home | 1946-21st century | Failed Radicals in Europe and Japan

Sather Gate, U.C. Berkeley.
Click to enlarge and for details

Joan Baez sitting-in at Sproul Hall,
supporting the right of students
to solicit on campus, especially
for civil rights issues. (Photo by
Richard Muller. Used with permission.)

Eldridge Cleaver.

The cover of Jerry Rubin's
1970 book, "Do It."

Berkeley California to the End of 1966

In early 1964, students from the University of California were joining others on campus in supporting equality and jobs for blacks, including demonstrations at Lucky's supermarket in Berkeley, auto-row and the Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco, and at Oakland's major newspaper, the Tribune. Among the students at Berkeley were those who went to the Republican convention in San Francisco to demonstrate their support for Governor Scranton, Goldwater's rival for the Republic Party's nominee for President. Some conservatives in the Bay Area were disturbed by organizing on-campus for agitation off-campus. The leader of Californians for Goldwater and a political power in the area was Senator William Knowland, owner of Oakland's Tribune. It is rumored that Knowland complained to the university administration. Knowland was to deny this. At any rate, the university administration was concerned about the appearance of scruffy looking radicals at the main entrance to the university soliciting donations, passing out leaflets and creating a bad impression for visitors entering university grounds, and the university was determined to do something about it.

Among the student-activists attending the University of California at Berkeley were thirty to sixty who had gone to the South in 1964 for "Freedom Summer." And when they returned to campus in September they joined others in supporting local civil rights organizing. Political activity was forbidden on campus. Students, sitting behind card tables, were soliciting on the sidewalk at the entrance to the campus - on what was believed to be city property. The university administration discovered that this area was actually university property, and it included the area in its ban on soliciting. Students were upset, and believing that they had the right of free speech, they moved their tables onto campus. Having defied segregation in the South and having organizing skills that they had learned in the civil rights movement, they ably organized defiance against university policy. And against the students, the university administration vacillated as it tried to keep disruption and bad publicity at a minimum.

Then on October 1, the university attempted a showdown with the students by sending a campus police squad car to arrest a politically active student who had been sitting at a table for the Congress of Racial Equality. Students sat in around the police car through the night and into the following day. Some fraternity boys expressed their hostility verbally and by tossing lighted cigarettes and garbage onto people sitting-in, and those sitting-in responded with civil rights songs. Students who had stood on the roof of the police car to make speeches had left it dented, and the activist students took up a collection to pay for the damage.

On the second day, police were massed just off campus, waiting for orders to move against the sit-in. But rather than a messy confrontation that was sure to make the news, the President of the California's university system, Clark Kerr, encouraged by the university's faculty, offered the demonstrators a compromise. The student still under arrest in the police car was to be booked and then released without the university pressing charges, and negotiations were to follow for establishing permanent rules. Spokespersons for the demonstrators accepted, and the sit-in ended.

But agreements on campus rules were not worked out between the administration and what was now a student organization called the Free Speech Movement. Kerr was upset that among the top half-dozen or so leaders of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) was Bettina Aptheker, daughter of a Communist Party scholar; Michael Rossman, a self-described "red-diaper baby," and a couple of people who could be described as Trotskyists. Kerr was concerned about appearing to be caving into Communists. Kerr complained about the FSM leadership, and the FSM rank and file was surprised that Kerr would, in their words, "resort to red-baiting."  Kerr was under pressure from the university's board of regents, and he moved to suspend a few of the student leaders. The Free Speech Movement called for an overnight sit-in at the campus administration building (Sproul Hall). Their strategy was to force Kerr into bringing police onto campus, believing that this would help broaden their base of support. It would, they calculated, take fifteen hours for the police to arrest and take away all those sitting in.

The sit-in began on December 2, with the movement's star speechmaker, Mario Savio, making a fiery speech. Savio was an impassioned former civil rights worker in Mississippi, from a working class family and an exceptional student. He spoke of "the machine" becoming so odious and making one so sick at heart that one had to put one's body on the gears and wheels. Then Joan Baez sang, and about a thousand people marched into the administration building.

Kerr and his associates were in contact with the state's governor, Pat Brown. A false report went to Brown that the students were "busting up" offices. Pat Brown called in the Highway Patrol - California's elite police force. Through the night and much of the next day 733 arrests were made, and the police cleared the building by dragging the arrested students down the stairs - bump, bump, bump. The movement's strategy of non-violence - learned from the civil rights movement - worked. They broadened their support. Many faculty members were upset by the police having come onto campus and used force, and they threw their support to the student's fight for the freedom to organize politically on campus. It was the first big student rising in the United States in modern times, and it was a sensation in the United States and abroad, and it set an example for other campuses.

Support for the students was, however, narrow. Television crews had been coming to campus, and most of their coverage was moronic in that it was snapshots of the most sensational happenings without background information, and most of what description was added to the snapshots was unflattering toward the activists. Only journalists from the New York Times and one or two other elite news organizations tried to gather perspective by in-depth interviews.

The Hearst newspapers focused on the Marxist influence on campus, and people across California were complaining that they had not been able to go to college because they had to work and here were these ungrateful kids at Berkeley rioting. Hate mail had arisen, describing the students as rotten beatniks, as malodorous, over-privileged, under-brained, bleeding-heart megalomaniacs and as serving the Communist plan to takeover the country.

A New Activism in Berkeley and Re-election for Lyndon Johnson

Television and newspaper coverage of events on campus, was helping to radicalize students on campus - some of them from Republican families. So too was the fact that it had been a liberal governor, "Pat" Brown, who had ordered the police onto campus. Some students began looking for alternative sources for an understanding of events and to those to the left of liberalism. Some of Berkeley's illustrious faculty members, discomforted by the attitudes and tactics of the Left on campus, and the politicization of the campus, began looking elsewhere for employment, among them the liberal-leftist sociologist opposed to the U.S. policy in Vietnam, Nathan Glazer.

The new year began with students returning to their routine schoolwork, while rules were being worked out for the orderly administration of university life. The Free Speech Movement had called for the administration to be responsible for no more than maintenance, such as sweeping up, letting the faculty and students run things. This did not happen, but the Free Speech Movement did win for students the right to maintain tables and to organize on campus, and to use a microphone for speeches at Sproul Hall during the noon hour.

As those arrested for sitting-in at Sproul Hall were attending court together and facing fines, probation or light jail sentences, student activism was shifted to opposition to President Johnson's policies regarding Vietnam. Johnson had easily defeated Goldwater in November 1964. Goldwater had done well among whites in Southern cities, but Johnson had won urban blacks in the South - who had voted heavily for Richard Nixon in 1960. Johnson had won with 61 percent of the popular vote, the greatest margin of victory by any contender for the presidency. Goldwater had come across as a man interested in abstract principles and as most uncompromising regarding communism. Johnson had won portraying himself as the man interested in the well being of all Americans, as less likely than Goldwater to get the United States involved in a nuclear war. And Johnson had campaigned stating that American boys should not fight a war that Asian boys should be fighting.

