What We Went Through - Yippie Girl by Judy Gumbo

by Judy Gumbo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Yippie Girl: Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI by Judy Gumbo came under the heading “Revolution Then and Now” at the Bay Area Book Festival last spring. Because I lived through some of it, “came of age” in it like the author did in the 1960s and early 1970s, I CAN say that it WAS the “Second American Revolution,” far more than the January 6th 2021 riot was another “1776.” (THAT was more of a “Siege of Ft. Sumter,” kicking off the Second CIVIL WAR,… IF we let it go that far.)

Judy Gumbo of Yippie Girl grew up in an argumentative, politically left-wing family in Toronto. In the chapter titled, “From Communist Party to Hippie Pad,” she attends the American Sociological Association conference in San Francisco, gets a job as a Teaching Associate at Cal, but “had no idea that moving to Berkeley in late 1967 meant I’d be adopting as my hometown an epicenter of hippie counter-culture, free love, and anti-war protest” as well as an “artistic…community that defined Bay Area life and politics.” 

Here she found “tables crammed with leaflets” inside the Student Union where “women… argued intensely with each other – about politics!” because, among other things, Lyndon Johnson was battling on in Vietnam using up plenty of young white, black and brown lives and bodies. Women were enjoying the Sexual Revolution, music scene and soft drug culture, but also starting to get angry about being ignored at meetings, handling the phones and typewriters, but never getting the spotlight, front page or bylines we deserved. Gumbo was one of us. 

“We will have our freedom. We will not be ignored” entered side-by-side with “Hell, No, We Won’t Go” (fight and die in imperialist wars in poor, non-industrialized countries), Black Power and “the beginning of the Revolutionary Ecology Movement,” even though all these movements were mostly ignored, ridiculed, demonized or downplayed in the mainstream culture and press at the time. 

At the fountain by Sather Gate, “cool” “golden eagle” Stew Albert would not only become a “forty-year relationship,” but also introduce her to his two best friends, Jerry Rubin, Yippie co-founder; and Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party, who later gave her the name “Gumbo” when she courageously shouted “I am not Mrs. Stew! I am not Mrs. Anybody! I’m me. I’m Judy….I am a person in my own right!” 

Yes, the same 6’ tall Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver glowering out from the cover of Soul On Ice (1968), which he wrote while in San Quentin for assault, rape, armed robbery and attempted murder. This woman’s got guts. And she tells it like it is.  

What it was. What we went through. 

Cleaver’s wife and “Communications Secretary” Kathleen, among others, shared Gumbo’s “Yippie sense of the absurd,” using satire and media to shift power from the heavy-handed “Establishment” back to “the People.” Panther Bobby Seale paved the “self-defense only” boulevard in resistance to white supremacy and police brutality while Huey Newton defied the Oakland Police Department in armed revolt, was jailed and later took a deadly gangsta drug, money and violence path.

Gumbo KNEW that Carol Hanisch was the one who “had revolutionized the east coast women’s movement…spring of 1969” with “the personal is political” because she was on the pulse, held a women’s consciousness-raising group in her Keith Street apartment and Ashby Avenue collective while a lot of the rest of us were slowly floating around amoebically between sex object and personhood.

She’d helped build Peoples’s Park, The Black Panthers and Women’s Liberation through her movement connections, support work, activism and at the Berkeley Barb, respected there or not. (The editor published her feminist manifesto as “Why Women are Revolting.”)

“The Movement,” both organized and spontaneously, demonstrated against the Vietnam War in Lincoln Park, met by Mayor Daley’s police riot in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, “And I was there.” 

A deep desire for radical change moved Gumbo/them/us all to both strategically and spontaneously re-frame cultural norms through media, demonstrations and “expose establishment hypocrisy using theater of ridicule,” bring “ultra-democratic” spirit to “Power to the People,” endure “The Great Chicago 8 Conspiracy Trial.”

Witness the downfall of Nixon while being spied upon night and day, make antiwar missions to Hanoi, Moscow and Havana, stand up for women’s empowerment, autonomy and rights; discover, discourage and eventually dismantle FBI surveillance and many other brilliant, erotic, deadly and harrowing adventures and situations? Yes, she did it all.

