Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ memoir, Cell 2455, Death Row which was made into a 1955 film. Although he protested his innocence to the last breath, the real issue in the case became the barbarous nature of the death penalty itself. After losing a last appeal in 1959, Chessman was supposed to die the following February, but Governor Brown, stalked by young protestors (including his own seminarian son Jerry) and inundated with clemency appeals from around the world, blinked at the last moment and stayed the execution for two months. This only unleashed fury from the Right as Republican legislators, seeing an opportunity to revenge themselves for their epic defeat in 1958, called for the governor’s impeachment. Brown, worried about collateral damage to his proposed Master Plan for the colleges and upcoming State Water System bonds, punted the issue to the legislature in the form of a bill to abolish the death penalty. He knew it had no chance of passage.

      The Chessman protests in February coincided with the Southern sit-ins, while the execution in March was followed within two weeks by the so-called “HUAC riots” in San Francisco, when police used batons and fire hoses to violently disperse Berkeley students (including Albert Einstein’s granddaughter) peacefully demonstrating against hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Meanwhile, the Cuban Revolution was turning leftward (in March President Eisenhower had given permission to start training exiles for an invasion), and the international “Ban the bomb” movement was burgeoning (over Easter 100,000 Britons rallied in support of the Aldermaston peace march). Together these events catalyzed the birth of a new student activism on California campuses, with Berkeley, of course, as the nominal capital.³²

      In Southern California the foremost example was LA City College, where a spontaneous anti–death penalty rally in the winter, the first protest on campus in twelve years, led to the formation of a multi-issue activist group, the Independent Student Union.³³ While continuing to work on the Chessman case, the LACC students quickly joined the CORE-coordinated demonstrations at local Kress and Woolworth’s stores, and by August they were sponsoring three weekly picket lines. On May 7, after extensive leafleting to unions and on campuses across L.A., the ISU led a nine-hour-long “Ban the bomb” march of 300 people from MacArthur Park to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium—a distance of seventeen miles—where Nobel laureate Linus Pauling spoke. (The public that spring was skittish about the Bomb. Two weeks after the march, a Los Angeles company announced that it had stopped selling trampolines [a recent fad] and was moving instead into the more lucrative market for fallout shelters.) Meanwhile a rally of 300 sit-in supporters at Exposition Park in late May led to the formation of the Southern California Committee on Integration, with Walter Davis, who was organizing an ISU group at Cal State LA, as one of the leaders. In late October, still picketing the retails chains every Saturday, the LACC group mobilized 200 protestors outside a tribute dinner for a local member of HUAC.³⁴

      This was an impressive record of protest, especially for students on a junior college campus at the end of the 1950s. But LACC was an ethnic salad bowl of inner-city students, and, despite a reactionary administration, perhaps the most likely campus for the inauguration of a new generation of protest. A nearby coffeehouse, Pogo’s Swamp, provided a home for freewheeling political debate under the gentle eye of its manager, Levi Kingston, an LA native (from the Pueblo del Rio projects) who had seen the world as a merchant seaman. The ISU, unlike later student groups, was solidly multiracial, and two of its most charismatic leaders, both South Central locals, had recently joined the Communist Party: Carl Bloice, the speaker at the first Chessman rally, and Franklin Alexander, the ISU president. Bloice would soon move to the Bay Area and eventually become the editor of the Peoples’ World, while Alexander, after the 1965 Watts Rebellion, would become a leader of the Che-Lumumba Club (joined by Angela Davis in 1968). Other ISUers, if not party members, had heroic red diapers. Paul Rosenstein, a key figure in the LA Peace and Freedom Party in 1967–68 and much later mayor of Santa Monica, was the son of a renowned International Brigader. Likewise, Ellen Kleinman (Broms), soon to be a Freedom Rider, was the daughter of the last American prisoner released from Franco’s prisons.

      Two leaders of the future Black Power movement were also habitués of Pogo’s Swamp. Ron Everett, whom Ellen Kleinman remembers whistling Beethoven’s Ninth on picket lines, was vice president of the LACC student body (the next year he would become its first Black president) and a spellbinding orator. Intensely interested in African languages and cultures, he went on to UCLA, and then, as Malauna Ron Karenga, founded the controversial US organization. His roommate, Ed Bullins, became a celebrated avant-garde playwright and a central figure in the Black Arts Movement. (He also served a stint as minister of culture in the Black Panther Party.) However short lived, the ISU was both a stepping-stone to the civil rights battles of 1961–63 and a sign that the anti-communist ice age was beginning to thaw on campuses.

      June: Fire Rings

      A specter haunted Los Angeles in the summer of 1960: beach fire rings. Captain Robert Richards of the Venice Division of the LAPD warned the press that the five rings at Playa Del Rey Beach would “sooner or later” be the scene of a riot. He cited instances of unsupervised teenagers gathered around beach fires, drinking and necking. When told to leave, he reported, “they become angry and vandalize property.” The county had already taken action against such anarchy by closing its beaches at night. Surf fishermen protested, and sheriffs replied that they would only enforce the law against “loiterers,” that is to say, juveniles and young adults.³⁵ Los Angeles, it seemed, had too many beaches, too many deserted roads, too many spaces where young libidos and imaginations ran wild. Black and Chicano kids, of course, were used to being denied access to public space, but white teenagers were now seen as a comparable problem, not as individual, alienated delinquents like those depicted in Rebel without a Cause, but as rowdy crowds and defiant mobs.

      Captain Richards’s warning seemed prescient when in August 3,000 young people in San Diego, angry at the closure of the only local drag strip, blocked off a main street to race their ’40 Fords and ’57 Chevys. The arriving police were greeted with a hail of soft drink bottles and rocks; it took baton charges, tear gas, and Highway Patrol reinforcements to finally quell the hot-rodders. One hundred sixteen were arrested. The city’s ultra-conservative daily paper immediately discerned “a family relationship” between the riot, the Southern sitins, and the supposed targeting of youth by Communists. According to one syndicated columnist, the Reds were also encouraging kids to organize “sex clubs” on their high school campuses. Los Angeles meanwhile braced for its turn, and in 1961 ten so-called “teen riots” erupted in a six-month period, three of them involving thousands of youth. These were not trivial events. The subsequent political activism and youth culture of the sixties would be built upon this substratum of rebellion against curfews, closed beaches, disciplinary vice principals, draft boards and racist cops. Indeed, spontaneous anti-authoritarianism would define the temper of an entire generation.

      July: The Democrats Come to Town

      The 1960 Democratic National Convention at the new LA Memorial Sports Arena is best remembered for the dramatic battle between Kennedy and Johnson for the nomination, both of whom were almost upstaged by an emotional last-minute rally for Adlai Stevenson. But it was also the occasion of a bitter breach between Jesse Unruh, who had already endorsed JFK, and Governor Pat Brown, who was running as a favorite-son candidate.³⁶ (Henceforth, every California Democrat had to choose which camp they belonged to: Unruh or Brown.) It was also a unique opportunity for the nuclear disarmament and civil rights movements to strut their stuff on television and, for the latter, to directly confront the candidates about their plans to dismantle segregation.

      On July 10, the day before the opening of the Convention, 3,000 supporters of a nuclear test ban marched from MacArthur Park to Exposition Park, to hear Nobelist Linus Pauling, fresh from an interrogation by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and General Hugh Hester. Hester had won a Silver Star in the First World War and was a quartermaster to MacArthur in the Second, but the nuclear arms race, he told the crowd, had turned him into an “atomic pacifist.” The sponsoring groups included the American Friends Service Committee, which later during the Vietnam War would play an inestimable role in supporting conscientious СКАЧАТЬ