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By Root 1010 0

fortunately, approved later that month by the Faculty Council—I went on strike with everyone else. I did continue going to one class. The great professor Hugh Holman had agreed to teach one undergraduate class, definitely the first he had taught in years and probably the last he ever taught, and, because there was an imposing reading list, there were only about ten undergraduates in his American Novel survey. But it was worth it to hear him talk with such fluidity about the literature, the art, the social fabric of each novel. I kept going to his class—but I went with a tape recorder, and I taped his lectures, which he gave to the two of us who still came. Then I typed the transcript of the lectures onto mimeo sheets and printed them, smelly and purple, and handed them out to Todd Cohen and Fenner Urquhart and the others who were not in class. I didn’t know them well, but I knew what they were missing, what they were paying for this statement of principle, and I was trying to help. One day when I was packing up my tape recorder, Professor Holman asked me why we were striking. “It is useless, you know,” he told me. “They don’t hear you in Washington.” “We know that,” I said, “but we can’t do nothing.”

And so it was. We were part of something bigger, something that in time, years later, could have shaped a national resolve, but as much as I wanted to change the policies of the government, I participated because I had to, for me. Even if I was spitting in the wind, at least I had to try to spit. And it was so much easier to get up each morning and prepare for the march on South Building or hand out fliers for another rally in the Pit, because we were all trying together to let our outrage, our sadness, our vision be heard. I can tell you that I worked with Grady Ballenger or Charlie Dean, or that I took orders from John Rosenthal, or that I marched behind Rich Leonard, and all that would be true, but what would also be true is that I worked and marched and chanted alongside students whose names I did not know, but I knew we were joined in a cause.

Sometimes I would have to step back. At one evening rally, there was a call to march to President Friday’s house. The University provided Bill and Ida Friday with a lovely home on Chapel Hill’s main street, Franklin Street. The University also rented the house next door to the Fridays to the head of the Naval Science Department, the commanding officer of NROTC—my father. As soon as the call went out to march to President Friday’s, I took off running. Breathless, I flew in the front door, turned off the television in the front room, and told my mother and father to stay indoors. Did anyone even know the head of NROTC was in the next house? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want these worlds colliding. Mother, Dad, and I talked in the kitchen while the protesters gathered, unaware, next door.

In terms of national policy, Hugh Holman was right. Nothing we had done had changed the government’s policies. But we had been part of changing the national mind. By fall many of us who took multiple incompletes in courses the previous spring had to put away the protest signs and finish our classes for the fall semester and the previous semester, too. But we had changed things. Despite Jesse Helms’ television commentaries about the “communists in Chapel Hill,” opposition to the war was not just at coffee houses and SDS meetings anymore. It was at fraternities and in student government, who sponsored one of the largest protests, in the football stadium. Even Dad took some of the armaments that had surrounded the NROTC down in order to do his job without interruption or protest.

After all this, English graduate school seemed like another world, but I wanted to teach, particularly to teach young people to love literature as I did, so this was where I wanted to be, or so I thought at the time. English graduate schools in the early 1970s were dismal places. The learning was quite fine, the students came full of purpose and with a genuine love of literature, but there was nowhere to go, there were no jobs