Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969

Chapter 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969 (iv)

As the “Days of Rage” approached, I still didn’t rule out the possibility of going out to Chicago, though. A split-off faction of Weatherman, called Revolutionary Youth Movement II, was planning to hold a less militant demo in Chicago simultaneously with the Weatherman “kick ass” demo. Near the end of September, I attended a Newsreel film showing at Rutgers University's Newark campus, that was part of a radical student anti-war festival there. Florrie and Lynn turned out to be the Newsreel people who brought the films to be screened. After the film showing, Lynn gave a militant speech to the crowd of about 100 anti-war youths and urged people to come to the Chicago demo in a few weeks.

Although Lynn was not a member of the Weatherman group, her politics at this time were quite similar. Her line on anti-sexism, however, was much harder than the anti-sexist line at this time of Bernardine and the other Weatherwomen. Weatherwomen, such as “The Motor City Nine” (who successfully used their karate skills in a Detroit community college classroom to apparently gang up on two pro-war men students who tried to disrupt an anti-war movement recruiting speech), emphasized the importance of Movement women becoming physical feminists and as fierce physical fighters as Movement men. Lynn, however, stressed more the importance of Movement women fiercely fighting against the male chauvinism of men—inside and outside the Movement—and against male supremacy everywhere.

In early October 1969, a few days before the Chicago “Days of Rage” demo, I bumped into Harvey in front of the Washington Square “Peace” Church on W.4th St., where Newsreel was holding an all-day screening of its films.

Harvey was friendly at first when we met. Then his expression turned serious and he asked: “Are you going with us to Chicago, Bob?”

I shook my head and replied: “I’ve decided not to go. The pigs are too well-armed for us to be effective. I agree with the Panthers. It’s a suicidal trip.”

Harvey frowned. “You’re wrong, Bob. It’s the right strategy. We can’t use the same tactics we used at Columbia to build the Movement now. We have to put our bodies and our lives on the line—and fight—if we want to see a Revolution. We can’t hide behind our white skin privilege anymore. And we have to be ready to die, Bob.”

“I don’t think it’s going to accomplish anything without the Black community in Chicago and the Panthers supporting the demo, Harvey.”

“The Panthers have different strategic needs than we do. Unless we follow through on this demo and really bring the war home, we’ll be selling out the Vietnamese.”

I felt bad about not wanting to follow Harvey out to Chicago, although it still seemed morally justified, but politically illogical, to me. “Maybe you’re right, Harvey. But I just don’t believe it’s the place and time for me to risk my life. Most Movement people in New York aren’t going to join the Weather demo. At best, they’ll join the RYM II march,” I said.

“Most Movement people are bourgeois. We’re looking for militant working-class fighters, not middle-class talkers, now.”

“I doubt if many non-Movement working-class youth are going to go to Chicago either.”

“Well, even if our demo is small, we have to go through with it. We have a revolutionary obligation to fight as hard as the Vietnamese. And to risk our lives as much as the Vietnamese, as long as the war in Viet Nam continues.”

“I agree with you there, Harvey. But I’m not sure Chicago next week is the best place or time to risk our lives.”

“I’m right, Bob. And you’re wrong.”

Feeling further debate was useless, I wished Harvey luck at the demo and went inside the church to watch the Newsreel films.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969

Chapter 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969 (iii)

In early September 1969, I decided that I wanted to participate in the Weatherman Chicago action the next month and possibly join Weatherman. Although I had read in the (now-defunct) U.S. radical newsweekly Guardian that Mark, JJ and others had been involved in some physical fights with PL people (during the summer and at the Black Panther Party-called anti-fascist conference on the West Coast) that seemed politically counter-productive, I still felt politically close to the Weatherman tendency; and thought that many anti-war youths would turn up for the October 1969 “Days of Rage” demonstration in support of the Chicago Conspiracy 8. From my previous year’s organizing work on Staten Island, from living out in Queens again, from attending Queens College and from working at UPS, I realized that the political consciousness gap between the elite university campuses and the rest of white Amerika was quite great. But I still felt that the Weathermen could quickly eliminate this gap by an intensive organizing campaign in white working-class neighborhoods.

I had Nick’s telephone number in Queens, as a result of doing some work with him earlier in the summer at Frank’s White Suburbs Organizing Project Movement office in Douglaston. So I telephoned him in the morning one weekday and he gave me the address of the Richmond Hill house where he and the other Weathermen were living in Queens. It was agreed that I would stop by there later that day.

