Alice Embree : Chile and the Politics of Memory

Me gustan los estudiantes. This painting by Austin's Carlos Lowry is the cover art on the Fall 2013 NACLA Report on the Americas.

The contradictions of Chile
and the politics of memory

The elections in Chile take place as the country marks the fortieth anniversary of the bloody military coup that happened with covert U.S. assistance.

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / November 20, 2013

“[T]he battle over memory is a struggle over meaning…” -- Steven S. Volk, "The Politics of Memory and the Memory of Politics," Fall 2013 NACLA Report on the Americas.

On Sunday, November 17, Socialist Michelle Bachelet received 47% of the vote in a field of nine Chilean presidential candidates. She will go into a December 15 run-off with a candidate from the hard right, Evelyn Matthei, who received 25% of the vote. Bachelet will likely serve a second term as president of Chile.

Both run-off candidates are daughters of Chilean Air Force officers. Bachelet’s father was an Air Force Brigadier General at the time of the 1973 military coup. Known for his loyalty to the democratic government, he was arrested for treason, tortured, and died in prison. Both Michelle Bachelet and her mother were arrested, tortured, and forced into exile. In stark contrast, Matthei’s father was a key member of the military junta. The memory of military rule for these two women could hardly be more disparate.

The elections in Chile take place as the country marks the fortieth anniversary of the bloody military coup that happened with covert U.S. assistance. The September 11, 1973 coup overthrew the elected Socialist president Salvador Allende. The Fall 2013 NACLA Report on the Americas, published by the nonprofit North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), explores the implications of that coup.

The cover art on the NACLA issue is by Austin artist Carlos Lowry. The painting hangs above our couch. It features Camila Vallejo against a background of jubilant students. The painting's name, Me gustan los estudiantes, is taken from a song by the legendary Chilean folksinger Violeta Parra.

Camila Vallejo, featured on NACLA’s cover, was president of Chile’s largest student federation. She became the well-known face of the 2011 student movement demanding change in an educational system that has left Chilean students among the most indebted in the world. On Sunday, Vallejo was elected to the Chilean Congress. Three other student leaders were also elected.

NACLA’s compilation of articles describes Chile 40 years after the coup. To some, Chile became a neoliberal economic success story. "Shock Doctrine" is what Naomi Klein calls it in a book by that name. Democracy was dismantled and social movements demobilized by military force. Opponents were imprisoned, tortured, “disappeared,” and exiled -- displacing and scattering Chileans across the globe. The public sector was weakened, free market tactics were celebrated, and public services were privatized.

But NACLA deals with another aspect of Chile’s coup -- the success of an international solidarity movement, the exposure of U.S. complicity in the coup through congressional hearings, the mobilization of many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to address human rights abuses, the creation of human rights archives (including one at the University of Texas at Austin), and the genesis of Central American solidarity committees.

NACLA also examines the Chilean student uprising, and contrasts it with Wall Street occupiers and Spain’s indignados. The student movement of Camila Vallejo claimed new space for social movements, and defied the status quo of Chile’s neoliberal economy. Student leaders rejected “politics as usual” as practiced by the dominant coalitions since 1990. The student demand for tax reform sufficient to support free education will become a major challenge from the left for Michelle Bachelet when she takes office again.

The bold student demonstrations, complete with theater, took politics into the streets in ways not seen for decades. Students staged an 1,800-second long "kiss-in" for education and an 1,800-hour-long relay around the presidential palace. The "1,800" symbolized the investment (2.2% percent of Chile’s gross domestic product) required to fully fund public education.

Chile is a territory of contradictions. They are as vast as its geographic extremes -- Andes to ocean, desert to rainforest. It is a country in which neoliberal policies deformed public education, weakened national health care, and caused students to incur burdensome loans. Its new prosperity rests upon severe income disparity.

It is a country that U.S. Republicans have sought to emulate in plans to “privatize” Social Security. Yet, it is a country whose recent student mobilizations have inspired students around the globe. It is a country that just elected Camila Vallejo, a Communist, to office, and is poised to elect Michelle Bachelet, a Socialist, to a second term as president.

[Alice Embree, a contributing editor to The Rag Blog, is a long-time Austin activist, organizer, and member of the Texas State Employees Union. A veteran of SDS and the women's liberation movement, Alice is a former staff member of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) and of underground newspapers The Rag in Austin and RAT in New York. She now co-chairs the Friends of New Journalism. Read more articles by Alice Embree on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Michael James : Going Off Campus, 1965

Sam and Theophilius at sunset in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Photos by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Going off campus:
Idaho, Wyoming, and Connecticut, 1965

I proceeded to quote Tom Paine: “Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils were I to make a whore of my soul.”

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / November 11, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

At UC Berkeley in the winter and spring of 1965 the Free Speech Movement battles continued. The court proceedings for the Sproul Hall arrests continued, as did rallies and negotiations. My sentence gave me a choice: 25 days in jail, a year’s probation, or a $250 fine. Believing that a year’s probation would limit my political activities, I took the fine, and said to the judge; “A lot of people across the land are coming to feel as I do,” and proceeded to quote Tom Paine: “Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils were I to make a whore of my soul.”

Eventually the University agreed to permit tables and discussion in Sproul Hall Plaza, and reversed their edict on no political activity. And political activity there was. The U.S. war on the people of Vietnam was in the forefront. I got involved with the Vietnam Day Committee initiated by Jerry Rubin, Stew Alpert, and others. In May we held a two-day teach-in, which thousands attended. Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska was a featured speaker. He and Oregon’s Wayne Morse were the first Senators to stand in opposition to U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam.

Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters showed up in a wildly painted school bus; Allan Ginsberg, Wavy Gravy, and others were on the scene. Protest singer Phil Ochs came to perform. Before he took to the stage I was fortunate to hang out with him at the home of Neil Blumenthal, a Berkeley psychologist and the Free Speech Movement’s resident shrink.

Man on Harley, Route 53, Connecticut.

For the teach-in I helped compile a pamphlet with articles on Vietnam and the war. While laying it out at the Berkeley Free Press, I leaned on the light table and fell through the glass (no injuries, luckily, and the shop owner took it in stride). When the pamphlet made it to press, I remember the brass bell on the Multilith offset that gave a constant ding-ding at the tempo of the press’s speed. The pressman was David Goines, who became a well-known poster artist.

Students for a Democratic Society was the organization that caught my attention, and then my love and devotion. Back when we surrounded the police car with Jack Weinberg in it -- the event that really set the Free Speech Movement in motion -- I had found a leaflet put out by SDS calling to “build the interracial movement of the poor.” SDS “traveler” (field organizer) Mike Davis, now a noted author, came through town and signed me up into the ranks of SDS. At an SDS party I talked and drank wine with Michael Harrington, who I had heard speak in 1962 at the University of Chicago, along with the old socialist Norman Thomas. Harrington’s ’62 book The Other America exposed the dramatic extent of poverty in the U.S.

The summer of ’65, while the anti-war movement was building at Berkeley and across the land, some of us were making plans to move into West Oakland. We would be among SDS members involved in the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), which had begun organizing in 13 cities, trying to build an interracial movement of the poor. Paul Booth, an SDS leader, came to California to help with what would be called the West Oakland Community Project (WOCP). We were idealistic. We said, “Let the people decide.” An SDS button proclaimed Sam Cook’s lyric “A change is gonna come.”

