The Port Huron Project

Mark Tribe
was a series of reenactments of
Vietnam-era protest
speeches.

The Port Huron Project

Mark Tribe, an interdisciplinary artist,
staged public reenactments of speeches
by six New Left leaders:
Angela Davis, Cesar Chavez, Reenactments of New Left
Stokely Carmichael, Protest Speeches
Paul Potter, Howard Zinn
and Coretta Scott King.
This book features
transcripts
of the speeches,
photographs of the reenactments
and archival photographs
of the original speakers.

Texts by Mark Tribe,

Nato Thompson, Rebecca Schneider
72 pages
20 illustrations including 14 in color
 Mark
tribe
Reenactments
Essays by
Rebecca Schneider
and

of New Left
Nato Thompson

Protest Speeches
 9 Introduction
Mark Tribe

19 Yesterday’s Future
Nato Thompson

25 Protest Now and Again

Rebecca Schneider

31 Let Another World Be Born:

Stokely Carmichael 1967/2008

37 We Are Also Responsible:

Cesar Chavez 1971/2008

41 The Liberation Of Our People:

Angela Davis 1969/2008

49 Until The Last Gun Is Silent:

Coretta Scott King 1968/2006

55 We Must Name The System:

Paul Potter 1965/2007

63 The Problem Is Civil Obedience:

Howard Zinn 1971/2007

69 Biography
 mark tribe
Introduction
When I started teaching at Brown University in
2005, I was surprised by how little anti-war pro-
test there was on campus. Brown has a long his-
tory of student activism: the eruptions of 1968
culminated in Brown’s adoption of a progressive
new curriculum drafted by students, and in 1985,
students erected shanties and staged hunger
strikes to protest the university’s investments in
companies doing business in South Africa.
It was clear that my students objected to
American involvement in Iraq and the Bush
administration’s disregard for civil liberties, but
they seemed to believe that resistance was futile.
It is not hard to imagine why. In 2000, they wit-
nessed a presidential election that many believed
had been stolen. In 2003, many students partici-
pated in the largest anti-war protests in history
(the BBC estimated that six to ten million people
in sixty countries protested the imminent inva-
sion of Iraq on February 15 and 16 of that year),
but the Bush and Blair administrations were
7
undeterred. In 2004, many students worked on
John Kerry’s presidential campaign, only to see
George W. Bush reelected by a narrow margin
amid accusations of voting fraud. Their forma-
tive political experiences had left them demoti-
vated, if not cynical.
The absence of contemporary youth-led
protest movements is often attributed to the lack
of a military draft, to greater economic uncertain-
ty or to the rise of the Internet as an alternative to
face-to-face interaction. But it seems to me that this
absence is symptomatic of larger political, cultur-
al and intellectual dynamics as well. Slavoj Žižek
argues that “Things look bad for great Causes
today, in a ‘postmodern’ era when, although the
ideological scene is fragmented into a panoply of
positions which struggle for hegemony, there is an
underlying consensus: the era of big explanations
is over… in politics too, we should no longer aim
at all-explaining systems and global emancipatory
projects.” (In Defense of Lost Causes, 2008.)

The collapse of the Soviet Union, the
widespread abandonment of socialism in the
face of neoliberalism and the rise of capitalism
in communist Asia have created a situation in
which it has become difficult to sustain sweeping
radical agendas. Revolution seems impossible,
at least for now. All but a very few of us have
abandoned what Alain Badiou calls the “com-
munist hypothesis,” the theory that a “different
collective organization is practicable, one that
will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even
the division of labor… [that] the existence of a
coercive state, separate from civil society, will no
longer appear a necessity: [that] a long process
of reorganization based on a free association of
producers will see it withering away.” (New Left
Review, January 2008.) It appears that we have
Max Bunzel delivering Paul Potter’s 1965 speech, “We Must Name The System,” on the National Mall, Washington, D.C., on July 26, 2007.
Photo by Meghan Boudreau.
8 9
entered an era in which reform and tactical re-
sistance define the horizon of possibility.
Although some students do stage small
protests focused on specific issues like racial
profiling by campus security and divestment
from companies involved in Israel’s occupation
of Palestine, many more are engaged in public
service. If you can’t start a revolution, the logic
goes, change the world by helping one person
at a time. For these students, the “massive so-
cial movement” that SDS President Paul Potter
called for in his 1965 speech “We Must Name
the System” is practically inconceivable. Yet
the legacy of the New Left movements of the
1960s and ’70s continues to inform the ways in
which radical politics is imagined and practiced.
In 2006, students at dozens of campuses around
the country formed a new national organization
named after Students for a Democratic Society,
the radical student group that was founded in
1960 and grew into the largest student activist
movement in U.S. history before dissolving in
1969. The original SDS had fraught relation-
ships with Old Left organizations such as the
League for Industrial Democracy (LID), and
represented a generation that united behind
the saying, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” It is
thus ironic, if not surprising, that the new SDS
looked to their parents’ peers for inspiration.
***
In the Port Huron Project, I sought to engage
the legacy of the New Left by reanimating large-
ly forgotten protest speeches. I wanted to pluck
speeches out of the archives and bring them into
the present without smoothing over the inter-
vening historical transformations. I adopted the
form of historical reenactment in order to pro-
duce what New York Times art critic Ken Johnson,
referring to The Problem is Civil Obedience: Howard
Zinn 1971/2007, called an “odd sense of chron-
ological dislocation… For though the speaker
seemed to be addressing people in the present,
he was, in a theatrical sense, speaking to an in-
visible audience, a crowd with a very different
sense of the moment.” My aim was not to hold
up the New Left as an ideal, but rather to create
situations in which the New Left’s specific politi-
cal positions, as well as its spirit of political ur-
gency and utopian possibility, might be grasped
intellectually, through rhetoric, and aesthetically,
through embodied experience.
I chose the speeches for their historical sig-
nificance and their points of resonance and dis-
sonance with contemporary issues. I was struck
by the ways in which many of the speeches
linked imperialist war with racism and econom-
ic injustice, and by the boldness with which they
called for a radically different future. The first
reenactment, a 1968 speech by Coretta Scott
King in Central Park, New York, took place
in September 2006 and was presented by the
Conflux Festival. In July 2007, I staged reenact-
ments of a 1971 Howard Zinn speech on Boston
Common and a 1965 Paul Potter speech on the
National Mall in Washington, D.C. Later that
year, Creative Time, a New York organization
that supports art in the public realm, agreed to
commission and present the final three reenact-
ments. And in 2008, I received a substantial
grant from the Creative Capital Foundation to
complete the project. That summer, I staged re-
enactments of a 1971 speech by Cesar Chavez
in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, a 1969 speech
by Angela Davis in DeFremery Park, Oakland,
and a 1967 speech by Stokely Carmichael out-
side the United Nations in New York City. The
Los Angeles event was co-presented by LACE
(Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). The
Oakland event was co-presented by the Oak-
land Museum of California.
All six reenactments were staged at the
sites of the original speeches. Obtaining permits
was a complicated and uncertain task—the per-
mit for the Stokely Carmichael reenactment was
not granted until the day before the event. I cast
actors to deliver the speeches to audiences that
included people who came to participate in the
reenactment and passersby. A great deal of ef-
fort went into attracting people to the event: I
worked with Creative Time and local partners
to organize community meetings, post flyers,
send e-mails and engage the media.
The speeches were given in their entirety,
using original texts, transcripts or audio record-
ings. The performers did not attempt to look or
sound like the original speakers; I directed them
to wear their everyday clothes and to deliver the
speeches in their own voices. I made no attempt
to theatricalize the performances or to create
any illusion of returning to the past. My guid-
ing principle was to realize the idea—reenacting
New Left protest speeches at their original loca-
tions—in a straightforward manner without self-
conscious gestures or aesthetic adornments.
***
The Port Huron Project is in part a medita-
tion on the role of media in protest politics. In
1968, protesters outside the Democratic Nation-
al Convention in Chicago chanted “The whole
world in watching,” knowing that their images
would appear hours later on the evening news.
Two years later, Jerry Rubin wrote, “You can’t
be a revolutionary today without a television
set—it’s as important as a gun! Every guerrilla
must know how to use the terrain of the culture
that he is trying to destroy!” (Do It!: Scenarios of the
Revolution, 1970.) Today, major newspapers and
television networks ignore most political pro-
tests. Activists can no longer rely on mainstream
media to carry their messages, so they become
media makers themselves, organizing actions
via online social networks, bringing their own
cameras and posting videos online. Although
anyone who wants one can have her own TV
channel, bodies in the street seem to have less of
an impact on the body politic now than they did
before the advent of participatory media. The
Internet has empowered us as individuals and
small groups, but in doing so it may have short-
circuited our ability to organize ourselves as a
collective mass.
To engage this dynamic, I assembled a
conspicuous crew of photographers, video cam-
era operators, sound recordists and production
assistants to document the events, turning the
reenactments into small-scale media spectacles.
10
I then distributed the documentation on vari-
ous media sharing sites, screened it on campuses
and in media festivals, and exhibited it in art
spaces. Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher
Knight reflected on this aspect of the project in
his review of We Are Also Responsible: Cesar Chavez
1971/2008:
“It’s the scripted, taped and electronically
distributed nature of these performances that
is distinctive… The Port Huron Project is a kind
of digital samizdat, a technological twist on the
distribution of political leaflets that is as Ameri-
can as Tom Paine and as revolutionary as farm-
ers and small-businessmen toppling the com-
bined power of George III and the East India
Co. […] Activism seemed futile when, despite
the hundreds of thousands of people flooding
into city streets around the world in protest be-
fore the invasion of Iraq, the ill-fated war went
on. Yet there’s a difference between old models
based on mass culture, which had their zenith
in the 1960s era of these original speeches, and
the new ‘niche culture’ of our high-tech pres-
ent. Mass culture is effectively over. The possi-
bility for closing the contemporary gap between
activism and the individual is underway in the
netroots—activist blogs and other online com-
munities, including artistic ones.”
The Port Huron Project installation in “De-
mocracy in America,” an exhibition and event
series organized by Creative Time curator Nato
Thompson at the Park Avenue Armory in New
York City, explored the role of the body in pro-
test, and its relation to the media, using surround
sound and two synchronized video projections
to reproduce the reenactments as an immersive
environment. Each screen corresponded to a
stationary camera at the performance, display-
ing a single unedited shot. Matching angles
of projection and speaker locations to camera
angles and microphone placements produced a
spatial correlation between the installation and
the event site. This effect reproduced in techno-
logical form the performative mediation inher-
ent in reenactment as a cultural form, as well
as the historical distance that separated the re-
enactments from the original events. As of this
writing, similar installations have been exhibited
at the Aspen Art Museum and at LACE.
In September 2008, videos of the Cesar
Chavez and Angela Davis performances were
shown on a large video screen in Times Square,
New York City, as part of a public program or-
ganized by Creative Time. For this screening, I
made short videos using only close-ups of the
performers, and, because there was no sound, I
added closed captions, cable news-style graphics
and a text crawl. The following e-mail from a
passerby gives me hope that the Port Huron Project
may not have been entirely in vain: “Yesterday,
I stood on Broadway trying to figure out what
was going on. First the intense expressions on
the giant close-up attracted my attention. Then
the words: clearly aggressive politics and from
another time. Yet the image was brand new and
in HD quality. Could someone really be saying
this somewhere in the U.S.A. today?”
***
The Port Huron Project videos are available online
at www.marktribe.net
11
The Port Huron Project screening organized by Creative Time in Times Square, New York City, September 2008.
Photo by Sam Horine.

