In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Generation on Fire: Voices of Protest from the 1960s
  • Amy Scott
Generation on Fire: Voices of Protest from the 1960s. By Jeff Kisseloff. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. 2007.

In Generation on Fire, Jeff Kisseloff, a journalist who has written oral histories of Manhattan and American television, offers a third collection celebrating the political and cultural dissent of 1960s social movement activists. Kisseloff describes his work as "a tribute to those Americans who stood up and said no to war, greed, racism, sexism, homophobia, pollution, censorship, lame music, and bad haircuts" (1). In a short introduction and fifteen chapters, he offers enlivening primary accounts by a cross-section of Sixties activists, including Freedom Rider Bernard Lafayette, Civil Rights activist Gloria Richardson Dandridge, women's liberationist Marilyn Salzman Webb, counterculture icons Peter Berg, Barry Melton, and Verandah Porche, and gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny. In the final chapter, Barry Levine and Doris Krause movingly tell of the 1970 antiwar protests and shooting deaths of 4 Kent State University students by Ohio National Guardsmen.

Readers should not expect a scholarly analysis of the 1960s. Occasionally, historical facts are inaccurate, such as the date of the Freedom Rides. The chapter introductions are methodologically and analytically inconsistent: some are biographical, others provide a general summary of a movement, several are vignettes about how the interview began, including on one occasion, what the interviewee was wearing.

Despite Kisseloff's informal style, several themes in social movement history are accessible in the entertaining narratives by sixties activists, and he has contributed to the growing literature on the Sixties by eliciting compelling primary accounts that describe a new politics of personal responsibility. These 15 activists repeatedly voiced their belief that they needed to rise up, dissent, and inject a collective voice for radical, moral change into the nation's political dialogue. "We all learned we could act politically," recalls former New Left politico Lee Weiner (86). As activists reinterpreted the meaning of political participation, many came to believe that political action meant personal, everyday commitments to cultural and social transformation. The expansive interpretation of political action that characterized Sixties activism resonates in the recollections of Verandah Porche, [End Page 179] founding member of Total Loss Farm in Vermont. "Politics," Porche says, "'was what we did all day'" (237).

Instructors of the Sixties, social movements, and the U.S. History survey will find Kisseloff's book pedagogically useful. Interviews with Lafayette, Zellner, and Richardson Dandridge provide numerous examples of how Civil Rights activists endured brutal beatings and risked death to render racial injustice visible, thereby altering the perceptions of activists, white segregationists, and bystanders who witnessed movement activities. These same chapters demonstrate that nonviolence and self-defense held nuanced and multiple meanings to Civil Rights workers who were trying to counter terrorist tactics by white extremists. Richardson Dandridge recalls, "I wasn't committed to nonviolence. It was a good model, but it didn't upset me if sometimes that model broke" (54). To activists in Columbia, Maryland, self-defense included rubbing red pepper on one's clothing to prevent attacks by police dogs during a nonviolent protest; it also meant shooting back at white nightriders, and shoving a national guardsmen's rifle out of one's face.

By pairing the chapters on Peter Berg, Elsa Marley Skylark, and Verandah Porche, instructors can ask students to compare the urban and rural counterculture movements. Finally, though Kameny's and Webb's accounts students will find evidence of the multifarious influences—whether ideas, people, or events—between the Civil Rights movement, the New Left, women's liberation, and gay liberation.

Amy Scott
Bradley University
...

pdf

Share