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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.
Eight Venezuelan police officers have been arrested in connection with the shooting death of student activist Yuban Ortega Urdaneta two weeks ago. The charges against the officers include homicide.
Ortega, a supporter of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and the president of the student association of the University Technical Institute of Ejido, was reportedly shot in the forehead during a campus protest against university corruption on April 28. He died of his wounds three days later.
The shooting of Ortega sparked three days of student riots in the city of Mérida, just north of the Ejido campus. In a television appearance after Ortega’s death, president Chavez said that “the full weight of the law must fall” on whoever was responsible.
A group of Florida high school students is waging war against a local curfew.
The law — which bars under-18s from downtown West Palm Beach after 10 o’clock on weeknights and eleven on weekends — is, they say, unconscionable age discrimination. But that’s not all.
The law exempts married young people, but not those who are out with parental permission. On the contrary, it imposes fines on parents who “knowingly permit or by insufficient control allow” their children to break the curfew. “Insufficient control” is apparently nowhere defined — is a parent whose 17-year-old is in college expected to exercise “sufficient control” to keep him or her indoors at night?
The most bizarre — and, in a bizarre way, comforting — provision of the two-year-old law is one which exempts young people who are “attending or traveling directly to or from an activity that involves the exercise of rights protected under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution” from the curfew.
That’s right. The curfew as written only applies to those young people who don’t intend to speak while they’re out on the town. If you’re going to be exercising your freedom of speech (or assembly, or religion, or the press, or, you know, petitioning the government for redress of grievances), you’re golden. If you’re heading out to sit by your grandmother who’s in a coma, though, you’re getting a ticket.
(Only not really. The city is mostly just using the law as a mechanism for rousting young people rather than going through the hassle of ticketing them — as of the end of March it had issued a thousand warnings but only five citations.)
It’s ridiculous, is what it is, and the National Youth Rights Association of Southeast Florida is doing something about it.
NYRASEFL leaders Zach Goodman and Jeffrey Nadel (both 16) spent a big chunk of the spring explaining to the mayor and city commission just how farkakte the law is, but didn’t get anywhere. Then in late March they retained local civil rights attorney Barry Silver, who managed to get a law that criminalized feeding the homeless (yes, really) overturned last year. But so far he hasn’t had any luck either.
So on the evening of May 1, they took to the streets, letting the city know when and where they would defy the curfew.
During the protest they were tailed by two officers on Segways, but otherwise left alone. Their presence does seem to have gotten under the cops’ skin, though, as police ticketed several teens who were waiting for their parents outside a nearby movie theater as the protest was going on.
NYRASEFL intends to make one final effort to convince the city commission to repeal the curfew law before filing suit against the city. We’ll keep you informed as the story develops.
Update: As Justin Graham notes in comments, NYRASEFL is on Twitter, too.
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