Class Discussion

Citizens Band: Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, and Social Movements

Cheryl Higashida

American Quarterly, Volume 74, Number 2, June 2022, pp. 317-344 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI:

For additional information about this article

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https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0021

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© 2022 The American Studies Association

Citizens Band: Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, and Social Movements Cheryl Higashida

In the mid-1960s, African American civil rights organizers Nettie and Isaiah Sellers wrote to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) requesting funds for a two-way radio committee in their home-

town of Moss Point, Mississippi. Nettie and Isaiah were at the forefront of struggles for social, political, and economic justice in the Deep South. Nettie was assistant secretary of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), formed in 1964 to challenge the suppression of Black political participation. Her husband, Isaiah, a master electrician and TV repairman, built and main- tained the citizens band (CB) two-way radio systems that SNCC relied on for communications and protection against police and vigilante violence. These two-way radios were of tremendous interest to the Moss Point community. As Isaiah reported to SNCC, “They were talking all kinds of terms of getting people involved in the organization of radios so we have tried that and it is working.”1 Through organizing the Moss Point radio committee, the Sellerses also planned to organize their community around “political and economic [issues] to service the needs of the people.”2 The Sellerses and the Moss Point radio committee are one of many convergences of grassroots political organiz- ing and technological training in the US southern civil rights movement. By analyzing movement records and media coverage, I argue that a goal of the long civil rights movement was to develop grassroots technopolitical agency through two-way radio.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) established CB radio service in 1958 to provide “low-cost, short-distance, voice-communications service for business, necessary personal, and specified emergency uses.”3 CB licenses grew from 49,000 in 1959 to 300,000 in 1962 and 745,000 in 1965, with an unknowable number of unlicensed CB’ers adding significantly to these figures.4 The FCC’s ideal CB users were “the professional man (such as the doctor and the engineer), the small businessman, and the plain citizen.”5 In mass media and popular culture, typical CB users were stranded drivers call- ing for help, farmers radioing their barn from the field, housewives reaching husbands on the road, and above all, freewheeling truckers.6

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However, SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Deacons for Defense and Justice deployed CB in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana for communications, self-defense, and mutual aid in voter registration drives and community organizing.7 Part of the “southern diaspora” of people, orga- nizations, and ideas, rural African American CB organizing gave rise to the community police patrols at the roots of Black Power on the West Coast.8 Reconceiving technology designed without regard for, and in negation of, their bodies and lives, Black grassroots organizers and their comrades transformed their daily lives, political strategies and tactics, and dominant conceptions of mediated communications.

Theorizing Black vernacular technological creativity, Rayvon Fouché uses “reconception” to refer to “the active redefinition of a technology that transgresses that technology’s designed function and dominant meaning.”9 In response to their communities’ needs, Black freedom fighters reconceived two-way radio’s dominant function and symbolism: panauditory police sur- veillance. The surveillant dragnet of two-way radio was recast to create social networks of “dark sousveillance,” Simone Browne’s term for the critique of racial surveillance through Black epistemologies of antisurveillance, counter- surveillance, and other freedom acts.10 These dark sousveillant CB networks were essential to Black self-defense in organized and guerrilla struggles against white terrorism. CB dark sousveillance discloses that such struggles, often demonized and criminalized, are coextensive with mutual aid strategies that support, empower, and connect vulnerable communities through alternative infrastructure developed by and for the people.11

Dark sousveillant CB networks, then, were also ones of solidarity, mani- festing the Black radical tradition’s principled generosity and generativity in stimulating other freedom struggles. Civil rights CB sousveillance was integral to the beginnings of the Black Power, Chicanx and Filipinx farmworker, and American Indian movements. Along with the accessibility of two-way radio, its intentional use for organized dark sousveillance made it as essential as cars and guns to the civil rights and self-defense movements that thrived and in- tersected in the 1960s and 1970s. According to a 1971 study of twenty-eight self-defense groups,

The most frequently reported types of equipment were walkie-talkies and car radios, and 14 percent of the groups (most of which had young members) wore identifying shirts, berets, or jackets.12

Spreading from the Deep South through organizing and media coverage, Black CB sousveillance became integral to Black, Chicanx, Filipinx, and Native

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people fighting differentially shared conditions of racial capitalist and colonial violence in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Delano, California, and Minneapolis.

Two-way radio enabled a strand of grassroots organizing entwined with but distinct from broadcast radio, which has received much more attention in scholarship on media and movements.13 As transmedia organizers, civil rights workers worked across print, television, and radio in its mass broadcast and person-to-person forms to raise public awareness and mobilize support.14 CB’s restricted reach and simpler setup did not prevent organizers from imagin- ing ways that it could feed into community radio broadcasting. Nonetheless, two-way radio’s low-tech ordinariness, in conjunction with its brief, mundane interpersonal communications, have relegated it to the less audible range of the historical spectrum. More so than mass broadcast radio receivers that dis- seminate commercial and public content, two-way radiotelephony has become one of those quotidian technologies that “constitute much of what it means to be human” yet “disappear in a fog of familiarity.”15 But it is precisely as an accessible instrument for interpersonal mobile communications that CB sustained the everyday work of movement building.

Two-way radio organizing of the Cold War era expands surveillance, social movement, and sound studies to account for the obscured yet generative acts of people of color and Native people who reconceived tools and cultures of listening that developed through long histories of aural surveillance and ter- rorism—from the banning of drumming by the African-descended and their enforced listening to acts of torture, to the wiretapping of dissidents and the weaponization of music in military prisons.16 Attention has been given to late twentieth- and twenty-first-century activists using mobile computing devices to engage in sousveillance and political resistance. Scholars of race and tech- nology have shown how seemingly neutral or beneficial digital technologies reproduce the slow violence of discriminatory and criminalizing surveillance.17 But as Browne shows, racializing surveillance and dark sousveillance extends from the era of slavery when the policing, immobilization, and exploitation of Black bodies required their hyper- and in-visibility.

Two-way radio organizing amplifies the audiopolitics of racializing surveil- lance and dark sousveillance, which have been marginalized in a field of study etymologically deriving from the French words for “over” (sur) and “watch” (veiller).18 While ocularcentrism is clearest in panoptic surveillance studies, the field’s general privileging of visuality is evident in field-defining books like the Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies and David Lyon’s Surveillance Studies: An Overview, with its sections “Viewpoints,” “Vision,” and “Vis- ibility.”19 However, as Jennifer Stoever makes clear, audio technologies and listening practices are crucial not only to policing the “sonic color line” but also to challenging it.20

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Sound studies scholars, including Stoever and Jonathan Sterne, provide methods for apprehending two-way radio organizing by shifting exclusionary focus on white male “fathers” of invention to historicized study of the social con- structions and everyday cultures of sound and listening. Building on Raymond Williams, I examine CB technology “as being looked for and developed” out of “known social needs, purposes, and practices to which the technology is not marginal but central.”21 Meanwhile, two-way radio organizing addresses sound studies’ uneven attention to grassroots, collective technopolitical agency, which has led foundational sound studies scholarship to overemphasize hegemonic sound culture, including its distortion or silencing of marginalized and resistant sounds.22 Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian people are not merely victims of technological progress. CB sousveillance is part of a long ongoing history of marginalized communities collectively surviving and reimagining racist policing, disenfranchisement, discrimination, displacement, and elimination by recon- ceiving the technologies that emerge from and refract these structural realities.

