Politics: 1962-1971

NOTE: The following is another chapter in my autobiography, No Secrets.

Less than two months after arriving in Berkeley, the Cuban Missile Crisis hit and the threat of nuclear nightmare captivated the world. When I saw a flier announcing a protest of Kennedy’s escalation, I went to my first political demonstration. If the United States could have missiles in Turkey, I didn’t see why the Soviet Union couldn’t have missiles in Cuba. Ultimately, I backed Bertrand Russell’s “Ban the Bomb” campaign.

When I reached Telegraph and Bancroft, a man standing on a utility box while holding onto the pole with one hand and a megaphone with the other was ranting and raving about the end of the world. Only a few people listened. Unimpressed with the speaker, I quickly left.

I considered the Soviet Union a brutal dictatorship, but the widespread paranoia about a Communist takeover struck me as an oppressive attempt to stifle open debate. I preferred a thoughtful discussion about the relative merits of various models, none of which seemed ideal to me.

In high school, when I first read Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, I related to his affirmation of individual freedom. Then I read Russell’s “The Case for Socialism,” an argument for European-style democratic socialism as was established in England and Sweden, re-read Goldwater, and concluded that his freedom was freedom for Big Business to do whatever it wants regardless of consequences. I didn’t consider myself a “socialist,” but socialists made some good points, it seemed to me.

In May 1963, shortly after being moved deeply by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, I went to hear James Baldwin speak to several thousand students at Harmon Gym. The arena was packed and Baldwin was on fire. He spoke passionately about Bull Conner’s police dogs and the horrors of segregation.

But what struck me most was Baldwin’s theme that White folks need to insist on civil rights not just for Black people but also for the sake of their own soul. As I left, tears were streaming down my face, not caring who noticed.

Over the next several months, I read everything Baldwin had published, both his essays and his novels. During Christmas vacation in Dallas, I decided to join the civil rights movement when I returned to Berkeley.

My first action was the Lucky Stores “shop-in” on Telegraph Avenue. CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) was challenging hiring discrimination at Lucky stores. In addition to Campus CORE picket lines, some of us would go inside, get a shopping cart, have the cashier ring up our purchases, and then walk away without paying. The store’s corporate owners soon reached a settlement.

Shortly thereafter, I joined protests against hiring discrimination in San Francisco hotels, which hired very few people of color. Our focus was the historic Sheraton Palace on Market Street.

During one picket line, hundreds of demonstrators entered the lobby, sat down, and spent the night sleeping on the carpet. We experienced a marvelous sense of community, especially when Dick Gregory appeared and regaled us with his comedy. On the second day, a series of small groups of protestors blocked an entrance and were arrested. I was about to subject myself to arrest when word came down that our leaders had reached an agreement with the hotel association, which prompted an enthusiastic celebration.

Next up were demonstrations on Auto Row in San Francisco, again calling for the hiring of racial minorities. These demonstrations were larger and even more spirited, with singing and chanting that induced an altered state of consciousness. Again, our leaders were able to negotiate a settlement fairly quickly.

That summer in Dallas I joined a CORE picket line at the Piccadilly Cafeteria, which was refusing to serve Blacks. The only other White person on the picket line was Richard Koogle, who became a good friend. As was the case in the Bay Area, these demonstrations were victorious.

On occasion, though I was underage, at night I’d go with CORE members to blues clubs in the ghetto. And we drove around in my father’s car gathering canned goods to send to the Freedom Summer voter registration campaign in Mississippi.

That August proved to be a watershed moment for the movement. Confronting the all-White state Democratic Party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) traveled to the national convention in August 1964 demanding to have its delegates seated as the legitimate representatives from Mississippi. President Johnson and the national Democratic Party feared further alienating White Southerners whose votes they wanted for the November election. After a long, heated struggle, Johnson offered the MFDP two at-large seats, which would have only allowed them to watch the floor proceedings.

