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It’s been a half-century since Thomas Grace was knocked off his feet by an Ohio National Guardsman’s bullet, but he still braces for a flashback whenever people “under the color of uniform” concoct dubious claims to justify deadly force against other Americans.
Last month it happened again. He watched as videos from Minneapolis showed agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement shoot, first Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, and, less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Veterans Administration nurse. And then he saw officials from the Trump administration scramble to avoid accountability and shift blame to the victims.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m able to shake this kind of thing off,” Grace told me when I gave him a call last week. But those attacks, he said, were “just so violent and unprovoked” that “it definitely had an impact on me.”
The basic facts of the tragedy at Kent State University are well-known. Shortly after noon on May 4, 1970, twenty-eight soldiers kneeled on a grassy knoll and fired more than sixty rounds in thirteen seconds into a crowd of students, most of whom were there to protest the expansion of the Vietnam war. They killed four and wounded nine, including Grace, a sophomore history major who was shot through his left heel.
The circumstances back then, of course, differed substantially from the deadly recent events in Minneapolis. Yet for those of us who came of age in that era, for whom the Ohio tragedy is seared into our memories as a critical turning point during a time of national crisis, the striking parallels are impossible to ignore: A country deeply divided over urgent matters both domestic and foreign. Opponents of a president, demonized with inflammatory claims by those in power. Unarmed citizens, dead at the hands of government agents ill-suited to their mission.
View, from behind, of members of the Ohio National Guard, with gas masks and fixed bayonets, as they advance towards Blanket Hill to disperse antiwar demonstrators and students at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, May 4, 1970. Four protesters were eventually shot and killed (and nine injured) when troops began to fire their weapons into the crowd.Howard Ruffner/Getty
And, of course, the cover-ups. Before the blood had dried on the Kent State campus, the Guard commanders declared that the soldiers had acted rationally out of fear for their lives. Not only was a violent mob of antiwar protesters just yards away and closing in with rocks and bricks, they claimed, but someone else had fired the first shot. “At the approximate time of the firing on the campus,” a spokesman for the Guard told reporters, “the Ohio Highway Patrol—via a helicopter—spotted a sniper on a nearby building.”
They even provided evidence: a bullet hole in a fifteen-foot-tall abstract metal sculpture named Solar Totem #1, which sat roughly between the students and the Guard’s position on the knoll known as Blanket Hill. The jagged side of the hole faced the soldiers, and therefore, they argued, the bullet had been fired toward them by someone in the crowd.
That is why, three days later, the artist who’d created the sculpture, Don Drumm, accompanied journalists from Akron’s Beacon-Journal to a nearby farm. Drumm brought a sheet of the weathering steel he’d used. With a borrowed rifle and the same type of ammunition used by the Guard, the group fired a bullet through the sheet. The entry side turned out to be the jagged one. The bullet that struck the sculpture actually had been fired from the Guard’s position.
As for the supposed sniper on the roof? A photographer from the school paper holding his camera, not a gun.
If those errors by the Guard could be charitably chalked up as being a rush to judgment, another bit of faulty evidence could not. Captain J. Ronald Snyder, an 18-year veteran of the Guard, commanded one of the units deployed on campus that day. He claimed he had been first to reach the side of one of the dead students, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, a 20-year-old sophomore psychology major who was shot through the mouth and bled out, face down, on the pavement. Snyder told investigators that he’d found a .32 caliber revolver when he flipped the lifeless Miller over with his boot. Here was some evidence suggesting that if a sniper hadn’t been involved, perhaps Miller had fired first.
It wasn’t until five years later that Snyder confessed in a federal courtroom that he had planted the weapon in hopes of exonerating his colleagues—a throw-down gun, as it’s known in corrupt police investigations.
New York Times, July 1, 1975New York Times/Kent State Guardsmen Oral History Project
His admission was unsurprising. His lie had long been undermined by one of the most powerful images in that time of American crisis, one that appeared on the front page of nearly every major newspaper. In the photograph, a 14-year-old named Mary Ann Vecchio was crouched in anguish over Miller, her arms spread wide. No guardsmen could be seen anywhere nearby. The student who shot the picture, John Filo, would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize, as did the Beacon-Journal for its coverage of Kent State.
