Revolution ‘67 Stirs Controversy
Since the documentary deals with a subject that, “like a kaleidoscope”:http://blog.nj.com/ledgernewark/2007/07/crossroads_part_1.html, drastically changes depending on the perspective of the viewer, you had to see this coming. The ??Star Ledger?? has posted an op-ed by respected civil rights leader ??Robert Curvin?? entitled, “PBS distorts Newark riot history”:http://www.nj.com/starledger/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-0/118386944494430.xml&coll=1. Here’s an excerpt:
For reasons yet to be explained, Tom Hayden — founder of Students for a Democratic Society, who came to Newark in 1964 with a cadre of mostly white activists to organize the poor — is the principal commentator on local action. Hayden and the Newark Community Union Project, the group formed by the SDS members, are portrayed as leaders of the city’s racial struggles, fighting on behalf of blacks against the white establishment.
In truth, the Hayden group carved out a 20-square-block area of the lower Clinton Hill in the South Ward as their theater of operation. But the battles that Tibaldo-Bongiorno identifies as preludes to the riot — the killing of Lester Long by a policeman; the fight to make Wilbur Parker the first black business administrator of the school system; the picketing, negotiating and legal actions to get blacks jobs, and the fight over the building of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey — were struggles that Hayden and his cadre were only marginally involved in, if at all.
Nonetheless Hayden says, “We were outside agitators, but we had to be, because there were no agita tors from within the community.” An interview with George Richard son, a black former assemblyman who joined with black activist forces in the city, is patched in to attempt balance. It does not help much; Tom Hayden and NCUP still dominate the film.
I’ve heard this criticism elsewhere, too: Tom Hayden didn’t have enough to do with the riots to give him the kind of play — at least a quarter to a third of the interview video — that he received from Revolution ‘67. While Hayden, who looks and sounds not too unlike “Fox Mulder from the X-Files”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Mulder, speaks authoritatively on some of the events leading up to the riots, the exploration of his experiment in socialism in downtown 60’s Newark did feel as though it was a bit divergent from the social and racial issues taking place in the city at that time.
Still, it’s worth checking out Rev ‘67. As someone told me today, you can’t swing a dead cat anywhere in the city without hitting someone showing the film — and most likely for free. Despite its flaws, the film adds some detail and color to an event that continues to have an air of confusion and contention, even forty years later.