Kent State redux

Paul Venter
is an IU graduate and a University of Indianapolis graduate student.

John Filo won a Pulitzer Prize for his iconic photo of Mary Vecchio kneeling over slain Jeffrey Miller at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. In Filo’s second famous photograph, Alan Canfora is shown waving a black flag shortly before being wounded by the Ohio National Guard that same day. Four students laid dead and nine others were wounded.

Canfora recently found an old audio tape that might answer the ongoing question: Was there an order to fire? The tape will be flown to California, the most modern machinery will digitize it and experts will then give their opinions. With the 40th anniversary of the massacre approaching, I went to Kent State and spoke with Alan Canfora.

The central mystery of the Kent State riot has always been one thing: Did the soldiers decide to fire because they feared for their lives? Canfora contends that the nearest rock-throwing students would have posed no serious threat.

The ranking officer said there was no order to fire. Some of the individual soldiers said they heard an order to fire, others said they fired because they feared for their lives and some said they didn’t fire when they actually did. The soldiers collectively admitted to firing 31 shots, but there were 67 shots fired. (It is important to note that some soldiers deliberately fired into the air over the protestors’ heads.)

Canfora and many others believe the Ohio National Guardsmen should not have been summoned in the first place. With an election two days away, then-Gov. James Rhodes might have done more than anyone else to inflame the Kent State situation. In a speech one day before the riot, he said the protestors were the worst type of people in America — worse than the communists. The governor said the protestors had fired at the police and the rioters were burning buildings worth millions.

The ROTC building was burned, but it was old and dilapidated. There was no evidence that the protestors fired at the police. He stepped up on the podium and said “we are going to eradicate the problem,” and on May 4, four students were eradicated. His rhetoric almost succeeded — one week before the election he was behind by 8 percent, but he only lost by a fraction of 1 percent.

The hippies are long gone, and there are no more zealots at Kent State, but wherever you trek, the past is still serious business for many people. It is still serious to the people at the Special Collections section in the library. It is still serious to the occasional old man who walks up Blanket Hill at Kent State as the evening fades. And it is still serious to Alan Canfora.

If the experts find that the order to fire is on the tape, the investigation should be reopened.