As for the commanders’ assertion that the soldiers fired to defend themselves from imminent danger, the Scranton Commission on Campus Unrest, a national panel set up on orders of President Richard Nixon six weeks later, used films and pictures to determine that “the main body of aggressive students was about 60 to 75 yards away, at the foot of the hill.”
The four people killed were located in or at the edge of a parking lot outside Prentice Hall, a women’s dormitory. Closest to the shooters was Miller, 85 yards away. Allison B. Krause, 19, a freshman in the Honors College, was 110 yards away, killed by a bullet that passed through her left upper arm into her left side. William Knox Schroeder, 19, a sophomore psychology major, shot in the back, and Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, a junior studying speech therapy, hit in the front of her neck, each stood 130 yards from the soldiers.
Fast-forward to the morning of January 24, 2026.
At least six masked federal agents in Minneapolis confronted Alex Pretti, who had turned out to observe and record the often-brutal tactics of ICE immigration raids. As Pretti was helping a woman who agents had knocked down, they surrounded him, pepper-sprayed him, and knocked him to the ground before firing ten bullets at him. After Pretti’s death, a collection of Trump officials immediately amplified various justifications —none of them accurate— just as they had after the fatal shooting several weeks earlier of Renee Good. They claimed Pretti was “brandishing” his gun (which had been holstered until the agents pulled it out) and was out to “massacre law enforcement.” As for Good, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem branded her a “domestic terrorist” who had tried to run over the agent who ended up fatally shooting her.
In both instances, visual evidence collected by bystanders was crucial to getting closer to the truth. This is why I checked in with Tom Grace.
I’d met Grace a couple of years earlier at an author’s event where we both signed books, in his case Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties, published in 2016 (and mine, MAYDAY 1971). The bullet in 1970 took off a chunk of Grace’s left foot. The ambulance that sped him away from the scene also carried Sandra Scheuer, who died on the way. He watched as medics covered her head with a sheet. When he arrived at the hospital, only his mother’s plea to the surgeons saved him from an amputation. I knew that it had been excruciating for him and other survivors to see the National Guard try to blame the students for their own injuries.
Grace returned to Kent State, became a social worker, and then earned his doctorate in history, teaching until his recent retirement from SUNY Erie near Buffalo, where I reached him at home. He told me that just as photographs and films helped correct the 1970 narrative, so did smartphones this time. Without the videos of Pretti’s last moments, the falsehoods from the administration and ICE might have prevailed. “Half the country would still be thinking he was a would-be assassin,” he said. (Although, given the climate of misinformation created by our government, half the country still might.)
Grace suggested that I speak with another survivor, who now teaches in Kent State’s School of Media and Journalism. Roseann ‘Chic’ Canfora was part of the 1970 protest and became one of the most effective advocates for its proper remembrance and commemoration. Her brother Alan Canfora, who was also wounded that day, was Grace’s best friend.
“It’s chilling for us to see history repeating itself. The more confusion that sets in from the start, the harder it becomes to change minds that are already made up.”
“It’s chilling for us to see history repeating itself,” she said. Canfora teaches her students that when government officials muddy the truth, it can be hard to undo the damage even in the face of new evidence. “The more confusion that sets in from the start,” she said, “the harder it becomes to change minds that are already made up.”
If we needed one more reminder of the parallels between then and now, a bittersweet one showed up last week. Just as Kent State inspired Neil Young to write “Ohio,” which quickly became a timeless anthem of the era, another rock legend released a single about the current events. Bruce Springsteen went to Minneapolis to perform his new requiem, “Streets of Minneapolis.” “And there were bloody footprints,” he sang, “Where mercy should have stood.”
Not long ago, at the Kent State campus, I stood on the grassy knoll where the guardsmen kneeled, gazing down at the parking lot where most of the victims had been standing. The lot remains in daily use except for the exact spots where the dead students fell, each marked off permanently by six pylons that light up like beacons at night.
From that hill on a soft, peaceful morning, it was frankly impossible to fully grasp what occurred in 1970. If they weren’t about to be overrun by a bloodthirsty mob, if no sniper had fired, then what led a contingent of part-time soldiers to aim loaded M-1 rifles, weapons with a horizontal range of almost two miles, at anyone, never mind unarmed members of their own generation, the length of a football field away.
A similar curiosity motivated Brian VanDeMark, a historian and author, now in his sixties, to spend more than four years working on his 2024 book, Kent State: An American Tragedy, which is without doubt the most comprehensive look at the events. “I’d always been perplexed about the unanswered questions,” VanDeMark told me. “What led to the shooting? Why did this happen? How could it reach a point of tension and pressure where American soldiers could kill American students on American soil?”
