May '70: 4. The Eruption Begins!

In the previous installment of this growing May ’70 retrospective (criminy, can this be installment four already?) I wrote about being at the New Haven rally for Black Panther leader Bobby Seale on May Day and the call that the assembled demonstrators issued for a national student strike in the wake of Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia.

Thus armed, the NYU Uptown contingent headed back to campus on Saturday, May 2, to start organizing the strike. Imagine our surprise--half delight and half chagrin--when we found out that the despised campus liberals (like the student government types headed for law school and a career in the Democratic Party) already had it taped!

They had called a mass meeting and voted to go out on strike and the majority of the student body was aboard. A friend of mine ever since those days, Mindy, who had not gone to New Haven with the Uptown hardcore, recalls:

I date my getting involved in the struggle to the invasion of Cambodia. On April 30 President Richard Nixon announced to a national television audience that US troops were invading Cambodia. I was a sophomore in college. I had gone to antiwar demonstrations. But I wasn’t an activist. Then, with the invasion of Cambodia, my country crossed a line. I felt that I could not longer just be critical and express my outrage. At my campus, as at hundreds, maybe thousands across the country, students shut the school down.

The same thing had happened at NYU's much larger Washington Square campus. At this point the center of the action at NYU shifted there, where the university’s administration was--as were some important targets, which I’ll write about later.

And the NYU campuses were only straws in the wind. Spontaneous demonstrations hit schools from coast to coast on May 1. At Kent State University in Ohio, for instance, an anti-war rally on the Commons drew over 500 pissed-off students; one burned a draft card, an act Congress had made a felony punishable by five years in jail, A big rally was announced for the Commons at noon on May 4. In the evening, anger exploded on a downtown strip with trashing, a bonfire street blockade and clashes with the police.

The next day, May 2, Ohio Governor James Rhodes announced he was sending in the National Guard. The mayor imposed a dusk off-campus curfew. The Guard started rolling into Kent about 10 PM, forty years ago tonight. Too late. A big demonstration had started swirling around the campus in the early evening and soon a couple thousand students were watching the ROTC building go up in flames. When the fire department showed up, first a few, then hundreds of students grabbed their hoses, unrolled them and dragged them across the campus. Police reinforcements arrived, then the National Guard, but the building burned.

So did Reserve Officers Training Corps buildings at the University of Maryland-Hobart, Princeton and Oregon State! This underlines the importance of one of the demands from the New Haven rally: End Campus Complicity With The War Machine. Being able to find immediate targets helped students take effective action against the war, and highlighted the question of what was higher education for anyhow—to serve the needs of the rich and their government or to serve the needs of the students and the people?

Dramatic though these ROTC actions were, the campus I want to highlight is the University of Maryland at College Park. May 1 started with a big rally, which proceeded to the campus ROTC building and trashed it pretty thoroughly. Then thousands of students headed down to nearby US 1, a main drag between Baltimore and the nation’s capital (especially as that stretch of 1-95 wasn’t opened until 1971).

They blocked all traffic on Route 1. Governor Marvin Mandel ordered the state cops out in force, and at 6 PM they informed the protesters that their blockade was illegal. The demonstrators informed them that the invasion of Cambodia was also illegal--and the whole occupation of Vietnam, for that matter.

Clubs swung, tear gas grenades were fired and the battle was on. After several hours it swung to the campus where all students were fair game. Cops put pepper-fogger machines in the front doors and mail slots not only of the dorms but also the frats and sororities on Fraternity Row and beat the students as they fled the teargas for open air. The battle didn’t die down until about 3 AM. And while US 1 was no longer a liberated zone, it would remain contested territory in the coming weeks, blockaded again and again.

A grace note to the whole thing. News reports on the war meant many students knew of the main North-South road in South Vietnam-- Highway 1--running the coast from Hue through Danang to Saigon and down into the Delta and frequently cut by National Liberation Front (“Viet Cong”) guerillas. Thus one of the slogans chanted during this and subsequent blockades of Route 1 was “Highway 1, Highway 1, Take Saigon And Washington!”

I have loved that chant since I was first told of it forty years ago, so much so that I hate having to play the pedant and deconstruct it for those of you who may not have been in the house then. Oh, well. Note that it rather matter-of-factly takes the side of the Vietnamese against the US occupation. This reflected a big step many young activists had taken over the preceding years--from opposing the war because war is a Bad Thing or because this one was unnecessary to opposing it because the Vietnamese were right, and our government was wrong.

The other noteworthy thing is the semi-joking reference to taking Washington. We knew that wasn’t about to happen right away, but the idea that it might have to be done to win real change in this country was spreading.

And it wasn’t entirely a joke. Before another week was out, the administration would decide it was a good idea to secretly shift President Nixon from the White House to Camp David for a couple of days, and to fill the basement of the executive office building with armed troops from the 82nd Airborne!


