Word: davenports
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...dynamic in the American Left surfaced last week with the formation of the New American Movement (NAM), which attracted 450 people to its first program conference in Davenport, Iowa, over Thanksgiving week-end. NAM--a growing organization with more than 25 chapters around the country--began on the west coast last spring. Community organizers--some with projects several years old--sensed that they needed some type of national coordination, and they responded favorably when Michael Lerner. Thierrie Cook and Chip Marshall, West Coast radicals, sent out a statement calling for NAM's formation...
People of all kinds responded to the NAM statement and went to Davenport. Many, as previously mentioned, were ex-student radicals in their mid-twenties who now consider themselves part of the working class--white collar or blue collar--and have been organizing in communities on a variety of issues. Some of them were former SDS'ers--several people had been at Port Huron--but many were independent radicals who found NAM appealing because of its realism and openness...
...chapters which already exist (which have 10-20 members each) represented a fairly even cross-section of American communities. Only the South was under-represented. The traditional radical centers, Cambridge. New York and Berkeley, sent contingents--along with groups from less likely places such as Baltimore. Durham, and Davenport itself. The largest chapter is in Pittsburgh...
...Left in recent years. The organization is grounded in reality: it seems to be broadly based and it attracts people who have proved that they are serious about changing American society by persevering through several years of difficult and frustrating organizing experiences. People returned to their home communities from Davenport with a kind of hold-your-breath optimism...
...must also expand to include life-long workers and not just students-turned-workers. It must come to grips with how it will relate to black. Puerto Rican and Chicano movements, a consideration conspicuously absent from the Davenport conference...