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| Frontispiece of a book of poems by Salasin, published in 1988 |
In January 1969, about 400 students
at my alma mater occupied the administration building and staged a two-week
sit-in. The students were protesting the denial of tenure to an assistant
sociology professor named Marlene Dixon.
Ultimately, whether Dixon had
been turned down because she was a feminist and / or a Marxist (or unworthy of
tenure) became part of the larger issue of student participation in decisions
by the university. Often cited were the lack of student representation on advisory
committees, the necessity of more women professors, and the effect of the
university’s urban renewal initiative on poor blacks.
Of course student occupations and strikes occurred all over North America and Europe during the 1960s. But since
I was a student at Chicago, this sit-in was particularly interesting.
Besides, my friend Andrew and
I were in the habit of flipping through old
issues of the college newspaper and came upon the 1969 story about six months
before its ten-year anniversary. We thought that our student paper should run a
retrospective and I would write it.
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| Outside the administration building during the 1969 sit-in |
How long ago this seems now.
The sit-in had occurred just a decade earlier. The past was nearer then.
In 1979, plenty of people on
both sides of the sit-in still lived in the neighborhood. As I started to
contact them, each led to another and then many others. Someone referred me to a
former student who had been expelled and I wrote to him at an address in Asia.
The letter was forwarded two or three times.
Finally a reply from “R,” as
Andrew and I came to refer to him, arrived from Japan. R never gave us his
first name. The letter was hand-written in cramped script on six onion skin
pages. We eagerly deciphered it together.
Now, thanks to the internet,
I know who he was. But at the time, Robert Alan Salasin desperately wished to
remain anonymous. He believed that at least two federal agencies would love to
get their hands on him. However, he could not resist telling us about the
sit-in, his two expulsions from the university, and how it was better to work
around an FBI plant than to out him and have to figure out the identity of the
new guy.
Immersed in ideology, R reflected
on the failure of student movements:
The
problem was that we were terrible Marxists—we didn’t practice the logical
implications of our own analysis. What we should have done was organize slowly
and carefully to enter into struggles of the university workers and local black
community, an effort of several years at least . . .
R also expressed acute paranoia
that Andrew and I had trouble comprehending. But his “ultra-Leftist
adventures,” as he described them, had continued after he left Chicago and went
on to Drake University where he earned 23 court injunctions. So it made sense
that the U.S. government kept an eye on him.
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| Poem by Sal Salasin |
What we did not know, though,
is that R was a poet whose work appeared regularly in San Francisco Poetry Journal, the Poetry Project
Newsletter, and other alternative reviews. A founder of RealPoetik Magazine, he published
several collections of poetry under the name Sal Salasin.
One of his poems, “Radio
City,” begins:
When
I was six my parents took me to Radio City to see Esther Williams
in
Dangerous When Wet
and
I thought that’s a funny name for a girl,
Wenwette. . .
Andrew and I never would have
guessed that R might have a sense of humor.
In the mid-1980s, R came back
to live in the United States. He returned to Chicago and other
places where he had been young and angry.
Some of that anger persisted in the poems which he continued to write and publish until his death in
Berkeley in 2009, at the age of 61.
