In politics, success can bring as many problems as failures. During the 1964–65 school year, and just before, the movement leapt forward. Mississippi Summer broadened a primarily southern civil rights movement to involve large numbers of young northerners, primarily white; often, it caught up as well their parents, schoolmates, friends, and even their congressional representatives. The following spring, events in Selma, Alabama, and the march to Montgomery stamped the issue of voting rights on the national consciousness. Protest played loudly in schools, churches, and television stations throughout America. The US Congress, increasingly responsive to movement pressure, passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning segregation (at least in theory). In 1965, in direct response to the Selma-Montgomery march, it approved a historic Voting Rights Act. In April of that same year, SDS organized the first mass demonstration in Washington against the Vietnam War—shortly after the initial US Marine Corps combat force had landed on the beach near Da Nang. On campuses across the nation, teachers and students reacted with excitement and uncertainty: What would changes in race relations and the new student activism mean for the organization of campus life, as well as for curricula and classroom dynamics? We were increasingly contesting the very definition of “education.”

The assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965 also defined these months, along with the uprising against unemployment, crumbling housing, inadequate schools, and police brutality of the black community of Watts in Los Angeles. Change involved more than peace and roses. In fact, it proved hard to know what the next steps in our “revolution” might be. Everywhere movement activists gathered, we debated that question—in meetings of our new SDS chapter, in the Friends of SNCC office in Washington, in jail during the Selma-Montgomery march. Nothing seemed fixed—not what we did in our classrooms, in the streets, in our lobbying, even in our movement organizations. “We’ve come this far to freedom, / And we won’t turn back,” we sang. Yes. But just where were we headed? And with whom?