Instead, Johnson began sending regular military units to Vietnam, to prevent the fall of the regime in Saigon, which was losing its war against the Communist forces. In the summer of 1965 demonstrations began on the train tracks that ran through Berkeley taking recruits to the Oakland Army Depot. In the fall of 1965 a teach-in was held on the Berkeley campus, with well known speakers such as Normal Mailer, Norman Thomas, Isaac Deutscher and Paul Goodman. The teach-in ended with people pouring off-campus and onto Telegraph Avenue for a planned march to the army base in Oakland, the demonstrators filling the avenue from curb to curb and still pouring off campus when the front of the march reached Ashby Avenue a mile away.

Meanwhile, with all of the publicity that Berkeley was receiving across the nation, it and San Francisco were becoming a Mecca for restless youths. Some of them had long hair and were called hippies. Some of them believed in sharing. Young people crowded together in apartments, living off the nation's affluence, with food that was discarded by supermarkets because it was not fresh. And some of the new arrivals were receiving checks from parents. Timothy Leary, a psychologist expelled from the faculty at Harvard University, was advocating that young people "tune in, turn on and drop out." People were beginning to try marijuana, speed, and the substance that Leary championed: LSD.

What had been a community of students and intellectuals became more of a place of strangers, with some young people walking down Telegraph Avenue - the main street just off campus - looking for peace and serenity and some others looking for action of some sort. Before 1966, around campus parties sometimes spilled out into front yards and one could step inside and be welcomed, nibble cheese, drink wine and dance. That had changed. Parties were now behind closed doors and consisted of smoking marijuana and staring into space.

To Berkeley had come people who were opposed to all authority, a few of them perhaps philosophical anarchists, the others just intuitively anarchistic - kids who had probably had problems with their parents. They were Berkeley's equivalent to the anarchists that plagued the Russian Revolution.  They were eager to chant "pigs" to the police. And during demonstrations against the war, these anarchist-types were happy to smash windows, amid pleas from other marchers not to do so. During a demonstration on campus one of their acts of revolution was to raid a Coca-Cola delivery truck while the driver looked on, despairing and feeling helpless. An off-campus activist set fire to the Berkeley campus' Wheeler Auditorium, angering faculty and students. Another off-campus activist invaded the Airforce recruitment office in downtown Berkeley and shot and killed a African-American Airforce recruiter.

In Berkeley, the crime rate was rising - from 5,037 major offenses in 1963 to 12,252 in 1968. In San Francisco, the group into sharing called the Diggers, were being harassed by thrill-seekers and tourists, and they decided it was time to get out of town. They paraded with a casket symbolizing the death of their movement, and then they headed north into Mendocino Country, where not long before a young man with long hair who drifted into a bar might be beaten up.

Ronald Reagan Runs for Governor

Ronald Reagan had made an impressive appearance as a speaker and supporter of Barry Goldwater in Goldwater's bid for the presidency in 1964. Immediately after Goldwater lost the election a committee of Republicans formed to support Reagan for the next round of presidential elections. Reagan and his wife Nancy were not interested in that or in appeals to run for governor of California. They relished their comfort. But he agreed to speak across the state to help California's Republican Party.

In various communities, grass roots Republicans urged him to run in the 1966 gubernatorial election. He writes in his autobiography of the opinions he heard:

People were tired of wasteful government programs and welfare chiselers; and they were angry about the constant spiral of taxes and government regulations, arrogant bureaucrats, and public officials who thought all of mankind's problems could be solved by throwing the taxpayers' dollars at them. [note]

Ronald Reagan, an American Life, p. 147.

Reagan decided to run, telling his wife Nancy that he did not think they could "run away from it." And he won the Republic primary, against the former mayor of San Francisco, Warren Christopher. Then it was Reagan against Governor "Pat" Brown, the man who had won against Richard Nixon's run for governor in 1962.

Reagan appeared before groups and took a lot of questions, knowing that his responses would appear less scripted than a speech. Contributing to his election were those who were disturbed as Reagan was by what was happening on the Berkeley campus. In his autobiography Reagan describes California's public universities - in the plural - as "going up in smoke" with students "literally setting fire to them." [note]

Living in Berkeley at the time, and working on campus, I was close to the events in Berkeley, and to me Reagan's view appears inaccurate. Many of the students were radical and against the war but they saw no point in destroying campus property. It was not a student who set fire to Wheeler Auditorium. Reagan failed to differentiate between campus radicals and the off-campus anarchist types who joined in demonstrations and protests and did meaningless acts such as breaking glass with stones, setting bonfires and chanting "pigs."

Reagan was a supporter of United States military intervention in Vietnam, believing it was against Communist expansion. He was opposed to all forms of lawlessness. He was watching the crime rate rise during the rise of the counter-culture, which included a new respect among people for "ripping off the establishment." He was opposed to those he called hoodlums, lazy professors and vacillating university administrators. Specifically, he was upset with Clark Kerr for having compromised with the Free Speech Movement. During the campaign he spoke of his respect for U.C. Berkeley as a great institution but that he was "sick" at what had happened there, that he was sick of the "sit-ins, the teach-ins and the walkouts." He said that as governor he would organize a "throw out" and that Clark Kerr would head the list.

Reagan ran as a non-politician while claiming that he would become a special kind of politician: a "citizen" politician. He labeled his opponent, Governor Pat Brown, as a professional politician - while Pat Brown, as honorable a citizen as anyone, believed that taking politics out of government was like taking flour out of bread.

Brown had been popular, and he appeared to be a happy man, without any of the pomposities in manner or speech that one often sees in politicians. At first he thought Reagan would be easy to defeat. Reagan had no experience in running any kind of government - city or state. But soon Brown was running scared, as Reagan was painting his administration as soft on student riots and soft on lawlessness in general. Brown was actually a tough law and order man. But Reagan made himself look tougher than Brown, while Brown was supporting Fair Employment, Fair Housing, Equal Opportunity and Social Justice. Some taxpayers were also unhappy with the amount of money that state government was spending on support for the poor, and Reagan won their votes by criticizing state spending.

Reagan complains in his autobiography that Brown "stuck to his one-note campaign of attacks on me as 'that Hollywood actor in makeup.'" He writes that he was not wearing makeup and had not for years and that he took joy in appearing on "Meet the Press" and finding Brown and the reporters in make up.

Suggesting during the campaign the he was a racist Reagan found insulting. Reagan had always wanted equality for blacks. He told an audience in 1965 that he supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and that it should be enforced "at the point of a bayonet if necessary."

