[5 articles]
Alumni remember Kent State shooting, protests in '70s
http://www.doaneline.com/mobile/alumni-remember-kent-state-shooting-protests-in-70s-1.2260258
By Meghan Kurtz
May 6, 2010
Forty years ago yesterday four students left their rooms at Kent
State University in Ohio.
They were students in good standing: Jeffrey G. Miller. Allison B.
Krause. William K. Schroeder. Sandra L. Scheuer.
They wouldn't return home.
The news of students being shot by the Ohio National Guard slowly
reached Doane, mostly through the one television in Frees Hall, said
Eunice McArdle, director of alumni information.
"We lost our insulation that day; the war had been going on for a
while, but Kent State people actually died," said Tom Hood, associate
professor of physical education. "The most shocking thing to us was
an auto accident."
Professor Evelyn Haller had recently moved to Doane from Berkeley,
Calif. where she had participated in some of the anti-war protests.
"I had attended enough demonstrations to know feelings ran high and
people became irrational," Haller said. "But the need to demonstrate,
as well as the need to follow orders controlling demonstrations, was
bound to result in bloodshed and killings."
Frank Shoemaker, laywer and alumnus, had spent a semester in
Washington, D.C. for his political science major.
"We had all these things going on around us," Shoemaker said. "There
was tear gas all the time. It was personal, threatening."
Doane was recovering from tremors, though. In the space of two years
Merrill Hall had burnt, rumors ran rampant that it was arson, though
the official report says it was spontaneous combustion, and a
separate ammonia accident in town had taken the life of student
Ronald Hatchett and his toddler son.
On the previous Stop Day, Ronald "Waco" Wolowicz had drowned and Hood
had been seriously injured.
While Kent State would come to represent the anti-war movement
protesting Vietnam, times were changing everywhere.
And Doane wasn't immune.
The semesters leading up to the graduation of the class of 1970 were
not as focused on the war as other parts of the country were; they
were busy integrating and learning to live with others different from them.
"There was evidence of a lot of crap going on, but we knew that,"
McArdle said. "The Owl complained about apathy, but people were
talking in small groups, in dorm rooms."
The campus, a smaller and more integrated society than today, was
even more fragmented by an influx of Vietnam veterans who at first
were not well accepted, Hood said.
While there was some talk about the war around campus, there were no protests.
"We didn't have the courage to perform acts of civil disobedience," Hood said.
Except for the infamous Beanie Riot of 1970, where approximately 110
freshmen marched to campus center and protested about having to wear
their beanies, Hood said.
"The upperclassmen showed up, pounded them and then threw them in the
lake," Hood said, laughing. "This was their form of civil disobedience."
It was a world away from the protests that Haller had participated in
prior to moving to Lincoln.
"On one occasion my family, and other families, had lined the road to
Port Chicago (the port where Napalm was shipped from the U.S. to
Vietnam) and large cars would swerve towards us," Haller said. "They
were not sympathetic to what we were doing."
Shoemaker said he remembered going to Washington D.C. to learn and
ask questions, more of a witness than an active participant.
"I had a young person ask me about that time and I told him, 'There's
a revolution in our country,'" Shoemaker said. "It was deadly, it was serious."
After the deaths at Kent State, students did protest at University of
Nebraska-Lincoln, where Modern Language Professor Peter Reinkordt was
teaching as a graduate student.
"I was not a part of that two-day protest," Reinkordt said. "They
were not canceling classes, but no tests were given, no attendance taken."
Instead, protestors gathered at the ROTC building and approximately
1,500 of them marched down to the State Capital to protest the war
and commemorate those that died.
Looking back at that time, Hood said that the students today reminded
him of those at Doane then.
"Students today are afraid to be committed beyond themselves," Hood
said. "We could have solved problems if we'd been more proactive."
--------
Kent State: Coming of age 40 years after May 4, 1970 shootings that
stunned America
http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/05/kent_state_coming_of_age_40_ye.html
By Michael Scott
May 02, 2010
KENT, Ohio -- Maybe Kent State has finally come of age.
Four decades have slipped by since Neil Young's"four dead in Ohio"
rang out as a generation's lament on the loss of life and innocence.
And some now say a renewed and mature Kent is rising -- even as it
finally fully honors its dead and embraces its dreadful place at a
deadly point in American history.
