Have any victims or families received civil settlements from the Ohio National Guard after Kent State?
Executive summary
Yes: after years of litigation the families and wounded students accepted an out‑of‑court settlement in January 1979 that provided $675,000 to plaintiffs in the Kent State civil actions; the payment was made by the State of Ohio rather than by individual Guardsmen [1] [2].
1. The legal aftermath that led to settlement
The shootings of May 4, 1970 produced a complex, multi‑stage legal fight: a 1975 federal trial produced verdicts favoring the Guardsmen and state defendants, an appeal overturned parts of that litigation and led to a new trial being ordered, and those procedural twists set the stage for the parties to negotiate rather than fight another full trial — a sequence recounted in federal trial histories and in Kent State legal chronologies [3] [4].
2. What the settlement was — dollar figure and date
In early January 1979 Ohio’s State Controlling Board approved an out‑of‑court settlement totaling $675,000 to the victims and families arising from the May 4 shootings; contemporary reporting and archival summaries identify the approved payment as the resolution of the civil liability claims [1] [5].
3. Who signed and what accompanied the money
The settlement included not only the monetary payment but also a signed statement of regret from Governor James A. Rhodes and 27 National Guardsmen who had been defendants in the litigation; reporting at the time emphasized the symbolic content of that statement even as the defendants and their attorneys characterized it as an expression of regret rather than a legal admission of guilt [1] [6] [2].
4. Who actually paid the award
Multiple institutional accounts make clear that the State of Ohio — not individual Guardsmen — paid the settlement sum, a fact reported by Kent State’s own historical material and regional press; scholars note the state opted to fund the settlement in part because its estimate of the cost of re‑litigating made settlement the expedient choice [2] [7].
5. How the money was allocated and the limits of the public record
Contemporaneous press summaries and the January 1979 coverage itemized the settlement distribution to plaintiffs, attorney fees and expenses, but public reporting does not provide full granular accounting of exactly how much each family or injured student received beyond those aggregate allocations, so precise per‑plaintiff disbursements are not documented in the available sources [1] [4].
6. Competing interpretations and the political context
Some sources and participants have framed the settlement as a form of vindication for plaintiffs after legal setbacks, while defenders of the Guardsmen and state officials have treated the agreement as pragmatic and not an admission of wrongdoing; the President’s Commission earlier condemned the shootings as “unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable,” which fed public pressure for accountability even as courts repeatedly grappled with legal liability [8] [3] [6].
7. What remains unsettled in the historical record
Scholarly and archival accounts document the settlement and the signed statements of regret, but they also stress that the legal and moral questions remain contested in public memory; the sources used here report the settlement amount and that the state paid it, yet they do not exhaustively catalog plaintiffs’ individual receipts or every internal motive behind the state’s decision to settle [2] [4].