Reagan won the election and stepped into the Governor's office in early 1967. Radicals were ready to begin demonizing him, although it was public opinion that had elected him on which they should have focused their concern.

Soon, while governor, all of the disturbances that Reagan had complained of during the campaign became more pronounced. 1967 was a year of more rioting by blacks in urban centers. In California it was the year of the anti-draft riot in downtown Oakland and the spread of upheaval from Berkeley to other college campuses. Governor Reagan could no longer blame the disturbances on California's Democrats, and he removed responsibility for the disturbances from the governor's office and focused blame elsewhere.

First Years of the Black Panther Party

Some young blacks in California were saying that "whitey's" promises were no good and that Martin Luther King's praying and marching would "not get it." Some described Stokely Carmichael and another SNCC activist, H. Rap Brown, as creating something new and better than King's movement. Some described the Watts rioting as the greatest uprising in modern times, and young men who had taken part in the rising were looked upon as heroic fighters for freedom. Many young blacks were listening more to those who were hostile toward King's movement. Among them was a young black attending Junior College in Oakland California - Huey P. Newton. Newton said that King's movement was too slow and too tame. Like other young people, Newton had been impressed by Malcolm X, and like other young people he did not want to wait ten or twenty years for the world to get better; he wanted a better world immediately. To a fellow student, Bobby Seale, he said it was a waste for people to be contributing money to King's movement. He said that there were already enough laws on the books to benefit blacks, that the problem was laws already on the books were not being enforced. Responding to what he saw as the inadequacy of King's movement and the inadequacy of other groups in the Oakland area devoted to African-American interests, in 1966 Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded a new organization: the Black Panther Political Party.

The Black Panther Party platform called for freedom, which it described as the power of the black community to determine its own destiny; full employment for black people; either a guaranteed income or confiscation of the means of production; an end of capitalist robbery of the black community; decent housing; education that exposes the true nature of "decadent American society;" exemption from military service for all black men; an immediate end to police brutality and murder; the release of all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails; blacks to be tried by black juries; and a plebiscite among blacks, supervised by the United Nations, to determine the will of black people as to "national destiny."

Newton was searching for ideas and had been attending book discussion groups. He was reading the writings of people who were popular on the Left: the Algerian Franz Fannon, Che Guevara and Mao Zedong. Newton had begun to favor socialism, and he viewed the struggle for freedom as a class struggle rather than a struggle between the races - which set him apart from the black nationalists around him with whom he frequently argued. In his book Revolutionary Suicide, published in 1973, Newton would quote not only Mao but two nineteenth century thinkers that Marx detested: the French socialist Pierre Proudhon, who wrote that property is theft, and Bakunin, who wrote that "the brigand... is the true and only revolutionary." Newton also quoted Frederick Douglas and Paul Robeson, and he quoted Melvin Van Peebles as having stated that black was "fast, classy... and ass-kicking."

Newton was well-mannered. He was the seventh child born into a caring family that had moved from Louisiana when Huey was three.  His father had been a Baptist Minister, and in Oakland he remained active in Church affairs. Huey (named after Huey Long) remained close to his parents, describing his father as proud, strong and protective, and describing his mother as loving and joyful. His father believed very much in work, but his parents had never been able to lift themselves from what Newton saw as poverty. They had given him an upbringing that included learning the piano, and his parents expected their children would be professionals - maybe doctors, lawyers, builders or airplane pilots.

But Huey had performed poorly in high school. While remaining close to his parents he rebelled against the world outside his home. He was breaking into homes in the affluent, Berkeley hills neighborhoods, believing that he was outsmarting the affluent. He had a friendly disposition, but, according to Bobby Seale, although he was only 5'10" and less than 160 pounds, he had made a reputation for himself as someone to respect.  He was quick with his fists if challenged by the bad manners of others.

Newton had feelings of camaraderie with blacks less intellectual than he. Newton had been ridiculed by movement blacks while trying to learn, and he vowed to treat "the brothers" entering the Panthers not with ridicule when they displayed ignorance but with patience and encouragement.

Political Action - Carrying Guns and Monitoring the Police

Newton saw the police not as protectors of the community but as the military arm of the oppressors. Newton and his Panthers began driving behind the police, to keep a community watch on them. On these patrols the Panthers carried guns with them that were legally displayed, and they wore black berets and black leather jackets. Whenever they saw the police questioning "a sister or a brother," the Panthers would get out of their cars, with guns in hand, and observe from a distance that could not be deemed as interference. Policemen were under a lot of stress, and some of them let their emotions run. In response to taunts from a policemen, Newton might accuse the officer of being a migrant from the South and a "cracker." A more common epithet that the Panthers and others were using to describe policemen was "pig," while some officers had been sponsoring the slogan that "pigs are beautiful."

In late October, 1967, Huey Newton started the evening celebrating the end of his parole. He borrowed a girlfriend's Volkswagen, visited his favorite bar and was happy to be with friends. Around four in the morning he and a friend, Gene McKinney, went for food, and while looking for a parking place they were pulled over by a policemen, John Frey, who had a reputation in black neighborhoods for his toughness. Frey waited in his car for a minute and then approached Newton. Frey put his head to the window, six inches from Newton's face and, according to Newton, said "Well, well, well, the great Huey P. Newton." Another patrolman drove up, and the two patrolmen hassled Newton concerning his identity and who owned the car. Frey asked Newton to get out of the car. Newton asked if he was being put under arrest. Frey told him no. Frey put Newton against the car and patted him down. Newton had his small law notebook in his hand. After the search, Frey told Newton he wanted to talk to him, and he pulled and pushed Newton back toward his police car and beyond to the second police car. Gene McKinney, was out of the car and being looked after by the second policeman. Frey brought Newton to an abrupt halt. Newton opened his law book and told Frey that he had no reasonable cause to arrest him. Frey, according to Newton, called him a nigger, told him to shove his law book and then struck Newton with his fist. Newton writes in his book Revolutionary Suicide that he stumbled back a few feet and went down on one knee, still holding his law book. He writes that he saw Frey draw his revolver, and that Frey fired as he, Newton, was rising, that the bullet hit him in his stomach, which, he said, seemed to explode. Then, according to Newton, "the world went hazy" and he heard a rapid volley of shots.

Attacking Newton was Frey's last pleasure. He died at the scene of his confrontation with Newton. Exactly how he died is unclear. Soon after, Newton was on a gurney at Kaiser Hospital. The police burst in and handcuffed Newton to the gurney, stretching his stomach and causing him more pain. According to Newton they cursed him for having killed a fellow officer. They threatened his life, one officer pointing a shotgun at him and telling Newton that it might go off accidentally. And according to Newton, they spat on him and he spat back.

