Summer
’13 saw a memorable reunion of the New Left (NL) activists of Indiana
University (IU) from the ‘60s and early ‘70s. Those were the days when they
took on the war in Vietnam and other pressing issues of social justice.
They
arrived back on the campus for the reunion from all parts of the country. Quite
a number had not broken bread or lifted a glass together in at least a quarter
of a century, while many had neither met nor even spoken for over 50 years.
Most were now people of age, in their late 60s or early 70s.
The
organizers of the gathering came up with a good way to break the ice and get
everyone re-acquainted – a ‘Town Hall’ meeting held in a small auditorium the
first morning. Reminiscent of Edgar Lee Masters’ long narrative poem, Spoon River Anthology (1915), the result
of the IU session was a fascinating compilation of mini-biographies of the
activists’ lives at the university and beyond.
The
crucial difference was that while Masters’ characters were all “sleeping on the
hill,” that is, in the graveyard of the fictional town of Spoon River, the New
Left people were alive and well in Bloomington, their old college town. For
openers, each one was asked to rise and give a name and a brief ID. Then a couple
of dozen of the 60 or so people there were randomly invited one by one to go to
the front of the room and bear witness to their long lives on the left – the affiliation of their youth to which they had
maintained fidelity over the years.
Taken
together their ‘testimonies’ comprise a remarkably diverse chronicle of life on
the left in America since the ‘60s. This post is the first of a series of the
self-portraits sketched that morning that we’ll be posting on the blog in the coming
months. The first three profiles are of a woman co-founder of the IU New Left;
then a man who followed in her footsteps as a campus leader; and finally, a
slightly younger speaker whose father, an IU professor, had been a local
activist at an earlier critical time in Bloomington.
In
their subsequent adult lives, the three became respectively a professional
song-writer/musician, a locomotive engineer, and a criminal defense investigator,
but all had kept faith with their past. With brief headnotes as background only
where needed, the first three stories as recorded and transcribed follow.
Leading
off that morning was Nell Levin, the former Bernella Satterfield, a ‘red diaper
baby’* originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. She was somewhat modest
about her interesting background. Nell and David Satterfield first met in North
Beach in California, then again in Greenwich Village where they hung out with
Bob Dylan before his rise to fame. At IU, Nell and David not only played
Country and Bluegrass together – Nell on the fiddle, David on the guitar – but
during spring ’65 when the US escalated the war in Vietnam, they also became
co-founders of the campus SDS chapter or the Students for a Democratic Society.
Nell
described the ’64 group that became the vanguard of SDS as “’outsider’ types –
we were beatniks, grad students, often older than the typical undergrad, and
some of us were from other parts of the country or the world … we were the
weirdoes, the bohemian fringe, the vanguard.”** Brother Jeff Sharlet, back from
the war in Vietnam, joined SDS not long after. He was the only ex-Vietnam GI in
the group.
The
Satterfields lived with their child Cordelia not far from campus, and their
living room became the venue for political discussions and early SDS meetings.
In her own voice, Nell picks up the story from there:
I got involved
with SDS in the early days, probably about 1964 and I was active til the
Weathermen*** takeover, and I said, “I didn’t sign up for this.” I started
writing songs in Los Angeles (LA) and someone said you have to go to Nashville.
I had already been to Nashville in ’78 playing with a band there, the ‘Buffalo
Gals’, and I knew a lot of people there. I had left Bloomington in 1982-83 and
went to LA for six years, that’s when I started writing songs. That’s when I
ended up going back to Nashville.
When I got to
Tennessee, I said, ‘Wow’ there’s a lot of problems in Tennessee. You know –
it’s the South, education was very low. The main thing was, I went to the
grocery store and they had a sales tax on food – I came from California where
there’s no such thing – the most regressive possible tax. I ended up working
for a group called ‘Tennessians for Fair Taxation’ for four years. I ran that
organization, and then I was talking to different people and they were saying
“We need a statewide progressive coalition.”
So in 2001 me
and a group of people founded an organization called ‘Tennessee Alliance for
Progress’ –
TAP. I’ve been running that organization
for the last 12 years and it’s been an interesting road trying to get the
progressive agenda passed in that red
state. Unfortunately, it’s gone from bad to worse now that Republicans control
all three branches of government, including the Tennessee legislature.
Nell Levin, 2011
For the first
time since Reconstruction, they control everything in Tennessee. In the 2003
election they got a lot of Tea Party people elected so we can’t get anything
passed presently. (Question
from the floor: Do you still have the food tax?) We still do, yes. We had a huge demonstration in 2002-03 when we came
within three votes of getting an income tax passed. We had riots in the
streets, it was incredible what we went through over that in Nashville, the
state capital. By three votes we failed.
We still have
tax on food although it’s been lowered a little bit. We still have no income
tax, but we have the food tax. We always get voted one of the most regressive
tax states in the US.
We got discouraged
by the 2010 election so we said, “Ok, we’re going local.” So now we’re working
in East Nashville, my neighborhood and a majority Black neighborhood. We
started doing work on environmentalism, tying that to jobs. That’s been our
focus for the last three years inspired by the work of Van Jones [an attorney and
nationally known environmentalist]. He’s
endorsed our work on his web site. We’re very proud to be endorsed by Van
Jones.