Dr. King and other national leaders argued that the effort had already resulted in great progress (at the next convention in 1968, the Democratic Party refused to seat the segregated party) and recommended that the MFDP accept the offer. But Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Robert Moses, and the MFDP rejected it.

Many activists, including me, were furious that Dr. King and others wanted to accept the token compromise. This anger fueled the development of the Black Power movement, which I supported.

Around Labor Day, I returned to Berkeley and got involved in demonstrations at an Oakland welfare office protesting forced workfare. I’d sit in overnight, go to my job, and then sneak back in to join the demonstrators. A settlement was reached before I was arrested.

Trying to be an activist, a student, and a worker all at the same time was too much for me, so one day I impulsively returned home (and missed out on the Free Speech Movement, which I followed proudly from Dallas).

Back in Dallas, one day I went to see a movie at the Texas Theatre, where Lee Harvey Oswald had taken refuge following the Kennedy assassination a year earlier. When the film was over, I saw Marvin Garson in the audience. We had met at the Oakland welfare office sit-in about two weeks earlier. He was in Dallas to research his conviction that Oswald did not act alone. Surprised by the coincidence of seeing me again so soon in another city, at first he suspected I was an intelligence agent. But after he relaxed, I helped him with his research.

One day, while driving my father’s car, we turned in front of the Texas School Book Depository to check out a possible line of sight for a second shooter. As we passed by and Marvin looked over this shoulder, his hunch was confirmed. A chill went down my spine.

In March 1965, I decided to go to Alabama for the final leg of Dr. King’s march from Selma to Montgomery and tried to recruit friends from the liberal Northaven Methodist Church where I was active. Surprised and disappointed that no one wanted to go, I signed up with some fellow students at Southern Methodist University.

We headed out in the morning, nervous about driving through Louisiana and Mississippi. We knew civil rights workers had been murdered in the Deep South and feared it was obvious that we were on our way to Selma. After getting gas, we’d look out the back window to see if anyone was following us.

Whether it was due to my fear or what I had eaten, I passed gas the whole way there. The odor was horrific, but I never apologized and don’t know if the others ever figured out that I was the culprit.

We arrived in time to march for hours through the outskirts of Birmingham to the state capitol, guarded by federal troops. (Though a firm advocate of nonviolence, Dr. King accepted the use of police force in certain situations.) Families on their front porches gave us a warm welcome. The climax of the rally was a speech by Dr. King, the only time I ever heard him in person. The march was a rousing success and led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which outlawed barring Blacks from voting in the South.

When I returned to Berkeley in September 1965, the movement against the Vietnam War was heating up and I became involved in teach-ins, marches, and rallies.

When Ronald Reagan ran for Governor in 1966 on a “law and order” campaign that took special aim at Berkeley students, I saw him as a caricature that was no real threat. Unhappy with the Democratic Governor, Pat Brown, I wasn’t worried about Reagan’s potential victory.

In fact, I believed his election would help radicalize others, as I had been radicalized. Our slogan was: Repression = Radicalization. We were certain we were right. We were winning. The tide of history was on our side. Soon we would convert enough people to make a revolution.

Prior to that time, I had read the liberal weekly, The New Republic, religiously, storing up back issues. In 1966, that magazine published a series called “Thoughts of the Young Radicals” with articles by Tom Hayden, Stokely Carmichael, Todd Gitlin, and others. I agreed with the radicals who advocated “participatory democracy.” These articles reinforced my hostility toward all forms of ideological authoritarianism that I had picked up earlier from writings such as The Rebel by Albert Camus. 

I particularly concurred with the critique of the paternalistic welfare state, which reinforces the status quo, induces dependency, and undermines self-reliance. The radicals analyzed how the dominant society uses various “tools of social control” to foster conformity. Those tools include “crumbs from the table” with welfare payments and the glorification of credentialed professionals who are placed on a pedestal in ways that weaken the self-esteem of their clients.

Among those who offered this critique were, on education, Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, on religion, Peter Berger, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies, and on psychiatry, R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience.

