Dr. Robert Kemp had recently joined our Steering Committee and had a long-time commitment to the separation of church and state. Pictured above, Bob and his wife Laura were staffing our AU table in early February. We are all saddened by his passing and wish to convey our sympathy to Laura.

He taught at a fundamentalist Christian college for 16 years where in his history and politics courses he spent much of his time trying to undo the damage done to students in Christian high schools and the home - school movement. Recently retired, he had a long career in both academia and politics. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago where he won the prestigious Louis Pelzer Memorial Award for the best article published in the Journal of American History.

He taught at Pitzer College, Claremont Graduate School, and Concordia University, Irvine, and served as a Research Fellow at the Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies and the Russell Sage Foundation. He received awards for excellence in teaching at both Pitzer and Concordia.

He was a veteran of several political campaigns, including Robert Kennedy’s presidential bid in 1968 and Daniel Moynihan’s first campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1976. He served on the staff of Rep. Andrew Jacobs, Jr., (D-IN) and Senator Moynihan and President Carter’s Welfare Reform Task Force.

At his untimely death on March 1, 2008, Bob was working on a biography of Gerald B. Winrod (1900-1957), the founder of the first Christian Right political movement in 1925.

We will all miss him.

"What we take with us when we leave this world is what we have given to others."