You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘History’ category.
This is really cool.
The Student Labor Action Project, a group that works with students across the US on economic justice organizing, has just completed a year-by-year history of its work. Here’s a sample, chosen pretty much at random:
2006
SLAP students at Temple University and University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia waged a campaign against security guard firm, AlliedBarton. Philly SLAP and the city’s Jobs with Justice coalition held numerous marches and protests to try and secure a living wage and benefits for security officers working on campuses and throughout the city. In Vermont, SLAP students also ran a living wage campaign for campuses workers. The National Student Labor Week of Action featured 250 actions on campuses. In addition to living wage campaigns going on throughout the nation, SLAP students also held actions against American Eagle and in solidarity with the Justice at Smithfield campaign.
In 2006, the Living Wage Action Coalition was founded to coordinate living wage campaigns taking place across the country. LWAC grew out of a living wage campaign at Georgetown University, and the students who ran that campaign hoped to create a larger network that could provide trainings, resources, and supports for struggles across the country. SLAP was a major partner with LWAC and provided its expertise to the assist the movement for a living wage.
Carlos Jimenez was hired as the fifth SLAP Coordinator.
This kind of narrative history is crucial to any movement, and student activists may be less likely to produce it than any other group. I can’t count the number of times I’ve wanted to mention something about an organization or movement in a larger work, but had to drop it or cut it down because I couldn’t find a solid overview source and didn’t have time to build one from scratch.
My dissertation was intended to fill one such gap, but there are a ridiculous number of others, many of them huge. Here’s to filling gaps.
I was quoted pretty extensively in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed story on campus protests against Chick-Fil-A, and one of the nice things about being interviewed by a sharp journalist is that it prompts you to articulate things you wouldn’t ordinarily have occasion to say.
A lot of what I write is in response to specific circumstances, and for a particular audience, and because of all that some basic stuff often goes unspoken. Here’s an example from the IHE piece:
“Students feel a sense of ownership over, or citizenship in, the campus. They don’t see themselves as consumers of a product. [The Chick-Fil-A protesters are] responding out of that sense of community, that sense of obligation.”
The concept of students as consumers of a higher education product isn’t one that students came up with. It was invented by university administrators in the early 1970s as a way of blunting student demands for an active role in governance while meeting the administrative challenges posed by new consumer protection laws and the decline of in loco parentis. To the extent that it’s been adopted by students in the decades since, it’s only hesitantly, conditionally, and under duress.
That’s worth remembering.
Mario Savio. Because Mario Savio.
Today is the second day of the 2012 National Student Congress of the United States Student Association. In this excerpt from my dissertation I describe the 1966 Congress of USSA’s predecessor the United States National Student Association, a meeting that took place in a watershed moment in American student history.
• • •
NSA’s health improved substantially in 1965-66 — attendance at the 1965 Congress had been among the lowest in NSA history, but in 1966 it rose above 250 schools. In the wake of Berkeley and the Vietnam escalation, student activism acquired a cultural resonance that it had not previously possessed. As protest became more pervasive — and as it became a mass-media phenomenon — the task of political organizers changed. At the very moment when campus activists had given up on organizing student governments, they discovered that student governments were beginning to organize themselves.
After Berkeley, an activist self-presentation was increasingly an electoral advantage for a student government candidate, whether that candidate was backed by an organized campaign or not. Across the country, activists were swept into office almost inadvertently by student bodies whose attitudes toward political organizing were undergoing a dramatic and rapid transformation.
In the summer of 1966 the new president of the Stanford student government, David Harris, was one such activist. A leader in campus protests, he had been approached by a leader of the small activist faction in the campus student legislature, and asked to run as a protest candidate for student government president. He would lose, he was told, but in running he would have a platform from which to publicize an activist agenda.
In a field of seven candidates that year, Harris stood out. Fraternities had long dominated the Stanford student government, and while Harris strolled the campus in jeans and what the campus newspaper called a “beatnik-style” haircut, the others campaigned in suits and ties. He ran on a platform that he described later as elimination of the Board of Trustees, student control of student regulations, equal policies for men and women, the option to take classes on a pass-or-fail basis, legalization of marijuana, and the end of all university co-operation with the conduct of the War in Vietnam, and he was a sensation. He led the field in the first round of voting, and a week later beat a fraternity candidate in the runoff, an election that saw the highest turnout in Stanford history. At the NSA Congress that summer he emerged as one of the strongest radical voices in the Association, and soon he would be a movement celebrity — co-founder of the draft-resistance group The Resistance, subject of an Esquire feature on “The New Student President,” and husband of folksinger Joan Baez, whom he met while both were jailed for their participation in a draft protest.
In a 1965 article in the Congress News, Hendrik Hertzberg had described that Congress as “in some indefinable way hipper, more aware that life does not begin and end with resolutions and caucuses, than the one that preceded it.” For all the upheavals of the previous year, though, the 1965 Congress had been a meeting whose most significant speech had been given by Hubert Humphrey, one which had closed with a mass singing of “We Shall Overcome” and the national anthem. The 1965 Congress was certainly hipper than 1964’s, but “hipper” is not the same as “hip.”
