Reunion of the Radicals
SDS brings back past members to revive group

Philip Rodney Moon

Thirty nine years ago Bert Garskof, the faculty advisor to the MSU chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), was fired for the group’s anti-war activities. On Friday, November 30th, he and the alumni of SDS came back to MSU.

The reunion wasn’t just a regrouping of individuals meant to be nostalgic about the past and fondly remember a favorite teacher. The event was part of a re-convergence campaign that seeks to create an intergenerational movement based on the old SDS.  The emergence occurs as the Iraq war draws comparisons to the Vietnam War and presidential candidates debate their activities during the 1960’s.

The reunion started with an early afternoon protest outside the Marine recruitment office on Grand River Avenue. SDS alumni and members of Students for Economic Justice, Young Democratic Socialists, and Ignite, the SDS chapter on campus, held up protest signs and spoke from the upper level of the commercial building that houses the Marine office.
Odile, a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, spoke about her opposition to U.S. policies in the Middle East.

“As a woman and a nurse we raise the children of this nation and the last thing we want is for those children to go kill other children that women have as a gift to the economy of their nation,” Odile said.

Robert Meola, an SDS alumnus, claimed the Marines were spreading disinformation about the benefits and were working to perpetuate wars.

“But what are the Marines perpetuating?” Meola asked. “Seventy percent of the people oppose the war in Iraq, yet they are all paying for it with their tax money. That is taxation without representation.”

Meola encouraged the protesters to go to the website for Movement for a Democratic Society and sign the group’s Iran Pledge of Resistance to fight attempts by the government to start a war with Iran. The pledge calls for mass non-violent civil disobedience to impede aggression by the United States. Over 400 people have signed the pledge.

The protest broke up early due to cold weather and high wind causing difficulties for the protesters.

The second part of the reunion was a meeting in Kedzie Hall. The meeting featured a panel of speakers from the old SDS. It included SDS first president Alan Haber, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn of SDS and Weatherman/ Weather Underground, and Bert Garskof, the faculty advisor for SDS in the 1960s.

Meola served as the emcee for the evening. He introduced the speakers and thanked several of the student groups for helping set up the event. Members from Detroit SDS and Ignite, the MSU chapter of SDS, spoke briefly about their activities and their hopes for the revival of SDS.

Time was given to remember Jeffery Miller, an MSU SDS activist who was one of the four students killed by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University. Miller is the dead student lying on the ground in the famous picture by John Filo.

SDS Alumni Tom Rice spoke about Miller. He described Miller as unassuming and big in questioning the activities of SDS in order to keep people focused on what they are doing.
“He was the opposite of the true believer. I think if Jeff had a motto… it would be ‘Don’t believe everything you think’.” Rice said.

Alan Haber, the first President of the national SDS organization, spoke about putting together several movements to change the overall system of injustice.

“There won’t be a change unless there is an insurgency in every part that it covers,” Haber said.
Haber said that in order to change the way the world was working, the various parts had to come together by finding the connections between the environmental, human rights, war, and other violations occuring. He encouraged the use of art and other creative endeavors to assist in the change.

“If we put out good art and poetry, we can reflect back what people are thinking themselves,” Haber said.

Following Haber was Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were members of the group Weatherman/Weather Underground, a radical left wing group that placed bombs in several U.S. government buildings. They lived underground for ten years until they turned themselves in 1981. Both are now professors in the Chicago area.

Ayers spoke about the commodification of the 60s and how it was being sold back to people as something it was not.

“No one actually lives their lives in decades,” Ayers said, “In a way nostalgia for the 60s is like a wet blanket on the young people. It’s like something that says ‘Oh, I should have lived in the 60s when the sex was better and the music was terrific and fighting in the streets was just a way of life’. None of it true, all of it fiction.”

Ayers said that in the 1960’s the movement was intergenerational, and that today the same movements are intergenerational.

Ayers said that in the 1960s the students really believed that they were going to change things, and that was necessary for a movement to be effective. He also emphasized that if a movement acts, it must also doubt itself.

“If you are certain about what you do, then you fall into dogmatism,” Ayers said.

Ayers spoke about what he saw as the three great movements of the current time, and how they were separated from each other. He said the anti-war movement was too white, the New Orleans rebuilding movement was too isolated as an African American movement, and that immigration movement was too isolated as a Latino movement. Ayers said the different movements were connected and if the group could find the connections they could work together to fight the injustices.

Bernardine Dohrn spoke about Martin Luther King as the person that threw her into politics and said quoted him as saying “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world is my own country”.  She thought it was true today and that the people were in the heart of the beast. She mentioned several causes for the violence and injustice in the world. She said the merger of empire and capitalism and structural implications of white supremacy were the biggest causes.

“The fight to humanize ourselves while recognizing the humanity of others is a radical idea in the heart of the beast,” Dohrn said.

The last of the speakers was Bert Garskof, a former MSU assistant professor and advisor to the SDS chapter at MSU. He was fired in 1969 for his part in the anti-war movement, and his firing led to students nominating him for Teacher of the Year.

Garskof said that in 1968 people felt that they were coming upon the end of worldwide capitalism and hoped for the change to socialism. He described the era as one of hope.

“In 1968 we were confront with a worldwide contentious conglomerate of liberational spirit, and I’m speaking sentimentally here, it was grand, it was grand,” Garskof said.

Garskof said that the image of the activists at the time was inaccurate.

“I know the spin. Those silly students, those few reckless faculty members, those mindless, hapless hippies, those pinko un-American leftists, those pacifists, those no-nuke nuts, all blind to our own ridiculousness… Do not believe it,” Garskof said.

Garskof addressed the current students, saying that the activities of the students in the 1960s had given them more freedom than they would have otherwise. He mentioned Denise Ryan, a female student in 1968 who announced she would violate University curfew rules that said women had to be in their dorms by eleven on weeknights and one o’clock on weekends. Ryan was put on a student trial and the rule was revoked.

“Students don’t have hours,” Garskof said. “The freedoms you have in your own personal lives come directly out of the struggles like those of Denise Ryan and hundreds of others. That was a victory.”