Kent State shootings in popular culture

This is a list of depictions of and references to the Kent State shootings in popular culture.

Documentary

• 1970: Confrontation at Kent State (director Richard Myers) – documentary filmed by a Kent State University filmmaker in Kent, Ohio, directly following the shootings.
• 1971: Allison (director Richard Myers) – a tribute to Allison Krause.
• 1979: George Segal (director Michael Blackwood) – documentary about American sculptor George Segal; Segal discusses and is shown creating his bronze sculpture Abraham and Isaac, which was originally intended as a memorial for the Kent State University campus.
• 2000: Kent State: The Day the War Came Home (director Chris Triffo, executive producer Mark Mori), the Emmy-Award-winning documentary featuring interviews with injured students, eyewitnesses, guardsmen, and relatives of students killed at Kent State.
• 2007: 4 Tote in Ohio: Ein Amerikanisches Trauma ("4 dead in Ohio: an American trauma") (directors Klaus Bredenbrock and Pagonis Pagonakis) – documentary featuring interviews with injured students, eyewitnesses and a German journalist who was a U.S. correspondent.
• 2008: How It Was: Kent State Shootings – National Geographic Channel documentary series episode.^[1]
• 2010: Fire In the Heartland: Kent State, May 4, and Student Protest in America (director Daniel Lee Miller) – documentary featuring the build-up to, the events of, and the aftermath of the shootings, told by many of those who were present and in some cases wounded.

Film and television

• 1970: The Bold Ones: The Senator – a television program starring Hal Holbrook, aired a two-part episode titled "A Continual Roar of Musketry" which was based on a Kent-State-like shooting. Holbrook's Senator character is conducting an investigation into the incident.
• 1974: The Trial of Billy Jack – The climactic scene of this film depicts National Guardsmen lethally firing on unarmed students, and the credits specifically mention Kent State and other student shootings.^[2]
• 1981: Kent State (director James Goldstone) – television docudrama.^[3]
• 1995: Nixon – Directed by Oliver Stone, the film features actual footage of the shootings; the event also plays an important role in the course of the film's narrative.
• 2000: The '70s starring Vinessa Shaw and Amy Smart, a mini-series depicting four Kent State students affected by the shootings, as they move through the decade.^[4]
• 2002: The Year That Trembled (written and directed by Jay Craven; based on a novel by Scott Lax), a coming-of-age movie set in 1970 Ohio, in the aftermath of the Kent State killings.^[5]
• 2005: Thank You For Smoking Directed by Jason Reitman; In the satirical film, based on the novel of the same name, the narrator, Nick Naylor, describes fellow lobbyist Bobby Jay as having joined the National Guard after the Kent State shooting "so that he too could shoot college students."^[6]
• 2009: Watchmen Directed by Zack Snyder; Depicts a reenacted scene of the shooting in the few opening moments of the film.^[7]

Literature

Graphic novels

• Issue #57 of Warren Ellis' graphic novel, Transmetropolitan, contains an homage to the Kent State shootings and John Filo's photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio.^[8]

Plays

• 1976 – Kent State: A Requiem by J. Gregory Payne. First performed in 1976. Told from the perspective of Bill Schroeder's mother, Florence, this play has been performed at over 150 college campuses in the U.S. and Europe in tours in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s; it was last performed at Emerson College in 2007. It is also the basis of NBC's award-winning 1981 docudrama Kent State.^[9]
• 1993 – Blanket Hill explores conversations of the National Guardsmen hours before arriving at Kent State University ... activities of students already on campus ... the moment they meet face to face on May 4, 1970 ... framed in the trial four years later. The play originated as a classroom assignment, initially performed at the Pan-African Theater and was developed at the Organic Theater, Chicago. Produced as part of the Student Theatre Festival 2010, Department of Theatre and Dance, Kent State University, it was again designed and performed by current theatre students as part of the 40 May 4 Commemoration. The play was written and directed by Kay Cosgriff. A DVD of the production is available for viewing from the May 4 Collection at Kent State University.
• 1995 – Nightwalking. Voices From Kent State by Sandra Perlman, Kent, Franklin Mills Press, first presented in Chicago April 20, 1995, (Director: Jenifer (Gwenne) Weber). Kent state is referenced in Nikki Giovanni's "The Beep Beep Poem".
• 2010– David Hassler, director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State and theatre professor Katherine Burke teamed up to write the play May 4 Voices, in honor of the incident's 40th anniversary.^[10]
• 2012- 4 Dead in Ohio: Antigone at Kent State (created by students of Connecticut College's theatre department and David Jaffe '77, associate professor of theater and the director of the play) - An adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone using the play Burial at Thebes by Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. It was performed November 15–18, 2012 in Tansill Theater.^[11]

