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“This Little Light of Mine”: Remembering the Civil Rights Movement and the Sixties
Dr. William Heath, Professor of English
Presentation at Mount Saint Mary’s University: 18 January, 2007
Introduction
The nineteenth-century French novelist Flaubert once remarked that he had been present
as a spectator at the major events of his time. I can’t make a similar claim, but I was in my
twenties during the Sixties and I was a participant in many of the typical happenings of that time.
What I would like to do tonight is offer a series of general statements, with little supporting
proof, to help you interpret the civil rights movement and the Sixties, accompanied by a few
specific accounts of my own experiences, to help you visualize and remember that period.
However, a word of caution before I begin: years ago one of my student evaluations stated that
“this professor is open-minded but scatter-brained,” so prepare for digressions and a rather hasty
scattershot approach to a complex period that certainly can’t possibly be summed up in an hour.
A final word of caution; the joke goes,
“If you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t there,”
Even though I was there (and rarely stoned—more on that later) all general interpretations are
suspect, and memories, at best, only contain a partial truth.
Growing Up Absurd in the Fifties
Youngstown, Ohio, as the Mafia’s own “Little Chicago”
I lived in the lily white suburb of Poland, Ohio, but my father was the principal of a
junior high in Youngstown, a tough, steel-making city with a diverse ethic mix, and my mother
taught English at Youngtown University. In those days Youngstown was at the center of a war
for control between the mafias of Cleveland and Pittsburgh; there were eighty bombings and a
number of people were killed, not all of them gangsters. I mention this to explain that my view
of politics in those days was very simple: Since the mafia controlled the Democratic Party in the
city, literally selecting the mayor and sheriff, it followed that all Democrats were corrupt and all
Republicans were good, although some were better than others. My first political memory dates
from 1952 when I went over to my neighbor’s house, pulled down his Taft for President sign and
put up my own hand-made I LIKE IKE sign.
My first rumble: the war of the corner gangs
The James Dean scene had come to my small high school; those who wanted to adopt a
rebel stance wore long hair brushed back in a DA, pegged pants, pointy toed black boots, and
kept a cigarette pack tucked into the sleeve of their T-shirt. Our corner gang often fought the
corner gang of our nearest rival town, Boardman, and even though I was essentially a jock then
and wore my hair in a crew cut, I sometimes found myself in situations when fist-fights broke
out. Fortunately, I was never in a serious rumble, where belts, chains, and switchblades were the
weapons of choice. I mention this to illustrate that even though rebellion was in the air in the
late fifties, it was, for the most part, utterly without political content or any redeeming social
goals.
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Race Relations in Ohio
Jim Snowden and me at the Twenty-One Club
The way I became aware of racial issues was through sports. I was a high jumper and
quarter miler in track and a point guard in basketball, so I did compete against Black athletes.
All high schools, large or small, in Ohio were in one big league when it came to State
championships; in my junior year I competed in the State high jump finals in Columbus, along
with two other teammates, a sprinter and a shot-putter. The other shot-put finalist from our
region was a Black guy from Youngstown, Jim Snowden, and so the four of us hung out together.
He was a football, basketball, and track star and a tremendous physical specimen: 6’5” and 240
pounds of solid muscle. He later went on to be an All American tight end at Notre Dame and had
a distinguished pro career. We were on our own, without adult supervision, and boys being boys
we decided to look for a little adventure. We called a cab and told the driver to take us where the
action was. He pulled up at a place called the Twenty One Club and the bouncer at the door took
one look at us and said, “You can’t come in here.” At first I thought it was because we were
underage, but Jim knew what he meant, and I remember looking over at him, seeing his jaw
clench and those powerful muscles bulge, and I sensed that that poor bouncer wasn’t long for this
world. But after a tense face-off Jim finally said, “We don’t want to go here,” and that was that.
