Late last night I was winding down about to go to bed when I got a call from a friend who was channel surfing and had run across the Tucson Festival of Books on CSPAN and discovered a panel of three people from the 1960s era talking about their experiences.
The man on the panel was Mark Rudd, there to talk about My Life with SDS and the Weathermen. SDS stands for Students for a Democratic Society and Mark was famous for having led the sit-ins at Columbia University in 1968, fanning the fire of the growing student movement (which we all called The Movement).
It is so interesting to see someone you haven’t see in 40 years and both recognize him and remember so much about him. I was a member of SDS back in the late 60s. For those of us who were against the war in Viet Nam, wanted to open admissions up and break the power of racism on our college campuses, it was really the only place to be!
We were bright, we were energetic, and we were influential in society. There was an upheaval of protest that swept our country. Yes, especially in the southern part of the US, in states like Texas, there weren’t that many of us, but we fed on the actions of those in the north–we watched with envy the sit-ins and the demonstrations where there were actually enough people to look like a crowd.
In my little part of the world, we were controversial to say the least. During the summer of 1968 a group of 6 of us got arrested on the campus of North Texas State University (now University of North Texas) for distributing “indecent and obscene literature.” We were passing out leaflets that said “the elections don’t mean shit–there is very little difference between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon.” Oddly enough, the jury couldn’t agree on convicting us, so when one person went to trial and it resulted in a hung jury, they dropped the charges and we went on our merry way.
I was what was then referred to as an itinerant agitator–which meant I traveled around to campuses in Texas and Oklahoma trying to get SDS chapters going. I have to admit, we weren’t enormously successful, as the political climate around here just wasn’t that conducive to uprisings of students. Most were paying little attention to Viet Nam, unless they lost their deferments and were subject to the draft; and racism was such a way of life here, that it didn’t rattle many cages for us to talk about it.
Our biggest success was at the University of Houston, which at that time had a very low enrollment of black students even though it sat in the middle of a mainly black section of southeast Houston. Most of the local kids were shuffled off to Texas Southern University, which at that time was much smaller, less well endowed, and considered second rate.
We staged marches around the campus to wake up action to open up admissions to black people. We moved from building to building, and Mark Rudd flew into Houston for a day and helped me make speeches about changing the school. A LOT of people turned out–which was amazing–but it actually seemed to be a cause that mattered to even the white local students that made up the enrollment. Amid lots of cheering and chanting, we had a heady feeling that we were making a difference!
Mark went back to New York and our group continued protesting the next day, culminating in a short take-over of the Safety and Security office, where I jumped up on a desk and made a rousing speech which ended with, “now let’s march to the Student Center!” Those were my “fatal words” it turned out because some wild kids ran ahead of us and decided to make a point by tearing up things and generally making a mess. Unbeknownst to me, this would later be considered a riot, and I would be accused of inciting it.
Being someone very much against any form of destruction of property, I followed these kids shouting, “stop!” but by then it had gotten out of hand, so we quickly dispersed and hoped that the activity would just die down. The next day, thinking it was all over, I decided to leave Texas and move up to New York and hang out with Mark and some other friends and see what fun I could have being involved in The Movement for real, up where the Real SDS people were.
It was so exciting to be in New York City and ride the subway–learn how to eat pizza by the slice–get temp jobs in off the wall offices to make money. I loved it! I lasted there about 3 months, but soon ended up paying the price for my speech by actually being arrested for incitement to riot. I’ll have to write about that adventure another time.
Seeing Mark brought all that flooding back to me–and I had a chance to look at how much being a part of that Movement had affected my life. And I also realized how deeply grateful I am that I moved on from it–that I found a deeper meaning, a higher sense of purpose than I could have developed if I had stayed in the purely political mode of thinking.
I love that I got involved, that I fought for things that mattered to me. And I love that I keep doing that in ways that work, that involve really smart people doing really meaningful things to change how we live together. That involvement got me aware of the huge responsibility we have–to be sure that we do all we can with all that we are given.
What a blessing! What a trip to be reminded of it!