman in the same Kansas Union ballroom gutted by the fire. "It wasn't anything that was going to get you applauded. You weren't going to win
any points with anybody for doing it. It was probably someone who was stoned or drunk or screwed up"
University Archives/SPENCER RESEARCH LIBRARY
Beth Lindquist said the Union had been a place where activists could meet for free and that she was shocked to see the fire after running up from her house on Tennessee Street.
"I didn't know people who thought it was a good idea," she said. "Most people who were anti-war and civil rights activists thought it was a bad idea because it put a question mark on the values and the moral choices of the anti war civil rights movements. The inference
that student activists had something to do with that was very negative for us."
The fire wasn't the end of trouble in Lawrence. Ahead was a nightly citywide curfew, major protests and a decision whether to keep school open in the face of possible violence.
RUN THROUGH THE JUNGLE
The day after the fire, Kansas Gov. Robert Docking ordered a 7 p.m. curfew on the city of Lawrence to quell the violence. Townspeople were supposed to stay off the streets and inside residences; police arrested 45 people, most for curfew violations, on
the first night. Snipers shot at businesses downtown, small fires were reported all over town, and people threw trash and broken glass into the streets to clown down buildings
chasing curfew violators.
Activists strung wire in the
Oread neighborhood alleys to slow police walking through on foot, but Lance Hill said the tactic backfired.
"Someone did stretch wire between two trees, and then when
pence came down the street and all the kids ran off, they tripped over their own wire, so it wasn't very effective," he recalls.
Many refused to take the curfew, which started later on the second and third days, seriously. Caz Loth, a 23-year-old who lived in the Oread neighborhood, said the street community had curfew parties.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY Students sit outside of Strong Hall after trying to speak with the Chancellor about closing school.
"We would sneak through alleyways to get to the party," said Loth, who now works in the racing industry.
Less than a week after curse ended, President Richard Nixon announced on April 30 that the United States would send troops into Cambodia, expanding the hated Vietnam War. The protests weren't over.
Once one thing kind of died down, then you'd have three or four days, then another thing would happen. Every day was something new," David Awbrey said. "You could get up in the morning and by the end of the day it would be a whole different world."
"Once one thing kind of died down, then
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
David Ambler was in the administration building on the Kent State University campus on May 4,1970. Ambler, who later became KU vice chancellor for student affairs,was a Kent State adminstra-
GIMME SHELTER
tor when the Ohio National Guard moved in to suppress student protests. That morning Kent State leadership had
left campus to discuss how to make the armed Guardsmen leave. When Amber saw a crowd of several thousand gathering to protest behind the building, he quickly phoned administrators to return.
"I had no sooner made that phone call when we
had a report on the walkie-talkies that there had
David Ambler was in
been shots fired." he said.
University News Photographs/
Kent State University Libraries/
SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES
David Ambler
been shots fired," he said.
Four students were killed when the National Guard opened fire on a peaceful crowd of students
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
University Archives/SPENCER RESEARCH LIBRARY
protesting Vietnam and the invasion of Cambodia. The deaths ignited protests around the country, including at Kansas. Chancellor Larry Chalmers canceled the annual ROTC ceremony, which the year before
had been disrupted by protests. He immediately received critical letters,
one telling him his "graven display of cowardice in cancer the annual ROTC review on May 5th, was a disgrace" and another demanding "Unless you expel all the students who are rioting, shooting, destroying property and resorting to violence, you should resign as chancellor of the University of Kansas immediately."
Students and the street community reacted to the deaths by marching to the ROTC building and throwing rocks through windows. Protesters later rallied in front of Allen Fieldhouse where students demanded a strike and a decision about closing the school. Half the group went up the hill to Strong Hall and camped in front of the chancellor's office. When his locked door didn't open, they sat on the stairs of Strong.
Chancellor Chalmers had to find a way to defuse the tense situation. In a May 8 speech given to most of
the University inside Memorial Stadium, he announced what he called a Day of Alternatives. It gave students options. Those who wanted to leave the campus could, either by skipping finals and earning the grade they had up to that date or by taking an incomplete. Or students could stay and take their finals.
This decision was unpopular with many parents and alumni, many of whom called for Chalmers' resignation and wished that Clarke Wescoe, the previous and more conservative chancellor, were still in charge.
Ambler disagreed with the criticisms, praising Chalmers for preventing
ABOVE, University officials inspect windows broken by protesters at the ROTC building. BELOW, An angry letter written to Chancellor Larry Chalmers during spring of 1970
EE
WESTERN UNION
Telegram
NO. AS SSJ177
AUG 29 19 30 AM
K BRAD71 JT PONUX BARTLISVILLE OKLAHOMA 81 20NP CST#
ERE LAURENCE CHALUERS JR, CHANCELLOR#
THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS LAWRENCE KANS#
UNLESS YOU EXPEL ALL STUDENTS WHO ARE RIOTING, SHOOTING,
DESTROYING PROPERTY, AND RESORTING TO VIOLENCE, YOU
SHOULD RESIGN AS CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
IMMED AT LATELY.
