40 years ago today, around 100,000 people marched down Broadway in Manhattan. With thousands of safety helmet-wearing members of various construction unions in the lead and American flags everywhere, it was perhaps the largest single demonstration in support of the war during the whole Vietnam era.
As the march traversed the Wall Street area, it was greeted by cheers from crowds on the sidewalks and showered, from the upper floor offices of bankers, stockbrokers and lawyers, with spirals of tape from stock tickers.
Naturally the media gave the march intense play, contrasting it with the campus protests, by that point near the end of the third week of the national strike. And this hooray-for-war rally was in fact a direct outgrowth of the campus explosion. Specifically, it was the culmination of two weeks of orchestrated actions in NYC aimed at pushing the idea that the working class of the US supported the war and hated the protesters, starting with the intensely violent “Hard Hat riot” attacks on peaceful protesters which I wrote about on May 8, forty years after the event.
Two subsequent demos, on May 11 and May 16, targeted the city administration, especially the anti-war mayor John Lindsay (a Republican), with protesters calling him a “commie faggot.”
All were more or less openly organized from the top by Peter J Brennan, the president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York and vice president of the city’s Central Labor Council, and it was he who pulled together the May 20th march. As with the May 8 riot, workers continued to be mobilized by their unions and to receive paid time off from the large construction companies to take part.
These demonstrations were localized in NYC and didn’t spread like wildfire, the way the student protests had after the invasion of Cambodia, That’s a phenomenon which requires a little comment, especially for those who weren’t around at the time.
In the first article in this series, I wrote of how deep the split was that the Vietnam War had produced in US society. Those of us who militantly fought to end the war remained a distinct minority, but through our work (building on the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people to liberate their country), a lot of people had gotten pretty sick of the war.
Still, in a Gallup poll commissioned by Newsweek Magazine very shortly after the killings at Kent State, 58% said that the students were primarily at fault. Only 11% blamed the National Guard. Maybe the numbers were exaggerated, the methodology was flawed, etc, but enough of us came from small cities, from towns, from rural areas--hell, from families--where this was the conventional wisdom to know that Newsweek wasn’t way, way off either.
There was an question of privilege here. The draft was the only way the ruling class could maintain upwards of 500,000 troops at a time in Vietnam and college students had had the best set of options for avoiding or postponing having to show up for the fateful physical. Those who had served in previous wars, and those of our own generation who didn’t have that chance, mainly for reasons of class, had plenty of motive to resent those who did.
Beyond the war, the poll reflected a backlash against the whole new role that young folks were playing in society. We were setting the social norms--in politics, in sexual behavior, in clothing, in music, in every aspect of society, and we were rejecting, wholesale, the values and practices that our elders had lived their lives under and tried to inculcate in us.
In fact, one big reason that the New York City stuff wasn’t a nationwide phenomenon was the legacy of the ‘50s, with its suburbanization, conformity and red-baiting: quite simply, Good Americans (white ones) didn’t demonstrate. Period. It was us, the black sheep, the outcasts, the unAmericans who did.
Click here to read this series from the beginning.
Click here to read the next installment.
May 20, 2010
May '70: 16. The Other Side Of The Chasm
May 16, 2010
First anniversary of Basire Farrell's murder shows "Hollywood" Booker is on the way out!
May 15, 2010
May '70: 15. Phillip Gibbs. James Earl Green. Murdered.
When a unit of the Ohio National Guard wheeled and aimed at Kent State students on May 4, 1970, they fired an estimated 61-67 shots.
Fast forward ten days.
At five minutes after midnight on May 15, local police and state highway cops ordered out by Governor John Bell Williams opened a barrage of at least 460 rounds, mainly from shotguns, at Black students gathered in front of a women’s dorm at Jackson State College in Mississippi. 
When it ended more than half a minute later, Phillip Gibbs, a sophomore and father of eighteen-month-old Demetrius, lay dead with two OO buckshot pellets in his head, a third beneath his left eye and a fourth under his left armpit. James Earl Green, an 18-year-old high school student headed home from his grocery store job, had fallen on the other side of the street, behind police lines, the left side of his chest blown away by a shotgun.
