1968 October 1

Yippies Disrupt HUAC Hearing in Chicago

 

The Yippies (for Youth International Party) on this day disrupted a public hearing by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) called to investigate the anti-Vietnam War movement.

The Yippies were a small but colorful anti-Vietnam War/countercultural protest movement that flourished briefly in the late 1960s, They mainly engaged in theatrical-style protests to dramatize issues. Abbie Hoffman, Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Nancy Kurshan, and Paul Krassner founded the Yippies in December 1967.

The events on this day were among the last significant events in the long and notorious anti-civil liberties history of HUAC. The House of Representatives finally abolished HUAC on January 14, 1975. The most famous anti-HUAC protest occurred in San Francisco in 1961, when protesters were excluded from the committee’s hearing room, and eventually fire hoses were used against demonstrators on the steps of city hall (see May 12, 1960 and May 14, 1960)

Watch the documentary Hippies, Yippies and Diggers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDyf7vRZ-JQ

Read Jerry Rubin’s account of the Yippies: Jerry Rubin, DO IT!: Scenarios of Revolution (1970)

Learn more about the history of HUAC: http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/huac

Learn more: Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (1995)

Read the recollections: Ron Chepesuik, Sixties Radicals, Then and Now: Candid Conversations with Those Who Shaped the Era  (1995)

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