1. Mass Action Gets the Goods

The most important lesson we can draw from the 1960s is that ordinary people can change the world. That fact may seem self-evident to us now, but it had been somewhat lost at the start of the New Left. In the 1950s, US political culture was still dominated by the Cold War and the McCarthyist Red Scare. As ’60s student activist leader Mike Parker wrote in Learning From the ’60s, individualist capitalist values dominated society, radicals were witch-hunted, “driven underground, or ‘converted.’” People were afraid to speak out against militarism or racism.

But over the next ten years, thanks in large part to massive student movements, millions of people’s consciousness was transformed. “Revolution was so popular,” writes Parker, “that it was at the same time denounced by the Beatles in song while the lingo was coopted by corporate America. Hundreds of thousands participated in militant civil rights and antiwar struggles that ignored the laws and challenged the ability of the social apparatus to function.” These movements helped end Jim Crow segregation and made protest and dissent a normal part of American life again.

The key to these movements’ power was a focus on mass, disruptive action. This was far more effective than both polite lobbying or electoral campaigns that sought to change the system “from within” on the one hand, and violent actions by small, clandestine groups of the already converted on the other.

Just as millions of workers won unions and a decent standard of living in the 1930s through the power of mass strikes, young people in the 1960s sat in, walked out, and shut things down to force important concessions.

At their best, these movements were also fiercely democratic. In 1962, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) declared for “participatory democracy.” Meanwhile Parker’s group, the Independent Socialist Club (ISC), promoted a “socialism from below,” spearheaded by ordinary working-class people instead of managed by bureaucrats. In the mass church meetings of the southern civil rights movement and the student assemblies on northern campuses, young activists saw that democracy itself could win lasting engagement — bringing more and more casual movement participants to see themselves as organizers and even leaders.

Students today are building broad-based actions at their schools and relearning the power of the mass assembly. As the movement matures, organizers will have to continue to emphasize an inclusive, democratic, and disruptive approach in order to win.

2. National Organization Puts Movements on Firm Footing

In 1960, black students in the South sparked a rebellious decade and taught the world the power of mass action through the sit-ins that began in Greensboro, North Carolina. On February 1 of that year, four seventeen-year-old black students decided that they had had enough of Jim Crow humiliation and started a nationwide earthquake by simply sitting down and ordering a coffee at a white-only lunch counter. Their spontaneous direct action galvanized a major struggle, as conflict between the students’ supporters and racist counterprotesters forced the store to close temporarily.

Their struggle spread. Just like the Gaza encampments have spread to nearly a hundred campuses and across the world a week after being sparked by the struggle at Columbia University, in 1960, sit-ins spread rapidly across the segregated South. In the two weeks after Greensboro, the movement struck Raleigh, Charlotte, Durham, and five other locations in North Carolina. By mid-April, fifty thousand students had participated in sit-ins in every segregated southern state, and students began initiating sympathy pickets across the North. News clips of white racists attacking peaceful black and white protesters became international news, winning support for the movement and exposing the horrors of Jim Crow.

The movement began winning. Some stores and even entire downtowns agreed to desegregate. But many other towns and most areas of life remained segregated. Historian and civil rights movement participant Clayborne Carson writes about the next phase of the sit-in movement in his excellent history In Struggle. Out of the spontaneous local protests, he writes, a layer of “increasingly self-confident, able, and resourceful . . . young black activists emerged as spokespersons for the local protest movements.” After a few months of sit-in struggles, the “spontaneous enthusiasm” started to wane and movement leaders began to think about building organizations to “preserve the spontaneity and the militancy of the sit-ins” while broadening the movement to “attack racism in all its dimensions.”

That’s where national organizations came in. With the help of veteran civil rights leaders like Ella Baker and Martin Luther King Jr, 150 sit-in activists from fifty-six schools came together in April 1960 for a weekend-long conference that founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). At this early stage, the decentralized SNCC was most of all a place to support, spread, and coordinate the actions of local sit-in activists. But over a few years SNCC would evolve into a coherent group with a national strategy, becoming a key organization in the black freedom struggle.

In the face of violent repression at the hands of racist white political leaders and the Ku Klux Klan, SNCC activists organized freedom rides, voter registration campaigns, and marches across the South. At times, older and more prominent leaders were trying to work with Democratic politicians like presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson while de-emphasizing the need for disruptive mass action. In these moments, SNCC became the crucial, independent force organizing black communities to keep the heat on political elites. Without the group’s militancy it’s hard to imagine that Congress would have passed major civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965, effectively ending legal Jim Crow.

Student activists today will also have to look beyond the current upsurge of encampments, however inspiring, to plan for what happens when the energy fades, especially during the rapidly approaching summer break. A national strategy summit for student leaders from different schools could serve as a place for sharing tactics and ideas and for building a united national action plan. Much of the pressure on schools and Democratic mayors to suppress protests is coming from Congress and President Joe Biden, meaning students have a national target even for local victories.

