Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 23: With Andrea Eagan and Newsreel, 1970

Chapter 23: With Andrea Eagan and Newsreel, 1970 (ii)

In early January 1970, we held a high school organizing caucus meeting in Kramer’s Lower East Side apartment. Kramer—a talented documentary filmmaker—had attended Weatherman’s “War Council” in Flint, Michigan in late December 1969 as an observer; and he gave a summary of what he had observed. He noted how Bernardine had given a flamboyant critique of white oppressor nation “honky culture” that appeared to gloat over the Sharon Tate murder. From listening to Kramer’s description of the Flint, Michigan meeting, it seemed to me that the Weathermen were still serious about attempting to “bring the war home” and were preparing to wage armed struggle in support of the Black Panther Party. But I did not yet realize that the Weathermen were apparently contemplating the start of a bombing campaign analogous to what an activist from the Columbia Community Action Committee, Sam Melville, had been accused of doing in November 1969—and apparently were even considering the start of some even “heavier” kind of bombing campaign.

I only bumped into Weathermen on three different occasions around the time I worked with Newsreel. One afternoon, while visiting Frank out in Bayside, I bumped into Stu, who was crashing there. When I said “Hi, Stu” in the presence of a third friend who was visiting Frank, Stu looked irritated and motioned for me to go into another room in the apartment with him.

“I’m going by the name `Tom,’ now,” Stu said in a conspiratorial tone.

“Oh. I didn’t realize that,” I replied.

On another occasion, I happened to stop inside Columbia’s Ferris Booth Hall one evening and accidentally bumped into Josh and Linda, who were sitting together in the lounge of Ferris Booth Hall.

“Hi! I haven’t seen you for awhile,” I said with a smile. “How is it being in Weather?”

Josh replied in a scornful, sarcastic tone: “It’s a great, meaningful job…Why aren’t you in Weather?”

“I’m working with Newsreel now.”

Josh sneered. “With the cameras? What good does that do?”

“It helps raise the consciousness of white working-class youth.”

“White working-class people are hopelessly brainwashed and hopelessly racist, Bob,” Josh replied. “The only place to be now in the Movement is with Weather. And it’s a better option than hanging out in some sterile, plastic university like Columbia.”

Josh and Linda appeared in a hurry to leave. So we didn’t spend much more time talking before they left Ferris Booth Hall—after giving me a farewell look that seemed scornful and disapproving.

“Take care of yourself, Josh. Bye, Linda,” I called after them.

The final occasion when I bumped into the Weathermen around this time was at a meeting in the parents’ apartment of a high school student who attended Fort Hamilton High School in Brooklyn. The meeting occurred when the high school student’s parents were down in Florida on vacation. Steve and I—representing Newsreel—and Lew—representing the December 4th Panther Support Movement (which had been formed by some ex-Columbia SDS people after Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed)—were there to discuss ways Fort Hamilton High School student activists could support the “Free The Panther 21” campaign. Judy and another Weatherwoman also showed up with a woman high school activist recruit. Judy urged the students to run through the high school shouting “jailbreak”, no matter how few they were in numbers, instead of just handing out leaflets about the planned Panther support march to other students.

“There’s a war going on and you have to choose which side you’re on. It’s not enough to just leaflet. Leafleting is bull-shit. You’re either part of the problem or you’re part of the solution. And if you’re too chicken-shit to do anything more than leaflet at your high school, then you’re part of the problem,” Judy argued in an emotional way.

Judy’s intensity and fanaticism appealed to me on an emotional level. But I felt that, despite her beauty and her bravery and her selfless devotion to the Movement, Judy’s strategic recommendation that the 10 activists in the high school immediately risk suspension, by running through the halls without having any mass base of students behind them, wasn’t practical at this time.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 23: With Andrea Eagan and Newsreel, 1970

Chapter 23: With Andrea Eagan and Newsreel, 1970 (i)

After a brief interview in the Newsreel office in late December 1969, I became an official member of Newsreel and began to work with its high school organizing caucus. Other members of the caucus were Florrie, Karen of Newsreel, Steve, Sara, Mindy, Zarrow and three other activists from the Columbia SDS scene: Andrea, Richard and Jim. As a Newsreel member I also met Bev and Lala for the first time and attended collective meetings that included 1960s Movement “heavies” like Norm, Lynn, the Falks, Allen Young, Kramer, Siegel and Melvin.

