The movements that built on the innovations of Mayday to create a new direct-action tradition in the 1970s and 1980s were overwhelmingly white in composition and generally unsuccessful—sometimes spectacularly so—in addressing race. The Mayday protest was to entail “action rather than congregation, disruption rather than display.” As one Mayday leaflet circulated in advance of the 1971 protests declared, in a clear allusion to the April 24 NPAC event, “Nobody gives a damn how many dumb sheep can flock to Washington demonstrations, which are dull ceremonies of dissent that won’t stop the war.” Mayday wouldn’t be a standard protest rally, where a series of speakers (usually chosen through an acrimonious behind-the-scenes struggle) would lecture to a passive crowd. Local residents, especially African Americans, almost immediately began supporting the imprisoned Mayday protesters by bringing food, blankets, and notes of encouragement to the football field and throwing them over the fence. City police then began sending the arrested to the fenced-in, open-air practice field of the Washington Redskins’ football team near Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. He was intrigued by the idea of “groups of like-minded people that weren’t public,” the sort of group that was “totally unknown to anyone else.” Embracing this clandestine structure, the Motherfuckers engaged in outrageous actions, which ranged from dumping garbage at New York’s Lincoln Center on its opening night (its construction having displaced a Puerto Rican neighborhood) to pelting then–Secretary of State Dean Rusk with bags of cow’s blood. 1961. We took it to the max at the Days of Rage, and the price was too high, and everybody knew it.” By the time the Mayday Tribe put out its call to protest, the concept of affinity groups had begun to blend with the other small-group forms that were rapidly growing in countercultural popularity: collectives, communes, cooperatives, consciousness-raising groups. Mayday wasn’t the last antiwar protest by a long shot, but it was the last big national one, and the last major one with ties to the fading New Left. On April 24, 1971, 500,000 people demonstrated against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C. From Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism, by L. A. Kauffman. The Days of Rage were widely viewed as a disaster. It was a period unrivaled, where youth repeatedly and visibly protested the war. In nightlife, Gus Bean's Colossus debuted on New Year's Eve to popular attendance (Jan . There was no declaration of martial law. The remaining protesters, estimated at 12,000, regrouped at various churches and college campuses in the area.[6]. 'Liz Taylor' started the first 'safe haven' for female impersonators in the DC area. In the spring of 1971, antiwar sentiment was running high in the nation's capital, both in the halls of Congress and on the streets. 1971: The Weather Underground is either accused of or takes credit for a series of bombings across the country: March 1, 1971: A bomb is detonated in a toilet in the Senate wing of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. “For a number of us, gay and straight, the women’s part of the conference was getting to know one another through dancing, swimming, making music together, singing, rapping in small groups, in twos and threes, digging on each other,” one woman wrote in Atlanta’s underground paper. Long ago, I know. “There was the notion,” Froines recalled, “that people from University of Wisconsin or Florida State or Smith College or wherever would come, and they would have encampments of their own, and they would develop tactical approaches to what they were doing.”, This decentralized structure, organizers hoped, would also help them avoid the legal entanglements they had faced after the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention protests. As Shin’ya Ono described the group’s preparations on a Weatherman bus heading to Chicago for the Days of Rage, “In order to get to know each other and learn to move as a group, we divided ourselves into several affinity groups of six or seven persons each and did a couple of tasks together,” he wrote. Create your own site at WordPress.com arrow-right. After ERA, the Storm of Abortion Rights Marches and other Protests. The organization named Randolph as its president in 1925 and by 1937 Black workers were receiving better pay, benefits, and working conditions. As passed, the . Over the weekend, while protesters listened to music, planned their actions or slept, 10,000 federal troops were moved to various locations in the Washington, D.C. area. However, it was Section 504 (interestingly, . The explosion is accompanied by a letter explaining that the act was taken in retaliation for Nixon's escalation of the war . But we did want to help them,” veteran civil rights activist Mary Treadwell said to the press. Protesters blocked the New York State Thruway and Chicago’s Eisenhower Expressway; others shut down Santa Barbara’s airport by occupying its runways. Found inside – Page 