Stories
1966 was an election year and those of us opposing the Vietnam War needed to run a candidate for Congress. Early in the year (February?), several of us met in the front room of the little apartment that Nina and I had on Howard Avenue in New Haven. Rick Wolff and his wife Harriet Fraad were there, and, I believe, Joan and Harris Stone.
There were two potential candidates, we decided. One was the chaplain of Yale, William Sloane Coffin, who ran a group opposed to the war, and the other was a young Yale Assistant Professor of Sociology named Bob Cook. We had recently gone to see Bob, who lived in Guilford, when he gave a speech on the Guilford Green against the war.
We decided on Cook, even though none of us had ever spoken to him personally. He was impressive, however. An ex-marine, a body-builder, and a sociologist whose hero was C. Wright Mills. Like Mills, he wore a leather jacket and rode a motorcycle. (Ironically, while Mills had taught at Columbia when I was there, I did not take any course from him because I was so disinterested in politics).
Fortunately, we did not decide to approach Coffin, as he played a very ambiguous role in subsequent events such as the negative pressures on Martin Luther King and on the Black Panther Party.
Joan Stone and Nina became the office managers for the political campaign, while Rick Wolff and I played roles in developing background documents, editing the campaign newsletter, etc. Bob Zellner, a young activist from the South, who had to flee to the North to escape assassination, served as the campaign manager. His wife, Dottie Miller, had been a friend of Nina when they were in college.
The Congressional campaign linked up with a campaign in the Hill neighborhood where a young black militant activist, Freddy Harris was also running for local office. Freddy was so eloquent that when I tape-recorded a speech he made on the streets of the Hill and tried to put it into the novel I was writing, (By What Ways, it simply made all the other prose I was writing seem very flat and lifeless!
Both Bob Cook and Freddy Harris were very appealing candidates, speaking eloquently for social justice and against the war in Vietnam. In the election, Cook obtained several percent of the vote, one of the highest votes in the country for an anti-war candidacy. And afterwards, those of us who had worked on the campaigns decided to keep working as an independent political party that we called (to be as neutral as possible) the "American Independent Movement." The name was so neutral that the same name was used later by the racist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, for the political party that he founded.
 |
Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme