Hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered at Kent State University in Ohio on Saturday to protest the war in Gaza, exactly 54 years after a similar campus demonstration ended in four student deaths.

The activists were silent but impossible to miss. They assembled in a semicircle around a stage on Kent State’s commons where speakers were commemorating the events of May 4, 1970: James Rhodes, then the governor of Ohio, had called in the National Guard to quell a demonstration against…