Certainly, a stifling shame has long shadowed Kent State University
-- its particular dishonor earned in 13 cruel and chaotic seconds at
12:24 p.m. on May 4, 1970.
On that day, in that moment, American troops, occupying an American
college campus, killed four American students and wounded nine others.
"It's no wonder it seems that this university was just trying to keep
its head down for a 40-year period after the shootings," said Kent
State President Lester Lefton, who came to the university in 2006.
"But I don't think that's the case anymore. I believe we're a very
different and a more successful institution today than we were on May
4, 1970."
Successful, certainly: Kent is now Ohio's third-largest state
university with 38,000 students (nearly twice as many as in 1970).
Kent State is home to the state's largest nursing school and a top 10
U.S. fashion school and museum is generally acclaimed as an
international leader in liquid crystal research.
School officials and graduates also laud the college of education and
journalism-mass communications school for annually turning out
"work-ready" teachers, journalists and communications specialists.
Yet for the last 40 years, Kent State -- like a troubled middle-age
victim of childhood trauma -- has also been awkwardly wrestling with
how to reconcile those successes with the fundamental failure of May
4. Dozens of histories have been written and dozens of studies (pdf)
have been done -- all focused on May 4, including more than an entire
floor at the Kent State University library.
"There was always one continuing, difficult conversation that went
like this: 'How do we respond to May 4?' " said Michael Schwartz, a
former Kent State president during two subsequent May 4 controversies
-- the 1977 construction of a gymnasium near the shooting site and
the 1980 erection of a memorial.
"This was the case no matter what else was on the table in any
context -- no matter what other projects were under way or
improvements being made. May 4 was always primary."
A dark anniversary
Tuesday will mark 40 years since the Kent State killings.
The dark anniversary falls in the same year in which Kent State
University celebrates its 100th year: It formed as the Kent Normal
School (with 144 students) for teachers in 1910.
"Nearly half the life of this institution has now been associated
with one, terrible event," said Carol Cartwright, another former Kent
president (1991-2006), now president at Bowling Green State
University. "That's no small thing -- even in the context of a centennial."
No, but it's not the only thing, Lefton asserts.
"Yes, May 4 was a defining moment -- but it doesn't define us," he
said. "And May 4 wasn't about Kent State; it happened at Kent State.
That's an important distinction."
In recent years, the university appears to be turning toward
embracing that distinction.
The May 4 site was declared an Ohio historical landmark in 2007 and
placed on the National Registry of Historic Places just this year. A
walking tour of the area occupied by the guard and the students is
nearly complete and a May 4 Visitors' Center is in the works.
"Kent State finally has found a way to remake itself while still
honoring that moment," Schwartz said.
Laurel Krause and Alan Canfora don't see it that way.
Krause, who was 15 in 1970 when her older sister Allison was killed
at Kent State, is on campus this weekend promoting her own new oral
history archive (the Kent State Truth Tribunal) to rival existing
records held by the university and Kent Historical Society.
"We have never had that sense that Kent State has taken ownership for
May 4," Krause said. "They may say it's all over and healed, but we
still feel like the work, the revealing of truth, is not complete."
Canfora in 2007 unveiled a new digital audio recording of the
shootings made by a student in 1970, in which he claimed an order to
fire was given. That recording will finally be professionaly analyzed
using technology never before available.
And Canfora, shot in the wrist that day in 1970 and now head of the
non-profit May 4 Center , still believes the May 4 Memorial on campus
-- built to less than 10 percent of its proposed size -- has never
properly honored the dead or wounded.
"The students will agitate again to finish that memorial," he
predicted. "The students are not finished with May 4."
It is within that sometimes uneven and uneasy tension regarding May 4
that Kent State's 40-year journey towards wholeness unfolds.
Kent State had culture of openness
Kent State University in May 1970 was a little-known college of
21,000 students nestled in rural Portage County, about 40 miles
southeast of Cleveland. Its reputation was mostly that it would take
in just about anyone out of any high school.
"It's true: In 1970, this was already an open-access university,"
Lefton said. "But then, after the shootings, Kent simply became toxic."
Enrollment dropped 13 percent in the four years following the
shootings and endowments also dropped off by an unknown measure,
officials and historians note.
The campus violence also worsened an already strained college-city
relationship.
Kent journalism professor Tim Smith, then a reporter for the Akron
Beacon Journal -- which won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the
shootings and its aftermath, said he also saw a frightening reaction
among rural Portage County residents.
