Bring Abbie Home Rally
Counterculture/Yippies
These posters promote two events - one in New York City at Madison Square Garden and the other at Grant Park in Chicago - in August of 1978 to support Yippie leader, Abbie Hoffman, who had been underground for four and half years. The New York event featured celebrities and movement activists playing music, giving testimonials and performing a mock-trial. Participants included Rip Torn, William Kunstler, Rennie David, Bobby Seale, Terry Southern, Larry Rivers, Taylor Mead, Jon Voight, William Burroughs, Ossie Davis, Dave Dellinger, John Froines, Jerry Rubin and others. Many wondered if Hoffman was in attendance in disguise. A recorded message from Hoffman was played at the event.
Bring Abbie Home Committee
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
August 1978
posters
Daley's Media
Yippes
This satirical flyer from the Yippies addresses politics repression during the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention.
Chicago Defense Fund
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1968
mimeograph
flyer
Mountain-Moving Day
Women's Liberation
This silkscreen was made in 1972 by the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective and features a poem by Yosano Akiko, which was the pen name of a Japanese poet, author, and activist who lived from 1878-1942. The portion of the poem excerpted and translated here was first published in 1911 in the first edition of Seito, a feminist literary magazine that announced the start of the Seitosha movement, an important early women’s liberation movement in Japan. The same year that this poster appeared, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band also set the poem to song, titled, “Mountain Moving Day.” The poster was reprinted from Liberation Graphics of Madison, Wisconsin by the Womens Graphics Collective, 852 W. Belmont, Chicago, Illinois 6065. According to Estelle Carol, the founder of the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective:
“The Chicago Women's Graphics Collective was first organized in 1970 to provide high quality feminist posters for the growing women's liberation movement. The Collective originally used silkscreen to create their large brilliantly colored prints because it was inexpensive and in the early days, posters could actually be produced in members' apartments.
As their distribution grew, the Collective moved to a series of studios and began using offset printing for their most popular posters. Graphics Collective posters reflected the broad diversity of the women's movement. The Collective produced posters on abortion, women's health, lesbianism, women's labor, sisterhood, women's sports, women's spirituality, rape and other clearly feminist issues, but also created posters on the United Farmworkers struggle, African liberation, anti-war themes and highly personal visions that defy easy categorization.
Graphics Collective posters appeared in peoples' homes, women's liberation offices, coffee shops, women's centers, women's health clinics, labor unions, and even on the set of a popular TV sitcom. All work was done in teams of 2-4 women led by an artist-designer. The Collective wanted a new feminist art that transcended the highly individualistic "Great Men of Art" syndrome. Members would propose a poster idea and then recruit a team to actually produce it. This method incorporated the vision of the individual artist into the collective art process.
Thousands of posters were distributed worldwide during the Collective's 13 year history from 1970-1983. Today some of their best efforts are considered classics of feminist poster art.”
Chicago Women's Graphics Collective
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1972
poster
Women and the Churches
Women's Liberation
This leaflet offers a critique of Judaism and Christianity as historically sexist religious faiths and institutions and argues for reparations.
Chicago Women's Liberation Union
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. early-1970s
photocopy
leaflet
Fred Hampton
Black Panther Party
This poster, created by Black Panther Party Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas, ca. 1969, features Fred Hampton, leader of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party. Hampton was murdered by the FBI after a raid on Panther headquarters in Chicago on December 4, 1969. The poster includes two quotes. The quote at the top reads "You can jail a revolutionary/ but you can't jail the/ revolution. You can run a/ freedom fighter around the/ country but you can't run freedom/ fighting around the country. You/ can murder a liberator, / but you can't murder/ liberation." The second reads "Fred Hampton Deputy/ Chairman Illinois Chapter/ Black Panther Party/ Born August 30, 1948/ Murdered by Fascist Pigs/ Dec. 4, 1969."
Emory Douglas for the Black Panther Party newspaper
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1969
poster
Call for a National Hard Times Conference
Anti-Poverty Movement
This pamphlet advertises the Hard Times Conference, which took place between January 30 and February 1, 1976, at the University of Illinois Circle Campus in Chicago. The conference was organized by the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, with the support of a number of Weather Underground leaders and sought to challenge political cuts to social welfare programs, protest inflation and advocate for a guaranteed jobs and income program. The conference slogan was “Hard Times are Fighting Times.” This pamphlet discusses the accessibility of social services in urban neighborhoods, the importance of obtaining a living wage, and problems accruing from inflation. According to the Freedom Archive, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee was “An anti-imperialist group that began as the Prairie Fire Distributing Committee in 1974 to distribute Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, written by members of the Weather Underground Organization. After its initial publication, groups sprang up around the country to discuss the book. PFOC was formally organized in 1976 and was active in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Chicago until the mid-1990s. Their work embraced a broad range of issues: international solidarity with national liberation struggles in Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Nicaragua and El Salvador; and with the struggles for self-determination of Puerto Rican, African-American, Mexicano, and Native peoples inside U.S. borders; support of political prisoners; opposition to white and male supremacy and support of women’s and gay liberation.”
Hard Times Conference Board
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1976
color print
pamphlet
Uncle Sam needs YOU nigger
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
This poster was issued by the Harlem Progressive Labor Club, the Harlem branch of the Progressive Labor Party, a Marxist-Leninist organization founded in 1962 out of a split within the Communist Party USA. Some described the organization as Maoist in the late-1960s. The PLP gained a foothold in the anti-Vietnam War movement through its Worker Student Alliance faction, which rivaled the Revolutionary Youth Movement within Students for a Democratic Society. The Harlem chapter initially emerged in response to police violence against African Americans in Harlem and later in opposition to the War in
Vietnam, emphasizing the racial dynamics of the war. This poster reads, "Uncle Sam needs YOU nigger/ Become a member of the world's highest paid black mercenary army!/ Fight for freedom... (in Viet Nam)/ Support White Power - travel to Viet Nam, you might get a medal!/ Receive valuable training in the skills of killing off other oppressed people!/ (Die Nigger Die - you can't die fast enough in the ghettos.)/ So run to your nearest recruiting chamber! (Keep the faith, baby)."
