Alan Canfora was one of nine students at Kent State that was a victim of the events of May 4, 1970. One the students killed that day was a friend of Canfora’s, who has spent almost fourty years trying to bring to justice those responsible for the events of that day.
He was fourty yards from the Ohio National Guards when they opened fire, shooting him in the wrist and hitting eight others, killing four. An audio recording of the event exists and Canfora wants the FBI, using new technologies, to analyze exactly what was said by those in the unit prior to it opening fire on students.
According to the Guardian newspaper in the UK…
“Although eight guardsmen were indicted, no one was ever prosecuted, and the episode exposed the deep disdain of the Nixon administration for dissenters. The families of the 13 killed and wounded pursued a civil suit against the state governor and the National Guard, which was eventually settled out of court.
The materials from that civil suit were eventually stored in the archives at Yale University, where Mr Canfora recently rediscovered a 30-minute recording of the protest.
The recording was made by a fellow student, Terry Strubbe, who placed an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder on the window sill of his dorm room, which overlooked the protests. Mr Strubbe, who has declined to speak to reporters, still has the original recording in a bank safety deposit box.
However, a spokesman for Mr Strubbe, Joseph Bendo, told the Guardian yesterday he was unsure whether there were sounds of an order to open fire on the original recording.
“It was never heard on our version of the tape, but maybe nobody ever listened. It’s unusual that nobody has heard it before in 37 years. Other people have heard this tape in the past, and maybe they weren’t listening for it,” he said.”
Given the massive advancements in audio technology between the early 70’s and now, it would seem only proper for the FBI to use whatever they have at their disposal to examine the recording. The rights of the students murdered that day must not be disregarded, be it a week later or almost fourty years after the fact.
For those of you unfamiliar with what was taking place that day at Kent State, there was a protest being held against the US invasion of Cambodia which was undertaken by US forces on the 25th of April of that year.
As was common in that era, the good intentions of some were routinely marred by the wanton actions of those that included themselves in such events that, in the case of Kent State, weren’t even students. While the official protest was scheduled for the 4th of May, three days proceeded it during which tensions ran high and acts of violence, such as the throwing of beer bottles at local police, took place. Those responsible for such actions on the 1st of May were primarily Bikers and out of town youths that frequented Kent State university bars.
On the 2nd, the university’s Army R.O.T.C. building was burned down. The day after, the Governor of Ohio, then James Rhodes, traveled to the campus and issued a statement that made clear that he intended to use “every force possible to maintain order”. He also likened the protestors to Brownshirts and vowed to keep the Ohio National Guard on campus until, in his words, “we get rid of them”.
The events of the day that followed are, obviously, well know and etched into the American psyche. A contingent of Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on students at some time around noon, killing four and wounding five, after employing tear gas to try and disperse the crowd. One of the most telling occurrences of that day is that after pushing the protestors over Blanket Hill, they did not follow the main body of protestors which had fled to their left but continued forward onto a small practice field that faced a parking lot…
“While on the practice field, the guardsmen generally faced the parking lot which was about 100 meters away. At one point some of the guardsmen knelt and aimed their weapons toward the parking lot, then stood up again. For a few moments several guardsmen formed a loose huddle and appeared to be talking to one another. The guardsmen appeared to be unclear as to what to do next. They had cleared the protesters from The Commons area, and many students had left, but many stayed and were still angrily confronting the soldiers, some throwing rocks and tear gas canisters. At the end of about ten minutes 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 the latter passed over the top of the hill and headed back down into The Commons.
At this point, a number of guardsmen at the top of the hill abruptly turned and fired into the students. The guardsmen directed their fire not at the closest students, who were on the Taylor Hall veranda, but at those on the grass area and concrete walkway below the veranda, at those on the service road between the veranda and the parking lot, and at those in the parking lot. Bullets were not sprayed in all directions, but instead were confined to a fairly limited line of fire leading from the top of the hill to the parking lot. Not all the soldiers who fired their weapons directed their fire into the students. Some soldiers fired into the ground while a few fired into the air. In all, 29 of the 77 guardsmen claimed to have fired their weapons. A total of 67 bullets were fired. The shooting was determined to have lasted only 13 seconds, although a New York Times reporter stated that “it appeared to go on, as a solid volley, for perhaps a full minute or a little longer.” (Wikipedia)
In all, 67 bullets were fired with 27 of the 77 National Guardsmen admitting to having discharged their weapons, all employing live rounds.
The chaos that followed the actions of the National Guard were, as to be expected, intense. While stunned students fled the campus and others languished over those that had been shot, others felt that they should retaliate and attack the National Guard, an idea that was, thankfully, defused by members of the faculty, chief among them Glenn Frank, a professor of Geology. In a little under a half an hour he was able to convince students to leave the Commons.
The Resonance Of The Days Of Rage
It’s no secret that the effects of the Days Of Rage had an impact on some of those that participated in the early events at Kent State (primarily on May 1st and 2nd), most of whom were not students, nor directly relatable to the organization whose manifesto outlined the exercise of bringing the war home. They were, not unlike many caught up in the dissolution of the peace movement in the early 70’s, individuals looking to confront the establishment in an altogether counter productive fashion, a tragic and entirely ignorant inclusion in what should have been a largely profound and productive protest.
The principle members of The Weathermen, all of whom were forced underground following the Greenwich Village explosion on March 6th, 1970 [1], (an event which also led to thinning of their numbers) would concede in later life that the actions of their group were, in many cases, counter productive and had an adverse effect on those that had also become disenfranchised with the lack of palpable success of the anti-war movement up until that point. Such actions included a number of terrorist attacks planned and carried out by Weather Underground cells throughout the United States.
