Madison on Fire 1968-1971

The published version of Fighting Times includes a significantly shortened version of Madison on Fire. The following is the full unedited text taken from the original manuscript. For those interested in the background story of how a solid core of revolutionary students who adhered to the Revolutionary Youth Movement II ideology of supporting the Black Panther Party and leaving the campus to organize in factories and working class communities, the following is well worth reading:

ROTC Gets the Boot

August 1968, I headed to Madison, Wisconsin, for the very first time. I hadn’t visited before I applied to the University of Wisconsin. There was a slightly nervous/slightly excited tingle in my gut. Growing up in Washington, D.C., I had driven and flown up and down the East Coast innumerable times, but this was my first trip West of the East Coast.

This was the start of a new phase of my life. It felt like I was about to be swallowed up. As I looked down from 30,000 feet on the endless pancake-flat fields of corn in neatly divided square plots, I observed for the first time in my life the contours of the “heartland.” So flat, for such a long distance, it seemed to disprove Aristotle’s assertion that the world was spherical. 

The next thing I knew, I stood in line with thousands of freshmen in the queue for class registration. Any thoughts that I would be registering for intellectually interesting classes were quickly dispelled – between geology 101, economics 101, mathematics 101…. An unexciting rehash of what we studied at my progressive little East Coast high school.

On my class roster, however, one slot shocked me from my doldrums – the choice of what time I would be taking “Freshman Orientation for Reserve Officer Training” (ROTC). UW was already famous as a hotbed of anti-war activity, but ROTC was still mandatory for male freshmen. No way; I had chosen to enroll in Madison precisely to fight against the Vietnam War. The prior year on campus had been marked by a violent sit-in and a strike against napalm-producing Dow Chemical’s recruiting on campus. That’s what enticed me to journey to the Midwest. 

As soon as my first year started, I saw fliers issued by Students for a Democratic Society and the Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union (WDRU) calling for a rally on September 14 to kick ROTC off campus and end the University’s complicity with the “war machine.” “Hell yeah,” I thought. “THIS is what I came to Madison for.” So I joined SDS. 

By the time I got to Madison, SDS had grown in numbers, and had moved further left since its founding in a Michigan college town in 1961. In 1965 SDS organized the first national protest against the Vietnam War. The war was justified by anti-communism, and the infamous ‘domino theory’, which was still widely embraced. In a sign of growing student radicalization, SDS chose to break from the quiescence of 1950’s campuses still in the grip of the Cold  War. 

SDS, along with its allies in the peace movement, changed the direction of the country. In unexpectedly high numbers, 15,000 to 25,000 young people and others flocked to the nation’s capital on April 17, 1965, in response to the SDS call demanding that:

The war must be stopped. There must be an immediate cease fire and demobilization in South Vietnam. There must be a withdrawal of American troops. All agreements must be ratified with the partisans of … the National Liberation Front and North Vietnam.

But our hopes extend not only to Vietnam. Our chance is the first in a generation to organize the powerless and voiceless at home to confront America with its racial injustice, its apathy, and its poverty, with that same vision for Vietnam: a vision of a society in which all can control our own destinies. (emphasis added)

Out of the gate, SDS made clear that it wasn’t simply an organization of young people opposed to war; rather, as Paul Booth, one of SDS’s main organizers, wrote in the New York Times: “...we’re really not just a peace group. We are working on domestic problems--civil rights, poverty, university reform. We feel passionately and angrily about things in America, and we feel that a war in Asia will destroy what we’re trying to do here.” 

Booth was describing a multi-issue “movement,” inspired by the struggle for civil rights. More than an “organization,” SDS quickly became a destination, or even a lifestyle. Across the country SDS “houses” spontaneously sprouted up as like-minded young people found each other and grouped together in collective living situations that soon dotted large and small towns from coast to coast. SDS housemates cooked together, partied together, and in effect, created a new youth culture free of society’s traditional boundaries and restraints.

Young people attended SDS meetings late into the night, argued over politics, and the next night went to SDS parties to be with others with whom they felt an affinity. Some put out SDS newsletters to spread our message, marching and demonstrating with fellow SDSers in small and large actions on college campuses and on city streets. SDS became ubiquitous, synonymous with anti-war youth culture, rebellion, defiance of the uptight “straight” culture of the 1950s: crew cuts, twin beds for married couples on TV sitcoms, racist images of Amos ‘n’ Andy shucking and jiving on the TV screen, penny loafers peeking out under cuffed khakis. Like Marlon Brando’s alienated biker in “The Wild One,” when asked “What are you rebelling against?”, our answer was “Whattaya got?” 

The Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union was two years old, but had already matured from a position of moral opposition to the war to a conscious political opponent of the “war machine.” They leafletted and demonstrated at induction centers, organized at colleges and high schools, and started various community service projects. WDRU also served as the national Draft Resistance Clearinghouse, which provided information for similar groups sprouting up all around the country. 

By 1968, national SDS had grown to over 100,000 attending meetings across the country, with many tens of thousands more identifying with its anti-establishment message. We had begun to define U.S. society as “us” versus “them,” even if those categories were fluid and “them” often became “us,” particularly after serving time in the jungles of Vietnam. 

My hopes were high. Madison SDS did not disappoint. Our collective sentiment held that ROTC was a direct manifestation of the war on campus, and had to go. In just the first couple of weeks, we had successfully kicked ROTC off campus, raising hell until normal Reserve Officer Training classes were virtually impossible to conduct. 

The campaign was kicked off by about 250 students gathered on the Library Mall under the banner “We Are the Freshman Resistance.” I felt right at home, united by a common denominator of alienation. Though none of us had met, we felt a strong affinity and immediately bonded as opponents of the war. 

Speakers from SDS and the WDRU revved up the crowd with speeches decrying the use of the campus as a recruiting ground for the military, and demanding an end to compulsory ROTC orientation classes. The last speaker asked for a show of hands from those at the rally in support of a boycott of  orientation classes. A cheer rose up from the crowd and plans were made to disrupt  ROTC classes the following Monday. And as it fortuitously happened, I had been assigned to the morning class on that day.

Over the weekend, I eagerly prepared to “disrupt” my first ROTC class. Before the class, I had promised myself that I would speak up, refusing to allow myself to be intimidated despite my newness on campus. After the second lieutenant leading the class had prattled on about the benefits of ROTC teaching leadership skills and the promise that ROTC would pay for college, I stood up. All eyes focused on me, wondering who I was and what I planned to do.  

I raised my voice, glancing around the room of mostly blank freshmen faces: “Can I please have everyone’s attention? What we’re hearing is a lot of bullshit. ROTC is trying to recruit us to be part of their military war machine. I say fuck the Vietnam War and fuck ROTC.”  

I turned to face the officer at the lectern who had been taken by surprise at my outburst. “Let me ask you a question. Why aren’t you telling us about how many officers like yourself who are being fragged, offed by their own soldiers?” Before he had a chance to open his mouth, I continued. “I’ll tell you why. The U.S. is fighting an unjust war of aggression against a people fighting for their liberation. I side with self-determination and liberation and don’t plan on sitting here listening to your tired propaganda!”

On cue, thirty of us disruptors, out of a class of around 300, walked out chanting anti-war slogans, leaving the lieutenant standing behind the lectern with his mouth hanging open, gobsmacked by our disregard for his message and his uniform. As I walked out I couldn’t help but smile to myself. I had come to Madison to fight the war machine and within week number one of classes we had already made the first ROTC orientation class of the new semester difficult, if not impossible, to conduct. 

SDS and WDRU had planned well for the anti-ROTC campaign. A meeting had already been set for Monday night. About 200 of us gathered and after a few speeches voted to endorse a campaign to engage in “prolonged disruptive discussions” during the class sessions, scheduled to continue throughout the week.

Responding to the immediate vibrancy and intensity of the campaign that continued the disruption throughout the week, the Student Senate met on Thursday and voted in favor of a bill to endorse making orientation voluntary and scheduling  a future referendum on whether ROTC should be kicked off campus. 

Students wondered what the difference was between the two mass student organizations leading the anti-war movement, the WDRU and SDS. While the WDRU had largely focused on counseling young people on how to beat the draft, both organizations shared the same fundamental goals, and were working together. On September 18 about 700 activists, some newly minted in the struggle against ROTC, and many veterans of the violent battle to kick Dow recruiters off campus the prior spring, met in the Social Science Building to consummate a merger of the two organizations.  

The unifying theme at the meeting, which set the tone for much of the school year, was a commitment to focus heavily on organizational and educational activity to win over broader numbers of students to the anti-war movement. Despite there being 700 of us in the packed hall, we put aside political differences to forge a broad front of opposition to the war. 

While the disruption of classes during the week of September 14 had largely been carried on by male students, as we were the ones required to attend classes, SDS/WDRU planned for the first women’s anti-war action for Saturday morning, September 21. Recognizing the essential role of women in opposing the war, educational fliers throughout the week called for women and their supporters to gather by the statue of Lincoln that sat on the Terrace atop Bascom Hill, overlooking State Street leading up to the Wisconsin State Capitol building. 

About 50 women (and a few male students from the ROTC disruptions) held a short rally and headed out on a lively march toward Agriculture Hall. As we marched and chanted, we encountered agriculture and engineering students who frequented “their” side of the campus. Here we were looked on as a curiosity, as many of the ag and engineering students had not yet been won over to embrace anti-war sentiment, with many of them walking by as if the war wasn’t their issue – an attitude that came to an abrupt end when they were soon confronted with the draft.

Upon reaching Ag Hall, we forcibly barged through the large wooden front doors chanting anti-war slogans, and busted our way into a session of an introductory Naval ROTC class. Laurie Rosen, a 17-year old freshman from Durham, New Hampshire, moved to the front of the all-male class carrying a sign that read “Resist.” She looked out at the all-male class, momentarily paused, and began reading from a prepared statement, “We feel that the University … should not be a place where techniques of warfare are taught… we are also opposed to the government’s policies in Vietnam.”

Despite heckling from a few in the class, rather than walk out after Laurie finished, we moved to fill the empty seats, determined to disrupt the class. Despite two angry warnings, and dismissive comments from the ROTC commandant that “further disruptions will not be tolerated,” he did nothing to interfere with our heckling and jeering at his attempts to explain the “benefits” offered by the Military Science program. 

Pursuant to the SDS/WDRU commitment to engage in ongoing educational work, we actively sought out freshmen to discuss the war and ROTC. On October 7, our steady organizing  bore fruit: male freshman voted 775-292 for ROTC orientation to be voluntary. For many freshmen, this constituted their first anti-war act, but it wouldn’t be their last as our movement on campus steadily grew in militancy and strength. Throughout the fall, agitation continued through educational fliers and on-going dorm discussions on ROTC and university support for the war. In response, the All-University ROTC Policy Committee officially recommended that ROTC orientation should be optional beginning in Fall 1969.

SDS/WDRU and other allied campus organizations called for a mass march on October 12 to celebrate the victory. About 3000 students gathered on Library Mall. One recently returned soldier spoke. The GI movement, which was organizing against the war on army bases and on the battlefield in Vietnam, grew alongside the student movement, and returning Nam vets had stories to tell. The GI addressing the rally emotionally castigated the war, painting a vivid picture of wicked destruction by planes dropping napalm onto the jungle and inhabited villages. On cue, we marched out of the Library Mall into State Street, behind huge banners calling for an immediate end to the war. Thousands of us took our stand in front of the Army Air Force recruiting station located midway up State Street towards the Capitol. “Hell No - We Won’t Go” and “1, 2, 3, 4 - We Ain’t Gonna Fight Your War” echoed off the buildings lining State Street.

Thus ended my first month and a half in Madison. The battle to dislodge ROTC was merely the beginning of how I would spend my next three and a half years in Madison. 

The Black Eagle

The war was “the” issue for many. I aligned with a growing number who saw it in the context of a universal fight against all oppression, foreign and domestic. One fall day, I noticed an 11” by 14” poster, stapled to a brown wood telephone pole. It was adorned with a bold black eagle with wings resembling an inverted Aztec temple. The poster announced a speech at the student union Great Hall by Jesus Salas, a representative of the Wisconsin Farm Workers Union (Obreros Unidos). He would lead a discussion on “workers’ rights” and the farm workers’ “grape boycott” that had jumped off a few years before in Delano, California.  

I thought I might be interested. It triggered memories of tales my father had told of his days of menial labor for low pay, before he had escaped the streets of Newark to eventually find his way to an unaccredited law school in Washington, D.C.  

