Other Seismic Moves Include…

NYT opinion writer and Columbia University professor James McWhorter has a piece in today’s NYT citing 1966 as the year woke politics emerged.

Agreed. I’ve always believed that my birth year, 1966—the year the Black Panther Party was founded, the year the National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded, the year the Velvet Underground was in the studio recording their first LP— was a Before-and-After year.

In fact, I have a poem about one of the many explosive events that took place in ‘66: The Sunset Strip Curfew Riots, which I believe were a herald and catalyst for merging two ascendant 1960s phenomenon—rock music culture and youth politics—into a more defined counterculture. Side note: The riots—which grew out of an L.A. rock radio station’s call to protest City Hall’s curfew crackdown on Sunset Strip’s teen music scene—also inspired the famous ‘60s tune: “Stop, children, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s going down…” (It’s a tune the aforementioned Velvet Underground probably scoffed at, but for what it’s worth, it becomes clearer and clearer as the decades go by that the seemingly disparate cultural factions of that time were part of the same change-agent movement.)

McWhorter’s essay is specifically about the shift in tone the Civil Rights movement took on that fateful year.

He begins:

The difference between Black America in 1960 and in 1970 appears vaster to me than it was between the start and end of any other decade since the 1860s, after Emancipation. And in 1966 specifically, Stokely Carmichael made his iconic speech about a separatist Black Power, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee he led expelled its white members (though Carmichael himself did not advocate this), the Black Panther Party was born, “Black” replaced “Negro” as the preferred term, the Afro went mainstream, and Malcolm X’s “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (written with Alex Haley) became a standard text for Black readers.

Happy that a New York Times column was giving my pet theory about 1966 some play, I emailed McWhorter.

Josh Feit <jfeitinwords@gmail.com>

5:47 AM

to jm3156

Mr. McWhorter,

As a partisan '66er (I was born in 1966), I've long believed it was a
jump cut year in cultural history, and my bar stool theory always
cited Stokely Carmicheal's historic June '66 "Black Power" exhortation
in Greenwood, MS  as the main example.

So, thank you for your piece.

As you are likely well aware, other seismic '66 moves include: Betty
Friedan and (Civil Rights leader) Pauli Murray founding NOW; white pop
music flirting with the avant-garde as it shifted from bubble gum to
psychedelia (Beatles' Revolver, Byrds' 5D, Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, and
the Velvet Underground record their historic debut, for example);
Ralph Nader (and the corporate accountability movement) emerged with
Unsafe at Any Speed (December, 1965, but his famous congressional
testimony based on the book comes in '66); and the first LGBTQ riot (3
years before Stonewall) at San Francisco's Compton's Cafeteria, among
many other breakthroughs and mood shifts.

I recently published a book of poems (about transit, city planning,
and YIMBY politics, actually), but one poem in the collection,
"Sidewalk Plaque"—about the "Curfew Riots" on the Sunset Strip in
November, 1966—attempted to place that moment in context of the
zeitgeist. It definitely includes a line about Carmichael.

I've attached the poem. I hope you enjoy it.

Sincerely,
Josh Feit

Sidewalk Plaque

The #2 bus pulled up to Sunset & Crescent Heights. Google Maps said I’d arrived. The destination is on your right.

 Sightseeing in L.A. I’d arrived at a Chase Bank, a drive-through branch, fronting a strip mall parking lot. But the afternoon’s real destination was the adjacent traffic island.

 No address there and bare, but where once Love, Sloths, Seeds played a place called Pandora’s Box. (City Hall had worried Pandora’s myth was coming true on Sunset Strip. The kids were hopeful about this too.)

Their curfew riot was one of many Constitutional amendments that year.  Pauli & Betty starting NOW. Stokely saying “Power.” The riot at Compton’s Cafeteria.

Compton’s Cafeteria no longer exists, but at least there’s a plaque on the sidewalk.

 Compton’s

Cafeteria Riot 1966

 Here marks the site of

Compton’s Cafeteria where a riot

took place one August night when

transgender women and gay men

stood up for their rights and fought

against police brutality, poverty,

oppression and discrimination

in the Tenderloin

There’s no plaque at the barren traffic island on Sunset Strip. 

Allow me:

 Pandora’s Box

Curfew Riot 1966

Here marks the site

                                     where

                                      night

stood up.

You have arrived. Your destination is found in others.