 By Amanda Young Illustration By Susana Harley Only outsiders refer to Curtis Pittman by his full name. An ambitious student at Kent State and an officer of Black United Students in 1970, Pittman was called "Jeter" by his friends for reasons unexplained. He wore dark shades, dark threads and combat boots to convey messages of Black Power. Pittman almost joined the Marines before he enrolled at Kent State. He thought it would be a good job opportunity. The Marines wouldn't accept him because he has some fingers missing from his hands, so he majored in engineering and excelled in sports at Kent State instead. On Saturday, May 2, 1970, the sophomore returned from a track meet at Bowling Green State University. He found, beneath the surface calm, that the campus was eerily in waiting. The National Guard had already settled at the bottom of the hill behind Taylor Hall, where the Art Building now stands. "We felt that with the National Guard on campus, the first people who would have got shot was us," Pittman says. Many of Kent State's African-American students paralleled the philosophy of the Black Panther Party: Better revolt to get things accomplished. They were Black and Proud. On the list of demands to the university, vehemently expressed by BUS President Erwind Blount, was an increase in enrollment of 5,000 black students by the next fall quarter, an all-black faculty in the Afro-American Institute, (now the department of Pan-African Studies) and a new black cultural center. Two years earlier, BUS had staged a walkout to protest recruiters from the Oakland, Calif., police force, who were perceived as racist and abusive toward blacks.  During the 1960s, African-Americans witnessed police brutality at civil rights protests in almost every major city. Members of BUS were well-organized, disciplined and determined to achieve their rights. In the BUS newsletter Black Watch, black students urged that they would use "any means necessary" to improve educational opportunities for minorities at Kent State. Getting by was tough for black students in a university, especially if they were the first generation to attend college. One element that confounds writers and historians dealing with the shootings on May 4, 1970, is why black students were actively protesting social issues but seeking a low profile when political issues resounded. The civil rights activists were succeeded by a militant generation of young black adults. Along with white students, BUS rallied against the Vietnam War, but its purpose was tailored more toward the rights of black brothers and sisters. At the core of its argument was disgust for the U.S. government's sending more blacks to fight on the front lines when they continued to be oppressed at home. The majority of black undergraduates at Kent State in 1970 came from inner-city Cleveland. They had witnessed their neighborhoods being burned during civil rights riots. The same violence happened in Detroit, Los Angeles, Newark, N.J., and other major cities across America. The chant, "Hell, no, we won't go," could be taken literally by black students of Kent State when the Guard moved onto campus - a little known, mostly white, conservative university in the Midwest - because black student leaders believed for every second that the National Guard might open fire.
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