Two authors take a look at the May 4, 1970, shootings at Kent State University from a unique perspective.
For their book, Above the Shots: An Oral History of the Kent State Shootings, they talked to dozens of people who recount their memories of the incident and surrounding events.
“We wanted to really look and listen to what people remember about the event and how they thought about it,” said co-author Gregory S. Wilson, who teaches history at the University of Akron.
The university was placed in the spotlight after a weekend student protest against the Vietnam War ended when Ohio National Guardsmen, who were called in to quell the situation, fired shots that left four students dead, one permanently paralyzed, and eight others wounded.
Craig Simpson, a library manuscripts archivist at Indiana University who was a librarian at Kent State University Special Collections and Archives where he managed the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, co-authored the book.
“The goal of the book was to look at the entire era, not just that day, but what led up to May 4 and of equal importance what has happened in the decades after,” he said. “In our book the actual shootings come about the midway part of the book, it’s not the endpoint. We also talk about how the university and the narrators have been able to come to terms with the event and how they’ve been able to remember it.”
Wider perspective
Another goal of the book was to gather memories from a wide range of voices, beyond former students and faculty and guardsmen.
Two guardsmen who were interviewed were not part of the company that fired the shots on campus that day. Former guardsman Capt. Ron Snyder, who was in another location, talked about the officers’ training. The other, former Beacon Journal artist Art Krummel, was working off campus when the incident occurred. He had a dramatic encounter the night before, involving a fellow guardsman who was almost run over by a drunk driver.
The authors also interviewed people in the town — a protester who helped burn the ROTC building, a Black United Students member who was warned to stay away from the protest, a guardsman sympathetic to the students, a faculty member supportive of the guards — and former KSU Presidents Carol Cartwright and Michael Schwartz, who weren’t there at the time but faced controversy with their decisions on how to memorialize the tragedy.
Both authors said they could not pick one favorite narrator in the 50 people interviewed, but Simpson said one of the most powerful recollections was by Ellis Berns, who was walking with one of the victims, Sandy Scheuer, a 20-year-old speech and pathology major.
“[It] didn’t feel right …something was in the air … people don’t have guns just to have guns … somebody’s going to get hurt,” he said.
In a split second, he said, he grabbed her and ran for cover after hearing shots.
“We both hit the ground. I had my arm around her … we both were kind of diving … not sure why, other than we just knew we didn’t want to be standing. We dove for cover until it was safe to get up … I remember calling out to her, ‘Sandy, it’s over, Let’s go, let’s go … there was no response … there was a lot of blood.”
Berns said she died in his arms.
“I think his narrative gives Sandra her humanity. He talks about their friendship and how they were walking across campus to class and not involved in the protest at all,” Simpson said. “A lot of times when you read about this event as much as has been written about it, the four victims almost get overshadowed with all the controversy and uncertainty about the National Guards and whether they were ordered to fire.”
Another compelling story comes from student Dean Kahler, who observed the protest and had grown upset that the guards were on campus. He was 300 feet away when he was shot in the lower back. He is permanently paralyzed from the waist down.
In his account, he said he knew the guardsmen were going to shoot just “by the deliberate nature of what they were doing” and he realized he had no place to hide. He said he hit the ground and heard bullets hitting the ground around him.
Another interesting view came from narrator Chuck Ayers, a former Beacon Journal artist and syndicated cartoonist. Both authors said Ayers told his story with an artist’s eye for detail, metaphorically painting a vivid picture.
The authors were too young when the shootings happened to remember the event.
“I think there are strengths and weaknesses to us being outsiders,” Simpson said. “We can’t pretend to know what it was like on an emotional level, but on the other hand I think some distance has some advantages particularly when you are doing oral history. Greg brought the scholarship of history and memory to the table and that made a nice balance with the emotion of the stories themselves.”
Simpson, Wilson and six other authors including former KSU student Thomas Grace, who was wounded on May 4, will attend a book signing at the KSU Bookstore from 10 to 11:30 a.m. Wednesday.
A historian, Grace wrote Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties — a book he said he had no intention of writing. He said some persuading by a professor and an editor swayed him, but not without a compromise. He didn’t want to write a memoir.
“By the time I agreed to do the book there were already about a dozen books out, but no one had done a book on the origin of the movement and how it grew and the aftermath,” Grace said. “I’d like to think I approached it in a stoic manner, but certainly there are some feelings that creep into the narrative. When I first submitted the manuscript in 2009 I only mentioned in an endnote that I was actually there.”
In another compromise, he ended up inserting a series of sidebars so that the reader could either pause and read the sidebars about what happened to him on that day or read the narrative uninterrupted.
Marilyn Miller can be reached at 330-996-3098 or mmiller@thebeaconjournal.com.