NET Journal; 189; From Protest to Resistance

[Film projector sounds] [Helicopter sounds] Now, whatever you want to call, ladies and gentlemen, the news came to me, I didn't go to the news. they say we shouldn't spend 15 cents going to the zoo when the zoo comes to me. I'm going to send you a napalm dinner tonight. Hope you enjoy it. [Music] Come on all of you big, strong men, Uncle Sam needs your help again. Got himself in a terrible jam [inaudible] in Vietnam. Put down your books pick a gun. We're going to have a whole lot of fun. [music continues] [music stops] [Lyndon Johnson] The situation in Vietnam is different, but there is an old American saying that when the

going gets tough, that's tough, yet going. Well, let no one doubt that we are in this battle as long as South Vietnam won't start to report and needs our assistance to perfect its freedom. [Protesters]: No draft for Vietnam, No draft for Vietnam, no draft for Vietnam, no draft for Vietnam, no draft for Vietnam. [Man]: You're gonna fight them over there or here. [Protester]: I don't believe we have to fight. I'm not going to get into a fight about it. [Man]: I just got back four days ago. [Protester]: Okay, I'm sorry. [Man]: You're sorry. I've been seen thousands of Marines die in the last five months and I'll beat your... [Protester]: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. [Man]: Guys, come on. Come on. Guys, come on. [Man]: Why? Why don't they fight? Why? [Man]: Why fight for peace? [Narrator]: In the last eight years, a movement has grown up in America to dramatize the key issues of the 1960s, Vietnam and racism.

In the public minds, these young people were associated with endless demonstrations, drugs, communism, and a blade with violence. These demonstrators reflected a national sense of unease that was brought to a climax by the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. The Black Ghettos exploded in many cities, and more than 90,000 troops and police were deployed to restore order. The racial violence was preceded by the news of Johnson's refusal to run again for president and by the announcement of talks with North Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands applauded the peace moves and publicly mourned the late Dr. King. Members of anti-war and Black power movements pointed to what they call the hypocrisy of America and promised to continue the struggle for peace and racial justice that began years before. The movement, as they call it, began as a protest by middle-class youth who believed that their moral outrage was enough to force the integration of Mississippi. A law was passed, but the activists saw a little change in the quality of Negroes' lives. The civil rights movement collapsed, and the activists turned their energy to anti-war protests and Black power.

They claimed that they were now revolutionary, challenging the very axioms of American society. This film is about three veterans of Mississippi who have become key spokesmen for the new opposition activities. It traces their thought and action over the past year as they see themselves moving from demonstrations to political organizing. Stokely Carmichael speaks for Black power, David Harris for the nonviolent draft resistance, and Mario Sabio for the new radical politics. [Music] Who am I? Stand and wonder to wait. While the wheels of faith slowly grind my life away. Who am I? There were some things that I loved one time, but the dreams are gone, that I thought were mine and hidden tears

That once could fall now, burn inside at the fault of all. Years of waste, years of crime. [Narrator]: In 1964, Mario Savio returned from Mississippi to the Berkeley campus where he became the nation's most publicized descender. As leader of the free speech movement, Sabio articulated student demands to end restrictions on political activity and for educational reform. To force University of California President Clark Kerr to accept the demands, Sabio led some 800 students into the administration building for a sit-in. [Savio]: I asked you to consider if this is affirmed and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something the faculty are a bunch of employees and where the raw materials, but we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be have any process upon us, don't mean to be made into any product, don't mean don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the university, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone, or you would be.

[Narrator]: Sabio and his wife Suzanne were among the 800 arrested, Mario received the longest sentence four months in prison. [Savio]: When I'm involved in some political activity, oh, I really enjoy it and I throw myself into it, writing leaflets, speeches. It's a job to get done. But when I contemplate going into some other such activity, I realize that I hate politics in a very deep way. It really is an intrusion on other things that I'd like to do. I'd like to go back to school very much. We'd like to have ourselves a little cottage where we're sort of a little romantic and I guess a point maybe we'd like to raise some flowers and vegetables. It just isn't time.

With the oppression of Negroes in America and with the rest of us in more subtle ways and of Vietnamese, and of the people in other foreign countries who are the victims of the American empire, we really find that our consciences couldn't quite bear our receding into private life, personally more fulfilling lives if we could only forget the suffering people on whom we turned our backs. [Suzanne]: We have discussions every day about the war and about national politics... [Savio]: And it's very difficult not to think of the war. It's the biggest topic of conversation that we have every day. We turn on the radio, there's the war, the newspapers and there's the war. When we see people having fun all around us, having their barbecues going to the beach, then maybe it's hardest not to think of a war. It seems to me that it should be impossible to be a citizen of a country at war and be able to go to the movies. [Music] And now my friend, we meet again. [Narrator]: Stokely Carmichael, age 27, has built a large and militant following among Black high school and college youth.