Yet I couldn’t escape my own prejudice stemming from prior experience with “blue collar workers.” My run-ins in the fall of 1967 involved angry white men hanging out of the windows of shoe factories, hurling tirades and accusations of “traitor” when I joined an attempt to shut down the military induction center in Manchester, New Hampshire. Their loud, angry taunts of “Better dead than red!” and “Hippies go home!” still reverberated in the back of my mind.  

Regardless, I decided to check out this Jesus Salas of Obreros Unidos, the union and the boycott. On the appointed evening, a couple dozen students gathered to hear Jesus, who spoke passionately about the years-old, bitter struggle in the grape fields of California, to form a union to protect the mostly Latino and Filipino workers from subhuman working conditions -- like life-threatening pesticides in the fields, and the absence of toilets or water to drink. The UFW’s campaign to boycott grapes (pending union recognition) brought the public into the fray, and put pressure on the growers to recognize the union.

I listened, deeply engrossed, as Jesus graphically explained the atrocious conditions in the fields of Delano, and the heroic struggle for justice being led by the United Farm Workers Union. Jesus’s words struck a sympathetic chord -- so much so that after the speech I hustled to the front of the hall to volunteer to work on the grape boycott.  

Jesus was thrilled to have solicited at least one seemingly enthusiastic volunteer. He introduced me to his brother Manuel, who ran the day-to-day affairs of Obreros Unidos in Madison. I immediately took a liking to the soft-spoken Manuel with his messy mop of black hair and accompanying bushy Pancho Villa mustache. He was at least five years older than me, which seemed like a generation gap at my age. Despite our vastly different backgrounds and upbringings, Manuel and I bonded from our very first meeting, so much so that Manuel virtually adopted me. 

Manuel took me under his personal wing and political tutelage – me, a skinny, bell-bottom wearing, long haired white kid “volunteering” to help Chicano farm workers. I might have backed out if I had known my union organizer apprenticeship required endless hours of listening to Ranchero music, hanging night after night in bars where no one spoke English (and I no Spanish) and driving Manuel around unpaved back country roads to meet with migrant workers in a vehicle that could barely pass DMV inspection, let alone hit 60 mph on a downhill slope of freeway. 

After giving me a thorough once-over a day before we left for a meeting in Milwaukee, Manuel delivered the news, with a devilish grin: “A real union organizer needs boots – manly black boots to kick ass.” He handed me his prized paratrooper boots from Vietnam – heavy black leather, with green canvas on the sides to allow for jungle wet. (Little did I imagine that just a few years later I’d be working at Pfister and Vogel Tannery in Milwaukee slinging hide after hide of black combat boot leather destined for the U.S. military.) Much to my excitement, which I suppressed so as not to appear foolish, Manuel’s boots fit like a glove. I deemed myself fully equipped to step out as an Obreros Unidos “organizer.” 

I felt empowered by my black combat boots. While my height and weight didn’t change, my stature did, at least in my own mind. That night, after our meetings, Manuel and I stopped in to eat at Conajito’s bar on the near Southside of Milwaukee: obligatory tacos and beer. Never mind that I was years underage for drinking, I hopped up on my bar stool next to Manuel and ordered a brewed-in-Milwaukee, union made Pabst Blue Ribbon – PBR! – the only beer worthy of a union organizer’s palate. 

With blaring, non-stop Ranchero music emanating from the 45’s in the jukebox, I listened to a cacophony of Spanish chat, none of which I could understand. In retrospect, it must have looked quite humorous, odd. One barely 18-year old, non-Spanish speaking white kid ensconced in a bar full of weathered looking Mexican laborers sporting big cowboy hats, belt buckles with prominent bull’s horns protruding over big bellies, finished off with decorated leather cowboy boots with toes that stretched for almost 6 inches past the end of the wearer’s foot.  

Meanwhile, Manuel engaged in animated conversation while I sat silently, drinking my beer and munching on Conajitos’ famous tacos plattered in a red plastic basket. Suddenly, I realized the guy across the bar was talking at me, but in Spanish that I couldn’t understand. I smiled like the village idiot, hoping not to offend or be noticed. 

Manuel turned to me, “He’s asking who you are and why you’re here?” The entire bar grew quiet, even the jukebox seemed to grow silent, as all avidly watched and waited for my response. Without missing a beat, “I’m his bodyguard,” I said, nodding toward Manuel. Laughter filled the bar. Face red, I knew I was being tested and my credibility challenged. 

I focused intently on my inquisitor, engaging his eyes in a locked look with mine, “I said I’m his bodyguard. If you want to try me – bring it on!” I didn’t just say it – I said it with all the conviction I could muster, feeling the power emanating from my black paratrooper boots dangling under my bar stool, my legs not long enough to reach the cross-bar. For a moment, the only sound was the accordion riff and typical grito (melodic holler) in the song on the jukebox, by Los Tigres del Norte.  

Suddenly the silence broke as broad friendly smiles crossed everyone’s face. As I breathed a sigh of relief, I looked up to a line of PBR’s on the dark, worn wooden bar in front of me, sent over by the other patrons. Waves and friendly nods paid homage to Manuel’s “bodyguard.”  

Manuel looked over proudly, “Hey vato – you’re my fucking bodyguard!” (For years, every time Manuel and I drank, he repeated the story of my standoff at Conajito’s.) “What the fuck,” I thought, “I might be a freshman in Madison, but tonight I’m Manuel’s bodyguard.” Luckily, no one challenged what “try me” meant.  

I continued my organizing with Obreros Unidos – Friday picket lines at Kroger’s grocery, printing Boycott Grapes bumper stickers, and leafleting students on campus to spread word of the strike. More than that, I was becoming a full-timer in something much broader - a revolutionary movement that covered many battlefronts.

Kenny Williamson: the Black Panthers & the P. Stones

One of the first friends I made at UW was a black student from Milwaukee named Kenny Williamson. Kenny and I couldn’t have come from more disparate backgrounds. I, of course, hailed from a stable, upwardly mobile, white, middle-class, East Coast, Jewish family. Kenny grew up in what some call a “broken family.” His birth mother had been a drug addict or prostitute (Kenny was never quite clear). He was raised by his grandmother under challenging circumstances. That meant coming up on the tough ghetto streets of Milwaukee’s north side, struggling to survive, without a family support network and with a minimum of formal schooling.  

At nine years old, Kenny had been scooped up by cops on 35th and Wisconsin. Milwaukee police were notorious for their racist behavior in the black community. He was roughed up and dropped off in a white neighborhood, left to make his way back to the ghetto. Kenny had been “recruited” to Madison to respond to the demand for more black faces; I had arrived in search of higher learning, and my own personal agenda to oppose the Vietnam War. 

For whatever cosmic reasons, which are often difficult to decipher, Kenny and I quickly bonded. We read and discussed revolutionary writers. We shared Franz Fanon, author of The Wretched of the Earth, and W.E.B. Dubois, Malcolm X, Mao Zedong and Che Guevara. We were both voracious adherents of the revolutionary vision emerging in the 60’s, that the world belonged to all of us and it depended on our efforts to transform it. Without forethought or hesitation, each of us accepted the role we felt destined to play.

We hung out together, smoked pot together, attended class together (although Kenny’s class attendance was a bit sporadic) and partied together. On Friday and Saturday nights, we shared many a bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine in its ubiquitous green bottle with screw-off metal cap – the cheapest alcohol legally purchasable by an 18-year old on the supermarket shelf. While the taste evoked a sickeningly sweet apple flavor, Boone’s Farm did the job, with a painful payoff the next morning. 

When we met, Kenny had already been active with the nascent Milwaukee chapter of the Black Panther Party, although due to internal problems the chapter spent much of its short life on “probation.” We spent a lot of time discussing the BPP and its mission to defend black people against police attacks and to create free breakfast and free medical care programs -- as Mao taught, to “Serve the People.” The Panthers offered a unique opportunity to stand up to the system that had held him down his entire life. For Kenny, dedication to the Party trumped his Madison “education.” 

Not one to be concerned with what others thought, Kenny proudly introduced me to other politically active black students. Some ultra-nationalists among them (often decked out in long, colorful dashikis) wanted nothing to do with white students, or white anything. In fact, some even shunned Kenny for being open about our friendship. 

In Chicago, the Panther Party, led by the legendary Fred Hampton (known as Chairman Fred), was building political ties with local street gangs - and not just from black neighborhoods. There were Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and poor whites. Hampton dubbed the alliance “the Rainbow Coalition.”

One Thursday, Kenny hit me up:

“Hey Melrod – tomorrow let’s take a ride to Chicago.” 

“Wow dude – what’s up? That’s a couple of hours drive.” 

“I promised the Party I’d go down to help provide security for Chairman Fred. He’s meeting on the Southside with Jeff Fort, the leader of the P. Stones [aka Black P. Stone Nation or BPSN, Chicago’s largest and most infamous street gang]. The Nation are the baddest black brothers on the Chicago streets. Chairman Fred wants to bring them into the revolutionary movement. He wants to turn their anger against the system into rage against the power structure. They got over 20,000 dudes in the BPSN. We can kick the pigs’ ass with the Nation on our side.”  

“Kenny – I appreciate the hook-up -- I truly do; but – I’m a white dude. What the fuck am I going to be doing hanging on a street corner on the South Side at midnight? I’ll look like a fucking Jew who got lost on the way to Shabbat services.”  

“It’s cool. No sweat -- I’ll handle it. You’re cool with me bro. You ain’t gots to come.”

I sat on pins and needles till Kenny got back to Madison. 

“Kenny – how’d it go?”

“Piece of cake – after everyone laid their guns on the street to talk. There was even members of Fort’s Main 21. [The Main 21 were the P Stone Nation’s leadership body.] The brothers was cool - negotiations went down smooth. We got us a deal. All hell’s gonna bust loose on the pigs if they attack the Party. We got ourselves a revolutionary army.” 

Not only did Kenny accurately identify the power of the alliance between Jeff Fort and Chairman Fred Hampton, but so did the FBI and its infamous chieftain J. Edgar Hoover (or as the Panthers called him, J. Edgar Hog). In January of 1969, eleven months before the Chicago police and FBI assassinated Chairman Fred in his bed, Hoover approved an insidious FBI plot to instigate disputes and possibly violence intended to derail the burgeoning Panther alliance with the P Stone Nation. The counterintelligence plan launched by Hoover that January constituted an integral component of the now infamous COINTELPRO campaign that successfully wrecked havoc and caused the loss of many activists’ lives in the revolutionary movement.  

The P. Stones grew from turf wars with older gangs over street corners on the south and west sides, into a budding criminal syndicate. Originally the “Blackstone Rangers,” after the south side ghetto street where they got started, the name change was a nod to growing black consciousness, “P” for power, people and pride. After the Panthers appeared with their black berets, the P. Stones began sporting red berets.

It is now well documented that FBI agents forged an anonymous letter to Jeff Fort:

Brother Jeff:

I've spent some time with some Panther friends on the West Side lately and I know what's been going on. The brothers that run the Panthers blame you for blocking their thing and there's supposed to be a hit out for you. I'm not a Panther, or a Ranger, just black. From what I see those Panthers are out for themselves, not black people. I think you ought to know what their [sic] up to, I know what I'd do if I was you. You might hear from me again.

[signed] A black brother you don't know

According to an internal FBI memo, since made public, the agency was fully cognizant, more accurately hopeful, that their fake letter to Fort might lead to violence and internecine warfare between the Panthers and the P. Stone Nation. The FBI, in secret, set blacks to fighting each other, rather than the system for which Hoover had appointed himself the ultimate guardian and bulwark. At the drop of a hat, Hoover acted to break the law or engage in whatever dirty tricks were required to advance his mission of destroying opposition to the power structure that he so dearly cherished.  

In reference to the fabricated letter to Fort, the FBI memo opined, 

It is believed that the above may intensify the degree of animosity between the two groups and occasion Fort to take retaliatory actions which could disrupt the BPP or lead to reprisals against their leadership. 

Impatience got the better of Hoover, however; just nine months after launching the plot to turn Jeff Fort against the BPP, he ordered a direct lethal hit on Chairman Fred. Some authorities on the subject have speculated that the reason J. Edgar Hoover ordered the assassination of Fred Hampton on December 4, 1969 had to do with the failure of FBI dirty tricks to turn the P. Stone Nation decisively against the Panthers. Fearing a permanent alliance, with a revolutionary army of tens of thousands of black men, Hoover did away with the one man who could breach the schism on Chicago’s streets between revolutionary struggle and gang violence. 

