Volume 14, Number 9 · May 7, 1970
Where We Are Now
By John H. Schaar, Sheldon S. Wolin
On February 1, 1960, four neatly dressed freshman students from a Negro college took seats at the whites-only Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, politely asked for coffee, and refused to leave until the store closed. Ten years and a thousand marches later, Fred Hampton lay dead in Chicago, the latest casualty in the police war against the Black Panthers. In early 1962, the Students for a Democratic Society adopted the Port Huron Statement, which argued that both 'the liberal and socialist preachings of the past' were inadequate to the present, and pledged the formation of a 'New Left' based in the universities and committed to the methods of 'participatory democracy.' On March 6, 1970, a few young members of that New Left, now divided and dispirited, accidentally obliterated themselves with their homemade bombs. The decade of the metaphorical 'youth explosion' ended with a literal bang. One era had ended and another begun.
Feature, 5132 words
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