My Activist Moment

In the spring of 1964, I was a senior at Queens College in New York City, an English major with an unmapped future and unable to take my situation seriously despite the growing likelihood that I would soon be in Vietnam.   

In that vein, I participated in the schoolwide mock political convention to choose a Republican opponent for Lyndon Johnson in November. Johnson's nomination was assured, so it seemed more realistic to battle over the GOP candidate.

While my delegation formulated its strategy, I went my own way, backing former Kansas Gov. Alf Landon, the 1936 nominee, for another run. I even made up signs: "Alf Is Alive!" one assured. Another read "A Vote for Landon Is a Drop in the Bucket."   

My fellow delegates tolerated my little eccentricity, especially since I assured them I'd be with them on the final roll call. But my mini-campaign illustrates that I was content to have a little fun rather than create a workable agenda and find ways to advance it.

One day I was wandering around the student center when the fellow who ran the Student Help Project, a tutoring program for underprivileged children, said he wanted me to meet someone.

"This is Andy," he said. "He's going down to Mississippi to work on the voting rights project this summer."

I looked at Andy. He was slender with fairly long brown hair and had a distant look, as if he was  visualizing his mission and was impatient to begin.

"Andy, I admire what you're doing," I said. "But I think you have to be crazy to go down there."

The conversation didn't last much longer. Later that day, I ran into the fellow who had introduced us again.

 "You didn't make him feel too good," he said.

The semester ended but I had to take one more course to finish a sequence, so I went to summer school.

Andy Goodman went to Mississippi, where, of course, he was murdered along with a friend of his and a local civil rights worker named James Chaney.

Later that summer, student leaders announced that a silent vigil would be held on the campus plaza. I turned up a few minutes after it started.

I slipped into a gap between a couple of acquaintances and bowed my head along with everyone else. Afer a minute or so I glanced up. Everyone else was still looking down. A few minutes later I repeated the process.

Although it was my first silent vigil, the first word should have told me all I needed to know.  It didn't. I looked up one more time and said, "What are we doing?"

A few people shuffled their feet. One said, "We are having a silent vigil. Show respect."

My response: "We're doing exactly what the people who killed Andy want us to do. Nothing."

One of the organizers looked up. "Do you have a suggestion?"

I did. "There's tremendous support in this community now for the Mississippi project and we need to take advantage of it.   Let's go out and collect money before that sympathy disappears."

We formed groups and hit many Queens neighborhoods that evening. My group of three rang doorbells in an area I'd never visited. Most people gave us at least a few coins.

I rang one bell and my two partners took a couple of steps back. They seemed to know something I didn't.

A woman's voice asked who was there. I told her who we were and what we wanted. A minute went by. Just when I thought she had decided not to open the door I heard it click.

The older black woman who opened the door invited us inside. "We get a lot of people just ringing the bell and knocking on the door to bother us," she said.  She gave us a couple of dollars.

Outside, one of my companions told us that we had just been in the home of Roy Wilkins, president of the NAACP.  

A couple of months later, after a couple of hurried applications, I found myself in grad school _ at the University of Georgia. There were two strongly held opinions there: that the demands for racial equality would go away if everyone ignored them, and that the new football coach would win two games that season and get fired.

They weren't right on either issue.