In the Vanguard

The other thing I should say about this period, roughly from 1960 till 1965, is that "we" [by which I mean me and the circles I travelled in] were very self-consciously in the "vanguard", on the cutting edge of social change. Here's what I mean by this: All of the cultural and political things that we were among the first to do became extremely popular nationally and internationally in the subsequent years. By this I mean the music we listened to [folk and jazz and early "world beat" like Ravi Shankar and Olatunji], the books we read [beat poetry, Marcuse, C Wright Mills, Paul Goodman, James Baldwin], the way we wore our hair, the movies we watched [from "foreign films" like the French New Wave to Andy Warhol and new American cinema], the drugs we took [Leary's slogan was "LSD in '63, even more in '64"], the way we dressed, and the way we made love. New York, with it's combination of beatnik culture, left politics, and racial mixing, was a really exciting place to be. Art D'Lugoff's Village Gate sponsored a benefit concert with Pete Seeger for striking miners in Harlan County; City College CORE had a folk benefit with the New Lost City Ramblers, the Greenbrier Boys, and a little-known named Bob Dylan. Amos Vogel, who owned the New Yorker theater, helped make the anti- apartheid documentary "Come Back Africa", filmed illegaly in South Africa, with then-unknown Meriam Makeba, and we showed it at mid-night screenings and at campus film clubs. Stokely Carmichael was a year ahead of me at Bronx Science, and when we did anti-war marches to Washington he and other Howard U students organized/joined us to do sit-in's at still-segrated highway diners in Maryland. And I could probably remember a lot more if I tried. Malcolm X spoke on street corners in Harlem.

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