Remembering Kent State

Today is the anniversary of the Kent State Massacre.  

A survivor has something to say.

Colleges across the country are grappling with how to respond to the demonstrations, with many administrations calling in local and state police to disperse them. More than 2,000 people have been arrested at protests nationwide in the span of two weeks, with some injured in the process.

House Speaker Mike Johnson even called on President Biden to send the National Guard to Columbia University last week.

  NPR

Either oblivious to the Kent State example or hoping for a repitition.

U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was dragging on and deeply unpopular with a growing number of Americans. Over time, [when Roseann "Chic" Canfora arrived at Ohio's Kent State University in 1968, she] became one of them.

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As a sophomore, she was among the protesters rallying on May 4, 1970, when members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of students, killing four and injuring nine

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"On Sunday night, [May 3, 1970] three students were stabbed in the backs, in the legs by guardsmen and bayonets," she remembers. "And that was all a foreshadowing of what was to come the next day, on Monday."

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As a sophomore, [Canfora] was among the protesters rallying on May 4, 1970, when members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of students, killing four and injuring nine — including her brother, Alan, who was one year her senior.

"My brother's roommate pulled me behind a parked car, and it was at that moment that I realized this was live ammunition because the car was riddled with bullets," she recalls.

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"I ran to where I last saw [my brother Alan] and saw the body of Jeff Miller at the foot of the hill, lying in a pool of blood," she remembers. "I first thought it was my brother until I saw the clothing that he was wearing ... One of our friends came up behind me and said, 'Alan  [...] got hit.' "

Canfora was one of 25 people indicted in connection with the demonstration, and among the vast majority who were later exonerated.

"Those trials were eventually thrown out for lack of evidence that we had participated in a riot," she explains. "Even though we were grateful that those indictments were thrown out ... we had lost our opportunity to tell the world what happened that day."

Don't think for a minute that wasn't front and center of the reasons they weren't tried.

"It's hard to believe that this will be our 54th year of returning to the Kent State campus to talk about what we witnessed and survived here, and to tell the truth that we know so that ... people learn the right lessons from what happened here so that students on college campuses can exercise their freedom of speech without the fear of being silenced or harmed," Canfora says.

Canfora says she can't talk about the use of excessive force — then and now — without "tying it to the inflammatory rhetoric that inspired that force."

Nixon referred to student protesters as "bums," while then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan said "if it takes bloodbath" to deal with campus demonstrators "let's get it over with." On May 3, Ohio Gov. Jim Rhodes described campus demonstrators as "the worst type of people that we harbor in America." "We were too young and naïve at 18 and 19 years old to know the danger of those inflammatory words," Canfora says. "But we saw the repercussions of that when American soldiers turned their guns on American people — in fact, on American college students — because they were conditioned to see us as dangerous and an enemy. And we should all learn the lessons from that."

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Canfora also draws parallels between the misinformation that ran rampant then and today, noting that "excuses" for the use of excessive force on campus began immediately after the shooting.

Students had two hours to leave campus, and she remembers watching the theories take off on television from her family's house.

"I had an aunt that came into our home while my brother was still bandaged from his wound saying, 'You know, there was a sniper [threatening the Guardsmen],'" she says. "It was very difficult for middle America to believe that American soldiers would turn their guns on American people without some provocation."

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Canfora says she's inspired by what she's seeing from college students today, noting that they have much less free time for activism than her generation did — in part because so many have to work to afford tuition.

Her college tuition was $197 a quarter, and room and board came out to $450 a year, which she was able to pay for with her minimum-wage job and spending money from her mom. In contrast, she sees many of her own students balancing full course loads with 40-hour work weeks.

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"If not a college campus, where else in our society, in this democracy, can we count on large groups of people to do exactly what these college students are doing: paying attention to the world, looking at what is being done in the world ... and coming up with strategies for opposing it if they don't agree with it?" she asks. "That's healthy. That shouldn't be something that is feared."

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["M]ost importantly, we have a university administration that doesn't ... distance themselves from the tragedy," she says. "But they embrace their history and they feel a responsibility as Kent State University to teach others what we learned from that, to make sure it never happens again on a college campus in this country."

I'm not feeling very hopeful on that count.

"I think a primary lesson from Kent State is you need to have local law enforcement in the lead if you're going to do something," [Kent State University President Todd Diacon] says.

Oh, yeah. That'll fix it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.