FoundSF - User contributions [en]

Reinhabitory Theater: A Legacy of Inspiring Bioregionalism Through Storytelling

2018-07-09T22:55:25Z

Seanburns:

''' Historical Essay '''

''by Yeshe Salz ''

[[Image:Reinhabitory-Theater cover1.jpg]]

''Photo: Eric Weber, Source: Reinhabiting a Separate Country, 1978''

In the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1970s, the [[Ecology Emerges 1970s|ecology movement]] was gaining momentum. Earth Day was born, the back-to-the-land movement was coming into full swing, and myriads of new environmentally focused community organizations were sprouting up. One of them was [[Planet Drum Foundation|Planet Drum]], an organization that set out to build grassroots awareness and community self-determination around ecology.[1] The founders of Planet Drum emerged from the lively Bay Area improvisational, political and community theater scene of the day when groups such as the [[San Francisco Mime Troupe Arrested|San Francisco Mime Troupe]] and the [[San Francisco Diggers|Diggers]] were capturing the imagination of people across the country, even internationally.[2] In 1977 a handful of these artists/ environmentalists, spearheaded by Judy Goldhaft and Peter Berg, set out to dynamically integrate the worlds of popular education theater and environmentalism. They traveled through the coasts and inland ranges of northern California performing improvisational renditions of both contemporary back-to-the-land and traditional Native American stories from the regions which they visited. They were the stories of animals and places, inspired by the oral traditions of the native Northern California Pomo, Maidu, Karok and Pit River tribes which have been collected in books such as ethnomusicologist Jaime de Angulo’s Indians in Overalls.[3] The group called their multi-species performance troupe the Reinhabitory Theater.

An “early experiment in ecological theater,”[4] the Reinhabitory Theater sought to engage the local communities they visited in the experience of living from a bioregional perspective. Their performances invoked the interdependence of all species, including human beings. “Audiences will have to be shown reasons to suspend whatever preconceptions they may have about a central place for humans in the biosphere...” wrote Peter Berg in an articulation of the vision of Reinhabitory Theater.[5]

The actors in the Reinhabitory Theater, often coming from experiences in the SF Mime Troupe or the Minneapolis’ Firehouse Theater, founded and shaped the Theater as a way to extrapolate upon bioregional ideas through improvisation, performance and community-based workshops. The Reinhabitory Theater actors creatively merged the worlds of environmentalism and theater, using performance and storytelling to address and explore the foundational bioregional concepts introduced by Planet Drum.[6]

Judy Goldhaft, who got her start in performance as a dancer, began doing mime workshops on animal behavior in 1975 and eventually incorporated this work, as well as her training in movement theater at the SF Mime Troupe, into her guidance of the Reinhabitory Theater. [7] In Peter Coyote’s reflection on his involvement with Reinhabitory Theater, he writes how “...coached by Judy’s quiet encouragement and insistence and Peter’s mad-cap and insightful illuminations… we assembled ‘a show.’ It was something of a miracle. We had discovered a way to discuss two new concepts—bioregionalism and reinhabitation—in the same wacky manner we had once conscripted to discuss political issues in the San Francisco Mime Troupe.” [8]

[[Image:Reinhabitory animals 2.jpg|300px|left]] [[Image:Reinhabitory Mt-Tam 3.jpg|300px|right]]

''Photos: Edna Tucker, Judi Quick, Edmund Shea, and Erik Weber; Source: Reinhabiting a Separate Country, 1978''

The idea of ''bioregions'' was at the center of the project. According to Peter Berg, ''bioregions'' are locations that share climate, watersheds, landforms, soils, native plants, animals, and other natural characteristics and appropriate human culture. Berg writes that, “The term refers both to geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness—to a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place.“ [9] Furthermore, 'reinhabitation', a term he coined, is the act of becoming native to places in order to adapt to the bioregion.[10] As Coyote paraphrased it, “reinhabitation”...is the process of learning how to live in a place according to the dictates of the place itself.” [11] It is a concept developed within a broader “bioregionalist” framework of thinking.

Bioregion was a 19th century biology term that was redefined by Peter Berg and popularized by Berg and Raymond Dasmann [12] as well as others such as Gary Snyder in his article, “Coming into the Watershed.” [13] Bioregionalism refers to the philosophy of living as a human in a way that is appropriate to one's own bioregion. Berg said that, “Bioregionalism is proactive. It is carrying the concept of a life-place into the activities and goals of human society… In a bioregion there are different zones of human interface with natural systems: urban, suburban, rural, and wilderness. And each of these has a different appropriate reinhabitory approach.” [14] According to Berg, the purpose of the Reinhabitory Theater was to inspire this kind of consciousness. [15]

The Reinhabitory Theater was about reimagining our relation to the natural world, so it was performed in a variety of locations. “We did the Reinhabitory Theater in a lot of places,” recalled Judy Goldhaft. “We did it outside, and we did it inside. We did it… underneath the freeway. We did it at grange halls, we did it in cow pastures, we did it in living rooms.” [16] The structure of the performance, including those who watched it, constantly changed as well. “Our audiences were all kinds of people,” Goldhaft reflected, “and when we did this theater we didn’t do it just as a theater. We did community empowerment workshops at the same time.” [17] These gatherings engaged participants in movement and improvisational storytelling. Often the skills learned there were used to re-enact scenes of injustice on stages and in courtrooms to make political statements and fight for environmental protections. [18]

[[Image:Reinhabitory Lizard-and-Coyote 4.jpg]]

''Photos: Shafi Hakim; Source: Reinhabiting a Separate Country, 1978''

The Reinhabitory Theater was also a direct response to the back-to-the-land movement of the 60s and 70s in which people from the cities chose to move to rural settings to be homesteaders. Goldhaft states, “They got very little support, and this theater was designed to let them know that what they were doing was important.”[19] The Reinhabitory Theater celebrated ways of living that prioritized being in touch with the earth’s natural rhythms and ecosystems and it created a space to connect communities engaging in this kind of lifestyle. Judy reflected that, “It’s really my hope that we’ll turn people on to investigate where they live and the stories that have gone down in the place where they live…We see the theater as helping to create a network among the communities.” [20] Such network-building and place-based thinking was all a part of the ways in which the artists and environmentalists in the Reinhabitory Theater were reimagining possible ways of living. “The seventies were really quite a revolutionary time,” Judy said in her interview for this article, “and the Reinhabitory Theater was a way to support the back-to-the-landers and others who were evolving a different society.” [21]

The Reinhabitory Theater did not last into the 1980s, but its legacy did. “We ended it in about ’79 or ’80,” states Goldhaft. [22] As Peter Coyote jovially remembers, “‘Everything Changes’... Life, family, economies, eventually intervened and after a good run of several years, some folks had to get jobs..." [23] Planet Drum continued as an innovative voice for bioregional sustainability, education and culture. Coyote continues, "...some [actors] moved away, and the Reinhabitory Theater Company eventually evaporated. The ideas it articulated and the emergent culture it identified did not, however. They were direct by-products of the fertile imaginations and unrelenting intellectual efforts of Peter and Judy.”[24]

[[Image:Reinhabitory-Theater-at-Lands-End.jpg]]

''Photo: Erik Weber; Source: Reinhabiting a Separate Country, 1978''

Notes

[1] Carlsson, Chris. [[Ecology_Emerges_1970s|“Ecology Emerges 1970s.”]] Found SF. (Reprinted from the anthology ''Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78'' (City Lights Foundation: 2011), edited by Chris Carlsson) 
[2] [http://www.diggers.org/overview.htm “Overview: Who Were (Are) the Diggers?”] The Digger Archives. 
[3] Berg, Peter. “Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California.” ''Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California'', Planet Drum Foundation, 1978, p. 186. 
[4] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 22. 
[5] Berg, Peter. “Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California.” ''Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California'', Planet Drum Foundation, 1978, p. 187. 
[6] Berg, Peter. [[Planet_Drum_Foundation|“Planet Drum Foundation.”]] FoundSF 
[7] Author interview with Judy Goldhaft, San Francisco. May 8, 2017 
[8] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 196. 
[9] Berg, Peter. “Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California.” ''Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California'', Planet Drum Foundation, 1978, p. 218. 
[10] Berg, Peter. [[Planet_Drum_Foundation|“Planet Drum Foundation.”]] FoundSF. 
[11] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 194. 
[12] Evanoff, Richard. “Bioregionalism Comes to Japan.” Sustainable City, ''Japan Environment Monitor'', 1998, sustainablecity.org/intervws/berg.htm. 
[13] Snyder, Gary. “Coming into the Watershed.” ''A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds, Counterpoint'', 2008. 
[14] Evanoff, Richard. “Bioregionalism Comes to Japan.” Sustainable City, ''Japan Environment Monitor'', 1998, sustainablecity.org/intervws/berg.htm. 
[15] Berg, Peter. [[Planet_Drum_Foundation|“Planet Drum Foundation.”]] FoundSF. 
[16] Author interview with Judy Goldhaft, San Francisco. May 8, 2017 
[17] Ibid. 
[18] Ibid. 
[19] Ibid. 
[20] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 51, quotes from Judy Goldhaft and Peter Berg. 
[21] Author interview with Judy Goldhaft, San Francisco. May 8, 2017 
[22] Ibid. 
[23] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 196. 
[24] Ibid.

[[category:Performing Arts]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:Ecology]]

Reinhabitory Theater: A Legacy of Inspiring Bioregionalism Through Storytelling

2018-05-24T17:05:40Z

Seanburns:

''' Historical Essay '''

''by Yeshe Salz ''

[[Image:Reinhabitory-Theater cover1.jpg]]

''Photo: Eric Weber, Source: Reinhabiting a Separate Country, 1978''

In the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1970s, the [[Ecology Emerges 1970s|ecology movement]] was gaining momentum. Earth Day was born, the back-to-the-land movement was coming into full swing, and myriads of new environmentally focused community organizations were sprouting up. One of them was [[Planet Drum Foundation|Planet Drum]], an organization that set out to build grassroots awareness and community self-determination around ecology.[1] The founders of Planet Drum emerged from the lively Bay Area improvisational, political and community theater scene of the day when groups such as the [[San Francisco Mime Troupe Arrested|San Francisco Mime Troupe]] and the [[San Francisco Diggers|Diggers]] were capturing the imagination of people across the country, even internationally.[2] In 1977 a handful of these artists/ environmentalists, spearheaded by Judy Goldhaft and Peter Berg, set out to dynamically integrate the worlds of popular education theater and environmentalism. They traveled through the coasts and inland ranges of northern California performing improvisational renditions of both contemporary back-to-the-land and traditional Native American stories from the regions which they visited. They were the stories of animals and places, inspired by the oral traditions of the native Northern California Pomo, Maidu, Karok and Pit River tribes which have been collected in books such as ethnomusicologist Jaime de Angulo’s Indians in Overalls.[3] The group called their multi-species performance troupe the Reinhabitory Theater.

