By Scott Cendrowski
The State News
In the spring of 1970, former President Richard Nixon had escalated the war in Vietnam with a bombing campaign in Cambodia, four students were slain by National Guardsmen at Kent State University - and at MSU, striking students were pleading their case against the war and against authorities for weeks.
The anti-war sentiment energized thousands of MSU students against involvement in Vietnam during the late 1960s. Already, the civil rights movement had mobilized black people throughout the country, and now students were taking a stand against the inequities in American policy.
On campus, MSU Interim President Walter Adams led thousands in a peace march from the Auditorium to the Capitol, professors gave out blanket grades to save their students from the draft and student organizations corralled the masses to protest the war.
Students found a voice with campus protests and Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, an anti-war and pro-social-change student organization with roots in Port Huron.
Meanwhile, undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation agents infiltrated SDS, trying to undermine its student leaders through anonymous letters and tactics bordering on violation of the First Amendment. An FBI file obtained by The State News details its infiltration of SDS and its monitoring of The State News during the late 1960s and early '70s. The infiltration turned into a badly kept secret, as most former SDS members knew the FBI and other governmental agencies were following their actions.
Protests of the times changed large, public-university campuses from complacent institutions to epicenters for social change with thousands of youths leading the charge. In 1965, 56 demonstrators were arrested at a sit-in protesting the city of East Lansing not adopting an open occupancy law for fair housing.
As much of a national issue as the Vietnam War was, former students, professors and SDS members from MSU say their efforts in bringing thousands of students to war protests aided in ending the war by helping diminish public support for what almost all of them deemed an "unlawful enterprise."
Part One
A social revolution
The beginning of Students for a Democratic Society was rooted in the 1962 Port Huron Statement, a draft of ideals and social values declaring the need for a sweeping social movement in the United States. It was created in Port Huron, and shortly after, as other social movements progressed, it expanded to large public universities nationwide.
After the group's expansion to campuses from Columbia University to the University of California, Berkeley, the FBI became more interested in the activities of the college organization.
In an FBI file obtained by The State News titled, "COINTELPRO-NEW LEFT-DETROIT," are countless documents, showing the FBI infiltrated SDS with undercover agents, sent anonymous letters to the student organization in attempts to create internal turmoil and was very active throughout MSU's campus, gathering intelligence on left-wing political activities.
Other government agencies worked undercover apart from the FBI, such as the Michigan State Police. The MSU Library's Special Collections has several "red files" about left-leaning MSU students and professors, some going back to the 1950s.
In a document dated Aug. 20, 1969, the FBI sent a letter signed, "An Angry Black Brother" to SDS leaders, including lines such as, "Since when do us blacks have to accept the dictates of the lillywhite SDS. We have had more than we can tolerate of white pig fascist control over our destiny." It says the letter was used as a technique to cause tension between SDS and the Black Panther Party.
SDS members at MSU organized protests and demonstrations, with members ranging from violent extremists to casual anti-war protesters. Never a cohesive group, most of its members leaned left, but internal disputes polarized the student organization.
Mike Price is a former SDS member who still lives by its ideals, attending meetings for the Students for Economic Justice and Direct Action, two activist groups in the East Lansing area. Price said the tension in SDS was obvious: "The tent was too big; it included people from religious pacifists all the way to Maoists."
Price has a stack of intelligence on him from the FBI, CIA and Michigan State Police, and said the Big Brother monitoring was just part of the movement.
"If you're doing the right thing, they'll come after you," he said.
There were more moderate students within SDS, including Rick Kibbey, an active member throughout his years at MSU from 1966 through 1972.
"I got involved in SDS about 10 minutes after I got to campus," said the Lansing resident and executive director of the Lansing Eastside Community Development Corp.
Kibbey and other former SDS members described the anti-war movement's beginning as an unprecedented time, when they couldn't look to any other generation for help because no other generation had participated in such an encompassing rebellion against the status quo.
"There's no question in my mind that the civil rights movement was a catalyst for what happened in the '60s," said Henry Silverman, vice president of the Lansing branch of the American Civil Liberties Union and MSU history chairman emeritus. "It was the first real example that the society that existed was unfair. The older generation was cheating the younger generation and look what the blacks were doing about it."
The anti-war movement stemmed, in part, from other social revolutions of the 1960s. Desegregation and the civil rights movement began with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and continued through the next decade. A sexual revolution took shape as the birth control pill became more widely accepted and prescribed. And with a liberal Supreme Court abetting a social shift, America had the opportunity to change.
As Kibbey described it, SDS and the anti-war movement's purpose were confirmed by returning soldiers.
"What made it click was when guys started coming back to campus who were over there, and the anti-war GI movement really galvanized," he said. "It was no longer an intellectual exercise - you knew a lot of lives were at stake, and the importance of what you were doing became more clear."
In 1968, Kibbey and 11 other student protesters went to trial after being charged with trespassing during a June 5, 1968, sit-in at the old Administration Building.