From Elvis the Pelvis to Folk, or Bob and Joan fall in love
A better organized talk than this one might focus exclusively on the significance of music
to the Sixties. I merely want to mention briefly the swift changes in the music scene that took
place between 1955 and the early Sixties. The key to Elvis, of course, is that he made the
rhythms of the great black musical tradition palatable to whites; and from that point on everyone
learned to shake that thing. I never saw Elvis in person, though I did see him from the waist up
on the Ed Sullivan Show; and when I was in Kentucky I often heard Little Enis, aka The Penis,
sing; he played left-handed, upside-down guitar and was pretty raunchy, but that’s another story,
which I tell in my novel Devil Dancer. The essential late-fifties musical contribution to the
Sixties sensibility was folk, which made it fashionable to be concerned about the down-and-out
and dispossessed and to develop at least a incipient social conscience. I listened a lot to The
Kingston Trio before Baez and Dylan came along, but it was the performances of Joan and Bob
at the Newport Folk Festival that really marked the beginning of Sixties music.
February 1, 1960: The Sixties Begin
The sit-ins, CORE and the Freedom Rides, the Peace Corps
Historians are supposed to be precise about dates, so here we go. The Sixties began on
February 1, 1960, when four students at a Black college in Greensboro, North Carolina, decided
to sit-in at the local Woolworth’s segregated lunch counter. They were, of course, denied service,
but the story made the papers, and the idea caught on, and before the summer was over 60,000
people, mostly students, both black and white, had staged sit-ins at restaurants, read-ins at
libraries, wade-ins at beaches, and in a variety of ways made it plain that unjust laws would be
broken and that segregation was morally wrong. The era of student protest, this time in support
of an integrated society, had begun. When students in those days were polled whether they
would rather have a job that served their fellow man or that paid a lot of money, a clear majority
favored social justice over getting rich. That is not the result pollsters that get nowadays.
The influence of Existentialism—Authentic versus Inauthentic Existence
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Putting your body on the line: Albert Camus, “I rebel, therefore we are.”
On the Road to Lake Placid: hitchhiking to nowhere in particular
The chief philosophic influence on college students in the early Sixties was
Existentialism, which stressed the notion that “existence precedes essence,” which is to say that
our destiny isn’t already laid out for us, but rather an individual is responsible for the quality of
his or her own life. We all must realize that our choices matter. As Sartre said, we have a
“terrible freedom” to shape our lives and we must do so wisely. A rather smug assumption of the
time was that most people didn’t use their freedom wisely, and so lived inauthentic instead of
authentic lives; they were the conformists who lived in ticky-tacky houses and raised cookie-
cutter kids. They were square not hip and simply didn’t know where it’s at, to speak the argot of
the time. They were at the mercy of mass culture, while we assumed that the purpose of a
college education was to outgrow childish things. More to the point was Albert Camus’s notion
that individual freedom of choice should be exercised in favor of human solidarity. The genuine
rebels were in rebellion not only against unjust authority but also in favor of a better human
community. Before social activism was in the air, the way existentialism played out on my
campus was that when classes ended on Friday some of us would walk out to the highway, stick
out our thumbs, and see where we ended up (I don’t recommend that you try this). My most
memorable hitchhiking experience happened one summer in the Adirondacks, when I was trying
to get to Lake Placid to visit a friend. I was picked up by a hippie who drove a hearse, which he
had converted into living quarters. He turned off onto a dirt road miles from my destination,
leaving me in the middle of the night, on top of a mountain, no lights or cars in sight, only me
and the black bears until dawn.
Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement in the Sixties
Nonviolence: A Strategy to End Legal Segregation in the South
“The Beloved Community” versus “Rattlesnakes don’t feel remorse.”
Martin Luther King first became a leader of the civil rights movement during the
Birmingham Bus Boycott of 1955. King had been selected by the other ministers because he was a
young (if things went badly he could start afresh elsewhere), he was already known as a good
speaker, and he was well-connected (his father was the minister of a major church in Atlanta).
Following the success of the boycott, King had trouble finding another battleground, but a decision
was made to break with the NAACP and put him at the center of his own organization the SCLC, or
Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The strategy of this minister-run group was to make
King the “star” of the civil rights movement. Because of his exceptional abilities, King was an
excellent choice, but in honoring him, we should never forget that the civil rights movement was
about much more than him, important as his contributions were. The heart of the movement was
always the local people, the thousands who sang and marched and risked their lives for racial justice.