An “early experiment in ecological theater,”[4] the Reinhabitory Theater sought to engage the local communities they visited in the experience of living from a bioregional perspective. Their performances invoked the interdependence of all species, including human beings. “Audiences will have to be shown reasons to suspend whatever preconceptions they may have about a central place for humans in the biosphere...” wrote Peter Berg in an articulation of the vision of Reinhabitory Theater.[5]

The actors in the Reinhabitory Theater, often coming from experiences in the SF Mime Troupe or the Minneapolis’ Firehouse Theater, founded and shaped the Theater as a way to extrapolate upon bioregional ideas through improvisation, performance and community-based workshops. The Reinhabitory Theater actors creatively merged the worlds of environmentalism and theater, using performance and storytelling to address and explore the foundational bioregional concepts introduced by Planet Drum.[6]

Judy Goldhaft, who got her start in performance as a dancer, began doing mime workshops on animal behavior in 1975 and eventually incorporated this work, as well as her training in movement theater at the SF Mime Troupe, into her guidance of the Reinhabitory Theater. [7] In Peter Coyote’s reflection on his involvement with Reinhabitory Theater, he writes how “...coached by Judy’s quiet encouragement and insistence and Peter’s mad-cap and insightful illuminations… we assembled ‘a show.’ It was something of a miracle. We had discovered a way to discuss two new concepts—bioregionalism and reinhabitation—in the same wacky manner we had once conscripted to discuss political issues in the San Francisco Mime Troupe.” [8]

[[Image:Reinhabitory animals 2.jpg|300px|left]] [[Image:Reinhabitory Mt-Tam 3.jpg|300px|right]]

''Photos: include participants Edna Tucker, Judi Quick, Edmund Shea, and Erik Weber; Source: Reinhabiting a Separate Country, 1978''

The idea of ''bioregions'' was at the center of the project. According to Peter Berg, ''bioregions'' are locations that share climate, watersheds, landforms, soils, native plants, animals, and other natural characteristics and appropriate human culture. Berg writes that, “The term refers both to geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness—to a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place.“ [9] Furthermore, 'reinhabitation', a term he coined, is the act of becoming native to places in order to adapt to the bioregion.[10] As Coyote paraphrased it, “reinhabitation”...is the process of learning how to live in a place according to the dictates of the place itself.” [11] It is a concept developed within a broader “bioregionalist” framework of thinking.

Bioregion was a 19th century biology term that was redefined by Raymond Dasmann and popularized by Berg [12] as well as others such as Gary Snyder in his article, “Coming into the Watershed.” [13] Bioregionalism refers to the philosophy of living as a human in a way that is appropriate to one's own bioregion. Berg said that, “Bioregionalism is proactive. It is carrying the concept of a life-place into the activities and goals of human society… In a bioregion there are different zones of human interface with natural systems: urban, suburban, rural, and wilderness. And each of these has a different appropriate reinhabitory approach.” [14] According to Berg, the purpose of the Reinhabitory Theater was to inspire this kind of consciousness. [15]

The Reinhabitory Theater was about reimagining our relation to the natural world, so it was performed in a variety of locations. “We did the Reinhabitory Theater in a lot of places,” recalled Judy Goldhaft. “We did it outside, and we did it inside. We did it… underneath the freeway. We did it at grange halls, we did it in cow pastures, we did it in living rooms.” [16] The structure of the performance, including those who watched it, constantly changed as well. “Our audiences were all kinds of people,” Goldhaft reflected, “and when we did this theater we didn’t do it just as a theater. We did community empowerment workshops at the same time.” [17] These gatherings engaged participants in movement and improvisational storytelling. Often the skills learned there were used to re-enact scenes of injustice on stages and in courtrooms to make political statements and fight for environmental protections. [18]

[[Image:Reinhabitory Lizard-and-Coyote 4.jpg]]

''Photos: Shafi Hakim; Source: Reinhabiting a Separate Country, 1978''

The Reinhabitory Theater was also a direct response to the back-to-the-land movement of the 60s and 70s in which people from the cities chose to move to rural settings to be homesteaders. Goldhaft states, “They got very little support, and this theater was designed to let them know that what they were doing was important.”[19] The Reinhabitory Theater celebrated ways of living that prioritized being in touch with the earth’s natural rhythms and ecosystems and created a space to connect communities engaging in this kind of lifestyle. Judy reflected that, “It’s really my hope that we’ll turn people on to investigate where they live and the stories that have gone down in the place where they live…We see the theater as helping to create a network among the communities.” [20] Such network-building and place-based thinking was all a part of the ways in which the artists and environmentalists in the Reinhabitory Theater were reimagining possible ways of living. “The seventies were really quite a revolutionary time,” Judy said in her interview for this article, “and the Reinhabitory Theater was a way to support the back-to-the-landers and others who were evolving a different society.” [21]

The Reinhabitory Theater did not last into the 1980s, but its legacy did. “We ended it in about ’79 or ’80,” states Goldhaft. [22] As Peter Coyote jovially remembers, “‘Everything Changes’... Life, family, economies, eventually intervened and after a good run of several years, some folks had to get jobs..." [23] Planet Drum continued as an innovative voice for bioregional sustainability, education and culture. Coyote continues, "some [actors] moved away, and the Reinhabitory Theater Company eventually evaporated. The ideas it articulated and the emergent culture it identified did not, however. They were direct by-products of the fertile imaginations and unrelenting intellectual efforts of Peter and Judy.”[24]

[[Image:Reinhabitory-Theater-at-Lands-End.jpg]]

''Photo: Erik Weber; Source: Reinhabiting a Separate Country, 1978''

Notes

[1] Carlsson, Chris. [[Ecology_Emerges_1970s|“Ecology Emerges 1970s.”]] Found SF. (Reprinted from the anthology ''Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78'' (City Lights Foundation: 2011), edited by Chris Carlsson) 
[2] [http://www.diggers.org/overview.htm “Overview: Who Were (Are) the Diggers?”] The Digger Archives. 
[3] Berg, Peter. “Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California.” ''Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California'', Planet Drum Foundation, 1978, p. 186. 
[4] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 22. 
[5] Berg, Peter. “Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California.” ''Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California'', Planet Drum Foundation, 1978, p. 187. 
[6] Berg, Peter. [[Planet_Drum_Foundation|“Planet Drum Foundation.”]] FoundSF 
[7] Author interview with Judy Goldhaft, San Francisco. May 8, 2017 
[8] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 196. 
[9] Berg, Peter. “Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California.” ''Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California'', Planet Drum Foundation, 1978, p. 218. 
[10] Berg, Peter. [[Planet_Drum_Foundation|“Planet Drum Foundation.”]] FoundSF. 
[11] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 194. 
[12] Evanoff, Richard. “Bioregionalism Comes to Japan.” Sustainable City, ''Japan Environment Monitor'', 1998, sustainablecity.org/intervws/berg.htm. 
[13] Snyder, Gary. “Coming into the Watershed.” ''A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds, Counterpoint'', 2008. 
[14] Evanoff, Richard. “Bioregionalism Comes to Japan.” Sustainable City, ''Japan Environment Monitor'', 1998, sustainablecity.org/intervws/berg.htm. 
[15] Berg, Peter. [[Planet_Drum_Foundation|“Planet Drum Foundation.”]] FoundSF. 
[16] Author interview with Judy Goldhaft, San Francisco. May 8, 2017 
[17] Ibid. 
[18] Ibid. 
[19] Ibid. 
[20] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 51, quotes from Judy Goldhaft and Peter Berg. 
[21] Author interview with Judy Goldhaft, San Francisco. May 8, 2017 
[22] Ibid. 
[23] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 196. 
[24] Ibid.

[[category:Performing Arts]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:Ecology]]

Reinhabitory Theater: A Legacy of Inspiring Bioregionalism Through Storytelling

2018-04-27T19:57:18Z

Seanburns:

''' Historical Essay '''

''by Yeshe Salz ''

[[Image:Reinhabitory-Theater cover1.jpg]]

''Photo: Eric Weber, Source: Reinhabiting a Separate Country, 1978''

In the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1970s, the [[Ecology Emerges 1970s|ecology movement]] was gaining momentum. Earth Day was born, the back-to-the-land movement was coming into full swing, and myriads of new environmentally focused community organizations were sprouting up. One of them was [[Planet Drum Foundation|Planet Drum]], an organization that set out to build grassroots awareness and community self-determination around ecology.[1] The founders of Planet Drum emerged from the lively Bay Area improvisational, political and community theater scene of the day when groups such as the [[San Francisco Mime Troupe Arrested|San Francisco Mime Troupe]] and the [[San Francisco Diggers|Diggers]] were capturing the imagination of people across the country, even internationally.[2] In 1977 a handful of these artists/ environmentalists, spearheaded by Judy Goldhaft and Peter Berg, set out to dynamically integrate the worlds of popular education theater and environmentalism. They traveled through the coasts and inland ranges of northern California performing improvisational renditions of both contemporary and traditional Native American stories from the regions which they visited. They were the stories of animals and places, inspired by the oral traditions of the native Northern California Pomo, Maidu, Karok and Pit River tribes which have been collected in books such as ethnomusicologist Jaime de Angulo’s Indians in Overalls.[3] The group called their multi-species performance troupe the Reinhabitory Theater.

An “early experiment in ecological theater,”[4] the Reinhabitory Theater sought to engage the local communities they visited in the experience of living from a bioregional perspective. Their performances invoked the interdependence of all species, including human beings. “Audiences will have to be shown reasons to suspend whatever preconceptions they may have about a central place for humans in the biosphere...,” wrote Peter Berg in an articulation of the vision of Reinhabitory Theater.[5]

The actors in the Reinhabitory Theater, often coming from experiences in the SF Mime Troupe or Minneapolis’ Firehouse Theater, founded and shaped the Theater as a way to extrapolate upon bioregional ideas through improvisation, performance and community-based workshops. The Reinhabitory Theater actors creatively merged the worlds of environmentalism and theater, using performance and storytelling to address and explore the foundational bioregional concepts introduced by Planet Drum.[6]

Judy Goldhaft, who got her start in performance as a dancer, began doing mime workshops on animal behavior in 1975 and eventually incorporated this work, as well as her training in movement theater at SF Mime Troupe, into her guidance of the Reinhabitory Theater. [7] In Peter Coyote’s reflection on his involvement with Reinhabitory Theater, he writes how “...coached by Judy’s quiet encouragement and insistence and Peter’s mad-cap and insightful illuminations… we assembled ‘a show.’ It was something of a miracle. We had discovered a way to discuss two new concepts—bioregionalism and reinhabitation—in the same wacky manner we had once conscripted to discuss political issues in the San Francisco Mime Troupe.” [8]

[[Image:Reinhabitory animals 2.jpg|300px|left]] [[Image:Reinhabitory Mt-Tam 3.jpg|300px|right]]

''Photos: include participants Edna Tucker, Judi Quick, Edmund Shea, and Erik Weber; Source: Reinhabiting a Separate Country, 1978''

The idea of ''bioregions'' was at the center of the project. According to Peter Berg, ''bioregions'' are locations that share climate, watersheds, landforms, soils, native plants, animals and appropriate human cultures. Berg writes that, “The term refers both to geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness—to a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place.“ [9] Furthermore, "reinhabitation”, a term he coined, is the act of becoming native to places in order to adapt to the bioregion.[10] As Coyote paraphrased it, “reinhabitation”...is the process of learning how to live in a place according to the dictates of the place itself.” [11] It is a concept developed within a broader “bioregionalist” framework of thinking.

