In the American South of the late 1950s, segregation was part of the daily architecture. Airports had separate facilities. Restaurants barred Black customers or served them apart. Schools, buses, waiting rooms, and lunch counters carried the same instructions. The system depended on law, custom, and the expectation that most white people would accommodate it.

Resistance often began with small acts that carried real costs. A professor might drive arrested students back to campus. A family might refuse to send its children to segregated schools. A group of faculty members might walk toward a restaurant door together and be met in the parking lot by men who intended to stop them. The work required patience, and it also required a willingness to be arrested, disliked, and misunderstood.

Peter Klopfer, who died on June 5 at 95, spent nearly seven decades at Duke University as a zoologist, teacher, and builder of institutions. He helped develop behavioral ecology, studied mother-offspring bonding, and co-founded the Duke Lemur Center, which became the world’s largest collection of lemurs outside Madagascar. He was also the named plaintiff in a Supreme Court case that extended the Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial to state courts. The civil-rights defendant and the lemur scientist were the same man, formed by the same habits of attention and conscience.

He was born in Berlin in 1930 and raised in a German immigrant family in the United States. He attended Friends schools and later studied at UCLA and Yale. At UCLA he came into contact with Bayard Rustin, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the American Friends Service Committee. He also met his future wife, Martha, while working at an AFSC camp in California among Mexican orange pickers. Service became part of the structure of his life: where he made friends, found work, and chose the obligations by which he would live.

Before he came to Duke, he had already paid for those choices. As a Quaker pacifist, he refused the Korean War draft and served part of a prison sentence. During the McCarthy years he was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee after opposing compulsory ROTC and taking part in student organizing. Cambridge, where he did postdoctoral work, felt to him like a refuge. In 1958 Duke recruited him to North Carolina. He and Martha expected to stay a few years.

North Carolina brought the issue of segregation into view almost at once. At the Raleigh-Durham airport, they saw the separate drinking fountains and bathrooms. In a laundromat soon after arriving, Klopfer saw machines marked “Colored” and “White” and separated the family laundry by fabric before an attendant corrected him. The incident became a family story because it caught the confusion of an outsider facing a system that was both brutal and absurd.

Their children made the issue practical. The Klopfers would not send them to segregated schools. With other Quakers, they helped found Carolina Friends School, an integrated school intended to serve children whom the public system would not yet bring together. Some colleagues supported them. Others thought he should leave local customs alone. He had little use for that advice.

At first his role in the civil-rights movement was often logistical. When students were arrested at protests, they might be released late at night into hostile crowds. Klopfer and others organized rides to bring them safely back to campus. When resident advisers risked losing their campus jobs because they had been arrested, he argued that the university should not punish them for taking part in the movement. His own conviction for draft refusal gave the argument an edge. If Duke was prepared to employ him, it could hardly claim that arrest alone disqualified a student from serving in a campus leadership role.

Then came Watts Grill, in Chapel Hill. Student leaders wanted faculty to show that support for integration was not limited to undergraduates. A small group of professors from Duke and the University of North Carolina went to seek service as an integrated party. They did not get inside. They were attacked in the parking lot, and police intervened after blood was drawn. Klopfer was charged with criminal trespass.

The case lasted for years. His colleagues were convicted. His juries hung. After the Civil Rights Act changed the legal setting, prosecutors kept the charge alive without bringing him to trial. The unresolved case remained over him, still available for use. Klopfer sought the right to have it heard and dismissed. North Carolina denied that claim, and the question eventually reached the Supreme Court.

In 1967, in Klopfer v. North Carolina, the Court held unanimously that the Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial applied to the states. Klopfer later viewed the ruling chiefly through its practical consequence. Prosecutors could no longer leave defendants indefinitely under pending charges, waiting for fatigue, fear, or inconvenience to do the work of conviction. The decision limited a form of punishment that could be imposed without a verdict.

The case also helped bring lemurs to Duke. As Klopfer’s legal expenses mounted, friends and colleagues raised money for his defense. One contribution came from John Buettner-Janusch, a Yale professor working on lemur genetics. When Buettner-Janusch later came to Duke, Klopfer introduced himself to thank him. He showed him Duke’s zoology behavior station, with deer, goats, turkeys, and other animals in a 40-acre enclosure. Buettner-Janusch needed outdoor space for his lemurs. Klopfer saw that primates from Madagascar could also support behavioral research at Duke. He invited Buettner-Janusch to bring them to North Carolina.

That collaboration became the Duke Primate Center in 1966, later the Duke Lemur Center. It began on wooded land near campus, with animals moved from Connecticut to North Carolina. Over time it housed thousands of animals across dozens of species and became a center for non-invasive research, veterinary knowledge, and conservation work linked to Madagascar. Its origin story was unusual even by academic standards: a scientific institution partly made possible by a civil-rights defense fund.

Klopfer’s own science ranged widely. He studied ducks, goats, birds, fish, giant tortoises, antelopes, and lemurs. He helped clarify the role of oxytocin in maternal bonding. Later he turned to dwarf lemurs and hibernation, work with medical implications because primates are much closer to humans than other hibernating animals. His daughter Gretchen wrote of growing up around the Lemur Center before it had a front desk, when it was still a place of keepers, researchers, cages, and children who did not yet know what their father had built.

He returned to public protest in old age. In 2013, at 82, he was arrested during North Carolina’s Moral Monday demonstrations. His daughter learned by telephone that her father was in jail. He was there for only seven hours, and by her account was content with the result. The episode carried family comedy, but it also showed continuity. Half a century after the sit-ins, he still regarded arrest, when chosen for a serious reason, as part of citizenship.

His convictions were visible in repeated acts: drive the students, start the school, go to the restaurant, contest the charge, build the center, teach the students, return to the protest line. His life did not divide cleanly between science and justice. In both, he paid close attention to behavior, relationships, and the conditions that allowed living creatures to develop.

In a 2003 interview for the Durham Civil Rights Heritage Project, Klopfer looked back on the Supreme Court hearing decades earlier. He recalled sitting in the Court as Chief Justice Earl Warren questioned North Carolina’s attorney. When the state conceded that suspended charges could harm a defendant, Warren asked whether the attorney wished to consult his superiors about changing the state’s plea. Justice William O. Douglas laughed. Klopfer knew then that the case had turned.

He kept that memory for decades as evidence that institutions could sometimes be forced to do what they promised. He had seen courts fail, universities hesitate, police protect the wrong people, and communities defend cruelty as order. He had also seen charges dismissed, children taught together, students brought home safely, and lemurs arrive in North Carolina because a man under indictment still had work to do.

Klopfer died on June 5th, aged 95.

Banner image: Peter Klopfer. Photo by Anne Yoder

Further reading:

• Peter Klopfer, Civil Rights Activist and Co-Founder of the Duke Lemur Center, Died by Marie Claire Chelini and Owen Covington.

Cite this article

Rhett Ayers Butler (2026). Peter Klopfer, the scientist whose civil-rights case helped bring lemurs to Duke. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-321263

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Rhett Butler Editor

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EthicsHuman RightsLemursObituaryProtestsUnited StatesDuke Lemur Center

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