Students today need a highly effective, democratic, mass organization to coordinate beyond the summer. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) might be best positioned to fill that role, though whether it will rise to the occasion remains to be seen. To be effective, SJP and other groups should study and take inspiration from civil rights movement history. With proper coordination, students can make a big impact at the Democratic National Convention in August, at their schools when they return in the fall, and for the duration of the struggle for a free Palestine.

3. Activists Must Reach Beyond Campus Occupations

In September 1964, the University of California at Berkeley banned political groups from tabling on campus. The target of this ban was obvious: activists were recruiting students to join protests against segregated businesses in nearby Oakland, and the Oakland business community pressured the university to shut them down. Led in part by Berkeley students who had just returned from organizing with SNCC and other groups as part of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, activists at UC Berkeley refused to give in. They continued tabling. One such activist, Jack Weinberg, was taken into custody in a police car, as hundreds and then thousands of students surrounded the car, initiating a thirty-two–hour-long mass demonstration against the criminalization of political speech. The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was born.

Over the next two months, the Berkeley struggle escalated but faced a sophisticated opposition. Administrators made some concessions just as activists were losing steam, and leading organizers were divided about next steps and close to giving in. Just then, the administration singled out and punished four FSM leaders for the original tabling. Outraged, thousands of students joined FSM leaders in a series of escalations. On December 2, 1,200 students occupied at Sproul Hall after a now legendary speech by Mario Savio:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even tacitly take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears, upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all.

Police dragged out and arrested over eight hundred students. Yet the occupation represented only a small fraction of the entire student population. In his account of the role of the ISC in the movement, FSM organizer Joel Geier writes that they started to believe that “it was time to actively mobilize what was becoming the majority opinion of students beyond the committed activists.” Consequently, they began organizing for “a strike to shut the campus down.”

Graduate students were already planning for strike on December 4, and FSM activists rallied support for the strike from local labor unions, including campus unions, such as the Building Trades, Service Employees International Union, International Longshore and Warehouse Union, San Francisco Labor Council, and even the conservative Teamsters. FSMers met with Teamster officials and asked if they would respect students’ picket lines on the principle of “an injury to one is an injury to all.” Teamsters agreed, wrote Geier, that:

Crossing our picket lines would be scabbing, and they would prevent all deliveries to the campus. Within an hour, no trucks bringing supplies or food entered the campus, helping to halt the normal functioning of the university. The solidarity of campus workers was outstanding, particularly the underground support from secretaries and clerks of the main university administrators, who acted as part of our intelligence network, providing us with the enemy’s thinking, plans, and memos.

The strike was a success. Most students didn’t attend classes, and the FSM won a complete victory a few days later. As the FSM newsletter stated, “The sit-in was less of a threat to [UC president Clark] Kerr than the strike. He knew he could break the sit-in through mass arrests, but the strike was impossible to stop.”

Just like the Columbia demonstrators this month inspired others elsewhere, the Berkeley students’ struggle in 1964 sparked a new phase of the radical 1960s as students on northern campuses began waging militant, direct-action struggles like those they saw in the southern civil rights movement.

The FSM shows the incredible power and militancy of students who were able to organize a mass, disruptive movement quickly. But students also need allies, most of all in the labor movement. Campus workers keep the schools running and can provide practical and moral support to students. Students are also more vulnerable to state repression: the police answer to political leaders, who in turn are rarely accountable to transitory student populations. Nonstudent allies, especially unions that play a role in local politics, can help students beat back police repression and pressure administrators and politicians to respect civil liberties. Beyond campus struggles, unions are essential to building a strong movement that can end the genocide in Gaza and fight for a peaceful and just society in the United States.

As the student and black movements lost steam in the late 1960s, their militancy and radicalism began to spread to broader layers of the working class. In the 1970s a historic strike wave surged, involving millions of workers in thousands of what were often wildcat and even illegal strikes. Participants and historians cite the influence of ’60s movements on this rank-and-file revolt within bureaucratized unions.

Today, faculty and other unions have already started showing up and even walking out for their students. Such alliances will help defend students’ encampments and empower activists to escalate the pressure on their schools and the government.

4. A Long-Term Political Alternative Is Necessary

In 1965, Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson escalated the senseless war in Vietnam. He did this despite having campaigned in 1964 as the “peace candidate.” In the coming years, students played a leading role in the movement against the war and the draft. To give a few examples from 1967 alone: students joined a four-hundred-thousand-person-strong march in New York City; battled police at the University of Wisconsin–Madison while protesting recruitment by Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of napalm; and fought through lines of police to halt the functioning of the draft in Oakland, California.

By March 1968, Johnson had faced so much opposition from protesters, including at reelection campaign events, that he actually dropped out of the race. While Vietnamese national liberation forces had made the war militarily difficult, the US antiwar movement had made the war politically nonviable for a sitting president, forcing him into early retirement.

