TOC: Who is taking up these causes now?
James: I’m a part of a group now called the Rainbow Council of Elders. The original Rainbow Coalition wasn’t Jesse Jackson, it was in Chicago—it was kind of the Young Lords, the Black Panther Party, the Young Patriots for a while and the emerging Rising Up Angry. So after the World Social Forum last year, a number of people—Kathleen Cleaver, Ward Churchill out of AIM (American Indian Movement), some Asian groups, [Young Lords founder] Cha-Cha Jimenez, myself—we’ve been meeting together. And for me—besides the Internet, which gives you a lot of information about what’s going on—I’m hearing about all these other groups. There’s a Brown Beret—not just old Brown Berets [Mexican nationalist activist group that began in the ’60s in Chicago]—there’s this Brown Beret chapter in Watsonville or Castroville, California. There’s new SDS groups everywhere. There’s the emergence of new Black Panther Parties—some of them are kind of right-wing nationalists. I was actually the president of the 49th Ward Democrats; we consider ourselves to be a progressive Democratic organization. I just really feel that throughout the country—much like we saw in the ’60s—you have young people and now older people who were involved before (there were those older people then, too, but we didn’t know them that much) just coming to the fore around issues that affect their lives. And beginning to voice their concerns and take action. I think that we’re seeing a re-emergence of the movement and I think that it will be hard to stop.
Schultz: I’ve seen that at Columbia [College].
James: Yeah, everywhere. The kids have shifted, all of a sudden.
Schultz: They’ve gone from being antipolitical or apolitical within just a couple years—to being downright interested.
James: That gave us hope, and I think the rest of the world probably likes it, too.
Rose: I wonder how much of this is the times and the war and how much is Barack’s personal inspiration. I think that they play against each other.
Katz: I have two kids in their twenties, but even in 2002—
James: I think before Barack, it started.
Katz: Right. It started even before. What we saw, in 2002, there were two generations. The core of the team of us began to organize around it. There were demonstrations from October all the way to March. There were thousands of young people—in fact, in February—and this was even before the war—we had about 50 high schools come out into the freezing cold. You never saw this with Vietnam, certainly not in the first six months. So, I’ve really seen a lot of young people. And I think Obama is right. The paradigms have shifted. So I see thousands of young kids coming out around crime, around violence. But I think that Obama—one of the things about Bush not being responsive—we have seen the dwindling of demonstrations over the last 40 years. I still run the antiwar groups, but as I said in those meetings, it’s because the young people have felt that to be ineffectual. And they were not simply interested in expressing who they are. And with Obama—one of the things I actually think is that these young kids are not—I wouldn’t say they’re Democrats. I think they’re looking for revolutionary change. And they pin their hopes on Obama because they do not see our demonstrations—or what’s gone before—as having an impact.
James: May 1st, the longshoremen on the West Coast are going to shut down the ports. [The one-day strike was held as planned.] Check it out. I mean, when’s the last time that happened? A long time ago.
Kurshan: And the Latinos in Chicago, last May—
James: These marches. We got it going.
Peck: Well, yes and no. The war’s still on. You said the first six months in Vietnam; it’s five years. We can talk about evidence that kids are on the move or that we’re on the move. The point is that this is kind of a much longer—we were young once—
James: A lifelong struggle.
Peck: That’s right; it’s a much longer struggle.
James: Our whole lives.
Peck: One lesson of the ’60s is that people can make a difference. I think that things are still hung in the balance. I think there’s a lot of folks who are in their own foxholes. I think there are a lot of people who are yearning, but a yearning is not a revolution. There are people who want to rise above cynicism, who are looking for activism. I think one big change—I’m not going to be an Al Gore and invent the Internet thing—but I think peer-to-peer works in a much different way. We were very peer-to-peer-ish in the ’60s. We lived together, we demonstrated together, we worked together, we slept together. And in a weird way, we’re kind of back to that—where students, whether it’s social networking or whether it’s just not dating, but running in packs, or opened-up gender relations, there’s a lot more of that going on. And where that leads, I think, is pretty interesting. But I want to be careful that we don’t just put a bow on this. It is a lot more historical and the goals that we set in ’68—we won some and we lost some. The movement that came out of the Democratic Convention became in many ways far more intense and far more effective, in some ways, but also in many ways, lost its way. Chicago was a watershed. If you want, you can draw a dotted line to the Weathermen—that’s not an accomplishment, as far as I’m concerned.
Kurshan: There’s also Russia and China. We don’t exist in a vacuum.
Peck: Sure, we don’t. We have a more international consciousness.
Kurshan: More international. But what happened in the ’70s and the ’80s is Cambodia, is the falling apart of the Soviet Union, is a cultural revolution and its aftermath. So my goals for ’68—by ’69, I thought we were going to have a revolution. And we were going to win and we were going to join forces—
James: None of us see it that way any more. I don’t see we’re all of a sudden going to seize state power and all that. We see this as an ongoing plan—I want a better deal for people. There are still questions of an economic democracy or socialism. Those are different deals.
Peck: To re-appropriate a misappropriated word, what we were part of was a giant surge. And we crested and we accomplished a lot and we washed away a lot of bad things.
Schultz: [Nineteen] Sixty-eight ran away from us. It ran away from everyone that had taken part in any way. It developed so fast and got faster and faster and accelerated here in Chicago in the last week of August and there was a tremendous amount of conviction that came out of that with the people who were involved, but it had an enormous impact—
Peck: We couldn’t get out of it.
Schultz: The impact went several ways. I think there has been a kind of immunization against the effect of demonstrations. There was a huge demonstration, before the war started, in New York—the Iraq War, an ENORMOUS demonstration. And the demonstrations at the Republican Convention I think were truly very inventive but they were also facing police who had studied this and that.
James: We were talking about people being in kind of a hole, but then, all of a sudden, in the last election, you saw a real shift. And even though the Democrats—we keep thinking that they blew it in a lot of ways—they hadn’t done much—but it really was kind of a comprehensive shift, like a paradigm shift, on the part of many people in the country.
Katz: This is what I’m saying about Barack. What we saw—because of the worldwide situation—we had Russia, China, Cuba, whatever our favorite was—we saw the revolution as on hand. I’m telling you, my kids, who have my politics, see a reform—the election of Barack as the next step in solving fundamental issues. But history is a series of loops. So in fact, May Day was lost. May Day was not won during that period of time. The Haymarket—those guys got killed; it wasn’t until 15 years later. So we were sure that we were the generation that was going to take the whole world socialist. But guess what? History’s really like this—it’s really looping.
Peck: You wanted to go socialist.
Schultz: China may be the country that’s facing something like in ’68—those set of conflicts. I was in China teaching in October—creative writing at Fudan University in Shanghai. And some of the students there were very similar to the kind of apolitical or even antipolitical—the party congress was going on at the same time and they couldn’t have cared less. And I thought, “My God, I’m fascinated, I want to know about this.”
Peck: I visited Fudan University; they’re very different than having an activist movement.
Schultz: Like I said, it’s not an activist movement there at all. But the Tibetan movement is.
Peck: But the Han Chinese hate the Tibetan movement.
Schultz: The Han Chinese do. But you also have the working class in China and their movements, too.
Rose: They’re practicing a better brand of capitalism.

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