Ohio
On May 4, 1970 the Ohio National Guard opened fire into a busy college campus during a school day. A total of 67 shots were fired in 13 seconds. Four students: (L to R) Allison Krause, William Schroeder, Jeffrey Miller, and Sandra Scheuer were killed. Nine students were wounded.
Visit the Kent May 4 Center for more information.
Last week, a controversial audio tape of the day's shootings was revealed:
KENT, Ohio, May 1 — An audio recording of the shootings 37 years ago at Kent State University includes the voices of Ohio National Guard leaders ordering troops to fire into a crowd of students, according to a man wounded in the shootings, who obtained a copy of the recording.
If confirmed as authentic, the recording could solve the central mystery of the shootings on May 4, 1970, which became a defining moment in the protests against the Vietnam War.
Alan Canfora, who was shot in the right wrist, played a copy of the recording at a news conference here on Tuesday.
Through grainy static and the high-pitched calls of protesters, it was possible to faintly hear someone shout “Point!” Mr. Canfora said the full command is recorded on the tape, with multiple voices shouting “Right here!” “Get Set!” Point!” and “Fire!” Those words, however, were difficult to discern when he played the recording. A 13-second volley of gunfire follows, during which four students were killed and nine were wounded.
“The evidence speaks for itself,” Mr. Canfora said. “The voices are right there, very clear. There was an order to fire.”
The President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, which published its final report on the shootings in September 1970, never addressed whether commanders ordered troops to fire, saying only that the events immediately before the shooting “are in bitter dispute.” Based on the newly available recording, Mr. Canfora said he would call on Congress, the Justice Department and Ohio’s attorney general, Marc Dann, to open new investigations into the shootings.
Is that enough to reopen the investigation?
The audiotape of the shooting was recorded on a reel-to-reel machine by Terry Strubbe, a Kent State student whose dorm room overlooked the demonstrations, said Joe Bendo, Mr. Strubbe’s friend and spokesman. Mr. Strubbe declined to comment.
The tape originally was reviewed by the Justice Department, which contracted with the acoustics analysis firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman, now called BBN Technologies in Cambridge, Mass., to remove static and digitally enhance parts of the tape. James Barger, the scientist who analyzed the tape more than 30 years ago, still works at BBN. Through a spokeswoman, he said that no National Guard voices were audible on the tape.
The original tape sits in a safe deposit box near Kent, where it has been locked for over 30 years, Mr. Bendo said.
The copy obtained by Mr. Canfora came from the Yale University Library, which received it in 1989 as part of a large donation of materials from David E. Engdahl, a lawyer who represented the shooting victims in a civil lawsuit in the late 1970s. Mr. Canfora discovered the tape in the Yale archives a few months ago, he said, while researching a book.
Mr. Canfora, 58, works for the Summit County, Ohio, Board of Elections. He said he spends much of his free time teaching students about the Kent State shootings as director of the Kent May 4 Center, a nonprofit group that operates an informational Web site and organizes annual ceremonies to commemorate the shootings.
As with so many incidents involving governmental/police/military involvement, we may never know exactly what happened. Those of us who lived through that turbulent time however, still view the Kent State massacre as a symbol of exactly what can go wrong when a government involves itself in an extremely unpopular war and refuses to listen to the voices of the people - choosing instead to silence them by any means possible.
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