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The girl in the Kent State photo and the lifelong burden of being a national symbol
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The Washington Post
@washingtonpost
From the Magazine: In 1970, an image of a dead protester immediately became iconic. But what happened to the 14-year-old kneeling next to him?
The girl in the Kent State photo and the lifelong burden of being a national symbol
In 1970, an image of a dead protester at Kent State became iconic. But what happened to the 14-year-old kneeling next to him?
washingtonpost.com
2:28 AM · Apr 20, 2021
The Washington Post
@washingtonpost
From the Magazine: In 1970, an image of a dead protester immediately became iconic. But what happened to the 14-year-old kneeling next to him?
The girl in the Kent State photo and the lifelong burden of being a national symbol
In 1970, an image of a dead protester at Kent State became iconic. But what happened to the 14-year-old kneeling next to him?
washingtonpost.com
2:28 AM · Apr 20, 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/04/19/girl-kent-state-photo-lifelong-burden-being-national-symbol/
Last May, when Mary Ann Vecchio watched the video of George Floyd’s dying moments, she felt herself plummet through time and space — to a day almost exactly 50 years earlier. On that afternoon in 1970, the world was just as riveted by an image that showed the life draining out of a young man on the ground, this one a black-and-white still photo. Mary Ann was at the center of that photo, her arms raised in anguish, begging for help.
That photo, of her kneeling over the body of Kent State University student Jeffrey Miller, is one of the most important images of the 20th century. Taken by student photographer John Filo, it captures Mary Ann’s raw grief and disbelief at the realization that the nation’s soldiers had just fired at its own children. The Kent State Pietà, as it’s sometimes called, is one of those rare photos that fundamentally changed the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Like the image of the solitary protester standing in front of a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Or the photo of Kim Phuc, the naked Vietnamese girl fleeing the napalm that has just incinerated her home. Or the image of Aylan Kurdi’s tiny, 3-year-old body facedown in the sand, he and his mother and brother having drowned while fleeing Syria.
These images shocked our collective conscience — and insisted that we look. But eventually we look away, unaware, or perhaps unwilling, to think about the suffering that went on long after the shutter has snapped — or of the cost to the human beings trapped inside those photos. “That picture hijacked my life,” says Mary Ann, now 65. “And 50 years later, I still haven’t really moved on.”
Mary Ann Vecchio has granted few interviews in 25 years, and as a child of the ’60s — with her own entanglement with the FBI — she’s still a bit wary. Partway through the first of what would go on to be a dozen interviews over the phone, she stops abruptly. “Are you doing this on your own?” she asks. I’m freelancing, I tell her. Is that what she means? No, she wants to know if I’m working with a political party. Or law enforcement. “When you’ve lived the life I have,” she says, “you still worry that maybe people are after you.” She also tells me she’s researched me before agreeing to speak. “I’m a little FBI-ish myself, in a renegade way,” she says. “And I’m also still that hippie kid who always sees a rainbow.”
*snip*
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So many years, so many bodies.
