In asking the question, how did young people who started
with the nonviolent civil disobedience ideals of Thoreau and Gandhi get to the
point of street fighting and making bombs, I’ve been reading a bunch of memoirs
about the later Sixties. Fascinating people pass through these memoirs, people
you may not have heard about, but whose influence or leadership was strong at
the time. And because these books are reflective, looking back on a time almost
fifty years ago, it is a question many of the writers ask themselves.
Tom Hayden and Dick Flacks, SDS organizers who wrote the
Port Huron statement in 1962, were inspired by courageous civil rights fighters
and philosophers such as A.J. Muste, to seek social justice using participatory
democracy and non-violent civil disobedience. A broad-based student group, by
1965 it had begun to dawn on SDS members that, as Todd Gitlin says in The
Sixties, “Suppose the New Left were only apparently small? Suppose it were
actually the thoughtful, active vanguard of a swelling social force?”
Frustrated by Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam, by
1966 the draft and the complicity of universities in the military-industrial
complex began to take top priority on the SDS list. Greg Calvert, elected
national secretary, gave a speech in early 1967 describing the difference
between being liberal and being radical. Liberal reformists were always
“fighting someone else’s battles.” In contrast, “radical or revolutionary
consciousness is the perception of oneself as unfree, as oppressed. It leads to
the struggle for one’s own freedom in unity with others who share the burden of
oppression.”
“From protest to resistance,” became the rallying cry of
1967. Later that year, at the Oakland Induction Center, a demonstration against
the draft led to the first heady feeling that demonstrators could take on the
police and control the streets, even if only for a few hours. In the same
month, October 1967, demonstrators at the Pentagon were narrowly prevented from
a suicide charge by Greg Calvert and Dave Dellinger, who had intended
nonviolent confrontation.
By 1968, the more radical members of the left were reading
Franz Fanon, who found that in colonial settings, those who acted on their
anger were more emotionally healthy and whole; and Regis Debray, who described
small guerilla fighting foco groups. Some members of SDS organized themselves
into guerilla fighting cadres, which were in action during the confrontations
at the Democratic Convention in Chicago.
After the convention, impatience and anger led away from
open-ended problem solving to ideological commitment, as described by both Bill
Ayers in Fugitive Days and Cathy Wilkerson in Flying Close to the Sun.
SDS split into several factions including the Weathermen, who aimed to be the
most militant, aggressive, outspoken voice in the area, thereby attracting
alienated young people. “This confrontational strategy seemed like it might
move our aims much faster,” said Cathy Wilkerson. The group also wanted to
divert police attention from black activists, who were being brutally harassed
and threatened. The “Days of Rage” demonstration in Chicago in October 1969
directly confronted police but turnout was very low.
Fred Hampton, the bright, young Chicago chairman of the
Black Panthers, told the Weathermen they were provoking confrontation with law
enforcement in a way that was dangerous to themselves and the community around
them. Hampton was killed in 1969. That same year, Dick Flacks, the least
militant radical, was almost killed by an unknown attacker. Dick and his wife
Mickey moved to UC Santa Barbara, where through his classes on social movements
and his work with student groups, Flacks inspired young people to go into the
world and “make history” for the next 37 years.
Though many people took up street fighting, the fascination
with bombs can be traced to only a few. The secrecy and tight hierarchical
organization of the cadres the Weathermen developed also kept many of its
members from knowing what was going on.
From participatory democracy to ideology, protest to
resistance, surrounded by a women’s movement which grew out of the
highly-charged political atmosphere, the ongoing struggle for civil rights by
blacks, and changes everywhere induced by experiments in new lifestyles, the
political left did succeed in “bringing the war home,” until April 1975, when
the U.S. finally left Vietnam.
My characters, Line and Marty, are driven by the necessity
of finding their ways in life and earning their livings. Though Line does fall
in love with a “Movement heavy” and lives in Chicago where heated political
action echoes around her, her own activism turns to health and healing. Marty
arrives in Berkeley in 1967, where she embraces new aesthetics and the fact
that the Left Coast looks across the Pacific Rim to Asia. They both become part
of the yeasty process of cultural change and its implications for the future.
