Summer of '69: Alan Dershowitz

Alan Dershowitz, 70, the civil rights attorney, is a professor at the Harvard Law School. He had recently become the youngest full professor in the school's history when he took his family for a vacation on Fire Island in the summer of 1969.

I was biking with my two young sons when we got to a fence. We couldn't go past it - it was a private community called Point O'Woods. They wouldn't let us bike through the other end of the island. That was very upsetting.

I learned that no Jews were allowed. No blacks, either, and no Catholics.

Soon after, I organized a protest. We threw ethnic food over a fence, tied to handmade parachutes. I went to a deli and got the gefilte fish. Others got bagels, black-eyed peas, corn bread. We sent messages asking the children in the community to tell their parents that discrimination is wrong. We had signs: 'Free the POWs,' which stood for 'Point O'Woods.'

My friends and family had been active in the civil rights movement before that. Normally we were fighting other people's battles. This was the first time we were fighting our own battles.

We saw this as part of a bigger issue. In New York and in the north in general, communities were using restrictive covenants, screening for race and ethnic background. It was much more subtle than the South - it wasn't by public law, it was by private law.

We also sued to have the U.S. Post Office remove its branch, because the post office cannot be part of a community that turns away people because of their race or ethnicity. We won that . . . .

People from different ethnic groups can now live there. I ended up deciding not to summer there. I chose Martha's Vineyard. It was more open.