and what i mean by that is the initial stage of the project, because it was heavily commemoration-based, inevitably you're going to get primarily former students and then some faculty. now, we still did collect those and we did collect interviews during the big commemorations like the 35th and then the 40th, which was the last one i attended in 2010, but we also wanted to collect a wide variety of interviews, which we did just kind of informally throughout each year. and so as a result, we cast a bit of a wider net. so, for example, during that five-year period, we interviewed two former presidents of kent state university, michael schwartz and carol cartwright. also interviewed several citizens of the kent community whose voices really had not been heard, they had really not been interviewed that much either. and a member of black united students who eventually became president of b.u.s. after may 4,

i think around 1971 and also two members of the ohio national guard as well. we also wanted to have a wider time frame, and by what i mean by that is this. a lot of times when people look at may 4 they focus specifically on may 4 or just the four days i gave you. we wanted to kind of broaden the perspective a bit and look at some of the precursors, i didn't actually put it on here. but two of the big precursors were the b.u.s. walkout in 1968 on the kent campus and the sds takeover music and speech in 1969. we actively sought and got a couple of interviews that talked about those events. as far as the aftermath, we also wanted to look for narrators who could discuss some of these issues mentioned here. legal cases like the kent 25 which greg will talk about in a

few minutes, the krause verses rhodes big civil suit in the mid 1970s, the gym annex controversy also known as tent city in 1977, which is when student protesters camped out and unsuccessfully prevented an extension of the ksu gym from being built on part of the site of the shootings. the memorial design competition, some might say debacle, between 1985 and 1990 which was very controversial because some people -- there was a lot of debate over how these events should be remembered or if they should be remembered at all. and eventually the memorial commemoration in 1990. the strubbe tape, which is an ongoing debate about a very old tape which some believe renders audible "order to fire." you may have seen that in the papers the last couple years. the national hedge center of historic places in 2010 officially recognized the site as a historic landmark which was

a very significant event. and greg put up the website there. some common denominators and conflicting interpretations in this -- i should say i'm speaking in a lot of generalities here. what i'm saying here does not reflect every single narrator. but these were some general broad observations. one of them is that many of the people that i interviewed tend to see themselves more as bystanders than participants. many of them were against the vietnam war and they talk about their opinions of the war kind of starting neutral and then gradually changing over time with middle of the road political views. what they were really upset about by and large on the first few days of may was actually military occupation of the campus. chuck ayers, who was a student reporter, talked about in his interview he took off his sweater vest to reveal his kent state t-shirt underneath and he did so as a sign of solidarity with the students and what they were going through.

a more extreme case of activism was recounted by a narrator named james mueller. mueller, the day after the shootings, he didn't belong to ksu but was a university of akron alum. the day after the shootings we took a bus to columbus and tried to make a citizen's arrest of governor rhodes. there were also accounts from students who were actually in the line of fire such as this one here. it's kind of hard to see in the back there. but catherine delattre, one of the students i interviewed, she's being pushed out of the line of fire by her boyfriend in the background there.

that's a better view of her behind glen frank was able to calm the students down, defuse the situation and probably save a lot of lives that day. the two national guardsmen offered very diverse interpretations of these events. one, j. reynold schneider, who was a captain who led a company on may 4 that day, his company was not involved in the actual shootings. but he bristled at the suggestion that the guard was unprepared for riot training for this kind of event. another guardsman, art crumel also said they had very little riot training in the kind that the campus state presented. he was haunted by the confrontation by a faculty member trying to run through the road block on may 3rd. let's play just a little bit of this if i can. there we are. this might be a little loud. >> well, when i saw this happening and the man was edging his car forward and bumping my friend who staggered back a couple steps each time, i

realized that this could be a very, very unhappy outcome at the least. and very dangerous. i then unclicked the safety on my m-1, which was loaded, and one thing we were trained and pretty well in the national guard and in the army when we were trained on active duty was to never click the safety off your weapon until you were ready to use it. i was fully ready to use it. and i can remember still the feeling on my finger of clicking that safety. so anyway, luckily i saw a police car pull out -- there was a --

sorry, had to cut that short. all right. additionally many narrators believe in a conspiracy of some sort. but nobody agrees on exactly what that conspiracy is. some believe a circle of guardsmen made up their minds in advance to open fire in order to teach the students a lesson. on the other side, albert van kirk, who was a vietnam veteran with right wing leanings who also administered first aid to many of the wounded, suggested that radical organizations in town had created an elaborate underground network that deliberately provoked a confrontation with the university administration, the town administration and members of the guard.