Bioregion was a 19th century biology term that was redefined by Raymond Dasmann and popularized by Berg [12] as well as others such as Gary Snyder in his article, “Coming into the Watershed.” [13] Bioregionalism refers to the philosophy of living as a human in a way that is appropriate to one's own bioregion. Berg said that, “Bioregionalism is proactive. It is carrying the concept of a life-place into the activities and goals of human society… In a bioregion there are different zones of human interface with natural systems: urban, suburban, rural, and wilderness. And each of these has a different appropriate reinhabitory approach.” [14] According to Berg, the purpose of the Reinhabitory Theater was to inspire this kind of consciousness. [15]

Because Reinhabitory Theater was about reimagining our relation to the natural world, they performed in a variety of locations. “We did the Reinhabitory Theater in a lot of places,” recalled Judy Goldhaft. “We did it outside, and we did it inside. We did it… underneath the freeway. We did it at grange halls, we did it in cow pastures, we did it in living rooms.” [16] The structure of the performance, including those who watched it, constantly changed as well. “Our audiences were all kinds of people,” Goldhaft reflected, “and when we did this theater we didn’t do it just as a theater. We did workshops and community empowerment at the same time.” [17] These gatherings engaged participants in movement and improvisational storytelling. Often the skills learned in these workshops were used to re-enact scenes of injustice on stages and in courtrooms to make political statements and fight for environmental protections. [18]

[[Image:Reinhabitory Lizard-and-Coyote 4.jpg]]

''Photos: Shafi Hakim; Source: Reinhabiting a Separate Country, 1978''

The Reinhabitory Theater was also a direct response to the back-to-the-land movement of the 60s and 70s in which people from the cities chose to move to rural settings to be homesteaders. Goldhaft states, “They got very little support, and this theater was designed to let them know that what they were doing was important.”[19] The Reinhabitory Theater celebrated ways of living that prioritized being in touch with the earth’s natural rhythms and ecosystems, and it created a space to connect communities engaging in this kind of lifestyle. Judy reflected that, “It’s really my hope that we’ll turn people on to investigate where they live and the stories that have gone down in the place where they live…We see the theater as helping to create a network among the communities.” [20] Such network-building and place-based thinking was all a part of the ways in which the artists and environmentalists in the Reinhabitory Theater were reimagining possible ways of living. “The seventies were really quite a revolutionary time,” Judy said in her interview for this article, “and the Reinhabitory Theater was a way to support the people evolving a different society.” [21]

The Reinhabitory Theater did not last into the 1980s, but its legacy did. “We ended it in about ’79 or ’80,” states Goldhaft. [22] As Peter Coyote jovially remembers, “‘Everything Changes’... Life, family, economies, eventually intervened and after a good run of several years, some folks had to get jobs...some [actors] moved away, and the Reinhabitory Theater Company eventually evaporated. The ideas it articulated and the emergent culture it identified did not, however. They were direct by-products of the fertile imaginations and unrelenting intellectual efforts of Peter and Judy.” Planet Drum continues to experiment with fresh forms of educating the public about environmental issues and bioregionalism. [23]

[[Image:Reinhabitory-Theater-at-Lands-End.jpg]]

''Photo: Erik Weber; Source: Reinhabiting a Separate Country, 1978''

Notes

[1] Carlsson, Chris. [[Ecology_Emerges_1970s|“Ecology Emerges 1970s.”]] Found SF. (Reprinted from the anthology ''Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78'' (City Lights Foundation: 2011), edited by Chris Carlsson) 
[2] [http://www.diggers.org/overview.htm “Overview: Who Were (Are) the Diggers?”] The Digger Archives. 
[3] Berg, Peter. “Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California.” ''Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California'', Planet Drum Foundation, 1978, p. 186. 
[4] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 22. 
[5] Berg, Peter. “Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California.” ''Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California'', Planet Drum Foundation, 1978, p. 187. 
[6] Berg, Peter. [[Planet_Drum_Foundation|“Planet Drum Foundation.”]] FoundSF 
[7] Author interview with Judy Goldhaft, San Francisco. May 8, 2017 
[8] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 196. 
[9] Berg, Peter. “Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California.” ''Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California'', Planet Drum Foundation, 1978, p. 218. 
[10] Berg, Peter. [[Planet_Drum_Foundation|“Planet Drum Foundation.”]] FoundSF. 
[11] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 196. 
[12] Evanoff, Richard. “Bioregionalism Comes to Japan.” Sustainable City, ''Japan Environment Monitor'', 1998, sustainablecity.org/intervws/berg.htm. 
[13] Snyder, Gary. “Coming into the Watershed.” ''A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds, Counterpoint'', 2008. 
[14] Evanoff, Richard. “Bioregionalism Comes to Japan.” Sustainable City, ''Japan Environment Monitor'', 1998, sustainablecity.org/intervws/berg.htm. 
[15] Berg, Peter. [[Planet_Drum_Foundation|“Planet Drum Foundation.”]] FoundSF. 
[16] Author interview with Judy Goldhaft, San Francisco. May 8, 2017 
[17] Ibid. 
[18] Ibid. 
[19] Ibid. 
[20] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 51. 
[21] Author interview with Judy Goldhaft, San Francisco. May 8, 2017 
[22] Ibid. 
[23] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 196. 

[[category:Performing Arts]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:Ecology]]

Reinhabitory Theater: A Legacy of Inspiring Bioregionalism Through Storytelling

2018-04-27T19:51:05Z

Seanburns:

''' Historical Essay '''

''by Yeshe Salz ''

[[Image:Reinhabitory-Theater cover1.jpg]]

''Photo: Eric Weber, Source: Reinhabiting a Separate Country, 1978''

In the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1970s, the [[Ecology Emerges 1970s|ecology movement]] was gaining momentum. Earth Day was born, the back-to-the-land movement was coming into full swing, and myriads of new environmentally focused community organizations were sprouting up. One of them was [[Planet Drum Foundation|Planet Drum]], an organization that set out to build grassroots awareness and community self-determination around ecology.[1] The founders of Planet Drum emerged from the lively Bay Area improvisational, political and community theater scene of the day when groups such as the [[San Francisco Mime Troupe Arrested|San Francisco Mime Troupe]] and the [[San Francisco Diggers|Diggers]] were capturing the imagination of people across the country, even internationally.[2] In 1977 a handful of these artists/ environmentalists, spearheaded by Judy Goldhaft and Peter Berg, set out to dynamically integrate the worlds of popular education theater and environmentalism. They traveled through the coasts and inland ranges of northern California performing improvisational renditions of both contemporary and traditional Native American stories from the regions which they visited. They were the stories of animals and places, inspired by the oral traditions of the native Northern California Pomo, Maidu, Karok and Pit River tribes which have been collected in books such as ethnomusicologist Jaime de Angulo’s Indians in Overalls.[3] The group called their multi-species performance troupe the Reinhabitory Theater.

An “early experiment in ecological theater,”[4] the Reinhabitory Theater sought to engage the local communities they visited in the experience of living from a bioregional perspective. Their performances invoked the interdependence of all species, including human beings. “Audiences will have to be shown reasons to suspend whatever preconceptions they may have about a central place for humans in the biosphere...,” wrote Peter Berg in an articulation of the vision of Reinhabitory Theater.[5]

The actors in the Reinhabitory Theater, often coming from experiences in the SF Mime Troupe or Minneapolis’ Firehouse Theater, founded and shaped the Theater as a way to extrapolate upon bioregional ideas through improvisation, performance and community-based workshops. The Reinhabitory Theater actors creatively merged the worlds of environmentalism and theater, using performance and storytelling to address and explore the foundational bioregional concepts introduced by Planet Drum.[6]

Judy Goldhaft, who got her start in performance as a dancer, began doing mime workshops on animal behavior in 1975 and eventually incorporated this work, as well as her training in movement theater at SF Mime Troupe, into her guidance of the Reinhabitory Theater. [7] In Peter Coyote’s reflection on his involvement with Reinhabitory Theater, he writes how “...coached by Judy’s quiet encouragement and insistence and Peter’s mad-cap and insightful illuminations… we assembled ‘a show.’ It was something of a miracle. We had discovered a way to discuss two new concepts—bioregionalism and reinhabitation—in the same wacky manner we had once conscripted to discuss political issues in the San Francisco Mime Troupe.” [8]

[[Image:Reinhabitory animals 2.jpg|300px|left]] [[Image:Reinhabitory Mt-Tam 3.jpg|300px|right]]

''Top Photos: (from left to right) Edna Tucker, Judi Quick, Edmund Shea. Below photos: Erik Weber, Edmund Shea; Source: Reinhabiting a Separate Country, 1978''

The idea of ''bioregions'' was at the center of the project. According to Peter Berg, ''bioregions'' are locations that share climate, watersheds, landforms, soils, native plants, animals and appropriate human cultures. Berg writes that, “The term refers both to geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness—to a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place.“ [9] Furthermore, "reinhabitation”, a term he coined, is the act of becoming native to places in order to adapt to the bioregion.[10] As Coyote paraphrased it, “reinhabitation”...is the process of learning how to live in a place according to the dictates of the place itself.” [11] It is a concept developed within a broader “bioregionalist” framework of thinking.

Bioregion was a 19th century biology term that was redefined by Raymond Dasmann and popularized by Berg [12] as well as others such as Gary Snyder in his article, “Coming into the Watershed.” [13] Bioregionalism refers to the philosophy of living as a human in a way that is appropriate to one's own bioregion. Berg said that, “Bioregionalism is proactive. It is carrying the concept of a life-place into the activities and goals of human society… In a bioregion there are different zones of human interface with natural systems: urban, suburban, rural, and wilderness. And each of these has a different appropriate reinhabitory approach.” [14] According to Berg, the purpose of the Reinhabitory Theater was to inspire this kind of consciousness. [15]

Because Reinhabitory Theater was about reimagining our relation to the natural world, they performed in a variety of locations. “We did the Reinhabitory Theater in a lot of places,” recalled Judy Goldhaft. “We did it outside, and we did it inside. We did it… underneath the freeway. We did it at grange halls, we did it in cow pastures, we did it in living rooms.” [16] The structure of the performance, including those who watched it, constantly changed as well. “Our audiences were all kinds of people,” Goldhaft reflected, “and when we did this theater we didn’t do it just as a theater. We did workshops and community empowerment at the same time.” [17] These gatherings engaged participants in movement and improvisational storytelling. Often the skills learned in these workshops were used to re-enact scenes of injustice on stages and in courtrooms to make political statements and fight for environmental protections. [18]

[[Image:Reinhabitory Lizard-and-Coyote 4.jpg]]

''Photos: Shafi Hakim; Source: Reinhabiting a Separate Country, 1978''

The Reinhabitory Theater was also a direct response to the back-to-the-land movement of the 60s and 70s in which people from the cities chose to move to rural settings to be homesteaders. Goldhaft states, “They got very little support, and this theater was designed to let them know that what they were doing was important.”[19] The Reinhabitory Theater celebrated ways of living that prioritized being in touch with the earth’s natural rhythms and ecosystems, and it created a space to connect communities engaging in this kind of lifestyle. Judy reflected that, “It’s really my hope that we’ll turn people on to investigate where they live and the stories that have gone down in the place where they live…We see the theater as helping to create a network among the communities.” [20] Such network-building and place-based thinking was all a part of the ways in which the artists and environmentalists in the Reinhabitory Theater were reimagining possible ways of living. “The seventies were really quite a revolutionary time,” Judy said in her interview for this article, “and the Reinhabitory Theater was a way to support the people evolving a different society.” [21]

The Reinhabitory Theater did not last into the 1980s, but its legacy did. “We ended it in about ’79 or ’80,” states Goldhaft. [22] As Peter Coyote jovially remembers, “‘Everything Changes’... Life, family, economies, eventually intervened and after a good run of several years, some folks had to get jobs...some [actors] moved away, and the Reinhabitory Theater Company eventually evaporated. The ideas it articulated and the emergent culture it identified did not, however. They were direct by-products of the fertile imaginations and unrelenting intellectual efforts of Peter and Judy.” Planet Drum continues to experiment with fresh forms of educating the public about environmental issues and bioregionalism. [23]

[[Image:Reinhabitory-Theater-at-Lands-End.jpg]]

''Photo: Erik Weber; Source: Reinhabiting a Separate Country, 1978''

Notes

[1] Carlsson, Chris. [[Ecology_Emerges_1970s|“Ecology Emerges 1970s.”]] Found SF. (Reprinted from the anthology ''Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78'' (City Lights Foundation: 2011), edited by Chris Carlsson) 
[2] [http://www.diggers.org/overview.htm “Overview: Who Were (Are) the Diggers?”] The Digger Archives. 
[3] Berg, Peter. “Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California.” ''Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California'', Planet Drum Foundation, 1978, p. 186. 
[4] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 22. 
[5] Berg, Peter. “Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California.” ''Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California'', Planet Drum Foundation, 1978, p. 187. 
[6] Berg, Peter. [[Planet_Drum_Foundation|“Planet Drum Foundation.”]] FoundSF 
[7] Author interview with Judy Goldhaft, San Francisco. May 8, 2017 
[8] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 196. 
[9] Berg, Peter. “Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California.” ''Reinhabiting a Separate Country: a Bioregional Anthology of Northern California'', Planet Drum Foundation, 1978, p. 218. 
[10] Berg, Peter. [[Planet_Drum_Foundation|“Planet Drum Foundation.”]] FoundSF. 
[11] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 196. 
[12] Evanoff, Richard. “Bioregionalism Comes to Japan.” Sustainable City, ''Japan Environment Monitor'', 1998, sustainablecity.org/intervws/berg.htm. 
[13] Snyder, Gary. “Coming into the Watershed.” ''A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds, Counterpoint'', 2008. 
[14] Evanoff, Richard. “Bioregionalism Comes to Japan.” Sustainable City, ''Japan Environment Monitor'', 1998, sustainablecity.org/intervws/berg.htm. 
[15] Berg, Peter. [[Planet_Drum_Foundation|“Planet Drum Foundation.”]] FoundSF. 
[16] Author interview with Judy Goldhaft, San Francisco. May 8, 2017 
[17] Ibid. 
[18] Ibid. 
[19] Ibid. 
[20] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 51. 
[21] Author interview with Judy Goldhaft, San Francisco. May 8, 2017 
[22] Ibid. 
[23] Glotfelty , Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel , editors. “The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg.” ''The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg'', Routledge, 2014, p. 196. 

