Revolution Revolution - Eldridge Cleaver for President
Black Power
In 1966, Detroit cultural radicals, Allen Van Newkirk, John Sinclair and Gary Grimshaw created Guerrilla, “a monthly newspaper of contemporary kulchur” and “weapon of cultural warfare.” The newspaper was a part of a larger project, the Detroit Artists Workshop, which was formed in 1964, “a local attempt in self-determination for artists of all disciplines.” Guerrilla mixed “humor, politics and music under the circus big top of surrealism and pop culture.” It was primarily a cultural review and included an international artistic perspective. Soon after its first issue appeared, Van Newkirk, who was an revolutionary anarchist with an antipathy for the hippie counterculture and slackers, split with the Detroit Artists Workshop and fired Sinclair, who was more aligned with the hippie counterculture. Despite their ideological and political differences, the two, in fact, continued to work together on Guerrilla, though Van Newkirk’s vision predominated. In subsequent issues, Van Newkirk included a series of oversized political posters, including this one.
The text on this poster reads: "A Rule Of Thumb Of Revolutionary Politics / Is That No Matter How Oppressive The Ruling Class May Be / No Matter How Impossible The Task Of Making / Revolution / May Seem / The Means Of Making That / Revolution / Are Always At Hand." At the center is information on a publication, Guerrilla with the quote "our purpose in entering the political arena / is to send the jackass back to the farm and the elephant back to the zoo." At the bottom is "Eldridge / Cleaver / For President / Minister of information/Black Panther Party".
Eldridge Cleaver was the controversial "Minister of Information" for the Black Panther Party. Cleaver, who edited the Black Panther Party newspaper, is credited with crafting a more radical and incendiary public rhetoric for the organization. His 1968 book, Soul On Ice, was a best-seller, simultaneously praised and condemned, and much-debated. Cleaver was the presidential candidate for the Peace & Freedom Party in 1968, earning .05% of the vote. Following a deadly altercation with Oakland police that same year, Cleaver fled the United States, first to Cuba, then to Algeria and ultimately France, before he returned to the United States in 1975. An ideological split between Cleaver and party co-founder, Huey Newton, led to Cleaver's ouster from the party. Following his exile, Eldridge Cleaver became a born-again Christian, dabbling in a variety of different denominations. He also participated in conservative politics through the Republican Party. Cleaver died in 1998.
Guerilla: Free Newspaper of the Streets
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
poster
Free the Panthers
Black Panther party
This poster encourages support for the Panther 21 in New York and includes a quotation from Afeni Shakur: “We will have our liberation or Babylon will have ashes to sleep on.”
In April of 1969, after a lengthy, coordinated effort by local and federal law enforcement to infiltrate and disrupt the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party, District Attorney Frank Hogan indicted 21 members of the organization, claiming a widespread conspiracy to murder policemen and blow up four police stations, five department stores, railroad lines, the Queens Board of Education building, and the Bronx Botanical Gardens. Ultimately, 13 Panthers, including Afeni Shakur and Dhoruba Bin Wahad, stood trial in a case that became a cause celebre among black militants and the broader New Left. For ten months prior to the trial, the jailed Panthers were held in solitary confinement with lights on 24 hours a day and denied reading materials, recreational facilities and family visitation. Several were not given mattresses and the two female Panthers were limited to four sheets of toilet paper per day. It was also reported that prison officials harassed Panther attorneys. Famed composer, Leonard Bernstein, helped raise bail money for the “New York 21.” During the court proceedings, District Attorney Hogan referred to the Panthers as a “terrorist organization,” read from Mao Zedong’s “Little Red Book,” showed jurors the film, “The Battle of Algiers” and attempted to introduce political posters from one of the defendant’s apartment into evidence. In what was, at the time, the longest and most costly trial in New York state history, the Panthers were acquitted of all 156 charges on May 12, 1971. In the wake of the failed prosecution, local law enforcement and the FBI continued to target the New York Black Panther Party.
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1969-1971
poster
Third World People Unite Against the War
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
This poster, published by the Third World Committee of the Student Mobilization Committee quotes Malcolm X: “What America is doing in South Vietnam is criminal... we see where the problem of Vietnam is the problem of the oppressed and the oppressor... Our action will be one of unity and in the unity of oppressed people is actually the strength, and the best strength of the oppressed people…” The Student Mobilization Committee was a member of the National Peace Action Coalition.
Third World Committee - Student Mobilization Committee
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. late-1960s
poster
abolish capital punishment people have always been punished by capital
Anti-Death Penalty Movement
This anti-death penalty poster was printed by ComeUnity Press in Lower Manhattan was started in the early-1970s as a 24-hour open access print shop run by a gay anarchist collective.
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
unknown
poster
Due to Circumstances Beyond Its Control Whitehall Will Be Closed
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
In 1967, anti-war activists shifted tactics from “protest to resistance” to the War in Vietnam, seeking more militant means on the home front to challenge U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. In October of that year, anti-war activists organized the first “Stop the Draft Week,” an effort to engage in civil disobedience at draft induction centers. Most famously, in Oakland, hundreds of activists marched on the Oakland Army Induction Center in an effort to shut it down. Police responded with widespread violence. In December, anti-war organizations organized a second “Stop the Draft Week.” In New York, Dr. Benjamin Spock and poet Allen Ginsburg led more than 1,000 demonstrators to the Whitehall induction center in New York.
A December 6, 1967, New York Times article by Homer Bigart, titled, “264 Seized Here in Draft Protest,” offered an account of the protest:
The police arrested 264 persons, including Dr. Benjamin Spock and the poet Allen Ginsberg, during a demonstration yesterday between 5 A.M. and 6 A.M. by more than 2,500 antidraft, antiwar protesters at the armed forces induction center at 39 Whitehall Street.
The mass arrests, anticipated by both the demonstrators and the police, brought the only turbulent moments in a generally orderly demonstration.
But the police were alerted for a livelier protest today when a coalition of more that 40 antiwar groups plans to surround the induction center with 5,000 demonstrators who have been instructed to paralyze traffic in the area.
The Police Department issued an order marshaling all available manpower in the 28,000-man force on either an active or a standby basis, effective through Friday. About 4,000 men were expected to be on duty at the induction station today.
The center opens at 5:30 A.M., Mondays through Fridays, and that is why the demonstrators are obliged to be up long before dawn.
Yesterday's siege failed to disrupt either the induction center or the neighboring tip of the financial district.
The ranks of demonstrators thinned out before the morning rush hour. Leaders said they had no intention of trying to force a halt in the induction process; they merely wanted a "symbolic" protest. But today, they said, would be different.
Starting at 5:30 A.M., according to instructions issued by the Stop the Draft Week Committee, demonstrators will not only block streets in the area but will try to intercept inductees and persuade them to join the protest.
The police massed more than 2,500 men yesterday and defended the induction center, a faded nine-story red brick building of 1886 construction, with barricades so formidable that Dr. Spock had to plead for an opening so that he could sit on the entrance steps and be arrested.
Among those arrested were Dr. Conor Cruise O'Brien, Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University, and his wife Maire, daughter of the former deputy Prime Minister of Ireland, Sean MacEntee. The O'Briens were among a group staging a sit-in at Broad and Pearl Streets, one block from the induction center.
Mrs. O'Brien told newsmen that mounted policemen drove their horses into the sitting group and her husband was assaulted by policemen who followed on foot.
"They [the police] kicked Conor around quite a bit," she said.
Dr. O'Brien, who headed the United Nations mission to Katanga during the 1961 Congo crisis, insisted on medical attention, according to Mrs. O'Brien. She said the police took them both to Bellevue Hospital, where it was found that Dr. O'Brien had suffered bruises. He was discharged yesterday afternoon.
Assembling in early morning darkness, the demonstrators arrived in Peter Minuit Plaza armed with notebooks and cameras so, they explained, they could record instances of police brutality.
But the police, operating under a set of "instructions and principles" issued by Chief Inspector Sanford D. Garelik, behaved in a manner that drew praise later in the day from Mayor Lindsay.
Mayor Lindsay told a City Hall news conference that he had received a full report on the demonstration and believed it was "handled very well by the police."
The Garelik instructions warned the police to respect the rights of the dissenters so long as the demonstrators did not impede the rights and the free movement of others.
All of the 264 persons arrested - there were 171 men and 93 women - were paroled when arraigned in Criminal Court on charges of disorderly conduct. Hearings have been set from Jan. 10 to Jan. 24.
In an unusual step, those arrested were not booked at a police station but were taken directly in police vans to the Criminal Court Building at 100 Centre Street. There, close to the courtroom, the police had set up a booking desk. Equipment for fingerprinting and photographing any who might be charged with a felony was also at hand.
In addition to disorderly conduct, two of the prisoners were charged with resisting arrest. They were Tuli Kupferberg, 44 years old, of 301 East 10th Street, an editor of East Village Other, and Jonathan Miller, 20, of 120 West 106th Street.
Judge Walter H. Gladwin released all without bail but warned the defendants that if they were brought before him after participating in any other demonstrations this week "I shall have to set bail for you."
Hearings for Dr. Spock and Mr. Ginsberg will be held Jan. 10.
Dr. Spock told reporters out of court that he had been "cheerfully straight-armed" by the police when he tried to climb over a triple row of wooden horses and reach the steps of the induction building.
Reporters who saw the incident recalled that the 64-year-old Dr. Spock after failing in an effort to crawl under the barricade, mounted the wooden horses but was gently pushed back into the mass of demonstrators by policemen on the other side.
Finally, a police official showed Dr. Spock an opening at the end of the barricade. Whereupon the child doctor and antiwar agitator led about a dozen demonstrators from the picket line in the middle of Whitehall Street to the building steps. There, surrounded by policemen, they were allowed to squat on the cold stones for a few symbolic moments before they were arrested.
As soon as the van had taken them off, a second, group, this one headed by Mr. Ginsberg, was allowed to repeat Dr. Spock's performance. Mr. Ginsberg, the bearded beatnik poet, was wearing an orange batik shawl, a huge flowered tie, a rosary and a Buddhist amulet.
There were cymbals on his fingers, of the sort affected by Egyptian belly dancers, and he made a cheerful tinkle as the police hustled him to a van.
Some of those who sat on the steps went limp as policemen approached and had to be carried to the wagons while the pickets cheered.
But there was no violence here. Many of the pickets seemed middle-aged or older, and were not inclined to be violently demonstrative. One of the demonstrators, Beatrix Turner, 68, an artist, even praised the police: "I think the police behaved well; I'm full of compliments for them."
Very few Negroes were seen among the pickets.
A younger, much more militant outpouring was predicted today. Tactics "inspired" by the antidraft demonstration in Oakland, Calif., last Oct. 16 will be used, according to the sponsors. At Oakland, missiles were thrown and vehicles set afire.
But spokesmen for four of the sponsoring groups insisted that the protest today would be "nonviolent," even though it would involve "active interference with the war machine."
Meanwhile, inside the induction center, the commanding officer, Lieut. Col. James McPoland, called yesterday's demonstration "a big zero." Induction operations were normal and he predicted that the center would continue to process about 250 men daily.
Youths carrying brown envelopes containing orders to report for induction made their way unmolested through picket and police lines during the height of the demonstration. They vanished through an elevator door that bore the slogan "The Security of World Peace Starts Here."
"Somebody's gonna fight," said Pedro Anton Baez, 19, as he neared the building. "If I have to go to Vietnam, I'll go."
Stop the Draft Committee
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1967
poster
Youth International Party Manifesto!
New Left
The Youth International Party, known as the "Yippies," was founded in 1967 by Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Nancy Kurshan, and Paul Krassner. Other activists involved with the Yippies included, Stew Albert, Ed Rosenthal, Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, Robin Morgan, Phil Ochs, Robert M. Ockene, William Kunstler, Jonah Raskin, Steve Conliff, John Sinclair, Dana Beal, Betty (Zaria) Andrew, Matthew Landy Steen, Judy Gumbo, Ben Masel, Tom Forcade, David Peel, Wavy Gravy, Aron Kay, Tuli Kupferberg, Jill Johnston, Daisy Deadhead, Leatrice Urbanowicz, Bob Fass, John Murdock, Alice Torbush, Judy Lampe, Walli Leff, Steve DeAngelo, Dennis Peron, and Brenton Lengel. According to Krasner, who coined the term, Yippies were “radicalized hippies.” In a 2007 essay in the Los Angeles Times, Krasner explained, "We needed a name to signify the radicalization of hippies, and I came up with Yippie as a label for a phenomenon that already existed, an organic coalition of psychedelic hippies and political activists. In the process of cross-fertilization at antiwar demonstrations, we had come to share an awareness that there was a linear connection between putting kids in prison for smoking pot in this country and burning them to death with napalm on the other side of the planet." Further, Anita Hoffman liked the term, but felt that "strait-laced types" needed a more formal name to take the movement seriously. She came up with "Youth International Party," because it symbolized the movement and made for a good play on words. Some referred to the group as "Yippie!," as in a shout for joy (with an exclamation mark to express exhilaration). As Abbie Hoffman wrote, "What does Yippie! mean?" Energy – fun – fierceness – exclamation point!"