The Oakland District Attorney's Office was eager to convict Newton and believed there were grounds for a grand jury inquiry. The grand jury estimated that seven shots had been fired, one hitting Frey in the thigh, another hitting him in the back, three bullets having struck the second officer at the scene and one other bullet lodging in the door of the Volkswagen. The only weapon found at the scene belonged to the second patrolman. The charges against Newton were first-degree murder and kidnapping. Newton had been driven from the scene of the killing by another black man, and Newton was accused of having kidnapped him. Newton was tried before a judge alleged to be sympathetic toward the prosecution. But he had a skilled attorney: Charles Gerry.

Free Huey became a rallying cry across the nation. The popularity of the Black Panthers skyrocketed, and small organizations calling themselves Panthers arose in various cities, aligning themselves with and subordinating themselves to the Black Panther Party in Oakland. Eventually Newton would be convicted of voluntary manslaughter. Feeling cheated, soon after the verdict a couple of police officers in Oakland shot up the Panther headquarters from their police cars. Neighbors called police headquarters, and the two officers were apprehended.

Newton was sent to a new prison, the penal colony at Vacaville in California. Then his conviction was overturned because the judge had failed to instruct the jury on their choice between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. And, in August 1970, Newton was released on $50,000 bail.

End of the Sixties

Into the 1960s a common view on the Left was that the United States was evil - inherently imperialist and racist and could be righted only by social revolution. Some prominent intellectuals who had been on the Left, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz and some others from poor immigrant families and who respected the United States for its institutions and for the opportunities that it had provided them, disliked this view and deserted the Left.

One believer in revolution from the 1960s was Jerry Rubin, a former graduate student in sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He had been a rank-and-file activist during Free Speech Movement. Then he took the lead on campus in organizing against the war in Vietnam. Rubin had visited Cuba and had been impressed. Castro, he believed, was creating a new kind of socialist revolution.

In 1966, Rubin's organization, the Vietnam Day Committee, split into groups that differed as to what should be done in opposing the war, some supporting electoral politics, some rejecting it. Rubin became manager of Robert Scheer's primary race as a Democrat running for Congress. After that failed, Rubin ran for Mayor of Berkeley as an independent, and he received 20 percent of the vote. Then he enhanced his celebrity status by changing his appearance. He had learned that antics and sensationalism attracted television cameras. He was letting his hair and beard grow. Rubin believed that a new kind of revolution was taking place in the United States, a revolution rising from young people who were a part of the America's new counter-culture. He was enthusiastic about young people turning against the values of their parents. He believed that the smoking of marijuana was turning youth against the war and that it would make men in uniform unwilling to fight. The government helped make Rubin a celebrity by calling him before the House Committee Armed Services Committee. And along with Paul Krassner and Abbie Hoffman he formed a group called "Yippies." He helped organize the October 1967 march against the Pentagon, which broke through police lines and stormed the Pentagon.

With other leading names, Rubin laid plans for a great demonstration at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. At the opening of the convention, Rubin and his fellow Yippies appeared in Chicago with a pig that they said they were running for president. In the wake of the Chicago police riot that followed, Rubin became a celebrity again, at the trial of the "Chicago Seven" (originally eight), charged with conspiracy, inciting to riot and more.

Woodstock and Altamont - the Happenings

The following year, an event of great notice took place on farmland near Bethel, New York. It came to be known as Woodstock, a great "be-in" and rock concert. Woodstock was the result of efforts by wealthy young men who bribed local officials and were looking for profit. At first, popular singers and rock-musicians were uninterested in their concert, but, when the entrepreneurs offered them twice as much money as they usually received for a gig, their interest increased - except for Bob Dylan, who remained uninterested.

The other big name performers were able to draw enough people to make the rock concert the biggest in history. And to some, big was beautiful. It was, someone said, "one hell of a party." It was big enough that it would be mythologized into a wondrous and glorious event of the 1960s.

The concert lasted three days and nights and was a nightmare in organization. People had come from afar, and there was little to eat. Rain turned the field into mud. Drinks were being laced with drugs. Feet were being cut by broken glass and aluminum from pop-top cans. When the sun did shine, people spaced out on drugs staring dumbly at it, adding to the 5,162 medical cases that were treated by volunteers at emergency medical tents, cases that included eight miscarriages. There was also petty thievery - a bicycle or two and Paul Krassner's white leather jacket to name a few. But there was only minor violence, in what was billed as a peace gathering. There were only two deaths, and some boys and girls enjoyed wading naked in a nearby pond.

Concert-goers had torn down the fence and attended the festival free, and the buyers of tickets provided the entrepreneurs with less money than they had expected. For them the event was disappointing and uneconomic - a loss of 2.4 million dollars.

The Yippies, Paul Krassner and Abbie Hoffman, had been at Woodstock, and the Yippies threatened to disrupt the event if donations were not made toward worthy causes. They had been bought-off, and they went away from Woodstock as hopeful as ever, looking forward to more gatherings and keeping the momentum of cultural revolution going.

The next sensational concert was by the Rolling Stones at Altamont Raceway fifty miles east of San Francisco. There, drugs were seen as producing something other than the new ideal of peace and love. The eyes of many concert-goers were reported to be a dull and vacant glaze. The Hell's Angels motorcycle club was put in charge of keeping order, and the concert became violent and ugly. The hope inspired by Woodstock popped like a bubble.

The Manson Murders

These were times when a few opportunistic young men who were using marijuana and perhaps other drugs were setting themselves up as wise leaders of little groups that included young women in search of meaning and companionship. It was a time too of the murders of Sharon Tate and her companions at her home in Beverly Hills and the murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. The instigator of the murders was an ex-con, mystic-guru commune leader, frustrated songwriter, guitarist, and fan of the Beatles, Charles Manson. Manson's pot-smoking had not made him the practitioner of love that he pretended to be. It was a popular myth that marijuana expanded consciousness, and Manson had at least pretended wisdom. He either believed or merely told his followers that he believed in an Armageddon in which black people would rise up against whites. The rising he called Helter Skelter, taken from a title of a Beatles song. Manson claimed that the Armageddon would destroy the blacks and that Manson and his group would survive and the world would be theirs. At least one of Manson's female followers was soon to claim that she believed Manson to be Jesus Christ.

Like other predictions of Armageddon, time passed without the expected event. With blacks having failed to rise, Manson believed that he had to have some white folks murdered to stimulate similar acts by blacks. Thus motivated, Manson sent his followers out to murder. They killed the LaBianca couple in their home and placed Rosemary LaBianca's wallet, with credit cards, in gas station restroom in a black neighborhood in hope that a black would find it, start using the credit cards, be blamed for the murders and stimulate the black community to rise up in their defense. The next killing, of Sharon Tate and her companions was at a secluded home in the hills where Manson had once gone in search of selling his songs. The killings were mostly multiple stabbings, done by a woman follower, with a couple of males and other women followers in attendance - all under the influence of drugs. Rosemary LaBianca had been stabbed forty-one times. And they left the crime scene with messages such as Pig, Death to Pigs and Helter Skelter, misspelled as Healther Skelter, written in the victim's blood.

