A confession, almost half a century late

Last night I saw The Help, a movie set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1960s, at the peak of the civil rights movement, a time when I was a graduate student at two universities -- the University of California and the University of Wisconsin.

I began that period as a classic young naive liberal, blind to the decline of my native Detroit, which had already begun. At Berkeley, I attended some meetings of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, but I stepped back when black students became more strident about taking over the movement and leaving whitey on the sidelines.

I became a serious student of the American past during my five years in Madison, mainly interested in popular history. I studied how hair styles and clothing fasteners had changed more than I read about the origins of the Civil War. As a teaching assistant in the English Department, I spent my leisure hours in the library of the State Historical Society, directly across the quad from the main University Library.

All through the Vietnam War, any student walking from one of those buildings to the other was sure to see planning meetings for demonstrations against the university administration or the state government a short walk down the street. Protest was in the air. Student outrage mingled easily with the politeness of youth from Oconomowoc and Wauwatosa.

My students were required to come to class, and I was required to keep track of their attendance. They could not simply show up for exams and expect to pass. Their name was taken off the class roll after they had missed a set number of classes, and they failed the course unless they had officially withdrawn.

I always amazed my students by knowing all of their names by the third or fourth time we met. But I got to know them quickly as I called out the names on my list. In my first year I repeated the name of one student, Paul Soglin, who never withdrew and never showed up, until he reached the limit set by the department for absences. My supervisors just said "Too bad," and they sent the information up the line. (Our passage in the dark does not seem to have affected him seriously. He soon became a member of the city council, and has been elected mayor of Madison three times since then.)

In an effort to know students better, I invited them to meet with me, and I got to know many of their personal details. I can still remember which one played the trombone, which one had a father who sold furniture and had a funeral home in Baraboo. One young man from Chicago would seek me out even at home, once showing up on a Saturday night with his date, the niece of a Green Bay Packer linebacker. This was as close to royalty as Wisconsin got, and he wanted to impress me.

I saw Ed as a typical Wisconsin freshman, polite, even shy, but simmering underneath, obviously interested in the politics of the day. During and after student demonstrations downtown, it was not uncommon for him to miss a class. Other students would tell me he had been arrested, where he was, when he would be back. I recorded all the information on my class roll.

There were times when he would show up five minutes before the class ended, and I would give him credit for having been there. We agreed that nobody should be keeping track of the movements of students at a university, and that what mattered should be whether they knew the required material at the end of the course. But I was assiduous in my records because they were one of the reasons the university was paying me.

In March 1965, Ed told me he wanted to join Martin Luther King's march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and that he would not be in class for a couple of weeks. I knew that would put him over the edge administratively, and I told him I would have a hard time justifying special treatment for him when I couldn't give it to anybody else. But he just said, "You'll think of something," and off he went. By the time I saw him again, his record was in the red and I had thought of nothing.

That spring, 25,000 people got to Montgomery singing "We Shall Overcome," Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act after promising that American values would overcome residual bigotry across the south, and Ed failed Freshman English because a teaching assistant could not overcome his own bureaucratic timidity, could not evaluate a student solely on the basis of whether he knew the material.

I already knew that Thoreau said we are sold to the institution that pays us. It was not my proudest moment. And I have never told that story until now.