Kent State 50 years ago - The day the Vietnam War Came home

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The Kent State shootings (also known as the May 4 massacre or the Kent State massacre), were the shootings on May 4, 1970, of unarmed college students by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, during a mass protest against the bombing in neutral Cambodia by United States military forces. Twenty-eight National Guard soldiers fired approximately 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis.

Some of the students who were shot had been protesting against the Cambodian Campaign, which President Richard Nixon announced during a television address on April 30 of that year. Other students who were shot had been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance.

There was a significant national response to the shootings: hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools closed throughout the United States due to a student strike of 4 million students, and the event further affected public opinion, at an already socially contentious time, over the role of the United States in the Vietnam War.

Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States in 1968, promising to end the Vietnam War. In November 1969, the My Lai Massacre by American troops of between 347 and 504 civilians in a Vietnamese village was exposed, leading to increased public opposition in the United States to the war. The nature of the draft also changed in December 1969, with the first draft lottery since World War II. This eliminated deferments allowed in the prior draft process, affecting many college students and teachers.

The war had appeared to be winding down in 1969, so the new invasion of Cambodia in 1970 angered those who believed it only exacerbated the conflict. Across the U.S., campuses erupted in protests in what Time called "a nation-wide student strike", setting the stage for the events of early May 1970.

Kent State protest activity, 1966–1970
During the 1966 Homecoming Parade, protesters walked dressed in military paraphernalia with gas masks.

In the fall of 1968, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and a campus Black Student Organization staged a sit-in to protest police recruiters on campus. 250 black students walked off campus in a successful amnesty bid for the protesters.

On April 1, 1969, SDS members attempted to enter the administration building with a list of demands where they clashed with police. In response, the university revoked the Kent State SDS chapter charter. On April 16 a disciplinary hearing involving two of the protesters resulted in a confrontation between supporters and opponents of SDS. The Ohio State Highway Patrol was called and 58 were arrested. Four SDS leaders spent six months in prison as a result of the incident.

On April 10, 1970, Jerry Rubin, a leader of the Youth International Party (also known as the Yippies), spoke on campus. In remarks reported locally, he said "The first part of the Yippie program is to kill your parents. They are the first oppressors." Two weeks after that, Bill Anthrell, an SDS member and former student, distributed flyers to an event in which he said he was going to napalm a dog. The event turned out to be an anti-napalm teach-in.

Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States in 1968, promising to end the Vietnam War. In November 1969, the My Lai Massacre by American troops of between 347 and 504 civilians in a Vietnamese village was exposed, leading to increased public opposition in the United States to the war. The nature of the draft also changed in December 1969, with the first draft lottery since World War II. This eliminated deferments allowed in the prior draft process, affecting many college students and teachers.

Timeline
Thursday, April 30
President Nixon announced that the "Cambodian Incursion" had been launched by United States combat forces.

Friday, May 1
At Kent State University, a demonstration with about 500 students[13] was held on May 1 on the Commons (a grassy knoll in the center of campus traditionally used as a gathering place for rallies or protests). As the crowd dispersed to attend classes by 1 p.m., another rally was planned for May 4 to continue the protest of the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. There was widespread anger, and many protesters issued a call to "bring the war home". A group of history students buried a copy of the United States Constitution to symbolize that Nixon had killed it.[13] A sign was put on a tree asking "Why is the ROTC building still standing?"

Trouble exploded in town around midnight, when people left a bar and began throwing beer bottles at police cars and breaking windows in downtown storefronts. In the process they broke a bank window, setting off an alarm. The news spread quickly and it resulted in several bars closing early to avoid trouble. Before long, more people had joined the vandalism.

By the time police arrived, a crowd of 120 had already gathered. Some people from the crowd lit a small bonfire in the street. The crowd appeared to be a mix of bikers, students, and transient people. A few members of the crowd began to throw beer bottles at the police, and then started yelling obscenities at them. The entire Kent police force was called to duty as well as officers from the county and surrounding communities. Kent Mayor LeRoy Satrom declared a state of emergency, called the office of Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes to seek assistance, and ordered all of the bars closed. The decision to close the bars early increased the size of the angry crowd. Police eventually succeeded in using tear gas to disperse the crowd from downtown, forcing them to move several blocks back to the campus.

Saturday, May 2
City officials and downtown businesses received threats, and rumors proliferated that radical revolutionaries were in Kent to destroy the city and university. Several merchants reported they were told that if they did not display anti-war slogans, their businesses would be burned down. Kent's police chief told the mayor that according to a reliable informant, the ROTC building, the local army recruiting station, and the post office had been targeted for destruction that night. There were unconfirmed rumors of students with caches of arms, plots to spike the local water supply with LSD, of students building tunnels for the purpose of blowing up the town's main store. Mayor Satrom met with Kent city officials and a representative of the Ohio Army National Guard. Following the meeting, Satrom made the decision to call Governor Rhodes and request that the National Guard be sent to Kent, a request that was granted. Because of the rumors and threats, Satrom believed that local officials would not be able to handle future disturbances.

The decision to call in the National Guard was made at 5:00 p.m., but the guard did not arrive in town that evening until around 10 p.m. By this time, a large demonstration was underway on the campus, and the campus Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) building was burning. The arsonists were never apprehended, and no one was injured in the fire. According to the report of the President's Commission on Campus Unrest:

Information developed by an FBI investigation of the ROTC building fire indicates that, of those who participated actively, a significant portion weren't Kent State students. There is also evidence to suggest that the burning was planned beforehand: railroad flares, a machete, and ice picks are not customarily carried to peaceful rallies.

There were reports that some Kent firemen and police officers were struck by rocks and other objects while attempting to extinguish the blaze. Several fire engine companies had to be called because protesters carried the fire hose into the Commons and slashed it.The National Guard made numerous arrests, mostly for curfew violations, and used tear gas; at least one student was slightly wounded with a bayonet.