The Weathercollective’s apartment was located in a house, a block south of Jamaica Ave. After I walked up the stairs and entered the apartment I was greeted by Nick. In an adjacent room were other people from Columbia SDS: Josh and Linda, Ted, Dave and Dionne. All said hello to me in a friendly way. Naomi, from the New York SDS Regional Office, was also in the adjacent room and she walked over to me and touched me on the back in an affectionate way. The Weather apartment was furnished in a sparse way, with little furniture except for the mattresses which were on the floor. The apartment looked as sloppy as a typical Movement office: political literature was scattered around the floor and on a table.

Nick then escorted me into the front room to speak to me alone about what was being planned with regard to the next month’s Chicago anti-war action.

“This demonstration is going to be different than previous demos,” Nick warned me in a somber tone. “It’s going to be heavy. And some of us may have to die.”

Nick then explained that since the purpose of the October 1969 demonstration was to bring the war home, Weathermen were not going to wait to be attacked and brutalized by the cops before starting to fight or engaging in property destruction. Instead, the Weathermen were going to Chicago with the intention of materially supporting the Vietnamese people and the National Liberation Front by engaging in property destruction and, in an aggressive way, fighting off the Chicago cops if they attempted to make any arrests of anti-war demonstrators.

“The Movement has to fight more militantly against the War and against the pigs than it has in the past. And not meekly submit to arrest. It’s national chauvinist for us not to risk our lives to stop the War when our Vietnamese sisters and brothers are risking their lives each day against our common oppressors,” Nick said.

I then asked Nick how many people were expected to participate in the Weatherman’s October “Days of Rage.”

“We’re expecting 50,000,” Nick answered.

I felt skeptical that 50,000 white working-class anti-war youth or anti-war student youth were actually going to come to Chicago if it was being advertised as a “heavy,” “kick ass” demo. I then asked Nick what people were going to do if the Chicago cops responded to our increased militancy and increased willingness to fight back, by using tear gas or their guns.

“We’ll be prepared to keep fighting back,” Nick replied.

“This demo sounds different than what people are used to. It’s one thing for people to spontaneously defend themselves against police brutality, like at Columbia or at the Chicago Convention protests. But it’s another thing to announce in advance to people that the demo is going to be a street fight with better-armed cops,” I said.

“We have to prove that we’re not chicken-shit in order to make a revolution here. We have to show that white revolutionaries are prepared to fight as hard as Black revolutionaries and Vietnamese revolutionaries, and not hide behind our white skin privilege,” Nick retorted. (Ironically, by the 1980s Nick had become a white upper-middle-class professor on one of the campuses of the City University of New York).

I told Nick that I would think about going to the Chicago demo and would call him if I decided to go out there with Weatherman. I then smiled at Ted and Dave, as I waved goodbye to them, and left the apartment.

As I left the Richmond Hill house and walked back towards the subway station, I began to consider the prospects for success of the “Days of Rage” in Chicago. I respected the apparent willingness of the Weathermen to risk their lives at this demo, but I doubted that enough people would follow them out to Chicago to risk their lives against the better-armed Chicago police for the action to be effective. I felt the Weathermen were quite justified, morally, in attempting to bring the war home in solidarity with the Vietnamese and the Black Panther Party—especially since the Chicago 8 trial seemed to indicate that the right of free assembly was no longer going to be allowed for the New Left.

Yet I was not confident that the Weathermen could pull off the kind of militant action they were proposing with any degree of effectiveness unless the Chicago Black Panther Party was willing to work closely with them in organizing the “Days of Rage.” When word came down from Chicago that Fred Hampton and other Black Panther Party people were not fully supporting Weatherman’s “Days of Rage” plan because they considered the proposed action too suicidal and “Custeristic,” I felt more strongly that it was doomed to fail. So I was not prepared to risk my life with the Weathermen in October 1969, despite my past political ties and personal friendships with many of them, by following them to Chicago to fight cops and break windows--without Black Panther Party support in Chicago for such militancy.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969

Chapter 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969 (ii)

When I wasn’t outside doing political organizing or working at UPS, I practiced my folk singing in a more intense way again, after purchasing a Phil Ochs songbook. I also began to write folk songs and love songs more frequently again, around this time. I still saw myself, primarily, as a revolutionary activist. But I also once again began to think of myself as a folksinger in the Guthrie-Seeger-Ochs tradition.