Carmichael, born in Trinidad and educated at Howard University, began his political career in 1960. When he joined SNCC, the Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After years of civil rights activities, Carmichael and the SNCC veterans concluded that protest changed little. Their new goal was Black Power, a phrase that frightened many moderates. Others dismissed Black Power as empty rhetoric. For Carmichael, it meant that integration into white society was neither possible nor desirable. [Carmichael]: I was told all the time that I was an exceptional Negro. I was an intelligent boy. I had scholarships to go to all the Ivy League schools. And that I could get into that society if I played by their rules. But that really bothered me because I found myself becoming less free. See I think that the freest people in this society are the people from Mississippi. Because they have not been caught up in the structure of watching your P's and Q's. I was very worried about that. So I wanted to go south just to see how free they really were.

And what the threat was to the whole power structure. I got caught up in the freedom lines and decided that Mississippi was where I'd like to stay and work. I learned from the people in Mississippi. I learned from the people in Mississippi what I never learned from the most brilliant professors I've sat under. They taught me how not to be ashamed. They taught me how to say what you want to say whenever you want to say it. [Music] Who am I? [Carmichael]: We've been so riddled and implicated with that American dream nonsense which we were never part of. I could never hope to be a part of. I think that's what the problem that America is now facing with a youth both Black and white. That we're all beginning to question why is it that she's the richest country in the world. Is it that she exploits other countries? Is it that she steals murders and plunders? Or is it that she's so smart that she can develop her resources to yield the amount of productivity that it does. And I think that most of the youth are beginning to see that the United States has been exploiting other countries.

And that we have been enjoying that good life at the expense of other countries. And that when you match that with the American dream which talks about honesty and equality and a fair share for everybody to recognize that you talked about nonsense at the expense of somebody in Vietnam or South Africa. All that in America, Asia and Japan just makes you sick to the stomach, you want to puke. When we look at all the acts of racist exploitation which this nation has committed whether in the name of manifest destiny or anti-communism we charge America with genocide. [Man]: Our next speaker is David Harris, former student body president of Stanford University. [Harris]: The brutality in Vietnam is simply a reflection of the brutality of American life. If you want to make a statement against that way of life then it's only when those draft cards that you all carry that pledge you've made to America that you will do her murder,

when and where she chooses are floating in the sewers of America with this war. It's only when those forces that seek to make every young man in this country a murderer are confronted with young men who will not murder that we can talk about building a world of peace on the rubble of the American dream. Join us! [Narrator]: David Harris was elected Stanford student body president on an anti-war platform that also included student rights and legalization of marijuana. He resigned his post after deciding he could be more effective by organizing draft resistance. He nows spends his time as a full-time organizer of the resistance, a long way from his father, a Republican attorney in Fresno, California. [Harris]: When you grow up in Fresno, California there's one place to go if you can make it, and that's Stanford.

I came to Stanford right out of Fresno with no conception of what radical was it even was. I don't even know that I'd heard the word before. I was kind of liberal Republican Democrat, something like that. Well, you know, you got to Stanford and kind of threw off all your all your past and said, well, now I'm going to build myself a life. And then Mississippi happened here or went to Mississippi and there was American society late open on its back there. It sure was ugly. You know, you decide what kind of life you want to lead in relation to that. And the initial feeling one gets is, wow, whatever kind of life I lead, I want to be part of it. No society that allowed Mississippi to exist can really be trusted anymore. I just see American society eating itself.

It's like for 200 years we've worked and worked and worked to produce enough garbage to fill the country. Now I fill the country in darkness and devours garbage, which happens to also be itself. It's frightening to go out into downtown Palo Alto and watch America roll by and it seems to be a really only path of complete self-destruction. All those forces in the society that control and use people's lives for purposes other than their own come together in a very symbolic point. The military conscription and we choose something like non-cooperation with the draft because it's with the system like military conscription that the lives of young people in this country are tied up. We simply see it as making America pay a larger price. If America continues to do this kind of thing, which I'm sure they will, what they're going to have to do is do it over the bodies of a lot of young people. They're going to have to put them in jail and they're going to have to keep them in jail. They're going to have to realize that they've got all these people in jail because they won't go along with that. And I think when we get out, we're in a kind of position that we can really start building a new society from.

