TRANSCRIPT:

1967 was a pivotal year in both the war in Vietnam itself, but especially in the response to it in the United States. Up to this time, in 1966, the response to the war in Vietnam that was calling attention to its cruelty and something that should not be happening, and that our young men should not be being drafted to fight in, it was coming primarily from students. It was their generation that was being sent to fight. They were being sent to fight and the war itself was showing itself to be something that was not doing good things for the people of Indochina, either. But it was mainly on college campuses, and then increasingly in high schools, that big actions were happening, mainly teach-ins.

There had not yet been the student strikes that were going to be coming as part of the response to the war. Mostly teach-ins and in organizing of discussions and some protests against the war in Vietnam.  However, by the end of 1966, when a march had been called by the National Coordinating Committee to end the war in Vietnam and two marches against the war for April 15th, one in New York City and one in San Francisco, things were changing quickly. I think the the news reports about US soldiers being killed in Vietnam as part of the war were hitting news and people were responding. But the biggest change, in my opinion, came when Martin Luther King entered the battle against the war, and he did so against the advice of other ministers in the Black community who thought it would be wrong to take on the US government because the government could be an ally of the Civil Rights Movement.

King gave an absolutely brilliant, impassioned and very thoughtful– one of the best speeches, I think, in American history – it’s been thought of that way – at Riverside Church. It was a call to his speech and why he thought it was impossible to avoid taking on the war in Vietnam if Black people were going to have any kind of future in the United States and if people of conscience had conscience because the war was so obviously wrong.

So that speech is something that, I think for a while it was being taught in schools, I don’t know if it still is, I certainly hope so because it’s relevant today. His doing this coincided with him agreeing to be a speaker at the Vietnam anti-war demonstration in New York and with his wife, Coretta Scott King, agreeing to be a speaker at the San Francisco demonstration.

Between those two demonstrations, people were being invited from all over the United States to come together in solidarity on behalf of bringing our troops home and against the war against the Vietnamese people. So I quit school to be a part of this. I was a senior at San Francisco State College, and other things had been going on in my life, but it was clear that this was something big when I was asked to be the West Coast executive director of the Spring Mobilization Committee, which is the coalition that had come together to build these demonstrations on both coasts. In addition to Coretta Scott King agreeing to come to San Francisco, Dr. King sent Jim Bevel to San Francisco to work with our committee to help make the demonstration happen.

Jim Bevel is the aide to Dr. King, who was responsible for the Birmingham, Alabama, youth uprising that is is featured in a marvelous film about the students in Birmingham taking on racism in that town and being sent to jail and revitalizing the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham at that time. And that was two years before we were doing what we were doing with Vietnam.

So it was a wholehearted endorsement that Dr. King gave to this. And that made all the difference in the world. I can tell you, as an organizer in approaching churches, in approaching unions, and approaching all kinds of organizations and asking for their support to the demonstration. And it happened. It happened big. And so on April 15th itself, we didn’t realize how big it had happened until a hundred thousand people showed up – more than that in New York City – to march against the war in Vietnam and at the rally there.

In San Francisco, where nothing like this had really happened since the general strike of 1934, according to the police estimates, between 75,000 and 100,000 people showed up at the foot of Market Street and marched four miles to Kezar stadium, which was at that point the place where the 49ers played football and which which sat 62,000 people. They marched in and started to fill the stadiums for a rally until every seat was taken.

Still tens of thousands were outside of the stadium, having gatherings of going to tables and not being able to get inside, listening to the–what was going on inside over loudspeakers. It was a gathering of a very expanded tribe. The students were there, people had come from up and down the West Coast, all the way from from Vancouver down to San Diego and there were busses from many different places.

In fact, one of the reports talks about how as people came into the stadium, they were carrying their banners and the San Francisco State Vietnam Day Committee banner was there. That was my starting point. But banners from all over the place, the last banner that entered the stadium and the one that people gave a warm applause to was from Orange County, California Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Now, at that point, Orange County was the center of the John Birch Society of right-wing activity. And when people saw that there was a whole group there with a banner from Orange County, it kind of demonstrated that this is a pretty new phenomenon. But among the banners that are reported on, there were contingents from every western state: Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Idaho, and busses from cities and all those places.

There were banners from different unions, different churches, different women’s organizations, etc. And as those people came in to sit down there was something in the air. Of course, this was massive change in what was going on in the United States. And we were 3 hours later than something similar that had happened in New York and we were getting, you know, there was no quick, there was no Internet back then or anything like that. But people were getting phone calls: “oh, my God, you should see this!” from friends in New York City who were reporting similar things. And so it was in that atmosphere that I, who was 21 years old, I took the stage first at Kezar Stadium to call the event to order and to welcome a music group that was playing a piece that had been written specifically for this action and to call people to order and to begin the rally.

I had that honor of doing that. As I told my students for years afterwards, it was the easiest speaking I’ve ever done because you have a mic in your hand and you’re surrounded by the stadium of people– nobody can see in each other’s eyes. I mean, I couldn’t see in anybody’s eyes I was talking to and they couldn’t see in mine.

So it was unintimidating in that sense. And I said something in the mic that people liked, all of a sudden there would be this roar that sounded like you were watching a football game. So it was a very, yeah, I was not nervous. I was overwhelmed with pride in the people who were there and with joy about it, as we all were. But just before I began speaking, a group of Nazis tried to take the stage. They were encouraged to. They were repelled by, easily, by the people standing around the stage. And then I began.