This week, we continue with our series of longer pieces unraveling the histories of storied buildings.
Jeff Davis, self-proclaimed King of Hoboes, pictured in the January 16, 1913 Tacoma Times. (Image courtesy of Washington State Library, via Chronicling America.)
Heckles and howls echoed through the meeting rooms of 64 East 4th Street on February 1, 1913. “Down with How and his postage stamp philanthropy!” yelled Jeff Davis, the self-proclaimed King of the Hoboes. “He has never given us any of his mythical millions!”
The way I’ve always understood them, psychedelics are much more than extremely potent drugs– far from being toys for recreational escapism, they’re actually a means of temporarily nullifying the crushing reality of routine by rendering the everyday in the starkest, most exaggerated terms. The truth becomes obvious and untruths are revealed.
East Village pacifist David McReynolds has been arrested at least 15 times in pursuit of his varied causes, once for organizing and leading a 1967 sit-in during the Vietnam war at the downtown Whitehall Military induction center. Arrested with him were leftwing luminaries like Allen Ginsberg, Grace Paley and Dr. Benjamin Spock.
McReynolds, who was on the editorial board of the now defunct Liberation magazine, was arrested two years earlier for burning his draft card in Union Square. Along the way, he visited Hanoi before the fall of Saigon to the communist North Vietnamese — or, as he would put it, “the liberation of Saigon” that occurred just before May Day 40 years ago. More →
In 1994, with the signing of NAFTA, the Zapatistas—a revolutionary leftist group—emerged in Chiapas, under the aegis of Subcomandante Marcos. Chiapas is an impoverished agrarian region in southeastern Mexico, and the anti-capitalist movement’s base is made up of indigenous people eager to thwart the state’s military, paramilitary and corporate incursions into the mountainous region. Join activists fromLa Universidad de La Tierra en Oaxaca (University of the Earth) and the collective Veredas Autonomous (Autonomous Trails) for a discussion of the history and future of social struggles, in Mexico and across the world.