"I was stopped by farmers with shotguns who wanted to know if I was
one of the communists coming into town to stir things up," Smith said.
Schwartz recalled even worse statements from some Kent city residents.
"One of the worst things I've ever heard in all my years was: 'They
should have shot more of them,' " Schwartz said. "I never understood
how anyone could have thought that about other people's children on a
college campus."
Wayne Wilson, a Kent city councilman, agreed: "May 4 was just the
worst part of a lot of distrust and real divisions here in Kent," he said.
Divisions on its significance
That college-city rift would remain untended for decades while the
university sporadically dealt with its own May 4 dichotomy.
"For the first few years, the university was trying to grapple with
what went on, and in about year five, they just said, 'Enough. We're
not commemorating this anymore,' " said Carole Barbato, a student at
Kent in 1979 and one of the professors who led the effort to get the
May 4 site on the National Register of Historic Places.
"It was really the students, the May 4 Task Force, who pushed it
along, during the court hearings that followed the shootings and after."
That -- it was initially the students, and not the institution, who
made the effort to remember the dead and injured has long bothered
former students and faculty who say Kent State has never taken full
responsibility.
"They didn't protect my sister that week," Laurel Krause said. "The
university has never owned up to its role in this."
Many faculty, conversely, weren't thrilled with the student
organization dredging up May 4, recalled Robert Matson, a former Kent
dean now working at the University of Virginia.
"I think for a long time the university -- like me -- wanted to put
it behind, to forget about it," Matson said. "The May 4 Task Force
wouldn't let that happen. At the time a lot of us didn't like it
because it brought up an emotional, hard time.
"But in the end, they were right to do that -- to make sure that
people didn't forget too easily."
But forgetting doesn't come easily at Kent -- especially when the
university in 1977 proposed building a new gymnasium annex near where
the shootings had occurred.
Protesters occupied a "tent city" on the site for several months.
They failed to block construction, but once again Kent State was
recognized for May 4 trouble -- not its academics or athletics or
anything else.
Schwartz said he now wishes university trustees would have seen the
wisdom of not building anything near what was considered sacred
ground by many.
"I think they felt that feelings were not running strong anymore --
and they still were," he said. "This isn't something that just goes away."
But it did begin to slowly transform.
Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste came to the 1990 May 4 commemoration and
apologized on behalf of state government to the families of the dead
and wounded. "Everyone was flabbergasted because that was completely
unexpected," Schwartz said.
Then, Cartwright did something in her first year (1991) that none of
the previous four presidents had done since 1970 -- she attended the
Task Force's candlelight vigil to honor the dead and wounded.
Then, in 1999, the university agreed to place markers in the parking
lot near Prentice Hall where students had been shot.
"We finally were able to stop people from standing or parking on the
ground where they died, so that was another step in the right
direction," said Roseanne "Chic" Canfora, who was on campus in 1970
and is the sister of Alan Canfora. "Little by little, the university
itself has begun to come around to recognizing the value of the May 4
victims."
Kent State rising
While the May 4 angst ebbed and flowed, still dominating the news out
of Kent, the university was quietly building its resume.
"It's almost as if Kent benefited somehow from having to work harder
than other colleges about its image because of what happened," Matson said.
Kent State increased academic standards for incoming freshmen in the
1980s and 1990s and emphasized its role as a research college. The
latter paid off in 1994 when Kent State made it into a coveted list
of research universities kept by the Carnegie Foundation.
Bricks-and-mortar improvements followed with a series of renovations
and construction in the late 1990s.
Old dorms were demolished, new ones were built. The university
renovated its historic original campus and built a new student
recreation center and academic buildings like a $20 million
communications and journalism building.
By the 30th anniversary of the Kent State shootings in 2000, the
groundwork was in place for the university to come more into the
open, daring to portray itself as something other than "the place
where kids were shot on campus," Lefton said.
And finally, during Cartwright's tenure, the university turned a
corner in its approach to May 4. A survey of city residents said they
wanted the university to get off the fence and either bury May 4 or
own it. The university's own studies and an alumni group report also
said it was time.
"We began to see that we should deal with May 4 in the right way --
in a context of making it a learning moment," Cartwright said.
Kent in the future
Kent is already looking ahead.
Following 2008, in which the university spent $38 million in new
construction, Kent State is pursuing three new projects -- one
distinctly May 4-related and the other two indicative of how the
university aims to build on strengths, while reconciling its one
lingering division by reconnecting the two Kents:
The university has hired a Washington, D.C., museum designer,
Gallagher & Associates (Woodstock Museum in New York, Maltz Museum of
Jewish Heritage in Beachwood) and is trying to raise money to build a
May 4 Visitors' Center in Taylor Hall, atop the hill that was central
in the shootings. Kent's new College of Public Health started
accepting students this school year and has 146 students and 15
faculty members. It becomes only the second in Ohio after Ohio State
University and one of 33 nationwide.
"This is big," said Lefton, noting that studies show that Ohio will
need some 10,000 public-health workers -- from epidemiology to health
services administration -- over the next decade or so. "This is the
new future in education at Kent State -- it's a big investment for us
with the payoff to come many years from now."
Also, the university and city are working together to physically link
the university and downtown. They'll do it by extending into downtown
Kent something called the University Esplanade, a 30-foot-wide,
one-mile long walkway that now meanders across campus.
The extension, expected to be completed in time for the opening of a
new hotel and conference center in downtown Kent (paid for in part by
a $20 million federal stimulus grant), is not only physical but
"intellectual, emotional -- and it's financial," Lefton said.
City Manager David Ruller agreed: "This is hardly purely
philanthropic," he said. "The university makes up 40 percent of our
tax base. Every city knows to take care of its biggest employer, so
this is an orchestrated effort, not just chance."
But it gives Kent State University and the city of Kent a chance to
find a unity that many say the two have never had since May 4, 1970.
"University cities can be unique places and they are one of the few
developing hot spots across the country," Ruller said. "Now that
we're working together, we can be a part of that."
Ruller's involvement and the new Kent ideal also might give Matson
the notion that it might be time to come back to the Kent he fled in
the 1970s.
"Even though I've not been back and I've been watching only from
afar, I admire what they've done there," said Matson, who found out
about Kent's changes after mentoring Ruller in a program at Virginia.
"There's nothing I could hope for or pray for than this -- to see
Kent, and me, coming around to closure, to finally deal with this and
to recover from it."
Kent today
When Kent State leaders are asked what aspects of the university set
it apart today, they often cite four areas:
The Liquid Crystal Institute. Research into the properties of liquid
crystals pre-dates May 4, 1970 -- but is ironically connected to the
demonstrations of that era.
The group Students for a Democratic Society reportedly decried the
groundbreaking research being conducted at Kent State because it was
funded in part by the Defense Department, a federal report said.
No one is protesting against LCI now.
The institute recently netted $15 million in outside grants to Kent
"to attract the best minds in the world to do their research here,"
said Oleg Lavrentovich, a native of Kiev, Russia, who came to the LCI
in 1992. "The idea is that what happens here leads to economic growth
throughout Ohio someday."
It's happening already:
AlphaMicron Inc. and Kent Displays Inc., both start-ups from Kent
grads or former faculty, received $1 million each this year in Ohio
Third Frontier money, granted by the state to promote
technology-based businesses in the state.
The School of Fashion Design and Merchandising and Museum.
New fashion school director J.R. Campbell gushes that the school,
started in the decade following the shootings, is now world-class.
"I've been to maybe 25 different institutions with a fashion program
-- in Europe, the U.K. especially, in New Zealand and here in the
States, and this facility is right up there with the best of them,"
said Campbell, who came to Kent in 2009.
Kent now has small campuses for fashion students in New York City's
fashion district (50 students); Florence, Italy (200); Geneva,
Switzerland (50); and Beijing (10) and is exploring opportunities in
Turkey and several African countries.
Kent also has the only simulated Air Traffic Control Center among
Ohio colleges, and its Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative
program is the only one in the state accredited by the Federal
Aviation Administration.
The $2 million simulated control tower allows student controllers to
mimic an entire flight from takeoff to landing. The school will
graduate its first class next year.
"The FAA predicts there will be a need for more than 14,000 air
traffic controllers by 2018," said Maj. Maureen MacFarland, academic
program director of aeronautics. "Kent is going to be one of the
schools that's getting them ready."
NCCA athletics. Retiring Athletic Director Laing Kennedy said people
all over the country know Kent State for something entirely different
from the May 4 shootings.
"They see 'Kent State' on my shirt or jacket and say, 'Kent
basketball! Elite 8!' "
The Golden Flashes became a March Madness darling in the 2002 NCAA
basketball tournament, falling one game short of a Final Four
appearance and securing the school's place among the most competitive
"midmajor" universities in the country.
And then there's football -- although Kent has seen players like
Antonio Gates, the Browns' Josh Cribbs and others make it to the NFL,
the team is rarely competitive.
"But we're going to have a winning football team," KSU President
Lester Lefton insisted last month (on the day he hired a new athletic
director). "That's next."
--------
A Moment Kent State Won't Forget
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/us/04kent.html
By REGINA GARCIA CANO
Published: May 3, 2010
KENT, Ohio Black pillars mark four sites on the east side of Kent
State University each memorializing one of the four college
students killed by the Ohio National Guard during antiwar protests on
May 4, 1970.
Torey Wootton, now a freshman, wants to lie in one of those sites, to
understand what her uncle Paul Ciminero felt on that warm and sunny
day 40 years ago as he stood watching Jeffrey Miller, a fellow
student, die in that spot. Mr. Miller was shot in the mouth by a
National Guardsman.
"It's just to take a moment and reflect and appreciate, more than try
to connect to it," said Ms. Wootton, 19, a musical theater major from
nearby Akron.
"I want to look at the space around because that might have been the
last thing that they got to see," she said of the fallen students.
To commemorate the anniversary, on Tuesday the university will host
about a dozen speakers, including John Filo, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning photographer of the famous image of 14-year-old Mary
Ann Vecchio kneeling over Jeffrey Miller's body just after the
shooting; Russ Miller, Jeffrey's brother; and Florence Schroeder, the
mother of another student who was killed, William Schroeder.
In downtown Kent, an event where witnesses to the shootings will
narrate their stories will be streamed live by the filmmaker Michael
Moore, on his Web site, www.michaelmoore.com.
While Ms. Wootton said she understood the killings as a turning point
in American history, she seemed to be an exception.
Fourteen of 15 freshmen interviewed on the campus said they did not
feel any connection with the lives of the students who were
protesting the United States' invasion of Cambodia at the time.
The university requires first-year students to watch a historical
video of what happened that day and the events leading to it: the
violent confrontation between protesters and local police and the
burning of the R.O.T.C. building near the Commons.
Freshmen attribute their lack of interest to the time span.
"Our generation doesn't necessarily really care because it happened
so long ago none of us were alive," said Ethan Moore, a freshman
majoring in nursing. "Though it definitely shouldn't be forgotten
because they were people, too."
Eboni Pringle, director of the university's Student Success Programs,
said that with years students developed a deeper understanding of May 4.
A sophomore photojournalism major, Nora Rodriquez, is the
co-chairwoman of the May 4 Task Force, a student organization that
tries to raise awareness among peers on the historic relevance of the
shootings.
"I like politics, and I'm pretty sure that it could have been me in
the protest," said Ms. Rodriquez, who joined the group after
attending in her freshman year a candlelight vigil for the students
who were killed.
"The task force tries to understand all of the misunderstood truths
surrounding May 4," Ms. Rodriquez said. "There are things we still
don't know about that day."
In addition to Mr. Miller, 20, and Mr. Schroeder, 19, the other
students killed were Allison Krause, 19, and Sandra Scheuer, 20. Nine
other students were injured.
Ms. Wootton and her uncle, Mr. Ciminero, plan to attend Tuesday's
commemoration ceremony.
And until she graduates, Ms. Wootton will follow the advice her
parents, both Kent State alumni, gave her when she left for college.
"We don't want to see you in the news," they said, "and we don't want
to see you get shot."
-------
1970 Kent State shootings are an enduring history lesson
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-05-03-kent-state_N.htm
Updated 5/4/2010
By Rick Hampson, USA TODAY
KENT, Ohio Forty springs ago, on the day the Vietnam War came home
as it never had before, Mary Ann Vecchio was there. She's the girl in
the haunting photo crying, kneeling over the student's body.
That was Kent State University, May 4, 1970, a few days after Richard
Nixon, who'd campaigned for president on an implicit promise to end
the war, widened it by invading Cambodia.
Across the nation, students protested. At Kent State, where two days
earlier the ROTC building was burned down, National Guardsmen fired
into a crowd and killed four unarmed students, the closest of whom
was nearly a football field away.
