Reply #4: From a former Oxfordian

[kainah]

I graduated from Western College for Women in 1973 -- its next to last graduating class before it folded and got bought out to become Miami's honors college. I have many, many, many memories of Oxford during the Vietnam era protests. Sitting at the gate to Western, watching busloads of National Guardsmen coming into Oxford with guns and vicious dogs after the Kent State shootings....

There's a fine tradition of protest in Oxford so I am glad to hear that you're continuing the tradition. If you need any impetus to encourage people, remind them that Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were training for Freedom Summer at Western College when they got word that the church outside of Philadelphia, MS where they'd been conducting their freedom voting schools, had been burned by the Klan. They left, in the evening, and drove straight through to Mississippi, up to the church where they met with some people and then, as they were leaving, they were pulled over by the cops, held in jail while the KKK gathered. When they were released, of course, they were chased down, brutally murdered, and thrown in an earthen dam.

Their deaths did more to change the voting rights in this country than probably anything else. And Oxford was integral to the training. Other towns, colleges, etc. turned away the freedom summer people because it was considered so radical and so dangerous. But Western College for Women welcomed them in and I've always been incredibly proud of that.

Carry Oxford for kerry in memory of Schwerner, Chaney & Goodman!

Oh, and welcome to DU.