From Protest To Resistance (dir. Saul Landau)

Speaker 1: You got the best country in the world, they don't know it. Uh, whatever jackals, uh, everything, whatever you want to call them, ladies and gentlemen, the zoo came to me. I didn't go to the zoo. You save me 15 cents going to the zoo when the zoo comes to me. I'm going to send you a napalm dinner tonight. I hope you enjoy it and prove that you're men. Yeah! Come on, all of you big strong men, Uncle Sam needs your help again. Got himself in a terrible jam way down yonder in Vietnam. Hey! Well, it all comes early days. Well, there ain't no time to wonder why we're here. I'm gonna die.

Speaker 2: The situation in Vietnam is different. But there is an old American saying, that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. So let no one doubt that we are in this battle as long as South Vietnam wants our support And needs our assistance to protect its freedom.

Speaker 1: No draft for Vietnam! No draft for Vietnam! No draft for Vietnam! No draft for Vietnam!

Speaker 2: Rather fight them over there or here?

Speaker 1: I don't believe we have to fight them.

Speaker 2: I'm not going to get into a fight about it. I just come back four days ago. Okay, I'm sorry.

Speaker 1: You're sorry.

Speaker 2: I've seen a thousand Marines die in the last five months, and I'll beat your sorry.

Stokely Carmichael: I'm sorry.

Speaker 1: Guys, guys, guys, come on, guys, come on.

Stokely Carmichael: All right.

Speaker 1: Why don't they fight? I fight for peace. Why don't they fight?

Richard O. Moore: In the last 8 years, a movement has grown up in America to dramatize the key issues of the 1960s: Vietnam and racism. In the public mind, these young people were associated with endless demonstrations, drugs, communism, and of late, with violence.

Speaker 1: Maxine, you ready?

Richard O. Moore: These demonstrators reflected a national sense of unease that was brought to a climax by the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. The black ghettos exploded in many cities, and more than 90,000 troops and police were deployed to restore order. The racial violence was preceded by the news of Johnson's refusal to run again for president and by the announcement of talks with North Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands applauded the peace moves and publicly mourned the late Dr. King. Members of antiwar and Black Power movements pointed to what they called the hypocrisy of America and promised to continue the struggle for peace and racial justice Join in behind the porch to call to action, people! The movement, as they call it, began as a protest by middle-class youth who believed that their moral outrage was enough to force the integration of Mississippi. A law was passed, but the activists saw little change in the quality of Negroes' lives. The civil rights movement collapsed, and the activists turned their energy to anti-war protests and Black Power. They claimed that they were now revolutionaries challenging the very axioms of American society. This film is about 3 veterans of Mississippi who have become key spokesmen for the new opposition activities. It traces their thought and action over the past year as they see themselves moving from demonstrations to political organizing. Stokely Carmichael speaks for Black Power, David Harris for the nonviolent draft resistance, and Mario Savio for a new radical politics.

Speaker 1: Who am I? Standing one day I wonder to wait, while the wheels of fate slowly grind my life away. Who am I? There were some things that I loved one time, but the dreams are gone that I thought were mine, and the hidden tears that once could fall.

Richard O. Moore: In 1964, Mario Savio returned from Mississippi to the Berkeley campus where he became the nation's most publicized dissenter. As leader of the free speech movement, Savio articulated student demands to end restrictions on political activity and for educational reform. To force University of California President Clark Kerr to accept the demands, Savio led some 800 students into the administration building for a sit-in.

Speaker 1: I ask you to consider, if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something: the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we're the raw materials. But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be— have any process upon us, don't mean to be made into any product, don't mean Don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the university, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone, or human beings.

Richard O. Moore: Savio and his wife Suzanne were among the 800 arrested. Mario received the longest sentence, 4 months in prison.

Speaker 1: There really was nothing else we could have done at the time and have felt that we were being at all honest with ourselves.

Speaker 2: When I'm involved in some political activity, oh, I really enjoy it, and I throw myself into it— writing leaflets and speechmaking. That's the job to get done. But when I contemplate going into some other such activity, I realize that I hate politics in a very deep way. It really is an intrusion on other things that I'd like to do. I'd like to go back to school very much.

David Harris: We'd like to go back to school.

Speaker 2: We'd like to have ourselves a little cottage. We're sort of a little romantic and, I guess, quaint maybe. We'd like to raise some flowers and vegetables. There just isn't time. With the oppression of Negroes in America, and with the rest of us in more subtle ways, and of Vietnamese, and of the people in other foreign countries who are the victims of American empire, we really find that our consciences couldn't quite bear our receding into private life, personally more fulfilling lives, if we could only forget The suffering people on whom we turned our backs.

Speaker 1: We have discussions every day about the war and about national politics, and, uh—

Speaker 2: It's very difficult not to think of the war. It's the biggest topic of conversation that we have every day. We turn on the radio, there's the war. The newspapers, and there's the war. And when we see people having fun, uh, all around us, having their barbecues, uh, going to the beach, uh, Then maybe it's hardest not to think of the war. Seems to me that it should be impossible to be a citizen of a country at war and be able to go to the movies.

