Minneapolis Is Not the First Time Armed Government Agents Killed Protesters — It Happened at Kent State in 1970 — and I Wrote a Book About It

By Frank Gormlie

Ever since armed ICE agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis within a two week period this year, the mood of much of the country has turned against ICE and its enabler Donald Trump. Both Good and Pretti were acting objectively in protest of the masked, deadly agents terrorizing neighborhoods in the Twin Cities area.

Yet, this tragedy is not the first time armed agents shot and killed protesters in America. In early May of 1970, in the midst of college students nation-wide demonstrating against President Richard Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam war with his invasion of Cambodia, National Guard troops fired into crowds of unarmed students at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four — two were not even demonstrating; one was a ROTC cadet and another was on her way to class.

The uproar that followed these senseless killings swept across the country like a tsunami and created a debilitating crisis for the establishment, Nixon’s administration and America’s higher education system. I know. I spent five years studying what happened that May on over 700 college campuses, and wrote a book about it in 2024 — The May 1970 Rebellion.

Eerily, the two batches of shootings separated by over half a century have distinct parallels, as we can see today.

The killings involved protesters of government policies — the Vietnam war, the invasion of Cambodia, the Guard’s presence on campus and then the shootings themselves in 1970, and Trump’s immigration policies and the terror of ICE agents in 2026.

In both cases, government officials lied about what happened in the immediate aftermath, creating a narrative that colored the Guardsmen as the good guys and the protesters as the bad guys at Kent State, and now with the statements of Vance, Noam and Bovino, coloring the armed ICE agents as the victims and Good and Pretti as “domestic terrorists.” In both cases, the shootings were initially justified.

And in both, the government failed to release the identities of the shooters themselves. At least in timely fashion. The identities of the National Guardsmen weren’t made available until eight of them were brought to trial years later. They were all exonerated. No accountability.

In 2026, it took a week before the identities of the two ICE-type agents who killed Pretti were made public. And since, with pronouncements that investigations would not even occur with the Good killing and that a questionable commitment for the Pretti shootings was made, it appears that there will be no accountability — just public outrage.

Although Governor Walz vowed Minnesota law enforcement would carry out an investigation into the violence conducted by the federal agents.

And in both cases, the public outrage that resulted caused both presidents, Nixon and now Trump, to back off their initial condemnations of the protesters and become more conciliatory.

Both in 1970 and in 2026, the country was severely divided (the divisions in 1970 were even greater than now — hard to believe, but true), and the shootings exacerbated those divisions.

Also, songs came to crystalize the emotions of the moment. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sang “Ohio” and Bruce Springsteen is singing “The Streets of Minneapolis.”

What was and is key to both instances is the students’ and public reactions.

In 1970, there was an explosion of protest on college campuses in 48 of the 50 states. Today, there’s been student walk-outs across the country involving many high schools and a few colleges.

In 1970, up to several millions of college students joined protests at several thousand campuses — 650 of them were literally shut down. There were two more killings in 1970 – two people at Jackson State College – an all-Black school – were shot by local police; in addition there were 1300 people injured or wounded across the country; over the month of May there were 4,500 arrests and the National Guard was deployed two dozen times in 16 states.

The students’ rebellion caused the country to change its mind about the Vietnam war in 1970 — and eventually helped lead to the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

Currently, while ICE is still raging in Minneapolis — even with a supposed “draw-down”, White House officials and allies are promising more ICE invasions of other cities, with even some boasting that there will be ICE agents surrounding polling places during the mid-terms. Yet, the tide has turned; poll after poll show that most Americans are fed up with Trump’s immigration policies and his use of ICE to terrorize communities.

The parallels are simply too great to ignore.

The great lesson from 1970 — remembering Kent State — was a hard one for the establishment. The murders on that college campus hardened young people’s minds and commitment to change. And even though Nixon was riding on high levels of approval, his base began to erode over the next couple of years until by far most Americans were opposed to the war and that opposition began to be reflected in votes and positions of Congress. Nixon was the first president in modern history to resign.

In 2026, Trump’s base is being eroded by the violations by ICE of the First, Fourth and Tenth amendments. And the swelling of opposition looks like Republicans will lose the House of Representatives come next fall, and perhaps even the Senate. If that happens, Trump believes he will be impeached again.

We can hope this will all happen – but we need to do much, much more than hope. As the students in May 1970 rebelled, we today must also resist the feds and cause a deepening crisis for the White House. We can use the winds of the lessons of 1970 to encourage us for today.

The May 1970 Rebellion is available both in paperback and as an ebook at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.