“We’re having fun, here!”

…Ring-toss Game Concessionaire (Harry Morgan), State Fair

 

Being among the group who participated in the Montgomery demonstrations marked you, for good or evil.  And as the campus at that time had only around 800 students, there was no way to blend into a crowd…there weren’t any.  You couldn’t even band together at dinner and eat in peace.  All seating was assigned, in a lame attempt to have at least one person from each class at every table.  Although there were a lot of students and some professors who were supportive, a far greater number were not.  The professors more or less just kept their counsel.  The students did not, and a sizeable number were downright hostile.

Totem Inn in the basement of the old women’s gym was a particular problem.  I didn’t spend a lot of time in “Tote,” as it was called, even though it was the only place mid-campus where you could actually hang out, talk, and eat something.  The little mailroom and all the student mailboxes were there.  I was still getting Time Magazine, and I was keeping up a steady correspondence with friends from high school.  Plus, every Friday I got a letter from home containing two dollars.  So just like most everybody else, I ended up walking through “Tote” a couple times a day.  Many of the football players and jock wannabes congregated at tables close to the south wall, where they would all sit facing out.  Normally, they were just loud and mildly obnoxious with that insecure defensiveness disguised as bravado and directed mostly at coeds.  For whatever reason, they were unanimous in their disdain for the male participants, and most of us were the subject of sneers and stupid comments, the latter delivered loud enough so everyone could hear.  I would come in through the northeast entrance closest to the men’s dorms, check my mailbox on the wall right in front of door, then walk diagonally across the entire floor, and go out the southwest door, which was closest to Student’s Hall and the science building.  This path resulted in maximum exposure to the crowd sitting along the south wall.  I was never actually threatened, and as far as I know, no one else was, either.  But there it was:  something else to add an edge to the daily grind of classes, labs, and working your ass off in the dining hall.

One incident that really stunned me happened in “Tote” and had nothing to do with athletes.  In a rare moment not long after we got back, I was sitting at a table with fellow participant Fred Bailey when in walked a group of three coeds who were waitresses in the Oneida dining hall, where I worked “elevators up” with Ken McFadden and Phil Jones.  I had always gotten along well with the waitresses, who treated me like the scullery crew’s little brother because of following in the footsteps of my older brother, who worked in the dining hall four years and who graduated the June before I started.  The dining hall crew was tight knit.  It was hard, miserable work, took up an enormous amount of time, and was pretty much thankless.  All of us knew that we were there only because we had to be:  neither we nor our parents had the money to pay our way.  So I didn’t expect what was coming.  One of them really tore into me about how I should’ve minded my own business and that we all should have been arrested in Montgomery and then tossed out of school when we got back.  I’ve never been particularly fast with a comeback, and I was so surprised I was speechless.  Fred, who also worked in the dining hall, started in on them.  Moral judgments were soon flying back and forth, and I ended up in the middle trying to calm things down but only able to interject things like “…wait a minute…hold on…but…”  The coeds finally stomped off with a parting “you’re just disgusting.”  One of them turned around and glared right at me:  “And I expected better from YOU.”  Only ten feet away, the jocks just snickered.  I could feel my ears burning.

The developing consensus was that we were either just thrill seekers or egotists who saw the whole thing as a way to make ourselves important.  Without any of us saying or doing much of anything, we were held to be arrogant with a holier-than-thou attitude of superiority.  People I didn’t even know and with whom I had never spoken a word assumed I was some sort of civil rights ambulance chaser, grabbing at a chance for fleeting significance in an otherwise wretched 18-year life.  All it did was make me mad.

 

The one criticism we could do something about was the one that claimed there was no reason other than the limelight for going south and that we should’ve stayed right at home and worked on racial issues in the Huntingdon area.  The first step was taken barely a week after most everybody had returned to campus.  From my entry for Thursday, March 25th:

“Attended Senate meeting and civil rights meeting.  Am member of a committee which will serve as a liaison between organization and national groups.”

A new committee was born that night and given the acronym SCORE, which stood for Student Committee On Racial Equality.  At the start, it was uncertain exactly what the group would do.  Certainly, Juniata admissions policy was something to work on:  the school was essentially pure white with only a few blacks from the local communities and a tiny number from out of the area.  There was a group in Mt. Union called HOPE (How Our People Exist) that could use students to help with tutoring.  Dean Heberling and Professor Crosby had both been involved in local civil rights activities for a number of years.  It was  agreed to have regular meetings, and a small workgroup was formed to write a statement of principles.

