Portside

A Brand-New Protest Format Catches on in a Very Big Way (1965)

MARCH 26 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of one of the very first examples of a brand-new form of political protest, the teach-in. 

The 8-hour event, which was organized by the Ad Hoc Teaching Committee on Vietnam, was held in Columbia University’s McMillan Theater in Manhattan with the full cooperation of the school’s administration. 

The Columbia event was inspired by the first teach-in, which had been organized by Students for a Democratic Society and members of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor’s faculty. 

The political-protest innovation immediately became the model for similar events on campuses far and wide; at the University of Wisconsin on April 1, a joint University of Pennsylvania-Swarthmore-Temple event on April 7, at Michigan State University on April 8, and at Rutgers University and the University of Oregon on April 23.

On May 15 the Inter-University Committee for a Public Hearing on Vietnam held a 27-hour teach-in, including a 3-hour Oxford-style debate, in the main ballroom of the Sheraton-Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. With some five thousand people attending the Washington event in person, it was broadcast on both radio and television, and attracted an estimated hundred thousand participants at coast-to-coast campus gatherings, plus an unknown number of home viewers and listeners. Two days after the Washington event, the New York Times devoted two entire pages to an abridged version of the day’s transcript.

Many, if not most, of the events were covertly surveilled by the FBI, but strangely enough, none of the teach-in organizers or participants was expelled, fired, arrested, deported, or accused of being terrorists. https://lithub.com/activist-learning-how-anti-vietnam-war-academics-reinvented-the-strike/

Wasn’t That a Time? Yes, It Sure Was (1995)

MARCH 27 IS THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY of an Oscar win that few anticipated. A 38-minute film that was developed by the Southern Poverty Law Project’s Teaching Tolerance program to introduce high school students to the 1960s Civil Rights Movement – “A Time for Justice,” produced by Charles Guggenheim – won the Academy Award for documentary short subject. https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/fall-2011/teaching-the-movement

A Catchy Name for a Rotten Program (1950)

MARCH 29 IS THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY of the coining of the term “McCarthyism.”  The wordsmith was Herbert Block, who is generally known by his pen name, “Herblock,” which is how he signed the editorial cartoons he created for the Washington Post.

The cartoon that introduced the world to the idea that the Senator Joseph McCarthy was leading a school of thought that might be on a par with “Marxism” or “Darwinism” was new, at least in part because McCarthy had only begun his rise to political prominence seven weeks earlier, when he told an audience in Wheeling, West Virginia, “I have in my hand a list of 205 . . .  a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department. . . .” 

In the few weeks after McCarthy had accused the State Department of willfully employing card-carrying Communists, the junior Senator from Wisconsin had become a major force in U.S. politics, a position he would occupy for another four years.

Herblock, the editorial cartoonist, was not alone in understanding how important McCarthy had already become, but he was the first to turn the Senator’s last name into an eponym that stood for demagogic anti-radicalism. You can click on this link https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/herblock/naughty-naughty.html#obj3 to see the cartoon that earned Herblock a well-deserved mention in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Texas Racists Throw the Book at Student Protesters (1960)

MARCH 30 IS THE 65TH ANNIVERSARY of mass civil disobedience by hundreds of Black students (the majority of the student body) from two small religious colleges in Marshall, Texas.  Police arrested 57 of the students and held them for more than a day under extremely harsh conditions before they were released on bail.

Operating with the support and encouragement of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Student Christian Federation, the students, all of whom attended either Methodist-affiliated Wiley College or Baptist-affiliated Bishop College, had collectively decided to join the 2-month old wave of protest against Jim Crow that was spreading throughout the southern U.S. 

The protests began when the students sat-in at the town’s white’s-only lunch counters in the Woolworth variety store, Rexall Drug Store and the inter-city bus depot. On the first two days of the protests the manager of each store responded by shutting the lunch counters down, after which the students left. On the third day, March 30, 57 students were arrested for sitting-in or attempting to do so.

After the arrested students had been held for hours in the county courthouse without any indication of when they might be released, they stood and began to sing the Star-Spangled Banner. They were distressed to see that none of the officers guarding them stood to show respect for the national anthem. 

After the arrested students waited hours for any sign of action by the police or court officers, some 700 students from both colleges marched into the courthouse square singing patriotic songs. Police responded by coralling some 250 of the students and putting them under arrest where they stood. 

At that point, with more than 300 students in custody, District Attorney Charles Allen apparently realized he was losing control of the situation and told all of those who had been arrested they could leave without being charged, but that if the demonstrations continued, the 57 who had been arrested at first would be re-arrested and put on trial.

All the students left the courthouse to join the hundreds who filled the square, at which point the fire department, acting on the police orders, assaulted the students with high-pressure streams of water, forcing them to leave the courthouse square.  Police told reporters on the scene that the fire department did so in an effort to “calm” demonstrators.                    

Two days later, the sit-ins began again. As the District Attorney had threatened, the 57 who had been the first to be arrested were taken into custody and imprisoned at the county jail. The arrested students were held for more than 24 hours in cells that were intended to accommodate less than half the number actually present.

Ten months later, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed all of the charges against the arrested students. https://youtu.be/nV6YwYBBoOI?si=rRGhaoeB8mN2yWeZ

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