Harlem Progressive Labor Club
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1968
poster
Television and the Black Revolution
Black Power and the Media
This is the text of a speech given by Lou Potter at the Spring Television Symposium at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Potter was the program editor at <em>Black Journal. </em>The speech offers his thoughts on the influences of the "black revolution" and "youth revolution" on U.S. media
Lou Potter
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
April 8, 1969
mimeograph
Vietnam: Our Boys Are Dying In Vain
Anti-War Movement
On Memorial Day in 1967, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War organized a mass march against the Vietnam War in Chicago, welcoming additional antiwar organizations to increase support.
National Mobilization Committee to End the War
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1967
Button
Physical Object
National Hard Times Conference
Ant-Poverty
This poster, created by Flood Time’s Here Culture Collective for the New England Regional Office for the National Hard Times Conference, promotes the Hard Times Conference, which took place between January 30 and February 1, 1976, at the University of Illinois Circle Campus in Chicago. The conference was organized by the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, with the support of a number of Weather Underground leaders and sought to challenge political cuts to social welfare programs, protest inflation and advocate for a guaranteed jobs and income program. The conference slogan was “Hard Times are Fighting Times.” According to the Freedom Archive, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee was “An anti-imperialist group that began as the Prairie Fire Distributing Committee in 1974 to distribute Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, written by members of the Weather Underground Organization. After its initial publication, groups sprang up around the country to discuss the book. PFOC was formally organized in 1976 and was active in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Chicago until the mid-1990s. Their work embraced a broad range of issues: international solidarity with national liberation struggles in Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Nicaragua and El Salvador; and with the struggles for self-determination of Puerto Rican, African-American, Mexicano, and Native peoples inside U.S. borders; support of political prisoners; opposition to white and male supremacy and support of women’s and gay liberation.”
New England Regional Office for the National Hard Times Conference
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1976
poster
New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Band
Women's Liberation
The Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band, which was connected to the Chicago’s Women’s Liberation Collective, and the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band, which was connected to New Haven Women’s Liberation, attempted to inject a feminist perspective into rock music and challenge the traditionally hyper-masculinist and misogynistic rock scene. As bassist and vocalist, Susan Abod, recalled, “We loved to dance, [but] we were dancing to songs that were degrading to us.” The groups were around from 1969 to 1973 and recorded their first record together, “Mountain Moving Day,” in 1972. In the liner notes, the women explained, "We wanted to make music that would embody the radical, feminist, humanitarian vision we shared.” The strong feminist orientation and DIY ethos of the groups foreshadowed the Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s and paved the way for other female artists.
The full liner notes to the 1972 album are here:
Both the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band and the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band were begun about 2 1/2 years ago by women in and around the women’s movement in our two cities. At that time some of us were already musicians who had gotten an education in sexism by playing in male bands. Some of us were fugitives of high school marching bands, folk music groups and Mrs. Porter’s music recitals. Some of us had stashed unplayed instruments under our beds years ago. And some of us were would-be musicians, learning to play for the first time. All of us wanted to create a new kind of band and a new kind of music, though we had no clear idea how to do that.
We knew what we didn’t want: the whole male rock trip with its insulting lyrics, battering-ram style and contempt for the audience. We didn’t want to write the female counterpart of songs like “Under My Thumb,” “Back-Street Girl,” “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” where men say to us ‘you’re beneath contempt and we will celebrate your degradation.’ We had to think of some other way to make a hit besides bumping and grinding like Mick Jagger, raping and burning our guitars like Jimi Hendrix, or whacking off on stage like Jim Morrison. We didn’t want to pulverize our audience’s (and our own) eardrums with 1010 decibels. As performers we didn’t want to get off by trashing the people we played for, and we didn’t want to have a star backed up by a squad of secondary musicians.
But what did we want anyway? We knew that we wanted to make music that would embody the radical, feminist, humanitarian vision we shared. And the lyric were the obvious place to begin—the field was wide open. Most of the rock songs women have sung till now were about the pain men cause us—the pain that’s supposed to define us as women. We didn’t want to deny that tradition (women struggled hard for the right to sing even that much) bvt we wanted to sing about how the pain doesn’t have to be there—how we fight and struggle and love to make it change. At first it was easiest to write new lyrics to old songs, but as time has gone on we have begun to write entirely new material (the record contains examples from both these phases).
We also had to demystify the priesthood of the instrument and the amplifier— move and set up the equipment, find the fuses, fix the feedback, mike, monitor and control it all ourselves. We had to try to break down the barriers that usually exist between performers and audiences by rapping a lot between songs about who we are, what we’re doing, and where our songs come from. Whenever possible we’ve played in places where people can dance, done some theatre and comedy, passed out lyrics so people could sing with us, and invited other women to come and jam with us.
The hardest thing to deal with was the music itself—what could we make out of such a motley collection of tastes, backgrounds and instruments? We had started from scratch, not by fitting accomplished musicians into traditional slots. We had no leaders, arrangers, managers, agents, roadies—even equipment or instruments. We thought of the bands as collectives, so we wanted to learn together and work toward eliminating the inequalities of (musical) power that existed among us. Our progress has been slow and difficult-it has come out of thousands of hours spent practicing, teaching each other, taking lessons, listening to other bands, jamming, writing and working all kinds of things out with each other.
Over the past 2 1/2 years each band has evolved its own material and style which is partly the result of the combination of instruments we happened to end up with and largely the result of our efforts to make collective, non-assaultive joyful rock music.
WHAT WE DO:
We are the ‘agit-rock’ arm of our respective women’s movements. In Chicago this means we are a chapter of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (more about this later). In New Haven we are all members of New Haven Women’s Liberation. We go places where leaflets can’t go—college dances, women’s conferences, rallies, benefits, festivals, prisons and miscellaneous events. And perhaps we say things that leaflets can’t say because we have music and performance to help us generate for those few hours while we’re playing some glimpse of the world we’d like to see happen. Some of our jobs have been more than just exciting—we and the audience have shared in a deeply-felt celebration of our vision. At others we’ve been met with bad vibes, hostile men, inadequate electricity, freezing weather. We charge for our performances according to what people can pay, and so far have spent our earnings on equipment, transportation, food, drink, rent for rehearsal space and donations to the women’s movement. We don’t see the bands as profit-making (all of us have other jobs which support us) but as part of what needs to be done to change the culture of this society.
