On May 2, 1971, about 200 uniformed police surrounded the perimeter of Exposition Park while 30-odd plainclothes officers circulated through the crowd as farm labor leader César Chávez delivered a brief but impassioned speech decrying the Vietnam War at a rally sponsored by the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice.
According to The Times' report, the formidable presence of law enforcement was perhaps unwarranted: No incidents or arrests were reported at the gathering, where Chavez's speech was preceded by a memorial service honoring those killed Vietnam.
At 6 p.m. today in Exposition Park, Chavez's speech will be heard again -- this time delivered by UC San Diego visual arts assistant professor Ricardo Dominguez. The event most likely won't be patrolled by 230 police officers. Nor will celebrity activists Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland be on hand, as they were in 1971.
But the artist responsible for staging the re-creation, Mark Tribe, hopes that reanimating the words of Chavez almost 40 years later will enable the Internet generation to experience "what it would feel like to believe you were part of a movement that would change history."
Chavez's 1971 speech was part of a week of nationwide antiwar activities; the 2008 event in Los Angeles, titled "We Are Also Responsible," is the fourth installment of the Port Huron Project, Tribe's series of reenactments of Vietnam-era speeches on the sites of the original addresses.
The series -- which since 2006 has staged a 1968 Coretta Scott King speech in New York City's Central Park, a 1971 address by author and activist Howard Zinn in Boston, and a speech given by Paul Potter, former president of Students for a Democratic Society at the 1965 March on Washington -- takes its name from the Port Huron Statement, the manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society, written at an early 1960s group meeting in Port Huron, Mich.
Creative Time, a nonprofit organization that commissions and presents public arts projects, will present the Los Angeles speech as well as the final two series installments, an Aug. 2 restaging of a 1969 Angela Davis speech in Oakland's DeFremery Park, and on Sept. 7, the reenactment of a 1976 speech by Stokely Carmichael in New York City. The Exposition Park presentation is co-sponsored by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE).
