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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