Ricki Green: From Protester to Producer

While a political-science student at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, Ricki Green became swept up in real-life politics. The lightning rod was the free speech movement that led to Green becoming an active Vietnam War protester, worker for the National Urban Coalition and a founder of the Women’s Equity Action League.

Now vice president of news and public affairs at WETA in Washington, Green is executive producer for national news and public affairs programming including PBS’ “Washington Week in Review.”

She also is one of the executive producers of the six-part PBS series “Making Sense of the Sixties,” which airs two episodes nightly Monday-Wednesday.

The series examines the roots of the turbulent decade, which challenged traditional values, rules, ideologies, family, sexuality and established authority. It was a time of free love, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, the decade of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.

It was the decade that changed Ricki Green’s life.

Green talked about the ‘60s with Susan King.

What was Berkeley like in the ‘60s?

It was like somebody turned on a switch inside of me. I started really feeling connected to something.

At Berkeley, when all of this free speech stuff happened, it started over a small issue. We couldn’t have card tables to hand out literature on campus. That is all it was. They wanted the card tables off the campus. It just got to be bigger and bigger with more and more kids coming together and protesting. The students began to be drawn into it even if they didn’t understand what had started.

It was just something happening on campus that you felt was something new. It was something in the the air and this was the first of all the protest movements to follow.

Parents are a part of “Making Sense of the Sixties.” What were your parents’ reactions to your protesting?

One of the reasons I felt so strongly about putting in the parents’ side of the ‘60s all the way through the series was (that) now being a parent I can understand how upset our parents werethat we were not just following in their footsteps.

We were really challenging their value systems and the way they had lived, and that is what was so enraging and bewildering to so many of our parents.

My mother was terribly threatened by it. She couldn’t understand why her formerly obedient daughter who had never questioned authority in her life was suddenly demonstrating and wanting to lead a different lifestyle from what she thought I would follow.

I wasn’t interested in getting married right out of college. The expectations were that if you didn’t have an “Mrs.” degree by the time you graduated from college you were in big trouble.

What misconceptions do high school and college students have today about the ‘60s?

On one hand, I think they think they missed a good time. From a lot of the research we did, and we talked to 100 professors who teach ‘60s courses on campuses which now are so popular, what we found is that the kids get the sex, drugs, but they don’t understand the what, why and how. There is a real sense of wanting to understand more about what it was really about.

It has been clear to me in being a parent that I have had real trouble in communicating to my kids--my daughter is 16 and I have a son who is 20--and telling them what the ‘60s really meant to me. And that was really the impetus for me to do this series. I knew if I was having trouble there must be a lot of parents having the same trouble. In the research we did, it is a common problem of ‘60s generation parents that they can’t talk to their children about their experiences. I hope that this series will answer some of those questions for our kids and ourselves as well.

The Vietnam War is still a painful subject.

When you talk about the legacies of the ‘60s, this whole issue whether it was more patriotic to go or stay and protest is still something like an open wound. Just think what happened when Dan Quayle surfaced and it turned out he was in the National Guard. All of a sudden, people went into their Vietnam War positions with some people saying he was trying to get out of the draft and other people saying, kind of quietly, that a lot of people were doing that then.

It was like reliving it all over again. We still haven’t resolved that. It is still a stigma for people who were very active in the anti-war movement if they want to get into national office or run for public office.

I think that there are still a number of people who probably might have made good leaders for us who haven’t stepped into the public arena because they are worried what they did in the ‘60s will come back to haunt them.

Do you think the ‘60s could happen again?

I think that small elements could happen again, like massive protests if a Gulf War went on and on and there were a lot of casualties. I don’t see the reaction against traditional values, which was so much of what the ‘60s social protest was about. I think the ‘60s succeeded in really smashing a lot of that. We don’t have a traditional, rigid society as we did coming into the ‘60s. I don’t think in that way there is as much socially to rebel against. There is so much more tolerance now to dress any way, to look any way, to be different.

“Making Sense of the Sixties” airs Monday-Wednesday at 9 p.m. on KCET.