Yeah, it was like that. Yes, it WAS like that! The good, the bad, naive, hilarious, curious, courageous, sexy, ecstatic and the just plain painful, confusing, misogynist, annoying and furious narrative Judy Gumbo tells in first-person, glorious detail. 

It still IS “like that,” in many ways, and as far as militarized police, brutality and surveillance goes, I think a whole lot worse, due to the prison-industrial-complex, "improved" technology and domestic terror by social media-mobilized movements and “citizen reporting.” 

Gumbo gives us all the dialogues, scenarios and pivotal events she witnessed in one of the best Bildungsromane of “narrative non-fiction” I’ve ever read. 

Yippie Girl is a REALLY GOOD, thought-provoking pleasure to read, both for eclipsed histories, present encouragement and future inventiveness. 

Buy this book, SAVOR IT, loan it to your book club, social action, food shelf, men’s group, voting rights and Indivisible co-members; daughters, Mother, in-laws, spouse, lover, sorority sisters and best friends. 

 Wyndy Knox Carr, Knox Book Beat, in The Berkeley Times as "Handbooks By, For and About Activists," 6 October, 2022.
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Intents & Impacts – Steve Zolno on Democracy

 Published 22 September, 2022 in The Berkeley Times, Knox Book Beat, short version of "Bitter Truths, Distorted Hopes." © Wyndy J. Knox Carr.

Guide to Living in a Democracy by Steve Zolno
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think this is a Guide to start class discussions with in junior high school, paired with a real history text, The U. S. Constitution and Amendments. It’s really good. Unfortunately, the American public school system; especially in history, civics and social studies; has been so damaged and degraded since the 1950s and 60s, that Zolno’s Guide may be suitable for high schools and even community colleges and adult ed.

Parts and tones of Steve Zolno’s Guide to Living in a Democracy left me confused and hesitant at first. I had to put my “writing tutor” cap on to realize that he started with abstractions named from an authoritative stance that seemed to “leave me out.” He was instructing me about things I already knew, without sharing the tools I need to make those ideals and principles into realities.

Three things I learned as a copy editor and in graduate school in Creative Writing:
Ask first “Who is ‘my audience’?” “Who do I want my reader to be?” then
“SHOW, share stories and sense images; don’t TELL” and
"How can my structure and language support those two goals best?"

Journalism and Poetry are two ends of a spectrum of writing styles where Facts and Rules are on one end and “throwing out the rule book” in order to Take An Inspired Leap with the intuition-spirit-heart-mind-senses is on the other. The “nonfiction” middle path Zolno’s striving for needs a good dose of both to actually get his readers engaged.

If I’d picked up his book in a bookstore and started reading the first few pages or chapter, I would have put Guide back down, thinking, “This isn’t for me.” Our readers’ time is valuable, too – in persuasive nonfiction especially, how do we bring others along with us in our most courageous, passionate dreams for creating a present and future world?

When Zolno describes events, concepts and people in general, flat binaries only; highlighting quotes, persons and events in either/ors; his views slant condemnatory or rosy. After an elementary introduction “about what the democratic vision looks like,” Zolno’s Guide glides past specific Union goals stated in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution like “establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquillity”…et cetera to very contemporary memes like “Shared Prosperity,” “Freedom of Choice,” “Fair Elections” and “Protecting our Environment,” assuming his readers not only know all about their details, but are with him in mind and spirit. 

Excellent ideal goals, of course, but how can we enforce, coerce or educate thOurselves to participate nationally in thOur democratic republic abiding by principles of “Constructive Dialogue,” “Universal Respect,” “Commitment to Truth” and “Equal Justice” when we have so much heated discussion as to what those are, in structure as well as policy, let alone whether we can commit to, employ and practice them wholeheartedly? What kinds of practices, people and organizations will “get us there?” 

Grappling with how to employ particular policies and actions globally when thOur cultures, languages and governmental structures are so diverse feels even more daunting, even if it’s more necessary than ever. “We all live downstream,” and a war or epidemic on the other side of the world also devastates thOur own. 

Can “We the People” lead the way, or at least shine a light into the seeming darkness? How can we “walk the talk,” “put our money where our mouths are” “be the change we want to see in the world” and live out other encouraging metaphors describing activity leading to real political functionality? 

