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When I arrived at our Coalition meeting on Monday, May 4, I realized that events had once again gone beyond anyone's control. The talk all day had been of the Cambodian invasion, and I was not surprised to find that this was our main topic of conversation as well. I felt the same way I had at our demonstration over the My Lai poster, that there was nothing more I could do to influence events. Rather, I was their prisoner—I could only settle back and let myself be carried along by them. Under these conditions all questions of leadership were for others to resolve, and they had already stepped in to do so. Once again Farman and the militant wing were in their element, industriously discussing how best to organize teams to design and print posters, which other teams would put up on walls and building throughout the Village, indeed throughout the city.

Then someone came in with the news that several students had been killed—at first we understood eight, though someone else said four. I remembered hearing a radio voice talking about shooting at students in Ohio but had been unable to catch the details. Someone else reported that the entire NYU student body had gathered at the Loeb Center, just a few blocks away from us. It was decided we should send someone over to find out what was going on and report back to us. Then several artists insisted on our starting the meeting. Some of us sat down to do so, while others just wanted to go on talking informally.

The person we had just sent over to the student center came back suddenly with another member who had just returned from there. By now most of us had arrived, and under normal circumstances we would have started our meeting. But these were not normal circumstances, the full news had finally arrived. We were told everything then known about the shootings at Kent State. We were further told that the students had already occupied the Loeb Student Center and were in the process of taking over other university buildings. It was moved that we all adjourn our meeting and go directly to the student center, reconvening at "MUSEUM" after we had determined what the need was and how we could best help. Although it took the rest of the art world another two weeks to mobilize itself over Cambodia and Kent State—and they were prodded to a great extent by us—we immediately jumped into the middle of things.

For the next few weeks we came close to losing our identity as the Art Workers Coalition, as we merged with something much vaster. We also managed to lose, for a while at least, the petty factionalism which often came so close to destroying us. It seems regrettable that major calamities are necessary to make people forget minor ones. As soon as we returned to "MUSEUM" that night—those of us who did return from that crowded emotion-drenched student center, already unrecognizable from graffiti and leaflets covering the walls—we resolved to suspend all normal functionings of the Coalition for as long as necessary and to use "MUSEUM" as an emergency base for whatever work might prove needed—making posters, maintaining communications, perhaps even treating the wounded—no one knew what might come next, but whatever it was we would do it. Over the next few days and weeks the art schools of New York were converted into day-and-night poster factories, and Coalition artists played a role in sparking and coordinating this operation.

If the reader finds the last few sentences fantastic or melodramatic, I think it is because we have all, purposely or otherwise, forgotten how close our nation came to breakdown during the week after Kent State. Perhaps those who were most closely involved have forgotten the most, while those who were on the sidelines are in no position to remember. I am sitting peacefully at my desk going through a pile of leaflets and other documents handed out at the Loeb Student Center and elsewhere during that week, and I find it all a bit hard to believe myself, even though five or so years have passed between that time and my writing this account. For, instance, I find in that week's copy of the Washington Square Journal, the NYU student newspaper, that a spokesman for the students occupying the university has just made the following demands:

"All functions (must) cease at the University until the end of the semester.

"All employees be paid for the duration of the strike.

"No scholarships be rescinded.

"All students including those on probation be given credit in the courses taken this term.

"All final exams be cancelled.

"Diplomas be given to all graduating students.

"No injunctions, reprisals, civil actions be taken against people involved in the strike."

Courant Hall housing a large computer used by the Department of Defense was among the buildings the students had occupied. And another hall containing sophisticated printing equipment was also in student hands. A group of professors had set up a committee to reach out to other groups in the community and cooperate with them in whatever way might prove necessary.

During those incredible two weeks, I roamed the streets of the Village and the halls of NYU freely, partly to keep track of events for EVO, partly to serve as liaison in whatever way I could. It was ironic that it had taken this crisis to make some professors at this university, often accused of callous indifference to the community around it, suddenly become aware of it. All at once, affairs in the city seemed to proceed on a neighborhood-to-neighborhood, even a block-to-block basis. For the first time Ilene and I became really aware of NYU as a major entity in our own area. It was as though these professors were instinctively taking the initial steps towards setting up an informal para-government, in the not unlikely event that the authority of the legal government should be further diminished. I think we were all beginning to act like cells in a single organism at that moment, as though we had been pre-programmed for such an emergency all along.

The Washington Square Journal also contained pieces about plans for mass mobilization being prepared by the law students, articles on student confrontations with police and rednecks, and two significantly brief and factual pieces, each in its separate box, one entitled If You're Busted... the other If You're Gassed... And this was not an underground paper at all but the very sedate NYU student paper, which also carried a full-page ad for Grand Union's "Frozen Food Festival."

