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Alan Canfora, Who Carried Wounds From Kent State, Dies at 71

He devoted his life to pursuing the truth about the tragic events of May 4, 1970, and to keeping them in the public eye.

Alan Canfora waved a flag as part of an antiwar demonstration on May 4, 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio. Moments later, members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on the demonstrators, killing four of them and wounding nine, including Mr. Canfora.Credit...John Filo/Getty Images

In April 1970, Alan Canfora, a junior at Kent State University in Ohio, was outraged when a friend was killed in the Vietnam War. He was infuriated all the more when President Richard M. Nixon announced an expansion of the war into Cambodia.

Nixon’s action set off a wave of antiwar demonstrations across the country, including at Kent State, where the Ohio National Guard was called in to respond to destruction and to be a presence at a major demonstration planned for May 4.

The day began with brief skirmishing; students threw rocks at the Guard and the Guard fired tear gas at the students, whose numbers would swell from the hundreds to the thousands.

At one point, some soldiers knelt and aimed their weapons at the students, in an apparent bluff that they were going to fire. Mr. Canfora then walked out toward the soldiers by himself, waving a black flag.

The members of the Guard stood up and moved to a hilltop. Then, suddenly, 28 of them turned in unison and opened fire on the unarmed students.

They fired up to 67 shots in 13 seconds, killing four students — Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder — and wounding nine others. Mr. Canfora was among the wounded, shot through his right wrist as he darted behind a tree.

A photograph of Mr. Canfora waving his flag was part of a spread in Life magazine that became emblematic of the events of that day, one of the epic confrontations of his generation, when warriors in tactical gear gunned down students on an American college campus. Millions of students across the country went on strike, forcing hundreds of colleges and universities to close and bringing the war home in a visceral way that captured the political and cultural upheaval of the era.

Mr. Canfora went on to become a walking encyclopedia on all aspects of “Kent State,” the university’s name becoming synonymous with the shootings and with state-sanctioned violence — so much so that in 1986 the university tried to rebrand itself as “Kent.” Mr. Canfora spent the rest of his life making sure the university would never erase May 4 from its history.

And he and others never stopped trying to answer questions that persist to this day: Who gave the order to fire? Why? And why was no one held accountable?

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Mr. Canfora at Kent State in 2007 with an audio recording that he said proved the National Guard opened fire on students not out of panic, but because they were ordered to do so. The Justice Department declined to investigate.Credit...David Maxwell for The New York Times

Mr. Canfora died on Dec. 20 at the home of his sister, Chic Canfora, in Aurora, Ohio. He was 71.

His sister said the cause was a pulmonary embolism, a complication of his chronic kidney disease.

Mr. Canfora had held various jobs and positions. Since 2011, he had been the director of the Akron Law Library. Active in politics in his hometown, Barberton, Ohio, he served as chairman of its Democratic Party for 27 years.

But the work of his lifetime was to pursue the truth about what happened on May 4, 1970, and keep it in the public eye. He lectured widely, warning of the dangers of using excessive force to quash political dissent.

The university initially commemorated the shootings each May 4. But it stopped in 1975 and sought to disassociate itself from the tragedy.

Mr. Canfora and others established the May 4 Task Force the next year to keep up the annual remembrances. These events, which sometimes drew as many as 10,000 people, continued through the 50th anniversary last year, when it was held online because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Over the last half-century, Mr. Canfora was part of most of the developments involving the shootings.

“Alan has been THE driving force in the May 4 protest community since 1970,” Derf Backderf, author of the graphic nonfiction novel “Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio” (2020), wrote on Facebook last month after Mr. Canfora’s death.

He said Mr. Canfora “forced the university to face and accept its history, when all it wanted to do was sweep it under the rug.”

He was not always successful. When the university announced plans in the 1970s to build a gymnasium on part of the May 4 site, Mr. Canfora and his allies set up a tent city to block it. In the end, the gym was built.

But as part of a broad, if sometimes fractured, alliance with professors, historians and students, Mr. Canfora and the May 4 Task Force also helped make a lasting imprint.

They had permanent markers placed where the four students had been killed; until 2000, cars had been parking on those very spots. They developed a walking tour of the site where the protests and shootings occurred. They created the May 4 Visitors Center. They pressed successfully for the site to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010 and to be named a National Historic Landmark in 2017.

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Mr. Canfora in 2019 giving a tour at the site of the Kent State shootings. He was a walking encyclopedia of the events of May 4, 1970.Credit...via Kent State University

Along the way, Mr. Canfora, a librarian by training, amassed and archived mountains of material about May 4 and organized new information as it was declassified. He also examined archives that were stored at Yale. It was there, in 2007, that he discovered an audio recording of what appeared to be a clue to the shootings.

A forensic analysis of the audio file commissioned by The Plain Dealer of Cleveland confirmed that a voice on the recording was that of someone commanding the National Guard, “Fire!” The newspaper said such an order refuted the suggestion that the Guard had started shooting at the students, most of whom were hundreds of feet away, out of panic.

Using the audio file and other corroborating evidence, Mr. Canfora hoped to persuade the Justice Department to open an investigation. But the department declined.

Mr. Canfora’s zeal sometimes rubbed people the wrong way.

“His passion resulted in a backlash from Guard apologists and callous dismissals from many in local media, who advised him to ‘get a life,’” Mr. Backderf said in his Facebook post.

But he would not “move on,” Mr. Backderf added, “until the truth was known.”

Alan Michael Canfora was born on Feb. 13, 1949, in Barberton, in northeast Ohio. His mother, Anna (Minarik) Canfora, was a homemaker, raising four children. His father, Albert John Canfora, was an aerospace worker at Goodyear Aircraft. He was also a shop steward and organizer with the United Auto Workers and a longtime Barberton city councilman — an inspiration, Ms. Canfora said, for her brother’s civic engagement.

Alan earned his bachelor’s degree in general studies in 1972 and his master’s in library science, also at Kent State, in 1980.

He met Anastasia Mamedova at a meeting of the May 4 Task Force in 2009, and they married in 2010.

In addition to his wife and his sister, his mother survives him, as do his daughter, Maya; his son, Lev; and his brothers, Albert Jr. and Mark. His father died in 2018.

Many of the nine who were wounded at Kent State formed lifelong friendships over the subsequent decades. By the 50th anniversary, two of them had died.

Over time, the university started to reclaim its history; in 2000, it reverted to calling itself Kent State. As the university’s former president Beverly J. Warren said in a 2018 speech, it accepted its role as “reluctant custodian of an indelible mark on the American landscape.”

More recently, it agreed to resume overseeing the annual May 4 commemorations.

By the time of last year’s events, Mr. Canfora felt a sense of accomplishment.

“The dust of history is settling,” he told Smithsonian magazine in May. “We’ve never given up, and now the university is fully embracing their educational duty.”

Katharine Q. “Kit” Seelye is a Times obituary writer. She was previously the paper's New England bureau chief, based in Boston. She worked in The Times's Washington bureau for 12 years, has covered six presidential campaigns and pioneered The Times’s online coverage of politics. More about Katharine Q. Seelye

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Alan Canfora, 71, Casualty Of Kent State Who Spent Decades Seeking the Truth. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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