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SLATE
REUNION SLATE, the campus political party formed at Berkeley in the fall of 1957 represented and stimulated the re-awakening of student activism after the dark age of the McCarthy/UnAmerican Activities Committee red scare and repression of the left in the after war years. SLATE originally simply referred to a slate of candidates who ran for seats on the student government that fall on a program which included opposition to nuclear bomb testing, opposition to Apartheid in South Africa, a call for an end to discrimination on the campus, including in the fraternity and sorority system. Paving the way, leaders of SLATE had been active the prior year in getting the University to lift its 20 year ban on all political meetings on campus. The slate was thrown off the ballot for the sin of passing out leaflets. It kept getting better after that; and in 1959 SLATE was able to elect a student body president. Tom Hayden spent the summer of 1960 living with the SLATE leadership, studying what SLATE had been doing which enabled it to awaken the campus to involvement in issues on and off the campus. He went back to the University of Michigan, and founded its political party, Voice, which led into the Port Huron Statement and SDS. SLATE continued to provide the umbrella for campus activism, expressed in its commitment to creating unity by working together on the basis of "the lowest significant common denominator." SLATE’s first reunion in 1984 was a wonderful event. SLATE people found that the media’s depiction of 60s radicals as becoming staid and conservative as they entered middle age was so wrong. We found that most people had continued to express the values that brought us together in SLATE in other aspects of their lives: work, family, community. This reunion will mark 40 years after SLATE led the demonstrations of 1960 that led to the demise of HUAC. We hope that people who were in or related to SLATE will join us. The reunion agenda is still a work in progress, but the
outline of it is shown below. Mike Tigar will be our theme speaker, we will all
be keynoting our lives! If you have not received snail mail from us by now it means we don’t have a current address for you. (About 800 people were members of SLATE from 1957 through 1968. We have good addresses for about 240.) Please contact us, with email to Marvin Sternberg: SternbergM@aol.com You can also download the registration form here and send it in. You can write, snail mail or fax to Julianne Morris - SLATE 6757 Armour Drive Fax 510. 339.9862 |