30Boston, Mass., April 30, 1971. : . . . Evaluation of Administration on Aging and Conduct of White House Conference on Aging: Part 1. Washington, D.C., March 25, 1971. Part 2. Washington, D.C., March 29, 1971. Part 3. Washington, D.C. ... It was just one of those moments where a lot of people were on the same wavelength.”, The Mayday Tribe hadn’t succeeded in its stated goal—“If the government won’t stop the war, the people will stop the government”— and its singular experiment in nonviolent obstruction was soon forgotten, too messy or perhaps too unsettling to be part of popular understandings of the Vietnam War and the movements that opposed it. Mayday, the scruffy and forgotten protest that helped speed US withdrawal from Vietnam, changed the course of activist history as well. The philosophy of civil disobedience that he and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. propounded, and most pacifists embraced, entailed a willingness to accept violence and a refusal to engage in it, even in self-defense. If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government. They neither took the time to secure identification of the persons they arrested nor write down the conduct they had observed which supposedly justified the arrests. It was the largest such rally to date on the West Coast. It helped end the Vietnam War — and reshaped American activism. Free shipping for many products! “Following the disintegration of SDS,” the radical magazine Liberation explained, “there were many in the movement who were thoroughly disillusioned with the whole idea of a national political structure. Millions of Americans know that speech well enough to paraphrase its concluding passages. As Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton wrote in their influential 1967 manifesto Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, “Black people must redefine themselves, and only they can do that. The tumult of spring 1970 faded by the fall, however, and an air of futility hung over the established antiwar movement. It came at a time of crisis for the left—indeed, the distress call embedded in the mobilization’s name could apply equally well to the state of American radical movements in 1971 as to the conduct of the war they opposed. The Three Penny Opera 1971. The protests, however, were a failure. Among these troops were 4,000 paratroopers from the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division. But the government was clearly more concerned with maintaining control than with maintaining public sympathy, as would prove to be the case time and again—during the Seattle WTO blockades; at an array of Occupy encampments across the country; in Ferguson, Missouri—when direct-action protests threatened public order. The 1971 May Day Protests were a series of large-scale civil disobedience actions in Washington, D.C., in protest against the Vietnam War. Demonstrators all around the country quickly organized themselves and blocked highways, key intersections, and railroad tracks. It happened in 1971 in Washington, DC from May 1 to May 3 and diminished within several days. We conducted a small number of trials in which we severely embarrassed the police and the prosecutors who were relying on their testimony. Toward that end, NPAC put forth just one lowest-common-denominator demand: “Out of Vietnam now!” NPAC also vehemently opposed the use of any tactics that went beyond legally permitted protest. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for 1971 March on Washington Vietnam War Protest Poster ~ Vets Discarded Medals at the best online prices at eBay! National Peace Action Coalition, S. (1971) Stop them! And because this is an American story, it’s shaped at every level by questions and divisions of race. “Affinity groups at Mayday,” remembered John Froines, another Chicago 7 defendant centrally involved in the action, “were both a tactical approach in terms of the street and also something more, connected to people’s linkages to one another.”, That said, there was a haphazard quality to the Mayday organizing; a lot of the action was put together on the fly. Protesters announced that because the government had not stopped the Vietnam War they would stop the government[4] and told troops, many of whom were of similar age, that their goal was to prevent the troops from being sent to Vietnam. And it just happened to be the case that I had my own experiences with mass arrests of anti-war demonstrators in New York City just a few years earlier when I was the director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. The police then engaged in a back and forth with the protesters outside the university's main gate on O Street, lobbing tear gas over the gate each time they pushed the crowd back. Publication: Washington DC: National Peace Action Coalition, 1971. The 1971 May Day Protests were a series of large-scale civil disobedience actions in Washington, D.C., in protest against the Vietnam War.These began on Monday … It wouldn’t be a conventional protest march, where demonstrators would trudge along a route that had been