The administration immediately threw up a roadblock by refusing to charter the group as an official campus organization.  This pointless and blatantly harassing battle with SCORE continued for the entire three years of the group’s existence and resulted in its being a sort of unwillingly shadow organization.  We were allowed space for meetings but received no college stipend.  The administration also saw to it that we were barred from mention in the college yearbook, the Alfarata (named for a mythical Indian “princess”).  Thus, there are a scattering of “SCORE-1,2…” entries in the activities listings under the pictures of a small number of graduating seniors in each of the three later yearbooks (1966-1968), but no mention in the yearbooks themselves about what in the world SCORE was.

 

 

When word got around campus that SCORE existed, the challenges became more direct and more frequent.  I don’t ever recall being physically intimidated or threatened outright, but I do remember being on the defensive.  Because of my inability to come up with quick retorts, I wrote down an outline of what I believed to be the central tenants of entire civil rights movement followed by thought-out responses to the three most common criticisms (I call them “attacks”) leveled at us by students.  I used the very same spiral-bound notebook in which I wrote my journal of the Montgomery demonstrations.

The three pages of text are provided in Figures VI-3 through VI-5, followed by the text itself, set off in italics.  I have no idea how I arrived at all of this.  If I talked with anyone, it would’ve been John Garrett.   I don’t recall memorizing any of it or even having to use it.

 

 

 

Page one starts with three circled items at the very top, followed by three Roman numeral items:

“1.  READ ABOUT DEMONSTRATIONS

2. REACT – VIOLENT OPINIONS
3. IN THAT – DEMONSTRATIONS HAVE DONE MOST OF WHAT THEY WANT TO ACCOMPLISH! 

I  Negroes Committed To Action

Federal and state do nothing

Nominal efforts unsuccessful: problems

Economy poor

Education poor

General fear and intimidation

A method needed to overcome stifling power structure

Cannot work within it

No support to work from without 

II  Problem That No One Knows Or Cares About

National attention needed

Influence needed to change inert system

Force people to recognize & confront problem

Normal channels unsatisfactory

Test cases too slow

Formal pressures ineffective 

III  Demonstrations Reveal Wrongs

Show that something is going on

Arouse and focus indignation

Force power structure to reveal position

Violence against peaceful demonstrations

Subtle terrors unmasked

Leads to attention to other areas”

 

The flip side of the page continues with three more Roman numerals: 

“IV  Direct Aims Of Demonstrations

Public accommodations

Bus boycotts & freedom rides:  transportation

Little Rock: education

Sit-ins: restaurants, barbershops, etc.

Selma march:  suffrage

Tacoma Beach:  recreation

Picketing:  housing

Human rights

Little Rock:  education

Selma March:  right to vote

Bogalusa:  employment

 

V  Results Of Demonstrations

School Integration Act

Civil Rights Act

National concern – citizens and congress

Pressure and overruling of local power structure

Foothold in long battle for equality

 

VI  Conclusion

Civil disobedience proves only way

Federal government protects demonstrations

Laws broken shown to be wrong

Now have foothold

Laws provide basis for more work

People united in common cause”

 

Finally, my list of three “attacks” with what I thought were appropriate responses: 

“ATTACK #1:  NO RIGHT TO BREAK LAWS

Most use moral judgment

Government is not God

When not representative, usually oppressive

If not democratic, must use other means

Laws broken done away with by Fed. Gov’t.

Once human rights granted, breaking laws unnecessary

ATTACK #2:  ACTUALLY VIOLENT METHOD

Movement is strictly non-violent

Violence committed by power structure

Violence unnecessary in situation

No effort to examine problem

No attempt to solve it

Reactionary answer is result

 

ATTACK #3:  SOUTH NOT READY; MUST CHANGE WHITES

White stagnant for 100 years

Problem is to get rights first

Once equality is guaranteed, understanding will come”

 

I didn’t carry the notebook around campus and whip it out every time I got into an argument.  In fact, I don’t remember what I did with it.  But there it was, just in case.

I was home on Sunday, April 4^th, the last day of the weeklong “spring recess.”  My entry in the little red book notes:

            “Church and Sunday school.  Lectured on Alabama.”

