Overview

Through a Mirror, Darkly examines the turbulent 1970s, a decade of hopeful rebellions and catastrophic disappointments, via flashpoint moments when American students protesting domestic racism and overseas wars were met by state violence in May 1970. As the Vietnam War came to its bloody end, for the American media, the memory of four American students shot dead at Kent State University was sometimes as emotionally charged as the millions of deaths in Vietnam. In the decades that followed, a memorial community has formed around the “four dead in Ohio.” Yet while the deaths of students Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder at Kent State, Ohio, are remembered, not many recall Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green, two students killed ten days later by police officers at Jackson State College, Mississippi, a Historically Black College.