Peter Benenson Founder of Amnesty International 28 February 2005

When I attended graduate school in Anthropology at Stony Brook University, NY, my housemate started an Amnesty International chapter at the University. We thought we might have trouble, but the trouble was underground, leaking nearby gasoline "tank farm" over 1 million gallons over ten years. He and his brother were Italian natives, their father worked in laser physics at the Brookhaven National Lab on a grant. He went on to work in arms limitation research according to one alumni list. We also roomed with a professor of American "native/slave" relations, Phil Ributo, Cherokee and Italian-American. He had found on Bermuda's St. David's Island (Happy St. David's Day Wales!) that the son of "King Phillip" (or Metacomet, beheaded after the native uprising against Pilgrims, and whose head was placed on a pike for 25 years) had been given in slavery to the Governor of Bermuda, from whom he escaped. His mother and sister had been sent to Curacao. So the local legends, on an island that had a causeway only since WWII, built by the USA, to it.