There’s a sad, little story behind those two, short phrases.  I had been asked by Charles Schlegel, a high school history and social studies teacher, to give a talk to his tenth grade students about my experiences.  He also taught Sunday school at my church, the Albright Evangelical United Brethren, which occupied most of the block on the northwest corner of Fifth and Chestnut Streets in Sunbury.  Mr. Schlegel was the junior varsity basketball coach and was one of those teachers NOBODY messed-with.  I have no idea how he earned his reputation, but the students were uniformly scared to death of him, including the biggest bad-asses whose destinies were limited to the Marines or the slammer.

I was down at the high school mid-week and gave an emotional, over the top performance with only a few embellishments.  Mr. Schlegel turned out to be very well informed and amazingly sympathetic.  He asked the class a bunch of questions and tried to draw them out into a discussion of civil rights in general.  The class was indifferent, but word must’ve gotten around because just a day later I was walking home from the library after it closed at 9 PM when a car full of kids drove past me, and somebody yelled out the back window, “Go back to Alabama, asshole!”  I could hear the shrieks of laughter as the car sped away.   I was both hurt and angry and remember thinking, ‘Go back?  Go BACK?  I’m hometown.  Hell, I’m BACK right now!’

I stewed the rest of the evening and had a hard time getting to sleep.  Somehow, I had changed in the seven short months I had been away at college, and somehow my hometown had not kept up.  Somehow, I had become a changeling, resented by those with whom I most identified.  Or was that sense of identity fading away?  I was sure I was in the right.  But did that matter here at home?  At least at Juniata no one had called me an asshole.  Did I belong more at college than at home?  I fell asleep listening to the Tommy Shannon AM rock ‘n roll radio program on WKBW, Buffalo.

After the talk at the high school, Mr. Schlegel asked me to do a repeat for his junior-high-age Sunday school class, and I agreed.  My older brother Fred was in town, down from MIT, and my mother’s brother Dale Strouse and his family were up from Camp Hill for the weekend.  Not knowing what kind of reception I’d get at church, that Saturday I talked Fred and my cousin Pam Strouse into taking a walk with me all the way to the top of Mile Hill and out the road to Klinesgrove, where my high school friend Larry Bassett lived.  I remember wanting to walk somewhere without worrying about being watched or followed.  Even though my tenure in the South was a short one, the incident on Thursday night had brought back the most unsettling of all the memories.

It was a pleasant day, and I remember most the wind.  The road runs along the spine of a long, high hill with views to the west all the way to Laurel and Chestnut Ridges in the heart of the Appalachians and to the east past Treverton Mountain and on into the mysterious keeps of the middle western anthracite coal fields.  Maybe I was subconsciously thinking that the wind would blow away all the bad memories.  I wanted to feel free and as far away as possible from all of that.  Rather than trying to sort it all out, all I wanted was distance.  We walked for a good four miles and talked about everything except civil rights.

We got back in the late afternoon, tired and flushed.  My mother made a big meal, and afterwards Fred, Pam, and I walked down to the soda shop at the “uptown” Rea & Derrick drug store.  Everybody was back for spring break, and I got to wear my dark blue cardigan sweater with my just-received varsity letter with the winged foot for cross country.  The booths were stuffed and there was no place to sit.  Everybody seemed to be talking at once, a nickel Coke in one hand and a cigarette in the other.  The stores on Market Street stayed open until 9 PM on Saturday night, so we walked down to Cameron Park and back up.  The older guys were already parking their hotrods in front of the bank and carefully sitting their drag trophies on the roofs.  Others were cruising the circuit.  When we got back to “Rea’s,” there were a couple of small knots of kids out on the sidewalk, talking and leaning on the parking meters.  As we joined one of the groups, for one brief moment I wanted to stay and wanted the long walk in the country and the dinner with relatives and the soda shop and the walk downtown to last forever.  As we left everybody and made our way out to Wolverton Street and home, I kept repeating to myself that I had made the right choice.

On Sunday, we were to leave for Juniata right after the traditional noon Sunday dinner.  I was down at the church by 8:30 AM and gave a repeat performance for what turned out to be a combined Sunday school class made up of junior high kids through adults.  I managed to get through it all before one of the adults said, “I don’t think it was your Christian duty to do any of that.”  All hell broke loose, and in a Sunday school class at that.  I had never committed to memory all the notes shown in Figures 3 through 5, and I stumbled right out of the block.  A kid a class ahead of me in high school, Donnie Michaels, finally came to my rescue by talking about the impossibility of legislating morality and offering that sometimes direct action had to be taken when all other recourse had failed.  The heated argument shifted focus away from me, and I faded into the background and sat down.  I remembered that our pastor only five years before had warned the congregation that if they voted for Jack Kennedy and he won, the Pope would be running the country.  So I guessed it all fit.  The arguments and epithets, celestial and earthy, were finally trumped by the beginning of the regular morning church service.  Everybody filed sullenly out, most avoiding eye contact.  I went directly home, surprising my mother, who was busy with the roast beef.  Later on the long drive back to campus, the Saturday night idyll lost more and more of its glow the further we drove southwest down Route 522.