On FM radio during July and August 1969 there had been much media hype about a “Festival of Life” rock concert which was to be held in Woodstock, New York, near Bob Dylan’s country retreat and mansion. The idea of holding a counter-cultural “Festival of Life” summer rock concert was ripped-off by hip capitalist businessmen from yippies like Abbie Hoffman. During the previous summer, Abbie and the other yippies had organized an anti-war “Festival of Life” free concert in Chicago’s Grant Park which attempted to unite hip rock culture with New Left politics, in order to bring the maximum number of anti-war youths to the Democratic National Convention protests. The hip capitalist organizers of the Woodstock rock concert took the idea of a festival of life summer rock event at which various counter-cultural bands would play, divorced the event from any connection with anti-capitalist New Left political protest overtones, and planned to charge a hefty admission fee for the weekend of music.

In the weeks before the Woodstock Rock Festival, Movement people and the underground press accused the hip capitalist rock promoters of being rip-off artists, for both ripping off the yippies’ festival of life idea and for not turning the concert into an admission-free youth cultural event. As a concession to Movement people and Movement groups, the hip capitalists agreed to let various Movement groups set up informational booths in the rear of the concert site.

Because it wasn’t being billed as a free concert and seemed to be being pushed and sanctioned by the U.S. corporate establishment media that I had come to hate, I didn’t bother to go up to the Woodstock rock festival. But I listened to news reports about it on my transistor radio, while I hiked around Queens that weekend.

A few days after the event, which was attended by 400,000 predominantly white hippie youths (most of whom were either tripping on acid or high on grass), I received a detailed description in the Queens College cafeteria of the four days, from a hippie guy I had known at Richmond College, who had driven up to the Woodstock event.

“The thing that amazed me most was being around so many people who were also tripping. And being with so many chicks who were unashamed to go naked with cats around them,” the hippie guy said.

The New Left Movement failed abysmally in politicizing many of the white youths who spent the four days stoned together at Woodstock—and Abbie Hoffman was not cheered by the audience when he tried to appeal to the crowd to remember John Sinclair (who was then in jail in Michigan for 10 years after being convicted for the possession of one joint of pot). But the myth of Woodstock became influential in the 1970s. That fact that so many hip young people would gather in peace and love, united by psychedelic drugs and music in a community that was more joyful and less alienating than the Death Culture of the 9-to-5 corporate world, was impressive.

What was also both impressive and surprising was the number of people who showed up at the Woodstock festival and who now identified as hippies. Unlike in the early 1960s, many more people now clearly identified themselves more as bohemian hippies than as political radicals. Because over a hundred thousand more people showed up than the hip capitalist rock promoters had anticipated, they were unable to implement their plan to charge a hefty admission fee and the rock festival turned into a free music festival after all. The rock promoters, however, were still able to make huge profits from ripping off the counter-culture--by successfully marketing the rights to the Woodstock movie and the Woodstock vinyl record album, over the course of the next year.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969

Chapter 22: At United Parcel Service and Queens College, 1969 (i)

By early August 1969, I was desperate to leave my parents’ apartment for my own space again. I found myself a part-time evening job unloading trucks at United Parcel Service in Maspeth, Queens for $52 per week, sold my saxophone for $100 to a follower of Meher Baba to raise my security deposit and broker’s fee, and rented a furnished room in a Jackson Heights rooming house, near 37th Ave. and 74th St. Most of August was spent completing the last two courses I needed to graduate, hanging out at Queens College for a few hours in the afternoon, and unloading trucks at UPS at night.

During my last weeks of attending classes at Queens College, I met a woman student who dealt grass on campus and ended up smoking pot with her in her parents’ Mitchell Gardens apartment in Flushing one afternoon, when her parents were away on vacation. She was a hippie and bohemian and spirited, but she wasn’t at all interested in radical political organizing. Another woman student I met at Queens College around this time, named Martha, was interested in New Left politics. After she handed me a flyer one afternoon on campus, I ended up asking her for a weekend date. She was a divorced ex-hippie who had lived in San Francisco when married for a few years. Martha also was the daughter of an Old Left musician and his wife, and she now lived with her parents in a large high-rise apartment in Flushing’s Carlyle Towers.