I don't relish living without women for two to five years or relish being locked up, the act of going to prison is if it can be done for no other reason than simply one of preserving one's own honesty. We don't think of non-cooperation as going to jail. We think of it as non-cooperation with the draft. One of the results of that, one of the prices you're going to pay for that is you're going to be sent to jail. But the important thing is not worrying or lamenting the fact that you're going to be sent to jail. It's how you go to jail and how you work before you're in jail that really matters. We've got one rule, which is that before you go to jail, you leave two people to do your work. And that constantly you understand yourself and what you're doing in terms of that larger thing, that thing that exists so much beyond us. [Narrator]: The war led to an increase in the number of conscientious objectors now more than 20,000 who regularly meet for advice from older draft objectors on the law and on life in prison. conscientious objectors and draft resistors are a growing minority of those called the serve.

1966 and 67, almost 1200 draft evaders were convicted. Thousands have cases pending. [Man] :I saw him as somebody who was in prison for a little while the other day because of the [inaudible] and said, and he said you can see a difference between the older prisons and the younger prisons. The older prisons thought you could beat the system and the younger prisons just wanted to blow their minds. Just looking at the vast numbers of people each day and wondering exactly what they think, I do feel somewhat alone in my convictions. What's been bothering me is isn't the loneliness. In itself, I mean it's lonely but it's not too serious. But I really need someone to come across to some older person I think mainly. I think one of the things that you have to watch out for maybe something like this is that you start feeling that you're so much better than the guy on the street because you're going to jail. The problem is not people proving their moral superiority over other people and the problem is people find the answers to the conditions of their lives. I don't know that jail is the only option for those conditions, at least no for my life.

The whole form of splitting when things get hot really it is not my life. I just see it is a much more healthy way to live to take whatever it is you've got in jail than to sit across borders watching the world go down a large drain. I just don't see going to Canada's any answer. If I in fact really wanted to quit America then I don't know qualms about going to Canada, but this looks more and more there's no place to run to. The rest of the world has become more like America every day. If you're going to have to fight dragons you might as well fight them where they live. [Narrator]: The number of draft dodgers in Canada is estimated at anywhere from 4 to 15,000. Canada is a safe refuge since Canadians do not extradite men for draft evasion. If the young men returned to the United States voluntarily they would face trial and long prison terms. [Man]: Well as soon as you step across that border you just expect [inaudible] everybody seems to get this. It's like tons of pressure just released

walking right out of the United States and going across the border. And I've become rather extremely bothered by comparisons between World War II Germany and the prison U.S. situation. And I sit and think of parallels and these upset me no end. And finally it got to the point where I had three choices, come to Canada, go to jail, or go out and fight for something that I'd been protesting against for a better part of two years. And I just couldn't see myself doing the latter and Canada seems like a awfully nice jail. I mean I think it took more guts to come here. To me it was a decision, was I going to chicken out and get drafted, you know. That was the whole thing, I mean I knew that if I did it I might be a murder, if I went in there and engaged in that kind of thing. No question about it.

As far as making up my mind the main reason was general dislike for the racism in the States which is tremendous. I'm from Texas. I'm in a lot of it. I had quite a religious hangup. God and the country's equality with God and patriotism and I thought that was patriotic and moral but I wasn't godly. And when the draft came by it was mainly just are you going to sell out and go and kill and be a part of insanity? Are you going to stick by what you know is right but which is harder than hell to do? And go to jail or cut out and I had to really work myself up emotionally. I didn't want to fight it at all so I said to hell with it I'll go to jail. So by my report date I think the day after my report date I accidentally spotted a piece in the paper about Canadian draft Dodgers. It just gave me the idea that I might come up here and be free. And my father didn't want us to fight. He says you can't beat city hall. You know I'm going to beat the US government. They're going to get you.

He's a [inaudible] in Dallas. He makes good money and it's all his individual effort. But he's had to sell out a lot, compromise a lot to get there. And he's last based on that and he doesn't see fighting it. He thinks that you're just getting it and just get what you can. I think it's got to be better than that or it's not worth living at all. I was thinking very seriously about going to prison and then I just thought you're going to be squashed like a damn bug and you're not going to. It's not gonna mean a damn damn thing and once you get out you're going to have also a prison record. It's going to be hard to get a job and... I want my friends out. And that's what I'm going to try to do. Two or three good friends I'm going to try to get them out. [Narrator]: In several Canadian cities groups were formed to aid the American draft Dodgers to adjust to life and exile. The sociology professor Lewis Feldheimer of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver is a Canadian member of one of the committees that is assisted the young Americans. [Feldheimer]: What I'm trying to point out is that the people who are coming up here to evade the draft superficially would appear to be people who are rejecting American culture.