The Yippies were influenced by The Diggers in San Francisco and often used guerilla theater, pranks, absurdist forms of protest, as well as political and cultural disruption in their activism. They sought to merge the personal with the political… and have fun in the process. ABC News once stated, "The group was known for street theater pranks and was once referred to as the 'Groucho Marxists'." Among their many storied antics, the Yippies suggested lacing the New York City water supply with LSD, sent joints to hundreds of random people in New York from the telephone book, threw fake money on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and suggested a circle of hippies could “levitate” the Pentagon during an October 1967 protest. The Yippies understood the dominant role of mass media and television in contemporary society and often went on television, but refused to obey the normal rules of corporate TV production, hoping to “break the frame” and reveal to audiences the constructed nature of mass media. The Yippies were also involved in the underground press movement. Much of the writing and visual culture they produced consisted of obscenity-laced diatribes against mainstream society, but made few serious calls to militant action.
Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies first suggested a “Festival of Life” in the park outside of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. They also planned to nominate a pig, nicknamed “Pigasus,” for President. Other New Left organizations joined the effort, which ultimately descended into chaos when Chicago police, at the order of authoritarian Democratic Mayor Richard Daley, attacked and brutally beat demonstrators in front of reporters and television cameras, causing an international controversy. In the melee, many Yippies were injured and arrested, including Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who were put on trial as a part of what become known as the Chicago 7.
In 1970, an estimated 200-300 members of the Yippies descended on the Disneyland amusement park in Anaheim, California, to hold what was billed as their “First International Pow-Wow” to protest the U.S.’s continuing involvement in the Vietnam War and to liberate Disneyland as a symbol of the establishment. Hoffman authored a pamphlet in 1967, titled, “Fuck the System”; two books, “Revolution for the Hell of It” (1968) and “Steal This Book” (1971); and an LP record, “Woodstock Nation: A Talk-Rock Album” (1969).
The Yippies began to fragment and disintegrate during the 1970s. A disillusioned Hoffman committed suicide in 1989. Jerry Rubin became a “Yuppie” during the 1980s, embracing capitalism and starting a number of businesses. He was killed in 1994 when he was struck by a car. Even so, a number of Yippie followers have carried on in the same spirit.
Along the bottom right of this poster, it reads: “more copies: YIP 333 East 5th Street, NYC."
The main text on the poster is the Youth International Party Manifesto and it reads:
YOUTH INTERNATIONAL PARTY
MANIFESTO!
WE ARE A PEOPLE
We are a new nation.
We believe in life.
And we want to live now.
We want to be alive 24 hours a day.
Nine-to-five Amerika doesn't even live on weekends.
Amerika is a death machine. It is run
on and for money whose power
determines a society based on war,
racism, sexism, and the destruction
of the planet. Our life-energy is the
greatest threat to the machine.
So they're out to stop us.
They have to make us like them.
They cut our hair, ban our music
festivals, put cops and narcs in the
schools, put 200,000 of us in jail
for smoking flowers, induct us,
housewive us, Easy-Rider murder us.
Amerika has declared war on our New Nation!
WE WILL BUILD AND DEFEND OUR NEW NATION
But we will continue to live and grow. We are young, we have beautiful
ideas about the way we should live. We want everyone to control their
own life and to care for one another. And we will defend our freedom
because we can’t live any other way.
We will continue to seize control of our minds and our bodies. We can't
do it in their schools, so we'll take them over or create our own. We
can't do it in their Army, so we'll keep them from taking our brothers.
We can't make it in their jobs, so we'll work only to survive. We can't
relate to each other like they do - our nation is based on cooperation
not competition.
We will provide for all that we need to build and defend our nation. We
will teach each other the true history of Amerika so that we may learn
from the past to survive in the present. We will teach each other the
tactics of self-defense. We will provide free health services: birth
control and abortions, drug information, medical care, that this society
is not providing us with.
We will begin to take control of drug manufacture and distribution, and
stop the flow of bad shit. We will make sure that everyone has a decent
place to live: we will fight landlords, renovate buildings, live
communally, have places for sisters and brothers from out-of-town, and
for runaways and freed prisoners. We will set up national and
international transport and communication so we can be together with our
sisters and brothers from different parts of the country and the world.
We will fight the unnatural division between cities and country by
facilitating travel and communication
. We will end the domination of women by men, and children by adults.
The well-being of our nation is the well-being of all peace-loving
people.
WE WILL HAVE PEACE
We cannot tolerate attitudes, institutions, and machines whose purpose
is the destruction of life and the accumulation of "profit.”
Schools and universities are training us for roles in Amerika's empire
of endless war. We cannot allow them to use us for the
military-industrial profiteers.
Companies that produce waste, poisons, germs, and bombs have no place in
this world.
We are living in the capital of the world war being waged against life.
We are not good Germans. We who are living in this strategic center of
Babylon must make it our strategic center. We can and must stop the
death machine from butchering the planet.
We will shut the motherfucker down!
WE WILL MAKE OUR NEW NATION FIT FOR LIVING THINGS
We will seize Amerika’s technology and use it to build a nation based on
love and respect for all life.
Our new society is not about the power of a few men but the right of all
humans, animals and plants to play out their natural roles in harmony.
We will build our communities to reflect the beauty inside us.
People all over the world are fighting to keep Amerika from turning
their countries into parking lots!
WE WILL BE TOGETHER WITH ALL THE TOGETHER PEOPLES OF THE EARTH
Pig Empire is ravaging the globe, but the beautiful people everywhere
are fighting back. New Nation is one with the black, brown, red & yellow
nations.
Che said:
'You North Americans are very lucky. You live in the middle of the
beast. You are fighting the most important fight of all, If I had my
wish, I would go back with you to North Amerika to fight there. I envy
you.' "
Yippies
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1968
poster
“Break And Enter / Rompiendo Puertas"
Anti-Poverty and Housing Rights
“Break And Enter / Rompiendo Puertas,” also known as “Squatters,” is a short film by the Newsreel collective in New York City. It focuses on "Operation Move-in," an anti-poverty and urban redevelopment campaign by Puerto Rican and Dominican families to actively reclaim unused, vacant housing on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
A July 22, 1970, New York Times article, by Edith Evans Asbury, titled, “Squatter Movement Grows As Housing Protest Tactic,” offered a view of the campaign as it unfolded:
City officials, the courts, a hospital, Columbia University and private landlords were embroiled in a growing squatter movement yesterday as about 170 families illegally occupying apartments insisted on what they called their “Moral” right to remain.
At the end of the day, 25 men, women and children evicted from a building on West 15th Street won a promise from the city's Housing and Development Administrator, Albert A. Walsh, that the city would negotiate with the, landlord who evicted them.
The group, which went first to City Hall to see Mayor Lindsay, held a sit‐in at the administration's head quarters at 100 Gold Street all afternoon. They represented six families who had moved into empty apartments at 233 West 15th Street and were evicted by the police Monday.
The Rev. Robert O. Weeks, who had accompanied the families, hailed Commissioner Walsh's announcement as a “great victory,” declaring that “bureaucracy does work.”
City to Furnish Cots
Others in the group ex pressed skepticism, but left the Gold Street offices cheer fully, minutes after a contingent of policemen had arrived.
Mr. Weeks had sheltered the evicted families the previous night in Holy Apostle Episcopal Church, of which he is rector. He led them back to the church at Ninth Avenue and 28th Street, with Commissioner Walsh's assurance that the city would furnish them with 50 cots and blankets.
The group had demanded that the city take over the building from which they had been evicted‐ and convert it to units for low‐income families. They said the owner, Leon Nagin, of 425 Beach 146th Street, Far Rockaway, Queens, had boarded if, up prior to converting it to luxury units.
The announcement that sent the squatters away smiling at 5:45 P. M. yesterday was that Mr. Nagin had agreed to suspend any dernolition work for the rest of the week while he discussed selling the building to Housing and Development Administration for rental to low‐in come families.
Mr. Walsh told the group that there was “a very real possibility” that the city's proposal would be accepted, but warned that it might take several months to rehabilitate the building.
Housing Promised
Meanwhile, Commissioner Walsh promised to provide temporary apartments for the squatters in unoccupied apartments of city‐owned buildings in lower Manhattan urban renewal areas.
Buildings in Manhattan's Upper West Side Urban Renewal Area already contain about 150 squatting families, according to Operation Move In, a group of several anti poverty and community organizations in the area.
The families in the Upper West Side buildings, and in other buildings, have been as in moving into the vacant apartments by a variety of tenant organizations, community groups and churches.
They say that poor and middle‐income families are being squeezed out of Manhattan as the buildings they occupy are vacated and demolished to make way for new housing that they cannot afford. They argue that the current housing shortage is so critical that the poor and middle‐income families have a moral right to move into habitable boarded up buildings.
These arguments were offered in Civil Court yester day by volunteer lawyers on behalf of several families who made an unauthorized take over of apartments on East 13th Street. But a jury re turned a verdict in favor of the landlord, and authorized him to proceed with their eviction.
Hospital the Landlord
In this case, the landlord is the New York Eye and Ear Hospital, which owns four tenement buildings on 13th Street between First and Second Avenues.
The hospital seeks to clear tenants from the buildings to convert them to a residence for nurses.
Six squatter families were welcomed into the buildings, at 317 to 327 East 13th Street, on June 5 by families already living there.
“I was delighted to see them move in,” Mrs. Rose Arak, a resident for 40 years of 319 East 13th Street, said yesterday. “When those apartments were vacated and the tin was put over the windows, it was an open invitation to addicts and junkies and bums, and I was afraid to go into the halls alone.”
One of the squatter families moved from a city‐owned building in Brooklyn where it had been robbed of all furniture and clothing, and arrived with nothing but two sleeping bags, according to Mrs. Arak. “Now their apartment is completely furnished —by neighbors around here,” she added.
Philip Goldrich, a Bronx teacher who has lived at 317 East 13th Street for five years, also helped to welcome the squatters.
“I can't find a decent apartment at a price I can pay, so I know they can't,” Mr. Gold rich said yesterday.
Eric Greenbush, one of the lawyers representing the 13th Street squatters' families, will be back in court to day to press, for a stay of their eviction from Judge Richard W. Wallach, before whom the case was tried.
Over on East 11th Street, a group of squatters moved into buildings owned by a private landlord.
Here, too, the squatters were welcomed by people al ready living in the building. And here, with the help of Mrs. Francis Goldin, of the Metropolitan Council on Housing, tenants, supporters and the squatters were able to persuade the landlord to discuss letting the squatters stay.
“He's really a wonderful landlord,” Miss Susan Hirsch, an elementary school teacher and a resident, said yesterday.
“He takes wonderful care of our buildings, as you can see,” she said, waving a hand at freshly painted, well lighted halls. “But he wants to hold apartments empty so he can sell the buildings for a lot of money, and that's just not fair in a housing crisis.”
The owner, Jack Gucker, was not available for comment yesterday. But squatters' representatives reported that they had met, with him and that he was considering letting the squatters stay for a limited time as rent‐paying tenants.
“I hope it is true,” said 13‐year‐old Luz Rosado, in a sunny, fifth‐floor apartment at 120 East 11th Street.
“On Allen Street we all had to sleep in one room,” the girl went on, gesturing toward her three brothers and a sister. “Here I have my own room, and everything is so nice.” She translated for her mother, Mrs. Anna Rosado, who already had sheer white curtains hung, at all of the windows and was talking of painting the kitchen white.
Another landlord that yielded somewhat toward a squatter this week was Columbia. University. It permitted Mrs. Juanita Kimble, who moved in with her eight children, to have the gas turned on and plumbing connected at 130 Morningside Avenue.
“No, we have not accepted her as a tenant,” a university spokesman said yesterday. “We acted on a humane basis.” The building is scheduled for eventual demolition and replacement, he said.
Newsreel
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1970
poster
New York - A Holiday in Any Language
Anti-War Movement
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. mid-1970s
poster
Anti-WW3 International Arts Show
Anti-War Movement
The Anti-WW3 Internationalist Arts Festival was organized by the San Francisco Poster Brigade in 1981-1982 as a travelling exhibit of roughly 2000 works of contemporary art and poetry that dealt with themes related to peace and social justice. Stops included San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tucson and New York. This poster was designed by artist, Rachael Romero.
