In the summer 1962, future Harvard student Steve Saltonstall was one of the early wave of white northerners who went into the Jim Crow south to work for civil rights. Still a teenager, Saltonstall assisted a SNCC project in Cairo, Illinois, then a hotbed of KKK activity, that sought to integrate public accommodations built with federal funds.

From there, Saltonstall enlisted on a crew organized by the American Friends Service Committee, to travel fifty miles west to work on a seemingly more mundane project, to help clear a tree-filled drainage ditch near the segregated, all-white community of Circle City, Missouri, that caused the city to flood each year. The AFSC crew was integrated by a single African American woman who, as Saltonstall recalled, "ultimately left the camp for unknown reasons I never fully understood," and as a result, the northerners was visited nightly by night riders. "But the head camp counselor, Mick Micklem," Saltonstall wrote, "was a southerner who persuaded the rednecks to leave. We cleared the trees from the ditch and had a Quaker Meeting in it on the last day of camp. It was a beautiful sight, pink cotton flowers as far as one could see."

After college, Saltonstall spent some time as a back to the land hippie and later received a law degree from Northeastern University. Today he does civil trial work in Vermont, with a specialty in personal injury and wrongful death, criminal defense, and civil rights and civil liberties.