What we all want to do is use the power of rock to transform what the world is like into a vision of what the world could be like; create an atmosphere where women are free enough to struggle to be free, and make a new kind of culture that is an affirmation of ourselves and of all people.
CWLU
We in the Chicago band wanted to add just a little note about the organization that we’re a part of because we feel that it has been important to us and to the women in Chicago. This is the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, which is the only on-going radical feminist organization of its type in the country. In its three years it has provided a political unity and sense of direction for much of the women’s movement in Chicago. Some of the projects included in the Union are:
- Women’s Graphics Collective (original feminist art & posters) Liberation School for Women (alternative education for and about women)
- Health Project (which fights to keep city maternity centers open and offers pregnancy testing and health referrals)
- Work Work Group (to equalize salary and job differentials for city employees)
- Womankind (a women’s newspaper)
- Speakers Bureau
- Rape Crisis Center
The following is an abridged version of an article by Ben Kim from April 1994 that appeared in Chicago's alternative paper, New City:
“Suffragette City: The Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band”
“Changing the lyrics, controlling the equipment, making low the mighty—these are obvious [although difficult] tasks of a feminist, humanitarian music. Divesting rock of its sexism, however, leads to a startling development apparently, one can’t simply make nice, clean revolutionary rock without the rock itself—the musical form—changing. Maybe the quality of that energy which so characterizes relic is modified when it is used for dancing and celebration rather than as an insistent, repetitive power trip to keep the audience awed, obedient, and flat on its back.”
—Naomi Weisstein and Virginia Blaisdell from “Feminist Rock: No More Balls and Chains” (1972)
“Wanna start your own rock band, its easier than you think,” claims an article in this month’s Sassy. In “Kicking Out the Jams: A How-To Guide,” Mary Ann Marshall breaks it down neatly, from step one: “Learn to play an instrument,” to step 11: “Shop your demo to labels.” The band illustrated is comprised like Sassy’s targeted readership, of adolescent girls.
Notwithstanding prevailing sexism on the radio/video airwaves, in clubland, on the charts, and in the industry in general, things have come a long way: the Sassy article isn’t some fantasy, it’s a nuts-and-bolts guide to what hundreds of women can do, will do, are doing. The riot-grrl phenomenon, which welled up just a few years ago in a bright-hot fusion of postfeminist politics and postpunk rock, selected the guitar as a tool every girl should have to build a secret world apart. As never before, it’s a time for women to rock. But 24 years ago, a group of Chicagoans said it was time. And they were early. That is, they were first.
The Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band was the self- described “agit-rock” arm of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. Founded in 1969, the union was an umbrella organization, rooted in principles that came to be identified as socialist feminism, focusing on projects in education, service, and direct-action, by and for women (This predilection for action distinguished the union from its more theoretically oriented counterparts across the country, which emphasized consciousness-raising.)
These projects included the Liberation School which predated most women’s studies curricula), Graphics Collective, Legal Clinic, Prison Project, Direct Action for Rights of Employment (DARE), Speakers Bureau, Action Coalition for Decent Childcare (ACDC), Rape Crisis Center, and the renowned Abortion Counseling Service, Jane.
Naomi Weisstein organized the band in March of 1970.
Though later in the decade punk rock would affirm that indeed “anyone can play”, feminism spread that plain truth to women early on. “Our early women’s movement said that any woman could do anything” Weisstein writes. (Due to ill health, Weisstein could not conduct a personal interview. Her comments are drawn, with consent, from a recent essay and correspondence, cited at the end of this piece.) “As long as a woman wanted to learn an instrument or wanted to sing, I included her as a member, believing that with positive expectations and a good deal of enthusiasm she could quickly learn what she didn’t know.”
Many lent their efforts during the initial months, and the band debuted in Grant Park that summer with 12 singers and 4 guitarists: by all accounts it was a musical disaster, proving the open membership policy untenable. Soon after, the band’s core lineup solidified: Susan Abod (bass, vocals), Sherry Jenkins (guitar, vocals), Patricia Miller (guitar, vocals), Linda Mitchell (manager), Fania Mantalvo (drums), Suzanne Prescott (drums). and Weisstein (keyboards).
“We were trying to tackle the form,” recalls Abod. “With the exception of Sherry, we were all coming from classical or folk backgrounds so it was a real challenge for us. We were just trying to get our technical skills together and get a strong backbeat.” If the band’s musical quality was initially shaky, the enthusiasm of the audience more than compensated. “I remember one of our first gigs, in January of 1971, at Alice’s Revisited (a popular coffeehouse on Wrightwood),” recalls Pat Solo, formerly Patricia Miller. “We were just terrible. And we got a standing ovation. Clearly it wasn’t just for the music.” Abod remembers the gig, too. “The place was packed to the gills with women. After I sang my first song they roared.
Musically, we were schlocking our way through. But there was so much love and support for what were trying to do. They just thought we were the greatest!”
Like the union itself, the band was about action, but steeped in ideology, born of it. The band theorized its purpose, debated its role, and even documented the course of its thoughts. In a “Work Group Analysis,” written late in 1972, the band saw itself expanding the union’s scope in a vital way.
“(In the union) there was no awareness of how a culture shapes what people want and how they should want it. Aspects of culture such as music, poetry and art were frivolous (The union should) recognize the seriousness of our commitment to the Women’s Movement. We are more than an entertaining way to break the tensions that. come from ‘serious’ political work”.
Every band, to some extent, concentrates on extra-musical details, everything that might possibly define what it stands for— today’s indie rockers, for example, focus enormous attention on graphic design.
