'It Seemed a Very Local Affair': The Student Movement at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

Co-authored with Robbie Lieberman. From The New Left Revisited, edited by John McMillian and Paul Buhle (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003)

In late February 1970, Southern Illinois University’s Carbondale campus was in an uproar. More than a thousand students were engaged in a campaign of civil disobedience, and the dean of students responded by suspending six leaders of the student government, including Dwight Campbell, the first African American president of the student body in SIU’s history, and student body vice president Richard Wallace. Student leaders reacted by calling for a boycott of classes, while Campbell proclaimed, “Students are niggers and it’s time to break the chains.”¹

On the surface, these events appear fairly typical of the student movement of the late sixties and early seventies in terms of tactics and rhetoric. But a closer look reveals a much more complicated and paradoxical picture. In the first place, we have a black leader defining himself as a “nigger”—not because he is African American but because he’s a student.² Second, the issue that provoked such upheaval concerned the university’s in loco parentis policies, specifically restrictions on the hours that men and women could study together in women’s dormitories. Led by Campbell and Wallace’s Unity Party, the student senate had passed a bill extending these hours from 9:00 P.M. to 11:00 P.M. on weeknights and from 11:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M. on weekends. When the bill was vetoed by the board of trustees, students began defying the administration en masse.³

Finally, the strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience over the issue of dorm hours stands out when placed against the backdrop of increasing violence nationally and events at SIU over the previous two years. In 1968 SIU witnessed numerous bomb threats and several bombings, including one in May that caused $50,000 worth of damage to the Agriculture Building. In June 1969 the Old Main Building—the campus’s most recognizable landmark—burned to the ground. All such acts were attributed to anti-Vietnam War radicals.⁴ In the first two months of 1970, antiwar students had engaged in a series of demonstrations against the Center for Vietnamese Studies on campus, including an occupation of the center that had been forcibly put down by campus and city police.⁵ Student leaders had responded to police violence with an explicit rejection of nonviolence. Terming the event a “police riot,” Campbell said, “there is a crisis on this campus and this is just the beginning. Going up against a club with a flower will never work.”⁶ It thus seems jarring that a few weeks after defending the occupation of buildings and urging self-defense in antiwar activities, Campbell would be engaged in leading something so quaintly anachronistic as an integrated, nonviolent protest over dorm hours.

The rapid growth of the student movement in places like Carbondale created these kinds of juxtapositions. Nationally the movement had evolved, as ideologies and tactics developed and adapted to changing situations. Integration gave way to “black power,” Gandhi to Fanon, civil disobedience to revolution, the Port Huron Statement to the Weathermen. But in places like Carbondale this development was telescoped into a brief period. We see then, coexisting simultaneously, rhetoric and strategies that had developed over several years nationwide. For instance, at least at the leadership level, the movement at SIU was still largely integrated, long after the national movement had fractured along racial lines.⁷

The contradictions in the Carbondale student movement largely grew out of the fact that it was composed of three separate strains that gradually came together in the late sixties. The first can be described as a student party culture, which developed with the rapid increase in university enrollment during the sixties. The second was the student rights movement, which began in earnest in the mid-sixties, drawing together politically active students from across the spectrum. The third student culture, and numerically the smallest, was the New Left, which had been a presence on campus since the civil rights movement of the early sixties and had developed through such organizations as the Student Non-Violent Freedom Committee (SNFC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). These strains alternately converged and separated until, by the spring of 1970, a combination of local and national events brought them together for a series of mass demonstrations that culminated in a student strike and riot that closed the university.

In many ways, Carbondale is an unlikely place for a major university. Located on the boundary where the prosperous farmland that makes up most of Illinois gives way to rugged, forested hills, the area around Carbondale and southward differs from the rest of the state both economically and culturally. The economy of southern Illinois historically has been based on mining, and the region is marked by many small towns and a history of violent labor struggles and frequent depressions.⁸ The nearest metropolitan area, St. Louis, lies more than a hundred miles away, while Chicago is more than three hundred miles north.⁹ As SIU professor and novelist John Gardner wrote in 1973, “nobody arrives at and nobody escapes from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale by accident.”¹⁰

The transformation of SIU from a small teachers’ college to a major multiversity occurred between the end of World War II and 1970, thanks largely to the efforts of one man, SIU president Delyte Morris. A visionary, Morris undertook a massive building campaign to accompany the expansion of the university’s mission. Under his leadership, SIU attracted such luminaries as Buckminster Fuller and pioneered in a variety of fields, from handicap accessibility to the creation of the first U.S. program in ecology. Enrollment exploded, increasing from nine thousand in 1960 to eighteen thousand in 1968 to almost twenty-four thousand in 1970.¹¹ The result was an environment characterized by flux and experimentation. As one former student recalls, “When I first came to SIU in ‘64, the campus was raw, unfinished. . . . Temporary barracks, cheap buildings were being used, with a great many important functions—things you would think of as important in a university—carried on in these buildings which were essentially shacks.”¹²

As SIU alumnus Dick Gregory remembers, Morris “was not just the head of the university, he was the father. . . . Delyte Morris was the first white man I knew who had both power and compassion.”¹³ He was in most respects a staunch liberal. From the beginning he strongly supported civil rights and sought to increase the black enrollment at SIU.¹⁴ He was also deeply committed to using the university to combat the region’s poverty and to keeping costs and admission standards low enough to ensure accessibility for the area’s population.¹⁵ At times Morris’s liberal principles caused him to put students’ right of free speech above the university’s prestige. In 1962, for instance, he defended the rights of SIU students to participate in the civil rights movement in nearby Cairo, and in 1965 he allowed the campus SDS and Socialist Discussion Group to invite Communist Herbert Aptheker to speak on campus. Both actions provoked strong criticism outside the university.¹⁶

At the same time, as Dick Gregory implies, Morris was a paternalistic ruler over his domain. He tried to run the university he had created as if it were still a small teachers’ college where he knew the students and faculty and they deferred to his benevolent authority.¹⁷ He dealt with challenges through a combination of strength of character and diversionary tactics. In 1952 he successfully faced down a crowd of one thousand male students on a panty raid with the words, “It’s been fun. Now let’s all go home and go to bed.”¹⁸ In 1965, when the students rights organization, the Rational Action Movement, presented a petition calling for greater student participation in university policy making, Morris defused the challenge by appointing a commission of students to begin meeting the following fall and issue recommendations nearly a full year later.¹⁹

Morris’s leadership style grew increasingly untenable throughout the decade. SIU students were in the position, then, as now, of being part of a large university in a small town in the middle of nowhere, with limited sources of entertainment. With the rapid increase in enrollment in the sixties, SIU developed a reputation as a “party school,” which often placed students in opposition to university administrators and city officials. The first major confrontation occurred during finals week in June 1966 and became known as the “Moo and Cackle riots” after Carbondale’s first downtown fast-food restaurant, the Moo and Cackle, outside which much of the action took place.

The events began on Sunday, June 5, when students engaged in a late-night water fight that was broken up by police. The next night a large crowd of male students took part in a panty raid at two women’s dorms. “Eye-witnesses said many of the coeds encouraged the men in the demonstrations and threw various ‘unmentionables’ out of dormitory windows,” according to the local paper.²⁰ Again police broke up the festivities, using, students complained, excessive force. The third night students returned, spreading into downtown Carbondale. State police dressed in riot gear joined local and campus cops, firing tear gas into the crowd as students built a bonfire in the street, threw rocks at police cars, and chanted “cops eat shit.” When police arrested thirteen students, the crowd marched to the police station and held a sit-in on Main Street. On the fourth night police arrested twenty-three more rioters, and President Morris expelled all students who had been arrested, the first mass expulsion in SIU’s history.²¹

The Moo and Cackle riots were merely the first in Carbondale’s long history of impromptu street demonstrations that frequently turned into clashes with the police.²² Placed in context, the event is characteristic of the development of SIU’s student movement in several ways. In the first place, the origins of the riots were completely apolitical. But overreaction by the police created resentment on the part of the students, which then became the issue. A reporter on the fourth night of the riot commented, “Students who were present could give no clear idea of why they were there, except that ‘they didn’t want to be pushed around by police’ or ‘we have a right to be out here.’”²³ Once the demonstrations gained a focus, however, students began imitating tactics from the civil rights movement, engaging in a mass sit-in. In spite of such tactics, the overall atmosphere was anything but nonviolent, as students enjoyed engaging the police in violent confrontations. As one participant recalled, “There were a bunch of people running up and down the street, because once you know the police are after you, it’s fun time.”²⁴

Even as this party culture developed at SIU, it increasingly came to be dominated by the counterculture of the late sixties. As southern Illinois native Larry Vaughn, who entered SIU as a freshman in 1968 remembers:

When I first got here, y’know, I hung out in West Frankfort with beer-drinking, fast-car-driving kids, so I started hanging out with the same type in Carbondale in the dorms. And over Christmas I went home for the holidays and a friend of mine had gone to Stanford University and he brought some pot home. So we got in the car and drove out into the country. Instead of drinking we started smoking pot and by the time the holidays were over it was like my whole perspective on how to have a good time had changed. So I came back to the dorms and I started hanging out with an entirely different crowd of people.²⁵

The counterculture was not just about drug use, however. It was also about exploring alternative ideas and ways of life, all of which created a strong sense of community. Jim Hanson, a graduate student at SIU in the late sixties, described the scene: “There was a lot of socializing in those days. Most of the houses around Carbondale, you didn’t even knock on the door, you just walked in. People laid down real cool, ‘hey man.’ . . . It was a neat time, especially this kind of public part of living in Carbondale.”²⁶

The student rights movement developed contemporaneously with the party culture, but at first there were few direct connections between the two.²⁷ The development of student rights as a significant movement on campus began in the spring of 1965 with the founding of the Rational Action Movement (RAM). In late April and early May, RAM gathered twenty-five hundred signatures and held a mass rally focusing on student control of the student center, the administration’s decision to shorten spring break, and its censorship of the editorial page of the student newspaper.²⁸ One student warned that “unless our demands are met along the way, the movement may end up in a riot.”²⁹ Another supporter, though, stated that the movement “is not going to be another Berkeley.”³⁰ RAM drew the support of a broad cross-section of students; its twenty-member coordinating committee included Mike Harty of the Student Peace Union as well as representatives from the Young Republicans and the Young Americans for Freedom.³¹ RAM also led to the creation of a student party, the Action Party, which consistently fought for student rights issues for the rest of the decade. But President Morris increasingly dug in his heels, refusing to abolish women’s dorm hours and, in 1967, banning KA, a student-edited insert in the campus newspaper, after it published an anonymous article encouraging students to violate dorm visitation rules.³²

The third student culture in the mix grew out of the Student Non-Violent Freedom Committee, a local chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, which was formed in 1962. The SNFC engaged in regional actions (in Cairo, for instance) as well as in picketing local businesses that practiced racial discrimination.³³ In the words of student activist Jim Hanson:

There was always that group of people [who] got their first baptism as radicals working in Cairo for civil rights in about ‘62 or, at the latest, ‘63. And there were probably . . . fifteen to twenty people who were down there who got shot at, who were SIU students . . . and that was the core. Most of them operated out of a Marxist-Maoist understanding of how the world worked and how the United States was conducting itself, how the university was conducting itself, and, of course, how the Department of Defense was conducting its foreign policy in Vietnam.³⁴

A small group of students active in local civil rights activities but seeking to expand the scope of the movement formed the Socialist Discussion Club in 1965 because, as founding member Mike Harty put it, “it occurred to us . . . if you were a recognized student organization you could get a room at the student center for a meeting or if you wanted to pass out pamphlets—not that we had any—if you wanted to and you were a recognized student organization, you could have a table there.” The group soon began to focus on the war, handing out antiwar literature next to military recruiters in the student center.

