The plan we have been pondering—as college students at Ripon School in central Wisconsin, 60 years in the past this month—appeared loopy at first. But it surely was the Nineteen Sixties, and we have been younger and brimming with the idealism of the age. So we set out confidently to make our nascent plan a actuality.
Nearly a thousand miles away, in Selma, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr. was getting ready to steer a 54-mile voting rights march to Montgomery, the state capital. It was a simply trigger, and we have been keen to affix in. However how would we get there, and the way would we finance the journey?
As we have been mulling it over, Patrick Hunt, the assistant dean of males on the school, obtained a name from Dan Friedlander, a scholar activist on the College of Wisconsin in Madison. He mentioned that about 100 college students from the college could be leaving for Selma quickly on three chartered buses, and he requested whether or not any Ripon college students may be occupied with coming alongside.
After Hunt advised us this, we approached the college chaplain, Jerry Thompson, to see if he could be keen to steer a school-sponsored scholar delegation to Selma. He agreed. However he mentioned he was in no place to finance the journey, neither personally nor from his meager faculty price range.
It appeared to us that the one choice was to method the scholar senate for the funds.
The subsequent night, the president of the senate referred to as an emergency assembly of the physique to contemplate our plan. It was there that we started to appreciate that not everybody was on board with Martin Luther King Jr.’s dictum, set forth in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail” two years earlier than, that “injustice anyplace is a risk to justice in all places.”
On the assembly, Chaplain Thompson was the primary to talk, arguing that touring to Selma, the place the voting rights march was on account of start on Sunday, March 21, 1965, would underscore the college’s dedication to the continued wrestle for civil rights in America.
Some members of the senate contended that the cash could possibly be higher spent elsewhere, comparable to writing a verify to the NAACP or inviting a speaker to campus to handle the problem of voting rights discrimination.
This brought about James Bowditch, a professor within the English division, to explode, saying that throwing cash on the downside—with out having the braveness to place our our bodies on the road for a simply trigger—could be the worst factor we may do.
In the long run, after an hour or so of dialogue, the senate agreed by a vote of 13–9 to allocate $400 for our journey south. Later that night, a few dozen of us met in Chaplain Thompson’s workplace and agreed that we would depart for Madison the subsequent day to affix the others.
The information of what the scholar senate had completed unfold like wildfire throughout the campus that night. College students who had earlier been deaf to what was taking place down south now discovered a cause to be outraged.
Main the protest was a scholar who used his present on the school radio station, WRPN, to induce different college students to show their opposition to this alleged misuse of scholar cash at a mass rally the subsequent morning. About 400 offended college students—roughly half of the scholar physique—heeded his name and turned out the subsequent day to attempt to stop our departure.
Chaplain Thompson sought to calm the group, explaining that the journey to Selma would present the college’s assist for civil rights. Then, as a backhanded praise, he praised the protesters for displaying curiosity in one thing vital “as a substitute of beer and intercourse.”
After a quick risk by some college students to lie down in entrance of our two automobiles, the ten of us—six college students and 4 school members—have been quickly on our means. We arrived in Madison a few hours later and have been herded onto one of many three buses headed for Selma.
On arriving in Chicago, nonetheless, we have been knowledgeable that the scenario in Alabama had grow to be too harmful for us to proceed, given the beating of White school college students in Montgomery the day earlier than and the continued violence and rigidity in and round Selma. We have been advised that our new vacation spot could be Washington, DC, the place we might be a part of protesters outdoors the White Home demanding that President Johnson ship federal troops to Alabama to guard the civil rights activists who have been already there.
In DC, we have been dissatisfied that we weren’t in Selma, the place the motion was. So 5 of us—Chaplain Thompson, Hunt, and three college students, together with me—determined to lease a automobile and drive to Selma, the place we might arrive the day earlier than the Selma-to-Montgomery march was on account of start.
Collaborating within the march, one of many pivotal moments within the civil rights motion of the Nineteen Sixties, was inspiring. It modified my life.
What was additionally inspiring was being welcomed on our return to Ripon School a couple of days later with expressions of assist from some college students, like Jim Reed, a sophomore from Seattle. Jim wrote within the scholar newspaper that he was bored with listening to individuals say that “we Northerners” had no proper “to go meddling in different individuals’s affairs.” He wrote that “we’re one nation and one individuals.” And he ventured that maybe “the fundamental cause that the issue has been so unhealthy for thus lengthy, is that delicate individuals within the North have felt it was none of their enterprise. … What’s going on within the South immediately is our downside as properly.”
After receiving a PhD at Harvard, Reed went on to pursue a distinguished profession as an historian and educator, ultimately winding up as president of the Massachusetts Fulbright Affiliation. He has since handed away.
If I have been capable of see him immediately, I’d thank him for his assist a few years in the past in school. And I’m positive we might agree that, certainly, “injustice anyplace is a risk to justice in all places.”