Most of the activists in Newsreel were upper-middle-class artsy-bohemian whites in their mid-to-late 20s, who were from wealthy intellectual backgrounds. Newsreel offices were located in New York City and San Francisco and plans were being made to set-up or expand existing Newsreel offices in Chicago, Cambridge and Putney, Vermont. Over 80 films were being distributed from Newsreel’s New York City office and there were many requests for Newsreel films at this time from white and African-American student groups at campuses all around the country, from faculty at various educational institutions and from political, church and community groups in Latino and African-American communities.

What was good about Newsreel was that it would provide its films for free to activist groups that could not afford to pay any film rental costs but wished to use the revolutionary films as organizing tools. Better-financed, institutionally-affiliated individuals and groups, however, would be billed at the listed rental fee. Because Newsreel was willing to provide its films to activists for free and wasn’t into moneymaking, it was not a profit-making “alternative” Movement media venture, economically. But it did seem to have the potential in early 1970 to make a good impact on U.S. life politically. It had been formed less than 2 ½ years before, but its collection of films produced and its Movement reputation were already quite impressive. Politically, most Newsreel people were close to the Black Panther Party in their views and even less sectarian than Columbia SDS’s New Left faction had generally been.

Working with Newsreel in January, February and March 1970, I attended many internal political meetings, brought Newsreel films to be screened and led discussions at places like Richmond College, the High School of Music and Art, Mamaroneck High School, Cardozo High School, Erasmus High School and a special education high school in Westchester. I took my turn every few weeks staffing the Newsreel office for a day and, in March 1970, took a turn as office manager for a week.

As a member of the high school organizing caucus, I also handed out Rising Up Angry underground newspapers and “Free The Panther 21” Committee leaflets to students entering and exiting different high schools; and I spent a number of weekdays hanging out in White Castle Hamburger restaurants, across the street from city public schools. I also performed day care duties at the Falks’ townhouse on East 15th Street in Manhattan.

Like all the other Newsreel activists, I neither expected nor received pay for this kind of revolutionary organizing. But my low rent enabled me to survive by just working about 10 hours a week in the early evening, for two months, as a file clerk for pay, at American Express’s corporate offices, in a skyscraper on Broad Street. I got this early evening job through a temp agency and it provided me with enough money for food and my low rent.

By the time I started to work in an intense way with Newsreel, the main political issue within the organization was how to organizationally respond to the Newsreel women’s radical feminist criticisms of the way the organization functioned and the way the Newsreel men related to Newsreel women, politically and personally. At the first internal Newsreel high school organizing caucus meeting I attended (which was held in Mindy’s Lower East Side apartment), much of the discussion was devoted to criticizing Steve’s male chauvinism. He was criticized for describing Florrie as “pretty,” for putting his arm around Newsreel women in the Newsreel office and for relating to Mindy in a male chauvinist way when they did a film screening together. Movement men were also criticized by Florrie for still sometimes referring to women as “chicks” or as “girls.” Although there was also some talk about the best way to turn on high school students to the Movement, the main focus of the discussion was on combating male chauvinism within the Movement.

Mindy was not as physically beautiful or as personally warm as Florrie or Karen of Newsreel. And unlike Florrie or Karen of Newsreel, Mindy appeared to generally dislike men. But she seemed very intellectual and very politically conscious and the observations she made about male chauvinism among Movement men appeared to be valid. Florrie also impressed me for the first time at this meeting with her intellectual power and her political consciousness. Along with Andrea, Florrie appeared to be the dominant strategist within the high school organizing caucus. Clearly, Florrie was as capable of being a Movement political leader, and not just a Movement office worker, as any Movement man.

Andrea seemed even more intellectually self-confident and politically aware than she had been during the 1968-69 academic year as a Columbia SDS leader. Andrea was the daughter of a medical doctor; and she had been married to a brute of a first husband, following her graduation from Bennington in the early 1960s. After enrolling at Columbia, however, Andrea met Richard. But neither Andrea nor Richard had been active in the Movement while at Columbia until the April 1968 revolt, during which they were married inside Fayerweather Hall when it was still occupied.