Within a fairly short time, the Socialist Discussion Group developed into a chapter of SDS. As Harty explains, SDS was

never a large organization, but it was always kind of a front organization and it, the membership of that old Socialist Discussion group, pretty much became SDS. Some one of us got a hold of the Port Huron Statement. We all read it, we all pretty much agreed with it and felt, well hell, here’s something we can affiliate with and still have fun, which is pretty much what it was. . . . The irony was that from ‘65 through ‘68, SDS was in technical terms quite conservative. We were sort of serious, we weren’t interested in game playing, we weren’t interested in drugs.³⁵

The local SDS chapter was also totally autonomous and separate from the national office, though not necessarily by choice. As Harty says, “We tried to have contact, but nobody ever wrote back.”³⁶ Jim Hanson echoes Harty:

It seemed a very local affair. . . . I didn’t see any coordinated national leadership. . . . As far as national SDS people coming in holding rap conferences with us--“Here’s what we’re doing here, what are you guys doing here? We’ll assist you, we’ll send you money, we’ll help you get out posters, we’ll do this, we’ll do that at Carbondale, we’ll help you if you’ll help us”--I never heard [of or] attended a meeting like that. It was all local insofar as I knew.³⁷

In addition to SDS, there were other small leftist political organizations forming on campus in the late sixties. One of the most important was the Southern Illinois Peace Committee (SIPC), founded in 1967 and led by Bill Moffett, a black Trotskyite and pacifist.³⁸ One SIPC member says that Moffett played a major role in holding the group to a philosophy of nonsectarianism and nonviolence. “We had a lot of debates about . . . ideology, did we stand for a certain ideology? Moffett always succeeded in telling us, no, we’re an issue-related social movement—that is, we’re going to stop the war—and any political statements or any acts of violence in the end would be counterproductive.”³⁹ Moffett and the SIPC would maintain this philosophy throughout the period. Following a violent antiwar riot in February 1970, the SIPC went into the streets and cleaned up the debris before leading a peaceful march on twenty-five hundred.⁴⁰ And during the May 1970 riot, Moffett entered occupied buildings to plead with students not to engage in vandalism.⁴¹ But the SIPC remained relatively small, and while Moffett was a visible leader at virtually every antiwar rally of the period, he never gained a large following.⁴²

From the beginning, organizations such as SDS served as the left wing of the student rights movement. In Harty’s view, the Left viewed in loco parentis issues as valuable for educating students about the nature of their powerlessness. Even apolitical students resented the administration’s paternalistic actions and SDS believed that such resentment could be used to “show people what the university was all about. . . . We also saw it as a way of forming alliances with people you wouldn’t necessarily go to for an alliance with. People who you didn’t even know, student government, fraternity and sorority people.”⁴³

Despite the efforts of SDS to pull the student rights movement leftward, RAM continued to represent a broad cross-section of the political spectrum for several years. It was not until the 1967-1968 school year that the three strains—party culture, student rights, New Left—began to come together, especially under the leadership of student government president Ray Lenzi. A candidate for the Action Party, Lenzi had been elected with his running mate and fraternity brother Richard Karr on a straight student rights platform. But during the fall term Lenzi hesitantly began to speak out against the war, a stance that created tension between him and the conservative and pro-war Karr.⁴⁴

During the winter and spring quarters of 1968, Lenzi consciously began to try to pull the three strains of the movement together. He was aware that the politicization of many students grew out of their participation in the party culture. “Everybody was getting turned on. . . . They were smoking pot, they were dropping acid. . . . That increased their sense of negativity toward the government. ‘What do you mean, they put you in jail for doing this?’ That was just another reason to assume there was something evil about the authorities and government system.”⁴⁵ In April Lenzi introduced a bill in the student senate titled “Legalization of Marijuana: Pot is Groovy,” which stated that “marijuana is too popular to be denied the public” and called on SIU police to “take the most relaxed attitude toward enforcement of this law” and “preferably exercise no enforcement whatsoever.”⁴⁶ During the same period Lenzi also became one of the featured speakers at the growing antiwar demonstrations.⁴⁷

Although Lenzi and Karr found themselves more and more at odds on political and cultural matters, they still cooperated on student rights issues. In April they published an open letter in the campus paper criticizing the administration for ignoring a student senate bill calling for the reform of women’s dorm hours. The letter called on students to engage in mass civil disobedience by ignoring university rules and “determin[ing] their own hours.”⁴⁸

Student rights issues continued to provide the glue that held the three student cultures together, though frequently in odd ways. In April 1969, for example, three hundred women staged an after-hours walkout from their dorm, chanting “hour power” and “we shall overcome.” But as the politicized women exited the dorm, they were greeted with the old-fashioned party culture in the form of a crowd of men chanting, “We want pants [sic].”⁴⁹

The most self-conscious attempt to pull together the student rights, party, and New Left cultures came with the Unity Party campaign in the spring of 1969. The party crossed racial lines, running the black Campbell for president and the white Wallace for vice president. Ray Lenzi wrote optimistically in the underground paper Big Muddy Gazette, “The forces for change on this campus are no longer disparate. Blacks, new left radicals, freaks, hippies, workers, and all other progressive people can stand together supporting the candidacy of Dwight Campbell and the Unity Party. The pieces of a truly mass radical movement for social change have fallen together in southern Illinois. This spring we shall capture the initiative and change will come.”⁵⁰ Campbell also emphasized bringing different kinds of people together. “We’ve got to realize that we are all students and all our problems are intertwined. . . . To unify the campus the Party has to have people who dig people, and this is the first thing I do.”⁵¹