Party Time in Milwaukee

A couple of weekends after the BPP/BPSN parlay, Kenny and I headed to a party in Milwaukee. A political friend, Bruce, had invited us to a gathering at his north side apartment. As it turned out, Bruce and I were about the only white guys at the party. It was a  Black scene -- whites were not always welcome. All were drinking and smoking pot as the sounds of Motown filled the cramped space of the old second floor walk up. I may even have drunk enough wine to get up to dance, despite my total lack of rhythm or acceptable dance moves. Only the alcohol might have shielded me from the certain embarrassment.  

Feeling the need for a less raucous space, I retired with Kenny to a back bedroom, quieter but also filled with partygoers. I settled in, kicking back on a mattress set on the floor when I felt a violent tug. A big, muscular dark arm violently yanked me backward on the bed. The pressure from the arm instantly hampered my breathing, but more troubling – much to my trepidation, I felt a sharp, cold blade across my neck. Trying to wiggle or lift my body upright, only increased the pressure from the blade, just light enough to not break the skin of my neck above my Adam’s apple. 

“Shit!” I thought to myself. “What’s up? What the fuck did I do?”

From behind me, Willie – the wielder of the knife, in a heavy southern drawl, spoke to me for the first time that evening. While Willie had been eyeing me, I had been oblivious to his disdainful looks cast in my direction. 

“You little white mother fucker. What the fuck you doing down here slumming in the gheeeto? My brothers each killed white fuckers like you. Both are doing time – so I ain’t new to this shit with you white folk slumming with us niggers.” 

Willie’s words slurred and ran together from the alcohol that I could smell as he spoke. The message remained painfully clear, though – Willie wasn’t one bit happy with my presence at the party, despite Bruce having invited me, and despite the fact that Bruce was dating Willie’s girlfriend’s sister, and despite the fact that I had been minding my own business. 

I half reclined on the bed frozen in place – not moving and not speaking. Intuitively, I knew that anything I uttered would certainly inflame the already precarious situation and be taken by Willie as a provocation. For the moment, Willie’s internal demons saw me as the white race that had for generations persecuted his family and his family’s family in the deep south.  

I glanced over at Kenny who was standing silently with his back to the bedroom wall, briefcase in hand. Kenny often stood with his back cautiously to the wall to ensure that no one snuck up behind him. I guess my eyes looked pleading, as Kenny jumped in.  

“Listen my brother – that white dude is with me. He’s my partner so if you fuck with him – you fuck with me. I’m packing my shit in this briefcase. Don’t make me take it out. If I take it out – shit’s gonna happen that you and I don’t dig.” 

Even in his inebriated state, Kenny’s words sobered Willie. Kenny had a look on his face that I had never experienced or witnessed before. I could see and feel how unhappy he was with Willie and the shitty situation Willie had created. He looked like he’d rather be anywhere but in the back bedroom of Bruce’s apartment. I could also see Kenny’s unfaltering determination to not let anything bad happen to me – at least if he had anything to do about it. (It’s hard to imagine in retrospect that I was barely 19 and Kenny barely 20 at the time.)

“Hey brother – why you backing this white boy?” Willie stammered, offended that Kenny had bad rapped and called him out in public in front of his people. What had minutes before been a dance party had morphed in seconds into a highly charged racial conflict. I wondered if Willie’s wounded pride would make him more dangerous, hoping not. All the time, I remained painfully aware of the knife blade pressing against my neck.  

“I already told you brother – the white boy’s with me. That’s all I gotta say. Now let him up and we’ll be outta here.” 

I could feel Willie’s hot, acerbic alcohol breathe on the back of my neck. In fact, the little hairs on the back of my neck tingled as his breath touched my skin. I could also feel his hand beginning to shake slightly as the knife pressed on my neck. While I remained outwardly unflinching, the room felt like the temperature was rising, but it might have been merely my imagination or discomfort, or both.

“Aw fuck it. I was just b.s.-ing anyways. Get the fuck up white boy and get your ass outta here.” Willie had backed down – not true for his two brothers who were doing time. 

In seconds I was up and off the bed, heading out the door with Kenny a few feet behind me. Like a snake primed to strike, Kenny always checked out the 360 degrees surrounding him, and in this case surrounding the both of us. Without speaking, we got into my car. After a moment of deafening silence, I asked:

“Dude – do you really have a pistol in your briefcase?” 

“I guess we’ll just leave that for me to know.” answered Kenny as I dropped him at his grandmother’s. 

Black People’s Alliance - On Strike Shut it Down!

Madison included a large number of students from rural Wisconsin who headed to the state’s top university to hone their skills in the world of agriculture. Out of Madison’s tens of thousands of students, a mere handful were Black. Madison’s student population was so white that even Jewish kids stood out. Half of the campus buildings were devoted to farm related activities, such as dairy produced student-made ice cream.  

When I arrived, out of a student population of around 40,000, there were no more Black students than in 1964. A group of students had formed Concerned Black People a few years earlier, which became the Black People’s Alliance (BPA.) The BPA was nationalist-oriented, but Kenny Williamson became one of their leaders, a delicate balance for his more class-oriented Panther Party politics. 

During the 1968-1969 school year, the BPA reissued demands to the Administration that included recruitment of more minority students and faculty, and the creation of a black studies department - all intended to address the historical disparity faced by African-American students in an overwhelmingly white university. Despite the BPA persistently pressing the Administration to acknowledge and address historic inequities, little changed. 

The 1969 school year opened with the BPA again petitioning the Administration to respond to their demands; again, their efforts collided with an impenetrable brick wall. Frustrated, an angry squadron of Black students roamed classroom buildings exhorting fellow Black students to join a class boycott, while pulling fire alarms to disrupt “business as usual”.  

The BSA, at this juncture, had not reached out to white students. With such an infinitesimal  number of black students on campus, however, their ‘go it alone’ strategy seemed likely to fail without broader support. In fact, many white students embraced the BSA’s 13 demands, understanding that the University’s history of institutional racism needed to be remediated. Only a united front of all students wielded sufficient power to confront the University. 

On February 7, a contingent of 250 black and white students, with leaders Willie Edwards and Kenny Williamson at the helm, made an unannounced evening “visit” to the home of Chancellor Young, but were unceremoniously shooed away. Tired of the Chancellor’s stonewalling of their legitimate attempts to redress long-standing grievances, the BPA vowed that if their demands were not met, they would instigate a boycott of classes on the following Monday.  

Word circulated via the activist grapevine that the Chancellor had again rebuffed the BPA. That evening, several black student activists made it into the Fieldhouse (venue for athletic events) to demonstrate during the Ohio State-Wisconsin basketball game. Outside, in freezing temperatures, police held 300 of us at bay, repelling efforts to rush the Fieldhouse. 

Like a rugby scrum, we tightly massed together and tried to force our way through the solid wall of blue, only to be pushed back. I had never been in the Field House, not being a sport’s fan. I wondered, as we repeatedly mounted efforts to crash the doors, what it would be like if we made it into the midst of thousands of loyal, dedicated Badger fans. I never found out; impenetrable lines of cops in riot gear blocked our entry. 

In the opening salvo of what soon became days of confrontation, four Madison police were injured and four persons arrested. Governor Knowles emerged from the basketball game to find his car trashed. Several windows of the Fieldhouse had been broken out. UW administrators “deplored” the destruction and warned that property damage and disruption of classes would “not be tolerated.” Both sides threw down the gauntlet.  

Campus indignation ratcheted up. Levels of frustration with the intractability of the University to entertain Black students’ legitimate grievances reached a boiling point. Through the weekend, SDS discussed the critical importance of supporting the BSA. In meetings, we analyzed the importance of the 13 demands through the lens of a long history of structural and institutional racism, both at the University and in society in general. Back and forth we debated whether white students could be counted on for support, and if so, how many? We agreed to shoulder responsibility for educating white students to grasp that we all shared responsibility for righting wrongs perpetuated by a historical legacy of white supremacy. Like righteous warriors planning John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry, we pledged our commitment to the pending strike, and the struggle for black liberation.  

On Sunday, the Wisconsin Student Association met in an emergency session. A near unanimous motion passed in support of a class boycott. At the urging of WSA President David Goldfarb, the student Senate pledged a $3000 bail fund, established a $1000 legal aid fund and allocated $400 for publicity to support the BSA. 

Monday February 12, hundreds of  students -- mostly white -- streamed into the Great Hall at the Memorial Union. Excitement and nervous anticipation were palpable as we anxiously eyed each other, comrades preparing for battle; by now, we all expected the University to dig in and remain intransigent. A hush descended as Willie Edwards took the stage, decked out in a brightly colored dashiki. He was joined by his wife Libby with a flourishing Afro, my buddy Kenny, other black students wearing Panther black berets, and my close friend and SDS comrade Michael Rosen, representing the white students. 

Willie spoke impassionedly in a rapid, high-pitched cadence (similar to Huey Newton): 

The white pig power structure and their bootlicking lackeys in the administration have been playing us for Uncle Toms. We been demanding the same shit for five years. We got … 13 non-negotiable demands we want you’ll to support. This is about black liberation. This is about black power. This is about freedom. We gonna shut this mother down unless our demands are met! You’re either with us or against us. 

Our aim is to bring the University Administration to its knees! 

An adrenaline rush tingled inside me, raising goosebumps of expectancy. Willie’s words, delivered in the parlance of Black revolution hung in the air, dousing us with righteous inspiration. The hundreds of us white students filling the hall had been transported to the epicenter of the impending black-led rebellion. We occupied ground zero. We were galvanized by the opportunity to change the trajectory of history to right long-standing societal wrongs. 

While we couldn’t erase the horrors of slavery or Jim Crow, or the years of racial abuse we studied in sociology and history 101 – we could transform the present to recognize that the black liberation struggle was going down, right now and right here - and we were part of it!  

As if on cue, we rose as one from our stadium seating and marched out of the Union; as we headed up Bascom Hill, our numbers grew to 1500 as students were attracted by the contagious magnetism of our shared mission. We all fell in line behind a contingent of Black students – most with large Afro’s, black berets and clenched fists raised high. Chants of “Bang bang – Ungawa – Black Power!” and “On Strike – Shut it Down” - echoed off the rows of classroom buildings that lined Bascom Hill. As we climbed the icy hill, my heart raced with excitement. 

While I didn’t go to Badger football games, I imagined the feeling of thousands of students united as one - overcome by the excitement and exhilaration of the moment. If a mountain had arisen in our path, we would have rolled over it, propelled by our collective charge to right hundreds of years of wrongs committed against Blacks in America. 

At the top of the hill, we gathered in front of venerable Bascom Hall, our numbers still growing like moths attracted to light. Willie took the bullhorn:  

The university, their jackanapes in the white power structure that control it have failed to meet a single one of our righteous demands. We’ve been riding on the back of this bus for way too many years – for hundreds of mother fuckin’ years. This shit has got to stop! If our demands aren’t met in full – tomorrow we shut this mother fucker down! 

A unified, collective roar arose from the crowd; according to plan we broke into smaller, mobile groups. Contingents split off heading toward ten major classroom buildings – Bascom, Van Hise (which housed most administration offices), Education and Social Studies. Once in the buildings, we marched into classrooms to seize the lectern - either politely by requesting the professor’s permission, or, in the case of recalcitrant professors, shunting them aside. 

I still feel the thrill of turning the classroom paradigm upside down. Tenured professors no longer commanded unchallenged authority, their pedestals having been kicked out from under them and their lecterns commandeered. There I stood with others as we took charge of the classroom and educated fellow students to the justness of the strike, oblivious to the consequences of our actions in stark contravention of university rules. We alternated amongst ourselves to convey our message:

We’re here to let you know that the university is being shut down as of today. The time for business as usual has come to an end! The Administration has, year after year, rebuffed all attempts by black students to rectify historical racism. There will no longer be classes allowed to function until the Administration grants the Black Student Alliance’s 13-demands. 

Our pitch delivered, our “roving picket line” moved to the next classroom, and on to the next, repeating the call to shut the university down. 

While the BPA’s demands did not directly touch the academics of white students, we strove to convince the student body that “Black Demands” were all our demands. Many students walked by, their heads hung low. We remained undeterred, breaking down the message that racial injustice directed at black students should not be tolerated in an equitable society and needed redress. More students listened and pondered; growing numbers joined the strike, understanding the fundamental fairness of the BSA demands. 

