Me, I don’t have much memory of Nixon’s April 30, 1970 speech announcing the invasion of Cambodia. It could have been because nothing the bastard did would have surprised me by that point, but more likely it’s just that I was already on my way to New Haven to see about Bobby.
That would be Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party, who was facing trial in the case of some Connecticut Panthers accused of murdering a member they thought was a police informant. A national call had gone out for a May Day demonstration to defend Bobby, and thousands of young radicals from around the country and especially the Northeast were en route. We had a couple of dozen from NYU’s Uptown campus with us.
Lemme step back here to set a little context. NYU today is a bigtime, self-promoting academic powerhouse whose relentless pursuit of lower Manhattan real estate for expansion has earned them the hatred of all clear-thinking New Yorkers. Back then, NYU was a bit cheesier, with a campus in Greenwich Village and a satellite one in the Bronx. (The Uptown campus was abandoned by the racist NYU administration later in the 1970s when it found the West Bronx was becoming, let’s say, too colorful, and is now the home of Bronx Community College).
We had a pretty good SDS chapter at NYU Uptown and saw no reason to change anything just because the national organization had imploded the previous summer. (In fact, at one point we decided the chapter head, Lon E. Thud, must be National Secretary of SDS—nobody else was doing it, after all). NYU had given me a “compulsory leave of absence for academic reasons” at the endof the previous school year, a tactical mistake on their part. I was still a registered student and, as such, could not be excluded from the campus.
We began the school year with an orientation week packet and program we had put a lot of time into prepping and followed up with extensive dorm canvassing, picking up some fine new members. One of our fall activities was selling the Black Panther, the BPP’s weekly paper, to build support for the revolutionary group—a dynamic model of revolutionary organization, hugely popular in the Black community and under concerted and deadly attack by local police forces and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
In the early months, we could barely sell a dozen papers. The problem wasn’t their militant program or their guns. We were meeting particular resistance on a disproportionately Jewish campus. “Aren’t they anti-Semitic?” folks would ask, citing the BPP’s early support of the Palestinian struggle and Fatah.
But patient education and organizing would combine with the increasing radicalization of the times to create a more favorable climate. By mid-winter SDS took a contingent of over 100 from the Uptown campus to join a march from Manhattan to the Queens House of Detention in support of the Panther 21 (more political prisoners, victims of frame-up charges, whose long court case and trial, the most expensive in NY history, eventually resulted in complete exoneration).
When the call came to rally on May Day in New Haven to Free Bobby! (a slogan which had somehow mysteriously appeared writ large across various Uptown campus buildings), a couple dozen of the most active radicals at the school headed up there, to join 15,000 other protesters crashing in Yale dorms and rallying on the New Haven Green.
Friday, May 1 was a very tense day, which foreshadowed the month to come in its combination of repression and concession. The governor had persuaded Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, to airlift 4,000 Army paratroops and Marines from Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune for deployment in New Haven! Meanwhile, Connecticut National Guard troops in APCs and tanks were stationed around the city.
At the same time Yale University head Kingman Brewster, facing a substantial groundswell of support for Seale within his elite student body, famously set himself against the establishment, declaring at a mass faculty meeting, to the horror of many alumni: “I personally want to say that I am appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass in this country that I am skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States."
Significantly, that faculty meeting was dealing with the threat of a student strike at Yale, endorsed at a 1500 student rally where a Panther spokesman declared “That Panther and that Bulldog gonna move together!" In a pre-emptive strike, the profs voted to suspend business as usual. Faculty members didn’t have to hold classes, and no students would be penalized academically for not attending.
Finally, Brewster had decided to open the campus to the protestors, so as to avoid making Yale an easy target for us. Meanwhile, he negotiated with established organizers and leaders from New Haven’s Black community and the upstart Panther chapter there to ensure that dangerous violence wouldn’t break out. Even New Haven’s police chief fought for authority over the military contingent, and they were kept out of sight for the most part.
It was still a close thing on May Day. The afternoon rally was, as rallies tend to be, peaceful and long and boring, even with the occasional whiff of tear gas. In the evening, there were running skirmishes in the campus area, some clearly the work of provocateurs, and tear gas aplenty. We were ready to rumble, but the tactical and political leadership, headed by the Panthers, directed us to keep things cool. New Haven didn’t blow.
Nothing I’ve read mentions the most important thing to come out of the rally. We voted to respond to Nixon’s Cambodia invasion with a national student strike (which, though we didn’t yet grasp it, was already underway). And we laid out three main demands for the strike:
US Out Of Southeast Asia
End Campus Complicity With The War Machine
Free Bobby Seale & All Political Prisoners
With no widely-recognized national student organization to provide direction to the forces already set in motion, this call did a lot to lay down the political terms on which the events of May ’70 would take place. Campus after campus took the three demands up. Indeed, they were just what the doctor ordered—very broad, revolutionary in fact, but still specific, and representing mass sentiment among a whole layer in every part of the country and every section of the people, millions who had been thrown into motion by the ferment of the ‘60s.
Click here to read this series from the beginning.
Click here to read the next installment.
May 1, 2010
May ‘70: 3. May Day & Bobby Seale
February 27, 2008
Some news from the student movement
Seems those meddling kids in SDS are at it again, with a new issue of the SDS News Bulletin. Some stuff about creative uses of the Iraq Moratorium ahead of the March 20th protests and lots more. (PDF badness defanged through use of PDF Me Not, btw).
Now a question for those elders who "saw it live": how's the new SDS stacking up against the original? Read more!
February 16, 2007
Take Five--Vietnam Moratorium Memories
[Take Five. Every Friday, Fire on the Mountain picks a category and lists five cool things in it. It's up to you, dear reader, to add your own in the Comments section. Just click on the word "comments" at the bottom of the piece and you're off to the races.]
There's been a most heartening spike in activity against the occupation of Iraq in recent days--the student strike peaking in the seizure of CA Highway 217 in Santa Barbara, the Vermont legislature calling for immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, the swelling wave of takeovers of Congressional offices blogged here a couple days back.
In this context, it's hardly surprising that activists brainstorming the next step are contemplating the possibility of an Iraq Moratorium, based on the massive Vietnam Moratorium of Autumn, 1969.
Hence, here are five things I recall about the Moratorium. Readers who were there would be making a small but real contribution by sharing your own memories. Your comments will be a real help to folks trying to see what might be done this year.
TAKE FIVE
1. It was big, real big. On October 15, 1969, the Bronx campus where I was based hosted a borough-wide twilight rally of over 10,000, most of whom came on an unprecedented nighttime march through residential neighborhoods.(I seem to recall this being the candlelight demo where our SDS chapter marched with candles made from three foot lengths of 2 x 2, wire-wrapped at the top in kerosene-soaked mattress fabric.)
2. One unifying theme nation-wide was the widespread use of black armbands and ribbons.
3. Though the initial call six months earlier was for something more like a general strike, the no more business as usual aspect mainly took the form of student strikes at colleges and high schools, some junior highs too.
4. The Moratorium seemed pretty distant from the infighting between (and within) the two large anti-war coalitions and even more removed from the revolutionary politics them hegemonic in the student movement.
5. The single biggest error the organizers made was a voluntarist one: the concept was that each month the Moratorium would be extended by a day until the government caved in. In fact, after October, where participants in all the local actions must have numbered well over a million, the November Moratorium was folded into a huge Washington, DC March. By the middle of December, when it should have run an unsustainable three days, the Moratorium was heading for the dead letter office.
[This is crossposted over at DailyKos, where an interesting set of reminiscences is accumulating in the comments section.]
December 22, 2006
Take Five--Reasons for the Fall-off in Anti-war Demos After '69
It's Friday, and time for Take Five. Last week's inaugural list was five lefty mysteries.
This time, it's a little more free-form. In a discussion about the student movement of today on another blog, a commenter nmed lawyerDan raised the following question:
One of the things I always wondered about was why there were those huge demonstrations of maybe 2 million people in the fall of 1969 and then, even as the war became even less popular, there were never such big marches again. It was like the Vietnam Moratorium ended the war, but it took 6 years to process the paperwork.
What say you, dear readers?I agree that the high point of mass demos was 1967-69. In the remarkable "Honorable Peace," one of the finest and most savage protest songs of the Vietnam era, Gerry Goffin writes of the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi ordered by Nixon and Kissinger:
I know the tide of protest has passed us by somehow,
But when will you speak out, if you don't speak out now?(This puppy was recorded on Christmas Eve 1972 as the bombing intensified by, believe it or not, B.J. Thomas, Mr. "Rainsdrops Keep Fallin' On My Head," and almost universally forbidden radio play by station managers fearful of its blunt condemnation of Nixon.)
Five short points in partial explanation:
1. Fatigue with what some of us had taken to calling "Peace Crawls" and saw as ineffective and toothless, especially as media coverage dwindled.
2. A broad radicalization in the student movement which led to the eruption in May, 1970 (Cambodia, Kent State, Jackson State, national shutdown of campuses, the partial or complete destruction of 33 ROTC buildings around the country, etc.). This advance was undercut even as it was happening by the 1969 collapse of SDS, depriving the student movement of organizational leadership.
3. The perception that the war was in fact ending with negotiations with North Vietanm and the NLF underway, the drawdown of US troops under "Vietnamization" to fewer than 200,000 by Fall, 1971, and the erosion of the US military.
4. The institution in 1969 of the draft lottery which let a majority of draft age males know whether or not they would likely be facing conscription, thus limiting the insecurity previously felt by an entire age cohort. This was followed by the end of the draft overall in 1973.
5. The fact that despite the shellacking of "peace candidate" George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election, more and more Senators and Congressmen were belatedly taking stands for ending the war.
