As spring begins, the May 4 Visitors Center and museum prepares for more guests as the date of the 1970 massacre draws near. This year, the Visitors Center will show comics and graphic art related to May 4, some told from the point of view of those who were there. 

The Visitors Center unveiled the new exhibit “Graphic Content: Comics of May 4″ in March, with Chuck Ayers, the artist behind some of the works, featured as a guest speaker. 

Ayers, an Akron native, was a student at the university at the time of the shooting. He was a member of The Kent Stater and worked for the Akron Beacon Journal in 1970. He had gone to the demonstration on May 4 to take photographs for a photojournalism course he was enrolled in. He entered Taylor Hall, the then-quarters of The Kent Stater, just before the shooting began.

“I learned later that just as the doors of the building closed behind me, the guard turned and fired right through the area I was just standing,” Ayers said in an interview with KentWired at the opening of the “Graphic Content: The Comics of May 4″ exhibit in March. 

In the same interview, Ayers said what he experienced after greatly affected his work around May 4.

“I saw Jeff Miller’s body in the street … and I took a picture from a distance. It was really tiny,” he said. “It burned this image into my mind and … I drew that image.”

That cartoon, along with others by Ayers and other artists Derf Backderf and Katherine Wirick, are on display in the gallery of the May 4 Visitors Center on the first floor of Taylor Hall. Additionally, the gallery features other political cartoons from the Vietnam War era and present-day that connect to Kent State.

Backderf wrote the first-ever graphic novel about May 4, “Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio”, which won an Eisner Award in 2021. Snippets of the novel are featured in the gallery. 

“It does such a fabulous job of telling the story in a very immediate, accessible way,” Alison Caplan, the director of the May 4 Visitors Center, said. 

Backderf, a historian, used Kent State resources in his research into the novel, Caplan said. 

“One of the things we wanted to show was how he did his research,” she said. “He used Kent State’s May 4 Archive and special collections. The Visitors Center itself is part of the library, so we really wanted to highlight that, and show items from the special collections and the May 4 Archive that connect to his book.”

Katherine Wirick, artist behind “No One is Safe,” a series of art pieces that portray the events behind May 4, has her own personal connection to the events that transpired that day.

On May 4, 1970, her father, then a student at the university, sat next to William Schroeder during an ROTC exam. Just hours later, Schroeder would be dead from a bullet fired by the National Guard. 

The three main artists featured represent three different generations connected to May 4. This is something that Caplan wanted to incorporate into the farming of the exhibit. 

“I thought, ‘this is a generational thing.’ We could frame the show as three different generations of cartoonists, or graphic novelists, looking at May 4,” she said. “They’re three different approaches to illustrating May 4, from three different generations of artists.”

Caplan said the focus on art as opposed to other mediums in the exhibit was intentional.

“I think there’s an immediacy to comics,” she said. “There’s an accessibility to comics, and we’re really looking at growing our audience here at the center. And comics are the perfect way to engage lots of audiences.”

Caplan said May 4 is just as important today as it was in 1970, and that student organizations and faculty both work to use May 4 to elevate student voices today. And the Visitors Center and museum does not want to stop there. 

“If you are not represented in this space, you should be,” Caplan said. “So, come make yourself represented.”

She said the May 4 Visitors Center has recently worked in conjunction with student groups like the May 4 Taskforce and Students for Justice in Palestine. 

“It’s really part of a continuum of Kent’s history going back from before May 4,” she said. “Kent has a rich history of protest on our campus. To today, and so many of the themes and ideas of things that happened on May 4 related to protest, related to first amendment rights, related to voting rights and students, they’re so relevant and will be even more relevant in the days and months ahead.”

Leah Shepard is a reporter. Contact her at [email protected].