Mary ann vecchio biography of george

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

Kent State protester (born 1955)

Mary Ann Vecchio (born December 4, 1955) is an Italian Americanrespiratory therapist and one of two subjects in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by photojournalism student John Filo during the immediate aftermath of the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970.

The photograph depicts the 14-year-old Vecchio kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller, who had been fatally shot by the Ohio National Guard moments earlier. Vecchio had joined the protest while visiting the campus, where she befriended two of the other students who would be hit by gunfire that day: Sandra Scheuer, who was killed, and Alan Canfora, who was wounded in the right wrist.

Biography

Vecchio was from an Italian immigrant family who lived in Opa-locka, Florida, where she attended Westview Junior High School at the beginning of 1970. She states that her home life was volatile, and that she and her siblings would leave the house for long periods when their parents fought. Vecchio soon got in trouble for smoking marijuana and skipping school. In February 1970, the police told Vecchio, then 14 years old, that they would send her to jail if she skipped school again. Weeks later, on March 10, she ran away from home. Vecchio says that she was not rebelling or intending to make a political statement: "I just wanted to be anywhere that wasn't Opa-locka." Vecchio began hitchhiking her way across the country, sleeping in fields and hippie crash pads with other transient youth, while occasionally working odd jobs for food.

Kent State

On May 4, 1970, Vecchio was at Kent State University in northern

In an age when 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, it is often a single indelible photograph that tells you where we are, where we’ve been and who we are.

The photograph that captures the here and now of the here and now is of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin slowly, calmly, choking the life out of George Floyd, a recently laid-off restaurant worker. It’s the blithe calmness of Chauvin's actions that are so unsettling. Chauvin has his knee planted firmly on Floyd’s neck, placing a good part of his weight on it. Floyd is handcuffed, so not much of a threat to Chauvin. The police officer has his sunglasses perched on top of his head, the way people do at parks or in backyards. But it’s the way Chauvin’s left hand rests casually in his pants pocket that just did me in. The banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt so memorably described Adolf Eichmann’s indifferent manner at his 1961 trial for war crimes, was also on full display in Minneapolis that day in May.

And so began a tearing apart of the frayed American fabric, a rip so violent and so shocking that you began to wonder if the whole would just come apart. Anger, protests, combat and looting in more than 140 US cities. Dead bodies on the streets. More than four dozen journalists arrested – the sort of occurrence that is rare in democracies. Sirens wailing through the night as they had done earlier in the month during the hell zone of the pandemic.

As the United States burned, crowds gathered in London, Paris, Berlin and Toronto, as well as in Africa, the Middle East and South America, to protest racism, many of them chanting Floyd’s dying words, “I can’t breathe.”

Trump? Trump did his best impersonation yet of a tin-pot dictator, ordering riot units, military police and cops on horseback to use tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse peaceful protesters in front of the White House. All so he could walk with strongman bravado to St John’s Church, which was damaged in the riots, sq

The first display you see upon entering Gallery I at the May 4 Visitors Center at Kent State University expresses a concept initially advanced by famed playwright Arthur Miller.

“May 4, 1970, was the day the war came home.”

And nothing brought the Vietnam War home more dramatically than a photograph taken that day by a Kent State photojournalism major.

You probably already know which photo we're talking about: Young Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling next to the dead body of student Jeffrey Miller, her hands turned upward in despair, a look of horror on her face.

It was the face that launched a thousand protests.

It was the face that mirrored the nation's shock that American soldiers would fire into a crowd of unarmed students.

It was the face that may, more than anything else, have turned middle America against the Vietnam War.

The photo, taken by John Filo, who won a Pulitzer Prize for it, flooded the media. Front page of the New York Times on May 5. A while later, the covers of Newsweek, Time and Life. Reproduced at one time or another by almost every general-interest publication across the continent.

Perhaps the only photo from the era that rivaled it, in terms of both usage and impact, was the blood-curdling 1968 image of South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a prisoner in the side of the head.

Kent State emeritus professor Jerry Lewis, 82, was in the crowd that horrible, sunny day in May, serving as a faculty marshal. He was standing a mere 20 yards from Sandy Scheuer, one of the four students killed. When he heard the shots, Lewis, an Army veteran, dove behind a bush.

A sociologist who has written extensively about the tragedy, Lewis compares the drama of the Mary Ann Vecchio photograph to nothing less than Michelangelo's renowned religious sculpture The Pieta, which portrays the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus.

Both the Vecchio photo and p