Speaker 1: Who am I? And now, my friend, we meet again.

Richard O. Moore: Stokely Carmichael, age 27, has built a large and militant following among black high school and college youth. Carmichael, born in Trinidad and educated at Howard University, began his political career in 1960 when he joined SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After years of civil rights activities, Carmichael and the SNCC veterans concluded that protest changed little. Their new goal was Black Power, a phrase that frightened many moderates. Others dismissed Black Power as empty rhetoric. For Carmichael, it meant that integration into white society was neither possible nor desirable.

Stokely Carmichael: I was told all the time that I was an exceptional Negro. I was an intelligent boy. I had scholarships to go to all the Ivy League schools, and that I could get into that society if I played by their rules. But that really bothered me because I found myself becoming less free. See, I think that the freest people in Yes. In this society are the people from Mississippi, because they have not been caught up in the structure of watching your P's and Q's. I was very worried about that. So I wanted to go south just to see how free they really were and what the threat was to the whole power structure. I got caught up in the Freedom Rides and decided that Mississippi was where I'd like to stay and work. I learned from the people in Mississippi. I learned from the people in Mississippi what I never learned from the most brilliant professors I've sat under. They taught me how not to be ashamed. He taught me how to say what you want to say whenever you want to say it.

Speaker 2: Who am I?

Stokely Carmichael: We've been so riddled and inculcated with that American dream nonsense, which we were never a part of and could never hope to be a part of. I think that's what the problem that America is now facing with the youth, both black and white, that we're all beginning to question, Why is it that she's the richest country in the world? Is it that she exploits other countries? Is it that she steals, murders and plunders? Or is it that she's so smart that she can develop her resources to yield the amount of productivity that it does? And I think that most of the youth are beginning to see that the United States has been exploiting other countries and that we have been enjoying that good life at the expense of other countries. And, um—

Speaker 1: I think that's right.

Stokely Carmichael: That, when you match that with the American dream, which talks about honesty and equality and a fair share for everybody, and to recognize that you talk that nonsense at the expense of somebody in Vietnam or South Africa or Latin America or Asia or Japan, just makes you sick to the stomach. You want to puke.

Speaker 1: When we look at all the acts of racist exploitation which this nation has committed, whether in the name of Manifest Destiny or anti-communism, we charge America with genocide! Our next speaker is David Harris, former student body president of Stanford University. The brutality in Vietnam is simply a reflection of the brutality of American life.

Richard O. Moore: Yes.

Speaker 1: If you want to make a statement against that way of life, then it's only when those draft cards that you all carry, that pledge you've made to America that you will do her murder when and where she chooses, are floating in the sewers of America with this war. It's only when those forces that seek to make every young man in this country a murderer are confronted with young men who will not murder, that we can talk about building a world of peace on the rubble of the American dream. Join us!

Richard O. Moore: David Harris was elected Stanford's He was elected student body president on an antiwar platform that also included student rights and legalization of marijuana. He resigned his post after deciding that he could be more effective by organizing draft resistance. He now spends his time as a full-time organizer of the resistance, a long way from his father, a Republican attorney in Fresno, California.

David Harris: Reminds me over and over of lies and promises and deeds When you grow up in Fresno, California, there's one place to go if you can make it, and that's Stanford. I came to Stanford right out of Fresno with no conception of what radicalism even was. I don't even know that I'd heard the word before. I was kind of liberal, Republican, Democrat, something like that. Well, you know, you got to Stanford and kind of threw off all your, all your past and said, well, now, now I'm going to build myself a life. And Mississippi happened, and I went to Mississippi, and there was American society laid open on its back there.

Richard O. Moore: It sure was ugly.

David Harris: You know, you decide what kind of life you want to lead in relation to that, and the initial feeling one gets is, wow, whatever kind of life I lead, I don't want to be part of it. No society that allowed Mississippi to exist can really be trusted anymore. I just see American society eating itself. It's like, for 200 years, we've We've worked and worked and worked to produce enough garbage to fill the country. Now we've filled the country, the entire country's going to devour its garbage, which happens to also be itself. It's frightening to go out into downtown Palo Alto and watch America roll by, and it seems to me we're really on the path of complete self-destruction. All those forces in the society that control and use people's lives for purposes other than their own come together in a very symbolic point, military conscription. And we choose something like non-cooperation with the draft because it's with a system like military conscription that the lives of young people in this country are tied up. We simply see it as making America pay a larger price if America continues to do this kind of thing, which I'm sure they will. What they're gonna have to do is do it over the bodies of a lot of young people. They're gonna have to put them in jail, and they're gonna have to keep them in jail, and they're gonna have to realize that they've got all these people in jail because they won't go And I think when we get out, we're in a kind of position that we can really start building a new society from. I don't relish living without women for 2 to 5 years or relish being locked up. The act of going to prison is— it can be done for no other reason than simply one of preserving one's own honesty.

Speaker 1: Is there anything in here?

