VLVL "the Movement"

[jbor]

> You had said:    "By 1968-9, the time depicted in the novel, the
> counterculture had forgotten all about civil rights and the Vietnam War ..."

I had indeed. And then I clarified the statement.

> Now it's 1970-71, although the student strikes, leading to the killings at
> Kent State were in May of 1970.   But why quibble.   Next post you can make it
> 1974, when Nixon resigned.

What for? The student movement started falling apart pretty dramatically at
the end of '68, as I've said, and from 1971 on it was all but non-existent.

> In any case, "unity of purpose" could mean anything;

Well, no, it means unity of purpose.

> and there was certainly
> never anything like organizational soldarity.   There was no "organization."

That's a pretty astonishing and inaccurate statement. There was quite a lot
of organisation, and there were indeed alliances between various groups.
These alliances began to break down pretty dramatically from '68 on.

> There were numerous groups and agendas and goals among many across a vey broad
> country.   

And civil rights and anti-war were common causes across the board. There's
been no claim made that it was some "united bastion", merely that the
alliances between groups and mutual support and goodwill dissipated as the
decade progressed.

> The Freedom Ride was entirely the product of CORE and the southern black
> movement.   It had nothing to do with campus activity in Berkeley in 1964

Who said it did? The chronology runs the other way, of course:

    The most famous campus protest of the early 1960's was the
    Free Speech  Movement (FSM) at University of California,
    Berkeley. Black students in the South had organized protests
    before and actually were the impetus for the civil rights
    movement, and the boycotts, voter registration drives, and
    demonstrations in the South became a training ground for hundreds
    of students from Northern colleges. The FSM actually came out
    of a struggle for the right to collect money on campus for civil
    rights workers in Mississippi. The university took the position
    that since some of the civil rights workers were getting arrested,
    they were engaged in illegal activity, and it was against university
    rules to allow the collection of money for illegal activities. This
    shocked and enraged students on campus who were furious that their
    liberal university would so strongly side with the racists in the
    South -- opposing voter registration drives and protecting the
    killers of children. The students took over a campus building, and
    the police were called in to arrest the hundreds and hundreds of
    students inside. Newspaper photos and television film clips showed
    tens of millions of Americans the extreme brutality of the police,
    smashing heads with clubs, throwing people down concrete stairs,
    pulling women by their hair -- all because of a sit in to support
    civil rights, something the U.S.A. was supposed to stand for.

http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/riseandfall.html

best