Tonight for a middle eastern dinner I had a few guests who, like I, were active in the 60’s social justice and peace movement in Milwaukee and will be part of a presentation to the Utopia Society convention in Milwaukee this year. For one plenary session some of us involved in the social justice and peace movement in the 60’s will tell our stories, our dreams and struggles for a better society. The word Utopia comes from the Greek words meaning a good place. Utopia is about our struggle to create a better society or, as Peter Maurin, co founder of the Catholic Worker, used to say, we need to create a society where it is easier to be good.

In this sense telling some of the stories of the sixties can be a good way of understanding how we can, as we Christians pray, make the kingdom of heaven on earth. As we were talking over dinner it became clear that one of the difference between the sixties and now is that, while there were many diverse causes amidst us, we had much more togetherness. In the major struggles of civil rights and the anti-war movement there was common focus we all shared.
One of the persons at dinner tonight was married to one of the leaders of the civil rights movement in Milwaukee in the 60’s, Jim Groppi. She has produced a play called “March on Milwaukee” and help convene a digital history of the civil rights movement called March on Milwaukee: Civil Rights History Project. In the play and on the web site you can see and almost feel the tremendous struggle that was involved in getting an open housing bill passed in Milwaukee.

I participated in the in the Open Housing Marches, in the ‘Respond’ to desegregate Marquette University and in the Milwaukee 14 action against the selective service system. These three actions took place in the years 1967 and 1968. Will we see a time of change like this again? I do not know about the future but believe that for now we are too scattered, not focused or together.

This summer we, Breaking the Silence had our ‘Freedom Marches’ at major festivals in Milwaukee. Our marches were not as well attended as Open Housing Marches in the 60’s, and were largely ignored by ‘powers that be’ and the media. But as Martin Luther King Jr. said, we have no choice but to march against injustice and war. So the March on Milwaukee continues.

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