Civil disobedience, the coalition's leadership believed, accomplished little while alienating many from the cause. We got badly gassed and a lovely upper class lady brought us into her elegant home to wash the gas off and gave us tea and finger sandwiches. Radicals who aspired to create a mass movement-like the Socialist Workers Party with its 24 April NPAC march and rally-were reproducing the very structure they should be challenging. Jones interview; Scagliotti interview; telephone interview with John Froines, 23 June 2000. How Much things cost in 1971 Yearly Inflation Rate USA 4.3% Yearly Inflation Rate UK 8.6% Year End Close Dow Jones Industrial Average 890 Average Cost of new house $25,250.00 Average Income per year $10,600.00 Average Monthly Rent $150.00 Cost of a gallon of Gas 40 cents Datsun 1200 Sports Coupe $1,866.00 United States postage Stamp 8 cents There are left before your next birthday. On Saturday, May 1, 1971, Procol played at the May Day concert at American University's Woods-Brown Amphitheatre in Washington, DC. 1. Police descended on West Potomac Park and shut down the encampment, evicting the groggy radicals en masse and arresting those who refused to leave. i would love to republish this whole article, with credit to the author, of course. They were very freaked out by that experience and left us alone." Like most of the vets I split to avoid arrest and regrouped later. May 7, 1971 was a Friday and it was the 127 th day of the year 1971. ... 200,000 at Washington Peace march (circa 1971 John Kerry speaks and John Denver sings) - Duration: 5:47. Nixon ends the US trade embargo against China. Mayday took place a year after the Nixon administration invaded Cambodia, an escalation of the Vietnam War that had provoked angry walkouts on more than a hundred college and university campuses. As the camp grew, however, the open meetings ceased, and were replaced by announcements made over the loud-speaker system by a male voice." I am grateful to Steve Duncombe for sharing his copy of this pamphlet with me. The sites were mainly not notorious hotbeds of radicalism: They included Minneapolis, Albuquerque, Boulder, and Gainesville; Evanston, Illinois; East Lansing, Michigan; Oxford, Ohio. A central theme of each was the question of representation: who speaks for whom; who makes decisions, and in whose name.21 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. You can create online monthly calendar May 1971 with holidays. We made it over the wall and into the patio before being driven back. Bart Barnes and J.Y. “The idea was to shut the city down because the war wouldn't stop,” said Eddie Becker, a documentarian who filmed the protests. perhaps the most useful way to get it, and the way most people would read it, would be for it to be typed up as well. 41. 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.13 With much antiwar protest having become dreary and routinized ("Should I take pictures, I kept questioning myself, or would photographs from past identical rallies suffice?" Ever since, affinity groups have been a defining feature of most direct action protests. 55. John Scagliotti recalls, "It was so romantic: Everybody around campfires, all these revolutionaries in their affinity groups, talking and planning their last-minute strategies. One Gay Mayday leaflet called the Vietnam War "a straight man's game," created by "men who need to gain their masculine identity through the killing of women, children, and their own brothers." Also enjoy the culture with Hula and numerous local vendors. Download printable May 1971 calendar. May 29, 1971 (Saturday) The 1971 Indianapolis 500 was won by Al Unser the second year in a row. By:Anonymous Date:c. 1970 Source:Photo by Keystone/Getty Images. I've not read it yet. To add to the confusion we lifted hoods of cars stopped for lights and let air out of tires." But already by 1970, even some of those who had flirted with violence were concluding that rioting and armed struggle were dead ends for the movement. 37. intervals . "[I]n our opinion, small civil disobedience actions-whether in the Gandhi-King tradition or in the vein of violent confrontation-are not effective forms of action," declared the SWP's newspaper, The Militant. 54. On May 3, 1971, after nearly two weeks of intense antiwar protest in Washington, DC, ranging from a half-million-person march to large-scale sit-ins outside the Selective Service, Justice Department, and other government agencies, some 25,000 young people set out to do something brash and extraordinary: disrupt the basic functioning of the federal government through nonviolent action. Waves of helicopters landed alongside the Washington Monument, ferrying Marines into the city. Many of the longtime organizers who had persevered beyond the movement's crisis year of 1969 were now burning out. The question of movement marshals was particularly contentious at that time, because of what had happened during the national demonstration that was hastily organized in May 1970 to respond to the Cambodia invasion. Perhaps there was still a slight frisson of clandestinity attached to the use of affinity groups, given the sense among many that "Mayday was sort of the above-ground Weatherpeople," in the words of John Scagliotti, who worked in the office for the action. It was the crowd’s peaceful refusal to actually disperse that finally led the police to surround the DC core and scoop up everyone. 