On May 3, 2016, four students from San Francisco State University, at a noon rally on Malcolm X Plaza near the Caesar Chavez Student Center, announced a hunger strike to protest planned budget cuts to the College of Ethnic Studies. The College’s budget for the current year was $5 million, although one student “demanded” an $8 million allotment, but then offered, “Let’s say we don’t get the $8 million. Having the community support us is an act of revolution.”
The bright ambiguity of that conditional claim should not diminish the sincerity of the student’s commitment, but one could be forgiven for pairing hunger strikes in one’s mind with protesting deleterious prison conditions, human rights abuses, or British rule, rather than adding two Africana Studies professors, creating a Pacific Islander studies program, and hopefully requiring all students to take an ethnic studies class to graduate. Limiting nutritional intake to chicken broth and coconut water, the four students, all minoring in Race and Resistance Studies, christened themselves Third World Liberation Front 2016, commemorating the sit-in strikes and campus shutdown of 1968 by the Black Student Union/Third World Liberation Front which inaugurated the country’s first college program devoted to Ethnic Studies.
On May 11th, the strike was called off, negotiations spanning from early morning to late afternoon resulting in an agreement reached between the hungry students, faculty, and administration to implement some of the ten “demands” pared down from twenty-six, and an additional $482,806 found, or reallocated, to keep the College of Ethnic Studies afloat, if not thriving. No word on how the $482,806 suddenly appeared. The four protesters will return to a much quieter campus than their predecessors of 1968 endured, whose strike lasted 115 days, and included broken windows, trashing of the Gator newspaper office and roughing up an editor, and threatening to shut down the university…which in turn was met with tear gas, police on horseback charging protesters, and university President S.I. Hayakawa donning tam’o shanter ripping the cords out from the strikers’ PA system.
A photograph of the strikers shows the four students sitting on lawn chairs under blankets, clutching coconut water, a strike leader reading a statement into a bullhorn and wearing a Palestinian kaffiyeh over his head tucked under a San Francisco Giants cap, while all around supporters gather, raising the iconic closed-fist the Black Panther Party made historical in those less than halcyon days.
I remember raising that closed fist. In 1991 students marched from the San Francisco State campus one afternoon to protest the US invasion of Iraq, blocking traffic en route to an Army recruiting center in the West Portal neighborhood to shut it down. The recruitment staff had wisely evacuated before we’d arrived, though this didn’t deter speeches from a bullhorn to the gathered audience primarily of those who’d marched. I held that raised closed-fist until my armed wearied and the gesture was drained of power, too embarrassed to lower my arm and dampen my commitment in the eyes of others.
College campuses, easily enough, engender rebellion. The most remarkable memory I have of passionate intensity at San Francisco State in 1991 during the first of two whirlwind Gulf Wars, of marches and speeches and demands and sit-ins, remains how similar it all seemed to the protests of 1968, as chronicled by Joan Didion in her collection of essays, “The White Album.” Didion had missed the campus upheavals at Berkeley and Columbia of the same year, and wanted to survey a “campus in disorder.” Campus shutdown proceedings at San Francisco State then were spurred by the suspension of an instructor who also served as Minister of Education for the Black Panther Party. Black militants and striking white radicals—radically enfranchised as urban guerrillas “on an investment of virtually nothing”—wandered through Administration buildings and strategized with sympathetic deans. Demands were published. Press conferences held. Hand votes taken and retaken. But to Didion, “the place never seemed serious.” Indeed, it more closely resembled “a musical comedy about college life.”
All rings a plaintive bell. Having admired Didion’s essays many years before the 1991 protests, I remember thinking I’d photocopy the relevant section of the much longer title work, and tack it to the rickety campus bulletin board constructed by the Notorious 40 as someone affectionately if not dismissively named them. This lively bunch were the core progressive students you could count on to show up to your march, sit in at your protest, and undersign your demands. They would block traffic. Demonize police. Sling epithets at Authority. Hurl demands down from an imaginary Masada of leverage. I looked around and wondered at how little things changed since Didion penned her sardonic review.
I was glad to attend college in a liberal city rich with diversity both ethnic and artistic, with vocal, thriving bands of political progressives, with culinary choices ranging from dire vegan to Rabelaisian, with time in the year to read Chomsky and Parenti. I never thumbtacked a Frida Kahlo poster on a prominent wall in my incense-tinged apartment, but swept clean my heart’s inglenook, stoking angry fires honoring beleaguered indigenous peoples. I named my cats Sandino and Che, then dutifully attended activist meetings on windy evenings. During that time I nurtured a vigorous contempt for brethren, family, and citizenry, the concern abroad turning spite at home. From my backyard growing up in Sacramento I used to longingly gaze west on the glorious, beckoning sunsets splashing across wide valley skies. I had outgrown the suburbs, and believed life was elsewhere.
