"You don't need a weatherman to know which

way the wind blows. “ Bob Dylan

The Counterculture
Movements
J-Term 2011
The Sixties
Terry Bunde
 Gandhi and Margaret Mead
• "You must be the change you wish to
see in the world.“ Mahatma Gandhi

• "Never doubt that a small group of

thoughtful, committed citizens can
change the world. Indeed, it's the only
thing that ever has.“ Margaret Mead
 Abbie Hoffman
• "We are here to make a better world. No amount of
rationalization or blaming can preempt the moment of
choice each of us brings to our situation here on this
planet. The lesson of the '60s is that people who cared
enough to do right could change history. We didn't
end racism but we ended legal segregation. We ended
the idea that you could send half-a-million soldiers
around the world to fight a war that people do not
support. We ended the idea that women are second-
class citizens. We made the environment an issue that
couldn't be avoided. The big battles that we won
cannot be reversed. We were young, self-righteous,
reckless, hypocritical, brave, silly, headstrong and
scared half to death. And we were right."
 June Jordan
• "...we condemned them, our children,
for seeking a different future. We hated
them for their flowers, for their love,
and for their unmistakable rejection of
every hideous, mistaken compromise
that we had made throughout our
hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult
lives."
 Abbie Hoffman
• "Smoking dope and hanging up Che's
picture is no more a commitment than
drinking milk and collecting postage
stamps. A revolution in consciousness
is an empty high without a revolution in
the distribution of power. We are not
interested in the greening of Amerika
except for the grass that will cover its
grave.“ (from Steal This Book)
 Abbie Hoffman
• "You are talking to a leftist. I believe in the
redistribution of wealth and power in the
world. I believe in universal hospital care for
everyone. I believe that we should not have a
single homeless person in the richest
country in the world. And I believe that we
should not have a C.I.A. that goes around
overwhelming governments and
assassinating political leaders, working for
tight oligarchies around the world to protect
the tight oligarchy here at home."
 Abraham Lincoln
• "This country, with its institutions, belongs
to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they
shall grow weary of the existing government,
they can exercise their constitutional right of
amending it, or their revolutionary right to
dismember or overthrow it."

Abraham Lincoln
Source: First Inaugural Address
David Brothers, Black Panthers
• "When I was marching with King down in
Selma and Washington, when the racist pig,
the fascist cop, was beating me over my
head to the tune of "We Shall Overcome" -
you see, had I been politically educated, I
would have taken that club, you see, and
beaten the hell out of him. I'm not thinking
about myself. I'm thinking about my people.
Because I'm not persecuted as an individual.
I'm persecuted because I'm black."
 Deborah Smullyan, HS Grad
• "General Motors wants crew cuts,
punctuality and respectful conformity.
Uncle Sam wants patriotic cannon
fodder. A world like this deserves
contempt. Only goodness in our
generation can counter the decadence
of the society we are inheriting. And
our generation is good."
 Frederick Douglass
• "If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those
who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate
agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up
the ground, they want rain without thunder and
lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar
of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one,
or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral
and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and
it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly
submit to and you have found out the exact measure
of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon
them, and these will continue till they are resisted
with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of
tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those
whom they oppress."
 Mario Savio
• "American society is a bleak scene, but it is all a lot
of us have to look forward to. Society povides no
challenge. American society in the standard
conception it has of itself is simply no longer
exciting. The most exciting things going on in
America today are movements to change
America...The "futures" and "careers" for which
American students now prepare are for the most part
intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-
plated consumers paradise would have us grow up
to be well-behaved children."

• Source: An End to History (1963)

 Timothy Leary
• "Hippies started the ecology movement.
They combated racism. They liberated sexual
stereotypes, encouraged change, individual
pride, and self-confidence. They questioned
robot materialism. In four years they
managed to stop the Vietnam War. They got
marijuana decriminalized in fourteen states
during the Carter Administration."

Source: Chaos and Cyberculture

 William S. Burroughs
• "The people in power will not disappear
voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops
just isn’t going to work. This thinking is
fostered by the establishment; they like
nothing better than love and
nonviolence. The only way I like to see
cops given flowers is in a flower pot
from a high window."
 Student Groups in the 1960s
• Student Non-violent Coordinating
Committee
• Black Panther Party
• Students for a Democratic Society
• Weather Underground (100,000 members)
• Berkeley Free Speech Movement
• Young Americans for Freedom
• National Student Association
Students for a Democratic Society
• Founded in 1959 as a branch of the older
socialist organization, the League for
Industrial Democracy
• Organized in 1960 at the University of
Michigan
• Political Manifesto (The Port Huron
Statement) was written by 22 year old
Tom Hayden, then Field Secretary of SDS
 Other Student Organizations
• The Berkeley Free Speech Movement –
founded by Mario Savio
– Fought against “corporate” education where
students were not as important as appeasing
the big donors to the university
– Fought to collect money on campus for civil
rights organizations – led to sit-ins on campus
and occupation of the Berkeley administration
building
 Weather Underground
• Positions characterized by revolutionary,
anti-imperialist, Black liberationist, and
feminist rhetoric
• Started a campaign in 1969 to blow up
government buildings and banks
• Took their name from Bob Dylan’s song
Subterranean Homesick Blues, “You don’t
need a weatherman to know which way the
wind blows
 What Were They Protesting
• Protesting the War in Viet Nam
• Protesting Segregation anywhere
• Protesting for relevant courses in college
that they wanted to take
• Protesting the lack of adequate healthcare
and support for the poor in the richest
country in the world
• Protesting for rights (women, gay/lesbian,
African American, Native American)
 Port Huron Statement
• As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by
events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and
victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the
Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most
of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact
of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the
Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our
friends, and millions of abstract "others" we knew more
directly because of our common peril, might die at any
time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel
all other human problems, but not these two, for these
were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too
challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the
responsibility for encounter and resolution.[
 Basic Principles of SDS
• Civil Rights, Peace, and Student
movements were too poor to make a big
impact, labor unions were too weak so the
university was the most logical place for
protesting for rights and peace
• Students and like-minded faculty must
wrest control from the administrative
bureaucracy and raise the important
questions in the curriculum
 The Weather Underground
Split from SDS in June, 1969
• Off shoot of the SDS; students who felt
that the way to stop the war was to create
the greatest violence in the United States
aimed at the government and universities
that supported the government.
• Independent Lens The Weather Undergro
und | PBS