When Activists Were Acting Up

IN THE COLLAGES that pass for popular history, memories of the fabled 1960s dwell on the action shots in living color—cue Joan Baez, burning draft cards, long-haired hippies sticking flowers inside rifle barrels, motel balcony in Memphis, Chicago cops on a rampage, Kent State scream freeze-frame. And why not? The movers and shakers of the movement, as the opposition was known, acted in the world—they were activists, who spoke with their actions—and a lot of what they did, and a lot of what was done to them, was photogenic, dramatic, and spectacular. They sat down at lunch counters, put their bodies on various lines, and got mauled by white supremacists. Their buses were torched. They got assaulted, bloodied, gunned down. They filled streets, seized buildings, got seized themselves. They disrupted the everyday.