[[category:Performing Arts]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:Ecology]]

Berkeley's Sanctuary Movement

2017-05-04T18:47:25Z

Seanburns:

''' Historical Essay '''

''by Kat Jerman''

[[Image:Addressing-injustice.png|left]]

{| style="color: black; background-color: #F5DA81;"
| colspan="2" |'''On March 24, 1982 five churches in Berkeley, California and the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona held coordinated press conferences that launched the modern day “Sanctuary Movement” in the United States. They demanded that the U.S. government meet its moral and legal obligations to grant asylum to the thousands of Guatemalan and El Salvadoran civilians fleeing civil war and U.S.-funded death squads in their home countries. The six congregations publically declared their intent to “provide sanctuary—support, protection, and advocacy”—to undocumented Central American refugees who requested safe haven from deportation. [1] Following their lead, religious communities throughout the Bay Area and across the country flocked to support the newly christened “Sanctuary Movement.”
|}

Gathering in front of assembled reporters at Berkeley’s University Lutheran Chapel (ULC), representatives of the five Bay Area churches—University Lutheran, St. John’s Presbyterian, St. Joseph the Worker, St. Mark’s Episcopal, and Trinity Methodist—were joined that Wednesday morning by three Salvadoran asylum-seekers, who had agreed just days before to take the risk of speaking publicly in hopes of galvanizing support for the congregations’ efforts and drawing attention to the worsening situation in El Salvador. [2] The three men, comprising a medical student, a teenager, and a survivor of the 1980 Ajo tragedy (in which thirteen Salvadoran asylum-seekers died in the Arizona desert after being abandoned by their coyote), would be the first to formally accept the East Bay churches’ offer of sanctuary. [3]

[[Image:March-24,-1982---Sanctuary-Declaration.jpg]]

'''March 24, 1982 press conference at University Lutheran Chapel.'''

''Credit: http://www.share-elsalvador.org''

Prior to their public declaration of sanctuary, each of the original five Berkeley congregations went through extensive educational processes, consulting with refugees, lawyers, theologians and historians and reflecting at length as a congregation before. voting to adopt a ‘sanctuary covenant’ drafted by St. John’s lay member Steve Knapp. [4,5] This covenant, with its tripartite vow to support, protect, and advocate for refugees, would inspire congregations of all faiths and become a model for churches, temples, and synagogues around the country. [6] As sanctuary proponent Robert McAfee Brown of Berkeley’s Pacific School of Religion later noted, the decision to frame their efforts by “invok[ing] the ancient tradition of ‘sanctuary’” gave the movement great appeal to both religious and secular communities, for while “its legal power is nil, its symbolic power is impressive - churches and synagogues as places where people are free of intimidation, harassment, and, now, deportation.” [7]

The Berkeley congregations created the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant (EBSC), a collective grassroots organizing structure to coordinate their efforts to shelter, aid, and advocate for refugees. The EBSC grew rapidly, and soon exceeded thirty member congregations from Berkeley, Oakland, and Albany, California, including Protestant and Catholic churches, Buddhist temples, and at least five synagogues. [8] It was joined by regional covenant committees from San Francisco, Marin County, the South Bay, Sonoma, and other Bay Area communities, which by 1986 formed a regional alliance known as the Northern California Sanctuary covenant, with a focus on national organizing. [9] In addition to publicly declared sanctuary congregations, a much larger web of supporting congregations developed, exceeding 600 nationally by the end of 1983. [10]

In addition to offering several asylum-seekers physical refuge from deportation, sanctuary congregations and supporters engaged in a wide variety of activities, both humanitarian and political. The EBSC office coordinated approximately 200 volunteers a week from local sanctuary congregations, including hundreds of volunteer lawyers who helped with legal advocacy and fighting deportation orders, dozens of medical personnel who volunteered services each week, and countless lay members who assisted refugees in accessing food, work, housing, and daily transportation. [11] In addition to providing direct services, the EBSC also participated in education and political advocacy, lobbying Congress and the President for changes in immigration and foreign policy and developing a robust speakers bureau that conducted outreach to other faith communities and to the general public. Finally, at the request of their colleagues at the San Francisco-based refugee organization CRECE, sanctuary congregations participated in hundreds of solidarity delegations to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, bearing witness, providing protection, and building lasting relationships with their Latin American counterparts. [12]

[[Image:Rev.jpg|450px]]

'''Reverend Gus Schultz with Alejandro, a Salvadoran Refugee, at ULC, 1985.'''

''Photo: Swift, Harriet. "Bay Area Sets Pace for Refugee Sanctuary." Oakland Tribune 22 Feb. 1985: n. pag. Rpt. in The Sanctuary Movement. Oakland: Data Center, 1985. 59-60.''

By early 1985, the three-year-old Sanctuary Movement had spread to all sections of the United States, with more than 200 publicly declared sanctuary congregations nationwide, and as many as 800 more offering other forms of support or acting as sanctuaries in secret, according to ULC Reverend Gus Schultz. [13] In the Bay Area alone - still a critical hub and a recognized “pacesetter” for the movement - some fifty faith communities from all denominations had formally answered the call to sanctuary.[14]

In February 1985, the City of Berkeley would again step into the spotlight, opening a new front in the Central American Sanctuary Movement. Through their tireless organizing in defense of the waves of Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum-seekers who were pouring into the country, for whom deportation could mean death, “East Bay congregations and church leaders influenced municipal governments … to extend similar protections.” [15] On February 19, 1985, the progressive Berkeley City Council voted 8-1 to approve a resolution declaring all of Berkeley a sanctuary for undocumented refugees. [16] The measure, which would pave the way for the creation of “sanctuary cities” nationwide, prohibited Berkeley police or other city employees from assisting federal immigration authorities in the arrest and deportation of Central American asylum-seekers and ensured that city services would not be denied to those refugees or to institutions supporting them. [17] “Let the federal government do its own job,” declared Berkeley Mayor Eugene “Gus” Newport at the City Council meeting that evening, expressing hope that the measure would pave the way for other cities to follow. [18] Mayor Newport, who introduced the ‘City of Refuge’ resolution with strong support both from local representatives and the then-existing dozen or so Berkeley sanctuary congregations, stressed the importance of the effort, not merely as a humanitarian gesture, but a means for raising awareness and for sending a clear message to the Reagan administration “that the American public does not support the use of our tax dollars to support repressive governments that people have to flee.” [19]

Within days of Berkeley’s action, other cities began following suit in expressing support for the movement and their local sanctuary congregations, adopting policies ranging from largely symbolic non-binding resolutions to “enforceable municipal ordinances” that legally restrict local government compliance with federal detention requests. [20] Los Angeles declared itself a City of Refuge that November, insisting that “the tragedy of denying entry to Jewish refugees in the 1930s and 1940s must not be repeated.” [21] San Francisco adopted its own resolution one month later, in response to extensive organizing by Bay Area sanctuary congregations. [22] Beginning in California, several colleges and universities similarly embraced the strategy of declaring sanctuary, forming the Inter-Campus Sanctuary Network, and by 1987, twenty-four U.S. cities, dozens of university campuses and other secular institutions, and even two states—New York and New Mexico—had proclaimed themselves safe havens for Central American refugees. [23]

Initially, advocates of Berkeley’s trailblazing 1985 resolution had emphasized the measure’s symbolic importance, freely admitting that the practical impact of such an extra-legal policy remained an open question. Reflecting back in 2015, however, members of the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant declared that the “safety-net role” of Berkeley’s sanctuary policy had proven “profound,” minimizing some of the daily stress and fear that their undocumented clients face, while keeping them safe in their interactions with city officials. [24] While the broad range in definitions makes counting “sanctuary” localities somewhat difficult, a 2016 report found that 39 cities, 364 counties, and at least four states—including California—continue to serve as sanctuaries, with legislation limiting local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration authorities. [25]

A Pre-History To The Refugee Sanctuary Movement

The earliest roots of “sanctuary” as a concept date back to Hebrew scripture, in which temples or even entire cities could be designated as sanctuaries, where those falsely accused of crimes could escape retribution. In Roman and medieval societies, Christian churches were recognized as places of refuge for fugitives or those fleeing persecution. [26] Early proponents of the sanctuary movement drew inspiration from a long legacy of offering safe haven, such as the churches and individuals who helped shelter Jews during the Holocaust. As Mayor Gus Newport observed in regard to Berkeley’s “City of Refuge” vote, “the first sanctuary system this country ever knew was the Underground Railroad for black slaves.” [27]

The vanguard role that the San Francisco Bay Area, and the city of Berkeley in particular, played in the emergence of the sanctuary movement during the Central American refugee crisis of the 1980s began taking shape many years earlier. The original five Berkeley sanctuary churches, each located in close proximity to the University of California, Berkeley campus and active participants in the progressive social and political movements that brought Berkeley to international attention in the 1960s and 1970s, were heirs to a long tradition of organizing around social justice issues, both at the congregational and individual level. [28] During the Vietnam War, this activism led the congregations, and ultimately the city, into a confrontation with the federal government that would pave the way for the development of Central American sanctuary a decade later.