Martha’s intellectualism and leftism interested me, and we had a good time taking a subway to Coney Island, hanging out on the beach, swimming together and riding the roller-coaster. For a few weeks it looked like we might become lovers. Our friendship ended, however, when Martha saw me handing out a leaflet on campus for a political group, the Mother Jones Caucus, that she felt was competing with the political sect that she was in at this time.

The Mother Jones Caucus was a small New Left political group that was started at Queens College in early September 1969 by a married bohemian couple named Chele and Gunner. Chele and Gunner lived together in a rent-controlled, run-down apartment on Great Jones St. on the Lower East Side. Gunner was a good-natured, unemployed carpenter who was also taking some courses at Queens College in Fall 1969. Chele was a strong, warm, vibrant, idealistic, liberated woman activist with long light-brown hair, who had grown up in California. She was also enrolled at Queens College in Fall 1969.

Chele, Gunner and I became fond of each other quickly because of our philosophical similarities. We were able to organize both a Queens College rally that built for a march in support of anti-war GIs at Fort Dix in New Jersey and a campus rally that protested a police attack on the Black Panther Party office in Corona-East Elmhurst, Queens (which had left one Black Panther Party activist wounded).

But by early November 1969, Chele, Gunner and I all began to feel that New Left organizing at a commuter school like Queens College was unable to produce many more New Left Movement recruits. Queens College students (unlike students who lived in college dormitories or their own off-campus apartments) were tied too closely to their parents, in whose apartments and homes they still lived, to be personally emancipated enough to join the Movement en masse. So the Mother Jones Caucus at Queens College became inactive after a few months. I still felt close to Chele and Gunner, though. They were the type of Movement people who would invite you to dinner at their apartment on a Saturday night, if you worked with them politically.

Aside from doing political organizing work by day at Queens College in Fall 1969 (after finishing my summer courses and receiving a Richmond College BA in the mail), I continued to work part-time unloading trucks at UPS. It was hard physical labor; and there was never a shortage of trucks to remove heavy boxes from and then place the boxes down on the rapidly moving conveyor belt. About 50% of the UPS unloaders, packers and sorters were African-Americans and a substantial number of all the workers were returning Viet Nam War veterans. While we toiled in factory-like conditions, a sound system throughout the UPS distribution center broadcast either rock music or the New York Mets baseball game (The Mets were in the 1969 pennant race and would go on to win the World Series, and there was intense UPS worker interest in their fate). “Honky Tonk Women,” sung by the Rolling Stones, was the hit song being played on the radio most at this time.

Nobody at UPS enjoyed their work during the night shift. But it became clear to me after the first week at United Parcel Service that neither the 1960s Black Liberation Movement nor the white New Left Movement had made much impact yet on the consciousness of UPS workers. There was no sense among the UPS workers that a Revolution in the U.S. was either approaching or practical; and the idea that socialism was preferable to capitalism was not being advocated by anybody else in the distribution center. Whenever I worked inside the UPS trucks, the world of Movement people--who talked as if a Black Panther Party-led Revolution was about to begin shortly in the U.S.--seemed to be a fantasy world. I had to keep reminding myself not to assume that all working-class people in the U.S. were as uninterested in Black Liberation politics in 1969 as my UPS co-workers.

Working at UPS each night from August 1969 to early December 1969 was quite exhausting at first and reinforced my gut hatred for the classist capitalist system, but it also enabled me to have my days free to organize at Queens College and elsewhere. After finishing college, I was at a loss at what exactly to do with my life. Since I would soon lose my student deferment, it seemed impossible and purposeless to make any long-range plans, until I figured out a way to beat the draft.

I considered going into the U.S. Army to organize, if drafted, because a GI resistance movement was developing. But I concluded that it was still more practical and important for me to resist being drafted.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 21: Weatherman Comes To Queens, 1969

Chapter 21: Weatherman Comes To Queens, 1969 (iii)

Newsreel’s office in late July 1969 was in a loft on W.31st St. in Manhattan, which looked like a bohemian artist’s loft. On the early weekday afternoon when I first stopped by there, a thin woman in her early 20s, about 5’2” tall, who wore a scarf on her head, jeans and a blue work shirt, was sitting behind the office desk, talking on the telephone. Her conversation on the phone appeared to be about some romantic relationship-difficulty she was currently having.

The woman activist’s name was Florrie; and her face reminded me of a model’s face on the cover of a magazine. Her voice sounded highly educated. But unlike most young Movement women at this time, Florrie still wore lipstick. When she hung up the telephone, Florrie, with a smile, asked if she could help me.