As soon as my eyes opened every morning, despite the bone-chilling cold of our poorly heated walk-up apartment, I jumped out of bed with anticipation of how successful our picket line would be that day. Before classes convened, Black students and white supporters met on the Mall and divided into groups to picket each campus building’s entrance. Day-by-day, our lines expanded to more campus buildings; the University ground to a halt.  

Backlash erupted from conservative white students, members of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), a nasty right wing organization instigated by arch-conservative William F. Buckley, and once led by Ronald Reagan. Emanating from the Law School, YAF members argued that the BSA demands were “illegal”, and not supportable. YAF adopted their strike-name - Hayakawas - after the infamous right wing president of San Francisco State University, S.I. Hayakawa, who had viciously and forcefully opposed the strike for Black Studies at SFU, the longest student strike in U.S. history. YAF members donned armbands with the letter “H” on them. 

YAF President Charles Yanke told the press, “What we objected to was that the protestors felt they themselves were the enlightened elite and were imposing their will on us peons.” YAF, despite their big-talk and loud-mouths, lacked substantial support. They passed out legalistic sounding fliers questioning the lawfulness of the University entertaining the BSA’s demand.  

Overnight, venerable Bascom Hall, which could have been located on any East Coast Ivy League campus, transformed into a militarized command post. The university jettisoned all pretense of academic neutrality. With long batons at ready, helmets and masks covering their heads and faces, riot police repeatedly charged our picket lines. A friend recently sent me an archival black and white photo. I look very young with a barely visible, adolescent mustache, 1960’s sideburns and puffy military parka. About 30 of us blocked the entrance to a classroom building. At center stage, stood a Black student out of central casting, decked out in black beret and dark sunglasses.  

When a phalanx of riot police, in tight formation, moved menacingly in our direction, we broke ranks into mobile smaller groups to avoid arrest, and scurried into the building to disrupt classes. Again, we marched to the front of the class, seizing the lectern to urge those not yet on strike to join us. I shuddered with anticipation as the police phalanx entered the building; we retreated, one step ahead of the cops and reformed our picket line at another building. 

The BSA had called for non-violence, so we avoided direct confrontation with the police, staying one step beyond their reach. When our cat and mouse game of repositioning ourselves by moving from building to building became impossible, faced with overwhelming legions of police reinforcements, we marched off campus into the city streets, chanting and blocking traffic. Like fish swimming upstream – we marched against the flow of traffic, in-and-out of lanes, making it difficult for police to chase us without breaking ranks. 

We  blocked intersections, bringing traffic to a chaotic halt. Once the police arrived, we dispersed, only to regroup at the next intersection. We darted around cars, dodging left-and-right to avoid pursuing police. We regrouped at the next intersection amidst a cacophony of honking horns and charging police. After hours of cat-and-mouse chases both sides retired, exhausted by freezing temperatures, having jumped over snow-banks, and slipped and slid on ice-covered streets.  

Momentum extended beyond the ranks of committed activists. Athletes on Badger sports teams, holding the status of gods, risked their athletic standing and even their enrollment; six black athletes boycotted the track meet against Michigan University. Suddenly, everyone rode the wave with us, wanting to stand on the right side of history. 

Despite continuing BSA attempts to negotiate, the Administration remained intractable; strike leaders proclaimed an escalation and called for more forceful, impenetrable blocking of classroom doors and disruption of classes. We believed there existed overwhelming support among the student body, at least in the liberal arts, convinced the majority would honor and abide by the escalation. 200 city police, county sheriff’s deputies and traffic officers --- riot equipped from head-to-toe – moved in to clear us from Bascom Hall, where I was stationed. 

For the first time, fistfights and shoving matches broke out with strike opponents, including with Hayakawas wearing their ‘nom de guerre’ H armbands, who formed flying wedges to smash through picket lines. We huddled tightly together and physically repelled their repeated charges.  

Ralph Hanson, Chief of the campus police, publicly admitted that “350 police were unable to cope with the situation”; strikers had gained the upper hand. Governor Knowles issued a statewide call to mobilize the sons of farmers and factory workers in the National Guard to standby for assignment to Madison, America’s most active war zone outside Vietnam. 

February 12, more than 2000 students blocked the entrance to all major campus buildings, including Van Hise Hall, where University President Harrington’s office was located. We had finally shuttered the entire liberal arts campus, and even brought the closure to President Harrington’s front door.

The next day, February 13, the tide turned. YAF ran amok with impunity; emboldened by the State’s overwhelming response. They formed squads of ten, wearing blue H armbands. Among the “H” squads were large white players from the Badger football squad. Hayakawa's cowardly ambushed random black students, especially women walking alone at night.

A spokesman from the Chancellor’s office announced, via the Daily Cardinal, that the university planned to “get tough”. He complained, “We’re getting tired of being pushed around. They [the strikers can] play Mickey Mouse games with us for 100 days.” 

The Guard rolled into town in caravans of green army trucks; youthful, puzzled faces peered out from under canvas tarps barely shielding the occupants from the bitter cold. Upwards of 1000 Guardsmen, dressed in full battle gear, green fatigues with fixed bayonets, as if dispatched to the jungles of Vietnam, marched onto campus in tight, locked-step military formation. Emboldened Guardsmen recklessly sped around campus in camouflaged jeeps with high caliber machine guns mounted on the rear. Guard helicopters circled overhead and directed the movement of troops.  

Baby-faced Guardsmen ringed campus buildings. Initially, some students naively implored the Guardsmen to show solidarity with the strike and lower their bayonets. These students, not yet battle-hardened, child-like naivete in their eyes, engaged the Guard in futile discussions, inches from the blades of their razor sharp bayonets. Their impassioned pleas fell on deaf ears, as unyielding officers ordered their troops to clear picket lines, bayonets at ready. 

Military units, combined with the entire Madison police force, forcefully opened safe pathways into classrooms. Thousands more students, previously mere observers on the sidelines, grew infuriated by the Guard’s armed presence. The machine gun equipped jeeps speeding around campus prompted many to question the role and unyielding stance of the University. Unsheathed bayonets, silhouetted by buildings named Education, Sociology and Science, angered students who had remained neutral. Many potential draftees, attending the university to avoid Vietnam, witnessed the war at home. Their time to take a stand had arrived. 

The BSA and SDS issued a clarion call to all supporters for a mass march on the domed Capitol – home to the Wisconsin legislature and the seat of State power. By all news accounts, 12,000 students – over one-in-three of the student body – gathered in throngs as the sun fell, the skies darkened, and cold wind whipped through our ranks like a knife. With tectonic force, thousands surged into the streets with placards and banners supporting the black liberation struggle and the BSA’s 13 demands. Never had such a powerful force of humanity gathered under one banner in Madison’s history. 

Black student leaders held flaming gas soaked torches aloft, turning the night skies orange. We marched up State street, an endless mass of humankind on a singular mission to disavow white supremacy and support the BSA. We snaked up State street bonded in multi-racial unity, enraged by the University administration and the Governor who had unleashed the armed might of the State, the Madison police force, and the jack-booted National Guard to suppress our movement for justice.  

At one point, from the front of the march, I looked back at the endless flow filing State street from end-to-end. The sheer expanse of humanity was both humbling and inspiring. Never would I have predicted, nor allowed myself to imagine, that 12,000 would stand solidly with the BSA and Madison’s Black students. For that moment, revolution was in the air and racial justice appeared just over the horizon.  

Like a tornado that arrived with thunder and fury, but dissipated after having spent its massive energy, the gargantuan march marked the pinnacle of the strike. The National Guard had placed Madison and the campus under a virtual lockdown. Before we could assemble a significant gathering of students, unsheathed bayonets and jeeps with machine guns forced us to disperse. The Guard had regained control of our streets and our campus; we no longer had the wind at our backs.  

By February 18, student support had dissipated to the extent that the BSA temporarily suspended the strike. Despite our most sincere desires, momentum no longer existed to shutter the university. The vast majority of white students, feeling overwhelmed by the forces arrayed against us, hesitantly straggled back to classes.  

On February 27, the Daily Cardinal, captured the Black Student Strike two weeks earlier: 

“Students were more in control of the UW-Madison campus than the administration was by Feb. 13, 1969.” 

Truly, those many thousands of white students, mostly Wisconsin kids, had taken an unprecedented stand. They willingly jeopardized their educations, and even risked being thrown out of school, to support demands that expressly, and solely, addressed the historical disparity faced by blacks at UW Madison -- and in essence, across the nation. Collectively, we had proved that despite years of racist divisions, thousands had left behind the barriers of history and marched forward as one. 

The most significant concrete achievement of the strike was the establishment of UW’s Afro-American Studies Program, which launched in fall 1970. A graduate student at Madison, researching the strike, wrote in 2011:

[The Black Campus Movement] paved the way toward appreciation of difference within the university, which aided other groups that did not have a voice within the institution to raise consciousness about their particular struggle for recognition and respect. Thus, the story of the Black Campus Movement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, while a local example, nevertheless serves as an example of how change within higher education occurred. (…) As a social movement that operated within the Black Power era, the Black Campus Movement helped African Americans to move from the margins of American society.

Paris in Madison

I had fled the dorms before the end of my first year, moving with a roommate into a third-floor walk-up apartment in the epicenter of the student ghetto. I moved to the 500 block of Mifflin Street, the beating heart of the youth counterculture. For blocks in all directions, thousands of us, all young and free from parental bonds, were packed into wood-frame houses needing fresh paint, long neglected by absentee landlords who rented to ever-changing generations of faceless students.

I can picture ours—dull grey, rotting wood porch, roof shingles missing, rusting gutters, and creaky narrow wooden stairs leading up to our third-floor attic apartment. I know the exact street number, even though it’s been more than fifty years since I sat on those sagging steps or heard the unforgettable creaking of those narrow wooden stairs. Lest I forget my address of May 1969, page 27 of my thousand page FBI dossier that I hold in my hand as I write this informs me that I lived at 506 W. Mifflin Street.  

I often walked up the block past a few similarly nondescript, beat-up houses and across the street to the Mifflin Street Co-op. I’d pause just inside the front door, helping myself to free peanuts from a huge wooden barrel, and talk with other students—shelling and tossing—about politics and culture. Fliers announcing political and cultural events of every stripe covered the Co-op’s windows and walls, and a larger-than-life, black-and-white poster of Ho Chi Minh dominated the front plate-glass window. The first of its kind, the Co-op was initiated by students in the 1960’s, a food cooperative and a symbol and direct manifestation of the emerging youth movement. Students owned the corner store, peanuts and all. There was no boss, only workers.   

That spring, 1969, I’d hang out there most every day. In the spring of 1969, some people meeting at the Mifflin Co-op decided to have a street dance on the first weekend of May in order to celebrate “their” community and the coming of spring. A loose coalition of conscious student activists, political and social, began planning the first Mifflin Street Block Party.  

While the never-ending Vietnam War was in the back of all our minds, the Block Party was to be a celebration, but with a them versus us overtone. A notice in the Daily Cardinal read:

Why don’t we do it in the road? 4 P.M. until …… 500 block W. Mifflin. Be there. Off the PIG! Roll you own reality. Bring share, Food, Fun, Drums, Dogs. [Emphasis added.]

The festivities were to be expressed with music and dancing, light-heartedness and fun, rather than the sharp political conflict and violent confrontations that marked much of the school year. While it was implicitly a public castigation of the war, it was also an occasion to celebrate the mutual interests and shared aspirations of students and youth in shaping political events and developing an unfettered common culture based on our shared humanity. 

We stapled posters all over the campus and on city streets, armed with staple gun and evaporated milk for glue. I was on a shared mission with a tribe of youthful cultural and political warriors. The posters featured the iconic Zig-Zag man (the pot-smoking logo of the popular brand of rolling papers, known to one and all), and issued the clarion call to “Roll Your Own Reality.” No pole or empty window was spared. 

We asked nothing of the University or the City of Madison. The party was to be an expression of our politicized lifestyle, the fusion of the cultural and political movements that dominated campus life. What we didn't know was that the Block Party was a precursor to the bifurcation of those two movements—a regrettable, but permanent parting of the ways—and to collateral damage from the violent events soon to unfold. 

Even though the gathering was to be mainly cultural, it was scheduled for Saturday, May 3, the one-year anniversary of the massive French student rebellion that, in solidarity with striking workers, had nearly toppled the French government. Students just like us had almost overthrown a sitting Western government. Images of street barricades and flying cobblestones captured our imaginations and inspired us as comrades across the ocean.  