Rachael Romero
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1981-1982
poster
Anti-WW3 Internationalist Arts Show
Anti-War Movement
The Anti-WW3 Internationalist Arts Festival was organized by the San Francisco Poster Brigade in 1981-1982 as a travelling exhibit of roughly 2000 works of contemporary art and poetry that dealt with themes related to peace and social justice. Stops included San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tucson and New York. This poster was designed by artist, Rachael Romero.
Rachael Romero
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1981-1982
poster
Viet Nam Shall Win
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
This poster was created by self-taught Cuban artist, Rene Mederos, as a tribute to North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, and the Vietnamese people’s struggle against U.S. imperialism. It was published in the U.S. in 1972 by The Glad Day Press, an I.W.W. shop in Ithaca, New York, as a part of a fundraiser for Medical Aid for Indochina. The large text at the top of the poster reads, "Viet Nam". The text below reads, "Shall Win" in 13 different languages. "Mederos - Cuba/71" is in the bottom left corner of the illustration. "Price $2.50. Published by The Glad Day Press, Ithaca, N.Y. All proceeds go to N.Y.C Medical Aid to Indochina, a project of MCHR, 135 w. 4th St., N.Y., N.Y. 10012" is in the right bottom margin.
Rene Mederos
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1971
poster
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
Confront the Warmakers
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
This poster promotes the October 21, 1967, antiwar demonstration held in Washington, D.C. by a collection of organizations, including the Vietnam Peace Parade Committee in New York. The estimated 100,000 protesters who took place in the demonstration included radicals, liberals, black nationalists, hippies, professors, women’s groups, and war veterans.
The rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial started peacefully. Dr. Benjamin Spock, the baby specialist, author, and ardent critic of the war gave a strong speech, labelling President Johnson “the enemy.” Afterward, demonstrators marched toward the Pentagon, where some violence erupted when the more radical element of the demonstrators clashed with U.S. troops and Marshals. The protesters surrounded and besieged the military nerve center until the early hours of October 23. By the time order was restored, 683 people, including novelist Norman Mailer and two United Press International reporters, had been arrested.
One of the notable aspects of the Pentagon protest, in addition to its size, was the participation of both the political and counter-cultural wings of the New Left. Famously, in a bit of political theater, Yippie leaders, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, claimed demonstrators would perform an "exorcism" on the Pentagon. Surrounding the five-sided building with a circle of hippies, “they would make the Pentagon rise from the ground a few inches. And all the evil was going to leave.”
Rubin stressed to the media that “we were going to close down the Pentagon” – which was taken more seriously than the levitation. President Johnson retorted, “I will not allow the peace movement to close down the Pentagon.” As Rubin pointed out later, “By saying that he wasn’t going to allow us to close it down, he gave us the power to have that possibility. So in a way, just by announcing it, we created a victory.”
In an essay for The Nation, titled “Bastille Day on the Potomac,” Robert Sherrill described the protest at the Pentagon:
“The strange thing about the confrontation, at least at first, of the troops and the protesters at the Pentagon was that there seemed almost to be a rapport, partly contrived but also partly natural. The troops who met the marchers and turned them away were sometimes cursed, but more often they were merely lectured as flower children might lecture a nosy cop in DuPont Circle. One boy stuck chrysanthemums in the muzzles of the rifles confronting him; late in the day, a soldier was seen tossing a package of cigarettes into the sprawl of sit-inners he was guarding. More significant than these random, amiable acts, however, was the fact that the protesters, although they made repeated forays with their identifying banners onto forbidden territory (one participant said it reminded him of the schoolboy game, Capture the Flag), never seriously contested or baited the troops physically—except for the one occasion when half a dozen protesters outflanked the main cluster of soldiers, raced through an unguarded Pentagon door, and made their coup, before being tossed out. A handful of stones, a couple of bottles, a few pieces of heavy cardboard were tossed at the soldiers during the day—but considering the size of the crowd, at peak emotion, acting over a period of several hours, these peaceniks were really peaceful. And by day, so were the troops. At dusk, they shot a couple of canisters of tear gas into the protesters’ ranks; and after dark they used their boots and rifle butts more freely than they had during the day….
On the occasion of the actual penetration of the Pentagon, there was rough stuff on both sides, but the only brutalities were committed by the marshals. When the protesters raced for the Pentagon entrance, The Nation’s reporter was in the van, not fast enough to get into the building with the six who made it, but in time to reach the doorway just as the bodies came hurtling back through, borne on a wave of soldiers. In the midst of this, he observed, one of the protesters was knocked down and lay imprisoned among the legs of the soldiers. A marshal seized this opportunity to start beating the helpless young man with all his might and the beating continued for so long and seemed of such homicidal intent that the several newsmen caught in the crush began screaming at the marshal to quit. Finally the soldiers stopped him. The Nation’s reporter saw the marshals beating demonstrators on five occasions, four of these beatings were administered when the demonstrators were either on the ground or helpless.”
The Pentagon protest was paralleled by demonstrations in Japan and Western Europe. In one raucous incident outside the U.S. Embassy in London, 3,000 demonstrators attempted to storm the building.
Vietnam Peace Parade Committee
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1967
poster
"When You Finally Notice Something..."
Anti-Nuclear Movement
This 1975 anti-nuclear power poster by Gillado Booth and White Whippet Press includes the quote, "When you finally notice something that's been a long while coming you don't have much time left." During the 1970s, many environmental activists opposed nuclear power because of concerns over nuclear waste disposal.
art by Gillado Booth and published by White Whippet Press in Huntington, New York
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1975
poster
Mobilize to End the War in Vietnam
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
On April 15, 1967, the National Mobilization Committee organized a protest march against the Vietnam War from Central Park to the United Nations. One of the largest demonstrations of the Vietnam War era, an estimated 100,000 to 400,000 participated, including a range of anti-war and civil rights organizations. The march was peaceful, with five arrests, all of people who opposed the demonstration. During the event, Martin Luther King, Jr., Floyd McKissick, Stokely Carmichael and Dr. Benjamin Spock all gave speeches in front of the United Nations critiquing U.S. involvement in the war as well as the socioeconomic politics of the draft. Prior to the march, nearly 200 draft cards were burned by youths in Central Park. In San Francisco, Black nationalists led a march of an estimated 20,000 mostly white demonstrators in San Francisco on the same day.
Here is a news footage of the march in New York:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=18&v=40m5gBgwjQE
Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam
Photo Credit to Robert Joyce
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1967
poster
Assata Shakur - Free All Black Liberation Fighters
Black Power
Assata Olugbala Shakur is a political activist, author, fugitive and aunt of hip-hop artist, Tupac Shakur. She was born in 1947 in New York City, JoAnne Deborah Byron. Following her parents’ divorce, Byron spent much of her childhood moving between her grandparents and other family in Wilmington, North Carolina, and New York City, where her mother moved after she remarried. As a student at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and then City College of New York, Byron was exposed to African American history and Black Nationalism, which made a significant impact on her political development. She met her husband, Louis Chesimard, and began participating in the student movement, anti-war activism and the struggle for black liberation. In 1970, while visiting Oakland, California, Byron met members of the Black Panther Party and joined the Harlem branch upon her return to New York, where she worked with the breakfast program. Frustrated with the Black Panther Party’s unwillingness to work with other black radical organizations, Byron left the party in 1971 and joined the Black Liberation Army, an underground Black Power group whose goal was to “take up arms for the liberation and self-determination of black people in the United States.” In her autobiography, she wrote, “the Black Liberation Army was not a centralized, organized group with a common leadership and chain of command. Instead there were various organizations and collectives working together and simultaneously independent of each other.” The group believed "the character of reformism is based on unprincipled class collaboration with our enemy" and asserted the following principles:
1. That we are anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist.
2. That we must of necessity strive for the abolishment of these systems and for the institution of Socialistic relationships in which Black people have total and absolute control over their own destiny as a people.
3. That in order to abolish our systems of oppression, we must utilize the science of class struggle, develop this science as it relates to our unique national condition.
It was also at this time that Byron changed her name to Assata (“she who struggles”) Olugbala (“love for the people”) Shakur (“the thankful”).
In 1972, the FBI issued a warrant for Shakur’s arrest for alleged crimes committed by the BLA and was the subject of a multi-state manhunt by law-enforcement. During a traffic stop on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973, Sundiata Acoli Zayd Malik Shakur and Assata Shakur got into an altercation with two police officers, Werner Foerster and James Harper. The incident resulted in the deaths of Zayd Shakur and Foerster. Harper and Assata Shakur were also wounded in the shoot-out. Over the next few years, beteen 1973 and 1977, Shakur was charged with a variety of crimes related to the 1973 incident and others, including murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, bank robbery and kidnapping. Six of the charged were ultimately dismissed, though she was convicted of Foerster’s murder and seven other felonies related to that incident in 1977 and sentenced to life in prison plus thirty years. Many black liberation and New Left activists argued that Shakur did not receive a fair trial. In 1979, three members of the BLA helped Shakur escape from prison. For the next few years, Shakur lived underground, ultimately fleeing the U.S. for Cuba in 1984, where she was reunited with her daughter, who had been born in prison while she was on trial. Shakur continues to live in Cuba and remains on the FBI’s list of “most wanted terrorists.”
The quotation printed on this poster is from a letter Shakur wrote on July 4, 1973 from prison. The full letter is here:
Black brothers, Black sisters, i want you to know that i love you and i hope that somewhere in your hearts you have love for me. My name is Assata Shakur (slave name joanne chesimard), and i am a revolutionary. A Black revolutionary. By that i mean that i have declared war on all forces that have raped our women, castrated our men, and kept our babies empty-bellied.
I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heart-less robots who protect them and their property.
I am a Black revolutionary, and, as such, i am a victim of all the wrath, hatred, and slander that amerika is capable of. Like all other Black revolutionaries, amerika is trying to lynch me.
I am a Black revolutionary woman, and because of this i have been charged with and accused of every alleged crime in which a woman was believed to have participated. The alleged crimes in which only men were supposedly involved, i have been accused of planning. They have plastered pictures alleged to be me in post offices, airports, hotels, police cars, subways, banks, television, and newspapers. They have offered over fifty thousand dollars in rewards for my capture and they have issued orders to shoot on sight and shoot to kill.
I am a Black revolutionary, and, by definition, that makes me a part of the Black Liberation Army. The pigs have used their newspapers and TVs to paint the Black Liberation Army as vicious, brutal, mad-dog criminals. They have called us gangsters and gun molls and have compared us to such characters as john dillinger and ma barker. It should be clear, it must be clear to anyone who can think, see, or hear, that we are the victims. The victims and not the criminals.
It should also be clear to us by now who the real criminals are. Nixon and his crime partners have murdered hundreds of Third World brothers and sisters in Vietnam, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. As was proved by Watergate, the top law enforcement officials in this country are a lying bunch of criminals. The president, two attorney generals, the head of the fbi, the head of the cia, and half the white house staff have been implicated in the Watergate crimes.
They call us murderers, but we did not murder over two hundred fifty unarmed Black men, women, and children, or wound thousands of others in the riots they provoked during the sixties. The rulers of this country have always considered their property more important than our lives. They call us murderers, but we were not responsible for the twenty-eight brother inmates and nine hostages murdered at attica. They call us murderers, but we did not murder and wound over thirty unarmed Black students at Jackson State—or Southern State, either.
They call us murderers, but we did not murder Martin Luther King, Jr., Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, George Jackson, Nat Turner, James Chaney, and countless others. We did not murder, by shooting in the back, sixteen-year-old Rita Lloyd, eleven-year-old Rickie Bodden, or ten-year-old Clifford Glover. They call us murderers, but we do not control or enforce a system of racism and oppression that systematically murders Black and Third World people.
Although Black people supposedly comprise about fifteen percent of the total amerikkkan population, at least sixty percent of murder victims are Black. For every pig that is killed in the so-called line of duty, there are at least fifty Black people murdered by the police.
Black life expectancy is much lower than white and they do their best to kill us before we are even born. We are burned alive in fire-trap tenements. Our brothers and sisters OD daily from heroin and methadone. Our babies die from lead poisoning. Millions of Black people have died as a result of indecent medical care. This is murder. But they have got the gall to call us murderers.
They call us kidnappers, yet Brother Clark Squires (who is accused, along with me, of murdering a new jersey state trooper) was kidnapped on April z, 1969, from our Black community and held on one million dollars' ransom in the New York Panther 21 conspiracy case. He was acquitted on May 13, 1971, along with all the others, of 156 counts of conspiracy by a jury that took less than two hours to deliberate. Brother Squires was innocent. Yet he was kidnapped from his community and family. Over two years of his life was stolen, but they call us kidnappers. We did not kidnap the thousands of Brothers and Sisters held captive in amerika's concentration camps. Ninety percent of the prison population in this country are Black and Third World people who can afford neither bail nor lawyers.
