From left: Seth Grossman '71, Joyce Hobson Johnson '68, Julia Yang Bedell '85 Photos from the Chanticleer

Like many others his age--and unlike the stereotype of his generation--Seth Grossman was a conservative during his college years, and continues to be a conservative today. "I thought it was kind of phony," Grossman says of student activism. And so, when materials at his 30th reunion included photos from the Vigil and other protests, they didn't really reflect his college experience.

Grossman wrote for The Chronicle briefly during his freshman year in 1967, "then I got fed up with all the liberals and joined a conservative group," he says. The group, Young Americans for Freedom, handed out leaflets, hosted speakers, and produced an alternative student newspaper for a while, but their activities didn't attract as much media attention as the protesters', he says. Their greatest success was forcing a referendum that resulted in the Duke student government's withdrawal from the liberal National Student Association.

He says he's not surprised that people like him aren't part of the boomer image. "It was tough to make noise." Going to class when other students were boycotting, for example, wasn't something that attracted newspaper headlines, he recalls. His activities may have been overlooked by the media, but he wasn't alone: Younger voters were more likely to support conservative candidates. In 1968, many of George Wallace's supporters were young, Southern, and rural. One-third of the early boomers served in Vietnam. "It's almost like we're the last of the old generation, not the first of the new generation," Grossman says.

Joyce Johnson's time at Duke overlapped with Grossman's, but unlike him, she was a student radical. Even after she graduated from Duke, she continued to do activist work as a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But, because she is African American, she also is left out of the baby-boomer picture. "Woodstock was not part of my reality. Leave It to Beaver was certainly not my reality," Johnson says. "My grandmother and mother were maids in homes like that when I was coming up."

Born in 1946, Johnson was one of six African-American students who came to Duke in 1964, the second year that black undergraduates were admitted. Her father was a steel-mill worker in Richmond and her mother a domestic worker and a cashier in a tobacco factory. Along with the high expectations normally placed on all freshmen, she had an additional load to carry. "When I went to Duke, I went with the blessing and the responsibility of the whole community.

"Personal advancement was what I sought to do, but it was very closely linked with advancement for my entire race. It makes you very serious about your work, but it is an awesome thing."

The sense of community responsibility inspired her during her college years. She was one of the founders of the Afro-American Society, and was involved in some of the iconic events of the Sixties on the Duke campus. In 1967, she took part in the day-long "study-in" in President Douglas M. Knight's office that resulted in the administration's prohibiting the university's use of segregated facilities.

In 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, she marched with hundreds of other students to Knight's house, where they presented a list of demands that included calling for his resignation from the segregated Hope Valley Country Club. The protest moved to the quad in front of Duke Chapel, where as many as 1,500 students stayed for four days, in the now-famous Silent Vigil in support of striking Duke workers.

The following year, she was among the black students who took over the Allen Building and presented a list of demands that included banning Duke organizations from using segregated facilities and providing better working conditions for non-academic staff members of the university. The students also demanded that the university establish a department of Afro-American studies. They left the building peacefully at the end of the day but outside encountered a large crowd of mostly white students. The police were called in to handle the resulting conflict and fired tear gas on the crowd--including Johnson.

Johnson's career path reflects her ongoing interest in effecting social change. As a researcher and faculty member at North Carolina A&T University, she studied the public-transportation needs of low-income and handicapped persons. Now she is working with her husband, the Reverend Nelson Johnson, at The Beloved Community Center of Greensboro Inc., an organization that promotes racial, economic, and social equality. She is also involved in Greensboro's Truth and Community Reconciliation Project, based on the South African model. Members of a special conciliation commission are investigating the 1979 shooting deaths of five labor and community organizers at a Greensboro rally.

"My husband and I never gave up our Sixties activism," she says.

Johnson may have been one of just a handful of African Americans at Duke, but that tiny percentage is not representative of the generation as a whole. Nearly one-third of late boomers are minorities: Asian, Hispanic, or African American. In Johnson's early boomer group, the proportion of minorities is also very high--about 25 percent.

"We didn't expect so many of the baby boomers to be minorities and foreign-born," says researcher Angela O'Rand. "Nowhere was that image there. You didn't see it anywhere. You didn't see a group of highly ethnically diverse people in middle age."

One factor that contributed to the diversity of the baby boomers was immigration: 12 percent of early boomers and nearly 15 percent of late boomers are immigrants. The level of immigration in the 1990s was the highest since the turn of the twentieth century, and immigrants usually are between the ages of thirty and fifty. So, for the past thirty years, immigrants have been in the baby-boom category, O'Rand notes.

Julia Bedell, who earned a chemistry degree at Duke, came to the U.S. from Taiwan with her family at age eleven. She doesn't think of herself as a baby boomer. Born in 1963, she was just four years old when Seth Grossman was writing for The Chronicle and Joyce Johnson was taking part in the sit-in at the Allen Building.