Moments of Truth

Howard Ruffner

Description

A student journalist's photographic memoir of events surrounding the 1970 Kent State shootings Working as a photographer for the Kent State University student newspaper and yearbook, Howard Ruffner was a college sophomore when the tragic shootings of May 4, 1970, occurred-a tragedy that left four students dead and nine others wounded. Asked to serve as a stringer for Life magazine in the days leading up to May 4, as student protests against the Vietnam War intensified and National Guard troops arrived on campus, Ruffner became a witness and documentarian to this important piece of history. Several of his photographs, including one that appeared on the cover of Life, are etched into our collective consciousness when we think about civil unrest and the latter half of the 20th century.Here, in Moments of Truth: A Photographer's Experience of Kent State 1970, Ruffner not only reproduces a collection of nearly 150 of his photographs-many never before published-but also offers a stirring narrative in which he revisits his work and attempts to further examine these events and his own experience of them. It is, indeed, an intensely personal journey that he invites us to share.An epilogue details how Ruffner's images became critical evidence in the civil trials against the National Guard in 1975 and 1978, as he was the first witness called to take the stand. Ruffner also contemplates the words engraved on the path to what is now the May 4 Memorial Site, a place on the National Register of Historic Places: Inquire, Learn, Reflect. Ruffner's project affirms that we need to ask questions, we need to learn about our history, and we all need to reflect on the past so that our mistakes will not be repeated.

Sujets

• Memoir
• Ohio

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 03 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781631013874
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Moments of Truth
 
MOMENTS OF TRUTH
A Photographer’s Experience of Kent State 1970
Howard Ruffner
The Kent State University Press Kent, Ohio
Frontis: Pictures capture the truth of the tragedy at Kent State on May 4, 1970.
© 2019 by Howard Ruffner
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Number 2019013587
ISBN 978-1-60635-367-7
Manufactured in Korea
No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever, without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical reviews or articles.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ruffner, Howard, photographer, author.
Title: Moments of truth : a photographer’s experience of Kent State 1970 / Howard Ruffner.
Other titles: Photographer’s memoir of Kent State 1970
Description: Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, [2019] | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019013587 | ISBN 9781606353677 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Kent State Shootings, Kent, Ohio, 1970--Pictorial works. | Ruffner, Howard. | Kent State University--Students--Biography. | Photographers--United States--Biography. | Vietnam War, 1961-1975--Protest movements--United States--Pictorial works.
Classification: LCC LD4191.O72 R84 2019 | DDC 378.771/37--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013587
23 22 21 20 19  5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to Allison, Jeffrey, Sandy, and William who were killed on May 4, 1970, on the campus of Kent State University during a peaceful protest rally, and to Dean, Joseph, John, Thomas, Alan, Douglas, James, Robert, and Donald who were wounded that same day by the unwarranted firing of weapons by the Ohio National Guard.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Thomas M. Grace
Acknowledgments
Introduction
  1 Early Exposure to the Power of Photographs
  2 Air Force Provides Formal Training
  3 Spring 1969, Kent State University: Campus Photographer
  4 Fall/Winter 1969: Traditions and Campus Unrest
  5 Spring Quarter and Jerry Rubin
  6 May 1, 1970, Friday: Noon Rally
  7 May 2, 1970, Saturday: The ROTC Building
  8 May 3, 1970, Sunday: Governor Rhodes and the National Guard on Campus
  9 May 3, 1970, Sunday, the Eve before the Shootings: Curfew and Protests
10 May 4, 1970, Monday Morning: Stringer for Life magazine
11 Ready, Aim …
12 May 4, 1970: Calm after the Shootings
13 Aftermath: The Civil Trials
Epilogue
Index
 

