The Last Sentence

David was a genius, a musician, and a prankster. His genius was confirmed when he was skipped past both the eighth and ninth grades at the same time. Even after that, however, he was still bored by the curriculum. And thus the prankster was born. 

His pranks were clever and complicated and often annoying. He filled the principal’s office with balled-up newspaper from floor to ceiling, packed in so tightly it formed a wall in the doorway that could not be penetrated without tools.  He managed to persuade his friends to assist him in getting a teacher’s new VW Beetle onto the roof of their two-story school. All were sworn to secrecy about how they achieved this feat. Certainly physics and engineering were involved.

By seventeen, he was headed to college, as a physics major with a minor in music. He was a skilled violinist. In fact, he’d been offered a seat with a well-respected orchestra, but he loved science just as much. So, he opted for both, at one of several prestigious universities that had offered him full scholarships.

For his sophomore year, however, he abruptly transferred to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He had felt too constrained by the Ivy League university he’d chosen. Antioch, by contrast, was small and flexible. This college put him on a path that suited his complicated, brilliant, ever-restless soul. (It had also turned out to be a good fit for many of its alumni, including Coretta Scott King, Rod Serling, anthropologist Clifford Geertz, and paleontologist and writer Stephen Jay Gould, among others.)

There were two barbershops in Yellow Springs at the time, Squire’s Barbershop and Gegner’s Barbershop. Squire’s integrated in 1960, but Lewis Gegner refused to do so, using the excuse that he did not know how to cut an African American’s hair. Gegner became a focal point for the rising Civil Rights movement, drawing national attention.  There were multiple demonstrations in Yellow Springs, sometimes attracting as many as 600 people to the little village, and David was always one of them. Working for the Civil Rights Movement became his calling, his mission, and his passion. 

David set aside both physics and his violin, and arranged to simultaneously continue his studies with Antioch long distance while heading down the road to Oxford, Ohio where he would enter a training program in non-violent protest with the Freedom Riders. By May 1961, he was on a bus headed to Mississippi.  He had been trained in peaceful protest and was especially intent on helping with a voter registration effort to reach all the disenfranchised and terrorized African Americans in south. He deeply believed in democracy, freedom, and equality for all. 

In Jackson, Mississippi, David was repeatedly blasted with fire hoses, attacked by dogs, beaten, arrested, and jailed, and he had both of his hands intentionally broken by an enraged, gleeful sheriff who stomped on them repeatedly. He maintained his position on non-violence as his dreams of being a concert violinist were crushed beneath the sheriff’s feet. His heart and courage, however, only grew stronger. 

His commitment to the values of America, and seeing them fulfilled in the south, continued.  He returned to Mississippi several times, always experiencing more beatings, arrests and incarceration. He marched in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963, to hear the powerful oratory of Martin Luther King, Jr. who delivered his now-famous “I Have a Dream” speech that day. David was only a few feet away from that great man.

He completed his undergraduate physics degree with Antioch the following year – a year early, of course — and entered a graduate program at American University. Within his first year as a Master’s student at AU, he had made a discovery in particle physics that was published and celebrated by physicists around the world. And he continued to work for freedom and justice as a constant warrior for Civil Rights, right alongside his work in physics.

On April 30, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an anti-Vietnam War speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. Titled ”Why I am Opposed to the War in Vietnam,” King spoke out on America’s involvement in that war, connecting it to economic injustice and the unequal treatment of the military’s African American soldiers.

David read the speech with interest, and decided that he had to think about that argument. He leaned toward agreement with King’s position, and so he folded these thoughts into his ongoing work in Civil Rights, while his focus in physics shifted toward sonar and acoustics, especially for use in submarines, thereby blending his love of music with his ongoing work in physics. It was a complicated combination for an equally complicated man.

And then, in the summer of 1967, he was notified to appear before the draft board. He learned that even though, as a graduate student, he had been automatically awarded draft status 2-S just the year before, he was now no longer exempt. Congress had voted to limit students’ deferment to one year, unless they were either in a Ph.D. program or were seniors due to graduate. David had completed his Master’s degree in the spring, but had not yet entered the Ph.D. program at AU. 

He was mystified and confused. He was doing work that would actually contribute to America’s national defense in his discoveries and development of improved sonar and hydrophonic listening capabilities for submarines. And yet, they wanted to pull him away from that work to send him to Vietnam. He contemplated his love for the idea of democracy, and his work to achieve greater equality and justice for this country, and struggled with King’s position on the war. 

David consulted family, faculty, clergy, civil rights colleagues — all with no clear answers to his dilemma, except an agreement that his beliefs and training in non-violence pointed him toward becoming a Conscientious Objector. Achieving this status would require a complicated maze of paperwork and interviews that he was preparing to complete, when he was told he could be prosecuted criminally for refusal to comply with draft board orders calling him into military service immediately. There wasn’t time to prove his long-held beliefs.

Yes, David was a warrior, for civil rights, but a scrupulously non-violent one. He was running out of time to work the problem, and so he concluded that he simply could not be the kind of warrior Vietnam required. It went against all he believed about peace and justice.

In less than a week from the notification, David left for Canada, knowing that he might never return. He had little time to prepare and left much behind. He didn’t know when he would see his family and friends again. His work for civil rights — at least in the United States, where it really mattered — was over, beyond what he might contribute from a distance. His work in physics, which did continue for many years after, would be within the University of Toronto, which had quickly accepted him, recognizing the groundbreaking, prize-winning work that was already in progress. David simply saw no other choices. This brilliant, complicated, large-hearted warrior for justice left the United States. Heartbroken, he wholly committed his life and work to Canada, and never returned to the U.S., except for a few brief visits following President Carter’s controversial pardon in 1977.  

My brother is a Canadian.