12 13
 NATO THOMPSON
Yesterday’s Future
Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project reenacted speech-
es from the anti–Vietnam War movement of
the 1960s and ’70s. Crisscrossing the country in
2006, 2007 and 2008, these performative events
transpired under the pall cast by the increasingly
bellicose Bush administration. As much as po-
litical conditions remain historically consistent
from the era of the baby boomers to the present,
even the span of two years had altered the po-
litical landscape. In 2006, Bush’s Iraq war was
unpopular, but by 2008, with elections on the
horizon, all things Bush were political poison.
Creative Time commissioned reenactments
of speeches by Cesar Chavez, Angela Davis and
Stokely Carmichael to accompany a large-scale
exhibition titled “Democracy in America” at New
York City’s Park Avenue Armory. Like the efforts
of Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1834 book of the
same name, the exhibition attempted to take the
political temperature of a country grappling with
democracy. No longer a fresh idea in the repub-
15
lic, democracy remained a contested notion as a
political community grappled with the troubling
question: How did George W. Bush get into of-
fice, not once, but twice?
The Port Huron Project served as a barometer
for contemporary democracy. Re-spoken at the
sites where they were first uttered, the words of
historic New Left figures resonated like echoes
in a time capsule. As it had been in the 1960s,
the country was again caught up in a protracted,
unpopular war. But a protest movement could
hardly be located. Articulate radicals like Angela
Davis, Cesar Chavez and Stokely Carmichael
seemed to have disappeared from public life.
With the country in such political turmoil, what
was it that made protest so unpopular? The anti-
globalization movement of the early twenty-first
century had faded on U.S. soil under the trauma
of 9/11, and the streets went silent.
In the summer of 2008, the legacy of ’68
was the subject of numerous books, films and
editorials. In the midst of these cries to remem-
ber, many activists were asking if the memory
of these figures proved overbearing. In Can’t Stop
Won’t Stop, writer Jeff Chang stipulates that the
children of the baby boomer radicals, the Hip-
Hop Generation, grew up burdened and dis-
gusted by the self-righteousness of their former
Black Panther parents. They might wax nostal-
gic for a time when there was actual activism in
the air, but meanwhile the incarceration rate of
young black males had skyrocketed. Angela Da-
vis, Cesar Chavez and Stokely Carmichael may
have been right that the war abroad was also the
war at home, but this war at home had contin-
ued and escalated for 39 years. The next genera-
tion was broke, banged up and in jail.
Yet Mark Tribe’s project also participated
in a particular genre growing in contemporary
art. Reenactment had become quite a popular
form over the first decade of the twenty-first cen-
tury. In 1999, artist Pierre Huyghe recreated the
film Dog Day Afternoon. In Huyghe’s version, the
starring role originally played by Al Pacino was
taken over by John Wojtowicz, the original bank
robber, who had just been released from jail. In
2001, artist Jeremy Deller reenacted a 1984 con-
frontation between police and picketing miners
in Orgreave, South Yorkshire. Deller’s cast of
800 people included some of the original miners
and police. The artist Omer Fast produced God-
ville (2006), an installation featuring interviews
with living-history character interpreters who
work at Colonial Williamsburg. And in 2002, the
artist Felix Gmelin remade a 1968 film in which
his father ran though the streets of Berlin carry-
ing a red flag. The list could go on; suffice it to
say that reenactment was in the air.
So what is it about reenactment that at-
tracted so much attention and interest? It’s a
peculiar form, often associated with Southern
enthusiasts clad in muslin drawers and cotton
The Port Huron Project installation in “Democracy in America,” organized by Nato Thompson/Creative Time at the Park Avenue Armory, New York City, September 2008.
Photo by Sam Horine.
16
shirts attempting to finally win the American
Civil War. But in the hands of politicized artists,
it has become a vehicle for memory. If the win-
ners write history, then reenactment offers up
an opportunity to unearth the losers’ narrative.
Throughout the 1990s, the art collective Repo-
History used street signs to bring attention to
lost histories of labor, urban renewal and queer
communities. The artist Krzysztof Wodiczko
uses large projections on city monuments to
make overwhelmingly public the historical nar-
ratives of oppressed communities. Within a po-
litical art tradition, one of the driving forces has
long been the power of historic memory. While
Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project is certainly an ex-
ample, it also complicates this narrative.
To understand the zeitgeist of the Bush
era at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it is
important to recall that a decade earlier politi-
cal theorist Francis Fukuyama had argued that
civilization had reached the end of history; the
victory of capitalism over communism signaled
the end point of ideological evolution. Liberal
democracy would inevitably become the univer-
sal form of government, and would henceforth little to no protest movement on U.S. soil. The front of the Natural History Museum of Los
reign unchallenged. Fukuyama’s emphatically aggregate of these conditions certainly motivat- Angeles County. Ricardo Dominguez, himself
counterintuitive declaration begged a look into ed Tribe’s desire to bring back to the stage Paul an artist, addressed an audience of about 300
the material reality of history itself. Potter, Howard Zinn, Coretta Scott King, Cesar spectators: “For the poor it is a terrible irony that
Couple the self-aggrandizing victory of Chavez, Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael. they should rise out of their misery to do battle
capitalism with the hawkish, anti-enlightenment If this was the end of history, maybe looking to against other poor people when the same sacri-
Bush administration, and one gets a sense of the past was a way of finding a more promising fices could be turned against the causes of their
the end not only of history, but of knowledge in future. poverty. But what have we done to demonstrate
general. For many thinking citizens in the Unit- Each reenactment took place at a public another way?” As his sonorous voice rang out
ed States, the Bush administration had brought site with a local partner, a performer, a produc- over the crowd, the war in Iraq raged on, young
embarrassment and a deep reconsideration of tion crew and an audience. In casting the part adults of color battled the people of a foreign
the entire democratic project. The Bush ad- of the speaker, Tribe looked not so much for a land, and migrant workers in the United States
ministration’s record of accomplishments— verisimilitude of appearance as for an ability to continued their battle for recognition and fair
the war in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, rendition enact the urgency of the speech’s political mes- pay.
flights, wiretapping, the response to Hurricane sage. Cesar Chavez’s impromptu speech at a In Oakland, a large audience gathered
Katrina—had crushed all hope that progress 1971 memorial service for Vietnam War dead in DeFremery Park on a beautiful August day
was on the table. On top of all this, there existed was restaged on location in Exposition Park in to hear a speech originally delivered by Angela
17

Davis some 39 years earlier. Families picnicked
among the oaks, community organizers set up
tables and former Black Panthers quietly ob-
served. Tribe stood at the podium, welcomed
the audience and began to direct people to stand
in particular areas for the sake of the cameras.
His instructions made clear that this was to be a
reenactment without illusions—a representation
that would not ask us to suspend disbelief. This
was not living-history as practiced at Colonial
Williamsburg. It was something different. As
the actress Sheilagh Brooks began her speech,
the audience had to grapple with an unresolved
conflict between the immediacy of performance
and the distance of the past. The relevance of
Davis’s historic words returned a sense of urgen-
cy. They mattered. “And what we have to talk
Nato Thompson (running) and crew at We Are Also Responsible: Cesar Chavez 1971/2008, Exposition Park, Los Angeles, on July 19, 2008.
Photo by Jules Rochielle.
18
about now is a united force, which sees the lib-
eration of the Vietnamese people as intricately
linked up with the liberation of black and brown
and exploited white people in this society, and
only this kind of a united front, only this kind of
a united force can be victorious.” The audience
could not help but consider the connections be-
tween the war abroad and the war at home, be-
tween then and now.
Meanwhile, camera crews documenting
the event moved through the crowd, heightening
the sense of artifice. Yet the rhetorical power of
the original speech and the intensity of Brooks’s
performance pushed back, insisting on their re-
alness. What did that leave the audience with?
Eloquence and patient rage punctuated
the analysis of Davis. As her speech dug into
the case of Chairman Bobby Seale, the tenor of black president, or do they remain a deft chal-
her words took on a more revolutionary tone. lenge to the established order? Young soldiers
This wasn’t simply a call for protest; it was a call are still fighting men of color across the world.
for regime change. How soft the contemporary Migrant farm workers are still denied fair pay.
rhetoric had become! The analysis remained And black males are still incarcerated at record
valid, but time had dampened the language of levels. We cannot ignore the prescient warnings
protest and revolution. Racism, capitalism and of the past. While things have certainly changed,
belligerent nationalism continued to demand some things remain poignantly the same.
the countervailing force of public disavowal.
The Port Huron Project gets its name from
The Port Huron Statement, a book-length manifesto
written by the Students for a Democratic Soci-
ety in 1962. A provocative text, its intention was
to articulate an alternative to Old Left thinking
and to challenge the Kennedy administration
and its pro-business cronies. For many, this ex-
traordinarily eloquent document foretold the
movement to come as it called upon middle-
class college students to rise up and challenge
the established order. One cannot help but feel
that Tribe hoped the same could be done with
the Port Huron Project—that the eloquence of the
New Left might again stir the imaginations and
hearts of citizens today.
As of this writing on October 12, 2009,
protests remain small and infrequent in this
country. On the heels of the Bush Administra-
tion came the historic election of Barack Hussein
Obama. Riding on themes of hope and change,
equipped with oratorical skills matching or ex-
ceeding those whose speeches Tribe had selected
to recast, and mobilizing a large cross-section of
the American public, Obama had captured the
exhausted imagination of the United States. His
town hall talks came with frank speech, a calm
analysis of racism and a belief in environmen-
talism. His words brought tears to audiences
across America. And his election had transpired
without a protest movement to be found.
Did the words re-spoken by Tribe’s per-
formers foretell the election of America’s first
19
 REBECCA SCHNEIDER
Protest Now and Again

If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should,
I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when,
even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, and occasionally to win.
I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive
moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
—Howard Zinn (2007: 11-12)

These are queer times indeed.

—Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages (2007: 204)

Thirty-six years after he delivered a speech on
Boston Common to protest the war in Viet-
nam, and in the same year that artist-activist
Mark Tribe staged a reenactment of the protest
speech as part of his Port Huron Project, How-
ard Zinn published a commentary on history
as “creative.” The promise for the future, Zinn
writes in A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, is in
the past’s “fugitive moments.”
Tribe’s Port Huron Project takes the prom-
ise of fugitive time quite literally. Orchestrating
the live reenactment of six protest speeches de-
livered between l965 and l971 by a variety of
anti-war activists, Tribe disperses or circulates
one time (l960s) across or within another time
(2000s), and then further disperses or circulates
that laminated time across multiple media at
multiple and shifting sites. The project includes
live reenactments of speeches, delivered by ac-
tors at original sites, which then become videos,
DVDs, still photographs, billboard displays and
the book in your hands—all of which are the
Project, none of which is a privileged object nor
singular event. Thus the Port Huron Project itself
takes place in multiple times, across multiple
registers, in multiple media. Arguably, the sense
of multiple sites gives a kind of credential twist
to the aspect of multiple or fugitive time that is the
politic of temporal play at the project’s base.
What are fugitive moments? And when
is fugitive time? Could such moments be, per-
haps, past moments on the run in the present?
Moments when the past flashes up now to pres-
ent us with its own alternative futures—futures
we might chose to realize differently? Might
the past’s “fugitive moments” be leaky, synco-
pated and errant moments—moments stitched
through with repetition and manipulated to re-
cur in works of performance, works of ritual,
works of art, works of reenactment that play
with time as malleable material? As malleable
political material? Might the past’s fugitive mo-

