Equally midnight neared, 2,000 antiwar activists surged upward Carr's Loma to the steps of the University president's darkened mansion. The radical lawyer William Kunstler spurred them forward, shouting, fist in the air. Thirty students locked arms to block the entry. Between the agitated oversupply and the defiant cordon, a lone activist tried to reason with the mob of his swain students, using a megaphone through the din. Beyond the locked door, President Edgar Shannon spoke urgently with student leaders who had run ahead to warn him. From upstairs, where she waited with their five young daughters, Eleanor Shannon called, "Edgar, they're coming!"

For one intense moment, the antiwar fervor of the 1960s converged on Carr's Hill at the University of Virginia. It was Midweek, May 6, 1970, and a movement to shut down the Academy was about to boil over. During that tumultuous week remembered equally May Days, many classes were canceled, antiwar rallies swelled to the thousands, protesters occupied the Navy ROTC building, pupil marshals stood lookout man against arson around the Academical Village, and baton club–wielding police stormed the Lawn and some fraternity houses, hauling dozens of fleeing students to jail. Through it all, Edgar Shannon walked a loftier wire: angering the governor, his board and many alumni by siding with the students against the war, just never bending in his determination to go along the Academy open up.

"It was a tense confrontation," recalls Jim Roebuck (Grad '69, '77), who was Student Council president and ane of the leaders who had hurried to Carr'south Loma to alert Shannon. "You didn't know what was going to happen."

On Oct. 21, 1967, tens of thousands of antiwar protesters marched on the National Mall and the Pentagon. At that time, antiwar activism was growing at UVA; two busloads of students went to Washington for the protests. Leif Skoogfors/Getty Images

Student activism had been building at the University, slowly, for years. It began alongside African Americans in the fight for civil rights in Charlottesville, in Virginia'south rural Southside, and in the Deep Due south with Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis. Later, activists and traditionalist students rebelled against rules that restricted their social lives, and made common cause to displace generations of fraternity control of pupil politics. Only nada catalyzed the student movement similar the state of war in Vietnam. At UVA and hundreds of other college campuses around the country, massive student protests erupted in response to President Richard Nixon's announcement on April 30, 1970, that U.Southward. troops were moving into Cambodia, widening the war he had promised to terminate.

This is the story of the gathering 1960s antiwar movement at the University, as recalled past some who were there, and its climax in the May Days crisis.

In 1966, the Vietnam War was escalating, with the draft taking about 400,000 young American men that year. Just antiwar sentiment was scant at UVA. That Feb, in the first demonstration against the state of war at the University, 23 students stood vigil on the steps of Alderman Library. According to the Cavalier Daily, they were jeered and pelted with snowballs.

Tom Gardner (Col '71), who was national chairman of a Southern version of the radical Students for a Democratic Social club, had been conducting "teach-ins" about the war since the previous spring. He says the inspiration to actively protest that February came directly from his and other students' involvement in the ceremonious rights movement. "That generation at UVA saw the legitimacy of the blacks' complaints," he says. "That gave usa the impression that organizing and protesting could brand a difference."

Jeff Kirsch (Col '71), who was instrumental in bringing Kunstler to Grounds and was that lone activist with the megaphone at Carr's Hill, sees a broader sweep to the growing activism in the late 1960s. "It was like a cultural train running through the University," he says. "There was this enkindling and outpouring of emotions and progressive instincts."

Antiwar activism grew on Grounds. In 1967, two busloads of UVA students traveled to Washington, D.C., for a march on the Pentagon coordinated by the National Mobilization Committee to Stop the War in Vietnam. "The Mobe," as it was known, connected antiwar activists on campuses around the country with one some other—a network that grew in influence.

In 1968, national events disturbed and disrupted norms throughout American gild. That January, the temporary success of the massive Due north Vietnamese and Viet Cong Tet Offensive showed that the U.Southward. war effort was not invincible, despite more than half a million American troops deployed. In April, an assassinator murdered Dr. King. In June, another killed antiwar presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. TV viewers were shocked in Baronial to meet Chicago police force brutalize protesters at the Autonomous National Convention. That violence would play into May Days two years later, as the threatening march on Carr'southward Colina was direct instigated past speeches by ane of the Chicago protest leaders, Jerry Rubin, and by Kunstler, who defended Rubin and the other radical organizers in a courtroom circus famous as the trial of the Chicago Seven.

