Fishwrapper - We overcame once
People and protests stopped Nixon and the Vietnam war; it can happen again
Note: This is the first of two parts. As New York authorities and the Bush administration plot the crushing of dissent at the Republican National Convention later this month, John Sugg waxes nostalgic about the protest movement.
“America, where are you now? Don’t you care about your sons and daughters? Don’t you know we need you now? We can’t fight alone against the Monster.” — Steppenwolf, “Monster”
This is a Florida Gators story, but no, it’s not about football or academics. My Bulldog buddies can lighten up. But the University of Florida once was No. 1 in the South in one important department — UF was the Berkeley of Dixie — and memories make me proud.
Deep inside me, I know, but seldom admit, there is a core of nostalgia. It is often a curse and occasionally an ecstasy. Each period of my life replays in my head, like old videotapes that must be ritualistically viewed for reasons long ago forgotten, losing a little more definition with each peek at the past.
On one tape is my official history, my resume. It says I went to the University of Florida, got a degree in 1969, did some graduate work, wrote and edited for the Florida Alligator, was selected for several honor societies.
All true, and simultaneously all lacking a dimension of truth. I did those things, yes, but at the time, they weren’t very important. The school, classes, football games, the student newspaper are shadows in my memories.
My real activities, those that mattered, were marching in an endless number of protests, cranking out antiwar and Civil Rights literature, organizing and occasionally leading a succession of groups, almost all banned by the university.
Southern Students Organizing Committee, the Student Peace Union, Student Mobilization Committee, Students for a Democratic Society — SSOC, SPU, SMC, SDS. The volatile, fractious protest groups were the true fraternities of my college days.
The memories of Gainesville are recorded on a higher quality tape in my mind than many of my life’s periods. The reality, the texture is bright and sharp, painfully so at times.
I often return to Gainesville — reporting a story, seeing a brother who taught law there, watching a Gators game. I usually pause in my business to stroll out onto the Plaza of the Americas, the university’s heart and hub, and its Hyde Park free speech zone. Many ghosts lurk on the patch of grass, cornered by old and new libraries, where I made and listened to speeches, where I sat at card tables handing out movement literature, where we gathered for rallies and marches.
A few years ago, students were having a merry protest at the plaza during one of my pilgrimages. It was familiar, and yet, not familiar. Gay students were having a “national out-of-the-closet day.” I sat on the turf with a few kids, listening to speakers. The students were nicely organized, with a stage and a sound system, snappy T-shirts. I asked one of the leaders if he had ever used a bullhorn. In my day, a bullhorn and a mimeograph machine were the essential tools of protest. Impromptu demonstrations were chorused by chants crackling through the bullhorn (“One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” is as good today as then). And the ink-smeared mimeo za-swished-za-swished with its fire-up-the-masses leaflets (“Legal Harassment Continues at UF! Fight Political Repression!”).
The gay student activist looked at me blankly. “Why?” he said. “The university furnishes the sound equipment.” I sighed, “Times change. The administration wasn’t quite so friendly when I was here.” I was afraid to ask if he even knew what a mimeograph was.
“4 Students Killed in Kent State Riot,” “Students Surround Miami Building,” “Strike Forces ROTC to Cancel FSU Drill,” “3,000 UF Students On Strike,” “Shutdowns Hit Campuses as Demonstrations Mount”
-- Headlines from Florida Alligator, May 5-8, 1970%
%%I am, I must conclude, just another aging radical, an avatar of a breed of middle-class firebrands who, credentialed only by our youth and idealism, and with incredible naivete and ineptitude, believed a rock-‘n’-roll-driven revolution was just over the horizon.
When I trek to a protest nowadays — the G-8 Summit in Brunswick, the School of Assassins at Fort Benning, or just the weekly antiwar gatherings at Peachtree and 14th streets — I feel like an American Legion member watching young soldiers. I am a veteran, like John Kerry, of both the Navy and the antiwar movement, and I have affection for both.