To reconstruct the events, VanDeMark explored the archives and the historical context and spoke with scores of witnesses, including several guardsmen who had never granted interviews before. His research suggests to me that disaster was all but inevitable. Just as with Minnesota, the causes of the events of May 4 can’t be limited to the moments before the guardsmen pulled their triggers.
While not considered a major hotbed of 1960s activism, Kent State wasn’t immune to the country’s increasingly poisonous political and social atmosphere. It had been brewing for years, stoked by extremists of all stripes and by many of the nation’s top leaders. That spring brought a chain of events that created even more volatile conditions, primed for any spark.
President Richard Nixon announcing during a press conference on April 30th, 1970, the entry of American soldiers in Cambodia. STF/AFP/Getty
On the evening of Thursday, April 30th, Nixon, who had won the White House with a promise to wind down the Vietnam War, announced on national television that he had expanded it instead into neighboring Cambodia. The next morning, he made an off-the-cuff remark overheard by reporters, denouncing “these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses.”
Nixon’s remark reflected his visceral disdain for antiwar protesters. One of his first official acts had been to order intelligence agencies to investigate whether the movement was being financed by foreign agents. “Little bastards are draft dodgers, country-haters, or don’t-cares” and “revolutionaries and radicals and bastards” were typical of the comments captured on his White House tapes. He usually left the public insults to others, such as Vice President Spiro Agnew, who railed against “misfits” and “impudent effete snobs.”
As Nixon’s aides had warned him privately, the antiwar movement, which had lost momentum, revived in fury with news of both the Cambodia incursion and his “bums.” Protests broke out on hundreds of campuses. Movement leaders began planning for a national student strike and a mass march in Washington a week hence, on the ninth of May.
On Friday, May 1, angry Kent State students gathered on the grassy Commons, where they held a mock funeral for the Constitution. Late that night, scuffles outside a strip of bars escalated into pitched battles between city police and students, some of whom ran through downtown, breaking windows. The mayor asked Ohio Governor James Rhodes to dispatch the National Guard. Before the guardsmen arrived Saturday evening, students surrounded the one-story wooden building used by Kent State’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and set it afire with rags soaked in gasoline. Then they blocked city firefighters from putting it out.
Into this charged environment rushed military jeeps and trucks carrying hundreds of guardsmen, exhausted from having just spent four miserable days deployed by the governor at the site of a Teamsters strike in Akron. (Rhodes treated the Guard like his personal army, having called it out thirty-one times in two years, VanDeMark reported.) They arrived on campus with rifles and fixed bayonets, clashing with furious students as they forced them back to their dorms.
Sunday, May 3, was a textbook example of verbal provocation by government officials. The governor, who was term-limited and running for a US Senate seat as a tough law-and-order candidate, arrived in Kent to hold court. At a news conference, likely emboldened by Nixon’s “bums” comment, Rhodes spoke bombastically, pounding on his desk. The protests and the ROTC burning were “the most vicious form of campus-oriented violence yet perpetrated” in Ohio, he told reporters. If he hadn’t called in the guard, he claimed without evidence, radicals would have burned more than a dozen other buildings. “They’re worse than the Brownshirts and the communist element, and also the Night Riders and the vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America.”
“They’re worse than the Brownshirts and the communist element, and also the Night Riders and the vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America.”
Asked by a reporter, “What size organization do you think that you’re up against here at the university?” Rhodes replied, “We’re up against the strongest, well- trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America,” one that would go to any lengths to achieve its purpose and “[causing] death is not going to stand in the way.” He added, “No one is safe in Portage County. No one is safe.”
Other officials at the news conference picked up on Rhodes’ tone. To stop the protests, “we will apply whatever degree of force is necessary,” declared the head of the Ohio National Guard, Adjutant General Sylvester Del Corso. The Kent police chief, Roy Thompson, agreed, adding, “Even to the point of shooting. We don’t want to get into that, but the law says we can if necessary.” Chief of the Ohio Highway Patrol, Robert Chiaramonte, warned that police and troops should prepare for possible snipers, and “they can expect us to return fire.” Canfora remembers hearing about the governor’s tirade at the time. “It never dawned on us that what this man was doing was not only sending armed gunmen onto our campus, but he was putting targets on our backs,” she said. If the students had realized that, “there might not have been so many of us there” the following day.
