Civil Rights

The Art of Protest

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The Art of Protest Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights

Movement to the Streets of Seattle

T. V. Reed

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis • London

The companion Web site to The Art of Protest includes audio and visual materials, bibliographies, discographies, filmographies, and links to historical and current social movements, as well as a supplementary chapter, “Peace Symbols: Posters in Movements against the Wars in Vietnam and Iraq.” Visit the book’s Web site at http://www.upress.umn.edu/artofprotest.

Lines from “A Poem about My Rights,” by June Jordan, are from Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989). Copyright 1989 by June Jordan. Reprinted by permission of the publisher Thunder’s Mouth Press, a division of Avalon Publishing Group.

Lines from “Trying to Talk with a Man,” by Adrienne Rich, are from The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems, 1950–2001 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973). Copyright 2002 by Adrienne Rich, copyright 1973 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

An earlier version of chapter 5 appeared in Wicazo Sa Review 16, no. 2 (2001): 75–96. An earlier version of chapter 6 appeared in Cercles 3 (2001). Portions of chapter 8 appeared as “Toward an Environmental Justice Ecocriticism,” in Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds., The Environmental Justice Reader (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003).

Copyright 2005 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reed, T. V. (Thomas Vernon) The art of protest : culture and activism from the civil rights movement to

the streets of Seattle / T. V. Reed. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-3770-9 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-3771-7 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Radicalism — United States. 2. Protest movements — United States.

3. Social movements in art. 4. Social movements in literature. 5. Radicalism in art. 6. Radicalism in literature. 7. Radicalism — Songs and music — History and criticism. I. Title.

HN90.R3R395 2005 303.48'4 — dc22 2005011442

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to Ella Baker, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and the millions of political-cultural workers, past, present, and future, who march alongside them toward freedom and justice.

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Beauty walks a razor’s edge — Bob Dylan

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Acknowledgments xi

Introduction xiii

ONE

Singing Civil Rights: The Freedom Song Tradition 1

TWO

Scenarios for Revolution: The Drama of the Black Panthers 40

THREE

The Poetical Is the Political:

Feminist Poetry and the Poetics of Women’s Rights 75

FOUR

Revolutionary Walls: Chicano/a Murals, Chicano/a Movements 103

FIVE

Old Cowboys, New Indians:

Hollywood Frames the American Indian Movement 129

SIX

“We Are [Not] the World”:

Famine, Apartheid, and the Politics of Rock Music 156

SEVEN

ACTing UP against AIDS:

The (Very) Graphic Arts in a Moment of Crisis 179

EIGHT

Environmental Justice Ecocriticism:

Race, Class, Gender, and Literary Ecologies 218

NINE

Will the Revolution Be Cybercast?

New Media, the Battle of Seattle, and Global Justice 240

Contents

TEN

Reflections on the Cultural Study of Social Movements 286

Notes 317

Index 345

All books are collective projects, but one of this scope is more than usu-

ally indebted to a host of people who helped make it possible. The map

that eventually became the territory of this book was first produced with

the aid of a Mellon Fellowship at the Humanities Center of Wesleyan

University. During my year there I was particularly grateful for the sup-

port of Richard Ohmann and for the friendship of Paula Rabinowitz,

the other “mellow felon” that cycle. At a crucial later stage in the project,

I received similar support from the Center for Cultural Studies at the

University of California, Santa Cruz. Center co-directors Gail Hershatter

and Chris Connolly provided a brilliantly stimulating environment, and

Hayden White quite literally gave me the space to work. The Fulbright

scholar program offered me the chance to work out some of the ideas in

this book with a bright group of students and faculty at Freie Universität

in Berlin, Germany. I am indebted to Margit Mayer and Bruce Spear for

their intellectual stimulation and hospitality during my stay there at the

John F. Kennedy Institut für Nordamerikastudien.

Among my many supportive colleagues in the American studies pro-

gram and English department at Washington State University, I would

especially like to thank Joan Burbick, Alex Hammond, Alex Kuo, Victor

Villanueva, Sue Armitage, and Shawn Michelle Smith for their friendship

and inspiring examples of committed scholarship and pedagogy. Among

my friends in the Santa Cruz diaspora, I especially thank Katie King,

Chela Sandoval, Barry Schwartz, Zoe Sofoulis, and Don Beggs. A number

of graduate students at Washington State also gave support and insight

xi

Acknowledgments

as the project evolved. I note in particular the influence of Christina

Castañeda, John Hausdoerffer, Sarah Hentges, Azfar Hussain, Melissa

Hussain, Jennifer Mata, Lori Safin, Allyson Wolf, and Tony Zaragoza;

their scholarly activism and activist scholarship gives me hope for the

future.

Many of these chapters began as presentations at national meetings

of the American Studies Association, my larger academic home, and I

am grateful for the work of scholars Hazel Carby, Michael Cowan, Michael

Denning, Paul Lauter, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Alvina Quintana, Jan-

Michael Rivera, Vicki Ruiz, George Sanchez, Steve Sumida, and Robert

Warrior, among many others, who make those conferences such stimu-

lating intellectual sites. Lauter and Carlo Rotello also provided crucially

important critical readings of the book in manuscript.

A less direct but more fulsome debt is owed to hundreds of cultural

workers for justice (of whom for me Bernice Johnson Reagon was the

paradigm and remains the paragon), who created the committed “art of

change” my work attempts to reflect and reflect on. This book is a trib-

ute to these indefatigable cultural workers, in the hope that I have done

at least partial justice to their brilliant, unceasing efforts.

Closer to home, two people played an immense role in this book.

Scholar-activist Noël Sturgeon, both as a model of engaged intellectual-

political labor and as my most trusted consultant on the substance of

this work, is owed an incalculable debt. Hart Sturgeon-Reed, who grew

from infant to teenager during the production of this book, inspires me

with his intellectual acuity, lightens my life with his wit, and reminds

me constantly of why we must struggle to leave the next generation a

better foundation from which to fight the good fight for social, economic,

environmental, and cultural justice. I am deeply grateful to Noël and Hart

for their love, and offer mine back to them along with the “acknowledg-

ment” that they are the most important people in my world. The love

and support of my sister Linda Ware, my mother Alice Reed, and my

niece Michelle Spencer have also been a crucial part of the world out of

which this writing has emerged, as has been my connection to a host of

wonderful relatives in the Reed–Sturgeon network. Finally, many thanks

to scholar-activist-editor Richard Morrison and all the other folks at

the University of Minnesota Press who brought this book and the com-

panion Web site out into the wider world.

xii Acknowledgments

This book hopes to prove useful to three main types of readers. For stu-

dents and general readers new to the subject, it presents an introduction

to social movements through the rich, kaleidoscopic lens of artistic and

cultural expression. For scholars of social movements, it offers intrigu-

ing observations on particular movements and useful insights into var-

ious ways to think about the relations between culture and social change.

For activists, it seeks to offer inspiration and a tool kit of ideas about

how art and culture can further movement goals. These three sets of

readers overlap, of course, in the form of scholar activists or activist

students, but to the extent that they sometimes speak different languages,

or have different interests, I hope that each type of reader will be patient

when encountering portions of chapters that may speak more clearly to

another of these audiences. Finding a style equally appropriate to all

has been my goal, but no doubt I have not always succeeded.

Social movements — the unauthorized, unofficial, anti-institutional,

collective action of ordinary citizens trying to change their world — have

shaped our politics, our culture, and our political culture as much as

any other single force. Studying movements matters because they have

played crucial roles in making national and world history. I have focused

in this book on movements in the United States, but throughout I show

how those movements have been connected to global changes. The

United States was created through a social movement, the American

Revolution, and social movements have helped make and remake our

nation since. Social movements, as the term implies, have been a moving

Introduction

xiii

force, one of the most dynamic elements in the development of U.S. so-

ciety and the culture. In particular, I believe “progressive” social move-

ments like the ones at the heart of this book have been crucial in taking

the important but vague and still unfulfilled promises of “freedom” and

“democracy” announced in the revolution’s best known manifesto, the

Declaration of Independence, and given them more reality, more sub-

stance, and wider applicability to the majority of people — women, people

of color, the poor — who were initially excluded from those promises.

More than fifty years of scholarly analysis has not generated an agreed-

upon definition of social movements. But that is less of a problem than

one might think, since both ordinary folks and ordinary scholars, though

they may argue about borderline cases, know a movement when they

see one. And seeing one may be precisely the point. One of the foremost

scholars of social movements, Charles Tilly, argues convincingly that the

essence of movements entails “repeated public displays” of alternative

political and cultural values by a collection of people acting together out-

side officially sanctioned channels.1 (It is because those official channels

have failed some people that movements arise.) Movements, in contrast

to their tamer, more institutionalized cousins, political parties and lobby-

ists, seek to bring about social change primarily through the medium of

“repeated public displays,” or, as I would put it, through dramatic action.

I like Tilly’s definition because it plays to the prejudice of this book in

focusing on some of the most dramatic movements of the past several

decades. This book tells the stories of some key social movements in the

second half of the twentieth century. While movements can be found

across the political spectrum, I have limited myself to an interlinked set

on the “progressive,” left side of this spectrum. Within these limits, I have

chosen movements that I think have been especially important, but there

are many other equally worthy ones that I have been unable to include.

I make no claim to providing a comprehensive study of progressive

movements since the 1950s. But I believe this book gives a good sense of

major developments in a central tradition of dramatic protest, resistance,

and change. I hope my book inspires readers to delve more deeply into

movements and issues I can only touch the surface of, and into move-

ments I have been forced by constraints of time to omit or only glanc-

ingly mention.

At the same time, I have sought in other chapters to make clear that

as centrally important as dramatic, public action has been to social move-

xiv Introduction

ments, it is by no means the totality of their activity, or the sole source

of their impact. I have tried to show that dramatic actions are them-

selves the products of usually rather undramatic, mundane daily acts of

preparation, and that the impact of dramatic moments is only as great as

the follow-up forms of daily organizing that accompany them. In several

chapters, most obviously in those on the women’s and environmental

movements, I try to show that dramatic movement events happen in

other, less celebrated spaces, including apartment living rooms, aca-

demic offices, and classrooms.

The particular movements I have chosen to focus on have played and

continue to play a crucial role in expanding freedoms and giving greater

substance to the American claim to be a democracy of, by, and for “the

people.” In that sense, they are the movements that have, to paraphrase

poet Langston Hughes, made America America, a place that has not yet

been but one day yet must be a free and just society.2 These interlinked

movements, from the 1950s through the early twenty-first century, built

on ones that came before — from the revolution itself to the antislavery

movement, populist farmer and labor movements, woman’s suffrage,

and a host of others — and they built on each other as well.

The movements chronicled in this book begin with the great African

American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That movement

was not only of tremendous importance in itself, but it also created a

master framework for protest that set in play key ideas, tactics, and forms

of resistance for the many movements that soon followed. Indeed, many

of these subsequent movements are also, among other things, “civil rights”

struggles. They are struggles for the right to equal and fair treatment,

and equal and fair access to the economic, political, and cultural goods

of the society. The word civil means pertaining to the life we live in

common, in community, and that is what these movements both assert

the right to and attempt to practice in their own work. Many movements

form strong cultures of their own, called “movement cultures,” which

offer alternative models of what our collective civil and civic lives might

be like, as part of their argument about the ways we have continually

fallen short of creating a just, egalitarian community.

This is the first book of comparative movement analysis to focus on

the cultural dimension of movements.3 In focusing mainly on the cul-

tural elements within and the cultural impact of movements, this book

seeks to fill a gap: scholars of social movements have had too little to

Introduction xv

say about culture, and cultural studies scholars have had too little to say

about movements. I use the concept of “culture” in three broad, inter-

related ways in the chapters that follow. First, I examine social move-

ments as sub- or counter-cultures to dominant cultures in the country.

Second, I look at the production of cultural texts (poetry, painting,

music, murals, film, fiction, and so forth) in and around social move-

ments. Third, and most broadly, I examine how the cultural texts, ideas,

identities, and values generated by resistance movements have reshaped

the general contours of U.S. culture (in the sense of “whole way of life”).

The study of social movements has been carried out by several differ-

ent kinds of investigators. Academics, including anthropologists, com-

munication scholars, historians, political scientists, and especially soci-

ologists, have examined movements from the perspective of their own

areas of expertise. Nonacademics, especially journalists and movement

activists themselves, have also contributed greatly to our understanding

of movements. Overall, sociologists have certainly produced both the

greatest volume of studies and the most systematic work. This book

owes a great deal to the many sociologists who have studied both the

particular movements I examine and the processes of social movements

overall. But as sociologists themselves have noted, until fairly recently

they have neglected the specifically cultural dimensions of social move-

ment activity.

Social scientists have concentrated primarily on the ways in which

movements have been forces of political change — changes in laws, legis-

lation, voting patterns, government institutions, and so on. They have

done a valuable service by subjecting movements to intensive and exten-

sive study, but this work has been limited by a strong bias toward the

most quantifiable elements of movements: numbers of participants,

amount of money raised, laws passed in response, shaping of voting

patterns, and so on. By comparison, social movements as forces of cul-

tural change have been relatively neglected. One key reason for this is

that culture is a messy business; it is a less easily measured object of

analysis than Supreme Court rulings, congressional bills, or income pat-

terns. But to ignore a whole terrain and its impact just because it is not

easily quantifiable seems highly unscientific, if not downright strange.

Movements are much more than the sum of quantifiable elements.

Movements, especially the kind talked about in this book, are deeply

transformative experiences for those who take part in them and deeply

xvi Introduction

transformative to those who are, sometimes quite indirectly or subtly but

pervasively, shaped by the ideas, feelings, styles, and behaviors emerging

from them. It takes nothing away from other important kinds of analysis

to say that we need far more work on the cultural forms active within

movements and the cultural forces movements unleash.

Cultural studies scholars, as the name suggests, have focused strongly

on questions of culture. But their prime target has been trends in popu-

lar culture, and subcultures that do not take the directly political form I

call “social movement cultures.” Much cultural studies work has offered

brilliant interpretive readings of cultural texts (movies, TV shows, pop

music, or fashion), but this work has not always been well grounded in

relation to the institutions and structural social forces that shape and

move through culture. In my view, the best cultural studies work has

attended to three interrelated levels of analysis: cultural production, the

texts produced, and audience reception of those texts. I will employ all

three of these at points in this book, but I am particularly interested in

movements as sites for the production and reception of cultural texts.

When I do use textual analysis, I am generally less interested in the for-

mal qualities of texts or in the attempt to read their larger cultural mean-

ings, than in their relation to each other within social movements as

part of the “cultural field.” French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu coined

the term cultural field for the social space where cultural texts exist in

relation to each other and in relation to texts in other social, political,

and economic fields.

Though not based in extensive new empirical research, this book seeks

to encourage a body of work, sometimes called “social cultural studies,”

that draws upon and synthesizes the best work from empirical history

and social science with the interpretive tools of the cultural studies tra-

dition.4 While I value formal textual analysis, and have done much of it

in previous work, I think it has been overvalued in cultural studies to

the neglect of meaning-making contexts. In this book, I have been more

interested in social movements as sites for the production and reception

of cultural texts than in the formal interpretation of these texts. Or, put

differently, the texts I am interested in most are the movements them-

selves, with their cultural productions as a means to that end.

I have tried to be precise in characterizing the relations between cul-

ture and the movements I explore here, but I am not interested in setting

up a single, systematic mode of exploring the movement-culture dynamic.

Introduction xvii

Instead, I am interested in exploring a variety of ways in which culture

matters to movements and movements matter to culture. Let me boldly

assert here one of my key premises: that those forces labeled cultural may

at times have a deeper and more widespread impact on most of our lives

than political or economic forces. But my intent is not to argue for the

greater importance of culture, just for its importance alongside and en-

tangled with political, social, and economic forces that have traditionally

gained more attention. These divisions — social, economic, political, cul-

tural — are, after all, themselves cultural concepts, not real things neatly

dividing the world. And giving culture a stronger footing in this list will

allow us to better understand the interactions of all these interwoven

forces.

Chapter Outline

This book consists of a set of interpretations of some of the key U.S.

social movements from the 1950s to the beginning of the twenty-first

century. Each chapter is designed to serve as an introduction to a move-

ment for those who know little about it, but also to offer a new angle of

vision to those who know the movement well. While I have been a par-

ticipant in many of these movements, I make no claim to be doing the

kind of work called “participant-observation.” And while I have done

original research on several of these movements, I make no claims to

having unearthed significant amounts of new empirical information. I

am acutely aware that to talk about close to a dozen movements and as

many different cultural forms borders on hubris. But while my range is

ambitious, my claims are modest. My main goal has been to creatively

reinterpret and synthesize elements from the large body of literature

available on each of these movements in light of questions of culture.

Relying on a great deal of rich secondary work by scholars and activists

before me, I have tried to offer fresh readings and to place them in jux-

taposition in mutually illuminating ways. This has meant incurring more

than the usual amount of debt to other authors, whom I hope I have

adequately thanked in my notes and acknowledgments. In addition to

these forms of recognition, however, I have made this book a tribute

to all the movement cultural workers whose texts and insights have made

it possible.

The movements I focus on are interrelated. I have emphasized a strand

of movements sometimes called the “direct action” tradition. These

xviii Introduction

movements have relied heavily on such direct action forms as civil dis-

obedience, sit-ins, strikes, boycotts, building or land takeovers, and other

dramatic confrontations. One key theme I argue throughout, however, is

that the “mobilizing” engendered by dramatic actions is only ultimately

effective when matched by active, in-depth, patient “organizing” of peo-

ple to take control of their own lives. This distinction, which I take from

the great civil rights activist/theorist Ella Baker, means that surrounding

the drama of social change there takes place much undramatic day-to-

day activity that alone can consolidate the work of a movement’s “ritual

public displays.” As I trace the particular features of each movement, I

also try to show how a growing set of influences diffused from move-

ment to movement, building a repertoire of ideas, tactics, strategies,

cultural forms, and styles.

The chapters are also intended to represent a range of examples of

ways in which culture has mattered to movements. The examples both

demonstrate how various art forms — music, murals, poetry, and so

forth — have made particular contributions to movement cultures and

social change, and raise more general questions about how culture works

in and around movements. Each chapter is designed both to historicize

the movement on which it focuses and to show that movement to be

very much alive today. The chapters cover a range of kinds of culture,

including folk culture (spirituals in the civil rights movement), high

culture (poetry in the women’s and fiction in the environmental move-

ments), and pop culture (rock music in the anti-apartheid movement,

Hollywood films and the American Indian movement), though these

categories are not mutually exclusive, especially in movement culture

contexts where they are often radically transformed.

Chapter 1 argues that music played a crucial role in virtually every

dimension of the African American civil rights movement. It traces the

rise and varied use of “freedom songs,” as activists transformed deep-

seated black religious and secular musical traditions into a major resource

for the struggle against racial injustice. Chapter 2 focuses on the black

power phase of the African American liberation struggle, demonstrating

that the Black Panther Party can be seen as engaging in a deadly serious

form of political drama on the national and world stage. The chapter,

like most of this book, challenges easy distinctions between culture and

politics, in this case between literary dramas and the “theater” of poli-

tics. Chapter 3 looks at the emergence and development of a new, radical

Introduction xix

wave of women’s movements beginning in the mid-1960s. Here I focus

on the role of poetry as one site of feminist consciousness-raising action

and as a resource in the formation of a variety of contested feminist

identities rooted in differences of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and

nationality, as they have evolved up to the present. Chapter 4 treats the

Chicano/a movement, focusing on the ways in which the thousands of

murals produced in and around the brown power movimiento embody

and reflect the political and cultural changes the movement generates in

its efforts to bring justice to U.S. communities of Mexican descent.

Where the first four chapters deal with cultural forms generated within

movements, the next two chapters deal with relations between move-

ments and mainstream popular culture. Chapter 5 focuses on the group

that called itself the American Indian Movement (AIM), one of the key

organizations in the wider Native American red power movement. This

chapter examines the ways in which the movement’s story has been told

through the widely circulated, if inevitably distorting, medium of the

Hollywood film. Chapter 6 takes a look at the role played by pop and

rock music in movements of the mid-1980s, especially the student-based

anti-apartheid movement. Student movements, from the 1930s through

the 1960s and the 1980s and into the present, have used popular culture

as an organizing tool. In focusing on one of these waves of student

activism, I try to show the important potential, as well as the limits, of

using pop culture as a force in the promotion of social movements.

Chapter 7 analyzes the brilliant use of graphic arts (posters, T-shirts,

banners, stickers) by ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), the

movement group at the forefront of the fight against HIV/AIDS. I focus

on how the group mobilized both the gay community and other affected

populations through a direct action campaign illustrating how homo-

phobia, racism, sexism, and class prejudice had created a deadly “epi-

demic of signification” that stalled progress in saving lives.

Chapter 8 directly addresses the relationship between academia and

social movements, challenging the assumption that the former is all

theory, the latter all practice. I complicate both sides of this image by

reminding readers that academic culture is a site through which move-

ments are practiced, and by suggesting that movements are theory-

making sites just as surely as is academia. I consider the work I am doing

throughout the book as support for the work of social movements, but

this chapter makes this point in a more direct way by talking about an

xx Introduction

intellectual formation that has grown out of a movement context. The

chapter does this by describing and arguing on behalf of an emerging

trend in academic literary and cultural study that I call “environmental

justice ecocriticism.” I argue for the need to expand this field in the ser-

vice of the grassroots environmental justice movement from which it

emerges.

Chapter 9 rounds out the movement story by focusing on the broad,

coalitional movement against corporate globalization. Here I analyze

the ways in which the new medium of the Internet has helped foster a

global culture of resistance to the poverty, environmental degradation,

and human rights abuses brought about by forms of globalization that

attend only to the rights of corporations and nation-states.

The story told by and about each of these movements is one of in-

creasing interrelationship and therefore increasing complexity. Each

movement has been shaped by and in turn has reshaped each of the

others. By the time we get to the antiglobalization or “global justice”

movement, questions of racism, gender inequality, labor and class issues,

the environment, and sexuality, for example, are increasingly recognized

as intimately interconnected. The dynamic that leads to this multifaceted

movement is also at work within each movement as I trace its story.

Chapter by chapter, I try to show how as each movement has grown and

changed, it has become more and more internally aware of the need to

act upon interrelations among issues, even while remaining centered

on its most crucial concerns.

The first and last of the chapters on individual movements are the

longest, reflecting their status as the alpha and omega of a long arc of

protest. The civil rights movement begins my story because it set in

place a “master frame” for much of what followed, and the movement for

global justice ends the story as a consolidation and worldwide expan-

sion of the energy of direct action movements. But the civil rights move-

ment was already global, in terms of both its influences (anticolonial

struggles in Africa, Gandhi’s ideas from India, for example) and its world-

wide impact. Thus, my ending point is not a claim that American move-

ments have been globalized, but rather the opposite — a recognition

that global forces have always been at work within U.S. movements and

that, now more than ever, movements in the United States must see

themselves as only a small part of a much larger set of transnational

transformations.

Introduction xxi

Chapter 10 offers some concluding “Reflections on the Cultural Study

of Social Movements.” It raises more systematic questions about various

relations between culture(s) and movements that are discussed and

exemplified in the course of the book. Those seeking a more explicit

framework of analysis through which to think about culture-movement

relations may wish to read this final chapter first. It is aimed a bit more

at academic movement scholars than the other chapters, but I think it

can be useful to all three of my imagined communities of readers.

While my range of movements studied is incautiously broad, I make

no claim to comprehensiveness. A comprehensive study, even one limited

to progressive direct action movements, is not possible. There are many

extremely important movements that limitations of space and time did

not permit me to cover. For example, while I draw upon gay/lesbian/

queer movement insights throughout, and show how their impact is

interwoven with several movements I do cover (most fully in my chapter

on HIV/AIDS activism), the gay/lesbian movement receives no direct

treatment on its own. The new left antiwar and student movement of

the 1960s and the Asian American movement are other important forces

treated only indirectly here. Indeed, there are many movements I might

have included had I but world enough and time (and a publisher will-

ing to publish a book of a thousand pages). In tracing one key strand of

movements, I have not covered moderate and conservative movements,

though they are present here and there as background or counter-forces

to the movements I do examine. I also assume it is clear that the treat-

ments I do offer of movements here are only introductions. My hope is

that this book will inspire readers to expand to the wider range of social

movements and to pursue in greater depth the movements covered here.

As the author of this work I have made no pretense to be neutral

with regard to the passionate political issues discussed here. I believe it

is vitally important for anyone, regardless of their political ideology, to

seek to be objective in the sense of trying to “get the facts straight.” A

clear-headed assessment of the world is far more useful than an ideo-

logical fantasy, regardless of what your ideology may be. However, as

critical social theorists have been pointing out since the invention of

objectivist schools like positivism and empiricism in the nineteenth cen-

tury, the process of “getting the facts” is always in part “inventing what

counts as the facts” and can never fully be separated from political bias.

Therefore, rather than attempt to hide my views behind an unjustifiable

xxii Introduction

claim of absolute objectivity, I believe it is more intellectually honest to

let my biases show amid my attempt to get the (interpreted) facts straight,

so that the reader can take them into consideration while evaluating

my arguments.

The “arc of protest” I trace in this book is part of a much longer his-

tory, one whose outcomes are far from certain. Martin Luther King Jr.

once told us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends

towards justice.” For Reverend Dr. King, this was in part an article of

faith. But his faith in no way limited his sense that the work along this

arc must be that of ordinary people often laboring in dark times. For

those who would join that journey, I recommend to you, in the words of

Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect,” combined

with “optimism of the will.” That is what I think you will find in the best

of the many brave and thoughtful cultural workers for justice whom I

honor with this book and whose deeds are directly or indirectly woven

into every page.

Introduction xxiii

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Then, too, there was the music. It would be hard to overestimate the significance of the music of the movement.

— Charles Payne, “I’ve Got the Light of Freedom”

The year is 1960. The place is the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.

It is one of the few places in the South where black and white people

gather together to talk about the emerging civil rights movement. Police

regularly raid the school and challenge the activists. Those inside know

their lives are in constant danger from the police and the Ku Klux Klan.

On this evening some high school students are among those gathered.

The police charge in and force the activists to sit in the dark while they

harass them by searching through their things. Amid this terrifying scene,

a girl begins to sing a song that was becoming the movement’s anthem,

“We Shall Overcome.” Huddled in the dark, she spontaneously invents a

new lyric. She sings, “We are not afraid, we are not afraid today.” Of

course, she was afraid in that moment. Anyone would be. But in singing

the fear is both indirectly acknowledged and directly challenged. Singing

away a bit of her fear, she asserts the rights she and countless others are

prepared to fight and die for — the right to freedom and justice in their

own land.1

“We Shall Overcome” belongs now to the world, sung by Germans at

the fall of the Berlin Wall and by Chinese dissidents in Tiananmen Square,

but its home will always be at the center of the movement for black free-

dom and justice in the United States. In a sense, the African American

O N E

Singing Civil Rights

The Freedom Song Tradition

1

civil rights movement began when the first Africans were brought as

slaves to the British colonies of the “new world” in 1619. Understanding

some of that long history will be necessary to our story, but when most

people use the term civil rights movement they are referring to a power-

ful force for change that emerged in the mid-1950s and had its greatest

impact in the 1960s. That movement is at the heart of this book not

only because of its intrinsic importance as a key moment in the long

struggle for black Americans to achieve equality and justice, but also

because it was the “borning struggle,” the movement that became the

model for virtually all the progressive social movements that followed it

in the latter half of the twentieth century. In terms of tactics, strategies,

style, vision, ideology, and overall movement culture, the black civil rights

struggle has had a profound impact on all subsequent social move-

ments and on U.S. culture at large. It was also the first major movement

covered fully by the new electronic medium of television, a medium

whose power increasingly shaped the context of movements over the

decades covered by this book.

The forms of culture most central to the civil rights movement were

undoubtedly music and religion. The freedom songs whose story I tell

in this chapter mobilized both. Music had long been a part of American

movements including the antislavery movement in the nineteenth cen-

tury and the labor movement in the twentieth century, among others,

but the civil rights movement brought a new level of intensity of singing

and left a legacy of “freedom songs” now sung all around the world.

Songs were everywhere in the movement — in meetings, on the picket

line, on marches, at the sit-ins, in jail, everywhere. Songs, especially as

embedded in a rich church culture and later in black pop music, formed

the communication network of the movement, and they also expressed

the “soul” of the movement, linking its spirit to centuries of resistance

to slavery and oppression.

The civil rights movement is undoubtedly the best known movement

in recent American history. Unfortunately, much popular knowledge

about the movement consists of half-truths and myths. Perhaps the most

common and most misleading myth is the notion that the movement

was started by and led by Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights move-

ment is often portrayed as virtually King’s singlehanded effort. But as a

far less well-known but equally important figure in the movement, Ella

Baker, put it, King did not make the movement, the movement made

2 Singing Civil Rights

King. As we will see, Reverend King was an important figure but he was

only one among thousands of activists and hundreds of leaders. While

he was a great orator and a great translator of the movement’s ideas to

mainstream America, he was more often a follower of the movement’s

actions than a leader of them. His high public visibility often obscured

the extent to which the movement worked from a model of collective

leadership and was driven by thousands of ordinary citizens struggling

without media coverage or even public recognition.2

Related to the exaggerated importance given to King is a tendency to

emphasize national leadership and centralized organizations. Central

organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of

Colored People (NAACP, founded in 1909) and the Southern Christian

Leadership Conference (SCLC, founded in 1957) were important forces.

The NAACP was the key, if not the only, black political organization in

many communities. It served as a vital network of activists the move-

ment drew upon in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But the efforts of local

people working under the guise of the NAACP were often quite differ-

ent from, more innovative and more radical than, those of the national

office, which had long stressed slow progress through the courts. Simi-

larly, while SCLC became the most visible civil rights organization under

Dr. King’s leadership, the national office also often found itself trying to

catch up with what bolder local pastors and parishioners were doing.

This pattern was intensified when the most important civil rights orga-

nization of the 1960s, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee

(SNCC, founded in 1961), emerged with its philosophy precisely based

on the idea of cultivating local, group-centered leadership rather than

building a central, hierarchical national organization.3

In a sense, there were dozens of civil rights movements in communi-

ties throughout the South (and the North), many of which were quite

independent of national leaders like King. The backbone of the struggle

consisted of hundreds of grassroots organizers, local people still mostly

unsung, who sought not notoriety but justice, and who toiled, usually

amid life-threatening danger, for many years before and after the most

dramatic demonstrations, protests, marches, and speeches that are the

best known manifestations of the movement. There were important local

and regional variations in the movement that need also to be acknowl-

edged, especially differences between urban and rural contexts. Indeed,

in each of the hundreds of local communities where the movement

Singing Civil Rights 3

emerged, particular political, social, and cultural mixes shaped the strug-

gle to unique contours.

Another myth has the movement suddenly and spontaneously emerg-

ing out of nowhere. But the large-scale, dramatic events that captured

media attention did not arise spontaneously. They were made possible

by countless hours, months, and years of work by local activists from all

classes and segments of the black community. Moreover, black women

did much of that local work. A focus on the (mostly male) national lead-

ers obscures the extent to which women were the majority of movement

workers and often the dominant force in many parts of the decentral-

ized movement. Too narrow a definition of national leadership also dis-

torts the role of women like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and Fannie Lou

Hamer, all women with deep respect for local traditions and shared

leadership, who nonetheless played roles that were decidedly national in

scope. It is unlikely that any figure in the movement logged more travel-

ing miles around the nation in these years than Ella Baker, a woman key

to the founding and functioning of both of the most important organi-

zations of the movement, SCLC and SNCC.4 Similarly, homophobia

has meant that the presence of gay men and women in the civil rights

struggle has not been given its due. “Gay-baiting” (using someone’s real

or alleged homosexuality as a way to discredit or blackmail them) was

sometimes used to stifle the movement, both locally and nationally. In

the case of key movement strategist Bayard Rustin, both his homosexu-

ality and charges that he was a communist (another common way of

attacking folks, known as “red-baiting”) were used in efforts to limit his

effectiveness.5

Yet another key myth misrepresents the integrated nature of the move-

ment, exaggerating the role of white people. There is certainly a partial

truth in this, in terms of both the goals of the movement (which included

an end to racial segregation) and the practice of the movement, in which

white people sometimes played important roles and exhibited great cour-

age in fighting for a cause that did not directly benefit them. But the

civil rights movement was fundamentally a movement by black people

themselves, many of whom remained highly skeptical about the possi-

bilities of racial harmony even if the legal basis of segregation could be

brought to an end. A focus on the role of white people is too often used

to cover the continuing racism in U.S. society in the name of the fiction

4 Singing Civil Rights

that if we just stop talking about race, we will be suddenly transported

into a colorblind utopia. In one of the strangest twists of political logic,

blacks and other people of color are thereby blamed for racism, as if

pointing to its ugly, ongoing existence were to create it, rather than a

crucial part of the effort needed to eradicate it finally from the culture.

Popular understanding of the movement also sometimes exaggerates

its visionary and spiritual dimension to the detriment of its more prag-

matic side. Spirituality and the black church were important forces in

the movement. But even the most famous visionary moment in the his-

tory of the movement, Reverend King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, was

delivered at a march (whose original planning stretched back long be-

fore King was even an adult) for “jobs and freedom,” with jobs getting

top billing. The movement often succeeded most fully when it brought

direct economic and political pressure to bear on white business people

and white politicians. Its moral appeals were important, but they were

always backed by such nonviolent direct actions as sit-ins, boycotts,

mass marches, and strikes, not to mention the threat of having to deal

with still more radical blacks tomorrow if you didn’t deal with civil rights

activists today. Nonviolence in the movement was directed at and formed

as power, a power as much political and economic as moral or spiritual.6

King himself became increasingly convinced, as the 1960s wore on, that

freedom without fundamental economic change would be empty. His

last major organizing campaign focused on a demand for economic jus-

tice for poor people of all races in the United States. King died believing

that some form of democratic socialism would probably be needed to

achieve racial justice in the United States.

So, if the civil rights movement was not quite what the mainstream

media make it out to be, what was it? It was a fundamentally radical,

grassroots, decentralized, mass-based, often women-led movement of

thousands of black people (and some white allies) bent on forcing a

deeply racist society to grant them freedom, dignity, and economic jus-

tice. The phrase “deeply racist” is meant to question another too easily

presented myth of the movement — that its only real opposition was

from ignorant, pot-bellied southern sheriffs with ties to the Ku Klux

Klan. In fact, racism was (and is) as deeply entrenched in the North as

in the South, and racist assumptions shaped the responses of well-

meaning white moderates and liberals as much as those of the more overt

Singing Civil Rights 5

kinds of bigot whom it is easy to parody. Moreover, the middle-class,

genteel racism of the businessmen of the White Citizen’s Council was as

crucial as Klan terrorism in blocking black freedom, and the council fre-

quently used the Klan to do its dirty work.

The movement, as it was simply known to its participants, had deep

roots and continues to echo today, but its heyday was from the mid-1950s

to the mid-1960s. The civil rights movement’s most visible target was the

system of racial apartheid in the South known as “segregation.” Laws

separating the races shaped every aspect of southern culture. Separate

and much less well-funded and -maintained facilities for blacks — schools,

restaurants, hospitals, public drinking fountains, even cemeteries — con-

stantly conveyed a clear insult to a people deemed inferior by white seg-

regators. But this legally sanctioned system of racial separation backed

by white terrorism was only the visible marker of a much deeper system

of racial oppression that ensured blacks a politically and economically

degraded status, in the North as well as in the South.

The core public strategy of the movement was based on nonviolent

direct actions (civil disobedience, sit-ins, freedom rides, boycotts, build-

ing of alternative institutions, strikes, and other actions) aimed at ending

the system of racial apartheid in the American South, securing the right

to vote and other basic political rights for blacks, and bringing down

the wider racist system of which these injustices were but a part. In regard

to the first two goals, ending segregation and securing basic political

rights, the movement proved a phenomenally successful, crucially im-

portant moment in a long, unfinished struggle.

The other, equally important part of the movement was its impact on

black people themselves. The ultimate terror of racism lies in its ability

to make the subjects of racism believe in their own inferiority. This

process, often given the overly simple label “internalized racism,” mani-

fests itself in many differing ways, some blatant, others subtle. Whether

successful or not at achieving particular goals set at any stage of the

struggle, the movement was always successful in challenging this vicious

force. Whether it was the act of signing a voter registration form for the

first time, or of appearing as a witness against a white person in court,

or even the bravery it sometimes took just to talk to an organizer, the

movement was made up of thousands of small and grand actions that

chipped away or sometimes dramatically swept away generations of

oppression as it had shaped the self-image of black people. Historians

6 Singing Civil Rights

and social scientists have few tools for measuring such supposedly “sub-

jective” changes, but they are at the core of the civil rights story.

Preconditions: Why the Civil Rights Movement Happened When It Did

Five main sets of large-scale changes provided preconditions that were

seized by the black community to form the new movement: (1) popula-

tion shifts and economic changes; (2) racial pride and resentment in the

wake of World War II; (3) new federal policies, stemming partly from

Cold War realities; (4) the example provided by anticolonial struggles in

the Third World; and (5) new political strategies and tactics culled from

the tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience.

First, a series of population shifts and economic changes repositioned

the black community both geographically and occupationally. The Great

Migration to the North that began after slavery continued well into the

twentieth century, creating important centers of relative freedom in the

North. These centers, such as New York’s Harlem and Chicago’s South-

side, provided comparatively safe spaces in which models of black free-

dom were forged and from which campaigns into the segregated South

could be launched to join an organizing tradition already at work there.

The declining importance and increasing mechanization of southern

agriculture, paralleled by a rise in the number of industrial jobs avail-

able in the region, created larger urban black communities, which gave

rise to a sense of collective power not felt as easily in rural isolation.

Industrialization also brought a certain amount of unionization. While

the South was and remains today a very inhospitable place for organiz-

ing labor unions, courageous and successful unions were created there,

and blacks joined in significant numbers, mostly in segregated unions,

occasionally in integrated ones. Labor unions became in effect training

centers where future leaders of the civil rights movement picked up valu-

able organizing skills and learned social movement tactics and strate-

gies. It is no coincidence that the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee,

which began in the 1930s with a focus mostly on labor organizing, became

a key civil rights training center in the 1950s.7 Nor is it simply fortuitous

that the most famous song of the civil rights movement, “We Shall

Overcome,” was first adapted as a labor song before it was transformed

into the movement’s anthem. Many connections existed between the

labor movement and the civil rights movement.8

Singing Civil Rights 7

To these regional shifts in demographics and economics must be

added a more national one. In its role as one of the two superpowers

after World War II, the U.S. economy began the largest and most sus-

tained period of growth in world history. Because the economic pie was

widely and accurately perceived to be growing for all Americans, many

white Americans became less resistant to modest gains by African Amer-

icans and other so-called racial “minorities.” These economic condi-

tions, of course, varied from state to state and county to county in the

South (as well as in the North), and one can trace with some precision

the degree of resistance to civil rights work based on the extent of eco-

nomic stakes held by whites. It is no accident, for example, that some of

the most difficult organizing took place in isolated rural counties where

the new economy had not penetrated, and where whites felt they had

the most to lose economically from black competitors.

A second set of precipitating factors revolves around the impact of

World War II. Many African Americans fought courageously for free-

dom in that war. Most often they did so in racially segregated units. But

under pressure from forces led by A. Philip Randolph, the great black

union leader who later led the March on Washington, the federal gov-

ernment was forced to provide fairer labor practices for black women

and men in the defense industries as the war began, and to desegregate

the military during the war. These efforts provided a model for other

desegregation efforts after the war, while at the same time pointing up

the irony that blacks were fighting Nazi racism in the name of a freedom

they did not possess at home. For many African Americans, particularly

those from the South, the war provided the first glimpse of wider worlds

where black oppression was not so absolute. Returning home from

the war, often as decorated heroes, black soldiers expected and at times

demanded respect from the white community, only to be met with renewed

racist hostility. A postwar wave of lynchings of blacks in the South attests

to the resistance such pride encountered from whites. Many of the key

organizers of the 1940s and 1950s who built the foundation for the wider

movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s were black veterans. The

sentiments also found their way directly into a freedom song: “I’m an

American fighting man / I’ll defend this country as long as I can / And

if I can defend it overseas / Why don’t you set my people free!”9

A third set of factors involved some small but important shifts at the

level of the federal government. The wartime desegregation efforts cul-

8 Singing Civil Rights

minated in the integration of the federal government itself, a controver-

sial act in the borderline southern city of Washington, D.C. Following

World War II, the Cold War against the Soviet Union brought new pres-

sures to bear. How would national politicians in the leading nation of

what they were calling “the free world” deal with the obvious unfreedom

of African American citizens? Southern apartheid became an inter-

national embarrassment to the U.S. government, and incrementally

pieces of civil rights legislation began to appear during the Truman and

Eisenhower administrations.

This atmosphere also contributed to the far more significant action

taken by the U.S. Supreme Court. After almost a half-century of court

cases and organizing efforts spearheaded by the NAACP, in 1954, in the

landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, the nation’s highest court

declared certain types of school segregation illegal. While the ruling was

limited and would only very slowly be enforced by the executive branch,

it proved immensely psychologically important to black Americans

generally and to an emerging core of civil rights activists in particular. It

also provided a key legal precedent for local activists seeking to chip

away at the myriad forms of segregation, not only of schools but also of

public facilities and private businesses. As it turned out, the federal gov-

ernment had to be pulled kicking and screaming into support of the

movement, even in the somewhat more liberal years of the Kennedy

and Johnson administrations, but Brown v. Board of Education initially

held out great promise that the national government might aid in the

battle against segregation and other systematic forms of racism enforced

at the state and local levels. In the terminology of social movement schol-

ars, this landmark Supreme Court case indicated a shift in the “political

opportunity structure” available to activists. Its suggestion of “move-

ment” in the federal structures further fueled “movements” at the grass-

roots level.10

Fourth, the rise of anticolonial struggles in the 1950s and early 1960s

in the Third World, especially in Africa, provided inspiring examples

for African Americans. The example of black people rising up to throw

off white European colonial governments in African countries like Chad,

the Congo, Dahomey, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, So-

malia, Upper Volta, Zaire, and others, was a potent stimulus. The con-

trast between these newly liberated homelands and American apartheid

was stark, and many African Americans began to conceptualize their

Singing Civil Rights 9

segregated communities as internal colonies within the United States. A

particularly strong wave of successful independence struggles in a dozen

African countries in 1960–61 coincided with and inspired the student-led

sit-in movement at segregated lunch counters and other sites in those

same years. Black novelist James Baldwin drew the direct connection in

a single, colorful sentence: “All of Africa will be free before we can get a

lousy cup of coffee.”11

The fifth key factor was the development of a new set of political ideol-

ogies, strategies, and tactics. The anticolonial struggle in India, culmi-

nating in independence from Britain in 1948, not only provided inspi-

ration, like the African struggles, but also, more concretely, gave the

movement a successful contemporary model of nonviolent revolution.

The movement adapted and adopted numerous philosophical, strategic,

and tactical elements from the anticolonial movement led by Mahatma

Gandhi, who himself had drawn upon a long American tradition of

civil disobedience. Stretching from seventeenth-century Quakers to

nineteenth-century abolitionists to early twentieth-century women’s

right activists, and given philosophical form by Henry David Thoreau,

this rich tradition provided a wealth of ideas and examples. Civil rights

activists gradually merged these ideas and tactics with traditional forms

of black activism and black Christianity. The key movement group that

developed these nonviolent philosophies, strategies, and tactics was the

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Founded in 1942, CORE was the

offshoot of the radical pacifist Quaker organization, the Fellowship of

Reconciliation. In the 1940s and early 1950s, through boycotts and sit-ins

in the slightly less daunting atmosphere of the North, CORE and like-

minded groups honed the techniques that would become widespread a

few years later in the South. Key activists in this tradition, such as James

Lawson, Glenn Smiley, Bayard Rustin, and James Farmer, provided philo-

sophical guidance and practical training in nonviolence to those already

forging a new phase of struggle across the South. They are also the people

largely responsible for educating Dr. King in the tradition he so effec-

tively popularized.12

Roots of the Movement

All these factors played a role in creating ripe conditions for a new move-

ment, but none of those opportunities would have been seized without

people ready and schooled to act upon these openings. Part of the myth

10 Singing Civil Rights

of the civil rights movement is that it appeared suddenly, even miracu-

lously, and spontaneously. Perhaps that is the way it looked to some white

people who had the luxury of not paying much attention to black lives.

But when the structural factors discussed above made the time right for

change, the movement of the 1950s and 1960s formed itself around deeply

rooted, longstanding cultural and political institutions based in many

generations of black struggle. Across those many generations, the most

important institution of the black community was the black church.

The church had its origins in slavery where, as in the civil rights move-

ment, it served politically ambiguous purposes. On the one hand, the

church had been allowed to form in part because slave owners thought

it might help pacify black slaves with a message of deliverance in the

afterlife. Embraced on such terms, black Christianity could have a quite

conservative effect. But preachers and parishioners also fashioned a very

different kind of black Protestant Christianity, one in which messages of

deliverance were read not as a heavenly promise but as an earthly goal.

Nat Turner was only one of many black preachers who led slave revolts.

Under slavery, black Christianity developed a kind of double coding in

which Bible stories became liberation stories. For example, the captivity

of the Israelites in Egypt became a metaphor of slavery, and the promised

land of Canaan became a very literal promise of freedom in Canada.

Black ministers and black choral singers developed sermons and songs

that contained elaborate coded messages about this-worldly routes to

freedom, such as the ones provided by the “underground railroad” of

safe houses that led escaped slaves from the South to relative freedom in

the North or in the still safer territory of Canada. Even when not used

in this directly political effort to achieve freedom, the songs and sermons

became a kind of liberation theology that kept alive alternative visions

of the world that would, under movement conditions, be turned again

to more earthly, political ends.

In the aftermath of slavery, the long struggle to give emancipation a

substantive meaning continued to involve the church in a central way.

