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CounterPunch
January
13, 2003
A Blast from
the Past
Where the Home
in the Valley Met the Damp Dirty Prison
by RON JACOBS
The fall of 1969 started hopefully. The Woodstock
Music and Arts Festival in upstate New York was a celebration
of mythic proportions. It wasn't all love and roses, but it did
announce to the world that there were lots of young people in
western civilization, and especially in the United States, who
were not happy with their lot. Simultaneously, plans for upcoming
antiwar demonstrations in the fall were falling into place, with
more and more people willing to commit their time and energy
to stopping the evil imperial adventure in Southeast Asia. Of
course, none of this was going unnoticed by the Nixon White House
and its ever-growing police state apparatus. Government agents
and provocateurs were everywhere working their hardest to discredit
and sabotage the antiwar movement and the counterculture. In
fact, September 1969 saw the beginning of the Chicago 8 conspiracy
trial--the "conspiracy" was composed of eight men who
had been charged by the feds with "conspiracy to cross state
lines with the intent to riot" after the police riot during
the Democratic convention in Chicago a year earlier. This trial
was perceived by the left and counterculture as a direct attack
on its values and way of life. This perception was correct. The
backlash against the new politics and lifestyles represented
by the young was now government policy. As one popular fundraising
ad for the Chicago defendants put it: "We are the Conspiracy."
Earlier that year, in June 1969, the
largest radical organization (Students for a Democratic Society-SDS)
in the United States at the time fragmented during a tempestuous
national convention in Chicago. This split was the result of
a hardening of political stances and disagreements over lifestyles.
Primary among the political disagreements were those over the
war in Vietnam and the role of the African-American struggle
for liberation. The dominant argument over lifestyle concerned
the role of youth in the movement and the political meaning of
the burgeoning youth counterculture. These issues loomed large
in the minds and hearts of the hundreds of thousands of politically
minded youth in the late Sixties and it was appropriate that
they would be played out at the national convention of the country's
largest radical youth group.
The three groups claiming the SDS mantle
were the Progressive Labor Party, the Revolutionary Youth Movement,
and the Weatherman organization. The name "weatherman"
was from the line "You don't need a weatherman to know which
way the wind blows" in Bob Dylan's 1965 song "Subterranean
Homesick Blues". Weatherman would go on to become not only
an underground group dedicated to its version of armed struggle,
it would also become the most well known of the three SDS remnants.
This was due to its headline grabbing actions--an explosion in
a NYC townhouse that killed three of its members, freeing LSD
guru Timothy Leary from a California jail, setting off bombs
in the U.S. Capitol and Pentagon in protest of military actions
by the United States against the people of Vietnam and Laos,
and its support of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
By October of 1969, Woodstock and its
accompanying euphoria had come and gone. The major antiwar demonstrations
planned throughout the United States--the Moratorium scheduled
for October 15th and the National Mobilization to End the War
scheduled for November 15th --were the focus of virtually every
antiwarrior in the country. Local organizers sat at tables in
shopping centers and universities, and spoke to community and
student groups urging people to make their opposition to the
murder going on in their name known. John and Yoko Ono Lennon
penned and recorded "Give Peace a Chance", and President
Richard Nixon told the press that he would be unaffected by any
demonstrations against his policies. As it turned out, Nixon
and his advisers decided not to attack Hanoi with nuclear weapons
after the massive protests of October and November (which attracted
more than two million people to both days of protest across the
country), fearful that a revolution would break out in America.
It was a revolution the ultra-left hoped for, but would never
see.
Meanwhile, the ultra-left, which included
most of those who had attended the SDS convention that June,
were organizing protests of their own. Weatherman was calling
people to Chicago for a series of offensive attacks on the state
and its symbols in an attempt to "bring the war home".
RYM had split off from Weatherman and were planning a series
of mass demonstrations in Chicago at the same time. Both groups
then planned to attend the November protest in D.C.. The Weatherman
demonstrations became known as the Days of Rage. Despite the
organization's hopes, these protests involved no more than 1000
people and succeeded primarily in alienating the group from much
of the left, at least for the time being. RYM had a bit more
success: their final demonstration attracted around 5000 students
and workers and the support of the local chapter of the Black
Panther party.
This chapter of the Panthers was led
by the charismatic Fred Hampton. Hampton was a young man, barely
20, and had been active in civil rights organizing since junior
high and was high on the list of Panthers who would assume the
chairman's position should Huey Newton remain in prison. His
leadership in Chicago had turned the Panther chapter there into
one of the party's strongest and most cohesive. Besides the standard
Panther program involving free breakfasts-for-kids and Panther
schools, Hampton was working on creating the first Rainbow Coalition-a
coalition he hoped would include the Latino Young Lords, the
working-class white Patriots and the street gang, The Blackstone
Rangers. To put it bluntly, the possibility that this proposed
coalition might take hold scared the pants off the local, state
and federal government, who did their best to sabotage the negotiations
that would bring the Rangers into the group. This ultimately
included the December 4, 1969 death squad murders of both Hampton
and Mark Clark-a member of the Illinois state Panthers. As court
testimony later proved, these murders were planned and executed
by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies working
together. These assassinations were part of a concerted effort
by the FBI and other government agencies to destroy the Black
Panther Party.
Musically, the Rolling Stones were touring
the country promoting their new album Let It Bleed , another
of their adventures in reworking North American blues and folk
idioms into hard-driving rock and roll. The song of the summer
had been Honky Tonk Women, which appeared on the album as a boozy
country funk. Perhaps the most important song on the platter,
however, was Gimme Shelter, a blistering indictment of the world
of war and greed. Of course, the Beatles had their own record
out as well. Abbey Road appeared in record stores on September
26 and blasted to the top of the charts. A bit more whimsical
than the Stones' album, it did include a somewhat acid-drenched
song written for Timothy Leary's run for the governorship of
California--Come Together.
Two days after the Hampton-Clark murders,
the Rolling Stones ended their tour at the Altamont Raceway in
California, closing out an all-day festival which included Santana
and the Jefferson Airplane, as well. The Grateful Dead were scheduled
to play after the Stones that night but changed their minds when
the festival careened towards chaos near the stage after a gun-wielding
black man was murdered by members of the Hells' Angels motorcycle
gang. This act was the final violent act of a very violent day--
a satanic reflection of August's Woodstock fest. The Dead had
hired the Angels as security believing that the band's past history
with the bikers would pay off and the festival could be run without
any real cops near the stage. Unfortunately for all, the Angels
who showed up to work that day were mostly hopeful prospects
eager to show how tough they could be and ready to kick anybody's
ass who dared defy their authority. As it turned out, anybody
included members of the Jefferson Airplane along with various
concertgoers. The concert ended after the Stones' set and forever
jaded the counterculture--it's innocence defiled. The new dawn
heralded by the Jefferson Airplane's Grace Slick at the beginning
of the Airplane's Woodstock set had become a wintry night. A
night which would extend into the seventies and, some would argue,
until today.
As Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter
wrote in his first song about the Altamont concert, New Speedway
Boogie, "One way or another, this darkness got to give."
Ron Jacobs
lives in Burlington, VT. He can be reached at: rjacobs@zoo.uvm.edu
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