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Fortune
Fortune
Fortune Editors

Student activists: Free-form revolutionaries

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Editor's note: This article from the January 1969 issue of Fortune details the diverse, and fragmented, array of protest movements organized by young Americans in the late 1960s.
Charles Burck In the washroom of a Wisconsin high school, a member of the Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union teaches an incipient radical high-school group how to mobilize sentiment not only against the draft but against restrictive school policies-e.g., dress codes, pressures to train for occupational slots, a ban on an underground high-school paper. To members of the Resistance at Ann Arbor, Michigan, organizing seems the best tactic, and proselytizing its method.Some 20 people make their home in the commune of Trans Love Energies, which is set amid the pillared mansions of the University of Michigan's fraternity row. Now four years old, Trans Love gets most of its income from the MC-5, a rock band that moved in a year and a half ago. It also regards the much-publicized band as its foremost revolutionary tool.What to do comes the revolutionIn the many-tiered Movement, the people are diverse, and their attitudes and styles far-ranging. Militant confrontation has been the byword at San Francisco State College. At upper left, black and other minority group leaders listen to President Robert R. Smith during the early days of the revolt that closed the school down and forced Smith's resignation.Young Socialist AllianceProgressive LaborW.E.B. DuBois ClubsPeace and Freedom PartyIn Los Angeles, a staff member of Open City, an underground newspaper, clutches a just printed issue whose front cover declares that "Revolution is Poetry." Open City, circulation 20,000, keeps a staff of eleven and many occasional contributors busy writing and printing news, satire, and cultural criticism.The new left's new directionsMany in the Resistance regard the way they live as their most important revolutionary act. Education at the Midpeninsula Free University in Palo Alto, California, also pivots around "the process of living" -- a heavy percentage of its 270-odd courses deal with personal development and relationships.
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