Only after the cops had spent 15 minutes or so picking up their shell casings were ambulances called to pick up the dozen or so wounded, and those injured by shattering glass or trampled as people fled the fusillade.
As with the police murders of six young Black men in Augusta, GA days earlier, the media accorded this massacre very different and relatively minimal coverage compared with that given to the students massacred at Kent State. Over the years I’ve heard all sorts of rationalizations for the downplaying of the Jackson State killings.
We knew better then, and we should know better now. The protest at traditionally Black Jackson State was a roiling unorganized thing--as it was at many predominantly white campuses. The three main demands weren’t front and center--and they weren’t at many predominantly white campuses. So what?
The students were riled up by clashes with racist motorists driving by the campus, and a rumor had spread that local Black leader Charles Evers had been shot down. This was not a hard rumor to believe: his brother, civil rights activist Medgar Evers, had been gunned down only seven years before by a Klansman (who was walked by an all-white jury).
And they knew that campuses all over the country were erupting in struggle. So when Jackson State students and local youths started chucking rocks and setting things on fire, they were very much a part of the upsurge that was shaking the country to its foundations that May. All the more so as one of those things was the campus ROTC building!
From that day on, those of us who battled our way through May 1970 have made a point to remind people who speak of Kent State that we must never forget Jackson State. It’s an uphill battle sometimes against historical forgetting, but it is one that won’t cease while veterans of that struggle remain.
And while Kent State administrators spent years trying to bury the massacre there, to their credit, the Jackson State administration, dependent though it was--and is--on overwhelmingly white state education authorities for money, has never repaired the stairwell at Alexander Hall, pocked by 160 bullet and pellet holes. All entering students see the evidence and hear the story of May, 1970, when an organized and heavily armed group of cops, dispatched by the governor, couldn’t intimidate protesting students and finally opened fire on what is now their new home.
Click here to read this series from the beginning.
Click here to read the next installment.
May 14, 2010
May '70: 14. ...'Til It's Over
Two weeks after Nixon’s 1970 invasion of Cambodia triggered the first and only national student strike this country had ever seen, battles continued to rage on campuses the length and breadth of the country.
Take the University of Maryland at College Park. Striking students and faculty had pretty much shut the place down during the early days of May. In fact, as the fourth installment of this series pointed out, thousands of them also invaded and shut down US Route 1, then the main artery between Baltimore and Washington.
Day after day, students poured onto Route 1, blocking it and the state cops mobilized to clear it. Day after day, the pigs attacked the campus, arresting scores, teargassing dorms and frats to the point where they were uninhabitable. and administering savage beatdowns as the students fled. This repression on top of rage at the Kent State murders swelled the ranks of protesters and keep the struggle hot.
The university was shut down by the strike but the administration hadn’t opted for the cancel-finals-and-pass-everybody trick being used at other schools, so the clashes continued. They peaked on May 14, 40 years ago tonight.
One grad who returned to campus to build the strike recalls:There was a lot of teargas the night of May 14. I didn't quite understand the campus politics, but a faculty vote had gone badly and several thousand students headed for Route One in protest.
That night, amid extensive trashing and the U of M Administration building very nearly went up in flames. The country’s campuses were still on fire with struggle!
Governor Mandel had mobilized the National Guard who moved on to campus after students were driven off of Route One. It was ironic, because we all knew that the reason many people joined the Guard was because they didn't want to fight in the unpopular Viet Nam War. I was sorry to see them. They were probably even sorrier being there.
The exchanges of teargas bombs and rocks were the fiercest I had ever seen. People were determined to hold on to their piece of liberated Maryland even in the face of a military occupation. National Guard Commander Warfield's helicopter flew overhead and added a further surreal menace to the whole scene.
We grouped on the hill in front of the Chapel. It was dark and hard to see how many people were holding out, but it seemed like thousands. The crowd ebbed and flowed depending on how many teargas bombs were fired by the National Guard and police from the base of the hill near Route 1.
Click here to read this series from the beginning.
Click here to read the next installment.
May 13, 2010
May '70: 13. The Senate Steps Up
Forty years ago today, Senators Frank Church (D, Idaho) and John Sherman Cooper (R, Kentucky) put before the United States Senate an amendment to the Foreign Military Sales Act of 1970 which, if passed, would ban the use of any US funds for combat in or bombing of Cambodia. Debate continued until the amended bill passed on June 30, the date on which Nixon had promised to end the invasion of Cambodia.
The Cooper-Church Amendment was a clear sign that dissatisfaction with the prolonged and catastrophic war in Southeast Asia was finally moving Congress to act. But the more immediate impetus for the bill was the great turmoil which had erupted on the country's campuses, and the panic it had awakened in the hearts of America’s rulers.
The back story is fascinating. Joseph Califano, who had been President Lyndon B. Johnson’s principal aide on domestic matters, was now ensconced in Washington as rainmaker and lobbyist for a prominent law firm and a powerhouse in the inner circle of the Democratic Party.
On May 6, he was braced by Yale prexy Kingman Brewster (him again!) to find some way to involve college students in lobbying against the war, lest college kids “destroy some of our major universities if offered no constructive alternative.” Brewster kicked Califano two of Yale Law’s top students to jumpstart a project.
Califano grabbed another veteran Democratic party figure, John Gardner, who was in the process of launching Common Cause, and with Brewster’s proteges came up with the idea of “Project Purse Strings,” an lobbying effort to cut congressional funding for the war in Southeast Asia. Califano and Gardner knew damn well that that was not going to happen any time soon but shined Brewster’s law students on, while deciding to limit the goal to the elimination of spending on Cambodia.
Califano was a busy little fellow that week. He also set up a money conduit to fund the operation. He bagged, in one day, 15 grand each from the heads of Coca-Cola, Hoffman-La Roche, Polaroid, Neiman Marcus and a bunch of other big corporations. Some opposed the war, others did not, but all shared Califano’s concern thatthere was a real danger of losing the best of a generation. We feared that they might turn into a rabid, persistently negative force in our society
and thatit was important to build a student movement pledged to work within the system.
Or, to put it another way, the national student strike had scared the living piss out of them.
Califano and Gardner meanwhile lined up Church and Cooper, respected Senate elders, to put their names on an amendment which was rushed to the Senate on May 13. It called for an end to funding of US ground troops and advisors in Cambodia past June 30, for banning air operations in Cambodian airspace that were not expressly approved by Congress and for an end to US support to South Vietnamese military operations outside its borders.
Weeks of debate and filibuster followed, replete with plenty of lobbying by clean cut, promising (and well-funded) college students. On June 30, the last day of the invasion of Cambodia, the United States Senate voted the Cooper Church Amendment up 58 to 37, making it part of the bill.
This was the first time in US history that a house of Congress had ever voted to cut funding for a war a president was carrying out. It signaled what was to come--Congress finally cut off all funds for the war in 1973, three long, grueling years later, and then it was only a matter of time until those helicopters were taking off from the roof of the US embassy as Saigon was liberated.
I never heard of “Project Purse Strings” back in the day, and I doubt that even many of the participants remember it today. To us, the lesson was obvious, and it wasn’t about what a good idea lobbying was. To force the government to back off from an unjust and unjustifiable war, you had to build a mass movement too large and too militant to ignore, to the point of threatening social collapse. Then they’d listen to us.
Me, I still think that summation shows the correct relationship between electoral politics and government on the one hand and mass movements on the other. Only independent mass movements can keep even the best of elected officials honest, and pressure or frighten them into doing the right thing. All the lobbying and electoral work that had taken place as part of the struggle to end the Vietnam war since the mid-’60s may have helped lay the foundation but those accomplishments paled before what the first two weeks of the May, 1970 campus uprising had done.
Click here to read this series from the beginning.
Click here to read the next installment.
May 11, 2010
May '70: 12. The Forgotten Dead [UPDATED]
There were six of them, gunned down by the armed force of the state.
I could be talking about the four students murdered at Kent State just seven days before plus the two who would would die later in the week at Jackson State.
But I’m not. I’m talking about six young Black men killed in Augusta, Georgia, 40 years ago tonight. Each was shot in the back by police shotguns, and their deaths were woven into the fabric of struggle and repression that was growing day by day in May, 1970.
Like many an urban rebellion in the ‘60s, it started with the cops. On May 9, Charles Oatman died in the Augusta city jail. He was 16 and mentally disabled. The police announced that he had died in a fall from his bunk. At the funeral home, his body was discovered to have fresh cigarette burns and bruises all over it. Open wounds from a whipping marred the corpse’s back. His skull was caved in. Changing their tune, the cops moved to charge his cellmates with murder.
On May 11, community activists who had been dealing with police brutality issues for a long time met with officials and left the meeting to find 500 furious community residents outside demanding action. A march was called on the spot and soon erupted into rock throwing and looting which went on into the evening.
The governor of Georgia, a foam-flecked racist named Lester Maddox, swung into action. He ordered out the state police to deal with the citizens he called “communists” and Black Panthers. He gave the cops orders to shoot to kill and even to raze “any building they’re in to its very foundation if necessary to get them out.” Maddox followed up by mobilizing 1,200 troops of the Georgia National Guard, who reached Augusta about 1:00 in the morning on the 12th.
By dawn on the 12th, the “Augusta riot” was over and over 80 people were wounded. Six young Black men were dead. None had been armed. All were hit in the back by shotgun blasts consistent with police riot guns.
Why do these ugly police murders belong in a series of articles about the campus uprising of 1970? To us, at the time, it was obvious. These kids were murdered just like the kids at Kent State. Augusta was, in fact, one of the last of the great urban rebellions against racism that shook the US to its foundations in the ‘60s. Those rebellions had helped form our understanding that of the oppression of African Americans was far broader and deeper than a question of Jim Crow segregation in the south. Around the country, leaflets and posters about the Augusta murders started to appear within hours.
Sure, the riot wasn’t on campus, but the folks in Augusta’s segregated inner city knew that colleges around the country were erupting in protests and had in one case been met with bullets. And how was the Guard able to mobilize so quickly, if they were not already on alert to deal with campus unrest?
But even our steps in solidarity with the Augusta rebellion wound up butting up against the ugly realities of life in a society built on, and shot through with, white supremacy and white privilege. If you went through the month of May in 1970, you will always have a visceral response to the names of Sandy Scheuer, Bill Schroeder, Alison Krause and Jeffrey Miller. You may even recall that Philip Gibbs and James Earl Green were the two slaughtered at Jackson State. I hope this piece has jogged your memory about Augusta.
UPDATE:
When this was first written in 2010, I reported that I had been unable to find the names of the six whose lives were snatched from them by the Augusta cops forty years before. Then filmmaker Banks Pappas, who made an independent documentary on the Augusta uprising (see his trailer here) contacted me after reading the original version. Thanks to him, I offer for your respect and your remembrance:
Mack Wilson, Jr.They deserve to be recalled with the others as young people whose lives were taken in May '70, at one of the historic peaks of the long struggle to bring into being a better world...
John (Johnnie) Stokes
William Wright, Jr.
Charlie Mack Murphy
Sammie Larry McCullough
John Bennings
Click here to read this series from the beginning.
Click here to read the next installment. Read more!
May 10, 2010
May '70: 11. The Campuses Start To Empty Out
Before following up on the strategy that college and university administrators were adopting to defuse the strike on many campuses, I want to tip the hat to the Canadian radicals who took a page from Richard Nixon and invaded the border town of Blaine, Washington from Vancouver on May 9.
Declaring they were doing it to strike at "sanctuaries for aggression," the 500 or so young militants vowed that they’d go no further than 19 miles into US territory, the limit Nixon had placed on his Cambodia invasion. That far they didn’t get, retreating in good order into British Columbia after trashing the Bank of Commerce and most of the vehicles on a freight train hauling new autos. A joke, certainly, but a pretty pointed one and the first foreign invasion of any of the United States since the War of 1812.
