Are we glossing over the complex realities and just embracing the legend?
By Todd Gitlin
For The Los Angeles Times
TODD GITLIN teaches journalism at Columbia University. His next book, "The Bulldozer and the Big Tent," will be published by John Wiley this fall.
January 27, 2007
THE NEWS burst forth this week that eight former radicals, all or almost all of them said to have been members of a Marxist-Leninist fragment called the Black Liberation Army (a small breakaway from the faction-ridden Black Panthers) had been arrested — 35 years after the fact — and charged with the shotgun murder of a San Francisco police sergeant in 1971. Two of these men are currently serving time in New York for another policeman's murder. Newspapers report that several of the others went on to constructive lives and that, by all accounts, they are husbands, grandfathers and all-around nice guys.
Just a few days before these arrests, I was one of more than 4,000 people at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, who watched Brett Morgen's vivid documentary "Chicago 10," about the street confrontations during the1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and the farcical riot conspiracy trial that followed in 1969-70. Most of the audience cheered wildly, probably aroused by the on-the-street rebelliousness of the time.
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