BY FRED HALSTEAD  
Between 1960 and 1965 a radicalization of some of the youth in the U.S. began to appear, not around Vietnam at first, but around two other issues: the Cuban revolution and the civil rights struggle in the South. Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista was overthrown by Castro’s guerrillas on New Year’s Day, 1959. The first Black student sit-in occurred at a Woolworth dime store lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960.

From the time the Cubans nationalized their major industries in 1960 through the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the U.S. perspective for military attack on Cuba was hardly a secret. The opening gambit in such an attack was launched by CIA-organized Cuban counterrevolutionaries in April 1961. It was crushed at the Bay of Pigs before the beachhead could be established.

In the U.S. a series of educational meetings and demonstrations were held opposing intervention in Cuba. These were organized mainly by the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This was, in a very real sense, an antiwar movement, but one which the old peace movement refused to endorse. Radical pacifist Dave Dellinger, however, played a prominent role in these activities.

At first the Cuban revolution received widespread sympathy in the U.S., particularly among the youth, but after U.S. holdings were nationalized in 1960 and the full force of the anticommunist campaign was unleashed against the Castro regime, support by adult liberals tended to fall away. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee became a united front of American radicals and pro-revolutionary Cuban residents of the U.S. (The political complexion of the Cuban-American community reversed itself over the next few years as many of those favoring the revolution returned to their homeland and many of those against it emigrated to the U.S.)

The Fair Play committee established a precedent for united activity of several sectors of the American left that had not been on speaking terms for many years. For example, at a demonstration of 5,000 in New York’s Union Square protesting the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, two of the main speakers were Peter Camejo of the Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance and Mike Stein of Advance, a youth group associated with the Communist Party. It was the presence on the scene of a new and broader force—in this case the Cuban Americans—that impelled this unity. (Both Camejo and Stein would later play significant roles in the anti-Vietnam War movement.)

The Southern civil rights struggle was sparked by college students and gave birth to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), originally affiliated with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and based mainly on Black campuses in the South. There was widespread support by Northern students, including picketing of stores in the Woolworth chain. In addition some Northern students and sympathizers went South on such activities as Freedom Rides, SNCC community organizing projects, and the Mississippi summer voter registration campaigns.

A central issue in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM), which burst forth in the fall 1964 semester, was the right of students to carry out support activities on the Berkeley campus of the University of California for the Southern civil rights struggle. Jack Weinberg, later a member of the Independent Socialist Club, was arrested for setting up a table for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Several thousand students surrounded the police car in which Weinberg was under arrest and for two days used its roof as a stage for speeches while Weinberg sat inside.

By the end of 1964, then, there existed a few thousand young people who had already begun to consider and adopt radical ideas and who had become activists to one degree or another around the Southern civil rights struggle and/or the Cuban revolution. These youth were ready, willing, and able to enter a struggle against the Vietnam War, but they could not do so through the old peace movement coalition, which was still dominated by the shibboleths of the cold war.  
 
 
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