I’m volunteering for Capitol Neighborhoods at the Mifflin St Block Party to help inform people at the event what to expect (I feel obligated, I voted on the exec committee to help sponsor the event) . . . we’ve come a long way from where it started.
REVISITING THE BATTLE OF MIFFLAND; and Its Relevance For Today
Every year in Madison on a Saturday in early May there is a huge outdoor beer bash for UW students in a neighborhood southeast of the campus and the downtown. The Mifflin Street Block Party is an officially-organized and heavily-policed opportunity for thousands of undergraduates to get publicly very drunk–even as most of them know nothing about the first Mifflin Block Party on May 3rd 1969.
Older residents of Madison will recall that the first Mifflin Block Party turned into a riot, in fact a three-day riot. Others much younger have learned of it from the award-winning 1979 documentary “The War at Home”, which shows how the growth of the Vietnam antiwar movement at UW and in the community led to polarization between radicalizing students and the Madison police who served a conservative city power structure. In a right-wing backlash to early student protests, Republican Bill Dyke was elected Mayor in April 1968.
A year later Mayor Dyke and his hard-line police chief truculently refused a permit for a block party in the Mifflin Street neighborhood, then a mecca for the student and hippie counter-culture who called it “Miffland”.
Paul Soglin had also been elected in April 1968 as the Alder for the district including Miffland. Liberal Democrat Soglin was a moderate voice attempting to head-off a confrontation between police and the radicalizing student community. Despite his efforts at mediation, a deliberate police attack on the first Mifflin Block Party along with the arrest of Alderman Soglin’s sparked a community insurrection which lasted far into the night of May 3-4 1969.
The term “riot” conjures up images of purely anarchic chaos and there certainly was much of that. But after the initial stone-throwing which temporarily drove the cops from the neighborhood the uprising assumed a more organized character in the next several hours and reached a climax in a classic barricade-style fight between community residents joined by some UW students on one side and hundreds of riot police mobilized from around Dane County.
After prolonged resistance at the barricade was broken by repeated police assaults the battle raged on far into the night in innumerable acts of “guerrilla” resistance carried-out by affinity groups and individuals throughout a ten-block area. In the early hours of Sunday May 4th the battle spread to the UW Southeast Dorms.On Sunday and Monday it continued intermittently in the Miffland area, around the Southeast dorm, and on Langdon Street where fraternities and sororities joined the action and police teargas was hurled into Hlllel and the Memorial Library.
Rioting eventually spread to the State St and the Square, resulting in extensive damage to stores and businesses.
The Battle of Miffland irreversibly changed the course of Madison politics. While Madison police would use forceful means in the next two years to contain huge student antiwar protest, the brutal arrogance and gratuitous violence they displayed at Miffland and May 1969 was rarely repeated. Such authoritarian hubris had been met by broad and spirited community resistance at huge financial and political costs for the local business class and city power structure.
A few years later when young people and university students acquired voting rights the city ruling powers tacked leftward, seeking to co-opt student protest into the channels of conventional local politics. Alderman Soglin became an indispensable mediator between an alienated and radicalized counter-culture and a more flexible city power structure. In 1973 Alderman Soglin was elevated to the pinnacle of the city power structure itself where he served as Mayor until 1979, and again in 1989-97.
Political adjustments in governance under Mayor Soglin included reforms in its police department implemented by liberal police chief David Couper to curb police brutality and educate his cops in a new argot of human relations and police-community dialogue. We see some of the legacy of that training in Madison’s police force today.
We are further reminded of the 1969 Battle of Miffland by the return of a Mayor whose early career owed so much to it. Soglin has returned to his 3rd term as Mayor, but in the very long shadow of a right-wing Republican governor, and ideological descendant of Mayor Dyke whose draconian fiscal and political measures are fueling labor and community protests.
The recent outpouring of street protests at the Capitol against an autocratic right-wing governor may conjure visions of what might happen down-the-road if the pacific recourses of legal challenges and recall elections do not restore the livelihoods and rights of Wisconsin workers and many others being savaged by the corporate class which Walker represents.
Somewhere down-the-road Mayor Soglin could be caught ironically in the uncomfortable position of having to order his police to quell street protests against a governor he detests if renewed protests at some point go beyond the orderly parades of last February and March.
While the story of the Battle of Miffland is indelibly associated with Soglin and his own story is stamped all over it in “The War At Home” and in countless interviews, there has never been any detailed public account of what actually happened in the streets in those first hours on May 3-4 1969. The “War At Home” only tells the story of the lead-up to and beginning of the historic confrontation and incorporates the few film clips available from an era before photo-taking cellphones. Historian Tom Bate’s 1992 book “Rads” provides a similarly sketchy account.
The full story of the battle remains buried in the Madison police archives in City Hall for other historical researchers to unearth and reconstruct.
In the meantime the untold story of the first night of the Battle of Miffland will be recounted on Tuesday May 3rd 7pm in the UW Humanities Building (Park St. & Library Mall) Room 1131, along with clips from “The War At Home”.
The program is titled “Night on Fire: the First Hours of the Battle of Miffland, May 1969”.
It will also address differences in the political situation then and now and the lessons of the Battle of Miffland for workers, students, and communities who will have to confront a highly-militarized corporate state when all their means of legal and orderly redress have been exhausted.
To be covered:
I. The Gathering Storm, 1967-1969
II. The Police Attack on the First Mifflin Street Block Party and the Arrest of Alderman Paul Soglin
III. Late Afternoon: The Beginning of a Street Fight, the Cops Temporarily Driven From the Neighborhood
IV. Dusk: Construction of the Grand Barricade at Bassett Street and W. Washington
V. Nightfall: The Police Return in Force, the Battle at the Barricade
VI. ‘Guerrilla’ Resistance Continues Far Into the Night
VII. The Battle of Miffland Spreads to the UW Campus
VIII. The Dominant Narrative About the Battle of Miffland and the Counter-Narrative
XI. Lessons For TodayCo-sponsored by the Peregrine Forum and the Madison Infoshop. For more information email dvdwilliams51@tds.net or call 608-442-8399.