That September, Robert Rosen (Col '69) wrote a full-folio "Prospectus for the University" for the Cavalier Daily, calling 1968 "a twelvemonth of riot, rebellion, near insurrection" and predicting a rising tide of dissent on Grounds. Rosen argued that students and faculty, not political appointees and absentee donors, should command the University. He claimed footing for a liberal, not radical, movement whose foremost cause would be rectifying the University's de facto segregation. He besides called for educatee control of activity fees and an end to the rules imposed on student behavior under the prevailing concept that college administrators operated "in loco parentis."

Records of the Virginia Law Weekly/Arthur J. Morris Law Library Special Collections

The more militant activist students had meanwhile unified every bit the Radical Student Wedlock, and they heated upwardly the issue of segregation reform early in 1969. Protesting on the Backyard outside the Board of Visitors meeting on Feb. 15, about 150 students called for the board to be remade to reflect the makeup of Virginia by race, gender and income level. Pointedly, they demanded the ouster of board fellow member C. Stuart Wheatley (Law '30), who as a land legislator had supported the state'south racist policy of Massive Resistance to school integration. In his Virginia Commonwealth University main's thesis on the growth of the New Left at UVA, Thomas One thousand. Hanna (Col '34) notes that some moderates reacted immediately to support the radicals' demands but not their style. A consensus was forming.

The next day, a meeting in Rosen's room on the Lawn produced the Educatee Coalition, which encompassed establishment liberals, antiwar radicals and fraternity leaders. In his recent UVA memoir, From Rebel Yell to Revolution, Joel Gardner (Col '70, Law '74) cites this meeting equally a turning signal. "The key," writes Gardner, who is not related to the activist Tom Gardner, "was to forcefully demonstrate that the forthcoming actions of the coalition did non represent the ideas of wide-eyed radicals and agitators, and that support for stronger actions to address the racial issues at the University was widespread."

In the adjacent two days, hundreds of students responded to the coalition'due south call to rally at the Rotunda, in what became known equally the "Coat and Tie Rebellion" because its dress code matched the traditional Sometime U standard. Rosen, who now practices law in his native Charleston, South Carolina, says, "I was the good liberal. Nosotros're going to clothing coats and ties. The whole idea of the coalition was to go the majority of students on our side." Half-joking, he recalls the purpose as, "Let's get all the real people, not just the scrungy communists."

Rosen was thinking in particular about Tom Gardner, who had just returned to the Academy, having left in 1967 to work across the S for civil rights and confronting the draft and the Vietnam State of war. In his volume Struggle for a Better S, historian Gregg Michel (Grad '89, '99) describes how Gardner and his Southern Student Organizing Commission partners were roughed up and banned from campuses—simply also spread their message, by means including an interview on Larry King'south radio prove. In a sign of the UVA-led organization's standing in the antiwar move, Gardner had been a member of  a delegation that met in communist Czechoslovakia with representatives of the Viet Cong, the enemy American troops were fighting.

Back on Grounds in 1969, Gardner saw value in joining forces with Rosen, appearances aside. "A coalition is a coalition," he says. "Some of them saw themselves equally the established pupil leaders and idea that the president of the University would talk to them, just not to us."

The Student Coalition presented 11 demands to President Shannon, including those of the Radical Educatee Union, but also calling for an increase in black enrollment, an African-American assistant dean of admissions, a Black Studies program and allowing University workers to unionize. After caravanning to Richmond, a delegation met with Gov. Mills Godwin—himself a 1940 Law alum—who was dismissive. Rosen gave a spoken language on the Capitol steps, warning that the University was not immune to the disruptions roiling other colleges.

Capitalizing on the broad-based appeal of the Coat and Tie Rebellion, the more than radical activists formed the Virginia Progressive Political party for the next Pupil Council election. "Nosotros realized that nosotros could have over student authorities through autonomous elections," Tom Gardner says. He took a seat that fall on a radicalized Educatee Quango that would requite the legitimacy of elected student government to an expanded list of demands during the May Days crunch the post-obit jump.

Though "Old U" and "New U" typically meant traditionalists versus activists, conservatives were also active in the '60s cauldron of student politics. Economics graduate student John Kwapisz  (Grad '69) had started a Young Americans for Freedom affiliate equally an undergraduate at the Higher of the Holy Cantankerous and saw a demand at the University. "Most of the coat-and-tie conservatives were agile in the Higher Republicans," he says, "but YAF was a little more hard-core, a little more activist."

