The Howard Zinn Re-Enactment, Today

Here are the details of what Mark Tribe, assistant professor of modern culture and media at Brown, will do today, at 5 p.m., on the Common:

"Exploring the parallels between the current war in Iraq and the Vietnam War, artist and curator Mark Tribe will stage re-enactments of Vietnam-era protest speeches this July on the sites where they were originally delivered. The re-enactments will take place in Boston on July 14 and in Washington, D.C., on July 26, 2007.

The events are part of Tribe’s Port Huron Project, a series of re-enactments of protest speeches from the New Left movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Each performance in the project is staged at the site of the original speech and is delivered by an actor to an audience of invited guests and passers-by. To reach a wide audience, videos of these events are also distributed on DVD and posted online at YouTube and other sites. The project is named after the Port Huron Statement, the visionary manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a radical student group formed in 1962. The first event in the series, Port Huron Project 1: Until the Last Gun Is Silent, took place Sept. 16, 2006, and was based on a speech given by Coretta Scott King at a peace march in Central Park in 1968.

At the re-enactment Saturday, July 14, 2007, at 5 p.m. on Boston Common, an actor cast by Tribe will deliver a speech originally given by author and activist Howard Zinn at a peace rally in May 1971. In the speech, Zinn argued for the necessity of civil disobedience to protest the war in Vietnam and called on Congress to impeach the president and vice president of the United States for the “high crime” of waging war on the people of Southeast Asia. The erformance, titled Port Huron Project 2: The Problem is Civil Obedience, will take place at the northwest corner of Boston
Common, near the intersection of Charles and Beacon streets, the exact site of Zinn’s original speech."