he also implied that a bullet hole in the pagoda sculpture shows a bullet trajectory implying perhaps a sniper opened fired first. yet another narrator who is in this photo in the background behind this famous john filo photo, he claimed to have observed one of the victims, who is also in this photo, throwing stones at a very close range at the guard, although i should hasten to add his memory of where the victim's body landed does not match the factual record, as you can see here. what this last account may suggest instead though is how the gym annex has altered the collective memory of this event because he recalls viewing the shootings from where the annex now stands. we actually went out there during his interview. it's -- i show this to give an approximation of how the annex gets in here. many protesters were upset about the annex being built because they felt it was being built on holy ground, on sacred ground.

i certainly respect and understand that opinion. i think as a historian i would just add to that that the other issue here is how it can alter people's historical memory because it was very -- he was very sincere in his account, but it's very easy to get confused out there with this structure being built. i'll turn it over to greg. >> okay. let's carry forward a little bit and talk maybe a little bit about how we can contextualize the events of these four days in may. and again, we in this short paper can't begin to deal with all the complexities, obviously. but we'll offer a few initial observations today and hopefully engage in some discussion afterwards.

at the core of the events are the four deaths and the nine wounded. the dead and the wounded make the events significant. they are at the heart of what locals call may 4 and what those outside the area call kent state. and all of the narrators are coming to terms with the dead, with the manner of their death, the wounded and the manner of their injuries. it's not simply that students were shot, but rather why they were shot, what the shooting, the wounding and the dying have signified. hence the heart of the matter is the contextualizing of the dead and the wounded. through oral history this emerges in the process of narration, recording and analyzing those narrators. we're engaged in an effort to assign meaning to the deaths that craig outlined and to the larger period of time that we have come to call, quote, the '60s.

we're also considering issues of power in society and the narrators discuss various conversations, issues related to government policy, to university policies, to behavior and to social norms as well. and again, just considering this issue in terms of the idea of reconciliation over the deaths and the two issues there are the reconciliation and again the larger meaning of the 1960s. if we take a queue from work in conflict resolution, we can see that the events at kent are a long way from a point of reconciliation, which you can consider on a continuum between sort of on an adversarial stance on one end and then reconciliation at the end of a conflict resolution process. it's clear within the oral history testimonies that in the collection, and in many other sources that you can look and read about, that the events are still yet marked by an adversarial stance.

scholars have written that these adversarial relationships in the context of conflict and trauma which is our theme for the conference involve assigning blame to the other's actions. the goal in this discussion then is to get the other person or other group to change behavior based on assigning guilt. both sides then defend their actions and relate those actions as merely a response to the others' actions as well. that's this adversarial stance. now, within -- as craig mentioned, just sort of general patterns here that are sort of emerging as we begin to really look at these interview, i'll offer just three narratives, if you will, that have emerge friday the interviews so far. one we might call a radical perspective which sees the deaths as murder or at least unwarranted action by the guard. craig has mentioned some of that already. or they came from a direct order to fire.

the strubbe tape has fed into this perspective of late. another narration perspective would be maybe a conservative one in which the deaths came mainly from radicals who escalated events through illegal and violent protests. and then there's a third narrative which i've come to call our tragic or accidental narrative in which the dead and wounded were largely victims of circumstance, accidental. in all of these, but perhaps in the radical and say conservative one, we can see that there is an effort to defend the position through memory, through narration of events through these oral histories. in the words of paul thompson, who has cited the work of others, these narrators have a, quote, sense of self protectiveness in the maintenance of their traditions. so from the perspective of maybe a radical perspective here for the guard as committing murder or at least performing an unwarranted action of shooting

students on may 4th, there's a stronger sense that in this continuum of conflict resolution that justice must precede reconciliation. here, just a sample from carol mirman, who is pictured here in the filo picture, which i think everyone has probably seen, looking at other people in this picture besides mary veccio and the body down here, carol miriman is here and her testimony, i think, gives us a perspective on this radical end. i'll see if this works for us today. >> but nonetheless, it was really, really, really painful for people to say students should have been shot based on misconceptions and narrow minded views of love it or leave it. people today still say, forget it, get over it. forget this stuff. they were rabble rousers, what does it mean to stand up and say when you're in opposition to the war, when you say we shouldn't

