It was the Spring of 1965 when Biff Butler ’68, Breece McKinney ’68 and another Kenyon student decided to go on a Spring Break road trip. For reasons that aren’t exactly remembered (beer and girls likely figured into the equation), the trio headed to Daytona Beach, then drove cross country to Ole Miss for pre-arranged dates. Except they skipped Ole Miss for Memphis, then to Biff’s grandmother’s house in West Kentucky for free food. Then to Louisville and back to Gambier. All in one week…about 2200 miles. Gas was 30¢ a gallon. A six-pack was $1.76.

On the drive from Daytona Beach to Memphis, Biff and his entourage passed Martin Luther King, Jr., in Alabama as he and a crowd marched from Selma to Montgomery. They hopped out  of their car, walked with the group for a few hundred yards and Biff took the accompanying picture.

Not realizing they were witnesses to history, they hopped back into Biff’s ’57 Chevy and headed west. Biff says, “It was exciting to see the dedication and enthusiasm of the marchers, who had been challenged just a week before when the Alabama State Police, at George Wallace's behest, trampled King and the group as they originally began the march at the Edmond Pettus Bridge in Selma. It took a Federal Judge's order to block Wallace's attempts to halt the marchers."

It is important to put the march from Selma to Montgomery in context. The Civil Rights bill had just been passed in the late summer of 1964, just six months prior. This march - in the cold spring of 1965 (King was wearing only an overcoat and hat) - was a visible demonstration of the forward movement of the Civil Rights effort and was the powerful impetus to pass the Voting Rights bill and other civil rights legislation that were still in the future.

And it was a Spring Break Road Trip that placed two of our Brothers in the middle of history…a day which they will never forget.