In the case of The Weathermen, because of the exposure of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program [2] by the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, which broke into a Pennsylvania FBI office and took some 1000 classified documents detailing COINTELPRO activities…
“Very few served prison sentences for their time in the Weather Underground; the infiltration and destruction tactics used against them by COINTELPRO made much of the evidence gathered against them deemed illegally obtained and inadmissible in court.”
After breaking into the Media, Pennsylvania FBI office and taking the documents, the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI mailed copies of the documents to several American newspapers, though their first exposure would not come until March of 1972 when WIN Magazine published the material.
Reflections Of The Military State
What occurred at Kent State on the 4th of May, 1970, may very well have been the result of nervous National Guardsmen panicking. Then again, it could have been the result of their outlook on those that were arrayed in front of them and the schism in American society at the time, being that the nation was in the throes of a politically charged struggle against what some perceived as traditional values and what others viewed as the degradation of their country and what it supposedly stood for.
In the aftermath of Kent State many Americans that were interviewed on television claimed that those who had been shot ‘had it coming’ and that they were attempting to ‘ruin the country’. The reason for this is because immediately following the incident, the media reported that various National Guardsmen had been killed and injured. The truth, of course, is that only one National Guardsman was ever reported injured, Sgt. Lawrence Shafer, who allegedly required medical attention prior to the shootings taking place. Yet, an FBI document (file # 44-703) that was prepared by the Bureau’s Cleveland branch claimed…
“Three persons interviewed regarding reported conversation by Sgt Lawrence Shafer, ONG, that Shafer had bragged about “taking a bead” on Jeffrey Miller at the time of the ONG shooting and each interviewee unable to substantiate such a conversation.”
Miller was shot in the head and killed instantly that day. His was the body over which Mary Ann Vecchio crouched screaming, an image that has come to represent the tragedy that day. Miller, who had just transferred to Kent State from the University of Michigan, was protesting the Vietnam war, as was his right under the Constitution of the United States. That spring morning he paid for that right with his life after being shot by one of his own countrymen, another man who also possessed the very same right.
Whether Shafer, who was supposedly in need of medical attention just prior to the shooting, shot Miller, something which would render reports of the supposed seriousness of his injury moot, is not the point. The point is that there is a direct link between the purpose of the protest that day and what is happening right now in the United States. While anti-war activists are marginalized and painted as radicals, the silent majority of Americans that believe the war in Iraq is wrong have not yet demonstrated the courage that cost Jeffery Miller is life. They have not stood up to this administration and said in a unified voice that Iraq, like Vietnam, was a monumental mistake, one that has, once again, tarnished not only the noble principles on which the nation was founded, but misrepresented them as a people to the world.
Four thousand more Americans arrived in Iraq today, four thousand more than should not have been, and the response to that, and the half a trillion dollars spend on that folly, a debt which affect future generations, will no doubt be limited by most a quiet shake of their head when it is echoing of the screams of Mary Ann Vecchio that should be coming out of their mouths.
Such inaction is not synonymous to the United States alone. Canadians too must realize that there is more at stake with regards to our participation in Afghanistan than the easily digested, over simplified, and pro-war information that we are fed on a daily basis.
Now is not the time for the silent shaking of heads, muted conversations around dinner tables replete with shoulder shrugs and uncomfortable shifting in chairs. Now is the time to dispel the myths that so many of us hold on to, that the power of the people can be derailed by the common belief that there are too many among us that are too uneducated or apathetic to act and thus somehow limit our ability to impact our own government.
Rivers that flow from the mountains to the ocean do not begin as impassible divides. They begin as trickles and end in swift currents that find the sea and thus become a part of unified bodies that know no bounds.
References
[1] On October 8th, 1969, a protest was held in Chicago that began at Lincoln Public Park against the trial of the Chicago Seven. At the end of the rally, members of The Weathermen, a radical splinter group which had once been known as the Revolutionary Youth Movement within the Students for a Democratic Society organization, urged protestors to ‘tear down the Drake Hotel and get Hoffman’ (referring, of course, to Abby Hoffmann), which led to a riotous rampage through Chicago’s Gold Coast neighbourhood during which store windows and cars were destroyed. The unrest continued for three days, during which considerable property damage was done, one person was killed, and numerous others arrested.
The impetus for the Days Of Rage, of which the Chicago rally was a part, and which organizers believed would draw in excess of 10,000 people (it only attracted several hundred), was an initiative aimed at bringing the war home, an exercise in organized chaos to wake the American people up to the suffering of the Vietnamese people.
[2] The FBI’s COINTELPRO program began in 1956 and monitored the likes of everyone from Dr. Martin Luther King to The Black Panthers to the Ku-Klux-Klan to anti-war groups including the SDS and splinter factions like The Weather Underground. The objectives of the program were as follows…
1. “Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents.”
2. “Psychological Warfare From the Outside: The FBI and police used myriad other “dirty tricks” to undermine progressive movements. They planted false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups. They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and made anonymous telephone calls. They spread misinformation about meetings and events, set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents, and manipulated or strong-armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials and others to cause trouble for activists.”
3. “Harassment Through the Legal System: The FBI and police abused the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. Officers of the law gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a context for false arrests and wrongful imprisonment. They discriminatorily enforced tax laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance, ‘investigative’ interviews, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate activists and silence their supporters.”
4. “Extralegal Force and Violence: The FBI and police threatened, instigated, and themselves conducted break-ins, vandalism, assaults, and beatings. The object was to frighten dissidents and disrupt their movements. In the case of radical Black and Puerto Rican activists (and later Native Americans), these attacks—including political assassinations—were so extensive, vicious, and calculated that they can accurately be termed a form of official ‘terrorism.’”.
The FBI also conducted “black bag jobs”, warrantless surreptitious entries, against the targeted groups and their members.