Wednesday, September 27, 2017 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, September 27, 2017 // The Statement 
5B

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Six decades of challenging the University’s administration 

b y T i m o t h y C o h n, Senior News Editor

At 7 a.m. on Monday, first year Public 

Health student Dana Greene faced the flag-
pole and took a knee at the center of the Diag.

On Sept. 16, racist graffiti was found on 

LSA sophomore Travon Stearns’ West Quad 
Residence Hall door. The following day, 
posters stating support of Dylann Roof — 
the white supremacist and mass murderer, 
who killed nine people at a historically Black 
church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 and is 
now on death row — were found on a mural 
in downtown Ann Arbor. 

In a letter to University of Michigan Pres-

ident Mark Schlissel, Greene expressed his 
frustration with campus apathy toward the 
recent racist incidents of vandalism that 
have plagued the student body since school 
started just a few weeks ago.

“I will kneel in the Diag facing the flag in 

silent protest until there is nothing left in 
me,” Greene’s letter reads. “I am prepared to 
miss class and work for a simple idea. I am not 
kneeling in disrespect to our troops or to our 
country. I am kneeling because we should 
be better than this. I am kneeling because 
I am tired of doing nothing. I am kneeling 
because I want this campus and this country 
to acknowledge a fact that I know to be true. 
We are not and have never lived by the idea 
of our founding that ALL men are created 
equal. I am kneeling because we our (sic) 
better than this.”

Hundreds of students joined Greene as 

the day wore on, pitching tents, providing 
food and Gatorade and — of course — kneel-
ing beside him in solidarity.

The same morning Greene took his spot 

in the Diag, a student protest blocked North 
University Avenue, preventing buses and 
traffic from following their usual routes.

Throughout the hot day and well into the 

night Greene continued to kneel. Finally, at 
about 4 a.m., after 21 hours of kneeling in 
almost total silence near the iconic block ‘M,’ 
Greene said “I think I’ve said enough.”

Greene’s activism on Monday did not 

occur in a vacuum — rather, it was a cre-
scendo within decades of unrest between 
students and the University administrators 
along issues of race and inclusion on campus. 

Civil rights activism on campus has been 

central to student social justice activity 
since 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was 
assassinated, prompting the University’s 
Black Student Union to stage a historic sit-in 
of more than 100 people in the LSA building 
until the University agreed to form an Afri-
can American Studies department and com-
mitted to a goal of 10 percent Black student 

enrollment.

But civil rights activism is just one of 

many social issues that has brought stu-
dents at the University together in a campus 
tradition of fighting for progress and social 
change. Greene’s ability to command the 
attention of our campus to the Diag recalls 
the days a man named Alan Haber empow-
ered his peers to participate in strikes and 
protests on the very same Diag in protest of 
the Vietnam War. 

************
When Alan Haber arrived at the Uni-

versity in 1954, he didn’t look particularly 
different than the average freshman — 
hardworking and from a respected family. 
Haber’s father, William, was a renowned 
New Deal economist who served in the Roo-
sevelt administration, helping to establish 
the U.S. Social Security Administration. 
Later on, the elder Haber became a dean at 
the University and an eminent Economics 
professor.

By his own admission, Alan was not very 

politically engaged when he first stepped 
foot on campus, nor did he have big plans to 
study politics — instead, he intended to pur-
sue a degree in chemistry.

But within six years of his matriculation, 

Haber would lead one of the most conse-
quential student movements in American 
history.

In the decade following World War II, 

most Americans were content to return to 
the traditional social order of the pre-war 
era. Wartime “Rosies” left their jobs, which 
were then filled by men — many of whom 
returning veterans. African Americans, who 
were once able to carve economic niches 
for themselves in the defense industry — as 
a result of President Franklin Roosevelt’s 
Executive Order 8802 and the Fair Employ-
ment Practices Committee — were once 
again relegated to second-class economic 
status when attempts to permanently codify 
these groundbreaking laws were thwarted 
in 1946 by Southern segregationist Demo-
crats.

During the ’50s, America became fixated 

on the consumerism and traditional gender 
and race relations, as portrayed in works like 
“Catcher in the Rye.” Conformity was king — 
until it wasn’t.

Almost every facet of the 1960s youth 

counterculture was a wholesale rejection of 
their parents’ values from the ’50s, and there 
is almost no place where this was more on 
display than in Ann Arbor. On the Universi-
ty’s campus, a reimagining of leftist politics 

took place with the emergence of the “New 
Left.”

