On July 14, 2007, a young man named Matthew Floyd Miller stood at a simple wooden lectern on Boston Common, the golden dome of the state house gleaming in the background. Speaking to a crowd of 40 or 50 people, he decried the "calm, smiling, murderous president in the White House." He called for the impeachment of those in power and for civil disobedience to "disturb those who are in charge of the war." The audience responded with shouts of, "That's right," and bursts of applause.
But the war Miller criticized was taking place not in Iraq, but in Vietnam. The people he wanted to impeach were Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. Miller, a professional actor, was reading words that had been spoken at the same site on May 5, 1971, by Howard Zinn, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
This unsettling, perplexing event was part of the Port Huron Project, conceived and directed by Mark Tribe '90, assistant professor of modern culture and media studies. Named after the 1962 Port Huron Statement - the manifesto of the activist movement Students for a Democratic Society - the project is an ongoing "series of reenactments of protest speeches from the New Left movements of the 1960s and 70s," according to PHP's Web site. "Each event takes place at the site of the original speech and is delivered by a performer to an audience of invited guests and passers-by."
So far, Tribe has produced reenactments of a 1968 speech by Coretta Scott King in Central Park and a 1965 speech given by SDS President Paul Potter on the National Mall, as well as the Zinn speech.
Tribe films the reenactments and distributes the footage on DVD and online. Watching these recordings - available at www.nothing.org/porthuronproject - the viewer, already separated from the event itself by what Tribe calls "temporal dislocation," experiences an even greater sense of distance. The reenactments explore the fault lines between art and politics, reality and spectacle and, of course, past and present.
"It does sound like they were written yesterday," Tribe said of the speeches. "You just have to change the nouns and it makes perfect sense. It's uncanny."
For Tribe, the idea for the project arose from a very personal disconnect between past and present. When Tribe arrived at Brown as a freshman in 1985, he found himself in an environment marked by student activism and political protest. That fall, he said, students built a shantytown on the Main Green to protest the University's investments in companies doing business with apartheid-controlled South Africa.
But when Tribe returned to Brown in 2005 to teach, he found a very different environment. "Three years into a bloody and misguided war, the campus is quiet. No protests, no flyers," he said in an interview with the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. He began to conceive of the PHP as a way to "connect with the sense of possibility" of New Left protest movements and somehow combat what he saw as the apathy of his students.
The project began in September 2006 with a reenactment of a speech Coretta Scott King assembled from notes taken from her husband's pocket after his assassination. Tribe produced the piece - officially called "Until the Last Gun Is Silent" - with the assistance of Shane Brennan '07, one of his students. "The first one was kind of an experiment to see how it would work," Tribe said.
The next summer, aided by an Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award and a production team of five students, he directed "The Problem Is Civil Obedience" and "We Must Name the System," the Zinn and Potter speeches, respectively.
"The UTRA was a fortuitous opportunity," Tribe said. "I realized that working with a posse of five students was really great. I constantly asked for their input."
Christina Ducruet '08, who worked on research and outreach, described the PHP as exciting and thought-provoking. "I believe it's a really good exercise for us to look at the past in creative ways and learn from it," she said. "I felt really inspired by these speeches."
"Part of what's at stake in this project," Tribe said, "is making the statement that art belongs in public space, that it can be provocative and politically-relevant."
On Jan. 9, Tribe's was one of 41 projects selected to receive a prestigious grant from the Creative Capital Foundation, which will allow him to produce reenactments of speeches by labor organizer Cesar Chavez, civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael and Black Panther Bobby Seale this summer. An exhibit of the project is scheduled for October at several spaces in New York.
Over the course of the PHP, Tribe has found that some of his original ideas about the project have changed. "Initially, I thought I wanted to inspire my students, shock them out of their apathy," he said. "That's no longer an aspiration of this project. It's more about a kind of compare and contrast. The striking similarity between then and now, in terms of the problem, puts into sharp relief the difference between then and now, in terms of the solution."
Tribe's opinion of Brown's lack of anti-war protest has also shifted. "I don't think my students are apathetic or even cynical," he said. "I think they're realistic. I think they understand clearly that bodies in the street no longer have the impact that they did 40 years ago." Tribe added that he doesn't see a contemporary equivalent of New Left protest speech. "I think times have changed," he said.
"If we're not out on the Main Green to protest in the way people did in the '60s," Ducruet said, "we're still learning, and people will go out and make unbelievable changes in the world."
As for what form political protest may take in the 21st century, Ducruet said, "I'm figuring that out at Brown every day."
