Fifth Estate Collective
Napalm Protest in Los Angeles
A determined three-day demonstration against UCLA cooperation with the makers of napalm bombs blossomed out at the university’s Student Placement Center last Monday through Wednesday.
Groups of picketers numbering between 20 and 30 gathered each of the three days inside the building and in front of the office which a representative of the Dow Chemical Company was using for job interviews with students.
The pickets, joined on Monday and Wednesday by the Guerilla Theater in stark skeleton masks and black robes and bearing blowups of Vietnam atrocity pictures, were on several occasions threatened with arrest for refusing to leave the building.
They effectively blockaded the Dow Chemical representative inside his cubbyhole. Vice Chancellor Charles Young ordered the pickets to leave the building on Monday and threatened them with arrest but they remained several hours anyway.
On Tuesday, University police told them that if they did not leave they would be physically tossed out. The picketing continued outside the building.
On Wednesday, the pickets (organized by the Vietnam Day Committee) returned again to the Placement Center and were again scheduled to enter the building, courting arrest.
“Vice Chancellor Young promised us that the matter of war crimes companies recruiting on the UCLA campus would be put up to a referendum of all UCLA students,” said VDC member Larry Kimmett.
“We demanded that the Dow representative be banned from campus until that time, but Young refused to consider this; so we continued our picketing. We also picketed the Dow man last December and we plan to continue picketing this producer of the napalm bombs which murder helpless civilians, until they decide to stay away from our campus entirely,” said Kimmett.
Related
See Fifth Estate’s Vietnam Resource Page.