Laura Davis, Kent State University professor emerita of English and the founding director of the university’s May 4 Visitors Center, has been a catalyst for remembrance and renewal.
In fact, Ms. Davis once said that the May 4 Visitors Center “brings memory and history together in order to serve the future.”
A witness to the Kent State shootings her freshman year, Ms. Davis has shown unwavering dedication in her quest to preserve contextual memories and history. In addition to her work developing the Kent State May 4 Visitors Center, she co-led the creation of an audio-guided walking tour of the May 4 historic site dedicated during the 40th anniversary.
Ms. Davis co-taught a Kent State University May 4 class and she co-chaired a Symposium on Democracy.
“The lesson from it that I tried to teach was to emphasize the power of language, how people are manipulated through language, and how to see through the language to reality,” she said during an interview in 2000, “recalling the furious debate over patriotism and free speech between government officials and protesters.”
She is co-editor of the book “This We Know: A Chronology of the Shootings at Kent State, May 1970.” Ms. Davis was one of four co-authors of the application instrumental in placing the May 4 site on the National Register of Historic Places, approved in 2010. In 2016, Kent State’s May 4 site was designated a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior.
The Laura Davis May 4 Papers are included in the Kent State University Library’s Special Collections and Archives. The papers contain a “wealth of information on many facets of the peace movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as incidents surrounding the Kent State shootings.”