21
ments not only remind us of yesterday’s sense
of tomorrow, but compose the sense again and
offer, without expiration date, a politic of pos-
sibility?
As Tribe suggests in his discussion of the
Port Huron Project in this book, how to effectively
protest government and multinational corpo-
rate actions under neoliberal global capital is a
question that has flummoxed the Left across the
Bush era. Tribe’s work adds complexity to the
issue by not only asking how to protest, but by
interrogating the when of protest. And his ap-
proach to “when” is not reductively to say that
now is simply not the right time, but to suggest
that now is material, has duration, and, like a
medium, can be mixed and recombined. Think
of it this way: must protest always only happen
Matthew Floyd Miller delivering Howard Zinn’s 1971 speech on location in Boston Common, Boston, on July 14, 2007.
Photo by Meghan Boudreau.
22
in a “now” considered distinct from prior nows
or future nows? In another of his many spurs to
action, Zinn wrote: “We are not starting from
scratch” (l990: 7). That is, we are not starting
now—or, our “now” is not only now.
Of course, when playing in the cross fire
of time, letting anachronism do its creative work,
things can feel a little uncanny, or dislocated, un-
settling, or queer. The questions that arise can
be mind-boggling: What happens to history if
nothing is ever fully over nor discretely begun?
When does a call to action, cast into the future,
fully take place? Only in the moment of the call?
Or can a call to action be resonant in the varied
and reverberant cross-temporal spaces where an
echo might encounter response—even years and
years later? When does that which has sound-
ed—deferred as an invocation or an appeal, a
plea or a prod for future action now—ultimately
occur? What are the limits of this future? What
are the limits of this now?1
Tribe writes here that “revolution seems
impossible, at least for now.” And so, in The Port
1. In this vein, and in homage to NOW (National Organiza-
tion of Women), we can consider artists such as Mary Kelly
and Sharon Hayes who have recently reenacted precedent
feminist protest actions. Mary Kelly’s WLM Demo Remix is a
ninety-second film loop in which Kelly uses a slow dissolve
to blend a photo of a reenactment of a 1970 “women’s lib-
eration movement” political demonstration in NYC with
the archival photo the first image reenacts. The loop begins
with the later image and slowly dissolves to combine past
and present—with the archival image either superimposed
upon or shining through the photo of the reenactment. In-
terestingly, the present image never completely fades—and
the archival image is never completely clear.
23
Huron Project the artist makes work that touches
another temporal register, bringing an alterna-
tive “now” into play and using seeming anach-
ronism, suggestive deferral and explicit repeti-
tion as political and aesthetic spurs to thought.
His work may be playing fast and loose with
“now”—but listen to the way Angela Davis stud-
ded her 1969 DeFremery Park speech with the
word. “Now” resounds so many times that lis-
tening to it in 2010 makes anachronism less into
an error of happenstance and more into a kind
of tolling bell against the industry—war—that
Davis so eloquently deplores. Now is still now if
we are still, now, waging war.
The site of “now” is, of course, the cel-
ebrated substance of live performance. Live
performance is most often (and some would say
too often) considered to be an ephemeral me-
dium, due to its composition in time, making it
take place only now, and otherwise disappearing.
But Tribe, and many others engaging reenact-
ments, complicate the singularity of “now” and
approach performance by mixing and matching
time, playing across temporal registers through
explicitly and literally re-playing. The re-play is
arguably the property of theater that Gertrude
Stein called its troubling “syncopated time”
(1935: 93)—a trouble many contemporary art-
ists are keen to deploy. The queering of time (to
borrow from twenty-first-century scholars such
as Puar, Pellegrini, Jakobsen, Frecerro, Dinshaw
and Freeman) troubles our heritage of Enlight-
enment (and capitalist) investments in straight-
forward linearity as the only way to mark time—
and points to a politic in veering, revolving or
turning around.
So, to go back for a moment: even if “rev-
olution seems impossible, at least for now,” as
Tribe writes, his own work suggests that it may
nevertheless be possible to revolve. This is the
sense of revolution that the cultural material-
ist Raymond Williams, whose work was widely
read by the New Left in the l960s, brings out
in his influential Keywords where he reminds the
reader not to forget that the word ‘revolution’
stems from simply turning around (1985: 270).
Perhaps this sense of revolution has gained a
certain political viability—at least in art circles.
The sheer numbers of twenty-first-century art-
ists exploring reenactment as medial material, as
a fertile mode of inquiry, as a means of mak-
ing and as a mode of art practice, should be
indicative of a turn toward temporality as mal-
leable substance, capable of intervention and
(re)articulation. In such a turn, in-time events
themselves might be given, like an object, to (re)
touch—causing one to question the promises as
well as the limits in thinking through (and even
24
acting in) cross-temporality. Does cross-tempo-
rality or inter-temporality bear material weight
or pull? Or, using Elizabeth Freeman’s terms, is
there political efficacity in “temporal drag”? 2
I started with the Zinn epigraph, above,
because the Howard Zinn re-speech was the only
one of Tribe’s Port Huron Project reenactments I
attended at the live moment of its performance.
Seeing the reenactment live on Boston Com-
mon, flush (if not packed) with photographers
and videographers as well as passersby, and lis-
tening to the againness of the actor re-intoning
Zinn’s speech, there was no hiding the fact that
this re-event was not about singular moments,
ephemerality or the disappearance of some
unitary performing subject. Rather, the “live-
ness” of the event was itself syncopated with
other times no longer live. The time, then, was
not (only) now. It was past and present, present
and deferred into the future when it would ob-
viously be reencountered screenally. The pres-
ence of technology and the explicit citationality
of re-speech tilted time off of the straight and
narrow—even at moments when it seemed that
“Zinn” might indeed be speaking about “today”
(too). Perhaps particularly in the re-live event,
time was explicitly folded. There was simply no
singular or discreet “nowness” to the action re-
acted, nor was there any invitation to suspend
disbelief and forget that it was, indeed, now—it
2. See Elizabeth Freeman, “Packing History, Count(er)ing
Generations.” New Literary History, 2000, 31: 727–744. The
act of revolving, or turning, or pivoting off of a linear track,
may not be nostalgic, if nostalgia implies a melancholic at-
tachment to loss and an assumed impossibility of return.
Rather, the turn to the past—or a gestic journey through the
past’s possible alternative futures—bears a political purpose
for a critical approach to futurity unhinged from Enlighten-
ment and capitalist investment in time as linear. On the lim-
its of the “American” denigration of nostalgia as compared
with the cross-temporal and visceral promise in the Greek
root, see Nadia Serementakis, The Senses Still (Westview Press,
l994: 4). See Julia Bryan-Wilson on nostalgia in Tribe’s work
in “Sounding the Fury,” Artforum, January 2008.
was 2007 and not 1971. But then, even in l971,
Zinn was not “starting from scratch.”
Listening to the Zinn reenactor, I looked
across the way to other performers and activ-
ists simultaneously using some of the Commons
space nearby. There was a living-sculpture mime
standing rock still in whiteface as if timeless. An-
other man protested the Chinese government’s
treatment of the Falun Gong by displaying pho-
tographs of tortured practitioners. A Christian
fundamentalist read aloud from the Bible beside
a poster advertising salvation and the second
coming. I wondered exactly what was anachro-
nistic in any of these scenes, including the faux
Zinn, and what was not? How was there even
such a thing as anachronism when the citational
or ritual properties of passersby waving hello, or
stopping to listen to “Zinn” for a moment before
tossing a dime to the “Statue of Liberty,” were
as studded with cross-temporal possibilities, ref-
erences and memories as the Zinn reenactment
itself. That the actor Matthew Floyd Miller was
not Zinn himself, that the date was not May l971,
that references to “now” were also “then”—none
of these things could fully dismiss the possibility
of efficacity. That some attendees or passersby
might have shrugged and said, “it’s only an act,”
or that some YouTube viewers might sigh and
think, “too bad the time for action is over, ” or
that some of us who are curious might wonder
at the seeming ability of Tribe to arrive so late to
the scene—these criticisms are only one aspect
to the event’s time-warped theatricality. The flip
side to these important criticisms is an equally
important possibility—one that irrupts only spo-
radically in listening to the re-speeches: the fugi-
tive moments of dis-temporality, of uncanniness,
of error, or of a return to sense that happens
in pauses, or stray sentences, or tiny moments
when the “now” folds and multiplies—even if
only for a fugitive flash.
25
The promise in a flash of fugitive realiza-
tion feels something like: Yes We Can. Yes We Can
protest now. And yes we must protest the limits
of a “now” handily considered by Left Melan-
cholists to be completely subjugated to the terms
of linear time. The time to protest the war in
Afghanistan is not over. The time to protest the
war in Iraq is not over. The time to protest the
war in Vietnam is not over. And as Zinn has
made clear across his life’s work, the time to
protest WWII is not over. Clearly, if sadly, the
time to protest the Crusades is not over. In fact,
the time to protest war and its inevitable ties to
industry, to capital and to the drive to empire is
not, and is never, complete. (My scholarship begins
to sound like a protest speech—as if such speech
might be infectious?) It is Now. It is Again. It is
the necessary vigilance of arguing for Never—
Again. And Again.
Works Cited
Bryan-Wilson, Julia. “Sounding the Fury.”
Artforum. January 2008.
Freeman, Elizabeth. “Packing History and Count(er)ing
Generations.” New Literary History, 2000, 31: 727–744.
Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism
in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007.
Serementakis, Nadia. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory
and Material Culture in Modernity. Westview Press, l994.
Stein, Gertrude. Lectures in America. Random House, 1935.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture
and Society. Oxford University Press, 1985.
Zinn, Howard. Declarations of Independence. Perennial, 1990.
Zinn, Howard. A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.
San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2007
 LET ANOTHER
WORLD
BE BORN
STOKELY CARMICHAEL
1967/2008
B
rothers and Sisters, I am
here today not just as the chairman
of the Student Nonviolent Coordi-
nating Committee, not just as an
advocate of black power, but as a black man—a
human being who joins you in voicing opposition
to the war on the Vietnamese people.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee took a stand against that war in 1965
because it is a brutal and racist war. We took our
stand because we oppose the drafting of young
Afro-Americans to defend a so-called democra-
cy which they do not find at home. We took that
stand because this war forms part and parcel of
an American foreign policy which has repeat-
edly sought to impose the status quo, by force,
on colored peoples struggling for liberation from
tyranny and poverty. Only the white powers of
the West will deny that this is a racist war. When
the colored peoples of the world look at that war,
they see just one thing. For them, the U.S. mil-
Stokely Carmichael speaking at the “Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam,” United Nations Plaza, New York City, on April 15, 1967.
Photo by Bob Adelman/Magnum Photos.
26
Speech delivered by Stokely Carmichael
at the “Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam,”
United Nations Plaza, New York City, on April 15, 1967.
Reenacted on September 7, 2008.
itary in Vietnam represents international white
supremacy.
We black people have struggled against
white supremacy here at home. We therefore un-
derstand the struggle of the Vietnamese against
white supremacy abroad. We black people have
struggled against U.S. aggression in the ghet-
tos of the North and South. We therefore un-
derstand the struggle of the Vietnamese people
against U.S. aggression abroad.
This is why there can be no question of
whether a civil rights organization should in-
volve itself with foreign issues. It must do so, if
it claims to have any relevance to black people
and their day-to-day needs in the United States
of America. It must do so, if it lays any claim
to that humanism which declares: no man is
an island. We therefore fully support Dr. Mar-
tin Luther King’s stand and that of CORE. We
call attention to the fact that Dr. King was once
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It seems that at
27
least in Sweden, the connection between ending
war and ending racism is clear.
Yet there are those who would remind us
that it is tactically unwise to speak out against
the war. It will alienate support. It will damage
our fundraising. We have a question for these ad-
vocates of expediency: in the words of the Bible,
“What would it profit a man to gain the whole
world and lose his own soul?”
It is up to you—the people here
today—to make your fellow citizens
see this other side of America.
We would remind these advocates of ex-
pediency of the Nuremberg trials, which af-
firmed that a man has a responsibility to speak
out against murder and genocide—no matter
what the opinion and standing rule of his coun-
try might be. This nation sent hundreds of Ger-
mans to jail after World War II precisely because
they did not act on their consciences. Where is
the voice of conscience today?
Those who attack us for opposing the
bombing of mothers, the napalming of children,
the wiping out of whole villages, are in fact sup-
porting the war whether they admit it or not. No
neutralism is possible in the face of such acts.
Would those same critics have advocated silence
when Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi?
Would those same critics have urged expediency
when the four young girls were bombed in a Bir-
mingham church?
To these critics, we would quote the words
of Frederick Douglass: “Those who profess to fa-
vor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men
who want crops without plowing up the ground.
They want rain without thunder and lightning.
They want the ocean without the awful roar of
its waters. Power concedes nothing without a de-
mand—it never has and it never will.”
28
We have not only a right to speak out—
we have an obligation. We must be involved, we
must fight racism in all its manifestations. We
must also look truthfully at this land of the free
and home of the brave, and remember that there
is another side to that land—a side better known
to the rest of the world than to most Americans.
There is another America, and it is an ugly one.
It is an America whose basic policy at home and
abroad can only be called genocide.
When we look at the America which
brought slaves here once in ships named Jesus,
we charge genocide. When we look at the Amer-
ica which seized land from Mexico and prac-
tically destroyed the American Indians—we
charge genocide. When we look at all the acts
of racist exploitation which this nation has com-
mitted, whether in the name of manifest destiny
