11

A March in Lowell

The Lowell Police Station seems particularly small this spring evening. The police break out a few shotguns. Outside waves of young people, hopped up on speed, acid, and booze, or simply the energy of the crowd, bay for blood, every ten or fifteen minutes charging the steps of the station. Repeatedly the cops sally out into the crowd, freely swinging their clubs, determined to deter the kids from storming the police station. Amy and I sit rigidly alert on the hard, wooden visitors’ benches somewhat relieved, but enormously uncomfortable and embarrassed. The front sitting area bustles with cops coming and going. Soon a noisy group of clean-shaven, close-cropped men, thick-waisted and wide-shouldered, come through the door laughing, backslapping, enjoying every moment. After a quick double take upon seeing us, they start in with gleeful banter: “What are you doing here? Hey, is that your wife? Hmm … Jack does that look like the woman we saw Mike with last time. Nope totally different. Hey last time I was on him he was with some babe of a blonde… . Really at MIT, I saw him with a gorgeous red head… . Which is his real wife? … Hey Mike saw all the gang tonight. What a night. Ira and Miles and Moofy, Josh, Debbie, and Danny and …” making manifest that they know every organizer I work with. These are the State Police assigned to the antiwar movement and radicals—the “red squad.”

Police drag in a kid from the crowds on the streets. As we sit in the waiting room, silent, embarrassed, we hear the cops work over the kid in the back, hear the impact of fists, boots, the angry yells of pain, rage, rebellion. And we sit there, attempting to make sense of what has happened. Sit there as “dangerous radicals” purposefully remaining in that police station. Sit there because originally those mobs of kids outside, now fighting police and threatening to storm the station, had been howling for our blood.

There are the occasional epiphanies: moments of sudden clarity, sometimes revealing truths that should have been blindingly obvious. My road to Damascus ran straight through Lowell in the spring of 1970.

The organizing group in Lowell was led by Ira Arlook. Handsome, small, intense, persuasive, Ira had been an antiwar leader at Stanford. He then moved to Boston and became an organizer of draft resistance. I grew increasingly close to him and thought of him as one of our best organizers and strategists. Neither of us had the slightest interest in any of the sectarian craziness that tore SDS to shreds. When Ira moved to Lowell to lead a small organizing group, I had little doubt that there would soon be a thriving community-based antiwar organization there. Indeed, the Lowell organizers steadily built a base of committed activists and many more supporters.

By 1970, Lowell was a hollow shell of the vibrant mill town that brought the industrial revolution to North America and sustained a strong textile industry for a hundred years. The massive brick mill buildings, beautiful and mighty, stood vacant, stripped of the machinery that had been moved to the American South before continuing on to Central America and Asia. The economy sagged, then cratered. Unemployment soared to 12 percent. The population was falling, the city failing. Neglect clawed the streets, the closed mill buildings, the boarded storefronts. Only the bars and taverns were full at ten in the morning and ten at night.

By the late sixties, the streets of Lowell would still be filled with young people, even as they longed to leave. Downtown was no longer vibrant, but it would be jammed, especially on Thursday—pay day, shopping night, drug-buying night. The culture was its own form of Wild West; young men challenging each other for no reason, for every reason, for the slightest reason, to fist fights on street corners, at gas stations, outside bars, inside bars. The Golden Glove regional boxing tournament was the annual talk of the town. Youth culture, few jobs, angry music, and a rolling river of despair powered a thriving drug market that was visible on downtown Market Street once the sun set. On a Thursday night, Ira and his team would be out on Market Street, talking with the long-haired, bell-bottomed men and the young women in their bell-bottoms, miniskirts, and short shorts. It was never hard to start up a conversation about the war.

“What do you think of the war in Vietnam?”

“Oh man, it sucks. Everyone knows that.”

“Do you have friends who are over there?”

“Yeah, my cousin is a marine in Nam right now.”

“We are working to get him home before he gets killed,” the organizer would tell them. “The politicians and the generals don’t care about your cousin; they don’t care about all the guys who get drafted. And you know it’s not their sons over there. It’s the guys from Lowell who are cannon fodder.”

