The way Tom Grace sees it, he is — above all else — an American historian. A fierce interest in sorting out how the past carries us to where we are started for him during his Lyncourt childhood, where he was raised by parents who both nurtured that passion, in different ways. Yet Grace also understands, in a searing first-hand way, how history sometimes comes looking for you. He was among 13 students shot by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970. Four people died. Grace — now a Buffalo author and history professor — was among nine students who were wounded. Grace is cautious about his public response to that trauma. He attends a memorial service every spring at Kent State. He has remained close to many of the others who were shot and survived. He still grieves over the death of his close friend and college roommate, Alan Canfora, who was also wounded by the Guard and remained a kind of reflective conscience about the shootings until his death in 2020. “I’ll miss him for the remainder of my days,” Grace said. A decade ago, Grace wrote a book — “Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties” — that is a thoughtful and detailed account of student activism at Kent State, over many decades. How he approached that project, in a way, was a statement of self. He prefers to face the world as a student of history, rather than being defined as the 20-year-old shot in the crowd almost 56 years ago. Still, sometimes it is impossible — as with the recent killings of civilians in Minnesota by federal immigration agents — to separate scholar from survivor. In those acts and the response, he hears echoes of Kent State. As a teenager, Grace attended high school at Christian Brothers Academy. He graduated and went to Kent State to study history, where he was a sophomore — walking toward a campus protest against the American invasion of Cambodia — when he saw a line of National Guardsmen near a burnt-out ROTC building lower their bayonets and walk toward demonstrators. Tom Grace (right) with his friend and lawyer John Lawson, at Kent State, late 1990s, during a commemoration of the 1970 killing of four student and the wounding of Grace, and eight others, by National Guardsmen. Credit: Courtesy Tom Grace They were firing tear gas, he recalls. The students — Grace included — began to retreat. He remembers running to a women’s dormitory, where young women were handing wet paper towels out a window, providing a means to wipe away that gas from burning eyes. Grace has spoken in the past of how he saw students throwing rocks, and how he saw Guardsmen bending down to throw them back. As he watched, Grace said soldiers with the Guards paused at the top of a hill. To his disbelief, he heard the sound of rifle fire. He turned to run and went down, hard. A bullet had blown apart his foot. He rode to the hospital in an ambulance with Sandra Scheuer, an honors student who was not part of the protest — and who died from her wounds. Grace spent the rest of the year in a cast that rose to his hip, and then — for another year — needed a cane. He downplays the physical aftermath of the damage. He recovered well enough, he said, to play in a men’s baseball league in his 40s. Even so, when I spoke almost 16 years ago with his late father, also named Thomas, for a column that I wrote for Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard, the elder Tom Grace said his son still felt pain decades later, both emotional and physical. “As he gets older,” the father told me, “it gets worse.” While Grace is 75, the violence against protestors in Minnesota quickly brings him back to the wake of the Kent State shooting, when he was a college sophomore not only recovering from a life-changing wound — but also stunned by the way many around the nation characterized all 13 students who were shot. To Grace, the similarity to the response now is almost overwhelming. The cover of a book by historian Tom Grace, survivor of the 1970 National Guard shootings at Kent State. Credit: Courtesy Tom Grace Alex Pretti, a Veterans Administration intensive care nurse, was shot to death last Saturday by ICE agents. The killing occurred in the same month that Renee Nicole Good was shot behind the wheel of her vehicle, killed by an agent who maintained a 37-year-old woman who had just dropped her son off at school was driving in a way to do him mortal harm. Pretti was carrying a licensed handgun, in a holster. Video analysis by The New York Times contradicts an early Department of Homeland Security explanation for the shooting, which claimed Pretti approached them with a handgun — and that he was, as White House advisor Stephen Miller described it on social media, “a would-be assassin.” The Times analysis indicates Pretti was pepper sprayed after trying to help fellow protestors during an altercation, then was forced to the ground by federal agents — who removed his firearm before he was shot to death. Homeland Security Kristi Noem initially accused Pretti of “domestic terrorism,” though she has backed off on those words. Friday, after seeing video of Pretti kicking out the taillight of an ICE vehicle while protesting two weeks ago, President Donald Trump described