Choosing to attend San Francisco State University for graduate school was unabashedly romantic and irrational. Through an eccentric Philosophy instructor at Sacramento State University I discovered the writings of Indian mystic Krishnamurti. Reading him fired my intellect. Of uncompromising integrity, he seemed to radiate wisdom from that misty Eldorado we mildly disaffected longed for: Enlightenment. As a student of Philosophy, I delighted in his writings, none more so than a large compendium of his lectures and dialogues called The Awakening of Intelligence. Two dialogues between Krishnamurti and one Jacob Needleman, recorded in Malibu, California, 1971, drew me in further. Needleman had then been a professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State and author of The New Religions, Lost Christianity, The Heart of Philosophy, among others. This guy had actually seen and spoken with this sage in the flesh and blood. Was Needleman still alive? He was, and still teaching only 99 miles away from Sacramento at the fog-enshrined campus near the shores of Lake Merced. I dreamed that after a productive, lively seminar Needleman and I would walk along a garden path in soft twilight, hands folded behind our backs, heads bent thoughtfully, while eucalyptus solemnly whispered and swayed. It never happened, although I took many seminars with him.
The awakening of my intelligence, however, coincided with youthful steps into minor political activism on the San Francisco State campus. In early 1991 the San Francisco State campus found itself fortunate enough to experience the riveting attention that only the United States invading another developing country could garner. I wanted to help the spark catch the wind. Krishnamurti was kicked aside.
***
August 2, 1990 Iraq invades and threatens to annex Kuwait. The US and allies invade to defend (we were always reminded) the non-democratically elected monarchy of Kuwait and reestablish its royal sovereignty to keep the oil flowing into Western friendly pipelines and ports and ships docking in Gulf of Arabia waters. As the US was the stronger, its only strategy across the world’s teeming political/economic savannah remained feeding on the weaker. Injustices committed by actors in the United States, singularly embodied in the fevered imagination as Imperialism, or Capitalist Power, didn’t play out then retire like an aged pirate on a veranda in Mar-A-Lago, but instead built on one another, accumulating across centuries from Manila harbor to the Persian Gulf, feeding a monster ever stronger after each gorging. It was against this dramatic backdrop that students at San Francisco State and other campuses, their time come, prepared for the long struggle. Adjacent to the campus bulletin board, and vital to the Gulf War protest that sunny spring of 1991, were the shanties, roughly designed, brightly painted, and hastily constructed square shelters inspired by the UC Berkeley’s protesting South Africa’s Apartheid in the 1980s, and the corollary demand of UC portfolio divestment. That protest, of course, constructed its shanties to highlight the wrenching poverty of South Africa’s majority disenfranchised black population. So already the Notorious 40 were building on a borrowed symbol. Seemingly overnight plywood sheets were hauled, 2x4s shouldered, hammers and nails liberated, and an eyesore was erected on a meandering sweep of lawn between two walkways connecting the classrooms with Malcolm X plaza and yet-to-be-christened Caesar Chavez Student Center (the Student Center’s multi-leveled and honeycombed design, the story goes, was chosen purposely by the nebulous State Powers to thwart the possibility of any large central gathering of the masses, compartmentalizing and therefore isolating into diffused pockets any sparks of protest). A free speech stage was set up for anyone at any time to stand and speak at “shantytown”. The grittiest committed protesters spent the night in sleeping bags in the many of whom were studying political science or ethnic studies or both. Angela Davis was rumored to have stayed a night in solidarity. One evening I brought an apple box filled with various fruits and nut “borrowed” from the produce market on Geary where I worked. A youth with an unblemished face selected a banana and asked “Are you from Food Not Bombs?”
I remember, too, walking through campus in fading sunlight posting on doors, in hallways, on gray-green lampposts handmade flyers publicizing an evening talk given by a visitor from El Salvador, reporting from the front lines of the US supported oppression in his country. A quiet young man, soft spoken and courteous, he seemed grateful for the chance to share his stories even only to the organizers gathered there in an open classroom, and a few bored passersby. All those flyers, all those warm chemical smells wafting from the copy machine. The flurry of serious activity that afternoon was captured in memory: a young activist—with whom, enamored, I shared flyer posting—racing up a leaf strewn pathway, papers clutched in one hand, and with the other impatiently brushing her long windblown dark hair from her weary, pretty face.