Twelve of us --11 white, one black -- were involved in the WOCP that summer. We had a house at 320 Henry Street near the Southern Pacific Railroad yards. People in the community wondered who we were and what was going on. A ragtag group of men who lived at the Catholic Worker’s Peter Maurin House came by to check us out. [Peter Maurin was a Catholic activist who along with Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker Movement]. They’d been drinking wine and their spokesman was challenging, but mellowed out when we shared our hopes and intentions.

Lots of people were working for change in Oakland. There were freedom schools, summer work projects, and labor projects. The issue that got traction in our efforts was beautification. It may not seem radical, but responding to the way the city was tearing down fences and ruining people’s gardens at Peralta Villa Public Housing without notice or community input, was about letting the people decide, a major SDS principle. The Peralta Villa folks were pissed off, and they let the city know about it. The fence removal was halted, a small but significant victory.

A mostly white group of Berkeley students organizing in a poor black community did not bring us far on the road to a revolution. Perhaps the biggest deterrent to sustained work by WOCP was the exploding growth of opposition to the Vietnam War. There was considerable anti-war activity on campus and energies were pulled in that direction.

To top it off, there were the troop trains, and the efforts by hundreds to stop them. During August there was a demonstration at the railroad tracks in Berkeley. My clearest memory of that day is a soldier’s face, probably a conscript, who was on the Union Pacific train from Fort Riley in Kansas, heading to the Oakland Army Terminal to be shipped off to Nam. He was at the window with a shaved head. His face was laughing yet somehow also fearful as he watched me take the picket sign I held and slap it against the window. “U.S. Out of Viet Nam!” I hope he made it back.

Sam and Theophilus in Wyoming or Nebraska.

At the end of the summer I headed back east. My Staples High School pal, football lineman Sam Whiteside, was on the West Coast. He and I, along with two women from the Oakland Project and a young black SNCC activist named Theopholis Smith, headed east in Sam’s Chevy wagon. Theo had been on a break from his work in the South and was heading back to the voter registration battlefield in Alabama.

I was back on the road, heading east from Berkeley by car for the first time. Sam, like me, was up for a circuitous route, and I had a camera with me. We drove through Nevada, then Idaho, and on to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where at sunset I caught a picture of Sam and Theo climbing a over a fence. Later that night we spotted Indians swaying and staggering along the road. We were riding through a Crow reservation as we neared Dubois, Wyoming. In Dubois we ate at a bar while a piano player tickled the keys. We joined him in song before driving off into the night.

By morning we were in my ancestral homeland of Nebraska. Near Valentine we decided to stop and take a jump into the Niabrara River. Sam cut his foot, and got stitches from a doctor in Valentine. I talked to the doc about the war, which he supported. As my family will attest, this was the beginning of a lifetime of bringing up politics with folks anywhere I am -- in an elevator, at a gas station, attending a wedding, on the phone with an operator at a credit card company in wherever. “And what state are you taking this call in? Hope you guys are going to vote out so-and-so!”

In Chicago we went to the Uptown neighborhood, where the JOIN (Jobs or Income Now) Community Union office was located on Argyle. There I met Sandra Cason, aka Casey Hayden, who had just left her work with SNCC in Mississippi after Stokley Carmichael (Kwame Ture) had booted the white members out. Sam and the others left me there.

Cross, cowboy, Conoco, and Wonder Bread truck in Idaho.

Casey and I visited Old Town, a pioneer hip neighborhood and happening place. The night heat was close to unbearable, and the sidewalks were packed with people. A guy on a motorcycle, his squeeze on the back, was jumpy and jittery as he revved his bike, moving through the crowds crossing the street. I suggested to Casey, “Let’s get out of here!” We took the Chicago Northwestern RR to Lake Forest, 30 miles north. It was cooler there, where we stayed at the home of my anthropology Prof Gerry Gerasimo.

The next morning we said goodbye to Gerry and his wife Dottie, who had been a classmate of mine. Casey and I grabbed our stuff and hitchhiked east, stopping for a night at an SDS ERAP project in Cleveland, located in a mostly poor white neighborhood near the Great Lake Erie. The next day, thumbs out, we hitched rides and made it to Connecticut.

We linked up with fellow Berkeley sociology student Nigel Young and his wife Antonia, serious peace activists from England. Nigel told me about writing “U.S. out of Guatemala” on a wall in London in 1956, when he got arrested while trying to figure out how to spell Guatemala. They were quite a couple, he in mod all black: turtleneck, black pants, short black jacket, and pointy-toe black shoes. Antonia wore a big long fur coat. (This was before there was much talk of animal rights.)

All four of us headed west in a gray 1957 Plymouth station wagon “drive-away” that needed to be delivered to California. We stopped at the Custer Battlefield and Museum in Montana, where the park ranger-guide kept referring to “the hostiles” coming over this hill, and doing this or that. With Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull already heroes in my consciousness, I found his rap to be offensive. In Billings we stopped to eat at a place with an adjacent bar that had a dirt floor and a sign “Check guns at door.” That made sense.

We cruised through Yellowstone National Park, took in the geysers, and had our progress momentarily halted while a bull buffalo decided to mosey along the middle of the road. In Idaho we crossed over a mountain and stopped to eat early in the morning. On the jukebox I noticed Johnny Cash covers of Dylan tunes, and thought: “Wow, something is happening here, the times indeed are a-changing.”

A ranch in Idaho.

On a back road we stopped at an abandoned ranch where I found a branding iron. Down the road we had to stop for a herd of sheep. The shepherd was Basque, didn’t speak English, and wore a jean jacket and pants and engineer boots. Later Nigel enlightened us about the struggles of the Basque people in Spain.

Back at school in Berkeley, I was a graduate teaching assistant. Casey was bereft, missing her comrades in Mississippi, and returned to her family’s home in Victoria, Texas. I tried to restart the Oakland Project along with Vivian Rothstein. From 12 of us, we were down to two. We moved into a different house where neighborhood kids ripped us off. Honest talk led to the goods being returned.

Barry and Betty, both of whom had worked in the Newark Community Union Project (NCUP), soon joined Vivien and me in our efforts. We took a trip to a commune near Big Sur. As we approached we heard beating drums, apparently a sunset ritual to help the sun to go down over the Pacific. A number of longhairs came running at us with clubs, but backed off when Barry yelled he was there to see his sister.

It quickly became clear that the Oakland Project had run out of steam. Though my heart was still with the interracial movement of the poor, I needed to figure out the best place for me to help work toward that vision. Knowing now that I wanted to leave Berkeley, to go off campus and organize, I began contemplating my next moves.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

HISTORY / Bob Feldman : A People's History of Egypt, Part 11, Section 1, 1945-1946

Egyptian students demonstrate on February 21, 2012, to mark anniversary of 1946 student and worker uprising. Photo by Mai Shaheen / Ahram Online.

A people's history:
The movement to democratize Egypt

Part 11: 1945-1946 Period/Section 1 -- Worker and student struggles lead to general strike.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / October 17, 2013

[With all the dramatic activity in Egypt, Bob Feldman's Rag Blog "people's history" series, "The Movement to Democratize Egypt," could not be more timely. Also see Feldman's "Hidden History of Texas" series on The Rag Blog.]

