TIME: Charlotte Alter- ‘Here’s What All Successful Student Protests Have in Common’

Source:TIME Magazine- 1960s civil rights demonstration.

Source:The Daily Review 

“Many college graduates have a story of marching in the quad, or holding signs, or gathering to chant slogans in front of a university building. Protest is as much a part of college as late-night pizza or last-minute exam cramming. But some movements make change, while others die down when midterm season comes or leaders graduate.

Students at the University of Missouri found themselves in the former category on Monday, when their protests over the University of Missouri president’s handling of racial issues on campus led to his resignation. Students had been ramping up pressure against Tim Wolfe for weeks, arguing that he had ignored or minimized problems including racial slurs hurled at black students and a swastika drawn in feces on a campus wall. On Monday, as a graduate student’s hunger strike stretched into its eighth day, and the school’s football team threatened to go on strike (which could have cost the university $1 million), Wolfe announced that he would step down and students celebrated.” 

From TIME Magazine 

“Six years in the making and with a cast of thousands, Berkeley in the Sixties recaptures the exhilaration and turmoil of the unprecedented student protests that shaped a generation and changed the course of America. Many consider it to be the best filmic treatment of the 1960s yet made.

This Academy Award-nominated documentary interweaves the memories of 15 former student leaders, who grapple with the meaning of their actions. Their recollections are interwoven with footage culled from thousands of historical clips and hundreds of interviews. Ronald Reagan, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mario Savio, Huey Newton, Allen Ginsburg, and the music of Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez and the Grateful Dead all bring that tumultuous decade back to life.”

Source:California Newsreels- protestors for free speech, unlike today.

From California Newsreel

Its reflective and insightful analysis of the era – from the HUAC hearings and civil rights sit-ins at the beginning of the decade through the Free Speech Movement, the anti-war protests, the growth of the counter-culture, the founding of the Black Panther Party and the stirrings of the Women’s Movement – confronts every viewer with the questions the 1960s raised, which remain largely unanswered.

What separates the student protest movements of the 1960s from today, is that the 1960s protesters were protesting for freedom. Protesting for civil and equal rights for all Americans. Protesting in favor of free speech on campus and in general. Protesting against an unjust war that they hated and so they wouldn’t have to go fight in that war themselves.

The so-called student protesters today are protesting in favor of political correctness over Freedom of Speech. They want a special new right for minorities: the Right Not to be Offended. No American currently has that right in the U.S. Constitution, but these New-Left protesters feel that minorities in America are entitled to it.

So you have the 1960s student protesters, the Baby Boomers the hippies, the real Liberals from this era who wanted the ability to be left alone, live their own lives and live in freedom, before the New-Left emerges in the late 1960s, that wanted to tear down the American establishment and our form of government and move to a socialist system.

The 1960s hippies marching for individual freedom for all Americans and not have to fight wars they think are immoral. And you have the sons and daughters, perhaps even grandsons and granddaughters of the New-Left of the 1960s and 1970s, protesting today against free speech. And create a new right for minorities that doesn’t exist for anyone else.

The hippies, we’re successful, because America was politically changing in the 1960s and becoming that country that we really are today of people who believe in the right to be left alone and be free to live our own lives and even freely express ourselves. While the New-Left, represented a fringe in the 1960s that believed capitalism was immoral and even racist, that our form of government was even undemocratic and completely wanted to change the American way of life and impose their socialist and even Marxist values on the rest of the country.

And today you have the New-Left still representing a fringe that sees free speech as dangerous and that minorities deserve the right not to be offended. The 1960s protesters were successful, because in many cases they had the country with them. The New-Left protesters today don’t have that.