New York City Anti-War Demonstration, 1968
(8 images)
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
Roz Payne took these photos at an undated 1968 nighttime anti-war demonstration in New York City.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
Yippies at HUAC Hearings (85 images)
New Left/Counterculture
In 1968, in the wake of the police riot outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) subpoenaed Yippie leaders, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, as well as other members of the Chicago 7, including Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Dave Dellinger, and early anti-Vietnam war activist Robert Greenblatt. A statement by the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (NECLC) called the HUAC hearings an “attempt by the Johnson administration to use every mechanism at its disposal to legitimize the action of Mayor Daley and the Chicago police.” Lawyers for the subpoenaed activists included Michael Kennedy and Henry di Suvero of the NECLC, William Kunstler of the Law Center for Constitutional Rights, and Gerald Lefcourt of the National Lawyers Guild.
In classic Yippie fashion, Rubin and Hoffman sought to create a satirical theatrical media spectacle out of their appearances. According to a Harvard Crimson article in February of 1969, “In the fifties, the most effective sanction was terror. Almost any publicity from HUAC meant the ‘blacklist'. Without a chance to clear his name, a witness would suddenly find himself without friends and without a job. But it is not easy to see how in 1969, a HUAC blacklist could terrorize an SDS activist. Witnesses like Jerry Rubin have openly boasted of their contempt for American institutions. A subpoena from HUAC would be unlikely to scandalize Abbie Hoffman or his friends.” Rubin told the Liberation News Service that he “plans to use the hearings as a stage for a theatrical assault on HUAC and as a platform to call for disruptive actions on election day.” During an earlier appearance before HUAC in 1966, Rubin dressed as an American revolutionary and passed out copies of the Declaration of Independence, claiming to be a descendent of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine and declaring "Nothing is more American than revolution." He also blew bubble gum bubbles as committee members questioned him about his communist affiliations, while others offered the committee Nazi salutes. During his responses to committee questions, he highlighted the segregationist pasts of prominent HUAC members, as well as their ties to Pentagon contractors.
Not to be outdone, Hoffman kiddingly told the LNS, “I plan to turn state’s evidence. I plan to squeal on everybody… I am going to indict my friend Peter Rabbit.” He went on to explain that his strategy was to “get crazy. Craziest motherfuckers they ever seen in this country. ‘Cause that’s the only way we’re gonna beat them. So fucking crazy that they can’t understand it at ALL.” As Hoffman’s biographer, Jonah Raskin related, “Abbie printed and distributed his own subpoenas, which were addressed to “Yippies, Motherfuckers, Commies, Narcos, Saboteurs, Conspirators, Sons of Liberty, Freaks, Guerrillas.” His subpoenas urged everyone to come to the hearings with “pot, incense, yo-yos, molotov cocktails, flowers, energy, black widow spiders, balloons, flags, gold balls, PIGS, music, banners, LSD, flaming crosses, hats, fruit, battleships, life, rice, licorice, slogans, flesh, rocks, lights, noise makers, buttons, cameras, gorillas.”
On the opening day of the hearings - October 1 – the activists and their lawyers engaged in a “stand-in” to protest the proceedings. Attorney Michael Kennedy shouted, “The Constitution is being raped, and we as lawyers are being emasculated in an armed camp.” Hoffman wore a tie-dyed t-shirt with feathers in his bushy hair, while Rubin wore a bandolier of live cartridges and carried a toy M-16 rifle. Members of the newly-formed women’s liberation group, Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.), including Roz Payne, wore black hats and dresses and carried broomsticks. As Raskin described, “Forming a circle around Jerry, they burned incense, danced, and chanted.”
Jerry Rubin described the the events this way:
“I come to the HUAC hearings wearing a bandolero of real bullets and carrying a toy M-16 rifle on my shoulder. The rifle was a model of the rifles the Viet Cong steal and then use to kill American soldiers in Vietnam.
The pigs stop me at the door of the hearings. They grab the bullets and the gun. It is a dramatic moment. Press and yippies pack us in tightly. The pigs drag me down three flights of stairs and remove the bullets, leaving the gun, Viet Cong pajamas, Eldridge Cleaver buttons, Black Panther beret, war paint, earrings, bandolero, and the bells which ring every time I move my body. My costume carried a nonverbal message: ‘We must all become stoned guerrillas.’
The secret to the costume was the painted tits. Guerrilla war in America is going to come in psychedelic colors. We are hippie-guerrillas.
In HUAC’s chambers Abbie Hoffman jumps up and yells out, ‘May I go to the bathroom?’ Young kids reading that in their hometown papers giggle because they have to ask permission every time they want to go to the bathroom in school.
The message of my costume flipped across the country in one day: an example of our use of the enemy’s institutions – her mass media – to turn on and communicate with one another.”