Sunday, May 3
During a press conference at the Kent firehouse, an emotional Governor Rhodes pounded on the desk,[23] pounding which can be heard in the recording of his speech. He called the student protesters un-American, referring to them as revolutionaries set on destroying higher education in Ohio.

We've seen here at the city of Kent especially, probably the most vicious form of campus-oriented violence yet perpetrated by dissident groups... they make definite plans of burning, destroying, and throwing rocks at police and at the National Guard and the Highway Patrol. ...this is when we're going to use every part of the law enforcement agency of Ohio to drive them out of Kent. We are going to eradicate the problem. We're not going to treat the symptoms. ...and these people just move from one campus to the other and terrorize the community. They're worse than the brown shirts and the communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes. They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. Now I want to say this. They are not going to take over [the] campus. I think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America.

Rhodes also claimed he would obtain a court order declaring a state of emergency that would ban further demonstrations and gave the impression that a situation akin to martial law had been declared; however, he never attempted to obtain such an order.

During the day, some students came to downtown Kent to help with cleanup efforts after the rioting, actions which were met with mixed reactions from local businessmen. Mayor Satrom, under pressure from frightened citizens, ordered a curfew until further notice.

Around 8 p.m., another rally was held on the campus Commons. By 8:45 p.m., the Guardsmen used tear gas to disperse the crowd, and the students reassembled at the intersection of Lincoln and Main, holding a sit-in with the hopes of gaining a meeting with Mayor Satrom and University President Robert White. At 11:00 p.m., the Guard announced that a curfew had gone into effect and began forcing the students back to their dorms. A few students were bayoneted by Guardsmen.

Monday, May 4
On Monday, May 4, a protest was scheduled to be held at noon, as had been planned three days earlier. University officials attempted to ban the gathering, handing out 12,000 leaflets stating that the event was canceled. Despite these efforts, an estimated 2,000 people gathered on the university's Commons, near Taylor Hall. The protest began with the ringing of the campus's iron Victory Bell (which had historically been used to signal victories in football games) to mark the beginning of the rally, and the first protester began to speak.

Companies A and C, 1/145th Infantry and Troop G of the 2/107th Armored Cavalry, Ohio National Guard (ARNG), the units on the campus grounds, attempted to disperse the students. The legality of the dispersal was later debated at a subsequent wrongful death and injury trial. On appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that authorities did indeed have the right to disperse the crowd.

The dispersal process began late in the morning with campus patrolman Harold Rice riding in a National Guard Jeep, approaching the students to read an order to disperse or face arrest. The protesters responded by throwing rocks, striking one campus patrolman and forcing the Jeep to retreat.

Just before noon, the Guard returned and again ordered the crowd to disperse. When most of the crowd refused, the Guard used tear gas. Because of wind, the tear gas had little effect in dispersing the crowd, and some launched a second volley of rocks toward the Guard's line and chanted "Pigs off campus!" The students lobbed the tear gas canisters back at the National Guardsmen, who wore gas masks.

When it became clear that the crowd was not going to disperse, a group of 77 National Guard troops from A Company and Troop G, with bayonets fixed on their M1 Garand rifles, began to advance upon the hundreds of protesters. As the guardsmen advanced, the protesters retreated up and over Blanket Hill, heading out of the Commons area. Once over the hill, the students, in a loose group, moved northeast along the front of Taylor Hall, with some continuing toward a parking lot in front of Prentice Hall (slightly northeast of and perpendicular to Taylor Hall). The guardsmen pursued the protesters over the hill, but rather than veering left as the protesters had, they continued straight, heading toward an athletic practice field enclosed by a chain link fence. Here they remained for about 10 minutes, unsure of how to get out of the area short of retracing their path. During this time, the bulk of the students congregated to the left and front of the guardsmen, approximately 150 to 225 ft (46 to 69 m) away, on the veranda of Taylor Hall. Others were scattered between Taylor Hall and the Prentice Hall parking lot, while still others were standing in the parking lot, or dispersing through the lot as they had been previously ordered.

While on the practice field, the guardsmen generally faced the parking lot, which was about 100 yards (91 m) away. At one point, some of them knelt and aimed their weapons toward the parking lot, then stood up again. At one point the guardsmen formed a loose huddle and appeared to be talking to one another. They had cleared the protesters from the Commons area, and many students had left, but some stayed and were still angrily confronting the soldiers, some throwing rocks and tear gas canisters. About 10 minutes later, the guardsmen began to retrace their steps back up the hill toward the Commons area. Some of the students on the Taylor Hall veranda began to move slowly toward the soldiers as they passed over the top of the hill and headed back into the Commons.

During their climb back to Blanket Hill, several guardsmen stopped and half-turned to keep their eyes on the students in the Prentice Hall parking lot. At 12:24 p.m. according to eyewitnesses, a sergeant named Myron Pryor turned and began firing at the crowd of students with his .45 pistol. A number of guardsmen nearest the students also turned and fired their rifles at the students. In all, at least 29 of the 77 guardsmen claimed to have fired their weapons, using an estimate of 67 rounds of ammunition. The shooting was determined to have lasted 13 seconds, although John Kifner reported in The New York Times that "it appeared to go on, as a solid volley, for perhaps a full minute or a little longer." The question of why the shots were fired remains widely debated.

National Guard told reporters that a sniper had fired on the guardsmen, which remains a debated allegation. Many guardsmen later testified that they were in fear for their lives, which was questioned partly because of the distance between them and the students killed or wounded. Time magazine later concluded that "triggers were not pulled accidentally at Kent State." The President's Commission on Campus Unrest avoided probing the question of why the shootings happened. Instead, it harshly criticized both the protesters and the Guardsmen, but it concluded that "the indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable."

The shootings killed four students and wounded nine. Two of the four students killed, Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, had participated in the protest. The other two, Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder, had been walking from one class to the next at the time of their deaths. Schroeder was also a member of the campus ROTC battalion. Of those wounded, none was closer than 71 feet (22 m) to the guardsmen. Of those killed, the nearest (Miller) was 265 feet (81 m) away, and their average distance from the guardsmen was 345 feet (105 m).

