Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  TOM MCCARTHY

  On May 3, 1969, the kids on Mifflin Street had a block party. What a mess. We had to break into their houses and blow the shit out of there with tear gas. We’d set little softballs—they looked about the size of softballs and they had cotter pins. If you pulled that cotter pin and you kept your thumb on the plunger, you could hold it there until you threw it and four seconds later it would explode. What we did is we left the cotter pin in and took another safety pin out, so that if you pulled the cotter pin it went off, right away. And we dropped a few of them in these houses. And the next morning, when we were examining the damage, we would hear explosions.

  KARL ARMSTRONG

  Mifflin Street was the hotbed of radicalism in Madison. It was the total scene. People lived communally, the underground newspapers were based out of that area, and it was basically the center for political activism. It was a place where people tried to live out the future life that they wanted to have. People were experimenting. People were learning to live with each other, no matter what their background or their preferences. I wasn’t into it, though. I lived in a fraternity.

  Anyway, they decided to have a block party, which to them was really not that big a deal. The police decided that they didn’t want that happening. So the block party went ahead and the police tried to break it up. I was kind of an outsider. I didn’t live in the area, but I came over and basically sat in front of a Mifflin Street house watching the people in the neighborhood battling the police. The police would throw tear gas, and people would pick it up and throw it back at them. Stones and bricks were being thrown. It was like a very surreal battle scene.

  The cops were going around in squad cars or unmarked cars with taped-up windows. When they pulled up, four or five cops would pile out and go running after people on the street and into their houses. Everyone was getting beat on, except me. I was just sitting there on the porch, watching all this go down. I was thinking, Wow, people are fighting back! This is great stuff! They were beating on everybody in the neighborhood, even people who had absolutely nothing to do with it. They followed people into their houses. It was just crazy.

  TOM MCCARTHY

  I thought breaking windows, destroying property, and burning buildings was despicable—they even burned down a goddamn grocery store because they’d arrested shoplifters—what the hell? I told my son, “You either go into a ROTC program, or you’re getting nothing from me.” And he went. He became a jet pilot in the Marine Corps.

  The demonstrators were always on campus. They would go and line up in the street, they would go to the mall, but they all lived on Mifflin Street. So we thought, We’re going to bring the war to Mifflin Street. They’re going to have to come back. So we went down there and bombed the shit out of them. We took their bicycles and threw them in a pile, and burned them. You name it. The protesters hated me and I hated them.

  PAUL SOGLIN

  The music was on, and unbeknownst to the students, the second in command of the Madison Police Department, Inspector Herman Thomas, assembled a group of officers in riot gear. He said to them, “Just stay behind me. We’re going to go down there and crack some skulls.” The police showed up at noon, and they started arresting people who were in the streets for not having a permit and obstructing traffic. I got arrested, and by the time I got bailed out, about four thirty, one square mile of Madison was totally engulfed in a pitched battle between the students and the police: There were Molotov cocktails; the whole area was covered in tear gas; very brutal beatings. Things calmed down about midnight.

  I got arrested the day of the Mifflin Street block party. The cops decided to cut the hair of the students who had been arrested, even though they hadn’t been convicted of anything.

  PETER GREENBERG

  We were the most violent campus in America, more than Berkeley and Columbia. Absolutely. We were ground zero because we took to the streets first, and we stayed on the streets longer. The sit-in at Columbia wasn’t until 1968. We were committed. It wasn’t a one-off. It was going to continue. As a result, the National Guard was on campus for months with armored personnel carriers and fixed bayonets. They surrounded the capitol building, because most of our marches went straight up State Street to the Wisconsin state capitol, which drove the legislators nuts. The governor wasted no time calling on the National Guard. He perceived that the government was under attack.

  Meanwhile, the focal point for the media in this country rapidly became the campuses. I was hired by Newsweek to be a campus stringer for twenty dollars a month. Prior to me, the campus stringer job was a fraternity handout, where once a year you got a query about whether culottes were back in style. I, however, was in the right place at the right time. There wasn’t a week I wasn’t filing a story. So, I was seventeen or eighteen, and by 1969 I had done six or seven cover stories on the “campuses in revolt.” It was unprecedented.

  * * *

  *1 Napalm is a highly flammable chemical weapon that was first applied with flamethrowers and later dropped from U.S. B-52 bombers onto the thick jungle canopy in Vietnam, where it could burn up to 2,500 square yards of vegetation and kill anyone who came in contact with it. The thick, gelatinous substance would stick to humans and melt their flesh, causing them to burn alive. Photographs of Vietnamese civilians being burned by napalm helped make the weapon a symbol of American brutality in Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1973, the United States doused Vietnam with 388,000 tons of napalm.

  *2 LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, and Maine senator Edmund Muskie won the party nomination over antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy at the August 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was also running for the nomination on a peace platform, was assassinated the night he won the California primary, June 5. Humphrey, who supported LBJ’s hawkish view of the war, did not participate in the primaries, and was nominated by party delegates at the convention in what the antiwar movement considered a behind-the-scenes power move by LBJ.

