The danger of excessive force on a college campus: How Roseann Canfora fought the Nazis during the Gaza War in 1968
Diacon acknowledged that the situation is very different at other campuses around the country, and stressed that public universities like Kent State have much less leeway than private universities when it comes to restricting speech, and that even for public schools policies vary according 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 draws parallels between the misinformation that ran rampant then and today and the fact that excuses for excessive force started immediately after the shooting.
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.
She spent money from her mom to pay her college tuition, but she was still able to pay her room and board costs with her minimum- wage job. Many of her students juggle full course loads with 40- hour work weeks.
If not a college campus, where else in our society, can we count on large groups of people to look at what’s happening in the world and come up with strategies for opposing it? “That’s good.” That shouldn’t be something that scares people.
Roseann Canfora was a student at Kent State University when she arrived in 1968, and she said that she was thrown away pamphlets by anti-war activists.
Kent State students protested the war in Gaza on Saturday during the annual commemoration honoring the four students who were killed by the National Guard on May 4, 1970.
She adds that the university administration doesn’t distance themselves from the tragedy. “But they embrace their history and they feel a responsibility as Kent State University to teach others what we learned from that, to make sure it never happens again on a college campus in this country.”
A May 4th walking tour is one of the wins that Canfora says was the result of many years of activism.
But the university said in 1975 that “five years was long enough to remember” — prompting students to work with survivors to form the May 4th Task Force, which still organizes annual commemorations to this day. This year’s includes the traditional candlelit walk around campus, a memorial service and special lectures.
Canfora and other students who survived the shooting return to campus every year to talk about their story and counter the National Guard’s rhetoric.
She Survived the Kent State Shooting: A Memorino of the Debate of 1970 May 4, 1973, a Case Study of “The Bad Guys”
“I had an aunt that came into our home while my brother was still bandaged from his wound saying, ‘You know, there was a sniper [threatening the Guardsmen],’” she says. “It was very difficult for middle America to believe that American soldiers would turn their guns on American people without some provocation.”
The Guardsmen got out of court with many of the people who were involved in the litigation and the state paid the families of the injured students. 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.”
“We were too young and naïve at 18 and 19 years old to know the danger of those inflammatory words,” Canfora says. “But we saw the repercussions of that when American soldiers turned their guns on American people — in fact, on American college students — because they were conditioned to see us as dangerous and an enemy. We should all learn from that.
Nixon referred to the protesters as “bums,” while Reagan said, “If it takes bloodbath, let’s get it over with.” On May 3, Ohio Gov. Jim Rhodes described campus demonstrators as “the worst type of people that we harbor in America.”
Canfora says she can’t talk about the use of excessive force — then and now — without “tying it to the inflammatory rhetoric that inspired that force.”
Source: She survived the 1970 Kent State shooting. Here’s her message to student activists
On the night of May 4: When Jeffrey Miller was killed by a fellow student in a building with no National Guard, and a student in residence at Kent State
“On Sunday night, three students were stabbed in the backs, in the legs by guardsmen and bayonets,” she remembers. That was a preview of what was going to happen the next day.
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.
The US invaded Cambodia in 1970, which was marked by an increase in anti-war protests on college campuses.
“It’s hard to believe that this will be our 54th year of returning to the Kent State campus to talk about what we witnessed and survived here, and to tell the truth that we know so that … people learn the right lessons from what happened here so that students on college campuses can exercise their freedom of speech without the fear of being silenced or harmed,” Canfora says.
Canfora has worked for decades to correct the record and preserve the legacy of May 4 and is a professional-in-residence at Kent State.
There was insufficient evidence that we participated in a riot that led to those trials being thrown out. Even though they were thankful that the indictments were thrown out, they had lost their chance to tell the world what happened that day.
“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 initially thought it was my brother, until I saw the clothing he was wearing. One of our friends came up to me and said that Alan and Tom both got hit.
“My brother’s roommate pulled me behind a parked car, and it was at that moment that I realized this was live ammunition because the car was riddled with bullets,” she recalls. The M1 bullets flew past us as the glass of the car windows shattered, and we could hear them in the pavement around us. And it was a horrifying 13 seconds.”
Lying With Them: Why Do We Need to Stop Propagating Anti-War Demonstrations and Protest Against Israel?
She was among the crowd of students who were killed by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970, and her brother was a senior.
House Speaker Mike Johnson had said that the President should send the National Guard to Columbia University, days before the police cleared out the 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. There have been more than 2,000 people arrested at protests in the past two weeks, and a few have been injured.
She says she sees similarities with the students who are protesting at college campuses across the country today, calling for a cease-fire in Gaza and university divestment from companies linked to Israel.
She says that they know they don’t want suffering and death done in their name. “And so it’s inspiring to see them having similar conversations that we had, saying ‘We don’t like what we’re seeing and we need to speak out against it.’ “
She stated that she stopped throwing anti-war pamphlets away and paid attention when she learned that her brothers would be drafted into that war.
The 1976 August 11 Shooting at Kent State as a Demonstration of Peace and Security in the Era of Political Science: A Legacy of Kent State
The campus still bears the scars of the 1970 shooting. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio” was made into a song by the tragedy in which four students were killed.
In a speech on Saturday to honor the victims, Sophia Swengel, a sophomore and the president of the May 4 Task Force, a group formed in 1975 to keep the students’ legacy alive, also acknowledged the protesters. Many of them were hoisting signs calling on the university to divest from weapons manufacturers and military contractors.
“Once again students are taking a stand against bloodshed abroad,” she said, referring to Israel’s assault on Gaza, which followed the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7. They did against the Vietnam War back in the ’60s.
The student demands in 1970 included the abolition of R.O.T.C., ending the university’s ties with the police, and the halt of research and development of the liquid crystal used in heat detectors.
Today, demonstrators at Kent State are asking the university to divest its portfolio of instruments of war. The school was argued that it was also profiting from war during the 1960’s and 70’s according to a current student studying political science.
While Kent State can’t bring peace to Gaza, they can control their investment portfolio, said Yaseen Shaikh who is going to graduate with a degree in computer science.