At that time, Goodman was a graduate assistant at Kent State and scheduled to teach a course at noon in the communications building, which was adjacent to the commons where some 2,000 students were gathering. In a personal essay he wrote years later, Goodman recalled, “The division director thrust his head into the entrance of my classroom, telling me to dismiss my class and follow him. Responding to the strange look on his face, I obeyed, slowly climbing a ladder to the building’s roof where I pleaded with students on the walks below to enter the safety of the lobby.”

However, the students continued to gather outside. “Suddenly there were cheers, shouts, drum beats and finally gunfire…Tear gas watered the eyes, sirens drowned out all other sounds and death hung heavy in the air,” Goodman wrote.

Thomas Huber, a Kent State student from Fredonia, shared his experience in the May 5, 1970 edition of the EVENING OBSERVER: “The order was given and the troops, bayonets poised, marched, pushing the core of the crowd up a hill. Students began stoning the armed soldiers and the tear gas fire resumed. Guardsmen again marched toward the students. I heard what I thought was blank cartridges from the top of the hill. Next came the sound of screams and sirens. Running to the top of the hill, I saw five bodies, limp and bloody. Panic broke out — disaster had struck.”

In all, four students — Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder — were killed and nine more were wounded.

AP File Photo Mary Ann Vecchio gestures and screams as she kneels by the body of a student lying face down on the campus of Kent State University, Kent, Ohio on May 4, 1970. National Guardsmen had fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing four.

Reaction at SUNY Fredonia

In the days that followed, students on college campuses throughout the country went on strike, and SUNY Fredonia was no different. “An estimated 500 students packed the Senate Chambers in anticipation of SGA’s support of the Student Strike here at Fredonia,” Max Schoenwetter reported in the May 7, 1970 edition of The Leader, Fredonia’s student-run newspaper. “Tuesday’s SGA meeting saw the largest turnout of observers in the history of the organization.”

Plans were immediately put into place to honor the deaths of the Kent State students, while protesting President Nixon’s recent decision to send U.S. troops into nearby Cambodia where the Viet Cong were believed to be launching attacks on the South Vietnamese. Interestingly — controversially, even — the secretary of state and defense secretary did not learn of this decision until the rest of the American public found out: in a television address two days later.

In a vote conducted on the night of the Kent State shooting, The Leader editorial board voted 5-3 to endorse the strike at Fredonia. By midnight on May 5, about 250 students began marching through Alumni Hall to rally support before moving on to Kirkland Quad. The Leader reported that, after making the rounds at the dorms, the group, now 800 strong, began marching down Central Avenue to President Lanford’s house and decided to march to Barker Commons. The EVENING OBSERVER reported that three students were hit by a car on Central Avenue, though no serious injuries were reported.

According to The Leader, another rally was organized at approximately 1 p.m. in the amphitheater. Fredonia resident Vicki (Bliss) Notaro, a freshman music major at Fredonia at the time, recalled the rally on that unforgettable day. “There was a significant number of students gathered,” she recalled. “I’d never seen anything like it. I didn’t march, but I did get one of the armbands students were wearing. It was a torn-up bed sheet with SOS (students on strike) written on it with black paint.” In all, approximately 1,000 students marched around campus that day.

Submitted Photo Over 1,000 Fredonia students marched in rallies and protests in the days that followed the Kent State shootings. Like many other colleges throughout the country, Fredonia ended its semester early, due to the number of students who went on strike.

Although the events at Kent State, alone, shocked Notaro, she recalled the climate of the day as being quite turbulent, in general. “There were all these crazy things happening in such a short period of time,” she recalled. “I remember thinking that this is really scary.” In 1968, when she was a junior in high school, Notaro recalled the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, just a few months apart. “In July 1969, I was at an orientation event at Fredonia. They wheeled in this black and white TV so we could all watch the moon walk. It was incredible,” she said.

Notaro remembered the May 6 memorial service that was held for the four Kent State students, which was attended by a group of 1,000 students. “I was there with another music student named Paul, who played the French horn,” said Notaro. “I remember thinking, ‘Am I ever going to see him again? Will college even exist or will he go to war and never come back? I never saw him again after that.”

Students on strike forced colleges all over the country to shut down, including Fredonia. That Saturday, college administration decided to give students the option of taking their grades as of May 5 or staying for final exams.

Members of The Leader urged students to stay and support the strike. “The strike cannot be a success unless those students who voted for it actively support it rather than using the strike as an opportunity for an extended summer vacation,” wrote Lynn Ann Eddy, editor-in-chief.

The aftermath at Kent State

Submitted Photo In the May 5, 1970 edition of the EVENING OBSERVER reports of the Kent State shootings included a first-hand account written by Thomas Huber, a junior journalism student at Kent State, originally a Fredonia resident.

Goodman, too, recalled the emptying of Kent State’s campus as an unforgettable, if not eerie, event. “Basically everything shut down the minute the shootings took place. Everybody was off campus: take what you could carry. They looked like refugees on the road,” he remembered. Students had just a few hours to gather their belongings and leave; no one was permitted on campus for nearly two months after that.

