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Before he was a movie critic, Roger Ebert was a student journalist. He wrote for the University of Illinois Daily Illini as an undergraduate, serving as the paper’s editor in his senior year.
Ebert also served a term as president of the United States Student Press Association, a national association of student newspaper editors affiliated with the National Student Association that supported campus media and advocated for student press freedom. As president of the USSPA, Ebert was invited to the White House reception at which the above photograph was taken.
March 18 update | Hello, Roger Ebert twitter-followers! To answer Roger’s questions, I found the above photo, I found it in the US National Student Association archives in Madison, Wisconsin, and I discovered it in the course of researching my dissertation on the Association. I’m heading off to teach right now, but I’ll post more details later. In the meantime, feel free to poke around. (If you want an update when I post more, you can follow me on Twitter at @studentactivism.)
March 19 update | I can’t seem to put my hands on the original of the photo right now, but it comes from a USNSA newsletter of some kind, probably the NSA News. The National Student Association was a generally liberal confederation of student governments that served as one of the incubators of sixties radicalism — many of the early leaders of Students for a Democratic Society met each other at NSA conferences, for instance, and NSA gave crucial early funding and support to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. (Until 1967 NSA itself received gobs of secret cash from the CIA, which made extensive and varied use of its international operations.)
One thing I love about the photo is how perfectly it situates Roger in the history of student organizing. It, like Ebert’s work as an advocate for student press freedoms, is emphatically of the sixties — what with him being flanked by LBJ’s wife and daughter and all. But its buttoned-up, stilted formality isn’t remotely of The Sixties. That Sixties, the Sixties of popular myth, lasted maybe four or five years, but it grew out of an earlier, murkier era — the era of Mad Men and the Free Speech Movement and Freedom Summer, an era in which a student activist who clambered up onto a police car to make a speech would take his shoes off first, to avoid doing any damage. It’s a historical moment that I’m fascinated by and more than a little smitten with, and it’s a moment that this photo captures beautifully.
Oh, yeah — I do have one more piece of trivia about Roger and the NSA. As he himself wrote in a blog post a couple of months ago, it was at the Association’s 1964 summer Congress, just five months after this photo was taken, that Roger Ebert “experienced the joy of intercourse with a female undergraduate for the first time.”
Go read that post, by the way. It’s a lovely one.
“Constitutional rights do not mature and come into being magically only when one attains the state-defined age of majority. Minors, as well as adults, are protected by the Constitution and possess constitutional rights.”
–Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, Planned Parenthood v. Danforth, 1976.
The student government at the University of West Georgia is looking to cut funding to the school’s student newspaper in retaliation for an opinion piece that mocked fraternities.
The day after the West Georgian ran a column called “Join a Frat with Buck Futter, Jr.” student body president Alan Webster — a fraternity brother himself — introduced a bill that would freeze the paper’s funds on a “temporary yet immediate” basis while the university explored alternative ways to “allocat[e] institutional funds to extend interesting, informative, accurate, and responsible information in a manner that sheds a positive light on the University.”
The bill was passed by the student government and is being reviewed by university lawyers prior to implementation.
The offending column described frat members as “over-aggressive alcoholics that have no sense of responsibility,” and said that the university repeatedly lets “frats off the hook despite their incessant rule-breaking and idiotic antics.” It claims that frat members keyed the word “FAG” into the finish of a Resident Assistant’s car, and went unpunished “because University Police never actually investigate any crimes against students.”
It also suggests that UWG fraternity members regularly have sex with each other and rape passed-out female students.
Perennial presidential-campaign asterisk Alan Keyes was one of twenty-two anti-choice activists arrested on the Notre Dame campus yesterday. The group, which included Operation Rescue founder/sleazeball Randall Terry, was protesting President Obama’s upcoming commencement address.
The group was arrested for trespassing — Notre Dame policy allows only “student-led protests” on campus, and apparently this group couldn’t (or didn’t care to) find any student supporters.
But that’s not my favorite part of the story. My favorite part of the story is this: When Keyes walked onto campus, he was pushing a blood-spattered doll in a stroller…
A Spongebob Squarepants stroller.
Update: Photo from here. Note that the doll was so small and unobtrusive that the (“pro-life,” but disgusted anyway) blogger who posted it thinks that Keyes was pushing a bloody Spongebob doll in the stroller. Note also that commenter Leslie Hanks actually approves of parading around with bloody Spongebob dolls as an anti-abortion tactic.
An Entertainment Weekly blog claimed last week that a New York crowd “staged a ’60s-style sit-in at a Manhattan KFC” after the restaurant ran out of the grilled chicken that Oprah Winfrey had given away free coupons for online. The story has been repeated over and over again since.
But the sit-in never happened.
The EW story was based on a Gothamist post, and Gothamist got it from an anonymous emailer who’d written to say that customers at a midtown Manhattan KFC were “currently holding a sit-in and refusing to leave until they get their free chicken.” But that email was an obvious, crude, and not particularly funny joke — it went on to claim that the store’s “manager ran from [a] screaming horde” who were “spew[ing] racial epithets” and threatening other patrons with “a beatdown.”
If there had been an actual sit-in the New York tabloids and television news would have been all over it, but a Google news search for KFC protest Oprah “New York” brings up not a single hit from local media. It gets plenty of hits, but they’re all to stories that were based on the Gothamist’s joke.
Were people at that KFC upset about missing out on the promotion? Some of them probably were. Any time a business promises a free giveaway and fails to deliver there are going to be some pissed off customers, particularly if they’ve been waiting in line for a while.
But the crucial element of the Gothamist/EW story is the sit-in angle, and it’s obvious why. Claiming that there was a sit-in brings all the racially coded elements of the story — Oprah, fast food, New York, fried chicken — together, and turns a story about corporate bungling into a story about race. Gothamist cast the story as a story about angry, violent blacks, while EW went for a more sardonic approach, but both made the incident into a morality play with blackness taking center stage.
And so it was inevitable that white racist idiots would pounce on the story, just as it was inevitable that blacks would recoil in embarrassment. But there’s no reason for anyone to be smirking, and there’s no reason for anyone to be cringing.
The sit-in never happened.
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