David Harris: We don't think of noncooperation as going to jail. We think of it as noncooperation with the draft. One of the results of that, one of the prices you're going to pay for that, is you're going to be sent to jail. But the important thing is not worrying or lamenting the fact that you're going to be sent to jail. It's how you go to jail and how you work before you're in jail that really matters. We've got one rule, which is that before you go to jail, you leave 2 people to do your work. And that constantly you understand yourself and what you're doing in terms of that larger thing, that thing that exists so much beyond us.

Stokely Carmichael: Once you're in prison—

Richard O. Moore: The war led to an increase in the number of conscientious objectors, now more than 20,000, who regularly meet for advice from older draft objectors on the law and on life in prison. Conscientious objectors and draft resisters are a growing minority of those called to serve. In 1966 and '67, Almost 1,200 draft evaders were convicted. Thousands have cases pending.

David Harris: I was talking with somebody who was in prison for a little while the other day because of the Port Chicago incident, and he said you could see a difference between the older prisoners and the younger prisoners.

Speaker 2: The older prisoners thought you could beat the system, and the younger prisoners just wanted to blow their minds.

Stokely Carmichael: Uh, just looking at the vast numbers of people each day and wondering exactly what they I do feel somewhat alone in my convictions.

Richard O. Moore: What's been bothering me isn't the loneliness in itself. I mean, it's lonely, but it's not too serious. But I really need someone to come across to, some older person, I think, mainly.

David Harris: I think one of the things that you have to watch out for if you do something like this is that you start feeling that you are so much better than the guy on the street because you're going to jail. The problem is not people proving their moral superiority over other people. I mean, the problem is people finding answers to the conditions of their lives. I don't know that jail is the only option for those conditions. I just know from my life that, you know, the whole form of splitting when things get hot, really, it is not my line.

Richard O. Moore: Right.

David Harris: I just see it as a much more healthy way to live, to take whatever it is you've got in jail than to sit across borders watching the world I don't see going to Canada as any answer. If I, in fact, really wanted to quit America, I'd have no qualms about going to Canada.

Richard O. Moore: But it just looks more and more that there's no place to run to.

David Harris: The rest of the world is becoming more like America every day.

Richard O. Moore: So—

David Harris: I think that's a very good point.

Richard O. Moore: I mean, if you're gonna have to fight dragons, you might as well fight them where they live. The number of draft dodgers in Canada is estimated at anywhere from 4,000 to 15,000. Canada is a safe refuge since Canadians do not extradite men for draft evasion. If the young men return to the United States voluntarily, they would face trial and long prison terms. As soon as you step across that border, your perspective just— the big clock face.

Speaker 2: It's like tons of pressure just relieved, walking right out of the United States and coming across the border.

David Harris: And I've become rather extremely bothered by comparisons between World War II Germany and the present U.S. situation.

Stokely Carmichael: Right.

David Harris: And I sit and think of parallels, and these upset me no end. And finally it got to the point where I had 3 choices: come to Canada, go to jail, or go out and fight for something that I'd been protesting against for, you know, the better part of 2 years. And I just couldn't see myself doing the latter. And Canada seems like an awfully nice jail.

Speaker 2: I mean, I think it took more guts to come here. You know, well, with me it was a decision.

Stokely Carmichael: Was I going to chicken out and go and get drafted? You know, that was the whole thing. Because I mean, I was—

Speaker 2: I knew that if I did it, I'd be a murderer.

David Harris: You know, if I went in there and actually engaged in that kind of thing.

Speaker 2: No question about it. As far as making up my mind, the main reason was general dislike The racism in the States, which is tremendous. I'm from Texas, so I'm in a lot of it. I had quite a religious hang-up. God and the country's equality with God and patriotism, and I thought I was patriotic and moral, but I wasn't godly. And when the draft came by, it was mainly just, are you going to sell out and go and kill? I'm not going to sell out. And be a part of insanity, or are you going to stick by what you know is right, but which is harder than hell to do, and go to jail or cut out? And I had to really work myself up emotionally.

Richard O. Moore: I didn't want to fight it at all, so I said, to hell with it, I'll go to jail.

Speaker 2: So, by my report date, I think the day after my report date, I accidentally spotted a piece in the paper About Canadian draft dodgers. It just gave me the idea that I might come up here and be free. My father didn't want us fighting. He says you can't beat City Hall. You're not going to beat the U.S. government.

David Harris: They're going to get you.

Speaker 2: He's a foreman at Ford Motor Company in Dallas. He makes good money, and it's all his individual effort.

Richard O. Moore: But he's had to sell out a lot, compromise a lot to get there.

Speaker 2: And his life's based on that, and he doesn't see fighting it. He thinks that you just get in and just get You do what you can. I think it's got to be better than that or it's not worth living at all. I was thinking very seriously about going to prison, and then I just thought, you're going to be squashed like a damn bug and you're not going to— oh, it's not going to mean a damn thing.

David Harris: Once you get out, you're going to have also a prison record.

Speaker 2: It's going to be hard to get a job. And I want my friends out, and that's what I'm going to try to do. 2 or 3 good friends, I'm going to try to get them out.

Richard O. Moore: In several Canadian cities, groups were formed to aid the American draft ...draft dodgers to adjust to life in exile. Sociology professor Louis Feldheimer of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver is a Canadian member of one of the committees that has assisted the young Americans.

Stokely Carmichael: Exactly.

Speaker 2: What I'm trying to point out is that the people who are coming up here to evade the draft superficially would appear to be people who are rejecting American culture. What I am trying to suggest is that these people are I'm not rejecting American culture. These people are the final absurd product of American culture. Now, I'm not condemning them as a particular group. These are typical Americans, typical in a sociological general sense. They have absolutely no conception that freedom is a social concept, that the kinds of things they want involve their behavior Every day, in a very direct way, with the society. These people are looking— what are they looking for? They'll tell you again and again, they're looking for direction. They're looking for self. They want to get out of a thing called the rat race. They've got all the words right. They've got all the words right, but they don't know what— they don't have a clue about what it means. These people were not politically motivated. These people had no conception of political action. They're members of American society, and all they do is get up and say, well, I believe in the American ideals of individualism, of brotherly love, of moral tolerance, and I see a lot of things around me that contradict that, so I quit. I think people coming to Canada creates an environment of doubt on the part of the older generation in America. I don't see how it can—

David Harris: This is the final, final protest you have.

Richard O. Moore: Just leaving.

Speaker 2: The number's increasing all the time. There isn't much you can do by carrying a placard. People kind of ignore you now.

Richard O. Moore: The political scene in the United States is ridiculous, and it's a waste of time. Radical politics is playing silly games. They're not going to change anything because it's going to take a social revolution to do that, and the United States just isn't going to go that far.

Speaker 1: Yes.

Richard O. Moore: In April of 1967 and again in 1968, hundreds of thousands of Americans demonstrated in New York, San Francisco, and elsewhere in the Spring Mobilization for Peace. These were the largest American demonstrations of antiwar feeling. The organizers hoped the government would notice the numbers who publicly showed their antiwar stand, listen to their pleas, And change its policy.

Speaker 1: One, two, three. What are we fighting for? Don't ask me. I don't give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam. And if five clicks, that'll open up the pearly gates. Well, there ain't no time to wonder why. We're all gonna die. Well, come on, Wall Street, don't move slow. I demand war, go, go! There's plenty good money to be made by supplying the Army. With the tools of his trade. Let's hope and pray that if they drop the bomb, drop it on the Viet Cong. Count it, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Richard O. Moore: In San Francisco in 1967, the parade ended at Kezar Stadium. The long list of speakers included Georgia State Representative Julian Bond, actor Robert Vaughn, and California publisher and unsuccessful candidate for Congress Edward Keating.

Speaker 2: America's militarism is the world's spreading cancer cell, and we have to work to eradicate it. The disease of racism infects our bodies, and we, black and white together, must wipe it out.

Speaker 1: We talk so fervently of saving face, without realizing that face already has been lost. It has been lost irrevocably, step by step, as we have been talking peace The answer lies with you, the people of this country, and peace depends upon the people.

David Harris: It's preposterous to have people walk 4.5 miles and sit for 4 hours listening to a lot of speakers that have absolutely nothing to say to them, which means not going through all the garbage of trying to make some kind of big political show to show how many people you've got, recognizing that the people who really understand this ...aren't that large in this country and that you can't get to them by having that kind of thing.

Speaker 2: Although I was one of the sponsors in the call to the conference that resulted in the spring mobilization, when it finally came time for the mobilization, at one point I didn't want to go. I felt, well, you know, I'm tired of being mobilized. A lot of us started expecting it to go altogether too easily. There were clear injustices we could see, and if only we would protest them, other people would be drawn to see the injustices, and then they'd just set them right. That's the idea of a protest. So you walk a picket line, and then there will be moral recognition on the part of the people who see you, and so on. Well, it didn't take long for us to learn that that was a lot of nonsense. Those people who went south to take part in the Negro struggle down there learned it very quickly, if they didn't know it before they went down. We learned it at the University of California. Even for people who just lately have joined the peace movement in the United States, the proof was in the recent mobilization. So, people marched. We went to a stadium, and a lot of us got around and talked to one another, and some people said Some more angry things, and then there it was all over. And the war goes on, and we'll drop some more bombs. Uh, protest doesn't work, and it's something which is very clear now. There's no long tradition of leadership.

Richard O. Moore: History professor William Appelman Williams of the University of Wisconsin is one of the intellectual mentors of the New Radicals. He is the author of several books, including The tragedy of American diplomacy.

Stokely Carmichael: Uh, is proof positive. See, they're looking for a tradition now in the middle of the protest rather than having come to the protest out of the tradition.