The Weathermen

1969 was also the year that the biggest political organization among students, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), divided and fell apart. One of the factions that emerged from the breakup was called the Weathermen - a title taken from one of Bob Dylan's songs. The Weathermen laid plans to return to Chicago, the site of the previous year's Democratic Party convention. They were going back to Chicago for what they called "days of rage" - to seek revenge, to inspire revolution and for the expressed purpose of releasing prisoners, "to liberate the city" and to strike violently at various points in the city - assaults which they called "wargasms."

The Weathermen (and women) predicted thousands would join them. In attempting to recruit soldiers for the Days of Rage, a Weatherman leader, Mark Rudd, spoke to Leftists at Indiana University, and his audience applauded thunderously to the announcement by one Leftist activist in the audience who told Rudd he "was out of his mind."

The "angry masses" that the Weathermen had expected failed to show. Armed with crash helmets and clubs the Weatherpeople destroyed some property and assaulted some police officers. They received more injuries than they inflicted. Two hundred of them were arrested. They had dedicated their assault to the Black Panthers, but the Panthers joined others in denouncing the action - the Panthers calling their rising "Custerism." But Jerry Rubin said he could not fault the Weathermen, and the leader of the saner faction of the SDS, Tom Hayden, had some kind words for his former colleagues.

Governor Reagan Responds to a Campus Disturbance

1969 was a year of violence also in Berkeley. Early in the year, black students on the Berkeley campus formed with Asian and Latino students what they called the people who identified themselves as belonging to the "Third World Liberation Front." Students belonging to the campus African American Student Union were calling for the immediate establishment of a Black Studies Department. Outsiders came onto campus to help extend the strike that had taken place at San Francisco State college to Berkeley. The outsiders made speeches denouncing the university, remarking about how white the student body was and declaring that the university should be open to anyone who wished to wander onto campus. The strikers attempted to cajole people into joining the strike. This did not work, and the strikers became desperate and more offensive. They marched through campus and threatened to tear up the main library. But as days passed the size of their picket line dwindled.

The campus police were staying on the sidelines. The tactics of the campus chancellor, Roger Heyns, was to let the strike die a natural death, and his tactics were working. The university asked people to walk around the shrinking picket line at the entrance to the campus, and there was plenty of room on both sides of the line, which was a double row of about fifty-feet long. But a few conservatively-dressed men, perhaps politically on the right,  walked directly through the picket line, and as a result scuffles occurred.

Governor Reagan was opposed to Heyn's tactics. He arranged for the Alameda Country Sheriff's Department, under Frank Madigan, to invade the campus and provide a safe passage for students going to and from campus. Deputy sheriffs lined up in riot gear across Sproul Plaza, standing their ground on both sides of the plaza. A few persons, perhaps provocateurs, attacked the police. The police defended themselves, and soon the police could not tell the difference between offenders and those who were merely watching or on their way home. Hostile to the police, some students joined in the attack, the San Francisco Chronicle having on its front page a photo of an angry coed hitting a helmeted deputy on the head with her umbrella.

An editorial in the campus newspaper descibed Ronald Reagan as "our stupid governor." Governor Reagan's crackdown and some punishments brought an end to the "Third World Strike" on the Berkeley campus, 99 students having been arrested and disciplined, and 52 persons from off-campus having been arrested. Those advocating the strike had been saved from what would have been their greatest humiliation: their strike ending in indifference or rejection by their contemporaries.

On March 4 the university's Academic Senate voted 550 to 4 in support of an interim Department of Ethnic Studies. On March 7 the university president, Charles Hitch, approved the Department of Ethnic Studies, which began in the Fall Quarter of that year.

Riots and Radicalization of the City of Berkeley

Then in May came a greater disturbance: the battle over a plot of university property just off Telegraph Avenue. Houses on university property, in which a lot of "street people" had been living, had been torn down, and the property was now a vacant lot with a few trees. Some activists decided to turn it into a "people's park," and the student body voted in favor it, 12,719 to 2,175. The Regents of California's numerous university campuses did not approve, and a chain-link fence was erected around the property. In defiance of the Regents, people left a rally on campus and headed to "the park" to tear down the fence. A violent confrontation with the police followed, and days of disturbances.

The California Highway Patrol was called in. So too were the Alameda County Sheriffs, and then the National Guard. Birdshot was used against the demonstrators, and then buckshot. The police were unable to discriminate between people standing on roofs watching and those on roofs throwing stones down on them. They shot and killed one person on a rooftop, James Rector, and they blinded another. Hundreds were rounded up and taken to a nearby prison at Santa Rita.

A National Guard helicopter flew over the campus spraying the strongest kind of tear gas. Students did not know which way to run. The gas penetrated Cowell Hospital on the north of the campus and tortured people in iron lungs. The tear gas (actually a powder) burned the skin of students at the swimming pool in the canyon just north of the campus.

The city was sealed off by troops, and inconvenienced city residents resented the forces of occupation. Berkeley's city council voted eight to one to ask Governor Reagan to remove the guardsmen. Downtown Berkeley was lined with rolls of barbed wire. Women put flowers into the barrels of the rifles held by lines of national guardsmen. It was a hot day, and some women stripped to their waists, in part perhaps to tease the guardsmen. A march snaked through Berkeley and was cheered by residents, who sprayed the marchers to cool them, amid cheers. The March ended at a dirt field about one mile from campus. There people danced to a hypnotic thumping of drums and whatever else was available to add to the beat. A young man was beating a rock against the steel grating over a stormdrain. Residents emerged from their homes and joined the celebration, one of them a middle-aged woman with a trumpet that she tooted in time with the beat.

The police crackdown and use of shotguns had added support to the Left in Berkeley, while support for local conservative politicians declined. In 1964 Berkeley's city council had consisted of four conservatives and five liberals. In 1965 it was three conservatives and six liberals; in 1966, two conservatives, six liberals and Ron Dellums, who was labeled by some as a radical. Dellums was a black ex-Marine who described the war in Vietnam, and much else that he disliked, as "insane." The year after the People's Park rioting, Dellums was elected to Congress. In 1971, along with two liberals and two conservatives, four other "radicals" would be elected to the city council.

Carmichael and the Panthers

The revolution by blacks that Stokely Carmichael wanted remained on hold. In 1966 Carmichael had announced in Mississippi that the civil rights movement had produced "nothing." "What we gonna start saying now, he announced, "is Black Power!" Carmichael attracted attention across the nation with his calls for black Power. He was elected Chairman of SNCC in 1966 by like-minded members of that organization. He had become a believer in Marxism and revolution. He was expelled from SNCC, and, while Huey Newton was in jail, Carmichael became "Prime Minister" of the Black Panthers, the Panthers happy to have a man as well known as Carmichael as one of their leaders.