Initially, like nearly everyone else who had been active in Columbia SDS during the 1968-69 school year, Andrea and Richard identified with the Weatherman faction. But by Fall 1969, Andrea and Richard felt the Weathermen were off-the-wall and so, instead, they became active in something called the “Mad Dog Caucus.” When the “Mad Dog Caucus” (which was a sect that was militantly anti-imperialist, but not as militant as the Weathermen) broke up in late November 1969, Andrea and Richard drifted into Newsreel.

Karen of Newsreel seemed as politically dedicated, personally sweet and as unselfish personally as she had seemed when I first met her at Richmond College. But she appeared content to let Florrie and Andrea exercise strategic and intellectual leadership within the high school organizing caucus.

Despite all the internal conflict around the struggle against male chauvinism, I, initially, felt we would be able to turn on high school students to the Movement, once we began leafleting and hanging out around the white working-class high schools we were going to focus our organizing on.

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

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

Steve’s W.16th St. apartment had a bathtub in the kitchen. Howie and Jamie were the two High School Student Union activists who were going to move in with us. I had met Howie the previous spring, when I had picked up flyers and union newspapers from the High School Student Union’s communal apartment on the Upper West Side, for distribution at high schools on Staten Island.

Our only furniture in the W.16th St. apartment ended up being mattresses on the floor and a few pieces of furniture that we had each picked up from the garbage on the street. By the end of December 1969, Howie, Jamie, Steve and I had moved in; and by early January 1970 the place had become a Movement crash pad for about 20 former high school activists who had been repressed by high school authorities during the previous school year, but who were still members of Howie’s entourage. The telephone rang constantly, as the former high school activists kept telephoning from their parents’ apartments in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens to gossip with Howie or arrange to come into the City and stop by the W.16th St. apartment to trip, get stoned or drink.

It was somewhat sad to see how disillusioned with people most of the former high school activists of the previous year had become, as a result of their organizing attempts of the previous year. In 1968-69, they had sponsored political meetings, handed out leaflets in schools, put out underground newspapers, lived collectively, organized anti-war demos and strikes and been written about in the New York Times Magazine. By early 1970, however, most of their time was being spent tripping, drinking, getting high and trying to repair broken love relationships. Most of the disillusioned activists were being pressured by their parents to get back on the academic track and apply to college, yet they all already realized that the U.S. university system “sucked.” When demos and marches were held, they would all be there out on the street in a militant way and they identified strongly with Abbie and the other Chicago Conspiracy 8 Trial defendants. But they had become too discouraged by the previous year’s daily activism to attempt any day-to-day Movement organizing at the high schools they either still attended or had dropped out from.

The former High School Student Union activists (who were mostly from white middle-class backgrounds or had mostly been on the elite student track) realized U.S. society was rotten to the core, people in the U.S. weren’t really free and revolutionary change was needed. But they felt the approach of the SDS Regional Office staff of older activists to building the Movement (as exemplified by Nick) had been ageist in relation to high school students; and plagued by Marxist-Leninist sectarianism, “correct lineism” and “vanguarditis.” They also had nicknamed Mark in an unfavorable way (referring to him, irreverently, as “Mark Crudd"). Yet they were too discouraged and impatient to be able to collectively develop an alternative way of interesting the mass of New York City high school students in revolutionary politics, once their underground newspaper was not instantly successful in recruiting high school students to strike and shut down the public schools for more than a few days in 1968-69. But they also felt in early 1970 that the Weathermen were on a “crazy death-trip.”

Living at the W.16th St. apartment in January and February 1970, though, was like another constant pot party and it enabled me to meet many teenage activists and former teenage activists who were a few years younger than me, in a grass-smoking situation. The women high school activists were as intellectually interesting to converse with as the men high school activists; and there was always some disgust expressed by them at the ageist implications of statutory rape laws and birth control information dissemination practices.