Some of us began in the early 1960s as foot soldiers in the Civil Rights Movement. Others became radicalized by autocratic college administrations. Women rebelled not only against a male-dominated society but also against the rampant sexism of radical student leaders — such as me. The gay movement first cracked the closet door in the late 1960s. The seeds of the environmental movement were planted. A hundred other causes, some decidedly weird, many confused, a few prophetic, pushed the youth of the ’60s onto the streets armed with placards, adorned with peace symbols and love beads.
“I got active, and I think I was typical, watching [early antiwar leaders] proselytize in the plaza. I listened to them debating people about the war,” says Steve Fahrer, best man at my first wedding, fervent SDS leader, and now a New York broker in socially responsible investments for unrepentant radicals.
“It was a gradual thing, getting radicalized,” Fahrer says. “But as I watched the buses leaving Gainesville, carrying guys to be drafted, I thought ‘This war is nuts.’”
“No more business with the war machine. ... No more complicity with the madmen in the Pentagon. ... STRIKE until Nixon brings all the troops home.”
-- Florida Alligator column by John Sugg, chairman of the Student Mobilization Committee, May 7, 1970%
%%The corrupt, savage and insane conflagration in Southeast Asia boiled simmering student discontent into frothing rebellion. “The war was emotional, shocking,” Steve Uhlfelder, student body president in 1970, former chairman of the Florida Board of Regents, and now lawyer/lobbyist, told me one time when we were reminiscing on bygone days. “In retrospect, I think about it a lot — all of us who didn’t go to Vietnam, and the kids, mostly poor kids, who did go.”
Those who didn’t want to go, those who didn’t want their sons and brothers and friends to go, those who had gone and had seen the horror — the pure, absolute, relentless horror of the American juggernaut — they were the movement. They and their children are still the movement, as George Bush proves history disastrously repeats itself.
And, at least in that one arena, the movement moved the world. The end of the Vietnam War began with eruptions of protest on college campuses that summer of 1970. The national student strike of May 1970 was sparked by the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the massacres at Kent State and Jackson State universities. Five million American students shut down more than 800 campuses during the only national student strike in American history.
“Young people speaking their minds, getting so much resistance from behind.”
-- Buffalo Springfield, “For What It’s Worth”
Richard Nixon was pushed to the point of physical and emotional collapse in 1970. Soldiers armed with machine guns were posted inside the White House while more than 150,000 angry protesters rallied outside May 9. Nixon’s nail-biting greatest fear was of the tens of thousands of veterans and active duty GIs who were the backbone of the demonstrations.
The line that marks my life’s progress spiked hard and high during those hot days. In Gainesville after the Kent State massacre, the strike started on the Plaza of the Americas, spilled out into the streets, boiled in front of the ROTC building, took a turn and headed for the scene of so many other demonstrations, Tigert Hall, the university administration’s bunker.
Antiwar and Civil Rights activists — for years a lonely group far removed from the mainstream rush of life at a Southern university — were joined by fraternity and sorority members, student government leaders, the political insiders of Florida Blue Key, football players. More than 10,000 students massed around the university May 6 in candlelight protest.
We faced off against cops, National Guard troops, every conceivable uniform authorities could muster, much like we did this summer in South Georgia at the G-8-carve-up-the-world shindig. The closest we came to violence in 1970 was when police charged at students May 7, much as they did late last year at the globalization conference in Miami.
In 1970, I remember seeing football players step between the cops and the demonstrators. The police backed down. People can win, if we’re united.
There had already been a steady patter of marches in the nation’s capital and in major cities around America. There would be more. Some of us grew so accustomed to the overnight drive to Washington, it was like commuting. But the spontaneous nationwide strike in the days following the massacre of four Kent State students by U.S. military troops — it was the watershed for the movement.
“We were right,” says Ken Megill, a philosophy professor in those days who went on to found the professors’ union in Florida and then to open a Malaysian restaurant in Washington, D.C. “And after Kent State, we knew we had been right all along. We were right.”
