Prompt:
We're getting up close to present. So think about the Jobs (commencement address) and Port Huron Statement texts as historical objects. What in them:
Seems dated, alien, or otherwise not like something you would write today? Why?
OR
Seems like something people do say today, but you think is clearly wrong?
Johnson's Great Society
I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights… [W]hen we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement… That after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution…In short, we have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.
King outlining the Poor People's Campaign
Mountaintop speech
Clark Kerr's "Multiversity"
'Not only must an administration preside over an institution with vastly increased and more complex relations with the outside world. The multiversity today can no longer be thought of as a single community, "like the medieval communities of masters and students," Kerr said. "A community should have common interests; in the multiversity they are quite varied, even conflicting. A community should have a soul, a single animating principle; the multiversity has several," he asserted.'
-Harvard Crimson, 1963.
Mario Savio, 1964
IBM 650, c. 1960
Black Separatism
DuBois in Africa