In the fall of 1971, ten churches from the San Francisco Bay Area declared themselves sanctuaries for sailors from the USS Coral Sea, an aircraft carrier harbored at the Alameda Naval Yard awaiting deployment to Vietnam, and the target of a massive antiwar organizing campaign. As a gesture of support for the congregations and servicemen who were torn between their military duty and their conscience, the Berkeley City Council took the unprecedented step of declaring the entire city a sanctuary for war resisters, providing a template for which dozens of U.S. cities would eventually model their own “City of Refuge” policies at the height of the Central American Sanctuary Movement. In October of 1971, Reverend Gus Schultz of University Lutheran Chapel was approached by seminary graduate and photojournalist Bob Fitch. Fitch had just arrived from San Diego, where he had been pivotal in organizing an effort to support war resisters from the USS Constitution, eighteen of whom had sought council and protection in a local Roman Catholic Church, referring to their actions as “sanctuary.” [29] Fitch proposed that Reverend Schultz and his congregation publically declare sanctuary for a second group of sailors from the Coral Sea, many of whom were furiously organizing a campaign entitled [[S.O.S & Stop Our Ship|“Stop Our Ship” (SOS)]], aimed at preventing the aircraft carrier from deploying to Vietnam. [30]

[[Image:1971-Coral-Sea-Poster.jpg]]

'''1971 poster in support of the ‘Stop Our Ship’ campaign'''

''SOURCE: http://quirkyberkeley.com/red-sun-rising-posters/''

Reverend Schultz, in turn, brought the proposal to his weekly Lectionary group, a small, multi-denominational community of progressive Berkeley clergy, who met each Tuesday morning for Bible study, and whose core membership—Gus Schultz, Marilyn Chilcote, Bob McKenzie, Bill O’Donnell, Ron Parker, and Phil Getchell—would go on to organize the City’s first five Central American sanctuary churches. [31] Together with Bob Fitch and a few local attorneys, Gus and the Lectionary group devised a vision of sanctuary as “a place where people could go to consider options and create new ones without the threat of intimidation by the powers that be, parents, military, police, whoever.” [32] Undergirding this vision was the fundamental notion of informed consent and an understanding that “whoever takes the consequences makes the decision,” principles which would apply both to soldiers seeking council on the decision to go AWOL and to congregations mulling the choice to declare sanctuary. [33] In each case, their job as clergy, the Lectionary group concluded, would be to provide as open and honest an accounting of the risks and rewards involved as possible, and then to guide the stakeholders through making an empowered decision. Following a thorough educational process, congregations which voted to declare sanctuary could do so by drafting a written covenant, while those who were not ready to accept this risk could provide support at whatever level the congregation felt capable. [34] Putting theory into practice, the group had soon assembled an alliance of ten Bay Area churches ready to make public declarations of sanctuary. [35] On November 9, 1971, in a scene strikingly reminiscent of the birth of the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant a decade later, Shultz, his fellow ministers, and five sailors held a press conference in a church basement, drawing substantial media attention and garnering support from a broad cross-section of the peace movement, including singer Joan Baez and Catholic Worker Dorothy Day. [36]

The following day, in an unprecedented extension of church-based ‘sanctuary’ to the secular realm, the Berkeley City Council voted 6-1 to support a measure declaring Berkeley itself a refuge for “‘any person who is unwilling to participate in military action.” [37] The resolution, which expressed support for the congregations and the soldiers who refused to serve and offered access to city facilities to support their efforts, was particularly noteworthy for its fifth provision, declaring “‘[t]hat no Berkeley City Employee will violate the established sanctuaries by assisting in investigation, public or clandestine, of, or engaging in or assisting arrests for violation of federal laws relating to military service on the premises offering sanctuary, or by refusing established public services.” [38] This measure, with its prohibition on local cooperation with federal efforts to enforce unjust laws, would directly lay the groundwork for the city sanctuary policies of the 1980s.

Ultimately, after receiving counsel from the congregations, none of the Coral Sea sailors elected to desert. [39] However, by end of the Vietnam War, some twenty-eight Bay Area churches had either declared sanctuary or offered support to sanctuary congregations, and more than 200 serviceman had sought counseling and assistance, with issues ranging from drug addition to family issues to the decision to go AWOL. Of these, sixteen soldiers ultimately emerged as genuine candidates for sanctuary, and with the aid of the church sanctuary committees, were able to negotiate discharges as conscientious objectors. [40]

For the congregations and individuals involved, the experience of declaring sanctuary for the Coral Sea sailors primed the participants, who even then began to contemplate additional applications of the sanctuary model. [41] As Reverend Schultz would later observe, for those involved in the painstaking educational and decision-making processes that preceded the public declarations of sanctuary, this commitment proved to be “‘not an event, but a process. . . . It's kind of like Baptism. You don't get rid of it. It's always there and when the time comes that it's needed . . . you just proceeded with it. And you didn't have to reinvent it, like the wheel.” [42] Indeed, many of these same churches would go on to play pivotal roles in the Central American Sanctuary Movement, following a nearly identical process from that developed in 1971.

The Impact and Legacy of the Central American Sanctuary Movement

While it can be difficult to quantify the impact of a decentralized, grassroots effort such as the Central American Sanctuary Movement, some estimates indicate that as many as 3,000 refugees received direct assistance from sanctuary congregations between 1980 and 1992. [43] For the more than 200 American congregations that formally declared sanctuary, participation in the movement did not lead to a decrease in membership, as many had predicted. Rather, sanctuary churches frequently grew, attracting back many people “looking for a place where faithfulness meant something.” [44] Beyond these achievements, the sanctuary movement also resulted in widespread public education and saw the creation of enduring relationships between American and Central American religious communities. [45]

For Berkeley’s original sanctuary congregations, the commitment that began in 1971 with the sailors of the Coral Sea continues to this day. As Reverend Schultz would later observe, the use of sanctuary as a tactic would ebb and flow over time, developing “a life of its own. Some did sanctuary for military personnel. There was sanctuary for refugees. There was some more conservative sanctuary and more radical Sanctuary. ... [I]t would grow and then, kind of collapse for a time. And then something would happen. The Persian Gulf was invaded and the churches would renew our offer of sanctuary.” [46] University Lutheran Chapel (ULC), for example, extended and reaffirmed its original 1971 Sanctuary Covenant several times over the years, both for soldiers and asylum seekers. In the early 1990s, during the Persian Gulf War, ULC renewed its covenant and welcomed conscientious objector Leanne Mobile to take sanctuary in the chapel. [47] Similarly, several East Bay congregations that were active in the Central American Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s would go on to invoke the same tactic for Haitian refugees during the 1990s, led by Father Bill O’Donnell of Berkeley’s St. Joseph the Worker. [48] In March 2006, in response to a surge in anti-immigrant legislation, ULC’s covenant of sanctuary was revised and reaffirmed once again. [49]

[[Image:Aristide-Schultz1994-cr.jpg]]

'''ULC Rev. Gus Schultz welcomes deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to Berkeley in 1994.'''

''Photo: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt3t1nf1gc''

The East Bay Sanctuary Covenant (EBSC) also lives on as a critical resource, serving thousands of immigrants and refugees each year from its offices at the Trinity Methodist Church. EBSC’s Community Development and Education Program director, Manuel De Paz, who himself fled El Salvador in 1990 after the brutal murder of his siblings and received aid and help attaining US citizenship from EBSC, today assists dozens of people each day with tasks including learning English, finding housing, and filing for workers’ compensation. [50] EBSC’s clients include Mexicans and Central Americans, Ethiopians, South Asians, and Eritreans—many, if not most, of whom came to the Bay Area fleeing violence and abuse in their home countries. [51] In addition to providing a variety of services for more than fifty walk-ins each day, EBSC offers free, ongoing legal aid for hundreds of asylum seekers annually, thanks to approximately 100 pro bono volunteers from Bay Area law schools including UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall. [52] In 2016, EBSC worked with approximately 700 clients, including 200 unaccompanied minors, who were seeking refuge in the United States. [53]

[[Image:EBSC-Oscar-Romero-Mural.jpg|left]]

'''A mural featuring Archbishop Oscar Romero welcomes visitors to the EBSC office.'''

''Photo: Sharon Abercrombie, “Refugees Find Sanctuary in Berkeley,” The Catholic Voice, May 21, 2007.''

At the city level, Berkeley’s “City of Refuge” status has likewise endured, with an impact that has proven both symbolic and pragmatic. In 2007, following the deportation of a family from the Berkeley Unified School District, the Berkeley City Council voted to formally reaffirm the city’s sanctuary policy. [54] Four years later, the city refused to participate in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “Secure Communities” program, which would have required Berkeley law enforcement to assist in detaining undocumented immigrants. [55] City officials and immigrant rights advocates agree that Berkeley’s status as a sanctuary city has been a proven success. In addition to providing a critical safety net for undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, offering families like EBSC’s clients substantial relief from the daily fear of arrest and deportation, the policy has proven beneficial for the community as a whole. As City Councilman Kriss Worthington notes, Berkeley’s City of Refuge law has not only served as a powerful statement in support of comprehensive immigration reform, but on a more concrete level, has successfully “enabled undocumented residents to come forward as witnesses in criminal investigations without fear of deportation.” [56]

 Sanctuary Today: An Ongoing Commitment

In 2014, in response to a surge in immigration from Central America, rising deportations, and a frightening escalation in xenophobic, anti-immigrant rhetoric, many of the original cadre of sanctuary congregations around the nation and in the Bay Area formally renewed their participation in sanctuary, dubbing themselves the “New Sanctuary Movement.” [57] While the sanctuary movement of the 1980s successfully challenged deportations in the short term, today “the ravages of war, and failed domestic and international economic and trade policies—many of them fashioned in the United States—have forced a whole new wave of political and economic refugees to search for safe haven” in the United States. [58]

In the face of a worsening refugee crisis and a growing climate of hostility toward immigrants and sanctuary advocates alike, Berkeley city officials and faith communities have recommitted themselves to the New Sanctuary Movement. As current pastor of University Lutheran Chapel (ULC), Jeff Johnson, lamented in June of 2016, “‘We live in perilous times—when national leaders advocate openly about building walls and barring whole populations from entry into the U.S. … It is a time of increased xenophobia, where refugees are derided, scapegoated, and blamed. For communities of faith, action in the present moment is imperative.” [59] As a gesture of this commitment, ULC began renovations that summer to transform an unused office space into a one-bedroom apartment, becoming the first congregation in Berkeley to offer its own designated residence for refugees at risk of deportation. [60] The project, which was initiated with the support of at least a dozen local congregations, was formally unveiled in July 2016, and will be made available to an individual or family who requests safe haven within the chapel, with preference given toward those for whom deportation would involve tearing a family apart. [61] Reaffirming its own commitment to defending immigrants and those who advocate for them, on June 28, 2016, the Berkeley City Council offered unanimous support for what Councilman Kriss Worthington commended as ULC’s “‘compassionate and courageous actions.’” [62]

[[Image:ULC-Apartment.jpg]]

'''Sanctuary apartment at University Lutheran Chapel, 2016.'''

''Photo: Tracey Taylor, “Local Church Offers Sanctuary to Those Facing Deportation,” Berkeleyside, 24 July 2016.''

The election of anti-immigrant President Donald Trump in November 2016 ushered in a new phase of the sanctuary movement, the history of which is unfolding at the time of this writing. Immigrants and activists have reacted to Trump’s unexpected victory with both deep fear and bold defiance. Despite the President’s threats to condition all federal funding on cooperation with federal immigration authorities, cities of refuge across the Bay Area and across the country have raced to publicly reaffirm their commitments to sanctuary. [63] Officials in Berkeley—a city which stands to lose some $11.5 million in federal funds in the proposed crackdown on sanctuary localities—have vowed not to buckle to pressure from the incoming administration. Upon Trump’s election, Mayor Jesse Arreguin pledged that Berkeley “‘will remain a beacon of light during this dark time,’” assuring residents that “‘[f]rom hard-working families in our neighborhoods to Dreamers in our classrooms, our city will be a safe space.’” [64]

Notes

[1] Original Covenant of Sanctuary, East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, Rpt. in Susan B. Coutin, ''The Culture of Protest: Religious Activism and the U.S. Sanctuary Movement'' (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993), 230. 
[2] Robert Tomsho, ''The American Sanctuary Movement'' (Austin, TX: Texas Monthly, 1987), 30. 
[3] Tomsho, ''American Sanctuary Movement'', 30. 
[4] Text of EBSC Original Covenant of Sanctuary (Coutin, Culture of Protest, 230): 
<blockquote>The Bay Area has become a place of uncertain refuge for men, women and children who are fleeing for their lives from the vicious and devastating conflict in Central America. Many of these refugees have chosen to leave their country only after witnessing the murder of close friends and relatives. 
The United Nations has declared these people legitimate refugees of war; by every moral and legal standard, they ought to be received as such by the government of the United States. The 1951 United Nations Convention and the 1967 Protocol Agreements on refugees—both signed by the U.S.—established the rights of refugees not to be sent back to their countries of origin. Thus far, however, our government has been unwilling to meet it’s [sic] obligations under these agreements. The refugees among us are consequently threatened with the prospect of deportation back to El Salvador and Guatemala, where they face the likelihood of severe reprisals, perhaps including death. 
This is not the first time religious people have been called to bear witness to our faith in providing sanctuary to refugees branded “illegal” in their flight from persecution. The slaves also fled north in our own country and the Jews who fled Nazi Germany are but two examples from recent history. We believe the religious community is now being called again to provide sanctuary to the refugees among us. 
Therefore, we join in covenant to provide sanctuary—support, protection, and advocacy—to the El Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees who request safe haven out of fear and persecution upon return to their homeland. We do this out of concern for the welfare of these refugees, regardless of their official immigrant status. We acknowledge that legal consequences may result from out action. We enter this covenant as an act of religious commitment.</blockquote> 
[5] Eileen M. Purcell, Introduction, ''The Public Sanctuary Movement: An Historical Basis of Hope: Oral Histories'' (San Francisco: Sanctuary Oral History Project, 2007), 9. 
[6] Bob McKenzie, interviewed by Eileen M. Purcell, transcript, ''Sanctuary Oral History Project'', Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA, January 21, 1998, 6-7. 
[7] Robert McAfee Brown, ''The Case for Sanctuary'', transcript, Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, 20 June 1986, Graduate Theological Union Archives, 3. 
[8] Marilyn Chilcote, interviewed by Eileen M. Purcell, transcript, ''Sanctuary Oral History Project'', Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA, June 30, 1998, 18-19; Coutin, Culture of Protest, 10. 
[9] Randy K. Lippert and Sean Rehaag, eds, ''Sanctuary Practices in International Perspectives: Migration, Citizenship, and Social Movements'' (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013), 217; Coutin, Culture of Protest, 39. 
[10] Vincent N. Parrillo, ''Sanctuary Movement'', Encyclopedia of Social Problems, Vol. 2 (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008), 799. 
[11] Harriet Swift, "Bay Area Sets Pace for Refugee Sanctuary" (Oakland Tribune 22 Feb. 1985), Rpt. in ''The Sanctuary Movement'' (Oakland: Data Center, 1985), 60; Marilyn Chilcote, June 30, 1998, 18-19. 
[12] Marilyn Chilcote, June 30, 1998, 19. 
[13] Charles Burress, “INS Assails Berkeley’s Latin Sanctuary” (San Francisco Chronicle 21 Feb. 1985), Rpt. in ''The Sanctuary Movement'' (Oakland: Data Center, 1985), 63. 
[14] Swift, “Bay Area Sets Pace,” 59-60. 
[15] Bert Johnson, “Berkeley Defends Sanctuary Status.” ''East Bay Express'', 23 Sept. 2015. 
[16] Associated Press, "Berkeley Votes to Be Sanctuary for Refugees," ''Los Angeles Times'' 21 Feb. 1985. 
[17] Rebecca Sainer, “Berkeley as Sanctuary: City Declares Haven for Central American Refugees” (San Jose Mercury 22 Feb. 1985), Rpt. in ''The Sanctuary Movement'' (Oakland: Data Center, 1985), 61. 
[18] Associated Press, “Berkeley Votes to Be Sanctuary for Refugees;” Sainer, “Berkeley as Sanctuary,” 61. 
[19] Sainer, “Berkeley as Sanctuary,” 61. 
[20] Matthew Green and Jessica Tarlton, "What Are Sanctuary Cities and How Are They Bracing for Trump’s Proposed Immigration Crackdown?" ''The Lowdown'', KQED News, 17 Nov. 2016. 
[21] Lippert and Rehaag, ''Sanctuary Practices'', 46. 
[22] Peter Sammon, interviewed by Eileen M. Purcell, transcript, ''Sanctuary Oral History Project'', Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA, February 13, 1998, 10-11. 
[23] Lippert and Rehaag, ''Sanctuary Practices'', 46, 224. 
[24] Johnson, “Berkeley Defends Sanctuary Status.” 
[25] Green and Tarlton, “What Are Sanctuary Cities?” 
[26] Ann Crittenden, ''Sanctuary: A Story of American Conscience and the Law in Collision'' (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), 62. 
[27] Associated Press, “Berkeley Votes to Be Sanctuary for Refugees.” 
[28] Gustav Schultz, interviewed by Eileen M. Purcell, transcript, ''Sanctuary Oral History Project'', Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA, March 10, 1998, 78; Bob McKenzie, January 21, 1998, 3; Bill O’Donnell, interviewed by Eileen M. Purcell, transcript, Sanctuary Oral History Project, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA, February 5, 1998, 1, 5. 
[29] Ignatius Bau, ''This Ground is Holy: Church Sanctuary and Central American Refugees'' (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), 167. 
[30] Lippert and Rehaag, Sanctuary Practices, 221-222. 
[31] Gustav Schultz, March 10, 1998, 86. 
[32] Robert D. Fitch, interviewed by Eileen M. Purcell, transcript, ''Sanctuary Oral History Project'', Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA, March 25, 1998, 14. 
[33] Rbert D. Fitch, March 25, 1998, 7. 
[34] Purcell, ''Public Sanctuary Movement'', 5-6; Robert D. Fitch, March 25, 1998, 8-10. 
[35] Bau, ''This Ground is Holy'', 168. 
[36] Tomsho, ''American Sanctuary Movement'', 28; Purcell, Public Sanctuary Movement, 5. 
[37] Bau, ''This Ground is Holy'', 168. 
[38] Lippert and Rehaag, ''Sanctuary Practices'', 223. 
[39] Bau, ''This Ground is Holy'', 168. 
[40] Gustav Schultz, March 10, 1998, 83; Gustav Schultz, interviewed by Eileen M. Purcell, transcript, ''Sanctuary Oral History Project'', Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA, March 11, 1998, 91-2; Tomsho, American Sanctuary Movement, 28. 
[41] Bill O’Donnell, February 5, 1998, 5; Robert D. Fitch, March 25, 1998, 15. 
[42] Gustav Schultz, March 11, 1998, 93. 
[43] Bau, ''This Ground is Holy'', 12. 
[44] Marilyn Chilcote, June 30, 1998, 16. 

[45] Purcell, ''Public Sanctuary Movement'', 10. 
[46] Gustav Schultz, March 10, 1998, 87. 
[47] Gustav Schultz, March 11, 1998, 92. 
[48] Bill O’Donnell, February 5, 1998, 9; Coutin, Culture of Protest, 229. 
[49] Purcell, ''Public Sanctuary Movement'', 6. 
[50] Brenna Smith, "Interfaith Organizations in Berkeley Welcome World’s Refugees," ''The Daily Californian'', 22 July 2015. 
[51] Smith, “Interfaith Organizations in Berkeley;” Sharon Abercrombie, “Refugees Find Sanctuary in Berkeley,” ''The Catholic Voice'', May 21, 2007. 
[52] Abercrombie, “Refugees Find Sanctuary in Berkeley.” 
[53] Smith, “Interfaith Organizations in Berkeley.” 
[54] Cassandra Vogel, “Undocumented Immigrants Face Uncertainty in Wake of Trump’s Election,” ''The Daily Californian'', 28 Nov. 2016. 
[55] Vogel, “Undocumented Immigrants Face Uncertainty.” 
[56] Johnson, “Berkeley Defends Sanctuary Status.” 
[57] Stephen Stock, David Paredes, and Scott Pham, "Sanctuary for Immigrants Comes Back to the Bay Area," NBC Bay Area, 24 Nov. 2014. 
[58] Purcell, Public Sanctuary Movement, 4. 
[59] Tracey Taylor, “Local Church Offers Sanctuary to Those Facing Deportation,” ''Berkeleyside'', 24 July 2016. 
[60] Lillian Dong, "Local Berkeley Chapel Offers Place of Sanctuary for Immigrants," ''The Daily Californian'', 24 July 2015. 
[61] Taylor, “Local Church Offers Sanctuary.” 
[62] Dong, “Local Berkeley Chapel.” 
[63] Green and Tarlton, “What Are Sanctuary Cities?” 
[64] Tom Lochner, "Berkeley to Remain ‘Sanctuary City,’ Says Mayor Elect," ''East Bay Times'', 25 Nov. 2016. 

[[category:Immigration]] [[category:Salvadoran]] [[category:East Bay]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:Bay Area Social Movements]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:1970s]]

Vietnam Day Committee

2017-04-25T01:25:59Z

Seanburns:

''' Historical Essay '''
 
''By Lucy Tate''

[[Image:Vietnam Day Committee Protests at UC Berkeley.JPG]]
 

[[Image:Addressing-injustice.png|left]]

{| style="color: black; background-color: #F5DA81;"
| colspan="2" | '''In the late 1960’s, students at the Berkeley campus voiced their opposition to American aggression in Vietnam by forming the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) with goals of organizing mass civil disobedience and directly disrupting the war effort. Initially organized as a committee to plan a one-day teach-in against the Vietnam War, the group developed into a lasting organization that significantly contributed to the building of the broader, international anti-war effort. '''
|}
<blockquote>Most of us grew up thinking that the United States was a great and humble nation, that only involved itself in the affairs of other countries reluctantly and as a last and final resort. But now the war in Vietnam has provided the incredibly sharp razor that has finally separated thousands and thousands of people from their illusions about the morality and integrity of this country's purposes internationally… What kind of a system is it that justifies the United States in seizing the destinies of other people and using them callously for our own ends? We must name that system and we must change it and control it, or else it will destroy us. 
- Paul Potter, president of SDS, speaking at Vietnam Day 17 April 1965 </blockquote>
 
<h4>Landscape of the 1960’s</h4>
Through their participation in the Civil Rights Movement and then the Free Speech Movement, students in the San Francisco Bay Area came into their own as agents of change in the politically tumultuous sixties. In the second half of the sixties, as students nationwide became increasingly disillusioned with the war in Vietnam, they sought ways to translate their sentiments into collective, organized, action. At UC Berkeley, the political activism of the era, combined with student aspirations to oppose the war, led to the emergence of new political organizations such as the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC).

While the Committee stood on its own, the organization was born out of the political climate produced by the Free Speech Movement (FSM) as “one of the fruits of the FSM’s victory.”[2] Another organization with a large presence on the Berkeley campus was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Many flyers for events hosted by VDC describe a partnership of “co-organizing with Students for a Democratic Society,” however such collaborative efforts did not exclude the VDC from organizing independently of the SDS.[3] While SDS published the Port Huron Statement against the war in 1962 on the national stage, the local branch of SDS created an “Anti-Draft Resolution.”[4] Still, SDS was at heart a multi-issue organization, and “unwilling to wait for SDS to pick up the ball on Vietnam, but [assuming] it would promote actions in the U.S., activists looking to conduct immediate actions formed the VDC.[5]
 
<h4>Meet the VDC</h4>
The VDC was born out of a 36-hour long teach-in called “Vietnam Day,” which featured famous speakers and activists, and attracted over 30,000 participants.[6] The organizers of the VDC include Jerry Rubin, Stephen Smale, Barbara Gullahorn, Paul Montauk, and a number of others. Rubin, a graduate student in the Sociology Department, and Smale, mathematician and professor, were highly influential among group members.

