May 4th awaits approval for National Historic Landmark

By Portia Booker and Neville Hardman

The May 4 Visitors Center is currently up for approval from the National Park Service for the title of a National Historic Landmark in November.

If approved, May 4 will be given historical significance before its 50th anniversary. Earlier this year the chair of the Board of Trustees wrote a letter to the National Park Service in support of May 4 as a designation for a National Historic Landmark.

The process

Director of May 4 Visitors Center Mindy Farmer sees this process as a sign of a strong application, a significant site and a place where people can learn about an event in history.

Currently, Ohio has 72 National Historic Landmark locations. If approved, May 4 will become the first national landmark in Portage County.

In order to apply to become a national landmark, a property needs to be on on the National Register of Historic Places first. Carole Barbato, Laura Davis, Mark Seeman and Jerry Lewis worked to put the event on the register in February 2010 in time for the 40th commemoration.

The original application only considered May 1970 and the days afterward, Farmer said. The application now changed to include Tent City and the Gym Annex protest as part of the landmark. Farmer said students attempted to put May 4 on the register in order to prevent construction to the Annex in 1997, but seven years hadn’t been enough time to prove it was a historical event.

“For the students, that was another insult to add to the injury of Gym Annex,” she said. “They took it to mean this place wasn’t significant.”

Other application changes included putting the event in the context of American protest and the Vietnam War movement. Farmer said the application needed to discuss the Boston Massacre and link similarities in that event with May 4.

“We ask for a context,” Patricia Henry of National Park Services said. “You have to discuss it in terms of other properties that might tell the same story or are related to the same event or person.”

The nomination needed to address similar events at universities, such as at Jackson State University in 1970 where two black students were shot and killed.

Now the application remains three steps away from gaining approval. The application still has to go through the National Historic Landmark Committee. Next, it goes to the National Park System Advisory Board, who makes recommendations to the Secretary of the Interior. Finally, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell makes the decision.

Benefits to the university

As the highest designation that can be given, Laura Davis, a professor emerita of English and the founding director of the May 4 Visitors Center, believes the landmark title will stress the importance of May 4 even further.

“The university as a whole has a million visitors per year, in one form or another, who come to the campus,” Davis said. “And truly a large percentage of those visitors, again before there was even a May 4 Visitors Center, wanted to be taken to the place where the shootings took place. They wanted to be told the story.”

One aspect considered other than the historical purpose is the physical integrity of the area. Henry said historical and current descriptions are required so the integrity can be assessed.

The landmark title can be taken away if the university doesn’t keep up maintenance in the area, Farmer said.

“It will attract more people to the story,” Davis said. “It will attract more people to the site and it will help them see patterns in American history, which lead to the kind of understanding that makes us better citizens, that makes us better able to deal with important issues.”