Jamie was from a wealthy Manhattan prep-school background of divorced parents and had a cynical low-key personality. By early 1970, he was spending most of his time either reading underground newspapers, getting stoned or tripping to Grateful Dead music or hanging out with his woman friend, who still lived with her parents in Queens, but who would often spend the night at W.16th St. with Jamie.

Howie was an enthusiastic, jovial guy with an extremely comical personality. He wasn’t able, by this time, to accomplish much in the way of political organizing, because he was too busy having fun. But he was quite humorous and funny and had a charismatic personality. He lived his daily life in a spontaneous and adventurous way and always seemed to enjoy having an audience of people around him to entertain.

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

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

After getting paid triple time for working on Thanksgiving at UPS, I decided to quit the job and give up my Jackson Heights room. My neighbors in the rooming house were very straight males—in terms of their orientation towards the 9-to-5 world—and were complaining about my guitar practicing and my playing of Supremes’ vinyl records on my portable phonograph. And I felt my job at UPS, while giving me a good sense of what factory work felt like and where blue-collar workers were at politically—was isolating me too much from Movement activists in the evenings.

In early December 1969, I began to crash in the living room of my parents’ smaller apartment in Fresh Meadows, Queens. They had moved to the smaller apartment in a slightly more affluent neighborhood, because they finally realized that my sister and I no longer needed to have bedrooms in their apartment anymore, because we had both left home. In the 1960s, the rent control laws made it easier for young people to live away from their parents during their 20s.

I was crashing in my parents’ apartment for only a few days when the TV news reported that Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, two leaders of the Illinois Black Panther Party, had been murdered in their beds by the Chicago cops. The next day, cops in Los Angeles stormed the BPP office there and shot it out with Panther activists, before making arrests. It appeared that the U.S. government had decided to escalate its war on the Black Panther Party—from the level of judicial frame-ups, arrests and random street shootouts in which over 25 Panthers were killed to an all-out campaign of orchestrated attacks on all Panther political action offices. It appeared that civil war between BPP-led Black ghetto masses and the U.S. government’s armed agents—which, during the summer, the Weather Statement had predicted was coming—was about to break out.

An anti-war demonstration was being held in the evening in Midtown Manhattan during the same week to protest the presence of Nixon at the Waldorf-Astoria. The “Dial-A-Demo” telephone answering machine announced the demonstration’s time and place. I traveled into Manhattan and joined a few thousand other protesters. People at the demo chanted “Avenge Fred Hampton! Avenge Fred Hampton!” A few demonstrators threw some rocks through store windows. The cops used the stone throwing as a pretext to charge into the crowd of demonstrators, clubs swinging, and to make some arrests. On the street while retreating from the cops, I bumped into a Movement guy named Steve, who worked as a film editor for Newsreel. I had met Steve during the summer, when he requested my assistance at his apartment for an afternoon, during his editing of a film on the Richmond College Social Change Commune that Karen of Newsreel was also working on.

Steve was a tall guy from rural Western Massachusetts who was more of a hippie-anarchist than a New Left politico. He lived in the Chelsea area of Manhattan, in a cheap apartment, but he was planning to move into a 4-room pad on W.16th St. and 8th Ave. with an even cheaper rent of $40 per month.

“What are you doing these days?” Steve asked.

“I’m looking for some Movement group to work with,” I replied.

Steve smiled. “Why not work with Newsreel? We need activists for our high school organizing caucus. I think you’d be good at organizing high school students.”

“I’d love to work with Newsreel. But I need to find an apartment to share. And once I find an apartment to share, I’ll have to get a straight job to pay my rent.”

Steve continued to smile. “I’m moving into this apartment where the rent is only $40, with some High School Student Union people. Why don’t you move in with us? Then you won’t have to get a 9-to-5 straight job and you can work as an organizer for Newsreel.”

I smiled. “That sounds great. When are you moving in?”

“In a few weeks. Why don’t we get together tomorrow at my place?”

“O.K. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”

The next day I went into Manhattan and Steve showed me both his old run-down apartment and his cheaper new run-down apartment. On the way to the apartment to which we were going to move into, we stopped off at the local public school to pick up a Newsreel film that had been rented and screened by a 6th-grade special ed teacher. It turned out that the teacher was an anti-war guy I had known at Richmond College, who had gone into teaching in order to avoid the draft. He was attempting to teach his class in an experimental, free-school fashion. While we were in the classroom, he had Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ album playing on the phonograph. But the eight students in the class appeared more interested in fooling around than listening to the Dylan record. And the anti-war teacher looked frustrated.

