In 1968, the College Responded to the Murder of Dr. King

Continued from page 6 lasted two hours and “wandered from topic to topic,” but resulted in multiple action plans, including a money drive for the striking garbage workers whom Dr. King had gone to Memphis to support a voter registration drive, and a boycott of Amherst businesses that would not hire Black students.

People also turned inward to look at how the college should respond. The fasting group worked with SDS convened to discuss a six-point, racial justice action plan to propose to the college: Increase the number of Black students on campus, abolish rushing and fraternities, establish a committee “to re-examine priorities in the College budget,” create a Martin Luther King Memorial Fund to aid the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), curtail commencement funds to use for civil rights programs, re-examine college investments in “corporations that practice or perpetuate racial equality.” SDS also devised a plan to conduct weekly seminars “instructing students in organizing anti-discrimination projects in white communities.”

In speaking about the response at Amherst, Sellers emphasized the smallness of the Black community — “ten of us in the entire class.” He believes that the intense mobilization in 1968 “led to a more vibrant and vital … group of African American students who ended up graduating from Amherst and have gone on to do some really incredible things.”

He also expressed that the events of 1968 galvanized many students, including himself, to look beyond Amherst to take action. “You felt like you had to do something,” he said. “And just hanging around Amherst and writing papers and debating nice intellectual things was not really doing something, you had to get out and do something.”

In his case, that meant participating in a summer program alongside Smith and Mt. Holyoke students, teaching Black students in Mississippi who would soon integrate all-white schools. “The loss of Dr. King and the emotion that night was the impetus, ultimately, for me, leaving Amherst and going to work in that program in the summer, and not coming back for a couple of years,” he said. “Amherst at that point didn’t seem like the real world, especially after Dr. King was killed … It was filled with a whole lot of smart people doing smart things. But it didn’t feel like it was the real world.”

Jesse Warr ’69, who wrote an opinion piece for the April 8 edition of The Student, shared similar thoughts with me this week. Going to Amherst, he said, “felt like interplanetary travel … you went into this sort of idyllic academic environment … our engagement with the … community around us was minimal.”

Some students who had done the Mississippi program during the previous summer wrote a piece in the April 8 edition where they connected their observations over the summer to the new reality that Dr. King’s assassination left in its wake, similarly describing it as a turning point. “There will be riots in Mississippi this summer,” they predicted. “The brink between hope and a repress[ed] but deep-seated hatred will be crossed; white America has shown … [our students] that there is no cause for hope … Most of our students this summer clung to a strand of hope in the white man, but when violence engulfs their last hopes there is only one way they can, as human beings, respond.”

Richard Aronson ’69, program director for careers in health professions at Amherst, wrote to me in an email that he felt that King’s death “served as a significant catalyst and driving force for the following changes that were on the horizon and that happened at Amherst over the next few years.”

Among these were the growth of the Black Student Union (then called the Afro-American Society), the establishment of the Black studies major, and the creation of a space for Black students in the Octagon later that year. Additionally, the college convened many efforts to continue diversifying its student body and invest in educational equity, including the Black and White Action

Committee (BWAC), a group of faculty, students, and alumni dedicated to addressing racial diversity at Amherst. In their report, BWAC referred to Dr. King’s assassination as a major wake-up call and a motivator of their work.

The April 15 issue of The Student announced that the college’s incoming class of 1972 was likely to have as many Black students as the three upper classes combined — this number was still a very low 27. The issue from April 18 reported that “a proposal calling for Amherst College to adopt broad new programs designed to respond to the current racial crisis in the United States will be presented to the Board of Trustees tomorrow night.” These programs included the previous sixpoint plan as well as the hiring of a Black dean.

In the same issue, an editorial titled “Revolutionizing” read, “The meetings and the proposals came one week after white America had buried its last Negro leader. We hope that the changes are not too late … Already the shock created by the slaying of Martin Luther King has begun to subside.” The Student’s Editorial Board noted that the “pitiful smallness” of the Black community of Amherst made “racism and apathy too easy.”

For many students, King’s death simply reinforced beliefs they already held about the necessity of a more radical view of racial politics and the U.S.’ role in Vietnam, a topic King had been discussing extensively immediately prior to his death.

“If anything, I thought I was with that … SNCC cohort, that King could have been even more radical,” Warr told me in an interview this week. In reflecting and rereading Dr. King’s later speeches, though, Warr said, “I realized he was standing up … against [his] government, one of the biggest moves the government was making in the international arena.”

He is pleased to see current discussion surrounding the fact that “we may have missed the core radicalism of King … that the sting of what he said has been taken out. He's become, sort of, the Santa Claus of the civil rights movement, jovial and optimistic … He was more than that. I'm in support of whatever people are trying to re-energize his message.”

Warr’s views on Vietnam and racial politics “didn't change with the assassination. I was already there. And the assassination just made me really sad. And it also made me somewhat frightened. What's going to come next?”

A number of other reactions were published in The Student, some of which you will find reprinted on the opposite page. They include the eulogy given by Simpkins at the memorial service, titled “You Killed Our Only Prince of Peace,” as well as other perspectives from some of the Black and white students, and articles from faculty members. Many people expressed their belief that Dr. King’s death would prompt a loss of faith in the efficacy of nonviolence.

For example, one anonymous white student reflected on how his mind had changed on the topic of violence. “I say ‘don’t be so goddamn militant.’ Well I just can’t say it anymore,” he wrote. “It isn’t right and it never was … You can’t say ‘don’t be violent,’ when you can’t possibly know the seething … embitterment that every black man must feel … You know after all that non-violence is not going to solve a thing … So if it takes a riot, and my house must go, then that’s how it’s going to be.”

In response, another student, Bob Ihne ’69, urged his peers against violence in a letter to the “self-styled white revolutionaries and black militants” who announced the end of nonviolence in The Student’s pages. Violence, he wrote, “is so efficient and so sick.” “Don’t riot in memory of Martin Luther King,” he proclaimed, “because you’re turning his dream into a nightmare … [With a violent movement] all America will get what it deserves — perpetuation of our sick way of life, a deeper imprinting of violence as a means of getting what we want.”

The articles and quotations opposite show in real time the varied responses to Dr. King’s assassination.

Now, 55 years later, Warr told me, “I'm mourning King again, in a way that I haven't in a while. He's become so much a part of … street signs … And then [re-listening to] the speech made it real … this is a man trying to move our country forward. And one bullet silenced him.”

Reprints from The Student:

“You Killed Our Only Prince of Peace,” Tuffy Simpkins ’69, April 8, 1968

This speech was given by Simpkins, who was the president of the newly formed Afro-American student society (now the Black Student Union), at the Amherst College memorial for Dr. King.

I have no eulogies today. Eulo-

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