They call us thieves and bandits. They say we steal. But it was not we who stole millions of Black people from the continent of Africa. We were robbed of our language, of our Gods, of our culture, of our human dignity, of our labor, and of our lives. They call us thieves, yet it is not we who rip off billions of dollars every year through tax evasions, illegal price fixing, embezzlement, consumer fraud, bribes, kickbacks, and swindles. They call us bandits, yet every time most Black people pick up our paychecks we are being robbed. Every time we walk into a store in our neighborhood we are being held up. And every time we pay our rent the landlord sticks a gun into our ribs.
They call us thieves, but we did not rob and murder millions of Indians by ripping off their homeland, then call ourselves pioneers. They call us bandits, but it is not we who are robbing Africa, Asia, and Latin America of their natural resources and freedom while the people who live there are sick and starving. The rulers of this country and their flunkies have committed some of the most brutal, vicious crimes in history. They are the bandits. They are the murderers. And they should be treated as such. These maniacs are not fit to judge me, Clark, or any other Black person on trial in amerika. Black people should and, inevitably, must determine our destinies.
Every revolution in history has been accomplished by actions, al-though words are necessary. We must create shields that protect us and spears that penetrate our enemies. Black people must learn how to struggle by struggling. We must learn by our mistakes.
I want to apologize to you, my Black brothers and sisters, for being on the new jersey turnpike. I should have known better. The turnpike is a checkpoint where Black people are stopped, searched, harassed, and assaulted. Revolutionaries must never be in too much of a hurry or make careless decisions. He who runs when the sun is sleeping will stumble many times.
Every time a Black Freedom Fighter is murdered or captured, the pigs try to create the impression that they have quashed the movement, destroyed our forces, and put down the Black Revolution. The pigs also try to give the impression that five or ten guerrillas are responsible for every revolutionary action carried out in amerika. That is nonsense. That is absurd. Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our oppression. We are being manufactured in droves in the ghetto streets, places like attica, san quentin, bedford hills, leavenworth, and sing sing. They are turning out thousands of us. Many jobless Black veterans and welfare mothers are joining our ranks. Brothers and sisters from all walks of life, who are tired of suffering passively, make up the BLA.
There is, and always will be, until every Black man, woman, and child is free, a Black Liberation Army. The main function of the Black Liberation Army at this time is to create good examples, to struggle for Black freedom, and to prepare for the future. We must defend ourselves and let no one disrespect us. We must gain our liberation by any means necessary.
It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Right edge has "Jackrabbit Press 464 Willamette Eugene Oregon" printed in black and a black stamp for the Assatta Shakur Defense Committee.
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1973
poster
Wobblies
Labor Movement
This poster promotes a production of a play, "Wobblies: The U.S. v. Wm. D. Haywood, et. al.," by The Labor Theater at the Hudson Theater in New York City. The play, written by Stewart Bird and Peter Robilotta, focused on the trial of 101 members of the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) during the First World War.
The Labor Theater of New York
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. mid-1970s
Women Unite
Women's Liberation
Women's Liberation poster created by Jeanne Friedman, for The Women's Strike for Equality March in New York City, August 26, 1970. The rally was sponsored by the National Organization for Women (NOW). More than 20,000 women gathered for the protest in New York City and throughout the country.
Jeanne Friedman
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1970
poster
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
Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America
U.S. Interventionism in Central America
In 1984, a group of artists in New York joined forces to use their creative talents to challenge U.S. intervention in Latin America under the Reagan Administration. This poster was a call for artists to join the effort and was created by American sculptor, Claes Oldenburg. The final version of the poster differed from the one here, listing 1,087 participants, from individual visual artists and collaborative teams, performance artists, poets, filmmakers, curators, art critics and writers, as well as 80 events, including 29 exhibitions, 20 film showings, 7 dance and performance festivals, 6 poetry brigades, 6 video and TV installations, 6 reading series, 2 street actions, 2 window installations, and 2 panel discussions. According to artist, Doug Ashford, "Artists’ Call Against US Intervention in Central America was a nationwide mobilization of writers, artists, activists, artists organizations, and solidarity groups that began in New York in 1983. Quickly mobilizing artists and their organizations across the country, Artists Call collectively produced over 200 exhibitions, concerts and other public events over a period of 12 months. These events increased awareness of our government’s involvement in state terrorism across the hemisphere, linked the notion of aesthetic emancipation to revolutionary politics and provided concrete resources for the cultural workers and public intellectuals in the region and in exile."
Claes Oldenburg
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1984
poster
Bread and Puppet Presents Joan of Arc
Experimental Theater
Bread and Puppet Theater is a radical theater group founded in 1962-63 in New York City by sculptor, dancer, baker and German émigré, Peter Schumann. During the 1960s, the experimental troupe participated in anti-war protests with large-scale puppets and was enmeshed in the countercultural scene. In 1970, they relocated to Plainfield and then Glover, Vermont, where they continue to perform today. The name of the group refers to their tradition of sharing bread with the audience to symbolize community and the significance of art to everyday life.
Bread and Puppet Theatre Company
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1977
poster
Bring the Troops Home Now
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
This anti-war poster was designed by Nancy Conor for the Student Mobilization Committee, a national organization that sought to foment student anti-war activism on U.S. campuses during the early-1970s.
Student Mobilization Committee
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
poster
Woodstock Music and Arts Fair
Counterculture
Between August 15 and August 18, 1969, an estimated 400,000 members of the counterculture generation descended on Max Yasgur's farm near White Lake, New York, to attend a series of sometimes rain-soaked concerts by 32 popular musical acts, including Janis Joplin, Santana, Canned Heat, The Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Joe Cocker, Country Joe & the Fish, Ravi Shankar, The Band, Johnny Winter, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Crosby, Stills Nash & Young, Sha-Na-Na, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Sly and the Family Stone, and Jimi Hendrix, whose searing, cacophonous performance of the "Star-Spangled Banner" on the final day of the festival has become iconic in the years since the event. Woodstock - which billed itself as "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music" - is one of the primary historical markers of the Sixties counterculture. A 1970 documentary on the festival won an Academy Award and the accompanying triple LP record reached #1 on the pop music chart that same year.
Woodstock Music and Arts Fair
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1969
Button
Physical Object
Yippie!
Counterculture and New Left
The Youth International Party, known as the "Yippies," was founded in 1967 by Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Nancy Kurshan, and Paul Krassner. Other activists involved with the Yippes included, Stew Albert, Ed Rosenthal, Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, Robin Morgan,Phil Ochs, Robert M. Ockene, William Kunstler, Jonah Raskin, Steve Conliff, John Sinclair, Dana Beal, Betty (Zaria) Andrew, Matthew Landy Steen, Judy Gumbo, Ben Masel, Tom Forcade, David Peel, Wavy Gravy, Aron Kay, Tuli Kupferberg, Jill Johnston, Daisy Deadhead, Leatrice Urbanowicz, Bob Fass, John Murdock, Alice Torbush, Judy Lampe, Walli Leff, Steve DeAngelo, Dennis Peron, and Brenton Lengel. According to Krasner, who coined the term, Yippies were “radicalized hippies.” In a 2007 essay in the Los Angeles Times, Krasner explained, "We needed a name to signify the radicalization of hippies, and I came up with Yippie as a label for a phenomenon that already existed, an organic coalition of psychedelic hippies and political activists. In the process of cross-fertilization at antiwar demonstrations, we had come to share an awareness that there was a linear connection between putting kids in prison for smoking pot in this country and burning them to death with napalm on the other side of the planet." Further, Anita Hoffman liked the term, but felt that "strait-laced types" needed a more formal name to take the movement seriously. She came up with "Youth International Party," because it symbolized the movement and made for a good play on words. Some referred to the group as "Yippie!," as in a shout for joy (with an exclamation mark to express exhilaration). As Abbie Hoffman wrote, "What does Yippie! mean?" Energy – fun – fierceness – exclamation point!"
The Yippies were influenced by The Diggers in San Francisco and often used guerilla theater, pranks, absurdist forms of protest, as well as political and cultural disruption in their activism. They sought to merge the personal with the political… and have fun in the process. ABC News once stated, "The group was known for street theater pranks and was once referred to as the 'Groucho Marxists'." Among their many storied antics, the Yippies suggested lacing the New York City water supply with LSD, sent joints to hundreds of random people in New York from the telephone book, threw fake money on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and suggested a circle of hippies could “levitate” the Pentagon during an October 1967 protest. The Yippies understood the dominant role of mass media and television in contemporary society and often went on television, but refused to obey the normal rules of corporate TV production, hoping to “break the frame” and reveal to audiences the constructed nature of mass media. As Krassner later recalled, “[T]he more visual and surreal the stunts we could cook up, the easier it would be to get on the news, and the more weird and whimsical and provocative the theater, the better it would play.” The Yippies were also involved in the underground press movement. Much of the writing and visual culture they produced consisted of obscenity-laced diatribes against mainstream society, but made few serious calls to militant action.
Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies first suggested a “Festival of Life” in the park outside of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. They also planned to nominate a pig, nicknamed “Pigasus,” for President. Other New Left organizations joined the effort, which ultimately descended into chaos when Chicago police, at the order of authoritarian Democratic Mayor Richard Daley, attacked and brutally beat demonstrators in front of reporters and television cameras, causing an international controversy. In the melee, many Yippies were injured and arrested, including Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who were put on trial as a part of what become known as the Chicago 7.
In 1970, an estimated 200-300 members of the Yippies descended on the Disneyland amusement park in Anaheim, California, to hold what was billed as their “First International Pow-Wow” to protest the U.S.’s continuing involvement in the Vietnam War and to liberate Disneyland as a symbol of the establishment. Hoffman authored a pamphlet in 1967, titled, “Fuck the System”; two books, “Revolution for the Hell of It” (1968) and “Steal This Book” (1971); and an LP record, “Woodstock Nation: A Talk-Rock Album” (1969).
The Yippies began to fragment and disintegrate during the 1970s. A disillusioned Hoffman committed suicide in 1989. Jerry Rubin became a “Yuppie” during the 1980s, embracing capitalism and starting a number of businesses. He was killed in 1994 when he was struck by a car. Even so, a number of Yippie followers have carried on in the same spirit.
_______
Here is a brief clip of Abbie Hoffman discussing Yippie tactics during the 1968 Democratic National Convention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=29&v=2oujcg_Tifw
Here is Jerry Rubin speaking to a group of Yippies days before the 1968 Democratic National Convention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10&v=oZlmjZPrG0s
________
Yippie
Manifesto
By Abbie
Hoffman
and
Jerry
Rubin
(1968)
Come
in to
the
streets
on
Nov.
5,
election
day. Vote
with
your
feet.
Rise
up and
abandon
the
creeping
meatball!
Demand
the
bars
be
open.
Make
music and
dance
at
every
red
light.
A
festival
of
life
in
the
streets
and
parks
throughout the world.
The
American
election
represents
death,
and
we
are
alive.
Come
all
you
rebels,
youth
spirits,
rock
minstrels,
bomb
throwers,
bank
robbers,
peacock
freaks,
toe
worshippers,
poets,
street
folk,
liberated
women,
professors
and
body
snatchers:
it
is
election
day
and
we
are
everywhere.
Don't
vote
in
a
jackass‐elephant‐cracker
circus.
Let's
vote
for
ourselves.
Me
for
President.
We
are
the
revolution.
We
will
strike
and
boycott
the
election
and
create
our
own
reality.
Can
you
dig
it:
in
every
metropolis
and
hamlet of
America
boycotts,
strikes,
sit‐ins,
pickets,
lie‐ins,
pray‐ins,
feel‐ins,
piss‐ins
at
the
polling
places.
Nobody
goes
to
work.
Nobody
goes
to
school.
Nobody
votes.
Everyone
becomes
a
life
actor
of
the
street
doing
his
thing,
making
the
revolution
by
freeing
himself
and
fucking
up
the
system.
Ministers
dragged
away
from
polling
places.
Free
chicken
and
ice
cream
in
the
streets.
Thousands
of
kazoos,
drums,
tambourines,
triangles,
pots
and
pans,
trumpets,
street
fairs,
firecrackers – a
symphony
of
life
on
a
day
of
death.
LSD
in
the
drinking
water.
Let's
parade
in
the
thousands
to
the
places
where
the
votes
are
counted
and
let
murderous
racists
feel
our
power.
Force
the
National
Guard
to
protect
every
polling
place
in
the
country.
Brush
your
teeth
in
the
streets.
Organize
a
sack
race.
Join
the
rifle
club
of
your
choice.
Freak
out
the
pigs
with
exhibitions
of snake
dancing
and
karate
at
the
nearest
pig
pen.
Release
a
Black
Panther
in
the Justice
Department.
Hold
motorcycle
races
a
hundred
yards
from
the
polling
places.
Fly
an
American
flag
out
of
every
house
so
confused
voters
can't
find
the polling
places.
