You can see more of Joe Melchione's photos of the riots here.

By Lara Cooper
Voice Staff Writer
Isla Vista these days seems an unlikely place for barricaded streets and flying bullets. Add UCSB students burning a bank to the ground and it seems surreal.

But that’s exactly what happened, starting Feb. 25, 1970, and a group of panelists will host a forum at the Brooks Institute Cota Street Gallery Sunday to discuss the events that followed.
“Re-Visioning Isla Vista 1970” will feature viewpoints from all sides of the event.

Joe Melchione, Mick Kronman, and Becca Wilson — all UCSB students during the riots — will be on the panel. Kronman is the manager of Harbor Operations for the City of Santa Barbara, Wilson is a filmmaker who lives in Los Angeles, and Melchione is a Santa Monica-based attorney and photographer who will have photos on display from the event.

Nearly 40 years later, the discussion and photographs promise to be just as poignant these days.

“We are in the same predicament as a nation, as a world, now as it was in 1970, with a war going on that is a not “right war,” if there is such a thing,” said Matthew Margulies, who helped organize the panel.

Margulies discovered Melchione’s photos from the Isla Vista riots, learned of his upcoming exhibit and wanted to help.

“The idea of having a panel came about because so many of the people who were involved in the riots still live here and have vivid memories of it,” he said.

“The parallels are interesting and we need to learn from history, particularly if we’re in the same boat that we were in before,” he said.

It was a turbulent beginning to a new chapter in Isla Vista’s history. A rally had just been held on campus with William Kunstler, the controversial defense attorney for the “Chicago Seven,” and the crowd of 7,000 leaving the stadium witnessed a student named Rich Underwood being clubbed by police after resisting arrest for carrying a bottle of wine that was mistaken for a molotov cocktail.

Add the event to the context of the war and suspicion between police and students, and the riots that ensued in Isla Vista seemed like a natural progression.

Police were chased away, Isla Vista became a fortified community, and students held their ground for three days until the National Guard intervened on the fourth day. In the meantime, students had burned the Bank of America building to the ground, the most visible representation of “establishment” in Isla Vista.

The incidents in Isla Vista led to one death, seven wounded by shotgun pellets, and 90 arrests, according to Richard Flacks, a research professor of sociology at UCSB and expert on youth and student activism, who will be leading the discussion.

“This was obviously a consequence of high levels of generational conflict,” said Flacks, who was a professor at UCSB at the time. His appointment to the faculty was controversial because of his activism.

“I want to have people think about and talk about not the events per se but how they look upon it now,” said Flacks, who said he hopes the event will encourage reflection.

Others present on the panel will be Bob Potter, former UCSB faculty member and author of “The Campus By the Sea Where the Bank Burned Down,” and Jean Voss, who worked as a dispatcher for the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department.

Although seating at the event will be limited, the photographic exhibit from Melchione will be showing at the gallery until Sept. 12.

“I really wanted this part of Santa Barbara’s history to not slip into myth,” Melchione said of his work.

Melchione, who was a senior at the time and photo editor of the Daily Nexus, called the event “shocking and disorienting and constantly puzzling.”

He said he was surprised at the event’s growing force — the largest number of arrests were in June.

Melchione had only first picked up a camera two months earlier, but knew that the fray had to be documented.

“I was thrown into the middle of it and I wanted to have some voice in the process,” he said.
He also said that tensions between black and Chicano students and the administration helped create a boiling point at the Kunstler rally.

“These were kids that recognized that things weren’t right,” he said.

Melchione wants people to walk away from the exhibit and the panel with a sense of optimism.
“I feel very strongly that we were able to change things and I think people don’t believe that any more,” he said.

“My hope is that people will walk away from this and realize you can bring about change.”