Grace recalls that he and his friends were angrier about the Cambodia invasion than the rhetoric of politicians. Still, the warnings about snipers must have been frightening to those on the other side of the barricades. Grace wondered in retrospect, “What kind of impact did that have on the National Guard?”
He heard an echo of those fighting words in a TV interview conducted last October with Trump adviser Stephen Miller, a clip that officials say is shown to ICE agents. “You have immunity to perform your duties,” Miller tells them. “And no one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.”
After another night of sporadic clashes between guardsmen and students, soldiers were posted on Monday near the Commons, where a midday rally was planned. The governor had declared martial law, a legally and constitutionally questionable decree banning any protest in town or on campus. Asked how big a group would constitute an unlawful gathering, he answered, “two students walking together.”
The students came anyway. By noon, there were more than two-thousand. People carried black flags and chanted slogans such as “Pigs off campus!” and “No more war!” Many taunted the soldiers. But witnesses, from students to faculty, from campus police to many guardsmen, later described the gathering as peaceful. Hundreds of kids coming through the center of campus after morning classes stopped to watch. It wasn’t easy to distinguish activists from spectators.
At this point, the belligerent comments from the governor, the head of the National Guard, and local officials must have been ringing in the ears of the highest-ranking officer on the scene, Brigadier General Robert Canterbury. A 55-year-old who’d seen combat in World War II, Canterbury nevertheless “lacked the understanding and empathy that are antidotes to tunnel vision and awareness of one’s limitations,” VanDeMark wrote. When the day was done, Canterbury would assert, improbably, that he had been present but wasn’t in the chain of command.
Against the advice of other officials, Canterbury decided to clear the area and told a university police officer to make the announcement over a bullhorn. The students refused to move. A few threw rocks. Canterbury, with approximately one hundred guardsmen at his disposal, ordered them to don gas masks and form a line with their rifles loaded and bayonets fixed to sweep a crowd of thousands off the Commons.
Most students didn’t realize the soldiers were permitted to carry live ammunition. They resisted until tear gas forced them to scatter. The guardsmen split up and kept marching beyond the Commons to push groups of students further out. In so doing, the contingent led by Canterbury found itself briefly trapped in a fenced-off football practice field, exchanging tear gas canisters and rocks with protesters. Under Canterbury’s orders, the nervous soldiers retreated, somewhat chaotically, aiming to regroup at the burned ROTC building. Dozens of protesters, realizing they had the guardsmen on the run, started moving in the same direction, some throwing stones and chanting with glee.
The soldiers later testified to investigators and in courtrooms that they were terrified they were about to be overrun and attacked, saying they believed the protesters were closing in and intended to inflict bodily harm or even death. They hustled up Blanket Hill. At the top, those on one flank stopped, turned on their heels, aimed. They had done the same thing minutes earlier in the practice field to halt the students’ advance.
But this time they fired.
Mary Ann Vecchio kneels over the body of Kent State University student Jeffrey Miller, shot during an anti-war demonstration on the university campus, Kent, Ohio, May 4, 1970. The protests resulted in the deaths of four protesters, including Miller, and the injuries of nine others after the National Guard opened fire on students. Howard Ruffner/Getty
Why? Was there an order? If so, who gave it? Over the decades, in reports and investigations, no clear answer emerged. A summary of an FBI probe of the killings, issued by the Justice Department in October 1970, was highly skeptical of the soldiers’ claim they were in imminent danger. The summary also suggested the bureau’s interviewers were frustrated at hearing conflicting stories: “One guardsman heard someone yell and believed he’d been given an order to fire. Another ‘thought’ he heard a command to fire. He, however, claims he did not fire. Another heard a warning to ‘get down’ just before the firing. Another ‘thought’ he heard ‘someone’ say ‘warning shots.’ Another ‘thought’ he heard ‘someone’ say ‘if they continue toward you, fire.’ Most guardsmen heard no order, and no person acknowledges giving such an order.”
For VanDeMark, however, the mystery is now solved. In 2020, he landed an interview for his book with Sergeant Mathew McManus, who had been on Blanket Hill in 1970. At the time, McManus was 25, had a job at a paper company and had served in the Guard for seven years.