Even Zolno admits to conundrums in his Guide to Living in a Democracy, confirming authors like Dante D. King in The 400-Year Holocaust: White America’s Legal, Psychopathic, and Sociopathic Black Genocide - and the Revolt Against Critical Race Theory: “The concept of universal respect and the actions of democracies toward others often are not consistent. They (not We, mind you – he’s taking the omniscient narrator stance here, absolving himself from blame or responsibility?) have a history of subjugating people under the guise of liberating them.” Indeed. 

These issues are about “morality and fighting for justice,” “radical change from the 1960s to today” using words, funding, technology, science and communication methods that we have now that we didn’t have then. It is STILL hard to tell the warmongers, racists and rapists that we want peace, community and bodily autonomy -- respect, freedom and creativity – preferably through art, humor and diplomacy – but will we persist “by any means necessary” if prejudice and privilege refuse to hear their/our/thOur pleas and incorporate new values and systems? 

We need to own up to the habits, values and systems we hold in thOur own pasts and psyches. Confronting thOur collusion in “the structure of a system.” 

Rebellion or revolt are open resistance or the attempt to overthrow a system, but Revolution is a rebellion that SUCCEEDS in overthrowing a government or system and ESTABLISHES a new one. (Farlex Trivia Dictionary online. © 2012 Farlex, Inc.) (note that there is no reference to being armed, the military or violence in these definitions. wc)

We civil rights activists, draft and war resisters, feminists, "back to the landers" and others who decided to “question authority” in the 1960s and 70s caused a broader change than many political and social historians admit to. We knew what the American Revolution against British monarchy was, because we learned about it in schools that were proud of it, as well as the Constitution and Bill of Rights that came out of that revolution, because our parents had just defeated authoritarian fascism in Europe, the Pacific and East Asia. We were not educated about Imperialism and the brutalities as well as the bounties of capitalism, however. We had to learn and relearn that time and time again over the past 50 years, from “Banana Republics” to “Climate Injustice.”

The Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, “New Federalism” and other policy-benders of education, commerce and law gathering power and support since Nixon, Reagan and the Bush presidencies have strategically “dumbed down” history and social studies in schools since then, however, leaning us to the far right. (The Brookings Institution, considered Centrist-Left by the Right and Centrist-Right by the Left in journalism and Congressional references, is referenced  almost evenly by conservatives and liberals in congress and the press, although "In total, since 1990, 96% of its (employees) political donations have gone to Democrats." Retrieved opensecrets.org , Dec 10, 2018, Wikipedia.) 

We’re facing fascism again, authoritarianism and totalitarianism here and globally. YOU are, because we’re too old to go through this again, and YOU have the tools, hope, energy and imagination to bend and defeat it, this time around. Again, I think this is a Guide to start class discussions with in junior high school, paired with a real history text, The Constitution and Amendments. 

Not a history text like the one my son had in Minneapolis Public schools in 5th or 6th grade, provided free of charge by the Heritage Foundation, with such notables on the editorial Board as Newt Gingrich and Lynne Cheney, Dick’s wife, who almost destroyed the National Endowment for the Humanities when she’d been appointed under President Reagan. 

If you are not familiar with the names of these people, policies, think tanks or corporations I mention here and in Zolno’s copious supporting footnotes, look them up. You will be AMAZED at what you HAVEN’T BEEN TAUGHT. And what varieties of viewpoints exist beyond your algorithmically-slanted FB, Twitter and Instagram “feeds.” (Algorithms “feed” you what they know you want and prefer already – that’s why they call them “feeds.” See more at * below.)

Unfortunately, the American public school system; especially in history, civics and social studies; has been so damaged and degraded since the 1950s and 60s, that Zolno’s Guide may be suitable for high schools and even community colleges and adult ed.

We have response-abilities. Find tools and mentors for Critical Thinking. “Democracy cannot survive on its own.”

