We got badly gassed and a lovely upper class lady brought us into her elegant home to wash the gas off and gave us tea and finger sandwiches. The description of small feminist groups is from Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women's Liberation (New York: David McKay Company, 1975), p. 103. That still left thousands of prisoners, whom the police herded into an outdoor practice field next to RFK Stadium. Date Facts: May 1, 1971 was a Saturday; Zodiac Sign for this date is: Taurus This date was 18,116 days ago; May 1st 2021 is on a Saturday; Someone born on this date is 49 years old; If you were born on this date: You've slept for 6,039 days or 16 years! Federal troops lined the Key Bridge, and a Marine battalion was stationed at Dupont Circle, "with tanks around the rim pointing out toward the street with their big guns." RED POWER MOVEMENT: Alvin M. Josephy Jr., Red Power: The American Indians' Fight for Freedom (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), and Adam Fortunate Eagle, Alcatraz! The 1971 May Day Protests were a series of large-scale civil disobedience actions in Washington, D.C., in protest against the Vietnam War. The history of this practice, though, is little known. So What?" Throughout the years, there have been many different events and Telephone interview with Jeff Jones, 20 June 2000. )52, A number of the women and gay participants, however, were energized by the gathering. "16, The Mayday organizers hoped to tap into the revulsion many felt toward the tactics of the Weather Underground and other violent groups, while steering clear of the submissiveness and sanctimony radicals associated with nonviolence. The Yippies, however, were more interested in gestures for their own sake-like throwing dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, as an arch commentary on capitalist greed-than in targeted actions with concrete goals. It was elitistly organized, mostly by males. On reflection, while I think that demonstrations are a good way to bring attention to an issue, but then the energy needs to be put into educating and organizing the public about the issue. (Attorney General John Mitchell explained to Nixon, during a White House meeting to plan the government's response to the protests, "I know they want to be arrested but, Mr. President, I don't think that's any reason for not arresting them. For an account of how it was shot, see his book, Videofreex: America's First Pirate TV Station and the Catskills Collective That Turned It On (Hensonville, N.Y.: Black Dome Press, 1999). The overflow crowd was estimated to be about 10,000 and included a large number of Vietnam war protesters and … Conditions were awful, with next to no sanitary facilities, blankets, or food. Toward that end, NPAC put forth just one lowest-common-denominator demand, "Out of Vietnam now," rejecting any attempt to link the war to other issues, such as racism or poverty. "In the pre-revolutionary period," they wrote, "affinity groups must assemble to project a revolutionary consciousness and to develop forms for particular struggles. The deaths sparked strikes at hundreds more campuses and inspired thousands who had never protested before to take to the streets. This approach seemed hopelessly establishment and uninspiring to radicals of the time. I am deeply grateful to Eileen Clancy for tracking down some of the surviving video footage from Mayday, and to Parry D. Teasdale for allowing me to view it. Frank Hammer, "The Impact of Mayday," Liberated Guardian (July 1971). "This form of struggle, no matter how radical its demands, never threatens the basic structure-the mass itself." A military junta led by Major General Idi Amin siezes power in Uganda (Jan. 25). The Mayday protest was to entail "action rather than congregation, disruption rather than display." The Mayday Tribe might not have literally succeeded in its stated goal: "If the government won't stop the war, the people will stop the government." What happened on May 19, 1971. As one participant from Richmond College in Staten Island explained afterwards, "As affinity groups you have to make your own decisions and be fully responsible. The tactical manual explained that Mayday would be militant in a way "that conforms more with our new life style" and deploys "joy and life against bureaucracy and grim death." "Trouble Over Bridged Waters," May Flowers; "Mayday Tactics: Report from Washington, D.C.," Northwest Passage (24 May-6 June 1971); "The Biggest Bust," Newsweek; "May Day Washington," Berkeley Tribe (14-21 May 1971). The Motherfuckers viewed affinity groups in grander terms as well. Hal Straus, "The War of Numbers vs. the War in the Streets," Berkeley Barb (May 7-13, 1971); Mayday Tribe, "Getting it Together," undated leaflet, Hedemann collection; "April 24th Anti-War Rally: 250,000 People Come to D.C. Mayday 1971 deserves rediscovery, for it occupies a pivotal place in American radical history. Anything that does that can help our people. "Freaky people": Mark Goff, "Washington D.C. -Spring 1971," The Bugle-American (13-19 May 1971). "They couldn't infiltrate it, because we were all sleeping