No plaque or memorial marks the site at Revelle Plaza where Winne took his life.  The location of an unofficial memorial is across campus, tucked away in the woods near the Snake Path and in the western shadow of Fallen Star.  Unlike these Stuart Collection art pieces, the Winne memorial is not marked on official campus maps.  In a similar sense, Winne’s story is not marked in the official history of UCSD.  It has been erased by slick videos and brochures that promote a fantasy image of the campus and a de-politicized version of its history. Although Winne was not affiliated with student antiwar activists on campus, he is part of an activist history that goes unaccounted for in official histories of UCSD.  Winne’s act of protest came a month after the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970 and a week after the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four students at Kent State University. For many young people, these two moments highlighted the underlying contradictions of U.S. institutions.  

Given the location of UCSD in the affluent city of La Jolla and in a major military city and border town, these contradictions were all the more stark.  Winne was not an aberration — his act is tied to the larger frustrations and hopes of the period.  At the time of his death, Chicano students, black students and working class white students were in the midst of a struggle to find Lumumba-Zapata College (eventually Third College and now Thurgood Marshall). These students, Winne and countless others held on to utopian dreams of a society where freedom was not premised upon inequality at home and war abroad. Forty-two years later, we are located on a much different map than the one those students imagined.  We live in a nation locked in its longest war, a state that spends more money on prisons than schools, along a militarized and lethal border with our southern neighbor and in a privatized university that conducts research for the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. Now, more than ever, it is important to remember the Lumumba-Zapata activists, George Winne and all those students who imagined a different future for UCSD and the world.

Join us this at Revelle Plaza this Thursday, May 10, at 4 p.m. to pay tribute to George Winne, Jr.

—Niall Twohig

Literature Ph. D Candidate

—Jorge Mariscal

Professor, Department of Literature