From Citizens’ Radio to Citizens Band

Civil rights two-way radio organizing emerged from the entwinements of policing and popular culture, militarization and media, the carceral system and commerce. In the 1930s two-way police radio revolutionized modern policing by increasing responsiveness, naturalizing what Kathleen Battles calls “the dragnet effect” of police omnipresence across time and space.23 As Battles shows, citizens came to accept police authority as surveillance, which infiltrated the domestic sphere and leisure time through popular radio crime dramas that heavily featured the sounds of two-way police radio.

The “father of two-way radios in police cars” was Ewell Kirk Jett, then assis- tant chief engineer of the Federal Radio Commission (the FCC’s predecessor) and later the FCC commissioner who envisioned a Citizens’ Radio Commu- nications Service that led to CB.24 Jett’s career elucidates the imbrications of radio telecommunications, militarization, and policing.25 Jett began working in radio in the US Navy during World War I when the navy had nearly ex- clusive control of the airwaves. As FCC commissioner during World War II, Jett wanted to adapt for civilian life the “remarkable progress achieved during the war,” resulting in “a large variety of new applications of radio,” including walkie-talkies and Handie-Talkies used by soldiers, and mounted radio for tanks and other military vehicles. Jett envisioned Citizens’ Radio would use surplus war equipment, employing “thousands of veterans [who] should be able to capitalize on their war radio experience and become ace repairmen in civilian life.”26 Citizens’ Radio would further serve a key role “in the greatest emergency of all—war.” Lamenting the difficulty of coordinating air-raid

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defense after Pearl Harbor, Jett postulated that there should be a “civilian- defense system of communications which would function without delay in the event of another conflict.”27 Thus, while “Citizens’ Radio” distinguished between civilian and military telecommunications, its material and political development undermined this division. The militarized bases of and rationales for Citizens’ Radio persisted in two-way radio’s use for white civilian defense in racial warfare against African Americans criminalized for rising up in the mid-1960s against de facto segregation, chronic unemployment, economic exploitation, racist inferior education, and police brutality.

The paradigm-shifting policing powers of radio telephony that Jett unleashed in the 1930s fed his vision for Citizens’ Radio Communications Service in the 1940s. Jett introduced the idea to the public in a 1945 Saturday Evening Post article, “Phone Me by Air.” Jett illustrated the service’s potential through the hypothetical case study of “a young woman motorist riding alone at night on a lonely road just outside a city” who is sideswiped by another car. While the woman’s race is unspecified by the text, an accompanying photograph featured a young white female sitting demurely on her car’s bumper with her Handie-Talkie:

Figure 1. E. K. Jett, “Phone Me by Air,” Saturday Evening Post, July 28, 1945. Photo- graph by Bob Leavitt © SEPS licensed by Curtis Licensing Indianapolis, IN.

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The caption puts the reader in the white woman’s position of reliance on police and heteronormative domesticity, a reliance enabled and shaped by the intimacy of two-way radio: “You merely spin a dial on your handie-talkie and tell your troubles to the state police or your favorite garage—or if it’s just a flat tire—to your husband.” Jett’s heroine dials the Citizens’ Radio distress frequency to reach a state trooper who presumably arrests the offending driver while saving white life. Privileging Citizens’ Radio’s function to reach the police, Jett not only demonstrated that US Americans would shift from “mere listeners or spectators” to “active participants” but suggested that they would be intimate participants in the radiotelephonic dragnet of police authority.

Jett’s vision of Citizens’ Radio Communications Service was realized when the FCC established two-way Class D, or CB radio, service in 1958. Enmeshed in the contradictions of US citizenship, CB engendered tensions between its populism (accessibility, ease of use) and its policing (the policing of CB in conjunction with its policing functions). If citizens band implies access to “the public airwaves via a service provided to the nation’s citizens by the federal government,” citizens band denotes the restricted spectrum—27 mhz in the shortwave band—of mostly privatized radio bandwidth within which broadcasting is illegal.28 Citizens band thus contrasts with “citizen radio,” the term for World War I–era amateur radio broadcasts of Morse code, music, and talk across the spectrum of US airwaves.29 Even as it radically delimited the public sphere of citizens band and amateur radio, the FCC increasingly if unevenly tackled what it called in its 1963 report the “baffling policing problem” of CB misuse.30

CB widened the dragnet of racial surveillance and the production of sur- veillant white citizens through two prominent functions in the 1960s and 1970s: emergency roadside assistance and neighborhood watch programs. Programs like REACT (Radio Emergency Associated Communications Team), established in 1962 with the sponsorship of a CB manufacturer, and HELP (Highway Emergency Locating Plan), proposed a few years later by the Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, encouraged CB’ers to monitor civilian distress channels and contact law enforcement and rescue agencies. Angela Blake argues that CB became a “technology of white rescue” among its majority users—not rebel truckers but working-class white male drivers of passenger cars.31 By the 1970s, these suburban commuters relied on CB for protection against people of color increasingly criminalized in response to their movements and urban uprisings.32

Concomitantly, suburban and urban neighborhood watch programs prolif- erated from the late 1960s. The historian Richard Maxwell Brown noted that

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these “neovigilante” groups’ main activity was “patrol action in radio-equipped automobiles (linked to a central headquarters) for the purposes of spotting, reporting, and discouraging criminal acts.”33 Anti-Blackness was foundational to two of his three paradigmatic cases: the Maccabees of Brooklyn for whom “the crime problem was mostly by teenage Negroes coming into Crown Heights from adjacent areas,” and the North Ward Citizens’ Committee of Newark, “organized to conduct nightly radio patrols for the dual purpose of spotting and discouraging criminal activity and repelling, should the need arise, an incursion of Negro rioters and looters from the adjacent Central Ward of Newark.”34 Community patrolling went to new levels in cities like Oakland, where in 1968, two years after the Black Panther Party’s founding, the Chamber of Commerce coordinated twenty companies, including “advertising agencies, public utilities, newspapers, telephone companies, taxi companies, construction firms and trucking companies,” to marshal radio-equipped vehicles to cooper- ate with police.35 Complementing COINTELPRO (1956–71), two-way radio proliferated, popularized, and signified racist surveillance, criminalization, and police collaboration.36

Citizens’ Radio and CB thus were not merely established for US citizens: they interpellated surveillant—and sousveillant—citizens. The ease of surveil- lance of and by CB proliferated opportunities for electronic eavesdropping: communications on any one of CB’s forty channels could be heard on another radio transceiver tuned to that channel. Yet civil rights organizers seized on these very properties of two-way radio to create dark sousveillant networks of self-defense, mutual aid, and solidarity in their struggles for liberation.