As an explicitly political entity, this band treated its every move as explicitly political—as a nominally leaderless collective, the band hashed out every decision at length. “We were riding this wave of tremendous change,” Abod notes.” And when you do that, stuff comes up. What are we going to say, how, and why. Who can and can’t do what and who says so. What does it mean for our power structure. It was political self-analysis at its gutsiest.”
Meetings and rehearsals placed heavy demands—a minimum of 15 hours a week, excluding performances—on the members, all who had full-time engagements as professionals or students. In this band, working out your part meant more than learning notes.
The band’s extraordinary self-consciousness combined with its dutiful self--chronicling, yields a rare, deep look into in idea in time. If its merely taking the stage was revolutionary, the band’s imperative to rock was radical in ways not readily apprehensible, as explained in a “Culture Paper” submitted to the union in early 1973:
“We like rock and so do millions of others. There is creativity and music and a sense of joy in all of us. What rock told us, though, was that in order to be able to create this kind of music, you had to be magic, and you had to be male. And everybody accepted that. We accepted that, until the words got through to us, and we realized that we were despised. Why were we digging the celebrations of our degradation? Partly hype, partly real content. The hype was that this music was the new insurgency, that it was dangerous to the powers that were. And the content had to do with the music...We should tell it simply: we chose rock because we dug it so much. And so did many other people: every 14-year-old listens to rock music. Here was a cultural vehicle of great popularity, power and appeal. Maybe we could use it.”
So they used rock to build q revolutionary, socialist feminist, humanist culture, first by writing politically charged lyrics, like the wonderfully angry “Secretary” (See Lyrics). But the band felt that lyrics weren’t enough.
“We have to change the total experience of the rock performance,” the band writes in its Culture Paper. “We have to involve our audiences as equals, include rather than insult them, respect rather than degrade them, play for them rather than at them, acknowledge that our audience is our life, our understanding, our spirit... We keep the house lights on them. We rap a lot with them.. .We do theater for them and with them...We pass out lyrics, teach them songs, and have them sing along.”
The band’s assault on male rock hegemony, simultaneously straightforward and tricky, used both music and humor. The latter came out primarily during the raps and theater. Abod recalls one particular crowd-phasing routine. “We did the Kinks ‘ You Really Got Me’ but with a whole new set of lyrics that started with ‘Man,’ instead of ‘Girl,’ and we pranced holding our ‘cocks’ like Mick Jagger. Or whatever rock star we found really annoying, and it would just look ridiculous. And the audience was totally into the guerrilla theater of it—they’d shriek and grab at our legs like groupies. It was so much fun, laughing at a culture that had kept us down.”
"We have been able to create an alternative to the total macho rock culture," the band wrote in its Work Group Analysis. In moving apart, they created a dialectic with that culture, casing Guyville and vandalizing its main street, mapping the regions of disgust and awe in a Mick Jagger, world not of their own making that would inescapably define their exile from it—all this around the time Liz Phair was gearing up for kindergarten.
All through 1971 and ‘72, the band racked up more gigs, traveling to Colorado Springs, Indianapolis, Ithaca, Lewisburg, Pittsburgh, Toronto and elsewhere, and playing locally at universities (U of C, UIC) Wobbly Hall on Lincoln, and the People’s Church on Lawrence. “Women are welcome to come with us on out-of-town gigs as space and money permits,” they wrote to union members. “Be willing to work a little and drink some”.
They got better as they played. And though clearly making history all along, the band was eventually able to freeze its moment in vinyl for posterity. In the spring of ‘72 they journeyed to Massachusetts, where, along with their counterparts in the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rack Band, they recorded on album for Rounder Records. “Mountain Moving Day” was released that fall, with each band contributing one side.
“We were perfectionists, so we weren’t satisfied with the product,” admits Abod. “We worked really hard on our stuff, and it still wasn’t where we wanted it so be.” Nevertheless, on “Mountain Moving Music” the band displays more than a fair amount of musicianship and spirit. The Chicago group contributes the mid-tempo rocker “Secretary:” the bluesy “Ain’t Gonna Marry,” a rag called “Papa” which transforms the traditional “Keep On Truckin'’ Mama” into an attack on —“Rolling Stones, Blood Sweat and Tears/I’ve. taken that shit for too many years”, and the stirring title ballad. Though “Mountain Moving Music” doesn’t rock hard by conventional standards, its strong convictions lend it considerable weight. In a sense, it’s the mother of riot grrl. foxcore, any rock by women who ask no quarter.
The band broke up in mid-1973, after Weisstein moved to the East Coast. The union continued until 1977. The others wrote to the union, upon dissolution, that “expanding a feminist vision through titanic will continue by the formation of new bands,” This, then, is the legacy of these women who played hard and thought rigorously—the very idea, so very empowering, of women rocking, echoed today in the riot grrl call for."all girls to be in bands."
"A lot of women came up to me after our shows and said,'I want to do that,'” remembers Abod. "and we tried to make them understood that they could. Any of them could. And I think a lot of them did."
“Our music is embedded in a context, Women’s Liberation and a vision of our possibilities as women,” the band wrote in its Work Group Analysis. The riot grrls dramatically reclaim that context just as Sassy—"This starting-a- band business is quite a committment...but if its something you’re meant to do, you’ll breeze right through it"-blithely accepts that birthright. And both versions--the battle still raging, the victory won—feel like progress. The vision of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band is a girl’s picture of herself rocking today. Rocking like it can change the world—like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Band
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1971
poster
Pig Power
Police Repression
"As students take to the streets in New York and Berkeley, the forces of order illustrate Mayor Daley's thesis that the police are there "to preserve disorder", and we must organize to challenge their control and preserve our lives as well as our life styles. A short impressionistic montage of music and images pointing up the disparity between their force and ours. The function of police repressing Black and white demonstrators alike is emphasized. " (Roz Payne Archive)<br /><br /> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hsu6SiImwJA" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Newsreel Films
YouTube
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
film
"Crime and Criminals," by Clarence Darrow
Prisoner's Rights Movement
This pamphlet reprints a 1902 speech to prisoners at the Cook County Jail by famed lawyer, Clarence Darrow.
