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On December 26, 1969, in Flint Michigan, roughly 300 college students – almost exclusively white – gathered in a run-down dance hall called the Giant Ballroom. The ballroom was located in the heart of one of Flint’s black neighborhoods, and also one of its most violent. A bullet hole in the front door marked the spot where, the night before, a disgruntled patron had fired a shotgun into the hall inadvertently killing a black customer who was there to celebrate Christmas, and was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.[1]
The attendees were members or alumni of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest radical movement on university campuses during the 1960s. They had come to attend the last “National Council” meeting of SDS.
The organization’s recently elected leaders, who called themselves the “Weathermen” were billing the event as a “National War Council.” The name was not rhetorical. Their intention was to transform SDS into an underground terrorist army whose mission was to be an “enemy within,” taking up arms against America, in behalf of the non-white peoples of the world whom America allegedly oppressed. They intended to play a key role in the struggle to defeat the global empire of U.S. imperialism, and replace it with a communist state.
Columbia graduate, Mark Rudd, the National Secretary of SDS, described the venue of the gathering in his memoir Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen. “The Detroit collective had decorated the ballroom unlike any other dance hall I’d ever seen. A six-foot cardboard machine gun suspended over the stage set the tone, as did psychedelic portraits of our heroes Fidel, Che, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, Mao, Malcolm X, and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers.”[2] Cleaver had earned his spot by breaking with the Panther leadership over his call for a shooting war against America starting immediately.
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