The Kent State Pietà: Background information when reading Kent State

The Kent State Pietà

This article relates to 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 moments before shots rang out across the campus Commons.

Vecchio was shaking and sobbing with her arms outstretched, screaming "They shot him! They shot him! They shot him!" when Filo photographed the scene. The photo, prominently featuring Vecchio's face and often name, appeared everywhere, including newspapers, magazines, and posters, in the wake of the tragedy. "That picture hijacked my life," Vecchio told VanDeMark years later. She was vilified by people on the far right who lumped her in with the counterculture they so despised, and her family even received phone calls and hate mail that labeled her as "a drug addict, a tramp, and a Communist."

The response was so painful and vitriolic, Vecchio ran away again and ran afoul of the law. She eventually moved to Las Vegas, married, and built a new life, although she did return to South Florida years later, where she earned her high school diploma at age thirty-nine. She also worked as a health therapist at the Miami Veterans Administration Hospital caring for (somewhat ironically) Vietnam veterans.

Vecchio and Filo met for the first time at a Kent State retrospective in 1995 at Emerson College in Boston. Filo was "apprehensive" to meet Vecchio, according to an article in Emerson Today about the event, because "the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo had helped make Filo's career as a photojournalist, but had brought Vecchio nothing but harassment, denigration, and death threats from around the country." But the two embraced and became friends, according to a Washington Post article about Vecchio. Despite a quiet retirement filled with growing fruits and vegetables along the edge of the Florida Everglades, Vecchio is still haunted by what happened to her. "It's been fifty years," she told VanDeMark. "Why can't I move on?"

Photo courtesy of Kent State University: Kent State Shootings - 50 Years Later

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This article relates to Kent State. It first ran in the September 18, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.