with each other," recalls John Scagliotti, "And we were doing a tremendous amount of illegal things, that they could have gotten us all for." He was intrigued by the idea of "groups of like-minded people that weren't public," the sort of group that was "totally unknown to anyone else." John Darnton, "Antiwar Protests Erupt across U.S.," The New York Times (10 May 1972); Linda Charlton, "Antiwar Protests Rise Here and across the Country," The New York Times (11 May 1972); John Darnton, "Hundreds Are Arrested in Antiwar Demonstrations," The New York Times (11 May 1972); "Roving Bands of Godless Anarchists," Up Against the Bulkhead (May 1972); "Chicago Groups React to War Escalation," The Torch (15 May 1972); "We Fight Beside the NLF," The Augur (20 May-3 June 1972). They were just being organized in their local whatever to come to this thing." More than 12,000 people were arrested, the largest mass arrest in U.S. history. An article from the Internationalist Communist Tendency about the recent 'migrant crisis' in Europe. alternately you can use an app like CamScanner, which is free in app stores to make a PDF of the account, then upload it here (or if you have any issues uploading here you can email it to us at libcom.org@gmail.com). I think it's an important glimpse into the Mayday protests of 1971 in Washington and I would like to share it. The term dates back to Spain in the late 1920s and 1930s, when small bands of militants from the Iberian Anarchist Federation (F.A.I.) "The white 'New Left' movement of the 1960s is dead and gone," one radical wrote in Space City!, a Houston underground paper. May 3, 1971: Facts & Myths About This Day. Mao Zedong invites the US ping-pong team to visit Beijing (Apr. More than 200,000 protesters and veterans converged on the US capital to demand an end to the war in Vietnam forty years ago on May 3, 1971. "33 Local affinity groups might choose their own targets and tactics, but a small group around Rennie Davis wrote the organizing materials, controlled the finances, called the press conferences, did the big-picture planning, and spoke for the action as a whole. The image is an auction find. "You do the organizing. Another participant declared, "There were a lot of things about Mayday that were totally wrong. (Many of these were uninvolved bystanders: as one protester noted, "[A]nyone and everyone who looked at all freaky was scooped up off the street.") Thanks mates for your thoughts and for being there. Scagliotti interview; "The Biggest Bust," Newsweek (17 May 1971). John Scagliotti recalls, "It was so romantic: Everybody around campfires, all these revolutionaries in their affinity groups, talking and planning their last-minute strategies. The Indian Occupation of 1969-1971 (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1992). 26. 51. President Mobutu renames the Democratic Republic of Congo, establishing Zaire (Oct. 27). Before dawn on Sunday, the morning after the rock concert, the government made its first move. wally martin. See Sale, SDS, pp. and the memorable "Up the ass of the ruling class!" For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHsk5GV1JM. Interview with Kai Lumumba Barrow, New York, N.Y., 20 September 2000. Explains S.J. The next time you can reuse your old 1971 calendar will be in 2021.Both calendars will be exactly the same! "Sexism in Peace City," The Fifth Estate (20-26 May 1971); Videofreex Mayday footage. On May 3, 1971, after nearly two weeks of intense antiwar protest in Washington, DC, ranging from a half-million-person march to large-scale sit-ins outside the Selective Service, Justice Department, and other government agencies, some 25,000 young people set out to do something brash and extraordinary: disrupt the basic functioning of the federal government through nonviolent action. The May Day tribe's purpose was clear: block the streets, stop traffic, harass officials and maybe this way no one would get to work and the Government, for at least one day, would stop. "49, In retrospect, the moment seems rich in symbolism, almost like a passing of the direct-action torch. The philosophy of civil disobedience that he and King propounded, and most pacifists embraced, entailed a willingness to accept violence and a refusal to engage in it, even in self-defense.15, In the activist climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, this kind of civil disobedience had acquired an aura of piety and passivity, distasteful to many radicals; as Jerry Coffin observes, "very few of [the Mayday protesters] would have identified themselves as being members of a nonviolent movement." Copyright Center For Social Research and Education Dec 2002 Many of the arrestees were ordinary people with no connection to the protest; they just happened to be where sweeps were taking place. Collective, The Organizer's Manual (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), pp. 3. Jerry Coffin, who teamed up with Davis when Mayday was only an idea, recalls it as an attempt "to create a responsible hip alternative" to the Weather Underground: "merging radical politics, Gandhian nonviolence, serious rock and roll, [and] lots of drugs." Everyone was responsible. Gay Mayday Tribe, Off the Butch in S.E. We grew by loving each other." 