Old News: Reaction to MLK Assassination at Amherst

Sonia Chajet Wides ’25 Managing Features Editor

“The murder of Martin Luther King has eliminated room for doubt, fluctuation and moderation. Action and result are all that is left.” — Tuffy Simpkins

’69

For this week’s edition of Old News, instead of letting a random number generator decide upon a year in the college’s history to look back on, I intentionally chose 1968.

This week in 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. I wanted to commemorate the 55th anniversary of his murder and take a look at how Amherst College responded at the time. Because of his leadership, Dr. King’s assassination was a deeply important moment in American history and across movements for racial justice. It also came in the middle of an enormously eventful year, in which the Vietnam War raged on, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated and Richard Nixon won the presidency, catapulting the nation into conservative backlash to the previous decade’s social upheaval.

At Amherst, these events were experienced by a campus community that was still all-male, with a graduating class that was just 2 percent Black. Like many schools around this time, the campus was ripe with student activism and political discussion. In the weeks surrounding Dr. King’s murder, The Student documented impromptu gatherings and speeches on the quad, community organizing meetings, protests, and fasts.

I knew from research for an article about diversity in admissions last year that many students at Amherst felt that Dr. King’s assassination further motivated the college community to make more strident demands about racial justice at Amherst.

In these papers, I saw on display the radicalization and galvanization that Dr. King’s assassination provided for so many students and faculty, and the beginnings of the major changes it would contribute to at the College and off campus.

Amherst in April 1968

I began with the April 4, 1968, edition of The Student, which was published in the morning, before Dr. King was shot and killed that evening. So the issue did not include the assassination in its news, but it gave me some context as to what the political environment was like at Amherst at the time.

One story reported on a student rent strike in the town of Amherst.

Another discussed the several proposals of Student Council member Jon Tobis ’69 to “publicize the repressiveness and brutality” of Massachusetts abortion laws, including the establishment “of an illegal Abortion Loan Fund … through which students could borrow up to $300 interest free for a year.”

Unsurprisingly, many stories related to the Vietnam War, the draft, and deferring it. Faculty had just voted to cancel classes on May 4 for a Day of Inquiry on American Involvement in Vietnam.

Discussions of racial justice also abounded: a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John Wilson, “a leader in the Black Power and peace movements,” was to speak in Converse Hall.

One opinion piece on prejudice at Amherst read: “Prejudice is out of fashion at Amherst. And repressed or rechanneled with extreme sophistication. Oh, occasionally there will be a joke at the expense of one minority group or another, but they are never meant seriously, of course … But you let it pass by. Because it isn’t that important, somehow. Amherst is different. The National Commission on Civil Disorders may say that there is white racism in the United States. But not at Amherst.”

The biggest discussion was about then-President Lyndon B. Johnson’s announcement that he would not run again in the 1968 election. A news article reported that students were widely celebratory in response to the announcement: “Firecrackers exploded well into the night, the Hallelujah Chorus blared from several dorms.” Students were generally unfavorable towards Johnson’s Vietnam War policy, and hoped that other Democratic candidates would be more staunchly anti-war.

But an editorial cautioned students not to celebrate too much: “We would do well to forget our cries of jubilation and our outpourings of praise … before we choke on them … The war goes on … We have to support a very new and radical system of values or there will be more fighting and dying in Vietnam and there will be more Vietnams. There will be more riots and more poverty.” Later that day, the murder of Dr. King would remind campus of this violent reality.

After the Assassination

The April 8 edition of The Student’s front page read, “Death of Martin Luther King Leaves Campus Sad and Angry.” The article’s author, Tim Hardy ’69, wrote, “A feeling of great loss and deep sorrow was inseparable from an equally strong feeling of anger towards American racism as Amherst mourned the death last Thursday of the assassinated Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.”