“A free-school, experimental approach doesn’t work in the public schools. The public school system is a mess,” he whispered to me glumly.

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

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

In November 1969, there was another large anti-war demo scheduled for Washington, D.C. At a pre-demo planning meeting on the weekend before this mid-November mass gathering, I noticed Mark. The meeting was well-attended and was being held inside the Washington Square Methodist “Peace” Church. It was the first time I had noticed Mark since the early summer demonstration at JFK Airport which had greeted Nelson Rockefeller, following Rockefeller’s Latin American tour.

Mark really looked like a wild hippie now. His hair was longer than it had ever been and he was again bearded. He also now wore a cowboy hat and he seemed like he was stoned. Because Mark and the other Weatherman men had been beardless and short-haired only a month before, during the “Days of Rage,” at first I did not realize that Mark was attending this meeting, because I did not recognize him. Mark did not bother to speak at this meeting and, after observing the meeting briefly, Mark walked out in the middle of the meeting. So I did not get a chance to exchange thoughts with him at this time.

The November 1969 D.C. anti-war protest was attended by large numbers of both anti-imperialist youth and by youth who were simply anti-war. Weathermen with motorcycle helmets on their heads also showed up in D.C.

On a Friday night during this weekend, just before a Weatherman march from DuPont Circle to the South Vietnamese government’s embassy was scheduled to begin, I bumped into Nancy and Gus in a Movement center at George Washington University. Preparing for this demo in the same room, and wearing a motorcycle helmet, was Dave. Dave smiled at me in a friendly way. And, after he left the Movement center for the DuPont Circle Weather “kick ass” demo, Nancy rolled her eyes at me and grimaced; indicating that she felt that Dave and the other Weatherman had really flipped out by coming to D.C. with their helmets and their super-militancy.

A few minutes later, curious about what would happen when the Weathermen confronted the D.C. police at DuPont Circle in their Weather affinity groups, I left the Movement center and headed up toward DuPont Circle. When I got there, the D.C. cops had begun to use tear-gas and clubs on the anti-war demonstrators. Weather or Yippie affinity groups were either fleeing or regrouping on the various side streets that formed a spoke around DuPont Circle. As they retreated or regrouped, the Weather or Yippie affinity groups heaved rocks through store windows and then quickly ran to other streets in order to continue the nighttime trashing, in response to the D.C. cops breaking up a peaceful anti-war march before it was even able to start marching.

After a few hours of running away from clubbing D.C. cops and police cars which had sirens blaring—and trying to avoid inhaling too much of the air that was filled with the stench of tear gas—I ended up spending the night in a D.C. church; uncomfortably stretched out in a room crowded with sleeping anti-war demonstrators, between a church wall and a bohemian anti-war artsy woman in her late 20s.

The following morning, 500,000 anti-war demonstrators gathered on the grass near the Washington Monument to protest the War, while Nixon watched a football game and pretended to ignore the crowd. Less than 5 years before, only 30,000 anti-war demonstrators had gathered at this same spot, indicating to what degree the rising body count in Viet Nam had turned U.S. public opinion against the government’s war policy. Most of the 1969 demonstrators were white left-liberal middle-class youth who were neither consciously anti-imperialist nor militantly anti-racist. Most of the November 1969 anti-war crowd was still largely into the kind of hip capitalist pacifism that John Lennon had expressed in his “All We Are Saying, Is Give Peace A Chance” song, which the crowd sang in unison.

The Yippies and other hard-core Chicago 8 supporters were more radical and militant than either the white middle-class pacifist youth or the SWP and CP left-opportunists and peace movement bureaucrats who had organized the demo. The pacifist, SWP and CP bureaucrats acted like cops while marshalling the demo, in order to discourage any kind of spontaneous civil disobedience or militant street actions.