Over the next few days, Hoffman and Rubin continued to create a spectacle from the hearings. Rubin returned with his bandolier, toy gun, Native American headband, body paint and North Vietnamese flag cape. But it was Hoffman who stole the show. Again, Jonah Raskin explains,
“Gerald Lefcourt later remembered that Abbie did not want to let HUAC steal the media spotlight. ‘He wanted what he was about to be on the evening news, and not what they were about,’ Lefcourt said. He explained that Abbie ‘had the idea of wearing a flag shirt and saying “I’m more American that you.” He was certain that he would be arrested, and that the arrest would make the news and steal the show from the committee. Moreover, he had a hunch that the police would rip off the American flag shirt from his back. Then, they’d be guilty of desecration.’
On the morning of October 4, everything went more or less as Abbie had planned. Anita painted the flag of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) on his back. Then Abbie put on a commercially made American flag shirt and pinned on two of his favorite buttons: one that read ‘Wallace for President: Stand Up for America” and another that said ‘Vote Pig in Sixty-Eight, Yippie.’ He also wore dark glasses that made him look mysterious and a bit menacing as well. Sure enough, on the sidewalk outside the Cannon Office Building, law enforcement officials stopped him, tore up his shirt, and arrested him for desecration of the flag. Abbie spent the night in jail. It was a dreadful experience that only added to his sense of outrage about the whole affair. ‘The law I was arrested under would make everyone who dresses in an Uncle Sam costume and most drum majorettes criminals,’ he wrote in the Epilogue to Revolution for the Hell of It. And he added that he had recently watched Phyllis Diller on TV wearing ‘a miniskirt that looked more like an American flag than the shirt I wore,’ but no one had arrested her.
He was the first person to be prosecuted under the new federal statute that made it a crime to deface or defile the flag. U.S. Attorney Benton Becker argued that the flag was ‘symbolically the United States of America,’ and that the government had ‘a legitimate interest in maintaining the sanctity of its symbols.’ Gerald Lefcourt defended Abbie on First Amendment grounds: wearing the flag was a form of symbolic speech, Lefcourt argued. His client had never intended to dishonor the flag. Morover, there was no physical violence, no personal injury, and no provocation to the public. ‘The communication of ideas is what the country is all about,’ Lefcourt told the court. ‘If we don’t protect the communication of ideas, then we’re leading ourselves down the path of serious trouble to a repressive society.’
On the witness stand, Abbie explained that he wore the American flag shirt because ‘I was going before the Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives and I don’t particularly consider that committee American, and I don’t consider that House of Representatives particularly representative; and I wore the shirt to show that we were in the tradition of the founding fathers of this country.’ He was found guilty of desecrating the flag and was sentenced to a thirty-day prison term, although an appeals court would subsequently reverse the lower court’s decision. 'Your honor, I regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country,' he said after he was sentenced.”
As Hoffman was arrested outside the HUAC hearings, Jerry Rubin comically shouted at police, “Communists,” for not arresting him, as well. Two months later, at another round of HUAC hearings in December, Rubin wore a Santa Claus costume “in a direct attempt to reach the head of every child in the country.” Hoffman refused to testify in front of HUAC.
The photos in this set were taken by Roz Payne on October 3 and 4, 1968, and include images of Abbie Hoffman and Anita Hoffman’s arrest, Jerry Rubin in costume, Hoffman talking to Paul Krassner, a dinner with lawyers and other miscellaneous shots from the courthouse scene.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
1968 New York Student Strike (51 images)
Black Power
Student activism hit a new high point in 1968, when dozens of campus protests broke out at colleges and universities across the country and internationally. Events evolved at a quick pace that year. In the wake of the Tet Offensive in January, an estimated 500 students at New York University demonstrated against Dow Chemical recruiters on campus. Dow was the manufacturer of napalm, a chemical agent used by U.S. military in Vietnam to burn plant life and human beings during the war. Students at NYU and elsewhere opposed the links between the university and what came to be known as the “military-industrial complex.” That same month, Minnesota senator, Eugene McCarthy, entered the Democratic presidential nomination process as an anti-war candidate, shocking Lyndon B. Johnson’s re-election campaign by earning 40% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary.
Shortly thereafter, Robert Kennedy entered the race and Johnson shocked the nation by announcing he was dropping out of the race. In Early-April, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, spurring dozens of urban rebellions in cities nationwide, including Harlem. At NYU, administrators suspended class for two days to hold a series of student-faculty seminars on race relations and formed a new committee to create a policy focused on African American students and other students of color.
From April 22-27, student activists in SDS and the NYU Committee to End the War in Vietnam (CEWV) organize and lead a week-long “International Student-Faculty Strike to Bring Our Troops Home, End the Draft and Racial Oppression,” consisting of a series of campus anti-war protests and discussions, a class boycott on Friday, April 26, and then a march down 5th Avenue the following day. That same day, members of SDS and the Student Afro Society at Columbia University seize several campus buildings in what will ultimately become a significant international incident.