pre-arranged with the police, shepherded by movement marshals controlled by the protest leadership. and run tactics throughout the city, trying to disrupt traffic and cause chaos in the streets. “No one seemed to think the conference was functioning to resolve any political problems or effectively to plan any future actions,” one attendee reported. You’re not simply following a leadership up at the head of a march … Rather than one conspiracy, it was thousands of conspiracies.”, The lack of formal organization, however, tended to undermine the ideal of egalitarian participation as a result of what radical feminist Jo Freeman famously called “the tyranny of structurelessness,” in one of the most influential essays of the time. The march … Some three hundred of the group’s followers converged on Chicago, where they went on what might best be termed a rampage: battling cops, smashing windshields, running through the streets, and creating mayhem. But the government’s victory, if you can call it that, came only as a result of measures that turned the workaday bustle of the district’s streets into what William H. Rehnquist, the assistant attorney general who would later become chief justice of the Supreme Court, called “qualified martial law.” While the government hadn’t been stopped, there was a very real sense that it had been placed under siege by its own citizens, with the nation’s capital city transformed into “a simulated Saigon,” as reporter Nicholas von Hoffman put it in the Washington Post. These depictions show . This was the scene in Washington, D.C., on May 3, 1971, after a great number of anti-war protesters were arrested and housed on the football practice field of the Washington Redskins. A new formation named the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) called for a massive legal march and rally on April 24. These began on Monday morning, May 3rd, and ended on May 5th. One anarchist wag made a sign proclaiming the football field “Smash the State Concentration Camp #1.” People who had strongly disapproved of the Mayday Tribe’s shutdown plan were appalled by the flagrant violation of civil liberties, and upset to see the nation’s capital under military occupation. Martin Luther King Jr. gives his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington in 1963. In St. Louis, the local chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War occupied the top of the Gateway Arch, while another group of radicals took over the decommissioned mine sweeper USS Inaugural, saying they wanted to repair it and take it to Vietnam to clear the harbor of Nixon’s mines. “The scene was midway between that of a sham battle and a war of death,” one protester wrote afterwards. To stop them from paralyzing the city, the Nixon Administration had made the unprecedented decision to sweep them all up, using not just police but actual military forces. Another participant declared, “There were a lot of things about Mayday that were totally wrong. But the war had certainly not ended, and neither had the underlying economic and racial injustices that organizers had sought to address across a long decade of protest politics. But white resistance to change, and the unrelenting violence directed toward the movement, had propelled many organizers toward very different approaches. By 1971 domestic opposition to the Nixon Administration's prosecution of the Vietnam War had grown, becoming both more widespread and more angry. Unlike any national demonstration before it, this action was to be created through a decentralized structure based on geographic regions. Check Also: 10 Facts about Manifest Destiny. But the daring action had in fact achieved its most important aim: pressuring the Nixon Administration to hasten the end of the hated war. It happened in 1971 in Washington, DC … This means no ‘movement generals’ making tactical decisions you have to carry out. “Small battles raged all over the city as demonstrators would build crude barricades, disperse when the police came and then regroup to rebuild the dismantled obstructions,” one underground paper reported. The prosecutors had no choice but to dismiss the rest of the cases, about 600 on that occasion. The Vietnam Veteran's March on Washington in 1971 drew thousands of protesters. . March on Washington sister march down Slauson to Leimert Park Village. The most influential large-scale political action of the ’60s was actually in 1971, and you’ve never heard of it. Ralph and Florence were seeking my advice on how to deal with the Nixon administration’s unprecedented crackdown on free assembly as well as its systematic violation of people’s due process rights through indiscriminate mass arrests. The Motherfuckers, in their own words, were “flower children with thorns,” a fierce and disruptive group devoted to creating a “total break [from the present]: cultural, political, social, everything.” Ben Morea, the founder of the Motherfuckers, had learned about affinity groups from conversations and debates with Bookchin, who had done extensive research during the 1960s on the Spanish Civil