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