Deceased November 1, 1969

View alumni profile (log in required)


In Memory

Marshall Bloom took his own life on Nov. 1 near his farm in Montague, Mass. Although he left a note, the reasons for his act remain unexplained.

People who followed the occasional accounts of Marshall’s activities in the New York Times may have concluded that he was simply Amherst’s equivalent of Mario Savio or Mark Rudd. It is true that Marshall shared the concerns of other young radicals over the last half-decade: civil rights, Vietnam, finally, the nature of American society itself. Indeed, Marshall was in the vanguard of students who discerned these problems and moved actively to solve them. The mass of student protesters often directed their energy toward issues which Marshall, among others, had helped define.

Marshall worked for social change in two ways: through his writing and through civil protest. As chairman of the Amherst Student in 1965-66, Marshall tried to bring concern about national social issues to a campus that was still largely apathetic toward them. With several Harvard students, he founded the Southern Courier, a newspaper based in Selma, Ala., which presented full coverage of civil rights progress and Negro life in the South that white southern newspapers often ignored. Finally, after serving briefly as head of the U.S. Student Press Association, he co-founded Liberation News Service, a wire service which supplied copy to the underground, anti-establishment newspapers burgeoning throughout the country. At the height of its influence, LNS counted 300 subscribers.

As part of his commitment to civil rights, Marshall was jailed for his part in demonstrations in St. Augustine, Fla., in 1964. While president of the Graduate Student Association of the London School of Economics in 1966-67, he led protests against the appointment of Walter Adams as head of the school, due to Adams’ part in promulgating Rhodesia’s apartheid policy. At Amherst’s 1966 commencement, he was a leader of the walkout which protested the conferring of an honorary degree on Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara.

But despite the painful questions which Marshall asked about American life and the civil disobedience he occasionally urged, he was not destructive, irresponsible or nihilistic. Marshall did not care about dogma; he did care about people. It was perhaps this priority which caused Abbie Hoffman to write recently: “Marshall wasn’t what you’d call a politico. He was about as political as Johnny Appleseed.”

It was typical, therefore, that before staging the walkout at commencement, Marshall took the trouble to emphasize that the protest was not an expression of “any hatred of country or college” but rather “opposition to honoring the leader of the war effort in Vietnam.” It was characteristic that, when a split developed in Liberation News Service, Marshall charged the opposition with being “doggedly Marxist, jargon-ridden and humorless.” (The influence of English 1-2 seems apparent there.) When a porter at LSE died of a heart attack during demonstrations there, it affected Marshall deeply. “In things like this, someone always gets hurt,” he said later. It was a main reason why he moved away from mass protests.

His writing became less important to him too. In mid-summer 1968, Marshall and others from the news service moved to Montague and began farming. Instead of advocating revolution, they aimed to live as if the revolution had been accomplished and to show others what that life could be. In this last phase of his life, Marshall turned away from overt discussion of politics. His conversation usually concerned ways to keep the farm going. Still, he often drove down to Amherst to borrow books from Reverend Lewis Mudge and read for hours in the library.

At Amherst, Marshall was a founder of Forum, the student lecture committee, student head of freshman orientation 1965, a dorm proctor and a member of Sphinx and Phi Gamma Chi.

He is survived by his parents, a brother and a sister.

Marshall is a main figure in Famous Long Ago, a book about the Liberation News Service by Ray Mungo, its co-founder.

A memorial service was held in (and outside of) Chapin Chapel at Amherst on November 23.

John Kroll ‘66