Poetry

• The incident is mentioned in Allen Ginsberg's 1975 poem Hadda be Playin' on a Jukebox.^[12]
• The poem "Bullets and Flowers" by Yevgeny Yevtushenko is dedicated to Allison Krause.^[13] Krause had participated in the previous days' protest during which she reportedly put a flower in the barrel of a Guardsman's rifle,^[13] as had been done at a war protest at The Pentagon in October 1967, and reportedly saying, "Flowers are better than bullets."
• Peter Makuck's poem "The Commons" is about the shootings. Makuck, a 1971 graduate of Kent State, was present on the Commons during the incident.
• Gary Geddes' poem Sandra Lee Scheuer remembers one of the victims of the Kent State shootings.^[14]
• Janet Ruth Heller's poem "For Mary Vecchio, 1973" portrays Vecchio as a modern Mary praying over the fallen students. This poem was first published in Canticum Novum (1973) and reprinted in Janet Ruth Heller's book, Folk Concert (2012).^[15]

Prose

• Harlan Ellison's story collection, Alone Against Tomorrow (1971), is dedicated to the four students who were killed.^[16]
• Lesley Choyce's novel, The Republic of Nothing (1994), mentions how one character hates President Richard Nixon due in part to the students of Kent State.^[17]
• Gael Baudino's Dragonsword trilogy (1988–1992) follows the story of a teaching assistant who narrowly missed being shot in the massacre. Frequent references are made to how the experience and its aftermath still traumatize the protagonist decades later, when she herself is a soldier.
• Jerry Fishman's How Nixon Taught America to do The Kent State Mambo (2010) is a fantasy novella about the tragedy.^[18]
• Stephen King's post-apocalyptic novel The Stand includes a scene in Book I in which Kent State campus police officers witness U.S. soldiers shooting students protesting the government cover-up of the military origins of the Superflu which is decimating the country.^[19]

Music

The best known popular culture response to the deaths at Kent State was the protest song "Ohio", written by Neil Young for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The song was written, recorded, and preliminary pressings (acetates) were rushed to major radio stations, although the group already had a hit song, "Teach Your Children", on the charts at the time. Within two-and-a-half weeks of the Kent State shootings, "Ohio" was receiving national airplay.^[20] Crosby, Stills, and Nash visited the Kent State campus for the first time on May 4, 1997, where they performed the song for the May 4 Task Force's 27th annual commemoration. The B-side of the single release was Stephen Stills' anti-Vietnam War anthem "Find the Cost of Freedom".^[21]

There are a number of lesser known musical tributes, including the following:

• Harvey Andrews' 1970 song "Hey Sandy"^[20][22] was addressed to Sandra Scheuer.^lyrics
• Steve Miller's "Jackson-Kent Blues," from The Steve Miller Band album Number 5 (released in November 1970), is another direct response.^[20]
• The Beach Boys released "Student Demonstration Time"^[23] in 1971 on Surf's Up. Mike Love wrote new lyrics for Leiber & Stoller's "Riot in Cell Block Number Nine."^[20]
• Bruce Springsteen wrote a song called "Where Was Jesus in Ohio" in May or June 1970 in response to the Kent State shootings.^[24]
• The Isley Brothers' antiwar medley "Ohio/Machine Gun" was included on their 1971 album Givin' It Back. "Ohio" is the Neil Young song about Kent State and "Machine Gun" was written by Jimi Hendrix.^[25]
• Jon Anderson has said that the lyrics of "Long Distance Runaround" (on the album Fragile by Yes, also released in 1971) are also in part about the shootings, particularly the line "hot colour melting the anger to stone."^[26]
• Pete Atkin and Clive James wrote "Driving Through Mythical America", recorded by Atkin on his 1971 album of the same name, about the shootings, relating them to a series of events and images from 20th-century American history.^[20]
• In 1970–71 Halim El-Dabh, a Kent State University music professor who was on campus when the shootings occurred, composed Opera Flies, a full-length opera, in response to his experience. The work was first performed on the Kent State campus on May 8, 1971, and was revived for the 25th commemoration of the events in 1995.^[27]
• Actress and singer Ruth Warrick released in 1971 a single with the song "41,000 Plus 4 - The Ballad of the Kent State", an homage to the four students killed at Kent State.^[28]
• In May 1970 the group Third Condition published the single "Monday in May - The Kent State Tragedy". The song was written by Chuck Robinette, a friend of the group.^[29]
• Album Everyone, by British band Everyone, released in January 1971 included song Don't Get Me Wrong by Andy Roberts about Kent State shootings.^[30][31]
• In 1971, the composer and pianist Bill Dobbins (who was a Kent State University graduate student at the time of the shootings), composed "The Balcony", an avant-garde work for jazz band inspired by the same event, according to the album's liner notes.^[32] First performed in May 1971 for the university's first commemoration, it was released on LP in 1973 and was performed again by the Kent State University Jazz Ensemble in 2000 for the 30th commemoration.
• Dave Brubeck's 1971 cantata Truth Is Fallen was written in response to the slain students at Kent State University and Jackson State University; the work was premiered in Midland, Michigan on May 1, 1971, and released on LP in 1972.^[20][33]
• The All Saved Freak Band dedicated its 1973 album My Poor Generation to "Tom Miller of the Kent State 25." Tom Miller was a member of the band who had been featured in Life magazine as part of the Kent State protests and lost his life the next year in an automobile accident.
• Holly Near's "It Could Have Been Me" was released on A Live Album (1974). The song is Near's personal response to the incident.^[34]
• The industrial band Skinny Puppy's 1989 song "Tin Omen" on the album Rabies refers to the event.
• Lamb of God's 2000 song "O.D.H.G.A.B.F.E." references Kent State, together with the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the Waco siege.
• A commemorative 2-CD compilation featuring music and interviews was released by the May 4 Task Force in May 2005, in commemoration of the 35th anniversary of the shootings.^[35]
• Joe Walsh, who briefly attended Kent State, has said that he wrote "Turn to Stone" in response to the shootings. He also mentions the event in the song "Decades" (1992).
• One of the students who participated in the protest was Chrissie Hynde, future leader of The Pretenders, who was a sophomore at the time.^[36] Her former bandmate,^[37] Mark Mothersbaugh, and Gerald Casale, founding members of Devo, also attended Kent State at the time of the shootings. Casale was reportedly "standing about 15 feet (4.6 m) away"^[38] from Allison Krause when she was shot, and was friends with her and another one of the students who were killed. The shootings were the transformative moment for him^[39] and for the band, which became less of a pure joke and more a vehicle for social critique (albeit with a blackly humorous bent).^[38]
• Magpie cover the topic in their 1995 album, Give Light. The song 'Kent' was written by band member, Terry Leonino, a survivor of the Kent State shootings.^[27]
• Genesis recreates the events from the perspective of the Guards in the song "The Knife", on Trespass (October 1970).^[20] Against a backdrop of voices chanting "We are only wanting freedom", a male voice in the foreground calls "Things are getting out of control here today", then "OK men, fire over their heads!" followed by gunshots, screaming and crying.
• Barbara Dane sings "The Kent State Massacre" written by Jack Warshaw on her 1973 album I Hate the Capitalist System.^[40]
• The Swedish rock band Gläns över Sjö & Strand made a song about the shootings, in the album Är du lönsam lilla vän?, called "Ohio 4 maj 1970".^[41][42]
• Musician, spoken word artist and political activist Jello Biafra, whose work was influenced by the Vietnam War protests and Kent State,^[43] mentions the shootings in the satirical song "Wish I Was in El Salvador", included in the collaboration album Last Scream of the Missing Neighbors he made with Canadian hardcore punk band D.O.A. in 1990. The verse recites "Commander says I gotta hold the line/'Til the TV cameras leave/Then we'll fire away, make my day/Just like good ol' Kent State".^[44]
• Experimental punk rock band At the Drive-In reference the shooting in their song "Alpha Centauri" singing, "students spray the kent state mist/wishing wills missing clientele/widows six legged lost and found".
• Chris Butler of The Waitresses and Tin Huey was among a crowd of students fired on.^[45]
• Ryan Harvey, a member of the Riot-Folk collective, wrote "Kent State Massacre (13 Seconds in May)" which was included in his 2004 album The Revolution Will Not Be Amplified.^[46]
• Jeff Powers' song "13 Seconds 67 Shots", written on the 40th anniversary of the killings in a style similar to Neil Young's "Ohio", was released in February 2012.^[47]

Photography

• In her 1996 still/moving photographic project Partially Buried in three parts, visual artist Renée Green aims to address the history of the shootings both historically and culturally.

Other Cultural References

• On September 2013, a Louisiana State University fraternity, hung a sign outside of their house with the text "Getting Massacred Is Nothing New to Kent St.," after a football game. Delta Kappa Epsilon later issued an apology.^[48]
• On September, 2014, Urban Outfitters was criticized by media and social media for the release of a faux vintage Kent State University sweatshirt. The sweatshirt had a red and white vintage wash finish, but also included what looked like bullet holes and blood splatter patterns.^[49]

References