be surrounded by tanks and troops, when nobody is really willing to really negotiate and talk about things, what other options are available? i'm not saying [ inaudible ]. i'm saying what happened was wrong and what came out in the press, lies. the awful things that people said were terrible and made it a lot harder for the healing process, for the guards and the students to be able to stand up and tell the truth. to try and heal. so that's what i want to say. >> from the other perspective, a more conservative narrative has emerged again in the interviews that craig has conducted and others that were done earlier. justice was already served on that day in the form of the shootings or in the form of the trials that came afterwards which resulted in a civil suit -- a civil suit which resulted in an apology, some would say an

apology, but not an admission of guilt. but the conservative view has taken that perspective, but also, as craig mentioned, others have seen the event here as not worthy of memorialization or commemoration at all. get over it is the typical phrase that you will hear and see in many of these narrators as they talk about the experience. john garibaldi was a young professor at kent state at the time in psychology. he was interviewed by craig for the project. he has followed this pattern as well. i'll play a short clip from his interview here. >> what do you think the consequences were of the shootings? >> well, one of the consequences that was rather apparent was that there weren't any further demonstrations.

that is to say, there weren't demonstrations of the sort that we had or that were going on. it was like all of a sudden people realized this was a deadly game. this was not a panty raid kind of mentally. -- mentality. this was not something that could be done on a whim without regard to consequences, that the consequences were indeed dramatic and severe. and i think it was a sobering moment nationally to see that we could have an occasion where the youth of our country were actually killed by the military units that were there to preserve the peace. of course, there was a lot of sympathy for slain students, talking about young people, they weren't children, first of all.

they were beyond the age of reason, they were grown people. we had innocent victims. but i'm talking about the people who were leading the rebellion, who were fomenting unrest among the student body. these were people fully in control of their faculties, and they were people that had a mission. >> okay. since we're running short on time, i'll try to move through the last part of this more quickly. just in terms of a third narrative, if you will, about a tragic narrative or accidental narrative, captain ron snyder is pictured here with the arrow here and the body of jeff miller and, again, carol mirman is in this photo, as well. snyder has said, and we don't have time to play his clip, my personal feeling is that it was a terrible accident. that's number one. second thing would be it was a terrible accident that received national attention to the national conscience. okay? another guardsman who remained

anonymous said "there's no one to blame, no incident to blame. in my mind i think was the dynamics of a lot of things happening at that one time. i truly feel sorry for a lot of people and i want to say that i feel equally sorry for the families of those students that were shot and equally sorry for the guardsmen that shot them." so trying to wrap up, in how we can sort of think about these narratives and the events at kent in the larger understanding of the '60s, historian david steigerwald has said that for those on the left, the '60s "was a moment of great change abruptly ended by war and right wing backlash. those on the right, conservatives, quote the beginning of a national crisis in authority and morality that legitimized anti-social behavior. clearly in the testimony you see both of these perspectives in a variety of ways.

and carol mirman and others fall into these sort of larger areas. and clearly then the oral history testimonies certainly don't settle the questions that have arisen about the events of kent. and they certainly haven't settled what the meaning of the 1960s is, but they certainly have given us a lot of evidence to look at and to consider as we begin to contextualize these events at kent. and accept them in the context of the meaning of the long 1960s. so thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you, craig. our next speaker is rosalie uyola, who is a phd. student

from rutgers university new parark. she earned her master's in education from new jersey city university in educational technology. as a sixth year public high school teacher, she promotes student directed oral history and mixed media community outreach projects and has been recognized by the national oral history association for her work. this year with the martha ross teaching award. she grew up in moscow, russia, and immigrated to the united states in 1991. her dissertation "newark remembers" is an interdisciplinary project that will be the first to examine the struggles over memory and identity in newark, new jersey. and her paper is entitled "the liberation of rutgers newark history memory and black student radicalism." >> thank you so much. good morning, everyone.

on february 24th, 1969, a group of black student activists took over conklin hall for a 72-hour sit in. the illegal taking of the building was a highly contested event. student activists and supporters viewed the sit-in as a localized part of a larger protest for equality, social justice and freedom during the '60s. the opposition which included members of rutgers administration, faculty, student body as well as councilman and his constituency within the newark community identified the takeover as a disruptive act of disobedience and an attack on the american institutions of higher education. yet when rutgers university celebrated the 40th anniversary of the conklin hall liberation, in 2009, the collective memory of the protest changed from conflict to consensus through commemorative process that highlighted racial cooperation.