“I’m taking a course at Queens College on `The Family,’ in which the class consists of fifty women and four men. The instructor is a liberal male academic. He’s arguing that the `natural role’ of family breadwinner is the male role. And that U.S. women don’t normally work or need to work. I spoke to Robin Morgan and she said that a woman from Newsreel might be interested in speaking to my class about women’s liberation.”

Florrie pointed to another woman activist in the office, who had long, frizzy brown hair, was wearing slacks and was cleaning some film at a table on the other side of the loft. “Maybe Lynn can help you,” Florrie suggested.

Florrie then called Lynn over to the Newsreel office desk and Lynn agreed to come to my Queens College “Sociology of the Family” class on the date that the male instructor had given me permission to bring in a feminist Movement lecturer. Lynn was a few inches taller than Florrie and appeared physically sturdier. But she was less friendly than Florrie. Although she didn’t appear reluctant to speak in my sociology class, Lynn seemed more wary of me—because I was a man—than Florrie did.

Florrie had grown up in Glen Cove, Long Island before attending Vassar College, in the days when Vassar was an all-women’s institution. After leaving Vassar, she had worked as an operator with the phone company for awhile, and then started working with Newsreel, although she, herself, was not a filmmaker. Prior to moving to her West Village apartment, Florrie had lived in San Francisco for a time. She was romantically involved with a tall Newsreel filmmaker in his late 20s, named Tivo, who—while living in San Francisco—had made a short film about the Black Panther Party, which featured an interview with Huey P. Newton, the imprisoned Black Panther Party leader.

Lynn had graduated from Radcliffe College four years previously and was now 26-years-old. Prior to joining Newsreel as a filmmaker and becoming the Newsreel person who edited its film on the Columbia Student Revolt, Lynn had worked as a film editor at NBC. The high-level of male chauvinism within U.S. mass media institutions in the 1960s had helped turn Lynn into one of the most hard-line radical feminists of the Movement’s women activists.

Wearing white slacks and a halter, on the day she was scheduled to speak, Lynn entered the classroom in Academic Hall at Queens College where my “Sociology of the Family” class was held, about 15 minutes late, and began to speak:

“Women are fed up with male supremacy, male chauvinism, sexism and the sexist division of labor. We no longer intend to be passive sex-objects for the first hip pair of pants that walks by. And we’re tired of being harassed and taunted by lonely men on the street.

“The Parsons model of the typical family no longer describes how women live today. More and more women have to work—or are choosing not to become housewives. And when women work, they only earn 59% of what the average man earns.

“Women are starting to meet together in groups and talk about their lives. And when we talk about our lives to each other we also find that many of us are frigid, despite all this talk about the joys of the `sexual revolution.’ We’ve also discovered that we’ve experienced similar kinds of oppression as a result of male chauvinism and male supremacy. For us to be free, we have to make a Revolution that also ends male chauvinism and sexism.”

After Lynn had spoken like this for about 20 minutes, the male chauvinist liberal academic started to interrupt her and, in a supercilious way, began to challenge her arguments. Lynn, however, more than held her own intellectually in the debate; and, by the end of the class period, the male academic appeared flustered and ill-at-ease—because he was not used to being intellectually overpowered by a woman in an academic debate. About half of the women students in the class—and all of the five middle-aged women students—seemed sympathetic to Lynn’s radical feminist views. The other half of the class and the male professor looked at Lynn as if she were some kind of “lesbian freak,” as she and I left Academic Hall together.

Lynn appeared satisfied with the results of her lecturing, and a bit friendlier towards me than she had been before speaking in my class. But, as we took the Q17 bus down Kissena Blvd. towards the Flushing Main Street subway station, Lynn seemed either too shy or too elitist to converse with me in more than a brief way. Because she was the most militant feminist in the Movement I had yet heard speak, I was quite interested in getting closer to her. Yet after walking with me into the Woolworth’s store that was located next to the subway station, Lynn suddenly turned away from me, as if I didn’t exist. And without saying goodbye to me, she exited from the store after she had purchased some items. But despite her strange lack of personal warmth, Lynn still seemed like an impressive political activist, very politically conscious and intellectual, and quite dedicated to the Movement.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 21: Weatherman Comes To Queens, 1969

Chapter 21: Weatherman Comes To Queens, 1969 (ii)

A Weather-led demo was held at JFK Airport to greet Nelson Rockefeller, at the end of Rockefeller’s tour of Latin America. Rockefeller’s tour had been greeted by militant anti-imperialist mass demos in every Latin American city that Rockefeller had visited. Around 100 of us, led by Mark and other former New York Regional SDS people who were now into Weather, showed up at the airport. But because the airport was so large and our numbers were so small, the demo felt like an ineffectual one.