Soon enough there would be a tight knot of young people intensely debating, most with serious faces, some stoned. Sometimes it would be a group of young women who had boyfriends and cousins facing the draft. Someone might bring up “We have to fight the commies,” and there would be a discussion of the history of the war. But usually, the real question was not whether the war was right or wrong, but would a kid be willing to do something out of the ordinary, would they join a march; would they take our flyers and pass them out?

While the young of Lowell seemed open to opposing the war, many of their parents were still firmly in the camp of “America, right or wrong.”

After months of these conversations, on street corners, in bars, outside of schools, the Lowell organizing team decided it was time for a march to show that the antiwar movement had come to Lowell. Flyers were handed out across the city, throughout downtown, at Lowell State and the community college and at the high school. The whole city seemed to be buzzing about the march and debating the war. Just what we had hoped for. The organizers thought they would turn out 500 people for this first march.

Two days before the march was scheduled, I talked with Ira who was somewhat concerned.

“Michael,” he said, “I am not sure what exactly is happening but in the last days, a lot of kids who had said they were marching with us are now saying they cannot. One kid in particular, I know he is with us, I know it. But now he keeps saying to me that he just can’t do it but he won’t tell me why.”

“Well often people get cold feet,” I said, “but I am guessing once the march happens, they will join in.”

“No,” Ira responded, “something is up, I am just not sure what. So, it will be good to have you and the rest of the organizers from other cities up here with us. Meet us early in front of City Hall.”

I thought nothing of this conversation at the time. So often we had seen people wrestle with the decision to take a first public step against the war.

Amy and I arrived early, meeting Ira and the other organizers who explained the plans for the March. We would start at City Hall and march through downtown Lowell. The lead contingent would be made up entirely of returned Vietnam veterans. A modest number of student antiwar activists from outside of Lowell showed up. We expected hundreds of Lowell young people to join us, but Ira said the numbers were definitely going to be lower than we had hoped for.

The late afternoon April light seemed harsh and flat as Amy and I made our way from our car toward City Hall, past Merrimack and Market Streets—the streets filled with even more young people than usual. The crowds large, roiling, talking, anxious, eager. Men were spilling out of bars, already juiced. As we walked by the crowds of young people, we could sense excitement. All around us were people nervously bouncing, talking heatedly. We could not make out the conversations. Perhaps, I thought, Ira is wrong, and this march is going to be larger than we thought.

While we made our way toward the assembly spot for the march, unknown to us, another group was getting ready, the regulars at the Celtic Club, a drinking spot above the Lull and Hartford Sporting Goods, a place often referred to as a “tough joint.” Some days before, the Massachusetts State Police Red Squad, accompanied by local police, had dropped into the bar, searching out some of the toughest young men in the city, some of whom ran and enforced the street-level drug selling, ex-jocks, bouncers, leg breakers, and street corner toughs. Days after the march we were told about what had transpired in the Celtic Club. Decades later, most of what we had been told was confirmed in an article in the Lowell Sun with the exception that the meeting with the police might have been the day of the march.¹ The conversation in the Celtic Club went something along these lines:

“Let us buy a round,” said the cops, to the surprise of the guys in the bar.

“Look,” the lead cop said, “you are All American boys, you love our country, right?”

“Sure do,” replied Gouch Gauthier, the de facto leader of the Celtic regulars.

“Look,” the cop went on, “you know about this planned march. Well, this march is not really about the war at all. It’s a ploy by a group of commies. They are getting big money from Fidel Castro and the Cubans. Listen these guys’ real aim is to take over your streets, your turf… . If you care about Lowell, if you love America, you need to get out there and kick the shit out of these outsiders. They don’t belong in Lowell. And they want to take over.”

The cops stood several more rounds. As everyone drank, the “Staties” passed around some pictures. “See this one—that’s Ira Arlook; he is one of the leaders. See this guy with the mustache? That’s Ansara. He is coming up for the march from Boston.”

Photos of the other organizers were shared, identities explained.

As the last round was drunk and one of the cops actually paid the barkeep, one of the lead Staties concluded: “Look. No guns. We don’t want you to kill anyone. Just kick their asses, show them what Lowell men are made of. Do your patriotic job. Protect your turf. The Lowell police will look the other way. Just run these commie maggots out of town.”

