March 13, 2019
In pop culture versions of
1960s activism, student radicals are often depicted as spoiled upper-class kids
rebelling against their privileged parents, engaging in random acts of
violence, and despising the nation’s wage-earning majority. In reality, the
100,000 or so youths in the student movement were largely drawn from the lower
middle class, and some from the working class; their parents were frequently in
general agreement with their children’s politics; the period’s radical activism
was much more about leafleting, petitioning, and tabling than about
confrontations with the police; and far from rejecting the country’s workers, a
significant part of the movement considered finding ways to approach this class
a central political issue.
You Say You Want a Revolution: SDS, PL, and Adventures in
Building a Worker-Student Allianceis a useful introduction to the actual experience of many
or most of the student activists a half-century ago.[…]
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