Just Kids - some young people killed by the state 1968-1972

Grew up reading about the late 1960s and early 1970s, all those heroic struggles of resistance and repression.They seemed like ancient history to me as a teenager but actually were only 10-15 years away, a time period that seems like yesterday to me today. Now I'm older but not necessarily wiser I like to think I'm less caught up in the historical romance of great events and when I read about Kent State, or the Panthers, or Bloody Sunday, what I see are just kids, cut down by the state (in this case the US and British states), leaving behind grieving friends and families. 

Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party, killed by Chicago police in 1969 - aged 21 (referenced by Jay Z in the line 'I arrived on the day Fred Hampton died' in 'Murder by Excellence' - Jay Z was born on that day, 4 December 1969). 

Frank Quinn, killed during a British Army operation in Belfast in 1971 ('the Ballymurphy Massacre') - aged 19.

Then of course there's Bloody Sunday 1972, where nine of the 14 people killed by the British Paratroop Regiment in Derry were aged 22 or under:

John (Jackie) Duddy (aged 17)
Patrick Joseph Doherty (31)
Bernard McGuigan (41)
Hugh Pious Gilmour (17)
Kevin McElhinney (17)
Michael Gerald Kelly (17)
John Pius Young (17)
William Noel Nash (19)
Michael M. McDaid (20)
James Joseph Wray (22)
Gerald Donaghy (17)
Gerald (James) McKinney (34)
William Anthony McKinney (27)
John Johnston (59)



I can't even find a picture on line of Kevin Gately, aged 20, killed in an anti-fascist demonstration in Red Lion Square, London in 1972.

Good to see Neil Young is keeping the memory of Kent State alive, still singing 'Ohio' more than forty years after he wrote it in the immediate aftermath of the killings.