Speaker 2: To me, it becomes more and more apparent that there isn't any tradition of radical politics in America. There isn't any tradition of how you stand outside the accepted framework of the consensus and still stay in the society as an equal. See, once you sort of get sucked into full-time opposition, really you have a very empty sort of life because you don't see your actions bearing fruit. It's very difficult to advance from one action to a more sophisticated one because you seem to be unable to get beyond protest, and you're always living in the awareness that it all may be over tomorrow. I mean, you're not part of this society because there are no opposition institutions. You're not building anything. You're really not building anything. If some kind of viable political alternative, if some alternatives for rational, reasoned, deliberate political action to change the system do not develop, I really think that the new radicalism which has begun so promisingly may become excessive, self-indulgent, self-destructive, resentful, and hateful. The thing that maybe is most fearful about it is that in our society, where economic lines are also racial lines, we might find that what began naively as a movement to change the heart of white America might end Um, up in a very grim race war. I used to think that there was a clear dividing line between rage and outrage, and I've come to feel that that distinction doesn't exist in me, that I have to watch carefully my reactions to events to be sure that my reaction is not excessive, that I'm not letting that part of all anger, which is hatred, Oh, get the better of me. A case in point, on the occasion of Clark Kerr's firing, I responded much more, much more by an expression of hatred than in any sober, reasoned way. I was on the Daily Express at the time. But that helped reveal to me that we've all been affected by the plague, and that even those who are trying to do good have a great deal of evil in them. I'm suggesting that the politics of white middle-class radicals often does have morbid origins, or at least in part. I think that the bad effects of those morbid origins would be reduced if there were more real possibilities for serious political action. But in the absence of those, it's altogether too easy to be pushed back into yourself and to act out the absurdity of your own personal situation in your politics. I suppose it's true of me anyway. If my life over a long period of years became built around crisis-oriented politics, If I were to get into politics, I would become not just once in a while hysterical the way I am now, but chronically hysterical. And I think it would have a bad effect on my politics. Why, I might start organizing guerrilla bands in the United States. At some time in the future, that might be appropriate. But if we did it now, I think it would just be a way of acting out deep resentments against a society that denies us a chance to lead full lives. This is really a great danger when your whole Your whole life becomes bound up in combat against a beast so much more powerful than you are.

Speaker 1: Stop the draft now!

David Harris: Stop the draft now! Stop the draft now!

Speaker 1: Stop the draft now! Stop the draft now!

Richard O. Moore: Stop the draft now!

Speaker 1: Stop the draft now!

Richard O. Moore: Oakland, California, October 16th, 1967. Stop the draft now!

Speaker 1: I'm here to protest.

Richard O. Moore: The object, to prevent the orderly induction of recruits. Thousands of young people from all over the San Francisco area came. They knew that this would mark the end of the nonviolent demonstrations. They came to confront the police, to tie up intersections, to show that they were powerful. After a week of demonstrations in October, including a violent clash at the Pentagon, many in the movement began to think They really hurt them.

Speaker 1: They beat up this poor man who was standing there on the sidewalk. He was just standing there. He didn't— he didn't think it was his thing, so he didn't move, and they just beat him up.

David Harris: I believe that it's now time for new tactics in the antiwar movement to mobilize all the support we can against the war.

Stokely Carmichael: It's come to this.

Richard O. Moore: There's nothing else to do.

Stokely Carmichael: The picketing and all of that, which has done very little It to stop the war, wasn't working.

Speaker 2: It's time for confrontation in the whole thing, and it's working now.

David Harris: The bonds of those demonstrations, you know, didn't spring out of any consciousness of the society they were dealing with at all, but rather the fact that they all felt impotent and they had to act that impotence out. And I don't think those demonstrations have a future except as a repetition of themselves. There'll probably be more demonstrations like them. I don't think they'll build anything more than they've built I think what they'll be is a continual kind of repetition with the same theme, the theme, we are powerful, we are in the streets, when in fact they're neither. They are in the streets, but they aren't at all powerful and have no conception of political power at all. Because it's not a revolution unless you can liberate the police also, and all the people that identify with the police, which is most of this country.

Speaker 1: Hell no, we won't go! Hell no, we won't go! Hell no, we won't go!

Speaker 2: I think that there's room for disruptive demonstrations, but where that becomes one of the key points, or maybe the center of one's political program, then at best one succeeds in frightening the population and giving an excuse for further repression. And since for the majority of Americans it's very hard to see what's wrong with the country, it's very easy Personally, I think it's terrible.

Speaker 1: Well, my husband's over in Vietnam right now, and he's fighting for his country, and I don't see why they can't fight for theirs. Well, if they want to do this, I think they should just ship them on a bus and take them over there. They're not getting nothing done this way. They're absolutely nuts. I think if they'd all go home and take a nice clean bath and clean themselves up, they'd have a different outlook on this whole thing. They're not men as far as I'm concerned. Well, I don't like them. I think it's a war, but I think there's nothing really that we can do about it except go over there and fight because we have to win against the copy mills.

Speaker 2: Are you standing here to block the car?

Speaker 1: Yes. Tell me why. Move! I've got to go to work. Hey, that doesn't work. I don't care. You can't hit anybody because I believe in. I was up all night.

Speaker 2: Sorry about that.

Stokely Carmichael: There's something my people don't understand either.

Speaker 1: Right, right. I support the bombing in Vietnam. As an intelligent American, I support it. It's absurd for people to have to go to a war that they think is morally wrong. And boys are being drafted.