Yesterday I wrote of how University administrators around the country were adopting or contemplating a strategy of proclaiming agreement with their protesting students and shutting down the campuses., declaring the school year ended early. This, folks who have read the third installment of this retrospective study may recall, was the strategy adopted by Yale president Kingman Brewster as he faced the May Day protests in New Haven.
[An interesting sidenote: Brewster had adopted this strategy after holding a secret meeting held in rural Massachusetts under the guise of a picnic. The other party there was Archibald Cox, head of the Harvard Law School, who shared the mistakes made at his campus the previous year when the administration sent in the cops in to retake an occupied building. Their brutality enraged many uninvolved students and triggered a hard fought, weeklong student strike.]
A couple bloggers at the left liberal Daily Kos site who had been at Michigan State in May '70 wrote comments about the piece I reposted there yesterday. A woman named Pam described how intense the struggle had been: During this period I was a student manager at the MSU Union Bldg. The riots that broke out because of the Cambodia invasion occurred when I was on duty at the Union. It was real bad.
After days of intensifying struggle, suddenly things changed according to a DKos regular who goes by austinblue:
We were directly assaulted with tear gas fired into the building air intakes. I had received assurances from the state police that they would not do that because I had several groups of elderly citizens meeting there. Several students who had been on the street came in to clean the gas out of their eyes and I recruited them to help me take care of our elderly visitors.As I recall, Michigan State was roiling. Then President Wharton cancelled classes just before Mother's Day weekend, and poof, the air just went out of the Movement.
Naturally, most students seized the opportunity, when it presented itself, to get away from campus and start chasing summer jobs early. But not all did. My bud, Mindy who was at NYU Uptown with me recalls:
I was astonished at how effective the tactic was. Up to that point I thought he wasn't paying attention (remember Nixon watching football a couple years later?), but it turned out that he outplayed us, or maybe he just lucked out. Whichever, the strike lost all momentum after the campus emptied out for a few days, and I always saw that last day of classes before the weekend as the peak of the Movement on our campus.At my campus, as at hundreds, maybe thousands across the country, students shut the school down. I don’t remember now how it happened but I know that there were no final exams and there are no grades on my college transcript for the second semester of 1970. It’s just 16 credits of PASS.
The school’s administration was amazingly cooperative, as Mindy indicates. If folks were using the university’s resources to provide sanctuary and real education to local high school kids or Serve the People programs to the community, they didn’t mind. Those who stayed in those free dorms and worked themselves to the bone all summer to create a different kind of institution with a different kind of relationship to the community were welcome to do so. Professors who wanted to help were encouraged to do so.
Somehow contact was made with students at the nearby high schools in the Bronx, the girls at Walton and the kids at Taft, and at Lehman College. Within a few days there was a massive march down the Grand Concourse. It wasn’t just students; lots of regular people from neighborhoods in the Bronx came out to protest. Speakouts were held on campus over the next few weeks. Workshops were developed on the war in Vietnam, the expansion into Cambodia, U.S. imperialism, racism, feminism. We set up a summer day care center for Bronx parents who lived near the school. We demanded, and got, free dorm space for the summer.
I don’t know how we did it. I don’t remember what it was like day-to-day. But I do remember that I was no longer a quiet college student, working hard in my classes and at my off campus part-time job while also trying to get a better understanding of how my country worked. I had become, and after many twists and turns, remain, a committed political activist.
I’d like to think that the folks who ran NYU were open to developing a new vision of their institution, but we didn't believe it at the time, and nothing that they have done since has ever suggested we were wrong. They did it largely because while we were only a handful, the respect we had won from many who would be returning in the fall made them think twice about trashing us. And the ties folks like Mindy were patiently starting to build in the West Bronx were turning our attention away from our student peers and campus affairs and toward the community. And they looked good doing it. All in all, it was a bargain for them.
Click here to read this series from the beginning.
Click here to read the next installment.