Eyewitness accounts
Another witness was Chrissie Hynde, the future lead singer of The Pretenders and a student at Kent State University at the time. In her 2015 autobiography she described what she saw:

Then I heard the tatatatatatatatatat sound. I thought it was fireworks. An eerie sound fell over the common. The quiet felt like gravity pulling us to the ground. Then a young man's voice: "They f*****g killed somebody!" Everything slowed down and the silence got heavier.

The ROTC building, now nothing more than a few inches of charcoal, was surrounded by National Guardsmen. They were all on one knee and pointing their rifles at ... us! Then they fired.

By the time I made my way to where I could see them it was still unclear what was going on. The guardsmen themselves looked stunned. We looked at them and they looked at us. They were just kids, 19 years old, like us. But in uniform. Like our boys in Vietnam.

Gerald Casale, the future bassist/singer of Devo, also witnessed the shootings. While speaking to the Vermont Review in 2005, he recalled what he saw:

All I can tell you is that it completely and utterly changed my life. I was a white hippie boy and then I saw exit wounds from M1 rifles out of the backs of two people I knew.

Two of the four people who were killed, Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause, were my friends. We were all running our asses off from these motherf***ers. It was total, utter BS. Live ammunition and gasmasks—none of us knew, none of us could have imagined ... They shot into a crowd that was running away from them!

I stopped being a hippie and I started to develop the idea of devolution. I got real, real pissed off.

May 4, after the shootings
Immediately after the shootings, many angry students were ready to launch an all-out attack on the National Guard. Many faculty members, led by geology professor and faculty marshal Glenn Frank, pleaded with the students to leave the Commons and to not give in to violent escalation:

I don't care whether you've never listened to anyone before in your lives. I am begging you right now. If you don't disperse right now, they're going to move in, and it can only be a slaughter. Would you please listen to me? Jesus Christ, I don't want to be a part of this ... !

After 20 minutes of speaking, the students left the Commons, as ambulance personnel tended to the wounded, and the Guard left the area. Professor Frank's son, also present that day, said, "He absolutely saved my life and hundreds of others".

Aftermath and long-term effects
Photographs of the dead and wounded at Kent State that were distributed in newspapers and periodicals worldwide amplified sentiment against the United States' invasion of Cambodia and the Vietnam War in general. In particular, the camera of Kent State photojournalism student John Filo captured a 14-year-old runaway, Mary Ann Vecchio,screaming over the dead body of Jeffrey Miller, who had been shot in the mouth. The photograph, which won a Pulitzer Prize, became the most enduring image of the events, and one of the more enduring images of the anti-Vietnam War movement.

The shootings led to protests on college campuses throughout the United States, and a student strike, causing more than 450 campuses across the country to close with both violent and non-violent demonstrations.[10] A common sentiment was expressed by students at New York University with a banner hung out of a window that read, "They Can't Kill Us All." On May 8, 11 people were bayonetted at the University of New Mexico by the New Mexico National Guard in a confrontation with student protesters.[ Also on May 8, an antiwar protest at New York's Federal Hall National Memorial held at least partly in reaction to the Kent State killings was met with a counter-rally of pro-Nixon construction workers (organized by Peter J. Brennan, later appointed U.S. Labor Secretary by President Nixon), resulting in the Hard Hat Riot. Shortly after the shootings took place, the Urban Institute conducted a national study that concluded the Kent State shooting was the first nationwide student strike in U.S. history; over 4 million students protested and hundreds of American colleges and universities closed during the student strikes. The Kent State campus remained closed for six weeks.

Just five days after the shootings, 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington, D.C., against the war and the killing of unarmed student protesters. Ray Price, Nixon's chief speechwriter from 1969 to 1974, recalled the Washington demonstrations saying, "The city was an armed camp. The mobs were smashing windows, slashing tires, dragging parked cars into intersections, even throwing bedsprings off overpasses into the traffic down below. This was the quote, student protest. That's not student protest, that's civil war." Not only was the President taken to Camp David for two days for his own protection, but Charles Colson (Counsel to President Nixon from 1969 to 1973) stated that the military was called up to protect the Nixon Administration from the angry students; he recalled that "The 82nd Airborne was in the basement of the executive office building, so I went down just to talk to some of the guys and walk among them, and they're lying on the floor leaning on their packs and their helmets and their cartridge belts and their rifles cocked and you're thinking, 'This can't be the United States of America. This is not the greatest free democracy in the world. This is a nation at war with itself.'"

President Nixon and his administration's public reaction to the shootings was perceived by many in the anti-war movement as callous. Then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger said the President was "pretending indifference". Stanley Karnow noted in his Vietnam: A History that "The [Nixon] administration initially reacted to this event with wanton insensitivity. Nixon's press secretary, Ron Ziegler, whose statements were carefully programmed, referred to the deaths as a reminder that 'when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.'" Three days before the shootings, Nixon had talked of "bums" who were antiwar protestors on United States campuses, to which the father of Allison Krause stated on national TV "My child was not a bum."

Karnow further documented that at 4:15 a.m. on May 9, 1970, the president met about 30 student dissidents conducting a vigil at the Lincoln Memorial, whereupon Nixon "treated them to a clumsy and condescending monologue, which he made public in an awkward attempt to display his benevolence." Nixon had been trailed by White House Deputy for Domestic Affairs Egil Krogh, who saw it differently, saying, "I thought it was a very significant and major effort to reach out." In any regard, neither side could convince the other and after meeting with the students, Nixon expressed that those in the anti-war movement were the pawns of foreign communists. After the student protests, Nixon asked H. R. Haldeman to consider the Huston Plan, which would have used illegal procedures to gather information on the leaders of the anti-war movement. Only the resistance of J. Edgar Hoover stopped the plan.

