College Students Protest “Jim Crow” Barber
On this day, students at Williams College in Massachusetts protested a barber in Williamstown who had tried to charge an African-American customer, Wayman Caliman, Jr., $3.00 for a haircut rather than the $1.00 he charged white customers.
One of the protesting students was Norman Redlich, who went on to become a distinguished lawyer, member of the Warren Commission that investigated President Kennedy’s assassination, and Dean of New York University Law School.
The barber protest was a hint of great student activism to come in the 1960s. The spark was the sit-in movement by African-American students and then many others that began on February 1, 1960. The political energy of white students in the north and west erupted in the Free Speech Movement on the University of California at Berkeley campus on October 1, 1964. All of that energy quickly became focused on the anti-Vietnam War movement, with the first anti-war march on Washington on April 17, 1965.
Learn more about the sit-ins and SNCC: Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1981)
Read: David Lance Goines, The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960s (1993)
Learn more about the anti-Vietnam War movement: Thomas Powers, The War at Home: Vietnam and the American People, 1964–1968 (1973)