McManus told the author that when he saw troops kneeling and aiming, he was desperate to avert tragedy. He said he yelled, “‘Fire one round in the air! Fire in the air!’” He then pointed his own shotgun up and pulled the trigger to demonstrate. The implication is that in the midst of all the noise and confusion, the others heard only “Fire!” and his weapon discharging. They then followed suit.
By this account, instead of heading off disaster, McManus’s good intentions brought it on.
The story was at odds with what McManus previously claimed to the FBI and others, which was that he shouted and fired only after hearing the first shots. He told VanDeMark he lied all those years out of fear and shame but has been haunted ever since. Finally, in his mid-70s, he said he wanted to set the record straight before it was too late.
For VanDeMark, this scenario fit the known facts and aligned with the testimony of nearly two dozen other eyewitnesses. “It was as if things suddenly rearranged themselves and clicked neatly into place,” he writes. Some of the student witnesses and survivors, like Chic Canfora, remain skeptical of this latest explanation of why the other soldiers fired. “That truth can only come from the triggermen themselves and not Mathew McManus,” she said, “who has changed his story numerous times over the years.”
Whatever the proximate cause, much if not most of the responsibility belonged to the officials who sent the guardsmen to Kent State in the first place, on a crowd control mission for which they were ill-suited, unprepared, and over-armed. They had little, if any, training in how to deal with student protesters or how to defuse a potentially violent situation. What’s more, politicians had vilified the people they were facing as dangerous and evil, and guardsmen had the added misfortune of Canterbury, an inept and reactive leader.
“That’s one of the pressing lessons of Kent State: abysmal military and political leadership set in motion a situation that contributed essentially to the thing getting out of hand and escalating into tragedy.”
“That’s one of the pressing lessons of Kent State: abysmal military and political leadership set in motion a situation that contributed essentially to the thing getting out of hand and escalating into tragedy,” VanDeMark said. Leaders have “a moral responsibility to minimize the risk of tragedy. That responsibility was abdicated in 1970.”
The consequences were dire. Four students were dead. Among the survivors, the most grievously wounded was Dean Kahler, a 20-year-old Ohio farm boy who had started college late and had only been on campus for about a month. He’d never been to a protest and wanted to check it out. A bullet in his back injured his spinal cord. He’s spent his life in a wheelchair.
Here is where I would love to report that these horrors launched a long overdue national soul-searching. That the nation’s leaders reckoned with the fallout from demonizing certain groups and unleashing an armed force upon them. That the divisions roiling families and communities healed as people came together to mourn their children. Even my own father, skeptical of the antiwar movement, a position that made my home visits increasingly uncomfortable, was so shaken by Kent State that he made a rare call to the pay phone in the hallway of my college dorm. You were right all along, he told me. It’s Nixon who’s the bum.
But it was not to be.
At first, it seemed the tragedy might melt one icy heart in the White House. Nixon was initially shocked when given the news from Ohio. “Is this because of me, of Cambodia?” he asked H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff. In his diary, Haldeman recorded, “Obviously realizes, but won’t openly admit, his ‘bums’ remark very harmful.”
Kent State haunted Nixon all week. Newspaper editorials heaped scorn on the White House. His remarks about students were “obtuse and heartless” and his invasion of Cambodia “a monumental blunder,” wrote Tom Wicker of the New York Times. Fires or explosions hit more than a dozen campuses. Nixon’s aides worried about his mental and physical state as tens of thousands of young people streamed to Washington for the big antiwar rally on Saturday, which was being supercharged by the Ohio killings.
The president couldn’t sleep that Friday night. Around 4 a.m. Saturday morning, he made one of the strangest moves of his presidency. He snuck out with his personal assistant, Manolo Sanchez, to visit the Lincoln Memorial. He was desperate to connect face-to-face with the young people sleeping there in advance of the protest.
In his own idiosyncratic way, Nixon was sincere in this effort, taking a real personal and political risk. But the meeting didn’t go well. A cluster of astonished demonstrators, most of whom had been roused from sleep, or were stoned, or both, stared at the president in silence for half an hour. He told them he understood that “most of you think I’m an S.O.B” and then delivered a rambling monologue on subjects ranging from Winston Churchill to travel tips. He asked a few about their schools’ athletics. But after Ohio, the kids were in no mood for presidential chitchat, and news reports veered close to ridicule. “Here we come from a university that’s completely uptight, on strike, and when we told him where we were from, he talked about the football team,” Joan Pelletier, a Syracuse University student, told reporters.
