Portland State Magazine Fall 2014

FALL 2014 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE 13 • Timothy Leary, the psychologist and University of California - Berkeley professor who openly promoted the use of LSD and the idea of space colonization, tells a crowd of Baby Boomers in 1977 of their special place in history. “I like to think that everyone born after 1945 is a mutant member of a post-human species. It’s time to move this species off this little planet,” he says. • African-American novelist Toni Morrison, speaking in 1975, criticizes the teaching of history for perpetuating racism by generalizing about peoples and cultures. “To continue to see any race of people as one single personality is an ignorance of Gothic proportions—an ignorance so vast, and a perception so blind and so blunted, an imagination so bleak, that no nuance can be ascertained,” she says. • Two years earlier, Stokely Carmichael, the civil rights activist who coined the phrase “Black Power,” had a remarkably similar take on history. “Most of history was written by the enemy, by the oppressors,” he says. “All of their heroes are positive. There are no negative images.” He reminds the crowd that George Washington owned slaves “and even that is positive because he treated his slaves well,” he laughs. “The political speeches are amazing to listen to because you see how central Portland State was. It was a major stopping point,” Paschild says. Also amazing is their dynamic and often spontaneous nature. The speakers don’t seem overly scripted, and they invite questions. Audiences clap and boo. Things fall in the room. There are unexpected laughs, awkward silences, faux pas, occasional profanity. In short, you feel like you are there. That immediacy is enough to give chills to even the most casual history buff. When you add in the knowledge of what came later—the predictions that came true, the promises that didn’t, the fate of some of the speakers (Bobby Kennedy was assassinated 10 weeks after his PSU speech)—listening to the tapes can become addicting.  John Kirkland is a staff member in the PSU Office of University Communications. Craig Hickman ’71 took photographs for the Viking yearbook from 1967 through 1971. He went on to create the computer Kid Pix art program and is now a professor of digital arts at the University of Oregon. In January he was honored as a pioneer who made a profound impact as part of Apple’s 30th anniversary of the Macintosh. Jean Kennedy Smith and Patricia Kennedy Lawford (left) sit with their brother, Robert Kennedy, before he speaks in the Portland State College gymnasium in March 1968. A recording from civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael (top) is in the speakers collection for 1973. Edmund Muskie (above) spoke on campus in 1971 as he was running for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination.