Decades after Kent State shooting, the tragic legacy shapes its activism (2024)

Their names and the distances the bullets traveled are recorded on the markers. So, too, are the names of four students who were killed.

In the decades since the horror of that afternoon forced a national reckoning over the Vietnam War, the trauma and the lessons to emerge from it have become embedded in the university’s DNA. Both help explain why, even as campuses across the country erupt in ugly conflicts over the Israel-Gaza war, the community here goes about its activism differently.

Kent State’s curriculum includes courses centered on the massacre. Its May 4 Visitors Center details what preceded the shooting and the steps needed to prevent something similar from ever happening again. Freshmen go there every fall as part of their orientation.

They’re taught not only about the school’s past but about “making it your own,” center director Alison Caplan said.

Administrators, professors and students have spent the past two weeks watching the demonstrations elsewhere in dismay. They are worried by what they see as precursors to the same kind of state-sanctioned violence that led to the deadly confrontation in 1970: rhetoric that dehumanizes opponents, university officials tapping law enforcement to quell protests and politicians calling for the National Guard to be sent in if that doesn’t work.

“They may have learned nothing from history,” said Chic Canfora, a Kent State journalism professor and one of the student protesters who was shot at 54 years ago.

The weekend had been tumultuous on campuses from coast to coast, students protesting President Richard M. Nixon’s announcement that the United States would invade Cambodia as part of an escalation in the war. At Kent State, the wooden ROTC building had been set on fire, and Gov. James Rhodes had flown in. He derided the protesters as “the worst type of people that we harbor in America” and vowed to use any means necessary — including guns — to end the unrest.

By Monday, nearly 1,000 members of the state’s National Guard occupied the northeastern Ohio campus. By noon, they were confronting about 3,000 students gathered in a large, grassy area called the Commons. The Guard declared the assembly unlawful and ordered them to disperse. Few did, and the soldiers started marching forward while firing tear gas canisters into the crowd.

What happened next stunned America: The students retreated up Blanket Hill and then down the other side toward a parking lot and practice football field. Most of the soldiers followed but stopped on the field. About 10 minutes later, the troops went back up the hill. Students like Joe Cullum thought the protesters had won.

“It just felt a little bit like a celebration,” he recounted this week during the final class of “May 4, 1970 and Its Aftermath,” a course the university offers annually.

Then, at 12:24 p.m., dozens of Guard members turned in unison and aimed at the crowd.

“They’re going to shoot,” Dean Kahler thought, picking up the story from Cullum. He remembers looking around for cover, but there was nothing to hide behind. “All of a sudden, I heard bullets hitting the ground real near where I was — I mean, they got real close.” He suddenly felt a sting in his lower back, like from a bee. It was a bullet in his spine, he told the students. He’d never walk again.

In 13 seconds, the soldiers fired more than 60 bullets down the northeastern slope of Blanket Hill. Students Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder were fatally injured.

Cullum, a 74-year-old retired high school social studies teacher, connected past and present during the class conversation and pivoted to the pro-Palestinian campus protests and arrests happening elsewhere. “I don’t expect [universities] to agree to all the demands that students are making, but I expect them to have a conversation,” he said.

On the first anniversary of the tragedy, Kent State’s leaders created the Center for Peaceful Change, now called the School of Peace and Conflict Studies and described as an “original ‘living memorial’ to the students killed on May 4, 1970.” Aside from that, some alumni and retired faculty recall, officials tried to distance the school from the shooting. They even briefly renamed it “Kent” as a way to separate it from “Kent State,” which had become synonymous with one searing moment.

The administration tried to end an annual commemoration after five years, saying enough time had passed, Canfora said. Students and survivors who disagreed formed the May 4 Task Force, intent on raising awareness about the factors that led to the shooting and the lack of accountability and justice in its aftermath.

“We were just an irritant that kept wanting the world to remember what happened at Kent State,” Canfora said.

In 1977, as the university prepared to build a gym over part of the site where the 13 students had been killed or injured, protesters created “Tent City” and started what would become a two-month, around-the-clock occupation of Blanket Hill. The goal was “to protect the May 4 shooting site with our bodies,” said Canfora, who was part of the effort. It ended only after court orders allowed law enforcement to forcibly remove and arrest nearly 200 protesters.

The university’s attitude has evolved significantly in recent years.