The party platform that united the various student groups focused primarily on student rights issues; of the twelve-point program the party put forth, eight involved student rights. Other points included hiring more black faculty members and increasing the university’s involvement in Carbondale’s poorest neighborhoods. Significantly, no mention was made of the war.⁵² This effort to build a coalition of left-liberal forces proved successful, as the Unity Party gained the endorsement of the Action Party and won the election in a landslide.⁵³

While the Unity Party sought to avoid the issue, other groups were anxious to focus on the war, especially since U.S. policies in Vietnam now had a tangible symbol on campus. In July 1969 Morris and the board of trustees had approved the creation of the Center for Vietnamese Studies and Programs. Widely believed to be a CIA front, the center was financed by the Agency for International Development (AID), which would provide $200,000 a year for five years to study ways to reconstruct Vietnam after the war.⁵⁴ Appointed as the Center’s distinguished visiting professor was Wesley Fishel, who had been part of a similar program at Michigan State, well known for antiwar activist Robert Scheer’s 1966 exposé in Ramparts of the connection between the CIA and the Michigan State program.⁵⁵

SDS attacked the center in its Big Muddy Gazette, denouncing it as an example of American imperialism and running a drawing of a nude Delyte Morris on the front page. University officials responded by withdrawing the permit that allowed the BMG to be sold on campus.⁵⁶ In the resulting furor, many people spoke out in defense of the BMG’s free speech rights, including those who did not necessarily share the paper’s politics, putting university administrators on the defensive.⁵⁷

By the fall of 1969 the convergence of the student rights movement, the New Left, and the party culture, along with the increasing intransigence of the administration, created a palpable tension on campus. As one person recalled, “everyone kind of knew something was going to happen in the fall [before the spring riots]. It was just like all anybody could talk about at every party.”⁵⁸ Under Campbell’s leadership the Unity Party not only led the fight for student rights but also sought to involve itself in the broader community. The party inaugurated a campaign called “Serve the People,” which sent student volunteers into Carbondale and surrounding towns to offer a free extermination service and trash cleanup projects.⁵⁹

But the war was the elephant in the room, and it was increasingly difficult to ignore. The reasons for student concern were as much personal as ideological. In the words of one African American student, “for me, the two big issues [were] the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, although I felt more involved in protesting the Vietnam War. That had more of a direct impact on me because I knew people who were dying.”⁶⁰ Larry Vaughn agreed: “The war in Vietnam affected me directly from high school. I actually had older friends, brothers of friends, sons of my parents’ friends, that had already died in Vietnam. For me it was a real thing. That was one of the most important aspects, we knew that we could die, that we could be killed. Y’know, it wasn’t a joke, it wasn’t something on TV.”⁶¹

As protests against the Vietnam Studies Center mounted, Campbell and Wallace offered the resources of student government to the antiwar movement. In late January 1970 violence broke out in demonstrations against the center that lasted two days and resulted in fifteen arrests. As tension escalated, so did student rhetoric. Both Campbell and Wallace denounced “the pig power structure,” and Wallace declared, “We fear that the brutal and reprehensible tactics used by police may be the beginning of a total police state at SIU.”⁶² Students responded with the creation of a coalition to “Off Viet Studies” and on February 20 two hundred protesters entered a meeting of the board of trustees and demanded the removal of the Vietnam Studies Center. In an exchange with board member E.T. Simonds, Wallace echoed Malcolm X: “If we’re beaten again, we’ll have to resort to self-defense in any form necessary.” When Simonds asked, “Is that a threat, partner?” Wallace responded, “If we’re attacked, we’ll defend ourselves. We haven’t threatened anybody.”⁶³ That night demonstrators engaged police in a series of disturbances that resulted in two arrests and $15,000 in damage to university buildings and Carbondale stores.”⁶⁴

Four days later Campbell and Wallace were suspended for their participation in the protest over dorm hours. Student rights, then, remained a central issue, and dorm hours, especially, provided a locus for all strains of the movement. For the student rights group, the curfew issue represented the university’s paternalism; for the New Left, it symbolized the broader issue of powerlessness; and for the party culture, it ruined many an evening plan. As for the war, despite its resonance for so many students, it probably would have remained a peripheral issue had it not been for the Vietnam Studies Center.

But all that changed in May 1970. On the evening of May 1, fifty people gathered in a parking lot just off campus to protest President Nixon’s announcement, the day before, that the U.S. military had invaded neutral Cambodia. When the small crowd started a fire in the street, police arrived and arrested eight people. The same night, someone threw a firebomb into the Vietnam Studies Center.⁶⁵

On Monday, May 4, Ohio National Guard troops killed four students at Kent State University. That night SIU’s student government held an emergency meeting and voted unanimously to join a national student strike, with a boycott of classes to begin at noon on Wednesday. On Tuesday two thousand students gathered at a rally in front of Morris Library, and the administration announced that classes would be canceled on Thursday for mourning.

