She gave a speech to student activists
The National Guard: Defending Excessive Force on a Kent State University Campus and Bringing Back the Stones of Peace and Conflict Studies
According to Diacon, Kent State and other public universities have less authority to regulate speech than private universities due to state law.
One is the danger of armed action on a college campus, he says, particularly when it comes to the National Guard, who are not controlled by the university administration.
Canfora notes that “excuses for the use of excessive force on campus” began immediately after the shooting, which is very similar to the misinformation that ran rampant then and today.
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.
College students are paying attention to the world and looking at what’s happening there, and this is exactly what large groups of people in our society can do to oppose it. “That’s healthy. That shouldn’t be something that is feared.”
When Roseann “Chic” Canfora arrived at Ohio’s Kent State University in 1968, she says she was constantly being given leaflets by anti-war activists on campus — and throwing them away.
The students at Kent State protested the war in Gaza as part of the commemoration for the four students killed by the National Guard in 1970.
Kent State University President Todd Diacon told NPR that the importance of kindness, respect, free speech and civic dialogue are “baked into our DNA now,” including in its statement of core values and the work of its School for Peace and Conflict Studies, founded in 1971.
Canfora says many years of activism led to wins like markers where the injured students fell on campus, so cars can no longer park there, a May 4th walking tour and visitor center with archives.
In 1975, the university said “five years was long enough to remember” and students started forming the May 4th Task Force. There will be a memorial service, a candlelit walk, and special lectures this year.
Every year Canfora and other students who survived the shooting return to campus to retell their story and to counter the rhetoric of the National Guard.
Sustained Kent State Shooting Activists: A Supremum for a Student Survivor, During the Blackout of May 4, 1970
She says that she had an aunt come into her home and say that there was a “splendid” threat against the Guardsmen. It was difficult for middle America to believe American soldiers would not resort to violence against their fellow citizens.
The state paid the families of students who were hurt in the battle, though the Guardsmen had settled out of court. The Ohio National Guard signed a statement that began, “In retrospect, the tragedy of May 4, 1970 should not have occurred.”
She points out that the commission on campus unrest that Nixon formed in June 1970 would issue a report calling the shootings “unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable,” while an FBI report released later that year found reason to believe the Guard’s claims of acting in self-defense were “fabricated subsequent to the event.”
Canfora says that they were too young and nave at 18 and 19 years old to know the dangers of those inflammatory words. We saw how the soldiers were conditioned to see American students as dangerous and an enemy when they turned their guns on them. And we should all learn the lessons from that.”
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, Jim Rhodes spoke about the best kind of people he could find in America.
She cannot talk about use of excessive force without linking it to the inflammatory rhetoric that inspired it.
Source: She survived the 1970 Kent State shooting. Here’s her message to student activists
From a standstill to a riot: The day of April 4, 1970, when the US invaded Cambodia was declared declared a terrorist attack
She remembers that on Sunday three students were stabbed in the backs and legs by guardsmen. “And that was all a foreshadowing of what was to come the next day, on Monday.”
They arrived on Saturday night to find Kent State’s wooden ROTC building on fire, burning to the ground. On Sunday, Canfora says students held a peaceful sit-on on campus, calling on the university president to get the National Guard off campus, to no avail.
Anti-war protesters on college campuses took off after April 30, 1970, when the US invaded Cambodia, a marked escalation of the war.
“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 … Canfora says that people learn the right lessons from what happened so that students on college campuses can exercise their freedom of speech without fear.
Canfora is a professional-in-residence at Kent State, teaching journalism and helping plan its annual commemoration events, after spending the past 40 years working to correct the record and preserve the May 4 legacy.
“Those trials were eventually thrown out for lack of evidence that we had participated in a riot,” she explains. We had lost our opportunity to tell the world about what happened that day even though we were grateful that the indictments were thrown out.
“I ran to where I last saw him 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 told me that Alan and Tom had been hit.
She says that she realized it was live bullets when she pulled her brother’s roommate’s car over. The glass of the car windows shattered as M1 bullets hit the ground around us. It was terrifying for 13 seconds.
From a student protest to a cease-fire in Gaza to protesting against famine, suffering and death in the name of Christi Ahrens
She was a sophomore at the time when members of the Ohio National Guard fired into the crowd of students, killing four and injuring nine.
The speaker of the House called on Biden to send the National Guard to Columbia University last week, days before New York City police arrested 300 protesters there.
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 two weeks, with some of them injured in the process.
She believes that the students are similar to those who are protesting at the college campuses today, calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.
“They at least know that they don’t want any famine and suffering and death done in their name,” she says. It’s inspiring to see them saying that they need to speak out against something, even if they don’t like it. “
She told NPR in an interview that she stopped throwing the anti-war leaflets away after seeing the draft that took her brothers to that war.
Against Gaza: Students in Kent State University are Fighting for the Status of the University’s Trade-Off in the 1970 Black Hole Inspiral
The campus was still scarred by the 1970 shooting. The song “Ohio” was written by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and is about the tragedy where four students were killed.
Sophia Swengel, president of the May 4 Task Force and a sophomore, acknowledged the protesters in a speech on Saturday to honor the victims. Many of them were waving signs calling on the University of Toledo to leave the weapons industry.
Students are standing up against bloodshed in other countries, she said, referring to Israel’s assault on Gaza. “Much like they did against the Vietnam War back in the ’60s,” Ms. Swengel added.
In 1970 the R.O.T.C. program, police training programs and the research and development of liquid crystal used in heat detectors were all abolished by the students.
Today, demonstrators at Kent State are asking the university to divest its portfolio of instruments of war. “The university is profiting from war, and they were arguing in ’69 and ’70 that the university was also profiting from war,” said Camille Tinnin, a 31-year-old Ph.D. student studying political science who has met with the school’s administration to discuss divestiture.
While Kent State cannot end the war in Gaza, “what the university can control is its own investment portfolio,” said Yaseen Shaikh, 19, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine who is about to graduate with a degree in computer science.