CB Surveillance and Sousveillance in the Deep South

This section shows that CB widened the panauditory dragnet around civil rights organizers who were unremittingly surveilled by police, the Klan, Citizens’ Councils (groups of “respectable” white supremacists), individual vigilantes, and local and federal government agencies. But in responding to CB surveillance and the needs of African Americans in the rural South, activists widened the reach, capacity, and forms of civil rights organizing. CB was suited for rural, often-isolated Black communities such as those of Jonesboro, Louisiana, and Amite County, Mississippi, that lacked telephone service.37 As SNCC recog- nized, farmers had “long found two way radios more convenient than phones and are well equipped to receive and send messages.”38 Reconceiving CB’s uses and meanings, southern Black organizers and their allies coordinated direct action, voter registration drives, and Freedom Schools; defended themselves

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against racial terror; quantitatively and qualitatively transformed communica- tions; and fostered participatory democracy and technopolitical agency. This history of rural southern Black two-way radio organizing counters our under- standing of technological innovation primarily through white, male, urban, and/or elite individuals, and through research and development abstracted from society. It offers an example of redeploying technology through an eth- ics of mutual aid “to create an alternative infrastructure based in left values of democracy, participation, care, and solidarity” for those rendered most vulnerable by racial capitalist and colonial domination.39

Acquiring CB, while offering significant protection to civil rights groups, invited further monitoring and repression. Mississippi’s State Sovereignty Commission closely noted the acquisition of CB and walkie-talkies by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), which coordinated the voter registration projects of SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP during the 1964 Freedom Summer.40 And COFO’s accrual of CB provoked a radio arms race: Greenwood’s Citizens’ Council “also stocked up on walkie-talkies and could be seen practicing with them.”41

Consequently, COFO organizations essayed to keep their CB systems under wraps. The SNCC CB manual for its Jackson office stressed that con- fidentiality of its contents, including “absolute cosmic top secret” base code names and channels, was “essential if we are to have any dependence on the radio network at all.”42 Their caution was justified. Police bent the antenna at the Natchez project.43 SNCC’s Greenwood Freedom Summer headquarters reported “continued and continuous trouble with the citizens’ band radios” including signal jamming and the use of Greenwood’s call letters by unauthor- ized individuals.44 In conjunction with audio surveillance, white supremacist forces engaged in sonic terrorism through radiotelephony, blowing a trumpet over COFO channels and hurling racist epithets over CB at George Walker, president of the Port Gibson, Mississippi, Deacons for Defense and Justice.45

Civil rights workers were further surveilled by the FCC, which referred to its monitoring as such.46 FCC surveillance of CB usage coincided with southern voter registration drives in the mid-1960s through the 1970s, encompassing the proliferation of nationwide community patrols. In 1964 the FCC noted “the increasing importance of radio monitoring and direction-finding opera- tions in the southeast sector” of the US.47 In 1965, as CB violations reached an “all-time high,” the FCC limited interstation communications from the full twenty-three channels to seven and stipulated that interstation communications be kept below five minutes with a five-minute wait between transmissions.48 Such rules helped criminalize people of color and activists like Cosetta Jackson, an African American man “arrested for possession of a concealed weapon and for owning a citizen band radion [sic] not registered with the federal government.”49

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The fight for African American enfranchisement thus took place on technological as well as social, cultural, political, and legal fronts. Civil rights organizations prioritized CB acquisi- tion, system building, and training. A refrain in SNCC and CORE fundrais-

ing appeals after the 1964 Freedom Summer was that CB could have prevented the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Th rough donations, loans, and extension of credit from an electronics dealer, SNCC acquired sixty-two CB radio transceivers by 1965 in Mississippi and Alabama.50 To communicate with projects within and across states, SNCC

Figure 2. SNCC staff member in one of the organization’s radio cars, featured in Ebony, July 1965. Credit Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy Ford Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Smithsonian Institution.

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utilized CB in conjunction with Wide Area Telephone Service, a kind of toll-free service, in “a network which has become the very nerve center of the operation in Mississippi,” as a SNCC working paper described it.51 That year, CORE also set up two-way radio systems throughout Louisiana.

In the face of systemic efforts to deny Black technopolitical agency, civil rights activists reconceived CB’s dominant functions and purposes of main- taining social control through panauditory surveillance; of serving the “mobile privatization” of the white citizenry’s “at once mobile and home-centered way of living”; and of defining citizenship through white surveillance of the racially criminalized.52 While civil rights activists took advantage of CB connectivity among homes, offices, and cars, they did so to meet Black collective rather than white individual needs, and to challenge rather than maintain social control: CB roadside assistance for white motorists was repurposed to rescue activists being tailed, shot at, and run off the road while driving through hostile towns, remote roads, and mountains. Through these and other actions discussed below, organizers and activists reconceived CB to be a tool and practice of social media rather than private communication; of community building and movement organizing rather than family home-making; of political education rather than criminalization.

Documentation of anti-Black violence was a key tactic in procuring federal protection and enforcement. In response to this need, SNCC reconceived CB’s person-to-person uses to produce “minute-by-minute” accounts by and about multiple participants of events like the first Freedom Day voter registration drive in Holly Springs, Mississippi.53 Such accounts were distributed not only to national media and the Justice Department but also to the FBI, the Lawyer’s Constitutional Defense Committee, and the FCC. CB telecommunications enhanced documentation of civil rights struggles in real-time, granular detail from multiple perspectives, approaching what is done though digital social media today.

Two-way radio in the white private sphere invited atomized, individual citizens to participate in the panauditory surveillant dragnet from the comfort of their homes and cars. But two-way radio in the southern Black domestic sphere emerged in part from collective sousveillant networks. Jessie L. Sherrod recalls that her father, Foda B. Sherrod Sr., a leader of the Hollandale, Missis- sippi, movement, “allowed our home to house a shortwave radio station used for communication by SNCC students. . . . I assisted with handling the calls through the radio.”54 E. W. Steptoe, leader of the Amite County NAACP in Mississippi, maintained contact with COFO’s McComb office through one radio set “in his bedroom; another in his car.” Lowndes County sharecroppers

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evicted for registering to vote used CB ingeniously with other sound reproduc- tion technology in their tent city “home” to maximize collective intelligence and security:

One family has a t.v. set. The only other communications outlet is a two-way radio in one of the tents, which is manned by Mr. S.’s teen-age sons (one goes to school while the other works the radio; the next day they switch around). A loudspeaker hook-up allows all the families to hear whatever comes over the two-way radio, which is connected to the Selma office and several Negro farmers.55

As this example suggests, CB adaptation involved technological skill and creativity instantiating political resistance. CB technopolitical agency challenges assumptions about nontechnical CB users compared with operators of amateur radio (who needed to know Morse code and radio theory and regulation) or more complex electronics. The FCC reinforced notions of CB’er ignorance by ascribing their violations to their being “unskilled,” “nontechnical,” and “immature” rather than canny rule breakers.56 Yet civil rights CB sousveillance entailed technological knowledge, as notes from a SNCC copy of an FCC study guide for radiotelephone operator permitting show (see Figures 3 and 4).57

SNCC foregrounded CB’s technicality in the telecommunications sec- tion of a working paper likely authored by Morton Schiff, the radio project director who installed many of the organization’s CB transceivers throughout Mississippi:

To some people the complex system of WATS line calls and the citizens band radios (SNCC SIGNAL CORPS) is already technological. Because it is often inefficient, people do not always think of it that way, but it require’s [sic] trained people to use such a network which has become the very nerve center of the operation in Mississippi.58

The working paper noted that SNCC’s sixty-two citizens CB transceivers throughout Mississippi

must first be installed and then maintained by specially trained people, and they are. Some of these people came out of the movement or from the Jackson community. They too are technocrats now. . . . Presumably, expansion into the black belt will mean more of the same.59

SNCC’s reliance on CB led it to extend its philosophy of participatory democ- racy and political education to technical training, engendering technopolitical empowerment: “specially trained people” from local communities are necessary “so that in the long run, local Negroes and whites alike, will run the network themselves.”60 CB thus proved essential not only to the civil rights movement’s

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Figures 3 and 4. Notes from SNCC copy of the FCC study guide for the examination for Radiotelephone Third Class Operator Permit.

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security and communications; it shaped and was in turn redefined by the movement’s strategies, organizing, and philosophy.