Site of the student rally and shootings on May 4, 1970. Curved lines trace the path of Ohio National Guard troops beginning at 12:05 P.M. on May 4, 1970. At 12:24, guardsmen turned 135 degrees at the Pagoda and 28 fired, primarily toward students in the Prentice Hall parking lot. Map by Chris Sheban with David Middleton. Copyright Kent State University. Reprinted with permission.
FOREWORD
Fifty years ago, “breaking news” was delivered—not by Twitter or the Internet but by photojournalists whose work became the iconic images of our day or the first draft of history, a phrase attributed to US journalist Alan Barth. Such images abounded during the tumultuous and violent decade of the 1960s and were seared into the memory of a generation: a young JFK Jr. saluting his father’s coffin, a tear rolling down the cheek of MLK Jr.’s widow, the twisted bodies of Vietnamese women and children in a ditch near My Lai.
On May 4, 1970, Howard Ruffner, a student who was stringing for Life magazine—the most important news-photo weekly of the time—took a picture that stunned the nation: a young Kent State University student named John Cleary lying in agony on the grass of his own campus, after being shot by Ohio National Guardsmen. Days before, the governor had sent armed troops to Kent State to quell sometimes fierce antiwar demonstrations.
At 24 years old, Howard Ruffner was relatively older than many of his fellow students and already an experienced newsman who had served in the US Air Force during Vietnam. As he points out at the conclusion of this fine memoir, richly illustrated with his own brilliant photographs, the images he captured forever bear witness to history and, like war, can never be erased from memory, either by those who participated, those who captured the images, or those who beheld them.
I was one of the thousands who played a part, albeit a minor one, in the demonstration at Kent that day, and was among the nine casualties who survived their wounds. Four others died, either instantly or within a short time. Although I fail to appear in any of Howard Ruffner’s pictures in this volume—despite being separated from the photographer at the time of the 67-shot salvo by a distance of no more than 50 feet—Ruffner did take a photograph of me or nearly did. In the Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest (1970), a Ruffner image shows a student looking down at me soon after I was hit in the left heel during the first moments of the Guardsmen’s 13-second barrage.
But all one can see of me is either a shadow or what may be the edge of the blood pool from my wound. The only other photos of me taken in the immediate moments after the shootings are indistinct. Following years of thought, this is to my liking. After all, few would volunteer to be captured on film, as was Cleary, at the most terrible moment of their life. Worse and more dramatic yet are the Howard Ruffner images of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling beside the body of the slain Jeff Miller ( pages 103 and 104 ).
However, as a newsman, Howard Ruffner could not shun his duty to take such images, as distressful as they were to both victim and photographer, as he points out in this memoir. As is often forgotten, Ruffner was among the prey that day as well as the dead, the wounded, and the hundreds who escaped the barrage of bullets. Like all combat veterans, we share a common bond.
He writes about that day:
I heard screaming and yelling. … I had a feeling of numbness that I still vividly recall. … Several distraught female students approached me and told me to stop taking pictures. They felt I was invading everyone’s privacy. … I knew I was intruding but told them I had to take pictures. … I tried to push back my own feelings, even though I shared their disbelief and rage. … I also knew I was on assignment and had to take these pictures to show the impact of this horror on innocent students.
Eight years later, I recall Ruffner when we crossed paths for the first time on a cold winter day in December 1978 at the federal building in downtown Cleveland. He was the first witness to take the stand for the plaintiffs, and I was about to take the stand as the second in a civil suit against Ohio governor James Rhodes and the Guardsmen who had shot at us. Ruffner had just rendered the opening testimony on behalf of all 13 shooting victims and their families.
With a steely yet unobtrusive presence—composure he describes in this memoir as both deliberate and gut-wrenchingly difficult to maintain—he painstakingly went through an extensive array of trial exhibit photographs that he and others had taken. Ruffner had done so effectively once before, in May 1975, having been the first witness selected by the plaintiff’s lead counsel to testify in an earlier trial. Attorney Joe Kelner would later write of Ruffner that the student’s many images served as “the most complete” photographic record of the day’s deadly turn. Further, Kelner observed that Ruffner “had the quiet manner of a mature person who weighed his words carefully.”
Despite the collective efforts and the evidence presented, the 16-week trial, conducted from late May to late August 1975, ended in a bitter defeat for the plaintiffs. In that first court case, 9 of 12 jurors exonerated the governor and all of the Guardsmen who shot to death unarmed students at distances of between 270 and 390 feet. However, due to judicial mishandling of a threat made against a juror in the 1975 trial, a three-judge federal appeals court granted a new trial. Owing to Howard Ruffner’s personal authority and command of the body of work captured by his camera, he would once again spend days on the witness stand telling the story of what his photographs revealed. Indeed, he was the only non-plaintiff to provide testimony at both trials, the second of which resulted in an out-of-court settlement.
Repeatedly interrupted by defense counsel objections during the first trial, Howard Ruffner now has the opportunity, in these pages, to tell the unbroken story of a day that nearly broke America. He has done so, he relates in these pages, because even after almost 50 years, he is still haunted by the 1975 verdict. And, more to the point of his life’s work, how the power of photography, and the truth it conveys, somehow failed to convince the jury. “Every photo is more than its surface,” he writes. “Each tells a story. The more I stare [at a photo], the more I see the truth.” Despite that, he adds: “Blood was spilled that day and has never been washed away.”
Howard Ruffner’s background is unique, and yet like the tens of thousands of mostly young people who attended Kent State University in the 1960s, his story is also representative.
Born in 1946, the first year of the baby boom, to parents Howard and June, Ruffner came of age in Lakewood, a community of 65,000 souls adjacent to and west of Cleveland. His father worked as a manager for a company that produced photographic paper and film, a career that may have subconsciously influenced his son and namesake. The first of seven boys, Ruffner and his brothers grew up near the city center, an area dotted by wooden frame World War I–era houses on a block between the railroad tracks and Detroit Avenue. The stately homes near Lake Erie were close yet so far way.
With the family lacking even a car until a few years after Ruffner had graduated from Lakewood High School in 1964, money for college never entered into their financial equation. Like a good number of future and sometimes erstwhile Kent State