The next day another rally in front of the library drew three thousand people. After listening to several speakers, a crowd marched through nearby buildings, calling students to leave classes and join the strike. About fifteen hundred strong by this time, the crowd moved to Wheeler Hall, where the Air Force ROTC offices were located. Using bricks from the remains of Old Main, protesters broke windows and then occupied the building.⁶⁶ While Bill Moffett urged students inside Wheeler to refrain from vandalism, others chanted, “burn it down.” Shortly after 5:00 P.M., about a thousand people marched through downtown Carbondale before returning to campus, where they reoccupied Wheeler Hall until they were forcibly cleared by police. In the meantime, at the request of the sheriff, 650 National Guard troops had been sent to Carbondale, a number that would swell to twelve hundred over the next several days.⁶⁷

On the evening of Thursday, May 7, another rally attracted two thousand people to the front of the library. At 9:00 P.M. demonstrators marched up Illinois Avenue and sat in at Main and Illinois, the town’s major intersection. City and university officials informed the demonstrators that they could remain and that traffic would be rerouted. At this time, according to H.B. Koplowitz, the crowd was “low-key, somewhat festive but benign.”⁶⁸ Speakers addressed the gathering as wine bottles circulated and marijuana smoke wafted through the air. Monitors wandered through the crowd, urging calm.

At around 10:00 P.M. about seventy-five people attempted to block the nearby railroad tracks. Carbondale’s mayor and several march leaders pleaded with them to keep the tracks clear while most of those sitting at Main and Illinois remained oblivious to the controversy. At this point national guardsmen and state police decided to move the entire crowd and began firing tear gas into the group of demonstrators. Panic ensued as police forcibly removed the crowd; many protesters responded by throwing bricks and smashing windows. By the end of the night there had been seventy-nine arrests, fifty-nine injuries, and $100,000 damage done to seventy-eight businesses. The mayor declared a state of civil emergency and a sundown-to-sunrise curfew.

Violent confrontations continued for several days as students held ever larger rallies demanding that SIU be shut down. Finally, on Tuesday, May 12, SIU Chancellor Robert MacVicar announced to a crowd of four thousand outside the president’s office that the university would be closed “indefinitely.” The next morning President Morris met with a crowd of three thousand students who encouraged him to keep the school open; Morris announced a referendum to be held the next day to determine whether the university would remain closed. On May 14 students voted decisively (8,224 to 3,675) to keep the university closed.⁶⁹

During this chaotic two-week period, a complex relationship developed between the movement’s leaders and the rank and file, each group interpreting events differently. From the leaders’ perspective the events were not so much a riot as a student strike. In Ray Lenzi’s words, “it was a very conscious, planned activity that was organized. The goal was to shut down the university as a statement to the state and the nation against the war in Vietnam and even though definitely things got out of hand and got a little disorganized at times . . . there were leaders with a conscious strategy who wanted to shut SIU down.”⁷⁰

But the question of leadership in SIU’s student movement was problematic. For one thing, New Left organizations like SDS distrusted the very idea of leadership.⁷¹ Even the most hard-core politicos at SIU neither provided nor saw any significant leadership of the student movement. Bennett recalls, “There were no charismatic leaders . . . who could stand up and rally the troops around [them]. This was pretty much a leaderless movement and I just don’t think there were any substantial leaders. There were functional leaders, people who, if a meeting needed to occur, got it organized. In a sense, it was a mob, a leaderless mob.”⁷² While leaders like Ray Lenzi kept in mind the goal of a student strike and tried to move things in that direction, events seemed much more spontaneous to the rank and file. As one participant recalls, “there were a couple of leaders, so to speak, people who got to make speeches. I thought it was pretty much issue-run. I’m sure there was somebody who said we’re going to get that together here and have this demonstration and pass out these things, but I never got the feeling that someone was manipulating us.”⁷³ Even some of the speakers saw events in a similar light. Jim Hanson remembers that “people took to the streets kind of spontaneously. From that point on, there really wasn’t any organizing to speak of. Not to say we weren’t happy to jump in front of a crowd [and] tell them what we wanted them to hear, but it was all very short-term planning, like hours prior to organizing something.”⁷⁴

Doug Allen, an assistant professor in the philosophy department who was “right in the middle of things,” was also struck by the spontaneity of events. “Things really escalated and it got to the point that it couldn’t be controlled.”⁷⁵ In the end, the movement’s rank and file, imbued with the party culture ethic, was in no mood to listen to voices of reason encouraging restraint. Larry Vaughn recalls, “What we did is we divided up into groups and we would roam around the streets and we would take bricks and we would pound police cars with all these bricks. The police cars looked like junk cars on wheels, completely torn up. . . . We were just out there doing what [we] thought [we] had to do.”⁷⁶

While the events culminating in the student strike brought together the various strains of SIU’s student movement, the decision to close the university revealed the movement’s rifts. When the university shut down, thousands of students reacted predictably. As Bill Bojanowski put it, “It was the original street party at SIU. People were smoking dope on the street. . . . We had our makeshift parades going down the street. Some guy with a Nixon mask on, it was a circus atmosphere. It was a lot of fun, nobody got hurt. . . . It was pretty peaceful, everybody was everybody’s friend.”⁷⁷

But for the more politically conscious within the movement, the closing of the university dissipated the movement’s strength and destroyed further opportunities for organizing. Doug Allen, for one, says he felt let down when the school closed and everyone went home:

There was a lot of potential, we were even talking about educational things, priorities, and what kind of university did we want this to be. It was exciting, sitting all day in rap sessions, exploring different things like nonviolent resistance. . . . Normally, you’d have a small group of people, but here [was] a huge number of people. There was a sense of excitement building up [and then] the whole thing toppled.⁷⁸

Similarly, SDS activist Larry Bennett believes that the growing influence of the party faction drowned out the influence of the more serious politicos and proved counterproductive for the creation of a long-term mass movement. According to Bennett:

None of the Big Muddy Gazette collective or the SDS types wanted this university closed. I think the pressure from the riots became more of a party and it sucked in a lot of people who weren’t politically on board and it just became like a happening, a way to be part of something that felt like a national movement. But it sucked up a lot of extra people and I think those people did want the university closed and had they been in Moo and Cackle in 1966, it would have been a panty raid. . . . I don’t think the serious movement people thought that was the thing to do because we understood that people are employed by the university. Close the university, you jeopardize people’s jobs. And we were also concerned about the way the working-class people in the surrounding communities would actually regard the movement. We wanted to be popular, we didn’t want to be elitist college students. . . . We didn’t want to alienate the working class.⁷⁹

