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PI: Now, just to keep this chronology straight, I went back to Antioch in the end of 1960. And I had a number -- I stayed active in the Civil Rights movement. And I had some jobs, my first jobs outside Washington. I went to Boston, worked at Harvard University School of Public Health for a while, and became active in Students for a Democratic Society, SDS, and went back to Antioch from there. And in the spring of, or the winter of 1962, I ran out of money. My father had died. I didn't have a scholarship.

And I had decided that I wanted to go into full-time organizing and social activism. And so I dropped out of school the beginning of 1962 and went back to Washington. And what I wanted to do, and what I did was to help organize a student demonstration in Washington against nuclear testing. It's called the Student Peace Union, and, an organization that I was very active in later became affiliated with Students for a Democratic Society. The Student Peace Union was made up of all kinds of people from Quaker Pacifists to some Communists, not very many. But the basic idea was that we took what was called "The Third Way." We were not going to follow either the East or the West. And in fact, now that I remember, we were very much opposed to Communists being active in SPU, and in fact, we tried to keep them out. And they, of course, tried to come in and infiltrate or influence our organization. But we were "The Third Way."

And we had set up a demonstration in Washington that was going to picket both the White House and the Russian Embassy -- which was just up the street, a few blocks north on 16th Street, from the White House -- and call for an end to all nuclear testing. This was a time when there was a lot of testing above-ground in this country and by the Russians in the Pacific, and there was a lot of concern about nuclear fallout and proliferation. So I worked full-time, and I lived in a little house in Washington with other organizers. And I remember we lived mostly on peanut butter and crackers and soup. And my job was media work and liaison with the police. We did not want this to get out of hand. This was not a confrontational demonstration. And we were going to send delegates from our group into the White House and into the Russian Embassy, or at least ask them to meet with us and appeal for a worldwide treaty banning nuclear testing as a first step toward ending the arms race. And so I worked on this.

And it turned out, this was in February of 1962, and I think it was February 13th and 14th, if I remember. And there was an unexpected snowstorm in Washington the day before the demonstration, and we were sure that nobody was going to come and that we might have at least a few hundred people, mostly from the Washington area. And as it turned out to our total surprise, people showed up out of nowhere that we had no idea were coming, in busloads and cars. There were about 8,000 people. Well, we'd been telling the press that we were expecting a thousand so that when 2,000 showed up we could say, "This is twice as big as we had expected." And 8,000 people showed up. We had a terrible time finding places for them to stay because it was a two-day demonstration. A lot of them wound up sleeping on church floors. And we got a lot of publicity, front page of the Washington Post. We had a rally at the Washington Monument. Somebody had, oh, there was a journalist, very important, influential guy in American radical politics, named I.F. Stone -- very independent guy. Put out a little four-page weekly newsletter, I.F. Stone's Weekly. And I read it religiously. It was all the news the New York Times didn't print. Izzy Stone was his name, and he lived in Washington. A guy who was then in his fifties or sixties, sort of a uncle or grandfather type figure to us. And he had the bright idea -- came to a couple of our organizing meetings -- of having our march, instead of going straight from the White House to the Washington Monument, which is not very far, of going all the way across the Potomac River to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery and then back. And so we thought this was a very good idea, not realizing, of course, that there was going to be a big snowstorm. But I remember on that march -- and we didn't stop, we just filed past in a single line, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the idea being that this is what we want to end, people being killed in war and buried like this in unknown graves. And one of my jobs was to stand at the Fourteenth Street Bridge, climb up on one of the pedestals there and count the people as they marched by. And I counted, and that's why I learned we had 8,000 people there. Counted every one of them. And that was a very powerful experience. I was for the first time a full-time organizer. And it was hard work, but it was really exciting, and I learned a lot from that.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.