The Kent State Pietà: Background information when reading Kent State

Of all the unsettling photos taken at Kent State University on May 4th, 1970, one of them became the iconic image of unthinkable tragedy. In this photo, twenty-year-old student Jeff Miller lies face down bleeding as fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio screams in horror over his body. The photographer was KSU student John Filo, and the future Pulitzer Prize-winning photo ran three columns wide on the next morning's New York Times, according to historian Brian VanDeMark in Kent State: An American Tragedy. With its dramatic content, composition, and Vecchio's wailing pose, the photograph has been called the "Kent State Pietà."



While Filo garnered prestige for his photo, Vecchio had a vastly dissimilar experience that has haunted her over the past decades. Vecchio was a South Florida teenage runaway who hitchhiked for months before ending up at the Kent State campus by "happenstance." She joined the anti-war protests there on May 4th and had just spoken to student Jeff Miller ...