But rather than being irritated or insulted by this assignment, Woodford says that he and most of his black friends saw it as absurd and entered interviews with the writer with an attitude that made light of the project.

‘HOTBED OF REST’

Woodford had grown up in Benton Harbor, Mich., an “apple pie, Chevrolet, all-American town” where he attended an integrated school and had not experienced significant first-hand discrimination despite his African-American heritage.

However, when he traveled to Washington, D.C. with high school friends to attend an amusement park after his senior year in high school, he found that he was denied entry to the park because of his race.

After this, Woodford found that he had a personal connection to the movement for racial equality, which drove him to get involved with the cause.

“Since I had been barred from that amusement park, I kind of felt immediately that I had been involved with [the civil rights movement] and maybe if I hadn’t, then it might have felt unnatural or like someone else’s problem,” Woodford says.

It was these first-person encounters with systematized racism that drove Woodford to take up the cause of racial equality. As an undergraduate, he and a fellow student picketed locations of Woolworth’s, a national department store chain with segregated locations in the South.

But not all students on campus carried the same passion for civil rights activism, leading Pressman to describe the atmosphere as a “hotbed of rest.”

For Jourdain, attending Harvard was less of a social statement than an opportunity.

“That was the mindset of our class,” Jourdain says. “We were there to get an education and then to go out and be successful people in our chosen fields, not start a cohesive social movement.”

While growing unrest in the South slowly brought news of boycotts and eventually the Freedom Rides in 1961, Harvard students often were not entirely aware of what was going on 1,000 miles to the south. Ganz says that not all Harvard students were aware of the extent of segregation in the South and the problems it created.

“When you come from very privileged backgrounds you don’t see the world that way and you have to be confronted with it,” Ganz says. “Retrospectively, we kind of look back at that era and say it looks obvious that racial segregation should end, but it wasn’t obvious to most people at all, even in a place like Harvard.”

For Ganz, it was not a specific incident that convinced him he could no longer stand on the sidelines. Inspired by people his own age leading the movement in the South, Ganz left Harvard to head to the South himself and campaign for civil rights.

Ganz says that many of his peers would publicly assert their belief in racial justice, but only a few were “really putting their lives on the line to change things. It forced you to examine yourself and say, ‘Are these values real to me and are they enough to make me act?’”

As civil rights began to inspire activism throughout the nation, the climate on campus slowly began to evolve.

“Was it a huge conflagration? Well, no. But the flames were sure flickering,” Ganz says.

—Staff writer Monica M. Dodge can be reached at mdodge@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Erika P. Pierson can be reached at epierson@fas.harvard.edu.