So that’s what
I’ve been doing for the last 12 years running TAP. It’s been a roller coaster,
hard to get money in the South for progressive causes. We don’t have a lot of
the foundations you have in other parts of the country. Anyway that’s basically
what I’m doing.
Along
with her activism, Nell continues her long music career. Backup on a
Grammy-nominated CD in 2000, she and her husband Michael recently formed the ‘Shelby
Bottom String Band’. Their first CD is East
Nashville Rag.
Ike
Nahem, now an Amtrak locomotive engineer operating out of New York, arrived at
Indiana University in the late ‘60s; he was in the second wave, so to speak, of
New Left activists. His reunion ‘testimony’ below at the Town Hall was fairly
complete and requires little further introduction. Ike covered his activism
from the IU years through his current continuing involvement on the left:
I was in
Bloomington 1969-73, the best years of my life until I met my wife of course.
So great to see people here who were my friends and comrades from those years. We were so active – I mean it was the height
of the Vietnam War – it was an amazing time.
Ike Nahem and his
wife
When you think
about it, a school that was 2% Black … elected a member of the Black Panther
Party as student body president in an election where thousands and thousands of
students voted. Where we gathered in Dunn Meadow this morning, we filled that
place after the Kent State and Jackson State killings [spring 1970]. Protestors were way out into the streets.
It was an
incredible time, and we had a really serious mass movement on this campus, one
of the best in the country, and it was also one of the best organized and led.
In Bloomington, we had very little of what we called ‘ultra-leftism’ and
violence and stuff like that.
We were
appealing to people and mobilizing them. I remember a lot of us hard core
activists in those primitive ‘old tech’ days would be on a mimeo machine stenciling
out things on a leaflet, and spending hours putting something together that we
could do in 10 seconds today. We were churning out leaflets and getting ink all
over ourselves and going out to demonstrations.
Fifty people
would come, 100 people would come, and then one day Nixon invaded Cambodia [April 30,‘70], and the same fraternities, some of them
who would scream and yell at us, poured out that day. We ended up having like
10,000 people marching down into Dunn Meadow, so those were the times and they
were great times.
Anti-Vietnam War
rally, Dunn Meadow, Indiana University, 1969
They marked me
for the rest of my life, and today I’m still involved in the struggle. I’m an
Amtrak locomotive engineer, I drive high-speed trains from New York to Washington, and I’m involved in the
union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, a division of the
Teamsters. I don’t have the energy I had back then, but I’m still very active
politically.
The main issue
I’m involved with is solidarity with Cuba. We’re trying to stop the US economic
and political war against Cuba, and free the ‘Cuban 5’ [in prison in
the US]. I’ve also been involved in the Anti-Apartheid
struggle. I helped publish some books of Nelson Mandela who I had the honor of
meeting as well as Fidel Castro.
It’s great to
see everybody after all these years. Those Bloomington years were amazing and
it’s great to see so many people who are fighting the good fight!
Ike
Nahem is currently the coordinator of Cuba Solidarity New York and a founder of
the July 26 Coalition in support of the Cuban Revolution.
The
last of the three activists presented here, Nora Liell was younger than most of
the veterans of the New Left’s Town Hall, having been a student at Bloomington
High School when most of them were at the university. But even in high school,
Nora and her classmates were involved in the Vietnam antiwar movement, in
particular opposing the draft.
Like
Nell Levin, Nora was a ‘red diaper baby’, but she was also a so-called ‘faculty
brat’ as well – her father was John Liell, a distinguished sociologist at IU who
had instilled in his children a sense of social conscience.
A
specialist on race and poverty, Professor Liell, a well-published scholar,
chose not to confine himself just to academic pursuits. He founded the Indiana Civil
Liberties Union and served as first president of the Bloomington chapter of the
ACLU. In the late ‘60s, President Johnson appointed him to an executive
position in the ‘War on Poverty’.
Nora
assumed that many of the IU alums at the Town Hall probably knew her father
from student days since both he and his wife were prominent local activists.
Proud of her father, she drew special attention to one particular action she
knew everyone in the room could relate to.
Bloomington,
nestled in southern Indiana, had been a town of ‘soft’ segregation well into
the ‘50s. Nora’s father had “helped organize the sit-in for African Americans
to be able to drink at Nick’s,” the most popular student bar then and now –
still there just off campus.
Nick’s,
Bloomington, Indiana
Following
in her parents’ footsteps, Nora became a community activist and a volunteer in
local Bloomington politics. She later became a criminal defense investigator in
the Office of the Indiana State Public Defender in Indianapolis, the state
capital.
These
have been but three of the many personal testimonies heard that morning at Indiana
University during summer ’13. In their accounts of their student activism and
subsequent lives, Nell, Ike, and Nora presented not only their personal
journeys from New Left days, but a view of activism in for progressive causes in
America in the course of the decades since those heady times. As Ike Nahem put
it, the struggle goes on.
* The phrase ‘red diaper baby’ usually signifies a child born of at least one parent associated with the American Communist Party, although more loosely as one born of radical parents of the Old Left. It’s difficult to know whether a self-described person means the term narrowly or broadly.
***At
the final SDS convention held in June ’69, the organization split into two
factions. The Weathermen faction subsequently went underground and engaged in
violence.