Goodman remembered the significant impact the event had on the surrounding community — an interdependence between the city and the university not unlike SUNY Fredonia’s relationship with the Dunkirk-Fredonia area. Businesses, restaurants, off-campus housing and transportation all suffered, not to mention the local individuals employed by the campus who could not return to work. “Kent was on a quarter system, and the spring semester had just started at that time,” Goodman added.

Goodman, retired professor and director emeritus of SUNY Fredonia’s Lifelong Learning, International Programs and Economic Development, finished his graduate work at Kent State and moved to Fredonia a few months later. “In 49 years, I’ve only been back to Kent State once,” he told the OBSERVER. “I still don’t want to go back.”

For Goodman, the events of May 4, 1970 are just as relevant today as they were then. “These issues run deep: patriotism, gun control, religious freedom…The conclusion for me and the message for my generation is, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. It’s a trite statement, but it is true.”

One of the most significant lessons that Goodman learned was that the events of May 4, 1970 were hardly random. “Every time something bad happens, you always see the same lede: Nothing like that could happen here. But at Kent, all the warning signs were there,” Goodman said.

He noted the context was a very turbulent time, as groups like the Weathermen and Students for a Democratic Society were holding rallies and protests across the country. At Kent State, students had burned down the ROTC building and the Crystal Institute, where they believed technology was being created to support the war. A riot broke out in Kent’s bar district the Friday before, which resulted in police forcing students out into the streets. Earlier that day, students had organized a symbolic funeral for the Constitution, which Goodman’s whole department attended. “You also had a college president who was several hundred miles away at a conference,” Goodman added. “It was the perfect storm.”

Goodman’s perspective on the Kent State shootings was a bit different from that of his university peers. “I was a bit older, and not your typical undergrad when I started at KSU…It was because of the military that I got to go to school because of the GI bill.” Goodman’s draft number was called just one year after he graduated from high school. He opted to enlist for a second year and served in southeast Asia in intelligence with the U.S. Army’s security agency.

“I was over there for two years…Having been away and the branch of service I was in, I couldn’t call home. Only letters. The only thing that you heard about happening was through the armed forces filter — no internet or CNN at the time,” he recalled.

It is no wonder, then, that Goodman was surprised at the “welcome” he and others received upon their return home through the Oakland Army Terminal in California. “That night, it was raining and we got into the place late. The next morning, we walked out into the bright sunlight. I thought, ‘Hey, I did something good,’ but people were screaming ‘Killers!’ and all kinds of things. I went back in and changed into my civilian clothes. That was the atmosphere of the time,” Goodman said with a shrug.

Kent State: continuing the conversation

In the months that followed the shootings, Goodman devoted himself to helping others learn how to talk about and deal with the issues of the day. He and a colleague worked together to create a game called Predictions. “It’s a board game but it’s really a communications game,” Goodman explained. “When you got together with people and tried to talk about sensitive issues, nobody wanted to. The theory was, if we can develop a board game that diffuses that, it just might work.”

The game proved to be successful, as it was published by Beacon Press, and now Kent State is working on an internet version. The game consists of question cards and different visual stimuli. “It’s cooperation versus competition: the only way you can advance on the board is to predict what somebody will say. Not whether they believe it, but what you think they’d say in that particular situation,” he said.

One card shows multiple symbols — a cross, star of David, swastika, U.S. flag and peace sign — and the player is asked, “Predict which symbol the player on your right will say has done the most good and the most harm.” The game becomes significantly more interesting depending on the experiences and cultural backgrounds of the players.

On another card, there is an image of someone destroying an American flag. This question asks the player to predict the response of the person across from him or her: “Desecrators of the flag should be a) arrested, b) tolerated, c) questioned, d) listened to.”

“What we found in developing this game was that everybody was competitive at the start, but in the end, all people stopped playing. All they wanted to do was talk,” Goodman said.

For Goodman, the game and its topics are just as relevant today as they were then. “This political situation today has divided families. How can you get people to address this and say, ‘I disagree with you say but I respect your right to say it’? Emotion takes over, and it’s really hard.”

NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem is a more recent example of controversy and patriotism. “People become so angry that they fail to recognize that speech is sometimes symbolic and tolerance is important,” said Goodman. “I’m not saying people should go out and burn a patriotic symbol, but if a person chooses not to stand, that’s their right. When somebody wants to condemn me for supporting Kaepernick, I say, ‘I served in the Army for his right to do that.’ That’s the way I look at it.”

In his lifetime, Goodman has seen events like the Kent State shootings happen again and again across the country. “Unfortunately, today it’s commonplace: shootings in high schools, places of worship, demonstrations…We’ve been conditioned to that kind of thing happening on a regular basis,” he noted.

Still, he remains hopeful that education — teaching students how to respect everyone’s views — can foster understanding and tolerance. The biggest lesson that Goodman has learned since May 4, 1970 are words that he has lived by every day since: “I may disagree with everything you say, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it.”