Like the Bolshevik's politburo just after the Russian Revolution, Panther leadership started to annoy one another. Carmichael was upset because he wanted classes for educating fellow Panthers - classes on Marxism-Leninism and scientific socialism. "We cannot be running just on instinct" he said. We must "have reasoning." And Carmichael was upset over the Panthers having joined forces with the Peace and Freedom Party - a political party with about 2,000 registered voters in Berkeley and consisting largely of whites. Carmichael was opposed to working with whites. The Panther slogan remained white inclusive, "all power to the people," rather than Carmichael's slogan, "Black Power." Bobby Seale and another Panther leader, Eldridge Cleaver, described Carmichael as "bourgeois." Carmichael was to describe Cleaver and Seale as stupid [note] and he was to describe himself as less than thrilled by the Panther breakfast program for children. He accused the Panthers of acting more like a "Salvation Army" than revolutionaries.

Carmichael quit the Panthers and went to Africa where he changed his name to Kwame Ture. He befriended the exiled former head-of-state of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah (who accused Carmichael of being too talkative), and Carmichael devoted himself to a new cause: the unification of Africa.

Ruin for the Black Panthers

While Huey Newton was in jail, the Black Panther Party had been growing, and it had become the target of hostility by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other law enforcement agencies. The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, had thought Martin Luther King Jr. a menace. In May 1968 King was murdered. And late that year, Hoover proclaimed that the Black Panthers were the "single greatest threat to the internal security of the United States."

Hoover's FBI had a "counter-intelligence" program (COINTELPRO) which combated whatever group Hoover declared as dangerous. The aim of the program, in Hoover's words, was "to neutralize their leaders, their spokesmen, membership and supporters." The program included infiltrating the organization, and stirring up differences within the Panther Party, in part by sending bogus mail. Treating the Panthers as U.S. citizens with rights, arresting them if they broke the law but otherwise allowing them to assemble, to disseminate their opinions and to organize people politically was not good enough for Hoover and some others in law enforcement.

The harassment of the Panthers reached was at a peak in 1968 and 1969. Local police watched the Panthers closely and made numerous arrests on whatever charges they imagined might be plausible - harassment arrests that could not be sustained by the courts. Panthers were harassed with high bail and with heavy fees in retrieving their cars from police impoundment.

There were shootouts between the police and the Panthers. The police killed twenty Panthers, including a Chicago Panther that law enforcement saw as especially dangerous: Fred Hampton. Hampton was a good orator and a capable organizer - smart enough to see that the Weatherman tactics of 1969 in Chicago were suicidal, and decisive enough to throw the Weathermen out of his office. He was having success in Chicago drawing people to the Panthers. Then the police raided his headquarters at around four in the morning, entering the building in a blaze of gunfire, killing the guard who was asleep with his shotgun just behind the front door, and firing a volley of rounds into the bedroom where Hampton was known to be. Hampton was severely wounded but still alive. He died when a couple of more rounds were fired into his head.

Like the violence against the civil rights movement, the violence against the Panthers was ineffective. No organization devoted to political and social change had much of a chance in the world if it could not withstand police harassment. And, despite the police harassment, the Panthers continued to grow. By 1972, Panther membership had expanded across the nation to 5,000. Joining the Panthers were also whites and Latinos. According to Erika Huggins, the Panther newspaper in Chicago had a circulation of 30,000, and in New York the Panther paper had a circulation of 35,000.

The Panther Party was receiving large donations of money, much of it from people in the entertainment industry. Some saw these donors as supporting the Panthers because it was fashionable, as in the phrase radical chic. Others saw the donors as indignant and as believing that the Panthers were a force for progress.

Eldridge Cleaver Calls for Revolution

Panthers saw themselves as both revolutionaries and as agents of immediate help on specific issues. In Oakland they had a food giveaway program and free breakfasts for children. They helped found a free medical clinic, a legal aid program, school and education programs and a service program for prisoners and for seniors. And they started an effort to help teens, abused children, battered women and homeless people.

Eldridge Cleaver, meanwhile, was in Algeria, where he had fled after a shootout with the Oakland police in 1968. In Algiers, Cleaver was visited by various people, including Timothy Leary who had escaped from a low security prison in California, and Abbie Hoffman's wife, Anita. Anita Hoffman found Cleaver to be "on a power trip." She disliked Cleaver's treatment of his wife, Kathleen. And she disliked the timidity of white radicals in the face of what she saw as Cleaver's strong-arm tactics. She spoke her mind, which resulted in some people on the Left ostracizing her and Abbie. The "New Left" appeared to be as inclined to squabbling as had been the old Left of Europe.

Cleaver went to Moscow, and there he met with a delegation of Leftists from the U.S. - a delegation organized by a former colleague of his at Ramparts magazine, Robert Scheer. Cleaver was uncomfortable with exile. And he was angry and impatient. According to Elaine Brown, a Black Panther who was with Scheer's group, Cleaver told the group that "Babylon" had to be burned.[note] But the Panthers, he complained, were abandoning their duty "to take Babylon down." He called for the bombing of "pig strongholds," the kidnapping of children of the rich, and burning the bastions of Wall Street to the ground. He denounced the Oakland Panther David Hilliard, what he called the "Hilliard dynasty," for having opposed the Weathermen action in Chicago and for convincing people to put down their guns. He said that he wanted whites like the Weathermen to take the first heat of the revolution, and he wanted the Panthers to get rid of the "weak-assed Hilliards." Cleaver wanted the group to go back to the United States and to rally the Left and the Panther Party for revolution.

Elaine Brown argued with Cleaver. She returned to the United States, reported to Huey Newton, and Huey Newton expelled Cleaver from the Panther Party. Cleaver was now without a political base, and he lost heart for revolution.  He went to France and tried to start a business designing clothes. This did not work out, and he wished to return to the United States.

Newton Dismisses Seale

When Newton was released from prison in 1970, he found the Party in shambles, and in his book Revolutionary Suicide, published in 1973, he blamed this on Cleaver. After booting Cleaver out of the Panther Party, Newton turned Cleaver's former position as Minister of Information over to Elaine Brown, with whom he had been having a romantic relationship. Brown had learned of Newton's temper, as when she was struck in the face by him for saying "thank you." Don't ever say thank you to me, he told her, pulling her to his face. When you thank me, he said, it means you are "not with me."