The 1966 Congress, at the University of Illinois, would require less equivocation. That year Allen Ginsberg appeared on a panel on drug policy reform, and stayed to give a poetry reading afterwards. (“Language, language … you pour it forth like napalm,” he intoned, in an apparent reference to the plenary.) One delegate put forward a resolution advocating the legalization of homosexuality, and another introduced a proposal to remove the word “God” from the NSA constitution. Longtime Conservative Caucus stalwart Danny Boggs put forward a libertarian argument for the regulation of LSD on the same basis as alcohol, and the plenary itself endorsed the repeal of the nation’s marijuana possession laws.
The center of gravity of the Congress was shifting rapidly. In 1966 each of the political caucuses at the Congress repositioned itself to the left — the Conservative Caucus renamed itself the Moderate Caucus, the Radical Middle Caucus renamed itself the Progressive Caucus, and the Liberal Caucus faced a schism between its liberals and its radicals.
The Liberal Caucus had been formed as an oppositional force, but it now stood at the Association’s heart. In 1966 the caucus didn’t merely debate the merits of pending legislation, it drafted and voted on resolutions of its own, and possessed the delegate strength to bring its proposals to the floor outside of the Congress’s formal legislative process. On Vietnam and the draft its majority position was by now essentially that of the Congress as a whole. This convergence of identity between the caucus and the larger delegate pool left the Congress’s most radical delegates with little incentive to continue to subsume their identity into that of the caucus — as the caucus mainstream gained power in the national office and influence with other delegates, it fell to the radical faction to take up the oppositional role that the caucus itself had previously played.
The radicals proposed their own Vietnam resolution in 1966, one that described the war as an attempt to advance “the American empire … in a calculated barbaric fashion.” The caucus balked — both at the analysis and at the way in which it was expressed — but the plenary majority went much farther in their own resolution than they had at any previous Congress. They declared, by a vote of 181-83 with only ten abstentions, that the United States had ignored the “legitimate aspirations for social revolution” of the Vietnamese people, and that the escalation of the conflict had alienated the Vietnamese, made the establishment of democracy there “virtually impossible,” and brought the world closer to nuclear war. They called for an immediate halt to American bombing and other offensive operations, and for the opening of multilateral negotiations.
On the draft as well as on Vietnam, attitudes were evolving. There was broad opposition among the delegates to the draft as it stood but disagreement about whether to call for immediate abolition or a gradual phase-out, whether to concede the government’s authority to institute a draft under any circumstances, and whether to propose the expansion of conscientious objector status and alternative service as interim reforms while the draft still existed.
The question of tactics divided the liberals from the radicals as much as that of goals, and on the question of tactics an NSA alumnus — 1950-51 president Allard Lowenstein — was a formidable voice at the Congress. Lowenstein argued that opposition to the war should present itself moderately and reasonably. “This country is not as sick as some people think it is,” he said, in a debate with David Harris. “There is a tremendous reservoir of American conscience which can be tapped if we approach it in the right way.” As an example of such a tactic he proposed sending an open letter to Lyndon Johnson from the nation’s student body presidents on the subject of the war. The suggestion was greeted with enthusiasm, $83 was raised from Liberal Caucus members to pay for an outreach mailing, and Lowenstein set to work on the text.
Gene Groves was Phil Sherburne’s chosen successor as NSA president, and he had a long history in NSA. He had been the chair of the Liberal Caucus in 1964, and a member of the NSB the following year. But he had spent the 1965-66 academic year at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, and so he had no immediate ties to any American university. To run for office he would need credentials from a member campus.
Groves had arranged with the student government at the University of Chicago, his alma mater, to be seated as an alternate in their delegation. But that placement had been challenged by longtime NSA conservative Danny Boggs — at the time a University of Chicago law student — and overturned by a campus judiciary committee. A few weeks before the Congress Groves approached Roosevelt College, which proved to have fewer compunctions. He applied for admission to their graduate school, and their student government credentialed him while that application was still pending.
Such credentials had in past years been provided to establishment candidates with little fuss, but by 1966 NSA’s membership was growing more restive. Groves’ Roosevelt credentials were challenged, and the issue became one of the consuming debates of the Congress. Ultimately the CSC supported Groves by a vote of 16-7 and the plenary upheld his credentials in a 278-95 vote, but after doing so they closed the loophole that he had used to secure his eligibility for office. They passed a constitutional amendment that restricted campus delegate and alternate seats to individuals who had been “registered and in attendance” at the school in question within the past two and a half years. A student government could, in other words, extend credentials to a recent alum if it chose, but not to a supplicant with no connection to that campus, or to one who, like Groves, merely pledged to enroll in the future. In the Groves battle, as in the ISC election dispute the previous year, the establishment prevailed, but the dispute left them diminished. This is how reform came to NSA — not through the overthrow of the establishment, but through insurgencies forcing insiders to make concessions, and through the leadership clique weakening from within as a result.
