Word: shocks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Harvard community needed a shock to begin acting on racial problems, the black students provided it a week after King's death. Harvard held a service in Memorial Church on the second day back from Spring recess, but the black students did not attend--they conducted their own service on the steps of Mem Church...
...found out that it was undemocratic. They looked at the policy-making boards of the university and found them loaded with businessmen and corporation lawyers. They looked at their professors and found them doing research for the government. The war caused it, and the recognition was quite a shock...
Coupled with the "shock of confrontation"--disproportionately strong for these students from privileged families--is the vision of failure these students see in the political system. The social injustice, the reaction in rioting that they see around them makes them reject the customary liberal belief that institutions already exist that can relieve the inequities. They have been around too long. Keniston writes...
Then, on February 16, lightning struck. In perhaps the single most important event of the year to the movement, the Selective Service decided to draft seniors and first-year graduate students in June. The symbolic confrontation at the Pentagon was now a real one. It was a shock that everyone knew was coming...
Then April came, and the next shock hit. Martin Luther King was assassinated, and nothing was different after all. Black students brought America back to the university, just as white radicals had brought the war to the university...