Bob Cover
(1944 — 1986)

 

As remembered by Miriam Cohen Glickman
June, 2008

In the summer of 1963, Bob Cover and I worked together as part of the SNCC project in Albany, GA. Bob and I spent our days going door to door together talking with folks, encouraging them to come to mass meetings and join the Albany Movement. I remember Bob as kind and gentle, and deeply committed to the work we were doing.

Bob was in jail for three weeks that summer, much of it on a hunger strike in the hopes of getting out earlier. He and Ralph Allen were beaten up in jail. Bob talked about how scared he had been. The local white man in his jail cell had been offered a shorter jail sentence in exchange for beating up Bob.

That fall, Bob went back North to finish college. He graduated from Princeton, then Columbia Law. He was in his late 20s when he become a professor at Yale Law School. At Yale, Bob was active in the antiapartheid movement and in helping unionize Yale's clerical workers. He was probably one of few law professors in the country with an arrest record.

Bob knew he had heart problems and was naturally worried. He had had two heart attacks at a young age. He died in l986 at age 42 of another heart attack. He left behind his wife, Diane, and his children, Avidan and Leah.

Miriam Cohen Glickman, June 2008


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