Harvey Richards

Dennis and I are watching more TV these days.  But I am so very picky about what I will sit through.

King County Library System has a film subscription service called Kanopy.  Last week we watched an excellent film regarding political and legal issues associated with the Japanese-American internment.

Last night we looked around, here's a movie called "Decision in the Streets," it looks like it's about protests in the Bay Area.  And it's only 35 minutes (a big plus in my book).

We watched this engrossing BW movie consisting entirely of primary footage of street protests in San Francisco and Berkeley in the mid 1960s.  Including the Free Speech Movement of 1964.  Which I wrote about in high school around 1969 using primary newspaper sources.  Maybe my parents were right trying to discourage me from hanging out in the Sacramento State College Library...

We didn't remember most of these demonstrations, even though they were going on right under our nose.  We were a little young but still.  The narrator had a decided lefitist tone.

Harvey Richards made this and other films.  Wow!  How come we had never heard about these movies.  He made them through the 1960s and 1970s.  Technology was different then, you needed more than a phone to make a movie.  Especially of live events.  In the streets.

Picture above was taken without permission from the movie Hasta Sacramento about the farmworker march from Delano to Sacramento in 1966.

As we went to bed, Dennis said 'Harvey, Harvey, where you been all my life?"  We were so stunned that these rich authentic films, made right nearby had been so hidden from us.  How come we didn't know?