With
Nixon's election, black and white radicals felt that the white and
conservative backlash had taken over the "Establishment" and that
official repression was bound to follow. Vice President Agnew's
anti-liberal attacks were taken by many as an expression of Nixon's
feelings which he preferred not to express himself.

The Black Panthers and the police became involved in a number of
confrontations or "shoot-outs" which the former believed to be the result
of a nationally organized, official repression. The police, at the same
time, accused the Panthers of deliberately trying to kill "pigs," the
Panthers' name for the police, and the Panthers accused the police of
deliberately creating situations which would allow them to kill the
Panther leadership. Before long, most of the Panther leaders were either
under arrest, had been killed, or had fled into exile to avoid being
arrested.

As civil disorders diminished in the ghettoes, college campuses were
increasingly rocked by student riots. In part, it was because students
asked for changes in the university structure. Black students demanded
that courses in black studies be initiated and that colleges aggressively
recruit new black students even if their grades were below admission
standards. Some urban schools, like Columbia University, were accused by
black and white students of diminishing the housing of ghetto residents
to make the university's expansion possible. Other campus riots were
aimed against the war in Vietnam. In May of 1970, when President Nixon
sent American troops into Cambodia supposedly in the process of
de-escalating the war in Vietnam, protests spread all across the country,
and several campuses exploded with riots.

At Kent State University in Ohio, the National Guard shot and killed four
white student protesters. At Jackson State in Mississippi, the police
killed two black students. Campus riots escalated, and dozens of colleges
and universities were compelled to close their doors for the remainder of
the academic year. While some Americans felt that these killings were a
result of government repression of the freedom of speech, others believed
that more action of this kind was necessary to curb what they viewed as
extremist protest. Blacks again noticed that it had been the death of
four white students which brought forth the widespread indignation. They
believed that killings of blacks by police and Guardsmen were usually
taken for granted or