Do you remember the iconic photograph by Robert Cohen for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of Edward Crawford wearing an American flag shirt as he tossed the tear gas canister back at Ferguson police while retaining his hold on a bag of chips? In the late 1960s and early 1970s, that was still considered a daring thing to do, and photographer Ken Light managed to capture one young man doing it anyway in Columbus, Ohio.
Those of us who came of age during the half-decade covered by Ken Light’s latest book, What’s Going On?, will find much of our youth in its pages.
The 20 years after the end of World War II saw an explosion of the birth rate as men came home to the women who waited for them, and they all did what comes naturally. And it had to be natural, as there was little available in the way of birth control.
In addition to all of that pent-up sexual desire, there was a pent-up spending spree waiting to happen as American industry turned from war manufacturing to consumer products. And Americans had been saving their money, since wartime shortages and rationing limited spending. That fueled one of the greatest economic booms we had ever experienced, and by the late 1950s it seemed that there was no limit to the growth of our economy and our opportunity. Yet by the late ‘60s, cracks were beginning to appear in the American Dream.
There was a dark side, as Ken Light explains in the mini-memoir that follows his photographs of the era. The duck-and-cover nuclear attack drills in schools, the assassinations of our heroes—the Kennedy brothers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.—during that tumultuous decade. By the time Light hit high school, there was also an unpopular war going on, and “long hair, rock and roll, and rebellion were now in the mix.”
Ken Light is the Reva & David Logan Professor of Photojournalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, but in 1969, he was a student at Ohio University in Athens and a founding member of the Athens Peace Committee.
In October 1969, the Athens Peace Committee organized and sent busloads of students to the Vietnam Moratorium March in Washington, D.C., which attracted over 500,000 antiwar protestors. I came back with a few photos that were my first serious images. The antiwar movement was heating up both on campus and nationally. SDS had split into numerous factions, including the militant Weathermen, who called for reaching beyond the “movement” and pushed for violent revolution. The Black Panthers had moved beyond Oakland, California, to other major American cities. Women’s liberation had become a tremendous social movement, too. Students were organizing around ending poverty and racism, throwing President Richard Nixon out of office, and lowering the voting age. We had found our political voice, but we were shut out of the system. We could be drafted and legally drink in many states, but the voting age was still 21. We could die for our country, but we couldn’t even vote for dogcatcher.
Light’s work captured some of the hope and the exuberance that so many of us felt while participating in what we knew was a revolutionary movement. You can see it in the faces above.
But the era was not all about student demonstrations, long hair, and free love. There were children collecting soda bottles to return for cash, retirees played cards, men still wore Fedora hats, and parades took place across the nation on the Fourth of July.
Ken Light captured these scenes of America and more. Kids in high schools, miners in West Virginia after the Buffalo Creek mine disaster, factory workers, politicians, and children. If you are a baby boomer these photographs will illuminate events you may have forgotten or never known. Roller rinks, straw hats for Richard Nixon, campers in Yosemite, Bobby Seale, and a garage band playing for a McGovern rally. This work gives a richness and depth to our history of that era as a young photographer traveled the country trying to find out what was going on.
There is also much for today’s youth to learn from these images. Using dog whistles, Richard Nixon appealed to the racist South, and to what he termed the Silent Majority. Today, at a typical Trump rally you can find people waving signs proudly proclaiming that “the silent majority stands with TRUMP.” There are differences: Nixon had to use dog whistles, while Trump doesn’t. But they both appealed to the worst aspects of America’s psyche. To the fear and the hate. Nixon won. Our greatest danger now lies in not appreciating the threat that the Trump campaign represents.
The images of the police response to protests are similar to what we see today during Black Lives Matter protests. Back in the day we didn’t have militarized police forces, so many state governors just used the military, even though the National Guardsmen were no more equipped to deal with angry students than are local police forces equipped to deal with angry young African Americans today—no matter how much body armor they wear or weaponry they carry.
As long as we don’t understand our past, it is destined to once again become our future. The ‘60s, as an era, was much more than turning on, tuning in and dropping out. It was a time of public awareness, engagement, and participation.
As a matter of fact, Ken Light’s participation as a photojournalist earned him his own FBI file, parts of which are included in his book. Also included is a brief memoir and at the end, a timeline of events from the inauguration of Richard Nixon in January 1969, to his resignation on August 9, 1974.
What’s Going On? 1969-1974
Published by Light2Media
November, 2015
192 pages
The publication of What’s Going On was crowdfunded through a Kickstarter campaign, that just reeks of ‘60s counterculture enterprise. And although it is available on Amazon, it is also for sale on KenLight.com and Light2Media.
KEN LIGHT is a social documentary photographer. Among his books are Valley of Shadows and Dreams, Coal Hollow, Witness in Our Time, Texas Death Row, Delta Time, To The Promised Land, and With These Hands. He has exhibited internationally and received numerous grants and awards, including two NEA photography fellowships and the Dorothea Lange Fellowship. He was a David Laventhol visiting professor at Columbia University and is currently the Reva and David Logan Professor of Photojournalism at the University of California, Berkeley.