Predictably, the Madison police denied permission to hold the party. To Chief Wilbur Emery, the party represented “a challenge to the city” and “could not be condoned.” Of course, denial by the authorities only fueled our determination.  Everything “they” said, we opposed. Everything we did or said, “they” condemned. Each side viewed the very same world but from diametrically opposed perspectives. We were sworn enemies, having faced off repeatedly throughout the year, separated by irreconcilable visions of what the future offered and to whom the world belonged.  

My front steps were prime real estate. I sat next to my roommate Dick, a rural Midwestern kid with tight Shirley Temple curls and horn-rimmed glasses, who always wore blue jeans and white t-shirt accented by a blue kerchief tied around his neck.  

We watched as kids began gathering a few yards away at the intersection of Mifflin and Basset, like little metal flakes being irresistibly drawn toward an invisible magnet. Shorts, flip-flops, and T-shirts were the uniform of the day.  Clean-cut students in Greek-lettered tees came from fraternity row on Langdon Street. Young, innocent kids from the farmlands of Wisconsin ventured over from the Ag School dorms far away on Elm Drive. Zoology majors, English majors, and Business majors all came as if summoned by the pied piper, the Zig-Zag man. 

We sat crammed shoulder-to-shoulder on the wooden front steps of neglected houses owned by absentee landlords. As the day progressed, kids spread out onto sidewalks, balconies, and porches, and every open space filled to capacity.   

In the heat of the afternoon, made warmer still by the crush of bodies, sounds of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Crosby Stills & Nash, Canned Heat, Sly and The Family Stone, and Big Brother and the Holding Company could be heard for blocks. (All California bands -- the Summer of Love had meaning in the Midwest.) Our anthems buoyed our spirits. There was no one over twenty-five—the world was ours for the taking.   

The pungent smell of marijuana, weak at first, filled the air by midafternoon. Joints, rolled in Zig Zag papers, passed from hand to hand. Listening to a guitar riff from Jimi, I took a toke. Twenty or so people sat hunched on my front stairs, which sagged from the weight of so many bodies, as did every other set of stairs up and down Mifflin Street. I basked in the levity and gaiety of the moment, relishing the carefree enjoyment of life. The only rule - don’t Bogart that joint.   

Hand-holding kids with long hair and wearing brightly colored tie-dye clothing circle-danced in the middle of the street, hippie-type dancing emanating an aura of youthful, easy innocence. Under blue skies made bluer by a bright sun, more and more migrated from steps and porches into the street—“do it in the road.”  

Late in the afternoon a squad car ominously arrived, creeping slowly down the 400 block of Mifflin, stopping dead in the middle of the street.  Several others followed closely behind—the tail of the snake.

Responding to an alleged “noise complaint,” Madison Police Department Inspector Herman Thomas arrived with about twenty officers decked-out in full riot gear. Inspector Tomas was quoted as saying, “We’re going down there … we’re going to crack some skulls.” No pretense of civility, they came to do battle. Their self-imposed mission was "to keep the street open." It was an apt metaphor—a symbol. There was no traffic, it didn't really matter if the street was “open,” but the police were there to keep it open, no matter what the collateral damage. It was a head-on collision of two opposing cultures, and the intersection for that inevitable collision was Mifflin and Bassett Streets.

As the squad cars slowly rolled along Mifflin, I left the porch and drifted up the street, past the poster of a smiling Ho Chi Minh. I was eager to be close to the action, feeling a wave of nervous anticipation in the pit of my stomach, a sensation I knew all too well after dozens of violent confrontations with the police over the past year.  

Kids snake-danced around the squad cars, encircling them like maypoles, merrily celebrating the rites of spring and flashing V-signs for peace. Suddenly, the cops loudly barked their order to open the street for traffic. Kids continued to frolic and dance, doing nothing wrong. Then came the announcement echoing loudly through the bullhorn: “You are ordered to immediately disperse. This is an illegal gathering.”  

Still, music and dancing filled the street, as many of the kids didn’t pick up on the menacing tone in the police command. I immediately suspected what was about to jump off. I turned to Dick, “Get ready.” He took off his glasses and stashed them in his pocket.

On a predetermined signal, lines of police swept down the street, wildly swinging riot-length billy clubs like baseball bats. Unprovoked anger and rage appeared to well up from deep within them. They pushed, shoved, and hit unsuspecting students at random. With each swing of a club, a blow for the sanctity of their status quo and perceived authority. 

We watched in astonishment as police grabbed and beat people. This was the first time the police had shown such unbridled viciousness toward kids, whose only wrongdoing was having a good time on a sunny afternoon. There were no picket signs, no chants, and no angry speeches, merely music and dancing. A cultural war was unfolding: we were on the front lines of a domestic war for liberation - ala Vietnam.  

A collective feeling of shock, then mounting anger, swept over us. We had done absolutely nothing to warrant their vicious attack. We started to fight back; the first few rocks and bottles flew. Veterans of earlier confrontations began forming into affinity groups of four or five, each named for a revolutionary figure: Che, Mao, Lenin, Abbie (Hoffman), Fred (Hampton), Huey (Newton), Malcolm (“X”). Each affinity group acted in concert to push cars and debris into the street and into the path of the police. If members of the group became separated, one would yell out “Che” or “Mao” and the group quickly reassembled. When the police charged, each affinity group protected its members.  

The shatter  of glass breaking on the pavement replaced the tunes of Hendrix, Janis, and The Dead. Garbage cans clanged and spewed out their debris as wildly weaving squad cars smashed into them, sending them bouncing in all directions. Above the ruckus, we heard the mingled shouts of police and students engaged in ever more violent clashes.  

Momentarily, the police were caught off guard. They were surprised by our collective willingness to stand our ground and fight back. As we charged, they retreated back up Mifflin Street in the direction of the Capitol, away from Uncle Ho, who continued to smile benevolently.  

A yellow taxi tried to weave its way down Mifflin Street and the driver—later to be Madison's Mayor Paul Soglin—was hauled out and arrested for “blocking traffic.” As the police regrouped, word passed among them to launch the first barrage of tear gas. Each officer pulled a gas mask from a pouch on his belt, masking his face in black rubber with bulging bug eyes.  

Suddenly, the blue skies gave way as  canisters spewing tear gas rained down on us. The acrid smell of the first clouds of tear gas cut the sweet aroma of marijuana. The mood darkened to menacing and ominous. More squad cars raced erratically down the middle of Mifflin Street, scattering students in their wake like so many bowling pins. More police wearing black riot helmets and armed with long batons jumped out and chased fleeing students up front porches and around the sides of homes. 

Pushed back by overwhelming force and the sting of tear gas, we retreated into the alleyways to gulp clearer air, regrouped, and ran out again to the street to battle. We dragged garbage cans and threw debris into the street to block speeding police cars. Smoke from burning garbage cans mixed with acrid tear gas. Affinity teams pushed parked cars into the traffic lane to create more effective barricades.

I felt as the Paris communards must have, throwing up barricades to defend our newly proclaimed commune. It was an exhilarating moment to be in the streets with the same resolve that our fellow students in France had shown one year before.    

The police charged repeatedly, launching canister after canister of tear gas, blanketing the street with blinding, biting, dense clouds of gas. Each time they chased us off the street, we picked up more rocks and charged back behind our barricades. I was part of history, standing shoulder to shoulder with my fellow communards. We were striking a blow against the hated Vietnam War. I picked up a rock at my feet, wishing it was a cobblestone, and threw it at the fast approaching squad car. 

Billowing clouds of tear gas washed over the street, porches, and alleys, and drifted into homes through open summer windows. Observers became participants as every eye felt the sting of the gas. There was no neutral ground.  

As darkness fell, running battles intensified. We used the alleys between the rows of homes as pathways to maneuver around the police and circle behind their lines. Word spread that a cloth soaked in vinegar offered protection against the irritation caused by the gas. Torn bed sheets and rags appeared seemingly out of nowhere to become our gas masks. Under the cover of darkness, we pushed more rubble and cars into the street. Behind the houses, we stockpiled rocks for ammunition.  

As the police wildly raced their cars into the burning barricades, hails of rocks and bottles clobbered them. The cops with clubs, increasingly pissed at our fortitude, started coming down harder on unprotected, vulnerable heads. Dozens of bloodied and broken students were whisked away in ambulances with sirens blaring. 

Next to me I saw a club open a skull like a split watermelon; blood dribbled onto the pavement leaving a trail of red. Blood soaked the victim’s tie-dye shirt, blocking out the pretty circular pattern of exploding pastels. Cops dragged the injured kid down the sidewalk and slammed him into the rear seat of a squad car. It sped off, lights flashing, as we pummeled it with rocks.  

On Saturday night, the Madison Bureau Chief of the UPI reported watching as a cop separated from his group, pulled his revolver and aimed it at students who had him cornered. By midnight, both sides were tiring of the back-and-forth cat-and-mouse battles. In the dark shadows under the hazy glow of street lamps, burning debris, broken glass, and hundreds of rocks littered the pavement. Smoke hung like a blanket over the garbage-strewn street. An unofficial, undeclared truce descended.  

Battle-weary, Dick and I turned to go home, realizing we were only a few steps from our apartment. As we climbed up to the porch and into the narrow hallway, the acrid smell of tear gas followed us through the door. My eyes watered and my face burned; my clothes reeked from the pervasive gas.  

I stripped and jumped into the shower to scrub off the smell. Gas burned my nostrils and tasted like a bad hangover, coating my tongue and mouth. I turned up the water temperature and felt the hot water beat down on my sore muscles. It stung my face and eyes. The small windowless bathroom filled with steam as the water drummed, washing off the remnants of the battle. 

The fire of the street had tested my courage. I was pleased with myself and my fellow students—my comrades and fellow communards. Under unprovoked attack by riot police, we had built barricades, held our ground, and engaged in relentless battle without retreating. No surrender, no retreat! 

Exhausted, I flopped down on the worn, faded Salvation Army couch in our “living room”—a narrow hallway with a sharply sloping ceiling that followed the peak in the roof. The angle was so steep and the space so tight that you bumped your head if you got up from the couch too fast.   

I was tired, but exhilarated. I looked up, my eyes still blurry and stinging from tear-gas. On the wall just a few feet opposite the sagging couch, I glanced at two tan-colored posters with red lettering. I had put them up as inspiration earlier in the year. Each displayed a quote from Chairman Mao: “People of the world, unite and defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs! People of the world, be courageous, dare to fight, defy difficulties and advance wave upon wave. Then the whole world will belong to the people.”  I pondered the day’s events and thought to myself, “The world doesn’t yet belong to us, but it doesn’t seem so far out of reach.” 

The next day students all across campus buzzed about what had gone down. Those who hadn't attended the block party heard multiple stories about the night’s events, which soon glowed with an aura of mystical romanticism.  

The campus was electrified. Everyone knew someone, activist or not, who had been beaten or arrested: frat row students, Ag students, science and arts students, male and female. The police attack was widely perceived as a capricious and unprovoked onslaught on the student body at large.  

Across town, the city administration was also electrified and on high alert. In a thinly veiled attempt to justify their unprovoked action, police officials held a news conference to display items they characterized as the “weapons” with which they were attacked—a penknife and a meat cleaver.  No officer, however, could even claim to have been injured.

A number of us sensed a continued will to resist and spread the word in the walkways, dorms, and other student housing that there would be a second block party that night, but without the music and the gaiety. We felt a deep sense of injustice that couldn’t be ignored. Word spread – “Night Time Is The Right Time”.  

At twilight on Sunday, students began drifting into the Mifflin/Bassett area. By the time  streetlights were illuminated, steps, porches, and roofs were again filled with kids anxiously waiting to see what was about to go down. Most carried little plastic bags stuffed with rags soaked in vinegar.  

The first tentative kids moved out into the street to test the waters, as if dipping a toe to check the temperature. Emboldened, more kids moved from stairs and porches into the street. We wanted to block the street to show the police we owned it. The 400 block of Mifflin Street was ours.

Several dozen squad cars clustered around the corner on Basset Street and up Mifflin Street. Police officers lounged in small groups standing or leaning against their cars with riot helmets tilted cavalierly back on their heads, smoking and talking nervously. Periodically, they pointed their clubs menacingly in our direction.  

One officer pointed his club like a rifle towards where I was standing with a small group of friends and pretended to pull the trigger. We yelled back, “Fuck off!” 

I turned and said to my friends, “It’s just a matter of minutes.”  

Sunday night, there was no pretense of responding to a “noise complaint.” No car dared drive down the gauntlet of Mifflin Street. The street was eerily silent as the two opposing camps warily watched, anticipating each other’s next move, both knowing that the inevitable was soon to unfold.  

