Mike Davis and Jon Wiener write a powerful book about the Sixties

Los Angeles: Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties

Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums, among others, has teamed up with Jon Wiener, who forced the FBI to release its John Lennon files, to lay bear the brutal underside of the so-called glamour capital, Los Angeles. 

Their book shows what the youth rebellion was all about. It chronicles the long struggle against the war in Viet Nam, the Watts Uprising, the Chicano Blowout, the city’s war against the Black Panthers, the student rebellion, the cultural revolution, and much more.

The authors don’t miss much that went on in Sixties L.A. With 36 chapters filling 630 pages, it’s a great book to settle in with during the quarantine. Even those who were part of the Sixties will learn a lot that they didn’t know. For younger readers, it will be a revelation. They’ll learn that not all the war babies and boomers were conservatives all their lives, nor are they today.

I was immediately drawn to Chapter 29, about the struggles at Valley State college and chapter 30 about the fight to save the last poor peoples beach, Venice.

San Fernando Valley State College, now known as California State University, Northridge, was barely on the map when the Sixties generation began enrolling. It was a 10-year-old campus built to accommodate the swelling numbers of college age students. Among those students in the late Sixties were Mike Lee, Marc Cooper, Cliff Fried, Mike Klonsky, Mike Davis, Phil Melnick, Evelina Alarcon, and me. All of the above and many more went on to be political writers and/or the leaders of radical organizations all through the 1970s and 80s.

There were about 20,000 students when I attended. Now, there are about twice as many. When Jerry Rubin, the Yippie, came for a rally, he yelled out that we were all communists, and the thousands in attendance yelled back their agreement. But if they were communists, they were libertine communists. What else could you expect in the Sixties, with 10,000 twenty-something women encountering the same number of men. Birth control pills were commonly used and AIDS had not happened yet. Sex, drugs (pot, uppers and downers), political rallies, rock-and-roll, and a little studying made up most everyone's lives. 

Nearly all were kids of working class parents, and they were often the first of their families to attend college. Most of us went to Valley State because it was cheap. I paid about $50 per semester for a full load of classes. Then, part of its appeal became that it was notorious because of its activism and confrontation tactics, by both students and administration. I once saw a list which put Valley State in the top ten in property damage of all universities in the country. 

We, the students, were arrayed against perhaps the worst chain of command this side of Nazi Germany. The Mayor was Sam Yorty, and the District Attorney was Evelle (evil) Younger. Both were as right-wing as they come and believed in maximum sentences for student activists (and everyone else). The Governor was Ronald Reagan, and the President was Tricky Dick Nixon. There were several campus presidents, but the one I remember was James Cleary, whose claim to fame was publishing a revised edition of Robert’s Rules of Order. A Hollywood movie couldn’t come up with a better group of rogues than those who were actually in charge in the 1960s.

In 1967, the exploding campus had 15,600 students of which 23 were Black and 11 were Latino. The major struggle on campus developed to win a Black Studies Department and a Chicano Studies Department. Black students took the lead in these struggles and ended up being charged with felonies, including conspiracy, assault, burglary, kidnapping and false imprisonment. Several were sent to prison. Mike Lee was framed for robbing a liquor store. He and Cliff Fried also spent time in jail. A long-time friend of mine, English Professor Richard Abcarian was one of two faculty (the other was Biologist Warren Furomoto) who was arrested along with 286 students for illegal assembly. Many of the faculty were sympathetic, but were unwilling to get involved and possibly jeopardize their chance to get tenure. It was a heavy price that the leaders paid, but finally the administration caved in and created departments of Black and Chicano studies. A well-known radical, Rudy Acuna, was named department chair. The administration finally began a real recruitment program for people of color.

Along with the Black and Chicano organizations, a mostly white Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was also quite active. I was one of the founders of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War group on campus. Most of my activity on campus was from late 1969 to 1971. During that time, which is beyond the scope of Davis and Wiener’s book, included being part of the national student strike in response to the killings of students at Kent State and Jackson State. I remember going from class to class in Sierra Hall, bursting in to say we were on strike, and that class was over. Most students knew it was coming and filed out quickly to join the mass demonstration in progress. Gov. Reagan, aware of the students determination, closed all the campuses in the state. In all, more than 500 colleges and universities joined what became the largest strike in U.S. history.

While significant victories were won at Valley State, and other campuses, the establishment retaliated by cutting the state budget for higher education, hiking the fees (there is no tuition in California thanks to the early 60s reforms by Gov. Pat Brown. But this idea for free higher education was subverted by making fees as high as tuition in other states. Student loans assumed astronomical heights. The purpose of higher education at Valley State, and elsewhere, changed from a place to learn, to a place for professionals to be trained in their trades. Because of inflation, and the onset of neoliberalism in the late 1970s, most students had to work while they attended college. The American Empire’s surplus won by dominating the planet since World War II, was being appropriated by the 1 percent while the working class suffered higher prices in food, housing and education. People of color, whether or not they had a degree, lived under a form of fascism, which the police and legal system tried out at Valley State.

Jim Smith is the author of Gentrifying Paradise: Repression and Removal in 21st Century Venice California. The book contributes to the chronicle of peoples struggles in the Venice area in the past 20 years.

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