It’s the 45th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, when bullets fired by members of the Ohio National Guard killed four students during an anti-Vietnam War protest on the campus.

It’s something I’ll never forget, and I expect most people anywhere near my age will feel the same.

Slate did a good background story for the 43rd anniversary a couple of years ago, if you’re looking for a basic overview (“Personal Remembrances of the Kent State Shootings, 43 Years Later“).

And PBS ran a documentary last week.

The Day the ’60s Died chronicles May 1970, the month in which four students were shot dead at Kent State. The mayhem that followed has been called the most divisive moment in American history since the Civil War. From college campuses, to the jungles of Cambodia, to the Nixon White House, the film takes us back into that turbulent spring 45 years ago.

LA Times reviewer Robert Lloyd gave it high marks.

“Kent State,” which moves back and forth between Cambodia and the U.S. to create a kind of dialogue between the war abroad and the war at home, is less an attempt to present every fact than to let you taste the urgency of the moment, to evoke a sense of colliding social tides and a country in division and disarray. Kent State is seen as a culmination of this conflict, and the beginning of the end of the antiwar movement.

It’s a measure of those times that a woman, asked about the Kent State shooting, responds in front of a television camera, “I’m sorry they didn’t kill more.” More than half the respondents to one poll blamed the students for the attack; only 11% blamed the people with the guns.

In a clip also seen in the aforementioned Dick Cavett show, Cavett wonders to a Nixon friend and defender, the Rev. Billy Graham, whether Nixon’s own characterization of protesters as “bums” had helped create the climate that made Kent State possible. (“I’m sure that he didn’t mean for the whole public to hear that particular terminology,” says Graham.)

The full episode is now available to watch online, if you missed last week’s broadcast.