Forty-four years ago today, on October 26, 1967, students at Oberlin College engaged in a spontaneous protest against the Vietnam War when they learned that a U.S. Navy recruiter was arriving on campus. Protesters discovered the recruiter in his car in front of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, surrounding him and refusing to let him out on to campus. Read the whole story here.
This photo, by chemistry student Peter Martyn, quickly became a symbol of the protest, and was printed on the front page of that week’s Oberlin News-Tribune. This demonstration changed the mood of campus, and prefaced the many protests that would continue to take place around the country until the end of the war in 1975.
Martyn is now a freelance consultant and instructor at the Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning.