On cue, the police marched in formation toward Mifflin to "open the street," as if that very act would strike a blow for their authority and for victory in Vietnam. As they moved steadily and slowly towards us, jabbing their clubs out in front of them in unison, they grunted a collective roar intended to intimidate. 

During the day we stockpiled rocks and fashioned artillery piles in alleys and alongside houses. On Sunday night, there was no pause between the announcement to disperse and their first charge. Nor did we expect one - last night’s truce had ended.  As they charged, we chanted, “The Streets Belong to the People! The Streets Belong to the People!”

Again, we young communards hastily erected barricades behind which we gathered, shoulder-to-shoulder. As the police launched their first attack, we barraged them with missiles. On the second night, there was no Janis Joplin or Grateful Dead, just pitched battles. 

Our guerilla tactics had become more sophisticated. Everyone knew that kerchiefs soaked in vinegar and water would filter the worst of the tear gas and had come prepared. The police switched to CS gas, a much more potent riot control chemical agent. They sprayed thick clouds of CS gas, burning our skin and eyes. I could feel little stinging particles clinging to my skin and irritating my eyes and nose. It was as if hot, sharp sand lodged under my eyelids. Vinegar rags no longer protected.   

The potent CS gas reacted with moisture on our skin and in our eyes, causing a burning sensation, much more intense than tear gas was the night before. All around me were kids whose eyes streamed with tears and noses dripped with mucus. A few who had come in direct contact with the gas violently coughed and vomited.  

Pitched battles raged late into the night as both sides took casualties and dozens of bleeding kids were hauled off to jail. In the midst of the melee, my high school  friend Fred ventured  to his second floor bedroom at 442 Mifflin. He had a birds-eye view of the battle. A kid named Ollie was pinned against the wall of a white wood shingled house below Fred’s window. Two cops held him in a crucifixion stance while repeatedly cracking his head with their clubs. Blood streamed down the white wall behind him in bright red rivulets as he vainly struggled to free himself.  

A collective rage welled up. One of ours was being beaten bloody by out-of-control thugs. Fred positioned his stereo speakers out the window.  At full volume we heard the Rolling Stones Street Fighting Man: “Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet … ‘Cause summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street.” Other students followed Fred’s example and Street Fighting Man blared from windows up and down the 400 block.

It was on. We launched a ferocious assault of rocks at the cops beating Ollie. The cops broke ranks and fled up Mifflin. Their senior officer vainly tried to shape them into a flying wedge. The rookie cops hesitated from fear or inexperience. More senior officers moved to the front and led a charge, clubs flailing in all directions, into our ranks.  

The heavy clouds of CS gas drove us out of the congested residential area of the battle zone. The skirmish lines moved beyond Mifflin/Bassett into the downtown State Street commercial district, the Southeast residence halls and up to Langdon Street by the lake.  The tear gassing of crowds on State Street led to further eruptions of violence; those attacked trashed at least eleven storefront windows. 

Affinity groups maneuvered around the police, who chased and then beat students who they caught. Days before, frat row on Langdon had been home to beer bashes and Toga parties. Today, from behind fraternity houses came steady barrages of rocks and bottles forcing the police to retreat.  

On the third night, battle lines again formed. By this time, however, our spirit had begun to dissipate and classes had resumed. After the third night both sides fell into an undeclared truce. In all, over 70 were seriously injured and over a 100 students were arrested. Although quiet outwardly prevailed, inwardly intense battle lines had been drawn.  

The ongoing brutality of the war in Vietnam took on new meaning for the students. The nightly news regurgitated the same, tired drum roll. The all too familiar retinue of politicians and military commanders promised that victory over communism was within reach—no more dominoes would fall. Young people, who days before had been studying in lecture halls, were now testing out their revolutionary theories in the streets.  

Looking back, contemplating events in retrospect, some might see young lawless miscreants acting out antisocial impulses, blowing off steam.  This is a mistake. On one side of the barricades on Mifflin Street was the system and its defenders in blue riot gear, and on the other side were thousands of students who intensely aspired for a better world, a new world, although most couldn’t exactly define what it would look like, only what it wouldn’t. 

The Block Party didn’t end the war, but it became a permanent cultural/political event in Madison. But the violence of May 1969 had its impact on the participants. The hippies on campus began withdrawing from politics to pursue their alternate lifestyle, while the political activists increasingly rejected claims that lifestyle had any meaningful effect on politics. We charted our future direction—there was no going back. Along with like-minded others, I chose the political road, opting to dedicate myself to the struggle for revolutionary change. 

The Union Makes Us Strong

That summer, 1969, I wholeheartedly devoted myself to working 24/7 with the Salas brothers, organizing the fledgling farmworkers’ union in the canneries and growing fields of rural Wisconsin. Proudly armed with a newly laminated Obreros Unidos card (stamped “organizer”), signed by President Jesus Salas, I permitted myself to daydream that I had roots in the militant 1965 wildcat strike by Filipino workers in Delano, California that launched the United Farmworkers Union (UFW). My commitment to help launch the new union brought on an adrenaline rush. 

During the summer of 1969, I lived in a house (formerly my friend Fred’s at 442 Mifflin) that headquartered the Obreros Unidos union organizing efforts. (Manuel had dubbed the residence Solidarity House, after the UAW headquarters in Detroit.)  One of the adjacent lots sat empty, cluttered with unsightly debris, broken bottles, and garbage. Community members decided to clean it up. We worked tirelessly under the blazing summer sun and turned it from an eyesore into a makeshift park. We utilized the vacant lot for fund-raising efforts for Obreros Unidos, including a visit by United Farm Workers’ legendary leader Cesar Chavez, to solicit financial resources for the California grape boycott. 

We worked for days tirelessly cleaning the neglected lot and hanging decorations, preparing for Cesar’s visit. When Cesar arrived, we served plate after plate of Mexican food to hundreds of students and community members who turned out in droves to support the UFW. I was pouring in sweat while stirring a huge cauldron of black beans, doling out portions to a snaking line of supporters carrying paper plates. Cesar spoke to those gathered about the importance of the grape boycott and union organizing efforts among Latino and Filipino farmworkers, even though the efforts were transpiring thousands of miles away in the fields of Delano, California. For many, Cesar’s speech marked the first time they had been exposed to the idea of joining forces with workers struggling for dignity and a decent life. 

We hoped Obreros Unidos would develop into a statewide local that might affiliate with the California-based United Farm Workers (UFW). Mexican-American workers populated the yearly migrant stream that traveled to Wisconsin in the summer for the harvest and back to Texas for the winter, trying to survive on the meager wages earned during the harvest.

But even after a supportive visit by Cesar Chavez, our efforts were frustrated. At summer’s end, we summed up that to truly build an ongoing Wisconsin-based farmworkers’ union, we needed dedicated organizers to travel with the migrant stream throughout the year, not just during harvest season. While I contemplated what such a life might mean for me, I wasn’t yet ready to make that leap. I had promised myself to leave Madison with a degree of some sort before I made the life decision of how to personally commit myself to the struggle to bring into being a better world. 

One of Obreros Unidos’s first organizing events entailed a visit to the School for Workers, where union representatives and rank-and-file unionist activists came to the Madison campus for a week to learn the history and practice of trade unionism. A bit apprehensively, I accompanied Manuel to a class filled with members of the United Steelworkers of America (USW). 

As I looked out at the mostly white steelworkers, my stomach knotted. The room was filled to capacity with a bunch of redneck looking guys – all white men - sporting union t-shirts and close cropped haircuts. These USW members looked ominously like the guys who had hung out the windows in Manchester, yelling epithets and hurling anti-communist tirades when we had tried to shut the induction center. 

Staring out at all the close-cropped heads atop burly bodies, I waited for Manuel. Meanwhile, I wondered why I was even there while most other students were off doing fun student-type things – hanging out at the beer garden at the student union, discussing Camus and existentialism and partaking of sex, drugs and rock ’n roll. 

Despite my study of exciting tales of heroic union solidarity down through the decades, I just couldn’t imagine these crew cuts giving a damn about Chicano farm workers in distant California. I couldn’t shake my prejudice – I pejoratively assumed they all must be for the Vietnam War, the ultimate dividing line of the ’60’s. Images of hard-hatted construction workers in New York City violently attacking anti-war demonstrators flashed through my mind. What was I doing here?

Manuel opened with a brief history of the farm workers’ strike, which had begun in 1965. Why the boycott? He laid it out. After decades of long hours under grueling sun, working for little more than a dollar an hour, 30,000 Filipinos in the grape fields had wildcatted (struck without a union’s official sanction). Once Filipino workers took the bold step of walking out of the fields en masse, Cesar Chavez, after much prodding and hesitation, pledged the support of the fledgling United Farm Workers (UFW) and the strike spread to include Chicano and Mexican workers. After years of an unending stalemate, a nationwide grape boycott had been organized to pressure the growers into recognizing the UFW. 

I looked out at the steely faces in the audience trying to read their take on Manuel’s message. Inwardly, I hoped to escape the room as soon as possible. “Come on, come on – finish up Manuel so we can get out of here. Maybe I could still find a party if he wrapped it up soon.” As Manuel concluded, however, a hand shot up – a small, yet muscular, appendage extended above a large body. “Brother Salas – how can we help? How can the USW join the fight?”

“Brother – what is this brother stuff?” I wondered. 

“Thank you brother,” responded Manuel, as if he were privy to some language I had not yet learned. “Every Friday we picket Kroger’s grocery store to pressure the chain to take non-union grapes off the shelves. We would be greatly appreciative if you would join us this Friday at Kroger.” 

Another USW hand shot up, “OK boys - I move that we support brother Salas and his union and join the picket line at Kroger’s this Friday, but we’ll make it a real picket line! Boys – let’s show ‘em how steelworkers do it!” As if on queue, all rose and sang the traditional union song – Solidarity Forever.

When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run 
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun 
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one 
For the Union makes us strong

Solidarity forever, solidarity forever 
Solidarity forever 
For the Union makes us strong

Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite  
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?   
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?   
For the union makes us strong

It is we who ploughed the prairies, built the cities where they trade 
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid 
Now we stand outcast and starving 'mid the wonders we have made 
But the union makes us strong 

All the world that's owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone  
We have laid the wide foundations, built it skyward stone by stone  
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own   
While the union makes us strong

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn 
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn 
We can break their haughty power gain our freedom when we learn 
That the Union makes us strong

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold 
Greater than the might of armies magnified a thousandfold 
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old 
For the Union makes us strong

I tingled all over listening to the words, as goose bumps popped up on my arms. I looked out again at the crowd and wondered – “maybe these guys aren’t so redneck after all. This is some really cool shit.” The last lyric played over and over and embedded in my mind - We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.

I was suddenly anxious for Friday to arrive. 

As I write this story, I am holding the first photo taken of me in political action, as it appeared in the Daily Cardinal. The picture stands in stark contrast to the way I really looked on a daily basis. If we planned to ask normal everyday neighborhood grocery shoppers not to buy grapes, I thought that my appearance might be important so I wore my only sport coat with a nappy silk kerchief tied around my neck. My hair was long, but at least I didn’t “look” like a typical hippie.

My first union picket line impressed me. I felt real camaraderie as we walked in a small circle of about 50 carrying signs demanding that Kroger stop selling “scab” non-union picked grapes. I joined enthusiastically in the singing of Solidarity Forever, while stammering over the lyrics I had just learned. I picked up the anthem from the steelworkers, who had inherited it from the militant union Industrial Workers of the World in its heyday in the early twentieth century.

On a cue that I hadn’t been aware of, we all marched into Kroger’s, past the shell-shocked manager who had positioned himself at the front door to “do his job.” Seeing the onslaught of steelworkers approach, he stood in dead silence as we streamed past him. 

Each steelworker nonchalantly filled a shopping cart to capacity, groceries spilling out over the sides of the basket, and walked to the checkout aisle. Upon reaching the cash register, each steelworker abruptly walked away, jamming up the checkout lanes with overflowing, abandoned shopping carts. As the lines backed up with aggravated shoppers waiting to checkout, we marched out signing Solidarity Forever. 

Maybe, just maybe, I had something to learn from these ‘rednecks’ in their nylon USW jackets. 

Weather Antics Disrupt SDS 

After a dizzying school year, the summer of 1969 passed relatively quietly. Apprehensive and excited students from all over the country streamed back for the fall semester, anticipating what the year might hold. I shifted focus back to campus from Obreros Unidos, which meant rejoining the student movement and SDS. Over the summer, while I had been bumping up and down the back roads of rural Wisconsin in a beat-up old Valiant, a small, dedicated, and highly analytical group within Madison SDS – the Woody Guthrie Collective – formed to meet the challenge.