Wear
costumes.
Take
a
burning
draft
card
to
Spiro
Agnew.
Stall
for
hours
in
the
polling
places
trying
to
decide
between
Nixon
and
Humphrey
and
Wallace.
Take
your
clothes
off.
Put
wall
posters
up
all
over
the
city.
Hold
block
parties.
Release
hundreds
o f
greased
pigs
in
pig
uniforms
downtown.
Check
it
out
in
Europe
and
throughout
the
world
thousands
of
students
will
march
on
the
USA
embassies
demanding
to
vote
in
the
election
cause
Uncle
Pig
controls
the
world.
No
domination
without
representation.
Let's
make
2‐300
Chicago's
on
election
day.
(On
election
day
let's
pay
tribute
to
rioters,
anarchists,
Commies,
runaways,
draft
dodgers,
acid
freaks,
snipers,
beatniks,
deserters,
Chinese
s pies.
Let's
exorcise
all
politicians,
generals,
publishers,
businessmen,
Popes,
American
Legion,
AMA,
FBI,
narcos,
informers.
And
then
on
Inauguration
Day
Jan.
20
we
will
bring
our
revolutionary
theater
to
Washington
to
inaugurate
Pigasus,
our
pig,
the
only
honest
candidate,
and
turn
the
White
House
into
a
crash
pad.
They
will
have
to
put
Nixon's
hand
on
the
bible
in
a
glass
cage.
Begin
now:
resist
oppression
as
you
feel
it.
Organize
and
begin
the
word
of
mouth
communication
that
is
the
basis
of
all
conspiracies
....
Every
man
a
revolution!
Every
small
group
a
revolutionary
center!
We
will
be
together on
election day.
Yippie!!!
________
A Yippie Manifesto
by Jerry Rubin
This is a Viet Cong flag on my back. During the recent hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington, a friend and I are walking down the street en route to Congress – he’s wearing an American flag and I’m wearing this VC flag.
The cops mass, and boom! I am going to be arrested for treason, for supporting the enemy.
And who do the cops grab and throw in the paddy wagon?
My friend with the American flag.
And I’m left all alone in the VC flag.
“What kind of a country is this?” I shout at the cops. “YOU COMMUNISTS!”
Everything is cool en route to Canada until the border. An official motions me into a small room and pulls out a five-page questionnaire.
“Do you use drugs?” he asks quite seriously.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Which?”
“Coca Cola.”
“I mean DRUGS! He shouts.
“Coca Cola is more dangerous for you than marijuana,” I say. “Fucks up your body, and it’s addictive.”
“Have you ever advocated the overthrow of the Canadian government?” he asks.
“Not until I get into Canada.”
Have you ever been arrested for inciting to riot?”
I reply no, and it is true. In August I was arrested in Chicago for something similar, “solicitation to mob action,” a violation of a sex statute.
Finally I ask the border official to drop out. “Man, your job is irrelevant,” I say. “The Canadian-American border does not exist. There are no such things as borders. The border exists only in your head.
“No state has the right to ask me these questions. The answers are mine. Next thing I know you guys will be tapping my brain!”
I try to get the cat to take off his uniform right there. But he refuses, saying, “I’ve got a job to do and a family to support.”
So goes the cancer of the Western World: everyone just doing his “Job.” Nobody learned the lesson of Eichmann. Everyone still points the finger elsewhere.
America and the West suffer from a great spiritual crisis. And so the yippies are a revolutionary religious movement.
We do not advocate political solutions that you can vote for. You are never going to be able to vote for the revolution. Get that hope out of your mind.
And you are not going to be able to buy the revolution in a supermarket, in the tradition of our consumer society. The revolution is not a can of goods.
Revolution only comes through personal transformation: finding God and changing your life. Then millions of converts will create a massive social upheaval.
The religion of the yippies is: “RISE UP AND ABANDON THE CREEPING MEATBALL!”
That means anything you want it to mean. Which is why it is so powerful a revolutionary slogan. The best picket sign I ever saw was blank. Next best was: “We Protest__________!”
Slogans like “Get out of Vietnam” are informative, but they do not create myths. They don’t ask you to do anything but carry them.
Political demonstrations should make people dream and fantasize. A religious-political movement is concerned with people’s souls, with the creation of a magic world which we make real.
When the national media first heard our slogan, they reported that the “creeping meatball” was Lyndon Johnson. Which was weird and unfair, because we liked Lyndon Johnson.
We cried when LBJ dropped out. “LBJ, you took us too literally! We didn’t mean YOU should drop out! Where would WE be if it weren’t for you, LBJ?”
Is there any kid in America, or anywhere in the world, who wants to be like LBJ when he grows up?
As a society falls apart, its children reject their parents. The elders offer us Johnsons, Agnews, and Nixons, dead symbols of a dying past.
The war between THEM and US will be decided by the seven-year-olds.
We offer: sex, drugs, rebellion, heroism, brotherhood.
They offer: responsibility, fear, Puritanism, repression.
Dig the movie Wild in the Streets! A teenage rock-and-roll singer campaigns for a Bobby Kennedy-type politician.
Suddenly he realizes: “We’re all young! Let’s run the country ourselves!”
“Lower the voting age to 14!”
“14 or FIGHT!”
They put LSD in the water fountains of Congress and the Congressmen have a beautiful trip. Congress votes to lower the voting age to 14.
The rock-and-roll singer is elected President, but the CIA and military refuse to recognize the vote. Thousands of long-hairs storm the White House, and six die in the siege. Finally the kids take power, and they put all people over 30 into camps and given them LSD every day. (Some movies are even stranger than OUR fantasies.)
“Don’t trust anyone over 30!” say the yippies – a much-quoted warning.
I am four years old.
We are born twice. My first birth was in 1938, but I was reborn in Berkeley in 1964 in the Free Speech movement.
When we say “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” we’re talking about the second birth. I got 26 more years.
When people 40 years old come up to me and say, “Well, I guess I can’t be part of your movement,” I say, “What do you mean? You could have been born yesterday. Age exists in your head.”
Bertrand Russell is our leader. He’s 90 years old.
Another yippie saying is “THE GROUND YOU STAND ON IS LIBEATED TERRITORY!”
Everybody in this society is a policeman. We all police ourselves. When we free ourselves, the real cops take over.
I don’t smoke pot in public often, although I love to. I don’t want to be arrested: that’s the only reason.
I police myself.
We do not own our own bodies.
We fight to regain our bodies…to make love in the parks, say “fuck” on television, do what we want to do whenever we want to do it.
Prohibitions should be prohibited.
Rules are made to be broken.
Never say “no.”
The yippies say: “PROPERTY IS THEFT.’
What America got, she stole.
How was this country built? By the forced labor of slaves. America owes black people billions in compensation.
“Capitalism” is just a polite schoolbook way of saying: “Stealing.”
Who deserves what they get in America? Do the Rockefellers deserve their wealth? HELL NO!
America says that people work only for money. But check it out: those who don’t have money work the hardest, and those who have money take very long lunch hours.
When I was born I had food on my table and a roof over my head. Most babies born in the world face hunger and cold. What is the difference between them and me?
Every well-off white American better ask himself that question or he will never understand why people hate America.
The enemy is this dollar bill right here in my hand.
Now if I get a match, I’ll show you what I think of it.
This burning gets some political radicals very uptight. I don’t know exactly why. They burn a lot of money putting out leaflets nobody reads.
I think it is more important today to burn a dollar bill than it is to burn a draft card.
“Humm, pretty resilient. Hard to burn. Anybody got a lighter?”
We go to the New York Stock Exchange, about 20 of us, our pockets stuffed with dollar bills. We want to throw real dollars down at all those people on the floor playing monopoly games with numbers.
An official stops us at the door and says, “You can’t come in. You are hippies and you are coming to demonstrate.”
With TV cameras flying away, we reply: “Hippies? Demonstrate? We’re Jews. And we’re coming to see the stock market.”
Well, that gets the guy uptight, and he lets us in. We get to the top, and the dollars start raining down on the floor below.
These guys deal in millions of dollars as a game, never connecting it to people starving. Have they ever seen a real dollar bill?
This is what it is all about, you sonavabitches!!”
Look at them: wild animals chasing and fighting each other over dollar bills thrown by the hippies!
And then someone calls the cops . The cops are a necessary part of any demonstration; always include a role for the cops. Cops legitimize demonstrations.
The cops throw us out.
It is noon. Wall Street Businessmen with briefcases and suits and ties. Money freaks going to lunch. Important business deals. Time. Appointments.
And there we are in the middle of it, burning five-dollar bills. Burning their world. Burning their Christ.
“Don’t, Don’t!” some scream, grasping for the sacred paper. Several near fist-fights break out.
We escape with our lives.
Weeks later The New York Times publishes a short item revealing that the New York Stock Exchange is installing a bullet-proof glass window between the visitor’s platform and the floor, so that “nobody can shot a stockbroker.”
In Chicago, 5,000 yuppies come, armed only with our skin. The cops bring tanks, dogs, guns, gas, long-range rifles, missiles. Is this South Vietnam or Chicago? America always overreacts.
The American economy is doomed to collapse because it has no soul. Its stability is war and preparation for war. Consumer products are built to break, and advertising brainwashes us to consume new ones.
The rich feel guilty. The poor are taught to hate themselves. The guilty and the wretched are on a collision course.
If the men who control the technology used it for human needs and not profit and murder, every human being on the planet could be free from starvation. Machines could do most of the world: People would be free to do what they want.
We should be very realistic and demand the impossible. Food, housing, clothing, medicine, and color TV free for all!!
People would work because of love, creativity, and brotherhood. A new economic structure would produce a new man.
That new structure will be created by new men.
American society, because of its Western-Christian-Capitalist bag, is organized on the fundamental premise that man is bad, society evil, and that: People must be motivated and forced by external reward and punishment.
We are a new generation, species, race. We are bred on affluence, turned on by drugs, at home in our bodies, and excited by the future and its possibilities.
Everything for us is an experience, done for love or not done at all.
We live off the fat of society. Our fathers worked all-year round for a two-week vacation. Our entire life is a vacation.
Every moment, every day we decide what we are going to do.
We do not groove with Christianity, the idea that people go to heaven after they are dead. We want HEAVEN NOW!
We do not believe in studying to obtain degrees in school. Degrees and grades are like money and credit, good only for burning.
There is a war going on in the Western world: a war of genocide by the old against the young.
The economy is closed. It does not need us. Everything is built.
So the purpose of universities is: to get us off the streets. Schools are baby-sitting agencies.
The purpose of the Vietnam War is: to get rid of blacks. They are a nuisance. America got the work she needed out of blacks, but now she has no use for them.
It is a psychological war. The old say, “We want you to die for us.” The old send the young to die for the old.
Our response? Draft-card burning and draft dodging! We won’t die for you.
Young whites are dropping out of white society. We are getting our heads straight, creating new identities. We’re dropping out of middle-class institutions, leaving their schools, running away from their homes, and forming our own communities.
We are becoming the new niggers.
I’m getting on a plane en route to Washington. An airline official comes up to me and says, “You can’t go on this airplane.”
“Why not?” I ask.
“Because you smell.”
That’s what they used to say about black people, remember? They don’t say that about black people anymore. They’d get punched in their fucking mouths.
Our long hair communicates disrespect to America. A racist, short-hair society gets freaked by long hair. It blinds people. In Vietnam, America bombs the Vietnamese, but cannot see them because they are brown.
Long-hair is vital to us because it enables us to recognize each other. We have white skin like our oppressors. Long hair ties us together into a visible counter-community.
A car drives down the street, parents in front, and a 15-year-old longhair kid in back. The kid gives me the “V” sign! That’s the kind of communication taking place.
Within our community we have the seeds of a new society. We have our own communications network, the underground press. We have the beginnings of a new family structure in communes. We have our own stimulants.
When the cops broke into my home on the Lower East Side to arrest me for possession of pot, it was like American soldiers invading a Vietnamese village. They experienced cultural shock.
Fidel Castro was on the wall. They couldn’t believe it! Beads! They played with my beads for 20 minutes.
When the cops kidnapped me in Chicago, they interviewed me as if I had just landed from Mars.
“Do you fuck each other?”
“What is it like on LSD?”
“Do you talk directly with the Viet Cong?”
The two generations cannot communicate with one another because of our different historical experiences.
Our parents suffered through the Depression and World War II. We experience the consumer economy and the U.S.A. as a military bully in Vietnam.
From 1964 to 1968 the movement has been involved in the destruction of the old symbols of America. Through our actions we have redefined those symbols for the youth.
Kids growing up today expect school to be a place to demonstrate, sit-in, fight authority, and maybe get arrested.
Demonstrations become the initiation rites, rituals, and social celebrations of a new generation.
