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Crobsy, Stills, Nash & Young perform Tuesday, March 7, 2000, at Reunion Arena in Dallas. Band members are, from left, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Neil Young and David Crosby.
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‘Four dead in Ohio’: How the Kent State shooting changed music history

Samuel Morales/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/AP

‘Four dead in Ohio’: How the Kent State shooting changed music history

Seeing the devastating pictures in Life magazine in May 1970, Neil Young — from 2,500 miles away — wrote the definitive song about the massacre at Kent State.

“Ohio,” recorded with Crosby, Stills & Nash three weeks after the May 4 shootings and released as a single that month, shocked the airwaves with its refrain of “Four dead in O-hi-o” and became a generation’s rallying cry for resistance to the Nixon administration and the Vietnam War.

One of the people dead on the ground, captured so strikingly in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, was Jeffrey Miller, a 20-year-old who had just transferred there from Michigan State University.

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First Published: April 30, 2020, 10:00 a.m.
Updated: April 30, 2020, 10:05 a.m.

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A picture of John Cleary, who was wounded by Ohio National Guardsman while a student at Kent State University in May 1970, fills the cover of Life magazine published a week after the historic shootings at the Ohio campus. Cleary, a retired Pittsburgh architect, had noticed a crowd near Blanket Hill after he got out of class that day. Intrigued, the 19-year-old freshman from Scotia, N.Y., stopped to take pictures. His photography ended when a guardsman's bullet slammed into his chest. (Steve Mellon/Post-Gazette)Slug: KENTSTATE0929Story by Michael Fuoco
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The cover of Life magazine published a week after the historic May 1970 shootings at Kent State University.
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The names of those killed May 4, 1970, are displayed on the B’nai B’rith Hillel Marker in the parking lot of Prentice Hall on the campus of Kent State University.
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Students aid John Cleary, then 19, who was struck by Ohio National Guard gunfire at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. Mr. Cleary, now 68, of Pine, had been a relatively apolitical student at that time. He was wounded as he was watching and photographing an anti-war protest when the Guard opened fire,killing four and wounding eight other students.This photograph, which originally appeared on the cover of Life magazine on May 15, 1970, was taken by a fellow student. The two men met for the first time this month at Kent State.
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Crobsy, Stills, Nash & Young perform Tuesday, March 7, 2000, at Reunion Arena in Dallas. Band members are, from left, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Neil Young and David Crosby.  (Samuel Morales/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/AP)
Samuel Morales/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/AP
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