On the home front

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat A 1969 Desert Yearbook photo of a UA march on the Mall

Editor's Note: 1999, the turn of the century and the millennium will be a worldwide year of historical reflection and celebration. The Arizona Daily Wildcat today features the first in a weekly series of stories examining the events that shaped the University of Arizona community and the roles we have played in world events.

They were about to put a match to the American Flag.

A late night rally in 1969 brought UA student demonstrators to the west end of Old Main with plans to lower and torch the flag to protest the Vietnam War.

Before the flame scorched the fabric, Marvin D. "Swede" Johnson, then the UA Vice President for Public Relations, grabbed the flag and wrapped it around his body.

By October 1969, more than 400 Arizonans had died in Vietnam jungles as opposition to the war grew nationwide and infected college campuses.

Sen. George Cunningham, D - Tucson, then a UA graduate student, finished his undergraduate study at the University of Arizona in 1967 and witnessed much of the drama that unfolded in that decade. He said yesterday the events of the 60s were dramatic, but that there was "much more at stake."

Cunningham said the protests of the time were not just about the war in Vietnam, but a manifestation of larger social changes.

"It was a Civil Rights era, an against the Vietnam War era, a question authority era," Cunningham said. "It was a little bit of a different country then. It was a different society. It was a society that was transitioning from one in which there really weren't equal rights for all."

And UA students wanted to be heard.

In the spring of 1968, about 150 students peacefully invaded the Old Main Building and put up a microphone outside the east steps. The student insurgents proceeded to decry the horrors of the Vietnam War and target the UA for its compulsory ROTC program.

Cunningham said the overall feeling was that the "administration or the university was effectively supporting the war in Vietnam because they were allowing ROTC programs on campus."

"It was an era in which the administration of the university was perceived to be evil," he said.

At the time, he said, he never would have envisioned himself as a university administrator, although he eventually served as University of Arizona Vice President from 1985 to 1988.

Cunningham, a bystander in the protests, said his job as a student campaign manager included pushing the youth platform on university officials.

"That was where I was far more a participant in terms of questioning authority," he said, referring to his time as a campaign manager. "We ran a platform that demanded the administration do certain things. (We) demanded that they eliminated compulsory ROTC."

Student leaders would later extend protests to overwhelmingly support the National Moratorium against the war in Vietnam in 1969.

The Moratorium movement spread throughout college campus and city streets nationwide. Supporters rallied, ranted and ditched classes to protest United States' involvement in the Vietnam War.

At the University of Arizona, planning for the Moratorium included negotiations with administrators about providing asylum for the students planning on ditching classes for the Oct. 15, 1969, March.

Students gathered on the west side of Old Main on the day of the protest and then marched down East University Boulevard toward North Fourth Avenue armed with crosses representing the Arizona military losses, which they eventually piled up in front of the downtown Selective Service office.

The protests were non-violent, but still potent enough to make a point, Cunningham said.

Social inequality, coupled with two decades of Cold War paranoia, enraged the younger generation in the late 1960s because it was hit hardest by both, he said.

"One, they were being drafted," he said. "Second, young people were at the front burner of the change. It was the idealism of students that everybody should have the same opportunity respective of their ethnicity or color that generated this tremendous energy and intensity among students to fight for those rights."