A Gallup Poll taken the day after the shootings reportedly showed that 58 percent of respondents blamed the students, 11 percent blamed the National Guard and 31 percent expressed no opinion. However, there was wide discussion as to whether these were legally justified shootings of American citizens, and whether the protests or the decisions to ban them were constitutional. These debates served to further galvanize uncommitted opinion by the terms of the discourse. The term "massacre" was applied to the shootings by some individuals and media sources, as it had been used for the Boston Massacre of 1770, in which five were killed and several more wounded.

Students from Kent State and other universities often got a hostile reaction upon returning home. Some were told that more students should have been killed to teach student protesters a lesson; some students were disowned by their families.

On May 14, ten days after the Kent State shootings, two students were killed (and 12 wounded) by police at Jackson State University, a historically black university ("HBCU"), in Jackson, Mississippi, under similar circumstances—the Jackson State killings—but that event did not arouse the same nationwide attention as the Kent State shootings.

On June 13, 1970, as a consequence of the killings of protesting students at Kent State and Jackson State, President Nixon established the President's Commission on Campus Unrest, known as the Scranton Commission, which he charged to study the dissent, disorder, and violence breaking out on college and university campuses across the nation.

The Commission issued its findings in a September 1970 report that concluded that the Ohio National Guard shootings on May 4, 1970, were unjustified. The report said:

Even if the guardsmen faced danger, it was not a danger that called for lethal force. The 61 shots by 28 guardsmen certainly cannot be justified. Apparently, no order to fire was given, and there was inadequate fire control discipline on Blanket Hill. The Kent State tragedy must mark the last time that, as a matter of course, loaded rifles are issued to guardsmen confronting student demonstrators.

Legal action
In September 1970, twenty-four students and one faculty member, identified from photographs, were indicted on charges connected with the May 4 demonstration at the ROTC building fire three days before; they became known as the "Kent 25". The Kent Legal Defense Fund was organized to provide legal resources to oppose the indictments. Five cases, all related to the burning of the ROTC building, went to trial: one non-student defendant was convicted on one charge and two other non-students pleaded guilty. One other defendant was acquitted, and charges were dismissed against the last. In December 1971, all charges against the remaining twenty were dismissed for lack of evidence.

Eight of the guardsmen were indicted by a grand jury. The guardsmen claimed to have fired in self-defense, a claim that was generally accepted by the criminal justice system. In 1974 U.S. District Judge Frank J. Battisti dismissed civil rights charges against all eight on the basis that the prosecution's case was too weak to warrant a trial.

Civil actions were also attempted against the guardsmen, the state of Ohio, and the president of Kent State. The federal court civil action for wrongful death and injury, brought by the victims and their families against Governor Rhodes, the President of Kent State, and the National Guardsmen, resulted in unanimous verdicts for all defendants on all claims after an eleven-week trial.[58] The judgment on those verdicts was reversed by the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on the ground that the federal trial judge had mishandled an out-of-court threat against a juror. On remand, the civil case was settled in return for payment of a total of $675,000 to all plaintiffs by the state of Ohio (explained by the State as the estimated cost of defense) and the defendants' agreement to state publicly that they regretted what had happened:

In retrospect, the tragedy of May 4, 1970, should not have occurred. The students may have believed that they were right in continuing their mass protest in response to the Cambodian invasion, even though this protest followed the posting and reading by the university of an order to ban rallies and an order to disperse. These orders have since been determined by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to have been lawful.

Some of the Guardsmen on Blanket Hill, fearful and anxious from prior events, may have believed in their own minds that their lives were in danger. Hindsight suggests that another method would have resolved the confrontation. Better ways must be found to deal with such a confrontation.

We devoutly wish that a means had been found to avoid the May 4th events culminating in the Guard shootings and the irreversible deaths and injuries. We deeply regret those events and are profoundly saddened by the deaths of four students and the wounding of nine others which resulted. We hope that the agreement to end the litigation will help to assuage the tragic memories regarding that sad day.

In the succeeding years, many in the anti-war movement have referred to the shootings as "murders," although no criminal convictions were obtained against any National Guardsman. In December 1970, journalist I. F. Stone wrote the following:

To those who think murder is too strong a word, one may recall that even [Vice President Spiro] Agnew three days after the Kent State shootings used the word in an interview on the David Frost show in Los Angeles. Agnew admitted in response to a question that what happened at Kent State was murder, "but not first degree" since there was – as Agnew explained from his own training as a lawyer – "no premeditation but simply an over-response in the heat of anger that results in a killing; it's a murder. It's not premeditated and it certainly can't be condoned."

The Kent State incident forced the National Guard to re-examine its methods of crowd control. The only equipment the guardsmen had to disperse demonstrators that day were M1 Garand rifles loaded with .30-06 FMJ ammunition, 12 Ga. pump shotguns, bayonets, and CS gas grenades. In the years that followed, the U.S. Army began developing less lethal means of dispersing demonstrators (such as rubber bullets), and changed its crowd control and riot tactics to attempt to avoid casualties amongst the demonstrators. Many of the crowd-control changes brought on by the Kent State events are used today by police and military forces in the United States when facing similar situations, such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and civil disorder during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

One outgrowth of the events was the Center for Peaceful Change established at Kent State University in 1971 "as a living memorial to the events of May 4, 1970". Now known as The Center for Applied Conflict Management (CACM), it developed one of the earliest conflict resolution undergraduate degree programs in the United States. The Institute for the Study and Prevention of Violence, an interdisciplinary program dedicated to violence prevention, was established in 1998.

According to FBI reports, one part-time student, Terry Norman, was already noted by student protesters as an informant for both campus police and the Akron FBI branch. Norman was present during the May 4 protests, taking photographs to identify student leaders,] while carrying a sidearm and wearing a gas mask.

