The civic failure in Minneapolis, now called out, and justice, we hope, being restored by the power and persuasion and dignity of ‘the Mob’, has much occupied my thoughts.

Any reader in social studies early confronts ‘the Mob.’ Senior year in college — when I was already pretty well steeped in Bacon’s Rebellion, the Boston Massacre, Nat Turner’s Revolt, the ’45, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Paris Barricades, La Fronde, the Draft Riots, the Haymarket Riots, the Molly Malones, the Sepoys, the Navarodniks, the Ashram, Civil Rights, the Chicago Riots and the Newark Riots, and a hundred more — the Royal Shakespeare company gave a master class at Penn, focused on the “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” scene in Julius Caesar.

Brilliant actor Julian Glover stood in the center as Antony, and directed us students, as ‘the Mob’; sprinkled in among us, in their sweats and bare feet, were a dozen or so Titan actors of the RSC. They helped pull forth from each of us some inner-directed passion that turned into movement: ‘That makes me want to reach up and shake my fist.’ Or, ‘when I hear that, I want to grab my guts and groan and bend over, shaking.’ That sort of thing. And over the course of the rehearsal, in response to the rhythms of Shakespeare, amplified by Glover — there must have been eighty of us — our individual movements all added up to a collective trajectory; we all stopped being inner-directed at all, and had formed into a swirling, pacing, rippling flock of changeable passion, roiling around the stage and riding the roller-coaster of feelings that Antony evokes. There was no audience there to see it but I bet their blood would have run cold.

In that rehearsal, everything I had ever read about civil unrest, 1,001 individual clashes for social justice, across the cultures of 13 language groups, all suddenly clicked. The study of the Mob is the study of Homo sapiens in society.

At the end of their stay, our big old Victorian off-campus house at 4041 Walnut Street hosted a memorable “last night” party for them. I mention it only because my old housemate, Seth Rozin, the playwright and director, recently found in his basement the handwritten thank-you note that Mr. Glover sent us. Such simple, noble gestures are rare today, so I reproduce it here. You can tell he truly enjoyed himself.