“Reed College Group Scans Poetry Under Light of Moon In Demonstration Against Arresting of Fellow Student”, 7 February 1947. Reed College students protested the previous night’s arrest of Tom Kelly, a fellow student, for going about campus reading Shelley by moonlight. Unluckily for him, a couple of cops came across him and decided he was a weirdo who needed to be arrested. Apparently in 1947 men of draft age were supposed to carry proof of draft registration at all times, and being without it was a federal offense. Our poor student pointed out that he was a World War II veteran and thus didn’t need to carry a draft card, and offered to show them his honorable discharge papers. This didn’t seem to make him any less of a weirdo in the cops’ eyes, and they arrested him anyway, left him in jail overnight, and handed him over to the FBI. Whereupon the FBI promptly released him.
So the following night, a large crowd of outraged students gathered at the corner of 34th & Woodstock to read Shelley by moonlight together. No arrests were reported.
The article quotes people fuming about civil liberties being violated, and really the whole thing reads like something that could have happened here yesterday. Except that Shelley has rather gone out of fashion of late, and young Mr. Kelly would have been tasered, and the other protesters would have been pepper sprayed, and the FBI wouldn’t have released him.
