Standard works on the white student movement of this time assert that activists clustered at prestigious universities that had a large proportion of middle and upper-class students. Although Kent State seemed an unlikely place to have a student movement, one did develop there.
Unlike many other universities, the Kent State peace movement was primarily student-led. Beginning in 1963, student activists formed an ad hoc committee on free speech that successfully challenged the university's ban on campus political activities, and also protested against university dress codes and the policy of in loco parentis. After a visit to Kent in the fall of 1964 by a State Department representative who defended President Lydon B. Johnson's Indochina policy, the Kent Committee to End the Was in Vietnam was created. The Kent Committee launched its attack against American involvement in the Vietnam War in February 1965 as 12 students participated in a campus peace picket. One hundred hawkish students mobbed the activists and threw demonstrator Barbra Brock to the ground, kicking her in the face. .
Kent State president Robert White, who looked back upon an era when the school had been smaller and the students conformed to Cold War political and social mores, declined to take disciplinary action against the conservative assailants. Nevertheless, the Kent Committee continued to demonstrate on the campus while the university community and the townspeople lashed out against them. In April, President White described the Kent Committee's Organizers as publicity-seeking martyrs and argued that the goals "are distasteful to the overwhelming majority of us. Similarly, the mass of students within a true university process will come to see the shallowness of its arguments." Even though this anti-activist sentiment was echoed by the student newspaper, the Daily Kent Stater, protests against the war and the ROTC grew larger.