Dr. King was fatally shot at a motel in Memphis, where he had traveled to support striking Black sanitation workers. The night before, Dr. King had delivered his famously prophetic speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” in which he said, “I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

Just after Dr. King’s death was reported on the evening of the 4th, a spontaneous demonstration commenced on the town common, where, according to Hardy, “the anger at American society overshadowed the feeling of grief and sorrow over King’s death.” The demonstration that evening began with 600 students from UMass Amherst marching down Pleasant Street, where they convened with Amherst College students to form a crowd of 1,000 people, who sang songs such as “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “We Shall Overcome.”

Two Amherst students spoke at the demonstration, Tom Sellers ’71, and Eric Bohman ’70, who was president of Amherst’s chapter of the national Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). “Bohman told the marchers not to forget that a racist society, and not a single insane man, was responsible for King’s death,” Hardy wrote.

An informal panel the next morning in Johnson Chapel featured Bohman, Sellers, and other students and faculty, drawing a crowd of over 150 students. At the panel, Sellers was quoted as saying, “I see racism as the most pervasive, basic part of our society … King was the best friend the white man ever had. His goal is alive, but his tactic (non-violence) is dead.”

I talked to Sellers this week, and 55 years later, he recalled that King’s assassination dealt a blow to people’s faith in non-violence: “There was a feeling, like it was not just the death of Dr. King, but it was like the death of non-violence as a strategy and as a tactic for the civil rights movement.”

Upon reflection, the older Sellers no longer agrees with that assessment. “Being a lot more mature, and having watched the success of folks like John Lewis, obviously, the tactic wasn’t dead,” he said. It continued to be a useful tactic for a lot of folks in the movement,” he said.

However, Sellers noted the urgency of the environment at Amherst and around the country. “It felt like we were on the brink of revolution, 1968 being a pretty crazy year,” he said. “At the moment, it felt like it was all over and done with.”

According to the April 8 edition of The Student, these first demonstrations were only the beginning. In the following days, 600 people attended a college memorial service conducted by college chaplain Lewis Mudge, and Cuthbert “Tuffy” Simpkins ’69, who was the president of the newly formed Afro-American Society.

Mudge, for his own part, had worked with Dr. King in the past and attended his funeral in Atlanta. He wrote about his experiences and the strangeness of re-entering Amherst afterwards in the April 15 issue of The Student. “There, up ahead, the … cart bearing the … coffin of the man you once sat beside in a car in St. Augustine,” he wrote.

“The man who knew that sooner or later this moment would come … Re-entry problems. Recompression. The faculty at coffee talking of their gardens. Signs of incomprehension, even bitterness.”

Mudge had no illusions about the significance of the murder. “To think now of going back to the spirit of 1963-65 is no doubt sheer nostalgia,” he wrote. “How to join enthusiasm and determination with the hard thinking and patient effort that any real changes in our life will require?”

At Amherst, political organizing continued. A large group of students and faculty planned to fast from the following Tuesday to Thursday, “‘for peace in Vietnam, for freedom and justice in the United States, for an end to violence,’ and in memory of Martin Luther King, who had issued the call for the fast before his assassination last Thursday.” The fast included 30 students, and faculty such as Professor of History and American Studies, and Emeritus N. Gordon Levin, who still teaches at Amherst.

Alongside chapters at Smith and Mount Holyoke, SDS also commenced planning for a “Ten Days” of protest with speakers, teach-ins, workshops, and films. “The focus of the activities during this organized period will be an educational confrontation with the imperialist policy in foreign affairs of the United States,” said Bohman. The group also organized symposiums on race and racism and the draft. One event, a Rally for Peace and Justice, featured Reverend James Bevel, a close collaborator of Dr. King’s, speaking on the Town Common.

“The stress of the activities reflects the SDS movement’s belief that any real political change in the United States, in Bohman’s terms, ‘must come from the bottom up,’” reported The Student, “‘lack of local political participation creates local impotence in American political structure.’”

The April 11 issue of The Student reported that there was a community organizing meeting that same week, attended by 220 people, that

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