We also need to remember that the movement, at the start, had a very spiritual strategy to achieve a
very specific goal. The basic concept was to use nonviolent protest in order to end legal segregation
in the South. The long-term, more idealistic goal was to create what was called “the beloved
community.” Not everyone agreed with this strategy, and many doubted if “the beloved community”
would ever appear on this earth, but King was the guiding light behind these notions, which he gave
his life to put into effect.
Albany, Georgia
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The Music of the Movement—Lift every voice and sing
Birmingham, Alabama
Playing to the Media—Bull Connor, police dogs, fire hoses
The March on Washington: (an excerpt from my story “The March”)
I was a believer in the gospel according to Peter, Paul, and Mary; Odetta singing
“Lowlands” or Baez “East Virginia” gave me gooseflesh; and in the scratchy voice of a gaunt kid
who blew ghostly riffs on a harmonica between the stanzas of his songs I thought I heard the
voice of a true prophet. I had used my only weekend pass of the summer to go to the Newport
Folk Festival where Dylan stole the show. A black corduroy Dutch boy’s cap riding a ratty halo
of unruly hair, standing a little bow-legged in his blue jeans and battered desert boots, Dylan
warned that a hard rain was gonna fall. The combination of harmonica and acoustic guitar was a
novelty to me, but the real mystery was his raucous, twangy voice, all snarl and bite and
unexpected emphasis, which made his surreal images as vivid as a mystical vision. It wasn’t
pretty; but it was unforgettable. To hear King speak and Dylan sing, I was willing to endure an
all-day mob scene in the sun….
In a grand finale everybody backed up Peter, Paul, and Mary singing “Blowing in the
Wind.” My eyes were on Dylan, a bemused smirk on his face as thousands of voices in the
crowd picked up the words of his lyrics and sang along:
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.
The answer is blowing in the wind.
I was so elated I wanted encore after encore, but at that point the crowd began to drift away.
Spontaneously, without any signal I saw, the march had begun…. Mostly people were silent, but
the spirited singing I’d left behind still echoed in my mind and filled me with a strange
solemnity. Nobody was in a hurry; we walked slowly in amorphous and sporadic lines; for long
stretches all I heard were the whisperings of serious conversations and the shuffling of thousands
of feet. An army of stragglers, our formations would never pass muster, but we shared a
discernable sense of purpose and direction. When we passed the television cameras, mounted on
small platforms held up by metal pipes, people became more animated, waving to the viewers
back home, shouting “Freedom Now!” or “Pass the Bill!” I carried a sign that read We Want
Batter Housing Now. A group in front of us from Danville, Virginia, wearing white sweatshirts
and black armbands, started clapping and chanting:
Move on, move on, move on with the freedom fight;
Move on, move on, we’re fighting for equal rights.
…I had been so intent on seeing the singers and listening to the songs, it wasn’t until we were
well on our way down Constitution Avenue that I took note of the composition of the crowd. I
had never seen so many Black people in my life, so smartly and elegantly dressed, with a general
flare for style that made most Whites look drab. I was ashamed of my T-shirt, blue jeans and
tennis shoes, but it was impossible to feel remorse for long in that intoxicating holiday
atmosphere that both soothed and excited me like a soft breeze. I felt an overwhelming sense
that biracial brotherhood was no idle dream. I walked beside the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and
Butcher Workmen of America, hard-nosed blue-collar guys from Minnesota who probably spent
their average workday swinging cleavers and spattering gore, but today they were joshing with a
group of Black women from a Baptist church in Albany, Georgia, as if they had known them all
their lives.
(the illusion that the beloved community had arrived: the Birmingham bombing)
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Bob Moses, SNCC, and Freedom Summer: “Snick” (SNCC) versus “Slick” (SCLC)
Organizing the Local People: The Mississippi Summer Project of 1964
Fannie Lou Hamer, the dangers of the simple act of trying to register to vote
The KKK and the murder of Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner
Their bodies are found the day of Tonkin Gulf Incident
Freedom Schools, Voter Registration, the Atlantic City Convention
“We didn’t come all this way for no two seats.”
Researching Freedom Summer: Mississippi martyrs
Herbert Lee, Louis Allen, unsolved lynchings
Becoming Radicalized: Freedom Summer’s Impact on the Sixties
The Free Speech Movement: The Student as Nigger
Mario Savio at Berkeley, Fall 1964
The Anti-War Movement: “I majored in Stop the War.”