Remember the Pentagon, center of the military ego? We urinated on it. Thousands of stone freaks stormed the place, carrying Che’s picture and stuffing flowers in the rifles of the 82nd Airborne.
Remember the Democratic Convention? Who, after Chicago, can read schoolbook descriptions of national political conventions with a straight face anymore? The farce within the convention became clear because of the war between the yippies and the cops in the streets.
We are calling the bluff on myths of America. Once the myth is exposed, the structure behind it crumbles like sand. Chaos results. People must create new realities.
In the process we create new myths, and these new myths forecast the future.
In America in 1969 old myths can be destroyed overnight, and new ones created overnight because of the power of television. By making communications instantaneous, television telescopes the rev solution by centuries. What might have taken 100 years will now take 20. What used to happen in 10 years now happens in two. In a dying society, television becomes a revolutionary instrument.
For her own protection, the government is soon going to have to suppress freedom of the press and take direct control over what goes on television, especially the news.
TV has dramatized the longhair drop-out movement so well that virtually every young kid in the country wants to grow up and be a demonstrator.
What do you want to be when you grow up? A fireman? A cop? A professor?
“I want to grow up and make history.”
Young kids watch TV’s thrill-packed coverage of demonstrations – including the violence and excitement – and dream about being in them. They look like fun.
Mayor Daley put out this television film about Chicago. It had cops beating up young longhairs. In one scene, the cops threw a tear-gas canister into the crowd, and one demonstrator picked it up and heaved it right back.
Who do you think every kid in the country identified with?
Then the announcer said the chiller: “These demonstrations are Communist led!…”
Communism? Who the hell knows from Communism? We never lived thro8ugh Stalin. We read about it, but it doesn’t affect us emotionally. Our emotional reaction to Communism is Fidel marching into Havana in 1959.
There is NO WORD that the Man has to turn off your youth, no scare word.
“They’re for ANARCHY!”
Damn right, we’re for anarchy! This country is fucking over-organized anyway. “DON’T DO THIS! DON”T DO THAT, Don’t!”
Growing up in America is learning what NOT to do.
We say: “DO IT, DO IT. DO WHATEVER YOU WANT TO DO.”
Our battlegrounds are the campuses of America. White middle-class youth are strategically located in the high schools and colleges of this country. They are our power bases.
If one day 100 campuses were closed in a nationally coordinated rebellion, we could force the President of the United States to sue for peace at the conference table.
As long as we are in school we are prisoners. Schools are voluntary jails. We must liberate ourselves.
Dig the geography of a university. You can always tell what the rulers have up their sleeves when you check out the physical environment they create. The buildings tell you how to behave. Then there is less need for burdensome rules and cops. They designed classrooms so that students sit in rows, one after the other, hierarchically facing the professor who stands up front talking to all of them.
Classrooms say:
“Listen to the Professor.
“He teaches you.
“Keep your place.
“Don’t stretch out.
“Don’t lie on the floor.
“Don’t relax.
“Don’t speak out of turn.
“Don’t take off your clothes.
“Don’t get emotional.
“Let the mind rule the body.
“Let the needs of the classroom rule the mind.
Classrooms are totalitarian environments. The main purpose of school and education in America is to force you to accept and love authority, and to distrust your own spontaneity and emot8ons.
How can you grow in such an over-structured environment? You can’t. Schools aren’t for learning.
Classrooms should be organized in circles, with the professor one part of the circle. A circle is a democratic environment.
Try breaking up the environment. Scream “Fuck” in the middle of your prof’s lecture. ‘
So we organized a University of the Flesh. Four of us go into a classroom. We sit in the middle of the class. The lecture is on “Thinking.”
Thinking!
We take off our shirts, smoke joints and start French kissing. A lot of students get nervous. This goes on for 10-15 minutes, and the professor goes on with his lecture like nothing is happening.
Finally a girl says, “The people there are causing a distraction, and could they either put their shirts back on or could they please leave.”
And the prof says, “Well, I agree with that. I think that if you’re not here to hear what I’m saying…”
We shout: “You can’t separate thinking from loving! We are hard in thought!!”
And the prof says, “Well, in my classroom I give the lessons.”
Scratch a professor deep and you find a cop!
Fucking milquetoast! Didn’t have the guts to throw us out, but in his classroom HE GIVES the lesson. So he sends his teaching assistant to get the cops, and we split.
The mind is programmed. Get in there and break that bloody program!
Can you imagine what a feeling a professor has standing in front of a class and looking at a room full of bright faces taking down every word he says, raising their hands and asking questions? It really makes someone think he is God. And to top it off, he has the power to reward and punish you, to decide whether or not you are fit to advance in the academic rat race.
Is this environment the right one for teacher and student?
Socrates is turning in his grave.
I was telling a professor of philosophy at Berkeley that many of his students were wiser men than he, even en though he may have read more books and memorized more theories.
He replied, “Well, I must take the lead in the transfer of knowledge.”
Transfer of knowledge! What is knowledge?
How to Live.
How to Legalize Marijuana.
How to Make a Revolution.
How to Free People from Jail.
How to Organize Against the CIA.
When a professor takes off his suit and tie, and joins us in the streets, then I say, “Hay man, what’s your first name?” You’re my brother. Let’s go. We’re together.”
I don’t dig the “professor” bullshit. I am more interested in a 15-year-old stoned dope freak living on street corners than I am in a Ph.D.
There is anti-intellectualism in America because professors have created an artificial environment. That is why the average working guy does not respect professors.
The university is a protective and plastic scene, shielding people from the reality of life, the reality of suffering, of ecstasy, of struggle. The university converts the agony of life into the securi6ty of words and books.
You can’t learn anything in school. Spend one hour in a jail or a courtroom and you will learn more than in five years spent in a university.
All I learned in school was how to beat the system, how to fake answers. But there are no answers. There are only more questions. Life is a long journey of questions, answered thro8ugh the challenge of living. You would never know that, living in a university ruled by the “right” answers to the wrong questions.
Graffiti in school bathrooms tells you more about what’s on people’s minds than all the books in the library.
We must liberate ourselves. I dropped out. The shit got up to my neck and I stopped eating. I said: NO. NO. NO!! I’m dropping out.
People at Columbia found out what it felt like to learn when they seized buildings and lived in communes for days.
We have to redesign the environment and remake human relationships. But if you try it, you will be kicked out.
You know what professors and deans will say? “Of you don’t like it here, why don’t you go back to Russia!”
A lot is demanded of white, middle-class youth in 1969. The whole thing about technological and bureaucratic society is that it is not made for heroes. We must become heroes.
The young kids living in the streets as new niggers are the pioneers of tomorrow, living dangerously and existentially.
The yippies went to Chicago to have our counter-festival, a “Festival of Life” in the parks of Chicago, as a human contrast to the “Convention of Death” of the Democrats.
I get a phone call on Christmas Day, 1967 from Marvin Garson, the editor of the San Francisco Express-Times, and he says, “Hay, it looks like the Peace and Freedom Party is not going to get on the ballot.”
I say, “I don’t care. I’m not interested in electoral politics anyway.”
And he says, “Let’s run a pig for President.”
An arrow shoots through my brain. Yeah! A pig, with buttons, posters, bumper stickers.
“America, why take half a hog, when you can have the whole hog.”
At the Democratic convention, the pigs nominate the President and he eats the people.
At the yippie convention, we nominate our pig and after he makes his nominating speech, we earth him. The contrast is clear: should the President earth the people or the people earth the President?
Well, we didn’t kill our pig. If there is one issue that could split the yippies, it is the issue of vegetarianism. A lot of yippies don’t believe in killing and eating animals, so I had to be less militant on that point.
We bring Pigasus to Chicago, and he is arrested in Civic Center. The cops grab him. They grab seven of us, and they throw us in the paddy wagon with Pigasus.
The thing about running a pig for President is that it cuts through the shits. People’s minds are full of things like, “You may elect a greater evil.” We must break through their logic. Once we get caught in their logic, we’re trapped in it.
Just freak it all out and proclaim: “This country is run on the principles of garbage. The Democratic and Republican parties have nominated a pig. So have we. We’re honest about it.”
In Chicago, Pigasus was a hell of a lot more effective than all those lackeys running around getting votes for the politicians. It turned out that the pig was more relevant to the current American political scene than Senator Eugene McCarthy. I never thought McCarthy could reform the Democratic Party. Hell, McCarthy barely got into the convention himself. He had to have a ticket. That’s how controlled the damn thing was. Finally, we forced McCarthy out into the streets with the people.
The election was not fair because every time we brought eh pigs out to give a campaign speech, they arrested him. It happened in Chicago, in New York, in San Francisco, even in London.
The yippies asked that the presidential elections be cancelled until the rules of the game were changed. We said that everyone in the role should both in American elections because America controls the world.
Free elections are elections in which the people who vote are the people affected by the results. The Vietnamese have more right to vote in the American elections than some 80-year-old grandmother in Omaha. They’re being bombed by America! They should have at least some choice about it, how, and by whom they are going to be bombed.
I have nothing in particular against 80-year-old grandmothers, but I am in favor of lowering the voting age to 12 or 14 years. And I’m not sure whether people over 50 should vote.
It is the young kids who are going to live in this world in the next 50 years. They should choose what they want for themselves.
Most people over 50 don’t think about the potentialities of the future: they are preoccupied with justifying their past.
The only people who can choose change without suffering blows to their egos are the young, and change is the rhythm of the universe.
Many older people are constantly warning: “The right wing will get you.” “George Wallace will get your momma.”
I am so scared of George Wallace that I wore his fucking campaign button. I went to his campaign rally – all old ladies.
There are six Nazis who come with black gloves and mouthpieces, looking for a fight. And two fights break out. Two guys with long hair beat the shit out of them.
I am not afraid of the right wing because the right wing does not have the youth behind it.
“Straight” people get very freaked by Wallace. “Freaks” know the best way to fuck Wallace up. We support him.
At Wallace’s rally in the Cow Palace in Sand Francisco, we come with signs saying “CUT THEIR HAIR1” “SEND THEM BACK TO AFRICA!” “BOMB THE VIETNAMESE BACK TO THE STONE AGE!”
When we arrive there is a picket line going on in front of the rally. I recognize it is the Communist Party picketing.
What? Picketing Wallace?
I walk up to my friend Bettina Aptheker and say, “Bettina, you’re legitimizing him. You’re legitimizing him by picketing. Instead, support him, kiss him. When he says the next hippie in front of his car will be the last hippie, cheer! Loudly!”
We have about two hundred people there, and we are the loudest people at the rally. Every five seconds we are jumping up and swearing. “Heil! Hitler! Heil! Hitler!”
Wallace is a sick man. America is the loony bin. The only way to cure her is through theatrical shock. Wallace is necessary because he brings to the surface the racism and hate that is deep within the country.
The hippie Fugs spearheaded the anti-war movement of the past five years by touring theaters and dance halls shouting into a microphone: “Kill, Kill, Kill for Peace! Kill, Kill, I’ll for Peace!”
Wallace says aloud what most people say privately. He exposes the beast within liberal America. He embarrasses the liberal who says in one breath, “Oh, I like Negroes,” and then in another breath, “We must eliminate crime in the streets.”
Remember what Huey Long said: “When fascism comes to America, it will come as Americanism.”
Wallace may be the best thing for those of us who are fighting him. You can only fight a disease after you recognize the diagnose it. America does not suffer from a cold: she has cancer.
The liberals who run this country agree with Wallace more than they disagree with him. George tells tales out of school. The liberals are going to have to shut that honest motherfucker up.
Do you dig that most cops support Wallace? Cops – the people who make and enforce the law in the streets! Wallace speaks FOR them.
Isn’t that scary? Can’t you see why blacks are getting guns and organizing into small self-defense units? Wouldn’t you, if you were in their situation? Shouldn’t you be?
Make America see her vampire face in the mirror. Destroy that gap between public talk and private behavior. Only when people see what’s happening can they hear our screams, and feel our passion.
The Vietnam War is an education for America. It is an expansive teaching experience, but the American people are the most brink-washed people in the world.
At least the youth are learning that this country is no paradise – America kills infants and children in Vietnam without blinking. Only professional killers can be so cool.
If you become hip to America in Vietnam, you can understand the reaction against the red-white-and-blue in Latin America, and you can feel why China hates us.
They are not irrational – America is.
Wallace is a left-wing agitator. Dig him. He speaks to the same anxiety and powerlessness that the New Left and yippies talk about.
Do you feel overwhelmed by bigness, including Big Government?
Do you lack control over your own life?
Are you distrustful of the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington?
Are you part of the “little people?”
Wallace stirs the masses. Revolutions should do that too.
When is the left going to produce an inflammatory and authentic voice of the people? A guy who reaches people’s emotions? Who talks about revolution the way some of those nuts rap about Christ?