Especially in those places where all or most political rights and spaces for

political activity continued to be denied to blacks, the church served de

facto as their political arena. One of the ironic effects of segregation was

that it contributed to the formation of tightly knit black communities,

and in those communities the churches became the heart of social and

political as well as religious life. Black ministers were often the political

Singing Civil Rights 11

leaders of the community. Thus, when the new societal conditions

opened up possibilities for a new kind of civil rights struggle, that move-

ment often came wrapped in the language of black Christianity and was

often represented publicly by ministers. Many preachers, but by no means

all, became key figures in the freedom movement. Some clergymen (and

they were almost exclusively men) avoided or opposed the movement,

often because, as the most prestigious and sometimes also the most pros-

perous men in black communities, they felt they had the most to lose.

Any movement needs certain basic institutional infrastructures to

function: an organizational foundation; a way to raise money; places to

meet; a way to spread the word to new recruits. In many places, partic-

ularly in urban areas of the black South, the church provided all these

resources. Church buildings became movement meeting places. Church

social networks became movement networks. The church collection plate

became the way to raise movement money. And moving from infra-

structure to ideas, church sermons and church music became trans-

formed into movement “sermons” and movement music that aided

in the recruitment of thousands of participants. This process was not

automatic or inevitable. Many conservative currents in black churches

fought this transformation. But where it was done well, hundreds of

black ministers and black congregations were rapidly transformed into

components of a growing movement. The church also provided a degree

of cover for movement activities. Black churches were bombed in ter-

rorist attacks by the Klan and its sympathizers, and many black minis-

ters died for the cause, but churches were relatively safe meeting places

and ministers the most respectable ambassadors to the wider white

world. In both the white world and the black community itself, church

involvement often sanctified the movement, made it more legitimate

and less frightening in the eyes of many people. While over time some

limits to the church-based part of the movement became clear, church

culture as it became transformed into movement culture was a key

force for change, particularly for older segments of the community.13

Two other key sets of networks also proved crucial to the movement’s

ability to act upon new opportunities: the expanding group of black col-

leges and universities, and the large network of local NAACP chapters.

Black colleges played a central role in the wave of sit-ins in 1960 and

1961 that eventually involved some seventy thousand students and sup-

porters. The NAACP was crucially important not so much as a national

12 Singing Civil Rights

organization but rather as a network of local people who either on their

own or nudged by people from outside the community seized the oppor-

tunity to go beyond the organization’s own national agenda to create

bolder movement actions.

Liberation Musicology

While many black cultural forms contributed to the civil rights move-

ment, most participants and most analysts agree that music was the key

force in shaping, spreading, and sustaining the movement’s culture and

through culture its politics. As the three key networks of churches, col-

leges, and NAACP chapters were galvanized into action, no cultural force

played a greater role at all levels of struggle than what became known as

the “freedom songs.” Alongside and entwined with the “liberation theol-

ogy” of black ministers stood the great “liberation musicology” contained

in the tradition of African American song. Singing proved to have wide

appeal across class, regional, generational, gender, and other lines of dif-

ference. It also crossed another line of distinction in the movement,

voiced most succinctly by Ella Baker. Baker often spoke of the difference

between “mobilizing” people and “organizing” them. Mobilizing focused

on getting lots of bodies into the street for marches and large-scale

demonstrations. Such actions had great dramatic value, and they were

often a way to ensure media coverage of the movement. But they also

tended to be fairly passive and transient events that did not necessarily

bring the deepest changes. In contrast, the organizing tradition, as Baker

defined it, focused on the slower but deeper task of bringing out the

leadership potential in all people, and on building group-centered, as

opposed to individual, leadership in communities that would do the

ongoing work of changing people and institutions.14

The freedom songs were used by mobilizers like Reverend King, and

by organizers like Baker, Septima Clark and Miles Horton.15 For the

organizers, the value of freedom songs lay especially in their capacity to

take the liberation messages latent in the black preaching tradition and

make them available to ordinary people. The group-centered process of

singing, with leaders emerging periodically out of the group to “line

out” a new chorus, was at once an instance of and a metaphor for the

general model of nonhierarchical leadership the organizers were seek-

ing to instill. It was also the perfect tool for organizing communities that

were for the most part deeply rooted in an oral cultural tradition. As the

Singing Civil Rights 13

great singer-activist-ethnomusicologist Bernice Johnson Reagon argues,

freedom songs are one of the best records we have of the transforma-

tion of consciousness in the ordinary people, the masses, who took part

in the movement.16

It is extremely difficult to invent a movement culture from scratch. It

is far more effective to adapt existing cultural structures to support the

new goals, ideas, and strategies set by the movement. No movement

ever did this more effectively than the civil rights movement. One of the

great tasks facing the movement as it took on new energy in the mid-

1950s was how to bring the strengths of tradition to bear on new condi-

tions. Almost by definition, traditions are conservative. Their job is to

conserve the past. But traditions are made, not simply given, when people

choose from myriad possible cultural forms those ones they will pre-

serve or reanimate as traditions. The legacy of American racism and re-

sistance to it meant that black culture included broad traditions of

struggle. But how could you bring that tradition of struggle into the con-

temporary scene with its new opportunities and new tactics? The genius

of the early movement was to bring the full weight of the liberation

theology of black church music into the new struggle.

Following the “river of song” as it flows through the movement will

allow us to see what forces were at play at various times, what ideas were

central and how they evolved, as well as to capture some sense of what

the movement felt like to those who enacted it. Music was the heart

and soul of the movement, but it was always also a highly practical tool

in the struggle.

Music as History

Like much else about the movement, the use of freedom songs that

appears to be a natural or inevitable development was the result of much

conscious, deliberate organizing over many years. Music did not enter

the movement spontaneously, immediately, or automatically. An amor-

phous “freedom song” legacy had to be uncovered, reworked, made into

a useable tradition. This involved planning, skills sharing, and active dis-

semination, not just natural evolution. Even when new songs, or new

parts of songs, did arise spontaneously, this should be understood as a

process something like the “spontaneous” improvisations of jazz in which

“inspiration” is built on hours and hours of careful preparation.

14 Singing Civil Rights

In reaching older black people especially, church music functioned

brilliantly as a way of pouring new content into old forms. The transi-

tion to the radically new ideas particular to the civil rights struggle was

made far easier when attached emotionally and intellectually to the feel-

ings and ideas found in the old spirituals and gospel songs. Some of the

traditional hymns could be carried over into the movement intact, with

no changes, because the change of context gave them new meaning:

“I’m on my way to freedom land, I’m on my way”; “This little light, I’m

gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.” The limits set by segregation

may not have been as total as those set by slavery, but a deep desire for

freedom arose out of both conditions. Other traditional freedom hymns

were remade in the movement, sometimes with practiced spontaneity,

other times through studied rewriting or rearranging. Lyrics were changed

to incorporate the particular meanings of the new times. Eventually,

whole new topical songs were created.

In two different but reinforcing ways music gave a sense of history to

the movement. First, the “traditional” gospel songs and spirituals pro-

vided a feeling of continuity over long periods of time. This was impor-

tant in letting those for whom the movement seemed disturbingly new

feel that it was also something quite old and familiar. It also gave a sense

of depth and patience. While the theme of having waited long enough

was often and rightfully voiced on many occasions, the movement fre-

quently depended upon a slow, evolving process. Organizing cannot be

rushed. Whenever the immediate stakes seemed not worth the danger,

pain, and frustration of the work, songs brought up from the days of

slavery offered a gentle reminder of how ancestors had faced far worse

circumstances. At the same time, they also fired hearts with indignation

that a hundred years after supposed emancipation, blacks still were

not free.

A second, different role played by music as history making we might

call “instant historicizing.” This refers to the altering of old songs and

the creation of new songs that told stories of the evolving movement.

Where the old songs gave roots, the new songs celebrated the new accom-

plishments of the living generations. Writing new songs or new verses

allowed each new community to claim its specific place in the long tra-

dition of black struggle. This was especially the case when old spirituals

were rewritten with lyrics about Nashville, or Hinds County, Jackson,

Singing Civil Rights 15

McComb, or wherever the latest struggle had emerged. Often the two

kinds of historicizing — finding roots and naming the history being made

in the present — were combined, as the songs would generally begin with

the older verses for a basis, and then add the contemporary events into

the narrative.17 More extended writings of movement sites, events, and

people into history occurred in the form of new, topical songs like “The

Ballad of the Sit-ins.” Perhaps not coincidentally, tracing the develop-

ment of the role of music in the movement seems to follow closely the

growth and development of the movement generally. Three clusters of

events in particular are key to the rise of both the music and the move-

ment: the Montgomery bus boycott, the student-led sit-ins, and the

Albany, Georgia, movement.

Many histories place the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955–

56 as the beginning point of the new phase of black struggle that came

to be called the civil rights movement.18 Other boycotts aimed at segre-

gated public transportation had occurred earlier in the decade in Baton

Rouge, Louisiana, Tallahassee, Florida, and elsewhere, but the Mont-

gomery action was particularly well orchestrated and effectively publi-

cized by movement activists. Myth has the boycott arising sponta-

neously when one tired woman refused to give up her seat on a city bus

to a white man. But it wasn’t quite as simple as that. Rosa Parks, the

woman in question, had been a leading activist in her community for

many years. Not long before her defiant act, she had been a guest at

Highlander Folk School, that key movement center, where she learned a

good many “freedom songs,” and a good deal about civil disobedience

tactics. Her refusal to go along with segregation law by giving up her

seat was indeed a spontaneous decision that day, but it came from a life

prepared for struggle through many years in the NAACP, and the quick

transformation of a seemingly isolated act into a full-fledged boycott

was the result of careful planning by experienced activists.

The individual who first seized upon Rosa Parks’s heroic act was E. D.

Nixon, a man with a long history of activism in the radical black union,

the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and in the local chapter of

the NAACP. Nixon had been waiting and preparing for just such an

opening as that provided by Parks. He immediately called into play the

key networks in the community, beginning with the ministers. Most of

the local ministers threw themselves unhesitatingly into the action. One

young minister, a newcomer to the community, was a bit more reluctant

16 Singing Civil Rights

but soon saw the light. His name was Martin Luther King Jr. Soon Nixon

had King not only involved but filling a central role. Precisely because

he was new to the community, King appeared to Nixon to be a good,

neutral choice for leadership since he would not be caught up in any

old personality conflicts or jealousies among the established ministers.

And a fine choice it was, as King soon became a superb public relations

person for the movement, and the finest orator of his generation.

While Nixon and the ministers played important roles, women were

the real force behind the bus boycott. After Parks provided the impulse,

Jo Ann Robinson and her Women’s Political Council did the grassroots

organizing and developed the logistics that gave the boycott its bite.

Robinson was an English teacher at nearby Alabama State College who

had often felt the sting of segregation and racist insult, despite her rela-

tively privileged occupation. She mobilized not only the council but

also dozens of students and fellow teachers. Working furiously over the

weekend after Parks’s arrest, the Women’s Political Council and its allies

distributed thirty-five thousand leaflets and by Monday had organized

an extraordinarily successful boycott. Only a handful of Montgomery’s

thousands of black citizens rode the bus that first day, 5 December 1955,

and few did in the weeks and months to come. Robinson’s women orga-

nized carpools and commandeered every vehicle that could move, in-

cluding a few horse-drawn ones! Many, many people walked, sometimes

as much as ten or twelve miles a day, rather than continue to face the

insult of segregated buses. For a year they walked and walked, withhold-

ing their business and cutting deeply into the profits of the bus line.

Thus it is no accident that several of the freedom songs that emerged

in Montgomery as symbols of their efforts had a whole lot of walking in

them. When five thousand of Montgomery’s black citizens gathered

inside and outside the Holt Street Baptist Church on the evening of the

first day of the boycott, they led off the evening with an old hymn called

“Onward Christian Soldiers” with the refrain “Onward Christian soldiers,

marching as to war.” The song, written in 1864, set the movement in the

context of Christianity and American history, and was one that all parish-

ioners, whether new to civil rights struggle or veterans, would know.

What would those gathered hear in the song and feel as they sang it?

They would hear and feel that theirs was a righteous cause. They would

hear and feel that they would need strength and fortitude, for it would

be a protracted struggle. They would hear and feel that the war that

Singing Civil Rights 17

Rosa Parks had touched off would surely need as many foot soldiers as

it could muster, would need an army. The song was an appropriate one

to start with because the people assembled there were about to decide

whether or not to continue the boycott that had initially been scheduled

for just that one day. The song gave the key for a crowd that was ready-

ing to commit to a long battle, one that lasted more than a year. The song,

however, was also one largely identified with the white Christian tradi-

tion, and as such it illustrates the rather conservative, middle-class con-

stituency that initially set the tone in Montgomery. A certain version of

“racial uplift” ideology in parts of the middle- and upper-class portions

of the black community viewed the old black spiritual songs as some-

thing to leave behind, as works full of excessive emotionality, as “primi-

tive” and “unsophisticated” reminders of darker times. The freedom

song movement as it emerged had to fight against this view of things, and

in so doing it helped bridge class divides in black communities.

Another old spiritual that became popular in Montgomery, “Walk

Together Children,” even more literally seemed to fit the scene and mood,

and was more rooted in black tradition: “Walk together children, don’t

you get weary. / Walk together children, don’t get weary. / There’s a great

camp meeting in the Promised Land.” These and similar songs were

deeply familiar to the respectable church-going folks at the heart of the

Montgomery movement. They needed no changing come movement

time, but were given new life and urgency by the movement. Reverend

King later recalled that people would sometimes come to meetings two

hours before they were scheduled in order to get in some good singing ses-

sions: “Usually the hymns preceding the meeting were unaccompanied

lined hymns of low pitch and long meter. One could not help but be

moved by these traditional songs, which brought to mind the long his-

tory of the Negro’s suffering.”19 At the outset of this new phase of struggle

that some came to call the Second American Revolution, others the Sec-

ond Reconstruction, the older hymns gave a sense of gravity, depth, and

continuity to the movement. They made it clear that far more than com-

fort on a bus was at stake, that the boycotters were all part of a long, long

story of suffering and triumph. That deep sense of history was carried

more fully by song than by any other medium. At a time when few works

of “black history” existed (most of what came to be so labeled emerged

out of the movement), and when a major segment of the community

had been kept illiterate, song played an immense educational role.

18 Singing Civil Rights

In the wake of the success of the boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. was

thrown into national prominence, and along with others he worked to

form an organization to further spread the movement gospel. The result-

ing group, founded in 1957, came to be called the Southern Christian

Leadership Conference. As the name suggests, SCLC began as a confer-

ence of southern black ministers interested in furthering the freedom

struggle, then evolved into a permanent organization to share infor-

mation, resources, tactics, and strategies, especially via the network of

Baptist, AME, and other black churches. While promising leadership,

most often in the years between the Montgomery boycott and a mass

upsurge after 1960, SCLC primarily filled a coordinating and informa-

tional function as most activity was generated and sustained at the level

of local communities. Few of the local struggles received the dramatic

attention accorded to Montgomery. One exception occurred in Little

Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, when federal troops had to be called in to pro-

tect black students whose efforts to integrate public schools in that city

met with violent white resistance. That clash received national news

coverage.

During the second half of the 1950s, most of the work was done by

local people who patiently built networks, tested alliances, identified

friends, measured foes, and learned organizing skills and the tactics of

nonviolent civil disobedience. A significant part of that work was done

at the Highlander Folk School (later Folk Center) where songs played a

central role in building a network of activists. Song sessions, often led

by the new music director there, Guy Carawan, proved an ideal way to

build solidarity, friendship, and trust. Part of the training of organizers

involved the use of music, as a repertoire of freedom songs evolved.

Visitors from all parts of the South and North brought with them local

songs or local variations on traditional ones. Misnamed the “fallow years”

by observers looking only for dramatic action, the late 1950s were a cru-

cial period of planting seeds that would lead to a spectacular harvest.

Harvest season, as it turned out, was announced in 1960 by four black

college students in Greensboro, North Carolina.

The Sit-in Revolution: Students Take Up the Song

Four black college students, inspired in part by a comic book about the

Montgomery bus boycott, and armed with rudimentary knowledge of

the movement tactic known as the sit-in, walked nervously up to the

Singing Civil Rights 19

“whites only” food counter at the Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North

Carolina, on 1 February 1960, and asked politely to be served. Like Rosa

Parks, these young men (Izell Blair, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain,

and David Richmond) were in the right place at the right time to run

smack into a “history-making day.” The tactic was not new, but at that

moment the act struck a chord with a new generation of young people.

Soon the young men were joined by other students from their college.

And those students were soon joined by students in other cities. Utiliz-

ing the black college network, a wave of student protest swept across the

South. Within two weeks of the Greensboro action, sit-ins had spread to

fifteen cities. By the end of March more than twenty northern college

campuses were also involved. Within eighteen months sit-ins had spread

to over one hundred cities in twenty states and involved more than sev-

enty thousand demonstrators, most college and high school students.

There were more than thirty-five hundred arrests for civil disobedience.

Much of the effort in this particular use of the sit-in tactic was directed

at private businesses, rather than the public facilities that had often been

the main focus earlier. Targeting national chains like Woolworth’s and

Kress department stores, these sit-ins pointed up corporate complicity

in state-sanctioned segregation, and also helped spread the movement

to the North where these large chains were picketed and boycotted in

solidarity with southern antisegregation efforts.20

In the South itself, one of the strongest local centers of student protest

was Nashville, Tennessee. From there came one of the key movement

music groups, the Nashville Quartet (James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette,

Joseph Carter, and Samuel Collier). Their specialty was the popular music

of black youth, “rhythm and blues.” The sit-ins announced that a new

generation was now the cutting edge of the movement, and, fittingly,

that generation added its music to the fray. Unlike the traditional songs,

which often had a strong liberation component already built in, the

adaptation of popular student music required more radical alterations.

For example, popular singer Little Willie John had a hit song at the time

called “You Better Leave My Kitten Alone.” It was a typical song of lover’s

jealousy, warning a rival away from the singer’s girlfriend. But in the

Nashville Quartet’s version, the “kitten” became “segregation,” and the

“you” became plural: “You better leave segregation alone / because they

[white folks] love segregation like a hound dog loves a bone.” I don’t

know if the “hound dog” line is a little slap at Elvis Presley whose “hound

20 Singing Civil Rights

dog” sound was widely understood as ripping off black musical style,

but the main message is clear: black folks had better leave segregation

alone because white folks’ dogged attachment to it was a sign of what

they had to lose.

The most adapted singer’s repertoire was no doubt that of rhythm

and blues soul singer Ray Charles. His songs, blending the traditionally

opposed forms of gospel (God’s music) and the blues (Devil’s music),

appealed to young people in emotional and political transition. The

Nashville Quartet, for example, celebrated the successful citywide inte-

gration of Nashville lunch counters with a new rendition of Charles’s

song, “Moving On.” Ray had sung of moving on from a love affair gone

bad. In the movement version, the bad relationship was with that em-

bodiment of segregation, Jim Crow: “Segregation’s been here from time

to time / but we just ain’t gonna pay it no mind // It’s moving on — It’s

moving on — It’s moving . . . // Old Jim Crow’s moving on down the

track / He’s got his bags and he won’t be back.” The song brings news of

a new day, and the notion of “moving” captured perfectly the feeling of

motion the movement embodied (it also worked nicely as a marching

song, in which the phrase “we’re moving on” became literal). For the

skeptics, the line is added: “Well I thought they was jiving about Jim

Crow’s gone / but I went down to his house and he sure wasn’t home /

He’s moving on.” Important here is the sense of personal witness. The

movement workers had truly seen Jim Crow on the run, and they were

going to continue to run him and his friends out of town.21

The thousands of sit-in participants clearly needed to be organized,

and in stepped the organizer’s organizer, Ella Baker, to help that process

along, with a fair amount of musical help. Baker persuaded SCLC to

fund a conference of student leaders, held on 17 April 1960. While SCLC

had originally hoped to form a kind of youth auxiliary, Baker and others

argued for an independent student organization. Out of that meeting

came the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pro-

nounced “snick,” founded in 1961), the movement group that became

the center of struggle in the years to come. The number of student par-

ticipants never regained the level reached early in 1960. Instead, SNCC

became a core group, never with more than a couple of hundred mem-

bers, who spread throughout the South, bringing with them the message

that building local, group-centered leadership, rather than a centralized

organization, was the key to success.

Singing Civil Rights 21

Many SNCC veterans point to the freedom song sessions held by

Highlander music director Guy Carawan as a powerful force in harmo-

nizing the diverse group of students at the founding conference into an

organization. Carawan also offered the youth movement a further gift, his

“Ballad of the Sit-ins”: “The time was 1960, the place the USA / February

1st became a history making day / Greensboro across the land the news

spread far and wide / When silently and bravely youth took a giant stride.”

It is revealing of the independent spirit that drove SNCC that this

song, written by the white southerner Carawan, was quickly adapted

and changed by the four young black members of the Nashville Quartet.

The Nashville students both shifted it musically from ballad form to a

complicated rhythm and blues arrangement, and dropped a key lyric.

Carawan had written the line, “We are soldiers in the army of Martin

Luther King.” While the students respected King, they also distanced

themselves from him, especially from the patriarchal style of leadership

he and SCLC embodied. Some referred to him as “De Lawd,” and they

refused to sing the line about being in his army. Thus, the song embodies

the dynamic by which important white contributions to the movement

were always contextualized within what was at base a black liberation

struggle.

Albany: The Singing Movement Comes of Age

While the sit-ins and their follow-up, the freedom rides, were dramatic

actions garnering national media coverage, they were not typical of the

movement’s development. More typical was the slow, long-term process

of community organizing. An example of this kind of work, which was

also a high point in the freedom song movement, occurred in Albany,

Georgia, in 1961 and 1962. Bernice Reagon offers numerous examples of

freedom songs that evolved not only lyrically but musically as they moved

from site to site of struggle. The high mark of this process was no doubt

the Albany campaign as well. From Reagon’s perspective, as well as the

testimony of many others, the community of civil rights workers in

Albany took over, deepened, and expanded the role of freedom songs as

none had before. “The mass meetings always started with freedom songs.

Most of the meeting was singing. Songs were the bed of everything.”22

Even allowing for a little local bias (Reagon is from Albany), she makes

an excellent case. Albany was the place where all the components of the

freedom song repertoire coalesced into a kind of musical united front.

22 Singing Civil Rights

The old spirituals had deep resonance with the older members of the

community, and again played a key role in bringing people together

across class lines. Of course, the students brought their pop adaptations

into full play (it didn’t hurt that one of their favorite pop singers to

adapt, Ray Charles, was born in Albany). Another key source for the free-

dom song repertoire that also received important makeovers in Albany

was old labor songs like “Which Side Are You On?” The adult commu-

nity was the backbone of the Albany movement, and all the freedom

songs went through a new baptism into a deeper spirit coming out of a

rich local tradition of religious singing.

The musical alliance that was Albany culminated in the formation of

the most aggressive force yet for disseminating the power of freedom

songs, the Freedom Singers (originally Chuck Neblett, Ruth Harris, Ber-

nice Johnson Reagon, Cordell Reagon, and Berth Gober). While other

musical groups, such as the Montgomery Gospel Trio, the Nashville

Quartet, and so forth, had played important local roles, the power of

music in the Albany campaign convinced SNCC that a musical group

could play an even larger movement role. The Freedom Singers eventu-

ally crossed the country many times, singing the movement story and

raising funds through their concerts. They were particularly effective in

bringing movement messages to the North and to young people on col-

lege campuses. The Freedom Singers also became associated with a bur-

geoning white folk song revival centered in Greenwich Village, New

York. That connection proved a key link in recruiting northern white

students to the civil rights cause. Freedom Summer of 1964, a massive

SNCC campaign that brought more than a thousand northern students

to Mississippi for three months of intensive movement activity, was

greatly facilitated by links the Freedom Singers had made. Freedom Sum-

mer in turn proved to be of immense importance as a training ground

for many of the activists who built the full range of student, antiwar,

women’s liberation, gay liberation, and other movements of the 1960s.23

The Freedom Singers gave institutional form to something that had

already become clear: music was a vital political force in the movement.

White Terrorism and Litanies against Fear

“When you get together at a mass meeting you sing the songs which

symbolize transformation, which make that revolution of courage inside

you,” said Bernice Johnson Reagon.24 And, as movement historian Charles

Singing Civil Rights 23

Payne writes, “The music operated as a kind of litany against fear.”25

Or, as put in song: “Oh freedom over me, Oh freedom / I’ll be buried in

my grave before I’ll be a slave / No segregation over me, No segrega-

tion / I’ll be buried in my grave before I’ll be a slave.”26 The brutal mur-

der of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, a Chicago native visiting relatives

in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1955 was in many respects an ordinary act

of southern white terrorism. Estimates suggest that between the end of

the Civil War and the 1950s, more than four thousand lynchings of blacks

by whites occurred in America (most, but not all, in the South). Well

into the twentieth century, lynching was a “spectator sport” enjoyed by

all classes in the white community; whole families would come out to

watch. Postcards of favorite lynchings were made to send to friends and

relatives.27 Thus, while Till’s case was nothing new, the context of new

times brought new attention to it. Till’s twin “crimes” — allegedly speak-

ing “fresh” to a white woman and mentioning that he had a white girl-

friend back home in the North — were typical of the slight pretexts used

to justify these murders. Till was taken out of his home late at night, tor-

tured, mutilated, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River with a weight

attached to his body. The weight was not enough to keep the crime from

surfacing, and when it did, it led to a trial that received national atten-

tion. The act was common enough that one local white man could muse

that he didn’t see what all the fuss was about since “that river is full of

niggers.”28 What was new was not the act, but the national and even in-

ternational attention that it drew. The shift in attitudes suggested by

the Brown v. Board of Education victory in 1954 was further evidenced

by media attention and some protestations of outrage from parts of the

white community. Still, it was not enough, and despite confessing to

the murder, the two men responsible were acquitted and “southern jus-

tice” affirmed.

The Till case was one of many atrocities of whites against blacks that

gained attention or, more often, remained in obscurity during the move-

ment years. At least two other murders of blacks, both tied, unlike Till,

directly to movement activity, occurred in Mississippi in 1955 alone. The

new level of black resistance in the wake of the Brown decision was

matched by renewed white terror and organization. The white Citizens’

Council, for example, emerged at this time. Described as combining “the

agenda of the Klan with the demeanor of the Rotary” club, it provided a

seemingly more respectable face for white supremacy, but was ready to

24 Singing Civil Rights

use any means necessary to maintain white power.29 But each new act of

terror and each new level of renewed white support for segregation was

met with greater resolve and redoubled efforts by the antiracist forces of

the movement. Many of the young women and men who formed the

cadre of activists in the peak movement years of the early 1960s recalled

seeing images of Till’s dead, damaged body in the pages of Jet magazine.

Some vowed then and there to avenge his death.30 Till’s story was kept

alive by movement song activists, and later folk-rock singer Bob Dylan

further immortalized him lyrically in his “Ballad of Emmett Till.”

The unmistakable intended meaning of the Till murder and others

like it is put succinctly by Charles Payne: “Black life could be snuffed

out on whim, you could be killed because some ignorant white man

didn’t like the color of your shirt or the way you drove your wagon. . . .

Those who wanted to work for change had to understand that they were

challenging a system that could and would take their lives casually.”31

Most of the imagined acts that allegedly precipitated lynching were as

flimsy as the accusation used in the Till case. If one could be killed for

an innocent remark, or in another contemporaneous case, for not get-

ting out of the way of a white man driving his car, then how much more

dangerous must it have been to openly challenge the racial hierarchy

that random terror was meant to uphold. Imagine what danger faced a

civil rights worker under such conditions. Virtually everyone who took

up the civil rights cause in the South, black or white, was essentially put

under threat of death. They could expect to lose their jobs, be beaten

many times, have their homes fire-bombed or fired on in drive-by

shootings, have threats made against the lives of their children and other

relatives. If these acts of intimidation did not work, and for most they

did not, then the next level was assassination. The list of those who died

for the civil rights cause is a long one.

While song was not the only means by which fear was overcome, it

appears again and again in accounts of that process. The “litanies against

fear” that freedom songs became were an indispensable part of a deep-

seated process of personal political transformation. As Bruce Hartford

remembers it, “We were singing. . . . Somehow, I can’t explain it, through

the singing and the sense of solidarity we made a kind of psychological

barrier between us and the mob. Somehow we made such a wall of

strength that they couldn’t physically push through it to hit us with

their sticks. It wasn’t visual, but you could almost see our singing and

Singing Civil Rights 25

our unity pushing them back.”32 Cordell Reagon’s choice of words is

likewise revealing in this regard: “You know you are . . . going to get . . .

beaten, you know you might even get killed, but the sound, the power

of the community, was watching over you and keeping you safe.”33 Note

that it is “sound” that contains the power of community, the sound of

the freedom songs.

The direct practical power of this singing as empowerment is illus-

trated by an occurrence during one of the dramatic follow-ups to the

sit-in wave, the “freedom rides.” The freedom riders were black and white

activists attempting to ride interstate buses across the South, stopping

at and integrating bus stations along the way. The rides met with brutal

resistance at virtually every stop. There were so many casualties among

the CORE volunteers who started the rides that SNCC had to step in to

replenish the ranks. After the bombing of buses in two cities, after brutal

beatings in other cities, the freedom riders crossed the border into the

most vicious state in all the South, Mississippi. One of the ride organiz-

ers, CORE’s James Farmer, recalls that crossing: “Our hearts jumped

into our mouths. The Mississippi National Guard flanked the highway,

their guns pointed toward the forest on both sides of the road. One of

the riders broke out singing, and we all picked it up. I remember the

words: ‘I’m taking a ride on the Greyhound bus line / I’m riding the front

seat to Jackson this time / Hallelujah I’m a traveling / Hallelujah ain’t it

fine / Hallelujah I’m a traveling / Down freedom’s main line.’ ”34 This

spontaneous generation of new verses helped calm the fear by remind-

ing the freedom riders that they had been there before, and they had

survived. At the same time, it incorporated the new foe into the familiar

terrain of the foe already met and faced down, and thereby cut the enemy

down to size.

Another kind of song used against white terrorism was the parody.

These songs seem aimed at demystifying whites, showing their hypoc-

risy and the relative poverty of their motives in the struggle. This song,

for example, was sung to the tune “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know”: “Jesus

loves me cause I’m white / Lynch me a nigger every night. / Hate the

Jews and I hate the Pope / Jes’ me and my rope. / Jesus loves me, the Citi-

zens’ Council told me so.” And here is a rather different verse sung to

“We Shall Overcome”: “Deep in my heart, I do believe / We shall keep

the niggers down / They will never be free-eee-eee / They will never be

registered, / We shall keep the niggers down.”35 As Charles Payne notes,

26 Singing Civil Rights

much of the humor in these songs was “an attack on fear.” The Klan and

the Citizens’ Councils that held people in thrall were made less threaten-

ing. The courage to take on the life-threatening task of organizing could

be gently instilled.

The Western tradition as embodied in the English language makes a

series of reductive oppositional concepts that make little sense in the

context of the civil rights movement. Practical/idealistic, transcendent/

immanent, sacred/secular, spiritual/political, these oppositions make

little sense in a movement where transcendence, idealism, and spiritual-

ity generated great, immanent, practical, earthly power. “Over my head

I see freedom in the air.” There is a transcendence of self here that is also

an immanent sense of personal power. It is not transcendence based nec-

essarily in faith in a reward somewhere else. Traditional religion could

offer that. It was very much a sense of power and satisfaction and per-

sonal reward felt in the moment, in the movement. Freedom songs deep-

ened the sense of religious devotion in those whose connection to the

movement was rooted in Christianity, but it also worked on the spirit of

those with more secular orientations. Transcendence was immanent in

the fight. Freedom was in the air freedom fighters breathed, not up in

heaven. One verse that might otherwise seem strange makes perfect sense

in this context: “we’ll never turn back until we’ve all been free.” Note

that it is not until all “are free” but all have “been free.” The movement

didn’t just talk about freedom, it gave it. Being free was part of the ex-

perience of the movement. But “freedom is a constant struggle,” not a

state achieved once and for all. At the deepest level, that sense of free-

dom came from overcoming the fear of death. While transcending the

fear of death is often discussed as a metaphysical issue, in the movement

it was very much a practical political issue. Fear, including the ultimate

fear of death, had long been and was still a tool of white oppression.

Without the ability to overcome that fear, there would have been no civil

rights movement, no matter what political opportunities or economic

structures came into place.

Music as Strategy and Tactic

The movement did not happen because black people just “woke up one

morning with their minds set on freedom.” “Freedom is a constant strug-

gle.” “You have to keep your eyes on the prize,” not “let anybody turn

you round.” You have to know “which side you’re on,” “never turn back

Singing Civil Rights 27

until we’ve all been free and we have equality.” “We shall not be moved.”

“Ninety-nine and half percent” of commitment won’t do. “You better

leave segregation alone.”

These are lines quoted or paraphrased from freedom songs, rearranged

a bit and with a few prepositional phrases to provide continuity. I mean

to suggest in this way that a good many ideas about movement needs,

values, tactics, and ideology were conveyed and reiterated through song.

In addition to the key role of fighting off paralyzing fear, songs played

other strategic and tactical roles. As Charles Payne notes, “The changing

fortunes of the movement and the morale of its participants could have

been gauged by the intensity of the singing at the meetings. Music had

always been a central part of the black religious experience. Ministers

knew that a good choir was a good recruiting device. In the same fash-

ion, many who came to meetings came just to hear the singing.”36

This is music that bypasses the commercial interests of the music

industry, and it also downplays the importance of singing expertise.

Singing in the black tradition is very much a participatory event. Thus,

going to a meeting, even just to listen, could quickly lead to deeper levels

of involvement. Get their voices, one might say, and their politics will

follow. Music becomes more deeply ingrained in memory than mere talk,

and this quality made it a powerful organizing tool. It is one thing to

hear a political speech and remember an idea or two. It is quite another

to sing a song and have its politically charged verses become embla-

zoned on your memory. In singing you take on a deeper level of com-

mitment to an idea than if you only hear it spoken of. The movement

was all about “commitment,” and singing was often a halfway house to

commitment.

Music could be used to deepen specific kinds of engagement as well.

Mississippi organizer Sam Block, for example, recalls using songs strate-

gically to ease people into greater degrees of leadership. He recalls that

freedom songs were important as “an organizing tool to bring people

together — not only to bring them together but also the organizational

glue to hold them together. I started to give people the responsibility of

thinking about a song they would want to sing that night and of chang-

ing that song, you know, from a gospel song [to a freedom one].”37 This

deepening of commitment through song had much to do with the body

as well. Civil rights workers spoke often of “putting your body on the

line” for the cause. Bodies were literally the weapon of the movement,

28 Singing Civil Rights

and “on the line” often meant in the line of fire, for fists, firehoses, spit,

and sometimes bullets. The act of singing, as Bernice Reagon describes

so well, is also a deeply physical thing. To let your voice go, to put it “out

there,” was also in meetings a kind of rehearsal for, and in demonstra-

tions an act of, putting your body on the line. The sense of personal

power felt in the act of singing in full resonance among a mass of fel-

lows was translated into movement power on the front lines. Reagon

recalls a voter registration meeting in 1962 in which “the Negroes began

to sing. The voices that were weak at first gained strength as they moved

up the scale with the old familiar words ‘We are climbing Jacob’s lad-

der.’ ” When the local sheriff came to disrupt the meeting, the singing

grew stronger, culminating in a rousing chorus of “We Shall Overcome”

as the sheriff retreated.

Beyond helping recruitment and deepening commitment, music

served to convey the key values and tactics of the movement. Kerran

Sanger notes that often the order of verses in a song enacted a move from

abstractions (freedom, equality) to concrete acts to secure that value (sit-

ting in, going to jail, breaking an injunction).38 Various kinds of mass

demonstrations, from marches to civil disobedience actions, were cen-

tral to the movement. Initially, most demonstrations were silent, since

any sign of “rowdiness” would be used as a pretext for assault. Songs

were first used only in rallies and in workshops teaching nonviolence.

But eventually it became clear that they could become key elements in

demonstrations and civil disobedience actions. Any time large numbers

of black people gathered in the South, they were viewed as a threat, as a

potential mob. Singing (along with prayer) became a perfect way both

to keep a mass from becoming a mob, and to convey to opponents that

one was witnessing an organized event, not a mob action. Songs con-

veyed messages of quiet defiance, not rage, and clarified the values,

stakes, and issues of the action. Singing could be both a rehearsal for

collective activity and a direct part of the action. Singers are not gener-

ally imagined as threatening figures. By their very posture and activity,

the singing activists conveyed their nonviolent intentions.

Songs were often the primary means to convey this difficult idea of

nonviolent struggle. Nonviolence was a core value of the movement,

but like much else it was interpreted differently by different civil rights

workers. For some it was a deeply held, often religious principle. For

others, its value was primarily tactical. In some situations, particularly

Singing Civil Rights 29

in rural areas, activists were sometimes forced to carry guns in self-

defense, even as they remained committed to nonviolence in their move-

ment actions. Especially in a situation where the opponent had a near

monopoly on the tools of violence, and where the use of that violence

was often legitimated by public opinion, nonviolence is a powerful

weapon. Many songs juxtapose acts of violence on the part of the segre-

gationists to the nonviolence of the protesters: “We’ve met jail and vio-

lence too / But God’s love has seen us through,” or “We’re gonna board

that big Greyhound / Carrying love from town to town.” These verses,

both from “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” refer to the movement’s adap-

tation of Christian love for one’s enemies, as interpreted through the

long tradition of pacifism. Love was almost as great a theme as freedom

in the movement, used effectively to contrast with the hate unleashed

by white supremacy in the form of police dog attacks, beatings, and

myriad other forms of violence.

When situations did threaten to get out of control of the organizers,

music could also serve more proactively as a tactic to change the mood

and thereby the action of the participants. Music could calm a tense situ-

ation. Or music could ignite a tired mass. Sometimes the same song

could do either, depending on the tempo and spirit with which it was

sung. There is no such thing as a definitive version of a freedom song,

because they were constantly adapted to the needs of particular situa-

tions, conditions, and locales.

“We Shall Not Be Moved”: Communicating outside the Movement

That the freedom songs played many and varied roles internally in the

movement is abundantly clear. But what about songs as a means of com-

municating to the worlds outside the movement? Did the music have

the power to transform people not involved in the movement? Out-

right racist defenders of white supremacy were largely immune to that

power, though a few stories of such extreme conversions can be found.

But among those undecided, those unsure of how to think about the

movement, the effect could be quite significant. Many, many accounts

exist of bystanders being deeply moved by the dignity and power of the

protesters in song. As one activist put it, “The music doesn’t change gov-

ernments. Some bureaucrat or some politician isn’t going to be changed

by some music he hears. But we can change people — individual people.

30 Singing Civil Rights

The people can change governments.”39 In particular, the movement’s

singing power had an impact on the press, whose surprising degree of

sympathy for the civil rights activists is neither typical nor predictable,

given the norms of the profession. Compared to political rhetoric, with

which most white reporters had the familiarity that breeds contempt,

movement music was something else, a different register of ideas and

feelings against which the press had fewer built-in defenses. One white

southern journalist recalls that the “songs, the mass meetings, not only

made common place rituals of the society I lived in, the white society,

seem pale by contrast, but spoke a condemnation that made them too,

unpalatable.”40 Stories are also told of jailers and police sometimes moved

by the songs to lessen their brutality. Southern wardens often seemed to

enjoy the singing as a change from the dull routines of prison life, little

suspecting that they were witnessing not “darkies” singing but activists

communicating.

The nature of the audience of movement songs is a complicated ques-

tion. On the one hand, lyrical phrases like “We shall not be moved”

seem like statements directed at outsiders. But more often they seem to

me to be directed internally as a reminder not to “be moved.” Similarly,

we hear the phrase “We are not afraid,” and this seems at once wishful

thinking and a truth. Or, more properly, it is wishful thinking becoming

truth as the act of singing itself gives the courage not initially felt. Move-

ment songs seldom seem directly aimed at outsiders, because to do so

would be to lessen the activists’ sense of their own power. It was more as

if they were willing to be overheard making their musical declarations.

The more important outside audience for freedom songs was no doubt

the fence-sitters, sympathetic perhaps but confused, frightened, or just

not yet knowledgeable enough concerning what the movement was all

about. James Farmer, in jail during the freedom rides, rewrote the 1930s

labor song, “Which Side Are You On?” as a freedom song with just this

kind of work in mind: “I rewrote the old labor song . . . on the spur of

the moment in the Hinds County jail. After the Freedom Riders who

were imprisoned [with me] had been discussing and speculating about

the attitude of local Negroes regarding the Freedom Rides.” With this in

mind, his rewrite directly challenges the fence-sitters: “They say in Hinds

County, no neutrals have we met / You’re either for the Freedom Ride

or you ‘tom’ for [segregationist governor] Ross Barnett // Oh people

can you stand it, tell me how you can / Will you be an Uncle Tom or will

Singing Civil Rights 31

you be a man?” Challenging white-subservient “Uncle Toms” was the

most aggressive form of address to those not yet in the movement. More

common were songs of invitation, or songs that acknowledged levels of

commitment. A good example occurs in the song “I’m on My Way to

Freedom Land”: “I’ll ask my brother to come with me / I’m on my way,

Great God, I’m on my way // If he can’t come, I’m gonna go anyhow . . . //

If you can’t go, don’t hinder me // . . . If you can’t go, let your children

go, / I’m on my way, Great God, I’m on my way to freedom land.”41

This lyric allows three levels of commitment: “come with me,” or at least

“don’t hinder me” (perhaps by being an informer), and if you can’t

help, at least “let your children go.” This last line is especially important

because as the movement became youth-driven in many places after

1960, generational conflict became a vital issue. The best young orga-

nizers were those who built upon the knowledge and organizational

base of the World War II generation of activists in order to help bridge

this gap. A brilliant practitioner of this was young black organizer Bob

Moses, who after leaving graduate school at Harvard to join SNCC,

worked closely and respectfully with the older Mississippi veteran activist

Amzie Moore. As Charles Payne characterizes it, “Older activists [had]

created . . . cooptable networks, and a younger generation found new

uses for them.”42 In this process as in so many others, music proved a

useful bridging tool to bring older people in or at least to let their “chil-

dren go” to movement land.

Music, Collectivity, and Identity

Beyond particular strategic needs, music strengthened and transformed

personal and collective identity for movement workers. One of the main

dynamics in any social movement is the relationship between individ-

ual and collective identity. People enter movements as individuals, and

must continue to feel a sense of individual commitment, but at the same

time they must gain a sense of collective identity as part of the group

effort that is the defining feature of movements. The civil rights move-

ment handled this delicate balance of individualism and collectivity

better than most movements, and once again, music played a significant

role. Listen, for example, to this line from the most famous song in

movement repertoire, “We Shall Overcome”: “Deep in my heart I do

believe, we shall overcome some day.” Note how the line starts with an

individualized statement of commitment “I do believe,” then shifts to

32 Singing Civil Rights

the collective with “we shall overcome.” The song actually began its life

as a black spiritual, “I’ll Be Alright,” and was adapted in 1945 by the

mostly black, mostly female members of a tobacco union in Charlotte,

North Carolina. It was they who turned the “I’ll” to “We” to support their

collective union struggle. The song received further refinement and

adaptation to the civil rights struggle by Zilphia Horton, the first music

director at Highlander. She taught it to folksinger Pete Seeger who in turn

taught it in 1950 to the man who became Highlander’s second music

director, Guy Carawan. But it was not until 1960, when Carawan held a

South-wide song workshop, that the song started to gain a central role

in the movement. Three weeks after that, it was a featured song at the

founding SNCC convention. In making it their own, the students further

changed it musically and lyrically. Thus, the song most identified with

the collective identity of the movement evolved through many individ-

uals contributing to its creation.

Music, of course, was not the only force in shaping movement identi-

ties, but it clearly was among the most powerful. Bernice Reagon beau-

tifully illustrates, for example, how a moment of musical improvisation

can be a direct outgrowth of, and contributor to, collective action, even

as it also brings personal transformation. In the midst of a tense moment

during the struggle in Albany, Reagon recalls: “Charlie Jones looked at

me and said, ‘Bernice, sing a song.’ And I started ‘Over My Head I See

Trouble in the Air.’ By the time I got to where ‘trouble’ was supposed to

be, I didn’t see any trouble, so I put ‘freedom’ in there.”43 I suggest that

in the moment, Reagon is not simply expressing a change of feeling, but

enacting it as the music changes her. As she describes it: “The voice I

have now I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got

out of jail. I did the song, ‘Over My Head I See Freedom in the Air,’ but

I had never heard that voice before. I had never been that me before.

And once I became that me, I have never let that me go.”44 The notion

of being born again in the spirit is deep in certain Christian traditions.

As Reagon suggests, the movement bred such feelings too. The sense of

a freedom deeper than freedom pervades the stories told by movement

folks. The word transcendence is usually used to describe something

above and beyond mere politics. But in the movement, transcendence

of self was also a discovery of self. Gaining a sense of “somebodiness”

that was so crucially a part of the movement’s work often came para-

doxically when the self was given up to a larger whole, a collective spirit.

Singing Civil Rights 33

The claiming of a positive sense of blackness is often credited to the

black power phase of the African American freedom struggle in the lat-

ter part of the 1960s, but the civil rights years laid down some impor-

tant elements of that identity reclamation project. And music was a key

part of that project. For many southern blacks, particularly those from

the middle classes, the great spirituals and gospel songs reworked by the

movement were part of a heritage they sought to deny in favor of cul-

tural forms with more cachet in the white world. For many movement

participants, reclaiming freedom songs was part of claiming an identity

as self-defined black people proud of their ancestry, rather than as

white-defined “Negroes.” The urban black power identity, discussed in

the next chapter, owes more of a debt to the civil rights phase of the

movement than is generally acknowledged.

Charles Payne summarizes this evolutionary process as embodied in

the music and other rituals of local mass meetings: “Mixtures of the

sacred and the profane, the mass meetings could be a very powerful social

ritual. They attracted people and then helped them develop a sense of

involvement and solidarity. By acting out new definitions of their indi-

vidual and collective selves, people helped make those selves become

real. Informed and challenged by the speakers, pumped up by the singing

and the laughing and the sense of community, many of those who only

meant to go once out of curiosity left that first meeting thinking they

might come once more, just to see.”45 And that “once more” often be-

came many more, and that performed self-singing became the real self

acting for change.

