In 1970, Northwestern students buried six empty coffins in the southwest corner of Deering Meadow.

In 1974, they planted six trees in the same spot.

On Sunday, some of these students returned to dedicate a plaque memorializing it all.

A plaque dedication ceremony was held at 10 a.m. Sunday at Deering Meadow to honor the students killed at Kent State and Jackson State universities in 1970 and to commemorate the antiwar movements at NU.

On May 4, 1970, members of the Ohio National Guard shot into a crowd of Vietnam War protesters, killing four Kent State students and wounding nine others.

Eleven days later, spurred on by riots at then-Jackson State College in Mississippi, police opened fire on a group of students in front of a dormitory. A Jackson State junior and a local high school senior were killed, and 12 Jackson State students were wounded.

“We wanted to recognize there was a time and a place when all the students came together,” said Linda Portnoy, Weinberg ’75, who coordinated the event.

The plaque was placed in the same spot where students planted six rosebud trees in 1974.

The deaths of those students served as a rallying point to unite NU students in political causes, said Andy Frances, Speech ’71, who emceed the ceremony, which about 30 people attended.

“Gettysburg was the turning point in the first civil war, and Kent State was the turning point in the second,” he said.

When Portnoy started planning eight months ago to return to campus for her 25-year reunion, she contacted NU officials to remind them of their promise to dedicate a plaque where the original trees were planted.

The dedication highlighted two speakers: NU archivist Patrick Quinn and keynote speaker Eva Jefferson Paterson.

Quinn described the atmosphere on campus during the first two weeks of May 1970 as electric.

“I’ve never experienced anything like that,” he said. “The entire campus came alive in response to what happened.”

Paterson said she wept when she was asked to speak at the ceremony.

“We tend to forget that the people who died were real people,” she said, as she began her speech by calling for a moment of silence.

“We were young, we were innocent,” she said of her generation. “We had no sense of mortality. We took on a president and helped stop a war.”

Many of those gathered cried as they took in the speakers’ words.

The dedication site had both functional and symbolic importance.

The southwest corner of Deering Meadow served as the main place where speakers and performers would address students during the late ’60s and early ’70s, said Claire Golan, Weinberg ’71.

Deering, which then stretched as far north as Lunt Hall, became the “natural place to gravitate,” Golan said, because there was no student center and Charles Deering Library was NU’s main library.

Prof. Emeritus Bob Wiebe, who has been an NU faculty member since 1960, said those years were some of the least complacent.

“There was more searching, more questioning, and a greater openness to looking at new ways,” he said.

Noting the accomplishments of her generation, Paterson emphasized the role it must continue to play in the future.

“We’re not running the world anymore,” she said. “What happened to that spirited revolution?”

She challenged her fellow alumni to “remember who they were” by continuing to make a difference.

“We are powerful, and we all have an obligation to do something,” Paterson said.