CB played a key role in SNCC’s efforts to merge technical and political education through the Radio Tougaloo project. Radio Tougaloo aimed to “make available to the people of Mississippi the knowledge, skills and resources necessary” to operate community radio stations that would broadcast relevant news, educational and cultural programming, including civil rights struggles that commercial stations suppressed.61 Technical and political education would fuse through interrelationships between Radio Tougaloo and the SNCC Free- dom Schools, which addressed Mississippi’s racist public education system through a curriculum of civics and history of the Black liberation movement, as well as reading, writing, and math. Servicing the movement’s CB systems— themselves a product of technical and political skills building—would be “a step-stone to the ability to oversee a highly powerful, many faceted radio sta- tion.”62 Like the Freedom Schools, the SNCC CBs were to be a pipeline for Black Mississippians to community radio engineering and production. The State Sovereignty Commission crushed Radio Tougaloo before it passed the planning stage. Nonetheless, it regenerated with much of its leadership and equipment intact as the Public Radio Organization (PRO) to develop low- power neighborhood AM radio.63

Organizers Isaiah and Nettie Sellers especially exemplify the fusion of technological and political network building through CB. Isaiah and Nettie “traveled throughout the hard core rural areas of the South organizing [CB] radio systems at SNCC projects” while struggling to support their family.64 This meant painstakingly picking up, repairing, installing, and delivering equipment throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, including the tent cities sheltering Black tenant farmers and sharecroppers displaced for their political activism.65

Isaiah built and maintained CB and other audio systems for two major efforts to empower African Americans through party politics: the multiracial Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) formed by COFO in 1964 to challenge Mississippi’s white supremacist Democratic Party, and the Black independent Lowndes County Freedom Organization formed by Alabama organizers and SNCC in 1966. In Atlanta Isaiah led staff training at SNCC’s national office, and he set up its thousand-dollar audio room, including “two Magnerecorders, one Westinghouse recorder and a splicing device,” to produce tape recordings of SNCC news for radio stations to air.66 The quality of Isaiah’s Atlanta work strengthened the conduit between rural and urban radio activ- ism: impressed by Isaiah’s audio room and repairs to the Magnecord reel tape

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recorders, the Public Radio Organization offered to lend “more audio and test equipment . . . to Mr. Sellers to be similarly serviced and kept functioning by SNCC until it is required by PRO.”67

As assistant secretary of the MFDP, Nettie campaigned for welfare relief and jobs for Jackson County, documented the harassment of African Ameri- cans, picketed segregated schools and businesses, participated in sit-ins, co-led political education workshops and meetings, spoke on the DC radio station WOL about the MFDP, and coordinated a “Black Christmas” boycott of white- owned stores.68 In a letter to the MFDP newsletter, Nettie militantly urged Black Americans, “fight if it is by law, physical, spiritual and stand up for your rights.”69 Nettie’s political leadership and Isaiah’s technopolitical expertise led them to fight by radio along with legal, physical, and spiritual means.

Extending citizens bandwidth into the struggle for citizens’ rights, the Sell- erses fostered technopolitical agency in Moss Point. As I discussed above, the Sellerses fundraised “to set up workshops and train worker [sic] how to use the short way [sic] radios.”70 Isaiah reported to SNCC, “We meet every week on Saturday nights. We [have] about 25 people mostly men who participate in the committee.” The Sellerses envisioned that the radio committee would “do other things locally, such as political and economic to service the needs of the people,” including supporting “a Negro police man who can arrest whites [who] has been layed off [sic] because one of the white officers says he was cursing.”71 Moss Point radio committee members affirmed their ties to one another and the broader civil rights movement through dues that went to both in-house expenses—a members’ savings club, a base station operator’s salary—and to SNCC. Moss Point CB’ers thus accomplished the translocal technopolitical movement building that SNCC attributed to amateur radio broadcasting: CB was key to “developing in local communities networks of communication and giving local citizens a sense of being a part of a movement which exists in more than their own isolated area.”72

SNCC’s urban organizing literally built on rural southern radio activism as the organization pivoted to developing urban Black power through local gov- ernment in the mid- to late 1960s.73 SNCC’s Atlanta Project, which centered on the working-class African American Vine City neighborhood, borrowed audio equipment intended for Radio Tougaloo and relied on Isaiah Sellers for training, repair, and maintenance.74 SNCC Atlanta furthermore investigated the “possibility of establishing a neighborhood radio station operating on a citizen band” featuring entertainment, news, community programming, and local MCs.75 Atlanta’s CB radio station never hit the airwaves; SNCC instead reached Vine City’s ears through sound trucks equipped with speakers and

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phonographs.76 Nonetheless, the idea of organizing and conducting political education through CB community radio demonstrates the reach of rural south- ern Black technopolitical agency to obviate punitive broadcasting regulations; to meet the needs of urban organizing; and to foment Black Power through radio.

Community Patrols and Rural Labor Radicalism: Dark Sousveillance beyond the South

Although the range of CB transmission was generally limited to twenty miles, its technopolitical reverberations emanated throughout the US, extending the Black radical tradition’s influence to encompass technology as well as philoso- phy, praxis, and the arts. The skills, tactics, and equipment of civil rights CB sousveillance constituted a practical blueprint and material tool kit for the Black Power, Chicanx and Filipinx farmworker, and American Indian movements. While two-way radio created telecommunications networks within groups, the lending of radio equipment produced symbolic and material networks of solidarity between different groups. Reporting on radio activism and sous- veillance, the movement press articulated the connections between different struggles for political rights, economic justice, and self-determination. Here I briefly limn this wider geography of dark sousveillance to show how organizers adapted CB sousveillance in the Deep South to other rural and urban guerrilla liberation struggles against police occupation, white supremacist terrorism, and hyper-exploitation.

Southern Black CB sousveillance spread through organizing networks and media coverage. The Deacons for Defense and Justice raised national aware- ness of two-way radio organizing conjoined with armed self-defense. Founded in 1964 in Jonesboro, Louisiana, and quickly multiplying in other states, the Deacons arose out of the African American community’s need to protect itself and CORE organizers.77 As Deacons leader Earnest Thomas put it, the group fought white supremacist groups on their terms: riding armed with pistols and rifles in radio-equipped cars or patrolling on foot with walkie-talkies.78 Ten percent of the two-dollar monthly membership fees went to the Jonesboro parent organization, which then equipped local chapters with CB radios.79 Armed with these radios in cars and homes, chapters created regional defense networks for assistance and news dissemination.80 Similar to but broadening the scale of the Moss Point radio committee, the Deacons’ CB sousveillance facilitated translocal organizing and shaped its tactics.