Speaker 2: It may be a little thing to do, but I mean, what can people do to protest the war? It's very confused, and the leadership is really groping, and they don't know where they're going. They advocate, on one hand, big demonstrations, and they didn't openly advocate violence, but they called for massive defensive measures. And what they did was they succeeded in provoking the cops to a massive display of force. I think what we're doing is wrong. I think killing is wrong. For any reason. For any reason. In the Oakland demonstrations, the people who began saying, we've been nonviolent long enough, and now we have to be prepared at least to protect ourselves and to defend ourselves, is a personal stand also, as is the stand of Dr. Martin Luther King. What other reaction a person can have to a perception of the violence that he has within himself. Concerning pacifism, pacifism embarrasses me. I think in part because I'm a bit of a pacifist myself. I think the pacifists represent themselves very much as something they're not. As often as not, a doctrinaire pacifism, I think, masks a Fear of one's own violence. When we see a policeman beating someone over the head, it's a quite natural reaction to want to beat up on the cop. There's something wrong with pacifism politically as well. It gives the illusion of being a political program when it isn't. Nothing that they're doing really affects the war in any way at all. Uh, the net result of sitting in in that way calmly and being carried The trade-off is that it costs you money and time. You have to get a lawyer. You're going to go to jail. Uh, it may be that you'll be in jail for a long time. And then what effect will you have had? Well, by allowing yourself to be taken out of the society in that way, you maybe leave the society worse than it was before you left it. Both points of view are a little bit hung up on violence. That's not the issue. The issue is political power. They're not exactly the same thing.

Speaker 1: We might as well be in Germany in 1940. We cannot allow that to happen.

Richard O. Moore: The era of nonviolence that began with the late Dr. Martin Luther King and carried over into the antiwar demonstrations had come to an end for many of the young activists. Some began to talk about the late Che Guevara. And guerrilla tactics. But ideas about how to change America and what kind of society they wanted for the future remained a disturbing and confusing subject. At the University of California, after the Oakland confrontation with the police, most of the students felt bitter and angry. Moral protest, they concluded, was no longer a sufficient reason to be arrested or clubbed. Many began to think about an ideology that would build a political Organization. University of California philosophy professor Herbert Marcuse, author of One Dimensional Man, has been one of the movement's theorists. The main enemy today is not the liberals. The main enemy sits in the White House, sits in the Pentagon.

Speaker 2: The whole function of the radicals is to make When radicals start choosing issues that completely alienate their potential constituents—

Richard O. Moore: Of course.

Speaker 1: They are good people. No, no, no. You think that we're better off having them because we have so many worse?

Speaker 2: To what extent can the system afford to do without those people?

Richard O. Moore: If we were in a pre-revolutionary situation, you may be right in fighting the liberals. But damn it, we are not in this country in any pre-revolutionary situation whatsoever.

Speaker 2: I think the frustration breeds the activism without any particular organization or direction. There are many different groups, and they tend to be off doing their thing, and to get them coordinated and to get a consensus in the resistance or the protest is very difficult. It's kind of eerie. There's a group of people who sincerely are concerned to change this society for the better. And in many ways they're acting as individuals and they're defining the problem as individuals. So I think there's one important exception at this point. I think that's the Black Power movement. The Black Power movement has more sense of community, more sense of cohesion, solidarity, whatever you want to call it, than the white students in particular. I think this is very striking.

Speaker 1: Individualism is a luxury that we can no longer The definition for black power is the coming together of black people to fight for their liberation by any means necessary. You are so simple and idiotic, you sit down and you let white people tell you what to do. You use your mouth for 2 things: to eat and to say, yes, sir. Use your mouth to say no and begin to use your knowledge for the good of black people who surround your campus.

Stokely Carmichael: For once they get someone who's speaking directly to them, who's beginning to challenge what has been defined as success for them in their college campus. Deep down they've always felt this, but they haven't been really sure how to express it because they're afraid they might be called racist or black nationalist. They finally begin to You can see that they had that release, so that I think you get the catharsis there, but then an awakening and a beginning to rethink what success is all about.

Speaker 1: To bring one who has been involved in this struggle for quite a long time, Stokely Carmichael.

Richard O. Moore: Black Power emerged from the collapse of the integration movement. The whites who had supported SNCC were repelled. Many young blacks, North and South, paid close attention to the new philosophy of race. Black Power has become a new organizing theme that has spread fear in many white circles and pride, excitement, and violence into the black ghettos of large cities.

Speaker 1: In this country, you would think that white people were God, that they had the right to give us Our freedom. And so what we had to do was to beg them or to act the way they want us to act before they gave us our freedom. We must stop seeking to imitate white society. We must create for ourselves to save our very humanity, because the fight for black power in this country is indeed a fight to civilize a barbaric country, the United States. We have to be able In order to gather the strength, you must be able to get the guts, as the intellectuals of the black society, to say, we are black. Our noses are broad. Our lips are thick. Our hair is nappy. And we are beautiful! And we are beautiful! And we are beautiful! And we are beautiful! Yes! Yes! Beautiful! Beautiful! We are black!

Stokely Carmichael: I think that black students have never heard anyone tell them that they're black and beautiful. White people like Negroes, but they have a role for them. They like them like maybe they like their pet dogs, but they like them. Now they have that role. Now when they break out of that role, there's a threat. I guess the sociologists would call that a threat to status or what have you. But there is that threat, and then they have to react to that. But that, that isn't just in the South. I mean, it's in the whole country. It's in the whole country.

