California

Chapter 13

• The social unrest that made up of California life during the 1960s were directly involved in the political activism of African Americans and Latinos seeking a better life. The Watts riots of 1965, sparked by police brutality, became a social symbol of the struggle for African Americans in the state. Later in the decade, the emergence of the Black Panther Party, formed by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, became a visual and vocal political movement that challenged the civil rights movement as a means for collective resistance among African Americans.

• Student civil rights action in the Bay Area has been significant and will become increasingly so. I am sure we haven't seen the last of the administration's attempts either to limit, or, if possible, to eliminate activity of this kind. On the other side, I think last semester has shown that such attempts, if drastic enough to be effective, are bound to end in disaster. So, what we have to fear is not some extreme act, such as was attempted last September, but rather petty harrassments of various sorts, and the not-so-petty exclusion of "non-students" from the campus, toward which legislation recently passed by the State Legislature is directed. I believe it unlikely for the students to rally in opposition to such harrassment; probably we shall have to be content with opposing decisively only gross provocation, which probably now the Administration has learned not to attempt.