Bob Moses, et. al. Allard Lowenstein, “Dump Johnson”
Women’s Movement: “The position of women in SNCC is prone.”
Mary King, Casey Hayden, et. al.
The Counterculture: clothes, communes, drugs, sex, language
Life in the Freedom Houses
The Mississippi Metaphor: America is a Police State
Moral Melodrama versus Social Analysis
Kennedy, Johnson and Civil Rights Legislation
JFK, RFK, the Solid South and “the Negro problem”
How reluctant JFK was to get involved, Freedom Rides forced his hand
Kennedy’s Assassination and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
JFK’s legislation was stalled in Congress, only his death passed the bill
Selma and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965
Whether to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge and face Sheriff Jim Clark
King wants to avoid violence; militants want to build momentium
The demand for confrontation: attacking “de Lawd”
I attend a SNCC meeting in Cleveland: I recall a very angry woman who
had just returned from Selma; she was furious at King for not
seeking a confrontation with the police, which probably would have
led to more deaths, since more people would have to die for the
Movement to succeed.
Black Rage, Black Power, and Urban Riots: The Civil Rights Movement in the Cities
The Great Migration, De Facto Segregation, the Situation in the Urban North
LBJ mortgages the Great Society to fight the war in Vietnam
Harlem (1964), Watts (1965), Cleveland (1966), Newark and Detroit (1967)
Burn, Baby, Burn: I work for Carl Stokes and witness Hough in Flames
The Abandonment of Integration
SNCC expels all White members; Bob Moses changes his name
Martin Luther King tries to bring “the beloved community” to Cicero, Illinois
The Rejection of Nonviolence and the Rise of Revolutionary Fantasy
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Malcolm X and the Black Muslims: “by any means necessary”
The Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Chic
“The Revolution has come / It’s time to pick up the gun”
Offing the Pigs: armed confrontation
The Dirty Secrets of Black Power: How James Forman went insane
A Black Panther held a gun to his head, played Russian Roulette
Excerpts from The Children Bob Moses Led
Poe gave Esther a this-chick-can’t-be-for-real head shake.
“You think what you’re doin’ is romantic,” he said with cutting sarcasm. “Black is what’s
happenin’. The Negro is in vogue this summer. Mississippi is the ‘in’ place to be. You get to write
yo letters home postmarked from some Black Belt hot spot and back on campus you can brag
about how you made that civil rights scene. But when something else becomes hip, you’ll split.
I’m on to you honkies. Look at you with yo bare feet, workshirts, and blue jeans. You think it’s
beautiful to be poor? Well let me tell you, there’s no glory in bein’ poor. It’s a grind, man. And I
didn’t learn that in no sociology course; I lived it. Poor people don’t need no bleedin’-heart
liberals comin’ down to ‘identify’ with their plight…. You, and all the rest of these honkies down
here pretendin’ to help us poor black folk,” Poe said scornfully. “You’re all part of the same
scam.”
“What’re you talking about?” I was determined not to let Poe destroy our renewed sense of
unity.
“All you honkies got that master’s mentality. You think these black cats need watchin’.
You think you know what’s best for us—that’s paternalism, Jack, plain and simple.”
“We’re down here putting our lives on the line,” I said, “because that’s the only way to
show that integration can work.”
“That’s right,” Esther concurred. “And there have been important changes. The civil rights
bill…”
“Integration may be the law of the land,” Feelgood said, “but it sure ain’t the reality of the
land.”
“You said it, man.” Poe smiled with approval. “Exactly so. The black masses can’t relate
to SNCC because it’s actin’ out a fantasy—this is a racist society and this black and white together
boogie-joogie don’t fool nobody. The time has come to unmask the cast of lyin’ characters and tell
the honkies to get out of the picture. This scene is ours, dig? From now on we will determine our
own destiny…. You’re history,” Poe said. “The time has come to pick up the gun and begin the
armed struggle. No more sit-ins. I’m ready for a shoot-out….”
