Into this fractured political landscape came the Mayday Tribe, a new player with a very different approach. The group was launched by Rennie Davis, a white New Left leader who had become nationally famous after the melees outside the Democratic National Convention in 1968, when the federal government prosecuted him and other prominent organizers—the Chicago 7—for conspiracy. In Davis’ conception, the Mayday Tribe would bring the most politicized hippies of the time together with the hippest of the hardcore radicals. The word “tribe” itself was a countercultural code word, having been appropriated by whites to signal groovy distance from the dominant culture (the 1967 San Francisco “Be-In” that propelled hippiedom to the national stage, for instance, was known as “A Gathering of the Tribes” despite a notable lack of Native American participation), and Mayday had a long-haired freaky flavor that was decidedly missing from either the Trotskyist or pacifist wings of the antiwar movement. Jerry Coffin, an organizer with the War Resisters League who teamed up with Davis when Mayday was only an idea, recalled it as an attempt “to create a responsible hip alternative” to the Weather Underground: “merging radical politics, Gandhian nonviolence, serious rock and roll, [and] lots of drugs.” Many—perhaps most—of the people who took part in the action were relative newcomers to the movement, from the generation that had been radicalized by Cambodia and Kent State.10
Davis took the idea of nonviolently blockading the federal government from a bold but ultimately unsuccessful attempt by the Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to paralyze New York City traffic on the opening day of the 1964 World’s Fair. CORE was an important interracial civil rights group founded in the 1940s, with pacifist roots and a strong commitment to nonviolent direct action. The organization is best known for the daring Freedom Rides it organized in 1961 to challenge racial segregation on interstate buses in the Deep South. These rides, with small groups of black and white activists defying Jim Crow through the simple act of traveling and sitting together, were met with extreme violence, with one bus firebombed and many Freedom Riders brutally beaten by white mobs. CORE was most active in the North, however, particularly in Chicago where it was founded; there, and in other northern cities, the group used sit-ins and other direct-action tactics as part of a major campaign in the early 1960s against school segregation.
By 1964, many in the civil rights movement were growing impatient at the slow pace of change. The Brooklyn chapter of CORE, younger and more radical than the organization as a whole, decided to use the occasion of the World’s Fair to draw attention to the deep racial inequalities in the event’s host city. CORE proposed disrupting the fair’s opening day through a “stall-in” at strategic points on the city’s highways, with protesters deliberately allowing their cars to run out of fuel so that the vehicles would block the roadways.
1964 CORE Stall-In leaflet (designer unknown; Elliot Linzer Collection, Queens College Special Collections and Archives, CUNY)
“Drive a while for freedom,” read a leaflet that organizers distributed throughout Bedford-Stuyvesant and other black neighborhoods. “Take only enough gas to get your car on exhibit on one of these highways.” The goal of the planned disruptions was to pressure the city’s government to take action on housing, education, police brutality, and other issues of urgent concern to New York City’s black and Latino population. But the outcry over this obstructive plan was enormous, with everyone from New York City officials to moderate civil rights leaders to President Lyndon Johnson denouncing the protest as one that would, in Johnson’s words, “do the civil rights cause no good.” CORE’s national director, James Farmer, was so appalled that he suspended the Brooklyn chapter. In the end, very few people went through with the highway action. They almost didn’t need to: the controversy had already garnered massive publicity, Fair attendance was a fraction of what had been projected, and civil disobedience protests inside the event led to 300 arrests.11
The Mayday protest, with its goal of blockading the nation’s capital, echoed the CORE plan in mischievous tone and disorderly intent. The Mayday protest was to entail “action rather than congregation, disruption rather than display.” As one Mayday leaflet circulated in advance of the 1971 protests declared, in a clear allusion to the April 24 NPAC event, “Nobody gives a damn how many dumb sheep can flock to Washington demonstrations, which are dull ceremonies of dissent that won’t stop the war.” Mayday wouldn’t be a standard protest rally, where a series of speakers (usually chosen through an acrimonious behind-the-scenes struggle) would lecture to a passive crowd. It wouldn’t be a conventional protest march, where demonstrators would trudge along a route that had been pre-arranged with the police, shepherded by movement marshals controlled by the protest leadership. With much antiwar protest having become dreary and routinized (“Should I take pictures, I kept questioning myself, or would photographs from past identical rallies suffice?” asked one radical after April 24), Mayday promised to be novel and unpredictable.12
Mayday would also diverge from the traditional form of civil disobedience that PCPJ supported. That type of action, the tactical manual explained, usually “involved a very small group of people engaging in ‘moral witness’ or action that involved them breaking a specific law, almost always with advance notice to authorities.” In a typical civil disobedience protest, participants would sit down at the entrance to a building or inside some official’s office and wait until police—who knew ahead of time what the protesters would do—carried them off to jail. If they were attacked or beaten, they would neither fight back nor run away. “Nonviolence in its dynamic condition means conscious suffering,” Mohandas Gandhi, the great Indian practitioner of nonviolent resistance, had declared. The philosophy of civil disobedience that he and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. propounded, and most pacifists embraced, entailed a willingness to accept violence and a refusal to engage in it, even in self-defense.13
In the activist climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, this kind of civil disobedience had acquired an aura of piety and passivity distasteful to many radicals; as Jerry Coffin observed, “very few of [the Mayday protesters] would have identified themselves as being members of a nonviolent movement.” The organizers of Mayday had a somewhat difficult sell to make, and the tactical manual emphatically distinguished their disruptive direct-action scenario from conventional nonviolence: “We need to be clear that we are not talking about an exercise in martyrdom; we are not talking about negotiated arrests; we are talking about using a tactic to attain an objective.” Explained S.J. Avery, who was working with the Quaker Project on Community Conflict at the time and ran some of the training sessions in nonviolence for Mayday protest, “The kind of nonviolent direct action that we had always been talking about was the very classic, traditional Gandhian sort, where you did your action and then you stayed there and you took your consequences. That was not part of the Mayday rhetoric. People wanted to keep it nonviolent, but I think a lot of people went down there thinking it was going to be pretty much guerrilla action. And that some people would get arrested, and some figured if they could get away, that was great.”14
The Mayday organizers hoped to tap into the revulsion many felt toward the tactics of the Weather Underground and other violent groups, while steering clear of the submissiveness and sanctimony radicals associated with nonviolence. Explained Maris Cakars, editor of the influential pacifist magazine WIN, “The idea of ‘we’ve tried everything, now there’s nothing left but violence’ was pretty much replaced with the notion that now that violence—trashing, bombing, off the pigging—had failed it was time for a really radical approach: nonviolent civil disobedience.” The tactical manual explained that Mayday would be militant in a way “that conforms more with our new life style” and deploys “joy and life against bureaucracy and grim death.” An organizing leaflet elaborated: “The overall discipline will be non violent, the tactic disruptive, and the spirit joyous and creative.” To underscore their gently irreverent take on the sometime pious tradition of nonviolence, Mayday’s planners used witty remixed versions of social-justice artist Ben