printed by Black Mountain Press for WIN: Peace and Freedom Through Nonviolent Action
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1969
pamphlet
"E.R.A.P. and How It Grew," by Richie Rothstein
New Left and Anti-Poverty Movement
This SDS pamphlet details the history and aims of its Economic Research and Action Project (E.R.A.P.), a program that tried to organize the urban white unemployed youths in several northern cities during the mid-1960s. ERAP got started in Chicago with the help of a $5000 grant from the United Auto Workers. Though this "into the ghetto" move was a practical failure for the organization, it drew many young idealists to SDS and provided critical early organizing experience. As the War in Vietnam accelerated, it overtook ERAP activism within SDS.
published by New England Free Press
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1967
pamphlet
Rising Up Angry, vol. 2, no. 10
New Left
Rising Up Angry was a radical organization compromised of working class youth from communities in Chicago, Illinois. The group published a monthly newspaper that ran from 1969 to 1975. This issue features articles about revolutionary organizing in Asian American communities in San Francisco and New York; a critique of President Richard Nixon's welfare program; and, a statement that explains the repression against the radical press. Also highlighted in this issue is an article about self defense, including information about possession and proper use of guns. Towards the back of the publication, there is an entire page dedicated to local community programs, most of which are medical or legal in nature.
Rising Up Angry
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1970
underground press
Rising Up Angry, undated excerpt
New Left
Rising Up Angry was a radical organization compromised of working class youth from communities in Chicago, Illinois. The group published a monthly newspaper that ran from 1969 to 1975. The excerpt from this undated issue features brief reports on the Young Lord's in New York; a radical organization called Mother Jones in Baltimore; the murder of Eugene Anderson in Baltimore; the Lin Pio Park One; a Teamster action in New York; the case of Mark Jahr in Patterson, New Jersey; racial disturbance at the 103rd Street Beach; dangerous working conditions in Waukegan; a racist firebomb in Harper Area; death of black man in police custody in Arkansas; police harassment in Hamlin Park; armed self-defense; murals; a conversation about drug use among military service members;
Rising Up Angry
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
undated
newspaper
After the 1968 Chicago Convention at the County Fair (45 images)
New Left
Photographs of activists at the County Fair following the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention. It is unclear which county, as the Cook County Fair appears to have stopped in 1948.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
August 1968
Chicago Election Day 1968
(1 image)
Black Power
A photo of a group of unidentified African Americans on Election Day in Chicago in 1968.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
New Left Notes, vol. 2, no. 1, January 6, 1967
New Left
New Left Notes was the official newspaper published by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). This issue includes articles about the Student Strike Conference at the University of Chicago; the role of students in social change; high schools and freedom of press.
Students for a Democratic Society
Bruce Pech
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
January 6, 1967
underground press
New Left Notes, vol. 1, no. 47, December 9, 1966
New Left
New Left Notes was the official newspaper published by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). This issue includes articles about “We Won’t Go” conference at the University of Chicago; coalition politics; anti-Vietnam war protest ideas; SDS ideology; National Council minutes; the Great Society and Apartheid; the “care and feeding of power structures”; a call for civil disobedience; a report from the Nebraska SDS chapter on a Black Power conference; proposal for national draft card burnings; SNCC Newsline; America in the New Era; a poem by Carl Oglesby; images from Berkeley.
Students for a Democratic Society
Bruce Pech
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
December 9, 1966
underground press
New Left Notes, vol. 1, no. 44, November 18, 1966
New Left Notes was the official newspaper published by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). This issue includes articles about councilmanic redistricting; anti-draft activism; an anti-war event in London; a plea to the people of America from prominent Latin Americans against the War in Vietnam; Malcolm X, power, politics and organizing; the case of Jeff Segal; war profiteering; university reform; Latin American Defense Organization; Radical Education Project; planning for the upcoming National Council meeting; report from Columbia, Missouri; analysis of anti-draft conference in Chicago; report of activism by San Fernando Valley State SDS chapter; report from first Mid-Atlantic SDS meeting; protest by magistrates in Pikeville, Kentucky; African liberation in Guinea, Angola and Mozambique.
Students for a Democratic Society
Bruce Pech
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
November 18, 1966
underground press
New Left Notes, vol. 1, no. 36, September 23, 1966
New Left
New Left Notes was the official newspaper published by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). This issue includes articles about anti-draft organizing; the Clear Lake National Convention; financing a movement; SDS at University of Kentucky; National Council Resolutions; National Secretary’s Report; paranoid politics; SDS and electoral politics; merger of National Farm Worker’s Union and AFL-CIO; Radical Education Project (REP) report; Student Un-American Activities Committee at San Jose State College; Inter-University Committee for Debate on Foreign Policy; JOIN Community Union; literature list; letters to the editor.
Students for a Democratic Society
Bruce Pech
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
September 23, 1966
underground press
New Left Notes, vol. 1, no. 17, May 13, 1966
New Left
New Left Notes was the official newspaper published by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). This issue includes articles about upcoming demonstrations against Vietnam draft tests on campuses; local updates; grape strike; National Council minutes; JOIN Community Union; MFDP summer recruiting; Southern Courier recruitment.
Students for a Democratic Society
Bruce Pech
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
May 13, 1966
underground press
New Left Notes, vol. 1, no. 29, August 5, 1966
New Left
New Left Notes was the official newspaper published by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). This issue includes articles about the upcoming SDS national convention in Clear Lake, Iowa; a debate over electoral politics and the National Council for a New Politics; a burglary at the Chicago headquarters of the DuBois Clubs of America; definitions of radicalism; an update from the Iowa City chapter; a discussion of the intersection of race and poverty and ERAP; a response to a previous article on the Communist Convention; SDS and ideology; “derisive terminology”; the radical tradition in America; the “crisis of Cold War ideology”; an Cleveland gathering of anti-war groups; “representative democracy” vs. “referendum democracy”; recent racial conflict on Chicago’s West Side; an upcoming Socialist Scholars Conference; grape strike; SSOC; a response to a critique of the New Left by Tom Kahn; letters to the editor.
