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I’m going to be giving a keynote address at the fall conference of the Minnesota State College Student Association this weekend, and one of the things I’ll be talking about is the effect of voting rights on the history of American student activism.
Until the passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment in 1971, the voting age in the US was 21, which means that throughout the huge waves of campus activism of the 1930s and 1960s, the vast majority of American college students were denied the vote on the basis of their age.
The effect of this disfranchisement on the course of student activism has received little attention in most histories of American student protest, and the effect of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment on the course of later activism still less. It’s a topic I devote a bit of attention to in my dissertation, and one I’m looking forward to discussing with the folks in Minneapolis.
At the 1967 Congress of the US National Student Association (NSA), the delegates present passed a resolution endorsing the Black Power movement, which they defined as a struggle for the unification and liberation of black people in America “by any means necessary.”
These last four words got a lot of attention.
One of the most prominent attacks on the resolution came from the New York Times, In an editorial entitled “Appeasing Negro Extremists.” The resolution, the Times declared, was “morally … inexcusable” because it was “insincere.” Surely the members of NSA did not, it continued, “believe that American Negroes have the right to seek something called ‘liberation’ by murder, arson and other terror tactics,” as “the phrase ‘by any means necessary’ clearly implies.”
A few days later Ed Schwartz, NSA’s newly elected president, replied in a letter to the editor.
The Black Power resolution had, Schwartz noted, made no reference to “murder, arson, and other terror tactics.” Its authors had deliberately left the phrase vague, leaving it “to the reader of the resolution to determine what means will be necessary to achieve social progress in this country.”
“If the Times believes,” he continued, “that ‘murder, arson and other terror tactics’ have become ‘necessary means’ to social progress, then it should examine why such tactics … have become ‘necessary.’ … Those who predict violence are,” he said, “admitting that we will remain incapable of solving problems of our own creation. The National Student Association is unwilling to make such an admission.”
If Bill Ayers’ name is brought up in tonight’s presidential debate, don’t be too surprised if someone mentions another radical opponent of the war in Vietnam, David Ifshin.
Ifshin, a campus protest leader who was elected student government president at Syracuse University in 1969-70 and the president of the National Student Association in 1970-71, visited North Vietnam in December of 1970 to promote a “People’s Peace Treaty” calling for an end to the war.
While he was there, he recorded a speech attacking the war, saying that the US was not fighting “for democracy or to defend the right of the people, but … to murder the people of Vietnam in order to make South Vietnam into one large US military base.” That speech was later broadcast as propaganda directed at American troops, including POW John McCain.
So why would anyone mention Ifshin tonight? Well, it’s a long and strange story, but the short version is that Ifshin came to regret giving that speech, and eventually became active in Democratic party politics. He and McCain met in the mid-1980s — at an AIPAC conference, of all places — and became friends. Ifshin died of cancer in 1996, and McCain delivered a eulogy at his funeral, saying that Ifshin had “always felt passionate about his country,” and “always tried to do justice to others.”
David Ifshin and John McCain forged a friendship that was grounded in a belief in redemption and forgiveness. John McCain may very well draw a distinction between Ifshin and Ayers tonight, and if he doesn’t, it’s just possible that Barack Obama will draw a parallel between the two.
Back in May, we reported on an online survey that Mother Jones magazine was conducting on contemporary student activism. (At the time, we noted that the survey’s title, “Are Today’s Student Activists Lazy?”, seemed oddly hostile to student organizing.)
Well, it’s back-to-school time, and the survey results have been posted, along with a cartoon guide to the varieties of present-day campus activists and a handful of other sidebars.
We’ll be posting an annotation of their “Student Activism Firsts” timeline later this week, and we’re interested in hearing your thoughts on that and the rest of the feature — feel free to post them here, or in the comments section over there.
History geeks may want to check out the Free Speech Movement Digital Archive, a collection of documents from, and writing about, the historic Berkeley protests of 1964-65.
We’ve added the link to our collection at left.
studentactivism.net 
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