Kent State Gunshots Reverberate 40 Years Later

(May 3) -- Forty years have passed since the Ohio National Guard killed four student protesters at Kent State University, shocking a nation already jolted by the turbulence of the 1960s. But as the school prepares for the anniversary Tuesday, the shootings remain a divisive moment in American history.

The university will mark the occasion with a walking tour, a candlelight march and vigil, and a speech by Democratic Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, a former civil rights activist. But bubbling underneath the surface of the planned ceremonies, uncomfortable questions remain about whether the guardsmen received an order to shoot and why soldiers were armed with deadly force among students on a college campus.

''There's a struggle over the kind of memory of Vietnam and that history, how history is written,'' Daniel Miller, a filmmaker who was a student at Kent State in 1970, told the Akron Beacon Journal. ''Depending on who you talk to, you get different versions of it."

What is undisputed is that on May 4, 1970, students gathered on the Kent State campus to protest President Richard Nixon's decision to escalate the war in Vietnam. When the National Guard ordered the students to disperse, students yelled insults and threw rocks at the soldiers, who released tear gas into the crowd. Then the National Guard assembled and fired some 60 shots, most of them into the air or at the ground. But when the hail of bullets finally stopped, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, Allison Krause, William Knox Schroeder and Sandra Lee Scheuer were dead. Nine others were wounded.

"I saw the smoke come out of the weapons, and light is faster than sound, and so I knew immediately [they] were not firing blanks. So it was almost instinctive to dive for cover," Jerry Lewis, who taught sociology at Kent State and witnessed the shootings, told National Public Radio.

"Obviously, if you turn together in close quarters with bayonet, there must be some coordination, but I've always interpreted as that they planned to fire but fire high -- because they were angry ... they were poorly led ... their tear gas masks didn't work properly," Lewis said. "But many people have used the turning together -- and there were lots of eyewitnesses to that -- as [a sign] that there was a rough agreement to do that, or that there was an order. But I haven't seen any evidence yet that there was an order."

An audio recording from the shooting may determine whether an order to shoot was given. The sound on the tape is distorted, but using new technology, researchers think they can clear the background noise off the tape and find out what happened that day.

Alan Canfora, one of the nine students who was wounded during the shootings, has said he heard an order to shoot. "Right here, get set, point, fire!" Canfora says he heard before the bullets were fired.

Charges brought against eight of the National Guardsmen were dismissed in federal court. A civil suit was settled with no admission of guilt on the part of the shooters.

Forty years later, Elaine Holstein is still waiting to know why her son Jeff was killed.

"I wanted an admission of culpability, and more than that, I wanted an assurance that no mother would ever again have to bury a child for simply exercising the freedom of speech," she wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer. "But all we got was a watered-down statement that better ways must be found, etc., etc."