The Deacons’ actions and fundraising trips garnered national media coverage of Black armed self-defense and sousveillance.81 Although the Deacons’ guns

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were of greatest interest and concern, their deployment of CB was noted by the press and contributed to their image. One UPI story began by detailing the Deacons’ radio-enabled security for the Mississippi leg of James Meredith’s 1966 March Against Fear, calling attention to a “disciplined young Negro” in the rear ranks of the march who “raised a portable two-way radio to his lips, pressed a button and spoke quietly into the set. Further up the marching line, another young Negro raised his own radio to his ear and listened.”82 Ebony drew its African American middle-class readers’ attention to the Deacons’ ra- dio communications in its September 1965 profile, which would have drawn heightened interest in the wake of the August Watts uprising. Image and text amplified radio’s place in the Deacon arsenal. Ebony noted the acquisition of “weapons, ammunition and citizens band radios” in the Deacons’ founding, and visually paralleled a Deacon’s rifle barrel with the whip antenna of another Deacon’s walkie-talkie (see Figures 5 and 6).83

Emphasizing that “their fight against racial injustice includes not one, but two foes: white reactionaries and police,” Ebony reinforced connections between rural civil rights and urban Black Power movements that African Americans in Watts had made during the recent uprising: as they threw rocks at motorists and firemen, they reportedly shouted, “This is for Bogalusa!”84

Building on CB civil rights organizing in the South, two-way radio sous- veillance shaped the Black Power phase of the Black Liberation Movement. Mobilizing against police occupation of their communities, African Americans in Watts and Oakland adapted the black panther iconography of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) of Alabama and the SNCC two-way radio network to which it belonged.85 The people of Watts implemented com- munity control through radio automobility the summer after the 1965 upris- ing had been sparked by California Highway Patrol officers pulling over and beating a young unemployed African American man, Marquette Frye. From the ghetto’s ashes the Temporary Alliance of Local Organizations (TALO) formed to address anti-Black police terror. The catalyst for TALO’s formation was the police murder of Leonard Deadwyler, shot to death with impunity by officers after being stopped for speeding to drive his pregnant wife to the hospital. TALO took the black panther “symbol of independent Negro power,” befitting its plans for “the South Central Colony” to secede from LA and form a Freedom City with its own police force.86

TALO also deployed SNCC radios to enact its first initiative, a Citizens Alert Patrol (CAP) established in June 1966 “to protect and observe,” in their appropriation of the Los Angeles Police Department motto. Watts CAP was inspired by Seattle’s African American patrols, which had emerged the previ-

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| 335Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, and Social Movements

Figures 5 and 6. The Deacons for Defense and Justice featured in Ebony, September 1965. Credit Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy Ford Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Smithsonian Institution.

ous year with support of the city’s CORE chapter in response to police killings of Black people there.87 In turn, Watts CAP influenced the formation of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.88 CAP’s Black Power ethos manifested in its shared headquarters and leadership with SLANT

(Self-Leadership for All Nationalities Today), a Black youth organization with the motto BURN (Brotherhood-Unity-Responsibility-Nationwide).

Watts CAP’s fleet of radio cars, featuring black panther bumper stickers, countered the police panauditory surveillance dragnet with a panauditory sousveillance safety net. This posed enough of a threat to Los Angeles Police that, according to CAP field supervisor Lenair Eggleston, cops “[kept] changing frequencies on their radios. . . . They think we have some fantastic power to be everywhere.”89 Indispensable to CAP’s “fantastic power,” its two-way radio cars expanded the patrol’s scope; “the beat of the Patrol extend[ed] way beyond Watts” to maximize coverage of the “meeting places for young Negroes and potential hotspots of police harassment.”90 Through two-way radio sousveil- lance, Black youth reclaimed their streets and mobility.

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Elsewhere in California, southern civil rights CB sousveillance was adapted by the mostly Chicanx workers of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) and Filipinx workers of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Com- mittee (AWOC). After supporting the NFWA’s 1965 rent strike in Tulare County, California, SNCC aided the 1965–70 Delano grape strike organized by AWOC with critical support from the NFWA. In addition to leading workshops on nonviolent resistance and sending volunteers to picket lines, SNCC provided “indispensable” two-way radios so that farmworkers could call for help when attacked and monitor strikebreakers over one thousand square miles of fields in the “guerilla [sic] warfare in the grapes.”91

Tracking SNCC/NFWA radio networks, SNCC’s newspaper the Movement educated its readers on multiracial working-class solidarity. A few months into the strike, the Movement published a letter contending that “to support the negro in the South is a worthwhile project—to support striking farm workers a ridiculous, irresponsible waste of time, energy & money. If they are hungry, let them go to work!”92 In rebuttal, the Movement juxtaposed this letter with a fundraising plea for NFWA radios on the heels of a story tracking SNCC and CORE radios from Mississippi and Louisiana to Delano and back to the South: “SNCC could ill afford to part with them, but the situation in Delano is so much like the Mississippi delta that a short term loan of the sets was made.”93 The radios’ movement between movements amplified connections between Black voter registration in Mississippi and the striking Mexican and Filipino American farmworkers in Delano’s grape fields, manifesting the entwinement of struggles against political disenfranchisement and capitalist hyper-exploitation.

Meanwhile, Black radio patrols influenced the 1968 formation of the American Indian Movement (AIM) by Ojibwe activists in Minneapolis for whom the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense served as a model. As in Watts, Native Americans in the “red ghetto” of South Minneapolis faced pervasive policing and incarceration, extending the settler colonial processes that had forcibly relocated them to the city. Police routinely swept the Native bars on Franklin Avenue that served as de facto social centers.94 Once arrested, Native people were often sentenced to unpaid “community service.”95

Consequently, one of AIM’s first projects was a community patrol outfitted with walkie-talkies, radio cars, cameras, and tape recorders.96 Similar to Watts CAP and the Panther patrols, the AIM patrol decolonized urban communi- ties through sousveilling “the cops who had long been known as a brutal and oppressive occupying force in our neighborhoods.”97 The AIM patrols visu- ally signaled authority through their red cars, shirts, and jackets with “Indian Patrol” sewn on the back, along with their walkie-talkies.98 AIM’s panauditory

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sousveillance produced a drop in arrests of Native Americans to citywide aver- ages, and a 60 percent decline in the number of Native Americans in jails.99 Illustrating the convergence of guerrilla struggle and mutual aid, AIM’s subse- quent community programs built on these patrols, from which emerged many of the Native youth, women, and men who led and staffed these programs.100

CB sousveillance undertaken by Black Power, Chicanx and Filipinx farm- worker, and Native American groups constituted organized technopolitical responses to distinct yet shared conditions of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Mexican, Filipinx American, and African American farmers and farmworkers all faced discrimination, hyper-exploitation, physical displace- ment, and rural poverty. Patrick Wolfe has argued that spatial segregation and mass incarceration are settler strategies that were extended from Native to US Black populations rendered surplus by postindustrialism.101 But in turn, the audio technologies that emerged through US imperialism and racial capitalism gave rise to CB dark sousveillance by African Americans of the rural South, a strand of movement organizing that fostered Chicanx, Filipinx, and Native American struggles. Their CB sousveillance exemplifies the technopolitical agency engendered by contradictions between media’s transformative, demo- cratic potential and efforts to delimit, commodify, and criminalize technological access and data.

Coda: Networks New and Old

The analog audio organizing of Cold War–era movements appears an era apart from internet activism; Manuel Castells asserts that “the networked movements of the digital age represent a new species of social movement.”102 The civil rights movement has been a touchstone for differentiating traditional movements from today’s networked movements. Malcolm Gladwell notably indicted the “weak ties” of internet activist networks in opposition to the “strong ties” exemplified by the student sit-ins and the Mississippi Freedom Summer.103 In making her case that “the revolution will not be tweeted,” Barbara Ransby contrasts contemporary social media activism with the radical democratic praxis of lead civil rights organizer Ella Baker.104 These critiques of cyber-utopianism propagate notions of a pre- or nontechnological civil rights movement.

