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.
U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was dragging on and deeply unpopular with a growing number of Americans. Over time, Canfora became one of them.
"It wasn't until I was personally touched, losing friends in that war and seeing the draft that would now take my brothers to that war, that I stopped throwing the anti-war leaflets away and I paid attention," she recalls in an interview with NPR.
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.
"They at least know that they don't want any famine and suffering and death done in their name," she says. "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.
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 the span of two weeks, with some injured in the process.
House Speaker Mike Johnson even called on President Biden to send the National Guard to Columbia University last week, days before New York City police cleared out and arrested some 300 protesters there.
Canfora is all too familiar with what can happen when the National Guard cracks down on campus demonstrations.
As a sophomore, she was among the protesters rallying on May 4, 1970, when members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of students, killing four and injuring nine including her brother, Alan, who was one year her senior.
"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 glass of the car windows was shattering above us, and we could hear the M1 bullets zipping past our heads and bumping into the ground in the pavement around us. And it was a horrifying 13 seconds."
Canfora emerged from the car to find Alan and came across several classmates injured, including two who later died.
"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 came up behind me and said, 'Alan and Tom both got hit.' "
Canfora was one of 25 people indicted in connection with the demonstration, and among the vast majority who were later exonerated.
"Those trials were eventually thrown out for lack of evidence that we had participated in a riot," she explains. "Even though we were grateful that those indictments were thrown out ... we had lost our opportunity to tell the world what happened that day."
Canfora has spent the intervening decades working to correct the record and preserve the legacy of May 4 and now works as a professional-in-residence at Kent State, teaching journalism and helping plan its annual commemorative events.
The events at Kent State more than five decades ago, she says, hold some especially timely takeaways today.
"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.
Anti-war protests on college campuses intensified after April 30, 1970, when President Richard Nixon announced the U.S. invasion of Cambodia a marked escalation of a war that many hoped was winding down.
Students nationwide held protests on May 1, a Friday. The situation in Kent intensified over the weekend, as demonstrators including college students clashed with police downtown, prompting Kent Mayor LeRoy Satrom to ask the governor to dispatch the Ohio National Guard to the city.
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.
"On Sunday night, three students were stabbed in the backs, inhe legs by guardsmen and bayonets," she remembers. "And that was all a foreshadowing of what was to come the next day, on Monday."
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."
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, Ohio Gov. Jim Rhodes described campus demonstrators as "the worst type of people that we harbor in America."
"We were too young and naοve 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. And we should all learn the lessons from that."
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."
After an almost decade-long legal battle, the Guardsmen settled out of court with more than two dozen defendants, though the state paid the families of injured students. The Ohio National Guard signed a statement that began, "In retrospect, the tragedy of May 4, 1970 should not have occurred."
Canfora also draws parallels between the misinformation that ran rampant then and today, noting that "excuses" for the use of excessive force on campus began immediately after the shooting.
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