Speaker 1: You ought to tell them clear, if you don't want any trouble, keep your filthy white hands off our beautiful black women! We want to talk about this thing called violence that everybody is so afraid about. Here you are talking about you afraid of violence, and the honky drafting you out of school to go fight in Vietnam.

Richard O. Moore: Yeah!

Speaker 1: Yeah, you're going to sit in front of your television set and You listen to LBJ tell you that violence never accomplishes anything, my fellow Americans. This is the most violent society there is.

Stokely Carmichael: I think that the society is— we're just headed towards suicide. And I really don't think that America could ever— that America could share in the guilt. I don't think we could ever see ourselves as a country and that I think people have to see themselves as individuals, and that's particularly true, I think, for white America. That you must see yourself as individuals. That's the death trap for most liberals. You know, the first thing they say to you is that, well, I'm not like the rest of them.

Speaker 1: Right.

Stokely Carmichael: That's their first phrase to you, because they recognize for them to share in the collective guilt, they would just have to drink themselves to death. And I think that people who People who even just touch on the collective guilt of white America must drink themselves to death, man. Just have to. Because, Larry, if you just woke up one morning and, you know, said, you know, for any reason at all you were burning babies, and you had anything to do with it, man, for any reason at all, you know, burning babies, even to stop communism, burning babies, man, you'd go crazy, you know, blow your mind.

Speaker 1: You're in Vietnam, baby.

Speaker 2: You could break a window on May 2nd.

Stokely Carmichael: What's the difference? The difference is you may not come back from Vietnam.

Speaker 1: In jail, you know you'll get out in time.

Stokely Carmichael: Yeah, well, I wish you the best of luck. I hope you come back, but as far as I'm concerned, I hope you fight that war in them jails.

Speaker 1: We are not only opposed to the war in Vietnam, we are opposed to compulsory conscription. We are against the draft. Now, we're against the draft for anybody, black or white. When you are called to serve, you have a choice. Either you say no and face the possibility of going to jail, or you become a hired killer. You inflict suffering on somebody.

Stokely Carmichael: It is more honorable to suffer.

Speaker 1: We must save our humanity. We cannot allow ourselves to be used as the black mercenaries in that war. You should join the greatest, Muhammad Ali, and tell them, Hell no, I ain't going. Hell no, we ain't going. Hell no, hell no, hell no, hell no, hell no, hell no, hell no, we ain't going. We ain't going. We ain't going. We ain't going. We ain't going. We ain't going. We ain't going. We ain't going. We ain't going. We ain't going. We ain't going. We ain't going down! We ain't going down! We ain't going down! We ain't going down! We ain't going down!

Richard O. Moore: Stokely Carmichael and other Black Power leaders provided the slogan for resistance against the draft. But one of the most active anti-draft groups retained pacifist principles. David Harris is one of the leading spokesmen for the nonviolent resistance movement. In October 1967, he called for a mass turning in of draft cards at the San Francisco Federal Building. Several hundred people attended.

Speaker 2: What's come about here is a basic understanding people have gained about their own lives, and that is that the assumptions that Selective Service makes about us and the assumptions that the American state makes about the young people of this country, and that those young people will be the bricks Upon which they'll continue to build an empire is an assumption that comes into a fundamental contradiction with the way we understand our own lives, and that the choice we've all made is a choice for life in America rather than death, and that the struggle that we've all jumped into today continues until there is no instrument of military conscription in this country.

Stokely Carmichael: That's right.

Speaker 1: And there is no such thing as an American empire.

David Harris: You know, you plant seeds is what you do. And I look upon the whole last year of my life as going to various places in the country, tossing seeds out of my bag. You know, they'll grow.

Stokely Carmichael: Some will grow.

David Harris: There's no such thing as success and failure, in a certain kind of sense. People have to understand their success is in doing it. You say, what is it that got us in, you know, into the kind of mess that America's in now? You can't use the same modes of thinking that got America to this position to get it out of this position. That it really calls for a transfer to a whole new concept of a way of living. I see the political goals of the resistance as being those of beginning a whole new kind of politics, which means that it's going to develop Well, I think that we have to develop a whole new route for power. I mean, that the power that exists in this society today is based off certain kinds of assumptions about people. Those assumptions about how people can live together are exactly the things that we're trying to destroy. The conception of man as essentially an animal, as essentially as base, calling upon those as the worst of his instincts, and calling upon a society with power to control the worst of those instincts. And rather, what we want to build is a society based on the best of those instincts.

Richard O. Moore: I mean, a society based on the best of man's nature.

Speaker 2: What about the people built who are in power?