The Celtic crew was more than willing.

As Amy and I arrived at the march starting point, there were remarkably few policemen on the streets. Perhaps 200 marchers assembled. There were eight or nine Vietnam vets, most wearing their fatigue jackets. A group of thirty students and a few professors from UMass Lowell showed up. Some high school students. Our organizers from around the state. A group of women from Cambridge arrived, many wearing army surplus, several with head bands, carrying flags of the National Liberation Front. Several marchers showed up with “Free Bobby Seale” posters. Almost all the marchers were white except for a small contingent from Lowell public housing. Their leader pulled Ira aside.

“Look man, I’ve heard there is serious trouble coming. I think I better run home and get my piece.”

“No. Look we have to keep things peaceful. Please don’t do that.”

“Okay, man, but I am telling you there is big-time trouble coming our way.”

Ira announced that we would start marching.

“Stay together,” he said. “Watch out for trouble. Stick close and be careful. We have marshals to guide us, please follow their lead.”

The Vietnam vets took their place at the head of the march. The small brigade of women swung in behind, the rest of the marchers following.

No sooner had the march begun than it became clear we were in for more trouble than we could possibly handle. The sidewalks were jammed with far more people than were marching; they pressed forward to get a good look at us. I had the distinct sense that the dense jostling crowds were eager, excited, and expectant, not actively hostile but not supportive. Every few minutes, the crowds would part, and a wedge of young men swinging two-by-fours would charge into the march, rapidly breaking it up. Soon we were ducking, trying to avoid a brick hurled from the back of the crowd. Suddenly a battered metal garbage can soared out of the back of the crowds and into the march, landing with a jarring clang and spilling its rotting contents onto the street. A beer bottle arced high, hit a woman in the head and she dropped, bloodied, and hurt. More beer bottles came flying. The worst damage, however, was done by the brawling guys with two-by-fours who kept sprinting into the march swinging wildly. I was jarred by the sound of wood hitting backs, the smash of bottles breaking on the street, the growing number of injured and bloody marchers.

The march quickly dissolved into a frightened and disorganized mess. It was clear that attempting to continue would result in serious injuries. The vets wanted to keep going. Ira said, “No, stop and head home.” We started breaking people into clusters and shepherding them away in different directions as quickly as we could. We knew the only safety lay in splitting the marchers into so many different groups that those intent on attacking us could not follow everyone. Still, we wanted our people to stay in large enough groups that the size offered some protection. Skirmishes broke out all over the place as the protestors headed to cars and vans. Soon the marchers had all gone. But the crowds of kids swelled and remained.

Amy and I finished successfully escorting one group to their cars and decided to head for our car and beat a retreat. Stupidly, we were alone. We had to walk back across Merrimack Street and the downtown to get to our car. Taking off our antiwar buttons, we hoped no one would know who we were. We were wrong. Crossing Merrimack Street, a small group of young men spotted us and yelled to each other, “There’s one of the cocksuckers!”

I was now quite worried.

I told Amy, “Okay let’s walk, not run, quickly in the other direction.”

The small pack of men walked briskly parallel to us on the other side of the street taunting and yelling.

“Don’t pay any attention,” I said to Amy. “Just keep walking.”

She put her head down and strode on purposefully. Everything slowed down and then sped into a blur of motion as Gauthier and his Celtic crew sprinted across the street, charging into us. Amy went flying, ending up wrapped around a parking meter. In a fraction of a second, Gauthier confronted me. I thought nothing, reacted not at all, as he suddenly swung a practiced right to the jaw followed by a quick combination from the left.

I felt the impact, a quick blow on one side of the jaw followed by the blow on the other side. The adrenaline was pumping. I couldn’t think straight. I was worried about Amy. I wanted to get us out of there but had no idea how. I just stood there. Hands down. He looked at me in surprise. I was still standing. Later he would tell our organizers that he was certain he had broken my jaw and was expecting me to fall. For a minute we just stood there looking at each other.

