Expanded version of my talk at May 4th, 2024 demonstration in Olympia in solidarity with Palestine
by Peter Bohmer, May 14th, 2024; member of Palestine Action of South Sound
I am reminded in May, 2024 of the global movement of 1968. The US war against Vietnam was raging. There were powerful movements across the globe calling for immediate withdrawal of the US from Vietnam and in many cases in solidarity with the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the North Vietnam Army fighting against the US and the South Vietnamese Army.
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, April 4, 1968. There were major uprisings in many cities following his assassination, mainly in Black communities. Social movements increasingly linked the Vietnam War and US imperialism to racial and other oppressions in the U.S. It is important for us to do that now.
1968 was the year of the Columbia University student occupation that demanded the end of the university’s complicity with the Vietnam war and that Columbia not buy up land in Harlem to build a gym for Columbia University, displacing residents. Black students did a simultaneous occupation. There was serious repression at Columbia; 700 were arrested and many more were beaten by the New York Police Department. There was a subsequent occupation there, later in the spring of 1968. The repression furthered resistance at Columbia and beyond and increased the popularity of this movement among students. …