The Homer statue adorned with strike signage "Educatee Strike, Homer Statue," University of Virginia Visual History Collection, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, UVA

The YAF made itself felt in the fall of 1969. At colleges effectually the state, "the Mobe" network, including UVA's Radical Student Marriage, promoted a National Vietnam Moratorium on October. 15—a one-day break from classes and work to bring together demonstrations against the state of war. By and then, more than 300 faculty members had signed a petition against the state of war, notes Hanna, and they and the Student Council pressed Shannon to declare the moratorium. The YAF threatened to sue. People were free to notice the moratorium, Kwapisz argued, only the University had an obligation to remain open for those who did not.

Shannon did non officially shut the University, but many classes were canceled, and many students and faculty participated in demonstrations and debates—including i in which Kwapisz faced Tom Gardner. "We stopped it that fourth dimension," Kwapisz recalls. But a rally confronting the war at the Rotunda drew more than 1,000 people, and the disruption foreshadowed the upheaval to come.

At about that time, to enhance money for the Virginia Progressive Party, Jeff Kirsch booked Kunstler, the radical attorney, to speak at UVA months subsequently, on May vi, 1970. He had no thought what was coming. "I booked a classroom," he says.

As the dogwoods bloomed on Grounds in spring 1970, American troop levels in Vietnam were dropping, falling below 400,000 from the top of 536,000 2 years earlier. Casualties were down from the high of 16,592 killed in 1968. The draft was declining but would still accept more than 160,000 young men that twelvemonth. So when President Nixon announced on Apr 30 that U.S. troops were inbound Cambodia, widening the war to root out Viet Cong sanctuaries and supply lines, a moving ridge of protests engulfed campuses beyond the state. At UVA, activists and moderates met on Sunday, May 3, and agreed on a walkout on Tuesday and a strike on Wednesday.

The May Days crisis had begun.

The side by side day, Monday, May 4, the stakes exploded with a volley of rifle fire in Ohio. At Kent State University, National Baby-sit troops, sent to quell violence after the ROTC building had been burned the dark before, opened fire on demonstrators and killed four students. Nationwide, protests and rage spiked equally the news spread.

"What happened at Kent Land was incomprehensible," Roebuck says. "It lit a fire at UVA."

President Shannon, left, listens as Educatee Council President Jim Roebuck presents the demands, including ending defense-related research and breaking ties with ROTC. Daily Progress

At the University, a rally at the Rotunda that night drew more 1,500 people, hundreds of whom marched to Carr'southward Colina to need that Shannon sign their telegram of protest to Nixon. He spoke to them from the steps of his domicile merely said simply that he shared their concern. Marchers and then turned to Maury Hall, UVA's Naval ROTC building. As some negotiated with moderate student leaders at the door, promising nonviolence, others broke into the edifice from the back. Hundreds of protesters poured within, refusing to leave. Strike leaders began to etch a list of demands, such as banishing ROTC from the University.

Because of lessons it learned from a building takeover at Duke University the previous year, UVA's administration had already drafted a court society forbidding obstruction or disturbance of any University property. A Charlottesville guess signed it that dark, and police arrived at Maury Hall about dawn with authority to oust the protesters if they disobeyed the court. "We had a pick to make," says Tom Gardner, who now teaches at Westfield Country Academy in Massachusetts. "I was a little older and I was an established radical, so I had some cred. I said I didn't think head-bloodying was going to accomplish anything. There was a lot of bravado, merely yous could feel relief in the room. I retrieve we marched out victoriously."

They'd be back.

The secret strike publication The Emerge Hemings

Later that solar day, Tuesday, 900 students packed Erstwhile Cabell Hall for a memorial service for the slain Kent Land students, led by Shannon and Roebuck, the Student Council president. As students arrived and departed, activists passed out black armbands, antiwar literature and a mimeographed "strike newspaper" called The Sally Hemings, urging students to abandon formal classes and join "teach-ins" on complimentary speech, women'south liberation, organizing for peace and other problems. From strike headquarters at 50 Eastward Lawn, they also promoted the next mean solar day's speech by Kunstler and Rubin—not in a classroom at present, but in the basketball arena, Academy Hall.

A Strike Committee of activists, overlapping with the Educatee Council, planned farther demonstrations, called for a general shutdown of classes, and further developed the listing of demands begun in Maury Hall the night earlier. These included revoking the Maury Hall court order, disarming UVA police, and keeping non-University police off Grounds, plus what had become standard on hitting campuses beyond the country: ending all defence-related research at the University and breaking ties with the ROTC. Simply they also linked back to the Radical Student Spousal relationship and Coat and Necktie Rebellion demands of the previous autumn, calling for a goal of twenty percentage black enrollment, plus admission of women on equal terms with men. The list was put to a Student Council vote to legitimize the demands.