Students for a Democratic Society
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
August 5, 1966
underground press
Handwriting On the Wall, no. 2
New Left
This SDS poster as a "wall newspaper" which was posted on city streets in Chicago by members of the group as a means of circulating their political agenda in the wake of the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention. This poster, the second in a series, discusses protests, skirmishes with police and strategy for upcoming activism.
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
"wall newspaper"
The Black Panther, October 4, 1970
Black Power
This October 4th, 1970, issue of The Black Panther includes articles about: Attica Massacre at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York State, with a statement from survivors of the massacre along with a critique of the New York prison system; prison conditions at San Quentin State Prison and Folsom Prison in California; the Boston Free Health Center; the murder of John Smith; an update on the trial of three Panthers in Winston-Salem; an interview with Marien N'Gouabi, President of the Congolese Workers' party; a statement of support for People's Republic of Congo-Brazzaville due to the political assassination of Patrice Lumumba; criticism of the California welfare law proposed by Governor Ronald Reagan; a call to sign a petition to grant Panther David Hilliard parole; a Community Survival Program in the Oakland area facilitated by Huey Newton; and, artwork by Emory Douglas.
The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
October 4, 1970
underground press
The Black Panther, January 9, 1971
Black Power
In this January 9, 1971 issue of The Black Panther, articles include: a statement of support for the National Liberation Front in Vietnam in the name of international solidarity; a map of the U.S. showing incidents of "Guerilla Acts of Sabotage and Terrorism”; an open letter to "revolutionary children" highlighting the activism and history of the Black Panther Party; coverage of the trial of Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale, including articles of support from allies of the Black Panthers and a letter from Huggins herself on "How to Love During a Revolution”; black draft resistance; the New York 21 case; the Jonathan Jackson Commune; the case of Monk Teba; the Juan Farina Defense Committee; Chicago Free Busing Program; G.I. Rights; police brutality in Baltimore, Toledo and Las Vegas; a U.N. Report on racism in the U.S.; a Solidarity Activities Calendar; international news shorts; the Ten Point Program; a statement of party rules; advertisements for The Lumpen, sponsored by the Chicano Revolutionary Party; and, artwork by Emory Douglas.
The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
January 9, 1971
underground press
The Black Panther, December 14, 1970
Black Power
Published on December 14, 1970, this issue of the The Black Panther includes articles on: housing discrimination and poor sanitation conditions in New York City; a garbage dump in Rockford, Illinois; a message to black entertainers; the Cabrini Green housing project; a police attack in Berkeley; a letter to the Black Student Union at Laney College; resolutions and declarations from the People’s Revolutionary Constitutional Convention; a message to black G.I.’s; anti-colonialism in Korea; updates on the cases of Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins and Lonnie McLucas; the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark just 10 days earlier in Chicago; anti-Imperialism and a war crimes tribunal that took place at the University of California; the case of Raymond Brooks and Katherine Robinson; Community Survival Programs; , the ten point program; Revolutionary Greeting Cards; and, artwork by Emory Douglas.
The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
December 14, 1970
underground press
The Black Panther, October 16, 1971
Black Power
Articles in this issue of The Black Panther, include: prison riots in Joliet, Illinois, Baltimore, Maryland, Alderson, West Virginia, New Orleans, Louisiana, Dallas, Texas, San Quentin, California and Winston-Salem, North Carolina and Attica, New York; the murder of Clarence Johnson; a boycott of Bill Boyette’s Liquor Store; extensive coverage of Huey Newton’s trip to China; an advertisement for a peoples tribunal aimed to indict New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and President Richard Nixon; criminal justice in Winston-Salem; a memorial poem devoted to fallen Panther George Jackson, who was shot during a prison escape attempt in San Quentin, California; and, artwork by Emory Douglas.
The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
October 16, 1971
underground press
The Black Panther, August 15, 1970
Black Power
Inside this issue of The Black Panther are multiple articles that speak to the harassment by law enforcement against party members selling the Newspaper in Winston Salem, North Carolina, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. This issue also highlights how the Federal Bureau of Investigation infiltrated the Black Panthers with trained informants and created a fake newspaper called the "Bay State Banner." Other items include an article on “revolutionary suicide”; short pieces on the Soledad Brother; Alabama Liberation Front; Chicago Liberation School; National Chicano Moratorium Committee; police brutality in Hartford; Joan Kelley; Bobby Seale’s appeal; a call for justice for the "Los Siete de la Raza”; a two page spread of letters written to Huey Newton from children at the Black Panther Party Liberation School in San Francisco thanking him and the Panthers for the school; a critique of the American Constitution explaining institutional racism, particularly in the prison system; a message from Huey Newton to the People’s Revolutionary Constitutional Convention; a critique off integration; the N.C.C.F.; and, artwork by Emory Douglas.
The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
August, 15, 1970
underground press
See You In Chicago
New Left and Anti-War Movement
In August 1968, the Yippies and other New Left groups organized a large protest against the Democratic Party during their national convention in Chicago. The protests gained international attention when police attacked demonstrators in front of the media.
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1968
Button
Physical Object
GI Rally October 26
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
This button was made for the first GIs for Peace march and rally held in Chicago in 1968. Military veterans and civilians were invited to exchange views on the war in Vietnam. The event took place at the Midland Hotel from 4pm to midnight. A flyer from the same event lists: entertainment, refreshments, active duty GI speakers, open microphone for all servicemen, Vietnam veterans, rock bands, Pete Seeger, clergy, films, speakers from the antiwar movement, speakers from black liberation movement and free antiwar literature. The organizers of the event were Chicago GI Weeks Committee, which included a coalition of groups, like Veterans for Peace in Vietnam, Student Mobilization Committee, the Chicago Peace Council, National Mobilization Committee, High School Students Against the War, Chicago Area Draft Resistors and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (Chicago Branch)
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
Button
en-US
Physical Object
ca. 1967
George Jackson, 1941-1971
Prisoner Rights Movement
Flyer for a "Free All Political Prisoners" rally outside the Cook County Jail, featuring George Jackson.