* “al′go·rith′mi·cal·ly adv.
Word History: Because of its popularity over the last century, one might figure algorithm for a new coinage. The source of algorithm, however, is not Silicon Valley but Khwarizm, a region near the Aral Sea in south-central Asia and the birthplace of the ninth-century mathematician Muhammad ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi (780?-850?). Al-Khwarizmi, "the Khwarizmian," who later lived in Baghdad, wrote a treatise on what is called algorism, or the use of Arabic numerals for mathematical computation. Despite the name by which the Arabic numerals are known in Europe, these symbols, as well as the methods for using them, were actually developed in ancient India. Europeans learned to use the numerals, however, through treatises written in Arabic by mathematicians working in the Muslim world. Algorism, the English word for computation with Arabic numerals, is derived from Al-Khwarizmi's name. The word algorithm originated as a variant spelling of algorism, probably under the influence of the word arithmetic or its Greek source arithmos, "number." With the development of sophisticated mechanical computing devices in the 20th century, algorithm was adopted as a convenient word for a recursive mathematical procedure, the computer's stock-in-trade. In its new life as a computer term, algorithm, no longer a variant of algorism, nevertheless reminds us of the debt that modern technology owes to the scientists and scholars of ancient and medieval times.”
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. (1 December 2022) https://www.thefreedictionary.com/alg... (2003-2022) Farlex, Inc.

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Moving the Minds of the Movement's Masses

 (Originally published in Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, as "Handbooks For, By and About Activists," 6 October, 2022.)       The Activist's Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator by David Fenton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

      David Fenton and his wife, according to Wikipedia, “divide their time between New York and Berkeley.” It is a true measure of our clout in the thought leader world that neither of these cities needs to designate thOur states, let alone thOur countries. We are “mononymous,” like Aristotle or Cher.      

Fenton started “hanging out with the radical kids… marijuana and rock and roll…demonstrating against the (Vietnam) war” in his late 1960s “75 per cent Black and Puerto Rican” high school; “arousing my senses, sexuality, and creativity in new ways.” 

     He and his fellow students in the Bronx banished their “dress code” “by word of mouth” by all “showing up in blue jeans” one day; the first of many civil disobedience actions that made him more and more confident to question authority, preferably in large groups with a lot of like-minded others willing to take action. 

    He also “subscribed to…intellectual new left magazines,” joined photography club, and “we started the New York High School Free Press,” out of the Student Union and anti-draft coalition. The parent publisher, NY Free Press, and other underground and formal adult magazines began picking up his “photographs of riots and demonstrations around New York,” helping him to make “serious money from photography” for them and the Liberation News Service of the “hundreds of hippie, counter-cultural, antiwar underground newspapers” that had sprung up “across the country.”  (He's center on this Getty Images photo -- very young.)  

     He latched up with Abbie Hoffman and the Youth International Party Yippies (see Judy Gumbo, Yippie Girl, Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI), impressed with how “creatively the defendants” of the Chicago Seven and their previous protest “mythmaking,” especially on television and talk show news, proved that “image” about “yourself or your organization, is as important to communicating your message as what you actually do.” Read that sentence again, because it is the essence of HIS message. 

     Officer Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck viscerally encapsulated Black Lives Matter, and the broadly misunderstood slogan “Defund the Police” kicked a hole in it. (It should have been "Demilitarize the Police," and Fenton is talking to the wrong audience when he uses the metaphors of "fight" "war" and "generals" when talking about progressive "leaders.")

    An Ann Arbor commune, riots, rock stars and tear gas followed, including his work in The Berkeley Barb during a time of police, corporate and secret repression under Nixon and Reagan. The Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and Koch Brothers/DT/Bannon/Giuliani/ domination years have followed, and he worked against alar on apples, big oil, and with Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon to ban fracking in New York State. 

     I don’t agree with all his stories about people and events, details and conclusions; but what he’s learned on the way to International Climate Action and confronting “The Conservative Media’s Alternative Reality” as a photographer, organizer and "ad man" is stunning. (see https://www.davidfenton.com/ Amazing!)

     Just A FEW bits/bytes: “For decades, I have watched crazy dogmatism hurt the Left,” (SO TRUE!) 

“People learn from engaging characters and moral stories,” (people we can relate to and empathize with) 

“Public relations also affects the legal system and the courts” (from the grassroots up, not always “trickle down”) and 

“To change policy, you have to change public opinion.” (see the dogged determination of the Heritage Foundation and other Right-wing Think Tanks over the past 40+ years culminating in Trump and the Dobbs decision etc. Persistence and appropriate "packaging" (fear mongering) (infusions of Hope) to the right population in thOur own language WORKS.

     Find this book, study it and USE his PR principles in your next endeavor. 