Music as Captivity Narrative

Why freedom songs? Why not justice songs, or equality songs, or some

other term? Freedom was the touchstone word of the movement. The

songs and the movement had an elective affinity: freedom was from the

beginning a major theme of the movement, but the songs played a role

in making that concept even more central to movement ideology. Why

was that word so important? It had both breadth and depth. First, there

was the historical depth, the resonance with the major fact of black his-

tory, slavery, as we have already discussed. In addition, the term points

to an open-ended present and future; it could mean many things in

the imaginations of many different participants and potential partici-

34 Singing Civil Rights

pants. Freedom was also one of the few political words almost univer-

sally embraced by Americans, at least in theory. Equality, probably the

only competitor for the label, is by comparison, a far more controversial

concept. Perhaps most important, in the South the concept of freedom

had great resonance because all black people in the region had felt deeply

a sense of unfreedom, had felt fettered by having to restrain and contain

themselves in order to play the roles demanded by a segregated society.

While equality might have suggested a desire to be like white people,

freedom suggested an open horizon to explore the many realms that had

been declared out of bounds to black people. Freedom worked on many

levels, from the most intimate to the most broadly public.

There is another, more specific way in which freedom resonated espe-

cially well in the movement. One of the most important sites for both the

composition and singing of freedom songs was jail. Much of the move-

ment was based on the tactic of nonviolent civil disobedience, the pur-

poseful breaking of a law judged to be unjust. Since the whole system of

segregation was unjust to blacks, occasions for going to jail were many.

Beyond that, the entire civil rights movement was essentially declared

illegal by the white southern power structure that harassed activists con-

stantly, arresting them for petty or made-up offenses above and beyond

acts of civil disobedience. Going to jail, therefore, was a major fact of

life for movement participants, and it could be the most grueling and

dangerous part of the work. It could be particularly frightening for those

raised with conservative religious views. Thus, several songs have God

endorsing and even demanding the experience: “Well, have you been to

jail? certainly Lord, / Certainly, certainly, certainly Lord.”46

Freedom songs also became a favorite way to pass time, maintain soli-

darity, keep spirits high, and communicate while in jail. Incarceration

also provided long hours of time to write, rewrite, and otherwise develop

the freedom song tradition. “We were in the Hinds County jail, and we

were fasting and singing all the time. We were in separate cells, but we

could sing to each other so it wasn’t bad.”47 Another account shows how

music kept solidarity alive even in solitary confinement. Bob Zellner, a

white southern movement activist, was placed in solitary after being

threatened with castration by other white prisoners. His movement mate

Chuck McDew was placed in solitary at the same time. They were in

five-by-seven-foot cells with only a five-inch-square ventilation opening

Singing Civil Rights 35

and a small grate in the ceiling. Zellner heard a familiar whisper coming

from the ceiling, and realized McDew was in the cell directly above him:

“Then we sang. As the police pounded on the door threatening to whip

us we sang ‘Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Set on Freedom.’ Even

after they turned the heaters on and blasted us with unbearable heat for

seven days, we continued to sing — ‘We’ll walk hand in hand.’ ”48

Freedom songs did some of their best work in jail where they made

all the more palpable the feeling that freedom was in the air, air that

could move freely, like the mind and the spirit, out of the confines of a

prison cell or the prison house of a racist society.

Musical Pleasures

In stressing the important, even instrumental role music played in the

movement, one should remember that singing could be a plain old

source of pleasure and recreation. Movement work was often unimag-

inably arduous. In such a context, but in any movement context really,

there needs to be time for pleasure and relaxation. And there too music

was often the key. In addition to songs drawn into the movement for

specific practical uses, there was music around just for fun. SNCC

activist and later U.S. congressional representative John Lewis recalls that

in addition to the freedom songs, and sometimes as a respite from them,

he spent many a long drive down country roads listening to the latest

pop songs on local radio stations, especially with the emergence of “soul”

music in the 1960s.

“Soul” music later became, according to former Black Panther leader

Elaine Brown, the “soundtrack” to the black power movement and may

have, to a far lesser degree, played a political role in that phase of the

black freedom struggle. But in the context of the civil rights struggle, it

was more often the soundtrack used to forget the movement for a while.

Some pop songs, like Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road, Jack,” which became

“Get Your Rights, Jack,” or Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song,” which

found a freedom rider version, did become part of the freedom song

repertoire. But Lewis’s point is that the hard, patient, dangerous work of

organizing was grueling, and any movement that does not leave room

for just plain fun is likely to burn out its participants. Given the constant

threat they faced, this need was particularly strong in those freedom

fighters in the rural deep South, but everywhere music was in the air,

36 Singing Civil Rights

sometimes even in the form of freedom from freedom songs with their

powerfully disturbing reminders of the struggle.49

Singing as and against Ideology

“When Mrs. Hamer finishes singing a few freedom songs one is aware

that he has truly heard a fine political speech, stripped of the usual

rhetoric and filled with the anger and determination of the civil rights

movement. And on the other hand in her speeches there is the constant

thunder of and drive of music.”50 Fannie Lou Hamer was not alone in

being able to turn a series of songs into political speech. Many organiz-

ers learned to do something like this. The movement’s best organizers

understood that success required an unusual degree of openness in terms

of movement ideology and strategy. Situations varied so much from

state to state, county to county, and between rural and urban black com-

munities, not to mention the varied class, gender, sexual, and educational

backgrounds that further complicated organizing. A single approach to

ideology and struggle would most certainly have failed to create the soli-

darity necessary to succeed. Given this situation, songs were uniquely

suited as organizing tools. As we saw, sometimes people would just come

for the music, and then find themselves drawn into the fray before they

knew it. Movement ideas could be conveyed to the illiterate and to the

literate who were deeply rooted in an oral tradition.

The larger point here is that music, as the center but hardly the whole

of the movement culture, functioned as an overarching site. It served

not only as an active tactical force and strategic unifier but also, more

fundamentally, as a baseline context in which differences could coexist.

Movement cultures function best when they both express and move

beyond ideology. Ideologies — elaborated key ideas and values — are

crucially important to any movement. But they are also often the points

of contention that pull movements apart. The very vagueness (or more

positively, open-endedness) of “cultural” forms, which has kept many

social scientists from examining them seriously as a movement force, is

precisely one of their virtues. Sometimes open-ended expressions can

do work that more precise forms cannot. The “freedom” in freedom

songs was never very precisely defined. As we have seen, it could be made

very concrete in particular situations, such as the freedom to be served

respectfully at a lunch counter. But it could also mean many things to

Singing Civil Rights 37

many different people. Freedom songs formed the core of an extraordi-

narily rich movement culture that harmonized diverse constituencies,

values, strategies, tactics, and goals, and in doing so they became a cen-

tral force in moving this nation further down that long, unfinished

journey to a place beyond racism.

From Freedom Songs to Power Plays

The accomplishments of the civil rights movement between the mid-

1950s and mid-1960s are quite astonishing. Two major federal civil rights

acts in 1964 and 1965 greatly extended rights for all Americans, especially

for people of color. By the late 1960s the vicious system of legal segrega-

tion in the South had been almost totally dismantled, and with it much

of the systematic white terrorism that stood behind it. The Citizenship

Schools and Freedom Schools that grew up during the movement had

also by mid-decade laid the groundwork for the radical reworking of

black history that was a key stage in the evolution of what we now call

“multiculturalism.” Indeed, it is hard to overestimate the effect of the

civil rights movement in transforming American culture. Yet its limita-

tions must also be confronted. For many participants who could not see

the long-term impact of their actions, the movement seemed as much a

failure as a success by the mid-1960s. More recently, the movement has

borne the burden of mainstream acceptance, becoming hallowed as an

American success story by the very forces of complacency that stood in

the 1960s and stand now in the way of further progress toward racial

justice. The movement has become a museum piece, its radical power

stuck in amber, its meanings reduced to Martin Luther King Day plati-

tudes. This process of denying or forgetting the radical dimensions of

the movement began already in the late 1960s when new, allegedly more

radical forces arose in challenge.

On the Meredith march, one of the last great events of the civil rights

phase, SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael scripted a performance that

would signal a shift to new sites and styles of black struggle. Carmichael

planned his speech for the rally that night as a direct counter to and

challenge of Martin Luther King’s leadership of the march. Carmichael’s

chosen method of combat was a battle of key words. In such rallies, it

was common for a speaker to shout, in call and response style, “What

do we want?” to which the traditional civil rights response was “Free-

dom now!” But on this night Carmichael had asked his comrade Willie

38 Singing Civil Rights

Ricks to seed the audience with people armed with a different script.

Timed to Carmichael’s call, Ricks and others shouted back not “Free-

dom now!” but rather “Black power! Black power!” The phrase quickly

drew media attention, and was read as signaling a split in the movement.

As open-ended as the term freedom, the phrase black power came to

have a dizzying array of meanings, but at that moment it did indeed

signal a sea change in the movement.51

The civil rights movement had always been about power. It wielded

its power quite successfully in all the ways discussed here, and more

important, it empowered thousands of ordinary African Americans.

But especially for those on the front lines of SNCC and others among

the hardcore organizers, the accomplishments seemed thin compared

to the sacrifice, and the emotional and physical scars ran deep. In rela-

tion to the abiding poverty and continuing racism in the South and the

North, they did not feel very powerful. These people understood better

than most the work still undone. They particularly understood it when

they looked to the northern ghettos where a long period of freedom

from legal segregation had not removed other deep economic, political,

and cultural forces of racial injustice. Drawing strength from the south-

ern struggle even as it strongly critiqued it, the black power phase of

black struggle took center stage.

Singing Civil Rights 39

The scene opens in the parking lot of the California state capitol build-

ing in Sacramento. It is the spring of 1967. Thirty young black people,

twenty-four men and six women, are pulling rifles, twelve-gauge shot-

guns, and .357-magnum handguns out of their car trunks and loading

them. Dressed in uniforms of black berets, black leather jackets, and

powder blue shirts, they begin to move in loose formation up the steps

to the capitol. One of the young black men on the scene shouts, “Look

at Reagan run!” as then governor and future president Ronald Reagan

beats a hasty retreat in the face of this phalanx of armed black Ameri-

cans. But the troops are not especially interested in the governor. They

are headed into the legislative chamber. Some hold their guns pointed

to the sky, others point them to the ground. As they walk around the

outer perimeter of the assembly chamber, people clear a path for them

amid many astonished looks. Photographers and TV camera operators

are ahead of them, walking backward as they move closer to the doors of

the chamber. About five or six feet from the gateway into the assembly

hall, a security officer jumps in front of the black man at the head of the

action and shouts, “Where the hell are you goin’?” The man calmly

replies, “I am going to exercise my constitutional right to see my gov-

ernment making laws, and my right under the second amendment to

bear arms.”

Someone shouts with alarm, “There are Black Panthers with guns on

the second floor of the capitol!” And he is right. It is 2 May 1967, and the

men and women who appear to be about to raid the center of govern-

T W O

Scenarios for Revolution

The Drama of the Black Panthers

40

ment are members of the recently formed Black Panther Party for Self-

Defense. They have driven up in a caravan of cars from their headquar-

ters in Oakland.

Some of the armed Panthers make their way onto the assembly floor,

others are in the viewing balcony above. As the cameras continue to

roll, very confused-looking legislators mumble and shout. Amid much

agitation, the Panthers leave the scene and return to the capitol steps,

where Panther chairman Bobby Seale, leader of the action, reads Panther

minister of defense Huey Newton’s “Executive Mandate #1”: “The Black

Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon the American people in gen-

eral and the black people in particular to take careful note of the racist

California Legislature which is now considering legislation aimed at

keeping black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that

racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the ter-

ror, brutality, murder and repression of black people.”1 That night, TV

news around California, the nation, and the world presented pictures of

the dramatic encounter, including Seale reading the mandate, as in the

background, possibly for the first time, the noun motherfucker makes its

way onto broadcast television.

The black power movement was mostly an urban, northern move-

ment complementing, building on, and critiquing the mostly southern,

often more rural, civil rights phase of the black freedom movement.

Some argue that black power is part of the civil rights struggle, others

see it as a break with the movement. It was both. The peak years of black

power, roughly 1965–75, brought a profound transformation in Ameri-

can life, inside and beyond black communities. Black power brought a

sweeping change in consciousness and identity for black people, and it

shaped every level of African American life. While moderate and even

conservative voices continued to exist in the black community, the domi-

nant voices of the era spoke the language of black power.

The loudest of these voices belonged to members of the Black Pan-

ther Party, who burst onto the stage of history through the “scene” I

narrated above. The “real life” events on the capitol steps unfolded in

the dramatic way I have told them. The guerrilla theater siege of Sacra-

mento was one of many dramatic moments in what was a very dramatic

time. The talking blues, proto-rap artist Gil Scott-Heron sang in 1968

that the “revolution will not be televised.” But he was only half right.

Much of the revolution going on in America at that time was televised,

Scenarios for Revolution 41

or at least reported via the television, and that fact shaped the history of

the period in positive and negative ways. The black power phase of the

civil rights/black liberation movement dominated much of the iconog-

raphy and dramaturgy of the late 1960s. The phrase “the drama of the

Black Panthers” in my chapter subtitle is meant to name two different

things: (1) a body of theater work designed to act as part of the cultural

arm of the black power movement; and (2) the fact that much of the

black power movement itself, particularly the Black Panther Party, can

be understood as a kind of theatrical performance. This second point is

not meant to belittle the Black Panthers, but rather to take them more

seriously. All politics involves a theatrical element, and a failure to under-

stand the relation between the “poetics” and the “politics” of the Pan-

thers is a failure to understand them at all.2 Much of the public activity

of the Black Panthers was built around highly dramatic, stylized con-

frontations, often involving guns and the police. These are among the

main actions that earned them notoriety. This theatricality was in many

ways the most important cultural contribution of the Panthers, but it

was also their greatest political limitation.

Hegemony — the process of getting people to unwittingly consent to

their own oppression — takes place largely by accretion, by having many,

many sites reinforcing the same ideas. In the case of black Americans,

many sites in white and black America were very much teaching mes-

sages of black intellectual and cultural inferiority at the moment black

power arose. The cultural front of the black power movement exerted

considerable influence because it managed to launch new messages of

black pride and empowerment into so many different spaces on so many

levels of culture. The black power movement included an intellectual

formation, led by figures as diverse as Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Toni

Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, Ron Karenga, and Stokely Carmichael,

among many others, and it spawned an immensely influential new in-

tellectual field, black studies. Black power also included a variety of per-

vasive cultural formations in the literary and performing arts centered

on the notion of an independent “black aesthetic.” The black arts/black

aesthetic movement reshaped virtually all the arts: jazz and soul music,

painting, dance, poetry, and theater. Black power also reshaped black

theology, sports, even black folkways. It influenced what people ate (“soul

food”), what clothes and hairstyles they wore (African-derived fash-

42 Scenarios for Revolution

ions, “natural” or “Afro” hair), what holidays they celebrated (Kwanzaa

instead of Christmas), the language they spoke (a “soulful rap” express-

ing black pride, declaiming that “black is beautiful”), and the gestures

they made (black power handshakes, the raised-fist black power salute).

Many of these attributes and styles were said to possess “soul,” some-

thing like the everyday-life or folk equivalent of the black aesthetic in its

celebration of the unique and positive dimensions of black style.3 Black

power cultural forms also reshaped popular culture, particularly music,

drawing in previously nonpolitical performers like James Brown (“Say

It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud”), and generating a radical revision of

the talking blues in artists like Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets. While

music was not as central a force in the black power movement as it had

been in the civil rights struggle, it did provide the soundtrack for black

power, and even the Black Panthers had their own soul music group, The

Lumpens. In sum, virtually no corner of black life remained untouched

by radical cultural revisions.

The black power movement had within it a vast array of political ide-

ologies, and its most radical political agenda certainly was not achieved.

But as historian William Van Deburg argues, if it did not achieve the

political revolution many called for, it did succeed in revolutionizing

black consciousness in ways that continue to echo today and have pro-

found political importance. Van Deburg contends that “black power is

best understood as a broad, adaptive, cultural term serving to connect

and illuminate the differing ideological orientations of the movement’s

supporters. Conceptualized in this manner, the black power movement

does not appear, [as] it so often has, a cacophony of voices and actions

resulting in only minuscule gains for black people. Viewing the move-

ment through the window of culture allows us to see that language, folk

culture, religion, and the literary and performing arts served to spread

the militants’ philosophy farther than did mimeographed political broad-

sides.”4 Especially if one includes speeches among the “performing arts”

and also, as I will argue here, certain black power movement actions as

“theater,” I think this is an important insight. Much of the black power

movement’s political impact came through cultural channels, but with-

out the political movement that impact would have been much reduced.

The changes brought by the movement varied considerably in long-term

impact, and the key force accounting for these variations was the degree

Scenarios for Revolution 43

to which style changes were connected to specific political ideas and

movement fractions.

Black Nationalisms

As we saw at the end of chapter 1, the phrase black power had its origin

in a highly staged event during the southern struggle. Stokely Carmichael’s

dramatic use of the new phrase encapsulated an important rhetorical

and political shift in the black movement. The move from “freedom now”

to “black power” embodied a sense that overthrowing the constraints of

segregation would not be enough if substantial shifts in economic and

political power failed to follow. The new slogan’s immediate effect was

to deepen a split in the southern movement, but its larger, long-range

impact was mostly in northern ghettos.

Both the flair for dramatic symbolism and the rhetorical weight of

the phrase “black power!” moved rapidly to the center of the urban north-

ern phase of the movement. By 1967 “black power” was the term most

often used to name the northern struggle. The desperate, angry mood

of the ghettos was apparent through a series of “riots” or “urban insur-

rections,” depending on your ideological viewpoint, that tore up Amer-

ica in the 1960s. A series of “long hot summers” began with a violent

riot in the African American Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965, and

was followed in subsequent years by massive insurrections in Chicago,

Detroit, Newark, and a hundred other cities across the country. The

government commission investigating the “civil disturbances” found

evidence of “two Americas, one Black, one white,” moving in opposite

directions. The black power movement attempted to give shape to the

inchoate “black rage” that fueled the riots, and to turn it into empower-

ment rather than self-destruction.5

Stokely Carmichael’s version of “black power” had been sharpened

during his organizing of an alternative political party in Lowndes County,

Alabama, one of the most dangerous places in the South to organize.

The symbol of that party was a black panther, and some folks involved

referred to it as the “black panther party.” When a year later two brash

young black men, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, formed a new politi-

cal organization in Oakland, California, one of the nation’s toughest

ghettos, they named that party the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense

in homage to their Lowndes County predecessors.

44 Scenarios for Revolution

The new organization formed by Newton and Seale quickly became

the most visible, best known embodiment of the symbolism, rhetoric,

and ideology of this black power movement. The movement drew not

only on radical currents in the southern struggle, but also on a long his-

tory, going back at least to the eighteenth century, of African American

ideas and organizing under the concept of “black nationalism.” While

present in a variety of incarnations with quite different ideological agen-

das, from conservative to revolutionary, the essence of black nationalism

was the notion that in some sense blacks in America were a nation apart.

Rather than viewing this as a liability to be overcome through integra-

tion into white America, black nationalists argued that black people

should organize themselves to reflect pride in their history and culture,

and to gain a significant degree of independent economic and political

power. Due especially to the work of Malcolm X, black nationalism was

a mass force again by the time of his assassination in 1965.

The black nationalism of the 1960s is traditionally divided into two

main forms, cultural nationalism and political nationalism. Cultural

nationalists stressed the development of independent artistic and cultural

forms based in black tradition. Political nationalists stressed contestation

with and the need to radically alter the white-dominated political and

economic system. I want to complicate this useful but limiting distinction

by suggesting that cultural nationalism (represented by individuals like

poet-playwright Amiri Baraka) and political nationalism (represented

by the Black Panther Party) overlapped and intertwined in significant

ways. The distinction was and is a serious one; in at least one case it was

a deadly one, when armed conflict broke out between representatives of

the “political” Panthers and the “cultural” nationalists of Ron Karenga

in Los Angeles. But the cultural/political distinction is also misleading,

both because the cultural nationalists had political ideas and impact,

and, more to the point of this chapter, because the political nationalists

had cultural ideas and impact, an impact made largely through dra-

matic action.

A New Stage of Struggle

The early 1960s saw the rise of two entwined forces that would have a

dramatic impact on the style of the Panthers: the rhetoric of Malcolm X

and the theater of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka. I want to outline here a

Scenarios for Revolution 45

three-stage evolution of “black power dramatics,” from the dramatic

speeches of Malcolm X to the plays of Amiri Baraka to the real-life dra-

matic actions of the Black Panthers. Malcolm was to the northern ghetto

what Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had been to the southern strug-

gle — the great articulator. Malcolm’s views on Reverend King and the

civil rights struggle changed over time from hostility to respect and

qualified support, but throughout his life he argued that conditions in

the urban North demanded a different kind of rhetoric and a different

kind of strategy than the one used in the southern struggle. Malcolm

became the master of a rhetorically violent but carefully legal wake-up

call to the urban ghettos. He understood that for blacks in the North

the issue was not segregation, though there was plenty of that (missing

only the legal sanction given the southern form). Rather, the issue was

systematic degradation through a thousand deprivations — poverty,

demeaning jobs or unemployment, police brutality, everyday racist

insults, inadequate schools, substandard health care — that often led to

a sense of self-hatred and despair. Malcolm believed that only a kind of

shock therapy addressed to “Negroes” could turn them into proud black

actors on the national and world stage. Malcolm’s speeches sought,

through a metaphor drawn from slave days, to separate out what he

called the “house Negro” (or Uncle Tom) who upheld or accepted white

racism, from the “field Negroes” who had plotted slave insurrections or

violent revenge on the white masters.6

At the same time, and under the influence of Malcolm X’s rhetoric, a

young black poet and playwright named Leroi Jones was turning him-

self into Amiri Baraka. Jones transformed himself from a Greenwich

Village bohemian poet into the playwright Baraka who offered dra-

matic theater to match the dramatic rhetoric of Malcolm’s new black

nationalism. As part of a wider black arts movement that included radical

poetry, fiction, art, and music, a theater of action aimed to support and/

or enact a black revolution rose rapidly in the mid-1960s. The beginnings

of black power theater are usually traced to the work of Jones, who,

mirroring a larger process of renaming and collective transformation in

black identity in the 1960s, gave up his “slave name” to be reborn as Amiri

Baraka. Most historians of black culture see the production of Baraka’s

play The Dutchman, in 1964, as the opening salvo in the black theater

revolution. The Slave followed in that same year, and before long a

46 Scenarios for Revolution

whole movement emerged, with dozens of young playwrights following

Baraka’s lead.

In 1965, in an important symbolic gesture, Baraka moved from Green-

wich Village to Harlem, where he began the Black Arts Repertory Theatre

and School (BARTS). The school became a testing ground for many

black actors and playwrights, as well as a place for Baraka himself to ex-

periment. The civil rights movement had already produced one impor-

tant theatrical group, the Free Southern Theater, organized by SNCC,

and as black power emerged within SNCC that company’s work also

metamorphosed into a significant black power theatrical force in the

South. As it evolved, black power theater took many forms, from full-

scale plays to short vignettes meant to be enacted as street theater on

corners or lots in the ghetto. The most common form was the one-act

play — long enough to develop significant ideas but short enough to

reach an audience not used to theater-going. This latter point was im-

portant, as the playwrights sought to reach audiences beyond the small

middle-class black play-going contingent.

As theater historian Mance Williams describes it, the central task of

black power theater was to use dramatic enactments to overcome inter-

nalized self-hatred in blacks “who had been brainwashed and psycho-

logically maimed by centuries of physical and mental abuse” (a notion

of therapeutic violence found in the immensely influential psychiatrist

and theorist of decolonization, Frantz Fanon). For Baraka, violence

(rhetorical at least) was a key component of black arts, an element nec-

essary to break through crusted layers of internalized oppression in blacks

(and less directly to break through layers of complacency in whites).

At the level of style, the black theater movement sought to instill pride

by celebrating existing cultural elements in the black community, and

synthesizing them into elements of a distinctive “black aesthetic.” This

meant, according to Williams, that “it would synthesize and codify

all those creative and artistic expressions peculiar to Afro-Americans,”

including not only such indigenous arts forms as gospel music, spirituals,

jazz, the blues, and black dance forms, but also such broader cultural

styles as black English (black slang, syntax, diction, and speech rhythms)

and even elements of black kinesics (ways of walking, gesturing, and

body language generally).7 All these things were, often for the first time,

brought into black drama during these revolutionary years. The new

Scenarios for Revolution 47

black theater often utilized the “call and response” pattern that was built

into black religion and much black music to help create a more partici-

patory experience. Sometimes this was accomplished by putting an actual

church service on stage with a minister preaching black power or an

on-stage “congregation” challenging the lack of black power rhetoric in

a traditional minister. Either way, the audience was encouraged to join

in. This not only got a black power message across but also undermined

the authority of conservative clergy who often stood in the way of the

new radical phase of the movement.

In the spirit of black nationalist independence, Baraka insisted that

his Black Arts Theatre be run, produced, directed, and acted entirely by

blacks, and performed to all-black audiences. In cases where white char-

acters needed to be played, Baraka had black actors apply “whiteface,” in

symbolic contrast to the long racist tradition of minstrelsy, in which

white artists donned blackface makeup to give stereotyped imitations of

blacks. In his own plays, Baraka sometimes created self-consciously stereo-

typed whites as comic figures. His theater would be a “theater of assault”:

The Revolutionary Theatre, which is now peopled with victims, will soon begin to be peopled with new kinds of heroes . . . not the weak Hamlets debating whether or not they are ready to die for what’s on their minds, but men and women (and minds) digging out from under a thousand years of “high art” and weakfaced dalliance. We must make an art that will function as to call down the actual wrath of world spirit. We are witchdoctors, and assassins, but we will open a place for the true scientists to expand our consciousness. This is a theatre of assault. The play that will split the heavens for us will be called t h e d e s t ru c t i o n o f a m e r i c a . The heroes will be Crazy Horse, Denmark Vessey, Patrice Lumumba, but not history, not memory, not sad sentimental groping for a warmth in our despair; these will be new men, new heroes, and their enemies most of you who are reading this.8

Baraka’s assaults on white racism and black fear of freedom were very

powerful, and played an important role in the creation of a “black aes-

thetic” throughout the arts that echoes to this day.

At the same time, Baraka’s work was also often virulently misogynist,

sexist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and based on a confining notion of a

biological black essence. One reason to champion Black Panther theater

over Baraka’s work is that the party took official positions against these

hideous views, though certainly many members struggled unevenly with

them at the personal level.

48 Scenarios for Revolution

Where cultural nationalism often became frozen in black essences,

the revolutionary political nationalism of the Panthers continued to

evolve as political alliances broadened their vision. Newton expressed

his distance from purely cultural nationalists in these words:

There are two kinds of nationalism, revolutionary nationalism and reactionary nationalism. Revolutionary nationalism is first dependent upon a people’s revolution with the end goal being the people in power. . . .

Cultural nationalism, or pork chop nationalism, as I sometimes call it, is basically a problem of having the wrong political perspective. It seems to be a reaction instead of responding to political oppression. The cul- tural nationalists are concerned with returning to the old African culture and thereby regaining their identity and freedom. In other words, they feel that the African culture will automatically bring political freedom. . . .

The Black Panther Party, which is a revolutionary group of black people, realizes that we have to have an identity. We have to realize our Black heritage in order to give us strength to move on and progress. But as far as returning to the old African culture, it’s unnecessary and it’s not advantageous in many respects. We believe that culture itself will not liberate us. We’re going to need some stronger stuff.9

The Panthers’ political approach to culture proved richer than Baraka’s

cultural approach to politics, a fact Baraka himself implicitly acknowl-

edged when he later developed positions closer to the Marxist inter-

nationalism of the party.

Revolutionary Consciousness

While the Panthers rejected what Newton called “pork chop” cultural

nationalism (as if eating soul food was inherently liberating), they still

learned from it, especially from Baraka’s black power drama. Baraka’s

theatrical ideas influenced the Panthers, both directly through encounters

with his work (he lived in San Francisco in the late 1960s), and through

the playwright-theorist’s influence on another key figure in the new black

theater movement, Ed Bullins. A young playwright who had studied

with Baraka, Bullins became for a brief time minister of culture for the

Panthers and was in their orbit during their and his formative years.10

According to theater historian Williams, it was Bullins who sought to

move black power dramatic ideas more out into the community as “street

theater.”11 He is a key link along this line of moving theatricality ever

more fully into the movement itself.

Scenarios for Revolution 49

Bullins was also a founding member of Black House, a community

center/theater in San Francisco that was taken over by the Panthers soon

after another Black House founder, Eldridge Cleaver, became minister

of information for the party. The Panthers’ takeover of a community

theater is neatly emblematic of my argument that the party became the

leading edge of political-cultural theatrical nationalism. While the seizure

of Black House, and Bullins’s association with the party, offers evidence

of the Panthers’ direct connection to black power theater, my claim is

broader. My notion is that the party took a feel for drama beyond the

playhouse into Panther political actions. They took the kind of shock

action theatrics practiced by the new black playwrights out of the theaters

and into the streets.

Precisely where the interest in drama came from is something of a

side issue, but it is a suggestive fact that Panther cofounder Bobby Seale

had acted in local plays, and was by Newton’s account a brilliant mimic

who undermined the political positions of other, less radical white and

black leaders through his right-on imitations of their voices and styles:

“[Seale] could also imitate down to the last detail some of the brothers

around us. I would crack my sides laughing, not only because his imita-

tions were so good, but also because he could convey certain attitudes

and characteristics so sharply. He caught all their shortcomings, the way

their ideas failed to meet the needs of the people.”12 In a related claim, I

suggest that Panther actions were an imitative extension and critique of

cultural nationalist theater.

What theater historian Williams says about the theory and practice

of black drama in the 1960s could be said equally well of the theory and

practice of the Black Panther Party: “Many of the Black Revolutionary

Plays were based on myth, but the myth of revolution the Black play-

wrights created was no less real than if it had actually taken place. Since

theatre occurs in the mind, within the imagination of the spectators,

the illusion of revolution can affect the audience if its members are

willing to accept the possibility of the real events. In most cases these

plays were rituals and rites, designed for purposes of purgation and

catharsis and intended, through stylistic incantations, to will into reality

an actual revolution.”13 As Williams suggests, the line between a “real”

revolution and a revolution in consciousness is not absolute. It is in

play along this ambiguous line that I would locate the main successes of

both black power theater and black power as theater.

50 Scenarios for Revolution

Much of this dramatic theory, it seems to me, describes Black Panther

ideology as well as the party’s manifestos and speeches. Their impact

was dramatic, and their drama drove their impact. Certainly in the life

consciousness of one of the most famous black revolutionaries of the

era, Angela Davis, it was two dramatic events that she recalled as key

moments in her political awakening. Davis remembers that it was hear-

ing Malcolm X speak at Brandeis University that first awakened her to

blackness, and it was seeing the image of the armed Panthers on the

steps of the California legislature that affirmed in her a sense of the

possibility of concerted black revolutionary action. Studying in Germany

at the time with Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno, Davis saw that

image of the Panthers in the local Frankfurt newspaper and knew

instantly that something new was abrew in her homeland.14 It would

not be long before Davis’s own iconic image would have a similarly

empowering effect on young black and nonblack women and men

throughout the world. To lesser and greater degrees, dramatic images of

the Panthers (and their allies like Davis) awakened countless numbers of

Negroes into African Americanness. The mass media became enamored

of the Panthers, and provided them an audience many times larger than

that attending the plays of Baraka, Bullins, and the whole tribe of black

playwrights.

Black Panther Power Plays

As Angela Davis confirms, for many the Black Panther Party burst onto

the national and international scene through those carefully staged events

at the state capitol building in Sacramento with which this chapter began.

For my purposes it is a nice coincidence that at the time the governor of

California was Ronald Reagan, a man who himself had been an actor,

and who would later play a starring role as president in a tragicomic,

partly successful attempt in the 1980s to roll back many of the gains

made by the wave of social movements that peaked in the 1960s.

The director and lead actor of the Sacramento action, Newton and

Seale, had been friends at Merritt Junior College and later talked politics

together in the Oakland Poverty Center where Seale worked. Seeing first-

hand the limits of government poverty programs deepened their sense

of the troubles in the black community and confirmed their belief that

liberal reform would not touch those problems. Like their idol Mal-

colm, they understood the need for black people to organize themselves

Scenarios for Revolution 51

independent of white influence, and the need to find allies in the wider

(and whiter) society. In 1965 the assassination of Malcolm and the riots in

Watts deepened their conviction that the black community needed new

leadership. Their answer was to draft a Ten-Point Program for a group

they called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.15 The ten points

included bold demands for decent housing, education in black history,

full employment, and release of all people of color from military service

(because they should not fight in a racist war in Vietnam) and from

prisons (in white America their only real crime was being black). The

document ended by quoting the Declaration of Independence to drive

home the point that the black community was declaring independence

from white supremacy.

The influences behind Black Panther ideology are summed up neatly

by the allegorical naming of Chairman Bobby Seale’s son, who was born

during the black power era. Seale named the boy Malik Nkrumah

Stagolee Seale. Malik, the Muslim name adopted by Malcolm X, repre-

sents the legacy of black nationalism in the U.S.; Nkrumah, for Kwame

Nkrumah, famed leader of anticolonialism in Africa, represents the Third

World internationalism of the Panthers; and Stagolee, notorious bad

dude of black folklore, represents the Panthers’ commitment to the ordi-

nary street “brothas and sistas” of the black community.

This last identity is perhaps the most original contribution of the

Panthers, for just as Baraka had put street dudes on the stage as charac-

ters, Black Panther theater took black street style and recoded it with a

revolutionary new message. The aura of violence in the blues/folkloric

image of Stagolee as the tough black dude (and to a lesser degree bluesy

“nasty gals”) gets transferred into a threat of black self-defense, and pos-

sibly offense, against whites. Many young black men and women, often

after passing through the battle zones of riots/insurrections, began to

transform the strut and stride of the street hustler into the assertive

posture of the black revolutionary. Anthropologists and sociologists

have long noted the deep importance of “performativity” in the black

community, the premium put on highly stylized forms of behavior. In

this cultural context, Panther style was substance. The black aesthetic

movement popularized the expression “black is beautiful,” but it was

the beautiful men and women of the Panthers, standing erect, nattily

dressed in black leather, arms raised in clenched-fist black power salutes,

marching in tight formation, who gave body to the phrase. The Panthers

52 Scenarios for Revolution

were nothing if not telegenic. The television screens in late 1960s Amer-

ica were filled with images of Panthers looking both black and power-

ful. The message contained in those theatrical gestures helped awaken

thousands of black people to new ways of being, especially when backed

by street-level organizing, powerful community word of mouth, and

concrete programs.

While the Sacramento action was the party’s most famous theatrical

work, I would argue that it was merely an extension of the theatrical

practice at the center of their activity. The Panthers also understood

early on that they needed to win over the ghetto community with more

than talk. They were not above such far-from-revolutionary acts as get-

ting a stoplight installed in a dangerous intersection when the city power

structure’s indifference to black life had led to the death of several chil-

dren. Informing the city officials that armed Panthers would stand guard

at the intersection until a light was installed proved just the leverage

needed to get the job done. Eventually they evolved a whole series of

“survival programs” as interim offers of the many things demanded in

the Ten-Point Program — including free food, education, clothing, med-

ical care, and legal counseling.

A better known early part of the Panthers’ dramatic presence in the

black community took the form of their policing of the police. Panther

members, armed with rifles and law books, would follow police officers

around Oakland, patrolling for police brutality and other violations of

the rights of black citizens of the city. In the spirit of the civil rights

movement, they were creating an alternative, parallel institution. But

this one was different. In effect, this strategy was the mirror image of

that key civil rights movement strategy, civil disobedience. Law books

and civil codes were used to symbolize that the police were engaged in

uncivil disobedience to law, and that the Panthers were there to enforce

the letter of the law. The action reversed the gaze of surveillance, so that

the watchers were now the ones being watched.

Carrying guns was meant to challenge symbolically the state’s monop-

oly on the use of violence, and to give notice that guns used to enforce

white supremacy would be met by black self-defense. Realizing that

legal fictions covered up oppressive practices, the Panthers were not

attacking the law but exposing its racist application. Where in the South

segregation laws were the clear enemy, in the North a more complex sit-

uation existed in which putatively equal laws rendered invisible de facto

Scenarios for Revolution 53

segregation in housing and employment, unequal schools, and routine

police harassment and brutality for the unwritten crime of being black

in white America.

As an article in the party paper summarized their position: “The

Black Panther Party recognizes, as do all Marxist revolutionaries, that

the only response to the violence of the ruling class is the revolutionary

violence of the people. The Black Panther Party recognizes this truth

not as some unspecified Marxist-Leninist truism, but as the basic premise

of relating to the colonial oppression of Black people in the heartland of

Imperialism where the white ruling class, through its occupation police

forces, agents and dope peddlers, institutionally terrorizes the Black

community. Revolutionary strategy for Black people in America begins

with the defensive movement of picking up the Gun, as the condition for

ending the pigs’ reign of terror by the Gun.”16

The Panthers knew that their actions would be seen very differently

in the “two Americas, one white, one Black” described in the U.S. govern-

ment’s official report on the civil disturbances rocking the ghetto. Bobby

Seale’s discussion of Newton’s planning around the Sacramento “inva-

sion” (as the white world reported it) shows his clear sense of this dual

audience: “When brother Huey planned Sacramento he said, ‘Now the

papers are going to call us thugs and hoodlums.’. . . But the brothers on

the block who the man’s been calling thugs and hoodlums for 100 years,

they’re going to say, ‘Them’s some out of sight thugs and hoodlums up

there.’ ”17 Indeed, events like Sacramento brought the “brothers” and

the “sisters” pouring into the organization. In less than two years, there

were Panther chapters in cities around the country, including New York;

New Haven, Connecticut; Raleigh, North Carolina; Detroit, Michigan;

Chicago; and Los Angeles. The party’s newspaper, The Black Panther,

had a peak circulation of nearly 140,000 by 1970. A Harris poll done for

Time Magazine in March 1970 found that one out of four blacks in Amer-

ica had a “great deal of admiration” for the Panthers. A Market Dynam-

ics/ABC poll taken later that same year found the Panthers judged to be

the organization “most likely” to increase the effectiveness of the black

liberation struggle. Two-thirds of blacks polled showed admiration for

the organization, despite by that time four years of vilification in the

white press and constant harassment by law enforcement.

Does this mean that Black Panther revolutionary ideology was

embraced by the black community? Probably not. It was far more likely

54 Scenarios for Revolution

that Black Panther theater was embraced by the community in the sense

that images of proud black men and women in black berets facing down

cops gave evidence of a new kind of black person in the world, one who

would not bow to racism any more. In this sense, Black Panther theater

proved far more successful than the specifics of Black Panther ideology,

though the former sometimes carried with it significant elements of the

latter, especially for the hundreds who were drawn by those images to

join the party.

The task of playing along the line I have been sketching between

“poetics” and “politics,” and between two very different audiences, was a

very tricky one. Some of the difficulties are clear in this interview of

Panther David Hilliard with two CBS correspondents, George Herman

and Ike Pappas, and Washington Post reporter Bernard Nossiter on 28

December 1969.

mr. pappas: . . . I was at the [anti–Vietnam War] Moratorium Day ceremonies and I heard [you say] “We will kill Richard Nixon. We will kill anyone. Any blankety-blank who stands in the way of our freedom.” And it is a very simple question: Do you think Richard Nixon is standing in the way of your freedom? Number two, would you kill him?

mr. hilliard: . . . I would say that Richard Nixon is the chief spokes- man for the American people. He is the highest official in this land. If Richard Nixon stands in opposition to freedom guaranteed to us under the alleged constitution, then the man is designated as enemy. But I did not and I will not here designate — I will not take responsibility of saying assassinate anybody.

mr. nossiter: Well, what you are suggesting, Mr. Hilliard, is that this was a metaphor, a figure of speech out in San Francisco.

mr. hilliard: I am saying that it was political rhetoric. We can call it a metaphor. It is the language of the ghetto. This is the way we relate. Even the profanity, the profanity is within the idiom of the oppressed people. So in the context of that speech I said that and I am not going to take that back.

mr. nossiter: Okay. Then let me ask you this: Is your revolutionary — are your revolutionary slogans, are these too metaphors? Is this also rhetoric or do Panthers literally believe that a violent overthrow of the government must take place in this country?

mr. hilliard: Let’s just say this: Let’s say that we could have our free- dom without a shot being fired, but we know that the imperialists, that the fascists on a very local level would not withdraw from the arena without violence. They have proven themselves very violent and thus

Scenarios for Revolution 55

far haven’t done anything to insure us our freedom. We were in the forefront of peaceful demonstrations for peace abroad, while right here at home we are being victims of attacks day and night by the criminal agencies manifested in police departments. Our slogan is that we want an abolition to war, but we do understand that in order to get rid of the gun it will be necessary to take up the gun.18

Hilliard is trying tortuously to add nuance to a discussion the jour-

nalists want to force into easy oppositions. He is trying to talk about the

violence of racism as it affects the black community in America, and

he is arguing that the possibility of radical change without violence

has been rejected by the powers that be. He is also suggesting that his

“political rhetoric” performed for a black audience (in “the language of

the ghetto”) is systematically misheard by the white world. He is even

willing to grant that his violent talk is a “metaphor,” but at the same

time he does not want to lose its force as a “weapon” of change justified as

defense against racist and “imperialist” violence. As the party did often,

Hilliard is pointing to the hypocrisy of a power structure that drops

tons of bombs on Vietnam and exercises police brutality daily in the

ghettos and yet criticizes the violence of his mere words.

While the Leninist-Maoist rhetoric of the Panthers could at times

become numbing, it was often combined with enough street-smart “jive”

to serve as radical political education. Just as the cool hustler became

the cool revolutionary, the fast-talking jive of the street became a machine-

gun fast rhetoric uniting class and racial analysis: “The United States of

America is a barbaric organization controlled and operated by avari-

cious, sadistic, bloodthirsty thieves. The United States of America is the

Number One exploiter and oppressor of the whole world. The inhuman

capitalistic system which defines the core reality of the United States is

the root of the evil that has polluted the very fabric of existence.”19 As

Nikhil Singh points out, the Panthers had dramatic success in their

“attempts to politicize and reshape the frequently episodic and disjointed

life-world of urban, Black subalterns by replacing everyday violence

and temporary fulfillments of hustling and surviving with a purposive

framework for political action.”20

Most of the dramatic impact of the Panthers came not in the form of

shootouts, but in day-to-day performances: speeches, marches into

demonstrations and rallies, press conferences, and so forth. They were

56 Scenarios for Revolution

an unmistakable presence both in the black community and in the white

media, especially television. As Van Deburg remarks, the “black power

movement brought irrevocable changes in the Afro-Americans’ atti-

tudes both about themselves and about the legitimacy of the white world

order.”21 No single force moved those changes along more than the atti-

tudes projected in both the rhetoric and the iconographic postures of

the Panthers. While to many the Panthers may have seemed to be engag-

ing in mere posturing, to many others their revolutionary posture spoke

volumes about no longer knuckling under to white power. Those people

may not have believed that a revolution was at hand, but they got the

message that only a new kind of black person would dare even to speak

revolution to the white world.

Panther Party Organization and Ideology

The organizational pattern chosen by Newton and Seale for their new

party was essentially a military one. Feeling that black people on the

street needed discipline, they structured the Black Panther Party as a

rigid hierarchy with a central committee made up of various ministers

(of defense, information, culture, and so forth), and emphasized military-

style training in arms use and marching in formation. The Marxist van-

guard element was based on the idea that “the people” needed to be

educated to their oppressed condition and have resistance to oppression

modeled for them by a dedicated cadre of revolutionary activists. In

contrast to the organizing tradition invoked in the southern struggle,

the party took a position, derived indirectly from Lenin and Mao, that

radical change needed to be pushed by an enlightened elite.

While the rigidity of this organizational structure would come to

haunt the party, the Panthers espoused an open-ended, coalitional poli-

tics that allowed them to evolve politically over time. Newton describes

the main changes he, as the party’s chief theorist, did much to shape:

In 1966 we called . . . ourselves Black Nationalists because we thought that nationhood was the answer. Shortly after that we decided that what was really needed was a revolutionary nationalism, that is a nationalism plus socialism. After analyzing conditions a little more, we found that it was impractical and even contradictory. . . . We saw that in order to be free we had to crush the ruling circle and therefore we had to unite with the peoples of the world. So we called ourselves Internationalists. . . . But

Scenarios for Revolution 57

since no nation exists [in a transnational world], and since the United States is in fact an empire, it is impossible for us to be Internationalists. These transformations and phenomena require us to call ourselves “intercommunalists” because nations have been transformed into communities of the world.22

The Panthers were a key force in the development of a Third World/

internal colonial position that featured alliances with postcolonial and

revolutionary groups in the developing world, and alliances with other

radicals of color within the United States. The rhetorical/political trick

of identifying U.S. people of color as part of the Third World trans-

formed an American “minority” into a global “majority.” The Panthers

developed alliances with revolutionary groups in Cuba, Southeast Asia,

the Middle East, and Africa, and with U.S. radicals including the Amer-

ican Indian Movement (AIM), the Chicano Brown Berets, the Puerto

Rican Young Lords, and the Asian American I Wor Keun (Red Guard).

They also allied themselves with white radicals like those in the Peace

and Freedom Party and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Late in the 1960s the Panthers made connections also to feminist and

gay liberationist groups. The clearest example of this is a piece Newton

published as a pamphlet in 1970, and reissued in 1972, as part of a col-

lection of his essays and speeches, To Die for the People, edited by Toni

Morrison. Entitled “The Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Move-

ments,” the essay was apparently prompted in part by his friend, the

French playwright Jean Genet, known for his radical gay views. Newton

wrote, “We haven’t established a revolutionary value system; we’re only

in the process of establishing it. I don’t remember us ever constituting any

value that said that a revolutionary must say offensive things towards

homosexuals, or that a revolutionary should make sure that women do

not speak out about their own particular kind of injustice. . . . [We Pan-

thers] say that we recognize the women’s right to be free. We haven’t said

much about the homosexual at all, and we must relate to the homosex-

ual movement because it’s a real thing. And I know through reading

and through my life experience, my observations, that homosexuals are

not given freedom and liberty by anyone in society. Maybe they might

be the most oppressed people in the society.”23 These statements, and

the alliances built to put them into practice, undercut the isolation and

freezing of “blackness” that limited the effectiveness of many other black

nationalist organizations. To be sure, the Panthers did not always prac-

58 Scenarios for Revolution

tice what they preached, but they left a legacy of struggle with multiple

forms of oppression that has often been lost in histories of black power

that deal only with race and in recent forms of neo-nationalism that

claim the Panther legacy but remain sexist and homophobic, and treat

blackness as a cultural or biological essence, rather than as a historically

constructed and changing strategic identity.

