It was about seven o'clock when the telephone rang.  I remember because the early Saturday morning Horror Show, featuring Boris Karloff as Frankenstein, had just run the title screen, and I was settling in for a quiet two hours before mowing the grass.  The caller, my grad student assistant, yelled into the phone "Guess where I am!"  I muttered something about my movie, and he rushed on to say, "I'm sitting on the piano in Doug Knight's living room."  That got my attention.  Doug Knight was the president of Duke University.

 "What in the world are you doing in Knight's house," I asked frantically, Frankenstein completely forgotten by now.  The story came tumbling out.  Martin Luther King, Jr., had been killed the week before, and Duke students had been searching for some appropriate University response.  Their leadership had quickly come to the conclusion that Duke should raise the wages of non-academic employees, many of whom were Black, to the lofty level of $1.60 per hour.  They had presented the proposal to the Administration, who, of course, temporized.  The students pondered ways of encouraging them to act.  Flushing all the johns on campus at once to destroy the sewage system was considered; a night time march into the area where many Duke faculty lived to discuss the issue was finally decided upon.  When President Knight realized what was happening, he feared the consequences, especially if some of the town's red neck bullies learned what was taking place, and quickly invited the students into the President's palatial home where they proceeded to spend the night.  Jamie Little, my colleague, had been with them, trying to encourage them to moderation.

 Before the day was over, the students had transferred themselves to the main quadrangle and had grown in number to over 1500.  They camped there in front of Duke's lovely Gothic chapel for the next two weeks, persistently insisting that Duke respond to King's death by paying their cooks, cleaners and gardeners a living wage.  Prominent faculty did not join their ranks publically but did press their case in the Faculty Senate, with the Administration, and finally with the Board of Trustees.  On Easter Sunday, James Clelland, Dean of the Duke Chapel, unexpectedly swung open the massive Chapel doors, bread and wine in hand, and served the Lord's Supper to the student encampment.  Perhaps the most dramatic moment in what came to be called the "vigil," occurred when the Chair of the Board, a corporate officer of a major automobile manufacturing company, arrived on campus from Detroit declaring that he had come to fire the President for not expelling the protesting students.  Cooler heads prevailed and that same corporate magnate was later to be seen, arms crossed, linked into a giant circle of students and faculty that surrounded the Quad.  He was singing "We Shall Overcome" at the top of his lungs!

 The Trustees finally met the demands of the students and increased the wages of the "non-academic employees" to $1.60 per hour.  The students broke camp and returned to their dorms and classes.  It took those self same employees days to remove the debris for the Quad and restore its manicured lawn. Two sleeping bags, my meager contribution to the Vigil, were never seen again.  The task remaining to some of us was to interpret the Vigil to a hostile community that included congregations and denominational agencies.

 The Presbyterian campus ministries at NC State, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and Duke had over the years sponsored symposia for North Carolina ministers and lay leaders.  My colleagues, Don Shriver and Harry Smith, together with our ecumenical team at Duke, quickly decided to sponsor a day on campus for church folk who wanted to understand what the Vigil was all about.  We arranged for them to visit with students in their natural haunts during the early part of the day, their task being to listen to what students had to say about what had taken place.  We brought them back together to report their findings in the presence of a panel of students who then were given the opportunity to have the last word.

 Genuine dialogue took place that day.  Stereotypes were shattered literally left and right.  One moment is engraved forever in my memory.  Doug Adams, a senior that year and now a professor at the Pacific School of Religion, expounded at length as he analyzed the Vigil economically, sociologically, politically, theologically and---as only a serious minded senior can do---tried his best to help us understand his motives.  When he had finished, he bounced once or twice on the soft sofa where he was seated and said, "And besides it was Spring!"

 It was my privilege to be a part of the religious community at Duke in 1968, when that community provided major leadership in helping the University respond to the social ills that had cost Martin Luther King, Jr. his life.

                                                           Clyde O. Robinson, Jr.                                                          February 23, 1998