WHAT POLITICAL conclusions were people drawing from the killings about the government and our society?
FOR MOST students, this was the beginning of their political activity. Many students had participated in demonstrations of one sort or another, but there was never something comparable in scope to what occurred during the national student strike. You could go to a college campus, in Chicago or Texas or California, and there’d be 10,000 students sitting and having a meeting–discussing and debating and proposing things. These giant mass meetings led students to begin to exercise genuine democracy. Art students took over the facilities of the universities, and began making art against the war, making fliers and posters. The facilities of the campuses began to be used to reach out to workers. For those of us who had been influenced by May-June 1968 events in France, that was our goal. We were trying to recreate what the French called the “red university.” We called it the “antiwar university,” but we were trying to do essentially the same thing–to take over the university and use it as a
