Ending a war: Inventing a movement: Mayday 1971

Radical Society, Dec 2002 by Kauffman, L A

Into this fractured political landscape came the Mayday Tribe, a new player with a very different approach. The group was launched by Rennie Davis, a New Left leader who had become nationally famous after the melees outside the Democratic National Convention in 1968, when the federal government prosecuted him and other prominent organizers-the Chicago 7-for conspiracy. In Davis's conception, the Mayday Tribe would bring the most politicized hippies of the time together with the hippest of the hardcore radicals. "Tribe" itself was a countercultural code word (the 1967 San Francisco "Be-In" that propelled hippiedom to the national stage, for instance, was known as "A Gathering of the Tribes"), and Mayday had a long-haired freaky flavor that was decidedly missing from either the Trotskyist or pacifist wings of the antiwar movement. Jerry Coffin, who teamed up with Davis when Mayday was only an idea, recalls it as an attempt "to create a responsible hip alternative" to the Weather Underground: "merging radical politics, Gandhian nonviolence, serious rock and roll, [and] lots of drugs." Many-perhaps most-of the people who took part in the action were relative newcomers to the movement, from the generation that had been radicalized by Cambodia and Kent State.11

Davis took the idea of nonviolently blockading the federal government from a failed 1964 attempt by the Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to paralyze New York City traffic on the opening day of the World's Fair. The tactic was to be a "stall-in" at strategic points on the city's highways, with protesters deliberately allowing their cars to run out of fuel so that the vehicles would block the roadways. "Drive a while for freedom," read one leaflet. "Take only enough gas to get your car on exhibit on one of these highways." The Brooklyn civil-rights group-younger and more radical than CORE as a whole-announced the planned disruptions as a way of pressuring the city government to take action on housing, education, police brutality, and other issues of urgent concern to New York City's black population. But the outcry over this obstructive plan was enormous, leading CORE'S national director, James Farmer, to suspend the Brooklyn chapter; in the end, very few people went through with the highway action (though civil disobedience protests inside the fair led to three hundred arrests).12

The Mayday protest, with its goal of blockading the nation's capital, echoed the CORE plan in mischievous tone and disorderly intent. The Mayday protest was to entail "action rather than congregation, disruption rather than display." As one Mayday leaflet circulated in advance of the 1971 event declared, in a clear allusion to the 24 April NPAC event, "Nobody gives a damn how many dumb sheep can flock to Washington demonstrations, which are dull ceremonies of dissent that won't stop the war." Mayday wouldn't be a standard protest rally, where a series of speakers (usually chosen through an acrimonious behind-the-scenes struggle) would lecture to a passive crowd. It wouldn't be a conventional protest march, where demonstrators would trudge along a route that had been pre-arranged with the police, shepherded by movement marshals controlled by the protest leadership.13 With much antiwar protest having become dreary and routinized ("Should I take pictures, I kept questioning myself, or would photographs from past identical rallies suffice?" asked one radical after 24 April), Mayday promised to be novel and unpredictable.14