Southern Protests

1 Southern Protests: Scott Camil and the Anti-War Movement at the University of Florida, 1969-1975 Michael Steven Thomas 2 Contents I. Introduction 3 II. Anti-war Fervor Reaches Florida 9 III. Scott Camil 23 IV. The May 1972 Crisis 33 Pictures from 1972 42 V. The Gainesville 8 and Assassination Attempt 47 VI. Conclusion 53 VII. Bibliography 56 3 I. Introduction “There is something special about Gainesville. I cannot tell you what it is, but Gainesville is a very unique place. Gainesville is in the national news a lot, and it is not that big of a city compared to cities all over the country… A lot of things happen in Gainesville.” -Scott Camil, 1992 Late one Tuesday night in 1972, a mass of students stood outside their school’s administration building, halting all traffic on one of the busiest roads in the city. Over 1500 students gathered over the course of the day in an attempt to protest the President of the United States’ escalation of the Vietnam War and their school’s indirect support of the war effort. Some yelled obscenities at the police officers in front of them, others played guitar to the chants of the crowd, while another group stood silently in support for their beliefs. After it became apparent to the politicians and police officers of the city that these protestors would not move, officers equipped with riot gear were ordered to break up the assembly. The chaos that followed seemed like a scene out of Birmingham in the 1960s. The protestors were blasted with a fire hose. Police shot tear gas and pepper spray into the crowd. Demonstrators threw the gas canisters back, along with beer bottles and rocks, refusing to disperse as they were ordered. Officers of the law and angry civilians claiming to be officers then moved into the crowd, forcing the protestors to run in all directions. The police chased after them, smacking whomever they could with their clubs and arresting anyone within their grasp. Officers chased students into neighborhoods, running through apartment complexes and grabbing anyone in sight, guilty or not. This was only day one of what turned out to be a three day protest, and it didn’t occur in New York or California. It happened in the small southern town of Gainesville, home to the University of Florida. 4 Despite having a vibrant protest community throughout the 1960s and 1970s, academic historians have largely overlooked the anti-war movement in Gainesville, Florida. Even the most recent work on the 1960s continues to focus on the most well known cases, like that of Columbia University, University of California Berkeley, and Kent State University. From historians to journalists, most studies tend to focus on northern schools, leaving the impression that these demonstrations are exclusive to the North and denying appropriate recognition of Southern schools that participated in violent protests.1 In the few publications that do discuss the South’s role in the movement, Gainesville is almost entirely missing. This is particularly troublesome because the University of Florida had a vibrant activist community and played an important role in the civil rights and anti-war movements throughout the 1960s and well into the 1970s. Encompassing hippies, black power advocates, and both liberal and conservative white college students, Gainesville’s movement was incredibly diverse. The University of Florida’s protests rivaled other schools throughout the country in size and received federal attention for them at the time. Gainesville was also home to Scott Camil, a founding member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), a national organization comprised of former veterans who opposed the war. Camil, along with the VVAW, orchestrated many large-scale protests in Florida, the largest of these intended to have taken place at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami. He was later put on trial for *I would like to thank Dr. Louise Newman, Dr. Michael Gannon, and Scott Camil for their extensive help with this project. 1 In her graduate thesis titled Protest Activities in Southern Universities, 1965-1972, for the University of Auburn, Kristin Grabarek does a wonderful job compiling a brief account of the demonstrations at many major Southern universities, however her work includes little information on the University of Florida. Like many of the historians before her, Grabarek explicitly states that protest activities in Florida ended in the spring of 1970, with the exception of a minor protest involving 55 students from Florida State University. While Florida State witnessed a protest of 55 students in 1970, nearly 6000 students took to the streets in one 1970 protest alone at UF. Additionally, Grabarek does not make any mention of the two other major protests at UF in 1971 and 1972. The fact that the University of Florida is not included in the scope of this graduate thesis further draws attention to the need for a comprehensive work on UF and a reevaluation of the timeline for anti-war protests within the South. 5 conspiracy to disrupt the 1972 Republican National Convention along with his other coconspirators in what became known as the Gainesville 8 trials.2 Camil was thought to be such a threat to the government’s agenda that federal agents attempted to assassinate him in 1975.3 Additionally, a comprehensive study of Scott Camil and the role he played in Gainesville's movement is important because his leadership is precisely what sets the University of Florida apart from so many other protest communities at that time. Anti-Vietnam War historians Simon Hall and Melvin Small both state that factional infighting from the many diverse interest groups that opposed the war became the movement's greatest downfall.4 5 While this was certainly the case for a number of schools and organizations across the country, this was not the case at the University of Florida. Scott Camil used his strong communication skills to bring together black students, liberals, libertarians, women’s rights activists, socialists and hippies to protest the war as a single, united front.6 Uniting these different interest groups was no easy task. African Americans largely opposed the war because they were disproportionately drafted into military service. Liberal college students opposed the war for ideological reasons, whereas libertarian students opposed the war because they felt as though the government was not doing enough to win it. Many more protestors simply saw the anti-war environment as an opportunity to party.7 Camil's leadership was so effective that he even enlisted the Quaker and Unitarian churches to fight for the cause.8 Though Small and Hall are correct in pointing out that diversity was often a weakness of the 2 Scott Camil, Interview by Michael Thomas, Gainesville, April 2, 2013 3 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Scott Camil,” Part 1 of 1, 1. 4 Simon Hall, Rethinking the American Anti-War Movement, (New York, New York: Routledge, 2012), 120. 5 Melvin Small, Anti-warriors: The Vietnam War and The Battle For America’s Hearts and Minds, (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002), 4. 6 For the sake of this paper, I will use the term “black” instead of “African American” because it was the preferred phrasing at the time used by the sources that I quote. 7 Scott Camil, interview by Stuart Landers, Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida, October 20, 1992, 52. 8 Bud Schultz and Ruth Schultz, It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 322-323. 6 national anti-war movement, Camil masterfully united a number of the University of Florida’s organizations that opposed the war, effectively turning diversity into a strength. Furthermore, Camil’s story is important not just because of the powerful role he played in orchestrating many of UF’s protests, but also because the government persecution that he endured shows just how far the US government went to silence those who spoke out against the war. After Camil was tried for conspiracy to disrupt the 1972 Republican National Convention, he began to construct an autobiography of his service in the war, his work fighting to end the war, and the subsequent persecution that he faced for his activism. When two federal agents shot him in 1975, his home was raided and his life's work confiscated. His work was never returned to him, despite a federal judge’s orders to do so, and still remains lost to this day.9 Because so little has been published on Camil, this paper relies heavily on Camil’s written testimony in It Did Happen Here, as well as various interviews with Camil and others present at the University at the time. Ultimately, the University of Florida is missing from the current historiography of the anti-war movement because the majority of its larger demonstrations occurred at a time when the rest of the country was winding its activism down. That is not to say that these demonstrations were not important; many historians cite the continued pressure from demonstrators as a contributing factor to the war's end.10 While historians like Melvin Small and Simon Hall do an excellent job analyzing the anti-war movement as a whole, the scope of their work is too broad to include the specific instances within the state of Florida. Additionally, both historians conclude their narratives of the anti-war movement with the infamous shooting of Kent State University protestors by National Guardsmen in 1970. Gregg Michel's work on the Southern Student 9 Scott Camil, Interview by Michael Thomas, Gainesville, April 2, 2013 10 Small, Anti-warriors, 159.

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