Members held weekly “discussions of tactics and their political implications” at the Vietnam Day Committee office at 2407 Fulton Street, Berkeley.[7] While no single, determinate set of politics grounded its organizing, the VDC did hold a set of principles highly influenced by the Free Speech Movement and the other civil rights movements occurring at the time, as their first statement of policy demonstrates:

<blockquote>The Vietnam Day Committee is a group of students, faculty and other members of the Bay Area community opposed to American intervention in Vietnam, the Dominican Republic and wherever else it may occur. Revolutionary struggles for self-determination are sweeping the world today. American suppression of these movements, we believe, is immoral, and a threat to the peace of the world. The Vietnam Day committee is organizing nonviolent direct actions, teach-in’s, door-to-door organizing and other educational activities to oppose American intervention. We believe that struggle for self- determination in other continent is related to the struggle for democracy in America — a democracy in which the people have the facts and the power to make decisions for themselves. The struggles in American against racism, poverty and bureaucratic conformity are part of the same movement as the struggle against American militarism.
We must build a New America, and join with those peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America building a New World. Join the Vietnam Day Committee: only $0.25 makes you a card-carrying member! 
Vietnam Day Committee: statement of policy [8]
</blockquote>
Aiming to tackle the war within the broader context of fighting “undemocratic power” and a “lack of representation,” the VDC envisioned the anti-war effort as another of many fronts in a unified, larger struggle.[9] A flier created by the VDC for a demonstration reads, “Vietnam, like Mississippi, it not an aberration — it is a mirror of America. Vietnam IS American foreign policy…. We must say to Johnson, if you want to go on killing Vietnamese, you must jail Americans.”[10]

Based off of these founding beliefs, the VDC utilized a multiplicity of tactics and means of engagement to achieve their aims. This included the serial distribution of anti-war literature — including a monthly newspaper, a bibliography of recommended reading material, and short cartoons and articles for troops overseas. The VDC also often spent time canvassing against the war, mainly in disenfranchised communities. [11] Most of all though, through their positionality as American students at an institution highly connected to the military, they sought to directly intervene in processes that enabled the continuance of American aggression abroad. In a most creative embodiment of such aims, some members tailed trucks transporting locally produced napalm in a pickup truck towing signage that read, “Danger, Napalm Bombs Ahead.”[12] However, the VDC would not limit itself to solely educational activism such as this, but would go on to implement mass civil disobedience tactics to advance their cause of immediate and complete withdrawal from Vietnam. In literature created by the VDC, the organization declares, “The primary strategy of the Vietnam Day Committee is primarily to mobilize as many of those people now opposed to Johnson as possible, rather than to attempt to rationally change the minds of those support Johnson, although of course we are trying that too.[13] Highly-coordinated, highly-publicized action will make people feel that they are not alone in speaking out.”[14]
 
<h4>Troop Trains and Direct Action</h4>
As the war began to escalate rapidly, with about 20,000 soldiers sent to Vietnam every month, VDC stepped onto the stage. Many soldiers bound for Vietnam came through Berkeley and Oakland. A VDC newspaper articulated that “a troop train is not merely a train, it is a symbol; an extension of the war machine.”[15] In fliers calling for demonstrators to flock to the tracks, the VDC called for students and community members to “demonstrate against the war machine; [to] stop the train and give [their] anti-war literature to the soldiers.”[16]
[[Image:Stop the Troop Train Flier.JPG]]
 
 
[[Image:Map of Oakland Army Terminal for Troop Train Protests.JPG]]
 
The first of these demonstrations brought 150 people to the train tracks.[17] Some of these activists sat on the tracks to block trains carrying U.S. soldiers bound for Vietnam.[18] These trains did not stop or slow upon arriving before these youth however, and policemen in plain clothes often had to push activists off the tracks to prevent their otherwise imminent deaths. These actions immediately garnered national news coverage.[19] Although many soldiers did not react or seem sympathetic, a soldier in one car of a train was reported to have held up a sign to a window which read, “Keep it up. I don’t want to go.”[20] A total of four blockades took place in August.[21] The fourth included a thousand picketers. [22] “I loved that,” participant Marilyn Milligan said. “That seemed to be a clear expression of how I felt.”[23]

In another instance of direct action, the VDC organized a picket against General Maxwell Taylor. When Taylor arrived at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel on August 24th, 1965, there were 100 VDC members awaiting his arrival.[24] Flyers depicting Taylor’s face and the declaration, “Wanted for War Crimes” were thrust at him and those who passed by.[25] Fleeing the commotion, the General was forced to take cover in the manager’s office.[26]
[[Image:General Maxwell Taylor War Criminal Poster.JPG]]
 
<h4>International Days of Protests, October 15-16th, 1965</h4>
The International Days of Protests rally was organized to manifest simultaneous antiwar protests overseas and within the U.S.[27] Rubin traveled to Washington to propose idea of “International Days of Protest” at the Assembly of Unrepresented People. According to the VDC, priorities for the peace movement included: national and international solidarity and coordination on action; militant action, including civil disobedience; extensive work in the community to develop off-campus grassroots opposition and to benefit from the militancy of direct action.[28] The state department, which originally intended to send a representative, withdrew from the program because it was “imbalanced.”[29] The National Guard of September 4, 1965 wrote, “Preparations are being made in about two dozen American cities for coordinated mass protests October 15-16th in opposition to U.S. aggression in Vietnam… in long-range benefit to the peace movement, for the emphasis of the ‘national days of protest’ is on community organization and education as well as on direct action against the war”.

The event attracted thousands of people in Berkeley.[30] Many students and professors took their first public steps against the war at the event’s workshops and teach-in’s. Media headlines regarding the protests also served to spread concern regarding U.S. foreign policy off of the campus as well.
 
<h4>Oakland Induction Center</h4>
As culmination of the International Days of Protests, the Vietnam Day Committee organized a seven-mile anti-war march to the Oakland Army terminal. The City of Oakland refused a permit for the demonstration, but the VDC voted to march anyways.[31] A member of the Committee said, “The Berkeley-San Francisco Bay Area aspect of the international protest will center around the ‘pacification’ of the Oakland Army Terminal.”[32] Flyers put out for the event by the VDC read, “We will tell them that under the 1949 London Treaty and The Nuremberg Codes they bear individual responsibility for committing war crimes, even if they are following the orders of a superior or obeying national law.”[33]

That night, police blocked people from approaching the terminal, and marchers were headed straight towards a collision with officers should they continue en route. Leading members of the march made the decision to turn the march around, not wanting to risk an unnecessary confrontation with the police. Jack Weinberg, a member of the Committee said, “I just decided that we were turning. I basically was the person who made that decision, but for years afterwards, got great degrees of shit for it, never knew if I did right or wrong. I still don't know if it was right or wrong decision.”[34]

The next day an even larger march that attempted to cross into Oakland found itself facing a police presence again. But this time, the marchers found themselves facing opposition from the Hells Angels as well. Breaking out into a scene of violent confrontation, members of the VDC described the event as a riot in which, “scenes of thousands of middle-class youth being carried away by military police [was] in every American living room… Massive disobedience on Vietnam [would] dramatize the issue throughout the country, express [their] personal rejection of the war machine, and expose the inability of traditional American institutions to cope with dissent.”

<h4>The End of The VDC, and Its Lasting Impact</h4>
The Vietnam Day Committee began to spread itself thin and lost a lot of momentum after the International Days of Protest. It even failed at pursuing electoral politics through Robert Scheer, a local antiwar activist and scholar. Organizers faced Scheer’s defeat as a final nail in the coffin, among other gradual VDC failures. VDC headquarters were bombed in April 1966 and a few months later UC Berkeley had banned the Committee from campus, on the grounds that many of its members were not students. While the VDC would continue to be active into the early 1970s, after the peak of activity in 1965-1966, the VDC began winding down.

However, while active, the Vietnam Day Committee succeeded in many ways, attracting thousands of people to its demonstrations between 1965 and 1966, and articulating antiwar perspectives that became immensely popular as America aggression escalated in Vietnam. These perspectives had previously garnered limited public support by “radicals” on or nearby the Berkeley campus. Prior to the mass activism of anti-war movements like the VDC, many Americans simply did not know enough about the war to take a strong stance. Student activists, such as those involved with the VDC, helped break this silence with their efforts aimed directly at the soldiers leaving from locations like the Oakland Army Base. “Now we have to continue to change this country,” said, Nancy Kurshan, an organizer with the Vietnam Day Committee— for activists such as Kurshan, the end of the war did not mean the end of the struggle. [35]

'''Notes'''
 
[1] Mark Kitchell, ''Berkeley in the 60s'' (New York, 1990) 
[2] Vietnam Day Committee, ''We Accuse: A Powerful Statement of the New Political Anger in America, as Revealed in the Speeches Given at the 36-Hour ‘Vietnam Day’ Protest in Berkeley California'' (Berkeley: Diablo, 1965), 2. 
[3]Rubin, Smale, Gullahorn 
[4] flyer, Stephen Smale papers, 1950-1998, MSS 99/373, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[5]Tom Gitlin, ''The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam'' (Berkeley, 1994), 51. 
[6]Ibid, 24. 
[7]Seth Rosenfeld, ''Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power'' (2012). 
[8] flyer, Stephen Smale papers, 1950-1998, MSS 99/373, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[9]flyer, Clark Kerr office files regarding the Free Speech Movement, CU-495, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[10]Vietnam Day Committee Newspaper, Clark Kerr office files regarding the Free Speech Movement, CU- 495, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[11] Gitlin, 50. 
[12]Ibid, 50. 
[13] flyer, Clark Kerr office files regarding the Free Speech Movement, CU-495, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[14] Ibid. 
[15] Vietnam Day Committee Newspaper, Clark Kerr office files regarding the Free Speech Movement, CU- 495, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[16] flyer, Stephen Smale papers, 1950-1998, MSS 99/373, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[17] Vietnam Day Committee Newspaper, Clark Kerr office files regarding the Free Speech Movement, CU- 495, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[18] Gitlin, 50. 
[19] Ibid. 
[20] Vietnam Day Committee Newspaper, Clark Kerr office files regarding the Free Speech Movement, CU- 495, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[21] Tom Gitlin, 50. 
[22] Vietnam Day Committee Newspaper, Clark Kerr office files regarding the Free Speech Movement, CU- 495, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
[23] Gitlin, 50. 
[24] Steven Smale: The Mathematician Who Broke the Dimension Barrier. 
[25] Gitlin, 50. 
[26] Ibid. 
[27] Gitlin, 51. 
[28] flyer, Stephen Smale papers, 1950-1998, MSS 99/373, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[29] flyer, Stephen Smale papers, 1950-1998, MSS 99/373, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[30] Gitlin, 50. 
[31] Mark Kitchell, Berkeley in the 60’s (New York, 1990). 
[32] Ibid. 
[33] Ibid. 
[34] Ibid. 
[35] Steve Long May, The Barb (Berkeley, 1975), 11.
 
[[category:1960s]][[category:1970s]][[category:Bay Area Social Movements]][[category:East Bay]][[category:Anti-war]]

Vietnam Day Committee

2017-04-25T01:22:45Z

Seanburns: Created page with "''' Historical Essay ''' ''By Lucy Tate'' Image:Vietnam Day Committee Protests at UC Berk..."

''' Historical Essay '''
 
''By Lucy Tate''
[[Image:Vietnam Day Committee Protests at UC Berkeley.JPG]]
 
{| style="color: black; background-color: #F5DA81;"
| colspan="2" | '''In the late 1960’s, students at the Berkeley campus voiced their opposition to American aggression in Vietnam by forming the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) with goals of organizing mass civil disobedience and directly disrupting the war effort. Initially organized as a committee to plan a one-day teach-in against the Vietnam War, the group developed into a lasting organization that significantly contributed to the building of the broader, international anti-war effort. '''
|}
<blockquote>Most of us grew up thinking that the United States was a great and humble nation, that only involved itself in the affairs of other countries reluctantly and as a last and final resort. But now the war in Vietnam has provided the incredibly sharp razor that has finally separated thousands and thousands of people from their illusions about the morality and integrity of this country's purposes internationally… What kind of a system is it that justifies the United States in seizing the destinies of other people and using them callously for our own ends? We must name that system and we must change it and control it, or else it will destroy us. 
- Paul Potter, president of SDS, speaking at Vietnam Day 17 April 1965 </blockquote>
 
<h4>Landscape of the 1960’s</h4>
Through their participation in the Civil Rights Movement and then the Free Speech Movement, students in the San Francisco Bay Area came into their own as agents of change in the politically tumultuous sixties. In the second half of the sixties, as students nationwide became increasingly disillusioned with the war in Vietnam, they sought ways to translate their sentiments into collective, organized, action. At UC Berkeley, the political activism of the era, combined with student aspirations to oppose the war, led to the emergence of new political organizations such as the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC).

