On Nov. 20, 1969, more than 70 Native Americans gathered before dawn on a dock in San Francisco Bay. They boarded three boats and sailed from the small, foggy harbor in Sausalito, Calif., to Alcatraz Island. They intended to make landfall on territory belonging to the United States government with the intent of claiming it for themselves. Or reclaiming it, depending on your point of view.
Read the NY Times reflect on this event, 50 years later.
Dr. King’s Riverside Church address exemplified how, throughout his final 18 months of life, he repeatedly rejected the sunny optimism of his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech and instead mourned how that dream had “turned into a nightmare.” But the speech also highlighted how for Dr. King, civil rights was never a discrete problem in American society, and that racism went hand in hand with the fellow evils of poverty and militarism that kept the country from living up to its ideals.
Finally, in early 1967, he had had enough. One day Dr. King pushed aside a plate of food while paging through a magazine whose photographs depicted the burn wounds suffered by Vietnamese children who had been struck by napalm. The images were unforgettable, he said. “I came to the conclusion that I could no longer remain silent about an issue that was destroying the soul of our nation.”
“Rules of behavior for Young Ladies, partly extracted from this work and the most celebrated books on Ladies education.”
Bryan Burrough’s new book describes the Weather Underground and other militant groups’ tactics to protest the government. He interviews former radicals who had never gone on the record before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWyv5Fw0JSk&feature=youtu.be
Here is my lecture on the social justice movements of the 1960’s and 70’s.
Lecture Outline:
Adam Rome’s genial new book, “The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-in Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation” (Hill & Wang), brings to life another era. We’re as distant from Earth Day as the Battle of Gettysburg was from James Monroe’s reëlection, and Rome evokes a United States that feels, politically, like a foreign country. There were a number of liberal Republicans. Most active members of environmental groups were hunters and fishermen. The Sierra Club was an actual club that required new members to be proposed by old ones. The Environmental Defense Fund was two years old. Things like bottle recycling and organic food were exotic.
A 1968 episode of William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, featuring a drunken Jack Kerouac, the Fug’s Ed Sanders and a clueless academic, Lewis Yablonsky, discussing the “Hippie” movement.
Fifty years ago this week, panty-seeking college boys lit the fuse on the 1960s.
“Imagine being the typical 20-year-old American-male college student in May of 1952. You have come of age in the new era of the American teenager. You are living in close quarters with thousands of peers amid a campus boom made possible by the GI Bill. Whether you study rocket science or history, you are being trained to win the Cold War. You are eligible to be drafted to kill and die in Korea, but you cannot vote, and you cannot spend the night with your girlfriend, and you cannot console yourself by rocking out to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” because Mick Jagger is still 8 years old. Which is not even to mention that homosexuality is grounds for expulsion. You have been waiting for spring. You have been studying Robert Herrick in English lit. The leaves are on the trees. The sun is in the leaves. The personal is the political, but there aren’t yet any second-wave feminists to say so. The sap is rising in the trunk. The panty-raider’s pursuit of unmentionables is sometimes a conscious act of political speech, sometimes the unconscious expression of teen lust in a repressive climate.”
LETTER FROM BERKELEY By Calvin Trillin Published originally in The New Yorker, March 13, 1965
The conclusion of Mario Savio’s memorable speech, before Free Speech Movement demonstrators entered Sproul Hall to begin their sit-in on December 3, 1964
An article about Mario Savio appeared in the February 16, 1965 issue of Life Magazine (‘The university has become a factory”)
Several essays about the FSM from varying Leftist points of view
Margot Adler, “The Free Speech Movement”
A richly autobiographical account, woven from a freshwoman’s family letters and mature reflection, portraying the FSM as an early, vital episode in the education of a pagan feminist. (1964, 1996; 34 pp.)
Robert Hurwitt. “Present at the Birth: A Free Speech Movement Journal”
The detailed journals of a graduate student record his involvement during the early action (9/23-10/2) and climactic events (12/1-9). An evocative personal introduction and a very brief summary of the months between tie the entries together. (1964, 1984; 18 pp.)
Joel Pimsleur, “Inside Sproul Hall” as written to Ralph Gleason
A young reporter assigned to cover the Sproul Hall sit-in from inside writes about what he can’t report. (1964; 5 pp.)
Michael Rossman, “The Birth of the Free Speech Movement”
In a tape-recording made the next morning (10/3), a graduate student recounts the raw experience of the Police Car Sit-in, and recalls the developments leading to this crisis, launching the FSM’s historical project. (1964; 18 pp.)
Yeah, I read about dolls now. My new life. This is interesting…you know, symbolically and what not:
Mayer described feminists as women who are “militant” and have a “chip on the shoulder,” which struck me as a pretty unsophisticated portrait. But a few days later I am starting to reconsider. Maybe Mayer’s outdated stereotypes are distracting me from the more interesting question: If someone as smart and successful as Mayer, someone who tours the country speaking to young women, can’t comfortably call herself a feminist, then maybe we need to take her objection seriously. Maybe there is a reason why that PBS documentary was so much better on the history than it was on the modern era. Maybe feminism is a term too freighted with history and it’s time to move on.
In the popular imagination, 1968 was marked by unusual turbulence and amazing music. Indeed, it began with the Battle of Khe Sanh and ended with the American debut of Led Zeppelin.
It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.
At one time, the novelist, critic, feminist, and troublemaker Rebecca West, whose birthday incidentally is on Friday, was considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. In 1947, her picture was on the cover of Time and her dazzling, ferocious prose was admired across the world; but now she is largely overlooked, underread, and out of print. Here, then, are 10 reasons to drop everything and read Rebecca West
Forty years ago this November, an album appeared in stores that wanted to change all that. Free To Be … You and Me aimed to teach kids that boys and girls aren’t different at all: that every child, no matter which gender, can wear whatever, like whatever, behave however it wants. That every child can be free just to be.
Check out this 3 part album retrospective
Writer Caitlin Moran believes most women who don’t want to be called feminists don’t really understand what feminism is. In her book How to Be a Woman, Moran poses these questions to women who are hesitant to identify as feminists:
What part of liberation for women is not for you? Is it the freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man that you marry? The campaign for equal pay? Vogue by Madonna? Jeans? Did all that stuff just get on your nerves?
In a conversation with Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross, Moran talks about how women are pressured into Brazilian waxing and how humor is the sharpest weapon she has a writer.
It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.
A discussion of Slaughter’s Atlantic piece at Slate
“La Jeune Fille a la Fleur,” a photograph by Marc Riboud, shows the young pacifist Jane Rose Kasmir planting a flower on the bayonets of guards at the Pentagon during a protest against the Vietnam War on October 21, 1967. The photograph would eventually become the symbol of the flower power movement.
