Imagine a sea of Ball State students gathering in front of the Arts Terrace at the David Owsley Museum of Art, not for graduation, but demonstration. At 10:30 a.m. May 7, 1970, a student yelled into a microphone, “Ball State, where are you?”
The rallying cry came from then-junior Angelo Franceschina, according to the next day’s edition of The Daily News. Franceschina was kicking off the largest Vietnam War strike to occur on Ball State’s campus. Before this event, Cardinal representation on the Vietnam issue was scarce.
History professor Anthony Edmonds, who was teaching on campus during the 1970s, in an email, recalled protest in the fall of 1969 included “only a couple of hundred people” with very few viewers.
Mary Posner, who was president of Ball State’s chapter of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, said the group often faced opposition and only had a small core of dedicated students.
With this in mind, the question Franceschina asked the morning of May 7 was fitting: where, indeed, did Ball State stand?
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Contact Carli Scalf with comments at crscalf@bsu.edu or on Twitter @carliscalf18.