The White Backlash
“Remember, Johnson is not running against Jesus, but Goldwater. Barry’s not a bad man,
but like a lot of Americans, he’s missing a few floors; all he sees are white hats and black hats; he
doesn’t understand human nature or how the world goes…. The problem is not so much Goldwater
as the people who are behind him…. The people behind Barry are dangerous, fanatical. They
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know exactly where the grapes of wrath are stored…. The hidden ingredient in this election is what
I call the ‘Woodwork Factor,’” Mr. Smith explained. “It is an article of faith among the Goldwater
people that there is a host of true believers out in the heartland, who have been waiting all these
years for Goldwater. He provides them, the theory goes, with a choice, not an echo. And so on
election day they are going to come crawling out of the woodwork, sweep Barry to a stunning
upset victory, and redeem the land from its sinful ways.”
“But the polls don’t support that,” I protested. “They show three times more Republicans
planning to vote for Johnson than Democrats switching to Goldwater.”
“You’re right,” Mr. Swift admitted, “but some of the most subtle and in-depth pollsters
have found one issue that could swing it the other way…. LBJ can only lose this election if race
becomes the central issue…. Ironically, the March on Washington has some unforeseen
consequences: it established an expectation of good behavior for Negro protest and now anything
that exceeds that norm offends white people. The riots this summer have caused a tremendous
reaction.”
“White backlash,” I said.
“Well, it’s real,” Mr. Swift said. “Some white Democrats have already switched to
Goldwater, and a lot more are tempted. Another major riot this year and they’ll jump…. The
Democratic Party does have a heart…but this is an inopportune time to test it. When a democracy
is confronted with a complex problem that requires that the majority of the people surrender
certain long-held privileges and prejudices, the chances are you’re not going to have a happy
ending.”
The Sixties, the Baby Boomers, the Generation Gap: Rebellion as Lifestyle
The Draft and the Anti-War Movement in America
As the war escalates, so does the protest movement
Martin Luther King and Bob Moses speak out against the war
White activists switch from civil rights to stop the war
Marches on Washington, campus protests: Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell
I get tear-gassed in Kentucky and check-out Antioch College
The Emergence and Marketing of the Counterculture:
“We all live in a yellow submarine”
Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll: from the Summer of Love (‘67) to Woodstock (‘69)
“If you’re going to San Francisco / Be sure to wear a flower in your hair”
The birth-control pill was readily available by 1960, later mini-skirts came into fashion… I
won’t testify further about the sexual revolution on the grounds it might incriminate me.
Tune in, Turn on, Drop out: from grass to LSD (“Speed Kills”)
I OD on Pot
I was in Atlanta, Georgia, at the time; my friend Jim and I had played tennis all afternoon in
the hot sun without drinking enough water; that night we went to a dinner party where the peace pipe
was being passed. I hadn’t smoked pot before and didn’t know what to expect. After about an hour
I said, “I don’t feel anything,” and Jim replied, “Well, that’s funny, because you’ve been staring at
the food on the end of your fork for five minutes.” Later, I went to the bathroom and everyone but
me heard a loud crash. The heat, the tennis, and the pot had left me so dehydrated that I briefly
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passed out. This was not a typical experience, I might add, but it is true that as the Sixties
progressed more and more hippies seeking ecstasy through drugs found only bummers and bad trips.
I know of no one else who OD’s on pot, but lots of people did permanent damage to themselves and
others when they switched to LSD, Coke, and Speed.
1968, or How the Sixties Spun Out of Control
January 31, 1968: The Tet Offensive: “We had to destroy that town to save it.”
April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King is murdered in Memphis: “I may not get there with
you.”
I was having dinner with the poet Diane Wakoski when the word of his death came
The ghettoes in flames: Bobby Kennedy in Indianapolis: “I, too, had a brother…”
“Dump Johnson”: Eugene McCarthy challenges Johnson in New Hampshire and LBJ
withdraws
I am “Clean for Gene” in Ohio and encounter Wallace supporters.
June 6, 1968: Bobby Kennedy is murdered in California: “Now it’s on to Chicago…”
I remember a friend called me in the middle of the night and said turn on your TV.