In May, student activists in Paris trigger a nationwide strike there. In June, Robert Kennedy is gunned down in Los Angeles after winning the Democratic primary in California. In August, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, crushing the “Prague Spring” protest movement. A few days later, Chicago police attacked New Left protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
In mid-September, a new controversy erupted at NYU surrounding the appointment of John Hatchett to head up the Martin Luther King Afro-American Student Center on campus. Hatchett had been a civil rights activist during the early-1960s, most significantly participating in sit-ins, marches and other demonstrations in Greensboro, North Carolina. In 1963, he moved to New York City to attend graduate school at NYU and Columbia University. He also taught in the New York public school system, where he continued to advocate for the interests of local black communities. On October 11, three months after Hatchett assumed his position as head of the AASC, administrators fired him amid claims that an article he wrote, “The Phenomenon of the Anti-Black Jews and the Black Anglo-Saxon: A Study in Educational Perfidy,” was anti-semitic and anti-white. In a speech, he had also referred to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, Richard M. Nixon and the president of the United Teachers Federation, Albert Shanker, as “racist bastards.” NYU President, James Hester, told reporters that the primary cause of Hatchett’s firing was that he had “proved to be increasingly ineffective in performing his duties because of the incompatibility of many of his actions and public statements with the requirements of his position in the university.” The firing was applauded by many local Jewish, Catholic and Protestant religious leaders, but sharply criticized by campus militants. The American Jewish Congress stated at the time that they hoped the university would replace Hatchett with “someone who is more likely to guide black students into harmonious relationships with their fellow students and the communities in which they will live.”
In response to the firing, NYU student activists mounted a series of demonstrations, including a general strike that lasted for about ten days before fizzling. Student radicals also occupied two buildings on the NYU Bronx campus. The university ultimately offered a compromise, allowing Hatchett to remain an adviser to African American student groups on campus. In November, the AASC became independent of the university, run by a board made up of African American students and faculty.
The images in this set were taken by Roz Payne during the NYU protests of
Hatchett’s firing. Interestingly, a number of the signs also reference the local Ocean Hill-Brownsville “community control” movement that was powerful at the time in New York public schools. Activists saw both as examples of the need for greater autonomy for black and brown people within local educational institutions.
The Ocean Hill-Brownsville district had been reorganized as an experiment in local control of public schools, with a community-controlled school board instituted in the primarily African American neighborhoods. Rhody McCoy was appointed superintendent of the new board. McCoy, who was popular in the black community, was a controversial figure because he was a follower and friend of Malcom X. Some claimed he was heavily influenced by Harold Cruse’s seminal book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, and believed Jews were too involved and powerful within the black freedom movement. McCoy also appointed Herman Ferguson as the principle of one of the schools in the district. According to an article he wrote in The Guardian, Ferguson advocated that schools offer "instructions in gun weaponry, gun handling, and gun safety" as important survival skills for children of color in a racist society. Ultimately, the appointment was withdrawn.
Over several months, tensions simmered between the new Ocean Hill-Brownsville board and a number of white teachers and staff who the board claimed were trying to sabotage the experiment in local control. In response the school board attempted to fire 83 teachers and staff, almost all of whom were Jewish. The teacher’s union balked at the move, which violated terms of their labor agreement with the district. Albert Shanker, the head of the teacher’s union called the board action, "a kind of vigilante activity." In response, teachers went out on strike. When they attempted to return to the school on May 15, a group of parents and community members who supported the board attempted to block them. Local police broke the blockade, allowing the teachers to return, though the board closed the schools. On May 22-23, teachers again protested by staying home, promoting the board to fire 350 more teachers.
At the start of the new school year in August and September, a city-wide teachers' strikes shut down the New York City public schools for 36 days. The strike caused divisions among civil rights leaders and union members. Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph supported the striking teachers, causing sharp criticism from many black parents, teachers and a new generation of racial justice activists. While large percentages of teachers participated in the strike, black and brown teachers, as well as white teachers who taught primarily black and brown students, tended to support the strike in much lower numbers.
The strike ended in mid-November with the state seizing control of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district and reinstating the fired teachers. Some argued that militant black teachers were “purged.” Undoubtedly, the conflict heightened tensions between the African American and Jewish communities.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
Strike 3
Electoral Politics
This button addresses New Left dissatisfaction with all three of the major presidential candidates in the 1968 election, Richard Nixon (Republican), Huber Humphrey (Democrat), and George C. Wallace (American Independent). Public disillusionment with the political process, the Vietnam War, and domestic social policies reigned throughout the late-1960s. In the end, Nixon and the GOP won the election, ushering in a new era of conservative politics, leaving many on the American political Left to continue to debate the best path for change, inside or outside "the system."
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Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
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Oppose This Pro-War Ticket November Fifth 1968
Electoral Politics
This button features the caricatures of George C. Wallace, Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Nixon, the major presidential candidates in the 1968 election. It signifies the growing disillusionment among many New Left activists regarding traditional electoral politics and the major political parties. In 1968, many New Left and anti-war voters sat out the election, causing some to charge that they delivered the election to Nixon over Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey.
For more context on this election, see:
https://library.duke.edu/exhibits/sevenelections/elections/1968/issues.html
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Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1968
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