or anti-Communism, we charge genocide.
We must look at the America which de-
plores apartheid in South Africa while our
banks and private business keep the South Afri-
can economy alive and thus maintain the most
brutal legalized system of white oppression to be
found in the world today. It is not merely the
whites in South Africa who suppress the huge
black majority. It is also white Westerners of sev-
eral other nations, including this one. The Unit-
ed States rescued the South African economy
six years ago. Today, almost 200 American com-
panies are there with an investment of half a
billion dollars. An American company helped
South Africa to build its first atomic reactor.
American companies are helping white South
Africa arm to destroy a black revolution.
There is an almost endless list of these other
Americas, but they all add up to the same thing:
this nation was built on genocide and it contin-
ues to wage genocide. It wages genocide in many
forms—military, political, economic and cultur-
al—against the colored peoples of our earth.
Ato Essandoh delivering Stokely Carmichael’s 1967 speech on location outside the United Nations, New York City, on September 7, 2008.
Photo by Meghan Boudreau.
29
This nation has been not only anti-revolutionary
but anti-poor, anti-wretched of the earth.
Most Americans do not wish to look at
these truths. They prefer to claim that we are a
moral people, fighting a holy war against Com-
munism. We claim that we want peace in Viet-
nam. Last December, the American Ambassa-
dor to the United Nations, Arthur Goldberg,
wrote to Secretary General U Thant: “We turn
to you … with the hope and the request that
you will take whatever steps you consider nec-
essary to bring about the necessary discussions
which would lead to a cease-fire.” And U Thant
offered his proposals. The United States ig-
nored them.
Meanwhile, up on the 38th floor of this
building—the United Nations—sits the Hon-
orable Dr. Ralph Bunche, who once marched
against police brutality in Selma, Alabama, and
today condemns those of us who would speak
out against the war.
This nation’s hypocrisy has no limits.
Newspapermen speak of LBJ’s credibility gap;
I call it lying. President Lyndon Baines Johnson
talks of peace while napalming Vietnamese chil-
dren, and I can think of just one thing: he’s talk-
ing trash out of season, without a reason. Let’s
not call it anything but that.
You must raise the question:
why is there a Department of War
and not a Department of Peace?
It is up to you—to the people here today—
to make your fellow citizens see this other side
of America. In your great numbers lies a small
hope. But this mass protest must not end here.
We must move from words to deeds. We must go
back to our communities and organize against
the war. Black people must begin to organize the
30
ghettoes for control by the people and against
exploitation. Exploitation and racism do not ex-
ist only in this nation’s foreign policy, but right
here in the streets of New York.
It is crystal clear to me that white people,
in their turn, must begin to deal with the fun-
damental problems of this country: racism and
exploitation. You must go into the white com-
munity, where racism originates. You must go
into the white community, where the Vietnam
War originated. You must work there, organize
there, strike against the American system at its
base. You must begin to organize in the poor
white community as SDS has done in Chicago.
We urge you to help make the Vietnam Sum-
mer now being planned in Boston into a nation-
wide effort.
You must raise the question: why is there
a Department of War and not a Department of
Peace? You must go into the churches and tell
the churchmen that you heard they followed the
one who wanted to bring good news to the poor.
Tell them that you heard they taught love and
nonviolence. Tell them that you heard they wor-
shipped the one who said: the world belongs to
all peoples. Tell them that you wait for their an-
swer, and that answer must be action.
We must all speak out more strongly
against the draft. Our position on the draft is
very simple: hell no, we ain’t going.
The draft exemplifies as much as racism
the totalitarianism which prevails in this nation
in the disguise of consensus democracy. The
president has conducted war in Vietnam with-
out the consent of Congress or of the American
people—without the consent of anybody ex-
cept maybe Luci, Linda and Ladybird. In fact,
the war itself is for the birds—with the omission
perhaps of George and Pat. The president sends
young men to die without the consent of any-
one. There is nothing new about this. For years,
The draft is white people
sending black people to make war
on yellow people in order
to defend the land they stole
from red people.
we have seen how peacetime conscription has al-
lowed the president to extend this nation’s pow-
er without the consent of its citizens. For years
we have seen the Pox Americana in operation. The
United States invaded one country after another
to suppress social revolution. The United States
has invaded one country after another to start
reactionary revolts where social progress threat-
ened to materialize. The draft takes the enslaved
black youth of this society and uses them to sup-
port enslavement abroad. The draft says that a
black man must spend two years of his life learn-
ing how to kill people of his own color and peo-
ple of his own kind: poor and powerless.
The draft is white people sending black
people to make war on yellow people in order to
defend the land they stole from red people. The
draft must end: not tomorrow, not next week,
but today.
We must also ask the question now heard
in certain circles: is it true, Mr. President, that
there is a planned invasion of North Vietnam?
I ask this question in all seriousness. We recall
that millions of Americans once watched a pres-
ident speak on television and assure us that there
was no planned invasion of Cuba. So is it true,
Lyndon, that there is a planned land invasion of
North Vietnam? Lyndon—we’re listening.
Practical suggestions for ending the war
abound. We will not offer new proposals. The
problem we face is not one of finding a formula.
But if we can admit that this country is indeed
a rapist of the colored peoples on this earth—a
31
rapist, today, of Vietnamese freedom—then let
me just ask this: if you were being raped, would
you call for negotiation or withdrawal?
Brothers and sisters, the future and the is-
sues are yours. We urge that the Spring Mobili-
zation be fully supported so that it may lead to a
summer mobilization and fall mobilization and
on to a great amassing of people who shall speak
out against this war.
It may seem that such opposition has lit-
tle effect on policy. But there is good reason to
believe that the war would have been escalated
even more had it not been for the opposition al-
ready manifested. We must sustain our declara-
tion of war on the Vietnam War, on racism, on
genocide. To everyone whom the Vietnam War
affects, to all the poor and powerless, and partic-
ularly to black youth, let me read these words of
a black poet, Margaret Walker:
For my people standing staring trying
to fashion a better way
from confusion from hypocrisy
and misunderstanding,
trying to fashion a world that
will hold all the people
all the faces all the adams and eves and
their countless generations;
Let a new earth rise. Let another world
be born. Let a second
generation full of courage issue forth, let
a people loving
freedom come to growth,
let a beauty full of healing and a
strength of final clenching be
the pulsing in our spirits
and our blood. Let the martial songs be
written, let the
dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
rise and take control!
 WE ARE
ALSO
RESPONSIBLE
CESAR CHAVEZ
1971/2008
T
hank you for inviting me
to participate in this meeting. It is hard
for me because we in the farm work-
ers movement have been so absorbed
in our own struggle that we have not participated
actively in the battle against the war.
In thinking about the memorial service I keep
thinking about the women in Washington, D.C.,
who participated in the veterans’ protest against the
war. The L.A. Times reported it as follows:
Anna Pine of Trenton, NJ, wanted to dis-
card her dead son Fred’s Air Medal &
Bronze Star and Purple Heart and a half-
dozen other awards for heroism. But she
had already turned away crying when
the first former soldier announced, hands
trembling, “And so we cast away these sym-
bols of dishonor, shame and inhumanity.”
“My son would be here,” Mrs. Pine said.
“He would throw these things away. But
Cesar Chavez speaking at a rally opposing Proposition 22 in September 1972, location unknown.
Photo by Glen Pearcy/Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.
32
Speech delivered by Cesar Chavez
at a Vietnam veterans memorial rally in Exposition Park,
Los Angeles, on May 2, 1971. Reenacted on July 19, 2007.
where do I throw them?” she wondered,
peering through tears about the crowd that
had edged her away from the veterans. An
hour passed, the crowd dispersed, Mrs.
Pine approached the fence. Digging into a
big plastic bag, she grabbed a handful of
medals and threw them against the statue.
I have eight children. It is almost impossible
to imagine the pain of seeing your own child die for
a cause that neither of you believe in—especially
when there are so many needs in the world and so
many specific ways to work for change.
What causes our children to take up guns to
fight their brothers in lands far away?
In our case thousands and thousands of poor,
brown and black farm workers go off to war to kill
other poor farm workers in Southeast Asia. Why
does it happen? Perhaps they are afraid or perhaps
they have come to believe that in order to be fully
men, to gain respect from other men and to have
33
their way in the world, they must take up the gun
and use brute force against other men.
They have had plenty of examples: In Delano
and Salinas and Coachella all the growers carry gun
racks and guns in their trucks. The police all car-
ry guns and use them to get their way. The security
guards (rent-a-cops) carry guns and nightsticks. The
stores sell guns of all shapes and sizes.
It would be easy to put all the blame on the
generals and the police and the growers and the oth-
er bosses. Or on violence in TV or the movies or
war toys.
But we are also responsible. Some husbands
prove to their children that might makes right by the
way they beat on their own wives. Most of us hon-
or violence in one way or another, in sports if not at
home. We insist on our own way, grab for security
and trample on other people in the process.
But we are responsible in another, more ba-
sic way. We have not shown our children how to
sacrifice for justice. Say all that you will about the
army, but in time of crises the army and the navy
demand hard work, discipline and sacrifice. And
so too often our sons go off to war grasping for
their manhood at the end of a gun and trained to
work and to sacrifice for war.
For the poor it is a terrible irony that they
should rise out of their misery to do battle against
other poor people when the same sacrifices could
be turned against the causes of their poverty. But
what have we done to demonstrate another way?
Talk is cheap and our young people know it best
of all. It is the way we organize and use our lives
every day that tells what we believe in.
Farm workers are at last struggling out of
Talk is cheap and our young people
know it best of all. It is the way
we organize and use our lives every
day that tells what we believe in.
34
their poverty and powerlessness. They are saying
no to an agricultural system that has condemned
them to a life of economic slavery.
At the same time they are making a new way
of life for themselves and their children. They are
turning their sacrifices and their suffering into a
powerful campaign for dignity and for justice.
Their nonviolent struggle is not soft or easy. It
requires hard work and discipline more than any-
thing else. It means giving up on economic security.
It requires patience and determination. Farm work-
ers are working to build a nonviolent army trained
and ready to sacrifice in order to change conditions
for all of our brothers in the fields.
Our opponents are at work every day to
crush us or to get us off target or to outmaneu-
ver us with the American public. There is no way
to defeat them unless we also are at work every
day—week after week, month after month, and
year after year if necessary, outlasting the opposi-
tion and defeating them with time if necessary.
That is what it takes to bring change in
America today. Nothing less than organized,
disciplined nonviolent action that goes on every
day will challenge the power of the corporations
and the generals.
The problem is that people have to decide to
do it. Individuals have to decide to give their lives
over to the struggle for specific and meaningful so-
cial change. And as they do that others will join
them, and the young will join too.
If we provide alternatives for our young out
of the way we use the energies and resources of
our own lives, perhaps fewer and fewer of them
will seek their manhood in affluence and war.
Perhaps we can bring the day when children will
learn from their earliest days that being fully man
and fully woman means to give one’s life to the
liberation of the brother who suffers. It is up to
each one of us. It won’t happen unless we decide
to use our own lives to show the way.
Ricardo Dominguez delivering Cesar Chavez’s 1971 speech on location in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, on July 19, 2008.
Photo by Cesar Garcia.
35
 THE LIBERATION
OF OUR PEOPLE
angela davis
1969/2008
Y
eah, I’d just like to say that
I like being called sister much more
than professor, and I’ve continually
said that if my job—if keeping my
job—means that I have to make any compromises
in the liberation struggle in this country, then I’ll
gladly leave my job. This is my position. Now, there
has been a lot of debate in the left sector of the
anti-war movement as to what the orientation of
that movement should be. And I think there are
two main issues at hand. One group of people feels
that the movement, the anti-war movement, ought
to be a single-issue movement: the cessation of the
war in Vietnam. They do not want to relate it to the
other kinds and forms of repression that are taking
place here in this country. There’s another group
of people who say that we have to make those
connections. We have to talk about what’s happen-
ing in Vietnam as being a symptom of something
that’s happening all over the world, of something
that’s happening in this country. And in order for
Angela Davis speaking at a Black Panther rally in DeFremery Park, Oakland, on November 12, 1969.
Photo by Stephen Shames/Polaris Images.
36
Speech Delivered by Angela Davis at a Black Panther rally
in DeFremery Park (AKA Bobby Hutton Park), Oakland,
on November 12, 1969. Reenacted on August 2, 2008.
the anti-war movement to be effective, it has to link
up with the struggle for black and brown liberation
in this country, with the struggle of exploited white
workers. Now, I think we should ask ourselves why
that first group of people want the anti-war move-
ment to be a single-issue movement. Somehow
they feel that it’s necessary to tone down the po-
litical content of that movement in order to attract
as many people as possible. They think that mere
numbers will be enough in order to affect this gov-
ernment’s policy. But I think we have to talk about
the political content. We have to talk about the
necessity to raise the level of consciousness of the
people who are involved in that movement. And
if you analyze the war in Vietnam, first of all it
ought to become obvious that if the United States
government pulled its troops out of Vietnam that
that repression would have to crop up somewhere
else. And in fact, we’re seeing that as this country
is being defeated in Vietnam, more and more acts
of repression are occurring here on the domestic
37

