John Wolf and Heiner Giese
A violent melee took place on the UW-Madison campus after officers forcibly cleared anti-Dow protesters from the Commerce Building on Oct. 18, 1967. For many of those attending the Radical Perspectives Teach-In, this sort of radical activism is the paradigm of the '60s.
The Madison Reunion will be a nostalgic homecoming for lefty activists who called Madison home in the 1960s. But it won’t be the only game in town.
Local activists are also planning an independent conference called Radical Perspectives Teach-In, aimed at representing, well, the more radical perspectives of the ’60s political counterculture.
“We heard about the Madison Reunion being organized from people telling us, ‘I don’t see anything I’m interested in here, this isn’t the radical Madison I know.’ It’s organized as an academic conference,” says Sarah White, a member of the local Gray Panthers and an organizer of the Radical Perspectives Teach-In. “There was an opportunity to do an educational event and address the interests of the radical left today in a way the Madison Reunion wasn’t doing.”
So White, along with co-organizer David Williams, started putting together an event based on the teach-ins of the ’60s. Now they’ve got a dozen workshops planned for Saturday, June 16, ranging from “Women Unmasking Power & Building Movements” to “The New Left’s Radical Legacy For Today.” There’s also a kickoff event the night before, including Max Elbaum reading from his book Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che.
“I’d say there’s a Marxist throughline to what we’re doing that you haven’t heard in a few decades,” White says.
She stresses that the event is meant to supplement, not compete with, the Madison Reunion.
“It’s an alternative and a complement, a ‘more than,’” White says.
The organizers behind the Madison Reunion, for their part, are all for it. “If we have contributed to the dialogue, then I’m very happy,” says Ben Sidran. The Reunion itself could never be all things to all people, he says, so he’s happy to see people run with the idea and tailor an experience that reflects their memories of the ’60s. “One of the main things we need to do right now is talk and listen. One of the consequences of the past couple years in politics is people are afraid to talk and don’t want to listen,” Sidran says. Anything that can break that impasse, in Sidran’s view, is a win.
The approach at the teach-in will be hands-on, with an emphasis on connecting older radicals with young people who are active today. “It’s about passing the torch,” White says. “We’re old, we can’t march in the streets anymore, we have to pass the torch to other people. People are really eager to engage in dialogue with young activists.”
That’s why there are several panels on high school activism, which White sees as a two-way street. “We were marching for the right to wear pants to school. Students today are marching for the right to go to school in safety,” White says. That new focus, coupled with the fact that community organizing has changed so radically with the rise of social media, means the kids have as much to teach the older generation as they have to learn from it, say the organizers.
“We want to hear what they have to say, to put to rest our fear that nothing’s happening, that they’re all lost in their own little screens, hopeless and disconnected,” she says. “And the events in Florida showed us they are not hopeless, they are not disconnected, they are mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore. We want to see that energy and support it any way we can.”
Williams, a campus radical dating back to 1968, is excited for intergenerational dialogue at the event. “People have talked about ‘passing the torch’ — and to a large extent it is passing the torch, because it’s the younger people who are going to have to spearhead a movement for radical social change. But some of us aren’t hanging up our spurs and quitting politics, we want to join forces with [younger generations],” Williams says.
“Anarchic” is the best word to describe it, White suggests. “We’re convening people, we’re creating space, we’re creating a framework. But everybody’s a presenter and all ideas are welcome. This isn’t going to be a few old white guys at a podium talking to an audience. This is going to be people mixing their ideas together and co-creating what happens that day.”