A September 1, 1945, report by M. Audsley -- the Labor Counselor at the UK Embassy in Egypt -- indicated what life for most Egyptian workers was like when the leaders of the Egyptian student movement were calling for the formation of a national committee to push for full Egyptian independence from the UK:

The Egyptian workers live in unhealthy and overcrowded dwellings -- they are so overcrowded in many areas that the workers occupy the dwellings in shifts as in a factory; they sleep in the streets and in any odd corner; servants and their families sleep under staircases, in sheds and in gardens or in the more modern buildings which are often not sanitary... Their level of wages is below the subsistence standard... There is no unemployment insurance, no provision for old age and similar state benefits...

Demanding full independence from the UK and the immediate evacuation of all British military forces from Egypt, the Egyptian student movement next called for and organized a massive general strike at a public meeting in Egypt on February 9, 1946, in support of these demands.

Selma Botman described in Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952 what then happened on that date in Egypt’s history:

On February 9 [1946] students called a massive strike. They marched by the thousands...from the university grounds in Giza toward Abdin Palace, chanting: "Evacuation! No negotiation except after evacuation!" When they reached the Abbar Bridge, which they needed to cross to reach the palace, they clashed with the police. The police opened the bridge while students were crossing it, causing the deaths of over 20 students by drowning and 84 serious casualties. In protest against the police’s behavior, demonstrations erupted in parts of Mansura, Zagazig, Aswan, Shabiz al-Kom, Alexandria and Cairo...

Then in Cairo, on February 18, 1946, “40,000 demonstrators came together in Abdeen Square while 15,000 others grouped at the university, where pamphlets were distributed attacking British imperialism,” according to Tareq Y. Ismael and Rifa‘at El-Sa’id’s The Communist Movement in Egypt: 1920-1988; and “along with these demonstrations, representatives of both the workers and students met and formed the National Committee of Workers and Students [NCWS]....with the aim of leading the struggle against the imperialists and their agents.”

This committee then called for a general strike in Egypt on February 21, 1946, in support of the following three goals:

1. “to struggle for national independence and to combat the military occupation and economic, political, cultural and colonial domination";
2. “to eliminate the local agents of colonialism, i.e., feudalists and big financiers connected with foreign monopolies;” and
3. “to unite all the anti-colonialist nationalist forces to support mass demonstrations and strikes, and to forge contacts with international anti-colonialist democratic movements.”

The NCWS’s February 21, 1946, demonstration and general strike in Cairo began peacefully. But then the Egyptian “protesters were insulted by the behavior of British military personnel” when “several military cars came through the crowds,” according to Selma Botman’s The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970; and the British troops next “opened fire” on the Egyptian demonstrators, according to Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952.

In response, “demonstrators attacked foreign shops, clubs, and the British military camp” and “at the end of the day, there were 23 dead and 125 wounded,” according to The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970. The dead Egyptian victims were “given martyrs’ funerals” while anti-imperialist nationalist demonstrations “spread to Giza, Shubra al-Khayma, Bab al-Sharqiyya, Misral-Jadrda, Abbasiyya, Helwan, Port Said, Ismailiya, Zagazig, Mansura, Zift, Mahasla al-Kubra and Tanta,” according to the same book.

The Egyptian student committee then decided to make February 25, 1946, “a day of general mourning for those who had been killed” on February 21; and on February 25, “a general strike took place” during which “clashes with the police led to the deaths of 28” more “demonstrators and the injury of 342” more, as well as “two British soldiers” also being killed and four UK soldiers being injured, according to The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970.

Another day of mourning was held in Egypt on March 4, 1946, to commemorate the additional anti-imperialist nationalist martyrs; and on March 4, 1946, “newspapers were not printed, coffee shops, stores, and factories were closed down, and schools and universities remained silent,” while “clashes in Alexandria left 28 more dead and hundreds wounded,” according to Egypt from Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952.

When the British government announced on March. 8, 1946, “their intention to evacuate the Cairo, Alexandria, and Delta zones” of Egypt “and set up military camps only in the region of the Suez Canal, the NCWS, with the rest of the [Egyptian] left, took this proclamation as their victory over the forces of imperialism,” according to The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-1970.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Michael James : Free Speech at Sproul Plaza, Berkeley, Fall of 1964

Gathering during Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, December 1964. At left, with mustache, is Jack Weinberg; center, in tie, is Michael Lerner; second from right, in glasses, is Marvin Garson. Photos by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Free speech, Sproul Plaza with Jesus,
and the Roseville Auction, Fall of '64

I am one of 773 arrested at Sproul Hall and hauled off to Santa Rita County Jail. One of many who goes limp, I am arrested with the added charge of resisting arrest, and dragged down the stairs. It will not be the only time I’ll get that charge.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / October 1, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

I’m heading west to grad school at Berkeley in my “ragtop” (convertible) 1957 Ford. Mine has a ripped as well as ragged top. I’m on US Route 40 -- Victory Highway, the first federally funded highway. In1964 it was the main cross-continental route and I take it from St. Louis west.

It takes me through Salina, Kansas, smack dab in the middle of the country -- a fact I know from having read Hot Rod Magazine’s 1955 report, “Showdown in the Middle of the Nation.”

Temperatures on the prairie and the plains are hot -- real hot. Around twilight I stop for gas and a good meal at a gas station diner in western Kansas and shoot the shit with the young attendant. He has long blond hair and is wearing blue jeans, a white t-shirt, and engineer boots, a la James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause.

Moving through the Great Plains I sense a moving on up, a gradual incline taking me higher and higher. The terrain changes, sagebrush rolls and tumbles, and I see dozens of black and white birds with long tail feathers on and along the road -- learned later they were Magpies.

I make it to California. It’s afternoon and I stop in Delano to visit the headquarters of the National Farm Workers Association (later the United Farm Workers), founded in 1962 by Dolores Huerta and César Chávez. Heat, dust. I find myself in a single story building, where I enter a room and meet and speak with Mr. Chavez. I donate my Lake Forest College football letter jacket to their clothing drive.

In the mid-70’s, progressive organizations -- including Rising Up Angry -- will welcome a large contingent of UFW workers to Chicago during the grape boycott and ongoing picketing of Jewel supermarkets. And in the fall of 1986 Caesar will be eating at the Heartland Café, sharing his jazz love. In my studio office I will show him my record collection and he will ask me to make tapes from my vinyl, selecting a stack nearly two feet tall. Sadly, he passed away before I could honor his request.

After leaving Delano, I roll into Canyon, a hip little town on the eastern slope of the Berkeley Hills. Skip Richheimer and his wife Susan are living in a cool crib at the bottom of a canyon, surrounded by tall redwoods and oaks. It is dusk. The home scene is warm and comforting.

I met Skip through a mutual friend, Gloria Peterson, a Lake Forest College classmate of mine. He was a fellow Triumph motorcycle guy, part of the Blessed Virgin Mother Mary Motorcycle Club at the University of Chicago. Once I was following him near the Museum of Science and Industry when he crashed, injuring both himself and his bike. We loaded it into my trunk, and then dropped him at the University of Chicago Hospital. An hour later I ditched the bike at his dad’s coffee roasting plant -- Richheimer Coffee, on Halsted near the Chicago River.

Calls to action: 'With Jesus' at Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley..

