In May 1970, four students at Kent State University were killed by the National Guard during a protest against the Vietnam War. It would be difficult to overstate the role this event has played in American cultural memory. Among the many works of art inspired by the shooting, from documentaries to YA novels, Neil Young’s Ohio is regularly ranked as one of the greatest protest songs of all time, if not the very best. Along with the Manson murders and Altamont (a 1969 festival, where Hell’s Angels hired as security stabbed an attendee to death while the Rolling Stones played on), Kent State is often talked about as a turning point in US history, when the youthful idealism of the 60s soured into something darker, or when innocence was met with terrible, implacable violence.

Today, it endures as a defining symbol of state repression in the US, inevitably called to mind whenever politicians or commentators urge the National Guard to swoop in and crush a protest (something we’ve seen a lot of in the last few years, including from Benjamin Netanyahu). Thanks to Kent State, “send in the National Guard” now comes across like a threat, and there’s no doubt it’s often intended in that spirit. Shortly after the Kent State shootings, two students were killed by police during a similar protest at Jackson State College, Mississippi. This event has not left anywhere near the same level of cultural footprint, often relegated to the status of footnote if it’s mentioned at all. What accounts for this disparity? This is one of the questions explored in Through A Mirror, Darkly, a new film by artist and filmmaker Naeem Mohaiemen, which is screening as part of his exhibition, Corinthians, at Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio.

A large part of the answer, according to Mohaiemen, is racism: the students killed at Kent State were white, and those killed at Jackson State were not. “It’s about how race is represented in the media and how certain deaths are [deemed] more significant than others,” he says. “The students at Jackson State were not just protesting the Vietnam War, but domestic racism much more directly”, he says, which makes the event a trickier fit within the conventional story of 60s protests. For some Black students, says  Mohaiemen, there was an added layer of ambiguity. “Of course, there was protesting against the Vietnam War on Black campuses, among Black students, but for some of them it was complicated. Enrollment in the army was seen as a way for African American self-empowerment, and the army was actually the first institution in the United States to desegregate.” Hotly debated at the time, these are the kinds of contradictions which get lost in the ossified, liberal narratives of 60s protest, which invariably favour the perspective of its white participants.

Through A Glass, Darkly deploys a three-screen, triptych technique to powerful effect: at any given point, the screens may be showing archival footage, quotations, and contemporary shots – quieter and more sombre – of the locations where these events took place. “The contemporary moment is marked by actually not much happening. There are commemorations, there are anniversaries, there are speeches, but in quiet moments, if you’re sitting at one of these markers, really what you’re more likely to be watching is the wind rustling through the grass of a leaf falling. Outside of the anniversary moments, the spaces are quite empty,” he says.

The archival footage, by contrast, is frenetic and bursting with activity, whether it’s depicting student protests or the Vietnam War itself, which was at that point the most visually documented conflict in history. This was due to a number of technical innovations: the war began around the time that television really came into its own; colour film was being widely introduced, and advances in video equipment meant that it was possible to attain usable footage through aerial filming. It was also the beginning of the idea, says Mohaiemen, of beaming images of a war into American homes to build either support or opposition. 

From the onslaught of footage to the protests themselves, the parallels with the modern-day movement against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza are obvious. Take Republican senator Jim Buckley railing against “small bands of radicals trampling on the rights of the student majority” and insisting “we’ve got to restore order on our campuses so we can get on with the serious business of education” – a near word-for-word echo of the rhetoric we’ve seen in the last few years. This is partly a coincidence: as a professor at Columbia University, Mohaiemen was surrounded by the Gaza encampments, but he was already working on the film by that point and had a fixed idea of what it was about.  “I think as visual artists, we must reserve the space to talk about something that interests us without it always being press-ganged into a commentary on the current moment,” he adds, suggesting the contemporary resonance is best left to the viewer.

When the parallels between then and now are so stark, it may be more illuminating to focus on the differences. Chief among them, Mohaiemen suggests, is the dramatically different makeup of the American campus.  “The US university of the 60s is going through a huge demographic shift, and education is still much more solidly a mechanism for social advancement,” he says. College is still, fairly reliably, something that will propel you into a life of middle-class security: a stable job, home ownership, and a family. More and more were attending college for the first time, and there was a far higher ratio of ‘first-generation’ students than there is today, which was especially pronounced in the African American community. 

The American university in the 2020s is dramatically different. “There’s a lot more accumulated privilege, i.e. the children of people who went to an Ivy League college attending the same one, and college has gotten tremendously expensive, which means the nature of the student experience is a lot more precarious,”  Mohaiemen says. “This is possibly the first generation of Americans who are going to graduate into a far harsher economic climate than their parents did. Now it's hard to imagine that you will graduate, enter the workforce, and in five years, be in a position to change things through legislation.” Despite the tragic events at Kent and Jackson State, university administrations were generally more willing to accommodate protest movements in the 60s than they are today, he suggests. Coupled with the fact that the goal of entering institutions and changing them from the inside feels less plausible than ever, there’s a greater sense of urgency to today’s student movements. “It shifts the mindset to: whatever change is going to happen, we have to do it now,” he says.

Through A Mirror, Darkly is a document of a specific time and place, shining a light on the people and events which have been neglected by posterity, rather than merely an analogue of the present day. But it’s also a testament to the fact that young people in the US have a long history of standing against injustice, and a much more reliable track record of being proven correct than the forces which repress them.

Corinthians by Naeem Mohaiemen is running at Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, until 24 May 2026.