> You and I must have been in the same march. I remember two anti-apartheid
> marches in the spring of '85, both leading to the Kansas University
> Endowment Association. At the first one, 16 were arrested, and at the
> second one, it was about 50. I remember sorority girls making fun of us as
> we walked up the hill toward Iowa Street. The police were incredibly
> polite. They took great care not to hurt Boog Highberger as they carried
> him off the steps of KUEA. I got the feeling that the bad old days of
> police riots were over forever. Perhaps what's changed is that the wind is
> blowing a different direction now, and the state feels threatened again.
Yep, I was at both ones and my first civil disobedience arrest was at one of them. The cops were pretty nice back then.
I was also part of that innovative campout where we managed to camp on the front lawn of the endowment association because they didn't own all of it. The endowment association was private and had a building on campus. One of our activists discovered that the property line ran diagonally, so we were able to camp right in front of the building. We had a shantytown going for several weeks.
I remember several marches that we did on Massachusetts Avenue in downtown Lawrence. At one of these we marched behind the homecoming parade. My favorite stunt though was flying the divestment banner over graduation.
The one honor I share with radical lawyer Ron Kuby is that we were both president of the K.U. Committee on South Africa at one time. (Kuby was the prez back in the 70s).
Speaking of sorority girls--one of the positive things that has happened since the mid-80s is that young people haven't been trained to be anti-communist or anti-activist. The last time I protested (in front of the FBI building for Leonard Peltier) and had somebody tell me to go back to the Soviet Union, it was said by a guy over 40. (I had to remind him that the USSR was history). At the NATO summit last year, when I was picketing by myself, a group of teenage male tourists came up to me and asked if they could do a group photo with me. Back in 1985 they would have been yelling insults at me.
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"A society is a healthy society only to the degree that it exhibits anarchistic traits."
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