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With the threat of the death penalty looming over him, John W. Perdew ’64 found himself sitting in a jail cell in Americus, Georgia the summer after his junior year at the College.
It was August of 1963, and Perdew had been arrested while protesting racial segregation with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the organizations that staged sit-ins and freedom rides throughout the South in the 1960s. The charge under which Perdew and three other SNCC activists were being held was “incitement to insurrection”—a capital offense in Georgia at the time.
Perdrew remained in jail for three months, until a three-judge federal court declared the Georgia insurrection law unconstitutional on November 1, 1963, paving the way for his release on bail.
Although Perdew was unable to return to campus in time for the fall semester, news of of his arrest did reach campus at the outset of the 1963-1964 school year, a time when the civil rights movement was capturing attention across the University and across the nation.
Writers at The Crimson raised awareness of the Perdew arrest with news on the latest from Americus. Shocked students collected funds for Perdew’s legal defense. And University officials pressed the federal government to monitor the situation in Georgia.
Among the Harvard community, Perdew’s arrest was widely perceived as an injustice, and faculty and students mobilized to his defense.
AT THE FOREFRONT
When Perdew left for Georgia in June of 1963, civil rights did not yet dominate the national political discussion and the country was two months away from the March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Still, on Harvard’s campus, a sizable group of students was already actively following and participating in the nascent civil rights movement.
A white student born in Los Angeles and raised in Denver, Perdew signed up for a summer placement with SNCC in the South, after crossing paths on campus with John J. Hartman ’64, who had volunteered for the organization on weekends.
“[Hartman] said that he had gone to Cambridge, Maryland, where there was a very strong movement associated with SNCC, and that he had been to a sit-in and spent a couple of hours in jail,” Perdew recounted.
Perdew said he was excited at the prospect of actively participating in the movement that he had only watched from afar up to that point.
Underestimating the grave situation in the South, Perdew expected that his work with SNCC would only last the summer and that he would return to Harvard in the fall. However, his experiences with segregationist violence ultimately compelled him to take three years off from Harvard to campaign for civil rights.
“I really had no idea how deep the hatred was—how thorough-going the segregation and the racial prejudice and the oppression—how complete that was, until I saw with my own eyes and was a victim of it,” recalled Perdew, who said he was considered a traitor to his race by many whites in the South.
‘IT WAS MY FIGHT’
Working in Albany, Georgia and later Americus, Perdew underwent considerable harassment from the state police, who followed him, interrogated those he talked to, and looked for grounds on which to arrest him.
“When I was driving, I had to be careful to obey every single stop sign,” Perdew said. “I had to give hand signals when I turned.”
Perdew and the other SNCC workers were finally arrested in Americus, where they held a meeting in a black church. Upon exiting, the activists found that law enforcement had surrounded the building.
“They had baseball bats, blackjacks, riot guns, and they were ready to beat heads, which they did,” Perdew said.
Perdew spent the subsequent three months in a jail cell with fellow activist Ralph W. Allen. Contact with their lawyers was minimal, and Perdew said he was genuinely fearful that a death penalty sentence was awaiting him.
“I remember one point early on in the three-month stay, I realized that the four walls were the physical limits of my world for who knew how long—and who knew what would be waiting for us at the end,” Perdew said. “So, for a long time, I avoided touching the walls and the door.”
Despite all that he had suffered, upon release, Perdew chose to remain in Americus for another year and continue SNCC’s work there. Perdew saw his decision to stay as a political statement—he was showing the community the determination, strength, and perseverance of the civil rights movement.
“[In jail] I had a lot of time to think about why I was there, why in the heck I had come to Georgia, what was going on, what I wanted to do about it,” Perdew recalled. “And I realized it was my fight, not just somebody else’s fight.”
‘THE WHOLE MOOD...CHANGED’
Perdew worked for SNCC in Georgia for three years, before returning to Harvard to complete his degree.
In the intervening years, he married fellow SNCC activist Amanda Bowens, a black woman from Americus. The ceremony took place in Perdew’s home state of Colorado, instead of Georgia, where interracial marriage was illegal.
To support his young family, Perdew returned to Harvard in 1966 to finish his degree. In line with national political trends, the University to which Perdew returned in 1966 was much more engaged with the civil rights movement than the University he left in 1963.
“[Between] 1960, when the first freedom riots happened, and my going back to Harvard, the whole mood of the country had changed,” Perdew recalled, adding, “there were many more students who were concerned about civil rights issues, who were aware of the protests.”
According to Howard L. Shecter ’65 and W. Bowman Cutter III ’64, much of the change on Harvard’s campus took place in the year following Perdew’s initial involvement with SNCC.
Shecter, Bowman, and many other Harvard students attended the March on Washington and heard Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech that August. According to Cutter, across campus in the fall, students were closely following the progress of President Kennedy’s proposed civil rights legislation.
News of Perdew’s arrest in the fall of 1963 sparked action among students and administrators.
On October 7, 1963, the Kirkland House Committee voted unanimously to initiate a College-wide fundraising drive for Perdew, with a target of $6000.
John U. Monro ’34, dean of the College at the time, hailed the fundraising effort as “extremely important.” He feared that Georgia state authorities would seek the highest sentence for Perdew and fellow activists as a warning to other “outsiders” wishing to protest Southern segregation.
University officials also sought assurance from Solicitor General Archibald Cox ’34 that the Justice Department would monitor the developments in Americus.
According to Cutter, several students were also interested in traveling to Americus to protest Perdew’s arrest. But they soon decided that a fundraising drive for Perdew’s legal defense would be a more effective measure.
Playing upon the French word for lost, “perdu,” the fund touted the slogan “Perdew is not lost.” Shecter, who was a member of the Kirkland House Committee and a key organizer of the drive, collected funds from undergraduates in various locations around campus, from the Freshman Union to the Radcliffe Quad.
“I didn’t find people who said, ‘He shouldn’t have done what he did,’” Shecter said. “The sentiment was largely, ‘That should not have happened to him. He was doing something that should have been done a long time ago. It’s not fair. It’s not justice.’”
A few days after his release, Perdew spoke of his experiences to students in Lowell Lecture Hall on Nov. 4, 1963. He then learned of the fundraising campaign that had been launched on his behalf. Although Perdew was bailed out of jail before the drive ended, the funds did eventually go towards compensating his legal team, according to coverage in The Crimson at the time.
‘THE EDUCATION OF A HARVARD GUY’
Students at the College during the 1960s witnessed a moment when race relations in the U.S. were being renegotiated. For many, this instilled a lifelong sensitivity to racial politics and a commitment to furthering equality.
In an e-mail to The Crimson, Shecter described race relations as “one of America’s most intractable (and continuing) issues.” He credited his current understanding of that issue to coming of age during the civil rights era.
Similarly, Perdew has continued to advocate for social change, supporting endeavors to curb income inequality and poverty in his current home of Atlanta.
In 2010, he documented his life story, publishing a book entitled ‘The Education of a Harvard Guy.’ Proceeds from the book as well as its play adaptation went to support a mentoring program that he runs for urban youth in Atlanta.
“The title is meant to be an ironic statement,” Perdew said, referring to his book ‘The Education of a Harvard Guy.’ “Yes, I went to Harvard, but I also got an education outside of Harvard.”
—Staff writer Sonali Y. Salgado can be reached at sonali.salgado@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @SonaliSalgado16.
