1968 - Mark Kurlansky [49]
The Zengakuren had been the student group that made Walter Cronkite realize how television was to be used in the sixties. Cronkite had been with a CBS television crew in Japan to report a 1960 visit there by President Eisenhower. But so many Zengakuren had turned out to protest the visit that Eisenhower decided not to land. The Zengakuren, however, content that a CBS television crew was there to record their protest, remained. Tens of thousands arrived throughout the day to protest, the television crew their only audience. With no U.S. president, Cronkite wanted to leave, but his route to the CBS vehicle was blocked by the huge crowd, which was at its most dense around the cameras. “It suddenly occurred to me,” Cronkite recalled, “that the easiest way for me to get to the top of the hill was to join the Zengakuren. So I got the pictures, tucked the film in my pockets, and came down off the truck and grabbed ahold—they had all linked arms—I linked arms with one of these Japanese. He smiled at me, and he said, ‘Banzai! Banzai, Banzai!’ as he flailed his arms angrily. And I started yelling, ‘Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!’ and I went to the snake dancing up the hill shouting, ‘Banzai Banzai Banzai!’ They were all having a wonderful time with me and I got up to the top of the hill and there was our car, so I said, ‘Well, good-bye.’ And they said, ‘Good-bye.’ And I got in the car and got to the airport.”
In the United Kingdom students had started out by demonstrating against the U.S. war in Vietnam and had moved on to local issues such as the size of government grants for education and control over the universities. By spring there had already been major protests at Oxford, Cambridge, and numerous other British universities. Of greater concern to the British government than the antiwar movement was a tendency for protesters to attack anyone who seemed to represent the British government. In March, when British defense secretary Denis Healey gave a talk at Cambridge, students broke through police lines and attempted to overturn his car. Soon after that, Home Secretary James Callaghan was heckled by students at Oxford who attempted to throw him into a fish pond. Gordon Walker, the secretary of state for education and science, was prevented from delivering a speech at Manchester University. Unable to speak, he attempted to exit but had to step over the bodies of students sprawled across his path. American officials were not immune. When an American diplomat, a press officer from the U.S. embassy, made the mistake of appearing in front of Sussex University students, they attacked him with wet paint. British protesters also had a good sense of media. In April they turned the water in the fountain in Trafalgar Square red.
Violence requires few ideas, but nonviolent resistance requires imagination. That is one of the reasons so few rebels are willing to embrace it. The American civil rights movement learned as it went along, making many mistakes. But by the mid-1960s the movement, especially SNCC, had thrilled the world with its imagination and the daring of its ideas, inspiring students as far away as Poland to stage sit-ins. By 1968, all over the world, people with causes wanted to copy the civil rights movement. Its anthem, Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome”—a folk song turned labor song that Seeger had turned into a civil rights song when sit-ins began in 1960—was sung in English from Japan to South Africa to Mexico.
The civil rights movement began to grab the world’s attention on February 1, 1960, when four black freshmen from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina in Greensboro went into a Woolworth’s, bought a few items, and then sat at the “whites only” lunch counter,