Description - Under Albany by Ron Silliman
"The event was nothing like their report of it." Working all day as a shipping clerk for PG&E in Emeryville, I was unable to get to the UC administrative building in which the students were holding their sit-in before the campus police locked the building at 5 p.m. For hours, I and several thousand other people milled around the building, singing songs from the civil rights movement along with the several hundred students indoors. People brought newly purchased plastic garbage cans filled with hot coffee, plus small buckets filled with birth control pills for the women now locked in. These were sent up ropes to the second floor balconies while film crews in the building's lobby turned their kliegs on us. The entire plaza had the air of a festival about it, with the very serious undertext of the presence of the police. I stayed until midnight, then headed home as I had another long day at work the following morning, so was not around when, at 4:00 a.m., Governor Pat Brown (at the urging of local officials who claimed that the offices were being trashed by demonstrators, which was not true) sent in the cops and over 450 students were arrested.
The next evening, Brown was quoted by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News as declaring that students had been misled by outside agitators. To illustrate the concept, the screen showed the images of us on the building's steps outside, carefully raising buckets and cans up the ladders. I was on screen for all of five seconds. The following morning, when I reported for work, I was told that my position as stock clerk was "no longer needed."
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