Wikipedia: For many decades, Howell had the reputation of being associated with the Ku Klux Klan due to White Supremacist leader and Michigan Grand Dragon Robert E. Miles, who held KKK gatherings on his farm 12 miles north of the city with a Howell address.[10] Miles died in 1992. However, these gatherings, including the burning of crosses, continued.[11] The reputation persisted into the 2000s, with events such as a public auction of KKK items scheduled for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday in 2005,[12] the 2010 suspension of a teacher who removed students for wearing a Confederate flag and making anti-gay slurs,[13] and students' racist tweets toward a racially mixed team in 2014.[14]
When we were in graduate school during the period when the country was as divided as it is today my fiancé and then wife and I used to take rides in the country, but we always made sure that we had enough gas so we didn’t have to stop. This was out of fear because, well, look at my student ID photo. As college students we were the enemy in certain parts of rural Michigan. I was the scruffy one.
My wife didn't look like the typical “hippie chick” but I certainly fit the stereotype of a hippie (even though I wasn’t). Because she was so pretty I could see how some uncouth loudmouth could taunt us with insulting comments about her and why she was with a scumbag like me.
I mean, what sane person wouldn’t be afraid of men like this?
An acquaintance of mine, the late Dr. Rick Zipper, was the supervisor of the Livingston County Community Mental Health Center which was located in Howell. He also lived in the city.
Not one to tempt fate, he wore his hair short and made sure he was a special deputy sheriff and carried his badge all the time. I never found out whether he carried a concealed weapon.
Michigan State, where I went to both undergraduate school and graduate school, was one of the five universities profiled in the book “Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities in the Vietnam Era”
The 1960s left us with some striking images of American universities: Berkeley activists orating about free speech atop a surrounded police car; Harvard SDSers waylaying then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; Columbia student radicals occupying campus buildings; and black militant Cornell students brandishing rifles, to name just a few.
Tellingly, the most powerful and notorious image of campus protest is that of a teenage runaway, arms outstretched in anguish, kneeling beside the bloodied corpse of Jeff Miller at Kent State University. While much attention has been paid to the role of the elite schools in fomenting student radicalism, it was actually at state institutions, such as Kent State, Michigan State, SUNY, and Penn State, where anti-Vietnam War protest blossomed. Kenneth Heineman has pored over dozens of student newspapers, government documents, and personal archives, interviewed scores of activists, and attended activist reunions in an effort to recreate the origins of this historic movement. In Campus Wars, he presents his findings, examining the involvement of state universities in military research - and the attitudes of students, faculty, clergy, and administrators thereto - and the manner in which the campus peace campaign took hold and spread to become a national movement. Recreating watershed moments in dramatic narrative fashion, this engaging book is both a revisionist history and an important addition to the chronicle of the Vietnam War era.
I was a small part of the anti-war movement as the leader of the Department of Social Work’s graduate student organization. We were the second department after the Department of Psychology to go on strike after the Kent State shooting. I will never forget the experience of addressing an overflow crowd of an estimated 9000 students and faculty for the few minutes it took to list our five demands, pausing after each one to thunderous cheers.
One time I was part of a giant anti-war march (see right) which began in East Lansing and progressed up the thoroughfare which connected the two cities. The march ended in front of the State Capital building where speakers were set to address us. I was in the front section and my then fiancé who had a class and had to wait to join was somewhere near the end. Above the general noise there was a strange sound alarmed voices blending together and when it finally got to me I heard that someone had crashed their car through the march. I remember the panic I felt knowing my fiancé was there. Nobody was killed or critically injured but several people were hurt. The driver was arrested but I lost track of what happened to him.
In the days of “hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today” and Richard Nixon, as angry as we were at our presidents and as fearful as young men were of being sent off to die in the jungles of Vietnam we could never have imagined that we’d live to see a president like Donald Trump.
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