Deceased August 26, 2020

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In Memory

John Nesbitt '72
John Howard Nesbitt died unexpectedly on Aug. 26, 2020, in Jacksonville, Fla. John was raised in Orange, N.J., and graduated from Amherst with a major in anthropology. He completed his MBA in finance at Rutgers as a Ralph Bunche Fellow in 1988.

John’s impressive career is chronicled in an In Memory piece on the class of ’72 webpage. He had been working in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as head of employment branding for the Saudi Electric Co. When his contract ended in 2019, John returned to Jacksonville. He planned to retire at the end of 2020.

Wayne Wormley ’72 recalls, “Nesbitt and I partied together and took a class in the history of Black music at Smith together junior year. He had a big Afro when he arrived at Amherst and wore this great winter coat that may have belonged to a West Point cadet. After graduation, we ran into each other periodically through the National Black MBA Association, to which we both belonged. I was really saddened to learn of his passing.”

John Nesbitt
Mark Kuperberg ’72 roomed with John junior year. “You got room-draw points for accepting a transfer student, and that is how Nesbitt joined our group. He was the hardest-working student I ever met, working day and night and taking caffeine pills to stay awake. On Easter Sunday, he came out of his room dressed in a blue suit. It was 1971; no one wore a suit.  We asked him what was going on. He said at home his family always dressed up for Easter Sunday. We were 20 years old, breaking down so many of society’s norms, and yet this reminded me we were still kids clinging to the cherished pieces of our childhood.”

The class of 1972 expresses its deepest sympathies to John’s family for their loss.

Eric Cody ’72