'Cold-Blooded'

Chatfield described the civil rights movement as "Machiavellian."

Civil rights activists "made coldblooded political calculations about how to conduct their affairs," Chatfield said.

These calculations all led to support for the Democratic party--and it was "no coincidence that the civil rights movement hit its stride after the Democrats ascended to power [in 1960]."

But Chatfield said activists were dealing with a president --John F. Kennedy '40--who was far from being a pure sympathizer.

"Kennedy was a man who had big supporters in the South and made judicial appointments that would make a liberal hang his head in shame," Chatfield said.

But activists were still able to "embarrass the federal government" into instilling radical change, he said.

Chatfield also related the story of his entry into civil rights activism.

In 1962, Chatfield was a summer school student at Harvard making up science and math classes he'd "failed" during the academic year at Trinity College, he said.

But he "spent more time reading about the civil rights movement than I spent studying math and botany," he said.

Towards the end of the summer, Chatfield read that a friend of his had had a pistol drawn on him in a small town in Georgia.

Later that month, Chatfield was asked to drive a truck full of books from Hartford to New Haven, which would then be transported to a Black college in Birmingham.

But when he arrived in New Haven, Chatfieldsaid he decided on "the spur of the moment" todrive the books to Birmingham and join the civilrights movement in the South.

"I decided that my fate resided in the South,not in botany labs," Chat-field said.

He said that he was a field worker in theSouthwest Georgia Project of the SNCC for the nextseveral years