Senior Editor John Sugg — who denies he ever wore love beads — will write next week about another Republican Convention and the lies another Republican administration told about dissenters. Sugg can be reached at 404-614-1241 or at john.sugg@creativeloafing.com.
“America, where are you now? Don’t you care about your sons and daughters? Don’t you know we need you now? We can’t fight alone against the Monster.” — Steppenwolf, “Monster”
This is a Florida Gators story, but no, it’s not about football or academics. My Bulldog buddies can lighten up. But the University of Florida once was No. 1 in the South in one important department — UF was the Berkeley of Dixie — and memories make me proud.
Deep inside me, I know, but seldom admit, there is a core of nostalgia. It is often a curse and occasionally an ecstasy. Each period of my life replays in my head, like old videotapes that must be ritualistically viewed for reasons long ago forgotten, losing a little more definition with each peek at the past.
On one tape is my official history, my resume. It says I went to the University of Florida, got a degree in 1969, did some graduate work, wrote and edited for the Florida Alligator, was selected for several honor societies.
All true, and simultaneously all lacking a dimension of truth. I did those things, yes, but at the time, they weren’t very important. The school, classes, football games, the student newspaper are shadows in my memories.
My real activities, those that mattered, were marching in an endless number of protests, cranking out antiwar and Civil Rights literature, organizing and occasionally leading a succession of groups, almost all banned by the university.
Southern Students Organizing Committee, the Student Peace Union, Student Mobilization Committee, Students for a Democratic Society — SSOC, SPU, SMC, SDS. The volatile, fractious protest groups were the true fraternities of my college days.
The memories of Gainesville are recorded on a higher quality tape in my mind than many of my life’s periods. The reality, the texture is bright and sharp, painfully so at times.
I often return to Gainesville — reporting a story, seeing a brother who taught law there, watching a Gators game. I usually pause in my business to stroll out onto the Plaza of the Americas, the university’s heart and hub, and its Hyde Park free speech zone. Many ghosts lurk on the patch of grass, cornered by old and new libraries, where I made and listened to speeches, where I sat at card tables handing out movement literature, where we gathered for rallies and marches.
A few years ago, students were having a merry protest at the plaza during one of my pilgrimages. It was familiar, and yet, not familiar. Gay students were having a “national out-of-the-closet day.” I sat on the turf with a few kids, listening to speakers. The students were nicely organized, with a stage and a sound system, snappy T-shirts. I asked one of the leaders if he had ever used a bullhorn. In my day, a bullhorn and a mimeograph machine were the essential tools of protest. Impromptu demonstrations were chorused by chants crackling through the bullhorn (“One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” is as good today as then). And the ink-smeared mimeo za-swished-za-swished with its fire-up-the-masses leaflets (“Legal Harassment Continues at UF! Fight Political Repression!”).
The gay student activist looked at me blankly. “Why?” he said. “The university furnishes the sound equipment.” I sighed, “Times change. The administration wasn’t quite so friendly when I was here.” I was afraid to ask if he even knew what a mimeograph was.
“4 Students Killed in Kent State Riot,” “Students Surround Miami Building,” “Strike Forces ROTC to Cancel FSU Drill,” “3,000 UF Students On Strike,” “Shutdowns Hit Campuses as Demonstrations Mount”
-- Headlines from Florida Alligator, May 5-8, 1970%
%%I am, I must conclude, just another aging radical, an avatar of a breed of middle-class firebrands who, credentialed only by our youth and idealism, and with incredible naivete and ineptitude, believed a rock-‘n’-roll-driven revolution was just over the horizon.
When I trek to a protest nowadays — the G-8 Summit in Brunswick, the School of Assassins at Fort Benning, or just the weekly antiwar gatherings at Peachtree and 14th streets — I feel like an American Legion member watching young soldiers. I am a veteran, like John Kerry, of both the Navy and the antiwar movement, and I have affection for both.