This intellectual ferment was occurring within the context of apparently successful violent revolutions throughout the world. In country after country, armed struggles for independence were overthrowing Western colonial powers. My fellow radicals and I celebrated those struggles. In marches against the Viet Nam War, we chanted, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Mihn. The NLF is going to win.” We watched the film The Battle of Algiers and sided with the urban guerrillas. In October 1966, Stokely Carmichael generated great enthusiasm when he appeared with his Black Power campaign on the Berkeley campus.

In January 1967, I participated in the peace-oriented Human Be-In festival in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, which aimed to unite political radicals and apolitical hippies – a theme that was later articulated in Woodstock Nation (1969) by Abbie Hoffman, with which I passionately identified. I especially loved Hoffman’s take on the liberating impact of Elvis Presley.

The Be-In was a marvelous, hopeful event that inspired the 1967 Summer of Love, a later series of Love-Ins in other cities, similar music festivals, and Woodstock in 1969. I didn’t go to Woodstock, but when the three-hour movie was released in 1970, twice I took LSD and went to see it, sitting through two showings each time while I was tripping.

As opposition to the war among the general public increased, police departments throughout the country began provoking riots by violently attacking peaceful demonstrators, many of whom responded by throwing rocks and destroying property. In November Reagan was elected Governor in a landside. The counter-revolution was in full force. We radicals welcomed the chaos, believing it would contribute to a collapse of the system.

In 1967 the Black Panther Party created a media sensation by marching on the State capitol in Sacramento armed with unloaded rifles and declaring the right of citizens to use violence to defend themselves against police brutality, which was pervasive in Oakland. Later that year Huey Newton was arrested after a violent confrontation resulted in the death of a police officer and I joined in a number of “Free Huey” rallies and marches.

That fall, Stop the Draft Week escalated the anti-war movement. The intent was to physically stop the buses taking draftees to the processing center. The organizers gave Joan Baez and her associates one day for strictly nonviolent demonstrations. The rest of the week was for street fighting.

We moved barriers, including parked cars, into the street to block the buses. Demonstrators threw tear gas canisters back at the police and hurled rocks and other objects at them. I never threw anything, but I was in the streets, trying to disrupt “business as usual.” We believed that if we made the system pay a high enough price, we could stop the war. On this occasion, we slowed the arrival of the buses by a few hours.

The federal government charged key Stop the Draft Week organizers with felonious conspiracy, which could have resulted in serious prison terms. During this period, in other cities as well, conspiracy charges were being filed, which induced widespread paranoia among activists. We often worried about who might be an undercover agent.

In early 1968, Eugene McCarthy almost defeated Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. Robert Kennedy entered the campaign and Johnson dropped out. As the Establishment was becoming extremely nervous about Dr. King’s plan to occupy Washington, DC with the Poor People’s March, Dr. King was assassinated, which sparked major riots in many cities. My reaction to his assassination was muted; it seemed like it was only to be expected, more evidence of the futility of pure nonviolence.

Columbia University was shut down by a student strike and France was paralyzed by a student strike of its own. I knocked on doors for the “Clean for Gene” campaign in California. Then Robert Kennedy was assassinated and all eyes turned to the August Democratic Convention in Chicago.

I wanted to go to Chicago, but I had little money. So I stayed in San Francisco and instead went to the annual convention of the American Association for Humanistic Psychology, which was open to the general public and featured all sorts of “human potential movement” workshops, including sessions with luminaries like Fritz Perls.

The opening session was in the Grand Ballroom of the Fairmount Hotel and involved the participants lying on the floor doing “sensory awareness” exercises. The next morning, the San Francisco Chronicle featured a front-page story on the unusual event.

Between workshops, I’d go upstairs to a room in the hotel where friends from Dallas were staying to watch TV coverage of the chaos at the Democratic Convention, which a national commission later described as a “police riot” that involved "unrestrained and indiscriminate" violence that the police "inflicted upon persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat." Going back and forth between the touchy-feely convention and watching those scenes on television was unreal.