These ideological positions are an important legacy for those who

care about progressive change in black America. They can serve as an

antidote to insular black separatist versions of nationalism that isolate

the black community from the kind of wider alliances that alone can

bring significant, structural economic and political change. It is impor-

tant to realize that the Panthers’ larger ideological gestures were always

matched by the specific demands of the Ten-Point Program, and by

their everyday actions in bringing food, medicine, education, trans-

portation, childcare, and elder care to the communities via the survival

programs.

Courtroom Dramas and Acts of Repression

The inability, or unwillingness, of the white world and its forces of law

and order to appreciate the distinctions Hilliard and other Panthers

labored to explain meant that the real theatricality of the Panthers’ vio-

lent rhetoric led to much real violence in the form of gunfights with the

police. From the police patrols onward, the Panthers had always been

extremely careful to know and work within the law. When the law they

were protesting in Sacramento was passed, for example, they immedi-

ately stopped the armed police patrols. Not surprisingly, Panther street

theater, with its use of former real-life street “hoodlums” among the

supporting cast, did not play so well to law enforcement audiences. Not

only did the local Oakland police dedicate themselves to stamping out

the organization, but soon FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared the

Panthers the “most dangerous extremist group in America.” Eventually,

so many FBI-placed “extras” (infiltrators) became part of Panther dramas

that the question of who was writing the script becomes impossible to

answer.

A murderous cat-and-mouse game, in which the cool-cat Panthers

came more and more to look like the mice, began to unfold. It became

increasingly difficult for the party to uphold its claim to be working

within the letter of the law. Those Sacramento protesters had been

Scenarios for Revolution 59

arrested, with most getting six-month sentences. This continued a pat-

tern already set by the Oakland police, and dozens of harassing arrests

followed. Most of these trumped-up arrests ended in acquittals, but even

those tied up the organization’s funds and personnel for years to come.

In select cases, notably that of party chairman Huey Newton himself,

arrested for the alleged murder of a police officer, the trials became

national and international events. Though eventually acquitted of the

crime after a series of trials, Newton spent three years in prison, from

1967 to 1970. Those were crucial years for the party. While Newton con-

tinued to try to direct that Panthers from inside prison walls, and a mas-

sive “Free Huey” campaign became a major rallying point and fundrais-

ing source for the group, the loss was considerable. Much of the time

Panther theater was reduced to the “radical chic” drawing room dramas

lampooned by conservative new journalist Tom Wolfe. These well-staged

shakedowns of rich and guilty white liberals proved effective in raising

funds but did little to push the revolution forward.24

Co-founder Seale also became involved in a major courtroom drama

when he and seven white radicals became the notorious Chicago Eight,

charged with fomenting the confrontations surrounding the Democratic

60 Scenarios for Revolution

Black Panthers invade the California state capitol. Courtesy of the Sacramento Bee.

Party convention in Chicago in 1968. Seale’s co-defendants included

Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the clown princes of the white new left

and founders of the surrealist, countercultural Youth International Party,

or Yippies. The theatrical Yippie organizers came to their trial dressed

in the costumes of the American Revolution and did their best (and

their best was very good) to turn the courtroom into a circus. Denied a

change of lawyer, Seale was forced to represent himself in the trial. He

soon so irritated the judge, Julius Hoffman (whom Abbie facetiously

called Uncle Julie), that he was declared in contempt, and ordered bound

and gagged in the courtroom. This image of Seale, the sole black defen-

dant, receiving not blind but shackled and gagged justice in the white

man’s courtroom played powerfully in the court of black public opinion,

confirming the Panthers’ longstanding claim that they faced only kan-

garoo courts, not courts of justice.

With key leaders already in jail, the FBI and other agencies unleashed

a sweeping, vicious program of repression against the Panthers and other

radicals in the late 1960s through COINTELPRO (short for Counter

Intelligence Program). Between 1967 and 1971 COINTELPRO employed

more than seven thousand undercover agents and police informers to

infiltrate the Panthers and other radical groups with the mission of dis-

rupting their efforts by any means necessary. This included falsifying

documents in an attempt to create power struggles within the organiza-

tion and between the Panthers and other black radical groups. Most

COINTELPRO efforts were focused on increasing the level of violence

among the Panthers; in at least one case this meant providing dynamite

to a Panther chapter.25 The state was attempting to erase the distinction

between self-defense and offense, and it successfully forced a literaliza-

tion of Panther theater. Pushing the Black Panther Party across the

line from symbolic to literal violence was one of the main goals of

COINTELPRO.

The two most important intellectuals influencing the black power

movement, Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X, both had argued that violence

was one of the necessary means of awakening Negroes into the power

of blackness. Fanon, writing in the context of anticolonial struggles of

Third World majority populations ousting white minorities, analyzed

how in revolutionary situations symbolic violence could turn into armed

struggle. But the late 1960s in America was not a revolutionary situation

in the military sense. The Panthers’ genius was in showing that the threat

Scenarios for Revolution 61

of violent self-defense could be used to expose the everyday violence of

police brutality and the structural violence of poverty. In March 1968,

the Panther minister of information expressed it this way in the party

paper: “Let us make one thing crystal clear: We do not claim the right to

indiscriminate violence. We seek no bloodbath. We are not out to kill

up white people. On the contrary, it is the cops who claim the right to

indiscriminate violence and practice it everyday. It is the cops who have

been bathing black people in blood and who seem bent on killing off

black people.”26 Unfortunately, both the police and some elements within

the Panthers were not so “crystal clear” on this distinction, and soon a

series of not-so-revolutionary pitched gun battles began. The govern-

ment’s efforts to increase the level of violence in the Panthers testify

tellingly to the foolishness of violence in a nonrevolutionary situation.

Or, in my terms, they testify to the necessity of maintaining the distinc-

tion between theatrical violence and violent theatrics. Doing so might

have extended the longevity of the Panther Party, not to say the lives of

many Panther members.

Many encounters between police and the party, like the killing of

Chicago Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, were effectively

political assassinations by the alleged upholders of “law and order.”

Hampton and Clark were shot dead in their beds in a predawn raid in

December 1969. Some eighty thousand Chicagoans paid homage to the

slain Panthers and checked out for themselves the truth of the police

version of the events by taking a Panther-sponsored tour of the murder

scene. Other encounters were more ambiguous or implicate some Pan-

thers in their own undoing. Where claims of self-defense and rhetorical

evocations of revolutionary violence often stirred “the people,” the actual

gun battles that led to so many dead and imprisoned Panthers had a

chilling effect on resistance. By the end of 1969, 30 Panthers faced capi-

tal punishment charges, 40 faced life imprisonment, 55 faced terms of

up to thirty years, and another 155 were in jail or being pursued by the

law.27 Many of these Panthers were not as lucky in their verdicts as leader

Newton had been; several are still in prison thirty years after their con-

victions.28 Getting caught up in gunfights with police played into the

hands of the state, both because the government’s greater force showed

up the weakness of the would-be revolutionary forces, and because the

real battle at that moment was still the symbolic one, the battle to shift

the consciousness of forces for and against radical change.

62 Scenarios for Revolution

With a lot of help from agents provocateurs from the FBI and dozens

of other branches of “law enforcement,” the Panthers lost that delicate bal-

ance achieved by Malcolm X — knowing the difference between rhetor-

ical violence and very real bullets. Much liberal and some radical cri-

tique has faulted the Panthers for their use of violence. But any critique

needs to sort out very different kinds of violence in and around the

party. I agree with the position taken by one of the Panthers’ most

astute recent analysts, Nikhil Pal Singh:

Generally, the evocation of trauma and failure is depicted as a question of who was the most violent during the 1960s, a discussion that proceeds as if violence is something transparent, rather than a concept in need of careful contextualization and theorization. Indeed, many accounts confirm this by regularly sliding between condemnation of Panther gunplay and criticism of their militant or violent rhetoric, as if these are the same thing, or as if one automatically produces the other. This collapse of politics and poetics spurs obsessional efforts at adjudication, at sorting out the innocent from the guilty, the victims from the villains, and deciding where the Panthers finally fall. The irony of this is that while the Panthers’ rhetoric is often dismissed as inflated, overheated and out of touch, it invariably returns as the implicit cause and/or emblem of an all-too-real body count that effectively ends the discussion. What has resulted is a flattening and even erasure of the richness and ambiguity of the Panthers’ racial and political self-fashioning, along with a more careful analysis and differentiation of the manifest and symbolic forms of violence that they deployed and confronted.29

As I have suggested, sorting out the “manifest and symbolic forms of

violence” in the world of the Panthers is a difficult task. There is no

doubt that the party’s performances were riddled with “ambiguities,”

not to say contradictions. All sides of those contradictions have lessons

to teach, and no side of them should be ignored, in celebration or in

condemnation.

Curtain Time: The Decline and Fall of the Panthers

The Panthers’ period of greatest influence, roughly 1966–71, was cut short

by external repression and internal battles. Eventually Panthers not only

fought and killed other black activists, like those in Ron Karenga’s Los

Angeles–based United Slaves (US), but also fought and killed each other.

Feeling under siege from all sides, Newton made a decision in 1972 to

further centralize the organization and move into the electoral arena.

Scenarios for Revolution 63

He asked all Panthers from around the country to move to Oakland to

strengthen the electoral base for a run for mayor by Bobby Seale and for

city council by soon-to-be Panther Party chair Elaine Brown. Though

Seale finished second among a host of candidates, he lost a runoff elec-

tion. Brown too failed in her bid for a spot on the city council.

The party began to implode soon after the electoral failure. Parallel-

ing founder Newton’s descent into drug addiction and physical abuse of

other Panthers, the party continued largely as a shadow of itself. Sorting

out the gangsterism from the revolutionism during this phase is not

always easy. But it is clear that when the revolutionism was thwarted,

only gangsterism remained. The decline of the party is a sad tale indeed,

not just on its own terms but for the ways in which it mirrors the decline

in the wider black community from activism to despair to a gangster

culture that for many was all that was left when radical resistance was

suppressed.30

Debate continues to swirl as to whether internal dissension or external

repression best accounts for the decline of the organization. Certainly

the latter exacerbated the former. But it is too simple to let the party off

the hook by seeing it purely as a victim. The original paramilitary struc-

ture of the party became increasingly centralized and authoritarian in

ways that made it easy to foster paranoia in the leaders. The Panthers’

failure to appreciate the extent of their symbolic power undermined

their efforts to delegitimate the state’s monopoly of violence. By playing

into the hands of agents provocateurs (“law enforcement” agents paid

to infiltrate the group and encourage violence), they left themselves vul-

nerable to hundreds of arrests and countless legal battles. They fatally

confused militancy and militarism. Ultimately, this led to a lot of dead

and imprisoned Panthers — a loss that permanently weakened the move-

ment and sowed seeds of paranoia in the survivors. Strong doses of van-

guardist elitism and masculinist egotism often cut leaders off from the

grassroots forces in the party, while their hierarchical, clandestine, para-

military organizational form also bred paranoia that left the Panthers

vulnerable to this infiltration and disruption.

In addition to the structural problems, some of the people attracted

to the party, including several in key leadership positions like Eldridge

Cleaver and, in his later days, Newton himself, were “crazy mothafuckas”

in far too literal a sense. Their personal pathologies, leading in Cleaver’s

64 Scenarios for Revolution

case to revolutionary fantasies and in Newton’s case to drug addiction,

deeply damaged the organization. If the Panthers had been a more demo-

cratic, grassroots organization, such leaders could have been held in

check. Instead a star system emerged in Panther theatrics, with figures

like Cleaver and Newton acting out a drama of little or no interest to

the rest of the party, let alone the rest of black America.

However, the pathologies of some members should not obscure the

dedication to improving the lives of millions of black (and other) Amer-

icans that motivated the several thousand, still largely unstudied “foot

soldiers” of the party. One historian deeply critical of the party’s self-

destructive elitist and authoritarian streak notes, nevertheless, that “the

Panthers contributed significantly to making America a more demo-

cratic, egalitarian, and human society. Party members led the move-

ment to end police brutality and create civilian police-review boards.

The BPP’s free breakfast programs became a catalyst for today’s free

meals to poor school children. More than most progressive political

groups, the party highlighted, connected to and protested U.S. oppres-

sion abroad and U.S injustice at home.”31 Panthers and Panther associ-

ates like Angela Davis also have been at the forefront of the prisoner

rights movement. That movement continues to grow in the face of the

massive expansion of the “prison-industrial complex,” which has put

more young black men in jail than in college.

Beyond the Theater of the Gun

The problem with stressing the most violent scenes in the Panthers’ the-

atrical repertoire is that this obscures other important dimensions of

the party’s legacy — for example, Huey Newton’s strong stand against

homophobia in mainstream and black communities, and his alliance

with the emerging gay liberation movement in the early 1970s. It also

tends to obscure the central role of women in the organization, and the

ways in which they and some of the men challenged “male chauvinism”

and misogyny inside and outside the party. Two-thirds of the party mem-

bers were women. Some women held key positions, including, in the case

of Elaine Brown, the top position.32 The theater of guns also overshadows

the less dramatic, daily work of the party: the petitions, the phone calls

to the press, hawking the Black Panther newspaper on the streets, serving

food in the breakfast program. While there were numerous showboaters,

Scenarios for Revolution 65

especially among the men in the organization, there were also dedicated

women and men who brought with them practical organizing skills.

Perhaps it is telling that while all the party’s media stars survived the

black power era, the party’s best grassroots organizer, Fred Hampton,

was singled out for police assassination.

An overemphasis on violence also obscures the internationalism and

the coalitional nature of the Panthers, their alliances with the external

and internal Third World. Unlike many strands of black nationalism

before, during, and since the black power era, Panther nationalism was

not based on some unchanging notion of black identity. While mobiliz-

ing a sense of pride in blackness was important in the work of organizing

their core constituency in the underclass, Panther politics was never an

“identity politics.” It involved coalitions with radical white groups and

radicals of color in the United States and around the world. An often

less remembered aspect of Panther theater is their actions on the world

stage, where they enacted a foreign policy with regard to Cuba, Algeria,

numerous African states, and China. Meetings of Panther leaders with

heads of state in these countries dramatized a kind of secession of people

of color from the United States and embodied the politics theorized by

Newton as “intercommunalism.” This was a community-to-community

connection that bypassed the nation-state, and anticipated the kind of

“globalization from below” being enacted by some on the left today.

Gun fetishism also obscures the less dramatic, but equally important

pragmatic side of the party represented by the “survival programs” — the

free breakfast programs, the schools, elder care, and health clinics. The

party’s electoral campaigns, though ultimately unsuccessful, provided

another public stage for putting forth key elements of their revolutionary

ideas. To romantic nationalists, these are signs of a sellout of the radical

movement. In reality, they were among the strongest links to local com-

munities and a key means through which radical ideas were dissemi-

nated. Most Panthers saw no contradiction between revolutionary rhet-

oric and “taking care of business” in the neighborhood through activities

too easily labeled as reformist. Newton argued that hungry students are

poor students, that the future of black and other poor communities,

including future revolutionary possibilities, would be lost if children

went hungry. The party characterized the survival programs as socialism

in action, but also made it clear that these were stopgap measures, not

66 Scenarios for Revolution

the revolutionary change they fought for.33 Refusing the easy dichotomy

of reform versus revolution, the Panthers’ survival programs were both

much needed practical services and symbolic acts designed to show up

the violence done by the lack of such services in white capitalist America.

Powers of Culture

As historian William Van Deburg puts it, “As a movement in and of cul-

ture, black power was itself an art form. In the words of Lerone Bennett

Jr., it made ‘everything political and everything cultural.’ ”34 I would add,

however, that while the political and the cultural can be collapsed into

one by movements in moments of active struggle, they can also be driven

asunder again. The message of Black Panther theater is twofold: first,

that the cultural form called drama can be a vital political tool; second,

that for the cultural to be truly effective politically, it must remain con-

nected to social movement groups with a clear, explicit agenda for struc-

tural economic and political change.

The Panthers’ revolutionary rhetoric was most meaningful when tied

to their famous Ten-Point Program and to their survival programs, a

stirring mix of concrete demands and utopian vision.35 When they ceased

to organize at the grassroots level, they not only stalled the progress of

Scenarios for Revolution 67

New York Black Panther rally for Huey Newton. Courtesy of Roz Payne.

the revolution but left themselves without the protection once accorded

them by the community (at one point early on, for example, community

members prevented a planned police raid on party headquarters by mass-

ing outside, placing themselves between the Panthers and the police).

When the Panthers had been destroyed by COINTELPRO and their

own internal difficulties, it did not prove difficult to turn revolutionary

style into a mere style revolution. The Panthers’ Stagolee as revolution-

ary was turned back into an apolitical black dude, or worse still into a

cop, through a wave of “blaxploitation” films in the late 1970s, such as

Shaft. African garb (dashiki robes for men, headdresses for women, tiki

necklaces for both) and “natural” hair (mimicking the revolutionary

“Afro” of Angela Davis and Panther women) soon became the com-

modified signs of blackness empty of political meaning. To paraphrase

the words of Panther Bobby Seale, power does not grow out of the sleeve

of a dashiki. But, contra Seale’s pal Huey Newton’s paraphrase of Mao,

neither does power grow out of the barrel of a gun, at least not when

the other side has an endless and more powerful supply.

The real weapon of the Panthers was a sense of how to deploy theatri-

cally powerful imagery to evoke a sense of black power in the black

underclass. The survival programs and the Ten-Point Program’s call for

“land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace,” when com-

bined with dramatic images of black women and men standing up to

the powers of the U.S. government, helped create a new kind of black

person. At their best, the Panthers dramatically melded questions of

black identity to questions of economic, political, and cultural change.

By contrast, theatricality without organizing severely limits the depth of

change. Put in the terms of this analysis, the Panthers provided too few

spaces for average black Americans to take part as actors, not spectators,

in their dramatic actions for change.

As playwright Jean Genet, for a time a close confidant of Panther

leaders, put it, “Wherever they went [in the world], Americans were the

masters, so the Panthers would do their best to terrorize the masters by

the only means available to them. Spectacle.”36 By at times confusing

their spectacular revolutionary theater with a revolutionary situation,

the Panthers ultimately squandered a good deal of their “black power.”

But as Frantz Fanon wrote in that key 1960s text, The Wretched of the

Earth, “Decolonization never takes place unnoticed for it transforms

68 Scenarios for Revolution

individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms spectators

crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors with the grandiose

glare of history’s floodlights upon them.”37

For a brief but utterly transformative moment, the Black Panthers

turned the glare of history’s floodlights onto the Third World inside

and outside the United States, and turned many colonized spectators

into privileged actors on the world stage.

Panther Legacies in Hip-Hop Scenarios

A vast amount of cultural criticism, particularly from black feminist and

“womanist” authors, has profoundly rethought the nature and limits of

black nationalism in the years since the Panthers’ heyday. As is often the

case with movements, their very successes become in turn problems. In

the case of black power, its successes have resulted in a certain level of

black nationalism becoming “common sense” in black communities.

But as Gramsci argues, “common sense” is the seat of both useful and

useless ideas. And in becoming common sense, less useful ideas become

deeply entrenched, taken for granted, and difficult to dislodge. The dif-

fusion of black power movement ideas into everyday life, as Wahneema

Lubiano, among others, has argued, has led to both positive values and

dangerously unreflective ones.38 In particular, the sexist, homophobic,

and essentialist dimensions of black power have often carried over in

Scenarios for Revolution 69

Angela Davis and Jean Genet. Courtesy of Robert Cohen.

the process of translation from movement ideology to common sense. I

want to end this chapter by looking at one “dramatic” site where this

positive and negative process is at work, the cultural formation sur-

rounding “rap” music and “hip-hop” culture.

One key factor in the relative success of social movements seeking to

better the lives of poor, marginalized people in the 1960s was the wide-

spread perception that the great American economic pie was getting

bigger and bigger. And this perception was generally right; the period

between the end of World War II and the end of the Vietnam War in

1975 saw the largest, most sustained economic growth in human history.

The American economy, initially free of any competition given the dev-

astating effects of World War II on other national economies, meant

tremendous financial gain reaped, unevenly to be sure, by most citizens

of the country.

But by the mid-1970s President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty”

was long gone, and soon a war on the poor was taking its place. Amid a

sense that the pie had stopped growing, fear of competition from mi-

norities fueled a white backlash that eventually segued into the “voodoo

economics” of President Ronald Reagan, boldly robbing the poor to fat-

ten the rich. Devastating new levels of poverty in inner cities arose when

whites flocked in great numbers to the suburbs, leaving a tax base too

small to adequately deal with even the basic need for schools and neigh-

borhood safety for the people of color left behind.

Out of these conditions, there emerged in the late 1970s a powerful

cultural force in black and Latino communities, creating art forms —

especially rap/hip-hop music — that had strong links to black and brown

nationalism. The rap music and hip-hop culture that arose out of the

devastation of inner-city ghettos and barrios was from the beginning a

highly schizophrenic phenomenon. The first two rap songs to make the

move from neighborhood folk culture to the national pop culture reflect

this split. One of those songs, “Rapper’s Delight,” by the Sugar Hill Gang,

was, as the title implies, a fairly lighthearted, commercially marketable

piece of fluff. The other song to emerge, “The Message,” by Grandmaster

Flash and the Furious Five, was, as its title implies, a song that had some-

thing to say — in this case a strong, clear message of anger about the hor-

rendous conditions in the inner city. For the next two decades, compli-

cated variations on rap as delight and rap as political message vied for the

70 Scenarios for Revolution

airwaves. The two sides of rap, of course, intermingled, for the line

between message and entertainment is never absolute.39

Certain rap groups and artists like Public Enemy, Paris, and Dead

Prez clearly took some of their messages from the Black Panthers. Their

efforts display both the strengths and weaknesses of rap as a political art

and the Panthers as role models. On the one hand, messages found in

some rap lyrics have played a role in keeping black nationalist discourses

generally, and the name Black Panthers specifically, alive during a move-

ment doldrum period. At the same time, while paying homage to the

Panthers, many rappers have displayed an ideological confusion that

shows their limited understanding of the Panthers or replicates their

least admirable dimensions.

The late Tupac Shakur illustrates several levels of contradiction. His

stories of black pride and empowerment were important ones for many

young black men and women. At the same time, his songs, and even

more his videos, often played into the hands of commercial sexism and

materialism. And Tupac’s hip-hop homage to women like his Black Pan-

ther mother Afeni Shakur inadvertently played into a family-values sce-

nario worthy of a conservative Republican.40 Other black nationalist

rappers have had too little to say about sexism and homophobia in other

rappers, and have sometimes shown evidence of both in their own music,

despite corrective jabs from feminist rappers like Queen Latifah, Salt ’n’

Peppa, and Roxanne Shante.

In addition, as Angela Davis has noted, Public Enemy sometimes

deified and reified the masculinist paramilitary “look” of the Panthers,

rather than their political substance. Ideological confusion is also demon-

strated when self-proclaimed Panther rapper Paris, among others,

embraces the socially conservative Nation of Islam along with the revo-

lutionary socialist Panthers.41 But, as I have shown, the Panthers too

were riddled with contradictions. And certain rap acts remain among

the most important forces of resistance in black communities. Rappers

are among the most likely voices to spark new national movements for

economic, social, and political change. Many are doing just that now at

the local level. From the Stop the Violence movement of the 1980s to the

Speak Truth to Power Tour in 2003, “conscious hip-hop” has embraced

the best legacy of the Black Panthers — those points where brilliant

theatricality connect to concrete, grassroots efforts to change the world.

Scenarios for Revolution 71

Appendix: Ten-Point Program of the Black Panther Party

October 1966 Black Panther Party

Platform and Program

What We Want

What We Believe

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black

Community.

We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to deter-

mine our destiny.

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to

give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if

the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then

the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and

placed in the community so that the people of the community can orga-

nize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are

demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres

and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor

and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment as cur-

rency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Ger-

mans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish

people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist

has taken part in the slaughter of over twenty million Black people;

therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to

our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made

into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build

and make decent housing for its people.

72 Scenarios for Revolution

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this

decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true

history and our role in the present-day society.

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowl-

edge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his posi-

tion in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to any-

thing else.

6. We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.

We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the mili-

tary service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We

will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black

people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America.

We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist

police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black

people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by

organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending

our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The

Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a

right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm

themselves for self defense.

8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and

city prisons and jails.

We believe that all Black people should be released from the many jails

and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a

jury of their peer group or people from their Black communities, as defined

by the Constitution of the United States.

We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution

so that Black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the

U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A

Scenarios for Revolution 73

peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical,

environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court

will be forced to select a jury from the Black community from which

the Black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white

juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of

the Black community.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.

And as our major political objective, a United Nations–supervised plebiscite

to be held throughout the Black colony in which only Black colonial sub-

jects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will

of Black people as to their national destiny.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one

people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with

another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and

equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them,

a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should

declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal;

that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;

that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to

secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their

just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of

government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people

to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foun-

dation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to

them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence,

indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be

changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience

hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are

sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which

they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations,

pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under

absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such gov-

ernment, and to provide new guards for their future security.

74 Scenarios for Revolution

For women, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, and then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

— Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Sister Outsider

No social movement in the past fifty years has had a greater cultural

impact than the women’s movement, which reemerged in the 1960s and

has grown in multifaceted ways into the present. The tremendous

impact of feminism in everyday life includes, but extends far beyond,

changes in laws, legislation, and political institutions. The texture of the

life of every single person living in the United States was changed by the

new feminism.

Here is a short list of ideas about women that were unimaginably radi-

cal for most American men and women to think, let alone endorse, up to

the 1960s, which are now viewed largely as common-sense statements.

• Women as a group have a right to earn as much as men. • Traditionally defined women’s jobs (nurses, maids, elementary school

teachers, childcare workers) should be paid at a rate comparable to similar work done by men.

• There are few, if any, jobs that women can’t do. • Women should have equal access to higher education, including fields

traditionally reserved for men.

T H R E E

The Poetical Is the Political

Feminist Poetry and the Poetics of Women’s Rights

75

• Female writers, artists, and musicians should have respect, support, and opportunities equal to those given males in these cultural fields.

• Women are entitled to sexual pleasure as much as men are. • Women should not be confined to housework but should be respected

for it when they choose it. • Women and men should share household and parenting work. • Women don’t need to be in a relationship with a man to be happy. • Treating women as mere sex objects is wrong. • Women should not be subject to sexual harassment in the workplace

or in school. • Girls and women should be encouraged to engage in sport. • Women should have equal power in interpersonal relationships

with men. • Women have a role in the military. • Women have a right to feel safe from the threat of rape. • Battering women is a political issue, not a personal matter. • Women have a right to be part of the decision if and when to have

children. • Women have as much of a place in the business world and the political

world as men do.

Before the women’s movement reemerged in the mid-1960s, not one of

these ideas was widely held by men or by women; most would have

considered them unacceptable. Today, while often still unrealized, these

are ideas most Americans embrace. As with most social movements, how-

ever, the people who came to support these views often distance them-

selves from the means by which the ideas came into being — feminist

activism — as something too radical to identify with.

In this chapter I will trace the social movement process by which the

once radical idea that women were entitled to equality with men moved

from the margins to the center, from the unimaginable to common sense.

First, I’ll describe the general contours of the women’s movement, and

then I’ll use feminist poetry as a case study for how feminist ideas were

formed in women’s movement cultures and subsequently projected out

into the wider culture. One key aspect of this process was something

called “consciousness-raising.” Feminist consciousness-raising in the

late 1960s involved women meeting in small discussion/action groups

to share their personal experiences in order to turn them into analyses

of common political and structural sources of inequality for women.

Consciousness-raising, while certainly not the only women’s movement

method, touched all realms of feminist action.

76 The Poetical Is the Political

Compared to the drama of civil disobedience of sit-ins, or the shock

of tragic shoot-outs with the police, the poetic “dramas of consciousness-

raising” described in this chapter may at first sound quite tame. But

part of my point is to suggest that they are anything but tame in their

effects. Feminists did and do engage in many large, dynamic public

demonstrations, and “zap actions” (small group acts of civil disobedi-

ence) were a key part of the movement, especially in the early years.

These included the infamous attack on the Miss America pageant in

1968 that earned feminists the misnomer “bra burners” (no bras were

burned, but many were thrown in a freedom trash can to symbolize the

throwing off of the constraints of male-dominated notions of feminin-

ity and women’s body image). But to argue that poems are every bit as

dramatic as these demonstrations, or as confrontations with police, is to

make a feminist point: what counts as dramatic has often been defined

in limiting ways based on male-centered visions of heroic performance.

If the goal is to change the world, there is reason to believe that publicly

performed or privately read poems have been a force as powerful as any

other. Before the 1960s poetry was still mainly a genteel, feminized but

male-dominated form, and that aura still lingers around it. But there

was nothing genteel about the raucous, often sexually frank, and always

politically charged poetry that came out of the women’s movement.

Moving poetry from polite lecture halls and quiet living rooms out into

the streets was part of many 1960s movements, but no one did it more

intensely or effectively than the poets of the women’s movement, and in

doing so they reclaimed public space as women’s space.

Consciousness-raising was especially important in that key feminist

theoretical act of challenging the boundaries of what counted as “polit-

ical” by rethinking the border between public and private life. One of

the best known slogans to emerge out of the new women’s movement

was the phrase “the personal is political.” The basic argument was that

given the historical separation of the Western world into a male public

sphere (of business, art, and government) and a female private sphere

(of domestic and family issues), only shifting the definition of politics

to include the “personal” private sphere could address the full range of

ways in which women were oppressed. This decidedly did not mean

that the movement was uninterested in public issues, but only that even

those public issues needed to be rethought in terms that refused the

easy separation between personal and political realms. On the one hand,

The Poetical Is the Political 77

the movement sought to give women the right to access all the goods of

the public sphere: equal access to education, good jobs, fair wages, posi-

tions of political power, and so forth. And on the other hand, it meant

redefining the “personal” private sphere, where many dimensions of

gender relations were formed, as a “political” sphere of discussion and

contestation.

“Poetry Is Not a Luxury”: Poems and/as Consciousness-Raising

Consciousness-raising was crucial in forming feminist thought on a

whole range of issues, from economics to government to education, but

it was particularly useful in giving a name to the “nameless” forms of

oppression felt in realms previously relegated to the nonpolitical arena

of “personal” relations. The premise of this chapter comes primarily

from an essay by feminist poet/activist/theorist Audre Lorde, quoted in

the chapter epigraph. As a child of Jamaican immigrants, a working-class

black woman, a mother, a lesbian, and a socialist, Lorde richly embodied

the complex multiplicities within and around feminism. In her land-

mark essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Lorde provides one of the strongest

and clearest cases for the value of consciousness-raising without ever

using the word. What she describes instead is the process of writing a

poem. This is no coincidence, I will argue, but rather a convergence. For

both consciousness-raising and poetry writing make the subjective

objective, make the inner world of “personal” experience available for

public “political” discussion. While poetry is often thought of as a pure

expression of personal feelings, only very bad poetry does that. Good

poetry makes personal experience available to others by giving it an out-

ward form.

As I look at poetry in this chapter as one key place where women’s

movement ideas, attitudes, positions, and actions were formed, expressed,

and circulated to wider communities, I will also be using poetry as a

metaphor for the larger process of inventing feminist analysis and dif-

fusing feminist ideas and actions throughout the culture. The modern

women’s movement has never fit the mold of social movement theory

very well, partly because that theory still largely holds to the division

between the cultural and the political that the women’s movement has

done so much to challenge. The women’s movement can be and has been

forced into that older mold, but in doing so much of the nature, power,

and influence of the movement is lost. No movement shows more clearly

78 The Poetical Is the Political

what is left out of the social movement story when the full range of

culture is not explored.1

Some social scientists divide social movement activity into (serious)

“instrumental” social and political action, and (merely) “expressive” cul-

tural activity. We will never find the real women’s movement if we use

these categories. Culture was a prime “instrument” of change for the

movement, not some decorative, “expressive” addition. So-called cultural

activity, or what might more accurately be called “cultural politics,” cre-

ated changes in consciousness that provided the basis for calls for legis-

lative and other forms of political change. And changes in consciousness

were even more important in shaping behavioral change in those “per-

sonal” realms that feminist consciousness-raising redefined as “political,”

such as family life; male-female interactions in the kitchen, the bed-

room, and the living room; female-female solidarity; female bodily self-

image; and the right to reproductive decision-making. Feminist cultural

activity also brought attention to the politics of cultural sites between

government and the private realm: the workplace, the medical office, the

classroom, the church.

Culture can be defined both as a kind of action in itself and as all

those meaning-making processes that make any kind of acting in the

world possible. It is surely possible to “act thoughtlessly,” but we gener-

ally denigrate such actions and claim to prefer consciously “thought out”

actions. Much of our behavior is driven by social norms we do not think

about. However, movements, especially movements like feminism with

a strong interest in reshaping culture, are thoughtful about those actions

we take for granted most of the time. They are of great importance pre-

cisely because they are one of the key sites where re-socialization, or

re-education, is particularly intensive and extensive.2

Only the dead parts of a culture are merely “expressive.” Culture is

fundamentally a creative process, a ceaseless process of unmaking old

meanings and making new ones, unmaking old ways of being, think-

ing and acting, and making newer ones. Social movement theorists

Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman have offered the useful term cogni-

tive praxis to describe the ways in which movements bring new ideas

into the world that have great, dare I say instrumental, impact. In an even

broader sense, movements engage in many varieties of “cultural praxis”

or “cultural poetics” — the generation of new ideas and also new “struc-

tures of feeling,” new ways of being and seeing, new thought-feelings

The Poetical Is the Political 79

and felt-thoughts. In this sense, the phrase “poetry of women’s libera-

tion” refers to actual poems and to a larger “cultural poetics” of social

change. Culture, to paraphrase Lorde, is not a luxury for feminism; it is

a material force at the heart of the movement.

Roots and Strands of the New Feminism(s)

The new energy around the rights and power of women that came into

focus in the late 1960s is sometimes called the “Second Wave” of femi-

nism, in recognition of earlier, “First Wave” efforts that began in the

mid-nineteenth century and culminated with women’s right to vote,

established in the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920.3

While useful in linking the new movement to the past, the term second

wave has also been criticized for linking the movement to the limitations

of the earlier phase, especially with regard to racism and class inequal-

ity, limitations that have continued into the more recent period.4 The

“waves” story has served to marginalize the key roles played by women

of color in feminist organizing across the centuries. But it is less the

wave metaphor than who defines the content of the metaphor that is at

stake. Those critical of the whiteness of the waves have sometimes inad-

vertently erased the important role played by women of color of all

classes, and working-class white women, in both “waves,” despite racism

and class privilege, and their increasingly central role in what is some-

times called the Third Wave of feminism, currently under way. As femi-

nist theorist Ednie Garrison has argued, the wave metaphor may need

to be reinterpreted more than abandoned — seen not as a solid wall of

(white) water but rather more like radio waves emanating from and

traveling out in many different directions.5

While the systematic denigration of women that came to be known

as sexism was close to a universal female condition in the 1960s, different

women experienced sexism in very different ways. Because feminist con-

sciousness emerges out of the specific, material conditions of particular

women, there are many different origins for the women’s movement(s)

that arose during that era. Differences in class, race, region, nationality,

and sexuality led to very different ways of articulating the nature and

needs of women. Conflicts within feminism around these and a host of

other social differences have been extremely difficult and have not been

resolved to this day. But struggling with differences among women has

80 The Poetical Is the Political

also led to ever broadening constituencies committed to equality for

all women.

The new women’s activism that sprang up in the 1960s not only came

from many different social locations but also took many different forms.

Some movement historians divide these forms too neatly into categories

like liberal feminism, radical feminism, socialist feminism, cultural femi-

nism, and the like. In reality there was much cross-over and overlap of

people and ideas in the various kinds of organizations and approaches.

Movement historians Myra Marx Ferree and Beth Hess argue convincingly

that the tendencies should not be seen as “branches,” since branches of

a tree remain separate and distinct, but rather as “strands,” since strands

weave together but may also unravel at certain points.6 Common delin-

eators used for the general strands of the new feminist activism include

“reformist” and “revolutionary,” “bureaucratic” and “collectivist,” “liberal”

and radical,” and “equal rights” and “women’s liberationist.” As Katie

King suggests, these categories are far more easily seen in retrospect

than they were in the heat of early struggles to define a new feminism.7

Some new feminist groups focused primarily on reforming the gov-

ernment in ways more favorable to women. This tendency eventually

coalesced around large organizations like NOW (National Organization

for Women), WPAC (Women’s Political Action Caucus), and WEAL

(Women’s Equity Action League). At other times and for other issues,

the movement activists preferred to organize themselves in smaller, less

hierarchical groups, which Steven Buechler has characterized as “move-

ment communities,” as opposed to more formal “movement organiza-

tions.”8 Some of the time feminist activism has been embedded in struggles

around racial and class oppression in which gender cannot be neatly

isolated as a factor (a variable, in social science lingo). At times femi-

nists have worked in separatist groups centered in ethnic identity, class,

nationality, or sexual preference, while at other times they have orga-

nized in groups and coalitions that cut across these differences. Similarly,

sometimes feminists have worked for specific, limited reforms, while at

other times the call has been for more sweepingly radical change of whole

systems of male domination and the larger race-class systems in which

they are embedded. Chicana feminist theorist Chela Sandoval has argued

that from the perspective of U.S. feminists of color, these various ele-

ments of feminism can be seen not as opposed schools but as a toolkit

The Poetical Is the Political 81

of tactics to be used in various combinations depending upon the issues

and conditions at hand.9

One key source of the new feminist energy that arose in the 1960s was

community organizing among working-class women of color. Not nec-

essarily articulated as feminist struggle, this important strand has often

been ignored or downplayed in stories of the women’s movement cen-

tered in the experiences of white, middle-class women. Women strug-

gling for economic survival in black, Native American, Chicana/Latina,

Asian/Pacific American, and working-class white communities never

easily accepted gendered limits on their actions, and often realized that

sexism inhibited their efforts to fight against the racial and class oppres-

sion faced by their communities. They formed activist groups like the

ANC Mothers Anonymous and the National Welfare Rights Organiza-

tion that forged a feminist path within other movements, including the

labor movement. Race-based power movements often drew the first

loyalty of women of color. Women played key roles in all these struggles

but also often found themselves struggling against male dominance

within the racial revolution. Some asserted themselves within ethnic

nationalist struggles; others formed explicitly feminist groups of color

like the National Black Feminist Organization, the Combahee River Col-

lective, Hijas de Cuauhtemoc, Asian Sisters, and Women of All Red Na-

tions (WARN). These groups were a key force of antisexist action and

codified a long history of struggling simultaneously with the intersec-

tions of gender, race, and class long before white feminist theory began

to recite this mantra.10 From the beginning, the women’s movement —

or more accurately, women’s movements — emerged from within and

were entangled with a host of other social movements. While for some

white, middle-class women these other movements provided merely a

model to appropriate, for working-class white women and women of

color there could be no disentangling of the struggle against racial and

class oppression from the struggle over gender oppression.

Black feminist Frances M. Beal referred to the condition of women of

color as “double jeopardy,” and a similar case of “double jeopardy” char-

acterizes the position of white, middle-class lesbians, while working-

class lesbians and lesbians of color face even greater difficulties (triple

jeopardy?).11 While stereotyped dismissal homophobically character-

izes all feminists as lesbians, in fact lesbians had to fight their way into

recognition in feminist organizations. In the most notorious example, the

82 The Poetical Is the Political

leader of NOW, Betty Friedan, referred to lesbians as a “lavender men-

ace” whose visible presence could damage efforts by feminists to achieve

legitimacy. When announcing this menace, Friedan assumed she was

speaking of women outside the organization, but not long after, in a

classic “zap” action, lesbians within NOW turned off the lights at a meet-

ing, took off their coats, and had a mass “coming out” party, wearing

shirts bearing the slogan “Lavender Menace” and taking over the meeting.

Lesbians of color within nationalist and straight feminist groups met

similar resistance and offered similar challenges through ideas and ac-

tions pioneered by the black feminist group known as the Combahee

River Collective, among others. Feminist theory written or inspired by

lesbians of color came to show brilliantly that racism, sexism, and hetero-

sexism are intimately tied together, that fighting homophobia is a key

element of fighting for women’s equality, and thus that struggles for

gay/lesbian rights before and during the rise of what came to be narrowly

defined by some as “the” women’s movement played a crucial role in the

wider struggle for gender equality.

A key force shaping the consciousness of some of the women who

became leading feminist activists was the experience of relative freedom

and empowerment on the home front during World War II. During the

war, women were recruited to fill a variety of previously male-identified

jobs in factories, government, and business. When the war ended, most

of these women were summarily drummed out of their new jobs.

Middle-class white women were told to return to the home as “house-

wives.” Many working-class women became feminists when they heard

their once highly touted contributions to the economy reduced or ridi-

culed, and saw their paychecks shrink as they lost men’s jobs and men’s

wages. Many women of color who had experienced higher paying fac-

tory work during the war were forced back into domestic service as

maids, or had to return to lower paid jobs as waitresses, cooks, or jani-

tors — a different form of “redomestication” to “women’s work” as food

makers and cleaners.

After the war, a vast government and corporate public relations cam-

paign was put in place to turn “Rosie the Riveter” into Dolly the Home-

maker, or Maria the Maid, but the transformation was not embraced by

all middle-class women, and could not be embraced by most working-

class white women and women of color who survived on work outside

their own homes. There had been a 50 percent increase in the number

The Poetical Is the Political 83

of married women in the workforce during the war, and of the women

workers polled at the end of the war in 1945, more than 75 percent ex-

pressed a desire to keep their jobs. Despite the campaign to redomesti-

cate women, a significant number remained in the labor force, and

some middle-class women who did not remain regretted their decision

when domesticity proved considerably less satisfying than promised.

Thus many of the women who would reanimate feminism in the 1960s

and beyond, including many middle-class women, were working women

or had grown up with working mothers.

Redomestication also included a huge rise in the birth rate after the

war, the famous “baby boom” that gave its name to the generation that

came of age in the 1960s. Much of the baby boom occurred among

middle-class families in the new social space of “suburbs.” A deeply racist

“white flight” from increasingly multiracial urban areas ensured quick

growth of these new suburban spaces. Suburbs were built upon a new

model of the isolated, “nuclear” family, in contrast to the centuries-old

model of extended families with many aunts, uncles, cousins, grand-

parents, and other relatives living together or nearby. Many women ex-

perienced these new arrangements as isolating and depressing, and were

unconvinced by the new ideology of “feminine mystique” that cele-

brated the joys of housewifery.12 For these women, the problem was not

the role of homemaking, but the claim that this was the only “natural”

or “proper” role for women, even as actual homemaking was trivialized

in the new suburban system. Many middle-class women experiencing

these conditions joined the fight for equal rights, and many passed on

to their daughters an even stronger will to fight for radical improvements

in the conditions of women’s lives.

President John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Committee on the Status of

Women, formed in 1961, is often cited as a precursor of the more mod-

erate, government reform or “equal-rights” strand of the movement.

Long-time feminist and former first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the

committee, and her personal prestige did much to draw attention to its

work. Roosevelt also provided a link with the previous wave of feminist

activism that had continued, despite hitting “doldrums,” from the 1920s

to the 1960s. Feminist scholars have shown that many cultural links

helped maintain feminist energy despite relatively low levels of public

engagement during the intervening decades.13 The equal-rights strand

drew strength from, but was also profoundly limited by, this past, and it

84 The Poetical Is the Political

was primarily the more radical waves of activism emerging out of poor

communities and newly radicalized, middle-class, young white women

that transformed the meaning of feminism into something far deeper

and more profound than new rights. With grassroots support from

these other strands, the reform branch achieved some key legislative vic-

tories: the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (broadened

from an initial application only to race to include “sex discrimination” as

well); the Title IX ruling on women in athletics; the Roe v. Wade Supreme

Court decision on reproductive rights (1973); and a host of other legisla-

tive and legal rulings favorable to women. Much of this activity was

then funneled into the campaign to pass a comprehensive Equal Rights

Amendment to the Constitution. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the

campaign did much to educate women around the country about the

rights they did and did not have.

The other, more radical strands of the women’s movement, which

emerged in the late 1960s, include the tendency most commonly known

as “women’s liberation.” This strand had its roots in other social move-

ments of the era, especially the civil rights movement, ethnic nationalist

movements, the student movement, and the anti–Vietnam war move-

ment.14 Less formal “movement communities” and collectives were par-

ticularly popular among the (often) younger, more revolutionary elements

of the movement, who dubbed their goal the “liberation” of women

in the context of other liberation movements based in race and class.

Detractors referred to them scornfully as “women’s libbers.” This strand

included many female college students and recent college graduates,

reflecting the increasing number of women in higher education during

these years, a trend driven by the postwar economic boom. Deferral of

marriage and a broadening of intellectual horizons during college years,

along with the freedom from unwanted pregnancy provided by the new

“birth control pill,” contributed greatly to the ranks of independent

young women attracted to the liberation movement.

Working-class, community-activist feminisms also linked up to the

women’s liberation strand through the involvement of young, mostly

middle-class white women in the civil rights movement and the student-

led new left emerging in and around college campuses. New left groups

like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) sought alliance with civil

rights groups to build an interracial movement of the poor. Efforts like

SDS’s Economic Research and Action Projects (ERAP) brought many

The Poetical Is the Political 85

young white women into contact with women of color who were com-

munity activists. While the projects were sometimes marred by conde-

scension, they were also powerful models of attempts to acknowledge and

resist the privileges that came with whiteness and affluence.15 Women-

to-women dialogues across divides of race and class in these projects

helped shape the kind of feminisms that emerged later in the decade.16

The women who formed the core and the corps of this strand of the

movement drew upon a great deal of social movement experience, and

some of that experience moved them to create their own movement.