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May ‘70: 3. May Day & Bobby Seale

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.

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Black NJ says: May 1st—Justicia Ahora!!!

"We don't just demand jobs for all," People's Organization for Progress chairman Lawrence Hamm proclaimed, "Slavery had a JOBS for ALL plan! We demand jobs at a living wage, good union wages that will allow us to educate our children. We demand jobs that won't require us to hold three or four separate ones at the same time just so we can buy shoes for our babies!!!"

In the wake of Arizona's racist new anti-immigrant law (SB 1070) which requires local police to stop and question anyone they may suspect of being born outside the U.S., and further obliges anyone who might be questioned to carry papers to prove their status, the battle against this apartheid-like ruling has drawn the line for May Day marches. Latina/o and other immigrant workers, immigrants' rights advocates, and the labor movement in general planned major May 1st rallies in immigrant population-centers across the country. Not since the massive, multi million-strong immigration rights rallies of 2006, has the International Workers Holiday been celebrated with huge rallies in so many locations.

The New York-New Jersey metropolitan area hosts many massive immigrant communities, so it ought to be no surprise that NYC and Brooklyn, as well as Trenton, Newark, and Morristown all had multiple rallies May 1st. Newark's wasn't among the largest, but the working people in attendance may have been among the most motivated.

May Day originated in Chicago during the struggle for the eight-hour day in 1886. That first May Day saw more than 300,000 U.S. workers walk off their jobs in over 13,000 businesses. May Day has, from the first, been associated with immigrant rights and the struggle of Black workers as well as "simple" labor-economic demands. The bulk of marchers in that first May Day were foreign-born workers and relocated former-slaves looking for labor-justice during the "Long-Depression" (1873-96) following the Civil War.

While the actual history of May Day may be of limited academic interest, it becomes truly important as U.S. workers develop the understanding necessary to fight the modern 21-century fascism of the "tea-party" movement. As POP's Larry Hamm pointed out, no worker is illegal to the mortgage companies who scam us into "loser-loans" that big bankers then speculate on, and no social-security card is required by employers if they can use the threat of our status (or lack of status) as a wedge to keep us from uniting to fight in our own collective interests.

Union members from the Laborers International Union (LIUNA), the CWA, the International Longshoremen's Association, the IBEW, and other labor organizations joined the rally. Soulful music and incisive speakers prepared the crowd of more than 100 to plan ahead, build the growing movement, organize future actions and take the next steps. Newark mayoral candidate Mirna White spoke (in English and Spanish) about the city's responsibility to its citizens. Ms. White didn't condescend, patronize or speak-down to the foreign-born demonstrators (as current mayor "Hollywood" Booker often seems to do), and I was impressed.

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May ’70: 2. Nixon Kicks It Off!

I want to continue this review of May, 1970 with a deeper look at Richard Nixon’s speech, broadcast 40 years ago tonight. It was that speech, announcing that US troops were invading Cambodia, which triggered the eruption of protest that was May 1970. Actually, you could say Tricky Dick predicted it:

My fellow Americans, we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed.

The US High Command had known since 1967 that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, as the leaked Pentagon Papers later showed. Nixon had been elected in 1968 with the promise that "new leadership will end the war" and giving wink-and-nod no-comment replies to reports he had a "secret plan” to do so.

What he gave us in the first year of his administration was Vietnamization, the idea that troops of the puppet Republic of Viet Nam (South Vietnam) could be quickly drafted (all males between 17 and 43 were subject to call-up), trained and armed to “defend their country” and large scale withdrawals of US troops would begin. [Stop me if any of this reminds you of US policies of, shall we say, more recent vintage.]

Meanwhile, in secret, US B-52s were carrying out insanely massive high-altitude bombing raids on neighboring Laos and Cambodia in an effort to disrupt supply lines from North Vietnam to the South. Early in 1970, a US-backed coup deposed Cambodia’s neutralist monarch, Prince Sihanouk and replaced him with a sketchy pro-US general, Lon Nol. This was followed by an even more intensive and deadly secret Air Force carpet bombing of large sections of the Cambodian countryside.

Nixon on April 20, 1970 had announced that he would be withdrawing 150,000 US troops in the next year, around 40% of the force then “in country,” a necessary sop to public opinion which was turning against the war. Ten days later came this attack in violation of international law and borders. It was, Nixon claimed, a limited incursion intended to disrupt or destroy a secret Vietnamese command base just over the border.

Nixon explained to a skeptical public that he was expanding the war to end it:

A majority of the American people, a majority of you listening to me, are for the withdrawal of our forces from Vietnam. The action I have taken tonight is indispensable for the continuing success of that withdrawal program.

A majority of the American people want to end this war rather than to have it drag on interminably. The action I have taken tonight will serve that purpose.