What I am trying to suggest is that these people are not rejecting American culture. These people are the final absurd product of American culture. Now I'm not condemning them as a particular group. These are typical Americans, typical in a sociological general sense. They have absolutely no conception that freedom is a social concept that the kinds of things they want involve their behavior every day in a very direct way with the society. These people are looking, what are they looking for? They'll tell you again and again, they're looking for direction. They're looking for self. They want to get out of a thing called the rat race. They've got all the words right. They've got all the word right. They don't know what they don't have a clue about what it means. These people were not politically motivated. These people have no conception of political action, they're members of American society.

And all they do is get up and say, well, I believe in the American ideals of individualism, of brotherly love, of moral tolerance. And I see a lot of things around me that contradict that, so I quit. I think people coming to Canada create an environment of doubt on the part of the older generation in America. I don't see how it could be any other way. Just leaving, the numbers increasing all the time, there isn't much you can do by carrying a placard, people kind of ignore you now. The political scene in the United States is ridiculous. And it's a waste of time for radical politics as playing silly games. They're not going to change anything because it's going to take a social revolution to do that. And the United States just isn't going to go that far. Yet. [Narrator]: In April of 1967 and again in 1968, hundreds of thousands of Americans demonstrated in New York, San Francisco and elsewhere in a spring mobilization for peace.

These were the largest American demonstrations of anti-war feeling. The organizers hoped the government would notice the numbers who publicly showed their anti-war stand, listen to their pleas and change its policy. [Music] One, two, three, what we're fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn. I can take five minutes to you now. And it's five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates. There ain't no time to wonder why we're all going to die. No time to wonder why we're all going to die. [music continues]

[Narrator]: In San Francisco, in 1967, the parade ended at Kizar Stadium. The long list of speakers included Georgia State Representative Julian Bond, actor Robert Vaughn, and California publisher and unsuccessful candidate for Congress, Edward Keating. [Speakers]: America's militarism is the world spreading cancer cell, and we have to work to eradicate it. The disease of racism infects our bodies, and we, Black and white together, must wipe it out. We talk so fervently of saving faith without realizing that faith already has been lost. It has been lost irrevocably, step by step, as we have been talking peace while escalating war. The answer lies with you, the people of this country, and peace depends upon the people.

[Man]: It's preposterous to have you walk four and a half miles and sit for four hours listening to a lot of speakers that have absolutely nothing to say to them. Which means not going through all the garbage of trying to make some kind of big political show to show how many people you've got. Recognizing that the people who really understand this war aren't that large in this country and that you can't get to them by having that kind of thing. Although I was one of the sponsors in the call to the conference that resulted in the spring mobilization when it finally came time for the mobilization at one point I didn't want to go. I'm tired of being mobilized. A lot of us started expecting it to go all together fully easily. There were clear injustices we could see and if only we would protest them, other people would be drawn to seeing the injustices and they just step them right. That's the idea of a protest so you can walk a picket line and there will be moral recognition.

The part of the people who see you and so on. Well, it didn't take long for us to learn that that was a lot of nonsense. Those people who went south to take part of Negro struggle down there learned it very quickly if they didn't know what went down. We learned it at the University of California. Even for people who just lately have joined the peace movement in the United States, the proof was in the recent mobilization. So people marched. We went to a stadium and a lot of us got around and talked to one another. Some people said some were angry things and then there it was all over. And the war goes on and we'll drop some more bombs. Protest doesn't work and that's something which is very clear now. There's no long tradition of leadership. [Narrator]: History professor, William Appleman Williams of the University of Wisconsin is one of the intellectual mentors of the new radicals. He's the author of several books, including 'The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.'

[Williams]: It's proof positive. They're looking for tradition now in the middle of the protest rather than having come to the protest out of the tradition. To me, it's become more and more apparent that there isn't any tradition of radical politics in America. There's no tradition of how you stand outside the accepted framework of the consensus and still stay in the society as an equal member and exert pressure. See what you sort of get sucked into full-time opposition. Really you have a very empty sort of life because you don't see your actions bearing fruit. It's very difficult to advance from one action to a more sophisticated one because you seem to be unable to get beyond protest. And you're always living in the awareness that it may be over tomorrow. I mean you're not part of this society because there are no opposition institutions. You're not building anything. You're really not building anything.

If some kind of viable political alternative, if some alternatives for rational reason deliberate political action to change the system do not develop, I really think that the new radicalism which has begun so promisingly may become excessive, self-indulgent, self-destructive, resentful and hateful. The thing that maybe is most fearful about it is that in our society where economic lines are also racial lines, we might find that what began naively as a movement to change the heart of white America might end up in a very grim race war. I used to think that there was a clear dividing line between rage and outrage and I've come to feel that distinction doesn't exist in me. But I have to watch carefully my reactions to events to be sure that my reaction is not excessive. That I'm not letting that part of all anger which is hatred get the better of me.

