She survived the 1970 Kent State shooting. Here's her message to student activists [View all]

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https://www.npr.org/2024/05/04/1249023924/kent-state-shooting-activists-protests-survivor?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0pkEW-KxmZMmzYhGneP4XwY697VHPLTZAlJhJKs_8GFaOsoL1nMwWwiLY_aem_Ab4LuGjrTMdA5qwBxbr0jM9HPuCYg6FTaKlHbDxkQGungXYc3MR3wuvhSQmIKPTUljhx5rZveOmyM5vnoINk_1sD


When Roseann "Chic" Canfora arrived at Ohio's Kent State University in 1968, she says she was constantly being given leaflets by anti-war activists on campus — and throwing them away.

U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was dragging on and deeply unpopular with a growing number of Americans. Over time, Canfora became one of them.

"It wasn't until I was personally touched, losing friends in that war and seeing the draft that would now take my brothers to that war, that I stopped throwing the anti-war leaflets away and I paid attention," she recalls in an interview with NPR.

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Canfora says she can't talk about the use of excessive force — then and now — without "tying it to the inflammatory rhetoric that inspired that force."

Nixon referred to student protesters as "bums," while then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan said "if it takes bloodbath" to deal with campus demonstrators "let's get it over with." On May 3, Ohio Gov. Jim Rhodes described campus demonstrators as "the worst type of people that we harbor in America."

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"If not a college campus, where else in our society, in this democracy, can we count on large groups of people to do exactly what these college students are doing: paying attention to the world, looking at what is being done in the world ... and coming up with strategies for opposing it if they don't agree with it?" she asks. "That's healthy. That shouldn't be something that is feared."

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