Indeed, the national debate now surroundingcivil rights is increasingly focused on a yeastynew center, staked out most recently by The NewRepublic, which rejects as non-solutions bothRepublican commitments to law and order andDemocratic commitments to welfare state policies.

"The issues today are really more class issues,and they are harder for people to get hold of,"says Patricia A. Wynn '67, an associate judge withthe Superior Court of the District of Columbia.

Still, many '67 alumni urge Americans not toforget the successes of the civil rights movement.

"For 40 percent of Blacks in the United States,the civil rights movement was an extraordinaryleap forward," says Robert H. Abzug '67, a formervolunteer with the Student Nonviolent CoordinatingCommittee (SNCC) who is now a professor of historyand American studies at the University of Texas inAustin.

"The civil rights movement had a profoundimpact on people like me," says McDougall, who isBlack.

Aside from an aunt, McDougall was the first inhis family to attend any college. When he came toHarvard, he recalls, "there was a total of about60 people of African descent" at the entireUniversity.

Still, McDougall says that among this groupwere "some incredibly intelligentmentors"--including the first Black woman toattend the Law School and an undergraduate fromZanzibar who participated in the revolution there.

"We had access to the vanguard of the civilrights movement," he says.

McDougall spent the summer of 1965 with SNCCregistering Blacks to vote about 30 miles fromTuscaloosa, Ala., then the headquarters of the KuKlux Klan.

The work was slow, marred by resistance andintimidation from white registrars and publicofficials and by the economic and psychologicalbarriers to voting in the rural Black community.

"We were really on the fringes out there,"McDougall says. In fact, SNCC's efforts throughoutthe South would only net hundreds of voters overseveral years. After the Voting Rights Act waspassed in August of 1965, thousands joined thevoter rolls in a few months.

"This was really the amazing time [for civilrights]--a turning point," says Abzug.

But only six days after Congress passed thevoting rights legislation--legislation thatempowered the federal government to overseeSouthern voting procedures for the first timesince Reconstruction--rioting broke out in Watts.

"[Watts] was totally foreign to the experienceof anyone born after World War II," Oliphant says."It came at a time when tremendous victoriesseemed to be happening for civil rights."

At the same time, the civil rights movementitself was breaking up into younger, angrier BlackPower proponents and the more moderate NAACPlawyers and civil rights workers.