Vecchio found Jeffrey Miller dead on the ground, a moment captured by
a student photographer.
Rarely has an American home front been so traumatized Yale
historian Jay Winter calls the Kent State shootings "a wound in the
nation's history" and for a time the school was so ashamed it
shortened its name to "Kent," changed its logo and ended its annual
May 4 observances.
But things have changed in 40 years, during which the United States
left Vietnam and entered Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, a campus that
unwillingly became synonymous with protest is more focused on
remembering opposition to that war than opposing the current ones.
Unlike Vietnam, the wars America now fights have never really come
home. Students don't worry about getting drafted. The campus anti-war
group is inactive. The big cause is Haiti, the big issue the cost and
availability of parking.
"There's no strong opposition to it," junior Kassandra Meholick says
of the fighting today, "and no strong support for it."
Although there's little of the real thing here, student anti-war
protest is studied in class, chronicled in archives and commemorated
on monuments, markers and even a postcard sold in the bookstore.
May 4 has become a teachable moment, part of what President Lester
Lefton calls Kent State's "brand." A documentary on the shootings is
shown at freshman orientation. "You feel like you're part of
history," says Meholick, of Harrisburg, Pa. "Something significant
happened on this campus."
This year Kent State has taken new steps to acknowledge and make
sense of the incident. An application to add the site of the
shootings to the National Register of Historic Places rare for an
event less than 50 years old was approved by the Interior
Department. A self-guided "May 4 Walking Tour," featuring trail
markers and audio narration by civil rights leader Julian Bond,
debuts next month. A visitors center is planned.
Speakers at 40th anniversary observances this week include Mark Rudd
and Bernardine Dohrn, former leaders of the anti-war group Students
for a Democratic Society, Black Panther Bobby Seale, singer Country
Joe McDonald and Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a civil rights pioneer.
A trauma is turning into history, objectified for students and
visitors, some of whom walk the site of the shootings like a Civil
War battlefield. The campus is a sort of museum of protest, in which
something raw and wild has been stuffed for study and shelved for display.
There is the granite May 4 Memorial (when it was dedicated in 1990, a
daffodil was planted for every American killed in Vietnam). A May 4
archive contains artifacts such as a student's shirt with a bullet
hole through the back and spent M1 shell casings. Four spaces in a
parking lot are marked off with light posts to indicate where the
four students died.
Many students today are inspired by their example. Krista Napp, a
junior, sees May 4 as a precedent for courageous anti-war protest.
Meholick, president of the College Republicans, sees a connection
between anti-war protests back then and the current anti-tax "Tea
Party" movement. "Some people draw a relationship to the students who
stood up against the government in 1970," she says. "They're both
grass-roots movements."
Vecchio, who despite a broken foot will return to campus for May 4
observances, says Kent State had to face its legacy: "It's something
that happened that you have to respect. It was never going to go
away. You can't shove it under the rug."
She ought to know. She spent years, she says, "trying to outrun that
picture." But she could not forget the sight of Jeff Miller any more
than America can forget the sight of her.
'Eradicate the problem'
In 1970 the United States was in what the President's Commission on
Campus Unrest later would call its most divisive period since the
Civil War. The Vietnam War, stalemated after five years of intense
U.S. ground combat, was the target of increasingly aggressive,
sometimes violent protests.
When Nixon announced the Cambodia invasion on April 30, campuses erupted.
In Kent, some students rioted outside the bars downtown the following
night, a Friday. Saturday night, protesters set fire to the ROTC
building, and slashed firemen's hoses. Even before that, Gov. James
Rhodes, a Republican, called out the Ohio National Guard.
He called the protesters "the worst type of people that we harbor in
America," and said: "We are going to eradicate the problem. We are
not going to treat the symptoms."
On Monday several hundred students gathered on the campus commons to
rally against the war and the Guard's presence. The soldiers used
tear gas to move the students off the commons, followed them up and
over a small hill, and formed ranks in a practice football field.
A standoff ensued. Students kept their distance, chanting slogans
"Pigs off campus!" and hurling rocks and bottles, few of which
reached their targets. Then the Guardsmen retraced their steps up the
hill, heading back toward the commons.
The crowd had swelled to several thousand, including protest
supporters, observers and bystanders. Many of them now relaxed; the
confrontation seemed over.
