Isla Vista and the Burning of the Bank
Near Santa Barbara, California
The seaside student neighborhood of Isla Vista, packed against the University of California, Santa Barbara, was the scene of one of the most dramatic campus uprisings of the Vietnam War era. On the night of February twenty fifth, nineteen seventy, after a fiery speech by the radical attorney William Kunstler and simmering anger over the war, the firing of a popular professor, and the beating of a student, a crowd surged through the streets. Protesters set fires, and before the night was over the local Bank of America branch, seen as a symbol of corporate power, was in flames.
The roof caved in as it burned. The unrest was not over. Two more major disturbances followed that spring.
In April, during another confrontation, a twenty two year old student named Kevin Moran was trying to stop arsonists from torching the bank's temporary replacement when he was shot and killed by a sheriff's deputy. His death stunned the community. Today a building called Embarcadero Hall stands where the bank once did, and a plaque out front remembers Moran.
Isla Vista has since become known worldwide for its dense, raucous student life, but it carries this deeper history of a generation that took its anger to the streets.