A majority of the American people want to keep the casualties of our brave men in Vietnam at an absolute minimum. The action I take tonight is essential if we are to accomplish that goal.

Well, we certainly wanted the war ended and the troops home. But after years of having been lied to about lights at the end of the tunnel, about crucial campaigns that would change everything, about the improved combat capacity of the puppet ARVN troops, about the evil "North Vietnamese" (fighting to liberate and unite their country) we sure as hell didn’t believe a word of this.

And when Nixon raised the specter of global anarchy and the destruction of 500 years of Western Civilization, it was us as much as the Vietnamese liberation forces he was talking about.

Because May 1970 didn’t erupt from a vacuum. For two years, reading the New York Times had been a positive treat. It seemed like every day there was a report on a student protest somewhere. “Hey, the kids at the University of East Dakota at Pumpkin Squat just took over the administration building! I didn’t even know they existed.”

One immediate example: In the week before Nixon’s speech, my friend Steve reminds me, the student affairs building, a center for student activism at the Lawrence campus of the University of Kansas, was mysteriously burned to the ground. This was the culmination of a month that saw a campus strike, a call by the Black Student Union for members to arm themselves against racist threats, a lot of arson, and ongoing small scale clashes in the streets between freaks and right wing locals. The days that followed the fire featured a 7 PM curfew, ordered by the governor, and repeated skirmishes between students and cops, including street barricades and sniping. (Later that summer Lawrence cops would kill Black activist Tiger Dowdell and an unarmed 18-year-old white student, Nick Rice, shooting both in the back of the head.)

And Lawrence wasn’t even a notably radical campus.

[Next time, it’s personal: Bobby Seale and May Day in New Haven]

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May '70: 1. Finally On Our Own...

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own…

Forty years ago today, on Thursday, April 30, 1970, Richard Milhouse Nixon, the president of the United States, appeared on television for a special announcement about the Vietnam War. He told us that US troops, tens of thousands of them, had moved into Cambodia, expanding an already prolonged and costly war into another country. He claimed it was a necessary step toward ending the war, and toward insuring that the US would not be perceived in the world as "a pitiful helpless giant."

Nixon's announcement kicked off the most intense wave of campus struggle this country has ever seen, a month of bitter and exhilarating clashes which triggered huge changes that echo to this day. May, 1970 also changed forever the lives of some significant number of the hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of students and others who took part.

Today that incredible upsurge, which pretty much shut down the 1969-70 school year throughout much of the American higher education system, is remembered mainly through one of its most dramatic events--the killing of four students at Kent State University by a sustained fusillade of gunfire from Ohio National Guard troops occupying their campus.

For forty years, the veterans of those days and younger activists have struggled to keep alive the memories of Kent State and of the subsequent police murders of two more students, this time at a traditionally Black college in Mississippi, Jackson State. We have succeeded in this, helped in part by that amazing mnemonic, Neil Young’s heartbreaking song, "Ohio," which opens with the couplet at the start of this piece.

But we have, in significant ways, lost the memory of the vast eruption which Kent State and Jackson State were a part of, and whose flames the killings provided so much fuel for.

Over the course of next month, I hope to recall--in a series of posts under the heading May '70--some of that legacy, for OGs like myself who were there and for younger folk who may never have learned much at all about the events in question. I will draw on my own memories and those of friends, along with some Internet surfing, especially in the early posts. Ideally, others whose lives were shaped during that heady month will come forward to weigh in with their own thoughts and memories.

There is one final thing I’ll spell out in this first post. You can consider it a reminder for the veterans of those days. Or call it context for young folks who may find it hard to believe that, for instance, in the first week of May 1970, more than 30 ROTC buildings around the country burned or were bombed. 30. More than four a day.

The Vietnam War had created a deep, deep fissure in the American body politic, deeper than anything since the Civil War. And this time the divide was not sectional. It ran through every part of the country, divided communities, split classes, sundered families. If anything, it was generational (though that itself is a big overgeneralization). As we sang along with Phil Ochs:

It’s always the old to lead us to the war
It’s always the young to fall

And it was that split--between the young and the America we had grown up in--that made us sense, in May of 1970, that we were finally on our own…

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Good News Out Of Arizona!

You’ve got to hand it to the white supremacists running Arizona. As May 1 demonstrations are upon us coast to coast, with immigrants’ rights as a central demand, they’ve provided a crystal-clear example of what we are up against. They are also showing just why May Day, the international working class holiday, has taken on new layers of meaning here and deepened its roots in sections of the US working class since El Levantamiento, the huge immigrant uprising of 2006.

The issue is, of course, the new mandatory racial profiling bill just passed by both houses of the legislature and signed by Governor Jan Brewer. It will likely be declared unconstitutional by the courts, but is meanwhile serving to promote anti-immigrant sentiment and police state practices in Arizona and elsewhere.