A journalist visiting from Germany asked me one clear blue morning about the shanties, their endgame. I must have offered a vague and lively strategy of a single candle alighting a bonfire across the land, then apologized for his arriving at “a fascist state.” He smiled, but only to be polite. “If this was a fascist state,” he said, waving his arm over the shanties and across the plaza, “none of this would be here.”
One warm evening a few of us were gathered on the dark and quiet campus, shanty walls flickering in candlelight. Suddenly we were pelted with eggs and exploding M-80s. We rushed out and glimpsed two or three assailants running into the shadows between the student union and Psychology buildings, and gave chase. I heard the mocking voice of one comrade: “I’m going to catch you, you know I am!” as he closed in. A few moments later two Heroes of the Revolution strongly escorted an anxious young man, who turned out to be a pledge from a fraternity, into the candlelit shanty for interrogation. One of the heroes, a combat veteran from South Africa’s uMkhonto we Sizwe, the African National Congress’s armed wing, conferred with others within earshot of the pledge, “Let us break his wrist. It is quite painful. He will surely tell us which fraternity he is with!” Surprisingly, the young man sat. When he tried to offer unbidden testimony, an enraged comrade yelled “No, you sit there and shut your mouth!” This elicited admonitions by the gathered women for the hothead to leave, assuring their good cop to the hothead’s bad cop will elicit information. The peacemakers proceeded, then, to circle round this wary anti-protester and offer calming introductions, emerging later with name, address, phone number, fraternity affiliation. The contrite pledge also named names of other fraternity brothers organizing the shanty raid.
I remember falling in love with one of the good cops, an activist majoring glumly in film. Karla was warm and intelligent, at home in an activist milieu, but her luminous hawk eyes kept me off balance. I’d hoped for more than long conversations beneath the library windows, but it never developed past a fully-clothed snuggle one evening, only a brief touch of her skin beneath her shirt, and she eating cold leftover pasta for breakfast.
Some months later, the State Police came to the apartment of a shanty comrade, kicked in his apartment door, and arrested him on charges of incitement to riot, disorderly conduct, illegal assembly, failure to disperse, and assault on a police officer with the intent of doing grievous bodily harm. The last charge stemmed from throwing one of the police barricades surrounding the shantytown at a patrol car. In jail, he showed his arrest sheet to one his cellmates who had approached him threateningly. The man read the sheet, then announced to the others, “Damn, homeboy! You crazy! What you go and try to kill a police officer for? Are you out of your fucking mind?” The comrade replied he was, and was left alone.
Didion surmised that perhaps novelist Evelyn Waugh possessed the eye to capture the portrait: “Waugh was good at scenes of industrious self-delusion, scenes of people absorbed in odd games.” Blocking traffic on the Bay Bridge or I-80 in Berkeley, screaming at portly police officers standing by in riot gear, marching around and around, chanting ditties and slogans, scattering from rushing police in the Mission District where protests peter out, then regrouping in pairs and threes and pretending to heed the feeble call of returning to the Federal Building and tearing it apart brick by brick, but instead calling it a night and grabbing victory beers at Toronado or Mad Dog in the Fog: what were these rowdy exertions but games of limited impact?
***
A protest march in an economically thriving urban metropolis like San Francisco is powered by the conceit that the world is watching, that trailblazers will galvanize. Shutting down or disrupting the everyday flow of public life was required to jar the repressed masses from their slumber and then…. If our demands were ignored, the machinery—Mario Savio’s coinage during Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement—will be prevented from operating, and then…. It was never entirely clear, beyond the inspiring metaphors, what the activism would accomplish, how life would be different from the sunny freedoms California grew in abundance like wine grapes. An easy irony: the more widely offered opportunities for political freedom to speak, write, and gather is inversely proportional to how vociferous the voices arose in protest. Speak truth to power, even if your voice shakes, was a popular bumper sticker in those years, calling to mind a determined, trembling figure with pursed mouth and a winter pallor standing before a shadowed tribunal of sneering men. Notice: language tends toward zealous abstraction, “Corporate Power” (even more unhelpful, Chomsky’s “Masters of Mankind”), when nothing and no one is stopping you from saying, writing, or doing whatever you want. That the masses hear the wake-up call, and choose not to foment a revolution but reserve a three-day getaway at the beach, simply means the masses are investing in what is possible given their own struggles. They don’t need reminding to support the local: the local’s all they really know. But I noted a further pathos in the tacit longing for that hallowed time of the great struggles, sufferings, and victories in the heady 1960s. They had their day. Ours was now. Perhaps you glimpse the sorcery: history doesn’t inspire, but charms.
