May 9, Rick Halperin, director of the SMU Dallas Human Rights Program, for a commentary in which Professor Halperin contemplated the future of his graduating human rights scholars while recalling his personal journey of protests as an undergraduate 50 years ago. Published in USA Today: https://bit.ly/3f3RFrx
It is that time of year when university students complete end-of-semester projects and prepare for exams in May.
Many graduates will pivot to advanced studies in graduate school while others head into the for-profit and nonprofit worlds. Some may be embarking on a gap year to wait out the lingering effects of the pandemic.
I anticipate many of my students in the Southern Methodist University Human Rights Program, where I teach, will remain active in social justice causes for Black Lives Matter, women’s and LGBTQ rights, anti-hate activism and beyond.
For many, an uncertain personal and national future is looming – circumstances I find personally familiar.
By Rick Halperin
It is that time of year when university students complete end-of-semester projects and prepare for exams in May.
Many graduates will pivot to advanced studies in graduate school while others head into the for-profit and nonprofit worlds. Some may be embarking on a gap year to wait out the lingering effects of the pandemic.
I anticipate many of my students in the Southern Methodist University Human Rights Program, where I teach, will remain active in social justice causes for Black Lives Matter, women’s and LGBTQ rights, anti-hate activism and beyond.
For many, an uncertain personal and national future is looming – circumstances I find personally familiar.
Grading papers this time of year reminds me of my undergraduate days and experiences, centered at George Washington University located just three blocks from the White House during the social and political upheaval from 1967 to 1971.
Exhausting in every way possible
I attended my first (peaceful) anti-war rally at the Pentagon in October 1967 with 55,000 people. I was studying history and philosophy, young (17) and idealistic about wanting my nation to end its terribly divisive war in Vietnam and to concentrate on achieving racial and gender-based justice. And then came 1968, arguably the most significant year in the second half of the 20th century in the United States. It proved to be exhausting in every way possible.
The Tet Offensive was unleashed in Vietnam, and though a complete military debacle for Hanoi, was a paradigm-changing moment in America as public opinion would swing permanently against the war for its remaining years.
On Feb. 8, after three nights of increasing racial tension over efforts by South Carolina State College students and other supporters to desegregate a bowling alley business, state police opened fire and killed three students and wounded 28 people in the first tragedy of its kind on any American college campus. The Orangeburg massacre would be a sad portent of things to come.
American forces would commit the worst known war crime in our history at My Lai on March 16; President Lyndon Johnson announced to a shocked nation on March 31 that he would not seek reelection; four days later the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be assassinated in Memphis.
With fellow students, I watched much of Washington, D.C., go up in flames that night. Sen. Bobby Kennedy, who would be assassinated two months later, delivered a prophetic speech the next day entitled “The Mindless Menace of Violence”; it is a lesson this nation has still not embraced.
The nation struggled through more violence that summer at the Chicago Democratic National Convention, as we watched a police riot against demonstrators on television. Cold War tensions were pushed again as Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia, and John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s Black Power salute from the victory medal stand at the Mexico City Olympics was a painful reminder of how much work remained to be done to fulfill Dr. King’s vision of a more just society.
More years of turbulence
The next year, 1969, brought little relief. The Vietnam War, now the responsibility of President Richard Nixon, would grind on with no end in sight. Britain sent troops to Northern Ireland to quell sectarian violence in what would become known as “The Troubles,” a skirmish to last three decades.
The uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York in June would forever change America and its LGBTQ struggles, and the counterculture would reach its peaceful zenith in August at Woodstock, New York, with crowds over 400,000. The Tate-LaBianca killings by the Charles Manson “family” that summer in California would make Manson a cult figure for decades to come.
The largely peaceful anti-war movement reached its peak that November as more than 500,000 protesters of all ages and generations converged on Washington while the president stated he would not be swayed, watching sports on TV instead.
The last two years of my undergraduate days seem like a blur. Monthly protests against the war, riots in the city and on our campus, and, following Nixon’s announcement again to a stunned nation that we had secretly been bombing Cambodia, the twin national tragedies in the spring of 1970 with student killings at Kent State University in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi.
A nation still divided
I graduated from college 50 years ago this May, but only after the tense days when the war, protest and struggle for democracy all met on the streets of the nation’s capital resulting in the May Day riots of 1971.
A record 7,000 people were arrested that day, the largest amount in American history; 12,000 would be arrested in total. (I was arrested more than a dozen times during my undergraduate days — always for my nonviolent participation.)
It had seemed as though the country was coming apart at the seams, unable and frequently unwilling to meet the demands of those struggling for social, economic and political justice. It all occurred without cellphones, Twitter and other social media.
Now, 50 years later, as a new generation of graduates gets ready to enter the next stage of their lives, they may wonder what lies ahead for both them and a nation still clashing with itself, again with no end in sight.
I hope that their idealism will push us closer to the just society so many want and desperately need, and that they remember that their turn at running this country is at hand.
May they learn the lessons of the past and be more successful at ushering in a future founded in the simple truth that this country has thus far failed to produce, namely, that there truly is no such thing as a lesser person.
Rick Halperin is the director of the SMU Dallas Human Rights Program. He has served several terms on the Amnesty International USA Board of Directors, including as chairman from 1992-93 and 2005-07.