In ’64 Skip is a Berkeley grad student in history and the only person I’m aware that I know at my new school. Soon I’ll run into some fellow Staples High students from Connecticut: Joy Kimball, Robert Roll, and Ginger Akin. I go on a date with Joy; Robert and Ginger are already conservatives and will soon work for the Rand Corporation think tank.

I enter the campus for the first time from Telegraph and Bancroft. Berkeley feels good -- exciting from the very get-go. I walk into events from which will grow the Free Speech Movement, soon to capture worldwide attention. There are people at many tables representing a smorgasbord of beliefs, organizations, movements, and causes. There is plenty of information and calls to action: left, right, Jesus, atheist, Zen, civil rights, socialist, peace -- you name it.

At Berkeley there is no shortage of people to talk with, to learn from. One is Al Plumber, a likeable old guy who had been involved with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He talks about earlier struggles -- government harassment and repression of organizations and activists. In the 50’s Al hid from the FBI, living up in Idaho with other Wobblies.

People are riled up about the University’s new rules that curtail advocating action and forbid fundraising for off-campus political activities. That strikes many of us -- including supporters of SNCC’s Mississippi Freedom Sumer voter registration drive and California farm workers -- as terrible.

The UC Berkeley policy is clearly out of sync with the student body -- and apparently with the times. The Bay Area -- with its long history of labor and civil rights activism -- had been the site of considerable protest and militant action. This included effective demonstrations against HUAC, the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). This Federal committee blackened the nation’s eyes with its witch hunts, interrogations, and imprisonment of Communists and non-Communists alike, accusing them all of being “un-American.”

At a nighttime rally in front of Sproul Hall a large group of fraternity guys show up chanting in support of the University’s edict, but are rebuffed by the rest of the crowd. Two sociology professors I thought to be “radicals” in the field -- Seymour Martin Lipset and Nathan Glazer -- try to defend the new policy. People boo them. I am taken aback, thinking these are supposed to be the good guys, part of the reason I selected Berkeley for grad school. I will learn to look beyond reputation and begin to understand revisionism.

At a meeting of graduate sociology students I meet Dave Wellman, who is the president of the Graduate Sociology Club. We become roommates and move into 5006 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland across from Vern’s Supermarket. There is a bar next-door where I meet singer Bill Withers ("Ain’t no Sunshine" and "Lean on Me") who is hanging out at the bar. And some blocks behind Vern’s I discover a blues club and spend two nights listening to one of my favorites, Little Junior Parker.

Davy is a red diaper baby. His dad and mom, Saul and Peggy Wellman, were members of the Michigan Communist Party. She was a labor organizer who had once been deported to Canada, when the U.S. government falsely claimed she had been born there. Saul was a commissar in the Lincoln Brigade, the American volunteer force that fought fascism in Spain in the 1930’s. President Roosevelt and Congress had turned a blind eye to the slaughter being carried out by dictator Franco, who was backed in the Spanish Civil War by Hitler and the Nazis.

Davy tells me about being a kid growing up in Detroit and being followed, questioned, and bullied by the FBI. I will learn a lot from him and be introduced to many interesting people and ideas. Our saddest day together is Sunday, February 21, 1965, when we are both home studying and learn of the assassination of Malcolm X.

On a weekend I take a ride north to Loomis, an agricultural town where Jack and Donna Traylor live. I know them from my 1962 motorcycle-trip-summer-of-study to Mexico City. They are schoolteachers and Jack makes music -- playing and performing. They have a daughter, Xochimilco (“garden of flowers”), who has just learned to walk and they live in a cabin in an Oak grove. I meet his mom -- an attractive blonde Oklahoma woman with her hair up in curlers. Walking back to Jack’s on a dusty road I meet his dad, who works for the state’s Department of Agriculture.

A visit to the Roseville Auction and Market in Roseville, California .

A highlight of my visit -- in addition to hearing Jack sing Woody Guthrie’s "Deportees" -- is a trip to the Roseville Auction. It’s a bit like Chicago’s Maxwell Street market -- all sorts of people, anything and everything for sale. I buy a second-hand cast iron frying pan I continue to use to this day.

At the Roseville Auction and Market livestock are for sale. I observe goats in a truck, where rams gang up on the ewe, forcing her into a corner. This catches my attention; anthropomorphizing, I find it somewhat disturbing and unfair.

On a weekend evening I end up at the San Francisco Mime Troup space. Later my sister Melody will be a member of that groundbreaking theater. On this particular night I meet SFMT founder R.G. Davis, and also Joe McDonald, the future Country Joe, mainstay of Country Joe and the Fish. And I meet the late filmmaker, writer, and Cuban documentarian Saul Landau, whom I knew by reading his articles in Studies on the Left.

On campus the protests over freedom of speech are heating up and on October 1, Jack Weinberg, working a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) table, refuses to give campus police his name. He is arrested and the local constabulary attempts to take him away. The police car is quickly surrounded and the FSM (Free Speech Movement) is born.

While sitting around the police car I find a leaflet on the ground. It has a picture of a black man selling apples and the slogan “Build the Interracial Movement of the Poor.” Put out by SDS’s ERAP (Economic Research and Action Project), it reverberates in my heart and mind.

I write SDS headquarters in Chicago: “I would like to be a part of building the interracial movement of the poor.” A return letter will tell me it is up to me to help build it. Soon that is exactly what I will try to do.

That fall the FSM is the main event. The rebellion grows and there are near-daily rallies and plenty of speakers and performers. State Senator (later San Francisco Mayor) Willie Brown fires up a crowd; so does Congressman Bill Burton. On November 20, Joan Baez performs for thousands while the California Board of Regents meets and takes a position to the right of the UC Berkeley Administration.

On December 2, the graduate students go on strike. The noon rally is huge. Our leader and FSM spokesman Mario Savio, who spent the summer doing voter registration in Mississippi, gives his great speech, a speech for the ages. He talks about universities' compliance with corporations and the educational and corporate machine’s dehumanizing process, which turns people into a compliant profit-serving workforce.

Rally at Lower Sproul Plaza, Berkeley.

Mario says:

There's a time when the operations of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to indicate to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machines will be prevented from working at all.

And with that, over 1,500 of us march into Sproul Hall.

In the wee hours of the morning on December 4, 1964, the Sproul Hall bust is on. (Five years later -- to the day -- Chicago Police will assassinate Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton in his bed.)

Some protesters leave before the arrests begin. I stay and am one of 773 arrested and hauled off to Santa Rita County Jail. One of many who goes limp, I am arrested with the added charge of resisting arrest, and dragged down the stairs. It will not be the only time I’ll get that charge.

We’re out of the slammer before sunrise December 5. Some of us reassemble on campus and attempt to block trucks from making their campus deliveries. We encourage Teamster drivers to honor our movement. They express their support, but we do not shut down the campus.

No, we don’t shut down the campus, but people around the world take note of these events. Nothing will ever be the same -- not for UC Berkeley and the university community, not for the members of the FSM, and not for me.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland radio show, here and on YouTube. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]


Type rest of the post here

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers : Looking Back at Kent State and Jackson State

President Richard Nixon, pointing to a Cambodian map, announces the entry of American soldiers into Cambodia, on April 30, 1970.
Kent State and Jackson State:
Looking back / leaning forward

Richard Nixon and the political class had denounced students as thugs and subversives for their resistance to the pervasive U.S. war crimes.

By Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers / The Rag Blog / May 8, 2012

Again and again we learn that war and empire abroad will find a way home.