At the end of the Congress, Groves faced Danny Boggs in the presidential race. Boggs, running as an anti-establishment candidate at least as much as a candidate of the right, won one-third of the total vote. Significantly, Groves had won more support in the credentials battle than he did in the presidential race — a significant number of delegates appear to have voted to put him on the ballot, and then voted against him.
After astronaut Sally Ride died earlier this week, Andrew Sullivan put up a column criticizing her for remaining closeted as a lesbian until her death. Though her achievements would “vastly outshine” her “flaws,” he wrote, “the truth remains: she had a chance to expand people’s horizons and young lesbians’ hope and self-esteem, and she chose not to.”
When a lesbian wrote to him to say that it was precisely because Ride wasn’t openly gay that she was available (in the writer’s conservative family and community) as a strong, independent, feminist role model growing up, and that “her closet is part of the reason I escaped mine,” Sullivan sneered:
“Which makes Sally Ride what? A role model for staying silent so as not to disturb the status quo? Once you accept the logic of prejudice, even as a tool for other laudable goals, you’ve given the game away.”
And that makes his most recent post on the subject really really weird.
This morning Sullivan returned to the subject of Sally Ride (for I believe the sixth time) to apologize for the tone of some of his earlier comments but to affirm his basic perspective.
“Perhaps a better way of putting this is to point to another American icon, Bayard Rustin. Rustin was both black and gay and was integral to the organization behind the civil rights movement. But because he was gay, and had been arrested for public sex, he chose to be in the background of the movement and not be a spokesman, in case it would do more harm than good. But in his later life, he became a towering figure for many of us looking for role models as out gay men. He was a pragmatist but also deeply principled, like the late Frank Kameny. He faced, like Ride, several layers of discrimination, but he found the strength to break through all of them. …
“No one is required to be a hero. But no one either should be judged too weak or oppressed for heroism. Sally Ride had a choice, as did Bayard Rustin. They are both heroes to my mind in many ways – and far more distinguished human beings than I could ever be. But Rustin’s shoulders are higher and broader. You can see the future from them.”
This is completely wrongheaded.
Bayard Rustin didn’t simply “choose to be in the background of the movement … because he was gay, and had been arrested for public sex.” He was pushed to the background of the movement after his conviction revealed his sexuality to the public.
As a closeted gay man, Rustin had been a prominent organizer within the nascent civil rights movement. As a known homosexual, he was fired from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, shunned by former allies, forced to contribute anonymously or surreptitiously or not at all. His involuntary ejection from one closet, in other words, had the effect of forcing him into another.
This is “the logic of prejudice,” and it’s a logic that Rustin well understood. Rustin didn’t choose, and wouldn’t have chosen, to go public as a gay man in the fifties. That choice was made for him, and it had exactly the negative effect on his life’s work that Ride must have feared disclosure would have had on hers. Bayard Rustin’s life stands as a refutation of Sullivan’s stance, not an affirmation of it.
And Sullivan compounds his error with his use of a fragmentary Rustin quote, apparently lifted from Wikipedia:
“Today, blacks are no longer the litmus paper or the barometer of social change. Blacks are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial discrimination. The new “niggers” are gays. . . . It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change. . . . The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people. “
The first thing that needs to be said about this quote is that it’s taken from a speech which Rustin gave when he was seventy-four years old, while Sally Ride died at sixty-one. So to present his words as an attack on Ride’s silence is shoddy and ugly.
But beyond that, Sullivan’s version of the speech is so chopped down as to render its true meaning unrecognizable. Rustin wasn’t arguing, as the excerpt seems to suggest, that the fight against racism had been won. Rather, he was saying that it was because overt racism had been largely driven underground — because “nobody would dare to say any number of things about blacks that they are perfectly prepared to say about gay people” — attitudes toward gays had become the “barometer” of public opinion on social justice issues.
And Rustin went on to identify this position as leaving gays with an obligation to other social justice movements, in an analysis that rebukes Sullivan’s. “Because we stand in the center of progress toward democracy,” he declared, “we have a terrifying responsibility to the whole society.” The gay community, he said, “cannot work for justice for itself alone,” cannot tolerate prejudice in its ranks, and must “recognize that we cannot fight for the rights of gays unless … we are ready to fight for a radicalization of this society.”
A society that leaves young children and the elderly in poverty, Rustin said, is a society that will never grant justice to gays. And so “these economic concerns must go hand-in-hand and, to a degree, precede the possibility of dealing with the most grievous problem — which is sexual prejudice.”
This, like all of Rustin’s life work, is an eloquent statement of the interconnectedness of struggles for change. Where Sullivan claims that marshaling your energy for your chosen battles is “giving the game away,” Rustin understood that any movement to uplift the oppressed must operate strategically, consciously, mindfully. Where Sullivan excoriates Sally Ride for her apparent calculation that she could do more to change society for the better from within the closet than outside, Bayard Rustin would have nodded. He would have understood.
He would have embraced her as a friend, a comrade, a hero.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments