'We formed the counter culture because as long as the war continued, we could not participate in anything that had anything to do with the Establishment'
After
Saturday's Hands Off rallies, I've seen a lot of opinions that protests are
great but they will not solve the problem, and I have a unique experience to
share. After numerous anti Vietnam war marches in the early sixties did nothing to bring home the troops, most activists 'dropped out' and formed a counter culture. It was 1975, more than a decade later, that the illegal Southeast Asia war finally ended.
In
1967 I was on staff of the Peace and Freedom Party, so I had the assignment of manning phones in the L.A. office on June 23 while antiwar demonstrators poured into Century City. LBJ was holding a high priced fundraiser. Police were prepared for a thousand people, but ten thousand showed up; L.A. cops overreacted and used night sticks to
club people in a nonviolent demonstration. You can
read about it in the article linked below from L.A. Times Archive from that day.
My
job as an office worker was answering phones and giving people directions to the
demonstration. As local radio news started reporting that the protest had
turned into a police riot, their words not ours, the three of us in the office on Western Avenue weren't
sure what to say as people kept calling. I was nineteen years old.
Not long after that Century City riot, at another Massive anti Vietnam war march in D.C., someone SOMEONE infiltrated, someone showed up and handed out Bad LSD. I'm not proud to say that many demonstrators gleefully accepted a free psychedelic, so naïve were they.
I was not there in D.C. but was someplace with other anti war activists, already feeling growing despair. when we heard about this crowd of peaceful demonstrators doing what people do when they take bad acid; and it
was like a gruesome spirit-killer spread through all of us, a nationwide bad contact trip, like all at once we
all realized this is awful, it was probably
the CIA slipping bad drugs into a crowd, many concluded. What will they do to us next? A lot of
people at that D.C. demonstration were taken away in ambulances and, if I remember
right, there was NO NEWS COVERAGE other than that the demonstration in Washington that day was smaller than
expected and ended early.
The
anti Vietnam war protests pretty much ended after that.
Instead of more marching, we dropped out.
CONTINUED BELOW
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| VVAW June 1967* |
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RELATED POST;
TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 2022
I was a teenage anti Vietnam war activist
Memoir by Kay Ebeling, featuring Nancy Pelosi and the Black Panthers
story cont'd
We
formed the counter culture because as long as the war continued, we could not participate
in anything that had anything to do with the Establishment. We moved to
communes in the country and became self sustaining, or tried to be.
Today lazy historians call us hippies but in truth we never used that word; we were Dropouts taking a passionate patriotic stand because we had become so discouraged and enraged that we could not stop an illegal war with protests. No one in power was listening.
We
started a counter culture that still exists today with organic grocery stores
and local farms and, yeah, even medical marijuana now legal for everyone.
But
it was not demonstrations that stopped the war.
It took USA LOSING HORRIBLY, military blunders fed by hubris, and the truth finally being reported in the Pentagon Papers etcetera that the war was illegal after all, to finally get USA out of Vietnam.
USA left Vietnam in shame.
The dropouts were right.
I hope this generation today has better results and is able to Find Something more effective than marching in the streets while illegal government acts go unabated. Although a new version of the counter culture dropouts might be really good for all of us today.
No. Too many people never dropped back in...
Meanwhile,
I think we should start a campaign to make everyone who watches Fox News feel
foolish for doing so. Or something.
Marches ain't enough. I doubt there are a lot of people like me who were there
in person in the sixties to relay personal stories like this.
You
can see the photos of those sixties antiwar demonstrations in history books and
Google Images. But there's no evidence that our efforts helped end the war. Sorry
to say. At age 77, I can write a looooooong list of things about the United
States that I wish were true but they aren’t, especially today.
777
From the LA Times Archives: 1967 antiwar protest turns violent
By Scott Harrison
June 22, 2017 1 AM PT·
On June 23, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson
arrived at Century City to deliver a speech at a Democratic Party fundraiser.
Ten thousand anti-Vietnam War protesters also arrived.
In a June 23, 1997, Los Angeles Times article, staff writer
Kenneth Reich reported:
The war at home over Vietnam had yet to
explode in mid-1967. Five hundred American soldiers were dying every month, yet
40% of Americans still supported sending more men.
So 30 years ago tonight, when a
coalition of 80 antiwar groups staged a march to the Century Plaza Hotel where
President Lyndon B. Johnson was being honored, Los Angeles Police Department
field commander John A. McAllister expected 1,000 or 2,000 protesters.
“When the mass of humanity came up
Avenue of the Stars and over the hill, I was astounded,” he recalled. “Where
did all those people come from? I asked myself.
Ten thousand marchers, by most
estimates, were assembling across the street from the Century City hotel.
Hundreds of nightstick-wielding police — using a parade permit and court order
that restricted the marchers from stopping to demonstrate — forcibly dispersed
them.
The bloody, panicked clash that ensued
left an indelible mark on politics, protests and police relations. It marked a
turning point for Los Angeles, a city not known for drawing demonstrators to
marches in sizable numbers.
The significance of the evening lay not
simply in the 51 people who were arrested and the scores injured when 500 of
the 1,300 police on the scene pushed the demonstrators into, and then beyond, a
vacant lot that is now the site of the ABC Entertainment Center.
Far more powerfully, the Century Plaza
confrontation foreshadowed the explosive growth of the national antiwar
movement and its inevitable confrontations with police. It shaped the
movement’s rising militancy, particularly among the sizable number of
middle-class protesters who expected to do nothing more than chant against
Johnson outside the $1,000-a-plate Democratic Party fundraising dinner and were
outraged by the LAPD’s hard-line tactics.
KEEP READING
Wikipedia
The 1967 Century City anti-Vietnam War march, also
known as the 1967 Century City police riot,[1][2] was
an anti-Vietnam War protest march which
took place on June 23, 1967, in the Century City neighborhood of Los Angeles. Beginning with a demonstration against the
war by an estimated 10,000 people, the march was soon halted by a contingent
of Los Angeles Police
(LAPD) officers who began assaulting the protesters,
later claiming that they believed a mob was forming. In the end, 51 arrests
were made and an unknown number of protesters were left injured.
KEEP READING
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Century_City_anti-Vietnam_War_march
777
Yes,
keep reading related post
https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2022/06/encountering-black-panthers-and-nancy.html
Blogged
by kay e blogger
**photo credit Zinn Education Project
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/vietnam-veterans-war/
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