Later that day, the president glumly hunkered down inside a White House encircled by a cordon of municipal buses for protection, as some 100,000 people marched peacefully through DC. He soon reverted to his default emotional state of suspicion and retribution. Within weeks, Nixon approved the notorious Huston Plan, which proposed wiretaps, break-ins, and other illegal acts against movement leaders and anyone else deemed an internal security risk. (He withdrew approval after aides argued it could be legally dangerous to sign off on such a document, even if classified. Formally approved or not, the black bag activities never stopped. And we all know how that turned out for Nixon.)
Nor did Kent State at least provide a cautionary tale for law enforcement facing unarmed students. On May 15th, police who were summoned to quell rowdy students at Jackson State College in Mississippi fired into a dormitory, killing two young people and wounding 12. The incident didn’t receive the same national attention as the one at Kent State, which led to charges of racism in the media, the government, and among the public, since the victims were Black.
As for public opinion, a Gallup poll conducted for Newsweek a few weeks after Kent State found that 58 percent of Americans blamed the students for what happened, and only 11 percent blamed the National Guard. In a representative letter to the editor in Ohio, 23-year-old Sherry L. Parke wrote to the Beacon-Journal, “It was a sad day indeed, when a minority mob of radical students could threaten the existence of our government and then be made heroes of the day by men and women of the news media.” Hundreds of construction workers brutally attacked antiwar protesters in lower Manhattan and went on to force Mayor John Lindsay to raise flags he had ordered set at half-mast to mourn the Ohio deaths.
Demonstrators march and hold banners during what became known as the Hard Hat Riot, New York, New York, May 1970. Stuart Lutz/Gado/Getty
Some grieving family members began receiving hate mail. The first get-well card Kahler opened in the hospital turned out to be from someone saying they wished he were dead.
Nor did the quest for accountability bring satisfaction anytime soon to the victims and their families. The state of Ohio filed no charges against the guardsmen. Justice Department officials initially declined to pursue a civil rights case, explaining there was no expectation they could prove criminal intent or conspiracy. State officials empaneled a special grand jury. It indicted not the soldiers but one faculty member and 24 current and former students, including Chic Canfora, on various charges of rioting, assault, and arson. The indictment criticized the university’s “overemphasis” on the right to dissent. (Canfora and 21 others were either acquitted or had charges dropped.)
Under pressure from the victims’ families, Nixon’s Department of Justice revisited the case and indicted eight guardsmen in 1974. All were acquitted.
The families didn’t give up, filing a civil case in federal court against the guardsmen and state officials. They lost again. Following a successful appeal, a retrial was granted. And in the end, in January 1979, the families agreed to settle in exchange for an “official statement of regret” plus a payment of $675,000. To get there had taken them nearly nine years and countless hours sitting in courtrooms facing the shooters.
As a survivor of the Kent State killings who participated in those trials, Chic Canfora said the Minnesota incidents are “painful to see, and it’s also troubling because it means we’ve learned nothing from that dark chapter in American history.”
Despite the extreme acts of those who more recently have been employing state power against dissenters, it is heartening to see that, over time, at least there’s been a genuine reckoning with what happened back then. In a national survey conducted by Emerson College to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the killings, 36 percent said the National Guard was responsible, nine percent blamed the Ohio governor, and eight percent blamed Richard Nixon. Thirteen percent blamed the students.
Prodded by survivors and their supporters, Kent State University, after many years of ambivalence about how to mark this difficult history, ultimately decided to fully embrace it. Memorials and markers on campus display the facts and chronology as well as any Civil War battle site. The university opened an impressive May 4 Visitor Center in 2013. Three years later, the terrain of the shootings was designated a National Historic Landmark.
And every May 4, the college sponsors a series of commemorations that begin on the Commons at 12:24 p.m., the time of the shootings, and culminate at midnight with a silent candlelight march around the campus and the town. It is not possible to remain unmoved on this march, as I discovered when I joined not long ago. What becomes clear in the silence is that whatever happens in the future, the four dead in Ohio, victims of one terrible moment in an era of national emergency, have not been forgotten. One hopes the same for those victims of our own angry times.
Lawrence Roberts, a former investigative editor with the Washington Post and ProPublica, is the author of MAYDAY 1971: A White House at War, a Revolt in the Streets, and the Untold History of America’s Biggest Mass Arrest.
