VLVL "the Movement"

[jbor]

> I agree that there was never any unified "Movement," student or otherwise.
> There were numerous protest causes,  the Vietnam War and Civil Rights being
> the two chief ones.  They had a common enemy, US "establishment."  But they
> were never a united front and their protests were mostly separate events.
> (I don't think amny white youths ever joined in with the urban race riots)
> The fact that poor blacks were over-represented in the troops was a concrete
> reason for blacks to also be anti-war.  But to say that they were not a
> unified "Movement" is not equal to saying that they were always selfishly at
> odds.  Where their agendas melded they could find common ground for
> cooperation.

I don't know that I'd characterise urban race riots as part of either "the
counterculture" or "the Student Movement", and there certainly were large
representations of whites and white students at the rallies and supporting
MLK, for example (and from 1967 MLK spoke out often against the Vietnam War,
see below). 

http://www.africanamericans.com/MLKjrBeyondVietnam.htm

But the issue raised here is a very pertinent one. Pynchon's 1966 NYT
article on the Watts riots and the confrontations between police and
residents there amply demonstrates where *his* sympathies were, and I don't
accept that his was a lone white voice at that time.

Between 1961 and 1968 there was significant overlap between the Student
Movement (Port Huron, "New Left", FSM, SDS) and the counterculture; on and
across the campuses anti-war and civil rights were common causes and there
was co-operation and solidarity between the various groups protesting
against government policies and actions. There were indeed "traveling
Movement coordinators" going from campus to campus (VL 205). At the 1968 and
1969 SDS National Conventions faction-fighting between the different groups
(PLP, NO, Black Panthers) resulted in the anti-war and civil rights causes
taking a back seat to ideological bickering. There were other contributing
factors, of course, and Pynchon addresses many of them in _Vineland_, but
after the Kent State murders and the 100,000-strong demonstration in
Washington in May 1970 the "Student Movement" was a spent force.

The "unified ... organization" nonsense was a straw man argument, of course.

best