"The vote was ten-x, and I broke the tie," Roebuck says. In coat and tie, he stood with Shannon on the steps of Alderman Library and read the listing aloud, forth with the demand that Shannon join other college presidents in signing a telegram denouncing the expansion of the war into Cambodia. Again, Shannon demurred, sympathetically.

Midweek was declared Freedom Day. Official class attendance dwindled, though the outdoor teach-ins remained. Picketing and peace vigils continued, and another rally at the Rotunda drew a crowd of more than three,000, according to Hanna. Not all was politics and protest. Frisbees flew. Rock and folk music, live and recorded, was essential entertainment. Like revolution, the odor of marijuana was in the mild spring air.

The tension mounted in apprehension of the speech that nighttime by Kunstler, who would be joined by Jerry Rubin, then part of an anarchist revolutionary group chosen the Yippies. At a time when the total undergraduate and graduate enrollment at the University was only under 10,000, more than 9,000 people filled U-Hall. Many came from other schools and communities. While the crowd waited for the speakers, one contemporary account says, they were amused by live rock bands, "a spectacular indoor Frisbee lucifer," and a giant, inflated assistant existence batted like a beach ball around the room. Just things turned serious when Kunstler and Rubin took the microphone. Joel Gardner describes the crowd as wearing denim and work shirts, some waving Viet Cong flags—a vivid dissimilarity to the coat-and-tie lodge he had seen there at the Honor convocation the year he arrived.

Wed was declared Freedom Twenty-four hour period; more than 1,000 attended a protest at the Rotunda. Records of the Virginia Law Weekly/Arthur J. Morris Law Library Special Collections

"With the flags waving, the oversupply existence whipped into a frenzy by a charismatic speaker, and the throngs making chopping motions with their arms, while screaming 'strike, strike' (rather than 'heil, heil'), I began to feel chills going up and down my spine," he writes. Bob Cullen (Col 'seventy), then the Cavalier Daily editor, says, "I remember looking at that and being dismayed, because it reminded me of old films of Nazi rallies—non the credo, necessarily, but the frenzy."

Clenched fist held high, Kunstler chosen for shutting downward the Academy to stop the war. "We've got to liberate the places in which we have the power—the campuses," he said, co-ordinate to May Days: Crisis in Confrontation, a pictorial collection published afterwards that yr. Virginius Dabney's Mr. Jefferson's University highlights these words from Kunstler:  "These fists have to be clenched, and they accept to exist in the air. When they're opened, we hope it's in friendship, not around the trigger guard of a rifle. But if we're not listened to, or if the event is forced, they may well open around trigger guards." Rubin followed with a rambling revolutionary tirade.

"Those two were marvels at whipping upwards a crowd, and Rubin specially and then," says Tom Breslin (Grad '69, '72), a Jesuit graduate educatee who was a member of the Student Council and editor of the alternative, antiwar Virginia Weekly. "He aimed to create violent mischief."

Kirsch, who was emcee of the effect as president of the sponsoring Virginia Progressive Political party, remembers what alarmed him. "Kunstler and Rubin started talking most how nosotros should 'liberate' the president's firm," he says. As a responsive crowd formed to march on Carr's Loma, Kirsch hurried to get there get-go, knocked on the door and told Shannon what was coming.

Breslin also raced to Carr's Hill with Roebuck. They and 2 others met with Shannon within the house. "I tried to give him some options to quell the mob," Breslin says, such equally renouncing his Navy Reserve commission to evidence his disgust with the war. "You could hear them coming. Eleanor and the children were upstairs, and she called down in obvious distress."

Joel Gardner and President of the Higher Whitt Clement (Col 'lxx, Law '74) were separately recruited to get ahead of the crowd. Gardner joined a group of students at the acme of the steps at the entrance to the mansion, linking arms to form a defensive wall. As the crowd came upwards the loma, he says, he heard people yelling, "Fire it downwards!"

"We were literally eyeball to eyeball with a frenzied mob," Gardner writes in his memoir. "I truly believe we were only moments abroad from tearing confrontation. In that location were many outside agitators and radicals in that crowd, and no one knows how badly this might have ended."