A case in point on the occasion of Clark Curry's firing, I responded much more by an expression of hatred than in any sober reason. But that helped reveal to me that we've all been affected by the plague and that even those who are trying to do good have a great deal of evil in them. I'm suggesting that the politics of white middle class radicals often does have morbid origins or at least in part. I think that the bad effects of those morbid origins would be reduced if there were more real possibilities for serious political action. But in the absence of those, it's all together too easy to be pushed back into yourself and to act out the absurdity of your own personal situation and your politics.

I suppose it's true of me anyway. If my life over a long period of years came built around crisis-oriented politics, I would become not just once in a while hysterical the way I am now, but chronically hysterical. And I think it would have a bad effect on my politics while I might start organizing guerrilla bans in the United States. At some time in the future that might be appropriate, but if we did it now, I think it would just be a way of acting out deep resentment against the society that denies us a chance to lead full lives. This is really a great danger when your whole life becomes bound up in combat against the beast so much more powerful than you are. [Narrator]: Oakland, California, October 16, 1967. Stop the draft week. The object to prevent the orderly induction of recruits. Thousands of young people from all over the San Francisco area came.

They knew that this would mark the end of the nonviolent demonstration. They came to confront the police to tie up intersections to show that they were powerful. After a week of demonstrations in October, including a violent clash at the Pentagon, many in the movement began to think about where they were going. [Man]: They really hurt them. They beat up this poor man who was standing down the sidewalk. He didn't think it was his thing. So he didn't move and they just beat him up. I believe that it's now time for new tactics in the anti-war movement to mobilize all the support we can against the war. It's come to this. There's nothing else to do. The picketing and all of that, which isn't working. It's time for confrontation and the whole thing. And it's working now. The violence of those demonstrations didn't spring out of any consciousness in the society they were dealing with at all. But rather than the fact that they all felt impotent and they had to act that impotence out. I don't think those demonstrations have a future except as a repetition of themselves. There are probably more demonstrations like them. I don't think they'll build anything more than they've built thus far.

I think what they'll be is the continual kind of repetition with the same theme. The theme "we are powerful." We are in the streets when in fact they're neither. They are in the streets, but they aren't at all powerful and have no conception of political power at all. And there's not a revolution unless you can liberate the police also and all the people that identify with the police, which is most of this country. I think that there's room for disruptive demonstrations. But where that becomes one of the key points or maybe the center of one's political program, then at best when succeeds in frightening the population and giving an excuse for further repression. And since for the majority of Americans, it's very hard to see what's wrong with their country. It's very easy for the majority of Americans to be convinced that we're the enemy. [Woman]: First thing I think it's terrible.

My husband's in out there in Vietnam right now and he's fighting for his country. I don't see why they can't fight for their. Well, if they want you this, I think they should just ship them on a bus and take them over there. They're not getting nothing done this way. They're absolutely not. I think if they'd all go home and take a nice clean bath and clean themselves up, they'd have a different outlook on this whole thing. They're not men, as far as I'm concerned. Well, I don't like the war, but I think there's nothing really that we can do about it except go over there and fight. Because we have to win against the communist. [Man]: Are you standing here to block the car? [Woman]: Yes. [Man]: Can you tell me why? [Woman]: Move, I've got to go work. [Woman]: I don't care. I don't care. [people shouting] [shouting continues] [shouting continues] [Woman]: Because I believe in the anti-draft movement. I was up all night. [Man]: Sorry about that some of my people don't understand either. [shouting] [inaudible] [Man]: I'm usually against

bombing. [Man]: Right, I support the bombing in Vietnam. [inaudible] [Man]: It's American I support. [Woman]: This is serious for people to have to go to a war that they think is morally wrong, and boys are being drafted. It may be a little thing to do, but I mean, what can people do to protest the war? [Man]: Very confusion. The leadership is very groping, and they don't know where they're going. They advocate one-hand big demonstrations, and they didn't openly advocate violence for the call for massive, defensive measures, and the way they did was they succeeded in provoking the cops, to a massive display of force. I think what we're doing is wrong. I think killing is wrong, for any reason, for any reason. In the Oakland demonstration, the people who began saying, we've been non-violent long enough, and now we have to be prepared at least to protect ourselves and to defend ourselves. There's a personal stand also, as it is, a stand of the doctrinaire neopacifist.

