Two months after the sit-in at the police car, Savio led a takeover of Sproul Hall, a university building, which resulted in the largest mass arrest of students in U.S. history. Before the seizure of the building, Savio made what may be the only student speech of the sixties that is remembered. He said:
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even tacitly take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you are free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
Most of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement had participated in the Freedom Summer. They took Bob Dylan’s stirring civil rights song, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and made it their own. Joan Baez sang it for them at one of their pivotal demonstrations, and overnight Dylan’s song for the civil rights movement became the anthem of 1960s student movements.
But the Free Speech Movement, like most sixties movements, claimed to be too democratic to have leaders. Savio always denied being the singular leader. It was because of him, though, more than any other single figure, that students entering college in the mid-1960s thought of demonstrating as a natural act. Savio made the connection from the civil rights movement to the student movement. From Warsaw to Berlin, to Paris, to New York, to Chicago, to Mexico City, students were stirred by the tactics and oratory of Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement. The names, the sit-ins, the arrests, the headlines, the fact that they won their demands for on-campus activism—all this became legend to students entering a university in the mid-1960s. Unfortunately, what was forgotten was the grace and civility of a rebel who walked in his socks on a police car in order not to scratch it.
Mario Savio and Tom Hayden were not particularly interested in the fashion of the times. In 1968, when Tom Hayden organized demonstrations at the Chicago convention, he still dressed very much like the journalist from the
Michigan Daily.
But if Hayden gave 1968 its statement of principles and Savio its spirit—its style was best expressed by an over-thirty man from Worcester, Massachusetts. In his entire lifetime, perhaps in all of history, there was no year that was better suited for Abbie Hoffman than 1968. It must have seemed extraordinary to him that year that the world had come around to his way of doing things. He used to say that he had been born with the decade, in 1960, and that was probably how it felt to him.
Abbie Hoffman was one of the first Americans to fully appreciate the possibilities and the importance of living in what was becoming a media age. He was the New Left’s clown, not because he was clownish, but because in a very calculated way he understood that the New Left was in need of a clown, that a clown could publicize their issues, that a clown was not ignored. Above all, Abbie Hoffman did not want to be ignored. And like all good clowns, he was very funny. He was a master of the put-on, and those who understood put-ons laughed while the others joined the television cameras waiting when he promised to spin and levitate the Pentagon, not understanding why he was not in the least bit embarrassed, or the slightest bit disappointed, when he failed to do so.
In 1960, the year he said he was “born,” he was twenty-four years old, having actually been born in 1936. He was the same age as Black Panther Bobby Seale, a junior at Brandeis when Tom Hayden first traveled fifty miles to the University of Michigan, six years older than Mario Savio, and a decade or more older than undergraduate college students in 1968. Hoffman had a sense that he was running late. He had never gone to a political demonstration until 1960, when as a graduate student at Berkeley he participated in a huge outcry against capital punishment led by Marlon Brando and other celebrities after Caryl Chessman, who had kidnapped two women and forced them to perform oral sex, was sentenced to death for his crime. But on May 2, after Hoffman’s first taste of political activism failed, the state of California killed Chessman.
That same year, Hoffman married and had two children and spent the next few years trying unsuccessfully to master fatherhood and a conventional life. In 1964, to his great frustration, he watched Freedom Summer on television. The following summer, the last time that large numbers of white volunteers went south, Hoffman was among them. He returned to the South the next two years, when few others went, working for SNCC. Hoffman had not only missed Freedom Summer, he had missed another 1964 watershed in the civil rights movement, the Democratic convention in Atlantic City. The convention belonged to Johnson, heir to the Kennedy administration. Johnson’s running mate, Hubert Humphrey, his protégé Walter Mondale, and other leaders of the liberal establishment, fearing they would lose the South to Goldwater, refused to seat the delegates of the Mississippi Freedom Party. This split the movement in two, largely on generational lines. The older civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King were used to the idea that the Democratic Party was not a dependable friend and required work. But SNCC lost faith in working with anyone from the white establishment. Bob Moses was angry. Young leaders such as Stokely Carmichael had no more patience. They began talking about Black Power, about black people going their separate way.
Only a few weeks before the Democratic convention, it was alleged that North Vietnamese gun boats had fired on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson retaliated by attacking North Vietnam and got Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which empowered the president to take “any means necessary” to protect South Vietnam. There has been much evidence, including a cable from one of the destroyers, that the attack may never have taken place. In 1968 the Senate held hearings on the subject but never resolved it conclusively. The suspicion has endured that the Tonkin incident, whether it occurred or not, was seized by Johnson as a pretext to pursue the war. Tom Hayden said, “When the Democratic Party was agreeing to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution at the same time they were refusing to seat the Mississippi Freedom Party, that was a turning point for me.”
The following year Stokely Carmichael went to Mississippi intending to form a local black political party in one of the counties there. He chose Lowndes County because it was 80 percent black. The all-white Mississippi State Democratic Party had a white rooster for a symbol. Searching for a predator that would devour a rooster, Carmichael called his party the Black Panthers. More than a year later two Californians, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, talked to Carmichael about starting their own California party for which they borrowed the name Black Panther. Not seating the Mississippi Freedom Party at the 1964 convention had radicalized the civil rights movement and profoundly changed the history of the 1960s in America.
One year after the Freedom Summer, the southern civil rights struggle was no longer center stage. Black Power was shifting attention to northern cities. Stokely Carmichael, Bob Moses, and all the diverse elements of the civil rights movement could agree on the importance of stopping the war and on little else.
Hoffman appeared not to have noticed this shift. In the spring of 1965, he opened the Snick Shop in his native Worcester, selling crafts made by poor blacks in the South while his fellow SNCC workers, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichel, Julius Lester, and others were selling books and pamphlets on Black Power. Stokely Carmichael admired him for his physical courage. It was somewhat more than physical courage—an irresistible pull toward the vortex. When demonstrators were attacked, he stepped to the front and did everything he could to be the most visible. But when SDS organized its first antiwar rally in Washington, Hoffman did not even go. His most publicized comment about opposing the war at the time was that everyone should protest by going to Jones Beach on Long Island on a summer day wearing only bathing suits.
In 1968 Julius Lester published his seminal work,
Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama!
Lester wrote about how it had been fine for SNCC to have “white and black together” in the words of the Pete Seeger anthem, when they were fighting southern racism, but once they went north it became clear that white people, not southerners, were the problem. “The mask,” he said, “began to slip from the North’s face.” He noted the media value of Black Power—it was provocative.
The cry for black power has done more to generate black consciousness than anything else. The term is not new, having been used by black people like Richard Wright and James Boggs, as well as whites like Charles Silberman. It achieved world wide notice, though, on the highways of Mississippi during the Mere-dith March, when SNCC organizer Willie Ricks condensed what everybody had been saying, “Power for black people!” and said, “Black Power!” (Ricks is not one to mince words.)
What had been a dull march turned into a major news event. Everybody wanted to know what this Black Power was. If SNCC had said Negro Power or Colored Power, white folks would have continued sleeping easy every night. But BLACK POWER! Black. That word. BLACK! And the visions came of alligator infested swamps arched by primordial trees and moss dripping from the limbs and out of the depths of the swamp, the mire oozing from his skin, came the black monster and fathers told their daughters to be in by nine instead of nine-thirty. . . . BLACK POWER! My God, the niggers were gon’ start paying white folk back, . . . The nation was hysterical. Hubert Humphrey screamed, “. . . there is no room in America for racism of any color.” He must have been lying because black people know of 48 states at least that have so much room for racism there’s hardly room for anything else.
SNCC had never been more than 20 percent white, but in December 1966, seven months after Carmichael became head of SNCC, the organization narrowly passed—19 to 18, with 24 abstentions—a measure barring white people. It was Bob Moses, the man who had brought a thousand volunteers south two summers before, who ordered the expulsion. Hoffman was furious and struck back in an article in that month’s
Village Voice,
where he originated his hip first-person colloquial style—a style that New York publications have been imitating ever since. He attacked SNCC’s Achilles’ heel: the fact that, as in many of the sixties movements, SNCC organizers had been doing a great deal of sleeping with one another. These were young people working closely together, often in great danger. As SNCC worker Casey Hayden said, “If you were lucky enough to have a bed, you might feel bad if you didn’t share it.” SNCC had tried to keep this information within the organization, because people were not only having sex, they were having
interracial
sex, black men with white women, and there was absolutely nothing that so provoked white racists as this. Abbie Hoffman wrote that white women had been lured into the organization and seduced and were now being thrown out: “I feel for the other whites in SNCC, especially the white females. I identify with all those Bronx chippies that are getting conned out of their bodies and bread by some dark skinned sharpie.”
In July 1967, when riots erupted in American cities, Johnson appointed an eleven-member presidential commission headed by Illinois governor Otto Kerner to study and recommend solutions to “civil disorders.” In March 1968, the Kerner Commission released its controversial but much praised study in which racism was said to be the key problem. It accused the news media of exaggerating violence and underreporting on the poverty of inner cities and said, “A new mood has sprung up among Negroes, particularly among the young, in which self esteem and enhanced racial pride are replacing apathy and submission to ‘the system.’ ”
The report, which sold so widely that by April 1968 it was number two on
The New York Times
nonfiction bestseller list, called for drastic increases in federal spending. “The vital needs of the nation must be met; hard choices must be made, and, if necessary, new taxes enacted.” Unfortunately, that same day Arkansas Democrat Wilbur Mills, who as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee was the leading figure on taxes, announced that the cost of expanding the war in Vietnam could force a tax increase. That was what the commission meant by hard choices. New York City mayor John Lindsay, a member of the Kerner Commission, was one of an increasing number, including Robert Kennedy, who were complaining that the cost of the war was keeping the country from its social responsibilities.
But the most quoted and remembered line of the report was “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” And that was exactly what was happening in the militant movements of the Left as well. Mirroring society, black and white activists were increasingly separated.
By 1967 Abbie Hoffman had become a militant for the privileged whites. He protested capitalism and commercialism by burning money and urging others to do the same. Burning money was not an idea that would resonate with rural southern blacks or urban northern ones. But what was significant to Hoffman was that setting fire to money attracted television cameras, because it was visual. In 1967, when he finally turned his attention to the antiwar movement, his concern was how to get it onto television. In May of that year he formed the Flower Brigade, made up of young antiwar activists with what had become the hippie uniform—long hair, flowered clothing, bell-bottomed blue jeans, headbands, beads—a uniform that seemed to draw cameras. Hoffman, waving an American flag, wore a cape that said “Freedom.”
Hoffman had learned from the civil rights movement that even creative nonviolence can go unnoticed unless the participants are attacked. The Flower Brigade was designed to get attacked. He trained the members in the defensive crouch that he had been taught in the civil rights movement. And they were attacked, young women beaten, American flags torn out of their hands. It made for powerful photographs, and the Flower Brigade was momentarily the talk of the peace movement. Hoffman told the press that they were poorly equipped from “uptown florists” but had plans to “grow our own.” He boasted that “dandelion chains are being wrapped around induction centers,” where draftees were processed into the military.