Robert Bennett Interview
This interview with Robert Bennett ‘69 entails his life from the day he was born, April 14, 1948, to his elementary years in Columbus, GA, to his junior high school years in Cincinnati, OH, to his high school years in Chicago, IL, to his college years at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, to the present day. Since Bennett moved around quite a bit throughout his childhood, he got to experience a multitude of different perspectives of the Civil Rights Movement. In Georgia, he attended the first official public school for Black people in the United States, Claflin School. He had limited interactions with white people during this time, but he was surrounded by a loving environment that uplifted other Black students. The lessons he learned during that era continued to motivate him throughout his life.
After being recruited to Dartmouth, Bennett entered a new world of activism. While activism wasn’t new to him, it was not until he got to Dartmouth that he became extremely passionate about it. This passion led him to become the Chairman of the Political Action Committee of the Afro-American Society and be at the forefront of change and equity for Dartmouth Black students.
After graduating from Dartmouth, Bennett attended Yale Law School, class of ‘72. Since then he has become an associate attorney with Winston and Strawn and later Rudnick and Wolfe (from 1975 to 1978), worked with ANC, helped campaign for Nelson Mandela’s presidency of South Africa and Jerry Rawlings’s presidency of Ghana, and spent many summers traveling across Europe and Africa.
To Bennett, he has not worked a day in his life, because he is doing what he truly loves to do: making a difference.