Peace and Freedom Party holds state convention in Seattle on September 17, 1968.

  • By Alan J. Stein
  • Posted 1/01/2000
  • HistoryLink.org Essay 1557
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On September 17, 1968, the Peace and Freedom Party holds its state convention at Seattle Center.

The convention nominated the following candidates for the November 1968 election (as listed and described on the Peace and Freedom Party 1968 Platform):

  • President: Eldridge Cleaver -- Author of Soul on Ice, Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party, senior editor of Ramparts magazine, university lecturer, member of California PFP State Steering Committee.

     

  • Vice President: Cal Winslow -- History Graduate Student and Teaching Assistant at UW, Past Chairman of UW Vietnam Committee, Member of SDS [Students for a Democratic Society].

     

  • U.S. Congress, 1st District: Judith Shapiro -- UW Assistant Professor of Economics, faculty advisor for SDS [Students for a Democratic Society].

     

  • U.S. Congress, 7th District: Flo Ware -- Longtime black community activist; participant in HEW [U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare] Model Cities Program, Head-Start, Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. Apartment house manager.

     

  • Lieutenant Governor: Mike Leavy -- Full-time unpaid organizer of Draft Resistance. Seattle convicted conscientious objector.

     

  • State Legislature, District 32-A: Walt Crowley -- UW student, Assistant editor of Helix.

     

  • State Legislature, District 45, Position No. 1: Dave Chaddock -- Former teaching assistant at the UW, former junior college instructor, longshoreman.

The platform included planks on Selective Service (the draft); Vietnam, Economics, Labor, Rights of Consumers, Welfare, Penal Reform, Education, Minority Liberation, Women's Liberation, Personal Freedoms, Youth, and the Elderly.

It is likely that the Women's Liberation part of the platform represented the first actual use of the term "Women's Liberation," used to describe the women's rights or feminist movement that became active during the late 1960s and early 1970s.


Sources:

Walt Crowley, Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 260; Peace and Freedom Party 1968 Platform, Pamphlet in possession of Dotty DeCoster, Seattle, Washington, March 2000.


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