The May Days photo book put out that year by students Rob Buford (Col '72), Peter Shea (Col '72) and Andy Stickney (Arch '73) captures the scene: "2 thousand strong, the marchers reached Shannon's darkened house at x:55, and their ranks pressed close, roofing the front end lawn. While some were content to pass joints in circles right at the front end steps, others shouted angry threats and Yippie cries, filling the air with an electricity which told that this was every bit tense as things had been so far. Strike marshals and a group of cocky-appointed guards flashed peace signs, discouraging the efforts of some to take the oversupply batter down the locked door."

Tom Gardner recalls Kunstler on the mansion's steps, facing the crowd, still provoking them. The radical lawyer equated President Shannon's refusing their demands with Marie Antoinette's saying of starving French peasants, "Let them swallow cake." Kunstler boomed: "We all know what happened to Marie Antoinette!"

Inside the firm, Roebuck says, "Mrs. Shannon was sort of hysterical." Breslin says that for every shout of "Burn information technology down!" though, he heard 20 shouts of "No! No!"

Out front, Kirsch faced the mob he had unintentionally helped to create. "People were inflamed," he says. "I felt like information technology was my fault. Information technology was my event." A megaphone amplifying his words, Kirsch addressed the oversupply. "I said, 'This is not the right tactic. We should exist going later a target that is more associated with the state of war effort—we should take the Navy ROTC building.' I didn't want to burn Maury Hall—I was trying to protect Shannon and his family."

"That was a brilliant decision on his part," says Breslin, who had left the house with Roebuck and circled around to the forepart, where he joined in the cry to movement again on Maury Hall. Near the steps, Tom Gardner favored diverting the crowd, too, before violent words became trigger-happy acts. He added his voice: "To Maury Hall!" From his position at i side, Clement says, it wasn't possible to tell who was proverb, "Burn down it downward" and who was saying, as he was, "The ROTC building, the ROTC building."

And to the ROTC building they went, occupying it again and declaring it "Freedom Hall." A photograph from that night shows a scorched mattress that had been dragged from the edifice's basement, mayhap a remnant of an endeavor to follow through on the cries of "Burn it down." The smoke, however, somewhen forced the protesters to abandon the edifice.

The threat of arson may have been uncertain, but the fear was real. As at Kent Country, buildings had been burned or trashed at some of the hundreds of campuses where students were by so protesting. After the confrontation at Carr'south Loma, volunteer marshals took upwardly watchful posts all over Grounds. In his novel A Southern Daughter, John Warley (Law '70) includes a scene taken from that night, when he was stationed at one cease of Old Cabell Hall.

Organized earlier in the week by the administration, particularly among law students, the volunteer student marshals were peacekeepers as well as sentries. From a control mail in the Law School dean's office, Ted Hogshire (Col '65, Law '70) acted as dispatcher, sending marshals to brewing problem spots via a network of walkie-talkies provided by Paul Saunier, an aide to Shannon. "It was like an apocalyptic week," says Hogshire, at present a retired judge in Charlottesville. "Nosotros were upward all night, nighttime afterwards night."

Some of the alarms were just rumors. But others were real. Hogshire was on the walkie-talkie network during the Carr'south Hill collision, having mobilized the marshals who blocked the door when it became articulate that Kunstler and Rubin's phone call to "liberate" the president'due south house was going to be trouble.

The next twenty-four hour period, Thursday, demonstrations continued, including a mass meeting of one,000 students on the Backyard. The YAF pressed its demand for a pupil referendum on the proposed strike and on the demands listed by the Strike Committee and Student Council. A vote was gear up for Monday. That nighttime, protesters assembled at the intersection of Rugby Route and University Avenue for a "honk-in"—urging drivers to honk their horns in back up of the strike and against the war. As the crowd grew, it flowed toward Emmet Street and Route 250, increasingly disrupting traffic, until state police with billy clubs herded the crowd dorsum toward Grounds. But it was merely a mild rehearsal for the post-obit night.

When Friday'southward "honk-for-peace" demonstration again flowed toward Emmet and Road 250, more than than 200 helmet-clad state police officers were waiting. And they didn't wait long. Declaring the assembly a violation of the Virginia Riot Control Human action—passed in 1968 every bit an anti-protest measure out—the police told University administrators to tell the demonstrators to disperse. When that failed, the law charged.

"That was an astonishing effect," Clement recalls. "I was at a black-tie function at the Rotunda and went outside. Students were taunting the state constabulary, who were lined upwards on the white lines on University Avenue with billy sticks. All of a sudden, the law charged, jumping over a rock wall. Everybody got the hell out of in that location."

