KENT STATE AUTHOR DONATES FREE EBOOKS TO STUDENTS, FACULTY MEMBERS, AND ALUMNI

KENT STATE AUTHOR DONATES FREE EBOOKS TO STUDENTS, FACULTY MEMBERS, AND ALUMNI

By Guest Columnist, cleveland.com 
This post originally appeared on the op-ed page of the March 6, 2020 Cleveland Plain Dealer.

LOS ANGELES -- Even though I received some of the best reviews of any book about the May 4, 1970, killings at Kent State University, I have been repeatedly prevented from speaking on the campus. Every time my original publisher or I tried to schedule a speaking engagement, it was made clear to me that I was, in the words of a sociology professor, “not welcome” at Kent State.

The reasons are varied and include the fact that I exposed some abominable behavior by some of the tragedy’s best-known characters, including that professor, who was laden with multiple conflicts of interest. Also, as far as the May 4 Task Force is concerned (the student group supposedly in charge of keeping alive the memory of May 4 ), I am much too respectable and middle class. That group, by the way, also blocked other May 4 authors from speaking at Kent, including Philip Caputo, a distinguished Pulitzer-Prize-winning author.

As an exercise in “creative revenge,” I decided that in 2020, during Kent State’s yearlong 50th anniversary commemoration of the shootings, I would donate the updated ebook version of my book, “Four Dead in Ohio,” to any student, faculty member, and alumnus or alumna who is interested. I figured that If the university was going to repeatedly censor me, I would make it impossible for KSU to prevent its students from discovering what I had to say.

I do not expect many students to take me up on the offer because, let us face it, the university still has not provided today’s students with a good reason to even remember May 4. If we were to be brutally honest about it, we would stipulate that May 4 (as it is called in shorthand) has very little to do with anything going on in the world today. The people who want to keep its memory alive are mostly the stuck-in-the-'60s protesters who want to be remembered as heroes of the anti-Vietnam War movement.

For this year’s commemoration, Kent State’s administration has been conned into honoring several not-so-former radicals who either have not been truthful about their own roles in the tragedy, or who still champion violent protest.

I have been particularly disturbed by the claims of two of Kent State’s “honorees,” wounded student Alan Canfora and his sister Chic, that they represent the views of the parents of the four students killed. As someone who actually worked with those parents in an attempt to get some semblance of justice, I can tell you they were, more often than not, not on the same page, particularly when the parents sought a federal grand jury investigation.

Kent’s “honorees” actually opposed a full investigation because they feared that they would be criminally prosecuted themselves instead of the Ohio National Guardsmen. In fact, another “honoree,” wounded survivor Thomas Grace, whose book “Kent State” is essentially a “love letter” to the defunct Students for a Democratic Society, disparaged the parents’ struggle for justice, telling fellow student Paul Keane that “the only way to get justice is to pick up a gun.”

The parents of those killed May 4 would never have approved of this behavior, nor wanted their “search for the truth” and “the struggle for justice” obliterated from KSU’s official history. Unfortunately, that is what Grace and his friends primarily accomplished when they served as consultants for Kent’s May 4 Visitors Center.

The reason May 4 deserves to be remembered is not because it single-handedly ended the war in Vietnam (although it obviously played some part), but because it quietly morphed into one of the greatest injustices in modern American history. The country may have grown weary of the war, but it had also lost its patience with the protesters who, in the name of peace, committed violence. In fact, the unpopularity of the victims was exactly why it was so easy to cover up the real story of the May 4 shootings.

Perhaps if Kent State had a law school instead of a sociology department, someone there might have recognized what transpired right in front of their eyes. If nothing else, I hope the donation of my book will help point Kent State’s scholars in the direction of the debate around these questions: Why did the Guardsmen fire? Why was no one held accountable in the courts?

And perhaps it might help students better understand why I and others who examined the hard, cold physical evidence concluded that murder may have been committed at Kent State.
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William A. Gordon is a 1973 Kent State University graduate and the author of “Four Dead in Ohio” and three other books.