It's another reaction a person can have to a perception of the violence that he has within himself, concerning pacifism, pacifism embarrasses me. I think in part, because I'm a bit of a pacifist myself, I think a pacifist represent themselves very much as something they're not. As often as not, the doctrinaire pacifism, I think, masks a fear of one's own violence. When we see a policeman beating someone over the head, it's a quite natural reaction to want to beat up on a cop. There's something wrong with pacifism politically as well. It gives the illusion of being a political program when it isn't. Nothing that they're doing really affects the war in any way at all. The net result of sitting in in that way is commonly in being carried off to that of costs you money and time. You have to get a lawyer, you're going to go to jail. It may be that you'll be in jail for a long time. And then what effect will you have had?

Well, by allowing yourself to be taken out of the society in that way, you may believe the society worse than it was before you left it. Both points of view are a little bit hung up on violence. That's not the issue. The issue is political power. They're not exactly the same thing. [Woman: We might as well be in Germany in 1940. We cannot allow that to happen. [Narrator]: The era of non-violence that began with the late Dr. Martin Luther King and carried over into the anti-war demonstrations had come to an end for many of the young activists. Some began to talk about the late Che Guevara and guerrilla tactive. But ideas about how to change America and what kind of society they wanted for the future remained a disturbing and confusing subject. At the University of California after the Oakland confrontation with the police, most of the students felt bitter and angry. Moral protests, they concluded,

was no longer a sufficient reason to be arrested or clubbed. Many began to think about an ideology that would build a political organization. The University of California philosophy professor Herbert Marcusen, author of 'One Dimensional Man,' has been one of the movements theorists. [Woman]: The the failure to take a strong stand of what enabled the whole country to continue as it is. [Marcusen]: The man [inaudible] [inaudible] The White House [inaudible] Pentagon Those are [inaudible] [Woman]: ...function of the radicals is to make their position untenable. [Man]: The radical start choosing issues that completely alienate their potential constituents. [Woman]: Where is the... They aren't good people. [Man]: No. [Woman]: If you're saying that... [Woman]: You're better off having them because we could have somebody worse. [Man]: What extent can the system afford to do without those people? [Marcusen]: If we were in the pre-revolutionary situation, you may be right in fighting the liberals, but damn it we are not in this country, in any pre-revolutionary situation whatsoever. [Man]: I think the frustration breeds the activism without

any particular organization or direction. There are many different groups and they're tend to be off doing their thing and to get them coordinated and to get a consensus in the resistance or the protest is very difficult. It's kind of eerie. There's a group of people who sincerely are concerned to change the society from the better. In many ways, they're acting as individuals and they're defining the problem as individuals. So I think there's one important exception at this point. I think that's the Black Power. The Black Power movement has more sense of community, more sense of cohesion, solidarity, whatever you want to call it than the white students in particular. I think it's very striking. [Man]: Individualism is a luxury that we can no longer afford. Definition for Black Power is the coming together of Black people to fight for their liberation by any means necessary. [APPLAUSE]

You are most simple and idiotic. You sit down and you let white people tell you what to do. You use your mouth for two things to eat and to say 'yes sir.' It's time to use your mouth to say 'no' and begin to use your knowledge for the good of Black people around your campus. [Carmichael]: Who is beginning to challenge what has been defined as success for them, in their college campus. Deep down they have always felt this but they haven't been really sure how to express this because they're afraid they might be called racist or Black nationalists. They finally began to see that they have that release so what I think we're getting the catharsis. There have been an awakening and they're beginning to rethink what success is all about. [Man]: [Inaudible] Involved in this struggle for quite a long time. [APPLAUSE] Stokely Carmichael.

[Narrator]: Black power emerged from the collapse of the integration movement. The fights who have supported SNCC were repelled by the new separatism that Carmichael advocated but he claimed he was no longer talking to whites. Many young Blacks, north and south paid close attention to the new philosophy of race. Black power has become a new organizing seam that has spread fear in many white circles and pride, excitement, and violence into the Black ghettos of large cities. [Carmichael]: In this country, you were to think that white people were God, that they had the right to give us our freedom and so what we had to do was to beg them or to act the way they want us to act before they gave us our freedom. We must stop seeking to imitate white society. We must create for ourselves to save our very humanity because the fight for Black Power in this country is indeed a fight to civilize our barbaric country, the United States. [APPLAUSE] We have to be able to gather this strength. You must be able to get the guts

as the intellectual of the Black society to say we are Black. Our noses are broad. Our lips are thick. Our hair is nappy. We are beautiful. And we are beautiful. And we are beautiful. And we are beautiful. Beautiful, yes, yes! I think that Black students have never heard anyone tell them that they're Black and beautiful. White people like Negores, but they have a role for them. They like them like maybe they like their pet dogs. But they like them to that extent. Now they have that role. Now when they break out of that role, there's a threat, I guess the sociologists would call it a threat to status or what have you. But there is that threat and they have to react to that. But that isn't just in the South. I mean, it's in the whole country. It's in the whole country.