A passing group of older men, seeing a young couple in obvious distress and not knowing, perhaps not caring, who we were, came across the street and yelled at the younger guys to knock it off. Amy stood up, bruised but not seriously hurt. We huddled close together. As the guys who had attacked us followed, the older men escorted us around the corner, telling us we should be okay now and veered off. We walked down the street as quickly as we could without running. Suddenly, ahead of us, we could see a much larger crowd of kids, screaming, laughing, running, throwing things randomly at windows, totally out of control and coming directly at us. At this point the smaller group behind us picked up their pace. We were caught in the middle. The crowd in front at full charge. The small group behind us running to catch up.

As we realized how much trouble we were in, we also realized why the older “good Samaritans” had suggested we would be okay. We sprinted for the only open doorway that offered safety—the front door of the Lowell Police Station.

We rushed in and sat down. Outside the young crowds were in an uproar. The violence against the march was quickly replaced by a joyful explosion of youthful revolt against authority as the crowd began to attempt to storm the police station. We were forgotten in a surge of rebellion directed at the police. Worried police broke out black helmets and chest protectors and—looking ominously anonymous and slightly robotic—charged past us to protect the front of the station. Shortly a few cops went into the back room and came out with shotguns. As the lethal violence of the state was made manifest, we sat there, silent, unsettled, attempting to pull ourselves back together.

Everyone was too busy to pay attention to us.

We watched, pained and miserable, as two of the police in riot gear dragged in a young man, one pulling him by the arms, the other alternating between pushing him and beating him with his baton. The young man, in bell-bottom jeans, brown hair down to his shoulders, his band-emblazoned tee shirt now torn, screamed at the cops as he was dragged along the floor, “Get off me you fucking pigs!” Each yell occasioned more beating. They dragged him past us and into the back to the cells. Amy and I found it hard to sit there, to do nothing. But the alternative seemed to be to leave, and outside the crowd was raging. We sat, silent, ashamed.

Every few minutes, policemen would return from out front, dragging another young man from the crowd outside. Soon we could hear screams coming from the cells in the back as furious police vented their anger on the rebellious kids. Slowly the crowds were beaten back from the front of the police station. More prisoners were dragged swearing and screaming into the station and some were worked over in the back.

The State Police Red Squad, smiling, obviously quite pleased with the results of their work, strolled in and started to mock us.

A young distant cousin snuck in to check if we were all right. We were physically bruised, but what hurt was sitting in that police station watching kids being worked over. We continued to sit. And as we sat, saying nothing, I thought, This is upside down. The young people of Lowell are in revolt, are being beaten by angry cops, and they want to kick the shit out of us.

The momentary youth revolt burned out, doused in part by the arrests. Slowly calm settled. We could no longer hear the noise of angry crowds outside. Still, we continued to sit. After a time, a small trickle of young men and a few young women made their way into the station hoping to get friends released.

Soon we were joined on our bench by a group of men in their mid-twenties, there to collect their friends. They did not know who we were and assumed we were there for the same reason.

The one sitting closest to me asked in a friendly tone: “Have you heard when the cops are going to release people or are they actually holding them for processing?”

“I am not here for a friend. Nope I haven’t heard anything about timing. Who are you here for?”

“We’re here for some of the guys we work with. All of us work together.”

“Oh,” I asked, “were you and your friends breaking up the antiwar march? Was that why your pals were arrested?”

He laughed and gestured toward the rest of his group down the bench.

“No. We thought the march was all fucked up, but we don’t like the war either. We were just watching what was going on but when the cops tried to arrest some of us, well, then it was all in. You know. We don’t let anyone push us around.”

I asked where they all worked.

“We all work at the GE plant,” he said.

I asked about how that work was and what they thought of their union. Good jobs, they said. Decent pay and bennies. Decent union.

“Well,” I said, “my wife here—Amy—and I helped organize the march tonight.”

“Shit you don’t say!”

“Yes, we are dead opposed to the war. I hate that so many guys from Lowell have to go fight that war and you know the sons of the rich don’t go. I think the war is wrong and I don’t want to see another American die over there for no reason at all.”

“Amen brother,” came the response.