Some of us began in the early 1960s as foot soldiers in the Civil Rights Movement. Others became radicalized by autocratic college administrations. Women rebelled not only against a male-dominated society but also against the rampant sexism of radical student leaders — such as me. The gay movement first cracked the closet door in the late 1960s. The seeds of the environmental movement were planted. A hundred other causes, some decidedly weird, many confused, a few prophetic, pushed the youth of the ’60s onto the streets armed with placards, adorned with peace symbols and love beads.
“I got active, and I think I was typical, watching [early antiwar leaders] proselytize in the plaza. I listened to them debating people about the war,” says Steve Fahrer, best man at my first wedding, fervent SDS leader, and now a New York broker in socially responsible investments for unrepentant radicals.
“It was a gradual thing, getting radicalized,” Fahrer says. “But as I watched the buses leaving Gainesville, carrying guys to be drafted, I thought ‘This war is nuts.’”
“No more business with the war machine. ... No more complicity with the madmen in the Pentagon. ... STRIKE until Nixon brings all the troops home.”
-- Florida Alligator column by John Sugg, chairman of the Student Mobilization Committee, May 7, 1970%
%%The corrupt, savage and insane conflagration in Southeast Asia boiled simmering student discontent into frothing rebellion. “The war was emotional, shocking,” Steve Uhlfelder, student body president in 1970, former chairman of the Florida Board of Regents, and now lawyer/lobbyist, told me one time when we were reminiscing on bygone days. “In retrospect, I think about it a lot — all of us who didn’t go to Vietnam, and the kids, mostly poor kids, who did go.”
Those who didn’t want to go, those who didn’t want their sons and brothers and friends to go, those who had gone and had seen the horror — the pure, absolute, relentless horror of the American juggernaut — they were the movement. They and their children are still the movement, as George Bush proves history disastrously repeats itself.
And, at least in that one arena, the movement moved the world. The end of the Vietnam War began with eruptions of protest on college campuses that summer of 1970. The national student strike of May 1970 was sparked by the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the massacres at Kent State and Jackson State universities. Five million American students shut down more than 800 campuses during the only national student strike in American history.
“Young people speaking their minds, getting so much resistance from behind.”
-- Buffalo Springfield, “For What It’s Worth”
Richard Nixon was pushed to the point of physical and emotional collapse in 1970. Soldiers armed with machine guns were posted inside the White House while more than 150,000 angry protesters rallied outside May 9. Nixon’s nail-biting greatest fear was of the tens of thousands of veterans and active duty GIs who were the backbone of the demonstrations.
The line that marks my life’s progress spiked hard and high during those hot days. In Gainesville after the Kent State massacre, the strike started on the Plaza of the Americas, spilled out into the streets, boiled in front of the ROTC building, took a turn and headed for the scene of so many other demonstrations, Tigert Hall, the university administration’s bunker.
Antiwar and Civil Rights activists — for years a lonely group far removed from the mainstream rush of life at a Southern university — were joined by fraternity and sorority members, student government leaders, the political insiders of Florida Blue Key, football players. More than 10,000 students massed around the university May 6 in candlelight protest.
We faced off against cops, National Guard troops, every conceivable uniform authorities could muster, much like we did this summer in South Georgia at the G-8-carve-up-the-world shindig. The closest we came to violence in 1970 was when police charged at students May 7, much as they did late last year at the globalization conference in Miami.
In 1970, I remember seeing football players step between the cops and the demonstrators. The police backed down. People can win, if we’re united.
There had already been a steady patter of marches in the nation’s capital and in major cities around America. There would be more. Some of us grew so accustomed to the overnight drive to Washington, it was like commuting. But the spontaneous nationwide strike in the days following the massacre of four Kent State students by U.S. military troops — it was the watershed for the movement.
“We were right,” says Ken Megill, a philosophy professor in those days who went on to found the professors’ union in Florida and then to open a Malaysian restaurant in Washington, D.C. “And after Kent State, we knew we had been right all along. We were right.”
Senior Editor John Sugg — who denies he ever wore love beads — will write next week about another Republican Convention and the lies another Republican administration told about dissenters. Sugg can be reached at 404-614-1241 or at john.sugg@creativeloafing.com.