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JAMES GILBERT
refused to
tum
grades in to the Draft Board, as an institution it
interpreted demonstrations against Dow and military recruiters to
be
a challenge to its own authority. The results were a disintegration
of the student-teacher alliance over opposition to the war, frustrating
equivocations by liberal faculty about the meaning of dissent and
administration crackdowns. The acceleration of
all
this into the 1967
march and assault on the Pentagon - symbolized by placing the
Cornell University flag on its walls - brought SDS and other Move–
ment organizations national attention. It carried them abruptly into
a confrontation with the converter of American capitalism, the bu–
reaucratic grid that changes the energies of social inequality, racism
and economic exploitation of underdeveloped countries into pure
power.
SDS's enormous success in focusing student discontent over the
war brought it great sympathy among students, and helped extend
the Movement from the elite universities into the large state sys–
tems. That it shut down Columbia in 1968, Harvard, Berkeley,
Wis–
consin and many other institutions was a measure of its success. But
in the long run these triumphs worked in reverse, for they led no–
where, except to a radicalization of the students themselves, based
upon their growing frustration and isolation. Each successful assault
meant an escalation in repression - first the police on campus, then
chemical weapons and, finally, last spring at Berkeley, helicopters.
The Black movement too was polarized by its success-failures.
The civil rights movement pried legislation out of Congress to help
end legal segregation, but this achievement helped kill the movement
in the ghetto. For legislation simply did not alter the terms of
life in America, especially in the North. The Black Panther party
grew up on the basis of organizational successes of other groups
such as SNCC, but it had as well a highly militant, defensive
p0s–
ture, which appealed to the northern ghettos. With leaders like
Eldridge Cleaver, the Panthers gradually took a radical position,
based in part upon identification with revolutions in underdeveloped
countries, and, particularly, with China. The Panthers' success in
organizing led to the repression and arrest of their leaders. The stage
was thus set for a new alliance between the Black movement and
white radicals based upon the merging of two issues - racism and
imperialism - into one program. Both movements projected a poli-
