May 4 site named National Historic Landmark
The site of the 1970 Kent State shootings has been a local landmark for 46 years, attracting hundreds of visitors annually, but this past week, the U.S. Department of the Interior named it a National Historic Landmark.
On May 4, 1970, four students were killed and nine were wounded when Ohio National Guardsmen fired into a crowd during a campus protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.
The landmark designation is “the highest distinction of its kind, the highest recognition that can be sought for a property,” said Laura Davis, an author and professor emerita of English, who was a witness to the shootings as a freshman on campus.
She spearheaded the landmark application and is the founding director of Kent State’s May 4 Visitors Center. The center operates out of Taylor Hall, the building closest to much of the student unrest that occurred in the days leading up to and on May 4, 1970.
The site covers 17.4 acres of the Kent State campus: the Commons, Blanket Hill, the Prentice Hall parking lot and the Practice Field. The site is an area where the soldiers, student protesters and an active audience of observers and sympathizers moved across a central portion of the campus. The confrontation lasted more than two hours.
The May 4 site was also placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010. At that time, it was recognized as a property associated with events that made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of U.S. history and as a property achieving exceptional significance within the last 50 years.