<Begin Segment 7>

AI: What was the first thing that you got involved with?

PI: Well, I remember, this was the year that, the year after Little Rock. But there was still a lot of excitement.

AI: So this was the fall of 1958...

PI: The fall of 1958.

AI: ...that you entered college?

PI: And at Antioch at that time, there was an organization, it was called the Youth Branch of the NAACP. And they had a chapter at Antioch. Antioch did not have very many black students, but it had a fair number. One that I remember very much and that had a tremendous impact on me -- when I first arrived at Antioch as a freshman, she was a senior, woman named Eleanor Holmes, who is now Eleanor Holmes Norton. She is the member of Congress from Washington, D.C. And Eleanor Holmes, even back then was a very striking, very articulate person. And I became involved in, there was, in fact, a barbershop in Yellow Springs -- very small town, about 5,000 people. Gegner's Barbershop was segregated. Lewis Gegner, who owned the barbershop would not cut black people's hair. And so he became the focus or the target of Antioch students who wanted to do something for civil rights. And poor Mr. Gegner, just, he was, his barbershop was picketed, there were demonstrations, people even sat down and blocked the highway in front, on Main Street. The state police came in and dragged people away. And I went to Washington, D.C., I think in the fall of 1958. It was called the Youth March on Washington for Integrated Schools. And it was the first demonstration, big demonstration, I don't even remember how many, but it was several thousand people went to that. We all got on buses and went to Washington. So that was one thing that I got involved in very quickly.

Another thing about Antioch is that it had a tremendous mixture of students, most of whom were from the metropolitan New York area -- a lot of people said Antioch was Washington Square West. And a lot of the kids who went to Antioch with me came from what we then called "progressive families," which meant that their parents were Communists or socialists or radicals of some kind. My roommate, my second roommate at Antioch, came from a Communist family, and the first live Communist I'd met. And this in fact was during a time when the Red Scare, McCarthyist period. And the thing I remember most is that although I never felt attracted to that ideology, I was very much attracted to sort of American homegrown radicalism, people like Eugene Debbs and Norman Thomas, and people -- the Wobblies. People who were sort of a very loose combination of socialists and anarchists. But the main thing they had in common was that they were agitators. They wanted to organize and improve people's lives. They didn't believe in strong parties. I was never attracted to the idea that there was a party, which you needed to follow the party's line to achieve things. And so I would have violent arguments with my Communist roommate about this. If he was losing the argument, I remember, he would pick up a volume he had on his bookshelf over his desk in our room, The Little Lenin Library, and there were about thirty or forty volumes, all bright red. And he would pick one up and throw it at me. So, but it was a very active time, and this was before the '60s. This was a time when America in general and college students in particular were supposed to be very quiet and passive and conservative, but Antioch was sort of a seedbed for a lot of social activism and radicalism. And a lot of people who came out of Antioch at that time became very active in the Civil Rights movement, the antiwar movement, all kinds of things that later developed into big mass movements.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.