>
> 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.
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