Many women in the civil rights, ethnic power, student, and antiwar

movements experienced marginalization, harassment, disrespect, and

an unequal workload. Sensitized to issues of inequality and injustice by

these other movements, they turned their analyses back upon their male

colleagues, demonstrating that they were not living up to their own egali-

tarian ideals when it came to the treatment of women. Two of the most

important early manifestos in this development were position papers

drafted within SNCC in 1964 and 1965, one by a young black activist,

Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, the other by two young white women in

the organization, Casey Hayden and Mary King. Both of these essays

argued, as would many others in short order, that the position of women

in SNCC had analogies to the position of blacks in white America. By

the late 1960s the concept of “sexism” emerged as the central movement

term, designed to parallel the concept of “racism.” The analogy, while

immensely productive of new ideas and attitudes, was also highly prob-

lematic, since race and gender were different in many respects, and

paralleling them initially seemed to erase women of color. As a later

book title colorfully expressed it: “all the women are white, all the blacks

are men, but some of us are brave.”17

While some men within SNCC and other radical movement groups

responded favorably to the claims made by women, many more did not,

calling their claims trivial and a distraction from the “real” struggles

around race, class, and war. Some feminists continued to work on issues

of gender equity within these movements, forming “women’s caucuses”

within organizations. While some success was achieved in this way, and

while women continued to work on all these issues, increasingly feminists

felt the need to carve out an independent movement to address their

concerns. Initially this proved easier for white women; many women of

86 The Poetical Is the Political

color continued to feel that racial oppression had to be their central

concern, or was a parallel rather than an intersecting concern. African

American activist Florynce Kennedy, for example, listed her affiliations

in 1970 as the black liberation movement and the women’s liberation

movement. But all the radical feminist groups formed in the late 1960s

and early 1970s were deeply shaped by the mood set by groups like the

Black Panthers; they saw women’s liberation as part of a larger revolution-

ary movement to overthrow a racist, capitalist, and patriarchal order.18

When these young activists started their own women’s liberation

groups, they drew deeply upon the antihierarchical forms that were

dominant in groups like SNCC and the radical SDS. But having seen

the limits to real equality within those supposedly egalitarian groups,

they were even more deeply suspicious of the tendency of inequalities

of power to emerge even within organizations dedicated to equality.

Thus, the movement communities these women formed were even

more carefully designed to fend off hierarchy. Just as blacks had come to

feel that the presence of whites in their liberation movement hampered

the independent development of black empowerment, many of these

early efforts insisted on being women-only groups.

Consciousness-Raising

The typical social science story of the women’s movement has a difficult

time dealing with the fact that large-scale, mass organizations with clear

hierarchies were only a small part of the movement. Indeed, they were

often seen as part of the problem. The most common form was the small

group or collective. These “CR groups” or “rap groups,” consisting most

often of from five to twenty women, gave a mass movement an unusually

intimate form and forum highly appropriate to the movement’s goals

and ideologies.19 While sometimes associated with white women’s libera-

tionist part of the movement, consciousness-raising, under various

names, has been central to all feminist struggles. Toni Cade [Bambara], for

example, wrote in 1970: “Throughout the country in recent years, black

women have been forming work-study groups, discussion clubs, coopera-

tive nurseries . . . women’s workshops on the campuses, women’s caucuses

within existing organizations, Afro-American women’s magazines.”20

As the other common name for CR groups, “rap” groups (from the

black English term for intense conversation), suggests, the roots of the

The Poetical Is the Political 87

form are partly in practices like the consensus-seeking meetings in SNCC

(see chapter 1). The women’s liberation strand of the late 1960s and early

1970s systematized what is often a more inchoate movement process. A

handful of CR groups became famous because of their location in big

cities or because of their widely circulated publications: for example,

Bread and Roses, New York Radical Women, the Furies, Redstockings,

Radicalesbians, the Combahee River Collective, WITCH. But by the late

1960s and early 1970s there were thousands of such groups in cities and

small towns across America.21

As African American feminist Cellestine Ware characterized it in her

brilliant book, Woman Power (1970), the role of CR groups was to express,

compare, analyze, theorize, and then organize against all the ways in

which women were oppressed. This meant thinking about and challeng-

ing the specific sexist structures in every “public” and “private” social

space: the factory, sweatshop, kitchen, bedroom, classroom, boardroom,

playing field, courtroom, or the halls of Congress. From the beginning,

the new feminists realized that this largely unexplored set of analyses

needed to be made from the ground up, through a process of comparing

individual women’s stories and turning them into a set of structural

analyses. The point was to move from collected personal experiences to

theorized general conditions, and then to further actions flowing from

the analyses.22

A new language had to be invented to characterize the experiences of

oppression and liberation that had no name. Sometimes this meant liter-

ally inventing new words; for instance, the newly minted concept “sex-

ism” was used to examine the ways in which discrimination against

women was built into the very structure of the language. Women chal-

lenged every generic use of man or he claiming to speak for all “human-

ity,” and they invented or adopted words to displace the presumptive

“man” at the center of all public activity: firefighter for fireman, worker for

workman, business executive for businessman, chair for chairman, police

officer for policeman, representative or senator for congressman, and so on

across all the various social spaces and places where women were absent

or underrepresented. This task also moved in the opposite direction,

replacing feminized and invariably lesser female versions of terms.

Thus, flight attendant replaced stewardess, or more to the point of this

chapter, poet came to be used in place of the condescending poetess. But

88 The Poetical Is the Political

beyond neologisms, the deeper task was to find language to express

oppressions and liberations that had no name.

Whether from formal CR groups, informal discussions, or shared

writings, there emerged from consciousness-raising a host of new issues

for the agenda of women’s liberation. Shared stories moved women from

the isolation of battering to a collective analysis of domestic violence,

from a personal sense of sexual inadequacy to calls for equal sexual plea-

sure for women, from a sense of the social “double jeopardy” of being a

woman and of color to women-of-color feminisms, from personal fears

about pregnancy or forced sterilization to calls for reproductive rights,

from poverty viewed as personal failure to analyses of welfare rights and

the feminization of poverty, from personal experiences of intimidation

by the boss to the concept of sexual harassment, and so on for dozens of

issues that were moved from the personal to the political through col-

lective dialogue, discussion, and debate.

The formal CR group, according to the early women’s movement ac-

tivist Pam Allen, proceeded through four stages: opening up (revealing

personal feelings); sharing (through dialogue with other group members);

analyzing (seeking general patterns by comparing to other experiences);

and abstracting (creating a theory). Sometimes misunderstood as ther-

apy, which it no doubt became on some occasions in some groups, CR

was intended to strengthen the theoretical basis for revolutionary action.

As feminist theorist and women’s movement historian Katie King notes,

the aim of “CR is not to exchange or relive experience, nor is it cathar-

tic. Rather, its purpose is to teach women to think abstractly, and the

purpose of thinking abstractly is to create theory in order to clarify and

clear the ground for action.”23 Much important feminist thought and

action emerged from this process, and was presented in written form in

such early feminist anthologies as Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970), The Black

Woman (1970), Radical Feminism (1973) (which collects materials from

three earlier collections, Notes from the First Year, Second Year and Third

Year), and, in poetic form, No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by

Women (1973).

As several feminist critics have argued, some kind of positing of group

commonality plays a necessary heuristic role in all feminist organizing

(or any other movement that includes an element of collective identity).24

The problem arises with the rush to give that heuristic concept a specific

The Poetical Is the Political 89

content. Some feminists can be justly accused of this kind of “essential-

ism,” arguments that homogenize all women as essentially alike (in op-

pression or in resistance).25 But there has always been a way of drawing

on experiences, a way of doing consciousness-raising, that suggests a path

through this dilemma. Rather than simply being replaced, consciousness-

raising can be, and often has been, re-placed into a more varied public

space where conflicting and complementary “experiences” have pro-

vided the bases for painful but productive arguments within feminism

that have broadened and deepened the movement(s). This is precisely

what happened in many parts of the early feminist movement, and has

continued to happen ever since. As I suggested, formal consciousness-

raising groups in the women’s movement of the late 1960s and early

1970s were just the particular form of a larger, more general process of

raising consciousness that goes on in many movements and many forms.

In women’s movements, one of the key forms, though hardly the only

one, has the been the writing, reading, and performing of poetry.

Women’s Movement Poetry and the Range of Feminist Issues

Poems about women in economic poverty and spiritual poverty; poems

about battering and resistance to battering; poems about sisterly soli-

darity and unsisterly betrayal; poems about factory work and maid

work; poems about men as oppressors or men as lovers or men as lov-

ing oppressors; poems about women loving women; poems about the

power in menstruation and the beauty of vaginas; poems about bad sex

and good sex; poems in Spanglish and Niuyorican, black English and

white Wellesley diction; poems about the pain of abortion and the pain

of childbirth; poems about sterilization of poor women and the sterile

lives of upper-class women; poems about women’s history and women’s

future; poems about reform and revolution; poems about women in

barrios and Chinatowns, Indian reservations and ghettos; poems revalu-

ing traditional women’s work and celebrating women breaking barriers

into male-dominated jobs; poems about women lumberjacks and women

quilters; poems about witches and bitches, brujas and voodoo queens;

poems about women athletes and bookish women; poems about breast-

feeding and breast cancer; poems about laundry and feminist theology;

poems about war and peace; poems about women in Vietnam and Span-

ish Harlem; poems about Harriet Tubman and Marilyn Monroe; poems

about Wall Street and Main Street; poems about changing diapers and

90 The Poetical Is the Political

changing lives; even poems about writing poems. Poems poured forth

by the hundreds from the new wave of feminist activity crystallizing in

the late 1960s.

Andrea Chessman and Polly Joan assert in their Guide to Women’s

Publishing that “poetry was the medium of the movement,” and that

while “every revolutionary movement has had its poets and its poetry,

no other movement has been so grounded in poetry as Feminism.”26

I do not think it is necessary to call poetry “the” medium of the move-

ment, but it has certainly played a very important role for many femi-

nists. One reason for this is that no movement has had a more sweeping

need for epistemological transformation, for transformation in the

nature and scope of knowledge. In effect, the feminist movement claims

that half of the world’s population has largely been excluded from pro-

duction of what counts as knowledge about that world. As noted above,

the women’s movement has transformed every field of human knowl-

edge, from business to science to politics to art and literature to “home

economics.”

Feminist poetry is certainly not alone in bringing about this pro-

found transformation, but it touches all these social and cultural realms,

among others. But feminism also has brought about a more general

transformation of consciousness above and beyond these particular

realms. To get at these two different dimensions, I will look first at

“women’s movement poetry” as a general tool of social change, and

then at a more narrowly defined “feminist poetry movement” as an

example of a formation aimed at one particular cultural sphere, the pro-

fession of poem-making.

The movement understood that knowledge was power, and that

knowledge/power was vested in language. At the center of this was the

notion that dimensions of women’s voices had been silenced, distorted,

or trivialized for centuries. Thus poetry, as one of the richest tools for

exploring the dynamic meaning-making processes of language, was

bound to become an important movement resource. Poetry is particu-

larly well equipped to challenge two crucial dichotomies: the separation

of private and public spheres, and the split between “emotion” and

“intellect.” Poems had practical advantages as well. They could be pro-

duced in the interstices of the busy multitasking lives most women lead.

They took far less time to write than books, and they were far easier to

reproduce and circulate. They could be nailed to trees and telephone

The Poetical Is the Political 91

poles, taped to windows, and slid under doors. They lent themselves to

performance in public, during a highly dramatic, performative era. They

could also be set to music, turned into song.

The whole panoply of feminist issues that emerged from formal CR

groups and from dozens of other sites of consciousness-raising activity

can be found in poetry produced in and around the movement. In addi-

tion to anthologies of feminist poetry, most of the general anthologies

of feminist thought from the new movement included poetry. The widely

circulated collection, Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings

from the Women’s Liberation Movement (1970), for example, was edited

by a poet, Robin Morgan, and included a section entitled “The Hand That

Cradles the Rock: Poetry as Protest.” And one of the first major collec-

tions of feminist writings to center on women of color, The Black Woman,

was edited by fiction writer/poet Toni Cade [Bambara], and privileged

poems as the first set of readings. This is not because poetry “reflected”

feminist issues, but because poetry was one of the main tools used to

identify, name, formulate, and disseminate those issues. Poetry was

consciousness-raising. Poetry was theory. Poetry was feminist practice.

When the radical women’s liberation phase, with its emphasis on

interconnections between race, class, and gender, was being displaced in

the mid-1970s by a more mainstream brand of feminism, poetry became

a key site for the articulation and contestation of feminisms. Poets like

Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Janice Mirikitani, Sonia Sanchez, Susan

Griffin, Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Wendy Rose, Judy Grahn, Pat

Parker, Irena Klepfitz, Robin Morgan, Nellie Wong, Chrystos, June Jor-

dan, Marge Piercy, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Joy Harjo, and Cherríe Moraga

used poetry as part of an ongoing dialogue about the nature(s) and pur-

pose(s) of feminism(s). In this context poems become mediators between

a collective “woman” and particular communities of “women.” Poetry

plays an important role in diffusing these subject positions out into the

wider culture where their impact is often independent of knowledge of

their movement origins.

For some people who might be recruited to a movement and for some

people already in it, poems (and other forms of art) are more effective

in conveying movement ideology than are manifestos and other directly

political forms. Katie King has argued that what she calls “art theoreti-

cal” discourses, including poetry, were central to the production of femi-

nist cultures that were in turn “the primary location of feminist identity

92 The Poetical Is the Political

politics in the 70s and 80s.”27 These “art theoretical” “writing technolo-

gies” (King includes “song” and “story” alongside “poetry”) were espe-

cially important in the struggles of various women-of-color feminists to

dislodge white, middle-class women from the center of feminist thought.

In this sense, poetry as theory and consciousness-raising did much to

challenge the limits of theory emerging from the often fairly segregated

movement groups.

Two poets edited one of the most influential books in the history of

feminist thought, This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writing by Women

of Color, and much of its content takes the form of poetry. This Bridge not

only featured poetry alongside more conventional forms of analysis,

but also insisted that poetry was a form of feminist theory. Poems in that

anthology (and others like it) drew upon personal experience mediated

through race and ethnicity as well as gender, to show up the limiting

“whiteness” of the identity proffered as normative in much women’s

movement culture. While poetry was by no means the only medium

through which this critique was offered, it was a particularly powerful one.

Many other forms and forums of writing — manifestos, academic

books and articles, novels and short stories, speeches, debates, and that

close cousin to poetry, the song lyric — also contributed greatly to this

process. King notes that mixed genres were particularly effective as their

challenging of generic boundaries embodied their efforts to challenge

the borders of what counted as feminism and feminist theory. This

category would include, for example, Audre Lorde’s mixing of autobiog-

raphy, poetry, fiction, legend, and essay in her “biomythography” Zami

(1982), or the mixing of poemas, cuentos, and essais in Gloria Anzaldúa’s

Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) and Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War

Years (1983).28 The writing of poems, however, preceded even these longer

works. Lorde suggests why this might be so: she notes that poetry is

economical not only in terms of expression but also in terms of the

material support needed to produce it: “poetry can be done between

shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, on scraps of surplus paper.

Over the last few years writing a novel on tight finances, I came to

appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between

poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the

major voice of poor, working class [women], and [women of color].”29

This Bridge uses poetry to articulate both a collective “women-of-color

position” and various ethnic-specific positionings. Other collections of

The Poetical Is the Political 93

writings, again invariably mixing poetry with prose fiction and nonfiction,

focused on specific ethno-racialized communities of women. These texts

identify points of solidarity and difference within such groups as Chi-

canas/Latinas (Making Face, Making Soul: Hacienda Caras), African

American women (The Black Woman, and Home Girls: A Black Feminist

Anthology), native women (Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contem-

porary Native American Women’s Writings of North America), and Asian/

Pacific American women (Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by

and about Asian American Women). Lesbians of color played significant

roles in all of these volumes, and each deals seriously with issues of sex-

uality as interwoven with class and other differences within communi-

ties of color. Similar volumes like Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology

did much the same for a variety of self-defined feminist movement sub-

cultures.30 In these volumes poetry does much of the work of “auto-

ethnography,” of showing the experience of the self to be part of and in

tension with the experience of the collective, the social group. The poems

also become what Young calls “auto-theoretical” works in which self-

exploration, as in all good consciousness-raising, is the beginning, not

the end, of a process leading to theory and action. Again, the point is

that poetry does not simply “reflect” ideas already in the air, but rather

in giving “form” brings the ideas into public existence, and helps to invent

identities, not merely to express them. Movements in general are highly

productive places, sites of a great deal of “cultural poetics” — the bring-

ing into visibility and audibility of new thoughts and feelings. In this

case, the cultural poetics occurs through actual poetry. But the lines

across genres in this respect are constantly transgressed; Rich, Lorde,

and Anzaldúa are as well known for their essays as for their poems, and

each reinforces and adds nuance to the other.

The process of feminist consciousness-raising continues. As it does

so, poetry plays a role in each new site or phase of activity, helping to

form new issues and new feminist identities. The rise of antimilitarist,

environmentalist feminisms in the 1980s and early 1990s, for example,

was inspired in part by poet Susan Griffin’s lyrical study Women and

Nature (1978), and various “ecofeminist” anthologies used poetry to

present new ways of thinking about relations between the devaluing of

women and the denigration of nature.31 And the critically important

challenges to the ethnocentric dimension of U.S. feminisms, emerging

under the impact of feminist movements in the Southern Hemisphere

94 The Poetical Is the Political

and of postcolonial theory in the universities, have also used poetry as

one key mode of contestation. Figures like Chandra Mohanty, Gayatri

Spivak, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Lata Mani, Caren Kaplan, Inderpal Grewal,

and Rey Chow gained prominence in the early 1990s by analyzing and

countering homogenizing, racist conceptions of “women in the Third

World” found in much U.S. feminism. This process gained support from

poets whose defamiliarizing verses challenged dominant Anglo-American

feminist paradigms. Trinh’s poetic, auto-ethnographic Woman/Native/

Other offers one example, while Spivak’s literary critical essays on Ben-

gali women poets and storytellers present another.32 Over time, virtually

every constituency or position within the wide terrain of feminisms has

been constructed in part through poetry, from the most essentialist

statements of universal womanhood to the most deconstructive celebra-

tions of postmodern fragmented subjectivities.

The Feminist Poetry Movement as a Cultural Formation

Let us turn now from “women’s movement poetry” to the “feminist

poetry movement.” The distinction is partly artificial, since the two forms

of activity overlap and intertwine, but it is useful to separate them in

order to understand the full cultural impact of feminism(s). The distinc-

tion can be put this way: in “women’s movement poetry” the movement

comes first and is the central focus, with poetry as one of many means

of serving the movement, while in the “feminist poetry movement”

poetry comes first and the central concern is to establish a new kind of

poetry.33 The feminist poetry movement is a cultural formation by and

aimed at professional poets and the cultural institutions (publishing

houses, literature departments, bookstores) surrounding them. The femi-

nist poetry movement is both inside and beyond the women’s move-

ment. It is what British cultural theorist Raymond Williams calls a “for-

mation,” an intellectual or cultural school of thought, like impressionism

in painting or naturalism in fiction writing, that can have “significant

and sometimes decisive influence on the active development of a cul-

ture, and which [has] a variable and often oblique relation to formal

institutions.”34

As historian of the feminist poetry movement Kim Whitehead puts

it, “feminist poetry began in a hundred places at once, in writing work-

shops and at open readings, on the kitchen tables of self-publishing poet/

activists, and in the work of already established poets who began slowly

The Poetical Is the Political 95

to transform their ideas about formal strategies and thematic possibili-

ties.”35 The grassroots troops of the new feminist poetry movement

grew out of the hundreds of consciousness-raising groups and collec-

tives. As these radical new feminist poets began to emerge, they caught

the attention of some powerful, already-established women poets whose

own poetry began to change under the influence of the movement.

Poets like Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, and Gwendolyn Brooks were in

varying degrees part of the poetry establishment when the women’s

movement emerged. The movement helped them understand ways in

which they felt marginalized, stifled, or distorted by the male-dominated

institutions and formations of the poetry world. At the same time, some

of these poets had anticipated feminist themes in their work and with

increasing self-consciousness brought that work to bear in the context

of creating the women’s movement. This led not only to a reworking by

these poets of their own work, but also to a rethinking and researching

of the role of women in the history of poetry.

Among living links to a longer legacy, no poet was more important to

the movement than Muriel Rukeyser. A winner of the prestigious Yale

Younger Poets prize in 1935, Rukeyser had given up a career of safe verse-

making to immerse herself in the social and political struggles of the

Depression years, a commitment she brought with her into the move-

ments she associated with in the 1960s. Rukeyser, along with younger

but established poets like Rich (who also had won the Yale prize for her

first, premovement volume) became indefatigable teachers of poetry

and poetics to the emerging generation of women’s movement poets.

Over time this process moved the category “woman poet” from a dis-

missive term to one charged with possibility.

As it emerged, the feminist poetry movement drew upon several other

compatible developments in the field of poetry. Three strands from

existing schools of poetry were particularly influential as rewritten into

the terms of an emerging feminist poetic consciousness. First, the beat

poets had begun in the 1950s a return of poetry to public performance.

Poetry had become a rather genteel affair, more often read in libraries

or living rooms. Beat poets like Allen Ginsburg were infamous for their

raucous public poetry rituals. This process was then taken up by many

protest poets in the 1960s, particularly antiwar poets (including Gins-

burg himself ) and poets in the black arts and other cultural nationalist

movements. No group developed this return to poetry as performance,

96 The Poetical Is the Political

rather than silent reading, more powerfully than feminist poets who

fostered hundreds of public readings in feminist bookstores, music

festivals, and demonstrations. Second, the confessional school of poets,

founded by figures like Robert Lowell in the 1950s and including some

proto-feminist poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, had opened up

possibilities for personal psychological exploration that played well into

the intimate psychological dynamics of emerging feminist experience.

And third, the Black Mountain poets, among others, had begun moving

poetry away from rigid formal lines to more open, free-verse forms.

These forms were both better suited to the open explorations of self-in-

society of feminist poets, and less daunting than rigid metrical poetry

for women excluded from formal literary training.

Just as the early feminist movement scoured all history for examples

of women struggling to liberate themselves from male-defined institu-

tions and social roles, when the feminist poetry movement emerged, it

naturally set out to find its poetic precursors. This task entailed both

uncovering women poets buried under male-centered poetic histories,

and rereading and reinterpreting female poets who had managed to find

some hold in the mostly male-defined pantheon of important poets. In

the United States it was nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson who

served most often as a distant American foremother to the feminist poetry

formation. The full range of Dickinson’s poetry had only recently be-

come available in the 1950s, and as her reputation grew as one of the

two great poets of the latter half of the nineteenth century (alongside

Walt Whitman), feminists struggled to rescue her from those who would

ignore the powerful things she had to say about the minds and spirits of

women.

Several poetry anthologies appearing in the early years of the new

women’s movement played a key role in solidifying the formation. The

most successful of these was No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by

Women (1973), edited by Florence Howe (co-founder of Feminist Press)

and Ellen Bass.36 The collection starts with poems by Amy Lowell, Ger-

trude Stein, and other members of the modernist poetry movement of

the early twentieth century, then presents an array of contemporary

poets “shaped in the women’s liberation movement.” The collection

includes 220 pieces from 86 poets, about 20 of them women of color.

The title comes, not surprisingly, from a feminist poem by Rukeyser

telling women to take off the false faces put upon them by patriarchy,

The Poetical Is the Political 97

and the subtitle indicates that the search for “poems by women” did

not necessarily restrict the collection to a political definition of “femi-

nist poet.”

Howe reports in the preface to a later edition of the anthology that

the book began as something of a “lark, a game” of collecting women

poets that she engaged in with her then student Bass. As she puts it, “in

the early seventies it was still possible to use a card catalog under the

word ‘women’ and find ‘poets,’ though we could not have known then

that many poets had slipped away, out of that net into invisibility.” This

process of scouring library card catalogs netted about fifty established

women poets for the collection, and then, Howe notes, the “younger

poets found us: Word spread quickly in the early seventies through

women’s liberation newspapers and newsletters. We received three hun-

dred submissions through the mail.”37 From this Howe and Bass culled

the collection, with only their “inchoate” feminism and an insistence that

the “poem please us aesthetically” to guide them. This second criterion,

the aesthetic one, is the mark of the formation on their efforts. The

larger task, which might define the formation, is expressed by Howe as a

set of questions in the preface to the original edition: “A nagging doubt:

are women victims of prejudiced editors or are women poets out of the

mainstream of modern poetry? What is the mainstream? And what do

women write about?”38

No More Masks! was one of several anthologies that took on the task

of answering these questions by making available for the first time a

wide range of historical and contemporary poems by women. Other,

similar volumes emerged in this same time period. It was clearly the

moment when the formation was strong enough to begin shaping its

own tradition. One such work was Rising Tides: Twentieth-Century Amer-

ican Women Poets (1973), whose goals were stated baldly in a prefatory

paragraph: “Because representation in most poetry anthologies of the

past has not gone beyond tokenism, most women writers have remained

minor figures in the male-dominated literary world. This book is an

attempt to make both men and women aware of the vital force women

poets today represent.” As the back cover put it, “Rising out of the same

growing consciousness that spawned the women’s liberation move-

ment, this book is a feminist statement in the largest sense.”39 A year

later came The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in En-

gland and America, 1552–1950 (1974), a collection whose title, again from

98 The Poetical Is the Political

a Rukeyser poem (“What would happen if one woman told the truth

about her life? / The world would split open”), shows its connection to

the movement, and whose subtitle indicates that it is aimed at helping

to establish a still longer tradition.

By the end of the twentieth century, this literary formation had con-

tributed mightily to a rewriting of the entire history of poetry. It is now

possible to go to any literary bookstore in America and find dozens of

anthologies dedicated to one or another of numerous strands and schools

of feminist and/or women’s poetry. Under the onslaught of this forma-

tion, and interrelated formations in ethnic and gay writing, literary his-

tory has been rewritten. It now not only includes but has been radically

changed by the presence of a panoply of female (and often feminist)

poets. And the future of poetry by women has been forever shaped by

this remaking of the universe of poetry into an available tradition for

women to build upon, just as surely as the wider culture was radically

rewritten from top to bottom by feminist challenges to dominant para-

digms of thought and action.

As impressive as the success of the “feminist poetry formation” was, it

was only one among many similar feminist intellectual and cultural for-

mations. Parallel efforts in academe, for example, gave birth to the closely

connected formation of feminist literary studies, and also to feminist

sociology, feminist political science, feminist anthropology, feminist

science, and so on. Few, if any, realms of the arts or sciences remain un-

affected by the kind of feminist formation represented by the feminist

poetry movement. Each of these formations has had both a local impact

on the particular area, and a mutually reinforcing impact across these

realms of thought, such that they form a broader feminist intellectual/

cultural formation of great power.

Building Feminist Cultural Institutions

Both women’s movement poetry and the feminist poetry movement

depended upon the creation and development of parallel, feminist

institutions. I have argued that, given the centrality of experience, emo-

tion, language reformation, and intimate spheres of action to the femi-

nist process of consciousness-raising, poetry with its linguistic and affec-

tive precision was well suited to play a major role in diffusing feminist

ideas out into the world. But a very concrete process of institution build-

ing underwrote this predisposition. Drawing on the tradition found in

The Poetical Is the Political 99

the civil rights, new left, and ethnic nationalist movements of creating

“parallel institutions” to challenge inadequate or corrupt ones in the

dominant society, all strands of women’s movements built formal alter-

native cultural structures. Many CR groups, the first level of institu-

tionalization, for example, became writing groups. Feminist CR/writing

groups in turn produced at first feminist broadsides, and then under-

ground journals run by feminist publishing collectives. Feminist pub-

lishing collectives sponsored poetry readings and poetry festivals that

widened the audience, encouraging small feminist presses to move into

bigger projects. These processes produced and rediscovered enough writ-

ing to justify the creation of small feminist bookstores, and small femi-

nist bookstores encouraged the creation of larger feminist presses. Larger

feminist presses proved the existence of a market for women’s writing

that mainstream publishing houses could not ignore. They began then

to broker deals with mainstream publishing houses that guaranteed a

wider audience for feminist writers, and netted the feminist presses

profits that allowed them to bring more radical writers into print.40 By

1978 a phenomenal seventy-three feminist periodicals and sixty-six fem-

inist presses had sprung up, along with dozens of women’s bookstores.41

While institutionalization certainly involved some watering down

upon entry into the “mainstream,” many feminist writers resisted and

continue to resist that process and the individualizing, divide-and-

conquer strategy it often entails. When, for example, white feminist poet

Adrienne Rich won the National Book Award in 1974, she indicated, as

part of a joint statement written with two African American feminist

poets, fellow nominees Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, that she accepted

the award “not as an individual but in the name of all women whose

voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world.” More gen-

erally, poets and editors negotiate between movement and nonmove-

ment sites, making individual and collective decisions about when to

support feminist presses and when to send their work out as incursions

into the wider world.

The process of feminist institution building also includes an academic

institution, women’s studies departments, with a strong literary com-

ponent that assisted the feminist poetry movement and used literature

as one means of classroom consciousness-raising. This led to efforts to

rewrite the canon of literature to include far more women’s literature

and a significant amount of feminist literature. This process moved from

100 The Poetical Is the Political

movement anthologies to women’s studies textbooks to such major

revisionist works as the Heath Anthology of American Literature, which

in turn forced a reworking of such mainstream collections as the Nor-

ton Anthology of American Literature. This process has taken several

decades, but from these small group beginnings there has emerged a

vast body of feminist writing that has touched every level, layer, and

corner of American society. There is now a great body of feminist

thought enmeshed in virtually every literary anthology available for use

in the classroom or by the casual reader.

Ultimately, Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize for literature, and the vast

women-of-color literary movement she embodies, grows out of move-

ment contexts through these layers of mediation. As usual, by the time

that point is reached, the originating movement contexts have been lost

in the mists of time (and hegemony), but their diffusion is nevertheless

movement work. One might note by way of materially tracing this

process that Morrison edited and wrote introductions for both the

first collection of Huey Newton’s Black Panther writings, To Die for the

People, and one of the most important early collections of black femi-

nist thought, The Black Woman, compiled by Toni Cade [Bambara].

Again, this can stand as but one example of a massive diffusing of femi-

nist and other radical movement ideas into the mainstream. That this

process also involves some defusing, some lessoning of the explosive im-

pact found when texts are produced and received within a movement

culture, is no doubt true. But that just suggests the need for ongoing

movement struggle, struggle that should include taking far more credit

for the powerful impact already achieved by the incorporation of femi-

nist ideas into common-sense, mainstream thought and action.

Third Wave Poetics?

The debates within feminism in the 1980s and 1990s are interpreted dif-

ferently. To some liberal white women committed to maintaining a sta-

tus quo, the debates were seen as divisive, particularly in the context of

a “backlash” against feminism in the years of Reaganism and Christian

conservatism.42 To women in the Third World, U.S. women of color,

and their white allies who believe feminism should not be dominated

by one set of privileged voices, the turmoil, however painful, has been

healthy and transformative. Similar ferment surrounds the language and

concept of a “third wave” of feminism. Some suggest that the critique of

The Poetical Is the Political 101

“hegemonic feminism” by lesbians and women of color in the United

States and the Third World itself constituted a third-wave movement.

Others see this as a process that has cleared the way, making it possible

for a younger generation to take the movement in new directions. For

others still, the wave metaphor is always falsely homogenizing, untrue

to the variety of sites of feminist movement activity.43 But however one

characterizes it, feminist activity is alive and well in the twenty-first cen-

tury, both in the form of ongoing women’s movements and in the impact

of feminism within other progressive movements.

It is also clear that as these movements continue, poetry will continue

to be a powerful feminist tool. The feminist music movement, which

has always been closely linked to feminist poetry, was given renewed

energy in the 1990s by new feminist music, most notably the indepen-

dent folk/rock of Ani DiFranco, the post-punk energy of Riot Grrrls,

and feminist rap by performers like Queen Latifah. The feminist poetry

movement is also one of the forces behind the renewed energy in per-

formed, or “spoken word,” poetry. Growing as well out of the powerful

hip-hop culture pioneered by black and Latino/a youth (which in turn

owes much to black power and Latino/a nationalist poetics), spoken

word performance is an important site of feminist consciousness-raising

for younger women (and men), and a sign that poetry will continue to

be one key site of feminist action for years to come.

102 The Poetical Is the Political

The people we now call Mexican Americans, or Chicanos, came into exis-

tence through resistance to two wars of conquest. The first was that of

Spanish conquistadors, who in the sixteenth century invaded and deci-

mated the native peoples of the territories now known as Mexico and

the southwestern United States. Rape, concubinage, and intermarriage

between the Spaniards, various indigenous peoples, African slaves, and

others eventually created la raza cósmica, the multihued mix of peoples

that is Mexico. The second war of conquest was that of the United States

against Mexico. The U.S. states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah,

Nevada, and California, as well as parts of Wyoming and Colorado, were

part of Mexico before they were forcibly brought under U.S. dominion

through the Texas and Mexican-American wars of the mid-nineteenth

century. Begun on a dubious pretense and resisted by many in the United

States as a war of imperial conquest, the Mexican-American War ended

in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Forced on a defeated

Mexico, the treaty extended the U.S. empire into the Southwest and

California. Overnight, thousands of Mexicans found themselves strangers

in their own land, putatively “American” now but generally treated as

second-class citizens.

Mexican Americans can rightfully claim deeper roots in these regions

of the United States than most other citizens, yet they are often con-

fused with and portrayed as “illegal aliens.” Maintaining their cultural

heritage while becoming citizens of the United States was a complicated

process involving sporadic open conflict (like the Mexican American

F O U R

Revolutionary Walls

Chicano/a Murals, Chicano/a Movements

103

outlaws who fought ranchers and Rangers in Texas), as well as subtle

daily acts of resistance during many generations. The process of “becom-

ing Mexican American,” as George Sánchez named it, was long, com-

plex, and multifaceted.1 It produced identities riddled with contradictions

resulting from decades of racism, externally imposed and internalized.

Before the 1960s, many Mexican Americans, especially those in a small

but influential middle class, believed that the best way to be accepted as

Americans was to deny much of the Mexican and Indian side of their

heritage and to assimilate into the white or “Anglo” world. But that

world was most often hostile and exploitative rather than welcoming.

Despite legal gains made by Mexican American civil rights groups like

LULAC (the League of United Latin American Citizens, a group similar

to the NAACP), the veterans’ group GI Forum, and others, Mexican

Americans entered the 1960s segregated in barrios (Spanish for “neigh-

borhoods”), with inferior schools and services, high unemployment,

and a staggering rate of poverty. They were routinely subject to racist

insults to their culture, as well as brutality from the police and discrimi-

nation from employers. The once open border between the United

States and Mexico had become a zone of harassment separating families

and loved ones, and subjecting both Mexican visitors and Mexican Amer-

ican citizens to constant threats of deportation or refusal of reentry.

But resistance was also present amid assimilation and acquiescence.

The popular front social movement of the 1930s and 1940s, driven by

labor union struggles, shaped many future leaders of what would be-

come the Chicano movement.2 Mexican American labor leaders like

Josephina Fierro de Bright and the “cannery women” strikers in Cali-

fornia, and Bert Corona of the Los Angeles branch of the longshore-

men’s union, set models for later activism and in some cases directly

involved themselves in the new struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Many

Mexican American activists in the 1930s were also part of El Congreso

de Pueblo de Habla Español, an important progressive political coalition

of “Spanish-speaking people.” Despite significant racism among the

white working class, the workplace in the 1930s and 1940s also included

multiracial coalitions, reflecting the sense that class unity was needed to

overcome the racist “divide and conquer” strategies of employers.3

When the new “Chicano generation” rose to prominence in the 1960s,

it had to negotiate the complications of these multiple identities, chal-

lenging assimilation, building on activist models laid by predecessors,

104 Revolutionary Walls

improvising new elements, and exorcising elements of internalized

racism that hindered the creation of a newly politicized sense of self

and community. Despite these difficulties, the efforts made by people of

Mexican descent living in the United States to claim the right to their

own dignity, identity, language, and culture broadened in the 1960s to

become el movimiento, the Chicano movement.

Various social factors help account for the rise of new activism: the

urbanization of Mexican Americans, an increase in the Mexican Amer-

ican population (which doubled after World War II in some areas like

Los Angeles), a larger proportion of youth as part of the “baby boom,”

more Mexican American students in college thanks to financial aid for

students of color in the wake of the black civil rights movement, and a

new group of Mexican American activists who learned organizing skills

in student-centered protest groups like SNCC, SDS, and the Berkeley

Free Speech Movement. Women like Maria Varela and Elizabeth “Betita”

Martinez, both SNCC veterans and the former a cofounder of SDS,

brought a new kind of movement know-how into the community. Vet-

eran labor movement activists like Corona and César Chávez added to

the storehouse of community organizing skills.4

As the 1960s rolled on, a new generation, led by students but including

many from earlier generations as well, began to call themselves “Chi-

cano,” a term taken from street slang that announced the emergence of

a new political identity. Chicanos reversed the policies and ideologies of

assimilation and sought instead to recover, understand, and celebrate

the cultural heritage that made them unique, while insisting on their

economic and political rights as citizens of the United States.5 Many

identified with the Mexican revolutionaries of the early twentieth cen-

tury and sought sweeping, radical change to wipe out racism and class

inequality.

Murals in Movement, Movement in Murals

While Chicano movement artists worked and continue to work in many

media, and while artists from many other racial and ethnic backgrounds

work with murals, most historians and critics note a special affinity

between the Chicano movement and the community mural movement.6

Some sense of this affinity can be conveyed by noting that in the Los

Angeles area alone (from which I will draw most of my examples) more

than a thousand Chicano murals have been created since 1965. Chicano

Revolutionary Walls 105

murals can also be found in great numbers throughout Texas, the South-

west, and some Midwest cities like Chicago, where large numbers of

Mexican Americans live.

The most common reason given for the attractiveness of the mural

form for Chicano (male) and Chicana (female) artist-activists is the

inspiration of the great Mexican muralists of the 1920s and 1930s: Diego

Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siquieros. These men

were important to the cultural politics of Mexico, and during the 1930s

they were significant figures on the cultural side of the popular front

labor movement in the United States. To a large extent the modern mural

art form is the invention of these Mexican artists. “Los tres grandes”

(“the three greats”), as they are known, were important models not only

as major modern artists but also as political activists who rooted their

muralism in support for the struggles of the poorest, most exploited

members of their communities. The work of the Mexican muralists was

extended into the United States during the 1930s through government-

sponsored mural programs that eventually covered the walls of hundreds

of post offices and other public buildings. Knowledge of this legacy

inspired many of the creators of Chicano murals and played a role in

the general public appeal of murals.

But there was another key element in that popularity — the prior exis-

tence in the barrio of a model of popular painted public art. This was

pulquería art, the painting of landscapes and other scenes on the exte-

rior walls of taverns, restaurants, shops, and other public buildings in

Mexico and in U.S. barrios. The tradition of pulquería art lent a sense of

familiarity to the murals that began to appear in the community with

the rise of the Chicano movement. Just as the adaptation of black church

music for the purposes of the civil rights movement allowed a radical new

content to enter through a familiar, nonthreatening mode, the existence

of pulquería art probably lessened the shock of the radical new mes-

sages being conveyed by community murals.

Other features of early Chicano murals drew from an image-system

familiar to many in the barrios. These include the use of images drawn

from Mexicano/Chicano religious observations, particularly altares (the

small religious shrines found in many Chicano homes), as well as estampas

and almanaques (chrome-lithographed religious prints and calendars).

On the more secular side, muralists drew upon the style of customized

ranflas (low-rider cars), on tatuajes (home-made india ink tatoos), and

106 Revolutionary Walls

placas (spray-painted graffiti logos). Initially less familiar but soon

ubiquitous images drawn from indigenous art, especially Aztec, Olmec,

Mayan, and Toltec sources, round out those elements that contributed

to a specifically Chicano aesthetic. Add to these sources images drawn

from American pop culture that had, by the 1960s, become part of a na-

tional youth culture shared by young Chicanos, and you have the main

image repertoire used for movement murals. In various combinations

these images became the aesthetic base for the articulation of complex,

painted political messages that played a key role in reinventing Mexican

Americans as Chicanos.

Painting History on the Wall

As I explore the interwoven histories of Chicano/a movement(s) and

Chicana/o murals, I’ll view the murals as expressions of key aspects of

and issues in el movimiento, while periodically addressing the political

possibilities and limits of the community mural as a form. I’ll discuss a

series of murals created by Chicano and Chicana artists from the late

1960s to the present, emphasizing that, like other movements, the Chi-

cano movement continues, despite setbacks and changes, to this day.

The intertwined nature of the Chicano movement and the mural

movement is apparent already in one of the first Chicano murals exe-

cuted in California. Painted by Antonio Bernal on the wall of the offices

of United Farm Workers/El Teatro Campesino cultural center in Del Rey

in 1968, this mural can be read as a kind of origin story of the Chicano

movement.7

To begin with, the location of the mural immediately points to one of

the political struggles that gave birth to the Chicano movement and

underscores that murals were not the only important Chicano move-

ment art form. El Teatro Campesino (The Farmworkers’ Theater) was a

vital theater group that grew up on the front lines of the farmworkers’

union movement led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta. El Teatro

Campesino originated in the fields in actos (one-act skits) performed by

farmworkers themselves that urged their compañeros and compañeras to

support the union. Under the guidance of Luis Valdez, El Teatro later

expanded its repertoire to take up issues facing urban Chicanos and

acted to bridge rural farmworker families and their city counterparts. El

Teatro inspired many other Chicano theater troupes that formed through-

out California, Texas, and the Southwest.

Revolutionary Walls 107

Turning to the mural itself, and “reading” it from left to right, we get

a clear, strong portrait of the forces feeding into and inspiring the Chi-

cano movement. On the far left we see La Adelita, mythical heroine of

the Mexican Revolution of 1910. La Adelita is a kind of composite figure

for all the soldaderas (women warriors) who fought in the revolution,

one whose spirit has often been celebrated in corridos (political ballads,

which have a long history in Mexican and Mexican American culture).

That revolution sought to return control of Mexico to ordinary peasants

and workers, particularly to those of Indian ancestry who had never

fully accepted Spanish domination. This celebration of indigenismo (the

native indio component of Mexican identity) was part of a similar cele-

bration of the Indian part of Chicano identity and a downplaying of the

European side (seen as too close to the dominant U.S. Anglo identity).

Alongside La Adelita are two heroes of the revolution, Emiliano Zapata

and Pancho Villa. These two peasant leaders became folk heroes to young

Chicanos who saw themselves as involved in a similar guerrilla struggle

of poor farm laborers and industrial workers against Anglo domination

in the United States. To the right of Villa is the legendary Joaquín Muri-

eta, the Mexican/Californian Robin Hood of the gold rush era. Murieta

is said to have fought bravely against European American gold miners

who stole the claims of Mexican Californians. The gold rush era was the

time when the transition of California from a Mexican to an Anglo

state was largely completed, primarily through the illegal seizure not

only of mine holdings but of many of the landholdings of Mexican Cali-

fornians under the newly imposed, Anglo-dominated state government.

Murieta symbolizes resistance within the confines of the once Mexican

parts of the United States, just as Zapata and Villa represent resistance

by ordinary people to class and racial hierarchy within Mexico proper.

Like La Adelita, Murieta has been and continues to be the subject of

numerous corridos.

These four figures from history served to evoke a heritage of struggle

by the peoples inhabiting the space where Mexico and the United States

have permeable boundaries. They express that el movimiento, though

often led by young people, quickly developed a strong sense of history

and drew strength from a long line of figures that had struggled in greater

Mexico (including the U.S. Southwest) for justice against oppression.

Retelling the history of Mexico and of Americans of Mexican descent

was a key part of the movement. This desire to create a new history free

108 Revolutionary Walls

of stereotyped docile Mexicans with an inferior culture led to struggles

to form Chicano studies programs that could assure these new stories a

place in the curriculum. A militant generation of Chicano historians

and social scientists gave rise to new scholarship that saw the United

States as an imperial power that, having conquered part of Mexico, tried

to force its people to conform to Anglo values, language, and culture.

They emphasized the ways in which attempts to impose European Amer-

ican culture were defeated by strong familial and communal resistance

from Americans of Mexican descent. Neighborhood murals in which

historical figures like these were portrayed as quite literally larger than

life became important “textbooks” that spurred an interest in history.

This interest could then be nourished by the writings of insurgent his-

torians whose academic work carried the movement to high schools

and colleges, where hundreds of students walked out of classes or went

on strike for an education that respected their heritage and identity.

These “blowouts,” as they were known, started in high schools in south-

ern California and were immensely inspirational. They challenged older

people to catch up with the younger ones.

Moving into more recent times, the next two figures in the mural

represent struggles that fueled Chicano pride and activism more directly

in the mid-1960s: César Chávez of the farm workers movement, and

Reies López Tijerina of the Hispano land grant struggle in the Southwest.

Chávez was a community organizer who became a union organizer and

therefore understood that workers are always part of larger communi-

ties. While the United Farm Workers (UFW) union had members of

many ethnic groups, the majority were Chicanos, and Chávez and union

cofounder Dolores Huerta placed symbols of Mexican and Mexican

American culture at the heart of their nonviolent organizing efforts.

The UFW flag (which Chávez holds in the mural) proudly bore a black

Aztec eagle against a red background, a symbol soon to become identified

with the Chicano/a movement generally. The union began its first huelga

(strike) on 16 September 1965, the day commemorated as the beginning

of the Mexican Revolution. And when they marched, the UFW mem-

bers carried a statue of the Virgen de Guadeloupe, patron saint of the

Mexican poor, thus linking the Catholic faith of the majority of union

members to the struggle, as black Christianity helped form a base for

the civil rights movement. In this way Chávez sought to reclaim the spirit

of Christianity from a conservative church hierarchy, much as Reverend

Revolutionary Walls 109

King and other black ministers had reclaimed the protesting spirit of

black Protestantism. While Chávez, deeply influenced by the multiracial

labor coalitions of the popular front era, never saw himself as leading a

Chicano union or as part of an exclusively Chicano movement, the union

and its members became powerful symbols whose strikes, marches,

boycotts, and other protests inspired pride and resistance among the

new Chicano generation.

Next to Chávez stands another figure of great importance to an emerg-

ing Chicano movement. Reies López Tijerina led the Hispano land grant

movement during the mid- and late 1960s in the Southwest. Tijerina

and his followers claimed descent from the original, pre-Anglo Spanish

settlers (hispanos) of the Southwest whose land had been stolen by the

invading Yankees. After repeated attempts to press their claims in court,

Tijerina’s Alianza took up armed rebellion on 5 June 1967, surrounding

and then occupying a courthouse symbolic of their land claims. Word of

Tijerina’s guerrilla action spread quickly among the Chicano commu-

nity, offering a contemporary exemplar of the kind of resistance prac-

ticed by Zapata and Villa. Though hardly a revolution, the courthouse

raid seemed to link the legendary bandits and revolutionaries of the

past to the current moment and to reinforce a sense among many mili-

tant young Chicanos that perhaps only armed resistance could overthrow

Anglo colonization of the U.S. peoples of Mexican descent.

More broadly, Tijerina’s focus on land fed into the developing notion

of Aztlán, quasi-mythical ancient homeland of the Aztecs, said to cover

most of those areas of the United States that now have large Chicano

populations. A desire to reclaim Aztlán was a deeply symbolic expression

of the right to feel at home within the confines of the United States, and

an attempt to found a newly awakened Chicano raza (people, nation)

on the resurrected memory of a homeland that predated by hundreds

of years the coming of Europeans. Evocations of Aztlán became common

in the political rhetoric, poetry, music, and murals of the movement.

Finally, the mural depicts to the right of Tijerina two African Ameri-

cans, a composite Black Panther/Malcolm X figure, and Martin Luther

King Jr. These figures express Chicano solidarity with the struggles of

African Americans and also presumably acknowledge the debt of the

Chicano movement to the model of struggle provided by the civil rights

and black power movements. César Chávez frequently acknowledged

his debt to King’s concept of nonviolent resistance, and it is not hard to

110 Revolutionary Walls

draw a parallel between Tijerina’s tactics and those of the Black Panthers

and other militant African Americans with whom he made alliances.

The inclusion of these figures suggests that el movimiento was allied to a

larger movement for justice for all peoples oppressed within a United

States dominated by rich white men and an all-white notion of “Amer-

ican” culture.

If I were to give the image of community conveyed in Bernal’s mural

a name, it would be something like “community as militant or revolu-

tionary solidarity.” To achieve this image of solidarity, the mural col-

lages together, or some would say paints over, several ideological differ-

ences. The nonviolent strategies of King and Chávez, for example, exist

unproblematically alongside the armed struggle represented by the Mexi-

can revolutionaries, the Black Panthers, and Tijerina. And while the

overall image was surely intended to evoke an emerging chicanismo, a

Chicano nationalism similar to the black nationalism discussed in chap-

ter 2, none of the pictured individuals, including the contemporary ones,

were full supporters of a nationalist position. But this expresses both a

truth of the movement and one of the strengths of muralism. The truth

is that a spirit of common struggle did unite a great many Chicanos at

this time, despite ideological, tactical, regional, gender, class, and other

differences. No medium was better equipped to express this solidarity-

in-difference than the wordless form of the mural where the complexi-

ties of verbal political positionings are muted in a visual language of

pure juxtaposition — all the figures forming a single, united front of

resistance. This sense of united effort was given historical depth not only

by the historical figures in the scene but also in the style of the mural,

which draws from the Mexican muralists who had drawn from the style

of ancient Indian friezes (which, like Bernal’s mural, typically depict

people in three-quarter profile).

Out of this ethos, inspired by Chávez, Tijerina, and the Mexican rev-

olutionaries, with models of action, culture, and rhetoric drawn from

these figures and from the black liberation struggle, and out of an in-

creasing dissatisfaction with liberal assimilation, a vibrant, widespread

Chicano movement had arrived by 1968. El movimiento was expressed

largely through regional power bases rather than a single national organi-

zation. In Texas and parts of the Southwest the Mexican American Youth

Organization (MAYO) and its offspring La Raza Unida Party played the

central organizing role. La Raza Unida challenged Anglo dominance

Revolutionary Walls 111

through city, county, state, and national electoral campaigns that were at

the same time movements of community and Chicano cultural pride.

In Denver the Crusade for Justice, led by Rudolfo “Corky” Gonzales,

was a powerful grassroots movement with a strong separatist bent that

celebrated Chicano culture and the most militant heroes of the Mexican

and Cuban revolutions. Significantly, Gonzales was also the product of

an urban barrio; a bit younger than Chávez and Tijerina, he was better

able to express the spirit of an increasingly young and urban Mexican

American generation. Gonzales’s epic poem, Yo Soy Joaquín (“I Am

Joaquín”), later made into a short film by Luis Valdez of El Teatro Cam-

pesino, was a powerful compilation of Chicano history from the Aztecs to

the United Farm Workers, which drew together and popularized many

of the key themes and aesthetic motifs of Chicano cultural nationalism.8

California was the center not only of the United Farm Workers but

also of the struggle for Chicano studies in the universities, a struggle

won usually through student protests and strikes. In Santa Barbara, Cali-

fornia, the creation of El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán

(MEChA) in 1968 united several existing student groups into the single

most important student group of the Chicano movement, one that be-

came a force on and off campus, in high schools as well as community

colleges and universities. California was also home to one of the most

radical, paramilitary groups in the movement, the Brown Berets, a

group with many similarities to the Black Panthers that protested police

brutality in the barrios and often provided security for marches and

rallies. These various groups had differing ideas and agendas, some

reflecting regional variations in the lives of Chicanos, some represent-

ing differences in political ideology, but all were imbued with a sense

that Chicanos would never accept being second-class citizens ashamed

of their culture. Some of the energy of MEChA emerged from the great

student “blowouts” of March 1968. Begun as a student strike at Abraham

Lincoln School in East Los Angeles, the blowouts eventually involved

more than ten thousand students and effectively shut down the city

school system. The thirty-six demands of the strike committee included

hiring Mexican American and Spanish-speaking teachers and adminis-

trators, offering classes in the history of Mexican and Mexican Ameri-

can culture, and ending other racist practices in the schools. On the

picket lines outside the schools and school board headquarters, signs

112 Revolutionary Walls

proclaiming “Chicano Power!” and “¡Viva La Raza!” drew media atten-

tion. As the first major mass protest specifically against racism by Mexi-

can Americans, the events had a stunning impact on an emerging gen-

eration of young activists.

Another famous Chicano mural that embodies this ethos and extends

the scope of solidarity even beyond Aztlán is based on a widely circu-

lated poster with a close-up image of Latino revolutionary guerrilla Che

Guevara next to the declaration “We Are Not a Minority.” Both the poster

and the mural versions parody the “Uncle Sam Wants You” recruitment

posters of World War I. They became in effect a kind of “Uncle Che

Wants You” recruitment device for the Chicano movement. The mural

version of the image shows the ability of murals to be at once powerfully

direct and yet usefully ambiguous in their rhetoric (even when assisted

by some words). For example, to some viewers this piece offers a clear

revolutionary message, either a cultural nationalist one about internal

colonialism oppressing Chicanos, or a revolutionary internationalist one

suggesting worldwide solidarity by peoples of color. These two related

but different brands of revolutionism were both prominent in the 1960s

and early 1970s. The notion of “internal colonialism,” developed power-

fully in one of the books that shaped the Chicano movement, Rudolfo

Acuña’s Occupied America, argues that the position of Chicanos within

the southwestern United States is parallel to the status of a nation under

European colonialism: the dominant culture attempts to impose its forms

on a subject people, extracts a wealth of resources from those occupied

territories, and gives back little other than paternalistic claims to be

helping backward peoples. The “internal colony” notion was a powerful

one, especially when tied to the idea of Aztlán as Chicano “homeland.”

While this first interpretation stresses the situation within the United

States, a second interpretation of the Che mural places it within a wider

claim about an international movement of resistance. Che Guevara was

an Argentinean by birth who played a decisive role in the Cuban Revo-

lution against a corrupt U.S.–backed regime, and later died fighting for

a similar cause in Bolivia. Just as the black movement drew strength from

the image of anticolonial struggles in Africa, Chicanos drew special in-

spiration from the struggles in Spanish-speaking countries of South

America against European and U.S. colonialism. In the black power move-

ment some groups, like the Panthers, stressed alliance with any groups,

Revolutionary Walls 113

including white radicals, furthering revolutionary change, while others

held a separatist all-black position. Similarly, Chicano groups divided

over this strategic question. This division is usefully invisible in the mural.

Probably the majority of people in the community would read the

Che mural more modestly and generally as a reminder that in the wider

world, people of color are the majority, not the minority, and that within

the United States no one should accept the second-class status that the

term minority conveys. There is also an attempt to give historical depth

to the community through an infusion of indigenismo in the form of the

letter A done in the shape of a Mayan pyramid. These various political

positions do not easily coexist, and they became the source of bitter

ideological struggle, especially in the early 1970s. But the mural shows

that the phrase “We Are Not a Minority” is meaningful to a very large

segment of the Chicano community, a community that the visual rhet-

oric of such murals helped to form.

The Del Rey and Che murals dramatically convey the political bravado

of the early years of the movement, roughly 1968 to the early 1970s,

when certain cracks and contradictions just beneath the surface could

still be plastered over. Eventually, failure to come to terms with ideolog-

ical contradictions between reformism and revolutionism, as well as

others regarding gender and class, would be part of the undoing of the

most radical phase of the movement. I want to suggest here that these

murals were expressing a strategic ambiguity or openness that is a key

ingredient in moments of movement formation. Such images of com-

munity speak a connection caught in el movimiento’s terms by carnal-

ismo, a “blood” connection deeper than ideology and carried not biolog-

ically, as the term misleadingly suggests, but through a shared cultural

history of exploitation, oppression, and resistance. Such a notion is part

of an “essentialist” moment that is probably an inescapable phase in

any emerging movement. “Essentialist” notions (suggesting a natural,

biological, essential connectedness) must always be weighed strategically

against the costs of suppressing necessary debate about political and

cultural differences. These moments embody a confusion between the

idea that the movement expresses the community, and the truer sense

that it is part of an attempt to invent such a community, one that existed

previously as at best a potentiality.

If these first two murals capture well the radical, even revolutionary,

fervor of the early Chicano movement, we turn now to some murals that

114 Revolutionary Walls

express the equally important and equally pervasive, pragmatic side of

el movimiento. I want to examine some murals that were used more as

survival strategies within the everyday life of the barrio than as revolu-

tionary signs. The pragmatic messages of this type of mural were gen-

erally of two types: those designed to instill pride by fighting racist

stereotypes, and those designed to lessen intracommunity violence. The

former concern, for example, is embodied in a mural by members of

East Los Streetscapers (Wayne Alaniz-Healy and David Rivas Botello),

La Familia. At one level it is a piece so conservative it might easily be

titled “family values.” Its male-led familial utopia is intended in part as a

reply to stereotyped representations of Mexican Americans as shiftless

street kids and gang members, or as parents who let their children run

wild in the streets. The mural is a vivid indication of the deep value

placed by Chicanos on family life, both inside and outside the move-

ment culture proper.

This mural is more than an image of the family in a narrow sense be-

cause the image of la familia is superimposed over a series of scenes

from rural and urban Chicano lives, which appear to be linked by the

radiating power of the family (represented by rays of sunlight). The

family is thus not simply an image of home life but of community and

Chicano national life — community as a kind of meta-family headed by

a meta-patriarch whose authority is superimposed on the diverse scenes

of community activity. The male figure in the mural dominates the scene,

his female partner tucked under his arm: it is his power, not hers, that

holds together “the” community. This image is paralleled quite explic-

itly at times in the political rhetoric of the late 1960s and early 1970s when

talk of “the family of Chicanos” served to unify forces. But it also served

as one focal point for Chicana feminist critiques of patriarchal relations

in the movement as they elaborated parallels between male dominance

of families and male dominance of el movimiento.

A more complex and striking image of family life was painted in

what became known in the mid-1970s as Chicano Park in San Diego.

This mural is not only a fascinating composition in its own right but

also has a story that raises some important issues about the politics of

public space entailed in mural making. In the image, a male farmworker

appears at once to be crucified on this freeway pylon “canvas” and to be

spreading his strong arms/wings like the Aztec eagle on the UFW flag.

He is both a powerful patriarch protecting his brood and a victim of

Revolutionary Walls 115

labor exploitation, at once pre-Christian indio and a Catholic martyr.

Again, these elements might evoke complicated political and cultural

contradictions if put into words, but here they are held together effort-

lessly by the powerful nonverbal language of muralism.

The park in which this and almost two dozen other murals appear

was created through a struggle over public space — one that most com-

munity mural work entails to some degree but that is dramatically illus-

trated by the history of this particular project. A struggle for public land

erupted when a longstanding request for a park in the Barrio Logan

section of San Diego was answered instead with a city plan to shove an

eight-lane interstate freeway through the heart of the barrio, displacing

more than five thousand people. This struggle over land could be linked

to the history of Chicano resistance to Anglo landgrabbing going back

to the mid-nineteenth century, while also remaining very much a prag-

matic current issue. More broadly, it can stand for the attempt in bar-

rios across the country to create Aztlán, for what the park makers were

doing was reclaiming local space as their own. Aztlán was both a myth-

ical homeland and a very real way to rename the land where Chicanos

lived. As one of the participants in the park struggle put it: “In English

barrio means ‘ghetto.’ In Spanish it means ‘neighborhood.’ ” Aztlán was

not just a mythical place in the past but a symbol of the way in which

the Chicano movimiento was returning the barrios to the people who

lived there, making them places that celebrated and defended the inter-

related cultures created by Mexicans and U.S. citizens of Mexican descent.

Nothing stated that reclamation more visibly than the proliferation of

thousands of murals produced in and around the Chicano movement

culture.

While the freeway could not be stopped, an attempt to set up a High-

way Patrol parking lot beneath the freeway was met by an occupying

army of Chicanos who claimed the site as their own. Surrounding and

then appropriating the bulldozers sent to lay out the parking lot, the

community members began instead to build a “Chicano Park.” After a

long, intense struggle, the community won their battle and the park was

built, complete with a Centro Cultural de la Raza that is still a commu-

nity rallying point today. This Chicano cultural center was one of dozens

of similar spaces throughout California, Texas, the Southwest, Colorado,

and anywhere else Chicano communities existed. These cultural centers

acted as educational institutions, organizing points, and artists’ studios,

116 Revolutionary Walls

where dance, music, art, theater, and other cultural forms were taught

in the context of Chicano history. In turn, students in these centers be-

came teachers of that history as part of the struggle for Chicano dignity

and rights.

That struggle included a large-scale “muralization” of San Diego’s

Chicano Park over a period of many years, including a “muralthon” in

1977–78 involving artists and mural collectives from all over the state.

The crucified farmworker mural was done earlier by José Montoya and

the Rebel Chicano Art Front (a legendary Chicano art collective cen-

tered in Sacramento, California) and inspired other muralists to use the

park’s unique “canvases.” What is perhaps most ingenious in that work

is the incorporation of the particularities of the setting into the composi-

tion, especially the freeway pylon itself, which becomes the mural’s cross.

But it is only the most striking of many imaginative efforts to incorpo-

rate the far from ideal site into the overall composition. This effort at

site-specific composition is an unusually vivid and effective extension

of the normal process of community mural making. (Here I use com-

munity in its more local, neighborhood sense.) Many muralists spend

days and weeks seeking the right site in a given community, and weeks

more learning about the community’s particular needs and values, be-

fore attempting a mural. Both the space and the mural content are thus

often complexly negotiated texts, texts that raise issues in the community

to new levels of debate. At the same time community murals, placed on

the outside of buildings rather than inside museums, challenge domi-

nant notions of the art object as fetishized individual production with

no real connection to any audience.

A second major arena of pragmatic community concern articulated

through murals is a kind of flip side of concern to portray the Chicano

community as strong in family values — an effort to acknowledge and

examine the issue of gang violence. While such violence has frequently

been the focus of racist moral panics directed from outside the com-

munity by the dominant society, these murals offer a perspective from

the inside where these events can be seen correctly as being most often

intracommunity violence conditioned by oppression. A piece known

informally as Homeboy, for example, painted in 1974 by Manuel Cruz in

the Romana Gardens Housing Project in East Los Angeles, joins issues of

gang violence with a key theme of much early Chicano mural work, the

articulation of the Indian dimensions of Chicano identity. In the mural,

Revolutionary Walls 117

Aztec human sacrifice is recoded as community suicide in the form of a

gang of homeboys killing another homeboy. While indigenismo was later

criticized by some people as an uncritical celebration of the Aztec and

other Indian empires that failed to acknowledge their oppressive ele-

ments, there is here already an ironic suggestion that the much mythol-

ogized Aztec religious practice of human sacrifice is preferable to the

meaningless street sacrifice of homeboy life. But there is also an inspiring

suggestion that a historically deep warrior spirit has been misdirected

to rub out fellow members of la raza rather than to uphold and build

cultural traditions.

An extraordinary piece entitled The Wall That Cracked Open, on a

related theme, richly documents the power of a mural as public art to

intervene directly at a specific site of social struggle. Executed by Willie

Herrón in City Terrace, East Los Angeles, in 1972, this mural was done

on a cracked wall in an alley where the artist’s brother was beaten nearly

to death by gang members, and it ingeniously incorporates the already

present gang graffiti into the composition. The multiply layered message

here includes the idea that the graffiti is itself part of an aesthetic impulse

that could be further developed and redirected, just as gang violence

could be redirected in more politically charged directions. Mural projects

were sometimes used to accomplish precisely that form of redirection.

One of the most artistically unusual Chicano murals brings together

several issues, from the local to the national to the international, sug-

gesting their linkage as part of the continuum of Chicano experience.

The piece is Black and White Moratorium Mural, by Willie Herrón and

Gronk, done in 1973 at the Estrada Courts housing project in East Los

Angeles (undoubtedly the most muralized housing project in the world,

with more than ninety murals). As the name suggests, the mural is

unusual first for being done in black and white rather than the far more

common rainbow of bright colors, but the subdued colors are appro-

priate to the subject matter. The subject is war, war abroad and at home,

and the black, white, and gray tones echo one of the great antiwar paint-

ings of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. The wall com-

memorates an event known as the Chicano moratorium, a march and

rally in August 1970 involving more than thirty thousand people who

opposed the war in Vietnam and linked that war to war at home against

Chicanos. While often misrepresented as a white student movement,

the antiwar movement had many dimensions, many constituencies, and

118 Revolutionary Walls

many links to other issues. This march organized by el movimiento was

part of the national moratorium, a tactic that declared an escalating series

of strike days against the war (a new day was added for each month the

war continued). The Chicano march was protesting that people of color

in general, and Chicanos in particular, were dying in the war at a rate

far above their percentage of the population. The war was being fought

disproportionately by people whose experiences of racism and poverty

made them far more vulnerable to being drafted and to enlisting out of

economic need. The mural vividly depicts the police riot unleashed

against the demonstrators at the end of the rally, capturing the screams

of victims and linking this police brutality to similar acts visited rou-

tinely on barrio residents. In that riot, the Los Angeles police, in what

they claimed was an accident but what others believed to be an assassi-

nation, killed Chicano journalist Rubén Salazar.

Salazar had worked for the Los Angeles Times and was one of the very

few journalists who were acting to transmit el movimiento’s ideas fairly

to a mainstream public. His death was a major blow and has been com-

memorated in other murals and artworks in addition to this one. The

rally and the mural that memorializes it also pointed to the ways in

which President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” economic reforms

were being decimated by the costs of the war. As a consequence, more

Revolutionary Walls 119

Black and White Moratorium Wall, by Willie Herrón and Gronk, 1973. Courtesy of Social and Public Art Resource Center.

Chicanos were dying in the streets of the United States from the eco-

nomic violence that leads to gangs and drug abuse. In these ways the

mural brilliantly encapsulates the arguments of the Chicano movement

as they moved from the barrio to the national government to interna-

tional politics and back again.

ChicanismA

Most participants in and observers of the Chicano movement agree that

the first phase of the movement had come to an end by the mid-1970s.

That period accomplished a great deal. El movimiento had succeeded in

creating a new sense of identity that all people of Mexican descent

benefited from and were affected by, even those more conservative folks

who rejected the term Chicano. A new sense of the dignity and depth of

Mexican and Mexican American character and culture had been achieved

through the work of countless organizers, including the cultural workers

who made poems, paintings, dramas, movies, dances, and, most visibly

and tangibly, murals, to represent the key components of this new iden-

tity. But this insurgent phase of the movement was also riddled with

problems and had reached certain political limits. Many factors con-

tributed to these problems, not the least of which was a great deal of

political repression of the kind we saw enacted against the Black Pan-

thers and other radical groups. Internal factors also limited this phase of

the movement, most centered on limited definitions of chicanismo and

ethnic nationalism.

For one thing, La Adelita notwithstanding, we can note a heavily male

cast to the murals I have analyzed thus far in this chapter. This empha-

sis accurately reflects early domination of both el movimiento and the

mural movement by men. But Chicanas, who had been deeply involved

in both movements all along, were by the mid-1970s asserting an increas-

ingly powerful presence as activists and artists. Their presence was the

single most important element in expanding and reopening the story

being told about the Chicano community through el movimiento. The

double oppression experienced by Chicanas positioned them to articu-

late a richer movement vision that supported much of the cultural

nationalist stance but also recognized that there were other issues both

within and beyond the Chicano community that needed to be addressed.

Chicana feminist reinterpretations of community became the key force

in moving toward a more fully inclusive politics. These issues are theo-

120 Revolutionary Walls

rized explicitly in the crucial works of Norma Alarcón, Gloria Anzaldúa,

Cherríe Moraga, Alvina Quintana, and Chela Sandoval, among others,

but they are also articulated through the Chicana murals of Judy Baca,

Yreina Cervantes, and many others.

The piece La Ofrenda (“The Offering”) by Yreina Cervantes, for

example, helps to retell the history of the Chicana/o movement. It places

Dolores Huerta, UFW cofounder along with Chávez, in her rightful place

at the center of the movement. This is important not just for doing

greater justice to Huerta as an individual but for symbolizing all the

work done in the 1960s, 1970s, and earlier by Chicana activists and

cultural workers — work that had been downplayed, ignored, or over-

shadowed by the dramatic self-importance often claimed by men in the

movement. Women did much of the most effective, day-to-day, grass-

roots organizing, the work that truly sustains a movement, while men

too often occupied themselves with strategizing sessions quite removed

from the concrete realities of ordinary Chicano lives. Obviously, not all

men behaved this way, and some women did manage against great odds

to achieve leadership positions, but too often the pattern was one of male

generals and female foot soldiers. Indeed, La Adelita is only further evi-

dence of this, since she is not a real individual like “General” Zapata, but

Revolutionary Walls 121

La Ofrenda (“The Offering”) for Dolores Huerta. Courtesy of Social and Public Art Resource Center.

a composite figure of all the anonymous women who followed him and

Villa into battle. And this very image of battle was part of the problem:

for too many in the movement, the rhetoric of armed struggle became

the only language to express Chicano manhood, and a fetishizing of the

gun, as with the Black Panthers, often got in the way of the real struggle

for the hearts and minds of everyday Chicanos.

Thus, Cervantes’s mural also represents work done by Chicanas to

incorporate the quieter heroism of everyday community life into the

movement story — in this case, the world of religious life as represented

by an allusion to the home altar. La Ofrenda is also indicative of the

feminist articulation of solidarity among women that helped to cross

certain rigid community borders. Thus, for example, Huerta’s Chicana

heroism in the United States is connected to the struggle of Salvadoran

women being victimized by U.S. policy and military repression in El Sal-

vador. Giving Huerta her rightful place in the movement is paralleled by

a feminist rearticulation of the continuing struggle of farmworkers in

the United States in such murals as Las Lechugueras (“The Lettuce Pick-

ers”) by Juana Alicia. This piece offers an “x-ray vision” of a child in the

womb of a lettuce picker in the field to dramatically depict how the

environmental and personal dangers of pesticides present a still greater

potential for harm to pregnant farmworkers and their unborn children.

The mural powerfully supports efforts by the farmworkers’ union to

limit the use of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals that harm

farmworkers.

An emerging sense of a Latina solidarity that cuts across national

community borders was also articulated by Chicana feminist mural col-

lectives like the San Francisco Bay area’s Mujeres Muralistas. Originally

formed in 1974 by three Chicanas (Patricia Rodríguez, Irene Pérez, and

Graciela Carrillo) and one Venezuelan (Consuelo Méndez), the evolv-

ing collective included other Latinas and Chicanas in subsequent incar-

nations and became an emblem of cross-national communication for

the diverse Spanish-speaking populations of the Mission district. Their

piece Latinoamérica, for example, develops this theme by using a com-

mon feminist focus on everyday women’s activities and common threads

of color to blend designs executed by different Latina artists drawing

upon their differing national styles and traditions.

At the level of aesthetic inspiration, the rediscovery of the work of

Frida Kahlo played an important consciousness-raising role for many

122 Revolutionary Walls

Chicana and some Chicano artists. Long before her rediscovery by the

New York art crowd, an exhibit of Kahlo’s work at Galería de La Raza in

San Francisco’s Latino Mission district contributed to the feminist rewrit-

ing of art history. A piece entitled Homenaje a Frida Kahlo (“Homage to

Frida Kahlo”), painted by Mike Ríos to announce the exhibit, not only

helps to mark Kahlo’s emergence from the very large shadow of her hus-

band, the muralist Diego Rivera, but also points to another dimension

of the reappropriation of public space by the mural form.

Ríos’s mural is actually painted on a commercial billboard near the

gallery where Kahlo’s show was appearing. Over a period of two years

the muralists and other community supporters engaged in a battle with

the owners of the billboard, painting over its commercial messages with

their artistic/political ones, until eventually the owners gave up and

donated the billboard to Galería de la Raza. This kind of reappropriation

of billboards and other public walls has been a significant part of the

mural movement — an important assertion of community rights over

property rights and an argument about the very public nature of public

buildings. In the context of the Chicano movimiento this retaking of

public space was part of a rebuilding of Aztlán not as mythic land in the

mists of time but here and now as a liberated zone.

Mural/Movement

I end this chapter with a discussion of the collective work guided by

Chicana feminist muralist Judith Francisca Baca, both because she is

among the most prolific and visionary muralists in the world and be-

cause her work brings together and extends many of the themes regard-

ing the relation between murals and movement cultures that I have

sketched thus far. Baca painted her murals in the spirit of what Charles

Payne calls the “organizing tradition” pioneered in the civil rights move-

ment. Her extraordinary career also offers further evidence that the dual

identity of Chicana and feminist helped to expand the vision of the Chi-

cano and mural movements toward connection with a wider multicul-

tural resistance force. But in using Baca as my exemplar, I want to make

clear that she herself works collectively and that she is only one among

many other cultural workers who are equally deserving of attention.

Baca’s work extends to something near its logical extreme a theme of

communal production that has long been at the heart of mural work.

Most of the work I have discussed so far has been the work of mural

Revolutionary Walls 123

collectives, often involving numerous nonartists from the community in

which the mural is to appear and usually based on input from the com-

munity. Baca has moved this process to a new level of complexity and

political power. For example, she was director of the Citywide Murals

project in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s that produced over two hun-

dred fifty murals, many done under her direct supervision. That project

entailed major input from Baca and other Chicano/as, but was also a

multiracial effort throughout the diverse neighborhoods of the city.

Funded in part by the city, this project also illustrates the deep tensions

community murals generate, and the complicated political negotiations

they involve. This project and others like it become struggles between

those hegemonic forces of the dominant culture seeking to turn murals

into barrio and ghetto “beautification” projects, designed literally to paint

over signs of deprivation and exploitation, and those forces seeking to

turn murals into critical sites of communal resistance that precisely

point out exploitation, while also celebrating cultures drowned out in

the so-called mainstream. The continued power of muralism will lie in

resisting the former force and defending the latter.

The Great Wall of Los Angeles and Radical Multiculturalism

The kind of large-scale vision that informed the Citywide Murals project

is taken in a different, even more spectacular direction in Baca’s super-

vision of the largest mural ever undertaken — the half-mile-long “Great

Wall of Los Angeles.” This work is a radically multicultural retelling of

the history of Los Angeles and California from prehistoric times to the

present. Begun appropriately in the bicentennial year 1976 and contin-

ued through five subsequent summers (with projections for extensions

in the future), the work was accomplished through Baca’s direction of

teams of Asian American, Native American, African American, Anglo,

and Chicano youth. Many of these young people came to her project

out of the criminal justice system, with mural work offered as an alter-

native to further jail time. Far from being a captive labor force, the young

people working on the mural were encouraged to become involved in

the complex invention, design, and execution of the work. Baca and her

team thus sought to create a liberated force for community change.

As in her other projects, Baca facilitated the creation of the “Great

Wall” by bringing together professional historians, community story-

tellers, and a variety of people from all the communities who were to be

124 Revolutionary Walls

represented on the mural. The young people took part in intensive revi-

sionist history classes that included lively exchanges about their past

and even livelier arguments about their futures. In these classes, in the

streets, and on the “Great Wall” itself, the revisionist history now appear-

ing in textbooks was anticipated and incorporated in story forms that

linked the past to the vitally contested political terrain of the present. In

fact, the wall came to be used by local teachers as a kind of painted text-

book that lets their students walk through time.

The “Great Wall” that emerged from this collective process presents a

powerful set of images, linked by narrative bridges. The mural links

diverse communities, weaving a history of interracial conflict into a wider

history of shared oppression and resistance. Here the multiculturalism

inherent in the Chicano identity, combined with a feminist vision of

everyday personal political linkages, has facilitated the creation of a

complex vision of the separate but interacting histories of Los Angeles,

California, and America’s diverse populations. Mural panels laid out in

chronological order depict a range of peoples and events, often in very

telling juxtaposition. The section on the 1940s, for example, includes

panels on the internment during World War II of Japanese Americans,

the flight to Los Angeles of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, and the

“zoot suit riots” unleashed by attacks made by white sailors on Chicano

Revolutionary Walls 125

Judy Baca and crew at the Great Wall of Los Angeles. Courtesy of Social and Public Art Resource Center.

street kid pachucos. The mural stories richly interweave race, class, sex-

uality, and gender, often with great humor. One panel, for example, cen-

ters on an image of Rosie the Riveter, symbol of the independent work-

ing woman, who is being sucked by a vacuum cleaner into a television

set. It wittily makes the connection between a redomestication of women

in these “father knows best” years of the 1950s, and the racial phenome-

non known as “white flight” — the flight of many whites to the suburbs

as cities became more and more racially integrated.

What emerges from Baca’s method of composition and from the

mural itself is a sense of the integrity of the different ethnic enclaves and

cultures of the city, and their inextricable interconnection. The rich

story of Chicano/as in “Califas” (California) is maintained, but written

also in terms of gender, class, and sexuality, and linked to other racialized

groups. This entire story of multiple intersections, and the power system

at its core, must be addressed if a radically democratic, truly multicul-

tural society is to become more than a glittering promise.

Connecting these issues has become a matter of central concern to all

resistance movements in recent years. They bring along with them difficult

questions. How, for example, can movements balance the danger of an

almost infinitely fragmentable politics of identity against the dangers of

a prematurely homogenizing emphasis on common interest that erases

important cultural as well as ideological differences? How can ethnic

identities be created that honor the diversity of gender, class, and sexu-

ality within the community, while maintaining a united front against

intersecting dominations? The Chicano community mural movement

and projects like the “Great Wall” and the Citywide Murals program of-

fer at least some glimmerings of a how a movement-inspired public art

can move us closer to answers to these questions.

From Representation to Articulation: Reimagining Community

The interlinked Chicano and community mural movements allow us to

see that community is a powerful concept, a powerfully enabling fiction,

yet with real points of reference in the world. However, the struggle to

suppress differences (of gender, class, sexuality, nationality, and ideol-

ogy, among others), particularly at the height of the nationalist phase,

reminds us of how often the term community is used to close debate

rather than open up possibilities. There are, no doubt, necessary moments

when communal racial, class, or gender identity must be articulated

126 Revolutionary Walls

univocally. But can we find ways to speak that acknowledge unity as the

provisional product of multivocal debate and as a negotiable contribu-

tion to a necessarily multicultural alliance? If a community must at times

speak as one voice in order to generate the utmost power, is it possible

still in that voicing to recognize dissent, internal otherness, or differ-

ence? Can an identity-based movement progress from a politics of repre-

sentation, which presumes to speak for an already known community,

to a politics of articulation that freely portrays community as an always

contested process, not a set thing?9

Can community be conceived as an ongoing, strategic, and negotiated

reality, and still be community? Or is every gain in self-consciousness

necessarily a loss in solidarity? Is there some quality of community that

can be recognized as preceding or exceeding ideology without resort to

exclusionary and mystifying claims to blood consciousness? Is there a

view of interconnectedness that is not so easily assimilated to an empty,

homogenizing kind of humanism long allied to oppression? Can com-

munity be reconceived in something like concentric circles, communi-

ties layered one upon another, but also with loose ends, openings of the

circle?

The Chicano/a community mural movement, with its development

into a “critical multiculturalism,” offers a model through which to think

about some of these questions.10 As the twenty-first century began, Chi-

cano/a nationalisms were again gaining ground. Some versions seem

doomed to repeat mistakes of the past. Others seem more open to mul-

tiple identities amid solidarity. A younger generation of Chicana/o mu-

ralists emerged in the 1990s to take up the movement/mural connection.

Artists like Alma López combine fierce racial pride with open treatment

of once forbidden topics like straight and lesbian sexuality. Like her

subject matter, López’s style, alternating between the traditional mural

form and the newer digital mural format, reflects both continuity and

change.

Moving On

The wider Chicano movement evolved through the 1980s and 1990s and

into the twenty-first century in directions often paralleling those of the

mural movement as represented by Baca. New scholarship and new

“movements within the movement” brought the concerns of Chicanas,

gays and lesbians, and other previously marginalized groups to the center

Revolutionary Walls 127

of concern. New immigration from Latin America reinforced a need

to think multiethnically within the Spanish-speaking U.S. community,

even as still wider multicultural coalitions seemed necessary to progress

further. Chicana/o studies evolved more complex, absolutely vital posi-

tions, though sometimes these seemed to move further away from con-

texts of movement contestation. The strengths and limits of Chicano

nationalism have been carefully examined, and both the theory and

practice of new models of organizing are richly visible. El movimiento

continues to grow and change, to face the challenges of a conservative

backlash (represented by anti-immigrant, anti–affirmative action, and

English-only ballot initiatives in California and elsewhere), and to assert

the powerful presence of Americans of Mexican descent. Chicanas and

Chicanos continue the struggle, as at once a community unto themselves

and a force connected to wider circles of resistance to cooptative forms

of multiculturalism prematurely celebrating a diversity not yet rooted

in equality of economic, cultural, and political power.

128 Revolutionary Walls

Do you remember Leonard Peltier? Do you remember he stood at the window of the farm house in South Dakota yelling Stella! Stella! while the FBI surrounded him and the rest of AIM, a cast of thousands. It was epic, a Cecil B. DeMille production made intimate when two FBI agents were shot to death.

— Sherman Alexie, from “The Marlon Brando Memorial Swimming Pool”

Native American “red power” warriors moved “like a hurricane” across

the landscape of America in the late 1960s and early 1970s.1 These new

“Indians” challenged five hundred years of colonial domination by fight-

ing for a return to full sovereign status for native nations, restoration of

lands guaranteed by treaty, just compensation for the minerals exploited

from reservations, and a renaissance of native culture. The most famous

and infamous native organization of the red power era, the American

Indian Movement (AIM), will be my focus here. Despite its name, AIM

was not the Indian movement but rather only one organization among

many groups that formed a larger movement. Many other important

Indian resistance groups preceded and ran parallel to AIM, but AIM

was the most visible and media-oriented of the radical Indian movement

groups, and media visibility is very much to the point because the art

form I will pair with the Indian movement in this chapter is the main-

stream Hollywood film.

While drawing information from various written sources and two

important documentaries about AIM (Incident at Oglala and The Spirit

F I V E

Old Cowboys, New Indians

Hollywood Frames the American Indian Movement

129

of Crazy Horse) as background, I will focus on the three fiction films that

deal to one degree or another with the group. After introducing AIM,

and talking about its use of and use by the mainstream media during its

years of peak activity (1968–73), I will discuss the films in order of release:

Powwow Highway (1989), Thunderheart (1992), and Lakota Woman: Siege

at Wounded Knee (1994).2 The discussion will assess and compare the

films’ strengths and weaknesses as representations of the nature and

aims of Indian radicalism to the movie-going U.S. public. The “public,”

of course, is a very vague, problematic concept, so at points I will try to

be more specific about what particular audiences might do with each

film. To do this I have supplemented my observations with as many

reviews and reactions as I have been able to gather, from both Indian

and non-Indian audiences.

The independent Native American documentary and fiction film

community is a vital, thriving one, yet so far it has not experienced a

breakthrough to the mainstream to equal those of African American,

Latino, or Asian American filmmakers.3 Racism and extremely high pro-

duction costs have kept Hollywood-style films largely beyond the con-

trol of Native Americans, the economically poorest population in North

America. This means that the filmed stories about AIM do not emerge

directly out of its movement culture, or even out of the native commu-

nity. This is particularly unfortunate since, as recent studies suggest, a

native aesthetics and cultural rhetorics differ in all manner of ways from

Hollywood filmmaking.4

AIM activists were involved to one degree or another in each of the

three narrative films I discuss here, but in none did they have anything

approaching control of the final cinematic product. Rather, AIM mem-

bers made various attempts to influence a movie-making process that

was in the hands of mostly sympathetic, but culturally and politically

limited white outsiders who were translating movement ideas and values,

sometimes well, more often poorly. And these outsiders, mostly from

that mythical land called Hollywood, attempted this translation within

a medium saturated with a history of racial stereotyping totally at odds

with the goals of the Indian movement. The AIM activists were trying

to get their message out to a wider public whose political unconscious,

like that of the filmmakers, was deeply shaped by the “cowboy and In-

dian” conventions of the Hollywood western.5

130 Old Cowboys, New Indians

To further complicate this whole picture, I will suggest that the “real”

AIM activists and their “real-life” opponents were to a certain extent

acting out their own internalized Hollywood scripts from the begin-

ning of the movement. From the start, for better and for worse, AIM

was engaged in a battle over control of its mass-mediated image. Thus,

the films about AIM can be viewed as an extension of, not something

wholly different from, its movement work. In this chapter I analyze the

relationships between a “movement culture” and a sympathetic “cultural

formation” within the dominant culture, a formation we could call “pro-

Indian Hollywood.” The formation began with the early interest in Indian

activism of actor Marlon Brando and spread to others, including Jane

Fonda, Robert Redford, and Michael Apted. My analysis addresses both

the usefulness and the limits of this formation in supporting the work

of the movement. Of course, the lines between these two kinds of for-

mation are fluid, not rigid. In other words, the movement was always

already partly in Hollywood, and vice versa.

AIMing Indians in New Directions

AIM was founded in Minneapolis in July 1968, with early leadership

provided by Anishinabé (Chippewa) organizers like Dennis Banks, Clyde

Bellecourt, and Mary Wilson. AIM was not the first name considered

for the group, however. They were originally going to call themselves

Concerned Indians of America. And while the acronym CIA certainly

would have been a resonant one, the choice of American Indian Move-

ment says a good deal about the genius and the arrogance of the group.

Robert Warrior and Paul Chaat Smith offer the best chronicle of AIM

written thus far, and they stress the sense of drama and the orientation

toward the mass media that was both AIM’s strength and its weakness.

In their excellent book on the Indian movement, Like a Hurricane, War-

rior and Smith summarize the dramatic flair already apparent in AIM’s

self-naming:

[The name was] perfect because it suggested action, purpose, and for- ward motion. Perfect because it was big, transcending the lesser world of committees and associations and congresses and councils. Organiza- tions had recording secretaries and annual dinners. Movements changed history. The initials — A-I-M — underscored all of that, creating an

Old Cowboys, New Indians 131

active verb rich in power and imagery. You aimed at a target. You could aim for victory, for freedom, for justice. You could also, defiantly, never aim to please. Written vertically and stylized a bit, the acronym became an arrow.6

Though they do not say so here, it is clear from the rest of the book

that Smith and Warrior also recognized that the name was extremely

presumptuous. Imagine what would have happened if the Black Panther

Party had tried to name itself The Black Power Movement, or if the

Brown Berets had called themselves The Chicano Movement. AIM’s bold

naming and equally bold actions certainly got the group the attention

they wanted, but in the process did some disservice to those Indian

resisters who came before and those alongside whom the group strug-

gled in the 1960s and 1970s.

Two main sources of inspiration shaped AIM in its early years. The first

was precisely these other, insufficiently acknowledged Indian activists.

Before AIM, a new generation of radicalizing Indians was reforming

older Indian organizations like the National Council of American Indians

(NCAI), and focusing new grassroots efforts that were emerging from

many sites around Indian country. When young Vine Deloria Jr. assumed

leadership of NCAI in 1964, he sought to link this older, established orga-

nization with new local groups of a more radical bent, and with the Na-

tional Indian Youth Council (NIYC). Led by figures like the great Ponca

organizer Clyde Warrior, the NIYC became the cutting edge of Indian

politics in the mid-1960s. Many in NIYC became interested in direct

action, inspired in part by actor Marlon Brando, who spoke to them of

translating the example of the black civil rights movement into Native

American terms.

One key example of a new direct action spirit was the so-called “fish-

ins” in the Pacific Northwest. Organized by local Indians, with support

from the NIYC and from Brando and other Hollywood activists, these

events in the early 1960s called for restoration of traditional fishing rights.

In the San Francisco Bay area, local Indian activists had laid ground-

work for years that emerged into prominence with a dramatic Indian

takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969.7

The other source of inspiration was militant antiracist organizations

like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Like the Panthers, AIM

was started primarily by victims of the criminal justice system. At the

132 Old Cowboys, New Indians

time of AIM’s founding, Indians made up 1 percent of the Minnesota

population but 50 percent of the state’s prison population. Like blacks

and Chicanos, urban Indians were (and are) routinely victimized by the

police, and early AIM actions included a police observation plan that

resembled the one in Oakland set up by the Panthers to resist police

harassment and brutality (see chapter 2).

Though AIM was initially peopled largely by Anishinabé men and

women from the reservations north and west of the city, the decision to

locate its headquarters in Minneapolis and its early focus on urban issues

gave the organization an urban image. This was initially a limitation in

the context of a city-reservation split. The Native American world had

been split asunder by two devastating federal government actions during

the 1950s, going by the ominous names “termination” and “relocation.”

The 1953 Termination Act brought an end to many reservations and en-

tailed the relocation of many Indians to urban areas of the United States,

a process carried out under the auspices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs

(BIA). Part of AIM’s work, along with that of many other Indian activist

groups, was an attempt to bridge this growing chasm between the reser-

vations and the cities.

Thus, after initially focusing on providing various daily-life services

to Minneapolis Indians and working Panther-style against police bru-

tality in the city, AIM extended its work to actions in white-dominated

towns like Custer, South Dakota, that bordered reservations. In such

towns Indians were routinely beaten, and sometimes killed, by local

racist ranchers (an encounter with “real” cowboys that set a tone for

later run-ins). AIM successfully intervened in several of these disputes,

forcing local law enforcement to take the cases seriously, and serving

notice that Native Americans would not take such abuse anymore. It was

largely these actions that first built a following for AIM on the reserva-

tions. In addition, AIM’s penchant for dramatic media events staged at

sites of traditional, nationalist white power spread the word of the group’s

brash style. For example, at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, AIM held an

action challenging the Thanksgiving myth, offering evidence that the

white settlers were in fact giving thanks for a recent triumph in massacring

New England Indians. A similar action was staged at Mount Rushmore,

symbol of white desecration of the Black Hills, a sacred site for several

native nations. Such well-publicized actions sparked the establishment

Old Cowboys, New Indians 133

of AIM “chapters” all over the country, some totally unknown to the

central leadership.

AIM also played an important role, along with numerous other Indian

activist groups, in the “Trail of Broken Treaties” car caravan that crossed

the country from west to east in 1972. The caravan picked up various

tribal contingents along the way and stopped at sites that represented

the continuing impact of two hundred years of treaties made and bro-

ken by the U.S. government. The trail ended in Washington, D.C., with an

unplanned occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs office. AIM

members and others, with help from FBI provocateurs, sacked BIA

headquarters, destroying and stealing documents and other government

property. The action split the Indian community deeply, greatly in-

creased the notoriety of AIM, and upped the ante of FBI surveillance and

counter-attacks against the organization. Whatever its limits as an ac-

tion, the BIA trashing had great symbolic power to many young Indians

who had felt themselves being trashed by Washington bureaucrats their

whole lives. And to a nation whose most popular, currently circulating

image of Native Americans was Indian actor “Iron Eyes” Cody weeping

in a television commercial against littering, the image of young Indian

warriors littering the BIA building with the bureaucratic detritus of two

hundred years of broken promises was surely startling.

But all this was soon overshadowed by AIM’s most notorious and

dramatic action, the two-and-a-half-month armed standoff with law

enforcement during the Indian occupation of the village of Wounded

Knee, South Dakota, in spring 1973. This AIM-led siege is the event

most often referred to in all three films, and it amply illustrates my

point about the entwining of a cinematic images and “real-life” AIM ac-

tions. The occupation started after AIM was invited by elders onto the

Oglala reservation to help the tribe in ousting its corrupt leader, Richard

“Dickie” Wilson. The village of Wounded Knee was a resonant stage for

the action, given its proximity to the site of the last great massacre of

Indians by the U.S. cavalry, which took place in 1890 and resulted in the

slaughter of three hundred undefended men, women, and children.8

Ostensibly, the second battle at Wounded Knee, which, in an eerie echo

of the first, involved about three hundred Indian resisters, was about

wresting tribal governance away from Oglala leader Wilson, who had

the backing of the U.S. government, and returning it to a sovereign

134 Old Cowboys, New Indians

Oglala Nation. But beyond the local dispute, this was clearly a symbolic

battle to reassert the sovereignty of all Indian nations once guaranteed

by government treaties. Real bullets were exchanged in the siege, and two

Indians were killed in the course of the action. Still, the war by guerrilla

tactics was clearly less important than the war by guerrilla theater.

