Hillary Clinton

By the spring of 1967, Gist, Williamson, Wardlaw, and Wilson—with the help of one student from the class of 1968 and a handful of students from the class of 1970—had officially founded a student group called Ethos. Williamson, the organization’s first president, announced its mission in a letter to the Wellesley News: “To represent the Negro students on campus in matters which concern and interest us.” Those matters took on even greater urgency after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968. “We had been meeting and voicing concerns,” Wardlaw said. “But the assassination of Dr. King caused us to really set out a platform with all the issues.”

A number of the white students on campus were also visibly upset by the assassination. But only one of them called Williamson. “I remember the evening he was killed,” Williamson said. “Hillary called me to express her sympathy, how upset she was. And I don’t know that any other white student did that. I was very touched.”

“What I respected about Hillary was you could see a gradual evolution,” Gist said. “She started out—for whatever it’s worth to have supported any candidate when you were seventeen years old—supporting Goldwater. And most of the girls in our class did come from homes that were Republican, whatever that meant at the time. But you could see her thoughtfully moving away from the ways and strictures and politics with which she’d been raised. By the time she started focussing on Eugene McCarthy and viewing the world through progressive and race-conscious and peace-conscious lenses, it was the result of a process. I always thought of her as somebody who is real, for that reason. She didn’t just jump into something without thinking it through.”