Princeton Radicals of the 1960s, Then and Now by William H. Tucker

Author:William H. Tucker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2015-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

7. Studying the Divide

In early March 1969 a statement in the Daily Princetonian announced formation of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), the counterpart of an organization at San Francisco State and Berkeley. Noting “America’s exploitation and oppression of non-white peoples,” the statement invited all Third World people—Asians, Africans, Latin Americans and American non-whites—to join the “militant coalition of non-whites” in the belief that “the recognition of unity is foremost in the understanding of the common enemy before us: namely the racism and imperialism perpetrated by the American (i.e., ‘free’) system throughout the world.” Interviewed by the newspaper, Gordon Chang, a TWLF leader and the statement’s primary author, explained that racism in the university could “not be defeated until racism in society is eliminated by the abolition of the capitalist system”; the group was anti-capitalist, he emphasized, not anti-white.1

“The first official TWLF act,” the announcement of its formation declared, was “to give complete support” to the demand for divestment from companies doing business in South Africa. Indeed, when the Association of Black Collegians occupied the New South Building five days later, the Princetonian’s front page article on the takeover featured a photograph of two supporters demonstrating outside the entrance: Doug Seaton, a patch over one eye, and, holding the microphone, Gordon, looking almost cloak and daggerish—the lapels of his overcoat turned up against the March wind, his moustache curling slightly down the sides of his upper lip, and his long dark hair in bangs covering the tops of his wire-rimmed glasses.2 Gordon himself referred to the picture as “barbarians at the gates”; “I was pretty scary looking,” he commented.

Gordon H. Chang—not to be confused with Gordon G. Chang, a conservative pundit specializing in commentary on China and North Korea—is now a member of the History Department and the Olive H. Palmer Professor of Humanities at Stanford, as well as a founding member of the university’s Asian American Studies Program and editor of the Stanford University Press series on Asian America. I arranged to interview Gordon in March 2008, just as the nation was being exposed to the footage of fiery sermons once delivered by a certain Chicago pastor and spiritual advisor to Barack Obama. Arriving in Palo Alto in the middle of the night, I checked into a small hotel in one of the city’s two separate downtown areas a mile and a half apart—a consequence of the fact that what had once been the township of Mayfield was annexed decades ago by its newer but faster growing neighbor to the North.

Gordon had offered to pick me up late the next morning, leaving me time to confirm Palo Alto’s reputation as a bastion of liberalism, its mixture of personal liberation and anti-war sentiment a contemporary version of the sometimes vexed alliance between hippies and radicals decades earlier. Posters on a bulletin board in the middle of the commercial area announced such events as an “Impeach the Terrorists Peace Concert and Rally” to mark the anniversary of the Iraq “war that

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