War. Jerry Coffin, an organizer with the War Resisters League who teamed up with Davis when Mayday was only an idea, recalled it as an attempt “to create a responsible hip alternative” to the Weather Underground: “merging radical politics, Gandhian nonviolence, serious rock and roll, [and] lots of drugs.” Many—perhaps most—of the people who took part in the action were relative newcomers to the movement, from the generation that had been radicalized by Cambodia and Kent State. Troops from the Marine Barracks lined both sides of the 14th St bridge. If they were attacked or beaten, they would neither fight back nor run away. “We had that discussion over and over again,” he recalled in a 2000 interview, “and each demonstration that we went to became a little bit more militant, until it was in our heads to organize a demonstration that was entirely street fighting, which we did, in which affinity groups played a very important role.”, All the participants in the Days of Rage were organized into the small groups, which Weatherman treated less like egalitarian collectives and more like military platoons. On Wednesday, May 5, 1,200 more people were arrested at a legal rally on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, bringing the total to 12,614 people, making this the largest mass arrest in U.S. history. They called their underground cells “grupos de afinidad,” explained Murray Bookchin, the writer and social ecologist who first introduced the term to the United States, “because people were drawn together not by residence, not even by occupation, but on the basis of affinity: friendship, individual trust, background, history.” The groups reflected both anarchist ideals of free association and military needs for security. The Act, twice vetoed by President Nixon in 1971 and 1972 for primarily fiscal reasons, was signed by the President in 1973 after significant amendment. No food, water, or sanitary facilities were made available by authorities but sympathetic local residents brought supplies. By the end of the day, over 7,000 people would be arrested in the largest mass arrest in U.S. history. By the time the march began at the Washington Monument around 250,000 people had gathered. The March on Washington, 200,000 strong, was the largest protest army ever seen up to that time in the nation's capital—a movement with historic impact and a message for us today, 50 years . Each group sticks together, protects each of its members, acts as a fighting unit in case of confrontation, and functions as a work team.”. Their orders were to arrest every demonstrator on sight. Sent for information. California District of Columbia San … “We don’t fight the mass (market) with a mass (movement),” the essay argued. Bob Dylan's three songs—two, really, as I'll explain … The crowd … On March 1, the increasingly … That still left thousands of prisoners, whom the police herded into an outdoor practice field next to RFK Stadium. (AP Photo). This 16mm film, a home movie shot on May 9-10, 1970, shows a march on the White House. It was a protest against the Vietnam War, but it wasn’t part of the storied sixties, having taken place in 1971, a year of nationwide but largely unchronicled ferment. In the New York Times, reporter Richard Halloran flatly declared, “The Tribe members failed to achieve their goal. It’s a story rooted less in radicals’ ideas about how the world ought to change than the evolving forms of action they’ve used to actually change it—whether hastening the end of an unpopular war, blocking the construction of nuclear power plants, revolutionizing the treatment of AIDS, stalling toxic trade deals, or reforming brutally racist police practices. However, demonstrations during the years since 1963 were not the manifestation of a long-developing tradition, but rather a series of tense, dramatic, and imaginative attempts . Officers went through the streets arresting anybody they could find who seemed to be an opponent of the war. It was called the Mayday action, and it provides invaluable lessons for today. The March on Washington showed Americans the power of peaceful protest × protest FRANCIS MILLER/CONTRIBUTOR—GETTY IMAGES a statement or action that expresses disagreement with something (noun) The March on Washington was a historic protest in Washington, DC. Saturday's March On . You don’t do that in a revolution. /1/ Source: National Archives, Nixon Presidential Materials, NSC Files, Box 625, Country Files, Middle East, Pakistan, Vol. Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window), Click to share on Instapaper (Opens in new window), Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window), In 1971, the People Didn’t Just March on Washington — They Shut It Down, This story was funded by Longreads Members, Friends: We Need Your Help to Fund More Stories. [1], Members of the Nixon administration would come to view the events as damaging, because the government's response was perceived as violating citizens' civil rights. In the city, over 5,000 police officers were on duty, backed up by 1,400 National Guardsmen. 