On April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon announced the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, a sovereign nation the U.S. had been secretly bombing for several months. It was a saturation campaign involving 120 strikes a day by B-52s carrying up to 60,000 pounds of bombs each.

But in the common doublespeak of war, the president claimed: “This is not an invasion of Cambodia… once enemy forces are driven out of these sanctuaries and once their military supplies are destroyed, we will withdraw…”

Nixon’s aggression against Cambodia was accompanied by a verbal assault on those inside the U.S. opposing the war: “we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home,” he intoned.

The next day, Nixon went to the Pentagon to clarify the point: “you see these bums…blowing up the campuses…burning up the books, I mean storming around about this issue... you name it, get rid of the war, there’ll be another one.”

On the rolling spring lawns of Kent State in the American heartland, students continued to press against an illegal, immoral war of occupation. The first entering classes of Black students formed themselves into what was to become a growing wave of Black student unions, even at Kent State. Returning veterans were throwing their medals back at the warmongers, and themselves becoming students.

Two days after the official invasion of Cambodia, 900 National Guardsmen amassed on the Kent State campus. M-1 rifles were raised, and within 13 seconds, 61 shots were fired on unarmed students -- four were dead, nine wounded. It was, the official Presidential Commission on Campus Unrest later found, “a nation driven to use the weapons of war upon its youth.”

The outright murder of (white) college students engaged in peaceful protest at Kent State University, and the lesser-recognized but equally tragic murder of (Black) unarmed college students at Jackson State University that same week, were shocking although forewarned. Richard Nixon and the political class had denounced students as thugs and subversives for their resistance to the pervasive U.S. war crimes in Viet Nam, to the secret wars against Laos and Cambodia, to the flagrant arming and supporting of tyrants throughout Latin America, and to the lavish funding of apartheid and colonialism in Africa.

Invasion, lawlessness, military occupation and counter-insurgency, displacement, and systematic violence visited on others necessarily created its domestic corollary: a militarized national security state promoting heightened cruelty and callousness at home, the shredding of constitutional liberty and rights, and the unleashing of armed violence on its own citizens. The 10-year war against Viet Nam and the murderous (secret) assault on the Black freedom movement were blood cousins, Kent and Jackson State its offspring.

Today the permanent wars carried out by the U.S. military and its NATO spawn bring home their own violence and tragedy. Witness the mass killings at Fort Hood, astronomical suicide rates for returning veterans, widespread rape and assault on women in the military by their fellow soldiers, attempted assassinations of politicians, and the galloping arms race among ordinary citizens and residents who are increasingly arming up and carrying concealed weapons to work and play.

Add to that the quiet violence of a 20% child poverty rate in the richest nation in history, a prison gulag of mass incarceration sweeping up 2½ million people, harsh economic “austerity” resulting in severe slashing and degradation of education, health care, housing, public transportation and jobs at home -- all of it hitting people of color disproportionally.

Empire and constant military wars not only squander the public wealth and directly destroy the lives of millions, they inevitably bring about a Panopticon-like national security state and a militarized domestic life at home.

At Kent State, students met with state violence and terror previously directed almost exclusively at the Black and Latino freedom movements. In response, 80% of U.S. colleges and universities called for some form of strike. Four million students were involved in protests, willing to face being beaten, gassed, or even shot. The National Guard was called out at 21 colleges and universities, 500 campuses cancelled classes, and 51 did not reopen until the fall. In Washington, D.C., 130,000 students mobilized against war and repression.

It was all merely prelude: greater repression and disintegration at home will accompany the long wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Bahrain, and Pakistan; Occupy, Madison, Trayvon, and inevitable resistance will surely follow.

[William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Bernardine Dohrn is Clinical Associate Professor of Law and director and founder of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University. Both Ayers and Dohrn were leaders in SDS and the New Left, and were founders of Weatherman and the Weather Underground. Find more articles by and about Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Richard Raznikov : From Berkeley to London, a Word From Our Sponsors

The Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley, 1964. Image from the New SDS Website.
From 60's Berkeley to the London 'riots':
A word from our sponsors

Whoever controls the media controls the story the public sees and hears. Whatever 'news' we get is filtered through the propaganda requirements of those who own it.

By Richard Raznikov / The Rag Blog / August 18, 2011

The first time I personally experienced the unreliability -- i.e. lies -- of the media was as a freshman at U.C. Berkeley in October 1964. Along with about a thousand others, my friend JBD and I found ourselves in the middle of what was to become the Free Speech Movement.

The University had embarked on a mission, spurred by its corporate sponsors, to impede the recruitment of civil rights volunteers on campus. Students were already in the forefront of demonstrations against racial discrimination in San Francisco at the Sheraton Palace, on auto row, and at Zim’s Restaurants, and the targets had grown to include businesses in Oakland’s Jack London Square and the Oakland Tribune newspaper.

Powerful people were pissed off, and they leaned on the University’s administration to put a stop to it.

The Free Speech Movement was the student response to new restrictions on free speech imposed by Chancellor Ed Strong and U.C. President Clark Kerr.

Being in the middle of this historic development was an intoxicating experience, and JBD and I participated in sit-ins and demonstrations, and passed out leaflets. We were among the first batch of students to surround a police car with our bodies, preventing the removal of one Jack Weinberg, who had been arrested for violating university rules when he sat at a recruitment table for either the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) or the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) -- I can’t recall which.

The October 1st capture of the police car in a spontaneous circle of students generated nationwide press coverage, and most of America learned of the incipient student revolt on their evening news programs. What they learned was a little bit different from what we were experiencing in Sproul Plaza.

The public heard that we were a bunch of ungrateful brats, outside agitators, and Communist dupes. The quite significant issues of freedom of speech and of constitutional rights in general, although they were the central point of the protests and of the speeches given by Mario Savio and others, standing atop the imprisoned squad car, were completely ignored.

We were too busy to watch ourselves on the news but we soon discovered how we were being portrayed. Personally, I didn’t mind the brat thing, but I resented anyone regarding me as a dupe. Not to mention that one of the friends I’d made in the FSM was a member of the steering committee who was a libertarian -- and happened to belong to "Students for Goldwater."

Whoever controls the media controls the story the public sees and hears. I am reminded of that daily, following events in England, in Israel, in Libya, in Syria, in Egypt, in Haiti, in Greece. Whatever "news" we get is filtered through the propaganda requirements of those who own it, those who sponsor it, and those whose threats can promote or make vanish a given narrative.

In other words, you can’t take at face value anything you see on television or coming from the mouths of politicians. They are lying to you. That’s a part of their job.

I wrote a piece called "London Burning" and got a pretty fast response from people who took issue with my slant on events. One of them was my old friend JBD himself, whose quite reasonable question was, mainly, how sympathetic would I be if the looters were looting and/or burning down my shop.

Answer: I wouldn’t be very sympathetic; I’d be pissed off.

But, here’s the thing: I didn’t write favorably about looters. I don’t even know how much looting has taken place, and neither do you. I know what the Cameron government is saying, but they are notorious liars to begin with. I also know that the media, in collusion with government, can make a snowplow look like a Trailways bus.

My point was this: the England riots are political.

What the media coverage is leaving out, among other things:

Last fall there were demonstrations across England by students angry about prospective cuts in social services. The level of outrage surprised the Cameron regime which, along with other European governments, has been implementing so-called “austerity” measures, the translation being that in order to satisfy the bankers and other corporate thugs the few crumbs formerly doled out to the poor will now be taken away.

