The United States of America, You Don’t Count the Dead when God is On Your Side

The United States of America, You Don’t Count the Dead when God is On Your Side

Kent State

The protest poster, “The United States of America, You Don’t Count the Dead when God is on Your Side” was created by Columbia College Chicago Students as a creative way of voicing their position on the Kent State shootings of 1970. This poster is not only a powerful historical object due to the weight of its context and value to American history, but is also a provocative work of art due to its aesthetic appeal and the level of thought it required to produce. This piece is characterized by two contrasting images, cohesively blended and rendered in monochromatic, vivid green, and features a small song lyric from Bob Dylan, which also happens to be the title of the poster. Of the images featured, the more emotional of the two is a scene from the shooting where a wounded student is shown with other students attending to him and the National Guard armed in the background. The poster also features an image of the five-dollar bill, strategically cropped to only show “The United States of America” and “In God We Trust”. These two images are tied together by the song lyric, suggesting that due the amount of trust America has in God, even in a situation as trying as this, there is somehow a silver-lining to be acknowledged. The concept of this poster can be summed up in a quote by Jeanine Centuori, from the Kent State/May 4 and Postwar Memory Article, stating that works of this variety ”…show the world how to allow the diverse beliefs of a community to coexist together in a public space…which binds the community through a collective memory”. The Columbia College Students used the silkscreen technique to create this piece.

Columbia College Chicago Students

Kent State, College Archives & Special Collections, Columbia College Chicago

College Archives & Special Collections, Columbia College Chicago.

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“The oral histories are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. “ All rights remain with the creators.

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