50th anniversary of Kent State University shootings: May 4th

Mary Ann Vecchio gestures and screams as she kneels by the body of a student lying face down on the campus of Kent State University on May 4, 1970.  The photo by student photojournalist John Filo won the Pulitzer Prize.

I can't remember when I first became cognizant of this, probably from the song "Ohio" by Crosby, Stills and Nash.

But it was many many years until I learned of similar killings by National Guardsmen at Jackson State University in Mississippi a couple weeks later.

There is a piece in the New Yorker ("Kent State and the War That Never Ended") and by Margaret Sullivan, the Post's media columnist ("How would Kent State tragedy be covered with today's resources").

Kent State University intended to commemorate the tragedy with a series of events, which have been cancelled because of the coronavirus.

KSU has an online exhibit.



A few years ago, I was reading an interview with one of the leaders of the band Devo.  He and a friend and future bandmate had been on the green at KSU that day ("Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale remember the Kent State Massacre," Nightflight; "How the Kent State massacre helped give birth to punk rock," Washington Post).

One of the KSU exhibits ties together civil rights and anti-war activism, and what I call "the coercive power of the state," "Civil Rights, Black Power, and Anti-War Actions: Orangeburg, Kent, and Jackson, 1960-1967."

Again, I hadn't known of the killings at Orangeburg State in South Carolina either, until a column by University of Maryland Professor and Washington Post sports columnist Kevin Blackistone, "Remembering the Orangeburg massacre, and the athlete-activists who took a stand."