Welcome to Flacks Fest, an event to honor Dick Flacks: activist, advocate, and academic — and, as Nick Welsh wrote in a tribute piece on Dick’s retirement in 2006, UCSB’s “most dangerous professor.” Dick’s journey is one of mythic proportions. We recount myths again and again because they anchor us in a larger narrative and they inspire us to greater achievement ourselves. So, to recount what many know, but bears repeating:
Dick was born in Brooklyn to two teachers, both Russian Jewish immigrants, union organizers, and communists, who were later fired in the anti-communist frenzy. Dick, “a red diaper baby” became disillusioned with communism and began a quest to shape his own ideology — one he could really live by. He met and married Mickey Hartman, a woman with a background uncannily similar to his own, and they began their quest together, committed to values of social justice, nonviolence, and radical change.
They left the stuffy East Coast for the Midwest where Dick pursued his sociology degree from the University of Michigan — and in 1962 teamed up with Tom Hayden to remake the Students for a Democratic Society and draft the Port Huron Manifesto. Also referred to as the “Agenda for a Generation,” the manifesto was prescient in 1962 for its commitment to racial justice, nonviolence, and call to locate the movement for social change in universities (rather than labor unions).