him as “an agitator and perhaps insurrectionist” in a social media post. To Grace — as both as an historian and survivor of government violence — one thing seems indisputable. Nothing that happened means Pretti should be dead. To Grace, there are especially aching parallels in “attempts to demonize this guy.” After the shooting at Kent State, he recalls, an early Gallup poll showed 58 percent of respondents blamed the students for their own deaths and suffering. Grace became close with most of the survivors. Over the years, he grew intimately familiar with the stories of those killed. He can tell you that many of the students struck by gunfire that day came from deeply religious backgrounds. As for his own family, his dad served in the National Guard during the Korean War. His uncle was killed in the World War II battle of Iwo Jima. At Kent State — already as a guy focused on history — Grace believed young Americans were dying in Vietnam for political reasons that made no sense, and he saw his objections to the war as part of an American tradition of speaking out. Around 1995: Tom Grace (right) outside of JB’s, the bar where the James Gang often played in the late 1960s, with Chic and Alan Canfora, siblings also wounded in the May 4, 1970 Kent State shootings. Credit: Courtesy Tom Grace It was hard to stomach, then, when the students shot, killed and wounded were swiftly vilified as “commies and hippies that got what was coming to us,” he said. The entire American experiment is supposed to be flexible enough for vehement protest and disagreement. But there is also an ugly tradition in response to such upheaval that “extends through the centuries,” Grace said. You can see it in fierce 19th century pushback against abolitionists who wanted to end slavery, or the angry resistance to advocates who fought for years to give women the right to vote, or in the violence and bloodshed visited upon marchers during the civil rights movement. The sad and familiar quality that Grace sees in prominent play in recent weeks is the idea of dehumanizing anyone who rises up in protest against the status quo, an effort to turn “those who are different or disagree into the other.” He saw how it happened, 56 years ago, after the bloodshed at Kent State. It is happening again, Grace said, in Minnesota. “We know Alex Pretti was not an assassin,” Grace said. “We know he didn’t go there to massacre ICE agents.” His particular focus of study and reflection, as an historian, is the Civil War. He is working on a book about the 98th Ohio regiment, whose soldiers were driven by a high vision of honor — by their faith in the higher result, the greater union, their sacrifice might achieve. He will give a presentation on that regiment in June, at the national conference of the Society of Civil War Historians. He believes, he said, in American ideals. His passion for history was nurtured in different ways by his parents. His mother, Collette Grace, bought him many books about the forces that shaped this nation — including a Time-Life collection, covering the sweep of American history, that Grace still keeps out on a shelf. Tom Grace, historian and Kent State shooting survivor. Credit: Courtesy Tom Grace Grace said his father offered almost spiritual gratitude for the idea of the American experiment. The older man remembered how his own family knew hunger during the Great Depression years, and how simply coming up with meals depended on money sent home by Grace’s uncles, who worked in federal Civilian Conservation Corps camps. In other words, at a time of hunger and struggle, they felt direct compassion from federal leaders in Washington D.C. “In the America I knew,” Grace said of his childhood, “neighbors looked after each other and went to church and were part of a collective whole.” In Lyncourt, Grace grew up in what he described as an ethnic neighborhood. Many people around him were immigrants, or their children. There was a sense of communal gratitude for what this country offered, a sense that empathetic sacrifice was part of the national character. That notion of appreciation always stayed with his parents, Grace said. Even when Grace disagreed with such national decisions as the long war in Vietnam, he held onto faith that student protests were part of the hard journey toward a greater nation. That feeling was a gift from his mother and father, a gut belief he never lost. Now — even more so, he said, than even after he was wounded and saw people die around him at Kent State — he is appalled by a kind of taunting federal cruelty and intolerance that puts the entire thread of long national communion at high risk. “Every generation has its rendezvous with destiny,” Grace said, recalling the words of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A flood of digital poison and falsehoods makes this moment particularly fraught, but he likes to think of what his dad taught him years ago about our nation, this vision of one sprawling and wildly varied family brought together — despite great differences — by selfless core beliefs. What Grace survived tells him his dad was right. That path is the way back. 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