Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties by Thomas M. Grace (review)

The story of the events which took place at Kent State University on 4 May 1970 has been told by novelists, film makers, political scientists, songwriters, sociologists, and others. Ohio National Guardsmen fired on protesting students, killing four and wounding nine. Largely absent from this pantheon of arts and letters is the work of historians. In this respect Thomas M. Grace’s Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties is long overdue.

The subject is not entirely unexplored by historians. Several edited oral history collections exist, the most recent being Craig Simpson and Gregory Wilson’s Above the Shots: An Oral History of the Kent State Shootings (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2016). Kenneth Heineman includes Kent State as one of four case studies in which law enforcement agencies fired upon student demonstrators in his book Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities in the Vietnam Era (New York: New York University Press, 1994). Heineman argues that only at a predominantly working-class university such as Kent would the state turn its guns on its own children.

Grace continues with Heineman’s class analysis, situating the university squarely within the context of northeastern Ohio’s post-war working class. Established as a teachers’ college in the early 20th century, the university and its student body expanded exponentially in the years following World War II. Located within the industrial triangle of Cleveland, Youngstown, and Akron, to a large degree students matriculating at Kent State in the late 1950s and 1960s were the children of unionized workers, themselves no strangers to political mobilization. In 1958, Ohio’s Republican Governor placed on the ballot a proposed “right to work” amendment to the state constitution. Labour organized a grassroots campaign and defeated the proposal. Albert Canfora, a local United Auto Workers vice-president, was one of the many union leaders involved in the campaign. A photo of his son, Alan, adorns the cover of Grace’s book. He is waving a black flag, taunting Ohio National Guardsmen, who point their M1 rifles at him across a practice football field at Kent State. As with many working-class families in northeastern Ohio, a tradition of political activism had been passed from one generation to the next. Moments later, Guardsmen shot and wounded the younger Canfora.

But class is just one sub-theme in what Grace describes as “a bottom-up history of dissident political activity over fifteen years.” (6) Race is equally important. The civil rights movement arrived at Kent State in 1960 in the form of the Kent Council on Human Affairs (cha). Its accomplishments included desegregating a local bar and approved off-campus student housing. The Black Power movement on campus manifested in itself in the form of Black United Students (bus), established in 1967. It was fed by a series of riots that engulfed African American neighbourhoods in Cleveland and Akron between 1964 and 1968. Time and again Republican Governor James Rhodes deployed Ohio National Guardsmen to quell the disturbances, often resulting in African American fatalities. Having lived through these events, Black students enrolled at Kent State became active in, or sympathized with, bus. One former bus president remembered, “‘I’ve seen the riots. Those cats (Ohio National Guardsmen) move in with rifles, man, they blow your head right off.’” (116) Wisely, when Guardsmen occupied Kent State on 2 May, bus advised African American students to avoid the soldiers and to stay away from demonstrations. All of those killed and wounded on 4 May were white.

Grace’s third and most important sub-theme is the debunking of the widespread belief that the events of 4 May 1970 occurred at (citing the late David Halberstam as representative) “‘an activist backwater ... distanced physically and emotionally from the centre of the antiwar movement.’” (8) Far from it, Grace demonstrates how Kent State was representative of the larger antiwar movement. In doing so Grace provides something unique to the historiography of the...