You ought to tell them clap. If you don't want any trouble, keep your filthy white hands off our beautiful place. We want to talk about this thing called violence that everybody is so afraid about. Here you are talking about you afraid of violence and the honky draft in you out of school to go fight in Vietnam. Then you going to sit in front of your television set and listen to LBJ tell you that "violence never accomplishes anything, my fellow Americans." This is the most violent society there is. I think that the society is just headed towards the suicide. I really don't think that America could ever, that America could share in the guilt.

I don't think we could ever see ourselves as a country and that people have to see themselves as individuals. And that's particularly true, I think, for white America, as you must see yourself as individuals. That's the death trap for most liberals. The first thing they say to you is that, well, I'm not like the rest of them. That the first phrase to you, because they recognize for them to share in the collective guilt, they would just have to drink themselves to death. And I think that people who even just touch on the collective guilt of white America must drink themselves to death, just have to. Because I mean, if you just woke up one morning and said, you know, for any reason, all you were burning babies. And you had anything to do with it, man. Any reason at all, you know, burning babies, even to start communism, burning babies, man, you go crazy, you don't blow your mind. [Man]: Vientnam. I got to go, you know break a window on May 2nd. What's the difference? The difference is you might not come back from Vietnam. Yeah, well, I wish you best of luck. I hope you come back but [inaudible]

fight that war themselves. [Carmichael]: We are not only opposed to the war on Vietnam, we are opposed to compulsory conscription. We are against the draft. Now, we're against the draft for anybody, Black or white. When you are called to serve, you have a choice. Either you say no and face the possibility of going to jail or you become a hired killer. You inflict suffering on somebody. It is more honorable to suffer. We must save our humanity. We cannot allow ourselves to be used as the Black mercenaries in that war. You should join the greatest Muhammad Ali and tell them, Hell, no, I ain't going. Hell, no, we ain't going. [Chants] Hell, no, hell, no. We ain't going. Hell, he ain't going. We ain't going. We ain't going. We ain't going.

We ain't going. We ain't going. We ain't going. [Narrator]: Stokely Carmichael and other Black Power leaders provided the slogan for resistance against the draft. But one of the most active anti-draft groups retained pacifist principles, David Harris, one of the leading spokesmen for the Nonviolent Resistance. In October, 1967, he called for a mass turning in of draft cards at the San Francisco Federal Building. Several hundred people attended. [Harris]: What's coming about here is a basic understanding people have gained about their own lives. And that is, if the assumption that selective service makes about us, and the assumptions that the American state makes about the young people of this country, and that those young people will be the bricks upon which they'll continue to build an empire. If an assumption that comes into a fundamental contradiction with the way we understand our own lives, and at the choice we've all made, the choice for life in America rather than death,

and that the struggle that we've all jumped into today continues, until there is no instrument of military conscription in this country, and there is no such thing as an American empire. The only plan sees is what you do. When I look up on the whole last year, my life is going to various places in the country. Tossing seeds out of my bag. They'll grow. Some will grow. There's no such thing as success in failure in a certain kind of sense. People have to understand their success is in doing it. I mean, that you say, what is it that got us into the kind of mess that America is in now? You can't use the same modes of thinking that got America to this position to get it out of this position, that it really calls for a transfer to a whole new concept of a way of living. I see the political goals of the resistance, who's being those are beginning a whole new kind of politics,

which means that it's going to develop a whole new route for power. I mean, if the power that exists in this society today is based off certain kinds of assumptions about people, those assumptions about how people can live together, exactly the things that we're trying to destroy. The conception of man is essentially an animal, essentially as base, calling upon those of the worst of his instincts, and calling upon a society with power to control the worst of those instincts. And rather, what we want to build is a society based on the best of those instincts. I mean, a society built on man's capacity to love other men. If you talk about why someone like myself is non-violent, or would be described as non-violent, is that I see that as the only hope of building a new kind of power in this society. I mean, we're engaged in two kinds of tasks. And the first task is that the destruction of the American state is that now exists in the destruction of the mechanisms that maintain that state. And at the same time, through that way of life that we establish in our attack upon American militarism, and in all the forms of American society, we build that new society. We establish communal living situations, and in that situation attempt to develop new forms for the society. And it's just the first step.