There is more than a little evidence to suggest that the Wounded Knee

occupation included much “acting” and “staging” by participants from

all sides. Cultural critic Kathleen Turner (not the actress) and historians

Robert Warrior and Paul Chaat Smith, among others, have described

the AIM actions at Wounded Knee as “theater,” arguing that they were a

self-conscious attempt to stage a media event that could dramatize

claims about broken treaties, continuing economic exploitation of Amer-

ican Indian lands, and an unrepresentative, puppet government on the

Pine Ridge Reservation. The FBI and other government forces were

equally theatrical in their actions, and generally more successful at

manipulating the media. For example, they banned the media initially

from any coverage, restricted media access throughout the occupation,

and threatened to arrest representatives of the progressive press who

offered sympathetic accounts from inside the AIM compound. A careful

study by Michelle Dishong of the coverage of Wounded Knee II by “the

newspaper of record,” the New York Times, richly documents the bias of

accounts toward the government side of the story.9

Comments from the activists and journalists on the scene at the battle

of Wounded Knee in 1973 also draw attention to the role the Hollywood

imagination played in the action. Indeed, this was probably inevitable

since no groups have been more powerfully and archetypically mythol-

ogized by U.S. popular culture than cowboys and Indians. Journalistic

accounts of AIM/FBI encounters at Wounded Knee reflect this media-

tion, and the accounts themselves were undoubtedly interpreted in part

through reception mechanisms shaped by years of cinematic and tele-

visual images. AIM member John Trudell, for example, has commented

that “[if ] FBI agents that grew up watching John Wayne and cowboys

and Indians come out here and want to play cowboys and Indians, then

they [have] got to suffer the consequences, just as we do.” In speaking

like this, Trudell reveals the extent to which he and his compatriots were

also playing out the cowboy and Indian script. And that script was fur-

ther encouraged by the mainstream media. For example, one journalist

Old Cowboys, New Indians 135

on the scene at Wounded Knee recalls that correspondents “wrote good

cowboy and Indian stories because that was what they thought the pub-

lic wanted.”10

If the occupation of Wounded Knee was a staged production, then

AIM leader Russell Means was surely its star. One Time magazine

reporter recalls that Means could sometimes be seen directing cameras

and staging events for the media’s benefit.11 Means’s career subsequent

to the Wounded Knee siege is also suggestive about the role he played

during the occupation. During the last decade Means has appeared in

several movies; he recently performed the voice of Powhatan in Disney’s

travesty of the Pocahontas story. Indeed, Means’s career has led one cul-

tural critic to invent a new term for his social role. American Indian

studies scholar James Stripes refers to Means as an “actorvist,” a term

that might fit John Trudell, national leader of AIM in the late 1970s, even

better since he appeared in two of the fiction films I will discuss and

was interviewed in both of the documentaries as well.12

Certainly a case can be made that the role of leader of AIM in the

early 1970s was one that trained Russell Means well for a career in “real”

acting. More than one historian of the American Indian Movement has

spoken of Means’s flair for the dramatic. During the occupation of the

Bureau of Indian Affairs office in 1972, for example, Means let himself

be caught on camera using a confiscated oil portrait of then president

Richard Nixon as a shield while engaging police on the steps of the build-

ing. Means’s “shades and braids” image was enough to get him more than

the “fifteen minutes of fame” Andy Warhol suggested all Americans

would soon have, and resulted in an actual portrait of Russell done by

Warhol himself. More than one detractor in Indian country has used

such facts to portray Means as more image than substance, and he was

sometimes accused of “impersonating” an Indian even before Holly-

wood, during his AIM heyday, partly because he spent very little time in

Indian country while growing up.

But implying that these AIM “actorvists” sold out to Hollywood or

were never real activists is too easy. Both Means and Trudell remain

vocal critics of Indian oppression, and both have claimed that they are

using, not being used by, the mass media. As Russell Means frames it, “I

haven’t abandoned the movement for Hollywood. I’ve brought Holly-

wood to the movement.” I partly agree with his statement, though I

would rephrase it to say that Hollywood, for better and for worse, was

136 Old Cowboys, New Indians

in the movement from the beginning. In this sense, the fiction films

about AIM are a logical extension of a process already at work in AIM

actions themselves. Thus, I look at the films as embodying a struggle

between the cultural frames offered by movement activists and the cul-

tural frames of the Hollywood film, and I want to suggest that at times

those frames overlapped and interacted, fused and confused the picture.

Powwow Highway

Perhaps the most unambiguously positive thing I can say about the

films in which AIM is represented is that Kevin Costner (also known as

“Dances with Wolves”) was not involved in any of them. On the other

hand, similarly inclined movie mogul Indian wannabees were involved.

Ted Turner was behind one of the films, Robert Redford was involved in

another, and former Beatle George Harrison produced a third. What-

ever limitations these films have, they are an advance over the Dances

with Wolves version of noble savagery in one important respect: the AIM

films attempt to portray living American Indians. Costner’s film, while

arguably a slight improvement over the traditional Hollywood western,

reinscribes a contemporary version of the noble savage myth that per-

vades U.S. culture in the form of nostalgia for what “the Indian” allegedly

was. This myth takes several forms: pseudo-vision quests in the so-called

men’s movement; the “New Age” claims of some white women and men

who, as native scholar-activist Andrea “Andy” Smith notes, boast of hav-

ing been Indians in a past life in order to make a great deal of money in

their present life through selling images of American Indian spiritual-

ity; or liberal guilt about what “the white man” did to the Indians in the

past.13 The sentiments seldom extend in any significant way to concern

about the hideous injustices that continue to be heaped upon native

peoples in the United States today. In Hollywood, the only really good

Indian is still the dead Indian. The AIM films, whatever their flaws, are

at least among the very few mainstream productions that even attempt

to make visible the generally “disappeared” lives of Indians in contem-

porary America.

Powwow Highway, bankrolled by George Harrison, was an indepen-

dent film that managed to gain something of a mainstream audience,

especially via television and video. As arguably the first widely circu-

lated attempt to present something of the contemporary lives of Native

Americans in film, its relatively low-budget and low-tech feel in some

Old Cowboys, New Indians 137

ways equip it better than the other two, glossier films to convey the low-

budget, low-tech lives of most Indians today. At its best, Powwow High-

way gives a complex sense of some of the intricate struggles between

tradition and modernity faced by descendants of first nations, and cap-

tures a certain casual resistance to white ways that people in Indian

138 Old Cowboys, New Indians

Film poster for Powwow Highway.

country identify as living on “Indian time.” At other moments the film

seems little more than a buddy film, a kind of On the Road, Indian-

style. Indeed, when the highbrow TV network Bravo screened Powwow

Highway, it characterized the film as “an off-beat road movie,” evoking

visions of Jack Kerouac in braids, or worse still, Bing Crosby and Bob

Hope on the road to Pine Ridge. The film is based on the novel of the

same title by former AIM member David Seals, who eventually came to

dissociate himself from the movie.

The protagonists are Philbert Bono, a seemingly none-too-bright,

gentle, three-hundred-pound Cheyenne who fancies himself a spiritual

warrior and refers to his beat-up old car as his “pony,” and Philbert’s pal

Buddy Red Bow. Buddy is a former AIM activist, veteran of Vietnam

and Wounded Knee, and a still angry fighter against federal/corporate

corruption and exploitation of the reservation. Clearly, the friendship

between the two men is weighted with symbolic value. They embody a

complicated play between Indian spiritual traditionalism and modern

militancy that was part of AIM’s history.

When Philbert attempts to get elder wisdom from his great-aunt, she

laughs derisively at him and tells him she is sick of young Indians look-

ing for some magic in the past. Undaunted, Philbert begins to cobble

together bits of traditional “medicine,” filtered through the distorted

lens of white Indian fantasy. Author Leslie Marmon Silko suggests in

her novel Ceremony that traditional rituals have always changed to meet

the needs of the present, rather than being lodged in an impossible-to-

return-to past. Similarly, Powwow Highway suggests that contemporary

Indian survival will blend respect for the past with wild improvisation, a

making-do with the impure tools of the present (as when Philbert leaves

a candy bar as an offering to his ancestors).

We first meet Buddy in a powerful scene in which he challenges a

slick presentation to the Cheyenne tribal council by a sell-out Indian

“apple” (red on the outside, white on the inside) working for a mining

corporation that hopes to further exploit the tribe’s mineral wealth.

Buddy eloquently rattles off statistics on Native American poverty and

compares the rosy promises of the corporation to hundreds of nice-

sounding treaties signed and ignored by the U.S. government over the

past two hundred years. He ends his speech by rejecting the mineral-

rights colonialism being offered as a chance at the American dream,

noting that Indian country “isn’t America. This here’s the Third World.”

Old Cowboys, New Indians 139

When Buddy’s sister is busted for drugs in New Mexico on what turns

out to be an FBI-directed frame-up used to get Buddy off the “rez” in

order to push through the uranium deal, Buddy teams up with Philbert,

the only person he knows who has a car. The plot meanders as the two

travel none-too-directly from Montana to New Mexico to help get

Buddy’s sister out of jail. The unfolding plot includes a slight mellowing

of Buddy’s anger in the face of Philbert’s gentle but strong faith in his

partly improvised spiritual tradition. In this the plot resembles the in-

creasing commitment to traditional spirituality that AIM demonstrated

as it evolved.

The most direct treatment of AIM occurs in the middle portion of

the film when Philbert, following the “powwow highway” rather than

the most efficient route to New Mexico, diverts his trusty Buick pony

named Protector to Pine Ridge, South Dakota. There Buddy meets up

with some of his old comrades from the Wounded Knee siege. When he

arrives, his friends tell Buddy of the terror still being waged against AIM

sympathizers on Pine Ridge — “a shooting every day,” as one of them

remarks. This is hardly an exaggeration, given that close to seventy AIM

members and sympathizers were murdered or died under mysterious

circumstances in the three-year period following Wounded Knee. Most

of these unsolved deaths have been attributed by scholars to AIM’s prime

enemy, conservative tribal chairman Richard Wilson and his vigilante

“goon squad,” actively or passively abetted by the FBI.

In Powwow Highway Buddy has a brief encounter with the leader of

the goon squads who have been harassing his friends. He publicly backs

the goon down at a powwow, with the aid of a knife thrown as a warn-

ing by a war buddy suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. This

is an important moment because an unusually large number of AIM

members were Vietnam veterans who concluded that they had been

fighting against the wrong government. They turned their deep anger

and their military skills to the service of Indian war against the U.S. gov-

ernment and its tribal puppets, and in so doing they brought the war in

Vietnam home in ways that deeply shaped Native American radicalism.14

The morning after the powwow, Buddy and Philbert give a ride to a

couple of friends who have been besieged by the goons, dropping them

off at a suburban tract house. The subplot here involves Buddy claiming

that the men have sold out, and his friend replying that Buddy himself

has not been living under the constant threats the friend and his wife

140 Old Cowboys, New Indians

have been enduring. A kind of respectful standoff is achieved, in which

Buddy’s ongoing militancy is given greater weight without condemning

the difficult choice made by his friend. I read this as a kind of reconcili-

ation narrative working within the orbit of AIM, where many such diffi-

cult choices were being made in the years following the internal struggles

and savage repression by the FBI and other authorities in the wake of

Wounded Knee.

The remainder of Powwow Highway never discusses AIM directly, but

we do see the FBI’s involvement in framing Buddy’s sister as a clear indi-

cation of the continuing collusion between the federal government and

corporations in exploiting mineral rights on Indian lands, one of the

key elements of AIM’s position. The climactic event of the film suggests

a complicated play of media frames. Philbert, with the aid of powerful

medicine he gathers along the powwow highway, springs Buddy’s sister

from jail Old West–style by pulling out the bars of her cell using his

Buick “pony’s” horsepower. Philbert’s inspiration for this Indian libera-

tion moment came while watching an old western on TV. The scene sug-

gests that Indian resistance will require a combination of turning white

mass-media culture against itself, Philbert’s traditional tribal magic,

and Buddy’s AIM-inspired militancy.

The final scene of the movie, immediately following the jailbreak,

also helps to undermine the “buddy movie” quality somewhat. We see

Philbert, his “pony” aflame at the end of a car chase with the police, walk-

ing down the road alongside Buddy, Buddy’s sister and her two kids,

and a white girlfriend who helped with the escape. In the background is

the pragmatic Cheyenne tribal chairman whose faith in the more ideo-

logically aggressive Buddy had led him to assist the war party from a

distance. The ending is a utopian one, suggesting that forces separating

AIM-style militancy from existing tribal governments, Indians from

whites, men from women can be easily transcended. It seems at best only

a magical resolution, a fantasy projection rooted as much in New Age

white imaginations as in serious Indian resistance.

While the film has its moments, reviews by Euro-American critics

suggest that much of the subversive potential of the film is recontained

for a white audience. The AIM material is given too little context, and

either the harmless buddy film or a feel-good-about-Indians, New Age,

spiritual reading predominates. Turning to native reactions, reviews

and personal accounts suggest that Powwow Highway was received with

Old Cowboys, New Indians 141

mixed feelings in Indian country. On the one hand, there seems to have

been a certain amount of appreciation that living, breathing “rez” Indians

were portrayed on screen at all. On the other hand, there was a sense

of disappointment that a rather whitewashed, and superficial portrait

emerges. Several reactions, including that of author Seals, discuss how

the film sanitizes the book, making the Indians too good, as if merely

switching black hats for white could undo the limits of the “cowboy

and Indian” formula. The novel’s Indians are far more ambiguously de-

picted, with real human flaws; Buddy’s sister, for example, is not just a

victim of an FBI frame-up but really is dealing drugs. Seals’s response in-

cludes having the film appear briefly as a spectral character in his novel-

istic sequel to Powwow Highway, Sweet Medicine, in order to underscore

the movie’s differences from his novel. Clearly Powwow Highway broke

some new ground in Hollywood cinema, but ultimately it veers away

from tough questions.15

Thunderheart

The second of our films, Thunderheart, was directed by British film-

maker Michael Apted. In the same year, 1992, Apted also directed one of

the documentaries about AIM, Incident at Oglala, with funding from

Robert Redford. Incident at Oglala deals with the case of Leonard Peltier’s

alleged involvement in the murder of two FBI agents in 1976. Thunder-

heart’s fictional story is a thinly veiled effort to deal with the period of

AIM activity after the events at Wounded Knee had passed. The film

opens with the following words on the screen: “This film was inspired

by events that took place on several Indian reservations during the 1970s.”

This would seem to be at once a claim for realism and a disclaimer,

probably aimed at Justice Department lawyers. “Inspired by” seems to

leave enough room to claim poetic license if the FBI took exception to

being portrayed in the film as conspiring to commit murder, obstruct

justice, and collude with private corporations to steal uranium-rich

Indian lands. The director also changes the name of AIM in the film to

ARM, “Aboriginal Rights Movement.” It also changes the name of the

FBI in the film, but in quite a different way.

The FBI’s name changes are made by a character in the film named

Crow Foot, a local Oglala cop whose skills make him a kind of cross

between Hollywood Indian scout and Sherlock Holmes. Played with

brilliant humor by Graham Greene, Crow Foot makes a series of revi-

142 Old Cowboys, New Indians

sionist readings on the most famous initials in American law enforce-

ment: from “Federal Bureau of Intimidation” to “Federal Bureau of

Interpretation” (here stressing the fictive dimension of interpretation).

Finally another Indian points out that on the rez FBI stands for “Full

Blooded Indian.” This progression from intimidator to interpreter to

Old Cowboys, New Indians 143

Film poster for Thunderheart.

Indian also marks the progress of the central character in the film, an

FBI agent played by Val Kilmer. Kilmer’s character is named Ray LeVoy,

a naive young agent who has an American Indian heritage he has deeply

and successfully buried, at least until he arrives on the reservation. He is

sent there as a token Indian to help legitimate the FBI’s attempt to round

up an AIM/ARM member who they claim murdered another Indian.

The ARM activist is played by AIM “actorvist” John Trudell.

The rather predictable plot revolves around the gradual re-

Indianization of Kilmer’s FBI character as he is at once seduced by the

powers of ARM’s tribal elder medicine man, played by Ted Thin Elk,

and appalled to find evidence of an FBI plot to frame the ARM activist

and abet the sale of uranium-rich lands. Thunderheart, like Powwow

Highway before it, rightly draws attention to the deadly effects, both

economically and through water contamination, that illegal mining

practices have had on Pine Ridge and other reservations.

One key moment in the film momentarily shatters the Hollywood

frame, which dominates this film more than the other two. It occurs

when Trudell, playing James Looks Twice, is arrested by Kilmer and his

hard-nosed FBI boss, played with aptly laconic flatness by Sam Shepard.

Kilmer’s character refers to Looks Twice as a militant, to which he replies,

“I’m not a militant, I’m a warrior.” Shepard’s character retorts, “Yeah,

and I’m John Wayne.” Looks Twice follows up with a quick speech:

“[I’m p]art of a five hundred year resistance. Deep voices that have to

be heard. You can kill us but you can’t break our spirit.” These words

closely echo ones the actor Trudell has made in his AIM speeches, and it

probably matters little to this analysis whether he gave them to or got

them from the movie script (though I think it likely was the former). The

effect is a momentary crack in the film’s melodrama.

As in Powwow Highway, there is a strong theme of connection be-

tween tradition, spirituality, and warriorhood. In the real-life history of

AIM such a connection was often the goal, though one not always

achieved. But accounts of the involvement of Sioux elders in the decision

to make a stand with AIM at Wounded Knee suggest that that event may

have done much to solidify a bond between the mostly urban Indians of

AIM and spiritual traditionalists. That bond is one of the most important

legacies of the AIM era (even though AIM’s often vague pan-Indianism

paid too little attention to particular tribal cultural histories).

144 Old Cowboys, New Indians

But no account I know of says anything about a turncoat FBI agent

playing a role in any of this. And that is surely among the most dis-

appointing elements of Thunderheart. Just as the film Mississippi Burning

undercuts its important retelling of the history of Freedom Summer by

making the FBI, which did so much to try to destroy the civil rights

movement, a hero in the film, Thunderheart’s use of this turncoat FBI

agent sometimes transforms the film into a ridiculous “Mississippi Burn-

ing Goes West.” But at least in this case the Indian FBI agent is used as a

device to expose the FBI, not to make the bureau the unsung hero of

another movement it did so much to try to destroy.

In Thunderheart the device may work to some extent to lure in the un-

sympathetic audience member who might initially identify with the FBI

position, given its prominence in hegemonic Americanism generally

and its reported role in saving the nation from militant “wild Indians”

like AIM. But the cost of the device is to undermine the film in many

other ways and turn it in some absurd, Hollywood directions. Kilmer’s

character is revealed to be a descendant of “Thunderheart,” a medicine

man killed at the original massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. A kind of

blood-essentialism perversely combines with a paternalistic suggestion

that only a hero from the outside, trained in the white world, can rescue

the Indian nations.

This plot line severely undermines the political pull of the film, and

particularly the movement dimension. Too little sense of even symbolic

collectivity is suggested around ARM in the movie, and what sense of

Indian community there is in the film is undercut by an incongruous

ending in which Kilmer’s character heads down the road as if this were

just one in a series of adventures. In a serious confusion of the “cow-

boys and Indians” plot, the movie ends with the FBI Indian “riding” off

into the sunset alone, cowboy-style. The film thus ends on a rather

hazy, nostalgic moment that locks Indian activism in a more recent past

as surely as Dances With Wolves locks Indian cultures in the nineteenth

century.

Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee

The third and final film I shall examine is Lakota Woman: Siege at

Wounded Knee, a Ted Turner–Jane Fonda co-production originally

shown on television and then released to video stores. The film is based

Old Cowboys, New Indians 145

on a controversial (auto)biography of AIM activist Mary Crow Dog “as

told to” Richard Erdoes. The book is controversial for several reasons,

including the question of who “really” wrote it, its sympathetic treat-

ment of AIM, and its long-time failure to find a publisher. This latter

point is of interest because the reason given for the initial failure to find

146 Old Cowboys, New Indians

Poster for Lakota Woman video.

a publisher, in the late 1970s, was in effect that Indians were no longer

fashionable. This raises the question of why Native Americans became

“fashionable” once again in the late 1980s and early 1990s when all these

films were produced. One partial answer, which probably mitigates the

effects of all the movies, is a pervasive capacity of American culture to

nostalgize any topic, even one as initially disturbing as the red power

movement. In this case one might speculate that this general nostalgia

was augmented by the particular nostalgia of Fonda, who had assisted

in airlifting supplies to the Wounded Knee encampment during her more

radical youth.

In any event, the passage of time between the original events and

their filmic reenactment surely works to the advantage of the “cowboys”

in this story since in the intervening years they viciously suppressed the

American Indian Movement, using the goon squads when necessary,

disinformation campaigns at every opportunity, and the court system

continuously. The general strategy was to use trumped-up charges that

were later dropped after they had done their damage of keeping key

figures tied up in legal battles and movement funds directed toward legal

fees rather than organizing. Sometimes the government had greater suc-

cess in actually framing and incarcerating individuals, such as Leonard

Peltier. Though 92 percent of cases that made it to trial were won by AIM,

the costs in money, time, jail time while awaiting trial, and movement

energy were devastating. While AIM continues to exist to this day, the

movement never recovered from this assault.

With those limitations in mind, it is possible to say that Lakota Woman

is the most complete, and in most respects the best, of the AIM fiction

films done so far. Much of the credit must go to the original material,

since Mary Crow Dog was for a time at the heart of AIM, and she pro-

vided a lucid and compelling story for Erdoes and later the filmmakers

to work with. Another key factor is that the story is told from the point

of view of an Indian woman. One of the least admirable aspects of AIM,

in my judgment, is a tendency toward masculinist posturing that Mary

Crow Dog does a nice job of puncturing from time to time in both the

book and the film. I read that posturing as in part a product of the

Hollywood script in which warriorhood was always just about armed

confrontation, rather than about building and protecting community by

many means. Putting Mary Crow Dog at the center decenters the “cow-

boy and Indian” dynamic considerably. It is also important because

Old Cowboys, New Indians 147

women have played and continue to play key leadership roles in many

parts of native cultures, and they certainly were important in AIM. The

film correctly shows, for example, that traditional women of Pine Ridge

played a particularly strong role in pushing to invite AIM to take up the

occupation at Wounded Knee. When a male leader suggests in the film

that women leave the encampment, Mary and the other women present

give a resounding response of “hell no!” More generally, a female center

is important because, as in most movements of the era, women in AIM

did much of the real organizing work while too often male leaders took

starring roles in the spotlights. Those starring roles, however, also meant

that it was disproportionately the men who ended up in jail. Eventually

women in AIM formed their own organization, WARN (Women of All

Red Nations), which supported the men of AIM but recognized the need

(and the traditional right) of women to form separate groups. WARN

remains today one of the most important native resistance organizations.

The character of Mary Crow Dog, played by Irene Bedard (who also

performed the voice of Pocahontas in Disney’s animated film), is also

used to illustrate the ambivalence in AIM about the use of violence.

While the women in the film are portrayed as every bit as militant as

the men, they do not fetishize guns. On the one hand, the advertise-

ments for the television presentation of the film seem to play up Mary’s

woman warrior stance by picturing her peering through the scope of a

rifle. On the other hand, in the movie itself we learn that when she peers

through that scope and gets a government soldier in her crosshairs, she

acknowledges his humanity and does not pull the trigger. That is for me

an important moment because, looking back on the radicalism of the

1960s and 1970s, it is clear that the FBI “cowboys” tried to provoke vio-

lence as often as possible in order to discredit movements. Dismissing

movements as “violent” and “extremist” has long been a way for the

government to avoid confronting the issues radical movements raise. In

the case of AIM, while government agents wanted to avoid a second

Wounded Knee massacre, they were pleased whenever they helped the

warriors live up to the violent, criminal “renegade” image they and the

media had crafted for them. While AIM’s official stance was always one

of violence only in “self-defense,” that proved a difficult distinction to

make, as it had been for the Black Panthers. It was made more difficult

by law enforcement infiltrators who joined AIM often for the express

purpose of pushing for more violent actions.

148 Old Cowboys, New Indians

Mary Crow Dog’s involvement with AIM becomes the center of the

film even more than in the book, and the movie gives a far more de-

tailed portrait of the spirit, ideas, and goals of AIM than any other film,

including the two documentaries. The film is also careful to make clear

at the beginning that it is only the story of “Mary Brave Woman [as she

was named after she gave birth inside the encampment during the

siege] — this is how she saw it.” While this may, again, have been written

partly as a legal disclaimer, it also makes clear that this is a partial por-

trait, not a definitive one. Following these opening printed words, the

film segues quickly to scenes of the Pine Ridge landscape, as Mary’s

voice-over tells us that this is the story of how she “finds her soul.” She

says modestly that it is “only a little story” compared to that of Crazy

Horse and other great warriors, but it is hers.

The film is good at giving a quick but textured sense of the back-

ground that led Mary and many Indians like her to join the movement.

An early scene contrasts her material poverty with a sense of the strength

of family in native communities. Mary narrates, “We were poor but I

didn’t know it and we had love and respect.” The story of the first

Wounded Knee massacre is also told as both a tribal and a family affair

through Mary’s grandfather who had witnessed it. This scene of mili-

tary genocide is soon followed by attempted cultural genocide as sym-

bolized by Mary’s Indian braids being cut off in a repressive Christian

boarding school, which systematically goes about trying to erase her

cultural heritage, as such schools have tried to do for many generations.

We also get glimpses of her teenage years, which can perhaps most aptly

be described as aimless. We get statistical information on the poverty and

unemployment rates on the reservation that contextualizes what in the

other films is too often mere background (though both of the other fiction

films make remarks about the rez being part of “the Third World”).

Mary and her friends court, and in one case meet, death in drunken car

chase games. One of the documentary films, The Spirit of Crazy Horse,

reads alcoholism as a resistance to the life imposed on Native Americans

by the dominant culture, and while that view is not made explicit in

Lakota Woman, it is clear that Mary redirects some of the reckless energy

and anger at what has become of her people under white domination

into the more creative and active response of working with AIM.

Her involvement is portrayed fairly carefully as developing in stages

rather than through some flash of conversion, as too often happens in

Old Cowboys, New Indians 149

films about radicals. There is an amusing scene in which she first learns

about radical Native American activism from an alternative newspaper

given her by a young “hippie chick” who is clearly thrilled to be talking

to a real live Indian. Later she gets a more direct lesson in the movement

while in jail after one of her drunken adventures, and she gradually

drifts into movement circles. A male inmate gives her the gist of AIM

philosophy as follows: “We light the spark; we’re gonna take it all back,

and then we’re gonna set it free.”

Bedard as Crow Dog offers voice-over narration that allows for a fair

amount of discursive development of AIM views and contextualiza-

tions, providing useful information for the audience as the film moves

rather quickly through most of the major events in the evolution of

AIM. The account begins with the intervention into border town killings

that first established AIM as a force in the Dakotas. The uprising around

the murder of Wesley Bad Heart Bull in Custer, South Dakota, which

solidified AIM’s reputation, is staged carefully. The narrator tells us that

Bad Heart Bull’s mother was given three to five years for allegedly incit-

ing a riot outside the courthouse where her son was being tried, while

the murderer was set free.

The Mount Rushmore action, where an AIM activist humorously

remarks that “we reclaim this piece of bad art in the name of the Lakota

people,” is also touched upon. Crow Dog’s narration adds that while

“we had no magic to restore the mountain, the FBI acted like they be-

lieved we might,” and proceeded to brutalize the protesters. Another

scene raises the important issue of archaeological desecration, again

with a touch of humor at the expense of white presumptuousness. AIM

activists approach a dig overseen by a professor surrounded by graduate

students and ask the befuddled prof, “Where’s your grandmother buried?

We want to dig her up and put her in our museum.” When the archaeolo-

gist asks, “Who are you people?” the activists reply: “We are walking sci-

entific specimens. We are quaint tourist attractions. We are living fossils.

We are your conscience, if you have one.”

When the film turns to the siege at Wounded Knee, which takes up

most of its second half, the effort to achieve accuracy is clear. We get

scenes of speeches by Russell Means (played by Lawrence Bayne) that

give the spirit, if not always the specific content, of AIM ideology. We

also get a sense of how the urban members of AIM became acquainted

with and were influenced by traditional elders on the reservations. That

150 Old Cowboys, New Indians

some of the conservatives among the traditionals opposed AIM is also

acknowledged, at least in passing, and one asks a question frequently

directed at AIM: Will these outside guys be here when the smoke clears?

And in the meeting in which the decision to go to Wounded Knee is

made, it is accurately women who take the strongest stance.

Leonard Crow Dog, the young Lakota medicine man who became a

spiritual adviser to AIM and whom Mary married after Wounded Knee,

has a central role in the latter part of the film. Lakota spirituality and its

relation to AIM work is handled with some care and without the heavy-

handedness found in the New Age version. While some have argued

that any depiction of native spirituality is a sacrilege, Lakota spiritual

advisers were hired to assure sensitive handling of the ritual scenes, and

humor was used to fight against Hollywood medicine man stereotypes.

For example, one elder remarks that “father peyote” will lead AIM back

“into the spirit world,” “where we’ll talk about the great mysteries of

life, like where the sunglasses go when you lose them.” (This is perhaps

also a gentle slap at the “shades and braids” image of the male AIMsters.)

The battle with the forces of Dickie Wilson (played with icy power by

August Schellenberg) is also trenchantly portrayed. Direct quotes from

Wilson’s press conferences, including his famous threat to cut off Russell

Means’s braids, give a sense of his growing frustration with challenges

to his paternalistic authority at Pine Ridge. More seriously, Wilson’s

campaign to wipe out AIM is referred to appropriately as a “reign of ter-

ror,” and his collusion with white vigilante cowboys in addition to the

federal marshal cowboys is clearly represented. In one scene we overhear

putative law enforcers relishing that fighting Indians is giving them a

chance to be “real” cowboys. Another scene stresses that, as it was in the

past, most of the firepower is on the side of the cowboy cavalry. FBI

training of Wilson’s goons to use automatic weapons, and details of the

far greater firepower of the cowboys, including two armored personnel

carriers, is carefully documented, unlike the original coverage in the New

York Times.

The presence of and limited understanding of events provided by

“the media” are also thematized. Mary notes that the reporters “loved

our Indian uprising” but suggests that their focus on the “cowboy and

Indian” dimensions ignored the subtantive issues, and that they quickly

grew tired unless new dramas were produced (which may account for

those events the real Russell Means allegedly staged). When Mary herself

Old Cowboys, New Indians 151

is asked by reporters to explain the meaning of the siege, she at first

tries to defer to the male spokesmen, but then offers her own answer.

She lists the names of various tribes — Mohawk, Nisqually, Ojibway, and

Cheyenne, among many others — whose members had come together

at Wounded Knee. To illustrate what this means, she holds up her hand,

fingers spread, then brings the fingers together into a tightly clenched

fist. But rather than digging deeper into the meaning of her gesture, the

reporters just ask her repeatedly to reenact it. In another scene, the Rus-

sell Means character chastises the press for not doing the background

work necessary to understand what the occupiers were fighting for. Later

the characters of Dennis Banks and Means address the issue of violence

as raised by a reporter. Banks says, “The history of AIM is one of action,

not violence.” When a follow-up question asks about the guns in the

AIM compound, Means makes a plea of self-defense by reeling off the

names of Indians murdered in recent months, linking the deaths to a

long tradition of killing.

There are other points I could detail in which documentary-style

information about the Wounded Knee events and the surrounding con-

text are given. One could also point out inaccuracies and distortions in

detail, mostly attributable to poetic license. But I want to close my discus-

sion of the film with remarks about a different dimension, its portrayal

of the ethos of the AIM encampment. One of the most profound aspects

of collective, social movement action, at least from my experience, is the

feeling political theorist Hannah Arendt referred to as “public happiness,”

the sense of exhilaration that comes when one throws one’s whole being

into a principled cause. This feeling is seldom captured in film, with its

bias toward individualized storytelling. But a sense of community, so

much a part of native nations as well as social movement cultures, is con-

veyed relatively well in the film. It is summed up by Mary’s remark that

she never felt more “free” than when inside the Wounded Knee camp.

That one can indeed feel most “free” when in jail for civil disobedience

or when surrounded by the trigger-happy federal marshals and FBI

agents is a paradox of social activism rarely portrayed in the mass media.

The sense of the encampment as a community, one both mundane and

extraordinary, comes through powerfully at points. While framed as one

woman’s story, and thus caught up to a certain degree in Euro-American

notions of individuality, the film’s narrative moves toward collective

power and communal responsibility.

152 Old Cowboys, New Indians

The film ends on a powerful note, one that attempts, not fully success-

fully, to fend off the nostalgic move that might lock Indian resistance in

the past. Standing in front of the mass grave monument to the 1890

massacre at Wounded Knee, Mary looks directly into the camera and

details the ways in which the government lied in its negotiated settle-

ment of the occupation, notes the role played by the media in the action,

then counts off some of the assassinations that followed in the wake of

the occupation, and recites the names of members still in jail. “Once we

put down our guns and the television and newspaper reporters went

home, the arrests began. They could say anything they wanted. Whatever

we said was gone in a cold Pine Ridge wind. Nearly everything is gone

now. The government tried to extinguish all signs that Indians once

made their stand here. It will do them no good because the world saw, the

world heard. Even though in time [some of our people] were murdered

by goons. Even though once again the government lied and betrayed us.

Even though some of our leaders are still in jail. In the end it will do

them no good at all to try to hide it because it happened. Today it is still

not ours, but tomorrow it might be. Because of that long moment those

short years ago at Wounded Knee. Where we reached out and touched

our history. I was there. I saw it. It happened to me.” Then in Lakota

and English she adds, “So that our people may live,” as two Indian chil-

dren run across the screen. The ending offers a refusal to have the past

erased, and a call to bring the warrior legacy into the future.

The ending is a powerful one, but it is also solidifies for me a feeling

that the film has been too perfect, too neat. The Indian-maiden beauty

of Bedard herself seems to tie together a film with too few rough edges,

too much Hollywooden idealism. The Indian resisters are a bit too good

to be true, the black hats on Dick Wilson’s Indian cowboys fit a bit too

tightly. There is little sense of the internal strife that wracked AIM, little

sense that some of the leaders had less pure motives and less admirable

characters than they are given in the film. Incarceration and service in

Vietnam had deeply wounded many AIM members, some of whom were

unstable, not to say just plain crazy. And, as I suggested above, the “shades

and braids” corps gave in more than once to a vanity that did not serve

the movement. In addition, the film says far too little about the failure

of AIM to follow through in the aftermath of its symbolic victories.

In their efforts toward sympathy, the filmmakers whitewash AIM, make

it too purely a victim. By robbing the AIM activists of their human

Old Cowboys, New Indians 153

imperfections, they ironically rob them of much of their human agency.

The ending is also problematic in its elegiac tone. Seeing Mary/Irene

alone before the site of two Wounded Knee struggles with nothing but

the wind blowing undercuts the sense of collective agency of Indian re-

sistance and evokes the vanishing Indian trope; it is as if only a return

of the Ghost Dance, rather than concerted tribal action for sovereignty,

will lead to a different future.

But looking at Lakota Woman from the angle of production rather

than product suggests a different ending to the story of Indian resistance

through film. One of the more admirable facts about Lakota Woman,

and one that, along with its woman-centered story, no doubt accounts

for many of its strengths, is that the filmmakers went to some lengths to

hire Native Americans not only as actors for the film, but as crew mem-

bers and consultants to assure a degree of accuracy on several levels. In

addition to Richard Moves Camp, consultant on Lakota spirituality, the

film employed Mary Crow Dog herself as a consultant (on her own life

story) and other former AIM members to go over details about the

occupation.

More important than the gestures toward authenticity, however, is

the hiring of the crew members. For I agree with critic Judy Merritt, nov-

elist David Seals, and many in Indian country that in the future Indian

films should be made as much as possible by Native American people.

Merritt challenges the Ted Turners and the Robert Redfords to put their

money where their mouths are by turning over whole productions to

Native American crews. Novelist Seals has said that he will not authorize

a sequel to Powwow Highway unless it is directed by an Indian. And the

Lakota people have recently worked to get Ted Turner to stop produc-

tion on a proposed film about the figure he calls “Crazy Horse” and

whom they know as Ta’ Shunke Witko. This is not racial essentialism or

“blood quantum” theory at work; it is about the need for a degree of cul-

tural competency Hollywood has again and again fallen short of, and

it is a call for the rights AIM aimed at from the beginning: self-

determination and self-representation for native people everywhere.

Cinematic self-representation, will, of course, be no panacea. It will be

subject to all the contradictions that trouble Native American commu-

nities today. But it will be an important step in a larger process, just as

surely as Wounded Knee itself was a step in a struggle that continues.

154 Old Cowboys, New Indians

In the meantime, we have these films about AIM, which have strengths

as well as serious flaws. In this they mirror AIM itself. Perhaps the deep-

est flaws in AIM were its misogyny and its own excessive reliance upon

the mass media, a flaw that my presentation here risks replicating. The

misogyny eventually led to brutal acts perpetrated against women in

AIM, including in all likelihood the murder of AIM activist Annie Mae

Aquash.16 AIM was spectacularly successful, for brief moments, in draw-

ing attention to Native American issues through effective guerrilla the-

ater. Actions like Wounded Knee awakened members of native nations

throughout the United States and around the world. But the often vague,

pan-Indian politics of AIM could not address the differing, complicated

situations of Indian nations. And while AIM’s mass media approach can

at best mobilize, it cannot truly organize people or communities. That

takes face-to-face, painstaking work.

In the wake of the relative decline of the organization due to internal

strife and FBI repression, much of the work of AIM passed on to specific,

local political, cultural, and spiritual warriors in the many Indian nations.

Great successes in rekindling native pride, cultures, and rights have

occurred in the years since AIM’s heyday, despite ongoing economic

exploitation. This work has been less visible, less spectacular, than

AIM’s symbolic actions, but it has also gone far deeper. From this deeper

base in various indigenous communities, cross-nation and even world-

wide native organizations have emerged to continue interlinked strug-

gles for land, sovereignty, and legal redress. At the same time, native art,

poetry, fiction, and film have flourished, bringing voices that stir Indian

hearts and minds, and address difficult questions to the white world.

But even in this new context, AIM’s work is not done. In a time when,

as Warrior and Smith note, young Native Americans are growing up

with little knowledge of the AIM era, AIM’s stories, even these flawed

filmed versions, may prove useful. Who knows but that, when encoun-

tered by chance on TV, or used by a teacher or organizer who can point

to the distortions, one or another of the films might spark some ques-

tions, touch off some “Crazy Horse dreams,” and ignite new kinds of

resistance efforts as the next generation of Indian and non-Indian

activists examines and learns from the successes and the failures of the

AIM era.

Old Cowboys, New Indians 155

Millions of kids are lookin’ at you You say, “Let them drink soda pop”. . . From the African nation to the Pepsi generation . . . You’re gonna make it rich as long as some poor bastard in Africa is lying in a ditch.

— The Pretenders, “How Much Did You Get [for your soul]”

We’re rappers and rockers United and strong. We’re here to talk about South Africa We don’t like what’s goin’ on.

— Artists United against Apartheid, “Sun City”

The mid-1980s saw the rise of a series of globally televised concerts,

records, and videos that have been variously called “charity rock,” “benefit

rock,” or, with a nod to a rather different tradition, “agit-pop” (a word

play on agit-prop, the shorthand term for so-called agitation propaganda

used by radicals to characterize movement-based political art in the

1930s).1 Benefit concerts are hardly a new thing. They are at least as old

as the Paterson Pageant of 1912, and have a rich history, especially in the

1930s and 1960s.2 But the global scale of these events of the 1980s was

unprecedented, and they set off a new wave of “rock and roll activism”

that continues today.

S I X

“We Are [Not] the World”

Famine, Apartheid, and the Politics of Rock Music

156

The archetype and best known of these agit-pop events is the “Live

Aid” African famine relief concert of 1985. Following upon Live Aid

there have been dozens of such efforts in countries around the world on

a host of different issues, from apartheid to the environment to AIDS to

political prisoners. These events were especially important because they

emerged in that famously conservative and greed-ravaged era of the

1980s, when progressive causes often seemed to be in eclipse. In actual-

ity, several important social movements were under way during that

decade, including a strong antimilitarist/antinuclear movement and a

host of “solidarity” movements attempting to change U.S. policy toward

El Salvador, Nicaragua, and, most relevant to this chapter, South Africa.3

The “benefit rock” events are important because they are among the

most compelling attempts to create moments of “popular global culture,”

in contrast to “global pop culture.” They are riddled with political con-

tradictions and limitations, but they also suggest one possible, progres-

sive axis of transnational communication in this globalizing era.

In this chapter I examine two clusters of these agit-pop events, with

the aim of suggesting the possibilities and limits of their use by social

movements as a point of entry onto the terrain of the “mass media” or

“popular culture.” In particular, I analyze these recordings, concerts,

and associated books, t-shirts, and so forth as presenting popular ideas

about relationships between the so-called “underdeveloped” Third World

and the (over)developed First World. In the process I want to suggest a

middle ground in two longstanding debates about popular culture and

social change. The first debate is between those who find the mass

media inherently conservative because of their commercialized nature,

and those who see popular culture as a zone of significant political resis-

tance. The second debate is between those who see U.S. pop culture as

part of a “cultural imperialism” that dominates and overwhelms other

cultures of the world, and those who believe that despite U.S. domi-

nance significant amounts of postmodern “transnational culture” flow

from many locations and in many directions. Although I do not ad-

dress these very large questions directly, my analysis is meant to suggest

that both sides of these important debates have at best part of the

truth.4

To approach these issues, I first look at Live Aid itself, along with the

associated “Band Aid” and “We are the World/USA for Africa” famine

relief projects. By way of contrast, I then analyze a cluster of musical

“We Are [Not] the World” 157

texts originating in the United States and Britain in support of resistance

to South African apartheid, in particular the American Sun City music/

video project, and the “Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday” tribute concert

in England. I chose the famine and anti-apartheid projects as examples

because they are similar enough to allow certain important political

contrasts to stand out, and because they allow me to examine two dif-

ferent ways that movements can contest for the meanings circulating in

popular culture. The most obvious similarity is that both famine relief

and the struggle against apartheid directly and indirectly comment on

relations between colonial and neocolonial nations (like Britain and the

United States), on one hand, and the emerging, decolonizing nations of

the Southern Hemisphere on the other. A focus on Africa allows me to

analyze both the dangers and the possibilities of Western pop and rock

music as embodiments of and resisters to the domination of “the West”

over “the rest” of the world. It further allows me to show how a global

phenomenon can be attached to local movement sites of action.

The prime difference between these two sets of events is that the

famine project had its politics more or less thrust upon it and thus rep-

resents a case of a struggle by movements to appropriate an ambiguous

cultural text, while the anti-apartheid project was more or less politically

radical from the beginning and thus represents a test of the limits of an

attempt to create a movement text within the confines of the mass media.

Benefit Pop/Rock and African Famine

Let us look at the Live Aid cluster of texts first, through a kind of double

lens: first, a textual analysis that elaborates a composite portrait of highly

negative critical interpretations of the famine benefit; then, a more pos-

itive contextual analysis that suggests the inadequacy of this first kind of

narrowly text-based analysis. These contrasting readings demonstrate

how the necessary task of analyzing a text as a formal structure needs to

be supplemented by analyzing the ways in which the meanings of texts

change as they are placed into new historical and political frames of

reference.

In the standard story told, the African famine-relief pop/rock benefits

begin with the efforts of the then moderately well known Irish rock

musician Bob Geldof. It is interesting that in this origin story Geldof ’s

efforts are themselves set in play by the mass media, in this case by a

BBC documentary on the famine that Geldof saw more or less by acci-

158 “We Are [Not] the World”

dent. The famine, which stretched through Africa’s Sahel region from

Senegal to Ethiopia, caused an estimated 1 million deaths in the 1980s.

Stunned and disturbed by the images and facts presented in the film,

Geldof organized British rock and pop stars to produce a record drawing

attention to the famine and raising relief money to fight it.

The first result of this project was the song, “Do They Know It’s Christ-

mas?” performed by various British artists under the name Band Aid

and released late in 1984.5 This record was followed a few months later

by release in the United States of the similar song, “We Are the World.”

Then, finally, on 13 July 1985, the huge and extremely financially successful

Live Aid concerts were held in London and Philadelphia, and were tele-

cast worldwide to more than 1.5 billion people.6

Even granting that there are a fair number of Christians in northern

Africa, it is difficult to imagine a more culturally insensitive question to

ask musically than “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” Moreover, how

likely is Christmas to be first on the minds of starving people? This du-

bious question typifies the narcissistic self-importance and ethnocen-

tric disregard for cultural differences that permeate much of this project.

An inability to see the very different cultural conditions of Britain and

Africa is reinforced by the virtual absence of black artists from the British

recording session and from the British half of the concert. This is impor-

tant not because every record or event has to be racially balanced, but

because the absence of blacks served to underscore the emerging, no

doubt unintended, racist message that the relief effort was about help-

ful whites helping helpless blacks. The absence of black artists is espe-

cially unforgivable given that the many Rastafarians among black British,

Afro-Caribbean, and African American performers view Ethiopia, one

of the more devastated of the famine areas, as a spiritual homeland.

From the point of view of fundraising with regard to their target

audience, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was perfectly conceived to

play into those seasonal spasms of humanist “good will toward men” that

get engraved on Christmas cards and fill the buckets of armies of salva-

tion of various sorts every holiday season in both the United Kingdom

and the United States. Indeed, in these terms, the song exceeded all expec-

tations, becoming a Number 1 hit and a gold record, raising more than

$11 million.

While this fundraising success is impressive, and while the personal

motives of most of those involved were undoubtedly sincere, these initial

“We Are [Not] the World” 159

efforts of Band Aid recycled some of the most problematic humanist

ideas, from patronizing, patriarchal “charity” and philanthropy to deeply

racist, imperialist echoes of “the white man’s burden” (the nineteenth-

century notion that the “white man” is bringing “civilization” to the

backward peoples of the world). In fact, “modern” agricultural develop-

ment contributed to undermine the food base, as well as the culture, of

the Africans who were experiencing the famine.7

When the text of musical famine relief migrates across the Atlantic to

the United States, some of its most suspect aspects are mitigated a bit,

but not much. Here the origins are significantly different in at least one

respect, the race of the prime movers, virtually all of whom were black.

Inspired by Geldof ’s project, the American effort was touched off by

Harry Belafonte, an entertainer with a history of political activism,

including a long association with Martin Luther King Jr. and involve-

ment in numerous progressive social movements.