In 1970, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover responded to questions from then-Congressman John M. Ashbrook by denying that Norman had ever worked for the FBI, a statement Norman disputed. On August 13, 1973, Indiana Senator Birch Bayh sent a memo to then-governor of Ohio John J. Gilligan suggesting that Norman may have fired the first shot, based on testimony he [Bayh] received from guardsmen who claimed that a gunshot fired from the vicinity of the protesters instigated the Guard to open fire on the students.

Throughout the years since the shootings, debate has continued on about the events of May 4, 1970.

Two of the survivors have since died—James Russell on June 23, 2007, and Robert Stamps in June 2008.

Strubbe Tape and further government reviews
n 2007 Alan Canfora, one of the wounded students, located a static-filled copy of an audio tape of the shootings in a Yale library archive. The original 30-minute reel-to-reel audio tape recording was made by Terry Strubbe, a Kent State communications student who turned on his recorder and put its microphone in his dormitory window overlooking the campus. At that time, Canfora asserted that an amplified version of the tape reveals the order to shoot, "Right here! Get Set! Point! Fire!". Lawrence Shafer, a guardsman who admitted he fired during the shootings and was one of those indicted in the 1974 federal criminal action with charges subsequently dismissed, told the Kent-Ravenna Record-Courier newspaper in May 2007: "I never heard any command to fire. That's all I can say on that." Referring to the assertion that the tape reveals the order, Shafer went on to say, "That's not to say there may not have been, but with all the racket and noise, I don't know how anyone could have heard anything that day." Shafer also said that "point" would not have been part of a proper command to open fire.

A 2010 audio analysis of the Strubbe tape by Stuart Allen and Tom Owen, who were described by the Cleveland Plain Dealer as "nationally respected forensic audio experts," concluded that the guardsmen were given an order to fire. It is the only known recording to capture the events leading up to the shootings. According to the Plain Dealer description of the enhanced recording, a male voice yells "Guard!" Several seconds pass. Then, "All right, prepare to fire!" "Get down!," someone shouts urgently, presumably in the crowd. Finally, "Guard! ..." followed two seconds later by a long, booming volley of gunshots. The entire spoken sequence lasts 17 seconds. Further analysis of the audiotape revealed that what sounded like four pistol shots and a confrontation occurred approximately 70 seconds before the National Guard opened fire. According to The Plain Dealer, this new analysis raised questions about the role of Terry Norman, a Kent State student who was an FBI informant and known to be carrying a pistol during the disturbance. Alan Canfora said it was premature to reach any conclusions.

In April 2012, the United States Department of Justice determined that there were "insurmountable legal and evidentiary barriers" to reopening the case. Also in 2012, the FBI concluded the Strubbe tape was inconclusive because what has been described as pistol shots may have been slamming doors and that voices heard were unintelligible. Despite this, organizations of survivors and current Kent State students continue to believe the Strubbe tape proves the Guardsmen were given a military order to fire and are petitioning State of Ohio and United States government officials to reopen the case using independent analysis. The organizations do not desire to prosecute or sue individual guardsmen, believing they are also victims.

One of these groups, the Kent State Truth Tribunal, was founded in 2010 by the family of Allison Krause, along with Emily Kunstler, to demand accountability by the United States government for the massacre. In 2014 KSTT announced their request for an independent review by the United Nations Human Rights Committee under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the human rights treaty ratified by the United States

Thirteen seconds of gunfire ripped apart the sunlit afternoon of May 4, 1970, on the Kent State University campus.

It was 12:24 p.m. when Ohio National Guard members fired 67 shots into a group of students during an anti-war rally. The massacre killed four students, wounded nine others and profoundly affected a country already polarized by the Vietnam War, a generational divide and vexing issues of race, class and culture.

In its immediate aftermath, the tragedy spurred 3 million students to strike universities across the country, causing widespread closures while amplifying a deafening debate over the war. And in the following years, the massacre was widely seen as hastening the war’s end, the lowering of the voting age to 18, and changing how authorities handle mass demonstrations.

On Monday, exactly 50 years later and on the same day of the week as the shootings, Kent State will mark the occasion with a virtual commemoration online, the culmination of a nearly yearlong observance of a seminal event in the history of the university and the nation.

Live campus events planned for 2½ years have been canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

These ceremonies were not always a certainty. For two decades, the university’s administration had little interest in publicly acknowledging and remembering what happened on the campus. So the duty of remembrance fell to students, who formed the May 4 Task Force, which annually commemorated the event.

Only in 1985 did university trustees approve the first May 4 memorial on campus. It took five years after that to dedicate the site.

But, in the years since then, the university gradually came to embrace the school’s May 4 legacy, honoring its context and meaning in a variety of ways on campus, in the classroom and online.

Rod Flauhaus, 50th commemoration project manager, said the lessons from a half-century ago still resonate. “Today’s society is a great reminder of polarization in our country. May 4 reminds us of the need for peaceful conflict resolution.

“For me, the greater lesson of May 4 and why it is relevant today is that four students died and nine others were wounded while exercising their First Amendment rights. We must never forget that.”

On Sunday, the National Guard invoked the so-called Ohio Riot Act, a law banning disruption of order on college campuses, and then fired tear gas. The demonstrators reassembled and blocked traffic.

On Monday, classes were held as usual.

The noon rally also went on as planned. But now, the protest was not just about the Cambodian bombing but also the campus occupation by armed National Guardsmen. It is estimated that about 500 students were actively participating in the rally and another 1,500-2,500 were watching it or on their way to classes.

Among those observing were freshmen Joe Lewis and John Cleary, ages 18 and 19, respectively. They were not far from each other near Taylor Hall, on a steep hill known as Blanket Hill.

Mr. Lewis, then of Massillon, Ohio, wanted to “lend a presence on the side of the students. I wanted the Guard to leave and let us go about our business.” Mr. Cleary, then of Schenectady, N.Y., had no position on the war but was curious about the rally and brought a camera.