"It was OK until they got up on that hill," Vecchio recalls.
Suddenly, about 12 Guardsmen turned 130 degrees, raised their rifles
and fired. "I heard the shots," Vecchio says, "and kissed the ground."
In 12.53 seconds, 28 Guardsmen got off 61 to 67 shots. (Some fired
into the ground or the air; 48 Guardsmen did not shoot at all,
according to the FBI.)
Vecchio found Jeff Miller, whom she'd gotten to know over the past
few days, bleeding to death. There was nothing she could do. She
screamed, "Oh my God!"
Also killed: protester Allison Krause; Bill Schroeder, an ROTC
student who'd been watching the protest and was shot in the back; and
Sandy Scheuer, who was walking to class.
Nine students were wounded. One, Dean Kahler, was shot in the back as
he lay on the ground. The bullet left him paralyzed for life.
Another, Alan Canfora, ducked behind an oak tree as a bullet passed
through his right wrist.
Canfora says today that after the Cambodia invasion, "We wanted to
bring the war home. But we never expected that."
The shootings provoked America's first national student strike,
closing hundreds of campuses, and inspired an anti-war anthem
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young'sOhio, which asked, "What if you knew
her/and found her dead on the ground?" Newsweek put the photo of
Vecchio on its cover under the headline "Nixon's Home Front."
A Gallup Poll found that only 11% of Americans faulted the Guard; 58%
thought the demonstrators were partly responsible for the carnage.
Based on an FBI investigation, the Justice Department concluded that
the Guardsmen were never in danger and that their explanation they
were surrounded, outnumbered and fired in self-defense was a
fabrication. Later that year, a presidential commission called the
shootings "unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable."
A state grand jury declined to indict any Guardsman, a federal judge
dismissed civil rights charges, and no one spent a day in jail. In
1979, the state paid $675,000 to the wounded students and the
families of the dead to settle a civil suit. The Guardsmen signed a
statement of regret, not apology.
Many felt there was nothing for which to apologize. Ron Snyder, a
Guard captain that day, says the shootings should not have occurred,
but were no massacre: "A massacre is something that's happening in the Sudan."
Kent State's enrollment declined almost 20% over the next decade and
did not pass the 1970 level for 17 years. Around Ohio it was known as
"Chaos U."
The shootings marked a turning point in the student anti-war
movement, radicalizing some and frightening off others; helped seal
the eventual demise of the military draft; and, in the opinion of his
aide Bob Haldeman, marked the beginning of Nixon's descent into the
political paranoia that led to the Watergate scandal.
Although it happened in broad daylight before thousands of witnesses
and was captured in hundreds of photographs and on film and
audiotape, Kent State remains what the writer William A. Gordon calls
"a murder mystery."
Many of the key figures are dead, including then-governor Rhodes. In
2000, a year before he died, Rhodes toldThe Columbus Dispatchthat
Kent State "was a terrible thing. ... But no one plans a train wreck,
either. It just happened. And life goes on."
So do the questions: Did the Guardsmen fire out of fear, or anger, or
on command? What explained their seemingly sudden and synchronized volley?
Jerry Lewis, a sociology professor, was in the parking lot when the
Guard opened fire. He's been studying the question ever since: "I
don't think we'll ever know why they fired. I don't think they know."
The survivor
The girl in the famous Kent State photo was not a Kent State student
but a 14-year-old runaway from Opa-locka, Fla., who hated the war.
After the shooting, Vecchio fled campus. Her father recognized her in
the newspaper and contacted the police. The FBI found her in
Indianapolis and sent her home.
She was infamous. Florida Gov. Claude Kirk, a Republican, criticized
her for being at the rally, and asked, "Is she part of the plot?" The
family got letters saying she was a communist and responsible for the
deaths. Years later, her mother would ask, "Can you imagine a
14-year-old girl having to deal with that?"
Vecchio's subsequent problems she ran away again, was arrested for
marijuana possession and loitering, wound up in a juvenile home
were well chronicled. When Kent State's May 4 Memorial was dedicated
in 1990, she told the Orlando Sentinel that the shootings "really
destroyed my life, and I don't want to talk about it." As for the
memorial, she said, "Big deal. It has nothing to do with my life."
Eventually, she made her peace with May 4. She came to feel that the
incident had helped shorten the war and given Americans "a little
more freedom."