While the Committee stood on its own, the organization was born out of the political climate produced by the Free Speech Movement (FSM) as “one of the fruits of the FSM’s victory.”[2] Another organization with a large presence on the Berkeley campus was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Many flyers for events hosted by VDC describe a partnership of “co-organizing with Students for a Democratic Society,” however such collaborative efforts did not exclude the VDC from organizing independently of the SDS.[3] While SDS published the Port Huron Statement against the war in 1962 on the national stage, the local branch of SDS created an “Anti-Draft Resolution.”[4] Still, SDS was at heart a multi-issue organization, and “unwilling to wait for SDS to pick up the ball on Vietnam, but [assuming] it would promote actions in the U.S., activists looking to conduct immediate actions formed the VDC.[5]
 
<h4>Meet the VDC</h4>
The VDC was born out of a 36-hour long teach-in called “Vietnam Day,” which featured famous speakers and activists, and attracted over 30,000 participants.[6] The organizers of the VDC include Jerry Rubin, Stephen Smale, Barbara Gullahorn, Paul Montauk, and a number of others. Rubin, a graduate student in the Sociology Department, and Smale, mathematician and professor, were highly influential among group members.

Members held weekly “discussions of tactics and their political implications” at the Vietnam Day Committee office at 2407 Fulton Street, Berkeley.[7] While no single, determinate set of politics grounded its organizing, the VDC did hold a set of principles highly influenced by the Free Speech Movement and the other civil rights movements occurring at the time, as their first statement of policy demonstrates:

<blockquote>The Vietnam Day Committee is a group of students, faculty and other members of the Bay Area community opposed to American intervention in Vietnam, the Dominican Republic and wherever else it may occur. Revolutionary struggles for self-determination are sweeping the world today. American suppression of these movements, we believe, is immoral, and a threat to the peace of the world. The Vietnam Day committee is organizing nonviolent direct actions, teach-in’s, door-to-door organizing and other educational activities to oppose American intervention. We believe that struggle for self- determination in other continent is related to the struggle for democracy in America — a democracy in which the people have the facts and the power to make decisions for themselves. The struggles in American against racism, poverty and bureaucratic conformity are part of the same movement as the struggle against American militarism.
We must build a New America, and join with those peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America building a New World. Join the Vietnam Day Committee: only $0.25 makes you a card-carrying member! 
Vietnam Day Committee: statement of policy [8]
</blockquote>
Aiming to tackle the war within the broader context of fighting “undemocratic power” and a “lack of representation,” the VDC envisioned the anti-war effort as another of many fronts in a unified, larger struggle.[9] A flier created by the VDC for a demonstration reads, “Vietnam, like Mississippi, it not an aberration — it is a mirror of America. Vietnam IS American foreign policy…. We must say to Johnson, if you want to go on killing Vietnamese, you must jail Americans.”[10]

Based off of these founding beliefs, the VDC utilized a multiplicity of tactics and means of engagement to achieve their aims. This included the serial distribution of anti-war literature — including a monthly newspaper, a bibliography of recommended reading material, and short cartoons and articles for troops overseas. The VDC also often spent time canvassing against the war, mainly in disenfranchised communities. [11] Most of all though, through their positionality as American students at an institution highly connected to the military, they sought to directly intervene in processes that enabled the continuance of American aggression abroad. In a most creative embodiment of such aims, some members tailed trucks transporting locally produced napalm in a pickup truck towing signage that read, “Danger, Napalm Bombs Ahead.”[12] However, the VDC would not limit itself to solely educational activism such as this, but would go on to implement mass civil disobedience tactics to advance their cause of immediate and complete withdrawal from Vietnam. In literature created by the VDC, the organization declares, “The primary strategy of the Vietnam Day Committee is primarily to mobilize as many of those people now opposed to Johnson as possible, rather than to attempt to rationally change the minds of those support Johnson, although of course we are trying that too.[13] Highly-coordinated, highly-publicized action will make people feel that they are not alone in speaking out.”[14]
 
<h4>Troop Trains and Direct Action</h4>
As the war began to escalate rapidly, with about 20,000 soldiers sent to Vietnam every month, VDC stepped onto the stage. Many soldiers bound for Vietnam came through Berkeley and Oakland. A VDC newspaper articulated that “a troop train is not merely a train, it is a symbol; an extension of the war machine.”[15] In fliers calling for demonstrators to flock to the tracks, the VDC called for students and community members to “demonstrate against the war machine; [to] stop the train and give [their] anti-war literature to the soldiers.”[16]
[[Image:Stop the Troop Train Flier.JPG]]
 
 
[[Image:Map of Oakland Army Terminal for Troop Train Protests.JPG]]
 
The first of these demonstrations brought 150 people to the train tracks.[17] Some of these activists sat on the tracks to block trains carrying U.S. soldiers bound for Vietnam.[18] These trains did not stop or slow upon arriving before these youth however, and policemen in plain clothes often had to push activists off the tracks to prevent their otherwise imminent deaths. These actions immediately garnered national news coverage.[19] Although many soldiers did not react or seem sympathetic, a soldier in one car of a train was reported to have held up a sign to a window which read, “Keep it up. I don’t want to go.”[20] A total of four blockades took place in August.[21] The fourth included a thousand picketers. [22] “I loved that,” participant Marilyn Milligan said. “That seemed to be a clear expression of how I felt.”[23]

In another instance of direct action, the VDC organized a picket against General Maxwell Taylor. When Taylor arrived at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel on August 24th, 1965, there were 100 VDC members awaiting his arrival.[24] Flyers depicting Taylor’s face and the declaration, “Wanted for War Crimes” were thrust at him and those who passed by.[25] Fleeing the commotion, the General was forced to take cover in the manager’s office.[26]
[[Image:General Maxwell Taylor War Criminal Poster.JPG]]
 
<h4>International Days of Protests, October 15-16th, 1965</h4>
The International Days of Protests rally was organized to manifest simultaneous antiwar protests overseas and within the U.S.[27] Rubin traveled to Washington to propose idea of “International Days of Protest” at the Assembly of Unrepresented People. According to the VDC, priorities for the peace movement included: national and international solidarity and coordination on action; militant action, including civil disobedience; extensive work in the community to develop off-campus grassroots opposition and to benefit from the militancy of direct action.[28] The state department, which originally intended to send a representative, withdrew from the program because it was “imbalanced.”[29] The National Guard of September 4, 1965 wrote, “Preparations are being made in about two dozen American cities for coordinated mass protests October 15-16th in opposition to U.S. aggression in Vietnam… in long-range benefit to the peace movement, for the emphasis of the ‘national days of protest’ is on community organization and education as well as on direct action against the war”.

The event attracted thousands of people in Berkeley.[30] Many students and professors took their first public steps against the war at the event’s workshops and teach-in’s. Media headlines regarding the protests also served to spread concern regarding U.S. foreign policy off of the campus as well.
 
<h4>Oakland Induction Center</h4>
As culmination of the International Days of Protests, the Vietnam Day Committee organized a seven-mile anti-war march to the Oakland Army terminal. The City of Oakland refused a permit for the demonstration, but the VDC voted to march anyways.[31] A member of the Committee said, “The Berkeley-San Francisco Bay Area aspect of the international protest will center around the ‘pacification’ of the Oakland Army Terminal.”[32] Flyers put out for the event by the VDC read, “We will tell them that under the 1949 London Treaty and The Nuremberg Codes they bear individual responsibility for committing war crimes, even if they are following the orders of a superior or obeying national law.”[33]

That night, police blocked people from approaching the terminal, and marchers were headed straight towards a collision with officers should they continue en route. Leading members of the march made the decision to turn the march around, not wanting to risk an unnecessary confrontation with the police. Jack Weinberg, a member of the Committee said, “I just decided that we were turning. I basically was the person who made that decision, but for years afterwards, got great degrees of shit for it, never knew if I did right or wrong. I still don't know if it was right or wrong decision.”[34]

The next day an even larger march that attempted to cross into Oakland found itself facing a police presence again. But this time, the marchers found themselves facing opposition from the Hells Angels as well. Breaking out into a scene of violent confrontation, members of the VDC described the event as a riot in which, “scenes of thousands of middle-class youth being carried away by military police [was] in every American living room… Massive disobedience on Vietnam [would] dramatize the issue throughout the country, express [their] personal rejection of the war machine, and expose the inability of traditional American institutions to cope with dissent.”

<h4>The End of The VDC, and Its Lasting Impact</h4>
The Vietnam Day Committee began to spread itself thin and lost a lot of momentum after the International Days of Protest. It even failed at pursuing electoral politics through Robert Scheer, a local antiwar activist and scholar. Organizers faced Scheer’s defeat as a final nail in the coffin, among other gradual VDC failures. VDC headquarters were bombed in April 1966 and a few months later UC Berkeley had banned the Committee from campus, on the grounds that many of its members were not students. While the VDC would continue to be active into the early 1970s, after the peak of activity in 1965-1966, the VDC began winding down.

However, while active, the Vietnam Day Committee succeeded in many ways, attracting thousands of people to its demonstrations between 1965 and 1966, and articulating antiwar perspectives that became immensely popular as America aggression escalated in Vietnam. These perspectives had previously garnered limited public support by “radicals” on or nearby the Berkeley campus. Prior to the mass activism of anti-war movements like the VDC, many Americans simply did not know enough about the war to take a strong stance. Student activists, such as those involved with the VDC, helped break this silence with their efforts aimed directly at the soldiers leaving from locations like the Oakland Army Base. “Now we have to continue to change this country,” said, Nancy Kurshan, an organizer with the Vietnam Day Committee— for activists such as Kurshan, the end of the war did not mean the end of the struggle. [35]

'''Notes'''
 
[1] Mark Kitchell, ''Berkeley in the 60s'' (New York, 1990) 
[2] Vietnam Day Committee, ''We Accuse: A Powerful Statement of the New Political Anger in America, as Revealed in the Speeches Given at the 36-Hour ‘Vietnam Day’ Protest in Berkeley California'' (Berkeley: Diablo, 1965), 2. 
[3]Rubin, Smale, Gullahorn 
[4] flyer, Stephen Smale papers, 1950-1998, MSS 99/373, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[5]Tom Gitlin, ''The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam'' (Berkeley, 1994), 51. 
[6]Ibid, 24. 
[7]Seth Rosenfeld, ''Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power'' (2012). 
[8] flyer, Stephen Smale papers, 1950-1998, MSS 99/373, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[9]flyer, Clark Kerr office files regarding the Free Speech Movement, CU-495, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[10]Vietnam Day Committee Newspaper, Clark Kerr office files regarding the Free Speech Movement, CU- 495, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[11] Gitlin, 50. 
[12]Ibid, 50. 
[13] flyer, Clark Kerr office files regarding the Free Speech Movement, CU-495, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[14] Ibid. 
[15] Vietnam Day Committee Newspaper, Clark Kerr office files regarding the Free Speech Movement, CU- 495, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[16] flyer, Stephen Smale papers, 1950-1998, MSS 99/373, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[17] Vietnam Day Committee Newspaper, Clark Kerr office files regarding the Free Speech Movement, CU- 495, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[18] Gitlin, 50. 
[19] Ibid. 
[20] Vietnam Day Committee Newspaper, Clark Kerr office files regarding the Free Speech Movement, CU- 495, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
[21] Tom Gitlin, 50.
[22] Vietnam Day Committee Newspaper, Clark Kerr office files regarding the Free Speech Movement, CU- 495, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
[23] Gitlin, 50.
[24] Steven Smale: The Mathematician Who Broke the Dimension Barrier. 
[25] Gitlin, 50. 
[26] Ibid. 
[27] Gitlin, 51. 
[28] flyer, Stephen Smale papers, 1950-1998, MSS 99/373, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[29] flyer, Stephen Smale papers, 1950-1998, MSS 99/373, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 
[30] Gitlin, 50. 
[31] Mark Kitchell, Berkeley in the 60’s (New York, 1990). 
[32] Ibid. 
[33] Ibid. 
[34] Ibid. 
[35] Steve Long May, The Barb (Berkeley, 1975), 11.
 
[[category:1960s]][[category:1970s]][[category:Bay Area Social Movements]][[category:East Bay]][[category:Anti-war]]

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