Elaine Brown was in effect the Party's second in command. Bobby Seale remained as the Party's co-founder and Party chairman.  Then one evening, at a small dinner party at Newton's place, Newton was angered over Seale having failed to discipline someone. Newton called Seale a punk. Seale tried to fend off the attack by telling Newton that he loved him. Newton ranted on about how it was he, Newton, who had founded the Party and had taken Seale along for the ride. He had his guards beat Seale. He told Seale that he was kicked out of the Party and told Seale to get out. And, without the shoes that he had taken off for comfort, Seale escaped down the hall to the elevator. Bobby Seale then left Oakland, moving to Philadelphia and the home of his wife's family. And in place of Seale as Party chairman, Seale elevated Elaine Brown to that position.

The Black Panther Party Falls Apart

Newton did not like public speaking. He thought of himself not as an orator but as an abstract thinker - abstractions not going over well in a speech. And Newton was not much interested in the details of Party organization or Party membership. He was close to his body guard and a few others around him, but he did not keep in close contact with people who were doing a lot of the grassroots Party work, and even in Oakland he often did not know who they were. Officially Newton was a member of the Party's Central Committee, as was Elaine Brown, but Newton did not function with others as an equal within a group. Huey was the Party founder and leader. Rather than working with people, building unity and consensus, Newton focused on obedience to him. After having dismissed Seale from the Party he booted out numerous others who had worked daily for the party, among them David Hilliard and his brother, June Hilliard. And he emerged from all this trusting few people within the Party and feeling closest to Elaine Brown and his bodyguard.

In 1974 Newton was charged with pistol whipping a tailor and shooting a seventeen year-old prostitute, Kathleen Smith. Elaine Brown used Panther funds to bail him out of jail. Newton jumped bail, went to China, where he was impressed with what he saw, and then he went to Cuba. There he lived with his wife and her two children. Elaine Brown visited him and heard his complaints about Castro not seeing him, about being unable to obtain cocaine and about the island not having "jack sh..t." Like Cleaver he wanted to return to the United States.  He spoke to Brown about the Panther Party having to disband one day, to be replaced by an organization that embraces a wide spectrum of people.

The case against Newton for the murder of Kathleen Smith was weak, and Newton returned to the United States in July 1977, to face the murder charges while he remained free on bail. Newton returned irritated and distrustful. He argued with Brown about maintaining the Panthers.

Elaine Brown had engaged the Party in electoral politics. She had run twice for a seat on the city council, winning 44 percent of the vote in the primary in 1975, with backing from the local democratic machine, headed by Ron Dellums, a local labor union, the Cesar Chavez' Farm Workers and others. She saw the benefit of coalition politics - indeed that coalitions was what politics was all about - and under her guidance, in 1977, the Panthers were supporting a respected local judge, Lionel Wilson for mayor. Elaine Brown was optimistic about the possibilities of growth for the Party, as she was to describe in her book, A Taste of Power. She told Newton that Party accounts were full. And she tried to encourage Newton to keep the Party going. Apparently Brown believed that the Party needed Newton to keep it together. She told him: "You are the party. You started it." Instead of saying that the Party should be able to get along without him, or that he would help in that direction, he said, "And I'll finish it." He said that he wanted "all the bullsh..t" stopped. Newton said that he wanted to be free of the Party.

Later, Newton called Brown, saying that he wanted to see her again. But Brown was disappointed with Newton. She did not want to be bothered by him. She lied to him about an appointment, gathered up her things, and her daughter, and fled town, leaving the Party to disintegrate.

Newton was working on a degree at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and he received a Doctorate of Philosophy in the History of Consciousness, his dissertation entitled War against the Panthers - a Study of Repression in America. From the 1970s, in addition to recreational use of cocaine, Newton had been drinking cognac. Newton was to die on August 22, 1989 at the age of 47, in a pool of blood on a sidewalk in West Oakland, shot three times in the head in the early morning hours, by a drug dealer - someone who had benefited from the Panther breakfast program for kids, who said that Newton had been quarreling with him, a drug dealer who believed that shooting Newton would give him a bigger name among the people he was running with.

Eldridge Cleaver, meanwhile, had, in the mid-seventies, landed back in the U.S.  He had been jailed briefly and released. He declared himself a Republican. And for the alleged crimes he had committed in 1968 he was, in 1979, sentenced to probation and work in community service.

The Seventies, New Activism and Old Problems

In 1970, President Nixon sent troops into Cambodia. Students protested. The National Guard killed four students at Kent State university in Ohio, and numerous universities shut down in protest. Jerry Rubin returned to the Berkeley campus to rally those opposed to the war. He was excited by the nationwide protest and he announced with enthusiasm that revolution was just around the corner.

Rubin in 1970 had his book, entitled Do It, published, and it was making money. It was not a book much like the works entitled What is to be Done by Lenin and his predecessor, Chernyshevsky. Rubin had not been detailed about what young people were to do other than rebel. In the book he mostly boasted about his own actions and antics. Rubin was still the revolutionary, claiming in the early seventies that the American economy was doomed to collapse, because, he said, capitalism had "no soul." Young people with soul, he believed, were going to overthrow capitalism by doing "their thing."

The counter-culture that Rubin had placed his hope in was changing, but not in the direction of social revolution. Dropping out was fading. The so-called hippies, moreover, were hardly revolutionaries. They had wanted to enjoy each other's company and experience the ecstasies of freedom, sex and what they saw as harmless drugs. Like the song about "girls," they just wanted to have fun. As they aged and the 1960s moved into the 1970s fewer among them were receiving checks from their mothers or fathers. They could not escape the forces of economics, any more than they could change the force of gravity, and some of them drifted into economically viable agricultural communes - a return to the world of work. Some others drifted into other forms of work - whatever they could find. Into the Seventies, the hope of paradise diminished. The Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco looked like a ghost town compared to what it had been in the mid-sixties. Many among the new crop of teenagers acquired a taste for the music of rebellion and new hairstyles. Pot smoking had increased in secondary schools, but fewer kids were leaving home.

The counterculture had lost more of its shine. In 1970, Janis Joplin died from an overdose of heroin - just four years after arriving at San Francisco. That year the famous black guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, also died. In 1971, Jim Morrison of the Doors died. By now the Beatles had broken up, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono were living in New York and hanging out occasionally with Jerry Rubin. Musicians were intentionally turning to sensationalism - not because they believed in it musically but because they wanted to attract attention and sell records. The leader in sensation and posturing was the group Kiss. Musicianship did not matter very much, and new opportunity was open for the so-called garage bands. And with this developed what was called punk rock. There was an urge by the new crop of young to identify with something different.

Punkers were no more inclined toward political organization than the so-called hippies, but one group that was into political action, and after something new, was the Zippies. They wanted to replace the Yippies, and in New York they "trashed" Jerry Rubin's car, as a stunt to advertise their new identity - which angered Rubin and gave him something to think about as he was engaged in one of his new interests: group massage gatherings.