The student movement did not die out altogether after the riots, but its character did seem fixed by the events of May 1970. Two years later, when Nixon announced the mining of Haiphong harbor, Carbondale again erupted in riot, as more than one thousand people participated in several days of both nonviolent and violent protests. Once again, rank-and-file protesters often overruled the reasoned voices of leaders. On May 10, when a crowd of about a thousand marched to the Vietnam Studies Center and began hurling rocks at windows, Bill Moffett confronted the demonstrators and urged nonviolence, saying, “We cannot trash [this place] because we are going to lose and alienate a lot of students who are against the war.” Believing his call for restraint had worked, Moffett then asked, “Do you want to trash?” and the crowd resoundingly answered “yes!”⁸⁰

In his address at the May 6 rally in front of Morris Library, Dwight Campbell drew a comparison between Kent State and SIU. “We need to understand that what happened at Kent State is something we should’ve expected a long time ago.” Referring to a January confrontation between students and campus security forces outside the Vietnam Studies Center at Woody Hall, Campbell said, “The only difference between what happened here at Woody Hall and what happened at Kent State is a matter of degree.” In conclusion Campbell urged people to honor the dead by continuing the movement against the war. “Them cats don’t want flowers. They want you to carry on the struggle where they left off. Don’t just have a memorial service—have a struggle service.”⁸¹

In echoing Wobbly martyr Joe Hill’s last words, “Don’t mourn, organize,” Campbell’s speech placed events at SIU in context of the long-term history of the American Left, the national mass movement against the war in Vietnam, and the escalating conflict between SIU students and administrators over local issues. The convergence of national and international issues with those of purely local significance, in Carbondale and similar places across the country, complicates our view of the development of the New Left and the student antiwar movement in the late sixties and early seventies.

On the most obvious level, our study of SIU reflects the diversity of the movement; the “prairie power” protesters of the late sixties had different backgrounds and sensibilities from the founders of the New Left.⁸² In less elite institutions, where students often lacked ties to the Old Left and where protesting meant a larger break from families and community than it did for students from professional, middle-class families, there was little sectarianism and a less distinct boundary between New Left and counterculture. Clearly, in parts of the country where the movement was too small and isolated to be able to afford the luxury of arguing over fine points of doctrine, people learned to work with others whose politics they did not share. And, always, the issues were as much personal as they were political.

Our conclusions about SIU point to the need for more studies at the grassroots level, as it becomes clear that formal organizations such as SDS were relatively unimportant on many campuses. The story of the student movement is not synonymous with SDS. Such studies must also address different components, or cultures, of the movement on various college campuses. Surely SIU was not the only campus where a political movement developed as on overlay of the party culture that already existed. It was not so much that people joined the movement simply to be “cool” or to save themselves from the draft—to mention two of the more popular explanations for student activism. It was, at least in part, because the protest movement was, for a time, a way to have fun. As students became swept up in something bigger than themselves, they discovered the joy of feeling part of a community and taking control over the decisions that affected their lives (living out SDS’s vision of “participatory democracy”). Having fun was an important part of the story.

In the wake of Kent State many young people dropped out of the movement, as the stakes seemed too high.⁸³ But activists did more than mourn—and they did not flock to Wall Street. Instead they struggled in new and different ways to live out the values of the movement. In the meantime universities such as SIU tried to deny, and sometimes to suppress actively, their own New Left, student rights, and party traditions.

As for the historiography of the student movement, the evidence suggests that there is no dominant narrative that fits every case; what local stories tell us is that the supposed anomalies are the story.⁸⁴ While the May 1970 riots at SIU appear in retrospect as a small piece of a large national story in which hundreds of campuses shut down, they were experienced at the time and at the grassroots as “a very local affair.” For a brief moment, the party culture became politicized enough to go beyond fighting for student rights and, in its own way, join a larger battle for the soul of the university.

1 Campbell is quoted in Bob Carr, “Slaves No More,” Daily Egyptian [Southern Illinois University at Carbondale], February 27, 1970, 4. See also P.J. Heller and Marty Francis, “Coed Study Hours Started at SIU,” Daily Egyptian February 25, 1970, 1; “Campbell, Five Others Suspended by Moulton,” Daily Egyptian, February 26, 1970, 1; “Student Boycott Today,” Daily Egyptian, February 27, 1970, 1.

2 This is even more interesting when understood as an allusion to Jerry Farber’s classic essay, “The Student as Nigger,” an attempt by white radicals to assert their oppressed status as students (Jerry Farber, “The Student as Nigger,” in The Student as Nigger: Essays and Stories [New York: Pocket Books, 1969], 90-100). The essay first appeared in 1965 in the Los Angeles Free Press and was widely reprinted.

3 Details of the bill can be found in Marty Francis, “Campbell Urges All Students to Reject Hours Compromise,” Daily Egyptian, January 21, 1970, 1.

4 Betty Mitchell, Delyte Morris of SIU (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 168-169, 183; H.B. Koplowitz, Carbondale After Dark and Other Stories (Carbondale: Dome Publications, 1982), 19-20. Robert A. Harper points out that, despite popular mythology, “the cause of the Old Main fire has never been determined” (Robert A. Harper, The University That Shouldn’t Have Happened, But Did! (Carbondale: Devil’s Kitchen Press, 1998), 259.

