Oakland Port Closes as Protesters March on Waterfront - NYTimes.com

Seeing the photos of "Occupy Oakland" blocking the port brings back memories.  It's deja vu all over again. I was a placid but curious undergraduate in 1965 in the monastic environment of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. I had started attending the Friday night discussions at the Phoenix club. Founded by Prof. John Dorenkamp, it introduced me to the political left. Father Robert Drinan, then Dean of Boston College Law School, came to speak against the war in Vietnam, as did Frank Wilkinson - Director of the Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. Friends of SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) met there too.

One of the members of in the Phoenix circle was the anarchist activist Abbie Hoffman. One Friday evening in the fall of 1965  David McReynolds of theWar Resisters League came to speak.  We all retired to Abbie's home in Worcester where he had grown up.  McReynolds showed us hand-held film footage of the Oakland Army Base protests where several hundred activists sat on the tracks and blocked troop trains bringing soldiers who would ship out to Vietnam the old-fashioned way: by ship. That story is one of many told by Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin in America Divided - the Civil War of the 1960's.  - GWC

Oakland Port Closes as Protesters March on Waterfront - NYTimes.com: "OAKLAND, Calif. — Thousands of Occupy Oakland protesters expanded their anti-Wall Street demonstrations on Wednesday, marching through downtown, picketing banks and swarming the port. By early evening, port authorities said maritime operations there were effectively shut down."

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