Kent State to open visitors center on 1970 shootings

KENT, Ohio (AP) — The historical significance of the 1970 shootings on the Kent State University that left four students dead and nine wounded will be chronicled in a visitors center opening on the northeast Ohio campus.

Kent State was the scene of deadly gunfire on May 4, 1970, when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students protesting the Vietnam War. The shooting site by the university’s Taylor Hall already has included a memorial, a walking tour and markers where the four students died.

The new 1,900-square-foot May 4 Visitors Center that officially opens Saturday on the ground floor of the former student newspaper office in Taylor Hall was funded by $1.1 million in donations from veterans groups, the public, the university and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Visitors will be able to “better understand the events of that day set against the political and cultural changes of the times,” university President Lester Lefton said in a statement.

Dean Kahler, paralyzed from the waist down by a guardsman’s bullet that day, said he remembers a time when he didn’t feel welcome on campus and officials didn’t to want to talk about what happened.

One photo in the new center shows Kahler on the ground just seconds after the shooting.

“I didn’t want to get too close,” he told the Akron Beacon Journal. “Those people had rifles.”