1971 Month Day March 01 . Read Paul Chevigny's "Police Complaints: A Handbook". “We had all these very expensive radios,” explained Jerry Coffin, “thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of radios. And they appear to have had no discernible impact on President Nixon’s policy in Vietnam.” Even Rennie Davis, the Chicago 7 defendant and New Left leader who had originally conceived of the Mayday action, announced at a press conference that the protest had failed. By the early 1970s, the small group was the predominant radical feminist form, characterized by “a conscious lack of formal structure, [and] an emphasis on participation by everyone,” in the words of organizer and theorist Jo Freeman. Drawing on her experiences in the women’s liberation movement, where collectives and consciousness-raising groups had flourished, Freeman described how the lack of formal structures and decision-making procedures—so democratic in intent and appearance—in fact allowed informal and unaccountable power dynamics to flourish. List of protest marches on Washington, D.C. The immediate goal was to snarl traffic so completely that government employees could not get to their jobs. The films we examined made it clear not only that the allegations against individual arrestees were false, but they also proved that the police officers who were identified in court as the arresting officers were not those who actually made the arrests for which they claimed to be witnesses. T he Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. While 200,000 people held a rally on the Mall in Washington DC, around 156,000 simultaneously marched here in San Francisco. Your region makes the tactical decisions within the discipline of nonviolent civil disobedience.”. So many people were radicalized during the spring 1970 uprising that the antiwar movement suddenly swelled with a new wave of organizers spread all throughout the country, many in places that had seen relatively little activism before then. “The white ‘New Left’ movement of the 1960s is dead and gone,” one radical wrote in Space City!, a Houston underground paper, soon after the action. Based on more than one hundred interviews with participants and accompanied by nearly forty photographs and maps, Battle Green Vietnam tells the story of the 1971 antiwar protest by Vietnam veterans that resulted in the largest mass arrest ... Local affinity groups might choose their own targets and tactics, but a small group of men around Rennie Davis wrote the organizing materials, controlled the finances, called the press conferences, did the big-picture planning, and spoke for the action as a whole. The media was critical as well. “The reason it changed, and went from a violent to more of a nonviolent kind of thing,” said Jeff Jones, “is because violent street fighting played itself out kind of quickly. Veterans' March On Washington 1971 A year after returning from Vietnam where I was a 1st Lieutenant in charge of an Army news team, my wife and I went the Veterans' … Because affinity groups were small and formed only by people who knew each other well, they were difficult to infiltrate or uncover. The Nixon administration was ready. Skirmishes between protesters and police occurred up until about mid-day. Many movements contributed to this long process of political reinvention, but feminism and queer radicalism played special, central roles, profoundly redefining the practice of activism in ways that have too rarely been acknowledged. Another 1,500 were packed into the jail’s recreation yard. And every major group that had a target had a radio and was in communication with our base.”. For you are not nice guys. The two had worked closely together on a committee to coordinate the national March on Washington, but their brief partnership and shared cause were where the similarities ended. “But what we did,” she continued, “was we went to the extreme and started engaging in armed struggle or at least self-defense, and we didn’t have enough experience with that perhaps, or we didn’t have enough support for that, and we were beat. Rennie Davis and David Dellinger of the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice and Jerry Coffin of the War Resisters League began planning the actions; later in 1970 Michael Lerner joined their number. "[12], Learn how and when to remove these template messages, Learn how and when to remove this template message, Opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam. "-Publishers Weekly From the reviews of History of an Obsession "This is truly a significant work, for Fischer gives a balanced account of a complex subject, making it painfully clear just how Germany became capable of genocide. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which heard the case, would summarize critically the actions of D.C. police this way: On May 3, 1971, when Washington, D.C., was confronted with a threat to bring the orderly conduct of the Federal government to a standstill, the public authorities responded by ordering mass arrests. 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