7. The phrase "disruptive confrontation" is from a November 1967 article by Marty Jezer, reprinted in The Movement toward a New America: The Beginnings of Long Revolution, ed. Formatted in the order of Month-Day-Year. But security was not their only purpose. "We were the wave of the 60s, and these kids seem to us to be the wave of the 70s," veteran civil rights activist Mary Treadwell said to the press. A call to participation elaborated, "We know that the men running the country are very deeply sexist-they relate to each other and to situations in an uptight straight male way. In this climate of grim frustration, the national antiwar movement split, as long-standing tensions about the political value of civil disobedience divided activists who were planning the antiwar mobilization for spring 1971. It was also the 139th day and 5th month of 1971 in the Georgian calendar. With great suspense and skillful storytelling, Roberts makes us feel the immense drama and stakes as the country grappled with the breakdown of law and order and its own reckoning with the polarization of the Vietnam War. The government initially prosecuted eight organizers, including Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin. "While we do not question the commitment and courage of those who deploy such tactics, we feel that they are not oriented toward winning and mobilizing a mass movement." PCPJ favored a multiissue approach to antiwar organizing and worked to build alliances with nonpacifist organizations like the National Welfare Rights Organization, drawing connections between the foreign and domestic policies of the U.S. government. Looking back at this some years after re-publishing it, I'm very pleased to see the commentary from comrades who took part in the actions. 55. Many of the longtime organizers who had persevered beyond the movement's crisis year of 1969 were now burning out. I was 18 and a freshman in college. The GAA did not invent the zap; it was created by the pranksters of the Youth International Party, or Yippies, the late Sixties band of politicized hippies led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Free dope! There were separate gay and women's gatherings beforehand, which set a consciousness-raising and identity-focused tone for the conference as a whole. Spring Movement (8 April 1971). Within a day, leaders of the district's African-American community, predominantly from the civil rights generation of the 1950s and early 1960s, organized a large-scale food drive for the crowd of arrestees, delivering the supplies in a twelve-car caravan. Its signature contribution to radical activism was the assertion that the personal is political, a proposition that was electrifying in its day. Movements with such wide-ranging concerns as nuclear power, U.S. military intervention in Central America, environmental destruction, AIDS, and reproductive rights-not to mention the movement that shut down the World Trade Organization in late 1999-have organized themselves on the basis of affinity groups. After SDS committed political suicide, and after the Jackson and Kent State shootings, one of the largest mass direct actions in US history took place under the slogan "If the Government won't stop the war, we'll stop the Government. 22. undertook a series of guerrilla actions: first against the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera; next against real or suspected fascists during the Spanish Republic; and finally, against the fascist regime of Francisco Franco during the sanguinary Spanish Civil War. The four day total May 2-5 was over 12,000. But its activist innovations influenced the shape of American protest movements for decades to come. How Much things cost in 1971 Yearly Inflation Rate USA 4.3% Yearly Inflation Rate UK 8.6% Year End Close Dow Jones Industrial Average 890 Average Cost of new house $25,250.00 Average Income per year $10,600.00 Average Monthly Rent $150.00 Cost of a gallon of Gas 40 cents Datsun 1200 Sports Coupe $1,866.00 United States postage Stamp 8 cents If May 07, 1971 is your birthday you're 49 years, 3 months, 1 day old and you'll celebrate your next birthday in 8 months, 29 days. The heavies didn't show, infuriating everyone else and underscoring in many people's minds the problem of "macho tripping within the movement." "53, The Mayday Tribe ceased to exist soon afterwards. Published on May 30, 2012. The quotations are from Tom Wells, The War Within: America's Battle over Vietnam (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1994), p. 512. If you've seen one or two, you've seen them all....[G]ood, bad, or in between, they have not stopped the war, or put an end to poverty and racism, or freed all political prisoners."6. Editorial Reviews. Hopefully we raised enough of them well enough to make the future better for all. The turnout was a fraction of what the Weather organizers had expected; the street fighting left most participants injured or jailed or both, with little or nothing to show for their bravado.