While there has been heartening coverage of high school walk-outs and other protest inside Arizona itself, there are other aspects to the resistance which merit some attention. Thus, the first–hand report and the hip hop video I am posting here.

I asked a long-time ‘rade of mine, Ajagbe Adewole, a Brooklyn boy who has been working as an educator in the Phoenix suburbs for the last several years (poor fish) what he’s been seeing and hearing. His comments, slightly edited, follow:

The general mood out here is outrage. Those supporting the bill are silent. You just don't hear folks defend this in public. Even local rightwing radio is questioning the bill, an unheard-of development.

The Dems are split along political/ethnic lines. Some are calling for military at the border ("If we could stop them at the border that would solve the problem"), others, like Democratic Congressman Raul Grijalva, are calling for a boycott of their own state and repeal of the law.

The anger among Chicana/os is palpable. This issue has really woken people up. I've never seen these folks react this way. This was a REALLY stupid move on the part of the Republicans. It has the potential to mobilize folks for May 1, and for the upcoming elections, including young Chicana/os.

Chicana/os out here are organizationally weak. Remember, this is a “right to work” state, so unions are not really a factor. I'm curious to see how the community is going to organize, but I don't see this issue going away. Folks I know, generally apolitical, are discussing and debating this. There's a lot of passion.

Now here’s another cut on things in AZ. Let’s start with Black rapper, Swindoe. A couple of years back he released a new cut called “Phony People” with a dramatic video. Based in his native Arizona, it features Swindoe and his posse helping undocumented immigrants deal with the deadly desert and the Border Patrol and it's moving as hell...



Okay, his persona is straight-up gangsta, his syzzurp-flavored, chopped and screwed chorus is druggy by definition, and he thinks rather highly of himself. Get past it, people. His production company is called BLK Boyz, standing for Black-Latino Konnection. The whole package is, to my way of thinking, a real-world example of the kind of Black/Brown alliance that revolutionary-minded folks have been advocating for years as the answer to ruling class efforts to pit the Black Nation and immigrants against each other.

And so is this comment, which is from the interesting and contentious Youtube comment thread when Swindoe’s “Phony People” video was retitled to mention SB 1070 ,the Arizona police state law:

i think its funny how yall argue over youtube.. lol Flash Virus is a fuckin dumbass.. I'm from eastside tuc town an we down wit grips_ of latinos. All me an my niggas date are latina girls.. it aint shit to us! we speak spanish! a REAL tuc town nigga who whats good wit tha 520 and tha black/latino connection.. if he wanna start shit, let him. cuz he'z dumb. bring his ass to irvington n park an let dem niggas get at him.. bet he wont eva diss a latino eva again!! Haha

Let’s see what the May Day marches this Saturday and the coming months bring. All this makes me optimistic.

And in that spirit, I think I’ll close with Tom Russell’s magnificent tune, “Who’s Gonna Build Your Wall?” which raises the musical question:

Now the government wants to build a barrier
Like ol' Berlin, 8 feet tall,
But if Uncle Sam sends the illegals home,
Who's gonna build the wall?

Who's gonna build your wall, boys,
Who's gonna mow your lawn,
Who's gonna cook your Mexican food
When your Mexican maid is gone,

Who's gonna wax the floors tonight
Down at the local mall,
Who's gonna wash your baby's face,
Who's gonna build your wall?

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Spring 1970 Student Upsurge — Spring 2010 High School Walkouts … Not so different

Kids shut-down high schools all around New Jersey…

My friend Jimmy Higgins recently wrote on this page about the student upsurge of Spring 1970 (the topic was about the lessons of the first Earth Day that same spring). Those nationwide demonstrations opposing the invasion of Cambodia began on campus and were also prompted the police and National Guard murders of students at Kent & Jackson State Universities. Jimmy reached out to other FotM correspondents to collect our memories of this important period in US history and I spoke extensively with a friend about a walk-out at our high school that spring.

In the midst of this, as we are about to get nostalgic about 1970 campus activism, the young people of today once again demonstrate that we old-timers have far more to learn than we have to teach. Student walked-out and shut-down high schools throughout New Jersey yesterday in reaction to Gov. Krispy Kreme Christy's budget attack on education and human-services (see the New York Times and the Star Ledger reports).

The largest demonstration against Gov. Christy's budget cut to education was in Newark

The news media wants to turn this into a process story, "The Role of Facebook", or some-such thing that downplays both the activism of young people and relocates the public image of these socially-responsible youths to the suburbs.While the papers tell readers that the largest action was in Newark, they also prefer to report on Montclair and other non-urban activism.

I first heard about these planned walk-out a week or more ago from the Teachers as Leaders in Newark (see TaLiN and "Protest NJ Education Cuts") but unfortunately missed the massive student street demonstration yesterday. This is the real upsurge that we must report on, while still drawing lessons from our own experience forty years ago…

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