5 Win Holden and Nathan Jones, “Six Arrested in Fracas at Center; Trial Set Feb. 26,” Daily Egyptian, January 30, 1970, 1; “Police, Students Clash at Woody,” Daily Egyptian, January 31, 1970, 9; “Campus Melee Evokes Varying Reactions,” Daily Egyptian, January 31, 1970, 9; Bob Carr, “Rally Voices Opposition to Viet Center, AID,” Daily Egyptian, February 21, 1970, 11; “Protesters Interrupt Trustees Meeting,” Daily Egyptian, February 21, 1970, 11; P.J. Heller and Bob Carr, “Weekend Results; Peaceful March, $15,000 Damage,” Daily Egyptian, February 24, 1970, 1.

6 P.J. Heller and Win Holden, “Coalition Stresses Themes,” Daily Egyptian, February 3, 1970, 8.

7 In interviews with Jim Hanson (July 20, 1997, Collinsville, Ill.) and Mike Harty (November 24, 1997, Carbondale, Ill.), both offered impressionistic evidence that this integration did not filter down to the grassroots level. M. Browning Carrot, who came to SIU in 1967 as an assistant professor of history, concurs, saying he never saw any African Americans at antiwar rallies (interview with M. Browning Carrot, May 21, 1999, Carbondale, Ill.). Other observers recall the movement as being integrated at all levels but as predominantly white.

8 For an example of the bitter labor wars in southern Illinois’s mining region, see Paul M. Angle, Bloody Williamson: A Chapter in American Lawlessness (New York: Knopf, 1952).

9 See Harper, The University That Shouldn’t Have Happened, 6-11. Even today, the nearest interstate is fifteen miles outside town.

10 John Gardner, “Southern Illinois University: ‘We Teach and Study and Raise All the Hell We Can,” Change, June 1973, 43.

11 Harper, The University That Shouldn’t Have Happened, 161, 209; the 1970 enrollment figure was 23,846. Cited in the Southern Illinoisan (Carbondale), August 22, 1999, 33.

12 Harty, interview.

13 Dick Gregory, foreword to Mitchell, Delyte Morris, ix.

14 On Morris’s early commitment to civil rights, see Harper, The University That Shouldn’t Have Happened, 39, 132.

15 Ibid, 34-38.

16 As reported in the Southern Illinoisan, February 26, 1965. See, for example, Delyte W. Morris to Reverend Lockard, August 2, 1962, SIU Archives, Student Affairs Division, 1951-1969, Box 12. Thanks to E. Jan Jacobs for making known to us this archival material.

17 See Harper, The University That Shouldn’t Have Happened, 38.

18 Koplowitz, Carbondale After Dark, 10-11.

19 “Background Information about SIU, RAM and the Commission,” November 1966, SIU Archives, Student Affairs Division, 1951-1969.

20 According to the local paper, “Estimates of the number of students involved varied from 500 to 3,000” (“Students Romp through Streets until 3 A.M.,” Southern Illinoisan, June 7,1966, 1.

21 Ibid; Richard Carter, “Police Stop New Student Uproar,” Southern Illinoisan, June 8, 1966, 1; D.G. Schumaker, “SIU Expels Students Arrested During Riot,” Southern Illinoisan, June 9, 1966, 1; Koplowitz, Carbondale After Dark, 14-15; interview with Ray Lenzi, March 20, 1997, Carbondale.

22 For a history of the many confrontations on Carbondale’s strip, see Koplowitz, Carbondale After Dark, 9-51.

23 Ben Gelman, “Few Riot, Many Cheer,” Southern Illinoisan, June 9, 1966, 3.

24 Larry Bennett, telephone interview by authors, April 14, 1999. Bennett went on to be active in Carbondale’s chapter of SDS and worked for the underground student newspaper, the Big Muddy Gazette.

25 Larry Vaughn, “I’m on the Pavement, Thinkin’ about the Government: Vietnam, Carbondale, and the May 1970 Riot” (panel discussion at SIU-Carbondale, April 16, 1997). Bill Bojanowski, who arrived at SIU in the summer of 1969, remembers how completely the counterculture seemed to dominate the Carbondale scene at that time. Bojanowski interview by authors, June 29, 1998, Carbondale.

26 Hanson, interview.

27 In 1960 Bill Morin rand for student body president, pledging to “stand up for student rights for everything from segregation to cars.” Morin had no problem with students demonstrating to express their feelings—which they did on the issue of having automobiles—as long as there was no violence or mob action. Daily Egyptian, May 6, 1960, 1.

28 Frank Messersmith, “Student Protest Group Distributing Petitions,” Daily Egyptian, May 1, 1965, 1.

29 Ric Cox, “Dissatisfactions Stirred Rational Action Move,” Daily Egyptian, May 1, 1965, 1.

30 “Students at SIU Seek Policy Voice,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 4, 1965.

31 Cox, “Dissatisfactions,” 1. By 1965 Harty was also a member of the Socialist Discussion Group and would soon help start SIU’s chapter of SDS.

32 Koplowitz, Carbondale After Dark. Morris also temporarily refused to allow KA’s editors to reenroll.

33 Ibid, 12, 14.

34 Hanson, interview.

35 Harty, interview.

36 Ibid. Hary also states, “I think it’s important to note that there were no red diaper babies at SIU, or if there were, I never knew them.”

37 Hanson, interview.

38 Koplowitz, Carbondale After Dark, 16.

39 Hanson, interview.

40 Heller and Carr, “Weekend Results.”

41 “Police, Students Clash; Several Hurt,” Daily Egyptian, May 7, 1970, 1.

42 Harty claims that Moffett “was one of these self-appointed leaders. You could find him on the front line of any demonstration, but that was only because he put himself there. . . . I mean, he was a Trotskyist cell of one.” Harty, interview.

43 Ibid.

44 Lenzi, interview.

45 Ibid.

46 “Senate to Consider Marijuana Bill,” Daily Egyptian, April 30, 1968, 2.

