“We had Dean Monro, and he was fabulous,” Jourdain said. “He is a giant in my eyes because he just quietly did what’s right. Those are the people I call true Americans.”

OUTSIDE THE GATES

A month before the Class of 1963 graduated from the College, 200 Radcliffe and Harvard students marched from Cambridge across the river to Boston Common, joining 7,500 others in showing their solidarity with blacks protesting in Birmingham.

The summer of 1963 was a pivotal phase of the civil rights movement that would garner the organizers and cause national status, propelling the issue to the floor of Congress months later in October 1963. In the summer of 1963, Harvard students joined the national effort for racial equality, traveling and protesting throughout the nation.

The Fourth of July that summer was, for five Harvard students, celebrated with a gesture fitting of the holiday. They protested near Baltimore at an amusement park known as a hotbed of racial unrest. As they attempted to illicitly enter the park, they were arrested on charges of trespassing and jailed alongside other protesters on July 4.

“We also thought it was a most fitting way to spend July 4,” Steven H. Johnson ’64, one of the Harvard protesters, told The Crimson.

John W. Perdew ’64 left Cambridge for Georgia. While working with SNCC, he was arrested twice and received threatening phone calls. His incarceration prevented him from returning to Cambridge in the fall.

By the time school resumed that fall, the movement was becoming more immediate to the Harvard community. With students in jail, others who had spent time in the South, and some who participated in the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs, the movement gained more prominence as a national and personal ordeal.

“These events were a factor in the University’s increased interest in the civil rights movement,” said S. Allan Counter, director of the Harvard Foundation. “Witnessing these things in 1963 changed my life.”

—Staff writer Charlotte Smith can be reached at charlottesmith@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Steven R. Watros can be reached at watros@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @SteveWatros.

EDITOR’S NOTE: May 29, 2013

An earlier version of this article featured the wrong draft of this article. It has since been updated with the updated story.