Looking back, I can divide my experiences of that decade into several chapters. In 1963, I graduated from Emory & Henry College in Southwest Virginia. This small United Methodist school, serenely nestled among rolling hills and green pastures, seemed far removed from the festering political and social issues of the early sixties. Even so, I was part of a student political group that considered sending a resolution to the college administration calling for the racial integration of the school. (How many of us recall that it wasn’t so long ago when many colleges and universities, particularly in the South, were racially segregated?)

I spent the year after I graduated at the University of South Carolina as a graduate student in English. That was the year the University integrated. I heard rumors those first days that students had threatened to bring guns to campus to keep black students out, although that never happened. I was, however, appalled to read an editorial in the student newspaper using the “n” word in an attack on desegregation.

That year also brought the assassination of President John Kennedy. This occurred during the run-up to the University’s biggest sports event of the year – the Carolina-Clemson football game. The custom then was for fraternity pledges to keep the Rutledge College bell on the old Horseshoe ringing non-stop twenty-four hours a day until the game began. All week, the constant clangor reverberated in the air and in our heads. The most poignant moment for me after Kennedy’s assassination was the sudden silence when the ringing stopped.

I left graduate school after a year with an unfinished Master’s degree and spent the next three years as a social worker in a Columbia children’s institution, founded as an orphanage. Young and single, I spent my free hours socializing and volunteering for the community theater. The Viet Nam War seemed far away. Civil Rights was the more blazing issue, particularly in South Carolina.

During this time, I was persuaded by a group of teenagers at the all-white church I attended to take over a project begun by others, which meant going each week to a community center in a poverty-stricken area of the city. The teenagers played games and sang songs with Head-Start children at the Center. Known as Black Bottom, this neighborhood was described by Civil Rights leader Whitney Young as “the worst slum in America.” I’m sure he was right. Thus began my education into some of the realities of the black experience. I also ran head-on into white fears when the church terminated this program altogether because the teenagers asked to invite the children to the church for a party. As one church leader said to me, “You can continue to go if you want, but not in the name of the church.”

But where was I in terms of the Vietnam War in these years? Like many Americans then, I saw the war through the eyes of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson (My first vote was for Lyndon Johnson). The war came home to me only in the death of a young Marine who dated one of the girls at the children’s institution where I had worked. During the first half of the sixties, I believed that our leaders knew more than I did about Vietnam and communism and I accepted what they told us as true.

For me personally, the first sixties’ years were more significant for experiences with African-Americans that deeply affected me. I probably brought about the actual integration of the children’s institution where I worked when we admitted a girl of bi-racial parentage. Although I learned that her father was most likely African-American, I let stand her mother’s statement that he was “Hawaiian.” Of course, this did nothing to change policy or attitudes in an institution that remained officially segregated for some time afterwards.

When I returned to the University graduate English program in 1966, I also worked part-time for what was called the Manpower Development Training Center, a program of President Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” The Manpower Center had a racially mixed administration and faculty, which in hindsight seems quite remarkable for Columbia, South Carolina at that time. I do not recall a single African-American administrator or faculty member at the University of South Carolina while I was there. I was in only one graduate class with an African-American (and only one African-American!) and that was in summer school.

The students at the Manpower Center were predominantly African-American adults, although there were a few white adults as well. The program offered basic education in math and English, high school equivalency (GED) and vocational training. I taught GED. The Center was the most effectively run program I have ever worked for, with a wonderful administrator and a dedicated staff and faculty. I enjoyed the students and was stunned midway through the first set of classes to learn how many were ex-convicts or day-release prisoners from the nearby penitentiary. Mostly young men, they were motivated, polite and fun to teach. How they later fared, I do not know. I was saddened to learn that one young man, a parolee who was a talented artist and the class clown, was later charged in a homicide. Many students, however, found jobs in skilled trades such as auto mechanics and carpentry. (I learned first-hand about these skills, when the carpentry instructor and one of his students were willing to come to my attic apartment and replace floor boards that I had surreptitiously torn out to rescue a kitten that had fallen through a wall crack into the crawl space below – “surreptitiously” because my apartment did not allow pets!)

I was employed at the Manpower Center when Martin Luther King was assassinated. Classes were suspended for King’s funeral and televisions set up. I recall how profoundly uncomfortable I felt among the staffers who were black. One young teacher with whom I had become friends said to me that day that he would like to talk with me sometime about “this,” meaning I assumed, black-white relations in America. But he never did.

When I took up my English lit studies again at the University, I found that integration had continued to open the school to black students. As a Freshman English instructor, I taught the first African-American USC scholarship football player. Later, another African-American football player, a bulky six-foot-five Freshman, whom I was tutoring, refused to walk with me across the campus to find a quiet place to study. He feared for his safety to be publicly seen with a white woman. Whenever people today think that little has changed in race relations in our society, I tell them this.

But in the latter part of the 60's, back in graduate school to finish my Master's and begin a Ph.D. program, I found I had more life lessons to learn as well. And I quickly realized that I could no longer ignore the Vietnam War.