Antiwar Protests


• Student Peace Union staged a protest outside the White House against testing nuclear weapons


  1959
• Student Peace Union had 3,000 members


  1961
• The Vietnam War led tens of thousands more students into anti-war activism
• 1,000 Yale University students staged a protest march in NYC


  May 1964
• Many universities held 'teach-ins' with anti-war lectures and debates, 20,000 participated in a Berkeley teach-in


  During 1965
• 8,000 marches clashed with the Oakland police and vandalised cars and buildings


  1968
• The largest anti-war protest to date was staged by the SDS in Washington DC
• New Left's National Mobilisation committee to End the War (the Mobe) organised a demonstration in Washington, over 100,000 attended the march, chanting 'Hell no, we won't go'


  1967
• Draft cards were burned across America
• Berkeley radicals tried to close down the Oakland Draft Headquarters

  1. Faced with 2,000 police

  2. Attacked them with clubs

  3. Demonstrators retaliated with cans, bottles, smoke bombs and ball bearings placed in the street to stop police horses
• High on drugs, some vandalised cars, parking metres, newsstands and trees
• Other protests were violent, the main targets were campus administration buildings and the offices of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), students resented the military attempting to recruit promising graduates through these offices


  By 1968
• Across the nation many of these offices and buildings were burned or bombed