Wallace says: “We’re against niggers, intellectuals, liberals, hippies.”
Everybody! He puts us all together. He organizes us for us.
We must analyze how America keeps people down. Not by physical force, but by fear. From the second kids are hatched, we are taught fear. If we can overcome fear, we will discover that we are Davids fighting Goliath.
In late September a friend calls and says, “Hay, I just got a subpoena from HUAC.”
I say, “Yeah” I didn’t. What’s going on here? I’m angry. I want a subpoena too.
It’s called subpoenas envy.
So I telephone a confident to the Red Squad, a fascist creep who works for the San Francisco Examiner, and I say, “Hey, Ed, baby, what about HUAC? Are they having hearings?”
He answers, “Well, I don’t know. Are they?”
Well, my friend just got a subpoena.” I say. “I’d like on too. If you can manage it.”
He says, “Call me back in a few hours.”
I call him back that afternoon and he says, “Well, I just talked to HUAC in Washington, and you are right. They are having hearings, and they are looking for you in New York.”
In NEW YORK? I’ve been in Berkeley a week! You guys are sure doing a shitty job trying to save this country!”
We exaggerate the surveillance powers of cops. We shouldn’t. They are lazy. Their laziness may be the one reason why America doesn’t yet have a totally efficient police state.
The cops were not lazy in Chicago. They followed the “leaders” continuously, 24 hours a day. If you are trailed by four cops just six steps behind you, you can’t do very much.
But the people really doing things – why, the cops didn’t even know who they were!
Pigs cannot relate to anarchy. They do not understand a movement based on personal freedom. When they look at our movement, they look for a hierarchy: leaders, lieutenants, followers.
The pigs think that we are organized like a pig department. We are not, and that’s why we are going to win. A hierarchical, top-down organization is no match for the free and loose energy of the people.
As the pigs check with their high-ups to find out what to do next, we have already switched the tactics and scene of the battle. They are watching one guy over there, and it is happening over here!
I come to the HUAC hearings wearing a bandolero of real bullets and carrying a toy M-16 rifle on my shoulder. The rifle was a model of the rifles the Viet Cong steal and then use to kill American soldiers in Vietnam.
The pigs stop me at the door of the hearings. They grab the bullets and the gun. It is a dramatic moment. Press and yippies pack us in tightly. The pigs drag me down three flights of stairs and remove the bullets, leaving the gun, Viet Cong pajamas, Eldridge Cleaver buttons, Black Panther beret, war paint, earrings, bandolero, and the bells which ring every time I move my body. My costume carried a nonverbal message: “We must all become stoned guerrillas.”
The secret to the costume was the painted tits. Guerrilla war in America is going to come in psychedelic colors. We are hippie-guerrillas.
In HUAC’s chambers Abbie Hoffman jumps up and yells out, “May I do to the bathroom?” Young kids reading that in their hometown papers giggle because they have to ask permission every time they want to go to the bathroom in school.
The message of my costume flipped across the country in one day: an example of our use of the enemy’s institutions – her mass media – to turn on and communicate with one another.
I wore a Santa Clause costume to HUAC two months later in a direct attempt to reach the head of every child in the country.
Our victories are catching up with us: America isn’t ready to napalm us yet, but the future doesn’t look easy.
From June to November 1968, when I was helping to organize the demonstrations against the Democratic convention in Chicago, I experienced the following example of Americana:
New York pigs use a phony search warrant to bust into my apartment, question me, beat me, search the apartment and arrest me for alleged felonious possession of marijuana; a pig in Chicago disguises himself as a biker to “infiltrate” the yippies as an agent provocateur and spy; he busts me on a frame-up, “solicitation to mob action,” a felony punishable by five years in the pen; the judge imposes $25,000 bail and restricts my travel to Illinois; then the Justice Department in a document to a Virginia court admits that it maintains “electronic surveillance…of Jerry Rubin..in the interests of national security.”
To try to suppress youth, Nixon will have to destroy the Constitution.
We will be presumed guilty until proven innocent.
Our privacy will vanish. Big Brother will spy on all of us and dominate our lives.
Every cop will become a law until himself.
The courts will become automatic transmission belts sending us to detention camps and prisons.
People will be arrested for what they write and say.
Congress will impose censorship on the mass media, unless the media first censors itself, which is more likely.
To be young will be a crime.
In response, we must never become cynical, or lose our capacity for anger. We must stay on the offensive and be aggressive: AMERICA: IF YOU INJURE ONE, YOU MUST FIGHT ALL.
If our opposition is united, the repression may backfire and fail. The government may find the costs too heavy.
Don’t think, “They can never get ME.”
They can.
You are either on the side of the cops or on the side of human beings.
YIPPIE!
Youth International Party
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
late-1960s
Button
Physical Object
Anti-draft Week
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
During the summer of 1966, the Inter-University Committee for Debate on Foreign Policy held a national conference for opponents of the War in Vietnam in Cleveland, Ohio. Activists at that meeting formed the November 8th Mobilization Committee to raise awareness about the increasingly brutal war in Southeast Asia during the fall election cycle and cultivate a broad-based national antiwar coalition that could mobilize large-scale anti-war demonstration in the U.S. Longtime pacifist and anti-war activist, A.J. Muste, was elected founding chairman of the group, while other notable anti-war figures also played leadership roles, including Dave Dellinger, the editor of Liberation magazine, and Robert Greenblatt, a professor at Cornell University. According to the organization’s newspaper, The Mobilizer, Muste was chosen because he “earned the respect of virtually every sector of the social protest movements in this country, displaying leadership in his work as a pacifist, radical, labor and civil rights [activist.]” Muste was particularly adept at synthesizing the competing philosophical and strategic approaches of individual groups within the broader coalition.
Following the November 1966 elections, the organization changed its name to the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, often referred to as “The MOBE.” The Spring Mobilization Committee was a broad anti-war coalition made up of students, unionists, progressive religious leaders, civil rights and black power groups, women’s organizations, Third World communities, and other members of “oppressed” constituencies, and was tasked with organizing massive demonstrations in New York City and San Francisco on April 15, 1967. Civil Rights and anti-war leader, Rev. James Bevel, now led the organization following the death of A.J. Muste in February of 1967. The April 15 protests attracted an estimated 500,000 participants (400,000+ in New York and 75-100,000 in San Francisco), marking the event as one of the largest days of anti-war protest of the Vietnam War era. The organizers of the Spring Mobilization Committee sought to combine mass action with local community organizing. Each participating group had distinct interests, spurring a variety of internal challenges and sometimes conflicts, which reveal many of the important fault lines within the New Left of the late-1960s.
The April demonstrations were peaceful, with only five recorded arrests, all of people who opposed the demonstration. During the event in New York, Martin Luther King, Jr. Floyd McKissick, Stokely Carmichael and Dr. Benjamin Spock all gave speeches in front of the United Nations critiquing U.S. involvement in the war as well as the socioeconomic politics of the draft. Prior to the march, young men burned nearly 200 draft cards in Central Park. At the San Francisco event, Black nationalists led a march of mostly white demonstrators.
At a conference in the wake of the April demonstrations, the group again changed its name, this time to the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which functioned as a permanent national organizing committee to bring together existing anti-war groups, spur the creation of new ones and develop strategies to promote the anti-war movement among everyday Americans. The National Mobe, which adhered to a non-violent philosophy at a time when a growing number of other anti-war groups were questioning the effectiveness of non-violence, had headquarters in New York and San Francisco, as well as an office in Los Angeles.
Between 1967 and 1969, The MOBE continued to play a central role organizing and participating in several important anti-war actions. In October of 1967, MOBE participated in a protest at the Pentagon, which attracted more than 150,000 people and resulted in more than 700 arrests and numerous claims of police brutality. This effort to “confront the warmakers” was notable for the presence of anti-war activists and counter-culturalists, particularly the Yippies, who sought to “levitate” the Pentagon. In April 1968, MOBE supported SDS’s “Ten Days of Protest” and that August, MOBE had a significant presence at the anti-war protests that rocked the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In January of 1969, the organization, now called the New Mobilization Committee to End the War, or New MOBE, participated in the anti-Nixon demonstrations that took place during his inauguration in in Washington, D.C. And on October 15 and November 15, 1969, MOBE organized the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. The October event attracted hundreds of thousands of participants to demonstrations and “teach-ins” in cities across the country and beyond, with the largest gathering taking place in Boston, where more than 100,000 listened to anti-war Senator George McGovern. The November event drew more than 500,000 anti-war supporters to Washington, D.C., including a number of celebrities and performers. MOBE also coordinated a national anti-draft week between March 16 and March 22, 1970, but by that time, the group had begun to lose strength and ultimately dissolved, with some members drifting into the People’s Coalition for Peace and other joining the National Peace Coalition.
New Mobe
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1970
Button
Physical Object
Curb Your Landlord with Tenant Power.
Housing Rights Movement
This button represents campaigns centering on urban housing and rent control for tenants, such as support for the New York City Rent Stabilization Law of 1969.
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. late-1960s
Button
Physical Object
I Support Vietnam Veterans Against the War
Anti-War Movement
Vietnam Veterans Against the War was an anti-war organization founded in 1967 by U.S. military veterans. According to the organizational website for VVAW, the group was created in New York City “after six Vietnam vets marched together in a peace demonstration. It was organized to voice the growing opposition among returning servicemen and women to the still-raging war in Indochina, and grew rapidly to a membership of over 30,000 throughout the United States as well as active duty GIs stationed in Vietnam. Through ongoing actions and grassroots organization, VVAW exposed the ugly truth about US involvement in Southeast Asia and our first-hand experiences helped many other Americans to see the unjust nature of that war." In the 1970s, VVAW began “the first rap groups to deal with traumatic after-effects of war,” “exposed the shameful neglect of many disabled vets in VA Hospitals,” “helped draft legislation to improve educational benefits and create job programs,” “fought for amnesty for war resisters, including vets with bad discharges,” and “helped make known the negative health effects of exposure to chemical defoliants.”
VVAW members engaged in a number of significant actions during the long-1960s, including Operation RAW (“Rapid American Withdrawal”), the Winter Soldier Investigation, the Dewey Canyon III protests, the Walter Reed Memorial Service, Operation POW and a 1971 occupation of the Statue of Liberty.
Vietnam Veterans Against the War
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. late-1960s or early-1970s
Button
Physical Object
March on Democratic Convention
Electoral Politics
In August 1980, the Coalition For A People’s Alternative organized a march on the Democratic National Convention in New York City, addressing police brutality, gay liberation, and antiracism.
Coalition For A People’s Alternative
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1980
Button
Physical Object
Mobilize to End the War in Vietnam
Anti-War Movement
On April 15, 1967, the National Mobilization Committee organized a protest march against the Vietnam War from Central Park to the United Nations. One of the largest demonstrations of the Vietnam War era, an estimated 100,000 to 400,000 participated, including a range of anti-war and civil rights organizations. The march was peaceful, with five arrests, all of people who opposed the demonstration. During the event, Martin Luther King, Jr. Floyd McKissick, Stokely Carmichael and Dr. Benjamin Spock all gave speeches in front of the United Nations critiquing U.S. involvement in the war as well as the socioeconomic politics of the draft. Prior to the march, nearly 200 draft cards were burned by youths in Central Park. In San Francisco, Black nationalists led a march an estimated 20,000 mostly white demonstrators in San Francisco on the same day.
Here is a news footage of the march in New York:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=18&v=40m5gBgwjQE
National Mobilization Committee to End the War
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1967
Button
Physical Object
Impeach Lindsay
Electoral Politics
John Lindsay was the liberal Republican mayor of New York City from 1966-1973. During the late-1960s, following labor and racial unrest, as well as his mishandling of a winter blizzard, Lindsay received a backlash from white conservatives who opposed his civil rights advocacy and campaign for increased low-income housing. Lindsay’s socially liberal platform challenged the growing conservativism of Nixonian Republicanism.
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. late-1960s
Button
Physical Object
End the War Now Hiroshima Nagasaki Week
Anti-War Movement
This button commemorates the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, linking the atomic bombings to fears concerning the possible use of nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War. The phrase "End the War Now" was used on other buttons and posters during the April 15, 1967 anti-war demonstrations in New York City and San Francisco, but it is unclear if this button is related to that protest.
