60 years ago, demonstrations that shook up the Stock Exchange

Sixty years ago this week, on April 12 and 14, 1966, Youth Against War & Fascism held two demonstrations on Wall Street targeting the New York Stock Exchange for its role of prioritizing capitalist profits in the U.S. war against the people of Vietnam. I was at the second protest and have often written or spoken about the first.

As we are today perched on the brink of events that could rapidly escalate toward World War III (some people argue that this war has already started), it should be useful to examine some of this history. It’s true that many conditions have changed in those last 60 years, which we won’t review for this article. The slogan on the banner the protesters held, “Big Firms Get Rich, GIs Die!,” was a perfect message for the action.

Two important conditions have stayed the same: The U.S. is the aggressor, this time allied with the Israeli settler state against the Global South; there is a possibility of mobilizing the working class of the U.S. against the war. For these reasons alone it is worthwhile examining that 60-year-old history.

I wrote the following article 10 years ago to commemorate the 50-year anniversary of those events. It starts:

April 12, 1966. “Fifteen young women and men slipped into the New York Stock Exchange. They didn’t belong there. They had no money to invest in stocks, nor did they care if the market was down or up that day.

“They had another purpose. …” (more — workers.org/2016/04/24781/)

April 14, 1966. “There hasn’t been anything like it for 30 years. …” (For pdf of that issue of Workers World, see War Protest Panics Wall Street.) 

Catalinotto is author of “Turn the Guns Around: Mutinies, Soldier Revolts and Revolutions,” 2017.