A minor controversy developed at Queens College around the same time, over the Queens College Administration’s failure to allow a summer program for African-American youth to be run in a way that respected African-American self-determination rights. Nick, Frank, myself and some of the high school activists attempted to make links with Queens African-American activists who were working with Rev. Mitchell, by attending a Queens College campus demo that the African-American minister had organized. But nothing further developed in the way of an inter-racial alliance in Queens County. Nick continued to work with Frank’s Douglaston White Suburbs Organizing Project during the summer. But the other Weatherman activists in Queens that summer involved themselves in different forms of activism and I did not see Ted again until September 1969, after he had met with Vietnamese diplomats in Havana, Cuba.

In late July 1969, I dropped some LSD for the first time at Frank’s apartment, on the same day that the U.S. was landing a man on the moon for the first time, and it turned out to be the one bad trip I’ve ever had. I became paranoid about the rise of U.S. fascism and started hallucinating in relation to the other people in Frank’s apartment who were also tripping. While everyone else was lost in their own trips, I sneaked out of the apartment and started running down Bell Blvd. towards Northern Blvd. I then hopped on a bus on Northern Blvd. and asked a friendly African-American teenage guy to let me know when the bus reached Union St., so I would know when to get off the bus. He proved to be a reliable navigator for me.

When I got off the bus, in front of Flushing High School at Union St. and Northern Blvd., I then started walking towards my parents’ apartment. Still hallucinating, I rang the doorbell of a private house at random. A white high school woman with long hair, who was at home with her middle-aged parents, answered the door. Luckily, she and her parents just told me I was at the wrong address, but didn’t call the police to pick me up.

A few minutes later, however, I had come down from the initial flying period of my trip enough to be able to find my way home to my parents’ apartment. My sister began giving me glasses of orange juice to drink and my father looked at me with a worried expression, his worst fears about my interest in psychedelic drugs apparently being confirmed. The next day I felt quite orgasmic and began to enjoy the tripping sensation, and I stayed away from my Queens College classes while I came down from my “confrontation with death.” But I kept away from acid again, until a few years later.

I had begun my second term of the summer session at Queens College prior to my LSD trip, taking a sociology course on criminology that was taught by a right-wing professor who was a former probation officer, as well as a course on “Sociology of the Family.” The criminology professor was not used to having to defend his ideas from New Left intellectual criticism in class, or in discussion with students who weren’t intellectually submissive. So he felt very threatened by the debates I kept having with him in class. By the end of the summer session he seemed to regard me as a combination subversive-juvenile delinquent—because I defended the democratic rights and the human value of people who violated U.S. capitalist laws and ended up being incarcerated for property theft.

Enrolled in the “Sociology of the Family” course were about 50 conventionally middle-class Queens College white women students and 4 white men students. The instructor was a male white professor who taught sociology from a Talcott Parsons empiricist standpoint and was both anti-C.Wright Mills and anti-feminist. In order to challenge his assertion that the reality of contemporary male-female role differentiation within the nuclear family was that the “natural woman’s role” was to be a housewife while her husband worked, I got the professor to agree to let me invite a Women’s Liberation Movement activist to class to criticize Parsons’ model of family gender roles.

I then telephoned Robin Morgan, a former child actress on the I Remember Mama television show of the early 1950s, who was active in Radical Feminist Movement circles in the late 1960s. Morgan was uninterested in speaking to my class, but she suggested that I ask one of the women who worked with the Newsreel radical filmmakers group to speak to my class.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 21: Weatherman Comes To Queens, 1969

Chapter 21: Weatherman Comes To Queens, 1969 (i)

In early July 1969, I heard from the Weatherman faction people, myself. A meeting was held at Frank’s 3-room apartment, which was located on top of a store on Bell Blvd. in Bayside, Queens. Frank had moved into this apartment after graduating from Columbia College in June 1967, in order to do full-time “White Suburbs” organizing for SDS, within the neighborhood he had grown up in: Douglaston Manor. Living alone, Frank single-handedly organized a white radical group composed of about 15 high school students, who were mostly women students from Little Neck and Douglaston Manor. Frank and his followers were able to open Movement organizing storefronts near the Douglaston Long Island Railroad station, just north of Northern Blvd. In Fall 1968, I had visited their original storefront once to lead a workshop on doing radical research and had visited it a second time to staff the phones, on the day when his group’s women high school anti-war activists leafleted outside their high schools.

