Dozens filled the Bill Bordy Theater on Tuesday night as the incongruous sounds of bouncy retro music played over documentary footage of students running and National Guardsmen marching—chaos on the lawn of Kent State in 1970.

The event, a 55th anniversary retrospective on the Kent State massacre hosted by Emerson’s communication studies department, featured panel discussions with some of the most important players in an oft-forgotten episode in American history, like photojournalist John Filo, protestor Mary Vecchio, and Russ Miller, the brother of slain Vietnam activist Jeffrey Miller.

In 1970, Filo was a student journalist who took the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo that defined the massacre. The picture depicted a 14-year-old Vecchio kneeling over the dead body of 20-year-old Jeffrey Miller, who was killed when Ohio National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of demonstrators on Kent’s campus, killing four and wounding nine. The iconic image and the shootings themselves are widely considered among the most important turning points that helped galvanize pressure to end the Vietnam War.

“Kent was the high water mark of student protests of that generation at that time,” Filo said in an interview with The Beacon. “We can analyze this 55 years later, like who’s at fault and what’s at fault, and what happened, but it’s coming again.”

Tuesday’s event came just days before the one-year anniversary of the police raid of the pro-Palestine encampment at Emerson that resulted in 118 arrests, mostly students.

“The students of Emerson College who were protesting were very much nonviolent in a similar way to those involved at Kent State,” Griffin Willner, a December graduate in creative writing, who attended the event, said. “There’s a direct parallel between the severe escalation that occurred from [law enforcement] in both situations.”

This week, Filo, Russ Miller, and Vecchio on Zoom, appeared in the Bordy alongside Prof. Gregory Payne and other panelists to reflect on the events of that day. The event was facilitated by students from Payne’s semester seminar course focusing on violence against students in 1970.

This isn’t the first time Emerson and Payne, chair of the communication studies department, have hosted a retrospective on Kent State, most notably organizing a 1995 event that brought together Vecchio and Filo for the first time since the massacre.

Payne wrote the first doctoral dissertation about Kent and an accompanying readers’ theater piece, which his students performed scenes from throughout the evening. He said each new retrospective attempts to “finally connect missing parts of the story.” 

Many at the event said the choice to revisit Kent now is layered with many poignant parallels, identifying a rise in protesting and free speech concerns following the detainment of college students and slashing of federal funding for universities under the Trump administration.

The night began with students reciting passages from Payne’s play, each embodying different perspectives from the inflamed and divisive rhetoric surrounding student protest in the ‘70s, which Nixon’s President’s Commission on Campus Unrest designated as “the most divisive time in American history since the Civil War.”

“Each year there are parallels to something going on, but they’ve never been more appropriate than right now,” Russ Miller said. “Some of these quotes … ‘Oh my God, that could have been yesterday’s news.’”

Vecchio described the horrors she witnessed on May 4, 1970, to the roughly four dozen in attendance. She said while it’s uncomfortable and scary for her to relive that day, she felt like it was her duty to pass down the experiences of her generation, especially as she sees parallels to that time returning.

“I felt the civil war coming on again,” Vecchio said. “If you know it’s wrong, you have to say something …  if we don’t protect democracy and our rights, then this can very well happen again. I don’t want you to go through what we went through.”

Schwebel, a 1990 Emerson graduate and former student of Payne’s seminar class and member of an advisory board at Kent State University, said the message of Kent is about having compassion and empathy. 

“I think a lot of people are missing those important things. They’re not fully comprehending what’s happening in the news, even with different issues like the Palestinian-Israeli issue,” he said.

“Obviously, there have been problems here on [Emerson] campus. There have been vital disconnects and a lot of people taking sides, and a lot of anger and hostility,” Schwebel said, saying he sees similarities between the polarization of today’s issues and the side-taking that happened following the invasion of Cambodia during Vietnam, which sparked protests like Kent’s. Following the shooting, two federal investigations found the National Guard culpable for the massacre, yet the guardsman were exonerated by a special state grand jury, which many throughout Ohio supported.

“I think here at Emerson there’s an opportunity for compassion, discourse, [and] understanding,” he said. “We have to help young people to grow up … [and] put them in rooms with other folks who may not think the same way they do.”

Payne said that the communication studies department will launch a new program next fall called Deliberative Dialogues to help facilitate civil discourse between students on political issues.

“I think that in talking to the President [Bernhardt] here, he understands and appreciates the need to always improve upon the communication,” Payne said.

While previously Emerson students in Payne’s class had the chance to travel to Kent, this year, Schwebel helped bring students and museum leaders from Kent to Emerson for the retrospective. 

This included Sophie Swengel, a junior history major at Kent State and the president of the student-led May 4 Task Force, which organizes campus initiatives commemorating the shootings, and which most recently coordinated protests at the university in response to increased federal oversight of higher education in Ohio, she said.

Because of the legacy of Kent State, its students are “in a really unique position for their voices to resonate throughout our country,” Swengel said. “It reminds us of the importance of freedom of speech, which is something that seems to be on everyone’s minds … these days.”

Kayla Ambruster, a junior political communications major in Payne’s class, said the retrospective was organized to empower students through education.

“It’s always important for student activists to know that their voices are powerful and can make a huge impact … and that’s exactly the narrative that we’re trying to explore with Kent State,” she said.

On May 2, 18 students from Payne’s class will travel to Kent to participate in a similar symposium on their campus.

Even in what he described as a dark and frustrating political time under the Trump administration, Miller expressed a belief in the power and importance of protest. “Any one action that you or I take isn’t going to make it, but it’s just going to be the cumulative effect, and I think we’re seeing that,” he said.

“Another wave is building of student protests,” Filo said.