***
The media source most trusted on the San Francisco State campus during the Gulf War protests of the early 90s was listener-sponsored Pacifica Radio station KPFA, the Bay Area’s progressive platform. Shortly after Operation Desert Storm’s warplanes strafed Iraq, KPFA allowed an “unprecedented” suspension of their regularly scheduled programming for a live performance of a singer-songwriter delivering an original protest anthem. The mics were on location, the transmission windy and trembling in the moment. The songwriter imagined the song inspiring kindergartners in the coming years to raise their voices and sing out. That he dreamed the song wearing legs long enough to reach a distant elementary classroom of pre-political tots, or even lodge in listeners’ ears beyond that afternoon, revealed a cherished if unspoken assumption that this generation’s time for the long struggle had arrived. A quagmire glimmered on the horizon like a mirage of water on hot asphalt. You glimpsed the hope in the giddy assurance that when the body bags start lining up on the tarmac, public opinion will turn against the US aggression in the Middle East. Often only the rueful chant: “When the body bags come home…” But of course the dramatic rising body bag death count fizzled at a mere 148, and these unfortunates were, predictably, not given the hoped for mainstream media coverage. Why focus on the negative? The war last a mere seven months, hardly a slog. The protest “movement” never had a chance to hit its stride. Eventually the Gulf War shanties too were disassembled, having served their vague purpose, and because many walls had become colorfully painted murals, word had it the pieces would be stored safely somewhere on campus to preserve and archive the historical moment. As I personally did no building, I volunteered to help break it down. Sometime later, in the gray afternoon light of a forgotten strategy meeting, a Notorious 40 member with a clenched teeth smile claimed someone spied me that Saturday morning helping the Authorities take away the shanties. What, he wondered accusingly, was I doing there?
Informants! So goes the revolution. Sniffing out the tiniest heresies brightens the dullest play in a dimly lit theater.
But the initial months were lively on the Saturday morning streets of San Francisco during that heady time, when the city-sanctioned marchers happily thronged the blockaded routes chanting, waving bright color posters and parting for the dancing puppets vilifying Bush and Cheney, delighting in a shared spirit of progressive political unity under a sparkling blue sky, sunshine flooding this fabled land at America’s end. I walked the streets with my neighbors, free, protected on all sides.
I left one Saturday march and felt my spirit dissolve, envisioning instead a garden to plant and weed. We had gathered at San Francisco’s affluent Marina District to protest a Support the Troops rally. Military vehicles and trailer-hauled missiles paraded by to the delight of the silent majority in attendance. Chanting turned to shouts. A suspected informant in our midst was surrounded and splattered with an egg. A former Marine turned anti-war vet climbed atop a passing Army jeep, its green canvas hood sinking and billowing under his stomping, and was giddily arrested. An entrepreneurial comrade dived into the exultant crowd cheering the lanky vet and offered an upturned hat: this brave, arrested soul would need bail money. We all pitched in, dollar bills flapping in the chilly salty mud breeze. A friend of mine, familiar with political arrests himself, dryly remarked “He’s going to need a lot more than a hatful.” A tug of war began between supporters and a diminutive but wiry Communist (“I’ve devoted my life to overthrowing Capitalism” I’d heard her exclaim), and I still remember the tight snarl on her face as she jerked the banner greedily, rocking a steel barricade lining the route. An elderly woman, uninvolved but passing by the scuffle, got bumped and fell upon the pavement. Frozen tableau: was she with us or against us, this fallen gray-haired woman? Reasonable folks helped her to her feet.
Riot police arrived. I walked home to my small apartment on Van Ness and Green....I remember well….
Traffic is flowing through the clean streets, bumpers and windows reflecting vibrant sunlight spearing the blue. Friends are heading to Ocean Beach. Strangers slyly glance at one another, attracted, hesitant. Servers with knives dust sourdough bread crumbs from tablecloths, scoop tips. BART is on time, MUNI is late. Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” drifts from an apartment window like a sterling silver rainbow. Shoppers flood the crosswalks. It’s somebody’s birthday, and somebody’s not sure the City by the Bay is where she wants to stay, but maybe she’ll stick it out in retail. Pigeons swarm and saunter, pick at crumbs, then spray across the skyline. Lovers give in, and give it one more chance.
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