“You know,” he said, bringing the rest of his buddies into the conversation, “we all served in Nam. We don’t support the fucking war. We know what’s going on.”

“So why did you hate the march?” I asked.

They listed their reasons in rapid and compelling order: “You marched under the flag of the Vietcong who killed our buddies. We actually respect the Vietcong; they’re tough motherfuckers but it disrespects our dead, our fight, and us to march under that flag.”

There was nothing I could say. I thought about all the years of hating the war and then hating the government that prosecuted it. I thought of how we had steadily slipped into a rage and in that rage, it seemed that we wanted to take the most extreme position of opposition that we could. How could I explain my path from loving the Declaration of Independence and believing in American exceptionalism to marching with National Liberation Front (NLF) flags? I didn’t bring them or wave them. I didn’t chant “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win.” But I had been totally comfortable marching with my pals who did. How could I explain any of that to these guys? How could I make sense of it myself?

They went on: “You had a group of women all march together and taunt us. What is that about? Trying to make us feel as if we are not men. Trying to provoke us? Well, you succeeded. And then some of the women were waving the Vietcong flag and waving posters of Ho. What the fuck was all that about? That was fucking insulting us, insulting our sacrifices and mocking our lives that was what that was all about.”

Again, I had no response. I felt sick to my stomach. I liked these guys.

Then, one of them stated with finality, “And you don’t come from here.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s true we don’t live here now, but my father was born right on Fletcher Street in the Acre and grew up here.”

That seemed to make me and by extension Amy somewhat less foreign. Also it was as if the act of listening respectfully while they explained what we had done wrong, had created a bond at least for that moment on that strange spring night.

I smiled at them and said, “I hear you. We respect you and we respect your sacrifices. Really, we do. We want to make sure that no one else has to go over there. You know we have spent so much time opposing this damn war, that sometimes we just get carried away. But I hear you. We should have been marching under the American flag. I hear you. We love our country, but we hate this fucking war—and we hate the people who sent you over there. The ones who sit in their nice offices and send others off to kill and die.”

As we sat on that hard wooden bench in the Lowell Police Station, waiting for their friends to be released, we relaxed into talking about everything; did we like the Stones; what did we think could stop Richard Nixon; we all agreed he was no good. Amy asked more about their experiences in Nam, and they shared stories, some funny, some frightening. We made the point that many Vietnam veterans were joining the antiwar movement. They weren’t sure that they could do that since they didn’t want to dishonor the sacrifices of their friends who had died there. But they were against the war so maybe. But what about those damn flags and the women?

Amy tried to talk about why women were marching together and how it was time for the roles of women to change. Their response to that was at best skeptical. Then we asked about their experiences with the police and that produced an outburst of profanity and more stories. We listened more than we talked.

After their friends were finally released, many battered, they introduced them to us. As we all got up to leave, they made a point of protectively walking us to our car to ensure that we did not get into any more trouble. Both Amy and I felt totally thrown off-kilter. The embarrassment and the irony of being in that police station was intense. The idea that the police had protected us from young Americans who also opposed the war but were insulted by us was profoundly upsetting.

I recognized their truths. How would I feel if my closest friend had been killed in Vietnam? I would hate the war that killed him. But I would not respond to anyone marching under the flag of the enemy. I understood how disrespectful and challenging we seemed. As much of a feminist as I thought myself, I also understood that there was a discussion and a process needed to get American men to change. Confronting men with chanting brigades of women just might not be the best way to get that discussion started. We needed to listen as much as we talked. More than anything else we needed to be respectful of the people we wanted to reach and organize—and we were going about it in the wrong way. I felt I had just seen how much I had to learn. I liked and respected those young men who sat on the bench next to us that night. I felt despair that the student and antiwar movements would ever be able to change enough to reach them. I also felt new hope that they could be reached. I was determined to learn a better way to organize.

Ira and the other organizers went out onto the streets of downtown Lowell the next day. Their audacity so impressed the group that had broken up the march, that a meeting was set up. Slowly trust was built. Gauthier and his guys realized that they had been played. They promised to protect the next antiwar march in Lowell, and they did. No one had the audacity to explain that with them on our side, there would be no one to protect the march from.