1970 Ward Circle protests
Below you will find links to primary source videos of the 1970 Ward Circle protests and an interview with a former AU student who witnessed the protests
-This is a video from May 1970 that documents the protests that happened at AU’s campus against the administration and police due to the Kent State shootings and Vietnam War involvement
-The video was commissioned by AU professor Glenn Harnden, who worked for the School of Communications, and asked his students to film the events that were occurring on campus and compiled the footage into one video
-The exact students who produced the footage is unknown
-What we can learn from the video is that AU students were very unhappy about the Kent State shootings and were going so far as to throw tear gas back at the police and across campus to show their dissatisfaction with the government
-This source illustrates how there is a history of AU students protesting on campus dating back to 1970
-It also shows how AU students were not just dissatisfied over labor practices at AU, but that political circumstances also influenced their activism
-This is a video that is the second part of the Ward Circle protest films collection in response to the Kent State shootings and Vietnam War involvement
-The source is a part of the same collection as the previous primary source and was commissioned by the same author and the person who filmed the footage is unknown
-The second part of the footage has more scenes of AU students being taken away to the hospital, washing out their eyes due to tear gas contamination, and a speech by the AU president and various other speakers in the amphitheater
-We can learn a lot from this film because it provides a lot of information concerning the unsafe protest environment that AU experienced during this period and also emphasized the role of the university during the protests by having footage of AU administrators speaking to students
-Audio is missing from the footage which would give the viewer a lot more information about these protests
-What we can learn from this film that we can’t learn elsewhere is how volatile the protest environment was at AU during this time and how much it has changed during protest movements at AU that succeeded this
-This is an interview that took place on October 4th, 2019 with Pamela Beardsley, a former AU student who was present during the Kent State protests in 1970
-The interviewer is Dan Kerr, the director of AU’s Humanities Truck, who recorded this interview as part of his series on American University from 1968-1969 and how this period was a year of protest and reform at AU
-This interview was created as part of the project to document the history of American University during the period of 1968-1970 and having a primary source interview is really important to provide insight on what was happening at the time
-We can learn a lot from this interview because it allows us to understand the first-hand experiences of an AU student during 1970 and how she reacted and experienced the Kent State protests at the time
-What we can learn from this interview that we can’t learn elsewhere is the feelings that this one specific person had concerning the protests and how she experienced going to AU during such a volatile time
-This interview contributes to our group’s understanding of protests at AU because it shows how police and the administration responded to this protests and how the graduation that year was surrounded by police and the overall atmosphere on campus at the time was very tense
Questions to consider:
Do you think AU students were concerned in taking part of these protests?
Do you think that protests like these could take place today on college campuses?
Why do you think the political atmosphere was so different in 1970?
How do you think that these protests affected labor at AU?