My diary lasted only one more week.  After writing longingly of high school days on Monday night, I’m back into the swing of campus life, gushing over Don Hope’s lectures in Literary Forms, rhapsodizing over a performance of Zoo Story in Oller Hall, bragging about mid-term grades, detailing a drive with John Garrett out to the Pine Ridge tunnels on the Pennsy middle division mainline.  The diary ends on Monday, April 12^th with a paean to spring.  Not a word about civil rights.

I have no notes about meetings of SCORE or any other campus happenings through to the end of the semester.  But that didn’t mean that things weren’t happening.  We quickly found out that Reverend Witt, pastor at the local Evangelical United Brethren Church and fellow participant, was being shunned by his congregation.  Word had it that most people either refused to acknowledge him or shake his hand as he stood at the church door after the Sunday morning service, or they simply went out another door and avoided him altogether.  Sunday donations plummeted.  A number of us started going to the Sunday morning service.  As a member of the Sunbury EUB church, I felt some small amount of belonging in the Huntingdon congregation, sort of like a distant cousin who only gets home once a decade or so.  On our first visit, there were only three or four people in the pews besides our small group.  The number never increased.  We kept returning until classes ended at the end of May.  I learned upon returning to campus that summer that he had been voted out of the congregation.

At one SCORE meeting, Don Hope showed up with about a dozen copies of a book of poetry he had edited while in graduate school at the University of Michigan.  He was offering them at one dollar, with all the money going to the SCORE treasury.  I immediately bought one and turned to the table of contents.  I recognized some of the names:  Donald Hall, X.J. Kennedy, John Heath-Stubbs, and W.D. Snodgrass.  There were also two poems by Don Hope himself.  It was dated 1961.  My autographed copy was lost, along with most of my personal memorabilia that I had with me (luckily, a lot, including the materials in this narrative, were still in storage at my parents’ house in Sunbury), during an ugly divorce in the spring of 1970.  I was able to find a copy on the internet, and the cover and title page are shown in Figure VI-9.

One issue at hand for SCORE was the election of officers for the upcoming school year.  Many of the participants would be gone from campus during their junior year abroad, including John Garrett and Janet Kaufman, and a few others I had gotten to know well during my freshman year.  For some odd reason, my closest friends all seemed to be one year ahead of me.  And most were going abroad for their junior year.  Others, such as Harriet Richardson and John Fike, were graduating.  A few such as Jim Lehman, were going to be so tied up with other obligations, they declined to run for office.  Luckily, Gary Rowe stood for president and was elected unanimously.  I don’t remember who the other officers were.  One of the first things the new officers did was put up a motion that SCORE send what little money we had collected and saved from the trip to Ed Jones, whose house we stayed at in Montgomery.  Ed had been thrown out of college and had lost his job due to his civil rights activities.  It wasn’t much (I vaguely remember $75), but it was all we had.

 

One event that had import for SCORE during the summer was my being invited to participate in the chemistry department summer research program.  This was a coveted prize for chemistry majors and involved returning to campus for the summer term and doing research.  You got to be on campus, had to pay a modest amount for room and board, and got to play in the chem labs for three months.  No classes, no homework, and no exams. The only obligation other than showing up and doing something was to give a talk at the end of the summer.  It was not trivial because I already knew that summer jobs were just about impossible to find in my hometown, where the manufacturing base was already eroding badly.  Westinghouse had moved out in the early 1950’s, Sunbury Textiles was barely existing at one-tenth its capacity, and others, such as Westinghouse, Champ Hats, and H.C. Bob were long gone.

I ended my freshman year more or less physically and mentally worn out.  I had managed to survive with a 3.00 grade point average, and I had a job for the summer.  I was regretting my chemistry major, but was stuck with it for the short haul because it was responsible for my upcoming paid summer “vacation.”  At the final SCORE meeting, it was decided that Elmer Maas and I would serve as the on-campus coordinators for whatever might come SCORE’s way.  Gary Rowe and Phil Jones had signed up to travel down to Georgia in Phil’s 1955 Chevy and go through field worker training at SCLC headquarters.