45. "In this Issue," Liberation (February 1972); interview with Ed Hedemann, New York, N.Y., November 10, 1999. Damn close. 23. The above date is written in the traditional western/American style of writing dates. Fed up by the rowdy atmosphere and the constant sexual advances by stoned hippie men, a group of women, mainly lesbians, stormed the stage along with a handful of gay male allies and tried to turn the concert into a consciousness-raising session. A 1971 May Day poster for a Coalition For Peace Justice march in downtown Seattle. Looking back at this some years after re-publishing it, I'm very pleased to see the commentary from comrades who took part in the actions. The breakaway group named itself the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC), and called for a massive legal march and rally on 24 April. "No wonder. On feminist influences upon Mayday, see "Women Build for Mayday," Quicksilver Times (30 April-13 May 1971); Mariette, "Here We Are, We've Been Detained; Not One of Us Has Been Arraigned," off our backs (27 May 1971); and "Sexism in Peace City," The Fifth Estate (20-26 May 1971). (Women's Health Action and Mobilization), would be inspired by the innovative tactics and techniques that GAA developed to pursue its goals. From the early 1970s until the very end of the 1990s, when there was a major resurgence of direct action by movements of color, the movements that would build on the innovations of Mayday to create a new direct action tradition were overwhelmingly white.50, Mayday was an ending as well as a beginning. As one antiwar publication put it, for the previous seven years, "We have met, discussed, analyzed, lectured, published, lobbied, paraded, sat-in, burned draft cards, stopped troop trains, refused induction, marched, trashed, burned and bombed buildings, destroyed induction centers. 32. "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. Free dope! Joreen, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness," in Radical Feminism, ed. That year, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the totemic organization of the New Left, had disintegrated into dogmatic and squabbling factions, one of which-Weatherman-took up street-fighting and bombings to pursue its chimerical program of revolutionary change. '-and it was just a hippie guy with long hair. Early attempts at human blockades at key intersections were broken up by overwhelming force. We felt, well, this is our sign that we've been accepted as radicals....We've just got to prove that we are willing to go in there, get our heads clobbered and arrested and beaten up, prove that we can do this. We grew by loving each other." The tactic was to be a "stall-in" at strategic points on the city's highways, with protesters deliberately allowing their cars to run out of fuel so that the vehicles would block the roadways. "Most everyone I know is tired of demonstrations," wrote New Left leader David Dellinger. By the end of May 1970, it's estimated that half the country's student population-perhaps several million youth-took part in antiwar activities, which "seemed to exhaust the entire known repertoire of forms of dissent. To transport the mass of prisoners, the police had to commandeer city buses; when even that wasn't enough, they hired Hertz and Avis rent-a-trucks.48. As Mary McGrory wrote in the Boston Globe, "It was universally panned as the worst planned, worst executed, most slovenly, strident and obnoxious peace action ever committed." "30, That said, there was a haphazard quality to the Mayday organizing; a lot of the action was put together on the fly. 8. This essay utilizes an anarcho-indigenous/mestize lens to explore how the Guaraní concept of teko'a (tekoha) (settlement/village/community) can lead to different formations of the ways in... A first person report of the 10 November demonstration against huge hikes in university tuition fees which ended in the occupation and vandalism of the Conservative Party offices. Early in May 1971, after nearly two weeks of intense antiwar protest in Washington, D.C.-from a half-million-person march to large-scale sit-ins outside the Selective Service Agency, Justice Department, and other government agencies-upwards of 25,000 young radicals set out to do something brash and extraordinary: shut down the federal government through nonviolent direct action. That was not part of the Mayday rhetoric. A call to participation elaborated, "We know that the men running the country are very deeply sexist-they relate to each other and to situations in an uptight straight male way. Concert, the government 's most serious problem was faulty intelligence slogan was, `` Why to... Established antiwar movement goal was to snarl traffic so completely that government employees could not get their! 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