Newark protest against Apartheid Nov. 10, 1985

 

I went to Newark to protest with Mary Kay. Unlike our march four years ago to Washington DC to protest the firing of the air traffic control workers, this was less slick, not backed by big union left wing money.

The Newark protest was filled not with political hacks, but with well-meaning, mostly deluded people seeking to overthrow the South African regime, much in the way equally deluded Free Riders did back in the 1960s. While not quite carpetbaggers, we all bore the same arrogant self-righteousness of the Abolitionists, determined to exert our will on people we perceived as evil doers elsewhere on the planet. There is always this type of self-declared moralists determined to tell out people how they ought to live their lives, and in this case, I kept them company.

A dozen of us climbed on board the bus at William Paterson College, looking at each other, puzzled about something that might have been missing: the old radicals from previous adventures, replaced by young naïve kids seeing this as some kind of adventure, their part in a new Civil Rights movement they can later look back on as doing their part.

Ripmaster was not on this trip, good old Ripmaster, our campus radical professor, seated comfortably somewhere safe and distant. We had Professor Nack, instead, dedicated but hardly as radical, who preached the whole trip from Paterson to Newark about how evil white South Africa was, making it clear to all of us why we were putting on bodies on the line for this cause. A black man in a green cap moved down the aisle asking all of us if we had our packages. I told him I’d left mine at home. He frowned, unable to make up his mind whether I was a student or a teacher, then said “You have to have our package. You can’t march without it.”

“I have to have a package to protest?”

The black man in a green hat grumbled as the bus moved on into Newark, then directed the driver to street us to March headquarters where I could obtain another package. He looked like a guerrilla straight out of Che’ Cuban experience.

Cops lined the streets where we got out, bored mostly, not all of them white, staring at us and the others not with hostility, but disinterest. For them, this was just more traffic to be controlled.

We waited among the thousands, around us banners of protest waving, black and white folks, swaying slightly, bending our heads to catch the words of speeches just beyond our ability to hear. Left wing opportunities pushed through the crowd, handing out flyers and newspapers, some selling buttons and bumper stickers to a captive market, most having nothing to do with Apartheid.

Time to radicalize, the old saying says.

If you get people interested in one radical idea, you sell them another.

When finally, the march started, we all started to chant led by someone with a mega phone, old slogans rehashed from the 1960s, which nearly everybody knew by heart, if not from experience, then from too many news programs.

The noise of it bounded off the stone faces of Newark’s downtown, an altered Newark from the one I knew when I went into the Army or even the one swept up by fire during the 1967 riots. It had become almost as white a city around its colleges as the place we were protesting against, but rules here less obvious.

Gentrification was gnawing away at the once-black and Jewish dominated city, something many in the crowd also opposed, even though many of them were the people responsible for it, young whites moving in, driving out elderly blacks.

The chanting went on and on, thousands of voices rising up, echoed and rising up again, opposing an invisible enemy none there was likely to ever see in real life, most of us completely ignorant of what life was like in that far away place, much as most of those who cheered on Free Riders were back in the day.

It was almost like we were programmed to hate anything we were told was evil but did not experience for ourselves. Most of the kids in the crowd had come from white enclaves elsewhere and hadn’t even a clue of the American experience, marching based on the radical lessons we got from professors who said these things existed and we naturally believed them.

Mary Kay – a product of a very white suburb in Connecticut – stuffed flyers in the open windows of cars, where passengers smiled nervously back and accepted them.

Later, back on the bus, she asked me why I was so cynical? Why am I so suspicious of the organizers’ motives? Why couldn’t I just see this protest as against the evil of Apartheid?

I wanted to feel as innocent as she was, the way I might have briefly felt during similar protests back in the 1960s. But I knew better and could not shed the experience of seeing radicals corrupted by the power they wielded or angered by their ability to misuse innocent people to further their own aims.

Professor Nack was the last one back on the bus, doing a head count to make sure we were all here, not wanting to leave anyone behind when dark came to Newark. Nobody felt like chanting on the way back. Everybody was too weary. Thoughtful would be the wrong word.

 1985 Menu


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