Sorry for the delay but this was sent to me only today.  My timeline was a bit off but my memory clear:

Reading things like these brings out Forest Gump syndrome.  Something of a participant; something of an observer.  Now, mere commentator.

SDS was a key element of the alliance that the Black Students union had pieced together at LACC by Spring of '69.  Other valued members were, most importantly, the Mexican American Students Union and the Vietnam Vets Against the War; there were also members of community based black nationalist orgs, e,g, Panther Party, US Organization, Nation of Islam; even members of CORE and SNCC and the SCLC; and, with these organized fractions, various hippies, bippies and assorted free spirits.  It was a grand coalition within which none of the strife between outside campus organizations penetrated.  And this is little more than 2 months after Panthers Bunchy Carter and John Huggins were assassinated at UCLA by members of the US Organization.

The BSU was large.  And it was powerful having won black (and brown) studies classes, black (and brown) administrators and faculty appointments.  We had won control of the student government with that alliance we  called EPIC.  Additionally we had won college finance, yet editorial independence, of The Black Call and El Machete, respectively the newspapers of the BSU and MASA (also called United Mexican American Students Association which then became MECHA).  SDS so far as we knew were one organization with rifts, if they existed, were not obvious on campus.

So the cops beat up middle schoolers at Carver Jr High and the Black Students Alliance (mother body of all BSUs in the greater LA area) ordered student strikes.  We did at City College and held and closed down the school for 3 days with that alliance.

Fast forward a couple or three years to UCLA and I'm there.  The BSU there wasn't shit (campaigning for some shit like black cheerleaders) and so my efforts were mainly in the neighborhood as a member of the (black in fact but not in essence) Socialist Collective a localized org with an internationalist attitude. 

So One-eyed Moshe Dayan gon speak at Pauley Pavilion (famed home of John Wooden's 10 time national championship teams with luminaries like Louis Alcindor (nee Kareem Abdul Jabbar) and current completely and totally dominant center-in-residence, Bill Walton.  Here there is a second story that ought be told but this has gone on long enough.

Anyway me and 4 or 5 other SC comrades, yes we were unapologetically communists, are there and there is obvious a mainly verbal strife between two groups of, all I saw was, white people.  I spotted Barbara Hertz who knew and respected me from LACC and I knew she was in a leadership role in PL.  I asked her what was the problem and she indicated that 'the problem' was the RCP, who I had no knowledge of.  I then asked her loud enough for soldiers on both sides to hear "Why the fuck are communists talking to this way to other communists".  So my SC comrades took up a 5 man line in between the two and held it...for a minute or two.  Finally one rather large RCPer broke through and I turned and hit him straight on the jaw.  I didn't weigh 130lbs untiI was 30.  He didn't blink.  He was about to return the favor when my brother, Les Daniels RIP, swung the cane he had so wisely brought along along with a feigned limp, in an arc across the asshole's head.  That still didn't seem to faze him either but...he went the other way.  We gave up on the truce keeping and let the silly, sorry-assed mfers go at it.

That is sectarianism.  And it was, is and most unfortunately will be an inherent weakness in this our great struggle for the human rights of all.  And all of this stemming from the pursuit of 'the correct line'.  Which is nothing but a manner of saying a desire, a need, to lead.  A desire that, at bottom, is a desire to tell others what to do.  Like you somebody's Daddy or something. 

Fuck y'all.

JAI