Understanding that real gains in our fight against the war could only be achieved by developing a program to unite the broad and diverse constituency of SDS, the Guthrie Collective had devoted their summer to working on just such a strategy.

Meanwhile, the war dragged endlessly on. Casualty numbers, while kept under wraps by the Pentagon, were known to have reached around 40,000 dead American soldiers. In August, the Gallup poll reported that 53 percent of Americans believed it had been a mistake to send U.S. troops to Vietnam. 

Under Nixon, antiwar sentiment rose: mass marches, civil disobedience, even violence - though not lethal, up to this point. Regardless, U.S. forces had reached a peak of 543,000. Simultaneously, soldiers in Vietnam began to openly rebel, with refusals to follow orders, mutinies, sabotage, and targeting officers with fragmentation bombs. Between 1969 and July 1972, official army records showed 551 internal incidents of assaults with explosive weapons (fragging of officers, particularly Second Lieutenants), with 86 men (mostly officers and NCO’s) killed, and more than 700 injured by “friendly fire”. 

With mass havoc and open rebellion on the ground in Vietnam and on domestic military bases, we were determined to intensify our anti-war efforts and support our comrades in uniform. The Guthrie Collective critically analyzed which particular campus institutions maintained close ties to the military industrial complex, and more particularly provided campus-based research for the global U.S. war machine.

But while Madison was rocked by its Mifflin Street showdown, nationally, SDS convulsed. While various factions in Madison SDS worked up action plans for the upcoming school year, in other cities the focus was on contradictory plans hatched by three warring factions with distinctively disparate approaches. 

The Guthrie Collective, by contrast, focused on mobilizing the greatest number of protesters to spur on growing opposition to the war. They encouraged Madison SDS to unite around a solid, concrete set of targets and plans of action. The SDS chapter, taking heed of a small group of committed leaders (which I was not yet involved with), consolidated an three-pronged action plan to usher in the new semester.

The kickoff was to be the year’s first mass SDS meeting where members of the Guthrie Collective would lay out goals to concretely advance the struggle against the Vietnam War on the Madison campus:

1. ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) OFF CAMPUS;

2. ARMY MATH RESEARCH CENTER (AMRC) OFF CAMPUS;

3. LAND TENURE CENTER OFF CAMPUS (LTC).

The AMRC did research for the military to be employed in the U.S. war efforts, and the Land Tenure Center conducted research aimed at “pacifying” rebellious indigenous populations in third world countries from Guatemala to Vietnam. Our collective plan was to unveil those three demands at the SDS meeting planned for incoming freshmen. But we weren’t ready or adequately prepared for the growing chaos in the national student movement.

Our fall meeting was to be the first since National SDS split in June 1969.  The ninth SDS national convention had been held at the Chicago Coliseum with some 2000 attendees. Unfortunately, the convention divided into a life-and-death faction fight. On the one side stood the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), and on the other stood the Worker Student Alliance (WSA) faction, controlled by the Progressive Labor Party (PL).  Most of us in Madison who related to the RYM faction had always stood on the side of the working class. WSA, however, employed “worker credentials” - such as university students on college campuses could muster - as a rhetorical cudgel to beat down and berate the RYM faction. 

The nuances of that ideological split may seem somewhat obscure, even picayune, today. But PL had declared ideological war on black nationalism as a reactionary diversion from true and pure workers’ revolution. The PL/WSA’s vitriolic attacks against the Black Panther Party as counterrevolutionary nationalists struck many of us as way off mark and racist, particularly in light of the ongoing COINTELPRO policy of the FBI to gun down, murder, and destroy the BPP.   

Despite the BPP putting their lives on the line every day in the struggle for black people’s liberation, to PL and WSA, the Panthers were political anathema; tagged with “dividing the working class” along racial lines. SDS had been a battleground of factional organizing and counter-organizing machinations since PL sent their cadres into the group, a few years previously. Most of us in the Madison SDS chapter stood in solidarity with the Panthers, so our allegiance to the RYM faction was a foregone conclusion. 

While most in Madison SDS saw our primary mission as building opposition to the war, PL/WSA pushed SDS to demand free parking for college workers. Regardless, the split at the national SDS meeting had widespread ramifications for the student movement on every campus, as chapters were forced to take sides. To complicate matters further, the anti-PL forces had already split between the street-fighting Weatherman group, and RYM-II, pro-worker and pro-Panther. Both anti-PL factions rejected PL’s purist put-down of Cuba and the Vietnamese guerrilla leadership as “sell-outs”(!).

(The reader may relegate these political distinctions to the world of esoteric debate. I record all this in the hope that today’s radical activists can see that divisive distraction and sectarian in-fighting can weaken the resolve of any political movement, and the unity necessary to fight the common enemy.)

In the Madison SDS chapter, a leadership team of about a dozen, expecting a large, enthusiastic turnout for the first fall meeting, met to discuss how best to handle the split. (By the conclusion of the prior school year, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Madison SDS consisted of a core group of activists roughly 300 strong.) While most of us stood with RYM, we understood that a united SDS chapter would out-perform one wracked with internal factional divisions. Moreover, political activists over the past few years in Madison, despite political differences, had been able to coexist and organize together without descending into internecine warfare. 

Subsequent to the split in Chicago, independent thinking members of Madison SDS proactively sought to insulate the local chapter from the factionalism that overtook the national convention. Madison SDS voted 66 to 35 to remain “independent”, refusing to side with any of the June convention’s “factions.”  

The first SDS “monster meeting,” or as pitched to incoming freshman – “Freshman Unorientation” - convened the evening of September 18 in the Great Hall of the Student Union. I still recall sitting with comrades in the Union’s Rathskeller “beer hall” sharing pitchers of cheap beer before the meeting. We used to position ourselves at tables in the Rathskeller by political affiliation, and that night our area had been lively and raring to go when time arrived to head upstairs to the auspicious Great Hall. 

The quite effective student rumor/information mill carried word that a crew from one side of the post-split national factional conflict, the Weatherman subfaction of RYM, which had no influence in our chapter, were headed to Madison from Chicago to try to take control of the meeting. We calculated a particularly large turnout based on the level of political excitement the year before. We were aware that a massive National Moratorium to end the war was being planned for October in Washington, which interested many SDSers, and, we hoped, would stimulate and energize newcomers. 

The hundreds of students cramming into the Great Hall were not ideologically rigid for the most part. They came as members of this new movement, determined to turn capitalist America upside down. The hall felt supercharged. I swiveled in my seat to glance around the hall, every seat taken, feeling that this was to be our year! No such luck.

As the meeting started, about a dozen Weathermen stormed the stage, grabbing the mic: “You don’t see no motherfucking students at no motherfucking university. Everyone up here on this stage is a stone communist revolutionary!”

The dozen Weathermen, waving Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) flags, while striking Bruce Lee-like martial arts poses, exhorted the crowd to storm outside, trash campus buildings, and “tear up the country!” About 200 Madison SDS regulars, many of whom had been alerted to expect the Weathermen disruption, heckled them to get off stage, as close to a thousand perplexed freshmen looked on in puzzled wonder at the incomprehensible, rapidly unfolding Kabuki theatre.

Max Elbaum, a seasoned (as much as one can be seasoned at such a young age) local SDS leader, accepted the mantle of leading the meeting – not a welcoming assignment, as he was tasked with making sure physical fights didn’t break out if the uninvited Chicago Weatherpeople sought to wreak havoc. We knew that if the Weather faction arrived, they would be hell-bent to win support for their upcoming “Days of Rage” national protest action – planning for violence, intended to “bring the war home.”  

In the words of Max Elbaum:

The last thing we wanted at the meeting was a brawl among radicals … So though we thought the chances of Weatherfolks actually trying to disrupt the meeting were small – they had virtually no support among Madison-based activists – we agreed that if they did we would not get provoked into a fight. 

The meeting convened in the Great Hall ... There was a crowd of 500-plus.

Maybe 20 minutes into the session, a line of a dozen people entered the room from the back. They brushed aside requests to take seats and participate along with everyone else, walked in file down the left side of the hall, and then climbed the stairs to the stage. … So I ... hopped down from the stage, and loudly said the leadership was asking everyone to stay calm.

The Weatherman contingent quickly spread out in a line across the stage, the person in the middle took the stage microphone and began to harangue the crowd. Their basic message was that it was time to up the ante in the struggle to “bring the war home”; the next big step in building a really radical movement would be their “Days of Rage” set for October 8-11 in Chicago. Anyone who was serious about making revolution had [emphasis added] to be there. Everyone else was a wimp or a chump. 

The first few rows began to stir and start hollering that if the Weatherfolks did not get off the stage willingly, there were more than enough people prepared to throw them off.  

Suddenly, the microphone in the hands of the Weatherman spokesperson went dead. The room went quiet and a couple seconds later everyone heard the crackle of static. Then a voice came from the newly turned on microphone in the back of the room. [The voice was that of Allen Hunter, another of the Madison SDS leadership.] ‘OK everybody, we’ve all had enough of this. Turn your chairs around and we’ll continue the meeting.’ A bunch of shouts and whoops of laughter went up, and then there was thirty seconds of noise as hundreds of chairs were turned around to face the back of the room. Allen introduced the next speaker and gave him the live microphone to get on with the planned agenda.

The reckless disruption by the Weather squad had been thwarted, but dissipated much of the initial energy, taking the wind out of our sails for a smooth, well-organized fall strategy. To our dismay, some students began straggling out of the hall in frustration. The seemingly pointless shenanigans of the Weatherpeople succeeded in driving potential members out. 

At a minimum, our SDS leadership had been able to put the SDS fall program of focusing on the three demands in front of the attendees. In fact, only a few days later, the issue of the Army Math Research Center took center stage. 

SDS vs AMRC

Sterling Hall sat almost smack dab at the center of the campus - a tall, stately, turn-of-the-century yellow brick building from a bygone era, when austere institutions of higher learning stood above and apart from the daily fray of society’s political turmoil. It housed other academic disciplines, but we knew it as the loathed Army Math Center, personifying the university’s abhorrent role in collaborating with the military. 

The AMRC was the only U.S. military-funded academic think tank in the country, employing 28 full-time and 15 part-time mathematicians, plus a support staff of 17. The budget in 1970 topped $1.5 million (close to $6 million in today’s dollars.)

Despite its benign yellow-brick façade, Sterling Hall was the eye of the storm for much of the 1969-1970 school year. Almost without fail, every demonstration during the last half of 1969 and first half of 1970 targeted or concluded with a march to Army Math demanding that the university cease its complicity with the U.S. military. We never missed an opportunity to cover the façade of the building with spray painted demands that Army Math be expelled from campus and that the university sever ties with the military. Campus security was usually overmatched and outnumbered by the size and anger of our protests. The use of spray paint became so associated with anti-war graffiti that Madison hardware stores stopped selling spray-paint cans to students and young people. 

As time went on, every anti-war action at Sterling Hall included barrages of rocks hurled at the building’s windows – the sound of breaking glass being the loudest message we could send the university. Whenever we got close to Sterling Hall, everyone knew the choreography. No matter the season, regardless of Wisconsin’s biting winter cold or baking warm months, as if on a rehearsed queue we all picked up our pace as we approached the yellow brick building. By the time we reached Sterling Hall, we were all in a dead run, chanting anti-war slogans, pockets bulging with rocks and broken pieces of concrete. To our frustration, after countless attacks leaving behind scores of shattered windows, the university replaced the glass with Lexan, an unbreakable plastic. The futility of throwing rocks at unbreakable Lexan metaphorically represented our growing feeling of futility over our stymied efforts to stop the war.  

For much of the early 1960’s, Army Math had evaded public scrutiny. In fact, when Army Math was founded in 1955, the UW Board of Regents passed a resolution mandating that top-secret material and information be withheld, even from the Regents themselves. While the annual reports were supposed to detail the work of the AMRC, the reports were heavily censored or restricted from public view. 

Army Math didn’t constitute the first battle line in the struggle against university complicity with the Vietnam War. Going back to the pitched battle in 1967 to throw Dow Chemical recruiters off campus, replete with hand-to-hand combat between police and demonstrators, students had become keenly aware of close ties between the corporate military machine and the University. (I knew about Dow Chemical before I even applied to Madison. A year ahead of me, my high school partner Reed had become both infamous, and a living legend, by taking off his belt and wrapping it around his knuckles, buckle facing out, to defend himself and those around him when campus police attacked during the Dow sit-in.)  By 1964, the school held more government contracts than any other institution of higher learning; Fortune 500 corporations coveted spots to interview and hire Madison graduates.