  *3 The “Battle of Michigan Avenue” was the climax of three days of skirmishes in Chicago between protesters and the police. Mayor Richard Daley deployed 22,500 police and state troopers who overwhelmed the approximately 10,000 antiwar protesters. In what was later called a “police riot,” the bloody confrontation was graphically televised. Ultimately, 680 protesters were arrested, 1,100 people were injured, and 37 reporters were beaten and roughed up while they tried to chronicle the extreme police brutality. Watching the demonstrators be violently beaten by police on television shocked the nation and radicalized many viewers.

  CHAPTER 4

  RADICALS

  (1968–June 1969)

  What had been a movement of nonviolent resistance, civil disobedience, and community organizing freaked out in 1969.

  —DAVID HARRIS

  Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) became the largest leftist student organization by the end of the decade, with 400 campus chapters, more than 100,000 members, and an influential weekly publication, New Left Notes. Initially conceived as a civil rights organization, in the second half of the sixties SDS turned its sights to resisting the Vietnam War and the draft. As opposition to the war increased, so did black urban unrest in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, and the civil rights movement transitioned from a southern struggle to end Jim Crow to an urban war against poverty and police oppression. The Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland, California, in 1966, espoused armed self-defense and soon became the boldest and most visible black power organization of the late sixties. The Panthers’ militancy and pro-third-world Marxist rhetoric strongly influenced some white members of SDS. The emerging alliance between SDS and the Panthers posed a potent threat to the social and political status quo, and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI stepped up its efforts to destroy both organizations and many others in the movement. By June 1969, crippled by factionalism between Marxist and Maoist ideologues, SDS imploded and a small group of militant radicals calling themselves the Weathermen took ove
r.

  MARK RUDD (Columbia student, SDS leader)

  I was this middle-class Jewish kid from Maplewood, New Jersey. My parents were assiduously apolitical. But I got caught up, as millions of other kids did, in the ripples of the counterculture of the time, which was the Beat culture. So in high school I read The Village Voice and The New Republic and listened to folk music.

  When I got to Columbia in September of ’65, the most interesting people I met were kids who were organizing for Students for a Democratic Society, SDS.*1 I just fell in love with these people. They were cool, and they became my crowd. I was always a bit of a loner, I never fit into high school culture—I was a bookworm—but I suddenly found a gang. A lot of them were red diaper babies who had leftie, communist parents and had grown up organizing. They taught the rest of us how to organize.

  What I fell into for three years, from ’65 to ’68, was an organizing culture. “How do we involve more people?” “What do we do to educate the campus, to get people to consider the problem of Vietnam, and the problem of racism?” And consider especially how they fit into it. That’s what organizing is. It took time, and it took a lot of knocking on doors.

  JULIUS LESTER (writer, SNCC member)

  I was a folksinger in those days. My early involvement in the movement was singing at fundraising rallies for SNCC*2 and at hootenannies. And then in 1964, I went down to Mississippi for the Freedom Summer, as a folksinger. It really wasn’t until ’66 that I got involved full-time in SNCC, and that was primarily working as a photographer. I worked for SNCC for two years, out of the SNCC office in Atlanta.

  One thing that has not been fully recognized is that the civil rights movement was a success. We’ve never observed that or celebrated that. The civil rights movement set out to end segregation in public accommodations, and to ensure voting rights. The ’64 Civil Rights Act, ’65 Voting Rights Act, accomplished what the civil rights movement set out to do. But the experience of people inside SNCC was that getting rid of segregation in public accommodations and ensuring the right to vote were only manifestations of a problem. There was a deeper problem, and the deeper problem was racism. And how do you picket an attitude? How do you demonstrate against an attitude? And so it was recognized within SNCC that black people lacked power to control their lives, and that having the vote was not going to give them the power they needed to control their lives. And so people started talking about power for black people. Then in 1966, Stokely Carmichael, the new chairman of SNCC, turned that around and simply started saying “black power.” The combination of the words black and power shocked the nation. I mean, white people went nuts. They just went nuts.

  WESLEY BROWN (Black Panther, draft resister)

  I left the South at the end of the fall of ’65, went back to college, kept ties with people in SNCC that I knew, and got involved whenever I could in the antiwar movement. When I graduated in ’68, I came back to New York, and I went to the SNCC office. I knew about the Black Panthers, but emotionally, my ties were more to SNCC. There was a lot of paranoia in the air and it seemed that SNCC was going through a transition and there was talk about joining with the Panthers, and making one organization, which obviously was doomed from the onset. SNCC was being pulled apart in so many different directions.

