Songs of Protest: Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Ohio” Challenges the National Guard’s Overuse of Force on Student Protestors

CSNY’s “Ohio” boldly responded to the murder of four students on Kent State University’s campus by the Ohio National Guard at a May 4, 1970 protest of the Vietnam War. 

Music is one of society’s best teachers. In Songs of Protest, writers analyze some of music’s greatest hits, using their findings to make sense of the world around them.

Written by Katy Vanatsky

Photo courtesy of the Bettmann Archive

Nothing embodies the chilling tone of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s 1971 classic rock hit “Ohio” more than these lines: 

What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground? 

How could you run when you know?

This lyric refers to the body of 19-year-old Allison Krause, a student at Kent State University,  one of thousands countrywide (three thousand at Kent State that day) who gathered on their college campuses to protest President Nixon’s announcement of U.S. plans to invade Cambodia, further polarizing the already extremely unpopular Vietnam war. 

Krause was also one of four Kent State students shot and killed that day by Ohio’s National Guardsmen, armed with lethal M-1 military rifles: “Four dead in Ohio.”

The unambiguous lyrics draw the listener to a sobering reality: When the U.S. government has the power to unleash militaristic strength on average citizens, anyone could be a victim. Krause could have been the girl who sits next to you in Biology every day, your neighbor that you kind of had a crush on. Krause could have been anyone. In fact, another of the victims, Sandy Schreuer, was not a participant in the protest at all, but simply a student walking to class. 

Lorrie J. Accettola, a former Kent State student and eyewitness to the shootings, remembers the sound of the National Guard’s bullets that “sizzled and hissed as they flew by [his] head.” He says that to him, the event is both a “hard lesson written in innocent blood” and a reminder of “how easily our existence can be altered or extinguished by others against our will.”

For Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, this song came from a place of pure rage-filled passion. According to an interview with Graham Nash, Neil Young heard about what came to be called the Kent State Massacre on the news, went into the woods, and emerged several hours later with the song. Although encouraged by their record label to wait until their other recently released song, “Teach Your Children,” had hit peak popularity, they refused. “We were angry now,” said Nash. “The kids were angry now. We wanted to speak and scream about this now.” 

“Ohio” confronted the violence at Kent State fearlessly, even calling out President Nixon by name in the very first line: “Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming.” Although many members of the counterculture movement countrywide felt represented and invigorated by the song, the students at Kent State strongly disagreed. Geralde Casale, future member of the rock band Devo, was a Kent State student who witnessed the killings of both Krause and Jeffrey Miller. In an interview with Young’s biographer, he said “We just thought rich hippies were making money off of something horrible and political that they didn’t get.”

However, others hold the opinion that the song was written in earnest, the product of Young’s emotional reaction to a truly heartbreaking event. Prior to “Ohio,” Young’s songwriting had never been politically charged; he was most well known for reshaping twisted love songs around catchy guitar riffs, for example in “Cinnamon Girl” or “Down by the River.” Although he continued to write politically active songs after “Ohio”’s release, such as “After the Goldrush,” a tribute to his passion for the environment, Young refrained from talking about or performing “Ohio” until the 2006 anti-George W. Bush Freedom of Speech tour. “For years I couldn’t sing it, because I felt I was kinda taking advantage of something that happened, and we were trading on somebody’s misfortunes,” he said. “In this period of time, that doesn’t apply. What it is now is, it’s a history.”

Whether or not CSNY was justified in its release, “Ohio”’s message still rings poignantly today. As of June 2020, 23 states (among those, Ohio and Texas) and Washington D.C. had the National Guard present during the widespread Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, most of which were completely peaceful. Aside from the deployment of the National Guard, photos and videos from these countrywide protests exhibit the militarization of police forces, including the use of armored vehicles, tear gas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets.  

Photo courtesy of Jonathan Bachman

The violent suppression of modern peaceful protests has reignited the conversation surrounding the excessive use of force by police and serves to show that we have a long way to go in protecting the average citizen’s right to protest safely. “Ohio” isn’t just a song of protest — it’s a song that champions our right to protest at all.