The enthusiasm and idealism of some of the high school women that Frank had turned on to the Movement impressed me, as did Frank’s continued off-campus dedication and enthusiasm. My roommate Brian had also spent some time visiting Frank’s White Suburbs Organizing Project in Fall 1968 and he was also impressed by the core of high school activists Frank had recruited. One of the most dedicated of these activists was a Cardozo High School student named Erica, who lived with her parents in Little Neck. When she attempted to leaflet outside Cardozo H.S., in order to call for a student anti-war walk-out, she was roughed up by the cops. But the police harassment of her only hardened her steadfast commitment to the Movement.

One reason why Frank seemed to have such success in getting a White Suburbs Organizing group together was that he also turned his Bell Blvd. apartment into a kind of liberated, private space for his followers, who all felt somewhat repressed, as a result of still having to live with their parents in Douglaston Manor. Frank’s apartment became the place they could go to after school, in the evenings and on weekends, in order to listen to vinyl records, smoke grass and get away from their parents. Frank usually had an ample supply of marijuana and he generously shared it with those of his followers who came over to his apartment to have meetings, talk politics and listen to music in an atmosphere that was free of sexual harassment.

Besides Frank, me and his Douglaston Manor/Little Neck core of high school student activists, the post-National SDS Convention meeting in Bayside was attended by Dionne, Ted, Nick and a woman activist, new to the East Coast, named Heddy. Heddy had spent the previous year working with Tijerina’s movement for Chicano autonomy, self-determination and land rights in New Mexico. Although Heddy was older than Dionne, she seemed more militant and politically stronger. Heddy seemed to have committed her whole life to making the Revolution. Prior to the meeting, Ted joked about how he and Dionne had had to pretend that they were a married couple while searching for a Weatherman collective house to rent in Queens.

Nick began this meeting by slowly reading and interpreting the Weatherman Statement, for those of us who hadn’t been out at the National SDS Convention. The main thrust of the Weatherman Statement, according to Nick, was that, within the domestic colony of Afro-America, revolutionary armed struggle, led by the Black Panther Party, was likely to break out in the early 1970s; at the same time that more wars of national liberation against U.S. imperialism (like the inevitably victorious Vietnamese national liberation struggle) would occur. Within the “mother country” oppressor nation of “White Honky Amerika,” the task of white revolutionary communists like us was to build a United Front Against Imperialism that was mass-based among white working-class youth, which opposed all forms of racism, sexism, national oppression and capitalism, and which militantly fought for the cause of revolutionary world communism.

After Nick finished reading the Weatherman Statement, everyone in the room, including myself, agreed that it accurately described U.S. political reality at that time. We all agreed that we would play our part to build an off-campus revolutionary white working-class youth movement which would fight for communist revolution in “the white mother-country” at the same time Black Panther Party-led masses of Third World revolutionaries in the U.S. domestic colonies, and Third World revolutionary masses in Asia, Africa and Latin America continued to fight, by any means necessary, for national liberation. Dionne then talked some about the need to free political prisoners like Ahmed Evans, who had been unjustly jailed for an act of armed self-defense in Cleveland. And we finally discussed possible methods of recruiting masses of white working-class youth out in Queens to the U.S. revolution and possible ways to stimulate more mass anti-racist consciousness among white youth.

When the meeting ended, Nick, Ted and Dionne drove back to Manhattan in one car and Heddy drove me and some other activists in another car through Flushing, where I was dropped off at Union St. and Northern Blvd., in front of Flushing High School. In the car, I sat in the front seat next to Heddy. Heddy noted that she used to be into modern dance before she became a revolutionary activist and she talked about some of the experiences she had had while working with Tijerina in New Mexico. Although I felt Heddy was one of the earliest and most fully-liberated Movement women in the U.S. at this time, the high school women activists in Frank’s group felt she was “too masculine” and “too domineering” in relation to them, and felt she was out of touch with where most young women in Queens were still at politically.