On that day, Kibbey came to watch the protest, but after seeing students walk in and out of the building several times at a supposed sit-in, he questioned how serious they were and left. During a break from his job at the Eppley Center, Kibbey came back to the protest to see what was happening. About five minutes later, a busload of state police officers drove up and began dispersing the crowd.
"I just got there, so I'm on the outside edge of crowd and the crowd turns around. I went from being in the back to the front.
"They never said a word. They came out swarming and started swinging at the crowd," he said.
Kibbey said he was hit across the face with an officer's baton and then restrained by police.
Turning your body limp was common knowledge amongst protesters when being restrained by police, Kibbey remembered, but said police would twist thumbs or wrists to make protesters comply.
Kibbey was arrested and charged with aggravated assault, a high misdemeanor. Before his trial, he watched his judge give a student 10 days in jail for first-offense trespassing. He said it was usually a $25 fine. Kibbey worried he would be sent to Jackson's state prison for his misdemeanor charge after watching the judge dole out harsh penalties.
The morning of his scheduled trial, Kibbey learned the judge had died the night before.
"I considered it to mean someone was looking out for me," Kibbey said.
In front of a new judge, Kibbey's attorney pleaded down his charge to assault and battery and, therefore, he would receive a lesser sentence.
The visiting judge in the case asked Kibbey if he knew what pleading guilty to the charges meant, and then asked if the persons he allegedly assaulted were in the courtroom.
"I was 140 pounds soaking wet, and these six state cops stand up," Kibbey said. "These guys are 6'2", 185 pounds, and the judge looks at them, then at me."
He recalls the judge told him that an assault and battery charge meant Kibbey must have had the means to put fear into the state police. Kibbey responded, "That's what they say."
The judge gave him a $50 fine. "I don't think I could've gotten off lighter than that," he said.
During the anti-war marches and rallies, a priority for students was being educated on the cause. To educate the masses, professors and student leaders staged small discussions around campus on current events.
Lash Larrowe, the former faculty adviser to SDS, started by explaining the socialism doctrine to SDS members, and after being so well received, spoke at rallies to energize students.
During one rally at the rock on Farm Lane, an SDS leader called Larrowe five minutes before it started, desperate for someone to speak.
"So I hot-footed it over there and the head of SDS was mulling around trying to get this thing started," the economics professor emeritus said. Larrowe didn't have anything prepared, so he asked the leader to find someone else. After he came around again, Larrowe finally spoke.
"So I climbed up on the rock and denounced a resolution they had passed and somehow the First Amendment was brought into it," Larrowe said. "They swamped me with these talks, generally at rallies against the war."
Part Two
'The Man'
spies on 'U'
Standing opposite of the masses were university officials and police, initially unprepared for the hoards of students galvanized by SDS and the anti-war movement on MSU's campus.
As associate dean and director of student affairs, Louis Hekhuis would stand with the protesters and try to find a medium between blocking Grand River Avenue and making their case.
Hekhuis' job was to keep the peace.
"The idea was not to depend on someone else to be your eyes and ears," he said of his time in rallies and protests, where he would talk with students about a way to avoid interfering with classes.
"We tried not to intervene, but to discuss how to avoid escalating things. Student organizations had the right to demonstrate," he said.
The FBI would try to work closely with university officials, Hekhuis said, trying to gather intelligence on students. But Hekhuis said he stopped giving agents information when they asked for personal information about specific students. At demonstrations, Hekhuis saw the FBI agents he had just worked with and undercover state police.
"Every time they looked like a used-car salesman," he said of the agents.
MSU police also joined the race to gather intelligence on student protests and were first in line to respond to demonstrations.
Dick Bernitt was MSU chief of police from 1960 to 1986, and considered most of the young men under his command to be sympathetic with the demonstrators.
He said in the face of spitting, cursing and thrown rocks, the police were extremely well-disciplined in dealing with the masses. Student protesters often claimed police brutality when being restrained at rallies, but Bernitt said it was "bullshit."
Part Three
FBI and The State News
At the same time the FBI entrenched itself in SDS, it also monitored The State News.
Several documents within the "COINTELPRO-NEW LEFT-DETROIT" files show the FBI sent anonymous letters to various State News advertisers because of a Feb. 12, 1969, Page One story headlined, "Counter-demonstrators face Movement; violence averted."
The State News reported a group of counter-demonstrators, mostly athletes, had confronted a rally of protesters at the Administration Building. One of the activists, a black student, took a microphone and said "some jocks were beating up on people last night" and that "(a)ll our brothers are gonna see that we aren't gonna have any more fucking jocks. Any of those mothers want to screw around, we gonna wipe their ass right off this campus."
The FBI responded to the article in an internal document dated Feb. 28, 1969, noting that anonymous letters to State News advertisers should include: "As a patron of your store, I can assure you that I will be no more tolerant of a store that continues to advertise in such a smut sheet." It also instructs the letter to be signed, "A Disgusted Tax Payer and Patron."
Edward Brill, editor in chief of The State News from 1968-69, said the decision to run what the FBI called "vulgar language" was surrounded by a lot of discussion within the newsroom, but ultimately, they ran it.