How is the economy going
to stand unless another Vietnam
is created, and who is going
to determine where that Vietnam is
gonna be? It can be abroad,
or it can be right here at home.
scene. And I’d just like to point to the most dra-
matic one in the last couple of weeks, which is the
chaining and gagging of Chairman Bobby Seale
and his sentence to four years for contempt of
court. I think that demonstrates that if the link-up
is not made between what’s happening in Vietnam
and what’s happening here we may very well face
a period of full-blown fascism very soon.
Now, I think there’s something perhaps more
profound that we ought to point to. This whole
economy in this country is a war economy. It’s
based on the fact that more and more and more
weapons are being produced. What happens if
the war in Vietnam ceases? How is the economy
going to stand unless another Vietnam is created,
and who is to determine where that Vietnam is
gonna be? It can be abroad, or it can be right here
at home, and I think it’s becoming evident that that
Vietnam is entering the streets of this country. It’s
becoming evident in all the brutal forms of repres-
sion, which we can see everyday of our lives here.
And this reminds me, because I think this is very
relevant to what’s happening in Vietnam—that is,
the military situation in this country. I saw on televi-
sion last week that the head of the National Guard
in California decided that from now on their mili-
tary activities are gonna be concentrated in three
main areas. Now what are these areas? First of
all, he says, disruption in minority communities,
then he says disruption on the campus, then he
says disruption in industrial areas. I think it points
to the fact that they are going to begin to use that
38
whole military apparatus in order to put down the
resistance in the black and brown community, on
the campuses, in the working-class communities. I
think that they are really preparing for this now. It’s
evident that the terror is becoming not just isolated
instances of police brutality here and there, but that
terror is becoming an everyday instrument of the
institutions of this country. The chief of the Na-
tional Guard said that outright. It’s happening in
the courts. There is terror in the courts: that judge,
whose name is Hoffman, proved that he is going
to take on the terror in the society and bring it into
the courts, that he is going to use what is supposed
to be a court of law, justice, equality, whatever you
wanna call it, in order to mete out all of these, you
know, fascist acts of repression.
Now, something else has been happening
in the courts, and I think this is an incident that
we all ought to be aware of because it’s another
instance of terror entering into the courts. Down
in San Jose, not too long ago, a young Chicano
was on trial, and I’d like to read a quote from the
transcript, a quote by Judge—I think his name
is Chargin, the fascist. He said, “Mexican peo-
ple, after 13 years of age, it’s perfectly all right
to go out and act like an animal. Maybe Hitler
was right. The animals in our society probably
ought to be destroyed because they have no right
to live among human beings. You are lower than
animals and haven’t the right to exist in organized
society, just miserable lousy rotten people.” Now
this is the direct quote from the transcript that’s
happened within the walls of the courtroom.
How can we fail to see that there’s an intricate
connection between that type of thing, between
what happened to Bobby Seale, between the un-
warranted imprisonment of Huey Newton, and
what’s happening in Vietnam. We are facing a
common enemy, and that enemy is Yankee impe-
rialism, which is killing us both here and abroad.
Now I think anyone who would try to separate
Sheilagh Brooks delivering Angela Davis’s 1969 speech on location in DeFremery Park, Oakland, on August 2, 2008.
Photo by Rick Bronson.
39
those struggles, anyone who would say that in
order to consolidate an anti-war movement, we
have to leave all of these other outlying issues out
of the picture, is playing right into the hands of
the enemy. I mean, it’s an old saying; I think it’s
been demonstrated over and over that it’s correct
that once the people are divided, the enemy will
be victorious. We will face defeat. And I think the
attempt to isolate what’s happening on the do-
mestic scene from the war in Vietnam is playing
right into the hands of the enemy, giving him the
chance to be victorious.
And I think there’s a much more concrete
problem. If you talk about the anti-war movement
as a separate movement, what happens? What
happens if suddenly the troops are pulled out of
Vietnam? What happens if Nixon suddenly says
we’re gonna bring all of the boys home? The peo-
ple, the thousands, the millions of people who had
been involved in that movement would feel as if
they had been victorious. I think perhaps a num-
ber of them would think that they could return
home and relish in their victory and say that we
have won, completely ignoring the fact that Huey
Newton is still in jail, that Erica Huggins and all the
other sisters and brothers in Connecticut are still
in jail. This is what we are faced with if we cannot
make that connection between the international
scene and the domestic scene. And I don’t think
there’s any question about it. We can’t talk about
protesting the genocide of the Vietnamese people
without at the same time doing something to stop
the genocide that is—that liberation fighters in
this country are being subjected to. Now I think
we can draw a parallel between what’s happening
right now and what’s—what happened during the
1950s. As the United States government was be-
ing defeated in the Korean War, more and more
repression did occur on the domestic scene. The
McCarthy witch hunt started. This is the Com-
munist Party, which was the main target of that.
40
I think we have to ask ourselves why that period
served to completely stifle revolutionary activity in
this country. People were scared, they ran away,
they lost their families, they lost their homes. They
did not resist. This is the problem. They did not
resist. Right now the Black Panther Party is the
main target of the repression that’s coming down
in this society, and the Black Panther Party is re-
sisting. And we all ought to talk about standing
up and resisting this oppression, resisting the on-
slaught of fascism in this country. Otherwise, the
movement is going to be doomed to failure. I think
we can say that if the anti-war movement defends
only itself and does not defend liberation fighters
in this country, then that movement is going to be
doomed to failure, just as we can say also if we in
the black liberation movement and the liberation
movement for all people in—all oppressed and
exploited people in this country, defend only our-
selves, then we too will be doomed to failure.
Within the whole liberation struggle in this
country, the black liberation struggle and the brown
liberation struggle, there has continually been the
sentiment against the American imperialist aggres-
sive policies throughout this world because we have
been forced to see that the enemy is American im-
perialism. And although we feel it here at home
it’s being felt perhaps much more brutality in
Vietnam, it’s being felt in Latin America, it’s being
felt in Africa. We have to make these connections.
[Inaudible] has to see that unless it makes that con-
nection, it’s going to become irrelevant. And what
we have to talk about now is a united force, which
sees the liberation of the Vietnamese people as in-
tricately linked up with the liberation of black and
brown and exploited white people in this society,
and only this kind of a united front, only this kind
of a united force, can be victorious.
Now, I think that there’s something else that
we ought to consider when we try to analyze what
has happened in the anti-war movement. And the
anti-war movement hasn’t just depended on num-
bers. It hasn’t just depended upon attracting more
and more people into the movement regardless
of their political orientation. If we remember, the
debate a long time ago was whether the anti-war
movement or the peace movement then should
talk about demanding the cessation of bombing
in Vietnam or whether it should talk about with-
drawing troops. I think now it’s very obvious that
you have to talk about withdrawing all Ameri-
can troops from Vietnam. This has occurred only
through the process of trying to raise the level of
political consciousness of the people who were
in that movement. And right now what we have
to talk about is not just withdrawing American
troops, but also recognizing the South Vietnamese
Provisional Revolutionary Government.
Now, I think we have to go a step further.
This is what’s happening inside the anti-war move-
ment, but we have to take it further. And we have
to say that if they—if we demand the immediate
withdrawal of American troops in Vietnam [inau-
dible] of the South Vietnamese Provisional Revolu-
tionary Government, then we also have to demand
the release of all political prisoners in this country,
here. This is what we have to demand. And I think
that the liberation struggle here sheds a lot of light
on what’s happening in Vietnam. It shows us that
we can’t just push for peace in Vietnam, that we
have to talk about also recognizing a revolutionary
government. There was a kind of a peace that was
obtained right here in this country, in a courtroom,
that was the peace which Judge Hoffman forced
on Chairman Bobby Seale by coercion, by gagging
him and binding him to his chair. This is not the
kind of peace that we wanna talk about in Viet-
nam, the peace in which you have a puppet regime
representing the interests of this country in which
you have other means of establishing the power of
this government in Vietnam.
And I think on a much more personal level,
41
there’s some parallels that we can draw. Some very
profound parallels I think. And we have to say that
Bobby Seale’s mother, who learned that he had
been chained and gagged and that he had been
sentenced to four years for contempt of court, is
no less grieved than an American woman who
finds out that her son has been captured in Viet-
nam. I think we have to say that—that Erica Hug-
gins and Yvonne Carter were no less grieved when
they found that their husbands Bunchy and John
[inaudible] liberation, than an American wife
would feel about her husband there. But there is a
different political consciousness involved, and this
is what we have to show the American people to-
day. We have to show the American people that
their sons and their husbands are being victimized
by American imperialism. They are being forced
to go and fight a dirty war in Vietnam. They are
We have to show the American
people that their sons and their
husbands are being victimized
by American imperialism.
victims too, and they have to be shown that their
true loyalties ought to be with us in the liberation
struggle here and with the Vietnamese people in
their liberation struggle there. Now, Bobby Seale
once made a statement at a peace conference in
Montreal that the frontline of the battle against
racism was in Vietnam. I think we have to ask our-
selves what this means, because a lot of people may
have thought that what this means is that we can
depend on the Vietnamese to win our battle here.
This is not what he was saying. He was pointing
to that inherent connection between what’s hap-
pening there and what’s happening here. And I
think we can say—and I’m talking from personal
experience, I was in Cuba this summer and I met
with some representatives of the South Vietnam-
ese Provisional Revolutionary Government and
they told us that we were—we revolutionaries in
this country—were their most important allies.
And not just because we take signs and march in
front of the White House saying U.S. government
get out of Vietnam because—rather because we
are actively involved in struggling to satisfy the
needs of our people in this country, and in this
way, as they point out, we are able to internally
destroy that monster, which is oppressing people
all over the country. I have to admit that I felt a
little bit inadequate about that because what he’s
saying—what the representative of the South
Vietnamese Provisional Revolutionary Govern-
ment was saying—is that we are to escalate our
struggle in this country, we ought to talk about
making more and more demands for the libera-
tion of our people here and this is going to be
what they will depend on. This is going to help
them in their liberation struggle. Now I think that
we ought to talk in the context of this upcoming
march here and in Washington about the [inau-
dible] to make simultaneous demands, and those
demands ought to be immediate withdrawal of
U.S. troops from Vietnam. There ought to be vic-
tory for the Vietnamese. There ought to be also
recognition of the revolutionary government in
South Vietnam, and I think this is perhaps most
important, we ought to demand the release of po-
litical prisoners in this country.
Just one last thing. You know Nixon made a
speech, on November 3rd I think it was, and he said
something that we ought to take heed of, we ought
to understand. He said, “Let us understand that the
Vietnamese cannot defeat or humiliate our govern-
ment. Only Americans can do that.” I feel that it is
our responsibility to fight on all fronts, to fight on all
fronts simultaneously to defeat and to humiliate the
U.S. government and all the fascist tactics by which
it is repressing liberation fighters in this country.
Thank you very much.

