Alcatraz! The breakaway group named itself the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC), and called for a massive legal march and rally on 24 April. The day of the week is Monday. Fred Halstead, Out Now! YELLOW POWER MOVEMENT: Amy Uyematsu, "The Emergence of Yellow Power in America," Gidra (October 1969), and William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Phildelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). "Trouble Over Bridged Waters," May Flowers; "Mayday Tactics: Report from Washington, D.C.," Northwest Passage (24 May-6 June 1971); "The Biggest Bust," Newsweek; "May Day Washington," Berkeley Tribe (14-21 May 1971). The immediate goal was to snarl traffic so completely that government employees could not get to their jobs. 55-73; and Gitlin, The Sixties, pp. But the more emblematic GLF slogan was, "No revolution without us! 12. Perhaps as many as 20,000 of the protesters were willing to risk arrest, including some members of Congress. Many of the arrestees were ordinary people with no connection to the protest; they just happened to be where sweeps were taking place. Looking back at this some years after re-publishing it, I'm very pleased to see the commentary from comrades who took part in the actions. I was there. The Mayday Tribe, a loose knit group of individuals, collectives and affinity groups, organized an attempt to shut down the U.S. government in Washington, D.C. in protest of the continued war in Indochina May 3-5, 1971 through the use of non violent civil disobedience. "GLFers chose the rocky road of fluid cellular organization," explained activist Lois Hart, "rather than perpetuate older, oppressive structures of Follow the Leader and passive participation by voting."36. The lack of formal organization, however, tended to undermine the ideal of decentralization, as a result of what one radical feminist famously called "the tyranny of structurelessness. For an account of how it was shot, see his book, Videofreex: America's First Pirate TV Station and the Catskills Collective That Turned It On (Hensonville, N.Y.: Black Dome Press, 1999). As one participant observed in the protest's immediate aftermath, "Twenty thousand freaks carry the seeds now, and they've been blown to every corner of the land."55. i would love to republish this whole article, with credit to the author, of course. 6. John Darnton, "Antiwar Protests Erupt across U.S.," The New York Times (10 May 1972); Linda Charlton, "Antiwar Protests Rise Here and across the Country," The New York Times (11 May 1972); John Darnton, "Hundreds Are Arrested in Antiwar Demonstrations," The New York Times (11 May 1972); "Roving Bands of Godless Anarchists," Up Against the Bulkhead (May 1972); "Chicago Groups React to War Escalation," The Torch (15 May 1972); "We Fight Beside the NLF," The Augur (20 May-3 June 1972). "25, To pull that off well, you needed some kind of agile, streetwise organization-something, perhaps, like "a street gang with an analysis." The above date is written in the traditional western/American style of writing dates. United Kingdom 1971 – Calendar with British holidays. ", Gay Mayday was an intriguing political experiment in fusing the new gay radicalism with the radicalism of the antiwar movement. From the emergence of Black Power in 1966, black radicals had rejected even militant nonviolence in favor of what they called self-defense. The quotations are from Tom Wells, The War Within: America's Battle over Vietnam (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994), p. 512. The description of small feminist groups is from Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women's Liberation (New York: David McKay Company, 1975), p. 103. ... FOUR DAYS in the Black Hole of the Capital . Your region makes the tactical decisions within the discipline of nonviolent civil disobedience. "This form of struggle, no matter how radical its demands, never threatens the basic structure-the mass itself." Anti-Mass: Methods of Organization for Collectives defined "the mass" as an intrinsically alienating and repressive structure of capitalist society, designed purely to facilitate consumption. It was the 22 nd Friday of that year. The organizers had also obtained a permit for an encampment in West Potomac Park from the time of the mass 24 April march and rally through 3 May, the Monday morning when the shutdown was to take place. hi. Sanford J. Ungar and Maurine Beasley, "Justify Arrests, Judge Orders Police: Total Sets a U.S. Record," Washington Post (4 May 1971); "Mayday Tactics: Report from Washington, D.C.," Northwest Passage (24 May-6 June 1971). "If you've got no organization, what do you do? alternately you can use an app like CamScanner, which is free in app stores to make a PDF of the account, then upload it here (or if you have any issues uploading here you can email it to us at libcom.org@gmail.com). ▶ Start forum discussions, submit articles, and more... about | donate | help out | submitting content | other languages | a-z | contact us | site notes, Ending a war: Inventing a movement: Mayday 1971, Ending a war, inventing a movement Mayday 1971.pdf. For a retrospective look at NPAC's approach by a political sympathizer, see Carole Seligman, "Lessons of a Winning Antiwar Movement," Socialist Action June 1999). The organizers of Mayday had a somewhat difficult sell to make, and the tactical manual emphatically distinguished their disruptive direct-action scenario from conventional nonviolence: "We need to be clear that we are not talking about an exercise in martyrdom; we are not talking about negotiated arrests; we are talking about using a tactic to attain an objective." CHICANO POWER MOVEMENT: Carlos Munoz, Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicana Movement (London and New York: Verso, 1989). This means no 'movement