Shawyer dissertation May 2008 final version - The University of ...

1969, “Four Days of Rage” campaign meant to recreate the chaos of Convention week. Adisastrous SNCC merger with the increasingly belligerent Black Panther Party signaledthe end of the organization’s nonviolent grassroots foundations. Fearful of anotherChicago, the police and military felt justified in using greater force against anti-wardemonstrators, which had tragic consequences at Kent State University and Jackson StateCollege in May, 1970, when student protesters were killed by authorities shooting intocrowds. 74After Chicago the Yippies and their allies also lost the support of many pacifistactivists and others who shunned militant dissent. The Left was split on violence as aprotest tactic. Internal wrangling over political theory and strategies fractured SDS andSNCC. Factionalism over political tactics also damaged YIP: at the 1972 DemocraticConvention in Miami Beach, young self-described “zippies” turned on the older Yippiegeneration, frustrated with the lack of leadership in the Yippie movement and blamingtheir elders for not providing more direction (Rubin, Growing 7). The very thing thatmade Yippie unique, its adoption of the hippies’ do-your-own-thing philosophy and nonhierarchicalnetwork organization, was scorned by younger activists desperate for clearleadership and a specific political message.Perhaps the young zippies had a point: the core of founding Yippies spent lesstime working for YIP as they involved themselves in other causes. In September, 1968,Robin Morgan and Nancy Kurshan turned their attention to demonstrating against theMiss America Pageant in Atlantic City, and delved into the women’s liberation74 Ohio National Guard killed four students at Kent State, while Mississippi State police killed two studentsat Jackson State.207