Sheilagh Brooks delivering Angela Davis’s 1969 speech on location in DeFremery Park, Oakland, on August 2, 2008.
Photo by Nick Davis.

42 43
 UNTIL
THE LAST GUN
IS SILENT
CORETTA SCOTT KING
1968/2006
M
y dear friends of peace
and freedom, I come to New
York today with the strong
feeling that my dearly beloved
husband, who was snatched suddenly from
our midst, slightly more than three weeks ago
now, would have wanted me to be present to-
day. Though my heart is heavy with grief from
having suffered an irreparable personal loss,
my faith is stronger today than ever before.
As many of you probably know, my husband
had accepted an invitation to speak to you to-
day. And had he been here, I am sure he would
have lifted your hearts and spirits to new levels
of understanding. I would like to share with you
some notes taken from my husband’s pockets
upon his death. He carried many scraps of pa-
per upon which he scribbled notes for his many
speeches. Among these notes was one set which
he never delivered. Perhaps they were his early
thoughts for the message he was to give to you
Coretta Scott King speaking at a peace rally in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, New York City, on April 27, 1968.
Photo courtesy of Bettmann/Corbis.
44
Speech delivered by Coretta Scott King at a peace rally
in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, New York City,
on April 27, 1968. Reenacted on September 16, 2006
today. I simply read them to you as he recorded
them. And I quote:
Ten Commandments on Vietnam:
Thou shalt not believe in a military
victory.
Number two: Thou shalt not believe
in a political victory.
Number three: Thou shalt not believe
that they, the Vietnamese, love us.
Number four: Thou shalt not believe
that the Saigon government has the
support of the people.
Number five: Thou shalt not believe
that the majority of the South
Vietnamese look upon the Vietcong
as terrorists.
Number six: Thou shalt not believe
the figures of killed enemies or killed
Americans.
Number seven: Thou shalt not believe
45
 that the generals know best.
Number eight: Thou shalt not believe
that the enemy’s victory means
communism.
Number nine: Thou shalt not believe
that the world supports the United
States.
Number ten: Thou shalt not kill.
We are indeed on the threshold
of a new day for the peacemakers.
You who have worked with and loved
my husband so much, you who have kept alive
the burning issue of war in the American con-
science, you who will not be deluded by talk of
peace, but who press on in the knowledge that
the work of peacemaking must continue until
the last gun is silent:
I come to you in my grief only because
you keep alive the work and dreams for which
my husband gave his life. My husband derived
so much of his strength and inspiration from the
love of people who shared his dream, that I too
now come hoping you might strengthen me for
the lonely road ahead.
It was on April 4th, 1967, that my husband
gave his major address against the war in Viet-
nam. On April 4th, 1968, he was assassinated. I
remember how he agonized over the great mis-
understanding which took place as a result of his
position on the Vietnam War. His motives were
questioned, his credentials were challenged, and
his loyalty to this nation maligned. Now, one
year later, we see almost unbelievable results
coming from all of our united efforts. Had we
then suggested the possibility of two peace can-
didates as frontrunners for the presidency of the
United States, our sanity certainly would have
been questioned. Yet I need not trace for you
46
how many of our hopes have been realized in
these twelve short months.
Never in the history of this nation have
the people been so forceful in reversing the pol-
icy of our government in regard to war. We are
indeed on the threshold of a new day for the
peacemakers.
But just as conscientious action has re-
versed the tide of public opinion and govern-
ment policy, we must now turn our attention
and the sole force of the movement to the prob-
lems of the poor here at home. My husband al-
ways saw the problem of racism and poverty
here at home and militarism abroad as two sides
of the same coin. In fact, it is very clear that
our policy at home is to try to solve social prob-
lems through military means, just as we have
done abroad. The interrelatedness of domestic
and foreign affairs is no longer questioned. The
bombs we drop on the people of Vietnam con-
tinue to explode at home with all of their dev-
astating potential. And so I would invite you to
join us in Washington in our effort to enable the
poor people of this nation to enjoy a fair share
of America’s blessing.
There is no reason why a nation as rich as
ours should be blighted by poverty, disease and
illiteracy. It is plain that we don’t care about our
poor people, except to exploit them as cheap la-
bor and victimize them through excessive rents
and consumer prices.
Our congress passes laws which subsidize
corporation farms, oil companies, airlines and
The woman power of this nation
can be the power which makes us
whole and heals the broken
community now so shattered
by war and poverty and racism.
Gina Brown delivering Coretta Scott King’s 1968 speech on location in Central Park, New York City, on September 16, 2006.
Photo by Veena Rao.
47

Never in the history of this nation
have the people been so forceful
in reversing the policy of our
government in regard to war.
houses for suburbia. But when they turn their
attention to the poor, they suddenly become
concerned about balancing the budget and cut
back on funds for Head Start, Medicare and
mental health appropriations. The most tragic
of these cuts is the welfare section to the So-
cial Security amendment, which freezes feder-
al funds for millions of needy children who are
desperately poor but who do not receive public
assistance. It forces mothers to leave their chil-
dren and accept work or training, leaving their
children to grow up in the streets as tomorrow’s
social problems.
This law must be repealed, and I encour-
age you to join welfare mothers on May 12th,
Mother’s Day, and call upon congress to es-
tablish a guaranteed annual income instead of
these racist and archaic measures, these mea-
sures which dehumanize God’s children and
create more social problems than they solve.
We will be marching towards Washington
soon. We will begin in Memphis where my hus-
band was slain and kick off this poor people’s
campaign. We will be marching towards Wash-
ington to demand that America share its abun-
dant life with all its citizens.
I would now like to address myself to the
women. The woman power of this nation can
be the power which makes us whole and heals
the broken community now so shattered by war
and poverty and racism. I have great faith in
the power of women who will dedicate them-
selves wholeheartedly to the task of remaking
our society. I believe that the women of this na-
Gina Brown delivering Coretta Scott King’s 1968 speech on location in Central Park, New York City, on September 16, 2006.
Photo by Winona Barton-Ballentine.
48
tion and the world are the best and last hope
for a world of peace and brotherhood.
This challenge is simply but profoundly
stated in the words of one of the greatest black
poets, the late Langston Hughes. He called the
poem “Mother to Son,” but it speaks to the sons
and the daughters of this generation and those
yet unborn. It speaks of the determination and
the indestructible spirit of a black people who re-
fuse to be conquered. This spirit must somehow
be imbued in the hearts and souls of women and
their sons everywhere. Listen to this black moth-
er as she councils her son in all of her ungram-
matical profundity:
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So, boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps.
’Cause you finds it’s kinda hard.
Don’t you stop now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
With this determination, with this faith,
we will be able to create new homes, new com-
munities, new cities, a new nation. Yea, a new
world, which we desperately need.
Thank you.
49
 WE MUST
NAME
THE SYSTEM
PAUL POTTER
1965/2007
M
ost of us grew up think-
ing that the United States was
a strong but humble nation,
that involved itself in world af-
fairs only reluctantly, that respected the integri-
ty of other nations and other systems, and that
engaged in wars only as a last resort. This was a
nation with no large standing army, with no de-
sign for external conquest; that sought primar-
ily the opportunity to develop its own resources
and its own mode of living. If at some point we
began to hear vague and disturbing things about
what this country had done in Latin America,
China, Spain and other places, we somehow re-
mained confident about the basic integrity of
this nation’s foreign policy. The Cold War with
all of its neat categories and black-and-white de-
scriptions did much to assure us that what we
had been taught to believe was true.
But in recent years, the withdrawal from
the hysteria of the Cold War era and the develop-
Paul Potter, president of Students for a Democratic Society in 1964 and 1965.
Photo by Todd Gitlin, date and location unknown.
50
Speech delivered by Paul Potter at the “March on Washington
to End the War in Vietnam,” National Mall, Washington,
D.C., on April 17, 1965. Reenacted on July 26, 2007.
ment of a more aggressive, activist foreign policy
have done much to force many of us to rethink at-
titudes that were deep and basic sentiments about
our country. The incredible war in Vietnam has
provided the razor, the terrifying sharp cutting
edge that has finally severed the last vestige of il-
lusion that morality and democracy are the guid-
ing principles of American foreign policy. The
saccharine self-righteous moralism that promises
the Vietnamese a billion dollars of economic aid
at the very moment we are delivering billions for
economic and social destruction and political re-
pression is rapidly losing what power it might ever
have had to reassure us about the decency of our
foreign policy. The further we explore the reality
of what this country is doing and planning in Viet-
nam the more we are driven toward the conclu-
sion of Senator Morse that the United States may
well be the greatest threat to peace in the world to-
day. That is a terrible and bitter insight for people
who grew up as we did; and our revulsion at that
51
insight, our refusal to accept it as inevitable or nec-
essary, is one of the reasons that so many people
have come here today.
The president says that we are defending
freedom in Vietnam. Whose freedom? Not the
freedom of the Vietnamese. The first act of the
first dictator, Diem, the United States installed in
Vietnam, was to systematically begin the perse-
cution of all political opposition, non-Commu-
nist as well as Communist. The first American
military supplies were not used to fight Commu-
nist insurgents; they were used to control, im-
prison or kill any who sought something better
for Vietnam than the personal aggrandizement,
political corruption and the profiteering of the
Diem regime. The elite of the forces that we
have trained and equipped are still used to con-
trol political unrest in Saigon and defend the lat-
est dictator from the people.
How can anyone be surprised
that people who have had total war
waged on themselves and their
culture rebel in increasing
numbers against that tyranny?
And yet in a world where dictatorships are
so commonplace and popular control of gov-
ernment so rare, people become callous to the
misery that is implied by dictatorial power. The
rationalizations that are used to defend political
despotism have been drummed into us so long
that we have somehow become numb to the pos-
sibility that something else might exist. And it
is only the kind of terror we see now in Viet-
nam that awakens conscience and reminds us
that there is something deep in us that cries out
against dictatorial suppression.
The pattern of repression and destruction
that we have developed and justified in the war
52
is so thorough that it can only be called cultural
genocide. I am not simply talking about napalm
or gas or crop destruction or torture, hurled in-
discriminately on women and children, insurgent
and neutral, upon the first suspicion of rebel ac-
tivity. That in itself is horrendous and incredible
beyond belief. But it is only part of a larger pat-
tern of destruction to the very fabric of the coun-
try. We have uprooted the people from the land
and imprisoned them in concentration camps
called “sunrise villages.” Through conscription
and direct political intervention and control, we
have destroyed local customs and traditions, tram-
pled upon those things of value which give digni-
ty and purpose to life. What is left to the people
of Vietnam after twenty years of war? What part
of themselves and their own lives will those who
survive be able to salvage from the wreckage of
their country or build on the “peace” and “secu-
rity” our Great Society offers them in reward for
their allegiance? How can anyone be surprised
that people who have had total war waged on
themselves and their culture rebel in increasing
numbers against that tyranny? What other course
is available? And still our only response to rebel-
lion is more vigorous repression, more merciless
opposition to the social and cultural institutions
which sustain dignity and the will to resist.
Not even the president can say that this is
a war to defend the freedom of the Vietnam-
ese people. Perhaps what the president means
when he speaks of freedom is the freedom of
the American people.
What in fact has the war done for free-
dom in America? It has led to even more vigor-
ous governmental efforts to control information,
manipulate the press and pressure and persuade
the public through distorted or downright dis-
honest documents such as the “white paper” on
Vietnam. It has led to the confiscation of films
and other anti-war material and the vigorous ha-
Max Bunzel delivering Paul Potter’s 1965 speech on location at the National Mall, Washington, D.C., on July 26, 2007.
Photo by Meghan Boudreau.
53
rassment by the FBI of some of the people who
have been most outspokenly active in their criti-
cism of the war. As the war escalates and the ad-
ministration seeks more actively to gain support
for any initiative it may choose to take, there has
been the beginnings of a war psychology unlike
anything that has burdened this country since
the 1950s. How much more of Mr. Johnson’s
freedom can we stand? How much freedom will
be left in this country if there is a major war in
Asia? By what weird logic can it be said that the
freedom of one people can only be maintained
by crushing another?
In many ways this is an unusual march be-
cause the large majority of people here are not
involved in a peace movement as their primary
basis of concern. What is exciting about the par-
ticipants in this march is that so many of us view
ourselves consciously as participants as well in a
movement to build a more decent society. There
are students here who have been involved in pro-
tests over the quality and kind of education they
are receiving in growingly bureaucratized, dep-
ersonalized institutions called universities; there
are Negroes from Mississippi and Alabama who
are struggling against the tyranny and repression
of those states; there are poor people here—Ne-
gro and white—from Northern urban areas who
are attempting to build movements that abolish
poverty and secure democracy; there are facul-
ty who are beginning to question the relevance
of their institutions to the critical problems fac-
ing the society. Where will these people and the
movements they are a part of be if the presi-
dent is allowed to expand the war in Asia? What
happens to the hopeful beginnings of expressed
discontent that are trying to shift American at-
tention to long-neglected internal priorities of
shared abundance, democracy and decency at
home when those priorities have to compete with
the all-consuming priorities and psychology of a
54
war against an enemy thousands of miles away?
The president mocks freedom if he insists
that the war in Vietnam is a defense of Ameri-
can freedom. Perhaps the only freedom that this
war protects is the freedom of the war hawks in
the Pentagon and the State Department to ex-
periment with counter-insurgency and guerilla
warfare in Vietnam.
Vietnam, we may say, is a laboratory ran by
a new breed of gamesmen who approach war as
a kind of rational exercise in international power
politics. It is the testing ground and staging area
for a new American response to the social revo-
lution that is sweeping through the impoverished
downtrodden areas of the world. It is the begin-
ning of the American counter-revolution, and so
far none of us—not the New York Times, nor 17
Neutral Nations, nor dozens of worried allies,
nor the United States Congress have been able
to interfere with the freedom of the president
and the Pentagon to carry out that experiment.
Thus far the war in Vietnam has only
dramatized the demand of ordinary people to
have some opportunity to make their own lives,
and of their unwillingness, even under incred-
ible odds, to give up the struggle against exter-
nal domination. We are told, however, that the
struggle can be legitimately suppressed since it
might lead to the development of a Communist
system, and before that ultimate menace all crit-
icism is supposed to melt.
This is a critical point and there are sev-
eral things that must be said here—not by way
of celebration, but because I think they are the
truth. First, if this country were serious about
giving the people of Vietnam some alternative
to a Communist social revolution, that opportu-
nity was sacrificed in 1954 when we helped to
install Diem and his repression of non-Commu-
nist movements. There is no indication that we
were serious about that goal—that we were ever
willing to contemplate the risks of allowing the
Vietnamese to choose their own destinies. Sec-
ond, those people who insist now that Vietnam
can be neutralized are for the most part looking
for a sugar coating to cover the bitter bill. We
must accept the consequence that calling for an
end of the war in Vietnam is in fact allowing for
the likelihood that a Vietnam without war will
be a self-styled Communist Vietnam. Third, this
country must come to understand that creation
of a Communist country in the world today is
not an ultimate defeat. If people are given the
opportunity to choose their own lives, it is like-
ly that some of them will choose what we have
called “Communist systems.” We are not pow-
erless in that situation. Recent years have finally
and indisputably broken the myth that the Com-
munist world is monolithic and have conclusively
shown that American power can be significant in
aiding countries dominated by greater powers to
become more independent and self-determined.
And yet the war that we are creating and escalat-
ing in Southeast Asia is rapidly eroding the base
of independence of North Vietnam as it is forced
to turn to China and the Soviet Union, involving
them in the war and involving itself in the com-
promises that that implies. Fourth, I must say to
you that I would rather see Vietnam Communist
than see it under continuous subjugation of the
ruin that American domination has brought.
But the war goes on; the freedom to con-
duct that war depends on the dehumanization
not only of Vietnamese people but of Ameri-
cans as well; it depends on the construction of
a system of premises and thinking that insu-
lates the president and his advisors thoroughly
and completely from the human consequences
of the decisions they make. I do not believe that
the president or Mr. Rusk or Mr. McNamara
or even McGeorge Bundy are particularly evil
men. If asked to throw napalm on the back of a
55
ten-year-old child they would shrink in horror—
but their decisions have led to the mutilation and
death of thousands and thousands of people.
What kind of system is it that allows good
men to make those kinds of decisions? What
kind of system is it that justifies the United States
or any country seizing the destinies of the Viet-
namese people and using them callously for its
own purpose? What kind of system is it that dis-
enfranchises people in the South, leaves millions
upon millions of people throughout the coun-
try impoverished and excluded from the main-
What in fact has the war done for
freedom in America? It has led to
even more vigorous governmental
efforts to control information,
manipulate the press and pressure
and persuade the public.
stream and promise of American society, that
creates faceless and terrible bureaucracies and
makes those the place where people spend their
lives and do their work, that consistently puts
material values before human values and still
persists in calling itself free and still persists in
finding itself fit to police the world? What place
is there for ordinary men in that system and how
are they to control it, make it bend itself to their
wills rather than bending them to its?
We must name that system. We must
name it, describe it, analyze it, understand it
and change it. For it is only when that system is
changed and brought under control that there
can be any hope for stopping the forces that cre-
ate a war in Vietnam today or a murder in the
South tomorrow or all the incalculable, innu-
merable more subtle atrocities that are worked
on people all over all the time.