the commemoration heralded the event as a turning point in the history of a racist university and accredited the take over as the most diverse campus in the nation. in 2009, it was the 13th year run. i argue that the commemoration of conklin hall emphasizes the progressive narrative a university that changed discriminatory policies in response to black student activism while it removed all voices of opposition and the puerto rican student involvement from the memory of the event. most importantly, in reviving and recovering triumphant memories and object securing the more contentious ones, the commemoration established a community that is grounded as part of the larger civil rights movement without acknowledging the university shortcomings in generating real changes in faculty diversity, community enrollment and programs of study.

this imagined community hailed the sit-in as a seat of diversity of rutgers newark, while ironically the majority of the liberators' demands continued to be unmet. i situate the conklin hall commemoration within the tension between history and memory. memory operates on a number of registers. what do we choose to remember? what do we choose to forget? who is the we that is remembering or forgetting? and through the process of public commemoration, how has the narrative of the takeover been transformed? what was the role of the public in shaping the 40th anniversary celebrations? i attempt to balance the claims of history and memory in my ongoing oral history project. it is too reductive to say that the history of the event is contradictory to its memory. unlike historians, i do not believe memory and history are opposed to one another. focusing on the tension between

the official memory produced by the university's commemoration and the history of the takeover allow us to see the messiness and nuance of the liberation story. the narrative produced by rutgers excludes actual historical facts including the work of puerto rican students who organized and fought alongside the black organization of students for equality and access to education. while i can see that there is a connection, i argue that the liberation of conklin hall is much more complex and often internally contradictory in a way that official consensus memory fails to acknowledge. the commemoration matters because it is a performance of official history. its significance lies in the political means by which it's memory has been cherry picked, disseminated by a public university.s memory has been cherry picked, disseminated by a public university. the 40th anniversary celebration produced a collective memory that is grounded in a consensus view of the sit-in.

rutgers memory of the protest emphasizes the liberators call for ending racist enrollment in hiring practices while simultaneously sanitizing the radicalism of the demands. the official memory constructed the official memory creates an abridged story of the takeover. this has a linear progression and happy ending. newark's journey from the epicenter of manufacturing to urban crisis in the 1960s has been mirrored by many other industrial cities across the united states. rates of poverty among black americans in cities like newark, chicago south and west sides, detroit, cleveland, pittsburgh, st. louis, camden and baltimore range from 25 to 45%. the residents of these central cities have struggled with tremendous loss of manufacturing jobs and the emergence of the

lower wage service industry sector. racial discrimination, poverty, political corruption, urban renewal and police brutality were social forces that led to the uprisings in the summer of 1965. within weeks of dr. martin luther king's assassination, 125 american cities exploded in flames. the simultaneous outbreak of urban rebellions in 1967. the 1967 summer of discontent was in the words of "life" magazine headlines predictable insurrection. between july 12th and july 17th, 1967, newark residents experienced six days of rioting, looting and destruction that left 26 dead and hundreds of men, women and children injured. the black community was rendered powerless and disenfranchised through exclusion from meaningful representation and police brutality.

the conklin hall liberator saw what happens when a city brutally institutionally and systemically disrespects its residents. unfortunately, two years after the rebellion, the fundamental racial economic and equalities of the city of newark were not reconciled. on the rutgers university campus, these were not even publicly acknowledged let alone addressed. in 1967, the black nationalist element of the black freedom movement inspired black students on the college campuses across the united states to claim a new unapologetic but politically engaged black and proud identity. this identity was not only cultivated at historically black colleges in the south, but also predominantly white colleges in the north. the rutgers newark campus was no exception. during the second semester of the 1966-'67 academic year, richard w. roper, one of 20 black students enrolled at the time, was elected president of the naacp campus chapter. roper and his like-minded

colleagues wanted social justice and demanded greater democratic access. they began to push for more radicalized direction of the group fueled by national debates, the assassination of dr. king and malcolm x, protests about integration, state power and freedom. out of this progressive direction, a new organization was launched. the black organization of students, or b.o.s., established a powerful narrative of justice, peaceful discontent and equitable opportunity in the history of rutgers university through a bloodless coup. while the takeover was a black student protest, it received support from cross-sections of the rutgers newark communities. similar to the convergence of black and anti-war movements in 1967, it was the joining of these forces and ideals by b.o.s. members and their supporters particularly the puerto rican organization of students that led to petitioning of the university's administration to tear down the physical fence that surrounded the periphery of the campus.