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ROTUNDA
VOL. LIX.
LONGWOOD COLLEGE, FARMVILLE, VIRGINIA TUESDAY, APRIL 17, 1984
NO. 14
Freedom Summer Students Dance For MD Campaign College campuses across the country are the focus of a massive student recruitment drive for an unprecedented voter registration campaign aimed at registering one million low income votes. The campaign, "Freedom Summer '84," has already gained wide support from campus organizers and leaders including students recently selected as paid coordinators. They will launch a recruitment blitz to enroll 5,000 student volunteers who will register voters at public assistance offices, "cheese lines," health clinics and other social service agencies in 60 cities. The 10-week project, June 1 through August 11, is sponsored by the United States Student Association (USSA), the National Student Educational Fund and Human SERVE (Service Employees Registration Voter Education) Fund. The drive marks the 20th anniversary of "Mississippi Freedom Summer 1964," a movement which drew students to the deep South. They plaed a major role in mobilizing and registering many disenfranchised Blacks, helping to gain passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1964. Freedom Summer '84 will involve a broader spectrum of statewide student associations, student governments and campus-based fraternities and sororities. They will be supervised by leading voter
registration organizations such as the Voter Education Project, Midwest Voter Registration and Education Project, Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project and Project VOTE! Many students will receive course credit, while more than 40 social work departments are placing students as part of field work programs. "Freedom Summer '84 will be the most important project that students can commit themselves to this summer. It will be an invaluable learning experience and provide the opportunity to move into the forefront of the political arena," said USSA President Greg Moore. "By November, any lingering doubts about the importance of students in the electoral process should be dispelled." USSA includes 3.5 million members and affiliates on over 300 campuses. Many of the affiliates have already recruited volunteers and are conducting campus voter registration. Freedom Summer Coordinators, selected from every region, will be paid weekly stipends and will launch campus rallies, teach-ins, classroom speaking and other drives to reach large numbers of students. Human SERVE Executive Director Hulbert James noted that student participation will give significant momentum to ongoing registration drives at social service agencies. Human (Continued on Page 4)
An energetic group of Longwood College students recently danced for 21 hours to raise money in the fight against muscular dystrophy. The "Super Dance," held in Ixmgwood's lower dining hall, began at 6 p.m. on Friday, April 6, and lasted until 3 o'clock the following afternoon. Thirty-two students participated; all but six danced the entire time, said coordinator Eddie Esatto. Those six people had to limit their dancing for medical reasons. They raised more than $2,200 for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, Esatto said. Each dancer had received pledges - some per hour, others a total pledge — prior to the dance. "This year's dance was a rebuilding process," explained Esatto. "We've had Super Dances at Longwood since 1979, but we didn't have one last year. We were trying to acclimate the freshmen and sophomores who didn't know what a Super Dance was." The dancers took 10-minute breaks every hour, and reserved a half-hour for dinner Friday and a half-hour for breakfast and lunch Saturday. "This was a dance-a-thon, not a dance marathon. But they still danced their hearts out." Pi Kappa Phi fraternity coordinated the dance, with help from all iraternities and sororities. About 500-600 people attended a mixer Friday evening at the Super Dance. "The mixer helped, because those people saw
Jim Steve and Susan Aasen dance to "Rock of Ages". the dancers and said to themselves, 'Maybe we'll do this next year,' " Esatto said. "We're hoping to have greater participation and raise over $6,000 next year." Billy Duncan, a disc jockey for Q-94 radio station and a former Longwood student, played music from 6 Friday
evening until 1 in the morning. "I can still hear music playing in my head," laughed Esatto, who was in the lower dining hall from early Friday afternoon until a few hours after the dance ended. Asked if the dancers felt "dead" by Saturday afternoon, Esatto said, "Actually, they were fairly peppy near the end."
LIVE '84 A Success A funny thing happened — or, rather, didn't happen — during LIVE '84 on Saturday, March 31. Organizers of LIVE '84, a Longwood College-sponsored volunteer work day in the community, had expected something to eventually go wrong with the first-time event. However, they were pleasantly surprised. "I thought we'd have some problems at some point in the day, but everything went like clock-work," said coordinator Tom Bailey. "The volunteers were great," added Bailey, a senior from Richmond. "We never had any complaints. Sign-in wasn't supposed to start until 8:30 — we Trae. Good^ o. M Taa Alpha remove. Step.es ,ron, wiadow tad^tj^l*^ at the Old Mill.
faculty and staff took part in the work day, known as "Longwood Initiates volunteer Energy." Volunteers performed yardwork at the homes of senior citizens and Ixmgwood's Alumni House; painted windows at the Old Mill; picked up trash along several roads; cleaned the former high school; Scope Senior Citizens Center, and the United Way-Red Cross office; and visited patients at Eldercare and Holly Manor. "We had doubled the number of workers for each site, thinking some wouldn't show, but just about everybody that we assigned to a work site showed up," Bailey -aid. "So the jobs got finished a lot quicker than we had anticipated. There were very few no-shows."
The work began around 9:30 in the morning, as the longwood bus transported workers to their sites. Members of Alpha Chi Rho fraternity and Kappa Oelta sorority worked at the former high school. Members of Zeta Tau Alpha sorority worked at the Old Mill, which is now used by the Waterworks Players, and visited at Eldercare. Alpha (lamma Delta sisters picked up trash along Rt. 15 south. Members of Longwood's Institutional Advancement staff worked outside at the Alumni House "I talked to guys who were driving the town trucks and they said they had never seen people working so hard," said Bailey. "They picked up 275 bags of grabage."