People are just as interested in the fact that I live in a commune as they are the draft. Perhaps even just give people that assurance that there is hope for life outside the context of American society. It's a question of forming a community which already has to begin in the individual sense of oneself. You can't begin talking about community in the situation of a large number of emasculated people. The first thing people have to be given is a sense of their own strength in the particular. And from that has to build a sense of movement, a sense of revolution. Of people merging together in some kind of calm and understanding to build for some kind of calm and calm as a humanity. [Man]: Money! [Harris]: Anything at the most basic all over town has broken a certain kind of paralysis of fear and uncertainty. Out of a political situation, wherever everyone was feeling very, very impotent and very unsure about where to go, and very cautious in the face of large risks, a group of people just stepped out and said, well, we're doing it, we're going to go off and do it.

And what we say to a society of murder and racism is a very simple no. No with the complete context of our lives. And what we say to our brothers around this country and around the world is a very simple word. That word is resist. Only we've learned is that there were a lot more people arrested non-cooperation than we originally ever thought. I mean in a very bubbling completely unput together way, we made that much more difficult for that great institution of war to continue going. Or I don't know if it is lucky, but we coincidentally are in a point of history where American society is breaking up. With or without the Vietnam War. The fact that large numbers of among the most privileged youth in this society, white-collar students are engaging in acts of disruption against the society is a clear sign of considerable instability. Also, it's becoming clear that we can't have such a war abroad and have a continuing expansion of affluence at home.

The Vietnam War has made clear to many people who hadn't seen this before that the government lies to us. That many important decisions concerning life and death concerning setting of economic priorities are not made at all with regard to the needs of the bulk of the population. We have the task of not allowing people to carry us off to jail nor of the fighting the cops. We have the harder task of beginning to organize millions of Americans who have no political power. [Narrator]: Many in the movement began to think in terms of winning political power rather than simply protesting. New politics became the phrase, and in California a peace and freedom party arose and won a place in the 1968 ballot by registering more than 100,000 voters in two months. Inside the peace and freedom party, an uneasy alliance developed between the Black Power advocates and the whites.

The party chose Bobby Seale of the Oakland Black Panthers as one of its candidates for Congress. [Seale]: Meanwhile, back in the ghetto, we get down from any gritty, and I don't jab myself for Black people. I don't go down on a block, talk to the Black people, a bunch of due to the stimulating processes that the basic social economic structure and the political social economic justice conflict, they don't want to hear that. Maybe you can use the technique with many poor whites. [Narrator]: Mario Savio became one of the new party's candidates for State Senate. [Man]: I do. A well known, an inarticulate student at the University of California, managed to find his voice at a very crucial time a couple of years ago, and who was a candidate for the nomination for State Senate from the 11th District. [Savio]: The day of reckoning has come. Dean Ross tries to frighten Americans with a prospect of one billion Chinese [inaudible] nuclear weapon.

He should try and he should be frightened. For on the ground and Vietnam, we are losing against the brave people for the history of throwing out foreign beings and murderers. I want to see them win. That's the course. We must proceed in two ways. First, we must work to break up the present majority of white people and white interests. Second, we must teach the people that something better is workable and sound. We've got to find ways of the missing people that they would like to make the decisions that affect their lives.

There's the very real likelihood that when the war is over, so will the white movement. We right now have an alliance developing in the country between a movement for neo liberation and the anti-war movement. But until we have a movement for white liberation in this country, we will have it best only a very transitory and unstable basis for taking power in the United States. What do the people of the earth already accept that in any conflict between the rights of property and the demands of human dignity, property must give way? Today, the United States is the single greatest obstacle to fulfillment of the deepest desires of the world wretched and oppressed people. We stand at a great watershed in the history of the human race. Our people are productive and intelligent. Our lands are rich. American has the unique opportunity to help usher in a golden age of peace and freedom.

On the other hand, America can insist on the rights of our empire. In this election year, we can help the American people to begin making this choice. We can begin this election year, the great turning of America and in the whole world, away from empire and disaster and toward peace. [Narrator]: The movement is a long way from political power. The entrance of McCarthy and Kennedy in the presidential race, Johnson's refusal to run again and the beginning of talks with North Vietnam have caused confusion in the anti-war movement. Some of the peace activists have rejoined the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Movement leaders believe that none of the major party candidates can solve the problems of U.S. involvement abroad and racism at home. But the movement thus far remains as a dissenting minority. It is not yet developed positive ideas and political actions that serve as alternatives to the major party.

It is groping toward program and organization, but its future will depend not only on the movement quality of ideas and actions. Its future will also rest upon the ability of the American system to deal successfully with the war, racism and the other issues which gave birth to and continue to feed this opposition. This has been NET Journal. A weekly look at the events, issues and people of the world today. This is N-E-T, the National Educational Television Network.