David Harris: on man's capacity to love other men. If you talk about why someone like myself is nonviolent, or would be described as nonviolent, is that I see that as the only hope of building a new kind of power in this society. I mean, we're engaged in 2 kinds of tasks, and the first task is really the destruction of the American state as it now exists, and the destruction of the mechanisms that have maintained that state. And at the same time, through that way of life that we establish in our attack upon American militarism, All the forms of American society, we build that new society. We establish communes, communal living situations, and in that situation attempt to develop new forms for the society. And it's just the first step. People are just as interested in the fact that I live in a commune as they are the draft. Perhaps you can just give people that assurance that there is hope for life outside the context of American society. It's a question of forming communities. Which really has to begin in the individual sense of oneself. You can't begin talking about community in the situation of a large number of emasculated people. The first thing people have to be given is a sense of their own strength in the particular. And from that has to, I think, build a sense of, you know, of movement, a sense of revolution, of people merging together. I think that's the problem. in some kind of common understanding to build for some kind of common cause of humanity.

Speaker 1: Money! Money!

David Harris: And I think at the most basic level, what we've done is broken a certain kind of paralysis of fear and uncertainty out of a political situation where everyone was feeling very, very impotent and very unsure about where to go and very cautious in the face of large risks. A group of people just stepped out and said, well, we're doing it. I mean, we're going to go off and do it.

Speaker 1: You know, what we say to a society of murder and racism is a very simple no, no with the complete context of our lives. And what we say to our brothers around this country and around the world is a very simple word.

Speaker 2: That word is resist.

David Harris: One thing we've learned is that there were a lot more people interested in noncooperation than we I mean, in a very bumbling, completely unput-together way, we made it that much more difficult for that great institution of war to continue going. Or I don't know if it's lucky, but we coincidentally are in a point of history where American society is breaking up, with or without the Vietnam War.

Speaker 2: The fact that large numbers of among the most privileged youth in this society, white college students, The fact that so many people are engaging in acts of disruption against the society is a clear sign of considerable instability. Also, it's becoming clear that we can't have such a war abroad and have a continuing expansion of affluence at home. The Vietnam War has made clear to many people who hadn't seen this before that the government lies to us, that, um, uh, many important decisions Concerning life and death, concerning setting of economic priorities, are not made at all with regard to the needs of the bulk of the population. We have the task not of allowing people to carry us off to jail, nor of fighting the cops.

Richard O. Moore: We have the harder task of beginning to organize millions of Americans who have no political Inside the Peace and Freedom Party, an uneasy alliance developed between the Black Power advocates and the whites. The party chose Bobby Seale of the Oakland Black Panthers as one of its candidates for Congress.

Speaker 2: But meanwhile, back in the ghetto, we get down to the nitty-gritty.

Stokely Carmichael: And I don't jive myself with Black people.

Speaker 2: I don't go down on the block talking to Black people a bunch of, uh, Due to the stimulating processes and the basic socioeconomic structure and the political socioeconomic industrial complex— wait a minute for all that. The brother don't want to hear that, man.

Speaker 1: How can I get some bread? Maybe you can use this technique with many poor whites.

Richard O. Moore: Mario Savio became one of the new party's candidates for state Senate.

Speaker 2: A well-known, inarticulate student at the University of California— —who managed to find his voice at a very crucial time a couple of years ago, and who is a candidate for the nomination for state senator from the 11th District. The day of reckoning has come. Dean Rusk tries to frighten Americans with the prospect of 1 billion Chinese armed with nuclear weapons. He should try, and he should be frightened. For on the ground in Vietnam, we are losing against the brave people with a history of throwing out foreign thieves and murderers.

Speaker 1: Mr.

Speaker 2: Ali Kadri, I want to see us get out, but if that can't be arranged so quickly, I want to see them win. That's the point. We must proceed in 2 ways. First, we must work to break up the present majority of white people and white interests. Second, we must teach the people that something better is workable and sound. We've got to find ways of convincing people that they would like to make the decisions that affect their lives. There's the very real likelihood that when the war is over, so will the white movement. We right now have an alliance developing in the country between a movement for Negro liberation and the anti-war movement. But until we have a movement for white liberation in this country, We will have at best only a very transitory and unstable basis for taking power in the United States. Most of the people of the earth already accept that in any conflict between the rights of property and the demands of human dignity, property must give way. Today, the United States is the single greatest obstacle Thank you. We stand at a great watershed in the history of the human race. Our people are productive and intelligent. Our land is rich. America has the unique opportunity to help usher in a golden age of peace and freedom. On the other hand, America can insist on the rights of her empire. In this election year, we can help the American people to begin making this choice. We can begin in this election year the great turning of America and the whole world away from empire and disaster and toward peace.

Richard O. Moore: The movement But the movement is a long way from political power. The entrance of McCarthy and Kennedy into the presidential race, Johnson's refusal to run again, and the beginning of talks with North Vietnam have caused confusion in the antiwar movement, and some of the peace activists have rejoined the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Movement leaders believe that none of the major party candidates can solve the problems of U.S. involvement abroad and racism at home. But the movement The movement thus far remains as a dissenting minority. It has not yet developed positive ideas and political actions that serve as alternatives to the major parties. It is groping toward programs and organization. But its future will depend not only on the movement's qualities of ideas and action. Its future will also rest upon the ability of the American system to deal successfully with the war, racism, and the other issues which gave birth to and continue to feed this opposition movement.

Speaker 1: This has been NET Journal.

Speaker 2: A weekly look at the events, issues, and people of the world today. This is NET, the National Educational Television Network.