This achievement for the movement also showed its limits. The 1968 Democratic National Convention descended into chaos amid protests and counterprotests, nominating Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, for the Democratic ticket. Democrats went on to lose to Nixon in November, and the war continued until 1975 (though increasingly massive protests, including a national student strike involving millions and a heroic soldiers’ revolt, made the war difficult to execute long before then).

While our movements today should aspire to have the power to push Joe Biden out of the race in 2024, we should also keep in mind the limits of a purely negative strategy, which in this case could improve the prospects of a Trump presidency. In the future, movements for peace and social justice will have to build toward a real political alternative to the “lesser evil” Democrats. While a new left-wing independent party capable of winning the presidency is a long way off, activists have been debating how to build functionally and politically independent, party-like organizations to fight for progressive politics at the national level in the near term.

As a new generation of students becomes radicalized by the genocide and the complicity of their schools and government, movement participants may start to see the need for a long-term alliance of progressive forces.

5. Nonsectarian Socialists Are Critical Movement-Builders

By the end of the ’60s, ultraradical sects descended into absurd infighting for control of the student movement and employed outrageous and alienating tactics. But before this anticlimax, radical cadres of one or another socialist group played productive and even essential roles in the movements described above.

Experienced socialists, including those associated with the Socialist Party and the Young People’s Socialist League — people like Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, Max Shachtman, and Michael Harrington — were indispensable advisers and organizers in the civil rights movement. Parker and Geier’s group, the ISC, and its intellectual leader Hal Draper, gave political clarity, tireless dedication, and organizing chops to the FSM and many other fights across the decade. Renamed the International Socialists in 1969, this group went on to help build Teamsters for a Democratic Union and found Labor Notes in the 1970s. The Socialist Workers Party and its leaders like Peter Camejo were skilled organizers and a political center of gravity for the movement against the war in Vietnam.

In the FSM, ISCers were not just organizers. They were political leaders. Geier writes:

The politics we fought for in the movement showed the enduring relevance of our views on mass action, the relation of free speech to black liberation, struggle from below, self-organization, democratic decision-making, a left opposition — principles of genuine Marxism vindicated.

But socialist organizers did not simply use movements as a recruiting pool for their socialist organizations, the definition of sectarianism. Instead, their goal was to build transformative mass movements that could win. And today, as in the ’60s and ’70s, that requires full participation by many more people than will be in our socialist groups anytime soon. Radicals in the FSM understood, Parker writes, “that the struggle, while initiated by the Left, had to quickly broaden and become the property of a much wider part of the student body.”

Unlike sectarians who can be seen at rallies today holding their group’s signs with slogans like “No Ceasefire Until World Revolution!” (a depressing sentiment if you believed it, since only their sect thinks revolution is imminent), effective ’60s radicals helped build broad movements on the basis of immediate, winnable demands. This is not because we only care about these immediate demands, but instead, as Camejo writes, because “we’ve got to deal with reality, not with abstractions.” Through struggle over immediate issues, people’s consciousness changes, and radical changes start to seem more reasonable and achievable. Camejo argues that radicals should “build movements which reach out and bring masses into motion on issues where they are willing to struggle against policies of the ruling class, and through their involvement in action, deepen their understanding of those issues.”

In the last week, millions of people, especially students fighting their school administrations, have been rapidly brought into struggle. In an interview, Geier told me that this week’s encampment movement reminds him of how fast consciousness transformed in the ’60s. A movement that focused last year on the more moderate demand of a cease-fire, he said, is now demanding an end to apartheid and “asking questions that challenge the fundamental order of our society.”

Socialists, then, should try, when possible, to build broader movement organizations arm-in-arm with nonsocialists. On campuses, this often happens as coalitions between a socialist group like Young Democratic Socialists of America and other organizations. But this coalition approach has limits if it primarily takes the form of coalition steering committee meetings with one representative from each group, and little participation by or interaction among the rank and file of the movement. Ideally radicals will either join and help build broader movement organizations, or when appropriate establish new ones.

Doing this means that the democracy we build in our movements can include all sorts of people from different perspectives, some activated for the first time, who agree on little more than ending the genocide. Not only does that make our movements stronger, but it also opens up a space for socialists — who have earned respect as talented and committed builders of the movement, not just recruiters to our socialist groups — to win other activists to more radical ideas in the course of that struggle.

On Monday afternoon, in response to administration threats of mass suspensions, students and faculty at Columbia University escalated dramatically. Instead of vacating the campus and giving in to fear, intimidation, and violence, these activists are bringing the fighting spirit of ’60s movements to the twenty-first century. Having achieved that revitalization of the student movement, the next challenge is to win. The civil rights movement and other struggles of the 1960s can teach us how to transform this momentum into victory.