Day of Death Is Remembered at Kent State

Kent State remembered with the tolling of a bell, a chalk message in a parking lot and silence.

There were peace signs and people dancing barefoot. Peter, Paul and Mary sang “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Some lit candles.

About 3,000 people showed up Thursday to mark the day 25 years ago that a cluster of National Guardsmen opened fire and killed four students during an anti-war protest.

Some in the crowd weren’t born back then. Others remember all too well.

In the hilltop parking lot where the slain students fell, silent candle-bearers stood vigil from midnight until a bell tolled at exactly 12:24 p.m., the moment the shooting began.

Around them, people chalked peace signs, flowers and messages into the blacktop. “Has anything in the way of change become real? HAVE WE LEARNED?” one asked.

The school’s victory bell rang 15 times--once for each of the 13 students killed or wounded and once for each of two students killed at Jackson State University in Mississippi 10 days later.

Around a stark granite memorial to the dead, 58,175 daffodils decorating the hillside--one for each American killed in the war--students, former students and others paused to remember Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder.

Mary Ann Vecchio, whose moment of agony kneeling near Miller was frozen in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, stood on the spot where he died.

Vecchio was a 14-year-old runaway when she kneeled, her arms upraised in horror, over Miller as he lay dying.

“Teach love. And compassion,” she said in an impromptu speech at the candlelight vigil. “I ask all the people who are teachers . . . to step back, take a breath and think about it.”

It was the first time Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary had seen the memorial, dedicated in 1990. Many have criticized it as too little, too late. Travers said it suits its purpose.

“As a memorial, as a physical thing, it’s enough,” she said. “The real memorial, of course, and the responsibility of the university is to infuse the student body with the moral questions that it produces.”