George Jackson was imprisoned for armed robbery in 1961 and placed in San Quentin Prison before being transferred to Soledad Prison. While incarcerated, Jackson became radicalized and formed a Maoist-Marxist group, the Black Guerrilla Family. He was also a member of the Black Panther Party. In 1970, he and two other inmates were charged with the murder of prison guard, John Vincent Mills, following a fight. They became known as the Soledad Brothers and were seen by many radicals as political prisoners. Jackson was also an author and published the influential, "Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George L. Jackson." Jackson was killed by guards at San Quentin during an escape attempt in 1971. Many activists believed he was murdered as retaliation for his activism.
The flyer includes a portion of a quote from Jackson:
“If I leave here alive, I'll leave nothing behind. They'll never count me among the broken men, but I can't say that I'm normal either. I've been hungry too long, I've gone angry too often. I've been lied to and insulted too many times. They've pushed me over the line from which there can be no retreat. I know that they will not be satisfied until they've pushed me out of existence altogether. I've been the victim of so many racist attacks that I could never relax again..."
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. early-1970s
color print
flyer
Eco-Guerillas
Environmentalism
This article describes growing militancy among environmental activists, or "eco-guerillas." The piece offers examples of actions by an activist that went by the name "The Fox," from Kane County, Illinois, as well as a new organization, "Eco-Commando Force 70."
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1970
newsprint
article
Chicago '68 Democratic Convention Protest Update
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
During the protests outside the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, activists created wall posters to inform other demonstrators of what was happening.
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
poster
"On to November..."
Black Power
This wall poster was created by unknown black power advocates and describes organizing efforts around the election of 1968, including organizing efforts in Chicago, a boycott by high school students on election day in New York, as well as prison organizing.
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
poster
No More Bullshit
Electoral Politics
In 1969, at the prompting of feminist leader, Gloria Steinam, author, cultural critic and activist, Norman Mailer, made an outsider bid for mayor of New York City. His campaign ran as a ticket with Jimmy Breslin, the raucous New York Daily News journalist who was seeking to become the President of the New York City Council. At the time, New York was facing a growing list of problems, including rising crime rates, increasing poverty and deindustrialization, middle-class suburban flight, congestion, pollution and political stagnation. In response, Mailer, whose campaign slogans were “No More Bullshit” and “Throw the Rascals In,” set out an outlandishly bold set of initiatives. His primary proposal was the “51st State” plan, a scheme whereby the five boroughs of New York would secede from the rest of the state in a bid to secure more independence, greater political representation, resources and power. Once independent, Mailer envisioned a radically decentralized political order with the city “splintering into townships and neighborhoods, with their own school systems, police departments, housing programs, and governing philosophies." In addition, he advocated a ban on private cars in Manhattan, replacing them with cabs and a monorail system that would circle the island; a citywide free bicycle rental program; and policies that would eliminate pollution, reduce taxes, and establish full autonomy for public schools. According to campaign literature, at the collegiate level, the campaign promoted “vest-pocket campuses built by students in abandoned buildings” that would restore “a sense of personal involvement that is lost in the large university campuses.” In perhaps his most utopian proposal, Mailer urged the creation of “Sweet Sundays,” which would mandate, once a month, that all mechanical transportation stop and elevators close down so that New Yorkers could decompress from their hectic urban lives and avoid breathing exhaust fumes.
Campaign events were often chaotic. At one, Mailer quipped, "The difference between me and the other candidates is that I'm no good and I can prove it." At another, he called his own supporters “spoiled pigs.” After learning that bars would be closed on election day, Jimmy Breslin complained, “I am mortified to have taken part in a process that required bars to be closed.”
Many New Left activists and libertarians supported the Mailer-Breslin ticket. The Black Panther Party also endorsed the duo after they backed the release of Panther leader, Huey Newton. To some, the campaign was a lark, to other a serious challenge to the established order, and to others an outright offense.
In the end, Mailer finished in fourth place during the Democratic mayoral primary, edging out state Assemblyman, Charles B. Rangel, who would go on to be elected to Congress in 1970 and remain in office until 2017. Even in defeat, though, Mailer’s campaign was seen by many leftists and libertarians as an important attempt to move from the realm of ideas into programmatic politics.
________________
Norman Mailer first gained fame in 1948 with the publication of his now-classic war novel, The Naked and the Dead, which was based in part on his own WWII experiences. In 1955, he was a part of a small group that established The Village Voice, an influential alternative newspaper located in Greenwich Village, which continued publication until 2018. Also an influential essayist, Mailer published “The White Negro” in Dissent in 1957, a controversial analysis of the “hipster” in post-war American culture.
Mailer became a ubiquitous cultural figure in the 1960s. In 1960, he published "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," an essay in Esquire on the rise of John F. Kennedy at the Democratic National Convention. He continued to see JFK as an “existential hero” for a new era. That same year, Mailer was convicted of assault for the stabbing of his wife, Adele, and served three years of probation. Mailer was also one of 29 prominent Americans who co-founded the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which opposed the hardline anti-Castro stance of U.S. politicians and military leaders during the early-1960s. The group achieved widespread infamy in 1963, when it became public news that Kennedy assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a member. In 1967, Mailer made a mark with the best-selling political book, Why Are We in Vietnam? and played an ongoing role in the anti-war movement, including signing the 1968 “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest,” a pledge to withhold tax payments to the U.S. government as opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam. Again that year, Mailer covered the turbulent Democratic and Republican National Conventions, work that he later published as, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968). In that book, Mailer portrays American politics cynically as a crass and self-interested exchange of political power. Reflecting back later on the party politics of the 1960s-era, Mailer wrote, "If you played for a team, you did your best to play very well, but there was something obscene… with starting to think there was more moral worth to Michigan than Ohio State." To Mailer, there was little difference between the disgraced Richard Nixon who left the White House after the Watergate scandal and Lyndon Johnson, whose liberal Great Society was derailed by the failed Vietnam war. Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, Mailer is also seen as a pioneer in what came to be known as the “New Journalism,” a form of creative nonfiction that used some of the style and devices of literary fiction to write fact-based journalism. His most significant work in this vein was Armies of the Night (1968), a nonfiction novel about the October 1967 March on the Pentagon. The book won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Mailer also wrote books about the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, a response to criticisms of him and other male authors by feminist author, Kate Millett, and an account of the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle,” the heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Forman in Zaire.
