- The War's Indirect Intrusions
- Facing The War Directly 1968-1969
- A Harsh Yet Enlightening Interloper
- Release From the War
Perhaps the most important role of small groups such as the Steering Committee for Peace Action was to link the campus to national groups such as the National Student Mobilization Committee (the “Mobe”).
Even in the winter lull, the national went ahead with plans to escalate protest in the spring. Donald Einhorn ’71, Eric Vaughn ’73, Molly Garrett Glassberg ’70 and a few other Wittenberg students participated in the Mobe’s Cleveland conference.
At home, however, a meeting drew only 17 people “and one dog.” Accordingly, the strong campus response to Nixon’s April 30 announcement that he had sent 8,000 U.S. troops into Cambodia suggests that both antiwar sentiment and a disposition to protest had become latent at Wittenberg.
That Thursday night plans were made for a rally and silent vigil in front of the Union the next day. Sheets were painted, posters and announcements made and distributed early Friday.
By noon there was a line of concerned people from Hanley Hall to the Business Center (now Student Development). In the afternoon, with the aid of a P.A. system, students engaged in an open “rap,” planned another vigil for Saturday and listened to a spontaneous rock jam session.
About 150 students and faculty called for a three-day fast to begin Sunday night. “Fasting is a way to say I care about America,” said one.
On Monday, May 4, the campus was rocked by word that four students at Kent State had been shot by National Guardsmen. An open meeting at 11 p.m. attracted some 700 people to the Union dining room, and the Union remained open through the night.
There were students present who had never before been involved in war or protest issues. Some of them called for extreme action in vehement language.
As the meeting became ever more heated, M.K. Millen Fynn ’74 was moved to take the mike and call for calm and for a constructive, nonviolent response to the tragedy. She was booed off the floor.
Eventually passions cooled and a couple of faculty members came forward. They would ask their colleagues to put their names on a full-page protest in the Springfield newspaper, and to help pay for it, they would put themselves on the line in their community.
What would the students do? The young people promised to publish a comparable signed protest in the Torch, to hold an informal teach-in the next day, and to build the war and protest issues into Parents Weekend at the end of the week.
At their Tuesday meeting, the faculty suspended Wednesday classes for a formal teach-in. When parents arrived on campus Friday they found themselves involved in a teach-in that included small-group exchanges with students and faculty.
On Saturday the Torch published a special Cambodia edition that included student and faculty columns. The following Tuesday, May 12, Peter Davis ’72, president of Concerned Black Students, convened a meeting in the light of the death of six blacks in Augusta, Ga.
Black victims of violence deserved as much recognition as whites, he said, and he challenged Wittenberg to take a stronger stand on student rights, the use of outside force, and the recent tragic killings.
The CBS meeting was interrupted by a bomb scare, and some 150 students headed instinctively for the chapel. Robert Hartje was with them, had been with the students through the whole tragic time since that first word from Kent State, not only because his son John was a leader in the antiwar group but because of his innate empathy for students under pressure.
In the chapel he finally found release from the tension. The following morning at 7:30 students returned for a memorial service for the Georgia students.
And the next day two black students at Jackson State College, Miss. were shot and killed in their dorms by law officers. The emotion of that first two weeks in May cannot be recaptured. T
he 1970 yearbook recalled, “An overwhelming feeling of crisis, anger, and disgust had brought many together.” Whole university systems — in Georgia and California, for example — and many universities and colleges closed down for the rest of the year.
Wittenberg remained open. It had absorbed the tragedy and responded to it as a community. Some wished to go further; some could not imagine finishing out the year as though it were normal.
There was a constructive proposal to give students the option of academic credit for community or political work-study, but it failed to get student endorsement. No one had the last word on the year.
But several nights after M.K. Millen was rebuffed in her appeal for peace in the Kent State meeting, she and a friend climbed up inside the clock tower of Recitation Hall and painted a peace sign on the clock window.
Just to be certain their action was understood as a serious commitment to peace and no prank, the girls painted an alpha and an omega on two other windows of the clock tower.
“No matter what, you’re in the insulated and lush world of Wittenberg University...,” the editors of the 1968 Witt yearbook had observed. “But in flashes of insight and the crush of events, the larger world of reality may become a harsh yet enlightening interloper.”