Austin McCoy, a postdoctoral fellow who 

studies progressive political movements in 
the upper Midwest, noted that the Univer-
sity’s campus climate at the time was ripe for 
political and social activism.

“Michigan, at the time, had a decent 

cohort of students who were thinking more 
radically in their politics and were capable 
of launching a student movement,” McCoy 
said. “They were thinking about the limita-
tions of the old left, of Communist politics 
and 
of 
organized 

labor.”

These limitations 

were 
particularly 

important on cam-
pus at the time, given 
the context of how 
entrenched 
liberal 

institutions were in 
state politics. If cars 
were king in Michi-
gan, 
labor 
unions 

were 
queen. 
And 

many of the early 
adherents 
to 
the 

“New Left” were the 
children of blue-col-
lar factory workers.

Haber’s 
political 

engagement 
began 

in the late ‘50s when 
he made friends his 
freshman year with 
a group of politically 
active students. He 
soonafter 
created 

the 
since-defunct 

Political Issues Club 
— then a forum for 
students to discuss 
political 
matters 

without 
attaching 

themselves to a polit-
ical party.

“Within a short 

time, 
my 
friends 

had said to me: ‘You know there’s no politi-
cal discussion on campus,’” Haber said. “So 
my friends told me that I should start a club 
that was focused on talking about political 
issues.”

By 1960, after a few years leading PIC, 

Haber became a well known student activ-
ist. Riding on his reputation, Haber was 
elected vice president of the Student League 
for Industrial Democracy — a national orga-

nization linking labor and socialist groups. 
Not long after his initial election to the board 
of SLID, Haber pushed for a change in name 
and strategy.

“I told them that I wouldn’t do it because 

SLID had definitely ‘slid,’” Haber said. “And 
if we were going to make a national student 
‘change the world’ organization, we had to 
be called something else. … And at that meet-
ing, we decided upon a new name — Students 
for a Democratic Society.”

SDS proliferated to campuses nationally 

by attracting a primarily northern, mostly 

white cohort interested in civil rights and 
anti-war politics. At the crux of the move-
ment was participatory democracy and 
advocacy for America’s youth. During the 
’60s, there was no singular issue that pre-
sented a greater threat to the youngest gen-
eration than the Vietnam War.

By 1962, SDS had grown to be influen-

tial in Ann Arbor and on dozens of other 
campuses around the country. Its leaders 

— many of whom were based at the Uni-
versity — concluded it was time to create a 
political manifesto that provided a synopsis 
of the organization’s official views. The Port 
Huron Statement — after which the Daily’s 
Statement magazine is named — became one 
of the seminal political documents of the era.

The Statement was primarily authored by 

Tom Hayden, a former Daily editor-in-chief 
and later national president of SDS.

The Port Huron Statement outlined a bold 

vision of leftist American politics for the 
1960s. In the document, Hayden highlights 
the key grievances of his generation: dissat-
isfaction with the Democratic Party’s inclu-
sion of southern segregationists, the Cold 
War arms race and a push for University 
reforms.

In the massive 25,700-word document, 

Hayden makes a direct appeal to college stu-
dents, convincing them of the urgency of his 
cause.

“As we grew, however, our comfort was 

penetrated by events too troubling to dis-
miss,” the statement reads. “First, the per-
meating and victimizing fact of human 
degradation, symbolized by the Southern 
struggle against racial bigotry, compelled 

most of us from silence to activism. Second, 
the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbol-
ized by the presence of the Bomb, brought 
awareness that we ourselves, and our 
friends, and millions of abstract ‘others’ we 
knew more directly because of our common 
peril, might die at any time. We might delib-
erately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other 
human problems, but not these two, for these 
were too immediate and crushing in their 

impact, too challenging in the demand that 
we as individuals take the responsibility for 
encounter and resolution.”

McCoy said The Port Huron Statement 

was so prolific on campus because it spoke to 
such a large part of the student body.

“The Port Huron Statement seemed to tap 

into the discontent of mostly white, middle 
class students who wanted to think more rad-
ically about changing their society,” McCoy 
said. “Students were distributing it and shar-
ing it hand to hand. And when I think about 
the intellectual history of the ‘New Left’ … it 
really became the most important document 
because it was written by a group of students 
and activists who were intentional about try-
ing to create a new form of politics.”

The SDS’s strategy was to incorporate 

their broader national political goals into 
localized action directed primarily at uni-
versity administrators across the country.

In the 1960s, when the federal govern-

ment announced that eligible students could 
only obtain draft deferments if they were 
in the top half of their class, the SDS at the 
University responded with protest, pressur-
ing the University not to hand over academic 
records.

