white students treated him with respect. In his experience, he said being African-American was met with curiosity more often than hostility.

“One day, I collected mail and went to the union to have lunch. I had a bunch of personal letters. Instead of sitting with a large group and discussion the meaning of life, I sat alone at a table to read my mail,” Easter said. “All of a sudden, someone asked if he could sit next to me. I agreed, and then he asked me if I wouldn’t mind talking to him. He was from North Dakota and had never seen a Negro [sic] before. We talked for hours, and became good friends after that. He even took me to my first hockey game,” he said.

SPEAKING UP

Though Harvard appeared to some to be a campus isolated from the violence and inequality that catalyzed the civil rights movement, echoes of the movement still rung throughout campus. With no one group or method of advocacy, many members of the Harvard community worked toward the same goal of equality in different ways.

In October 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. came to Harvard Law School, speaking about the inequalities that existed in the nation at large.

“We have come a long, long way in the fight for integration,” King told an audience at the Law School Forum. “But we have a long, long way to go. If democracy is to live, segregation must die.”

He went on to propose a series of steps—including federal action, nonviolence, and individual advocacy from African Americans themselves—that would advance the cause of nationwide integration.

Following King’s words and prescriptions, Harvard students and community members engaged in individual advocacy. In December 1962, a group of 45 Harvard and Radcliffe students joined the ranks of the Civil Rights Coordinating Committee. Together with volunteers from the greater Boston area, they assumed a mission of improving education, employment, and home-buying for the area’s African Americans.

Susan B. Jhirad ’64 became involved in the real estate facet of the group’s efforts. When persons of color had been refused by a realtor, white “testers” were subsequently sent to rent or purchase the same property. If the white clients were approved, then the group would enact appropriate legal proceedings set forth by a number of Massachusetts anti-discriminatory laws.

Tutoring programs were launched alongside boycotts of firms with discriminatory hiring practices.

In the spring of 1963, de Lissovoy stood in the servery in Leverett Dining Hall, collecting money for SNCC before he departed for Georgia. In six weeks, he raised $1400 from what he describes as a mostly supportive, yet inert, student body.

That money, which he personally delivered to one of the SNCC’s leaders, H. Julian Bond, paid for 127 activists to work a week each at the group’s set wage of $11 a week.

Behind the scenes, Harvard’s administration was led by progressive, though not necessarily outwardly vocal, supporters of civil rights. Former Dean of the College John U. Monro ’34, who spent 21 years at the College in various positions, quietly informed the liberal policies of the administration.

“Monro is the man most responsible for the College’s increased interest in enrolling men of color,” Easter said, adding that he believed that “he’s the voice that pushed the college into the 60s.”

In 1967, he would leave Harvard to take a teaching job at an unaccredited college outside of Birmingham, following his desire to improve equality in education across the country.