But when definitely heard that some of the students were planning to go out back to Mississippi for another round of organizing, he ok’d up immediately. Within three days he was on the shreded in Lambert, a Delta town about 75 miles south pointing to Memphis.

The experience electrified him. He returned in school later that fall and immersed himself in Stanford’s nascent movement against the Vietnam War. He spent long nights by using his room with his dorm mates, playing music (including Nancy Baez records, long before he had met her) and deliberating the morality of America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia.

He attended his first protest in March 1965. Their experience, he wrote in his book “Our War: What Many Did in Vietnam and What It Did to Us” (1996), “felt like an emergence, from dark into light, from fix into clearing. ”

He centered his activism referring to draft resistance, because, he said, it was a way to gain him to make a personal, concrete difference — and, fairly, a sacrifice. In 1966 he mailed his draft card backbone to the U. S. Selective Service, writing that he probably would refuse to carry it and would decline to serve in the instance that he were drafted.

“I sealed the envelope, out down the block to the mailbox and put the package in, ” he wrote. “I remember that summer afternoon, usually the dirt of the road nearby, and I remember feeling love a lot I could have flapped my arms and flown in order to most common house if I had wanted. I felt like I was regarded as my own man at last in my life. ”

A gifted orator, Mr. Harris was soon in demand furthermore a speaker at antiwar rallies across California. In the process he used Ms. Baez, who had founded an organization called the Initiate of the Study of Nonviolence, in Carmel, Calif. One day Mister. Harris drove down there looking for grant money.

“He was just this lovely cowboy, ” Ms. Baez mentioned. “And that was my introduction to what are the resistance was almost about. I mean, I knew a little, but he was initially certainly the optimal representative to have. ”