47 John Durbin, “700 Persons March in Saturday’s Rally,” Daily Egyptian, April 30, 1968, 1.

48 Ray Lenzi and Richard Karr, “Senate Writes Students,” Daily Egyptian, April 5, 1968, 1, 9.

49 Dan Van Atta, “300 Coeds Stage ‘Walkout’ in Protest of Women’s Hours,” Daily Egyptian, April 16, 1969, 2.

50 Ray Lenzi, “Unity,” Big Muddy Gazette, April 9, 1969m 12. Emphasis in original.

51 Norris Jones, “Dwight Campbell’s Idea—‘Unity is Strength,’” Daily Egyptian, April 11, 1969, 12.

52 Ibid. Another issue was the abolition of the loyalty oath for student workers and faculty.

53 “Unity Party Slate Receives Backing of Action Party,” Daily Egyptian, April 23, 1969, 9. According to Roger Leisner, the student government representative to the Carbondale city council, Campbell’s leadership style played a crucial role in building this coalition.

54 On the Center for Vietnamese Studies, see Harper, The University That Shouldn’t Have Happened, 256-259, 279-286; and Center for Vietnamese Studies and Programs Newsletter, September 15, 1969, Tom Busch papers, Box 3, Special Collections, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. For a history of the development of an opposition movement at SIU focusing on the Center, see Douglas Allen, “Universities and the Vietnam War: A Case Study of a Successful Struggle,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (Oct.-Dec. 1976): 2-16.

55 On the Michigan State program, see “The University on the Make,” Ramparts 4 (April 1966): 11-22; Robert Scheer, How the United States Got Involved in Vietnam (Santa Barbara: Report to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1965); Stanley K. Sheinbaum, “The Michigan State-CIA Experience in Vietnam,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (spring 1971): 71-75.

56 Dan Van Atta, “Big Muddy Gazette Loses Permit to Sell on Campus,” Daily Egyptian, April 11, 1969, 11.

57 For instance, on April 16 the Daily Egyptian ran an editorial defending the BMG’s first amendment rights next to a virulently anti-BMG cartoon showing a group of hippies making such comments as “How’s the editorial coming?” “I don’t know. Fidel hasn’t pulled our strings yet.”

58 Vaughn, “I’m on the Pavement,” panel discussion.

59 Marty Francis, “‘Serve the People’ Does ‘Crazy Things’ in Community,” Daily Egyptian, November 20, 1969, 9. Though neither Dwight Campbell nor Delyte Morris would probably have appreciate the irony, “Serve the People” stood firmly within Morris’s mission of using SIU to combat the region’s economic deprivation. See Harper, The University That Shouldn’t Have Happened, 34-38.

60 Patty Miller (pseud.), interview by authors, July 7, 1998, Carbondale.

61 Vaughn, “I’m on the Pavement,” panel discussion.

62 “Campus Melee Evokes Varying Reactions,” Daily Egyptian, January 31, 1970, 9. Heller and Holden, “Coalition Stresses Themes,” 8.

63 “Protesters Interrupt Trustees Meeting,” Daily Egyptian, February 21, 1970, 11.

64 Heller and Carr, “Weekend Results.”

65 “Eight Demonstrators Arrested,” Daily Egyptian, May 5, 1970, 1. In addition to reports in the Daily Egyptian, this description of events of May 1970 is drawn from a detailed “Chronology of Events Related to Closing of Southern Illinois University,” prepared by Max Turner, Government Department, Tom Busch papers, Box 2, Special Collections, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. For narrative accounts, see Koplowitz, Carbondale After Dark, 52-63, and Harper, The University That Shouldn’t Have Happened, 290-296. Of the two, Koplowitz’s is much more sympathetic to the demonstrators.

66 In an interesting instance of student-worker solidarity, the campus paper reported, “Several workers at Old Main were observed passing bricks over the construction fence to students.” “Police, Students Clash: Several Hurt,” Daily Egyptian, May 7, 1970, 1.

67 Ibid, 1, 10.

68 Koplowitz, Carbondale After Dark, 57.

69 Another 608 students voted for free choice. The faculty vote was 603 to 341 in favor of keeping the university open, with 62 voting for free choice. Staff voted 1,131 to remain open, 447 to close, and 49 for free choice. See Turner, “Chronology of Events.”

70 Ray Lenzi, “I’m on the pavement,” panel discussion.

71 Harty, interview; Bennett, interview.

72 Bennett, interview.

73 Bojanowski, interview.

74 Jim Hanson, “I’m on the pavement,” panel discussion.

75 Doug Allen, telephone interview by authors, April 26, 1999. Allen was later denied tenure at SIU because of his leadership in the movement opposing the Vietnam Studies Center.

76 Vaughn, “I’m on the pavement,” panel discussion.

77 Bojanowski, interview.

78 Allen, interview.

79 Bennett, interview.

80 Koplowitz, Carbondale After Dark, 26-28.

81 “Kent State, Vietnam protest draws 3,000,” Daily Egyptian, May 7, 1970, 10.

82 Despite the lack of contact with national SDS, the student movement at SIU lived out in many ways the notion of “prairie power,” a tendency that dominated SDS from 1966 to 1968. According to Carl Davidson, New Left theorist and national leader of SDS during this period, prairie power centered around students from large state universities, not elite schools that had produced SDS’s founders. These were young people without connections to the Old Left or, for that matter, to liberalism. They were homegrown radicals, more activist and less ideological than the SDS old guard. Fueled by the civil rights movement, they were fighting battles for themselves on college campuses on issues that ranged from dorm hours to university complicity with the war machine. They were not controlled from a center. They symbolized the spirit of alienated youth, and, for a brief time, their adolescent rebellion was politicized. Carl Davidson, interview by authors, September 17, 1997, Carbondale.

83 Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 16.

84 Thanks to James Farrell for this insight.