I came to oppose the Vietnam War during my final years at the University of South Carolina. I spoke openly about my views to those who knew me and in the classes I was teaching. Some of my best classes involved spirited debates on both sides of the issue. I participated in the Moratorium Against the War in October of 1968, joining students across the country who were demonstrating and boycotting classes. I did not boycott the classes in which I was the instructor but used the time to discuss the War. I participated with other students on campus in an anti-war demonstration and gathered signatures in downtown Columbia on a petition against the War. I sat through the night in an outdoor patio at the University while the names of the war dead were read. I wrote a letter to the editor of The State newspaper—which they published.

Ho hum. My activism, as you see, was hardly consequential.

Yet like so many others who came of age in the sixties, I was profoundly affected by the events of the decade. I saw hope and promise crushed in the assassinations of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, by a war that killed 58,000 Americans and tore us apart as a nation. I learned that my country, although great, is not always good. Or wise. That decisions of consequence can be made from less than noble calculations. That wars “of choice” are messy, difficult to bring to a satisfactory conclusion, no matter how costly in blood and treasure. I learned that our leaders can and do lie to us. .

[A few years ago President Johnson’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara admitted in a filmed interview that the second Gulf of Tonkin incident—the incident which was Johnson’s rationale for escalating the Vietnam War—NEVER HAPPENED (see National Security Archive). Although I had already discovered that in my research for Absolution, it took seeing McNamara say it on film before I actually believed it! Some days I am not certain I believe it yet.]

Even so, as I write this, I feel the sixties slipping away, hard to write about, to even want to write about. Is it because these events occurred forty years or more ago? Or is that in 2008, America turned the corner into the 21st Century?

I find my answer in two events of this past year.

In February, I was a participant at the South Carolina Book Festival in Columbia, South Carolina, the city where I had lived, worked and studied during the Sixties. On the elevator, going up to my hotel room, I met Jack Bass, a highly respected South Carolina journalist and author (jackbass.com). When I was a student in Columbia, Jack Bass was a young newspaper reporter. As we talked, he mentioned he was scheduled for a panel with Dr. Cleveland Sellers, Professor of African-American Studies at the University of South Carolina. I was immediately intrigued. In the Sixties I had a passing encounter, or more accurately a “brush” of an encounter, with Cleveland Sellers, who was at the time National Program Director of the black militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC.

The brush occurred in the slum neighborhood in Columbia known as “Black Bottom,” where one day each week I accompanied a group of white high school students who interacted with children in a community Head Start program. On one of those days, a young African-American couple visited that same neighborhood. They were strikingly attractive, impossible not to notice, and they were identified to us as Cleveland Sellers and his wife. During their visit, they engaged some of our group, pointedly asking what white kids were doing in a black neighborhood. It was not a friendly question. This was the era of “black power” when whites weren’t always welcome participants in the black struggle for civil rights.

Not long after this encounter, South Carolina was rocked by an incident known today as the “Orangeburg Massacre,” when police fired on demonstrating Orangeburg State College students, killing three people and wounding 27. I remember that event well and my outrage that unarmed students were shot to death. I did not then believe this would have happened on a predominantly white campus, although two years later it did at Kent State University in Ohio, an event which has a role to play in Absolution.

Although no police or students were ever convicted of wrong-doing in the Orangeburg Massacre, Cleveland Sellers was. He was tried on a false charge of “rioting” and spent seven months in prison. He eventually received a full pardon.

2008 was the 40th anniversary of this incident, so the South Carolina Book Festival offered the panel discussion, featuring both journalist Jack Bass who has written definitively about the shootings and Cleveland Sellers. I had a free hour at that time slot and chose to sit in.

What moved me most came toward the end of the discussion when Sellers described the recent appearance of Barak Obama at the University football stadium. He explained how planners had to keep shifting the venue because the demand for tickets kept mushrooming. He described the stadium crowd as a mix of all races, the excitement of the crowd, the good will. He ended by saying what a powerful moment it was for him and that he would never have believed such an event could happen in his lifetime.

Nor could I.

I was, after all, sitting in a convention center in the same city where more than forty years ago white male students had threatened to meet the University’s first two black students at the gate with guns, where the student newspaper felt free to use the "n" word, where a black football player refused to walk across the campus with a white woman (me) because he feared violence against him, where in four years as a graduate student I encountered not a single black professor or administrator and only one black graduate student in one summer school class and, where in the days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, a curfew was imposed on the city for fear of violence and rioting.

Later this year, in November, I and millions of others watched Barak Obama accept his election to the American presidency with a speech from Chicago’s Grant Park. Forty years before, during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, that same Grant Park was the scene of violent clashes between the Chicago police and anti-Vietnam War demonstrators. Some political historians suggest those clashes resonated far beyond Chicago, costing the Democrats the Presidential election that year and bringing Richard Nixon to power. Nixon expanded the War into Cambodia, spawning nation-wide protests and riots, including the deadly confrontation at Kent State. The continuing war and bitternes, and ultimately Nixon’s Watergate-forced resignation deepened the American political divide for decades to come, even into the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Forty years after these events, in the first days of 2009 as I write these words, I discover in myself the promise and hope of America renewed. Surely, it is time to bid the Sixties farewell.