In both countries there are
people struggling to build
a movement that has the power
to change their condition.
The system that frustrates
these movements is the same.
How do you stop a war then? If the war
has its roots deep in the institutions of Ameri-
can society, how do you stop it? Do you march
to Washington? Is that enough? Who will hear
us? How can you make the decision makers hear
us, insulated as they are, if they cannot hear the
screams of a little girl burnt by napalm?
I believe that the administration is serious
about expanding the war in Asia. The question is
whether the people here are as serious about end-
ing it. I wonder what it means for each of us to
say we want to end the war in Vietnam—wheth-
er, if we accept the full meaning of that statement
and the gravity of the situation, we can simply
leave the march and go back to the routines of a
society that acts as if it were not in the midst of a
grave crisis. Maybe we, like the president, are in-
sulated from the consequences of our own deci-
sion to end the war. Maybe we have yet really to
listen to the screams of a burning child and de-
cide that we cannot go back to whatever it is we
did before today until that war has ended.
There is no simple plan, no scheme or gim-
mick that can be proposed here. There is no sim-
ple way to attack something that is deeply rooted
in the society. If the people of this country are
to end the war in Vietnam, and to change the
institutions which create it, then the people of
this country must create a massive social move-
ment—and if that can be built around the issue
of Vietnam then that is what we must do.
By a social movement I mean more than pe-
Max Bunzel delivering Paul Potter’s 1965 speech on location at the National Mall, Washington, D.C., on July 26, 2007.
Photo by Meghan Boudreau.
56
titions or letters of protest, or tacit support of dis-
sident congressmen; I mean people who are will-
ing to change their lives, who are willing to chal-
lenge the system, to take the problem of change
seriously. By a social movement I mean an effort
that is powerful enough to make the country un-
derstand that our problems are not in Vietnam, or
China or Brazil or outer space or at the bottom of
the ocean, but are here in the United States. What
we must do is begin to build a democratic and hu-
mane society in which Vietnams are unthinkable,
in which human life and initiative are precious.
The reason there are twenty thousand people here
today and not a hundred or none at all is because
five years ago in the South students began to build
a social movement to change the system. The
reason there are poor people, Negro and white,
housewives, faculty members, and many others
here in Washington is because that movement has
grown and spread and changed and reached out
as an expression of the broad concerns of peo-
ple throughout the society. The reason the war
and the system it represents will be stopped, if it is
stopped before it destroys all of us, will be because
the movement has become strong enough to exact
change in the society. Twenty thousand people—
the people here, if they were serious, if they were
willing to break out of their isolation and to accept
the consequences of a decision to end the war and
commit themselves to building a movement wher-
ever they are and in whatever way they effectively
can—would be, I’m convinced, enough.
To build a movement rather than a protest
or some series of protests, to break out of our in-
sulations and accept the consequences of our de-
cisions, in effect to change our lives, means that
we can open ourselves to the reactions of a soci-
ety that believes that it is moral and just, that we
open ourselves to libeling and persecution, that
we dare to be really seen as wrong in a society
that doesn’t tolerate fundamental challenges.
57
It means that we desert the security of our
riches and reach out to people who are tied to
the mythology of American power and make
them part of our movement. We must reach
out to every organization and individual in the
country and make them part of our movement.
But that means that we build a movement
that works not simply in Washington but in com-
munities and with the problems that face people
throughout the society. That means that we build a
movement that understands Vietnam in all its hor-
ror as but a symptom of a deeper malaise, that we
build a movement that makes possible the imple-
mentation of the values that would have prevent-
ed Vietnam, a movement based on the integrity of
man and a belief in man’s capacity to tolerate all the
weird formulations of society that men may choose
to strive for; a movement that will build on the new
and creative forms of protest that are beginning to
emerge, such as the teach-in, and extend their ef-
forts and intensify them; that we will build a move-
ment that will find ways to support the increasing
numbers of young men who are unwilling to and
will not fight in Vietnam; a movement that will not
tolerate the escalation or prolongation of this war
but will, if necessary, respond to the administra-
tion war effort with massive civil disobedience all
over the country, that will wrench the country into
a confrontation with the issues of the war; a move-
ment that must of necessity reach out to all these
people in Vietnam or elsewhere who are struggling
to find decency and control for their lives.
For in a strange way the people of Vietnam
and the people on this demonstration are united
in much more than a common concern that the
war be ended. In both countries there are peo-
ple struggling to build a movement that has the
power to change their condition. The system that
frustrates these movements is the same. All our
lives, our destinies, our very hopes to live, depend
on our ability to overcome that system.
 THE PROBLEM
IS CIVIL
OBEDIENCE
HOWARD ZINN
1971/2007
S
ix young people who were in
jail with me yesterday in Washing-
ton, D.C., were arrested for walk-
ing down a street together singing
“America the Beautiful.” If Thomas Jefferson
were in Washington yesterday walking down
the street, he would have been arrested. He was
too young, and he had long hair. And if Jeffer-
son had been carrying the Declaration of In-
dependence with him in Washington yesterday,
he would have been indicted for conspiring to
overthrow the government along with his co-
conspirators George Washington, John Adams,
Tom Payne and a lot of others. So, obviously
the wrong people are in charge of the machin-
ery of justice, and the wrong people are behind
bars, and the wrong people are calling the shots
in Washington. The whole world seems to be
topsy-turvy. And what we want to do is try to
set it right.
A lot of people are troubled by civil dis-
Howard Zinn speaking at a peace rally in Boston Common, Boston, on May 5, 1971.
Photo by Daniel Ellsberg.
58
Speech delivered by Howard Zinn at a peace rally
in Boston Common, Boston, on May 5, 1971.
obedience. As soon as you talk about commit-
ting civil disobedience they get a little upset.
But that’s exactly the purpose of civil disobedi-
ence, to upset people, to trouble them, to disturb
them. We who commit civil disobedience are
disturbed too, and we need to disturb those who
are in charge of the war, because the president,
by his lies, is trying to create an air of calm and
tranquility in people’s minds when there is no
calm and tranquility in Southeast Asia, and we
mustn’t let people forget that.
And those people who get troubled and
excited about civil disobedience have got to have
some sense of proportion. The people who com-
mit civil disobedience are engaging in the most
petty of disorders in order to protest against
mass murder. These people are violating the
most petty of laws, trespass laws and traffic laws,
in order to protest against the government’s vio-
lation of the most holy of laws: “Thou shalt not
kill.” And, these people who commit civil dis-
59
obedience don’t do harm to any person. They
protest the violence of government.
We need to do something to disturb that
calm, smiling, murderous president in the
White House. Now they say we disturb even
our friends when we commit civil disobedience,
and that’s true. But the history of civil disobedi-
ence in this country and in other parts of the
world shows that people may at first sight be put
off by civil disobedience, but at second sight,
at second thought, they learn that the protest-
ers against war are right, and after a while they
join us in their own way, and that’s why we must
carry on.