Both young men were transfixed as a Guardsman using a bullhorn declared three times, “Students of Kent State, this is an illegal assembly. Return to your dormitories.” When that had no effect, the soldiers fired tear gas across the Commons, but a breeze diffused it and students tossed canisters back at the Guard, who were wearing gas masks.

More than 70 National Guardsmen fixed bayonets to their M1 rifles and moved toward the students, forcing demonstrators up over Blanket Hill, past Mr. Lewis and Mr. Cleary and a Pagoda sculpture. The Guard forced students down the other side of the hill onto the Prentice Hall parking lot and an adjoining practice football field with fencing on three sides.

After about 10 minutes of the Guard firing tear gas and students hurling rocks and epithets, some soldiers knelt and aimed their rifles at the students. Guard officers huddled and then the soldiers appeared to be retracing their steps in retreat.

“I was thinking they were leaving. I was silent as they came by me,” Mr. Lewis recalled. “I was so close to them I could hear their equipment jostling. Many of them were looking back over their shoulders toward the Prentice Hall parking lot.”

When they got near Taylor Hall by the Pagoda, the Guardsmen abruptly turned and aimed their rifles back at the students, including Mr. Lewis, who was standing still about 60 feet away.

“When they gestured with their guns, I gestured with my finger. I was frustrated and just wanted them to leave,” he said.

“I never thought the guns were loaded. The ground in front of me puffed up in a couple of spots. That’s when I realized there were bullets in their guns.” He was struck with a bullet in his abdomen just inside his right hip. While on the ground, he also was shot above his ankle.

Just before that, Mr. Cleary — standing next to the sculpture “Solar Totem #1” outside Taylor Hall — likewise felt things were winding down, but he wanted one last photo of the Guardsmen, who were 110 feet away away. And then he was struck. A bullet also pierced the metal sculpture.

“I didn’t think they had ammunition,” he recalled. “It was pretty instantaneous. It felt like I was hit in the chest with a sledgehammer.”

Following surgery, Mr. Cleary and Mr. Lewis shared a hospital room with fellow wounded student Dean R. Kahler, who was struck in the back and paralyzed. Both men are retired — Mr. Cleary, 69, now of Pine, as an architect, and Mr. Lewis, 68, now of Scappoose, Ore., as supervisor of that city’s drinking water treatment plant. Mr. Cleary graduated from Kent State. Mr. Lewis did not.

Of those shot, Mr. Lewis and Mr. Cleary were the closest and second closest to the Guard. The other 11, including those who died — Allison Krause, 19, of Churchill; Jeffrey Miller, 20, of Plainview, N.Y.; William Schroeder, 19, of Lorain, Ohio; and Sandra Scheuer, 20, of Youngstown, Ohio — were between 225 and 750 feet from the Guard.

Those wounded — two have since died — and the survivors of those killed have bonded as family. But Mr. Lewis noted, “You didn’t have to be shot to have been wounded at Kent State on May 4, 1970.”

The centerpiece of the commemoration Monday will be a video tribute to air at noon. The video will include footage from past commemorations as well as newly recorded messages from Mr. Cleary, Mr. Lewis and fellow wounded student Alan Canfora, who appears in a famously emblematic photo waving a black flag at the Guard moments before being shot.

Also included will be messages from musicians affected by that day, including David Crosby and Graham Nash, Kent State alumnus Jerry Casale from Devo and Jesse Colin Young from The Youngbloods.

At 12:24 p.m., the exact time of the shootings will be acknowledged. Other special content is already available on the website.

“We know how important it is to the family members of those killed and wounded, to those who were on campus that day and witnessed it, as well as so many across the country who experienced this,” Mr. Flauhaus said. “Even though there’s so much going on in the world right now, it’s important to remember the events of May 4, 1970.”

Mr. Flauhaus has been involved with the massacre’s legacy since the mid-1980s when, as student president of the May 4 Task Force, he led the 15th commemoration during the time the university did not participate. He was instrumental in persuading the school’s trustees to agree to the original campus memorial.

He said the university’s gradual and now full embrace of Kent State’s place in U.S. history is reflected in all that has occurred since the memorial was dedicated — May 4 classes being taught on campus, permanent markers in the Prentice Hall parking lot where the four slain students fell, creation of the May 4 Visitors Center in Taylor Hall, and dedication of 17 acres of the campus as a National Historic Landmark.

And the university had planned during its 50th commemoration to dedicate markers where Mr. Cleary, Mr. Lewis and the seven other men were wounded. That has been postponed.

Mr. Flauhaus said the passage of time allowed Kent State to accept its obligation to maintain the legacy of May 4.

“We have a responsibility to educate for the future, to make sure people remember what happened and learn from it,” he said.

IT IS A PHOTOGRAPH all young journalists should pin to their cubicle walls: the iconic image of the 1970 Kent State shootings, in which a teenage girl grieves over the body of a slain student.

Forget for a moment that the picture is among the most famous in US history, or that the photographer—a 21-year-old Kent State journalism student named John Filo—risked his life to document the tragedy.

Consider what the photo captures: Our own military occupied a public university and then opened fire on a crowd of unarmed citizens—students no less—killing four and wounding nine. One student was killed while walking to class.

Filo’s photo is a striking reminder of how quickly the world can turn upside down and how people in trusted, powerful positions can commit the most horrendous acts.

I was a student at Kent State in the early ’80s, a decade after the shootings. Even then, it was difficult not to be shaped by the deaths and Filo’s renowned photo. Questions about the shootings lingered: Why did the guardsmen fire? Were certain student protesters targeted?

A central part of the Ohio campus seemed to me like a giant crime scene, and I often wondered: Am I walking over the very spot where someone was shot? Am I parking my car where someone died?

The answer to both questions was yes, but I didn’t know any better. Most students didn’t. There was no proper memorial. There was no museum. There were no signs. School officials wanted to move on.