Despite the University’s concerted effort to erect an impenetrable cloak of invisibility around Army Math, a young investigative journalist for the Daily Cardinal, James Rowen, doggedly determined to ferret out the truth.  Led by Rowen, the Cardinal peppered the UW administration with unrelenting requests to gain access to the true nature of the “research” being conducted behind the yellow-brick facade. Refusing to divulge any details, the university responded that the Army controlled the flow of information, thus any disclosure lay outside the university’s purview. 

Undaunted, Rowen relentlessly banged at Army Math’s door to get the truth. The Army refused to provide Rowen with a copy of its 1967 AMRC Annual Report, falsely claiming that annual reports were not printed until 1968. Doggedly, Rowen continued to dig – asking progressive Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire to obtain a copy of the 1967 Report. The copy obtained by Proxmire was heavily censored; missing was a five-page section identified in the table of contents as “Assistance to Project Michigan.” 

Those four seemingly innocuous words, inadvertently left in the document, gave Rowen and the Cardinal their opening to ascertain the nature of Project Michigan. After months of digging, Rowen hit paydirt: Project Michigan involved University of Michigan research regarding the development and refinement of infrared detection and tracking technology. Rowen correctly extrapolated that Project Michigan constituted the foundation for the “Electronic Battlefield” utilized in Vietnam to zero in on targets hidden beneath the rainforest canopy. In the spring of 1969, Rowen penned a Cardinal series entitled “Profit Motive 101”. Bottom line: UW collected almost $1.5 million a year for hosting Army Math.  

As the two-decade wall of silence crumbled, evidence emerged that the actual, unadulterated mission of Army Math was to provide analytical assistance to the U.S. military to orchestrate the killing and suppression of peoples fighting for independence across the globe. Project Michigan’s research, along with its partner in crime Army Math, led to the development of the infrared airborne detectors employed to locate and eliminate Che Guevara’s guerilla band in the Bolivian jungle, as well as the foundational research on how to conduct B-52 carpet bombings from tremendous heights with the purpose of annihilating the entire countryside, including the earthen dug-outs in which the peoples of Indochina sought shelter from unceasing U.S. bombings. 

The AMRC Papers, a book later published after a nine-month research project, documented that the Center’s permanent staff worked on U.S. counterinsurgency, chemical and biological warfare, and weapons systems. Before the book, however, it took months and months for Rowen to dig out the truth from under the university’s unrelenting obfuscation of AMRC’s role. 

SDS seized on Rowen’s expose and turned our anger and heat on demanding that the university cut ties with AMRC. It soon became clear how vulnerable the UW administration was to criticism of its secret role in military research. On October 1, 1969, AMRC distributed an interoffice memo citing possible “disruptive activities” during the final days of the October National Moratorium Against the War. The memo asked staff to stay home from work.

As part of National Moratorium Day on Oct. 1, two Madison SDS representatives met with Chancellor Young and formally issued our three demands. They asked for “an act of good faith in ending ROTC, AMRC and the Land Tenure Center operations on the Madison campus.” Young, without blinking an eye, slammed the door in their faces

Thus, October 1 constituted the opening salvo in what soon became a sustained battle by Madison student activists against these three institutions. Our anti-war struggle escalated from being primarily reactive to aggressively proactive, as we orchestrated an ever growing number of students’ understanding of the link between the University and the military war machine.  

Even the previously conservative Wisconsin Student Association, like an ocean liner slowly changing course, took up the issue of Vietnam. Margery Tabankin, the 1969-70 Association vice-president, announced that they had passed a resolution condemning both AMRC and ROTC – quite a striking posture for the student government of a public university.            

We had set out to fan students’ disgust with UW complicity with the war by employing creative tactics and propaganda. When we heard about an upcoming mathematics symposium, we assembled picket lines with signs reading “SMASH ARMY MATH.” 

Picket lines at Sterling Hall were ongoing. On one occasion, more creative students than I had planned a lurid guerilla theater performance in front of the Hall during an International Conference taking place inside. My role included attacking the Center with a toy machine gun. Surreptitiously, spray paint cans were stashed under our jackets. During a pregnant pause in the guerilla theatre, we ran up to the building, my heart beating loud enough for all to hear, and sprayed red paint on the building exterior with slogans denouncing the war and UW complicity with the military-industrial complex.  

In Fall 1969, Madison SDS meetings were smaller, and often plagued by internal political bickering and maneuvering by various political factions on the left, looking to hijack leadership. The prevailing chaos and disorganization presented a ripe opportunity for police infiltrators to join our ranks, misdirect our goals, often alerting law enforcement of planned demonstrations, including march routes and tactics – leading to violent confrontations and targeted arrests.

The Murder of Chairman Fred

Another monumental event, in nearby Chicago on December 4, 1969, drove home the degree of violence and mayhem that law enforcement was capable of unleashing against those deemed, in the FBI’s words contained in my surveillance file - “Potentially dangerous because of background, emotional instability or activity in groups engaged in activities inimical to U.S.”. 

On the night of December 4, Chicago police, in league with the FBI, assassinated the charismatic Illinois Chairman of the Black Panther Party – 21-year-old Fred Hampton. Police raided the apartment he shared with his pregnant partner, Deborah Johnson (now known as Akua Njeri). He was riddled with bullets as he lay drugged (surreptitiously by a police agent) and unconscious in his bed. The uniformed hitmen grinned with self-satisfaction as they dispatched his body. 

Chairman Fred had assumed a particularly esteemed place in the Madison revolutionary and activist community.  Fred had spoken twice in Madison to overflow audiences. Each speech packed large lecture halls, creating a palpable sense of revolutionary purpose and fervor for those in attendance. 

Many who heard Fred’s highly inspirational speeches, including myself, departed the hall feeling transformed. If one attended Fred’s speech questioning the system, one often came out indicting the system. Fred made true believers and dedicated revolutionaries out of those of us who had already begun to question the fairness, or fundamental unfairness, of capitalism. While speaking in his rapid, often rhythmic, staccato style, Fred locked eyes with each of us, issuing what felt every bit a personal challenge.  

Fred’s words demanded of each of us that we rise to the occasion to do more than pose questions. I recall thinking to myself as I left Fred’s second speech, “Fred is right! There is a fundamental unfairness inherent to the capitalist system that can’t be covered over with a bandage.” I pledged to rededicate myself to fight for a new society devoted to the betterment and well-being of all people. Fred’s words triggered my metamorphosis from a student activist to a committed revolutionary, even though in the back of my mind I knew that making such a commitment would now largely determine my life’s path. 

Fred’s words also acted as a stern admonition of the dangers inherent in rebelling against the system. No one who attended his speeches could ever forget the chilling premonitional message that had become his revolutionary refrain before his dawn assassination, 

I am a revolutionary

I believe I’m going to die high off the people

I believe that I will be able to die as a revolutionary in the 

International Proletariat Revolution

Remember comrades –

You can kill a revolutionary – but you can’t kill the revolution! 

Fred’s death, at such a very young age, acted as a parable for us all that our lives were in danger once, and if we heeded his call for revolutionary struggle. While self-defense had once been an academic question, the murder of Fred and our unceasing, frequently violent battles with the authorities in Madison, had impressed upon  many students  the necessity to arm themselves for survival and self-defense. By the summer of 1970, many of those who lived in the Mifflin/Basset neighborhood were armed with handguns and long guns, having gained proficiency in the use of firearms. At one point, the president of the WSA opined to the Daily Cardinal that there were an estimated thousand weapons clustered in the student ghetto.

Only about four months after Fred’s murder, his partner in leadership of the Illinois Panther Party chapter, Deputy Minister of Defense Bobby Rush, was scheduled to speak at the Student Union. (Rush is now a U.S. Congress member of long standing, from a southside Chicago district.) I was tasked with providing security. I accepted the responsibility with trepidation, aware of the personal danger involved, at least in the back of my mind.. 

If I were to have weighed the pros and cons of agreeing to such a potentially life-endangering event, I might have paused to contemplate the consequences of my decision. Such were the times, however, that I stepped forward out of a sense of responsibility - consequences be damned. Providing security for a Panther leader, particularly after Fred’s death, constituted  serious business, as every Panther leader now walked with a target on their back.

At the last minute, the Chicago office of the BPP informed us that Bobby Rush couldn’t make it and that Illinois Black Panther Captain of Defense William Calvin would fill in. I borrowed an old Chevy from a friend, who had also attended high school with me, to deliver Calvin from the airport. 

On the appointed day, I dressed appropriately – black leather tam, black leather coat with a Mao pin on the lapel, and even wore black leather pants that my girlfriend Anne had sewn for me. (Looking back it may have appeared that I had been hired out of central casting uniform and all, but it reflected how seriously we took the struggle and the danger to the Panther Party from the government.)

I had parked the Chevy in front of my apartment on Mifflin, hoping not to attract attention when stashing my Mossberg pump shotgun with an 18” barrel in the trunk. The old Chevy had trouble starting as the bitter Wisconsin winter cold had chilled the already decrepit engine. Conscious that I might be followed, I drove the exact speed limit to the small Madison airport, parking in front of the terminal.

It wasn’t hard to pick out the Panthers even though I had never met them. Amongst a crowd of deplaning white passengers, 3 black dudes all in black leather screamed black militants. I opened the passenger door to let them in and we exchanged introductions, accompanied by requisite dapping (hooking thumbs) as a sign of solidarity. (Black soldiers returning from Vietnam had spread the custom of dapping as a symbol, often forbidden in the military, of rebellion and unity.)

As I slowly pulled away from the terminal, each Panther took out a pistol from a briefcase and bullet clip from their hand carry luggage. At the time, carrying a handgun on an airplane wasn’t prohibited as long as it wasn’t loaded. My earlier trepidation morphed into stark paranoia. I barely had time for conversation as I focused intently on every car in front, on the side and behind us, hoping that the drive to the Union remained uneventful, the needle on the speedometer remained steady at precisely 25 mph – the speed limit.

As part of a preconceived plan, we pulled up to a side door along a narrow street on the Bascom Hill side of the Union. I asked Calvin and his two bodyguards to hang for a few seconds as I retrieved the shotgun from the trunk. I took a deep breath and escorted the three through the door and onto the stage where the speaker’s podium stood, decorated with a poster of Huey Newton in black leather, black beret, and clutching a sawed off shotgun – a rather auspicious marker for the program. As I stood next to Calvin a quote from Mao looped through my mind:

“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous.”

Calvin raised a clenched fist, and, with a powerful, commanding  voice began - “All Power to the People,” to which the audience responded, “All Power to the People.” From my post next to Calvin, I surveyed the hall packed with mostly white students. Despite trying to keep my mind clear and focused, I couldn’t help but think – “Any one of them could be an FBI agent. I really hope that today isn’t the day they decide to take out the Illinois Captain of Defense.” In the wings, visible to those in the hall, stood the two Panther bodyguards nervously eyeing the crowd, always aware that only months ago Chicago police had drugged and murdered Chairman Fred.

Calvin began by explaining Bobby Rush’s absence, “The pigs said the only place he could travel is to prison.” Referring to the death of Chairman Fred, he continued, “We know now that the time is gone when the pigs stopped at the front door. Now they come all the way in and start shooting. He (Chairman Fred) was willing to give his life for the lives of the people.”

“I sure hope this isn’t the day I give my life,” I thought, as I continually scanned the room. Calvin continued, “We’re not using rhetoric any more. You have to practice what you preach, and not preach any more. You’re never going to get any peace talking about it. We’re going to bring liberation to the colony [the black community] and revolution to the mother country.”

As Calvin spoke, my mind wandered. What if shooting breaks out? What if I actually am called on to protect Calvin? Was I up to it? My thoughts wandered more, “There’s no way this university is not going to kick me out of school tomorrow. You just can’t stand in front of hundreds of students with a shotgun on your hip and expect to get away with it! SHIT!”

Finally, I detected that Calvin’s speech was concluding, “We don’t want war, but we understand that people with no guns have been compromising with people with guns. We don’t believe in murder; we believe in protecting the people we love.” I let out a deep sigh - I had done my job and luckily nothing bad had happened. Now I just had to hope that the university didn’t serve me with walking papers the next day.

Looking back, I can safely say that the short life and premature death of Fred Hanpton turned thousands of 1969 radicals into 1970 revolutionaries.

 >> Madison, Part 2