Then, on March 26th of this year, half a million demonstrators -- many of them trade unionists -- converged on London to protest the slashing of government programs and social services. They were joined by huge numbers of the young, especially students.

Traffic cone embedded in the smashed windows at a London shopping center. Photograph by Jim Dyson / Getty Images.
In a prescient article two months ago in the Indypendent, Peter Bratsis wrote:

...the class dimensions of the demonstration are not yet obvious nor are they reducible to the social-economic positions or to the intentions of those of us who were there. The class character of the demonstration will be manifest by its impact and what will follow in the months ahead...

As Bratsis pointed out,

One thing is certain, however: The March 26 protest will have as little impact on policymakers as the antiwar demonstrations did. Within the “democratic” world at least, orderly popular protests have proven to be of little consequence when it comes to influencing policies.

He then observed that while many union participants would abandon the field, having come to London and “done all that they could,” the events would lead to further radicalization of those who were most directly victimized by the government’s actions and targeted by police.

Partly as a response to the heavy-handed actions of the police and partly as a product of principled political reflection and organization, the extra-parliamentary left, especially anarchism, is on the rise. There were hundreds of mask-wearing protesters willing to engage in property destruction and risk arrest.

Their occupation of Fortnum and Mason, one of the most famous stores in London, and their attack on the Ritz Hotel and dozens of stores on Oxford Street, especially those known for not paying any taxes, is a clear sign that the movement is growing. Although there may still be far to go before the streets of London look like those of Seattle in 1999 or Athens in 2008, major progress is being made.

Historically, ideology is always an unsteady partner to rebellion. Indeed, if revolution waited for the development of a broad-based intellectual theory it would wait forever. Most American colonists had not read Tom Paine’s “Common Sense,” and those Russians who stormed the Winter Palace had by and large never heard of Karl Marx.

Bratsis continues:

According to the historian Karl Polanyi, the working class in Britain has been the most repressed and beaten down in all of Europe. Polanyi asserts that this has rendered them nearly incapable of any self-directed, progressive, political action. Nonetheless, we have seen flashes of political possibilities, such as the poll tax riots of 1990 that brought down Margaret Thatcher and the fierce but unsuccessful coal miners’ strike of 1984-85 that broke organized labor in the U.K.

The stakes of the current attack on working people are clear. Orderly demonstrations and petitions are not sufficient for fighting the power of the ruling classes and their... servants within Parliament. A new chapter in disruptive, disciplined and disorderly political action by the dominated is necessary. If marching is as far as the political efforts go, the overcrowded classrooms, shrinking universities, declining life expectancy and decreasing wages and pensions will be all the evidence we need for understanding how the class struggle in Britain is progressing.

More than 16,000 police have been deployed to retake the streets of London. More than 1,700 arrests have been carried out, and magistrates have already tried and sentenced some to prison. A majority of the arrestees are minors. One such was sent to jail for six months for stealing bottled water. Prisons and juvenile detention centers are running out of cells for the inmates.

London police have conducted raids specifically against low-income housing projects, and concerns over civil liberties of the accused have been brushed aside by the Cameron regime in the wild rush to convict and imprison those accused. The prime minister declared that “phony concerns about human rights” wouldn’t be permitted to get in the way.

Despite the cover stories promoted by the British government and the widespread media complicity in reducing the rioters to “mindless” criminals and “anarchists,” the enormity of the rebellion -- and its use of social networks and Blackberry messaging services -- suggests something with clearer direction and better organization.

The British government is working on policies which will shut down these web sites and services to impede future actions, much the same way the Egyptian government sought to save Mubarak’s miserable skin. It didn’t work in Egypt but maybe the English will have better luck.

The U.S. government has, of course, embarked on the same course, and the mass media in this country are complicit in distorting the news out of London. After all, the same kind of phony “austerity” policies being used in Europe to screw the last dime out of the poor and the seemingly powerless are being tried in America by the Obama regime and its Republican allies. Don’t think for a minute we’re not being set up. In England, the economics editor at
The Guardian (and a part-time magistrate) wrote:

From the bench, what magistrates see is a raging bundle of id impulses, the desire for immediate gratification untempered by a sense of guilt and with only an ill-formed notion of right and wrong. The temptation to bang them up and throw away the key is strong, and magistrates will no doubt be encouraged to do just that over the coming weeks.

Don’t be fooled by the press releases. Crisis is manufactured in order to seize money or to get rid of civil liberties, often both. When people fight back with whatever rudimentary weapons are at their disposal, it is essential that they be divested of reason and marginalized as criminals. That’s what the mass media do these days -- create and promote the cover stories of their sponsors.

No, I do not personally think that looting businesses is a good idea, a sound tactic, or a morally-defensible position. But I’m not going to pretend that there isn’t a reason for it.

[Richard Raznikov is an attorney practicing in San Rafael, California. He blogs at News from a Parallel World.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

David P. Hamilton : The 1969 Chuck Wagon Riot

Police riot at the Chuck Wagon on the University of Texas campus in Austin in November 1969. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
1969 in Austin:
The famous Chuck Wagon police riot

By David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / February 17, 2010

'...Another hero of the revolution stepped forth from the crowd and threw open the truck’s rear door, allowing our captured comrades inside to escape. The cops were mightily pissed.'

[Several Rag Bloggers who are veterans of the Sixties have contributed articles reflecting their memories from those days. This essay is part of David Pratt Hamilton’s developing memoir, working title: Lucky Guy.]

In early November 1969 the University of Texas campus in Austin experienced another upheaval, this one based more on generational rebellion against the arbitrary power of the University's Board of Regents than on the weighty issues of war and racism that had been sweeping the world, UT included.

A growing number of street kids were hanging out -- if not living -- on The Drag, the bustling street that ran along the west side of the UT campus. Some of them tended to seek refuge in the Chuck Wagon, the bohemian quarter among student eating facilities. The local newspaper editorialized against this outrage, labeling the denizens of the CW “pot smokers” and “non-student scum,” and called for this situation to be “cleaned up” precipitously.

The Chuck Wagon was the principal eatery in the Student Union, cheap and located right on the Drag (known to some as Guadalupe Street). It was also very popular with leftist students. SDS radicals and counterculture types were frequently found there and it was the scene of a great deal of personal organizing as we mixed easily with other students interested in listening to our positions in a relaxed atmosphere.

It was the only place on campus where the radicals dominated, our liberated territory. If you wanted to rub shoulders with the militants, the CW was where you went.

There actually weren’t hordes of street kids there. Maybe a dozen or so regulars depending on the weather, but this somehow became a big problem for the “authorities.” Shortly after the inflammatory editorial appeared, the city police stormed in to capture a runaway known as Sunshine, the name likely derived from a then popular variety of LSD.

It would have been fair to be suspicious when a large contingent of police suddenly became so concerned with a bedraggled street urchin that they staged an aggressive assault in an environment where they know their actions would not be appreciated by most of those present.

This provocation was the opening salvo in a show of force by the Regents and assorted University elders to reclaim lost turf, knowing the police assault would spark a confrontation and that confrontations inspire new rules. In the process, they would dislodge the radicals, their real target.