But we did have one thing: We had Filo’s photograph. Like the police shooting videos of today, it provided a sliver of justice, proof that what happened really happened, and hope that the events would not be whitewashed.

When I called Filo, now 67 and vice president for photography at CBS, he recalled his concern that authorities would confiscate his film that day and concoct a false version of events. Early radio reports, he says, characterized the tragedy as a shootout between students and the Ohio National Guard, with guardsmen also being killed—all untrue.

After the shootings, Filo was startled to see guardsmen cutting telephone wires on a main road out of town. He hid his film under the hood of his red VW bug and drove straight to Pennsylvania. Only when he was over the border did he pull into a rest stop, put his film in a canvas bag behind the front seat, and use a pay phone to call his hometown paper near Pittsburgh.

“Did you get any pictures?” a photo editor asked.

“I think so,” Filo responded.

His picture of the girl screaming over the slain student went out over the Associated Press wire and was published on the front pages of hundreds of newspapers worldwide. But the backlash, Filo recalls, was immediate. “I started getting hate calls. I got tons of hate mail. They said, ‘This never happened. This is obviously a posed photo. It didn’t really happen.’ ” Even some other professional photographers were skeptical, suggesting he sign an affidavit.

People were in denial, Filo says. “This was a shock to America.” The photo went on to win the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography and become a fixture in history books.

There are really only a handful of photographs that singularly have frozen a historic moment in time that almost everyone can instantly recall in their mind,” says Pete Souza, chief official White House photographer for President Barack Obama. “John Filo’s photograph of the Kent State shootings is certainly one of those. All you need to do is mention that episode in American history to anyone, and they remember that photograph. The details may be a bit foggy of what actually happened that day, but no one will ever forget that image.”

The irony is that Filo, at the time a senior majoring in photo illustration, didn’t want to take any pictures that fateful spring day.

Four days earlier, President Richard Nixon had announced on national TV that US troops were moving into Cambodia, in effect widening the Vietnam War. The news sparked student anti-war protests the next day on campuses across the country, including at Kent State. That night, protesters in downtown Kent, Ohio, broke windows, set bonfires in the street, and hurled bottles at police cars. The following day, guardsmen were called to campus, only to find the wooden ROTC building being burned to the ground.

But Filo was 200 miles away, in the forests of central Pennsylvania, finishing the requirements of his senior portfolio by photographing extreme close-ups of tiny flora, such as moss and teaberries.

When he arrived back on campus and learned of the unrest, he was convinced he had missed the biggest story of his life. Making matters worse, many of his classmates had signed on with major publications, such as Life and Newsweek, to photograph any additional protests. No one needed Filo’s help. “I was totally, totally dejected,” he says. “I don’t think I could have felt any lower.”

The following morning, May 4, the day of the shootings, he reported as usual to the journalism building, where he worked in the photo lab mixing chemicals and handing out equipment to students. When two professors spotted Filo moping around, they encouraged him to use his lunch break to photograph a student rally. Filo grudgingly picked up his camera, stuffed six rolls of black and white film in his right pants pocket, and headed out.

He was surprised to see the Commons, a field adjacent to the journalism building, packed with about 3,000 demonstrators and spectators. Guardsmen fired tear gas canisters to try to get them to disperse. Several photographers set up their cameras on tripods on the edge of the field, but Filo followed some guardsmen to the other side of the journalism building. Students hurled rocks at the troops.

A few moments later, Filo started up a hill, where dozens of guardsmen carrying high-velocity M-1 rifles had gathered. “As I was walking up the hill, I saw students turning and fleeing and almost running me over,” he recalls. “So I’m dodging bodies fleeing, and then you hear guns going off, and you realize the guard has started firing.”

At first, Filo thought the guardsmen were just trying to scare the students by shooting blanks. “I said, ‘Well, I got to get a picture of this.’ ”

He kept walking toward the guardsmen, coming within about 30 yards, not imagining they were firing real bullets. “I could see no reason to be firing from the top of the hill, shooting downhill at fleeing students,” Filo says.

He stood by a metal sculpture and trained his camera on a guardsman, who fired toward him. “A bullet slams into the metal sculpture, and it erupts in a cloud of rust, and the bullet hits the tree that’s next to me, and a chunk of bark comes off. And I went, ‘Oh, God! Someone is using live ammunition!’ ” Filo says.

Twenty-eight guardsmen fired between 61 and 67 shots over 13 seconds. When the firing stopped, Filo checked his thighs and stomach to see if he had been shot. He was OK. “I go, ‘This is crazy! I got to flee. I got to run.’ ”

He took three large steps down the hill, and then remembered the shooting was over and that he should be taking photos and not running. A few yards in front of him, face down on an access road, lay the body of 20-year-old student protester Jeffrey Miller. Blood was streaming from his mouth.

Filo recalls that the student was clearly dead, and he started taking pictures of him. A few seconds later, a girl with long, dark hair ran up and knelt over the body. Filo says he thought: “OK, this is a good picture. But I’m running out of film.”

He inched closer to the girl. “I’m trying to focus, and all of a sudden she lets out this scream”—and that’s when Filo captured his acclaimed picture. “I advance the camera, and I shoot another picture, and I advance one more, and I’m out of film.”

By the time he reloaded his camera, the girl was gone. Filo continued to photograph other people’s reactions to the body, angering some students. They yelled: “Why are you doing this?” and “What kind of pig are you, taking pictures of this?” Filo says he yelled back: “No one is going to believe this happened!”

The image of the girl kneeling over the student has often been compared to the Pietà, the depiction of the Virgin Mary holding the body of Jesus. Filo says he sees similarities, but didn’t at the time. “When it’s happening,” he says, “you’re reacting to a scream, a movement.”