The wrong people are in charge

of the machinery of justice,
and the wrong people are behind
bars, and the wrong people are
calling the shots in Washington.
The congressmen—you see this in the
newspapers—while seven thousand people are
arrested in Washington, you see congressmen
coming out in the headlines saying, “Oh, that’s
bad. You’re upsetting those of us in Congress
who have worked so hard. You’re rocking and
so on and so forth.” Well, we need to upset Con-
gress. We need to disturb Congress, because for
six years the president has carried on an uncon-
stitutional war, and for six years the bodies of
Americans have been coming home in plastic
bags, and for six years the villages and country-
side of Vietnam have been destroyed, and these
members of Congress have been sitting there
silently, passively, voting the money for this war.
And if these congressmen don’t like the upsets
to courtesy and decorum represented by civil
disobedience, then let them courteously, sepa-
rately, put an end to the murder in Vietnam by

Matthew Floyd Miller delivers Howard Zinn’s 1971 speech on location in Boston Common, Boston, on July 14, 2007.
Photo by Meghan Boudreau.

60 61
stopping the funds for the war, or by filibuster-
ing or impeaching the president and the vice
president and impeaching every high official in
government. Let them not criticize those who in
anguish cry out with the only means we have
left—with our energies, with our spirits, with our
bodies, against the abomination of this war.
It’s been a long time since we impeached a
president. And it’s time, time to impeach a presi-
dent, and the vice president, and everybody else
sitting in high office who carries on this war. The
Constitution says, Article 2, Section 4, that the
president and the vice president, and other civil
officers of the government, may be impeached
for, and I quote, “high crimes and misdemean-
ors.” Is not making war on the peasants of
Southeast Asia a high crime?
We grow up in a controlled society, and
the very language we use is corrupted from the
time we learn to speak and read. And those who
have the power, they decide the meaning of the
words that we use. And so we’re taught that if
one person kills another person, that is murder,
but if a government kills a hundred thousand
persons, that is patriotism. We’re taught that if
one person invades another person’s home, that
is breaking and entering, but if a government
invades a whole country, and searches and de-
stroys the villages and homes of that country,
that is fulfilling its world responsibility.
The history of civil disobedience
in this country and in other
parts of the world shows that
people may at first sight be put off
by civil disobedience, but at second
sight, at second thought,
they learn that the protesters
against war are right.
62
When nuns and priests, horrified by the
burning of children, disrupt actions that brought
about the war, actions that do no violence to hu-
man life, they’re arrested for conspiracy to kid-
nap. And when the government reaches into a
million homes and snatches the young men out
of them under penalty of imprisonment, and
gives them uniforms and guns and sends them
off to die, that is not kidnapping. That’s selective
service. So, let’s restore the meaning of words.
And let’s tell the world that the government has
committed high crimes. And that we don’t want
to continue being accomplices to these crimes.
And we have to do that, and we have to say that
in every way our conscience compels and every
way our imaginations suggest.
And so the veterans will throw away their
medals, and GIs will refuse to fight, and young
men will refuse to be drafted and women will
defy the state, and we will refuse to pay our taxes,
and we’ll disobey. And, they’ll say we’re disturb-
ing the peace, but there is no peace. What really
bothers them is that we are disturbing the war.
For two weeks, for two weeks we have not
let the country forget about this war. The vet-
erans in their ways, the mass meetings in their
way, the disrupters in their way… and we must
continue disturbing the war and the makers of
the war. We must not give them a moment’s
rest until the soldiers and warplanes are out of
Southeast Asia. And so, tomorrow morning,
early in the morning, let’s all go to Government
Center. All of us. Let us, let us be nonviolent. We
are going to be protesting against violence. We
may break some petty laws. We may interfere
slightly with business as usual. But these are not
terrible crimes. There are terrible crimes being
committed, but sitting down and locking arms,
that’s no terrible crime. War is the great crime
of our age.
We may be arrested, but it’s not a shame
to be arrested for a good cause. The shame is to
do the job of those who carry on the war. You
policemen, you policemen around here who are
going to be called on to make arrests tomorrow,
remember it’s your sons also that are taking off
for war to be killed. And it’s your sons, your sons
as well as ours that they want to die for the prof-
it of General Motors and Lockheed. It’s your
sons too, your sons too that they want to die for
the political profit of the Mayor Daleys and the
Spiro Agnews [unintelligible].
And they’ll say we are disturbing
the peace, but there is no peace.
What really bothers them is that
we are disturbing the war.
So you policemen will have to put away
your clubs and put away your guns, put away
your tear gas. Become nonviolent. And learn
to disobey the order for violence. You agents of
the FBI who are circulating in the crowd, hey,
don’t you see that you’re violating the spirit of
democracy by what you’re doing? Don’t you
see that you’re behaving like the secret police
of a totalitarian state? Why are you obeying J.
Edgar Hoover? Why are you obeying the lies
of an executioner, acting like a dictator from
Paraguay rather than a public servant in a sup-
posedly democratic state? Remember, members
of the FBI, you are secret police, and you ought
to learn what the German secret police did not
learn in time. Learn to disobey.
So you police and you FBI, if you want to
arrest people who are violating the law, then you
shouldn’t be here. You should be in Washington.
(Unintelligible) You should go there immediately
and you should arrest the president, and his ad-
visors, on the charge of disturbing the peace of
the world.
63
Biography
Mark Tribe is an artist and occasional cu-
rator whose interests include art, technology
and politics. His artwork has been exhibited at
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Trinity
Square Video in Toronto, the Park Avenue Ar-
mory in New York City and the National Cen-
ter for Contemporary Art in Moscow. He has
organized curatorial projects for the New Mu-
seum of Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA and
inSite_05. He is the co-author, with Reena Jana,
of New Media Art (Taschen, 2006). He is Assistant
65
Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies
at Brown University, where he teaches courses
on digital art, curating, open-source culture, rad-
ical media and surveillance. In 1996 he found-
ed Rhizome, an organization that supports the
creation, presentation, preservation and critique
of emerging artistic practices that engage tech-
nology. He received a MFA in Visual Art from
the University of California, San Diego, in 1994
and a BA in Visual Art from Brown University in
1990. He lives in New York City.

This book, like the Port Huron Project itself, was
the result of the collective effort of numerous
wonderfully talented people. First and foremost,
I would like to express my profound gratitude
to six remarkable individuals whose words and
deeds have inspired generations to struggle for
peace and social justice: Stokely Carmichael,
Cesar Chavez, Angela Davis, Coretta Scott
King, Paul Potter and Howard Zinn. I am par-
ticularly grateful to the lovely people at Edizioni
Charta for believing in this book and for their
patience and guidance. I will fondly remember
my meetings with Giuseppe Liverani and Fran-
cesca Sorace in Charta’s New York office—a
sprawling Tribeca loft with art-covered walls
and abundant espresso. I would like to thank
Sherry Lerner and Sean Elwood at Creative
Capital for providing crucial financial support
for both the Port Huron Project and this book,
66
Acknowledgements
and for fostering among their grantees a dy-
namic community of creative risk-takers. I am
deeply grateful to Anne Pasternak for getting
behind the project early and whole-heartedly,
and for her visionary leadership of Creative
Time. For his ceaseless energy, his willingness
to entertain my many ideas, and the wisdom
with which he cautioned me against “gilding
the lily,” I am indebted to Nato Thompson, as
I am to Gavin Kroeber, Shane Brennan and
Nicholas Weist for their tireless efforts. Carol
Stakenas at LACE, and Rene de Guzman and
Adam Rozan at the Oakland Museum of Cali-
fornia, were instrumental in helping me reach
out to and work with local communities in Los
Angeles and Oakland. To the performers—
Ato Essandoh, Ricardo Dominguez, Sheilagh
Brooks, Max Bunzel, Matthew Floyd Miller,
Gina Brown, Aleta Hayes, Brian Valparaiso
and Clinton Lowe—I am eternally grateful. I
am indebted to an amazing crew of fellow art-
ists, former students and interns who worked
with me on production and postproduction,
particularly Sarah Sharp, Paul Wallace, Ste-
phen Salisbury, Helena Anrather, Alexandra
Chemla, Christina Ducruet, Margaret Per-
kins, Sally Szwed and Maya Manvi. I would
like to thank all of the photographers who
helped document the Port Huron Project reenact-
ments and installations, especially those whose
work appears in this book: Winona Barton-
Ballentine, Meghan Boudreau, Rick Bronson,
Nick Davis, Cesar Garcia, Sam Horine, Davis
Jung, Meghan McInnis, Veena Rao and Jules
Rochielle. I would also like to express my grati-
tude to Daniel Ellsberg, Todd Gitlin and Ste-
phen Shames for granting permission to pub-
lish their historic photographs; and to Shawn
67
Dellis at the Pacifica Radio Archives, Mary J.
Wallace at the Walter P. Reuther Library at
Wayne State University, and the Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture for pro-
viding recordings, transcripts and archival pho-
tographs of the original speeches. I am grateful
to my colleagues in the department of Mod-
ern Culture and Media at Brown University
for providing valuable feedback and rigorous
critique, and to the Karen T. Romer Under-
graduate Teaching and Research Awards for
providing financial support for several summer
interns. Last but certainly not least, I would like
to say thank you to my wife, Emily Eakin, my
daughters, Isabel and Sadie, and my parents,
Carolyn and Laurence Tribe, for the countless
ways in which they have supported me and the
countless times they have tolerated my anxiet-
ies, absences and absurd sense of humor.
Design Cover
Mario Piazza, Letizia Abbate (46xy studio) Ricardo Dominguez delivering
Cesar Chavez’s 1971 speech.
Editorial Coordination Photo by
Filomena Moscatelli Cesar Garcia

Copyediting The author, Mark Tribe, made every effort to contact

Charles Gute Angela Davis to request permission to include
her speech in this book. Considering that Ms. Davis
Copywriting and Press Office granted permission to reenact her speech,
Silvia Palombi and recognizing that this book would be incomplete
without it, the author has decided to include it.
US Editorial Director
Francesca Sorace Photo Credits
Bob Adelman/Magnum Photos;
Promotion and Web Winona Barton-Ballentine; Bettmann/CORBIS;
Monica D’Emidio Meghan Boudreau; Rick Bronson; Nick Davis;
Daniel Ellsberg; Cesar Garcia; Todd Gitlin;
Distribution Sam Horine; Glen Pearcy/Walter P. Reuther Library,
Antonia De Besi Wayne State University; Veena Rao; Jules Rochielle;
Stephen Shames/Polaris Images.
Administration
Grazia De Giosa We apologize if, due to reasons wholly
beyond our control, some of the photo sources
Warehouse and Outlet have not been listed.
Roberto Curiale
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form
or by any means without the prior permission in
writing of copyright holders and of the publisher.

© 2010
Edizioni Charta, Milano
© Mark Tribe Edizioni Charta srl
Milano
TM/© 2009 the Cesar E. Chavez Foundation via della Moscova, 27 - 20121
www.chavezfoundation.org Tel. +39-026598098/026598200
for Cesar E. Chavez’s text Fax +39-026598577
© The Estate of Coretta Scott King e-mail: charta@chartaartbooks.it
for Coretta Scott King’s text
© the authors for their texts Charta Books Ltd.
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Tribeca Office
All rights reserved Tel. +1-313-406-8468
ISBN 978-88-8158-762-9 e-mail: international@chartaartbooks.it
Printed in Italy www.chartaartbooks.it
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