Some of the street guys with Sunshine obliged by pelting the departing cop cars with bottles -- or at least one bottle. This incident was a set-up for a war the University wanted to have.

Although the Student Union was supposedly governed by an autonomous board with a student majority, word came down from on high that henceforth anyone entering the Chuck Wagon would be required to show a University ID, a new rule clearly aimed at the imaginary non-student menace.

A significant number of those anti-war and SDS activists who hung out there may not have been in good standing with the University at any given moment, although virtually all those not currently enrolled had been recently and would be again, as many of us dropped in and out of school but remained a part of the university community. Despite frequent allegations to the contrary, there were no real “outside agitators” on campus other than the city's ruling establishment.

At an emergency meeting held that Friday around midnight, the Student Union board folded to the pressure and passed the new rule dictated to them by the Regents.

My roommate Paul Spencer and I somehow heard of the decision early the next morning -- it was probably on the local radio -- and reflexively decided to challenge it. Since I was a registered graduate student and employee of the Government Department, our plan was for me to hit the door first to case the situation.

Typical gathering at the Chuck Wagon back in the day. At rear left is David MacBryde, then a staffer at The Rag (the Sixties Austin underground paper) and now Rag Blog correspondent in Berlin. Rag Blog photo by Alan Pogue, then The Rag's staff photographer. (What goes around comes around!)
Early that Saturday morning I walked into the Chuck Wagon and, sure enough, was asked for an ID by some student employee standing by the entrance. I reproached him for being a collaborator with the forces of repression and left, without complying, to inform Paul who was waiting in the hall.

Paul had been a student for several semesters, but at this point was not enrolled. On principle, he wouldn’t have shown his ID anyway. Paul marched through the CW door, hurled pithy but withering verbiage at the young collaborator, and proceeded inside. There Paul was immediately confronted by the president of the University, Bryce Jordan, who sternly said, “Paul, you know you’re not supposed to be in here.”

Of course, it was completely astounding that the president of the university, a Frank Erwin flunky [Frank Erwin was the chairman of the UT Board of Regents and a close crony of Lyndon Johnson] was in the Chuck Wagon before 9 a.m. to personally help enforce a minor rule enacted only hours earlier by a board that was supposed to be autonomous of his control.

Even more revealing was that Prez Jordan knew Paul’s name and status. Clearly, the University’s rulers were orchestrating this power play and were way ahead of us in preparation. Regardless, we went for the bait.

Prez Jordan was backed up by two not particularly imposing campus cops. I don’t think they even had guns, a testament to the unmilitarized atmosphere of that earlier era, a condition that has been totally rectified since. Were a similar incident to occur now, the Prez would have 40 fully decked-out riot police waiting in the kitchen, a SWAT team in a room down the hall, the National Guard on call, and would be packin’ heat himself.

Although I was standing right beside Paul and had shown no ID either, Prez ignored me, probably because he knew that I was in good standing. Paul began to offer the Prez his take on the illegitimate nature of the dictate put forth by the tyrannical Regents to the Student Union Board. Not surprisingly, Prez Jordan did not want to get involved in a debate with someone much smarter than he was and who also had the advantage of being fundamentally correct and who was surrounded by 200 or so skeptical and judgmental students.

Hence, he precipitously escalated to the physical plane by motioning for the cops to step in, since Paul failed to respond quickly to his order to leave. They grabbed Paul. That was a tactical error. Although only weighing about 165 pounds, Paul was an excellent athlete and in his physical prime. They were not.

Together, the two cops couldn’t pen him. It was all they could do to hang on. Some student decided to help the cops until I propelled him through a couple of tables. Then I unsuccessfully exhorted the crowd to liberate Paul. But while talking the talk, I was unwilling to walk the walk. I choked at leading them by example.

In retrospect, I’ve always wished that I had just jumped on Prez Jordan, whereupon the cops would have had to come to his rescue, perhaps allowing Paul and me to both escape. But, despite my having spent the previous year “on the barricades” with hard-core types, I was unwilling to jump in and mix it up with the two rather vulnerable cops who already had their hands full.

Collectively the students could have freed Paul easily, but I didn’t provide the leadership in doing it. Since the Prez knew who we were, my inaction in this regard kept me temporarily out of jail, and in school, but hardly covered me in glory. More cops showed up shortly and Paul was carted away. To cover for my failure, I ran off to find a lawyer and raise his bail money.

The following Monday, the first day of classes after this first incident, there was a big lunch hour protest demonstration on the West Mall just outside the Student Union that drew a sizable crowd ready for action. After an hour of rousing speeches concerning the abuse of our rights by the dictatorial Regents, hundreds of us marched into the building and entered the CW en masse without showing ID’s. It was an occupation.

Paul, having already been arrested once -- and only recently getting out of jail -- stayed in the background and didn’t speak at the rally or come inside the CW during the occupation. The University had its military on call, hordes of city cops geared up for action. They surrounded the building outside the CW and gave us a deadline to get out by 4 p.m. This allowed us a couple of hours to decide how to respond.

Some civil disobedience volunteers decided that they would stay inside and get arrested in nonviolent protest while the rest of us, having pledged to bail them out, left in time to make the deadline. No such luck. In a paradigm of the cop-riot fashion of the day, the police stormed in at exactly 4 p.m. through the same two glass doors that the protesters inside were clearly using to leave.

The cops could have simply come through the outside door of the kitchen and been patient while all the people who were trying to leave did so. Instead, their frontal assault trapped lots of people inside trying to get out. Naturally, there developed a wild, panic-stricken bottleneck around the two heavily congested exits with MACE spraying, chairs flying, and glass breaking.

Those of us who had exited ahead of the cops' charge turned around to converge on them from their rear. I grabbed a screaming young woman who had been hit directly in the face with MACE and couldn’t see and took her to get first aid at the University Y across the street.

In the meantime, the police had brought in a large panel truck to haul away prisoners. They had succeeded in rounding up some of the protesters and putting them inside it when some heroic comrade slit one of the truck’s tires. This rendered it unable to proceed to the jailhouse except on the rim, the alternative being to change the tire on the spot while surrounded by hundreds of angry students hurling verbal abuse if not more tangible articles.

In their confusion, the police left the rear door of the truck momentarily unguarded. Another hero of the revolution stepped forth from the crowd at that crucial moment and threw open the truck’s rear door, allowing our captured comrades inside to escape.

The cops were mightily pissed. They then formed a phalanx that plunged into the crowd with the specific goal of grabbing Paul. He had been doing nothing beyond standing in the middle of a large crowd outside -- perhaps chanting -- and had not participated in the occupation, but they arrested him again anyway.

This 1969 Christmas card was sent by Chuck Wagon defendants. Left to right: Bob Rankin, Randy Carley, Jay McGee (Jay Motherfucker), David Pratt (Hamilton), Bill Meacham, and Paul Spencer.
A few weeks later, 21 of us were indicted by the Travis County Grand Jury as co-conspirators in the felonious destruction of public property, to wit, one truck tire worth $200. We became known as “the Chuckwagon 21” and a minor local cause célébre. It was my first local arrest, but number three for Paul. The cops came to my door to arrest me while I was smoking a joint, but luckily they failed to notice.

This was the only time in my life that I spent time locked up in a jail cell. Actually, I was only inside about 10 hours before we were bailed out, but it made a big negative impression on me regardless. The high point was getting a mug shot taken that later appeared in my FBI files wherein I was identified as an “SDS organizer.” It will forever be one of my proudest possessions.