  The Panthers were from Oakland, California, and Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the party in ’66. They took the symbol of the black panther from the Black Panther Party in Alabama, which Stokely Carmichael (then head of SNCC) was involved in. And they took the notion of armed self-defense from the Deacons for Self-Defense in Louisiana.*3 I had kept up with what was going on when the Panthers went in May of ’67 to the state capital in Sacramento, after observing the police brutality in the black communities, and learning that it was legal in California to carry a shotgun, as long as it was visible. And so, of course, when the state legislature was meeting to pass a law against carrying a shotgun openly, Bobby Seale went with a group of Panthers into the courtroom with their shotguns, wearing their black leather jackets, to protest this law.

  Martin Luther King, in his famous speech at the Riverside Church in ’67, came out in opposition to the war in Vietnam, and all these more traditional civil rights organizations attacked him. SNCC had come out against the war prior to that, and in 1967 the Panthers published their ten-point platform, and point six stated, “We Want All Black Men to Be Exempt from Military Service.” In 1968 Eldridge Cleaver [a Black Panther] ran for president from the Peace and Freedom Party, whose platform demanded an end to the war in Vietnam.

  The Panthers appealed to me partly because of their opposition to the war. They saw that blacks in this country were in a sense colonized, and I connected with that, because of what I had seen in rural areas in Mississippi. I also felt that the Panthers, while they were very race-conscious, had a perspective that seemed more international. They identified not only with liberation movements in Africa, but also with those in Latin America and in Asia. They did not have an exclusionary or nationalist perspective that did not embrace other struggles, and that was attractive to me.

  BOBBY SEALE (Black Panther Party chairman)

  May 10, 1967, Speech at the University of California, Berkeley

  Why don’t cops who patrol our community live in our community? I don’t think there would be so much police brutality if they had to go and sleep there….You’ve been told that the Black Panthers…make no bones about hating whites. That’s a bare-faced lie. We don’t hate nobody because of color. We hate oppression….We’re going to arm ourselves and protect ourselves from white racist cops. White cops are occupying our community like foreign troops. They’re there to hurt us and brutalize us, and we got to arm ourselves because they’re shooting us up.*4

  ERICKA HUGGINS (Black Panther Party member)

  I grew up in Washington, D.C., and attended a historically black university, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, about an hour from Philadelphia. I was in my junior year at Lincoln when I had the great fortune of sitting with Charles Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael when they were writing the book Black Power.*5 They would bring students together on weekday evenings and read from their work in progress.

  One day I was sitting in the Lincoln Student Union and somebody brought me a Ramparts magazine. It’s November 1967, and the featured article, written by Eldridge Cleaver, was about Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, as it was first named. I was struck not only by the words, but also by the photographs of Huey strapped to a hospital gurney with a bullet wound in his stomach and police standing guard. The picture in the article spurred something in me about what I had witnessed when I was a child in Washington, D.C. I had grown up in Southeast Washington, where my sister and I would regularly see the police stopping some black man or woman on the street for seemingly nothing. We would always wonder what the heck could this person have done? It was routine; it was part of the culture of living in the black community at the time, and it still is.

  So by the time I read that article and saw the picture, I was so saddened to see this man who had obviously been shot, and who was accused of killing a police officer, suffering.*6 When I read about the purpose of the Black Panther Party, I just knew that this is the organization I wanted to join. Because of their motto, “All power to all the people,” it struck me that the Black Panther Party wasn’t just for African American people, though African Americans started it. It was for—as the article and later everything I read said—all oppressed people.

  And so I left Lincoln University with my best friend at the time, John Huggins, and we drove across the country to California to join the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles.

  Credit 4.1

  A group of Black Panthers, with cofounder Eldridge Cleaver facing the camera wearing sunglasses, at a Free Huey [Newton] rally at the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland, California, in 1968.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFFREY HENSON SCALES.

  JEFFREY HENSON SCALES (Black Panther photographer)


  Huey Newton had gotten into an altercation with some cops and he was on trial for murder in 1968. It was courtroom drama. I would visit Huey at the Alameda County courthouse in jail once or twice a week. He sort of mentored me in how to organize high school students. I was fourteen years old. His gift was the idea that he and Bobby Seale developed in 1966. It was the ten-point party platform and the idea of having armed groups patrolling the police’s activities. It was really sensational and it was legal, so it got a lot of attention and it got a lot of people excited to be a part of it.

  As a kid growing up in Berkeley, I had been taking photographs as a hobby, and the Panthers were, of course, cool to take pictures of: the gear—the leather jackets, sunglasses—the style, the energy, the excitement of the movement. They had pulled together a media presence through the iconography of their uniforms and their militaristic presence. You know the famous image of Huey in the African wicker chair with the shotgun and the spear, all of that sort of business, which is image. I think their imagery was brilliant. Emory Douglas, Huey, and Bobby’s style—the whole thing hit the mark and they were able to have a broader audience because they weren’t black nationalists. They were more inclusive.

  Credit 4.2

  Young Black Panther friend and photographer Jeffrey Scales (far left, in glasses) at a Berkeley Free Huey rally in 1968. Scales is sitting next to Black Panther leader Barbara Cox (wife of Donald Cox). Yippie cofounder Stew Albert is at far right, with long blond hair.