Dave Dellinger, however, managed to announce a post-rally militant march to protest the fascist repression that was being legally implemented at the Chicago 8 Conspiracy Trial, but which had not been mentioned by any of the day’s previous speechmakers. So, despite the opposition of the big rally’s marshals, about 10,000 of us started to march to the Justice Department building, demanding that Bobby Seale be free and the criminal conspiracy charges against the Chicago 8 be dropped.

After we had gathered outside the Justice Department building for about 5 minutes, chanting “Free Bobby Now! Free Bobby Now!”, the D.C. cops broke up our demo by shooting a heavy dose of tear gas on the crowd. People retreated rapidly from the building and, within a few hours, were heading back out of D.C. in buses or in cars. Once again, the limits of non-violent militant street protest were demonstrated. As long as we had no effective weapons to use against their tear gas, it did not matter how militant or how numerous we were in our political confrontations with the Warfare State on the street.

After the sun had been down for a few hours, I was offered a ride back to New York City by a young couple in love, a few blocks from the Capitol. A few weeks later, the guy mailed me a postcard saying that, as a result of our discussion in the car, he and his woman friend had decided not to postpone any longer splitting from their parents and moving down to Florida to set up house together.

People changed their lives rapidly in the ‘60s and people drifted into and out of each other’s life rapidly in the ‘60s, in a spontaneous, yet intense way. The combination of the immediate draft threat, the repression from the cops and being high on pot most of the time seemed to produce this readiness to make quick, spontaneous moves.

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

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

In October 1969, the U.S. corporate media felt that the War in Viet Nam was now unwinnable. So when a non-Movement, non-radical white middle-class group called “The Viet Nam Moratorium” organized local anti-war demos at which Democratic Party politicians spoke in mid-October, the mass media provided pre-demo publicity. Like most Movement people in October 1969, I felt the main issue was imperialism, racism and the System that had let the immoral war last so long—not just the war. So although I welcomed the entrance en masse of liberal democratic people into the anti-war ranks, I did not trust all the Democratic Party politicians who began to jump on the anti-war bandwagon at this time.

In Manhattan, the Viet Nam Moratorium demo was well-attended, but dull and non-militant. Aside from Pete Seeger, none of the invited speakers or performers appealed to me as much as the speakers and performers who had been appearing for years at the previous anti-war rallies I had attended.

Around this time, I was getting lonesome for Helene, whom I hadn’t seen since I moved from Staten Island. So I spontaneously hopped on a subway from Jackson Heights and headed for the Staten Island Ferry terminal in Manhattan. When the ferry docked in Staten Island, I suddenly noticed a familiar-looking physical beauty standing next to me and smiling. It was Helene.

“You’re just the person I’ve been longing to see, Helene. I was hoping to meet you tonight. It must be cosmic,” I said with a giggle.

Helene laughed and invited me up to her new apartment, where she was now living with a different guy than she had been living with the previous spring. Her present boyfriend was away on a business trip within the record industry. Helene’s new apartment was a bus ride away from the ferry terminal and we spent the rest of the evening and early morning hours, after we arrived there, getting smashed together on Helene’s potent hashish, gossiping and feeling close again. I still was in love with Helene. But she still was not interested in getting involved with any New Left activist.

“People walking around with picket signs aren’t going to ever really change anything anymore in this country. Why waste your time trying to wake all these straight people up?” Helene said. Helene also joked with me about how some of the professors at Richmond College were now acting more like hippies and how a few married male professors there kept trying to seduce her. In tribute to Helene, I later wrote the “Open Up Your Eyes” song:

Open up your eyes
And eat my sweet candy
And hold me tight in darkness
And love me, fair Helene.

Oh, I was just a hobo
Trapped in poverty
But one day I spied you
I’m in love Helene.

Let me buy you ice cream
Fill your world with glee
People call me `stranger’’
Call me friend, Helene.

And I don’t want your money
Save your Aunt Tootsie
I just want to hug you
And be with you, Helene.

The Chicago 8 Conspiracy trial was getting daily coverage on all three TV networks during this time and Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were able to turn it into a comedy show, after Black Panther Chairman Bobby Seale was bound and gagged and shipped off to New Haven for another trial on a trumped-up murder-conspiracy charge. The effect of the fascist way Bobby Seale was treated and the media coverage of the satirical antics of Abbie and Rubin was to increase, in a major way, the number of anti-war white youth who considered themselves radical; and who felt that the U.S., indeed, had a totalitarian political system.