Only two weeks later did Filo learn that the girl was not a Kent State student but 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio, a runaway from Florida. “There were plenty of other women around who were 18, 19, and 20 years old who didn’t react like she did,” Filo says. “So you’re saying, ‘My God, I had this child react to this gore and horror in front of her. Had she been a student, would she have screamed? Would she have done that? And would the picture have been different?’ ”

Although several photos were included in Filo’s Pulitzer entry, the picture of the runaway over Miller’s body has been most remembered. The Pulitzer award lists Filo’s affiliations as The Valley Daily News and Daily Dispatch of Tarentum and New Kensington, Pennsylvania, a combined newspaper that developed Filo’s photos and helped send them over the wires. He says he took his film there as opposed to a larger publication because he had interned at the paper since high school and trusted the editors.

He remains one of the youngest people to win a Pulitzer, and one of the few students. He learned he had won by watching the news come over the wire machine in the Kent State journalism building, just feet from where he took his winning picture.

“I felt cocky for about two days,” he says. Then he received a congratulatory letter from mentor and Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Eddie Adams, who wrote: “Now, let’s see what you can do tomorrow.”

Filo says that for years he felt “very fortunate and very guilty” about the shootings, particularly when he considered the trajectory of the bullets. “An arm’s length to my right, a guy was shot. An arm’s length or two to my left, that’s where Jeffrey Miller was shot. I got this photo and I’m alive and it’s relatively famous. They are dead or wounded. We’re talking a few feet, either way. The randomness is what drives you crazy.”

The university, however, has come to terms with the event. A massive granite memorial resembling four caskets now stands near the shooting site. You can no longer park where the students fell. A visitors’ center and walking tour with trail markers are compelling and comprehensive.

Forty-four years after Filo took his picture, in Chicago, the city where I work, a white police officer shot a 17-year-old African-American, Laquan McDonald, 16 times, killing him. The city portrayed the shooting as an act of self-defense but refused to release a police dashboard camera video of the event. Only after 13 months, a public outcry, and a court order did authorities release the footage, which contradicted the official narrative. Just hours before the footage was made public, the officer was charged with first-degree murder. The teenager became a symbol of police brutality.

In many ways, Filo’s photo prefigures the McDonald video and other dramatic images of police violence that have captured the nation’s attention in recent years. Filo’s picture and the Kent State shootings have become vivid symbols of oppression. But the photo also represents hope and truth.

“That photo screamed for justice,” says Dean Kahler, who was shot by the guardsmen and paralyzed from the waist down.

Filo agrees. “You really couldn’t deny the photo,” he says. “That’s what it boils down to.”

While Kent State was not the only instance of violence against student protesters, it immediately became a byword for state-sanctioned violence. Campuses nationwide erupted in protest. Krause, Miller, Scheuer and Schroeder became martyrs, their deaths memorialized by the band Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in their song “Ohio.” The tremors were felt all the way to the White House; according to H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, they precipitated the sense of political paranoia within the administration that set Watergate in motion.

Thomas M. Grace, one of the students shot on May 4, went on to become a historian. Among his books is a well-received history of the protests, “Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties.” In it, he argued that the shootings and the mass student strike had three immediate, tangible effects.

First, the ensuing political pressure propelled Nixon to end the unwarranted Cambodian invasion earlier than anticipated, on June 30, 1970. Second, the horror of students dying at the hands of a militaristic state helped propel Congress to pass the War Powers Act in 1973, which curbed the president’s war-making authority. Third, the protests contributed to the ratification of the 26th Amendment a year later, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. Legislators recognized, not only that young adults old enough to be drafted should have the right to vote, but the civic awareness necessary for voting was evident in the acute appreciation of political problems that young people poignantly showed during the spring of 1970.

Looking back, 50 years later, we can also see clear but less tangible effects. Along with cultural touchstones like the Manson family murders and the concert at Altamont, Kent State marked the symbolic end of the 1960s, stretching from the optimism of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration through the March on Washington to the long hot summers of riots, assassinations and radical activism. If, as the sociologist Todd Gitlin noted, the decade was marked by both hope and rage, then the events of May 4 brought the sober recognition that neither could overcome the will of a militaristic state and a conservative political backlash.

Kent State did more than end an era; it also shaped a new one. As David Greenberg, a professor of history and journalism and media studies at Rutgers, explained, Kent State “left a legacy of disillusionment. Generations like mine and those after mine grew up in the shadow of the 1960s. We grew up without great expectations that our leaders would act valiantly, without a naïve or simple view of the military, without confidence that protest could bring about political change.”

Kent State also helped unearth a growing political polarization rooted in different views about the cultural changes wrought by the 1960s. The May 4 shootings were viewed very differently by conservatives and liberals; most conservatives endorsed the National Guard’s actions and at best wrote off the shooting as a tragic accident, at worst as the protesters’ just desert — a position that liberals and the left found unimaginable. “Just as many consider shootings by the police to be ridding the streets of ‘thugs,’ the killings at Kent State were also celebrated by many. ‘National Guard 4, Students 0,’ or ‘They Should have Shot 400’ were commonly voiced views,” Professor Grace wrote, finding a vicious split that is echoed today over everything from climate change to the Kavanaugh hearings.

We also need to recognize the way that Kent State is viewed through race. The students shot on May 4, all white, became martyrs; most people have forgotten that less than two weeks later, Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green, two students in Mississippi, were killed by police officers in the wake of a false rumor about the death of a civil rights leader. And while Kent State stands out as an exception — National Guardsmen killing white college students — over the years, state authorities have killed far more African-American protesters than whites.

Seen through that lens, Kent State was not an aberration at all, but a dramatic continuation of national afflictions — above all the willingness by the state to use force to quash dissent.

Robert Cohen, a professor of history and social studies at New York University, sees Kent State as a point on a line running from Woodrow Wilson’s censorship during World War I, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II and McCarthyism, up to the repression of antiwar activism in the 1960s, all of which set the stage for the deployment of violent tactics on the campus of Kent State. That line continues, Professor Cohen says, through the civil liberties-abusing Patriot Act and Trump’s Muslim immigration ban, which was given the benediction of the Supreme Court.