The decline of the counter-culture that had been popular in the sixties was accompanied by a rise in interest in matters personal and spiritual. With the arrival of the seventies, majors in psychology increased, psychology, for example, becoming the most popular major at UCLA. At the University of Washington in Seattle, credit was given for the study of extra-sensory perception, hypnotism and yoga. The new decade was described as a new age of narcissism - in other words, immediate personal gratification. Enrollments in courses on traditional religions increased. The 1970s was the decade of Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, the Exorcist, the Omen, and the Bermuda Triangle. Religious cults were on the rise, including the Hare Krishna's, the Reverend Moon's Unification Church and Jim Jones' People's Temple. Rennie Davis, former SDS leader, became a follower of the fifteen year-old guru Maharaj Ji, who promised perfection on earth by 1976. Werner Erhard, an encyclopedia salesman, had started his Erhard Seminar Training (EST), and by 1977 he was earning six million dollars annually. And by the end of the decade, Jerry Rubin was working as a stockbroker.

One kind of entrepreneur that was declining was the independent seller of little plastic baggies with marijuana. The drug trade was being taken over by drug lords and organized crime. Needle parks were appearing. Addicts were replacing happy hippies.

Also having a hard time in the new decade was Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman had been both a clown and a serious activist, working with SCLC and SNCC until 1964, when SNCC had expelled whites from its organization. Like his fellow Yippie, Jerry Rubin, Hoffman had looked to the counterculture for change. Hoffman, who was bright and educated, had made short but entertaining speeches. He had written a book called Revolution for the Hell of It, and he had asked that people steal the book. He had said that wages were insultingly low for many and that stealing was a way of maintaining self-respect. He described property as excrement. Schools, he said, should be destroyed. He said that people should be able to do whatever they want. Hoffman was bound to be disappointed. In the seventies he was arrested for selling cocaine, and he went "underground" for eight years. The decline of "the movement" left Hoffman depressed. He was described as having been manic-depressive, and in 1989 he was found dead in a New Jersey motel, a suicide at the age of 52.

One last gasp at revolution took place in 1974. In Berkeley, off-campus revolutionaries had organized what they called the Symbionese Liberation Army, led by a young black man who called himself Cinque (pronounced sin-Q). The Symbionese Liberation Army assassinated the Superintendent of Schools in Oakland, California, Marcus Foster, because they did not like what they called his "fascist Board of Education" and his plan to create a "computer identification system." They kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst, who had been attending the university at Berkeley, and this became a media sensation. Patty Hearst became the revolutionary called Tania. The Symbionese Liberation Army ended in a blaze and smoke in Los Angeles, the police having tracked them to a home there, which was set afire by a hot tear gas canister. Tania and a comrade, Wendy Yoshimura, were elsewhere and remained in hiding, to be captured in San Francisco in 1975.

The hope for revolution died in the 1970s. The word "revolution" had been co-opted by corporations to describe their sugar-waters and other manufactured products. What remained were practical, everyday politics and the targeting of specific issues. In Berkeley, various neighborhood streets were blocked at one end to keep speeding traffic from passing through. The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley had inspired the liberalization of student organizing and use of tables across the nation. A carryover from sixties activism had appeared the form of Earthday, with 1.5 million people participating. In 1971 an organization called Friends of the Earth had been formed. The notion of protest had been enhanced, and homosexuals had begun organizing to defend their rights. In the early seventies women were organizing and lobbying on women's issues, Gloria Steinem, and Ms magazine making the scene beginning in 1972 - the year that Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment. American Indians were trying to address specific issues, and an Indian organization, AIM, was making news. In the early Seventies, Ralph Nader formed his citizens lobby group, called Nader's Raiders, aimed at protecting consumers. In the early Seventies another lobbying group, Common Cause, was formed. In the 1970s Caesar Chavez was still active with his farm labor union. And blacks were still working on specific issues, the Reverend Jesse Jackson among them having created an organization called PUSH.

A good number of blacks at universities put their revolutionist rhetoric and activism behind them and graduated into the workaday world. The power that blacks expressed was at the ballot box. Free to vote, African-American voters represented a portion of the population equal to their number, and a minority capable of swinging elections - as they had for Harry Truman in 1948. In 1967 Carl Stokes had been elected mayor of Cleveland Ohio and Gary Hatcher was elected mayor of Gary Indiana. In 1968 people in the Bedford-Stuyvesant district of New York had elected Shirley Chisholm to Congress - the first black woman member of that body. In 1972 one of Martin Luther King's closest aides, Andrew Young, was elected to Congress from the state of Georgia, as was Barbara Jordan, who had been a state legislator in Texas. In 1973 Maynard Jackson was elected mayor of Atlanta Georgia. In 1974 Marion Barry was elected mayor of Washington D.C. The State of Massachusetts elected a black Republican, Edward Burke, to the Senate. And in the House of Representatives, Ron Dellums, from Oakland-Berkeley, remained in office and became chairman of the Armed Services Committee. African Americans still had a lot to fight for, as did other people. But rather than agitation of the failed black revolutionaries, the tactics were as they had been with Martin Luther King Jr. - patience and appeals to hearts and minds.

Into the 1970s, schools in the South became more integrated than schools elsewhere in the United States. To desegregate these other schools the courts ordered busing across school-district lines. Many whites disliked the coercion, and in Detroit and Boston they rioted. Largely the busing laws were obeyed, but more whites began sending their kids to private schools. Here and there, blacks were moving into the middle of white neighborhoods, or to the edge of white neighborhoods, but even in the liberal San Francisco Bay area African-Americans remained in predominately African-American neighborhoods, where many preferred to live. And at schools, blacks preferred to associate mainly with blacks and whites with whites. But an improvement had come in race relations. The races were getting along better. Tensions had declined, and interracial socializing had increased slightly.

Aside from integration, a big issue for African-Americans was employment for those who had not acquired marketable skills, and this shifted attention to both education and to the attitude of adolescents. With the turmoil of the 1960s had come a disrespect for "the establishment" and "the system," denigrated by revolutionaries. Between 1965 and 1978 a decline in student achievement had developed. [note] Some community leaders recognized that if one were to have hope one had to have some respect for the system, that if one were to become a productive citizen one had to learn to respect others. Black leaders were disturbed in finding among some black students the attitude that black kids who were studying and getting good grades were doing so because they wanted to be white.

In the 1970s an improvement in education was attempted through the federal government's Head Start program. More minorities were attending formally all-white schools. And more minorities were attending universities. Educators recognized the need for addressing issues item by item: class size, the quality of teachers, teacher's pay, good nutrition for children. Educators realized that improvements in education would come as did improvements elsewhere, in increments and by addressing problems limited in scope. It was recognized that in homes where education is more respected, kids are more likely to develop into good students. Kids whose parents are readers of good books are more likely to do better in school. But some kids without such parents benefit from humanity's spontaneity. At any rate, educators at the end of the century recognized that improving education involved, among other things, changing attitudes.

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Copyright © 1998 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.

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