In the fall of 1968, I’d often participate in the heated San Francisco State student strike, which after several months achieved its demand for an Ethnic Studies program.

When Richard Nixon was elected President in November by the thinnest margin ever, the anti-war movement knew it was in for some rough sledding.

In the spring of 1969, a handful of Berkeley radicals decided to take over a vacant lot owned by the University of California and turn it into a “People’s Park.” The University had planned to build a high-rise dorm there, but students were staying away from dorms to live more privately in houses and apartments, so the parcel had long been an informal parking lot. With support from local stores and benefactors, hundreds of people began planting grass, trees, and flowers and a lively sense of community blossomed.

Frank Bardacke, a leader of Stop the Draft Week, traced the “ownership” of the land back to the Native Americans who used to live in the East Bay. He summarized that history on a flier that featured a photograph of Geronimo holding a rifle. The flier concluded with a promise that when “they” come for the land again, we will fight for it. This threat was also communicated at Free Huey and antiwar rallies.

For weeks, People’s Park developed with widespread public support. The University, which was meeting with activists to develop a plan for the park, promised not to do anything without warning. But Governor Reagan, who had called Berkeley "a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters and sex deviants,” saw the action as a challenge to the rights of private property. He overruled the University and sent in the Highway Patrol in the early morning to erect a fence around the park.

At a noon rally at Sproul Hall with thousands of people, Dan Siegel, the student body President, spoke in opposition to the police action and mentioned some possible responses. When he cited taking down the fence as an option, the crowd immediately started going toward the park. Telegraph Avenue was packed, so I went down a block and circled toward the park.

But when I encountered demonstrators running away from the park with their backs bleeding and their shirts ripped open, I stopped in my tracks. Later, I learned the Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies had fired shotguns at demonstrators and had killed James Rector, an innocent bystander observing from a rooftop.

For two weeks, daily demonstrations rocked Berkeley. We’d snake through city streets, often battling the police. But some demonstrators put flowers in the barrels of the rifles held by National Guard standing in formation. At night, an open community meeting would debate and decide what to do the next day: direct democracy in action.

Public opinion polls showed that an overwhelming majority of Berkeley residents supported keeping People’s Park. When I’d go to a restaurant, I could talk with complete strangers about the day’s events. The whole town was one unified community.

After Woodstock, Andrew Kopkind wrote in The Rolling Stone, “For those who did not experience the intense communitarian closeness of struggles like Cuba, People’s Park, or Paris in May, Woodstock gave them a glimpse of what life could be like after the Revolution.”

At the end of May, on Memorial Day, supporters from throughout the West came to Berkeley for an enormous, climatic march in support of People’s Park. Residents played the Beatles and the Rolling Stones out their windows at loud volumes. The mood was festive, but tension was in the air. The National Guard had sharpshooters positioned on rooftops along the route. Great violence was a distinct possibility.

But even when demonstrators ripped up the asphalt in the streets next to the park and planted truckloads of donated grass, the police held back and the day turned into a glorious celebration. That night, I took LSD and joined in a spontaneous party at People’s Park Annex, about a mile from campus. Drums and fires made for a primitive atmosphere. Dancers leaped through the fires. Once two dancers ricocheted off each other mid-air and almost fell into the fire. I stayed there for hours, mesmerized.

The fence remained up around the Park, but a year or two later, on Bastille Day, a demonstration at the Park in which I participated led to demonstrators using wire cutters to tear down the fence, which has stayed down ever since. Eventually, the University and the City reached a deal for maintaining the Park as open space.

About a year later, Reagan defended the use of force, saying, "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement."

In the fall of 1969, seven organizers of the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention were charged with conspiracy. Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale was also charged, though the Panthers had had nothing to do with planning the demonstrations.

