Introduction

Jay Moore (pieinsky@IGC.APC.ORG)
Thu, 27 Nov 1997 02:47:04 -0500

Hello to Members of the Sixties-List --

Ron Jacobs, who has just come out with an interesting book on the
Weatherpeople, suggested that I join this List. After a couple of weeks
of lurking and reading other people's postings, I thought I ought to
introduce myself. Even though I didn't begin my political activism until
1970 -- I was born in 1952 -- still I consider myself very much a
Sixties person. I arrived at Michigan State in the fall of that year
having come up from a rural town in the South on a scholarship. That
was just after Weather went underground, leaving the SDS chapter at MSU
in the hands of a 2 or 3 member PLP rump. Those on the anti-imperialist
Left who were neither Weather nor PL -- or who were latecomers such as
myself -- eventually got reorganized as a group called "Crisis in
America" (or "CIA" for short!) which developed out of the street battles
on Grand River Ave. and campus occupations in the spring of 1972 against
Nixon's resumption of the bombing and the mining of Haiphong Harbor. I
also got involved around this time period with the UFW grape boycott and
a defense committee for Robert Williams who had just returned to
Michigan from exile in Cuba and China and was fighting extradition back
to North Carolina. This was an incredibly high time period, when the
Revolution truly seemed to be around the corner.

Anybody reading this List from Michigan State during that time period --
I would sure like to find you. Most of the serious people I knew in and
around the "CIA" by 1973-74 decided to affiliate themselves with one or
another Trotskyist (esp. "Spark") or Maoist group (I went solo with the
RU) and removed from East Lansing campus to the Detroit auto factories
for the purpose of making the Revolution there. Because of political
differences, which loomed larger then, I lost track of all the other MSU
people.

Leaving out many subsequent twists and turns, today I'm still trying to
uphold the revolutionary ideals of that wonderful, awful formative
period. Since the early 1980s, I've been living in Vermont -- to which
I was attracted to immigrate during the dark days of the early Reagan
administration (I was living in D.C. at the time) because it was, and
still is, a relative stronghold of Sixties cultural and political
values.

There is much more I could say -- and about Vermont, too. Sometime, I
need to write this all down. Perhaps joining this List will help to
bring back more memories and to serve my needs for reflection.

I hope to hear from others like me, who caught the Sixties' radical tail
and are still holding onto it.

Comradely yours,
Jay

Jay Moore
RD1, Box 720
Plainfield, Vermont 05667
E-Mail: pieinsky@igc.apc.org
Home Page URL: http://www.neravt.com/left/

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