Word: brunson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Munching hamburgers in an Atlanta Airport restaurant last December, Emory University Senior Remar ("Bubba") Sutton and the school's sophomore class president, Don Brunson, decided in a rush of anger that they were fed up with student protest against U.S. warfare in Viet Nam. They went back to Sutton's dorm, talked all through the night with four other students, by morning had drafted a set of purposes for a new organization-Affirmation: Viet Nam. They dedicated it to demonstrating that "the opinion of the majority cannot be obscured by the voice of the minority...
More responsible civil rights advocates publicly washed their hands of the Brooklyn militants. CORE'S National Director James Farmer, himself a rough-tough fighter who had plans of his own for demonstrations on the fairgrounds, suspended Brunson's chapter from the national organization. The Queens district attorney got a court injunction against the stall-in. President Johnson and key members of the U.S. Senate warned that demonstrations of that kind would serve only to stiffen opposition to civil rights progress...
...Brunson and his group kept right on with their plan. Stall-in motorcades from Maryland, Pennsylvania and Chicago were said to be on the way to New York. Brunson boasted that no fewer than 2,000 cars would stop dead on the highways. His demonstrators would slow down ticket lines at the fair by paying 199 pennies for the $2 admission. The city subway system would be paralyzed by 6 a.m., and the major highway approaches to the fair by 7:30 a.m. An airplane would fly over the fair and drop thousands of leaflets protesting discrimination, and a Harlem...
...stall-in got nowhere. For one thing, a chill rain kept thousands of would-be fairgoers at home. For another, the fear of getting caught in Brunson's traffic jam was enough to make all but the most imprudent motorist stay off the highways. So light was the traffic, in fact, that driving became almost a pleasure...
...Roads. But the chief cause of the failure of the stall-in was Brunson's and his cohorts' own ineptitude. Only a few out-of-town demonstrators materialized; there were never more than a dozen cars operating on the highways in a stall-in effort. Brunson, who ventured cautiously onto the roads with some friends, quickly got disheartened over the presence of so many police and so few demonstrators, pulled off and disappeared...