Alexander Cockburn: Fifty Years After Greensboro, Whatever Happened to the American Left?
[Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com.]
Fifty years ago this month, history took a great leap forward. On Feb. 1, 1960, four black students from Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina sat down at a segregated lunch counter in Woolworths department store in Greensboro, N.C. The chairs were for whites. Blacks had to stand and eat. A day later, the four young black men returned, with 25 more students. On Feb. 4, four white women joined them from a local college. By Feb. 7, there were 54 sit-ins throughout the South in 15 cities in nine states. By July 25, the store, part of a huge national chain and plagued by $200,000 in lost business, threw in the towel and officially desegregated the lunch counter.
Three months later, the city of Raleigh, N.C., 80 miles east of Greensboro, saw the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), seeking to widen the lunch-counter demonstrations into a broad, militant movement. SNCC's first field director was Bob Moses, who said that he was drawn by the "sullen, angry and determined look" of the protesters, qualitatively different from the "defensive, cringing" expression common to most photos of protesters in the South.
That same spring of 1960 saw the founding conference of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Ann Arbor, Mich., the organization that later played a leading role in organizing the college-based component of the antiwar movement. In May, the House Un-American Activities Committee was scheduled to hold red-baiting hearings in San Francisco. Students from the University of California at Berkeley crossed the bay to jeer the hearings. They got blasted off the steps of City Hall by cops with power hoses, but the ridicule helped demolish the decade-long power of HUAC....
In terms of organized politics, the explosion of radical energy in the 1960s culminated in the peace candidacy of George McGovern, nominated by the Democrats in Miami in 1972. The response of the labor unions financing the party, and of the party bosses, was simply to abandon McGovern and ensure the victory of Nixon....
It would be wrong to say that the left has no heft at all today in American politics. Hillary Clinton's presidential bid crashed and burned because, in the crucial primaries in 2008, the left never forgave her for her Senate vote in support of Bush's attack on Iraq in 2003. In the midterm elections this coming fall, the Democrats could well lose both houses if the left simply says at home -- the same way it did in 1994, disgusted with Clinton's first two years. But will Obama throw the left a sop, beyond a couple of populist gibes against the banks? There's scant sign of it.
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Fifty years ago this month, history took a great leap forward. On Feb. 1, 1960, four black students from Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina sat down at a segregated lunch counter in Woolworths department store in Greensboro, N.C. The chairs were for whites. Blacks had to stand and eat. A day later, the four young black men returned, with 25 more students. On Feb. 4, four white women joined them from a local college. By Feb. 7, there were 54 sit-ins throughout the South in 15 cities in nine states. By July 25, the store, part of a huge national chain and plagued by $200,000 in lost business, threw in the towel and officially desegregated the lunch counter.
Three months later, the city of Raleigh, N.C., 80 miles east of Greensboro, saw the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), seeking to widen the lunch-counter demonstrations into a broad, militant movement. SNCC's first field director was Bob Moses, who said that he was drawn by the "sullen, angry and determined look" of the protesters, qualitatively different from the "defensive, cringing" expression common to most photos of protesters in the South.
That same spring of 1960 saw the founding conference of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Ann Arbor, Mich., the organization that later played a leading role in organizing the college-based component of the antiwar movement. In May, the House Un-American Activities Committee was scheduled to hold red-baiting hearings in San Francisco. Students from the University of California at Berkeley crossed the bay to jeer the hearings. They got blasted off the steps of City Hall by cops with power hoses, but the ridicule helped demolish the decade-long power of HUAC....
In terms of organized politics, the explosion of radical energy in the 1960s culminated in the peace candidacy of George McGovern, nominated by the Democrats in Miami in 1972. The response of the labor unions financing the party, and of the party bosses, was simply to abandon McGovern and ensure the victory of Nixon....
It would be wrong to say that the left has no heft at all today in American politics. Hillary Clinton's presidential bid crashed and burned because, in the crucial primaries in 2008, the left never forgave her for her Senate vote in support of Bush's attack on Iraq in 2003. In the midterm elections this coming fall, the Democrats could well lose both houses if the left simply says at home -- the same way it did in 1994, disgusted with Clinton's first two years. But will Obama throw the left a sop, beyond a couple of populist gibes against the banks? There's scant sign of it.