Whatever Happened to Radicalism? Voices from the George Vickers Papers
Social Justice Movements
![Cover of a newsprint publication with the headline "King to Speak Here," and a large illustration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. below. A smaller photograph below depicts people participating in a vigil protesting housing discrimination.](https://exhibits.library.duke.edu/files/fullsize/a16e5e4c37c31516b5e3a704f46db3b7.jpg "Cover of a newsprint publication with the headline "King to Speak Here," and a large illustration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. below. A smaller photograph below depicts people participating in a vigil protesting housing discrimination.")
As with the antiwar movement, social justice action appears in two distinct modes, first in a civil right context. During the summer of 1965, George Vickers participated in the North Shore Summer Project, a suburban outgrowth of the Chicago Freedom Movement focused on combatting housing discrimination in Vickers' native Evanston and neighboring Chicago suburbs. Vickers helped organize the advertised MLK Jr. Rally, attended by thousands, as well as actions like the vigils described in the newsletter at right. In May 1964 he had been arrested for participating in a similar vigil in Evanston organized by the Congress of Racial Equality.
A model of social justice activism aligned with the tactics and rhetoric of the contemporaneous campus antiwar movement may be seen in the Black Student Union/Third World Liberation Front Student Strike at San Francisco State College (1968-1969), one of many struggles in the US and abroad Vickers would have observed from afar as a subscriber to radical newspapers, in this case Leviathan.
![An illustrated design with figures in black and white and a red background. To the right, a man sitting behind a desk with a nameplate reading "acting president" looks imperiously down as he writes the words "bull shit" repeatedly on a typewriter, as depicted on a long, continuous sheet of paper curling out of the machine. On the wall behind him are signed portraits of Ronald Reagan and Benito Mussolini. Inside two circles to the left of the composition are scenes of protestors being apprehended by police.](https://exhibits.library.duke.edu/files/fullsize/b7b7bf7bc4f7126cf0e0f6e0f4e7e292.jpg "An illustrated design with figures in black and white and a red background. To the right, a man sitting behind a desk with a nameplate reading "acting president" looks imperiously down as he writes the words "bull shit" repeatedly on a typewriter, as depicted on a long, continuous sheet of paper curling out of the machine. On the wall behind him are signed portraits of Ronald Reagan and Benito Mussolini. Inside two circles to the left of the composition are scenes of protestors being apprehended by police.")
In an issue featuring articles about the ongoing student strike, which would last five months and ultimately led to the creation of a Black Studies Department and a College of Ethnic Studies, Leviathan printed the poster design above as a centerfold. The composition centers on acting SFSC president S. I. Hayakawa, flanked by portraits of Mussolini and then-governor Reagan, and evokes the forcible suppression of protesters—one identifiable as student leader Roger Alvarado (bottom left). The design is more muted in its suggestion of violence than the widely circulated photos it echoes.
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