In 2014, it opened its special visitors center, with multimedia exhibits that take people through the tumultuous 1960s and the student activism that burgeoned at Kent State and throughout the country. Firsthand audio accounts trace the events on campus between May 1 and May 4. For Todd Diacon, then the senior vice president for academic affairs, the center recognized “the historical importance” of the shooting and offered people a chance “to reflect on significant issues necessary to sustaining a democratic society.”

But what some consider the turning point came in 2018, when Kent State’s then-president gave a speech in which she said it must accept its fate as “the reluctant custodian of an indelible mark on the American landscape.”

“We live with our wound,” Beverly Warren told the crowd. “The question we ask today is: What do we do with it?”

The Kent State of 2024 is different from that of 1970, though the public university’s student body — numbering nearly 32,000 undergraduates — still comes from predominantly working-class homes. On the main campus, about a third of students need to work 10 to 30 hours per week to pay for their education. At Kent State’s seven regional campuses, more than 50 percent need to do so.

“A lot of our students are just really busy working,” said Diacon, who became president in 2019.

Yet many are pursuing campus activism tied to the war in Gaza. While not the dramatic, highly visual encampments that have drawn such attention, as well as becoming such flash points at places like Columbia University, UCLA and Dartmouth College, their campaign aims to achieve some of the same goals.

The university addresses the violence and free speech issues of the May 4 shooting, but largely ignores the anti-militarism, anti-imperialist message being pushed by students at that time, said Magdalen Weiss-Vopat, 23, an organizer for Concerned Students, an ad hoc group of eight Kent State organizations. In her view, the heart of Kent State protests circa 1970 is relevant to America’s role in Gaza and Israel today.

“We’re trying to hold the university accountable and make sure that they’re not being essentially hypocrites,” she said.

In December, the group told administrators it planned to speak out at a Board of Trustees meeting and used the prospect of that to negotiate the release of information regarding the university’s $400 million investment portfolio — achieving a key demand of other student activists around the country. The ensuing months were spent scouring through the data, researching the university’s investment funds and homing in on five companies that the group believed manufacture military weapons being used in Israel’s attacks on Gaza.

Late last month, the group sent the president a letter demanding the university divest from those companies. In doing so, the students referenced Kent State’s past. The sacrifice of their predecessors demanded a greater responsibility than that shouldered by peers at Columbia, Yale University or the University of California at Berkeley, they noted.

“As current Kent State students, we have a moral duty to continue the work of those before us,” they wrote. “We not only stand in solidarity with our student activist forbearers, but with our fellow students around the country today as they advocate for a better world, free of genocide and imperialism. It is with this history that we call on you to take action.”

“Imperialism hasn’t really changed all that much. And we’re still fighting the same fight,” said Camille Tinnin, another Concerned Students organizer and a political science doctoral student whose focus is conflict analysis and management. “It’s all like a part of that one struggle.”

On Wednesday, members of Concerned Students met with two top administrators to present their findings about the university’s investment in weapons manufacturers. They provided two alternative funds that provide similar returns on investment and asked the administrators to urge the Board of Trustees — the ultimate decision-maker — to sit down with the group, Tinnin said.

“Based on what’s happening around the country, I think they will come to the negotiating table,” she said. “It would be a very bad look if they didn’t.”

Diacon purposely goes through the parking lot where the memorials and markers were placed at least once a semester. He walked by there again Tuesday en route to the visitors center, where for nearly an hour he talked about the singular legacy of 1970 on this campus. Surrounding and looming over him were the haunting, harrowing drawings from an illustrated history of “Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio” by prominent cartoonist Derf Backderf.

Diacon said he won’t judge the actions of other college presidents who in recent days asked outside law enforcement to break up protests on their grounds. Every situation requires its own unique response, he stressed. But he was emphatic that doing so was not for Kent State.

“We very clearly have a lived lesson, which is polarization and bringing in external armed troops was the exact recipe for the tragedy that happened on our campus,” he said.

A historian by training — he specialized in the central state power of Brazil — Diacon identifies parallels between what happened in the United States more than a half-century ago and what’s happening now.

“I worry about this moment in American culture and politics and history, that we’re seeing this kind of polarization that we saw in the late ’60s and in the ’70s,” he said. “And I worry about that as a recipe for another Kent State.”

Outside the center, barely 150 feet away, lay the National Historic Landmark plaque where soldiers once started firing. Even closer, a towering statue of metal panes that rises toward the sky like a vertical house of cards.

In one of the lowest panes is a bullet hole. Anonymous artists used chalk to incorporate the hole into a peace sign.

Below it are two words: Never forget.