Kent State Remembered: A girl screams before the body of a dead student lying face down on the campus of Kent State University in 1970. National Guardsmen had fired into a crowd of demonstrators and four persons were reported dead in the disorders,

May 4, 1970

At Kent State University armed members of the Ohio National Guard were deployed on May 4, 1970, to respond to approximately five hundred student demonstrators. Four unarmed students were fatally shot by Guardsmen and nine more were wounded. When the shots rang out, senior John Filo was working in the student photography lab. During the confrontation and ensuing chaos, he captured the agonized expression of fourteen-year-old Mary Vecchio as she kneeled over the body of Jeffrey Miller. Widely published, Filo’s Pulitzer prize–winning image transcended documentary photography to become an icon of the Vietnam War era, a signifier to this day of student protest and collective condemnation of violence.