In 1979, Mailer published The Executioner’s Song, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize. The “true crime” novel focuses on the execution of Utah murderer, Gary Gilmore. His final novel, Harlot’s Ghost, published in 1991, explored the hidden history of the CIA from the end of WWII through the mid-1960s. Mailer, who also wrote drama and screenplays for films, died in 2007.
_____________________
Jimmy Breslin was an outspoken journalist and novelist who was known as a tough-talking representative of working-class residents in his hometown, Queens, New York. In 1962, Breslin wrote a best-selling book on the New York Mets baseball team, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? In 1963, he was covering southern civil rights activism in Selma, Alabama, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. While other journalists wrote stories about the fallen president, Breslin secured an interview with Malcolm Perry, the Parkland Hospital doctor who had tried to save him. He followed that up with a powerful column about Clifton Pollard, the man who dug Kennedy’s grave. As journalist David Shedden later wrote, “It’s a plainly told story -- no breathtaking sentences here -- but the style is effective in its Hemingway-esque directness. Breslin moves from the gravedigger’s perspective, to a more omniscient view of the funeral, back to the worker. We like the passage about Jackie Kennedy, its moving description of her particular, telling gestures. But the piece’s central power lies in Breslin’s juxtaposition of the cemetery workers, the small details of the scene’s sounds and sights, with the enormity of the event." From there, Breslin secured positions as a columnist for a succession of New York newspapers, gaining a reputation as a staunch opponent of corruption and injustice. Like Mailer, Breslin was seen as a pioneer of the New Journalism movement and often mixed his own experience with his journalistic reportage of political events. In 1969, he published the true-crime book, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, about mobster “Crazy Joe” Gallo and his band of bungling baddies. The book was made into a film in 1971.
Breslin continued to be an influential writer until his death in 2017. In 1973, he wrote another novel, World Without End, Amen. In 1977, Breslin again gained notoriety for a series of compelling articles on the infamous “Son of Sam” serial killer, David Berkowitz. In response to those essays and in the midst of his killing spree, Berkowitz wrote to Breslin: “Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of N.Y.C. and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed on the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks.” The murderer continued, “J.B., I’m just dropping you a line to let you know that I appreciate your interest in those recent and horrendous .44 killings. I also want to tell you that I read your column daily and find it quite informative.” In 1978, Breslin received a sizable advance to co-write a book about the Son of Sam murders with Dick Schaap, titled, .44. Many viewed the book as exploitative and in poor taste so soon after the traumatic events. In 1986, Breslin won a Pulitzer Prize, in part for his writing about the AIDS epidemic in New York City, as well his broader work championing the causes of ordinary people. In later decades, he published a memoir, I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me (1996), as well as a non-fiction account of a Mexican construction worker in New York who was killed on site when a building collapsed, The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiérrez (2002), and a final book about the mafia, titled, The Good Rat (2008). Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith described Breslin, "like an Irish wind that has blown through Queens and Harlem and Mutchie's bar. It is a pound of Hemingway and a pound of Joyce and 240 pounds of Breslin." Following his death in 2017, Tom Wolfe called him, “incredible, the greatest newspaper columnist of my era.”
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1969
button
Hello Richmond Household
George Jackson Funeral
This letter to the commune Roz Payne lived at in Vermont describes the funeral for George Jackson in Mount Vernon, Illinois. Jackson was imprisoned for armed robbery in 1961 and placed in San Quentin Prison before being transferred to Soledad Prison. While incarcerated, Jackson became radicalized and formed a Maoist-Marxist group, the Black Guerrilla Family. He was also a member of the Black Panther Party. In 1970, he and two other inmates were charged with the murder of prison guard, John Vincent Mills, following a fight. They became known as the Soledad Brothers and were seen by many radicals as political prisoners. Jackson was also an author and published the influential, "Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George L. Jackson." Jackson was killed by guards at San Quentin during an escape attempt in 1971. Many activists believed he was murdered as retaliation for his activism.
unknown - "Jonny"
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1971
type-written letter
letter
"The Story of the Murder of Fred Hampton," John Kifner
Black Panther Party
Chairman of the Black Panther Party in Illinois, Fred Hampton was murdered on December 4, 1969 by Cook County police by the order of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Chicago police as he slept in his apartment. His death functioned as a catalyst for protests on police corruption and government oppression in the North. This article by John Kifner, reprinted from San Francisco-based magazine, Scanlon's, addresses biased media reporting on the death of Hampton and surveillance of him by state and federal authorities.
written by John Kifner, originally published in Scanlan and reprinted by Committee to Defend the Panthers
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1969
article
Yippie Schedule and Plan for 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention
New Left
This document describes Yippie plans for the upcoming protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Youth International Party (Yippie) - reprinted from The
Rag
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
mimeograph
leaflet
Yipster Times, August 1978
New Left and Counterculture
The Yipster Times, “America’s Only National Underground Newspaper,” was the semi-official newspaper of the Yippie movement, started by Dana Beal and published in New York City. The paper ran, in one form or another, from 1972 until 1989, when the name was changed to Overthrow. It was primarily a journal of anti-establishment politics and culture, with a strong focus on marijuana legalization.
In this issue, articles focus on cocaine use in the Carter administration; the assassination of Orlando Letelier; nuclear power; Washington, D.C. “smoke-in”; 10 year anniversary of the Festival of Life; interview of Abbie Hoffman; police repression in Atlanta; local shorts; Kent State; marijuana legalization; FBI surveillance and Ma Bell; nudity at Black’s Beach in San Diego; letters.
Youth International Party Information Service
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
August 1978
newspaper