Lecture and conversation: Dissent, Violence, Memory, and the War at Kent State

Thomas M. Grace is adjunct professor of history at Erie Community College. A 1972 graduate of Kent State University, he earned a PhD in history from SUNY Buffalo after many years as a social worker and union representative. One of the students shot by National Guardsmen on May 4, 1970 during an antiwar protest at Kent State, Professor Grace has written the most significant book on the history of activism on that campus, Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016). Professor Grace’s lecture will focus on the development of activism on the Kent State campus, providing students with a case study of its emergence over the course of the 1960s.  Grace will illustrate the roots many students had, through their families, in labor activism, as well as the important role played by Black campus activists in building a culture of dissent at Kent State.  He will also provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the events culminating in the shooting of May 4, 1970, offering a corrective to earlier accounts that explained the violence as the result of young, untrained, and exhausted Guardsmen.

Joseph A. (Andy) Fry is a distinguished professor of history emeritus at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the nation’s leading scholar of U.S. foreign policy and the American South. Professors Grace and Fry will have a conversation with Professors Jeffrey Mathews and Nancy Bristow, and the audience, regarding student protest during the war in Vietnam.