May 5, 1970: The UW Freeway March

The Kent State Massacre, during which four antiwar students were fatally shot by National Guardsmen at Ohio's Kent State University during a protest against the previous week's illegal US invasion of Cambodia, should have served as a brutal enough shock for any American still complacent about how our absurd military involvement in Southeast Asia had politically divided the nation during the otherwise prosperous 1960s. For the remaining still slumbering, the nationwide and passionate campus reaction the following day, namely, the date in focus here, was surely the acid test to separate the merely complacent from the Zeitgeistly dead--including and especially here in Seattle, where several thousand University of Washington students spontaneously marched from the UW campus onto Interstate 5 as part of a nationwide student strike against the Vietnam War.

As student strikes and campus building occupations ensued that day at over 100 universities and colleges across the US, nearly 7,000 UW students participated in a strike which would last throughout the month of May. The inaugural strike demonstration began at 10:30 a.m. in front of the Husky Union Building. There, striking students and faculty overwhelmingly approved a list of demands to be presented to the UW administration, including a pledge by President Charles Odegaard to never call National Guard troops onto the UW campus, and an end to University complicity with the war effort, including military recruiting and "war-oriented" research.

Crucially, the students also agreed to begin marching en masse through the University District. Eventually, marching north on University Way, they reached NE 45th Street. When a splinter group began chanting "freeway!," the march spontaneously but swiftly surged towards Interstate 5, and soon became, still 3,000 strong, the first antiwar freeway occupation in US history.

A somewhat diminished contingent, marching south, eventually reached the King County Courthouse that evening. The UW student strike, along with further and larger antiwar gatherings in downtown Seattle, continued throughout the month of May. The UW strike eventually lost its momentum and power as the UW administration began to clamp down on both the strike itself and coverage of the strike in the UW Daily and on KUOW-FM, at the time still a student-run station and often host to radical journalistic voices. Today, all involved are much more well-behaved--at least until further notice.

Sources: UW Daily archives; Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer archives; Walt Crowley, "Rites of Passage" (University of Washington Press, 1995).