generals' making tactical decisions you have to carry out. An organizing leaflet elaborated: "[T]he overall discipline will be non-violent, the tactic disruptive, and the spirit joyous and creative." "Following the disintegration of SDS," the radical magazine Liberation explained, "there were many in the movement who were thoroughly disillusioned with the whole idea of a national political structure. I was 18 and a freshman in college. "For a number of us, gay and straight, the women's part of the conference was getting to know one another through dancing, swimming, making music together, singing, rapping in small groups, in twos and threes, digging on each other," one woman wrote in Atlanta's underground paper. "They couldn't infiltrate it, because we were all sleeping with each other," recalls John Scagliotti, "And we were doing a tremendous amount of illegal things, that they could have gotten us all for." The largest and most audacious civil disobedience action in American history is also the least remembered, a protest that has slipped into almost complete historical obscurity. Historical events from year 1971. 17. 24. Compared to the previous year this effort was very successful at staying as peaceful as possible. "[We're] not going to put our bodies on the line, we're not going to get our heads beaten, but we can at least support these people," she explained. Mary McGrory is quoted in Noam Chomsky, "Mayday: The Case for Civil Disobedience," The New York Review of Books (17 June 1971); Carl Bernstein, "Rennie Davis: Make Clear...We Failed," The Washington Post (4 May 1971). Some three hundred of the group's followers converged on Chicago, where they literally went on a rampage: battling cops, smashing windshields, running through the streets, and creating mayhem. .... Each group sticks together, protects each of its members, acts as a fighting unit in case of confrontation, and functions as a work team. 375-79; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), pp. 49. The radical feminist influence was also felt in the GLF's "structureless" organizational form, comprised of decentralized collectives (called, in this case, "cells") with no formal decision-making process, membership requirements, or bylaws. In this climate of grim frustration, the national antiwar movement split, as long-standing tensions about the political value of civil disobedience divided activists who were planning the antiwar mobilization for spring 1971. Mike Gardner 10,296 views. Thanks mates for your thoughts and for being there. This coalition boasted a long and impressive list of endorsers, but was centrally controlled by the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and its offshoots. Before dawn on Sunday, the morning after the rock concert, the government made its first move. It's about people being people; it's getting rid of the old heavy rhetoric kind of politics. It was, one activist observed, "hate-the-heavies time," and the complaints about Mayday revealed how dramatically the radical landscape was shifting. And I immediately saw the possibility," remembers Morea. 38. Many-perhaps most-of the people who took part in the action were relative newcomers to the movement, from the generation that had been radicalized by Cambodia and Kent State.11, Davis took the idea of nonviolently blockading the federal government from a failed 1964 attempt by the Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to paralyze New York City traffic on the opening day of the World's Fair. That's how the Motherfuckers, the SDS chapter from Manhattan's Lower East Side, defined the affinity group in a broadside published around 1968. The phrase "qualified martial law" was used by William H. Rehnquist, who was assistant attorney general at the time and later named to the Supreme Court. Damn close. For more on the takeover of the concert stage, see "May Day (1)," off our backs (27 May 1971). 329-74. Editorial Reviews. Ron Hahne, Black Mask & Up Against the Wall Motherfucker: The Incomplete Works of Ron Hahne, Ben Morea, and the Black Mask Group (London: Unpopular Books and Sabotage Editions, 1993), p. 119; telephone interview with Ben Morea, 4 July 2000; Bookchin interview. The city was effectively under military occupation. Did we shut it down? Lawrence Roberts brilliantly takes us back to that day in May 1971 when the protests movements of the 60's culminated in the arrests of 12,000 people in the nation's capital. Perry Brass remembers the scene as one of "high hippieism": "People were dropping acid all over the place, smoking marijuana all over the place, just having a wonderful time with a political context to it." Nominally, the government still functioned-but only as a result of the largest sweep-arrests in U.S. history, which turned the workaday bustle of the district's streets into "qualified martial law. Most of the planned blockades held only briefly, if at all, because most of the protesters were arrested before they got into position: thanks to the detailed tactical manual, the government knew exactly where protesters would be deployed. We felt, well, this is our sign that we've been accepted as radicals....We've just got to prove that we are willing to go in there, get our heads clobbered and arrested and beaten up, prove that we can do this. "27, All the participants in the Days of Rage were organized into affinity groups, which Weatherman treated less like egalitarian collectives and more like military platoons. The image is an auction find. "Mayday: Women and Gay," The Great Speckled Bird (22, August 1971). By the end of May 1970, it's estimated that half the country's student population-perhaps several million youth-took part in antiwar activities, which "seemed to exhaust the entire known repertoire of forms of dissent. 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