Alumni reflect on Civil Rights movement

Three University alumni who played noteworthy roles in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s gathered for a panel discussion titled “John F. Kennedy and Civil Rights: Fifty Years After” on Wednesday in Robertson Hall.

The panelists — John Doar ’44, Nicholas Katzenbach ’45 and Harrison Jay Goldin ’57 — shared anecdotes that shed light on the tumultuous and tense decade they helped shape to a crowd of roughly 200 people.

Doar served as assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in the 1960s, Katzenbach drafted the 1964 Civil Rights Act during his time as U.S. attorney general in the Johnson administration and Goldin served as an attorney in the Department of Justice Office of Civil Rights in the Kennedy administration.

“The environment was one of extraordinary tension,” Goldin said. “We could sense it in the people with whom we spoke.”

Before Goldin took on a senior position in the Department of Justice, he was assigned to room with and facilitate the protection of James Meredith, the first African-American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

Goldin said that he felt he had stepped into “a scene from a World War I movie with troops bivouacked all throughout campus.” The logistical challenges of protecting Meredith involved coordinating the Mississippi Army National Guard, U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. army troops as well as using jeeps and helicopters, Goldin said.

Goldin cited as being particularly memorable a conversation he had with Meredith about not attending the first football game of the school year.

When Goldin tried to persuade Meredith to reconsider his attending the game, Meredith replied, “ ‘I’m on this campus only because the United States District Court said I have the right to be here under the Constitution of the United States. Every other student will be down there at that game, and your job is to protect me,’ ” Goldin said.

Meredith then received calls from then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and then-President John F. Kennedy, to whom he gave the same response.

“That experience had such a profound impact on me that it changed the course of my life,” Goldin said. “For all the failings ... of this country, there is no other place that I can think of then and that I can think of today that I could hear this young man talk to the leader of his country. All the forces of our country were mobilized to protect a single citizen.”

Katzenbach — who played a key role in protecting Meredith as well — chose to emphasize the role of Robert Kennedy in building up the role of the Department of Justice during the Civil Rights movement.

Kennedy built up a “morale that was sky high” in the department using his frankness, his commitment to what was right and his faith in his attorneys, Katzenbach said.

“[Robert Kennedy’s] not a good person to challenge,” Katzenbach said. “If you told him you can’t do it, he’d do it.”

Katzenbach also emphasized the importance of Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi.

“It showed people that you’re going to have to obey the law even if it takes 22,000 soldiers to do it,” he said. “Resistance to equal rights just wasn’t going to work.”

Doar, who is remembered nationally for his ardent commitment to making African-Americans’ right to vote a reality, emphasized the role of Robert Kennedy in the Civil Rights movement as well.

“Our strategy was to open up the vote,” Doar said. “We were able to demonstrate how corrupt and dishonest the system was ... [Kennedy] didn’t believe in corruption.”

Doar also shed light on a specific incident that captured the environment that civil rights activists had to overcome.

Following the death of civil rights advocate Medgar Evars in June of 1963, a riot broke out in Jackson, Mississippi. Doar decided to step in between the rioters and armed police in order to prevent a violent exchange and shouted, “My name is John Doar, D-O-A-R. I’m from the Justice Department, and anybody around here knows I stand for what is right.”

“That sounded like a good movie, didn’t it?” he said. “While I had a lot of confidence in the Jackson police ... I wasn’t at all sure about the sheriff deputies, and they had shotguns. I don’t know really what I thought, but I just walked out there.”

Members of the audience interviewed after the panel described it as poignant and reflective of a relatively recent shift in the American consciousness.

“These are Princeton heroes,” said Dean of the Wilson School Christina Paxson, who attended the lecture. “I thought that it was wonderful that these alumni were able to share their experiences and help us to better understand one of the most important moments in American history.”

Thomas Scott GS, a second-year M.P.A. student at the Wilson School, described the panel as “fantastic.”

“These stories are ones that only they can tell,” Scott said. “It’s an entirely different experience than learning about it through a museum or a book.”

Others who attended the event emphasized the lasting impact of the alumni’s contributions.

“It was very moving,” said Lisa Dunkley ’83, a project analyst in the Office of Stewardship. “These are three men who did a lot of work that had ramifications that will last forever.”

Ben Primer, an associate University librarian at Firestone Library, said that, as someone who grew up in the South before the Civil Rights movement, he thought the progress in U.S. race relations made in the last 50 years is noteworthy.

“If you asked me if we would ever elect a black president in my lifetime, I would have said, ‘No way,’ ” he said. “It’s just an enormous feat that these men accomplished.”

The event was moderated by Thomas Putnam GS ’87, director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, who described the alumni as “heroes of our time.”