Yet fostering vernacular technopolitical agency was a key accomplishment of the civil rights movement. Civil rights workers found CB useful for many of the reasons that activist netizens find social media indispensable to organizing. An earlier form of wireless social media, CB enabled activists to directly com- municate and document events on the ground as they happened, preliminarily

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approaching what is done with cell phones (themselves a type of two-way radio) and Twitter. Through CB, activists strove to fulfill radio’s potential to “mak[e] possible mass participation in a social and socialized productive process” of mediated communications, a possibility associated primarily with digital social platforms.105 Before the Arab Spring’s so-called Facebook and Twitter revolu- tions instigated uprisings around the world, two-way radio sousveillance spread from the US South across the nation through social networks.

Thinking about continuities between CB sousveillance and digital activism, rather than positing a decisive break or necessary progression between old and new media, questions the uncritical embrace of the latest, fastest technology, which can work against collective action while reinforcing racial and class inequities. The deployment of old and new media is a signal feature of trans- media organizing that Sasha Costanza-Chock theorizes through the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles from 2006 to 2013. Low-wage workers and youth from Latin America and the Caribbean integrate critical digital media literacy and participatory media production with community organizing “by any media necessary,” including print, compact discs, radio, mobile phones, and computers.106 Vivek Bald’s documentary Taxi-Vala/Auto-biography depicts CB community formation and organizing among South Asian taxi drivers in New York in the 1990s.107 Like earlier civil rights workers, immigrant taxi drivers appropriated CB to share news, tips, and gossip and come to one another’s aid. In the process they created what Bald calls “‘virtual communities’ that predate the use of that term in relation to the Internet by five or ten years.”108 These CB communities formed the basis for a 1993 mass protest in response to a series of driver murders and an even larger 1998 strike for which the New York Taxi Workers Alliance mobilized multiple ethnolinguistic CB groups. Organizers continued using CB alongside cell phones for the communal networking that individualized cell phone connections could not provide. Costanza-Chock’s and Bald’s accounts of organizing illustrate the ongoing effectiveness and advantages of low-tech sound media in the broader media ecology of the information age to reach, mobilize, and organize via music, storytelling, and native and heritage language broadcasting.

The discontinuities between Cold War–era civil rights CB sousveillance and the networked movements of the information age also bear examination. Social movements have been qualitatively transformed by the internet and other digital communication technologies: “The more interactive and self- configurable communication is, the less hierarchical is the organization and the more participatory is the movement.”109 Digitally networked movements are said to be horizontalist—leaderless, interactive, decentralized, spontane-

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ous, eschewing hierarchical coordination by formal political parties, unions, or organizations. These tendencies present obstacles to as well as opportunities for transformative structural change. Horizontalism can obscure de facto leadership and imbalances of access and knowledge through ungrounded assumptions of leaderlessness and interactivity; lack of structure can hinder accountability and sustainability.110 Ransby insists that we still need the radically democratic leadership and structure that Baker fostered in SNCC to build on mass mo- bilizations and spontaneous actions, and “to craft specific goals and demands wedded to a social justice agenda built on the needs and aspirations of the most oppressed sectors of our communities.”111 An implementation of radical democratic praxis, two-way radio organizing of the civil rights movement can provide insights into using media and technology to develop group-centered leadership and structure straddling embodied and virtual spaces—through, for example, the Sellerses, who organized their community around its interest in radio, thereby connecting local, tangible concerns to the SNCC network, merging technical training and political education, and entwining guerrilla struggle with mutual aid.112

Neither the technological driver of social change nor a single factor among many, two-way radio became an essential tool reconceived by democratic and insurgent struggles. In turn, CB paved the way for movements to develop tactics, subjectivities, and solidarities from the technological possibilities, mate- rial forms, and symbolic meanings of participatory social media. This history contests the Eurocentric technological determinism with which movements around the world are reduced to Twitter, Facebook, and iPhone revolutions, effacing vernacular technopolitical agency and the racializing surveillance that information and communications technologies proliferate. The long histories of dark sousveillant CB networks offer a praxis for appropriating technology to support those communities and movements most vulnerable, and resistant, to the velvet glove of digital surveillance and the iron fist of state and extralegal violence.

Notes This essay would not have happened without the insights, research, feedback, and support of Angelica

Lawson, Stephen Charbonneau, Emmanuel David, Lori Emerson, and the University of Colorado Media Studies Reading Group, Shu-Ling Berggreen, Jennifer Stoever, Alan Gross, Frank Paro, Lauren Adler, Raúl Melgoza, Aly Corey, Matthew Tettleton, Dani Won-gu Kim, and American Quarterly’s anonymous readers.

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1. Nettie and Isaiah Sellers, “A Proposal,” n.d., SNCC press contacts, press releases, and correspondence, folder 252253-013-0713, SNCC Papers, Black Freedom Struggle in the Twentieth Century: Organi- zational Records and Personal Papers, Part 2, ProQuest History Vault (hereafter cited as BFS).

2. Isaiah Sellers, “Report from Moss Point, Miss.,” n.d., SNCC Special Events Department records, folder 252253-036-0777, SNCC Papers, BFS.

3. Federal Communications Commission, Report to the Congress by the Comptroller General of the United States: Actions Taken or Needed to Curb Widespread Abuse of the Citizens Band Radio Service, [US General Accounting Office], 1975, 1.

4. Tim Allen Scherrer, “The Citizen’s Band Radio and American Culture” (master’s thesis, Truman State University, 2000), 68; Carlos Valle Roberts, “Two-Way Radio Communication Systems for Use by the General Public” (master’s thesis, University of Colorado–Boulder, 1975).

5. Federal Communications Commission, “Permissible Communications in the Citizens Radio Service,” SS Bulletin 1001c, January 1964, 2.

6. Representative Frank T. Bow wrote, “The typical Citizens Band licensee might be a farmer who would install a transceiver in his home, another in the barn, a third in his truck or automobile so that he might be in touch with his family and they with him on matters of business arising during the day” (“Dear FCC—Hands Off CB!,” S9 CB Journal, August 1965, 10).

7. CORE was founded in 1942 in the North to fight segregation through nonviolence. SNCC was founded in 1960 in the South to build on the student sit-in movement.

8. Donna Murch, “When the Panther Travels: Race and the Southern Diaspora in the History of the BPP, 1964–1972,” in Black Power beyond Borders: The Global Dimension of the Black Power Movement, ed. Nico Slate, 57–78 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

9. Fouché theorizes different levels of technological agency: “reconception,” “redeployment,” and “re- creation.” The importance of radio surveillance and sousveillance to African American technological agency is evident in Fouché’s examples of reconception, including Mbanna Kantako’s “inverted ‘neighborhood watch’” on his pirate Black Liberation Radio station. See Fouché, “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud: African Americans, African American Artifactual Culture, and Black Vernacular Technological Creativity,” American Quarterly 58.3 (2006): 639–40, 654. See also Nettrice R. Gaskins, “Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation across the African Diaspora and the Global South,” in Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, ed. Ruha Benjamin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 252–74.

10. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 21–23. Extending Steve Mann’s work on sousveillance—the appropriation of technologies of surveillance by disempowered people to thwart efforts to monitor and control them—Browne shows how surveillance is “practiced, narrated, and enacted” through blackness (9). On sousveillance, see Mann and Joseph Ferenbok, “New Media and the Power Politics of Sousveillance in a Surveillance- Dominated World,” Surveillance and Society 11.1–2 (2013): 18–34.

11. Dean Spade, “Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid for Mobilization and Survival,” Social Text 38.1 (2020): 131–51.

12. Gary T. Marx and Dane Archer, “Community Police Patrols and Vigilantism,” in Vigilante Politics, ed. H. Jon Rosenbaum and Peter C. Sederberg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 133.

