Uncovering the Right on Campus

[Chuck0]

Patrick Bond wrote:

> 
> But it's only a distant memory, of course. Each time I'm on the lower
> quad at JHU, I look hard in the grass for embers from that May 1986
> night where I nearly burned up. No sign of anything, past or present,
> even though we had reached the point later that year where Muller
> muttered at a trustees meeting, on record (we got access to the
> secret minutes), "We may be in a nonsurvivable situation" after
> our comrades started putting up more shanties and faced time in the
> Baltimore city jail and in contempt of a court order. The molotov
> tossers were found guilty in court, got a felony charge, and did
> community service. Their frat was briefly expelled. We sued the
> little rich bastards and got some tends of thousands to launch
> "Books for the Struggle," setting up little lefty township libraries
> across SA during the early 1990s.
> 
> So, I have a lot of nice memories of YAF/CR, Chuck.

Wow! They were useful enemies, for sure. I weened my activist teeth on
dealing with the YAFfies at the University of Kansas in the mid 1980s.
They tried to do stuff like defund student groups they didn't like,
including the Gay and Lesbian Services of Kansas. This motivated a bunch
of us to run for student senate and a few of us anarchists actually got
elected (this came several years after two anarchists "headed" student
senate at Kansas).

The YAF never did anything violent toward us, but I did enjoy yelling at
them in arguments. We even managed to get one of them, who wrote for the
campus paper, to recant his conservative opinions. It was funny, because
I had had a dream that this guy would do this and it came true!

We did shantytowns at K.U. too. Our first one was one we built on the
front lawn of the administration building. That action was a blast. We
started work on it on a Saturday morning, when the campus was abuzz with
people going to the football game. Yes, we built it in broad daylight. I
can't remember how long it stayed up, but the administration was pretty
nice us.

We followed that up the following Spring with one of my favorite clever
actions of all time. 

We (the KU Committee on South Africa) had been getting nowhere with our
attempts to get KU to divest, mainly because the public university had
set up a private endowment association. One of our members did some
research and discovered something very interesting about the property on
which the Endowment Association's building sat on West Campus (an area
with few campus buildings and lots of undeveloped university land). For
a reason that could only be attributed to the layout of the building,
the endowment association's property boundary with the university ran at
a diagonal across the front lawn of their building.

This provided us with an opening which was helped by the university
stating the previous semester that camping on campus was permissable
only if it was being done for a political reason.

So, one April night we started erecting tents and a shanty type
structure on the front lawn of the Endowment Association. Our encampment
last for several weeks and severely embarassed the endowment
association, which eventually made some modifications in its investment
policy.

I think it was the same Spring semester where we rented a plane to fly
over the graduation ceremonies with a banner that said, "KU Out of South
Africa."

Here are two pictures from the 1986 camp at the endowment association.
Yes, that me talking to the cops. Rare thse days!
http://flag.blackened.net/chuck0/home/ku1.gif
http://flag.blackened.net/chuck0/home/ku2.jpg

<< Chuck0 >>

This was the year *everything* changed.
      -- Commander Ivanova, 2261

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