Keeping a Sense of Commitment

Among the seven graduates that TIME profiled in its cover story on the class of '68 18 years ago were Vernon Ford of Northwestern, Liz Stevens of Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., and David Shapiro of Columbia. To see how they have maintained their sense of social commitment while coping with the pressures of family and career at mid-life, TIME Correspondents Elizabeth Taylor and Cathy Booth sought out the three Baby Boomers. Their report:

Rebuilding a Neighborhood

Vernon Ford went to Northwestern in 1964 to study and play basketball and became a black-power militant. Today Ford, 39, is living in the west-side Chicago neighborhood where he grew up. A nattily dressed real estate developer, he has a big house and two cars, one of them a BMW. But he has also kept the vow he made in college: to use his education as a lever to help other black people.

Taking an M.A. in sociology from Northwestern in 1970, Ford went west to law school at the University of California, Berkeley, because "I needed more credentials and equipment." After nearly three years of providing legal aid to welfare clients back in Chicago, he quit, frustrated by the low pay and disillusioned with the possibilities for creating change through the federal courts. He decided to go into real estate instead.

In 1976 he bought a run-down building that had been occupied by squatters and fixed it up. Soon he was buying and renovating other undervalued houses as well. His neighbors were suspicious at first that he aimed to gentrify the neighborhood by selling to well-to-do whites, but in fact his customers have all been black families. "The real restriction of being black middle class," Ford says, "is that nobody has a place for you." By providing affordable housing, Ford has, in a literal way, given them a place. "We came from a protest generation," he says. "We didn't know how to get mortgages. What I thought we could do collectively, I did by myself."

Kitchen Table Activism

Liz Stevens, 38, owns a roomy turn-of-the-century house in Providence that Ozzie and Harriet could have lived in. The only telltale sign of Stevens' activism is a 1979 Volkswagen Rabbit parked outside and plastered with bumper stickers like I'M PRO CHOICE . . . AND I VOTE. "I kid my friends that putting a bumper sticker on a car is the big political act of the '80s," Stevens laughs. She has maintained her sense of humor and the sense of commitment that led her, as a senior at fashionable all-women Wheaton, to tutor poor black children in a Boston ghetto.