Shortly before the trial started, federal marshals secretly arrested Seale to transport him by car to Chicago for the trial. Some ministers with Clergy and Laity Concerned called for a rally to protest the treatment of Seale. I got wind of it and joined in. After the rally and press conference, some of us occupied the U.S. Marshals office and got arrested.

Fortunately, we were placed in a holding cell before we were searched and fingerprinted, for I had forgotten that I was holding some marijuana, which was a felony at the time. I barely had time to flush it down the toilet before being processed.

A few weeks later, a few days after police forces and the FBI raided the Panther’s Chicago office and killed its leader, Fred Hampton, while he was in bed, I was in Los Angeles for what proved to be the last police raid on a Black Panther Party headquarters. I had been in L.A. to participate in a weekend Urban Plunge conducted by the New Adult Community, which was founded by Rev. Jim Donaldson, a Methodist minister.

Sunday night we were awakened by a phone call. The caller told us the police were attacking the Panthers and asked us to go to the scene as witnesses.

When we arrived, the area was blocked off. A crowd of 1-200 people stood in front of the police. A few rocks were thrown. After a while, the police marched forward in formation. As they came toward us, I greeted them with a Nazi salute and walked away.

My associate and I were going to our car when the line of police reversed direction. Then a few officers started running right at us. Accustomed to being able to escape such situations in Berkeley, I ran. But in the ghetto I was more conspicuous than I had been in Berkeley. I cut down a driveway into a back yard, which proved to be a dead end. The officers surrounded me, clubbed my skull causing a gaping wound, and told me they were going to kill me. I believed them.

In the police car they repeated their threats to kill me. I cried like a baby, weeping. At the station they charged me with assaulting a police officer, a felony, and locked me up near the Panthers they had just arrested, whose clothes still so reeked with tear gas I could barely stand it. My employer, Glide Church, bailed me out.

Later I learned that it was routine for the Los Angeles police to charge a felony after beating someone, reduce the charges to three misdemeanors, and allow the victim to (thankfully) plead guilty to one misdemeanor. The guilty plea would prevent the victim from being able to sue the police.

With a lawyer hired by Glide, I refused to play the game and pleaded not guilty to all three misdemeanors, was found guilty on two, and had to pay a fine.

This experience further radicalized me. While recuperating during Christmas vacation amid snow at the Squaw Valley Methodist Church, my resolve to fight for social justice deepened. But now I was motivated even more deeply by a burning anger that was personal.

Opposition to the war continued to build. In October, a majority of Americans said the United States should never have entered the war and millions joined the nationwide Moratorium, a one-day general strike. In early 1970, President Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia and in May 1970, the Ohio National Guard killed four protestors at Kent State University and police killed two protestors at Jackson State College in Mississippi.

Activists responded by planning a mass occupation of Washington, DC in May 1971. The plan was to paralyze the city by blockading the bridges and major thoroughfares.

In San Francisco, Jed Riffe and I went to a small planning committee meeting for a Mayday demonstration in San Francisco. I proposed that as the movement shut down DC, we tie up the financial district by blocking intersections and entrances to parking garages. My proposal was accepted and we proceeded to spread the word, plastering all over town a large poster that Jed designed.

The turnout was decent but as soon as we hit the street, the police went on the rampage. Chaos and street fighting ensued. Though we got some good media coverage, the financial district remained open.

But the North Vietnamese were winning on the battlefield and the American public was increasingly opposed to the war. So the war did end soon thereafter.

Many of my fellow organizers of the San Francisco Mayday demonstration were afraid we would be arrested for conspiracy. Some of the others immediately left town for a few days just in case. But even though I authored the plan, I suppressed my paranoia. Then a week or two later, I took some LSD while camping in Mendocino and experienced an extremely paranoid bad trip that lasted for months.

As it turns out, I was not the only activist who burned out in 1971. Many went through major changes and lived much differently thereafter. 1971 was a very hard year, prompted in large part by anger and frustration. We now had the American people on our side, but that dreadful war continued.

For us, the Sixties were over.