Available at Eastwind and other independent bookstores in the Bay Area and elsewhere.

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The 400-Year Holocaust: Dante D. King

 Together. The clock is ticking... Together. The time is NOW... (from Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, "Bitter Truths, Distorted Hopes," 8 September, 2022.)

The 400-Year Holocaust: White America’s Legal, Psychopathic, and Sociopathic Black Genocide - and the Revolt Against Critical Race Theory by Dante D. King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dante D. King’s The 400-Year Holocaust: White America’s Legal, Psychopathic, and Sociopathic Black Genocide - and the Revolt Against Critical Race Theory, edited by Marguerite Mallory, is a bitter pill to swallow. (photo - Frederick Douglass (circa 1879) George Kendall Warren. His Narrative of the Life.. An African Slave should be required reading in high school American History classes. wc)

The first 40 pages and subsequent rebukes peppering King’s book left me sometimes confused and hesitant, if not reactively skeptical. Just what was he trying to accomplish here?    

“DEAR BLACK PEOPLE.” Page i. OK. (Am I an eavesdropper or ally? Should I put the book down or give it away?)

“I am not attempting to convince any non-Black person…especially not whites …to agree with me. Such an act would be futile.” (?) “I will not debate this book’s perspectives,” but “a non-Black reader,” “will also likely want to debate long-established facts.” No, actually. I think facts are facts, too. 

When he starts including those facts -- then I get engaged, want to hear more and act. A bitter pill, indeed, but I agree with him.
His understanding, explanation of and specific references to the social, legal and psychological establishment of American Anti-Blackness empowering White Supremacy from Colonial 1619 to the present are spectacular historical game-changers; his scholarship outstanding. The relatedness of land, money, labor and Black=Slave=de-humanized=sexual/physical “property” he explicates step-by-step is diabolical, horrifying, immense. And all perfectly “legal,” enmeshed in thOur "heroic" "pioneer" heritage.

 I believe few Americans know the real details of this “genocidal agenda and its impacts (that) have persisted for more than 400 years." and that "It remains normalized in American culture.” “In the eyes of the law, Whites had total sovereignty over Black bodies.” True. All deeply traditional and institutionalized in (dominant) White Culture. And they/we still do.

I'm distracted from absorbing and moving to change this grotesque national addiction, however, when he keeps throwing in stumbling-block words and phrases like “always,” “never,” and “The unwillingness to see” to label a monolithic white construct. He's describing “The core of White morality,” as a totality “embedded into the fiber of American culture” that can "never" heal or change. If I really believed that, as someone raised white, I never would have finished his book, and probably wouldn't have chosen to review and publicize it in my blogs, Goodreads and book review columns.

He keeps setting up juxtapositions like these four sentences that are both true and false at the same time, freezing us in an immobilized past/present: “We get murdered repeatedly by the same people but are not allowed to be rageful. Most Whites know this, at least intellectually, if not emotionally. They know. They just do not care.” 

Even after witnessing Police Officer Derek Chauvin murdering George Perry Floyd? Really? “Know” that viscerally, but “Not care?” (photo - Birmingham Children's March, May 1963) When I compare what he's saying to the "invisibility" of systemic misogyny in the U. S. over 100 years after we got the vote, I "know what he's getting at," but there's something about the way he's addressing us that doesn't fit his readership, or displays the same kind of blunt force he so profoundly disdains.

He is absolutely accurate that WS forces are digging in ever deeper against “Critical Race Theory,” which is no more than an accurate history of slavery, the Jim Crow South, segregation and the Civil Rights Movement; with Proud Boys to soccer moms denying and attacking that “race” is used as an “intersectional social construct.” 

“Anti-Black laws, institutions, practices and mores of yester-years continue to permeate throughout current American life and culture exclusively to benefit White folks and at the detriment of Black folks.” Uncomfortable, unfortunate, DEVASTATING. And TRUE.

This has erupted from the subterranean realms of systemic denial. Admit thoroughly that it happened, is happening and will continue to happen unless we all make deep and vast changes. Mentally, physically, emotionally, socially and legally. 

Paired with Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, her newer Nice Racism and classics of James Baldwin (photo by Allen Warren), Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass and many others, King’s book and workshops can spur multilateral action. 

Together. The clock is ticking... Together. The time is NOW...

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