Protest marches and demonstrations went on that entire week, culminating in the Wall Street one on Thursday, which sparked the much-publicized attacks of the Hard Hats and Nixon's eulogy of their patriotism, and in an even more massive Friday demonstration starting on Madison Avenue and Forty-Third Street. From a rudely mimeographed copy of STRIKE DAILY NEWS, printed before the NYU students took over the printing presses and could turn out polished work, I excerpt the following editorial:

 "Universities throughout the city have shut down. Now we must educate ourselves and the community. We have got the time, the power, and the resources--we have got NYU. Now we must move outward.

"Isolated acts are not a movement. This is not a vacation or time to split. We have done nothing but begin. Let us broaden our actions and use as our weapons the university community,

"The Wall Street action is one vehicle to this end. To stop business on Wall Street, stop business throughout the country.

"Be there with us,

"The Kimball Hall Commune"

Most of the leaflets handed out that week expressed the same sense of urgency. The students occupying the computer center demanded $l00,000 ransom from the university, the amount to be paid to the Black Panther Defence Committee. Agitation was begun for a general work stoppage. The Graduate Student Council, the NYU Physics Department, and the medical students all stopped their normal activities to hold meetings, issue leaflets, and make remarkably militant noises. Feminist students used the uprising to pursue their own demands, as did gay students at the school ("UP THE ASS OF THE RULING CLASS" read one of their leaflets). The rhetoric of all these demands was strident, and it was possible for some to find it funny at the time, yet many of these demands have lingered on as increasingly respectable political causes.

But even then there were a few significant lapses which should have provided a tip-off that the revolution wasn't going as scheduled. A small suburban institution, Westchester Community College, refused to demonstrate, and the New York Times made much of this. Nor did any universities go out on strike in Kansas, Nebraska, or the Dakotas, at least at that time. Amidst the swirl of activity at the occupied Loeb Student Center, I watched one evening an incident of even graver reactionary import—a female student was handing out feminist leaflets, when she was accosted by an outspoken black girl who told her to "get the hell out of here with that Lesbian dyke shit--we women don't want your kind around here, because it's fucking sick." The two women came close to blows until the feminist was finally persuaded to give out her literature elsewhere in the hall.

What I found perhaps most significant was that at no point did any student leader or high-rankling educator suggest the students should simply go out into the streets and try to talk to their fellow citizens. All the energy went into doing things—marching, carrying signs, leafleting, speechifying shouting, but almost no one considered the need to reach other people. The students were largely content to talk to each other and by so doing they reinforced their sense of self-righteousness. And although a total of eleven students, black and white, had been killed, no one ever suggested that a mood of mourning might be more appropriate—that it might even be more effective politically—than what was being done. Everyone seemed totally committed to acting out their roles as they conceived them in some sort of movie-within-the-mind of the revolution. And this movie did not include any slow or thoughtful sequences.

As I have already pointed out, I believe the students of Berlin, despite their almost reverential worship of the powers of Diskussion, had fared better using milder methods. Their actions resulted in actually moving the German government in a slightly more liberal direction—or at least it did not antagonize such a change in the short run—while our own ran the risk of doing exactly the opposite. One other possible difference: although there was some effort to coordinate activities among our universities during the Kent State crisis, it did not seem to be anyone's first priority. I quote from a leaflet passed out by the "Central Coordinating Committee for all Strike Action Throughout City" the following:

"The first all-out effort to extend information to the non-academic community has been made. Volunteers are desperately needed to pass out flyers and to answer telephones. PLEASE HELP!"

During the crisis I did my best to inform myself on what was being done to coordinate communication, both within the university network and outside it. On a national level, an attempt was made to set up a network linking all college radio stations through a nationwide hookup, but nothing came of this attempt. The problem was one of expense, for a previous such hookup had cost the stations $18,000 for three days through the normal cable service during a three-day demonstration in Washington. As the crisis began to wind down, the students were beginning to look to labor unions to finance this hookup for them. If things had gotten any worse, perhaps this connection would have been made. Yet this would still have united the students only with each other rather than with the great majority of citizens in the country. However facile it may be after the fact to fault our students and would-be radicals for getting their priorities muddled and substituting a cinematic image of revolution for getting their story out to the American people, I nonetheless suspect this is at least a part of what happened. The story the students ought to have been communicating was not "REVOLUTION NOW!" but rather a simple stark presentation to the American people of the corpses of innocent martyred youths they had to bury, with the clear implication that if this could happen to students, it could happen to anyone.

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