May Days 1970 at UVa

[Yonnie3]

49 years ago I was in the midst of this. Some of the people in this story were my housemates and friends. My memories of the details are fading.

From Virginia magazine

Antiwar Stories

May Days, 1970: The week that would change UVA forever

by Ernie Gates



As midnight neared, 2,000 antiwar activists surged up Carr’s Hill to the steps of the University president’s darkened mansion. The radical lawyer William Kunstler spurred them forward, shouting, fist in the air. Thirty students locked arms to block the entry. Between the agitated crowd and the defiant cordon, a lone activist tried to reason with the mob of his fellow students, using a megaphone through the din. Beyond the locked door, President Edgar Shannon spoke urgently with student leaders who had run ahead to warn him. From upstairs, where she waited with their five young daughters, Eleanor Shannon called, “Edgar, they’re coming!”

For one intense moment, the antiwar fervor of the 1960s converged on Carr’s Hill at the University of Virginia. It was Wednesday, May 6, 1970, and a movement to shut down the University was about to boil over. During that tumultuous week remembered as May Days, many classes were canceled, antiwar rallies swelled to the thousands, protesters occupied the Navy ROTC building, student marshals stood sentry against arson around the Academical Village, and billy club–wielding police stormed the Lawn and some fraternity houses, hauling dozens of fleeing students to jail. Through it all, Edgar Shannon walked a high wire: angering the governor, his board and many alumni by siding with the students against the war, but never bending in his determination to keep the University open.

“It was a tense confrontation,” recalls Jim Roebuck (Grad ’69, ’77), who was Student Council president and one of the leaders who had hurried to Carr’s Hill to alert Shannon. “You didn’t know what was going to happen.”

Student activism had been building at the University, slowly, for years. It began alongside African Americans in the fight for civil rights in Charlottesville, in Virginia’s rural Southside, and in the Deep South with Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis. Later, activists and traditionalist students rebelled against rules that restricted their social lives, and made common cause to displace generations of fraternity control of student politics. But nothing catalyzed the student movement like the war in Vietnam. At UVA and hundreds of other college campuses around the country, massive student protests erupted in response to President Richard Nixon’s announcement on April 30, 1970, that U.S. troops were moving into Cambodia, widening the war he had promised to end.

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http://uvamagazine.org/articles/antiwar_stories

[mahatmakanejeeves]

1. The Kent State Protest: Standing Up Against the Vietnam War

[JudyM]

2. Wow, Yonnie, participating in an important chapter of my our history. That's intense.