“We got together to have a student refer-

endum about whether we should push the 
University to abandon its practice of calcu-
lating class rank so it could not comply with 
the order,” Haber said. “Not only did the 
University not want to hear about this, but 
we also learned that the administration was 
turning over the names of student activists 
to the House Committee on Un-American 
Activities.”

In addition to organizing Vietnam War 

protests, SDS also engaged in the civil rights 
battles which shaped the ’60s — promoting 
racial and gender equality and calling for 
an end to the overbearing paternalism of 
the University’s administration toward the 
student body. Known as in loco parentis, 
the prevailing philosophy among academic 
administrators at the time saw themselves as 
responsible for the moral welfare of students 
in the absence of parental supervision. This 
included a prohibition on political speech 
deemed antithetical to the mainstream val-
ues of the University, and — consequently 
— expellingstudents without due process. 
After a riot in front of the police department 
on February 18, 1970, over 100 students were 
expelled for protesting.

By the mid ’60s, the Vietnam War escalat-

ed and SDS grew in membership on campus, 
professors began to take action. On March 
24, 1965, a group of professors held the first 
campus “teach-in” — an all-night lecture 
that covered the topic of “alternative posi-
tions to present American foreign policy.”

“The Vietnam War was a very real threat 

for students on campus, and it seemed to 
many of these activists that the University 

was implicated in the war through research 
and development which fed into the military-
industrial complex,” McCoy said. “There 
really didn’t seem to be a space for students 
and faculty to have a real conversation about 
this until the teach-ins.”

McCoy described the all-night teach-ins as 

a compromise: The University did not want 
its professors devoting time and resources 
during the day to educate protesters.

The teach-in movement that began at the 

University would later expand to campuses 
across the country and become one of the 
most powerful weapons in the anti-war 
movement — 35 other colleges held their 
own teach-ins within a week. As the national 
political environment became polarized 
over the war, campus politics followed suit.

On October 15, 1965, 39 protesters, many 

of whom were University students, werear-
rested during a mass demonstration against 
the Vietnam War draft for trespassing and 
civil disobedience. The same night, students 
and community activists staged an eight-
hour Diag vigil.

Counter-protesters at each event came 

out in force. Some destroyed a student float 
at the demonstration depicting abuse within 
American POW camps and heckled arrest-
ed activists. Right-wing organizations like 
the Young Americans for Freedom, saw an 
increase in membership on campus as right-
leaning students developed nascent fears 
of Communist sympathies within student 
groups like SDS.

YAF’s sense of political urgency to resist 

leftist student movements only intensified as 
more radical break-away groups split from 
SDS. One such group, The Weather Under-
ground — started at the University by then-
student Bill Ayers — engaged in a domestic 
terrorism campaign that included a string of 
bombings in government buildings.

According to Grant Strobl, LSA senior 

and current National Chair of the Young 
Americans for Freedom, the right-wing 
organization’s growth was a response to the 
increasing radicalization of leftist splinter 
groups.

“SDS and the rise of The Weather Under-

ground were different from previous protest 
movements because they used violence and 
they used domestic terrorism to advance 
their ideas,” Strobl said.

YAF members on campus saw themselves 

in a unique position during the waning years 
of the 1960s — a political minority on cam-
pus, yet upholding the mainstream political 
values of former President Richard Nixon’s 
“silent majority.”

On the national scale, the tenuous coali-

tion of labor Democrats, younger radicals 
and later, Black nationalists would disinte-
grate due to internal divisions by the end of 
the 1960s — as was on full display during the 
violent clashes outside the 1968 Democratic 
National Convention.

Riding on a “Law and Order” platform 

that played on a distaste for political unrest, 
Richard Nixon narrowly beat Democrat 
Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and won re-elec-
tion in an electoral landslide against George 
McGovern — the Democratic candidate most 
aligned with the “New Left” — in what was 
arguably a repudiation of their politics by a 
silent majority.

While the “New Left” continued to define 

much of campus activism into the 1970s, the 
fractious coalition could exercise little power 
in electoral politics and remained tethered to 
its roots in the ivory tower.

************

See ACTIVISM, Page 6B

COURTESY OF BENTLEY HISTORICAL LIBRARY

 Former Daily editor-in-chief and SDS President Tom Hayden speaking at a 1960’s 
 

 demonstration

HALEY MCLAUGHLIN/Daily

Students and community members march in a campus walk-out organized by Students 4 Justice to protest racism near Ross, November 2016

