They burned down many cities in April and June after MLK and RFK were shot. The convention was the one they wrote songs about.
I remember all that. Also, I was living in rural Ohio (I’m from NYC) when Kent State happened.
It was because of the Kent State students, most of whom were from well-off Cleveland families who didn’t want to pay tuition someplace else. For this reason they would also declare their children emancipated minors and thus schools would have to take into account only the non-existent income of the “child” in giving scholarships and aid.
We were running a small old age home for an Orthodox church at that time, and one of the aides told me that she had saved all of her money from her summer jobs for years to go to college...and she got nothing in aid, because she had saved the money and her parents had contributed, while the rich kids from Cleveland got a full ride because they had “no income.”
The Kent State kids despised the locals and of course were totally caught up in the anti-Vietnam stuff and the hatred of and contempt for their fellow citizens in the military, including the NG. However, the Kent State “protest” was mostly peaceful - until it wasn’t.
What a lot of people don’t know is that the Guard started firing because gunshots (or possibly just fireworks detonations) came from the other side of the lawn, someplace near the dorms, and they thought they were being fired upon. This was reported in the local press at the time but disappeared from view almost immediately.