Fifty years ago, as we entered our final four months as undergraduates, two groups of events that had been brewing for some time reached critical points. Involvement by some of our classmates had begun earlier. Richard Joseph and other classmates had gone to Alabama, some as early as November 1964, to help mobilize people for the march to assure African Americans the right to vote. Prophetically, Joseph observed to The Daily D, “It’s going to be years and years before things are settled.”


Then, on March 7, 1965, Bloody Sunday, when more than 500 civil rights demonstrators, organized by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and led by John Lewis, sought to march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery. State troopers, some on horseback, others firing teargas, stopped the march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Many of the marchers were knocked to the ground and beaten with nightsticks. Seventeen were hospitalized. The incident was televised nationally and became a turning point in the civil rights movement. Three more marches followed during that month. In the final march Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led an estimated 25,000 protesters to the state capitol.


On behalf of the student government, Joseph had supervised the campus visit and lecture by Malcolm X shortly before the black leader’s assassination on February 21, 1965. Then, in April, he helped host the Northeast Colleges Conference at the College. It featured a keynote address by Lawrence Guyot, chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and John Lewis, chairman of SNCC. More than 200 students from the region attended. In comments to The Daily D, Joseph described the conference as an expression of “the Dartmouth College undergraduate commitment,” to establishing a new direction for the civil rights movement. “Our aim,” he said, “is to stimulate student government to play a more active role in the movement.” During a discussion group he urged “students working in civil rights not to scorn outright student governments, but to involve themselves in the hope of making use of the power and privileges available to them…to provide leadership” in the effort to achieve equality. 


In recognition of a lifetime of work in pursuit of social justice, Richard Joseph, now Northwestern’s John Evans Professor of International History and Politics, was recently honored by Dartmouth College with one of the Martin Luther King Jr. Social Justice Awards—the Lester B. Granger Lifetime Achievement Award. We will be honored to have him as a speaker at our 50th reunion in June.


The day after Bloody Sunday, 3,500 Marines landed in Vietnam. They were the first American designated ground combat forces to land, marking a clear escalation in the conflict.


The next month Phi Beta Kappa inducted 19 classmates, including Pete Baumbusch, Tom Bettman, Walter Carrara, Dave Feldshuh, Chris Fisher, Kris Greene, Chris Knight, Derek Knudsen, Gary Parker, Doug Peterson, Gil Podolsky, John Rapoport, Bill Stanton, Sid Stein, Joel Sternman, Dave Weber, Jay Wright and Alan Zern.


Please send me a note about what you have been doing.


—Tom Long, 1056 Leigh Mill Road, Great Falls, VA 22066; (703) 759-4255; tomlong@gwu.edu