From Kent State to Gaza: Student activism through tragedy and triumph

In the autumn of 1968, a spirited 18-year-old Roseann Canfora joined Kent State University in Ohio to study English. That same year, a movement against the US-led war in Vietnam began to grow louder on student campuses across the United States.

Two years later, as the war escalated - and President Richard Nixon announced the US invasion of Cambodia - so did the urgency of the anti-war protestors. Canfora, who today serves as a professor of journalism at the same university, became an active member of the movement, calling for an end to the fighting.

On May 4, 1970, at an anti-war demonstration on campus, the Ohio National Guard was called in by the state's governor to quell the protests. They fired at the 300 student participants, killing four of Canfora's peers. Nine others were injured, including her older brother Alan.

Speaking to TRT World, Canfora talked about the student effort to end the war in Vietnam and reflected on the similarities to today, as college students protest en masse against Israel's assault on Gaza.

TRT World: When the Vietnam War started in 1968, there was an anti-war movement growing across the United States and amongst the students around you. Tell us more about that.

I was not unlike many young Americans at the time who, either at 18 were going off to college or off to war, and I was also a very typical American teenager who believed that if our nation was involved in a war, it was probably for a noble cause. It was probably to oppose tyranny abroad, and it was probably to spread democracy abroad.

It took a while when I first got to college and saw anti-war protesters on campus for me not only to pay attention to what they were saying, but to use my own common sense to realise that our nation was not being completely forthright when it came to telling us what we were actually doing in Southeast Asia.

But putting together what I was hearing from my veteran friends, when they returned from Vietnam saying "I'm not fighting for anything I believe over there."

And learning from student activists who were far more advanced in their understanding of the war and our wrongness for being in that war, that made me actually take a stand against the fighting there.

TRT World: How many were on your campus protesting, and did you feel your voices were being heard and that you were making a difference?

Roseann Canfora: Well, Richard Nixon made it clear that he was ignoring us when hundreds of thousands of students marched. But even prior to his invasion of Cambodia (in 1970), we marched on Washington, and he publicly announced that he would be watching a football game instead of paying attention to our protests.

It was not surprising, then, when this criminal president who promised to wind the war down, and instead escalated it into the hamlet of Cambodia, that students across the country felt betrayed and outraged and took to the streets with more militant tactics than we had used before to make sure that the president who just wouldn't listen to us, heard our anger.

TRT World: Would you say that dehumanising language used by the government at the time led to the National Guard being called in and the use of excessive force?

Roseann Canfora: Without question, we won't know for certain until National Guardsmen get off point, stop recycling their same old talking points that they've used for 54 years to try to justify the use of excessive force against American college students. We won't know until they stand with us as we have stood together for 54 years telling the truth that we know. We need to know and understand.

Was it that inflammatory rhetoric that made those triggermen lift their weapons? Look through the scopes of their rifles, find targets in the bodies of 18 and 19 year old kids and not only pull the triggers, but to continue pulling the triggers for 13 horrifying seconds, even as students were falling to the ground and running in the opposite direction. They kept firing with the clear intent to kill.

We need to just know and understand Nixon calling us "bums," and Vice President Spiro Agnew likening anti-war protesters to Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

If the hateful words of Governor Ronald Reagan in California saying if students want a bloodbath let's get it over with, or the worst rhetoric the night before the shootings, when Ohio Governor James Rhodes said we were worse than the night riders and the vigilantes, the worst type of people we harbour in America, saying "it's over with in Ohio, we're going to eradicate the problem."

We were the problem to them and those soldiers aimed their guns and fired on us thinking we were the worst type of people we harbour in America.

Only the guardsmen who pulled those triggers can tell us if that hateful rhetoric was at the heart of their hatred of us. But it's reasonable to assume that even without their voice, that's what happened.

TRT World: Are you seeing a similar type of language used now towards the students who are protesting the war in Gaza?

Roseann Canfora: It should outrage us all, and alarm us all, that at one of the highest levels of government, US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, was one of the first to publicly call on state police and state governors to bring in the National Guard to quell student protest.

I was horrified when I heard that. It was truly not just an echo of what we heard out of Nixon and Governor Rhodes in 1970, but it put college students in danger if any of those state officials listened to that advice, which shows that the speaker has learned nothing from Kent State.

TRT World: Did the protests come to an end after the killing of four of your fellow students and the shooting of your brother Alan?

