On May 9 and 10 a small crew of revcom supporters took the leaflet Which Side Are YOU On? to commencement events at the University of Houston (UH), UH law school, and Texas Southern University (TSU). We distributed about 850 leaflets at the two schools to parents, grandparents, and siblings of graduating students. UH has one of the most diverse student bodies in the country. TSU is an historically Black college in 3rd Ward, one of the oldest ghettoes in the city.
For several weeks there had been a daytime occupation in a central area of the UH student center. The week before graduation, an outside encampment had been set up. It was attacked by police and shut down within hours. Students took their fight to hold a spirited impromptu demonstration at police headquarters. During the graduation ceremony at UH, at least one graduate proudly unfurled a banner as she stepped to the podium. (UH authorities removed it from the video of the graduation.)
We challenged people with the flyer’s call for “three things [that] must happen”: spreading the resistance to the genocide, defending the students under attack for doing so, and digging deeply into the source of all this, and the revolutionary solution. We received a wide range of responses from “ignore-ance” to "Thank you for doing this" to “Yes, we’re all human!” At the law school especially, we encountered a lot more Zionists, a lot of “fuck yous,” and we got out way fewer flyers relative to the numbers of people. But at the main UH ceremony, especially some younger folks took small stacks of leaflets to distribute.