Among those arrested besides Paul and me were Bill Meacham and a couple of the “motherfuckers,” Jay and Randy. The motherfuckers [the group was actually called "Up Against the Wall Motherfucker"] were an SDS offshoot, militantly dedicated to sex, drugs, rock and roll, and anarchy.

As an expression of their dedication to radical leveling and their alienation from the prevailing order, they all used Motherfucker as a last name. Hence, my comrade Jay McGee became Jay Motherfucker. He was in jail with us and some years later became my first wife Diane’s second husband with my blessing.

Having the Motherfuckers involved provided lots of energy and style, but somewhat complicated our public image at that trying moment when we were technically facing up to 20 years in prison.

Fighting the charges against us became our political work over the next several months. We bemoaned that fact at the time, realizing the forces of evil were tying us up in this sideshow so we could not continue to oppose their more serious crimes.

Miraculously, several very prominent liberal lawyers volunteered to serve as our defense team pro bono. They included the then famous criminal defense attorney from Odessa, Warren Burnett, a “whiskey-swigging, Shakespeare-quoting Texas lawyer who achieved near-legendary status” according to his New York Times obituary.

Famed San Antonio lawyer and politician Maury Maverick, Jr. and David Richards, constitutional law professor at UT and husband of future governor Ann Richards, also signed on, mainly just for a show of strength.

One of our defense arguments was to ask why we could all be held responsible for damage done by one person to one truck tire. The state said we had all conspired to commit this crime by our participation in the events. Constitutional issues of free speech and questions of procedure were also raised in our defense. Most of the actual legal work was done by young local progressive lawyers, Jim Simons and Cam Cunningham.

The DA, Bob Smith, had only recently been very publicly embarrassed when Burnett had successfully defended local writer Gary Cartwright on a pot possession charge. Not wanting to be again subjected to Burnett’s superior legal abilities, Smith was appropriately intimidated and dropped the charges altogether, at least against those of us he didn’t have something else on. So my charges were dropped, but he refused to drop those against Paul for assaulting a cop.

The DA wanted a plea bargain for 30 days in jail and probation. Paul, believing that he had been the one assaulted and that he had acted appropriately in support of lawful procedure, wouldn’t buy the deal and eventually bolted. They never chased him. Running him out of town was a sufficient victory for them. Austin’s loss was great.

[David P. Hamilton has been a political activist in Austin since the late 1960s when he worked with SDS and wrote for The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Paul Krassner : Kent State Anniversary Blues

Reaction from students at New York University after the Kent State massacre. Photo from NYU Archives Photograph Collection.
Four dead in Ohio:
Kent State Anniversary Blues

By Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2010

See gallery of photos, Below.

In my book, Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs: From Toad Slime to Ecstasy, Freddy Berthoff described his mescaline trip at a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert in the summer of 1970 when he was 15. “Earlier that spring,” he wrote, “the helmeted, rifle-toting National Guard came up over the rise during a peace-in-Vietnam rally at Kent State University. And opened fire on the crowd. I always suspected it was a contrived event, as if someone deep in the executive branch had said, ‘We’ve got to teach those commie punks a lesson.’”

Actually, President Nixon had called antiwar protesters “bums” two days before the shootings. While Freddy was peaking on mescaline, CSNY sang a new song about the massacre:

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in O-hi-o...

Plus nine wounded. Sixty-seven shots -- dum-dum bullets that exploded upon impact -- had been fired in 13 seconds. This incident on May 4, 1970 resulted in the first general student strike in U.S. history, encompassing over 400 campuses.

Arthur Krause, father of one of the dead students, Allison, got a call from John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, who said, “There will be a complete investigation.” Krause responded, “Are you sure about that?” And the reply: “Mr. Krause, I promise you, there will be no whitewash.”

But NBC News correspondent James Polk discovered a memo marked “Eyes Only” from Ehrlichman to Attorney General John Mitchell ordering that there be no federal grand jury investigation of the killings, because Nixon adamantly opposed such action.

Polk reported that, “In 1973, under a new Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, the Justice Department reversed itself and did send the Kent State case to a federal grand jury. When that was announced, Richardson said to an aide he got a call from the White House. He was told that Richard Nixon was so upset, they had to scrape the president off the walls with a spatula.”

Last year, Allison Krause’s younger sister, Laurel, was relaxing on the front deck of her home in California when she saw the County Sheriff’s Deputy coming toward her, followed by nearly two dozen men. “Then, before my eyes,” she recalls, “the officers morphed into a platoon of Ohio National Guardsmen marching onto my land. They were here because I was cultivating medical marijuana. I realized the persecution I was living through was similar to what many Americans and global citizens experience daily. This harassment even had parallels to Allison’s experience before she was murdered.”

What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

Now, 40 years later, Laurel, her mother and other Kent State activists have been organizing the 2010 Kent State Truth Tribunal, scheduled for May 1-4 on the campus where the slaughter of unarmed demonstrators originally occurred. The invitation to participate in sharing their personal narratives has been extended to 1970 protesters, witnesses, National Guardsmen, Ohio and federal government officials, university administrators and educators, local residents, families of the victims. The purpose is to uncover the truth.

Laurel Krause.
Laurel was 0nly 15 when the Kent State shootings took place. “Like any 15-year-old, my coping mechanisms were undeveloped at best. Every evening, I remember spending hours in my bedroom practicing calligraphy to Neil Young’s ‘After the Goldrush,’ artistically copying phrases of his music, smoking marijuana to calm and numb my pain.”

When she was arrested for legally growing marijuana, “They cuffed me and read my rights as I sobbed hysterically. This was the first time I flashed back and revisited the utter shock, raw devastation and feeling of total loss since Allison died. I believed they were going to shoot and kill me, just like Allison. How ironic, I thought. The medicine that kept me safe from experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder now led me to relive that horrible experience as the cops marched onto my property.”

She began to see the interconnectedness of those events. The dehumanization of Allison was the logical, ultimate extension of the dehumanization of Laurel. Legally, two felonies were reduced to misdemeanors, and she was sentenced to 25 hours of community service. But a therapist, one of Allison’s friends from Kent State, suggested to Laurel that the best way to deal with the pain of PTSD was to make something good come out of the remembrance, the suffering and the pain.

“That’s when I decided to transform the arrest into something good for me,” she says, “good for all. It was my only choice, the only solution to cure this memorable, generational, personal angst. My mantra became, ‘This is the best thing that ever happened to me.’ And it has been.” That’s why she’s fighting so hard for the truth to burst through cement like blades of grass.

[Paul Krassner’s latest book is an expanded edition of his 1993 autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut, available at paulkrassner.com. This piece was also published in High Times magazine.]


Mary Ann Vecchio kneels over the body of Jeffrey Miller after the Kent State shootings, May 4, 1970. Pulitzer prize winning photo by John Paul Filo / Valley News-Dispatch. Filo was a journalism student at Kent State at the time.
The Guard takes aim. Photo by Howard Ruffner / Picasa.
Four dead in Ohio: Allison Krause, William Shroeder, Jeffrey Miller, Sandy Scheur.

Allison Krause. Image from Mendo Coast Current.
Photo by Mr. Baggins / Democratic Underground.
Kent State Protest Poster, 1970. NYU Archives Collection.
The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...