Berkeley is so left-wing…

…that the Berkeley Public Library, as part of a rotating museum exhibit in its front window, recently chose to proudly show off its extensive collection of late-’60s and early-’70s revolutionary underground newspapers. They have (as seen here) the full run of Young Socialist. The display area faces the street along the library’s front wall. Out of the innumerable written works in the library’s huge archives, this is what they choose to promote.

This issue of the SDS’s New Left Notes was published for the infamous Students for a Democratic Society 1969 convention in Chicago, at which the Weatherman faction (Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, etc.) broke away from the rest of the SDS, declaring, “The goal is the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism.”

The Berkeley Tribe newspaper had a special Black Panthers edition, sporting Malcolm X’s famous quote, “By any means necessary” — i.e. the ends justify the means, and that it is therefore OK to use violence to bring about the revolution.

Another issue of The Berkeley Tribe had an essay by Black Panther Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver about the Weatherman group (later known as The Weather Underground).

And fond nostalgia over Berkeley’s anti-war riots prompted inclusion of this issue of Young Socialist with the headline, “The Campuses Explode.”