As the law pursued demonstrators up Rugby Road and even onto the Lawn, Clement'south room on the West Lawn quickly became a shelter—for people he didn't know. He recalls seeing police pulling people out of rooms past their legs. They made 68 arrests, virtually indiscriminately hauling protesters, student marshals, bystanders, a human delivering pizza, even tuxedo-clad fraternity members and their dates, into a pre-positioned Mayflower moving van. As far as Tom Gardner and other activists were concerned, as Sat arrived, Grounds were at present occupied by the police.

The overreaction angered and radicalized students, giving new life to an unfocused strike motility that had lost momentum. "You couldn't have written a better script," Tom Gardner says. "On the fraternity house balconies, at that place were now sheets maxim, 'Vote Yes on Strike.' "

On Dominicus, Shannon addressed a crowd estimated at more than 4,000 on the Lawn. The day was sunny and and so warm that many in the crowd were shirtless. At first he drew boos. Joel Gardner recalls that Shannon called the Carr's Hill marchers and the Maury Hall occupiers "mobs." And Shannon noted with some pride that the University had remained open up for students and faculty who did not strike, while many schools around the country close down. A shout of "Bulls---" sounded from the back. But he won the crowd over when he declared his opposition to the war. "I know your anguish over the armed services involvement in Southeast Asia," Shannon said. "I desire promptly to cease the war. I feel furthermore it is urgent that the national assistants demonstrate renewed decision to terminate the state of war and unprecedented breach of American youth caused past that conflict."

He shared the text of a letter he was sending to Virginia'due south two U.Southward. senators, in which he expressed grave concern over anti-intellectualism and growing militarism, criticized the Nixon administration'due south response to the Kent State killings, and decried government leaders' attacks on universities, students and the free press. He invited students and faculty to sign the letter and made copies available at Pavilion VIII. By the next day, Monday, May eleven, the letter had virtually 5,000 signatures, and Roebuck led a delegation of 100 students to Washington, D.C., to present it to Sens. Harry F. Byrd Jr. and William Spong. Byrd especially, he says, was cold to the criticism of Nixon and the state of war.

Besides on Monday, those who voted in the referendum approved the strike by a 2-ane ratio, and supported most of the demands for change—but not the demands to oust the ROTC programs and halt all defense inquiry. On the Lawn that night, 2,000 students rallied, but the event was calm. A educatee stone band played from the base of operations of the Rotunda steps.

As the narrative in the May Days photo book put information technology: "The mass of people sat transfixed, content to gaze the stars." With the strike vote won and with Shannon publicly calling for ending the war, the aroused energy of the strike was dissipating.

In the days that followed, Shannon'due south spoken communication and the letter were criticized as weak and appeasing past Gov. Linwood Holton, Sen. Byrd, editorial writers, alumni and the rector of the Board of Visitors. To calls for Shannon'due south resignation, though, students and kinesthesia rallied backside him with calls, petitions and letters to the editor. Looking back years afterward, Shannon dedicated his arroyo: "Nosotros were all together. Information technology tended to pull the University together, instead of having factions."

Roebuck, now a state legislator in Pennsylvania, agrees. "Shannon channeled the acrimony and frustration into a positive resolution, rather than escalation," he says.

On May thirteen, one week subsequently the dramatic confrontation at Carr's Loma, Shannon took public business relationship of May Days. No injuries on Grounds. No serious property damage. In every schoolhouse, he said, classes had essentially returned to normal. "The University is even so open," he said. "I am determined to keep it open."

The May Days furor largely subsided, though teach-ins and liberation classes connected outdoors, UVA students attended a statewide protest in Richmond on May 15, and strike leaders from various Virginia schools met at the University on May 17 and eighteen. Hanna calls that meeting the concluding meaning event of the strike, noting, "by the cease of the semester life was returning to normal."

Meanwhile, students sorted out the options presented by the faculty and administration for completing courses interrupted past the strike. Field of study to their professor's agreement, students could take their form as of May 1, substitute work for time missed during the strike, or defer their exam until the side by side semester. Joel Gardner, who duly completed his grade work and graduated that leap, writes that the last weeks took on a party atmosphere: "For all intents and purposes, the semester was over after President Shannon's speech and the approval by virtually kinesthesia of a flexible or no-exam policy."

The disruption was minimal: 1,974 students graduated on schedule.

At Concluding Exercises, thousands of appreciative parents, students and kinesthesia surged to their anxiety when Shannon rose to speak.

He accepted a hero'due south ovation.

Ernie Gates is a writer and editor based in Williamsburg, Virginia.