On May 4 1970, thirteen young Americans were shot down by the National Guard in a shocking act of violence against unarmed students. Jeffery Miller, Sandy Scheuer, Bill Schoreder, and Allison Krause were all killed while peacefully demonstrating against violent injustices wrought by the government that would take their lives, showing in graphic allegory the ways in which violence the US government commits abroad is brought home. Immediately following the tragedy, the largest student strikes and protests in history swept across 3,000 campuses nationwide, punctuated ten days later by the shooting of Black students at Jackson State College in Mississippi, where another two students, James Earl Green and Philip Lafayette Gibbs, were killed, and an additional twelve wounded. Despite the similar nature of the Jackson State shooting, it predictably failed to generate the press coverage that Kent State received. 

The film illustrates how this student protest did not suddenly arise out of thin air. It followed years of a growing and vibrant movement led by campus groups such as Black United Students and Students For a Democratic Society, and was built upon the work of the 1961 housing protests, the Freedom Rides, the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention protests, and opposition to police violence. At a moment when the continuing racist violence against African Americans in the United States overlapped with the continued perpetration of one of the most morally dubious and violent wars in US history, which resulted in the deaths of over 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 US soldiers, the relationship between government violence abroad and at home become impossible to ignore. While students demonstrated, Ohio governor Jim Rhodes espoused vitriolic rhetoric that dehumanized the protestors and primed the general public against them, setting the foundation for the forthcoming violence.