By Frank Gormlie
In my book, The May 1970 Rebellion – about the height of the anti-Vietnam war movement, I discuss “outside agitators.” Here’s an excerpt:
From college administrators, mayors, local politicians and governors to the President of the United States, the real instigators of all the violence and turmoil were the outside agitators, the Weathermen, professional instigators and rioters.
For example, Kentucky Governor Louie Nunn blamed “outside agitators” and “professionals” for the disturbances at the University of Kentucky. At Ohio University Athens and at the University of Minnesota in Duluth, outside agitators were blamed for the violence.
Chancellor Laurence Chalmers at the University of Kansas had claimed that “outside agitators” were the real culprits responsible for creating conflict on his campus. He called them “a small band of itinerants” who, after graduation, would “drift away from KU in colorful mini-buses.”
And when on May 1 in the city of Kent, Ohio, Mayor LeRoy Satrom declared a state of emergency, he called the governor’s office and asserted that SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] had taken over part of his city, even though the KSU chapter of SDS had disbanded a year earlier.
There is absolutely no evidence in the record that groups of professional agitators roamed the nation and set fire to ROTC buildings to stir up the locals, nor of any cells of SDS or Weathermen or of any other leftwing group that was instigating the rebellion. Yet, when even the Scranton Report raised the issue of outside agitators, it legitimized the idea. And we know that Nixon saw a vast, left-wing conspiracy brimming with outside agitators as wholly responsible.
It was apparently too difficult for these administrators, town mayors, governors and politicians to admit that the main source of the turmoil on the campuses were their own students, radicalized and energized, genuine and organic.
One Source of the Outside Agitators: the Police
However, one source of the turmoil were the actions of agents provocateur, undercover law enforcement officers or informants.
There were at least three instances during May where it was recorded that undercover agents actively contributed to the violence.
At Ohio State University in Columbus, two undercover officers led a crowd to a campus gate and then abruptly closed it triggering a massive violent police attack and confrontation. At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, two undercover cops dressed as students and carrying rocks and protest signs beat up an antiwar activist who had “outted” them.
At the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, an old, abandoned building that once served as the campus ROTC headquarters and scheduled for demolition was destroyed by a fire that also damaged two other buildings. A year later, it was uncovered that an FBI informant and agent provocateur had torched the hall
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This paragraph said it perfectly:
“It was apparently too difficult for these administrators, town mayors, governors and politicians to admit that the main source of the turmoil on the campuses were their own students, radicalized and energized, genuine and organic.”
“Their own students,” on campuses but also their own students in their own families.
They said of the 64 arrested at UCSD, 24 of them were not enrolled there. I wonder how many others that bailed just before the crackdown had no business being on campus to begin with.
You are only as credible as you are percevied by those outside your bubble.
The protesters should not be welcoming these people into their tent.
Slugs
I’m on UCSD campus at least once a week. I’m not a student there. People get to roam the City, the Campus, the Neighborhood.
Everyone protesting genocide should be welcomed into the protest tent.
Exactly.
I was a grad student at the University of Vermont.
But I was a young mother with two children in tow the day I got into
the small hangar in which Richard Nixon was giving a campaign
speech at the Burlington, Vermont, Airport.
A protester is a protester.