On April 30, 1970, I was a sophomore at Bryn Mawr College. At my (future) BMD's little apartment 3924 Pine Street in West Phila, we watched Nixon announce (or rather, as it turned out, admit) that we were expanding the Vietnam war into Cambodia. It was a warm moist night like tonight. I took the Paoli local back to Bryn Mawr and walked back to my dorm, Radnor Hall.
There was more going on than the traditional preparations for May Day (although as I recall, the Haverford students, those scamps! did pull the traditional prank of stealing one or more of the May poles.
May Day went on , the dance, the madrigal singing, the May baskets. But 3 days later on May 4, the great student "strike" of 1970 began.
I hafta say I thought it was funny at the time ( which shows you I have always been the cynical, snarky observer of the passing scene whom you've come to …love?🤞) I mean , really: " We aren't gonna do our term papers— there!! THAT'll show 'em!". Oh CTFO, why would anybody care? And at that time, we had maids and janitors in the dorms. They didn't clean our rooms at Bryn Mawr, we were girls, we were expected to deal with our own laundry—but at all-male Haverford, they did clean the rooms, and the boys called them "the wombats". But they kept the bathrooms and "smokers" clean ( that's what the lounges were called, since we weren't s'posed to smoke in our rooms) which we always left in a mess.
And I remember, I overheard one student, glasses, long kinky hair, earnestly talking to two of these huge, uniformed black people. (The maids wore those cotton dresses with short sleeves, white-cuffed, white collars, small white apron.) The student said, join us in the strike. She said, you're part of this community, too. (Duh, they were certainly a more permanent part than us students!) It may be the first time any student ever spoke to them directly! I'll never forget how scared the staff members looked. "No," said one woman, softly but decisively—and as I recall, that was all she said. I reckon It hadn't occurred to the student that, for the staff, a "strike" meant they wouldn't be paid, like, y'know, the money they needed for food, rent. For us students it meant lying around on the green not doing schoolwork—for them, it would mean privation.
Now wait! Don't look at me! I told ya, I was….just watching.
Sheee-uh, if we students had wanted to improve the maids' and janitors' lives, we coulda NOT shredded up our styrofoam cups in the lounges every night, and/or we coulda slit the sugar and Sweet'n'Low packets instead of ripping them in half and leaving both pieces lying around. There musta been waste baskets in those lounges, but we, the jeunesse dorée, simply dropped all the trash wherever we happened to be lolling. Okay yes I am ashamed.
May 1970 was just a prelude to the huge student protest that paralyzed DC in May 1971. Their slogan was "If the government won't stop the war, we'll stop the government!"
As I write this, I'm sitting here watching student protesters being forcibly cleared from Columbia's Hamilton Hall by armed NY city Police. I hope we don't see another Kent State tonight. Although I'm sure some of the agitators want that.
Welp—53 years on, memory has spoken.
Anybody else remember?
In case you didn't live it, I just thought you might like to know, to compare and contrast those events with what's happening tonight.
And: happy May Day!
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