March 1962

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No, it was in April. It was strange I couldn't tell you the date of one the most memorable days of my life, but an Alta vista search turned up the key. This on-this-date site for April 3 says, “1962 Benny "Kid" Paret, US welterweight boxer, dies after fight, at 24.” I want to tell you about the following Saturday. The forsythia was blooming in Washington, DC, but not in Williamstown MA.

Williams, my college in the hills of western Massachusetts, arranged a student exchange with Howard University, a predominantly black school in Washington, during the spring break of my freshman year. Somehow I was one of the half dozen students selected to go.

Maybe another time I'll come back and tell you more about the rest of that week, sitting in on classes with Rayford W. Logan and E. Franklin Frazier, going with old family friend Al Martin to see the Marine Band parade, and talking with Howard students until all hours.

My biggest impression of the Howard campus was how many different colors the students were. This was 1962, only eight years after Brown vs. Board of Education, and racial integration was the biggest issue in the country. Race relations were a big topic on everyone's mind, and I was used to seeing headlines in terms of black and white (or, in those days, negro and white). If there were four thousand students at Howard, though, there were four thousand different skin colors. You don't have to notice that when only a tenth of the people you see are black, but when you're one of a couple dozen white people on the Howard campus, all of a sudden you do.

When I got to Howard I met my student host, Sam Adebonojo, a graduate student in biology from Nigeria. He and a friend and I watched (or listened on the radio to?) that welterweight fight. Sam got me settled on campus, but I didn't have a lot to do with him most of the week. I didn't have a lot to do with the other Williams students during the week, either. The point was to see what life was like on a predominantly black school, after all, not to hang around with the people I could hang around with all the rest of the year.

You can see that I'm having a hard time working my way to the point. I've been wanting to write this for so long -- this is 1999, that was 1962, that sounds a lot like 37 years -- that I don't want to mess it up. Let me start another page and catch my breath. This isn't going to be a really smooth segue, so you might want to take a breath, too.

After I wrote the next page I went and found my copy of Sing for Freedom, edited and compiled by Guy and Candie Carawan, Sing Out Corporation, ISBN 0-86571-180-8. It has music and more words for the songs on the next page, and other songs that I was trying to remember; and you'll find lots more there about the Civil Rights movement than I can tell you.