One of them was Jack Rothman, a young professor of sociology. He had marched for civil rights and campaigned for Johnson in 1964. Now he felt betrayed.
Reading news of the escalating war, Rothman remembered later, “I was left with a sense of unbelief… Our ‘Great Society’s’ mechanized monsters were casually annihilating a tiny, underdeveloped country thousands of miles away, and nobody was aroused: the American people were silently, disinterestedly accepting this eerie atrocity.”
Two others appalled by the news were Zelda Gamson, a sociologist at U-M’s Survey Research Center (later a professor in the Residential College), and her husband, William Gamson, a professor of sociology. Her PhD was from Harvard, his from Michigan. They’d been active in the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and a peace group called Tocsin.
She turned to him and said: “We’ve got to do something!”
The Gamsons decided to invite like-minded colleagues to their home (1417 Granger, in the Burns Park neighborhood) for a meeting on the evening of March 11, nine days after the start of Rolling Thunder.
They had an idea — a faculty strike to protest U.S. policy in Vietnam. Sympathizing professors would cancel their classes for one day. Instead, they would hold a conference where students could learn about U.S. policy in Southeast Asia.
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