House of Unamerican activiities:
On May 12, 1960 three Congressional members of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began three days of hearings in San Francisco's City Hall. Mississippi's Edwin Willis chaired the meetings.
Although Joseph McCarthy had been censored by his Senate colleagues in 1954 and died an alcoholic in 1957, HUAC continued his work by staging periodic "road shows" around the country. The stated purpose of the May 1960 San Francisco hearings was to "expose" the "subversive" role of the Communist Party in Northern California.
At the time the Communist Party USA was too weak to subvert a garden club and HUAC knew it. In San Francisco the Congressional interrogators knew more about the party than the subpoenaed witnesses because the FBI had planted informers in the party's national leadership....
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Based on past road show victories, the House Committee expected to leave San Francisco triumphantly with the local press intimidated, the community polarized, and liberal groups demoralized and divided. Its favored right-wing fans like the John Birch Society, Anti-Communist Crusades and Young Americans for Freedom would be energized to launch their own witch hunts in local workplaces, school boards and public libraries.
That's not what happened.
Citizens from all over the Bay Area drove up freeways and across bridges to San Francisco's civic center to attend the widely publicized hearings. To everyone's surprise politically independent students organized the demonstration and thousands of young people turned out from dozens of Bay Area high schools and colleges.
During the first day, the Committee was challenged by eloquent "hostile" witnesses inside the hearing room and disrupted outside the metal doors by a growing non-violent protest by young people arbitrarily excluded from the "public" hearings....
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On the second day, May 13, later called “Black Friday” by the local press, sixty-four college and high school students and their supporters were arrested. On Saturday, the final day of the hearings, the McCarthyites were met by five-thousand longshoremen, outraged citizens and young picketers who encircled the city's classic landmark.
HUAC's 1960 San Francisco junket turned out to be its last. Although Black Friday is barely remembered today, a new generation had fearlessly confronted McCarthyism and courageously freed American politics from its deadening grip.
On May 13, the Fifties' gray social conformity was transformed into the pyrotechnic Sixties. The decade of rigid national thought control and the marginalization of dissent faded into history. On Black Friday, the vibrant energy of America's youth was liberated by high-powered fire hoses.
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