Roseann Canfora: Well in the Nixon tapes once they were released, we heard that Nixon wondered aloud if a few students dying in protest would quell the unrest.

If that was his intent or his thinking, it backfired, because after the shootings at Kent State and 10 days later there were shootings at Jackson State University in Mississippi, where 5 million people were in the streets protesting the Vietnam War.

And if you've ever gone to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, you will clearly see that the war reached its peak in 1970 and then slowly made its way to an end following 1970.

So the shootings at Kent State were clearly the turning point in the war and the voices of college students in America definitely hastened the end of that war.

TRT World: You were wrongfully indicted in connection to the demonstrations in 1970, but later exonerated, right? And then you returned annually to Kent State to remind the students of the events of that day. Why was that so important for you to do?

Roseann Canfora: Well, I wasn't surprised that a lot of people who survived the shooting said they would never return to Kent State, feeling so betrayed that our university administration had turned our campus over to armed gunmen, literally left campus and turned our campus into a military camp and left us so vulnerable to attack.

But I was not among those who said I would never return. In fact, all my degrees are from Kent State and I teach there today. But I think it might have been in part the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song "Ohio" that had one line in particular immediately after the shootings that resonated with me.

"What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground? How can you run when you know?"

It was hard for some of us to move on with our lives, but as oral historians we felt an urgency and responsibility to tell the truth that we knew, particularly as the Ohio National Guardsman began a 54-year reign of self defence claims that have been disproven one trial after another.

Nixon's own Scranton Commission called the shootings unwarranted, unnecessary, and inexcusable. Nixon's own FBI found the claims of self-defence by the National Guard were fabricated.

And yet, you know the guardsmen still try to make it seem like Trump did during Charlottesville, that there were right and wrongs on both sides. No, there wasn't.

Students weren't doing anything but exercising their constitutional right to dissent against a war that we disagreed with. We didn't do anything wrong.

That day, the Ohio National Guard engaged in mass murder. And so we are beholden to tell the truth that we know and until we can't do it anymore, until we don't have the breath to do it anymore.

I will forever call on the National Guard to join us in telling the truth that we know. We need to understand why they shot at us so that it doesn't happen again.

TRT World: Do you see similarities playing out in the protests that we are seeing across university campuses against the war in Gaza?

Roseann Canfora: I was very inspired to see students not just at Columbia (University) and NYU (New York University), but across the country, and including in our own university, taking a stand against the war in Gaza. And, you know, the mass bombings that they're seeing are painfully reminiscent.

You know, if we learn anything from Vietnam, it's that no matter how many bombs are dropped, whether it's in Vietnam or in the Middle East, it doesn't wipe out the problem that is at the root of the conflict.

You can't just entirely destroy populations of people that are the human casualties, like we saw in Vietnam, caught in the crossfire of the attack and the counterattack.

I'm not only impressed that students were taking a stand, but that students today are taking a stand at a time when they don't have the time that we had to pay attention when my tuition was affordable.

I could work a minimum wage job and pay for my full year of college. These students today are strapped with tuition, debt and credit card debt to pay for the high cost of education.

I think it was intentional that education is so unaffordable. They don't want students to have time to think and dream of the world they're entering. Because then they just might have time to change it.

These students today are finding the time they don't have. They're finding it because they see, as we did 54 years ago, how important it is to get in the way of the killing that we're seeing so unjustly across the world.

TRT World: Since the Vietnam War until today, there have been countless wars. But we haven't seen the same outcry as we are seeing now, why do you think that is?

Roseann Canfora: Well I know that during the Iraq war, one of the reasons people weren't paying as much attention was because (President) George Bush had learned from Walter Cronkite (American journalist) in 1970 that if we saw the graphic photographs and images at the My Lai massacre or during the Tet offensive, public opinion would turn against war.

So we had free speech zones during the Iraq war. We didn't see the flag-draped coffins because they weren't allowed to be seen.

I was very glad to see President (Joe) Biden come out very strongly and actually urge Israel not to make the same mistakes that we made when America responded after the 9/11 attacks by just launching these widespread missile attacks in Iraq, so that those targets ended up being people not even involved in the attack.

I can't explain why the outrage wasn't as apparent as it is today. This is just a remarkable generation of students that truly is seeing one assault on humanity after another and increasingly, using their voices to put an end to the suffering.