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1967
Button
Physical Object
I Support UE Strikers in GE
Labor Movement
The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) has a long history at General Electric. The UE local at the GE Plant in Schenectady, New York, was one of the first locals to join the more militant Congress of Industrial Unions in the 1930s. In 1946, the union mounted an effective strike resulting in pay increases for its members. Yet, by the late-1940s, the rising tide of McCarthyism had tainted the UE, which had left-wing associations, prompting the CIO to expel the UE and replace it with the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (IUE). This resulted in roughly two decades of fragmentation among workers at GE and little progress, particularly during a fairly disastrous 1960 IUE strike. By the end of the 1960s, though, the UE and IUE began to work together and mounted a successful 103-day national strike in 1969-70. The UE and IUE led an alliance of unions which broke the back of “Boulwarism,” GE's aggressive 20-year-long policy of "take-it-or-leave-it" bargaining. Boulwarism was named for Lemuel Boulware, the company's vice president of labor and community relations, who devised the strategy in reaction to UE's success in their 1946 strike, and to capitalize on the bitter divisions in the ranks of GE union members after 1949.
United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1969-70
Button
Physical Object
Free the Universities
Student Movement
This button underscores the campus-based student movement of the 1960s-era.
F.U.N.Y.
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
unknown
Button
Physical Object
Stop the War Against Vietnam
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
The militant youth wing of the Workers World Party, the Youth Against War and Fascism opposed American military interventionism as early as 1962, when the group set up a picket line in mid-town Manhattan to alert the public to the danger of sending U.S. military advisers to Southeast Asia. Later in the 1960s and beyond, the socialist YAWF continued its anti-war activism and also supported the black liberation struggle in America and Africa.
Youth Against War & Fascism
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Button
en-US
Physical Object
ca. 1970s
Crazies
New Left
During the late-1960s, the Crazies was a small, anarchist, New Left cell in lower-Manhattan that included Sam Melville, a former engineering technician known as “the mad bomber”; anti-war activist and writer for RAT, Sharon Krebs; Krebs’ partner, Robin Palmer, an “ex-Navy, ex-porn star, ex-deep-sea diver” turned radical; and, George Demmerle, a FBI informant who called himself “Prince Crazy” and known for wearing a purple cape and pink Roman centurion’s helmet. Members of the Crazies believed it was necessary to “bring the war home” by staging political stunts, instigating disorder and bombings. They were critical of “corporate imperialism,” specifically the US involvement in the Vietnam War, as well as social and racial inequality. They referred to these actions, which were not aimed at taking life but destroying property, as “responsible terrorism,” patterned on the actions of IRA members in Ireland and FLQ members in Canada. Members of the group helped Canadian FLQ members, who had bombed about a dozen targets over a six-month period, including the Montreal Stock Exchange, flee the country and hijack an airplane to Cuba. In 1969, they also infiltrated a $200 a plate political fundraiser at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Disguised as waiters, Palmer and Krebs stripped naked and presented pigs’ heads on platters to the dining politicians and wealthy donors. Some members of the group also participated in the theft of explosives from a warehouse in the Bronx, which were then used by Melville and others in a series of 8 bombings in New York City in 1969 and 1970, including United Fruit, Chase Manhattan, Standard Oil and an army headquarters, among other sites. Some members of The Crazies were also connected to the Weather Underground and other radical organizations during this period. Sam Melville, who was arrested and imprisoned at Attica, was killed during the Attica Prison Uprising.
The Crazies
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
late-1960s
Button
Physical Object
Dove and Money Sign
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
This button, created by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, or MOBE, depicts a white dove, symbolizing peace, and a dollar sign, suggesting that the greatest obstacle to peace is the American military-industrial complex. The button was designed for the April 15, 1967 anti-war demonstration in New York City.
National Mobilization Committee to End the War
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1967
Button
en-US
Physical Object
End Mass Murder in Vietnam
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
On April 15, 1967, the National Mobilization Committee organized a protest march against the Vietnam War from Central Park to the United Nations. One of the largest demonstrations of the Vietnam War era, an estimated 100,000 to 400,000 participated, including a range of anti-war and civil rights organizations. The march was peaceful, with five arrests, all of people who opposed the demonstration. During the event, Martin Luther King, Jr. Floyd McKissick, Stokely Carmichael and Dr. Benjamin Spock all gave speeches in front of the United Nations critiquing U.S. involvement in the war as well as the socioeconomic politics of the draft. Prior to the march, nearly 200 draft cards were burned by youths in Central Park. In San Francisco, Black nationalists led a march an estimated 20,000 mostly white demonstrators in San Francisco on the same day.
Here is a news footage of the march in New York:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=18&v=40m5gBgwjQE
The influence of the counterculture is evident in the design of this button.
National Mobilization Committee to End the War
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1967
Button
Physical Object
Her Fight is My Fight, Free Angela Davis
Black Power
Angela Davis grew up in the “Dynamite Hill” area of Birmingham, Alabama, in 1944. Later, she moved with her mother to New York City and studied at Brandeis University, the Sorbonne and the University of California-San Diego. In addition to the segregation and racial discrimination she experienced as a child, Davis was deeply influenced by the 1963 murder of four young girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, as well as the activism of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Black Panther Party. In 1968, she joined an all-black branch of the Community Party. The following year, UCLA hired Davis as an assistant professor of philosophy, a contentious appointment given her radical views, ultimately leading to her dismissal.
In the early-1970s, Davis became increasingly active in efforts to improve prison conditions for inmates, including the Soledad Brothers, two African American prisoners and Black Panther Party members, George Jackson and W. L. Nolen, who were incarcerated in the late 1960s. On August 7, 1970, 17-year old Jonathan Jackson, the younger brother of black radical, George Jackson, burst into the Marin County courtroom of Superior Court Judge Harold Haley, where James McClain was on trial for assaulting a guard in the wake of Black prisoner Fred Billingsley’s murder by prison officials in San Quentin Prison in February of 1970. Carrying three guns registered to Angela Davis, Jackson, with the help of McClain and Ruchell Cinque Magee, who was set to testify as a witness in McClain's trial, seized Judge Haley and ordered attorneys, jurors and court officials to lie on the floor. Magee freed another testifying witness, Black Panther William A. Christmas, who also aided in the escape attempt. In addition to their own freedom, the group sought a trade the release of Judge Haley for the “Soledad Brothers,” George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette, who were charged with killing a white prison guard at California’s Soledad Prison. During an effort to flee the courthouse in a van, a shoot-out with police took place, killing Jackson, McClain, Christmas and Judge Haley. Two other hostages, Prosecutor Gary Thomas and juror Maria Elena Graham, were also injured, but survived. Ruchell Magee was the only abductor to survive. Although Davis did not participate in the actual break-out attempt, she became a suspect when it was discovered that the guns used by Jackson were registered in her name. Davis fled to avoid arrest and the FBI placed her on its “most wanted” list. Law enforcement captured her several months later in New York. During her high profile trial, black militants and New Left activists made ‘free Angela” a powerful slogan. In 1972, a jury acquitted Davis on all charges.
Angela Davis Defense Committee
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. early-1970s
Button
Physical Object
The Draft is Stopping
Anti-War Movement
The Student Mobilization Committee was formed in 1966 "to coordinate opposition to U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam among college and high school students." Originally named The Vietnam Day Committee the SMC organized protests on campuses and in cities. While the group opposed the war, generally, it specifically focused on the draft. The SMC is also notable as one of the first Vietnam-era anti-war groups that included both civilians and soldiers. This button promotes the December 4-8, 1967, "Stop the Draft Week" that took place in New York City. Demonstrations that week resulted in 585 arrests, including Dr. Benjamin Spock.
Student Mobilization Committee
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1967
Button
Physical Object
Anti-War Referendum
During the mid-1960s, the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade organized dozens of peace and anti-war groups in a series of anti-war parades, “peace-ins,” an anti-war referendum, and other events. Like many organizations during this period, the group targeted university and college campuses in order to rally support against the Vietnam War. Dave Dellinger, who would later gain notoriety as a member of the Chicago 7 during the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago, and Norma Becker, who worked for the War Resisters League, led the group.
Fifth Ave. Vietnam Peace Parade Committee
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
Button
Physical Object
Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee
Anti-War Movement
During the mid-1960s, the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade organized dozens of local peace and anti-war groups in a series of anti-war parades, “peace-ins” and other events. Dave Dellinger, who would later gain notoriety as a member of the Chicago 7 during the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago, and Norma Becker, who worked for the War Resisters League, led the group.
Fifth Ave. Vietnam Peace Parade Committee
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
Button
Physical Object
Tengo Puerto Rico En Mi Corazon (I have Puerto Rico in my heart)
Puerto Rican Nationalism
The Young Lords Organization (YLO) functioned as a Puerto Rican nationalist group geographically focused in large urban areas such as Chicago and New York City. The YLO sought to address U.S. imperialism, Puerto-Rican self-determination, and public health access.
Young Lords Organization
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. late-1960s
Button
Physical Object
Fresh Air Fund - Friendly Town
Environmentalism
Founded in 1877, the Fresh Air Fund organization served as a non-profit outreach program for low-income, urban youths to gain access to country living. This button addresses the Friendly Town program, which enabled some families residing in small towns to host inner-city children from New York City in their homes.
The Fresh Air Fund
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
undated
Button
Physical Object
Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries
Gay Liberation
Founded in New York City in 1970 as a caucus within the Gay Liberation Front, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, or STAR, was an activist organization established by legendary civil rights activists and drag queens of color, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha Johnson, to advocate for homeless drag queens and young gay runaways. Both Rivera and Johnson were veterans of the Stonewall rebellion and the intense period of radical political organizing the proceeded it. STAR addressed the intersectionality of race and class with sexuality by emphasizing poverty and homelessness within the transgender community.
Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1970
Button
Physical Object
Abbie Hoffman Graffiti
(1 image)
Counterculture
Roz Payne photographed this graffiti tribute to Yippie leader, Abbie Hoffman, on Mercer Street in New York City following his suicide in 1989.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1989
"The Farmworker's Movement: A People's Fight Against Corporate Exploitation"
Farmworker's Movement
This issue of the Joint Strategy and Action Committee, Inc.'s newsletter, "Grapevine," attempts to pull together the farmworker's union "history, philosophy, tactics, program, church support."
Joint Strategy and Action Committee, Inc.
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
January 1972
newsletter
"Gay Liberation: 15 articles, plus documents, poems, photos and drawings"
Gay Liberation
This pamphlet gathers together a variety of influential articles, poems and images from the early gay liberation movement, including, ""Gay is Good"; "The Woman Identified Woman"; "What's Wrong With Sucking?"; "Gay Consciousness"; "Born to Love"; "My Gay Soul"; "A Letter from Mary"; "Gay Liberation Meets the Shrinks"; "A Letter from Huey to the Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters About the Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements"; "statement by Third World Gay Revolution"; "Hey, man"; "From the Men: Games Male Chauvinists Play"; "A Gay Manifesto"; "Revolutionary Love"; "The Flaming Faggots"; "Phoenix of New Youth"; "Bring the Beautiful Boys Home";
Gay Flames
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. ear;y-1970s
pamphlet
New York Committee in Support of Vieques
Puerto Rican Nationalism
This pamphlet, written in Spanish and English, is sharply critical of the U.S. military presence on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques.
New York Committee in Support of Vieques
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1980
pamphlet
"Prisoners of War: The Case of the New York Three"
Black Panther Party and Prisoner's Rights Movement
On May 21, 1971, two New York police officers, Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini, were shot and killed in a Harlem housing project. The killings took place within the broader context of growing black militancy and governmental repression against the Black Panther Party. Initially, five men were arrested and charged with the crime, Anthony (Jalil Muntaqim) Bottom, Albert (Nuh) Washington, Herman Bell, Gabriel and Francisco Torres. Charges were later dismissed against the Torres brothers. Bell, Bottom and Washington were members of the the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army and all targets of FBI COINTELPRO operations. The Black Liberation Army was an underground wing of the Black Panther Party. The group's program was to wage war against the United States Government. Its stated goal was to "take up arms for the liberation and self-determination of black people in the United States." Some believed the killings of the two police officers was retaliation for the killing of George Jackson during an attempted break-out from Attica Prison a few weeks earlier. Richard Nixon and other members of his administration, along with J. Edgar Hoover and other members of the FBI worked with New York Police in a special operation, called, "Newkill," to apprehend the perpetrators of these killings. The trial was controversial and included a number of questionable practices by local and federal law enforcement. All three were convicted and sentenced to long prison sentences. In 2012, Herman Bell admitted to the New York Parole Board that he played a part in the killings. He was released in April 2018. Washington died of cancer while still imprisoned in 2000. Bottom remains incarcerated.
This pamphlet, published by Friends of the New York Three, provides an overview of the case and broader context on COINTELPRO.
Friends of the New York Three
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. mid-1970s
pamphlet
"Problem Pregnancy Guide: By, For and About Women"
Women's Liberation
This pamphlet includes a collection of important articles and resources from the women's liberation movement on sexuality, masturbation, homosexuality, abortion, birth control and motherhood. It also includes a list of women's health resources in several northeastern states. This resource highlights the importance of women's health in second wave feminism.
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. early-1970s
pamphlet