"We felt that it was important to convey exactly what was being said," Brill said more than 30 years later. "And we probably wanted to be a bit provocative."
"This was a way to get some discussion going and be a little bit in your face with the type of reporting," he said. Brill is now a partner of Proskauer Rose LLP in New York City, one of nation's largest law firms.
Until The State News contacted Brill about the FBI files, he was unaware of the bureau's involvement in the activities of the newspaper.
"I was shocked and outraged," he said of the files. "But I had two opposite feelings: one was outrage at the government for the fact that they were trying to subvert a public institution.
"My other reaction was, what a total waste of government resources to think that this is what the FBI was doing, spending time writing memos and thinking of ways to interfere with The State News. SDS is one thing, but to be attacking The State News and trying to undermine it because they disagreed with the types of stories printed or vulgarity used - that's completely unbelievable."
Paul Bresson, an FBI spokesman, said examples of anonymous mailings are an indication of the times. He said the FBI would have to meet certain requirements or have a specific reason to mail them, however, he added that because of possible ongoing investigations and the amount of time passed, he couldn't comment further on the practice.
Part Four
You might be drafted
Even though SDS's grip on campus increased in the latter part of the '60s and early '70s, the majority of MSU students weren't members, but still wanted a part of the anti-war movement.
Paul Spata was an undergraduate student at the time and has been described by former students as a "protest-organizer extraordinaire."
After graduating from high school in 1965 and spending time at Yale University and Vista, a domestic peace corps group, the Lansing resident came back to the area to attend MSU in 1969.
In May 1970, he participated in the MSU student strike. During the strikes, professors canceled classes or taught their students outside of university buildings, and many students just stopped going to class. Attendance in the Social Sciences and Arts & Letters colleges ranged from average to zero. An MSU faculty publication in 1970 reported a professor in the College of Social Sciences saying only six students of the 90 enrolled attended a Thursday class.
Spata picketed in front of Berkey Hall during the strike to discourage students from attending class and to address the strike's issues. Before classes, he would enter classrooms to ask the professors for time to address their classes about the cause.
"They knew their students were anxious about it," he said. "As much as they were listening to their instructors, they were talking amongst themselves."
If nothing else, Spata said his address to classes would explain why students were picketing outside the building. "We were only actively picketing before classes; for the next 50 minutes we weren't going to be doing anything," he said. "By the time they let out, we'd be back and people had to find their way around us to get in.
"There are only three entrances to the building, so as long as we had those covered, they had to talk to us."
Campus during the strike was filled with anxiety, Spata said, stemming from the Kent State killings and a new sense of urgency with increased military presence in Indochina.
"Every kid on campus knew, even if they weren't part of a group protest, that their lives were on the line; they were no longer secure. People were feeling like if they didn't take a stand, it might be worse than taking one," he said.
Anxiousness also filled campus because of what Spata termed the five-letter word: D-R-A-F-T.
Men could be drafted until age 26. Spata said students could only defer themselves as a full-time student until 24. He was never drafted, but fear of the draft hit home at 23 when only a sophomore.
"We could only be deferred for so long, and then we were going to go," he said. "(Students) could ignore civil rights issues because they could be real insulated on campus. But it wasn't very easy to ignore the war."
Vietnam's jungles seemed close for MSU students, and the increasing proximity was felt by professors - all who had the power to control which students were subjected to the draft through grades.
Al Cafagna, now an associate philosophy professor emeritus, said grades were important to both professors and students during the draft.
"Suddenly your grades became the thing that would send someone to their death. So many professors inflated their grades and started giving blanket grades," he said. "So if a student flunked out, he was drafted."
In a Feb. 14, 1969, State News story about professors protesting university officials who contended "outside agitators" were responsible for many of campus rallies, Cafagna was listed in opposition of police and MSU officials.
A large contingent of faculty frequently denounced the administration. An anti-war, pro-civil-rights, student-run poetry magazine called Orange Horse was published by American Thought and Language professors. Many of the faculty involved didn't receive their tenure.
Part Five
Question of legality
In a cloud of secret agents and anonymous letters, the legality of the FBI's actions might not be easy to identify, said Kevin Saunders, a professor in the MSU College of Law.
Sending anonymous letters to The State News' advertisers could have been a violation of the bureau's policy, he said, but probably not law.
On the FBI infiltrating SDS, Saunders said if agents were just sitting in a public meeting, which most of the SDS meetings were, it's not a violation of the First Amendment, or freedom of speech, more specifically.
However, if those agents began to take notes on the cars in the parking lot or take pictures of the students at the meeting, ACLU's Henry Silverman said that would infringe on both the First and Fourth Amendments. The Fourth Amendment is the right of people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant.
"If you go to a pubic meeting and stand there, it's probably legal," Silverman said. "But if you overstep that and start taking notes, that's a search."
Both the Lansing branch of the FBI and its federal headquarters in Washington could not comment on the COINTELPRO cases of the 1960s and '70s because most of the personnel of the time have retired or changed positions.
The bureau also could not comment on whether the same tactics, anonymous letters and the use of undercover agents in student organizations are still in practice today.
