So I spent some time at the Harvard campus this weekend, and visited the “encampment” on Harvard Yard. It brought back some memories.
As some of you know, I’m an academic brat, and spent a fair bit of my childhood growing up around Harvard, mostly in various married student apartments. My dad got his Ph.D at the Divinity School, and we were around there basically from when I turned 4 until I turned 9, with a year off when we lived in Heidelberg as my father taught at the University of Heidelberg.
It was the 1960s, which means that there was a lot of protesting going on, of course, and my father was involved in a fair bit of it. Most of it took place elsewhere – for example, he traveled south back to his home turf in central Alabama to participate in the march at Selma, and was in the room with Martin Luther King and his advisers when some important decisions were made. (District Judge Frank Johnson, generally viewed as pro-civil rights, had issued a temporary restraining order blocking the march. Some of King’s advisors wanted to violate the order, which they, probably correctly, thought was unconstitutional. King said that they had gotten a lot of court orders against the segregationists, who had grudgingly obeyed them, and that was sure to come to an end if the civil rights folks started flouting them in their turn. They prayed instead of marching, until the order was lifted.)