13. Brian Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004). Art Blake’s Radio, Race, and Audible Difference in Post-1945 America: The Citizens Band (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2019) examines CB’s shaping of US neoconservatism and African Ameri- can counterpublic spheres. On grassroots civil rights history and historiography, see John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Charles E. Cobb, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

14. Sasha Costanza-Chock, Out of the Shadows, into the Streets! Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).

15. Eric Schatzberg, Technology: Critical History of a Concept (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 5.

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16. On aural terrorism and white supremacy, see Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016).

17. In addition to Benjamin, see Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018).

18. As Browne observes, the “apparent overreliance on the Panopticon in the field of surveillance studies . . . leaves the role of visibility overstated” (Dark Matters, 58).

19. Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty, and David Lyon, eds., Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies (New York: Routledge, 2012); David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). Lauri Siisiäinen theorizes panauditory surveillance in Foucault and the Politics of Hearing (London: Routledge, 2013).

20. Stoever, Sonic Color Line. 21. Whereas Williams’s “The Technology and the Society” focuses on the broadcast radio industry’s resolu-

tion of industrial capitalism’s contradictions, I tune in to two-way radio users’ heightening of these contradictions. See Williams, “The Technology and the Society,” in Theories of New Media: A Historical Perspective, ed. John Thorton Caldwell (London: Athlone, 2000), 39.

22. Radio studies is attuned to sound media and social movements. Additionally, recent work like Michael Denning’s Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (London: Verso, 2015) and Shana L. Redmond’s Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2013) bring media studies to bear on the rich scholarship on the music of social movements. But foundational work on sound studies such as Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) and Stoever’s Sonic Color Line sidestep relevant social movement history.

23. Kathleen Battles, Calling All Cars: Radio Dragnets and the Technology of Policing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Battles, “The Sonic Roots of Surveillance Society: Intimacy, Mobility, and Radio,” Sounding Out!, October 27, 2014, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2014/10/27/the-sonic-roots- of-surveillance-culture-intimacy-mobility-and-radio/.

24. “WMAR-TV’s Jack Jett, Former FCC member, Dies at Seventy,” Broadcasting, May 3, 1965, 76. 25. On CB’s military roots, see Scherrer, “Citizen’s Band Radio and American Culture,” 8–14. 26. E. K. Jett, “Phone Me by Air,” Saturday Evening Post, July 28, 1945, 16–17, 43, 46–47. 27. Jett, 17. 28. Art M. Blake, “Audible Citizenship and Audiomobility: Race, Technology, and CB Radio,” American

Quarterly 63.3 (2011): 545. 29. Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Min-

nesota Press, 1997), 41–44; Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 55–82.

30. Federal Communications Commission, Twenty-Ninth Annual Report for the Fiscal Year 1963 (Wash- ington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), 6.

31. Angela Blake, “An Audible Sense of Order: Race, Fear, and CB Radio on Los Angeles Freeways in the 1970s,” in Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. David Suisman and Susan Strasser (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 159–78, 162, 169.

32. On REACT, see Scherrer, “Citizen’s Band Radio and American Culture,” 38–41. 33. Richard Maxwell Brown, “The American Vigilante Tradition,” in Violence in America: Historical and

Comparative Perspectives; A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, June 1969, ed. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (New York: Signet Books, 1969), 192.

34. Brown, 187, 190. 35. FBI Files on Black Extremist Organizations, Part 1: FBI COINTELPRO surveillance files for Octo-

ber–December 1968, folder: 101094-002-0001, Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Federal Government Records, ProQuest History Vault.

36. Racialized CB surveillance complemented other applications of audio technology for criminalizing people of color. The sound spectrograph, or “voiceprint,” developed by a former Bell Telephone Labo- ratories engineer was used as evidence against Edward Lee King, an African American man tried for burglary and arson during the Watts uprising. See Terence Cannon, “‘Voiceprint’ Rejected in Watts Arson Case,” Movement, January 1967, 3.

37. Elizabeth Sutherland notes, “There were a few projects in rural areas which had no telephone; for them, the two-way radios installed at the end of July had special importance” (“The Cat and Mouse Game,” Nation, September 14, 1964, 106).

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38. SNCC, “Good Communications Saves Lives,” n.d., SNCC Papers, 1959–1972, folder 25223-014- 0467, SNCC Papers, 1959–1972, Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century: Organizational Records and Personal Papers, Part 2, ProQuest History Vault (hereafter cited as BFS).

39. Spade, “Solidarity Not Charity.” 40. 9-31-2-81-1-1-1 Informant X report, dated October 29, 1964, Sovereignty Commission MDAH. See

also Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 266–67. 41. Sutherland, “Cat and Mouse Game,” 106. 42. Citizens’ Band Radios and SNCC Radio Manual, 1964, R. Hunter Morey Papers, 1962–1967, Archives

Main Stacks, Mss 522, box 3, folder 2, Wisconsin Historical Society Freedom Summer Collection (hereafter cited as WHS).

43. Sutherland, “Cat and Mouse Game.” 44. Ruth Schein to Hunter Morey and Bill Robinson, August 7, 1964, memo, R. Hunter Morey Papers,

1962–1967, Archives Main Stacks, Mss 522, box 3, folder 2, WHS. 45. Schein to Morey and Robinson; Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil

Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 209. 46. The 1962 FCC annual report states, “Loose, irresponsible operations by class D licensees in the Citi-

zens Radio Service have become a major monitoring surveillance problem” (Federal Communications Commission, Twenty-Eighth Annual Report Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1962 [Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1962], 138).

47. Federal Communications Commission, Thirtieth Anniversary Report for the Fiscal Year 1964 (Washing- ton, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1964), 140, 137. While earlier FCC reports note violations by CB operators, its annual reports from 1962 and 1963 indicate a shift from more benign language in 1961 about CB’ers “forming clubs to promote self-regulation and encourage compliance for the benefit of all” (123) to the 1963 report’s remarks on “rampant violations.”

48. Federal Communications Commission, Thirty-First Annual Report for the Fiscal Year 1965 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1965), 151.

49. CORE, “Summary of Events in Jonesboro, Louisiana, March 8 through March 16,” March 16, 1965, CORE press releases, periodicals, and clippings, folder 001355-001-0625, BFS. On criminalization, see Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

50. Working Paper, [n.d.], SNCC press releases and reports, folder 252253-013-0713, SNCC Papers, BFS.

51. Working Paper. 52. In “The Technology and the Society,” Williams theorizes mobile privatization with respect to broadcast

radio (47), but it applies to two-way radio as well. 53. Holly Springs Freedom Day radio log, July 25, 1964, 15, SAVF-SNCC Social Action vertical file,

circa 1930–2002, Archives Main Stacks, Mss 577, box 47, folder 4, WHS. 54. SNCC press releases and publicity materials, folder: 252253-056-0433, SNCC Papers, BFS. 55. Friends of SNCC Memo, from Northern Coordination, March 18, 1966, “Tent Cities,” SAVF- SNCC

Social Action vertical file, circa 1930–2002, Archives Main Stacks, Mss 577, box 47, folder 6, WHS. 56. Patronizing characterizations of CB users appear in FCC reports as early as 1961 and worsen over the

years. 57. Handwritten notes in Federal Communications Commission, Special Study Guide and Reference Ma-

terial for Examination for Radiotelephone Third Class Operator Permit with Broadcast Endorsement for Operation of Certain Broadcast Stations, March, 1966, folder 252253-021-1105, SNCC Papers, BFS.

