Early Years
Fighting Times opens with a brief glimpse into Jonathan Melrod’s childhood living in a white middle-class neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Born in 1950, and surrounded by a large African American population subject to apartheid-like treatment, Jon grew up on the cusp of vast societal dislocation. The Fifties turned into the Sixties as the world turned topsy turvy.
In 1960, Glen Echo amusement park in nearby Maryland, where Jon and his buddies rode the roller coaster and the merry-go-round while munching on cotton candy, lurched overnight into a violent caldron of white racist animosity when black students integrated the park. In a vicious, Jim Crow-inspired attempt to hold back history, white supremacists dumped bleach in the park’s pool rather than allow black children to swim, despite triple digit temperatures.
On a family drive through the Virginia countryside on a sweltering summer day, looking out the car window, Jon observed black prisoners clad in striped prison-garb working on a chain gang on a Virginia roadside. Heavy metal chains bound prisoners to one another as they were watched over by white guards on horses cradling shotguns. The odious scene left an indelible impression on Jon. Though still a child, Jon took in the scene: all was not right – blacks weren’t treated the same as whites.
It wasn’t until Jon left D.C. for a progressive boarding school on a farm in Putney, VT, however, that he began to fully awaken to the systemic and fundamental inequities in American society. At Putney, living amongst students who already questioned the major fault lines in society – Civil Rights and the Vietnam War – Jon’s world view underwent a life-altering epiphany: only through dedicated political activism could he effect transformative change.
Summer 1965, Jon volunteered at the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in D.C. after three young civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi by the KKK. He assembled a van load of Putney students to travel to Manchester, NH, as part of the national anti-war mobilization to shut down military induction centers. Inspired by SDS students who seized campus buildings at Columbia University, he and another student organized the only student strike in Putney’s history.
By graduation in June 1968, Jon had committed himself to political activism as the platform from which he hoped, along with others of his generation, to right the wrongs of a deeply flawed society.