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Introduction: The Movement and the City of Brotherly Love The 1960s: Post-Cold War and Post-Memoir In the early 1960s a new generation's voice would emerge across the nation, responding to the kinds of themes highlighted in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Port Huron Statement of 1962: the threat of nuclear confrontation, the contradictions between American affluence and minority and Third World poverty, the contradictions between American commitments to equality and inclusion and the ugly realities of racism and segregation, and the sense that suburban affluence rested on a mix of hypocrisy, alienation, and meaninglessness. In Philadelphia, that New Left voice would face a number of challenges, some held in common with movement activists nationwide, others specific to this city. First of all, it would need to come to grips with the host of older radical voices that were struggling to recover from the dual blows ofMcCarthyist assault and the failures ofCommunism with the invasion of Hungary and the revelations of Stalin's crimes by Nikita Khrushchev at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956.1 Second, it would need to determine its relationship to the extensive Quaker organizational structures unique to Philadelphia. Third, young radicals would inevitably and necessarily overlap with and sometimes be at odds with the reform movement as it revitalized the city's liberals. How would New Leftists, who tended increasingly to define "corporate liberalism" as the enemy, accommodate themselves to a liberal reform movement in Philadelphia under assault from the right-wing, ethnic populism personified by notorious mayor Frank Rizzo? Fourth, New Leftists would have to work out relations with the emerging Mrican American activists, beginning with Cecil B. Moore of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as those involved with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Fifth, those seeking to build a movement based on participatory democracy would have to deal with the ways all the above relations influenced 2 Introduction issues of social class and ethnicity. How would young middle-class student radicals approach local unions and working-class people? How would they address the "Whitetowners," the residents of the ethnic neighborhoods belatedly achieving at least symbolic recognition in the 1960s with the elections oflrish American mayor James H. J. Tate and Italian American mayor Frank Rizzo? Sixth, young New Leftists would need to figure out how to confront the urban, racial, and ethnic dilemmas that were occurring in an environment shaped by deindustrialization , as smokestack America was beginning its painful decline. And finally, New Left radicals, operating in the twilight of the golden age ofAmerican capitalism, would need to come to grips with making demands on systems, especially city governments, that faced suburban flight, shrinking revenues, and a consequent deepening of competition over increasingly scarce resources.2 I begin with the assumption that one must examine the social and political movements of the 1960s-what participants characteristically called the "movement"-in the context of their geographic, political, and cultural environments. Of course, many movement efforts were focused not on local but rather on national and global issues, especially when the United States entered the war in Vietnam. But a movement that sought a broader and deeper democracy, at least until the late 1960s, must be evaluated in terms of how it sought to extend the boundaries of liberty, fraternity, and equality within its broadly defined community. Too often, accounts of the New Left have emphasized intent and what some call expressive politics-what one sought to accomplish and how one felt in the effort. It is important to examine these goals within the narrower confines of particular college and university campuses. But it is also essential to consider what kinds of effects this eruption of youthful idealism and utopian dreams had on the politics and culture of the broader local community. I examine such fundamental questions in the following chapters. Writing about the 1960s has been affected by two fundamental changes. The first is more obvious: the initial rush ofpersonal accounts, memoirs, and histories, written by people who were participantobservers , has been augmented by the efforts of younger and less personally involved historians, often doing groundbreaking work in disaggregating the period through a case study approach. As such, we now are benefiting from studies ofparticular campuses, including those which were out of the media spotlight, outside the bicoastal centers, and perhaps more representative than elite schools such as Berkeley and Harvard, which have often received the most...

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