Volume 27 · Number 4 · Summer 2010
Rebels with a Cause: A Protest Precedent
Last spring’s attempt by student protestors to block I-80 traffic was not a first at UC Davis. Students protesting the Vietnam War in 1972 briefly stopped cars on the freeway, before moving to shut down the tracks of Southern Pacific Railroad.
In one high-profile rally of the era, about 5,000 students marched through downtown Davis, and about 600 of them broke away from the pack and wound up on I-80. They stopped traffic for 20 minutes — “We were mostly annoying middle-class motorists,” said Bob Black, an Aggie student government president from 1966-67 who had just been elected as the student
representative to the Davis City Council.
“No one was arrested for being on I-80 per se, because before the police could get there in force, I went down and convinced them to move to the Southern Pacific tracks,” Black said. “After occupying the tracks for quite a while, about 100 of us were arrested for trespass.”
Black ‘73, J.D. ‘76 was at the epicenter of student protests at UC Davis in the 1960s and 1970s. He is now in private law practice in Crescent City.
Black said that Davis in the 1960s was neither a protest hotbed nor dull and docile. Things happened, just not on the grandiose scale of what was taking place in Berkeley.
“Davis was a special place for activists,” Black said. “We were confrontational and unruly but it never turned violent. The police didn’t wear their helmets or have their nightsticks out.”
Naively, he now admits, Black was so deeply moved when he first saw the massive and disorderly street protests in Berkeley that he thought to himself then, “Wow, this will definitely stop the war.”
It did not, but Black discovered that activism could produce tangible improvements in the lives of students. He channeled his energy into helping to establish the student-run Coffee House and Unitrans bus system, for example.
What is Black’s advice for today’s activists?
“Young people have to frame access to education as a broad social justice issue, rather than as an individual interest. We have to ask ourselves, ‘What is the public sector’s role, especially at the federal level, in helping students afford education?’” he said.
Looking back, he has mixed feelings about 1960s activism.
“The political movement became confused with the cultural movement, “ he said. “And, in a lot of ways, my generation really failed. “We failed our children, in the sense that we had virtually free education in the ‘60s and the ‘70s. Now the student debt load is staggering.”