K S ADAMS
University Archives/SPENCER RESEARCH LIBRARY
further violence. "Anyone else and this place would have blown apart a lot earlier than it did."
"I had never seen, in the United States, the open display of firearms," she recalls. "I saw trucks down on Massachusetts street with three rifles lined up in the back... It created an atmosphere of high anxiety, of high-pitched fear, because these are white vigilantes and it was because of the reaction of a group of African Americans to Rick Dowdell's death."
Only a few days later, police killed another activist. Police responded to
"I choose the alternative, which was to take pass-falls," Dodd said. "It really did wonders for my GPA."
Summer 1970
A Kansan article estimated that more than 83 percent of students chose not to finish classes, leaving fewer than 3.000 students on campus. Monroe Dodd opted to skip his finals.
And just like that, the tumultuous spring semester of 1970 ended abruptly. Many students departed and what can be described only as a school-wide uprising ended.
"Larry Chalmers really saved the University that day," David Awbrey said. "It would have been pretty bad. There would have been another Kent State."
Both the black community and the street community went into an uproar, and the front page of the next Vortex, an underground newspaper, proclaimed Garrett wanted for murder. The rest of the city reacted and men started circling downtown in their trucks, said Beth Schultz, who had just joined the KU English Department.
Edited by Liz Schubauer and Tara Smith
University Archives/SPENCER RESEARCH LIBRARY
Students left that summer, but activists and tension remained. Lawrence streets often held the sting of tear gas in the morning and the sound of gunshot at night. Activists were still unhappy with the status quo and were determined to make it known. Police and activists clashed in July when the tension snapped and police shot and killed two young people.
Black activists gathered at the Afro House, a place they could feel welcome and escape racism they found in Lawrence and in the police. On the night of July 16, police were called to the house after someone heard gunshots. A car left the house;
See page 7A to see what the reporter experienced while researching and writing this story.
one of the passengers was Rick "Tiger" Dowdell. Police thought the car looked suspicious, so they chased it until it drove onto a curb. Dowdell got out and ran down an alley. Police Officer William Garrett followed and the two exchanged gunfire. When Dowdell turned to run away, the officer shot him in the back of the head and killed him.
THE UNIVERSITY NAIY KANCAM
Students march through Lawrence after the deaths of Rick "Tiger" Dowell and Nick Rice at the hands of Lawrence police.
calls of small fires and an open fire hydrant near the Rock Chalk Cafe on Oread Boulevard on July 20 and were pelted with rocks, bricks and tomatoes. Later a crowd gathered and overturned a Volkswagen Bug at the owner's approval. Police reacted by releasing tear gas and shooting into the mob. When the crowd split, 18-year-old white activist and student Nick Rice was shot in the back of the head and dying.
Reports vary on what happened that night. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation's report claimed it couldn't determine if police shot Rice, so no officers were ever punished. Activists remembered that night otherwise, some saying they heard police say "Shoot 'em," and then saw them throw tear gas to prevent Rice from getting medical attention. They were outraged by what they felt was a police cover-up. Those few days left Lawrence in a haze.
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"It just seemed like there was this wave of campus killings, and in every case it was the authorities doing the shooting, killing students," said Tim Miller, then a graduate student and now KU professor of religious studies. "I don't know if everyone has ever really figured that out, why did they have to."
21 150 blacks clash with police in the morning. Nightly curfew imposed on town, starting at 7 p.m. 45 arrested that night, fires reported all over town and sniper fire reported on Louisiana Street.
2 Curfew starts at 8 p.m. People throw rocks and bottles at police. Some build and set ablaze a barricade of trash on Louisiana, police then use teargas to disperse people. Fires all over town, including Naismith Hall, a house on Oread, the ROTC building and an empty garage. Many bomb threats as well.
23 Curfew starts at 10 p.m. Many fires, snipings and bomb threats report-ed.
24 No cur-few. Board of Regents promotes profes-sors.
27 Portions of Union reopen.
30 Nixon announces troop movement into Cambodia, expanding the Vietnam War. Chalmers responds to comments by vice president Spiro Agnew, who said people who burned Union were students.
4 Four students die in Kent State shootings at hands of Ohio National Guard.
5 ROTC review canceled. People march to mourn Kent State deaths, moving from campus to the National Guard armory.
6 Rally outside of ROTC building leads to people hurting rocks through windows.
7 Rally in front of Allen Fieldhouse demanding a strike, some march up to Strong Hall and camp outside chancellor's office.
8 Chancellor announces day of Alternatives, where students can choose if they finish the school year normally. Most choose to leave. Some black students want school fully closed because it is a "racist society and it perpetuates racism." Students sign petition in support of chancellor.