58. Working Paper. 59. Transcript, “An Oral History with Dr. Peter Orris,” University of Southern Mississippi Center for

Oral History and Cultural Heritage, 12, accessed September 21, 2020, https://usm.access.preservica. com/uncategorized/IO_051ec247-514f-4b45-9f72-1affff40b8fc/.

60. Alan Cohen, “Rights’ Workers Tell of Progress, Failure in Mississippi,” Reporter Dispatch, September 10, 1964.

61. Christopher Koch, quoted in Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 268. On Radio Tougaloo, see Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 266–73.

62. Robert C. McNamara to Lucy Montgomery, January 29, 1965, Lucile Montgomery Papers, 1963–1967, Historical Society Library Microforms Room, micro 44, reel 1, segment 8a, WHS.

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63. Marilyn Lowen to James Forman, February 6, 1966, memo, SNCC “K” and “L” Files, folder 252253- 007-0397, SNCC Papers, BFS.

64. SNCC, “Good Communications Saves Lives.” 65. Issiah [sic] Sellers, report, Communications, n.d., SNCC Special Events Department records, folder

252253-036-0777, SNCC Papers, BFS. 66. Sellers; Betty Garman, Memo re: Mississippi Summer Project Fund-raising, n.d., SNCC memoranda,

folder 252253-024-0690, SNCC Papers, BFS. 67. David Finkelstein to James Forman, letter quoted in March 22, 1966, letter from Fay D. Bellamy to

Forman, SNCC Press Releases, folder 252253-014-0467, SNCC Papers, BFS. 68. On Nettie Sellers’s activism, see WATS Report, December 18, 1965, no. 212, MFDP-General papers,

1965–1971, part 2 (MFDP records, 1962–1971, Historical Society Library Microforms Room, micro 788, reel 2, segment 2, part 2); Morey—COFO Legal Coordinator—Legal Cases, 1962–1966 (R. Hunter Morey papers, 1962–1967, Archives Main Stacks, Mss 522, box 3, folder 12); WATS report February 20 and March 9, 1965, Freedom Information Service—WATS reports, January–March 1965 (Freedom Information Service records, 1962–1979), Historical Society Library Microforms Room, micro 780, reel 1, segment 11-13; MFDP News Letter, April 4, 1965, Walker—MFDP (Samuel Walker Papers, 1964–1966, Archives Main Stacks, Mss 655, box 1, folder 10) (all WHS).

69. MFDP Newsletter, July 7, 1964, SNCC files on MFDP, folder: 252253-059-0799 SNCC Papers, BFS.

70. Nettie and Isaiah Sellers, “A Proposal,” n.d., SNCC press contacts, press releases, and correspondence, folder 252253-013-0713, SNCC Papers, BFS.

71. Sellers, “Report from Moss Point, Miss.” 72. SNCC financial data, July 15, 1963, SNCC memoranda, folder 252253-024-0690, SNCC Papers,

BFS. 73. Prospectus for an Atlanta Project, 1966, Mendy Samstein Papers, 1963–1966, Archives Main Stacks,

SC3093, WIHVS260-A, WHS. 74. Prospectus for an Atlanta Project, 4. 75. Winston Grady-Willis, Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights,

1960–1977 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 237n31; Prospectus for an Atlanta Project, 7.

76. Charlie Cobb, “Ain’t That a Groove,” in Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, ed. LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal (New York: William Morrow, 1968), 519–24.

77. Hill, Deacons for Defense. 78. FBI surveillance files on the Deacons for Defense and Justice, October 1965–July 1966, folder 101094-

007-0329, BFS. 79. “‘Negro ‘Deacons’ Claim They Have Machine Guns, Grenades for ‘War,’” Los Angeles Times, June 13,

1965; Hill, Deacons for Defense, 47. 80. Hill, Deacons for Defense, 105, 167, 209. 81. Hill, 132, 162. 82. James K. Cazalas, “Deacons for Defense Play Unannounced Role in March,” Commercial Appeal, June

26, 1966. 83. Hamilton Bims, “Deacons for Defense,” Ebony, September 1965, 28. 84. Bims, “Deacons for Defense,” 25–26; Hill, Deacons for Defense, 235. 85. Isaiah Sellers installed LCFO radios. See SNCC Press Release, “Two Shootings in Lowndes County

the First Night of Tent City,” December 31, 1965, SNCC Miscellaneous Publications, Pamphlet Collection, 68-1510, WHS.

86. “Will Watts Secede?,” Movement, July 1966. 87. “There Is a Movement Starting in Watts,” Movement, August 1966; Jennifer Taylor, “The 1965 Freedom

Patrols and the Origins of Seattle’s Police Accountability Movement,” Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, accessed February 25, 2020, https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/freedom_patrols. htm.

88. Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 39.

89. Bloom and Martin. 90. Terence Cannon, “A Night with the Watts Community Alert Patrol,” Movement, August 1966.

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91. Lauren Araiza, To March for Others: The Black Freedom Struggle and the United Farm Workers (Phila- delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 11–41; Terence Cannon, “Guerilla [sic] Warfare in the Grapes: How a Rural Strike Is Fought,” Movement, October 1965, 4.

92. “Letters to SNCC,” Movement, December 1965, 7. 93. “SNCC Radios Go to CORE, Delano Strike: Two-Way Radio System Saves,” Movement, December

1965. 94. Christine Birong, “The Influence of Police Brutality on the American Indian Movement’s Establish-

ment in Minneapolis, 1968–1969” (MA thesis, University of Arizona, 2009), 35. 95. Julie L. Davis, Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin

Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 31; Clyde Bellecourt, The Thunder before the Storm: The Autobiography of Clyde Bellecourt (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2016), 54.

96. On the AIM patrol, see Fay Cohen, “The Indian Patrol in Minneapolis” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1973).

97. Objectives of the American Indian Movement, February 1970, 54, American Indian Movement News/ Newsletter, Minneapolis, Minnesota: The Organization, 1970–1971, Microfilm No. 1555, Minnesota Historical Society Library.

98. Marx and Archer, “Community Police Patrols and Vigilantism,” 146; Davis, Survival Schools, 32; Cohen, “Indian Patrol in Minneapolis,” 57.

99. Bruce E. Johnson, Encyclopedia of the American Indian Movement (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2013), 23.

100. Cohen, “Indian Patrol in Minneapolis,” 59, 134, 226; Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London: Verso, 2019), 179–80.

101. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8.4 (2006): 404.

102. Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012), 15.

103. Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change,” New Yorker, October 4, 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell.

104. Barbara Ransby, “Ella Taught Me: Shattering the Myth of the Leaderless Movement,” Colorlines, June 12, 2015, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/ella-taught-me-shattering-myth-leaderless-movement.

105. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, quoted in Martin Spinelli, “Radio Lessons for the Internet,” Postmodern Culture 6.2 (1996). Castells writes that “mass self-communication” is the fundamental change in communication wrought by the internet (Networks of Outrage and Hope, 6).

106. Costanza-Chock, Out of the Shadows, into the Streets! 107. Alondra Nelson and Thuy Linh N. Tu interview, Vivek Bald, “Appropriating Technology,” in Tech-

niColor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life, ed. Alondra Nelson, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, and Alicia Headlam Hines (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 88–99.

108. Nelson and Tu, 92. 109. Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope, 15. 110. For a critique of horizontalism, see Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Conteporary

Activism (London: Pluto, 2012). 111. Ransby, “Ella Taught Me.” 112. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Durham,

NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).