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Burying the ’60s in the ‘T’ word
The SLA, political memory, and how the real story of the 1960s is falling victim to the war on terrorism
BY J.H. TOMPKINS

I REMEMBER THAT summer afternoon in 1970 like it was yesterday. I was standing with my friend Elena on a street in downtown Oakland, California. After three years behind bars for killing an Oakland cop, legendary Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton was about to be freed. A thousand overwound Black Panther supporters had turned out to greet him — their campaign to "free Huey" and the work of his legal team had won Newton a new trial. We craned our necks and shifted our feet, and then suddenly there he was. The crowd roared, and Newton tore off his shirt, raising his fist in the air and smiling as if he’d just discovered how sweet life could be.

Years later, on the day Newton was murdered in West Oakland by the crack dealer he was trying to rip off, Elena picked me up, and we drove to the spot where he died. Newton had played a key role in shaping the political and cultural life of the nonstop circus that came to be called the ’60s, and the influence he’d once had on our lives was part of what linked Elena and me. We tried without success to find something worth talking about; eventually Elena dropped a rose on the pavement, and we left.

Newton had fallen a long way down — drugs were a problem, and his reputation for violence, including his alleged involvement in the murder of an Oakland prostitute, was not undeserved. He was once a courageous, visionary leader. He also made serious mistakes, hurt people, and died a thug’s death.

The only heroes who can’t let you down are dead ones. Real people struggle to survive; they fuck up, get scared, give in to confusion and self-doubt — and there was a bumper crop of that back in the day. In fact, back in the day, most of the people who were "activists" — and that was a whole lot of people — weren’t revolutionaries, or famous, or even what we would call "radicals" today. They were just ordinary people, thrust into extraordinary times, trying in all sorts of good and bad ways, with great successes and great failures, to survive and build a better world. I thought about that when alleged Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) associate and long-time fugitive Sara Jane Olson (formerly known as Kathleen Ann Soliah) was arrested in 1999, and again a few weeks ago when Olson, along with her brother-in-law, Mike Bortin, and onetime SLA members Bill and Emily Harris, faced additional charges for the murder of a woman during a 1975 bank robbery.

The recent SLA arrests have hit a community of veteran Bay Area radicals like a time bomb. People are nervous — and for good reason. The political climate these days is as ugly as it’s been in a long time, maybe since the 1960s. And in this climate, the whole message of the ’60s — the legacy of a generation of idealistic people whose actions changed the nation forever — is at risk.

Maybe you had to be there. Imagine a generation of young men and women, some in their teens, poised to inherit a world gone insane. More than 50,000 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had been fed to a killing machine. Vietnam wasn’t a count-dead-Americans-on-one-hand sort of war: it was your friend down the block, your cousin, your brother, and you. It was living in Vancouver, or in a wheelchair, or in a trench until you were killed in action, and then it was becoming just a name on a long marble wall. Black Americans in the 1960s lived in a very different world, and white kids didn’t really understand. But after a while even the dullest mind had questions. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, all shot dead — speech wasn’t free for everyone. Detroit erupted, and then Watts and Newark. Politicians, civic leaders, priests, you name it — nearly every fucking adult you knew lived in a web of lies and denial that insulated them from the ugly racist reality.

Those days birthed social experiments as bizarre as they were forgettable and hair-brained political solutions like you wouldn’t believe. We were kids, okay? — a fact, not an excuse. Extraordinary things happened, often when you least expected it. A cop car surrounded by UC Berkeley students kicked off the Free Speech Movement. Incredibly courageous, often desperate African-Americans demanded simple justice and equality and paid dearly, again and again.

There were dropouts, runaways, crash pads, Black Panthers, Brown Berets, and hippie communes, more than you could count. The ’60s spawned freedom riders, the "outside agitators" who crossed racial and class barriers — some died for it — to fight for civil rights in the South. In 1967, the Black Panther Party picked up legal manuals, Mao Tse-tung’s Red Book, and shotguns to institute citizen patrols of the vicious police occupying West Oakland’s black community ("Niggers with guns!" — the wail of a terrified cop). And there were the clear-thinking students who in 1963 in Port Huron, Michigan, founded Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and jump-started an organized flow of damning, socially flammable truth that grew wider, deeper, and more combustible and wouldn’t go away, that still won’t go away, simply because it was and is true. There was surprise and frantic fun. You partied like there was no tomorrow, because really, who knew?

America went through dramatic changes in the ’60s, some of them lasting. And powerful reactionary forces are still anxious to change things back after all these years. Today the legacy of the ’60s is under attack. Public dialogue on complicated, important questions — globalization, militarization, democracy, nationalism, cultural differences, you name it — has been stunted. Basic social concern — the human impulse to care for others — has been labeled political correctness, a thought-stopping punctuation mark masquerading as a noun. The federal government is choking on prayer, and foreign policy is now defined by a biblically inspired binary: good versus evil.

How is it possible that the nation is capable of forgetting the ugly, anti-democratic history of the Central Intelligence Agency? If America had even a short memory, rather than none, we’d be better off. But believe it or not, the CIA — its history of spilled blood, treachery, and drug dealing overshadowed only by its ability to lie about it all — is suddenly cool in post–September 11 culture. If that DJ job falls through, join the CIA: soon you could be in Uzbekistan, torturing the natives.

On January 30, 2002, SF Gate columnist Mark Morford, in a report since confirmed elsewhere, wrote that Attorney General John Ashcroft had directed the Justice Department to spend $8000 on heavy blue drapes to cover two statues of partially naked women that sit in the department’s Great Hall. Ashcroft heads up the country’s Justice Department. There is — how can I say this strongly enough? — cause for concern.

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Issue Date: February 28 - March 7, 2002
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