August, 1968: The Democratic Convention in Chicago: “The whole world is watching”
I went into shock when I witnessed what was later described as “a police riot”
Revolution as Theater
The New Left: The Diggers, the Yippies, SDS, the Weathermen
Dropping dollars on Wall Street, free food in Berkeley, Pegasus for
President
Days of Rage: breaking the glass of the ruling class
1969: The Altamont Concert and the Manson killings
The Rolling Stones got the bright idea of paying The Hell’s Angels $500 worth of beer to
protect their concert. At the height of the excitement, when the Stones were performing “Sympathy
for the Devil,” the notorious motorcycle gang beat and stabbed a black man to death in front of the
stage, claiming later that he had pulled a gun. Charlie Manson was an ex-con who took most of the
benign ingredients of the Sixties and turned them into a witches’ brew of evil. He smooth-talked
himself into the role of guru for a gang of groupies who did his bidding, including murder. Charlie
combined communal living, movie-making, sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, in sum, all the
accoutrements of the counterculture combined with a mad fantasy the Beatles’ records contained
coded messages and his mission was to murder people in order to instigate a race war, which Charlie
and his followers would go literally underground to avoid. At the end Manson would emerge to rule
over his groovy kingdom. No case better epitomized how the Sixties turned sour.
Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the Rise of Sunbelt Politics, and “Vietnamization”
George Wallace: “If any long-haired protestor lies down in front of my car…”
The Solid South goes Republican: The Politics of Race and Rage
“We’re going to take this country so far right you won’t recognize it.”
I (fail to) assassinate Nixon at Whitney Young’s funeral
When Nixon died, Whitney Young, who was the head of the relatively conservative Urban
League, decided to attend his funeral in Lexington, Kentucky. I went, too, to get a look at the
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President. My memory is that he was shorter than I expected and wearing such heavy make-up that
he looked positively unreal. What I didn’t know was that someone had issued a death-threat against
Nixon that day, thus half the people at the funeral were FBI agents and security people. Dressed in
my usual hippie garb, I was identified as a person of interest; I soon found myself surrounded by
crew-cut men in trench coats who had a disconcerting habit of scrutinizing me while whispering into
their lapels. Later, when the Young family realized he had been buried in a segregated cemetery—
one part for Blacks, another for Whites—they had his body disinterred and reburied in New York.
The Cambodian Incursion: Kent State: May 4, 1970, the Sixties end
The Kent State students had staged several protests, the ROTC building on campus had
burned down, and the rhetoric of Ohio’s governor, in particular, pictured the rioters in the worst
light. When the National Guard arrived, they were not in any danger from the student protestors, but
for reasons that are still debated to this day, they opened fire, killing four and wounding several
others, including one man who was permanently paralyzed. The shock of this seemed to take spirit
out of the student protest movement, even though there were, of course, other protests and other
students, most notably at Jackson State in Mississippi, would be shot.
Concluding Remarks: Earth Day, Global Warming, and the War in Iraq
I would hate to see a return to the excesses of the Sixties, but I do think students ought to
have a social conscience, and they ought to be idealistic enough to believe they can make the world a
better place; only when they get older should they concede that we can’t and it won’t, although the
effort to improve things may keep the situation from getting worse. Certainly most sane people have
realized now for years that global warming, for example, is a real and serious threat to the planet, yet
Earth Day during the Bush administration has not been characterized by hundreds of thousands of
students marching on Washington to demand action. Also, it’s been painfully clear for some time
that our invasion of Iraq has become a tragic misadventure and that we are repeating all the mistakes
we made in Vietnam. Most notably an utter inability to understand the country we are dealing with
and hence the impossibility of imposing our version of peace. Were students today subject to the
draft, I venture to say that Iraq would be very much on your minds, but since you aren’t, for the most
part the war is treated as if it were somebody else’s problem. The Sixties certainly provide many
cautionary tales, but I think they also provide inspiration. Social justice is everyone’s concern. To
conclude with one more set of generalizations, to which I’m sure there are notable exceptions:
Nowadays the addictions are electronic, mass culture rules people’s minds, and a recent poll finds
that the most common student dream is to become a celebrity in order to compensate for an unhappy
childhood. Things don’t have to be this way. I would humbly submit that Bob Moses might be a
better role model than Paris Hilton, but that’s just me.
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