Today Vecchio is 54, divorced, and living with her mother and dog on
a farm in Northern Florida she calls "my refuge." She works at a
hospital as a respiratory therapist.
She looks forward to going back to campus each May 4, when the
daffodils have bloomed, and talking with students. "They're nervous
when they come up," she says. "But I just talk to them, and before
long we're like long lost friends."
When they talk, she's realizes anew the importance of remembering
what happened that spring day.
"I tell them it shows what can happen if the evildoers get too much
power. They can take your freedom away. You could be walking to
school, and what happened back then could happen to you."
---------
40 years later, Kent State massacre still troubles Housatonic prof
http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/40-years-later-Kent-State-massacre-still-472784.php
Amanda Cuda
May 4, 2010
Put together, Michael Stein's photos form a mosaic of shattered innocence.
The pictures were taken in 1970, when Stein, now a professor of fine
arts at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, was a student at
Kent State University in Ohio. They depict the events leading up to
-- and the aftermath of -- one of the most shattering moments in
American history, when Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on a group
of anti-war protesters, killing four students and injuring nine others.
Stein took photos of the days leading up to the event, and of the
event itself. One picture, taken the day before the shooting, depicts
National Guardsmen dispensing tear gas and clubbing students. Another
depicts Guardsmen on campus in gas masks, ready for action. Yet
another depicts the sad, confused faces of a group of students. He
took a photo shortly before the Guardsmen started firing and shortly
after the firing stopped. About the only thing he didn't capture was
the shooting itself.
Almost until the moment the shots were fired, Stein had no inkling of
the enormity of what was happening on his campus. He knew that
something strange was going on, knew that the atmosphere at Kent was
peculiar enough to merit capturing on film. But he had no way of
knowing that he was documenting events that would affect the entire nation.
"Kent is not Berkeley," said Stein, who lives in Orange. "It's not
NYU. We'd never had guys with guns walking around our campus." Even
so, he said, "I didn't expect any violence to break out."
Tuesday marks the 40th anniversary of the shooting, which Stein said
shattered many people's illusions about the United States government
-- including his own.
"This was behavior, I think, that was unknown in this country up to
that point," he said. "At least, I don't know any precedent for it."
The impact of the shootings was such that, earlier this year, several
areas of Kent State's campus were added to the National Register of
Historic Places. Register historian Paul Lusignan said gunfire at
Kent State has been called "the day the war came home to America."
There had been protests and student unrest in the years leading up to
that day, but "what happened at Kent State raised the profile of
those other occurrences."
At the time of the shooting, Stein was finishing up his second
post-graduate degree at Kent State, in art history. Until the fateful
day of the National Guard incident, the campus was a relatively calm
place. "I went to Kent for a long time, and it's not an activist
school," Stein said.
But, like nearly all college campuses of the time, Kent State was
abuzz with discontent over the Vietnam War. On April 30 of that year,
then-President Richard Nixon announced he had authorized the invasion
of Cambodia. The announcement set off a wave of protests at campuses
across the country, including Kent State.
The students assembled at an area called Blanket Hill for the
protest. Though the exact events of that day are still unclear,
here's what Stein remembers: someone from the group of protesters
threw a stone at the National Guardsmen; a guardsman threw the stone
back. The Guardsmen began to advance on the students. The protesters
retreated up the hill. The Guardsmen backed down. Then the protesters advanced.
This went on for a while, Stein said, with students and Guardsmen
alike moving up and down the hill. For a while, Stein was part of the
student group, but he grew tired of walking back and forth on the
hill, and broke away from the group.
According to reports, the Guardsmen fired more than 60 shots in 13
seconds, killing four, injuring nine, and causing untold panic among
anyone who was there.
"To say we felt disbelief is kind of simplifying it," Stein said. "I
had just seen our government shoot college kids. We were scared
stiff. There was an incredible fear that they would kill us all. Why
would they stop when there were witnesses?"
Stein remembers that a rally was scheduled for May 4. A few days
before that, the National Guardsmen were called to the campus, which
created a tense, surreal atmosphere on the campus, Stein said. When
the day of the demonstration arrived, Stein had his camera ready to
capture the protest on film.
According to him, it was shortly after that the shooting started.
Today, Stein still recalls how lucky he was that he stepped out of
the path of the Guardsmen. "If I weren't quite as lazy as I am, I
would have been right in the middle of this," he said.
.
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