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

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

As a Movement alternative to Weather, I had begun to consider working more closely with Newsreel. Newsreel’s strategy of focusing on using its films to raise off-campus mass consciousness rapidly and combat corporate mass media manipulation in order to speedily create the prerequisite mass off-campus consciousness necessary to make revolution, appeared to be more realistic than Weather’s off-campus exemplary action strategy. I visited Newsreel’s new office at 922 Seventh Ave. one late September morning on a weekday. The new office was a much larger loft than the previous W. 31st St. Newsreel office that I had visited during the summer, when I had arranged for Lynn to speak at Queens College. Florrie was still staffing the office as Newsreel’s office manager in late September 1969. And she still was friendly.

“I’d like a few film catalogues in order to distribute them among community organizations in Queens and perhaps interest some of them in setting up screenings of your films,” I said.

Florrie agreed to give me some Newsreel film catalogues. And after she gave them to me, she suddenly gave me a glance of curiosity and asked: “What do you do with your life?”

I gazed into her eyes and replied: “I work part-time at United Parcel Service in the evening. The rest of the time I do Movement organizing at Queens College and around the City.”

I wasn’t too successful in interesting community groups in screening Newsreel films out in Queens during October 1969. When I showed the catalogue of films to the Cantor of the synagogue where I had been bar-mitzvahed (which had an anti-war rabbi), for instance, the Cantor’s only comment was: “Why is there a picture of Fidel Castro on the cover? I don’t think we could show these films here.”

As the “Days of Rage” approached, I became apprehensive about what might happen to my old friends from Columbia SDS and I also began to feel that I should be out there in Chicago, after all, in some way. So I telephoned Scott, who was still living on the Upper West Side with his woman friend Carol.

Scott was planning to drive out to Chicago to observe the “Days of Rage” demo. But since he wasn’t compelled to work 9-to-5 yet at this time, he was planning to leave too early in the week to make it possible for me to drive out with him, without me having to sacrifice my UPS night job, at a time when I had no money saved. So, over the phone, both Scott and I agreed that, while it would be good for me to go out to Chicago, it was self-defeating for me to sacrifice my only source of income just to be there as an observer, unless I could get a ride later in the week. But I couldn’t find any other non-Weather Movement person who was driving out there later in the week. So I wasn’t able to show up in Chicago between October 8th and October 11th, 1969.

In New York City, during the ‘Days of Rage,” the news from Chicago was that the only people who had showed up for the Weather demo were the few hundred hard-core Movement people who had joined Weather; and that the Chicago cops had wounded some Weathermen with gunshots and brutalized or arrested many Weathermen, after windows were broken by Weatherdemonstrators. I was not surprised that few people ended up showing up for the Weather demo, but I was relieved when I heard that none of the Weathermen had been killed.

As an alternative for those Movement people who hadn’t gone to Chicago, Movement white radicals who weren’t Weathermen had planned a march in support of anti-war GI's at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Josie, the former Columbia SDS and New York Regional SDS organizer, had set up an anti-war coffeehouse near the army base and 38 GI's had been placed in the stockade at Fort Dix for protesting the War in Viet Nam. Around the time that the Weathermen were completing their Chicago protest, about 3,000 anti-war protesters took buses from New York City to Fort Dix.

To express our support for the jailed anti-war GI's, we started to march onto the grounds of the army base, after a rally in which folksinger Barbara Dane sang a number of anti-war songs in a spirited way. But a few minutes after we entered the army base, about 20 MPs fired tear gas at us. So, coughing and choking, the 3,000 of us quickly retreated from the Fort Dix army base grounds and marched back in a disorderly fashion to the waiting buses which would drive us back to New York City. The tear gas attack on us, which effectively denied us our first amendment right to assemble in an anti-war protest on the military base, reminded me, once again, that unless the Movement developed an effective way to resist the State’s violence against us, it would continue to be repressed whenever it sought to dissent beyond the Establishment’s legal limits and attempted to non-violently disrupt the System’s war machine.