"At midday on May 4, 1970, after three days of protests, several thousand students and the Ohio National Guard faced off at opposite ends of the grassy campus commons at Kent State University. At noon, the Guard moved out. Twenty-four minutes later, Guardsmen launched a thirteen-second, sixty-seven-shot barrage that left four students dead and nine wounded, one paralyzed for life. The story doesn’t end there, though. A horror of far greater proportions was narrowly averted minutes later when the Guard and students reassembled on the commons.
The Kent State shootings were both unavoidable and preventable: unavoidable in that all the discordant forces of a turbulent decade flowed together on May 4, 1970, on one Ohio campus; preventable in that every party to the tragedy made the wrong choices at the wrong time in the wrong place.
Using the university’s recently available oral-history collection supplemented by extensive new interviewing, Means tells the story of this iconic American moment through the eyes and memories of those who were there, and skillfully situates it in the context of a tumultuous era."
"For President Spencer Jefferson Lee— the great-great-grandson of both Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee— it's politics as usual. On one side, the lily-white Senate wants quid pro quo; on the other, the all-Black House has an agenda of its own. The powers-that-be agree on one thing: Utter separation between the races is the key to peace and prosperity. To love someone of the opposite race is to court disaster; to act on that love is to become officially nonexistent.
In a speculative dystopian thriller based on the premise that the South won the Civil War, President Spencer Jefferson Lee is shocked to discover that underneath the facade of civil order in his world of very separate races, there is dissent. A protest group made up of 'losers' among this 'ideal' society— same-sex and cross-racial lovers and their children— threatens the seeming peace and order."