Belafonte soon persuaded his friends Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson,

and Stevie Wonder to take over work on an American version of the

Band Aid record. Unfortunately, Wonder, the only one of this trio with

even minimal political knowhow, was forced by other commitments to

drop out, and the actual composition fell to Jackson and Richie. The

result was the immensely (if briefly) popular song, “We Are the World.”

Once ubiquitous, still insipid, it remained, until Elton John rerecorded

“Candle in the Wind” as a tribute to Princess Di, the biggest-selling single

of all time.

In video form We Are the World received wide airplay on the then

relatively new Music Television network, MTV. Again it was a spectacu-

lar success. As in the song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” the text

can be characterized as extraordinarily ethnocentric, displaying a self-

centeredness reinforced by the video, which shows us no Africans at all,

but lots of rich musicians looking and sounding at once sincere and

self-satisfied. The extremely static staging of the video visually reinforces

a sense of inactivist self-containment; no one moves from the claustro-

phobic recording studio, and intercut images of Africans present only

victims.

The lyrics play back and forth between identity and difference in

such a way as to make it impossible to see Africans as capable social

actors, while simultaneously pretending “they” are just like “us.” The

presumed identification between “the starving children” and the well-

160 “We Are [Not] the World”

fed rock stars is a classic example of how liberal humanism obscures

important differences of condition, making political analysis impossible.

As the presumptive “we” of the title designates the First World, it serves

to remove “our” responsibility by folding us into the Third World as

one world. There is no difference or distance from which to construct

notions of relative responsibility for the famine. “We” too are its vic-

tims. While empathetic connection to those suffering from the famine

might be desirable, such a pure identification with “them” erases the

distance needed to understand and challenge the sources of their very

different political, economic, and cultural conditions. Such an easy sense

of connection covers differences of class, race, religion, and political

ideology within Africa, and within First World countries (where hunger

also exists in the midst of plenty). The problem is that the two worlds

come to be conceived as generically prosperous, on the one hand, and

generically deprived, on the other.

Even as this too easy sense of connecting the “worlds” is offered, the

subtext suggests its opposite, a pure difference between “us” and “them,”

we the saviors and they the victims. Thus, the most ironically truthful

line in the song is the one that goes, “We’re saving our own lives.” In-

tended to achieve identification with the “victims,” it marks the true dis-

tance by suggesting that the “we” who will be saved are not the Africans,

but the song’s singers and audience, saved from having to think seri-

ously about an “unpleasant thing” by simply giving a few dollars for

famine relief. At the same time, it masks the true connection, world and

national economies, in which the benefits to people like the musicians

and fellow contributors come at the expense of those whose work makes

possible the prosperous lives the musicians live.

Taken together, these two records could be said to add up to this mes-

sage: “We” [in the West] are the world, and “they” [in Africa] don’t even

know it’s Christmas.

The problematic aspects of these two record/video efforts are mag-

nified, but also somewhat diffused by the mega-concert that grows out

of them, Live Aid proper. Unlike the records, which make no reference,

and the videos, which make minimal reference to the famine itself, the

televised concerts did attempt intermittently to address the famine and

some of its causes. Recorded vignettes by “experts” in the field of hunger

were interspersed with musical performances. But the ideological limits

of those vignettes were quite narrow. No one, for example, seriously

“We Are [Not] the World” 161

addressed the relation of hunger to Western agricultural policy or the

role played by First World manipulation of the economies of the Third

World. Countries throughout the developing world have been forced to

borrow money from the World Bank and the International Monetary

Fund (both organizations largely controlled by the United States), and

in exchange they have been made to develop their economies only in

ways acceptable to and profitable for the United States and the other

major capitalist nations. The mechanized, chemical-dependent tech-

niques of large-scale agriculture are in many cases less efficient than

traditional methods, some of them thousands of years old and based on

a rich knowledge of local ecologies. Once having committed themselves

to expensive, U.S.–defined modes of modernization, developing coun-

tries are often drawn into a web of debt that becomes a way for the

First World to shape their politics and cultures. More subtly than in the

days when Europe could simply declare the rest of the world to be part

of its empire, but often just as devastatingly, the political and cultural

independence of the so-called “underdeveloped” Southern Hemisphere

is undermined, with a loss of biodiversity and cultural diversity. And, as

in the case of the African famines, these political-economic manipula-

tions often cost thousands of lives.

Apart from or combined with philanthropic appeals, most commen-

taries during the rock aid events coded the famine as either a natural

disaster or a technical problem. Coding the problem as “natural” removes

all human, political responsibility for the cause. And calling the prob-

lem “technical” reinforces a sense of African “backwardness” implicit in

the “underdevelopment” notion underpinning the overall story of “vic-

tims and saviors.” Some of the appeals did move a bit beyond charity or

the suggestion that Western technocratic elitism was the answer (rather

than part of the problem), but not many. And particularly in the Amer-

ican context of broadcast on commercial television, these gestures seem

quite obscene set alongside the perpetual orgy of consumption por-

trayed and appealed to in commercials.

Moreover, again and again, the north African famine is portrayed in

the televised event via pictures of starving “women and children.” As

these images build upon one another, Africa itself is in effect both femi-

nized and infantilized. One pervasive logo, used throughout the Amer-

ican broadcast of the event, begins with an image of the African conti-

nent, which then suddenly and magically becomes transformed into an

162 “We Are [Not] the World”

electric guitar. Indeed, in a curious metamorphosis it appears as though

the feminine womb of Africa gives birth to the phallic guitar that will be

its savior.

Some critics suggest that as these messages mix with commercials

pushing consumption of consumer goods, the American audience starts

in effect to consume Africans. One of the logos for the project super-

imposes a place setting with a knife, fork, and spoon over a map of the

African continent. Cultural theorist Zoë Sofia has argued, only partly

tongue in cheek, that the only solution to what she calls the “Cannibal-

Eyes” of mass-mediated consumer capitalism is to “eat the rich,” prefer-

ably on a prime-time game show. Whether or not eating the rich is the

solution, surely consuming the poor as a heartwarming television spec-

tacle is part of the problem.8

Summing up various critical readings of the famine relief benefits I

have been paraphrasing, one could say that Live Aid uses a falsely uni-

versalizing liberal humanism, robs Africans of their own power, re-

inforces Western ethnocentric racism, puts forth a vision of passivity that

equates children with women and both with Africa, and obscures the

neocolonialist sources of the famine by coding it as a natural disaster or

as a technical rather than political problem. Put more colloquially, this

analysis views Bob Geldof as a kind of clueless but slightly hipper Jerry

Lewis who takes up starving Africans as his “kids” and holds the biggest

telethon in history.

As the vicious pleasure with which I have presented this analysis makes

clear, I find a good deal of truth in it, particularly as an analysis of some

of the likely immediate effects of the event as presented to an Anglo-

American audience. But I do not think this kind of analysis is the whole

or final truth about the events if they are conceived not as one moment

in time but as the beginning of a contest over what meanings would be

attached to the famine and the relief efforts.

That such a contest over meanings took place is apparent as soon as

one moves from examining the texts to considering their historical and

political context. As cultural critic Stuart Hall has argued, the relevant

historical context is the rise in both the United States and the United

Kingdom of a very successful right-wing political project that went by

the name of Reaganism in the United States and Thatcherism in Britain

(named for the respective national leaders of the day, President Ronald

Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher). These projects, at the

“We Are [Not] the World” 163

center of the “me decade,” included a largely successful effort to wipe

out all vestiges of liberal or progressive notions of community or of

responsibility to anyone less fortunate than oneself. They promulgated

the myth that a “free market” would magically distribute goods fairly,

rewarding the hardworking and leaving the lazy to wallow in deserved

poverty. People were told all they needed to do was develop enough

“character” to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Unfortu-

nately, the political impact of this ideology left many without shoes, let

alone boots, with or without straps.

In such a context, Hall contends, even read most minimally as lib-

eral philanthropy, the Live Aid events were the single most important

counter-moment to the installation of this right-wing orgy of greed

and self-interest. Hall calls the famine relief effort “one of the great

popular movements of our time,” and believes it offered a “direct demo-

cratic” challenge to “bureaucratic” power. He even suggests that Live

Aid put the “new right” on the defensive, that it represented one of the

few significant rips in the seams of its emerging hegemony.9

Hall is perhaps exaggerating a bit here to balance what he sees as a

kind of knee-jerk left purism that produces the kind of analysis I gave

above. But I think the core of his logic has been borne out, both in the

evolution of the Live Aid project itself, and more important, in its use as

a model for many of the more directly counter-hegemonic musical mega-

events that came in its wake.

With regard to Live Aid, let me try to at least partially redeem the rock

star and “his” mega-telethon by describing the way in which Geldof

responded to critiques like those I leveled above. As the Irish rocker freely

admits, he began his project as a political naïf, so much so as to claim

that the famine was not a political issue. Finding himself, however, on

the covers of the conservative journal Spectator and Marxism Today dur-

ing the same week, he soon got the message that his event was political,

and could be claimed by both the right and the left. Amid this political

maelstrom, Geldof learned about Third World debt, defense spending,

and world agricultural policies, and eventually found himself before the

United Nations, scolding the assembled delegates for not dealing with

the effect of Western agricultural policy on Africa, and supporting a

call for a total moratorium on African debt, among other things.

Convincing criticism from the left moved Geldof and the project

further and further away from charity and its discourses. Policies for

164 “We Are [Not] the World”

disbursal of Live Aid funds were formulated that put only what was

absolutely needed into emergency relief, directing the rest to long-term

development programs, and eventually to attempts to Africanize all the

projects by turning them over to local control by the people affected.10

Although millions of people desperately needed these efforts, many

on the left (I among them) seemed willing, almost eager, to believe the

worst about the disbursal of Live Aid funds and goods. Rumors of cor-

ruption and inefficiency spread wildly. But an independent audit found

the Live Aid project to have been extremely efficient, above the standard

for such work. Indeed, funds were still being distributed years after the

concert, from a total raised that approached $250 million in cash, goods,

and services.11

I dwell on Geldof not to make him heroic but to offer him as an alle-

gory writ large for a process that many of the viewers of Live Aid under-

went in a less visible way when they tried to do more than send a check.

They joined various ongoing hunger relief projects in droves, and once

there they usually began a process of political education that was for

many also a process of radicalization. That process did not happen

automatically, however, and that is my key point: it happened because

some on the left chose to struggle for the meaning that Live Aid would

have, to try to reshape it to their analysis and their agenda. Rather than

just condemning it as naive, neocolonialist, racist, and so forth, they

chose to attempt to decolonize the event, to liberate it into more fruitful

political talk and action.

The second, related struggle set off by Live Aid was an effort to use

the specific breach it had made in the new right’s hegemonic process to

open up other spaces of resistance. Hundreds of subsequent musical

benefits and mega-benefits in dozen of countries attest to the ongoing

impact of Live Aid. Of those the most dramatic, especially in reversing

some of the imagery of Live Aid itself, were those projects entwined

with the anti-apartheid struggle.

Music against Apartheid

In the United States the most interesting of the efforts to draw upon the

precedent set by Live Aid was made by a group of musicians calling

themselves Artists United against Apartheid. Their major project was a

record and video entitled Sun City.12 Far more politically explicit and

aggressive than Live Aid, Sun City forms a kind of test case for examining

“We Are [Not] the World” 165

how far it is possible to convey radically progressive ideas through

mass-media forms. Far more directly than the relation between AIM and

Hollywood discussed in chapter 5, these efforts sought to connect a

movement to a pop-culture formation.

The Sun City project was started by “Little Steven” Van Zandt, formerly

the lead guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band and later, like

Geldof, a moderately successful solo artist and producer. In Van Zandt’s

telling, after learning from some American anti-apartheid activists about

the situation in South Africa, he traveled there himself and spoke with

numerous white and black South Africans involved in the liberation

movements. Asking different groups what he could do to be most effec-

tive, he was told again and again that his appropriate role would be to

tell his fellow musicians not to play at Sun City, a Las Vegas–like tourist

complex set in the middle of one of the barbed-wire-surrounded black

ghettos that white South Africans euphemistically called “homelands.”

So began the Sun City project, aimed to reinforce and expand the

United Nations–sponsored musicians’ boycott of South Africa, and to

educate the American public via music about the liberation struggle

and about conditions of blacks living under racist systems, not only in

South Africa but in the United States as well. Eventually the project came

to include a single, an album, a video (directed by Jonathan Demme

and Hart Perry), and various ancillary texts (including the obligatory

t-shirt, as well as glossy picture books and a “rockumentary”).13

I will discuss the video first because several contrasts with the We Are

the World video are immediately apparent. The first important difference

is that in Sun City black people, African American and Afro-Caribbean

musicians, and, most important, black South Africans play central roles.

They are visible in active not passive roles. Second, the musicians are

moving, they are going somewhere; there is movement, perhaps even a

movement, happening. The sense both lyrically and visually is a demand

to act on, not just consume, these images. Third, to reinforce this mes-

sage, the images themselves are far more kinetic throughout. On the

one hand, the piece fits relatively seamlessly into the flow of MTV-style

rock video imagery, thus allowing it into that mass-mediated space. On

the other hand, what it shows on closer inspection is raised, clenched

fists (mostly black ones) ripping away at apartheid and by suggestion

ripping away veils of televisual illusion to show some of the realities of

166 “We Are [Not] the World”

apartheid beneath. It is of key importance that it is clearly Africans, not

just the rock stars, who are ripping away at these images.

Van Zandt started his project as a more politically savvy and politi-

cally radical individual than Geldof, and thus his project too was more

radical from the beginning. When he, like Geldof, eventually found him-

self at the United Nations, in this case to receive a humanitarian award

for his work, he was careful to make explicit his project’s distance from

charity and its attendant discourse of victimage. His speech said in part:

“This is not a benefit record because though the needs of black South

Africans are great they do not ask us for our charity, and though the

black South African suffering is horrifying, they do not ask us for our

pity.”14

Despite this clear attempt to distance the Sun City project from the

discourse of Live Aid, Little Steven has frequently acknowledged that

his project would not have been possible without various precedents set

by the famine project, from directing focus onto the African continent

to disinterring notions of international human rights to politicizing rock

“We Are [Not] the World” 167

Sun City rock stars superimposed on South African protesters. Scene from The Making of “Sun City.”

musicians (several of whom appear in both projects). The Sun City

project’s tack was not to totally reject liberal notions of humanitarian-

ism, but instead to try to move its audience through and beyond that

position to a more politically engaged one. This is reflected in the dis-

tribution of profits from the project, which were more or less equally

divided along lines that allowed the project to finesse the ideological

border between humanitarianism and political action. Roughly one-third

went to the families of political prisoners; one-third to educational cen-

ters and colleges set up in Tanzania and Zambia by the prime anti-

apartheid force, the African National Congress; and one-third to grass-

roots educational outreach efforts by the anti-apartheid movement in

the United States.15

In virtually all the material released by the Sun City project, the finger

was pointed not just at South Africa but also at the United States as a

prime supporter of South African apartheid and as a site of homemade

racism. At every opportunity, Van Zandt was careful to articulate this

key point: “I hope that by focusing on the exaggeration of racism in

[South Africa], we can realize that racism is very much alive in our own

country, and that we can begin to dismantle our own apartheid right

here at home.”16

By apartheid at home, Van Zandt means U.S. racism generally, but

this includes apartheid within the musical community, both the segrega-

tion of black and Latino music, and the domination of the industry by

white producers. He and collaborator Arthur Baker tried to undermine

the segregation and segmentation of musical audiences by bringing

together the particular mix of musicians used on the session (rappers,

rockers, punkers, funksters, reggae singers, salseros, new wave musicians,

jazz artists, and significantly, Nigerian and South African musicians,

among others). While the music industry likes to talk about diverse

musical styles as simply reflecting different, freely chosen “taste cul-

tures,” demographic analysis makes clear that race, ethnicity, class, gen-

der, and, of course, age make up the prime determinants of musical

subcultures. Music subcultures certainly reflect tastes, but they also serve

to reinforce social divisions that doubly serve capitalism: by dividing

potential oppositional forces and by economically exploiting and trivi-

alizing ethnic diversity commercially. Attempts to bridge these subcul-

tural divisions musically formed an important subtext of the Sun City

168 “We Are [Not] the World”

project. Using the term musical apartheid to describe these divisions

risked trivializing political apartheid, but was also a key to bringing the

issues back home.

This multiple crossover list of artists also had a pragmatic marketing

value, to achieve maximum airplay, as the various specialized radio for-

mats would pick up on particular artist(s) representing their genre. But,

as I will discuss in a moment, this part of the strategy met limitations.

Rockin’ the Grassroots

I find two aspects of the Sun City project particularly suggestive. First, it

utilized virtually all the available, relevant mass-mediated forms, push-

ing them close to their didactic limits, while maintaining enough of

the form to keep it recognizable and thus available as a pop(ular) item.

And second, the project sought to create substantive links to grassroots

activism.

As I have already suggested, the Sun City video uses the hyperactive

style of rock videos but tries to disconnect that manic energy from the

postmodern aimlessness of MTV culture, and connect it to political

struggle and direct action.17 Some critics have suggested that the video

does this by making political action look like too much fun, too much

like a street party. But I would argue that this is precisely one of its

strengths. This objection exemplifies a continuing left puritanism that

is deadly to the possibility of a counter-hegemonic project. The inabil-

ity of recent oppositional movements to articulate (link) politics and

pleasure is one of the key factors that has condemned them to margin-

ality even among that notoriously rebellious social category, youth.

Indeed, the pleasures of political transgression remain one of the better

kept, presumably guilty, secrets of the left, and recent attempts to fore-

ground the pleasures of political as well as cultural transgressions seem

to me a key area of theorizing activity.

In addition to the music video, the project also used two other video

formats, recoding what is perhaps the most banally narcissistic of all

popular culture genres, the “Making of . . .” format. “Making of ” videos

are designed to take you the viewer “behind the scenes.” In the Sun City

versions, you are indeed taken “behind the scenes,” but the pretext of

giving glimpses of the recording and filming processes is used to extend

the audience’s glance behind the scenes of apartheid. The Making of

“We Are [Not] the World” 169

“Sun City” video, a ten-minute version of which was shown on MTV

while a forty-five-minute version was released for home use, includes

charts and graphs illustrating economic conditions in South Africa,

interviews with Winnie Mandela and other anti-apartheid activists, and

testimony from most of the musicians taking part in the project. These

latter comments naturally vary considerably in their level of political

insight, but that too may serve a function, as it allows points of connec-

tion for viewers who may feel initially too uninformed to act. Thus the

star-fan matrix, normally a site for adolescent fantasies, is here used to

secure identifications that open the possibility of acting despite not

(yet) having an elaborated analysis of South African politics. Space needs

to be left in such a project for the less well informed to make a first step,

and the inexpert comments of the musicians provide such an opening.

Similar use is made of the “star book” form, the glossy, vacuous genre

normally used to provide purchasers with a mini-poster collection, full

of pictures and with minimal, usually not very intellectually demanding

text.18 The Sun City project’s version of this book genre does have lots

of pictures, including obligatory ones of the musical stars who play on

the record, but it also includes pictures of Nelson Mandela, of South

African miners, of the victims and the resisters of apartheid. The glossy

book does have enough pictures of self-indulgent star nonsense to draw

in fans, but it also has a fairly substantive, though not daunting, text

that includes plenty of encouragement to get a more in-depth analysis

of apartheid. Indeed, the book, the record, the cassette, and virtually all

other associated paraphernalia of the project contain bibliographies on

South African history and the anti-apartheid movement, as well as ways

to contact anti-apartheid organizations. This leads me to the second

dimension of the exemplary actions by the Sun City project.

From its inception, Van Zandt had a sense that having grown out of

his contacts with grassroots activists in South Africa, the project should

be put to the service of grassroots activists in the United States. He tried

to accomplish this in several ways. Most directly, he traveled around the

country, offering himself as a speaker and making contact with dozens

of local anti-apartheid solidarity groups. He also made the video widely

available to these groups for use as an organizing tool, both to draw

new people to meetings and to educate them once there.

The Sun City project also created a teaching packet to accompany

the video for use both by community groups and in schools. The packet

170 “We Are [Not] the World”

included not only educational materials but also a list of direct political

actions from all around the country that had been inspired by the Sun

City project, actions that could be emulated or improvised upon locally.19

The Sun City project was an ambitious, in many ways successful at-

tempt to mediate between a mass-produced and -distributed cultural text,

and local sites of reception. Put more strongly, it set out actively to pro-

duce connections to local movement groups, and created more general

“reading formations” that would ensure a radical reading of the text.

But if the project reveals several potentially useful approaches to

making and distributing oppositional mass-mediated texts, it also sug-

gests some limits likely to be encountered by any such effort.

First, while the anti-apartheid project made a significant financial

and educational impact, when compared to the more politically vague

famine relief efforts, its impact was less spectacular. The album and single

made it onto the Billboard Top Forty but had trouble getting sufficient

radio airplay and never moved very far up the charts. This underscores

my sense that the project may have pushed near the limit of what a

didactic, radical intervention could do within the commercial mass

media’s terms.

While radio stations offered a variety of plausible nonpolitical rea-

sons for not giving the song more airplay, it seems clear that its political

message scared them. Similar difficulties were encountered when the

project sought to have The Making of “Sun City” documentary aired on

PBS. The offer was refused, despite numerous awards given to the video,

on the grounds that it would violate the “journalistic integrity” of the

network to air a program that simply promoted the ideas and careers of

its producers. At the time this statement was offered, PBS was running

two Lucasfilm documentaries on the making of those apparently less

commercial ventures, Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

As a result of this virtual censorship, the impact of the Sun City proj-

ect was not on the scale of We Are the World, although it is difficult to

measure precisely. My own informal poll of my students conducted in the

mid-1990s, probably not a scientific sample of 2 billion people, confirmed

my sense that Sun City is considerably less well known than We Are the

World, even among progressive students. But more than half of those

surveyed had seen the Sun City video or heard the song. According to

one source, the Sun City video received a “heavy rotation” slot on MTV—

a serious amount of airplay.20

“We Are [Not] the World” 171

The Sun City project years, 1985 and 1986, were peak years for anti-

apartheid activism in the United States, particularly through various

divestment campaigns on and around college campuses. The Sun City

project certainly did not create this movement, but just as certainly it

furthered it, providing a far more powerful outreach tool than those

usually available to local activists. The project harmonized with a devel-

oping anti-apartheid movement centered on American college campuses.

Student activists led the way with divestment campaigns aimed at getting

their universities and colleges to remove from their huge investment

portfolios corporations that bolstered the apartheid economy of South

Africa. Students around the country built cardboard shantytowns, mir-

roring conditions in many black townships in South Africa, and placed

them in prominent locations on campus, often near administration

buildings. This street theater was accompanied by educational campaigns

detailing investments of the particular school. Some campaigns also

included hunger strikes by students, rallies, sit-ins, and a host of other

efforts to dramatize the issues. Many shantytown demonstrations were

accompanied by a sound track provided by Sun City, mimicking the spir-

ited, festive music accompanying black resistance efforts in South Africa

itself. The circulation of Sun City records and videos was a significant

recruiting device, preparing students to hear the messages being offered

through the other movement “texts,” such as the shantytown installations.

Millions of dollars were successfully pulled out of apartheid land by

this campus movement, and as part of a worldwide divestment campaign

it had an immense impact on the white South African government.21

The Sun City project also helped pave the way for the next stage of

contestation, a move by the anti-apartheid movement to go after the

level of the “spectacle” achieved by that master event, Live Aid. The

movement held a “Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute” concert on

11 June 1988, in the same London stadium that had housed Live Aid, and

invited a few hundred million people to join in the celebration.

The Nelson Mandela Concerts

At the level of global spectacle and in terms of sheer numbers, the Nel-

son Mandela concert rivaled even Live Aid. Its worldwide audience is

estimated to have been around 600 million people in some sixty coun-

tries.22 Once again, I would not want to speculate on what these num-

bers mean across the staggering array of communities in which the event

172 “We Are [Not] the World”

was received, but it is possible to say something about what it meant in

the United Kingdom and the United States, which in this case provide

interesting contrasts.

Tony Hollingsworth, who produced the birthday tribute, claims that

he hoped to make the show act as “a flagship . . . whereby the local anti-

apartheid movements could pick up from the enormous coverage . . .

and run a far more detailed political argument than you could have on

stage.”23 Local anti-apartheid groups in Britain at the time of the concert

were organizing a “Nelson Mandela: Freedom at Seventy” campaign into

which the concert played very effectively. Chitra Karve, a spokesperson

for the British anti-apartheid movement, said that given this context,

“every second of the [concert] was political.”24 This would seem to be

confirmed by the threefold rise in membership in local anti-apartheid

groups in the weeks after the concert. A postconcert survey in Britain

showed that 75 percent of people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-

four knew of Mandela and supported his release.25

Such knowledge may not have run very deep, but it was apparently

broad enough to effect changes in, among other things, media cover-

age of South Africa. According to Hollingsworth, the agitational and

consciousness-raising elements of the concert combined to alter the

terms of media discourse in Britain with regard to the liberation move-

ment. Before the concert, Mandela was routinely referred to on the BBC

and in other media as the leader of a “terrorist” organization; after the

concert and its attendant publicity, Hollingsworth claims, this kind of

representation was no longer possible.26 Even making allowance for a

promoter-activist’s exaggeration, there is no doubt that events like the

Mandela concert played a key role in transforming the image of Man-

dela and the African National Congress (ANC), not only in Britain but

worldwide.

Perhaps the most eloquent testimony to this claim comes from Nel-

son Mandela himself who, upon his release from prison twenty months

after the concert, chose to make his major public appearance in Britain

not in Parliament, but at a rock concert in Wembley stadium. By his

presence there and in the speech he delivered on the occasion, Mandela

made clear his belief and the belief of the movement that events like the

seventieth birthday tribute were playing a role in their struggle.

Did rock songs and musical spectacles lead to the freedom of Nelson

Mandela and the end of apartheid? No, of course not. Twenty-seven years

“We Are [Not] the World” 173

of struggle by black South Africans, a worldwide network of solidarity

workers, and a complex process of pragmatic gambling on the part of

the white South African government did that. Moreover, Mandela is

still only relatively free even after serving as the president of his liber-

ated country, because his people are still not free of the poverty, disease,

and factionalisms left by apartheid.

But did these spectacles and the work of musicians play any significant

role? There I think the answer must be an equally emphatic yes — espe-

cially if those events are seen as connected to the vast networks of local

organizers who appropriated them for their work at the grassroots. The

anti-apartheid projects suggest the possibility that transnational and

even global texts can be articulated to particular local political condi-

tions with ideological goals partly outside of mass-mediated frames.

Corporate Mobilization and Rock Organizing

Let me conclude by using the rather different experience of the recep-

tion of the Mandela concert in the United States to suggest some limi-

tations, pitfalls, and points of struggle for those attempting to use mass-

mediated public cultural forms for movement purposes.

The Mandela concert broadcast in the United States was a significantly

deradicalized version of the British concert. The Fox network, which

secured American rights to the event, chose to cut out all of the anti-

apartheid political speeches, including those by musicians prefacing their

songs. Moreover, in a deeply ironic, perhaps intentionally cynical, fash-

ion, several of the sponsors of the American showing were themselves

companies doing major business in South Africa. This is a stark exam-

ple of something that should never be forgotten: because these events

and texts occur in a matrix of late capitalist enterprise, commercial

sponsors can both subtly and directly undermine projected political

meanings.27 Since the mid-1980s, the number of public events and in-

stitutions free of commercial sponsorship has declined drastically.28

More generally, such events do not significantly challenge, and in

some ways they reinforce, capitalist relations of production. Mega-events

require immense amounts of capital, and thus most have required some

degree of capitulation to corporate sponsorship.29 This dependence can

be lessened, however, and the potential for oppositional messages height-

ened, by use of the “ideology of rock.” Rock music defines itself against

commercial “pop” music by stressing rebellious authenticity.30 While

174 “We Are [Not] the World”

much of the time this difference is turned into little more than a mar-

keting niche by multimedia conglomerate record companies, this self-

definition as rebel music can be built upon by activists. Activists can

appeal to rock musicians and other wealthy music industry personnel

to take their rebellion more seriously by providing noncorporate fund-

ing for alternative political records and events.

The Sun City project’s stronger message was made possible in part

because it was not a capital-intensive venture, but also because it was

conceived in essence through the discourse of “rock” as it defines itself

as rebel music against the discourse of tamer “pop” in events like Live

Aid. Those who wish to use rock music to carry truly oppositional mes-

sages have a built-in ideological advantage that they can draw upon.

They have an opportunity to call out rock musicians to be the truly rebel-

lious figures they claim to be by involving them in serious, movement-

based rebellion.31

So far, the challenge that mega-events offer to late capitalist modes of

consumption are also relatively weak ones. Their images of normally

highly individualistic performers and highly individualistic audiences

doing collective work do provide some sense of collective, structural, as

opposed to merely personal, power. Without a movement culture con-

nection, however, this power can be folded back into the more empty

collective power felt at any large rock concert. Some critics have raised

the question of whether consuming images of Nelson Mandela raising

his fist is significantly different from consuming images of Michael

Jackson raising his.32 Certainly there is the potential for rock music in

benefit contexts to obscure or trivialize the politics they represent. But

it is not inevitable, and to make no distinction between the images of

Jackson and Mandela is the worst kind of postmodern, postmortem

posing.

The Sun City video, for example, does address its viewers in different

ways than does We Are the World, and I think those differences matter

politically. But those differences are only weak potentialities when left

to float in the vast sea of commercial culture. Until they can be linked

to movement cultures around and beyond these media texts, they are

easily absorbed back into the dominant system. Certainly, movements

are not pure spaces of resistance. Hegemonic forces of the so-called

mainstream flow through them as well. But they are spaces where an

unusually direct kind of cultural-political literacy can be practiced,

“We Are [Not] the World” 175

where a relatively strong counter-public sphere can shape the reception

of mass-mediated messages.

The process of “rock vs. pop” is often carried out at the level of sub-

cultures in contrast to mainstream pop culture, and it is taking place on

an increasingly global scale. In the ongoing debates about the meanings

of “globalization,” thinking through the phenomenon of agit-pop is of

great importance. Cultural theorist Fredric Jameson has pointed out

that how one makes sense of the globalization of culture depends in

great part on the starting point of analysis. Jameson notes that if you

focus on the texts of global cultural production, “you will emerge slowly

into a postmodern celebration of difference and differentiation: sud-

denly all the cultures of the world are placed in tolerant contact with

each other in a kind of immense cultural pluralism.” If you focus on the

economic production side of this global culture, “what comes to the

fore is increasing identity (rather than difference): the rapid assimila-

tion of hitherto national markets and production zones into a single

sphere . . . a picture of standardization on an unparalleled new scale.”33

At the level of cultural theory the question posed is how fully “com-

modification,” the turning of cultural text into a salable item, controls

the meaning of that text. But I would argue that that question cannot

be answered in the abstract. It can only be answered through political

struggle. And that political struggle will in large measure center on

attempts to politicize subcultures.

There is a central paradox at the heart of mass culture. On the one

hand, it thrives on standardization and reduction of all cultural mean-

ing to marketability. On the other hand, it must have innovation; it

must constantly produce newness in order to overcome the boredom

inherent in standardization. Innovation can seldom come from inside

mass culture. Thus, it is largely dependent for its success on its ability to

appropriate energy and style from subcultures (think of the way sub-

cultures like punk, grunge, and hip-hop have been essential to the music

industry in the last several decades). Subcultures, by contrast, inher-

ently define themselves against mainstream pop and against commer-

cialization. The trick for those who would bring progressive political

power into this process is to convince the inevitably arising subcultures

that their vague anticommercialism will not prevent the “selling out” of

their values because the pop industry needs them and will selectively

appropriate them. Again and again that process has meant diluting and

176 “We Are [Not] the World”

often destroying the subculture’s power of self-definition. The argument

would be that for “rockers and rappers [to be] united and free,” they

must develop explicit, full-fledged political and economic analyses of

their situation. This entails, in effect, transforming aesthetic or stylisti-

cally based subcultures into movement (sub)cultures.

We have a clear example of what is at stake here in the contrast be-

tween the parallel stories of the “grunge” and “Riot Grrrlz” subcultures.

These two subcultures grew up in the same time period and within a

few miles of each other in the state of Washington. Both had strong

“scenes” and innovative musical styles that eventually attracted major

record companies. But where grunge became almost fully absorbed into

the pop mainstream, despite its avowed anticommercialism, riot grrl,

despite flirting with the mainstream, largely has maintained itself as a

powerfully independent force. The difference, I would argue, is that the

third-wave feminism of riot grrl gave it a basis for launching a political

and economic analysis that was used to fend off transformation of their

politically charged work into mere “style.”34 This is not fundamentally

about maintaining purity, but about recognizing that subcultures are

inevitably entangled in political-economic struggles with the main-

stream that they can turn to their advantage by joining forces with or

acting as movement cultures.

Recall that the great civil rights organizer and theorist Ella Baker

always made a distinction between mobilizing people and organizing

them. Charismatic leaders, whether preachers, politicians, or rock stars,

play a role in mobilizing people. But organizing them is something else.

Organizing people to struggle with and for themselves requires deeper,

more sustained dialogue and different kinds of actions than those of

consuming mass-mediated images.

However, if it is true that mobilizing people is not enough, it is

equally true that without mobilization there can be but little organiz-

ing. Romantic images of face-to-face contact cannot alone compete with

the dramatic visions of the mass-mediated imaginary. A process of mov-

ing from the streets to the mass media and back again, mediated (as I

will discuss more fully in chapter 9) by the middle space of the Internet,

will be essential for movements today to make significant challenges to

the dominant order.

The space of social movements and the space of mass media hyper-

reality are different ones, and that difference is crucially important in

“We Are [Not] the World” 177

creating a radically democratic politics. But for the space of movements

to be more than a refuge for the politically correct, we must also create a

third space of mediation that attempts to shift that bizarre mass-

mediated virtual public sphere in truly democratic directions. Those

who believe that the “new world order” of Presidents George H. Bush

and George W. Bush looks all too much like the imperial world order of

King George III (the one we Americans fought a revolution against)

have much work to do.

Just as mobilizing is surely not enough in itself, any social movement

that is serious about extending its constituency beyond the margins needs

at some level to contest for and with the realm of mass-mediated mes-

sages. That kind of politics, as I have been arguing, may need some global

counter-spectacles and more than a little of that transnational language

known as rock music.

The energy set in motion by Live Aid continued nearly two decades

after it began. When Bob Geldof ’s protégé, U2’s Bono, addressed the

U.S. Senate on the Third World debt crisis and traveled to Africa with

Secretary of Treasury O’Neil in 2002, debating policy all the way, he was

building on that legacy. At a time when there are millions of people in

Africa with AIDS, and when a new, possibly even more devastating

famine is emerging in southern Africa, finding ways to harness the

power of global pop culture to assist popular global movements has

never been more urgent.

178 “We Are [Not] the World”

In this chapter I explore one of the most dynamic and successful social

movement groups of the late 1980s and 1990s, the AIDS Coalition to

Unleash Power, or ACT UP. One key argument of this book — that all

movement politics involves a degree of cultural politics — owes much to

recent activist groups like ACT UP, which have made such an insight

difficult to ignore. ACT UP, as much as any movement yet invented, has

made self-conscious cultural struggle part of its core work. Those of us

who now see culture everywhere, even in movements from earlier cen-

turies, owe a great debt to groups like ACT UP, which have brilliantly

highlighted the impossibility of fully separating cultural from political

dimensions of movement activity.

In examining ACT UP I tell its story as, among other things, an

attempt to reinvent the politics of protest in the face of the changed

political, economic, and cultural conditions often given the label “post-

modern.” While I think that claims to a unique, postmodern condition

are often exaggerated, they do point to certain cultural developments

that have reshaped the terrain on which movements function, and no

group has done more to address those developments than ACT UP. Post-

modern perspectives call attention to the notion that the cultural land-

scape is now so media-saturated and commodified, it is hard to tell the

real from the virtual, past from present, entertainment from news, resis-

tance from cooptation. One of the many ways in which this media-

saturated environment has had an impact on social movements has

been through the trope of decade segregation. How often does one hear

S E V E N

ACTing UP against AIDS

The (Very) Graphic Arts in a Moment of Crisis

179

the media use a phrase like “sixties-style demonstration,” which at once

trivializes movements as a “style” and suggests that the movement in

question is an anachronism (as though it had missed the one decade

when movements were apparently allowed, the 1960s). This attempt to

ghettoize movements as a phenomenon of one decade forms part of a

larger trend in which it has become more and more difficult for move-

ments to get the attention of the public. Part of the genius of ACT UP

has been the group’s amazing creativity, particularly through use of the

visual and performing arts, in challenging the media’s packaging of

protest and trivialization of movements. As we will see, it did this most

effectively through the use of striking, aesthetically rich images, accom-

panied by witty, sound-bite-worthy slogans. Drawing heavily on AIDS

DemoGraphics, a remarkable book by Adam Ralston and Douglas Crimp

that covers the work of New York City’s branch of ACT UP, I will trace

the major themes, foci, and actions of the organization primarily through

a trail of graphic — sometimes very graphic — slogans and images em-

blazoned on signs, posters, banners, stickers, t-shirts, buttons, bumper

stickers, and other paraphernalia.

Protexts and Contexts

The disease of acquired immune deficiency syndrome, which came to

be known as AIDS, emerged in the United States in the early 1980s. By

historical accident, in the United States the syndrome arose initially pri-

marily among gay men, a fact that forever colored the response. For the

first couple of years of the epidemic, very little attention was paid to it

outside the gay community. This was due in no small part to homopho-

bia, a social disease on the rise in a time of right-wing ascendancy in na-

tional politics. The far less virulent infection called legionnaires disease,

which was identified around the same time when an outbreak occurred

among a group of older, white male war veterans, received far more

medical attention. When AIDS was first identified, it was given the name

gay-related immune deficiency (GRID), a name that obviously reinforced

an association of homosexuality and the disease. The religious right,

recently emboldened by the election of President Ronald Reagan, quickly

seized on the situation to deepen their attack on homosexuality and

their promotion of an antifeminist agenda that sought to return sexual-

ity to the control of patriarchal heterosexual men.

180 ACTing UP against AIDS

The response in the gay community moved quickly from confusion

and panic to self-organization. In the face of neglect from government

and the medical system, service organizations like the Gay Men’s Health

Crisis (GMHC) emerged in many cities. The GMHC took on the monu-

mental task of lobbying for medical research, while also seeking to

attend to the needs of those afflicted with the mysterious disease. GMHC

and groups like it gradually became institutionalized as vitally impor-

tant AIDS service organizations, in effect filling in for the neglect of

local, state, and federal governments. They provided the latest medical

information, disseminated “safer sex” guidelines, and organized care for

those with the disease. By the mid-1980s, with the death count rising,

and during the administration of a conservative president who had yet

to utter the word AIDS in public, let alone offer a policy on the disease,

a growing sense of crisis was being felt. In this context, the GMHC and

other service organizations seemed too tame, too overworked, and too

tied to bureaucracies that still had done far too little to address AIDS.

As has happened in so many areas of contemporary society, economic

slowdowns and conservative antigovernment politics have forced vol-

untary, largely self-sustaining organizations to provide the services gov-

ernments should provide. In providing those services, however, these

ACTing UP against AIDS 181

ACT UP reworks the U.S. flag. Courtesy of AIDS DemoGraphics.

organizations inadvertently help the interests of a political system that

has shown its unwillingness to help them. They thus insulate govern-

ments from the demands of those in need. In the case of AIDS, the gov-

ernment’s (in)action of pushing responsibility onto impossibly under-

funded service organizations like GMHC was having a deadly impact.

Sensing the injustice of this situation, a new generation of activists sought

to tear away the insulation, provoking confrontation, not compromise,

direct action, not accommodation, in the face of government and cor-

porate indifference.

New York Stories

ACT UP was founded in New York City in March 1987 amid a deepening

sense of the horrifying extent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The group

declared themselves a “diverse, non-partisan group united in anger and

committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.”1 In myth, ACT UP

springs up spontaneously during a speech by AIDS activist Larry Kramer.

The speech and Kramer’s passion were certainly important inspiration.

But the origins of ACT UP are multiple and complex, drawing from

various elements of the women’s health movement, earlier AIDS activist

groups like the Silence � Death Project, disgruntled members of the

more moderate Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and various gay and lesbian

liberation groups. ACT UP eventually grew to national and inter-

national dimensions. By early 1988 chapters had appeared in various

cities throughout the country, including Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago,

and San Francisco. By the beginning of 1990 ACT UP had spread

throughout the United States and around the globe, with more than a

hundred chapters worldwide.

While this growth led to great diversity, ACT UP’s New York origins

left an indelible mark on the group. One can chart much of the activity

and cultural shape of ACT UP via a social geography of New York City.

Four of the major targets of ACT UP have a strong historical presence

in the city: the mass media (Times Square, home of the national TV

networks), corporations (Wall Street, the New York Stock Exchange),

advertising (Madison Avenue), and the arts (Soho, Greenwich Village,

Broadway). Two other favored targets of ACT UP activists, the Catholic

Church and government bureaucracies, also have major New York sites

that proved convenient points of focus. And proximity to Washington,

182 ACTing UP against AIDS

D.C., made a host of federal government sites accessible to ACT UP

NYC as well.

ACT UP had an unusual, if not unique, set of material and cultural

advantages, as well as substantial disadvantages as an organization. On

the negative side, especially in the early years it was lobbying on behalf

of several highly stigmatized communities, including gay people, intra-

venous drug users, and prostitutes. Add to this the stigma of working

on the terrain of a disease about which little was known and around which

much fear of contagion circled, and formidable obstacles confronted

the group. On the positive side of the ledger, the organization drew much

of its membership and support from middle- and upper-class profes-

sionals and semi-professionals, including people employed in some of

the very sites the group would target. This provided unusual amounts

of material resources, and unusual kinds of intellectual resources. Of

particular relevance for this analysis is that ACT UP’s membership

included visual artists, advertising copywriters, and media professionals

who knew intimately what would and would not work, what would or

would not sell in contemporary U.S. culture. They understood, for ex-

ample, that modern mass-media news most often takes narrative form;

thus, ACT UP’s dramatic demonstrations always sought to tell good,

carefully plotted stories.

Theorizing in an Epidemic of Words and Images

ACT UP’s somewhat atypical constituency also included an unusually

large number of academics, artists, and others who were conversant with,

if not enmeshed in, contemporary cultural theory. Cultural critic/AIDS

activist Cindy Patton claims that:

ACT UP, especially the New York City group . . . provides an interesting example of emerging postmodern political praxis using deconstructionist analyses and tactics. A number of key people in the group are artists or intellectuals with deconstruction politics. To many people actively in- volved in gay and now AIDS anarchist politics, deconstructionist, cultural marxist, and post-structuralist methods and jargon are fairly familiar, whether coming directly from Derrida, Gramsci, or Foucault, or simply as part of a zeitgeist. In addition, particular postmodernist texts form the reading list of the ACT UP New York group, which holds discussions of the relationship between their particular praxis and their experience/politics.2

ACTing UP against AIDS 183

Allowing for the likelihood that Patton is exaggerating the influence of

her own preferred theoretical-political style in the organization, it is

clear that ACT UP is informed by postmodern theory in some significant

ways. This is manifested particularly through a stronger than average

sense that, in Michel Foucault’s terms, power and knowledge are insep-

arable. This leads to great sensitivity to the ways in which even the most

factual, scientific knowledge is a cultural construct caught in politically

inf(l)ected webs of language. This has aided ACT UP especially in taking

on socially constructed medical knowledge, and in analyzing and using

mass media framings of the “real.”

In the same year as the founding of ACT UP, cultural critic Paula

Treichler published an essay that did much to bring theory into the orbit

of AIDS activism. Treichler noted that AIDS was not only a disease of

epidemic proportions, but a phenomenon that had spawned an “epi-

demic of signification.” Her essay offered a kind of primer for a post-

modern understanding of language as implicated in the process of cre-

ating AIDS: “The name AIDS in part constructs the disease and helps

make it intelligible. We cannot therefore look ‘through’ language to deter-

mine what AIDS ‘really’ is. Rather we must explore the site where such

determinations really occur and intervene at the point where meaning is

created: in language.” Treichler quickly refutes the common misunder-

standing of postmodern theory that sees it as claiming that nothing is

real, or that any story is as good as any other. Rather, she writes: “Of

course AIDS is a real disease syndrome, damaging and killing real human

beings. Because of this, it is tempting — perhaps in some instances im-

perative — to view science and medicine as providing a discourse about

AIDS that is closer to its ‘reality’ than what we can provide ourselves.

[But] try as we may to treat AIDS as ‘an infectious disease’ and nothing

more, meanings continue to multiply wildly.”3

After demonstrating brilliantly how even the most elemental scientific

“facts” about AIDS are infected with cultural assumptions, Treichler calls

for an approach to the medical knowledge about AIDS that is neither

dismissive nor submissive: “We need to use what science gives us in ways

that are selective, self-conscious, and pragmatic (‘as though’ they were

true). We need to understand that AIDS is and will remain a provi-

sional and deeply problematic signifier.”4 This understanding of knowl-

edge about AIDS as “provisional” and “problematic” was crucial to giving

ACT UP the power to challenge the proliferation of questionable cul-

184 ACTing UP against AIDS

tural meanings imposed on the disease by the medical community, the

government, and the media.

What became clear, with the aid of cultural theorists like Treichler,

Michel Foucault, Jan Grover, Cindy Patton, Simon Watney, Douglas

Crimp, and many others, was that homophobia, racism, and sexism

were deadly social diseases that needed to be fought along with the

virus, not only in the outside world but inside ACT UP as well. Preju-

dice against gays, people of color, drug users, and women set back the

process of treating and seeking a cure for AIDS and its causative agent,

the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The country’s longstanding

puritanical sexual attitudes made it difficult to talk publicly about a sex-

ually transmitted disease. It became clear that in an “information age”

and a “knowledge economy,” more than ever knowledge was power,

power knowledge. The war over HIV/AIDS was going to be very much a

“discursive” battle, a battle over the meaning of words and images. This

was surely not something wholly new in a social movement, but the

extent to which “semiotic” warfare became self-conscious and central to

the work of ACT UP was unprecedented.

The postmodernist element in ACT UP politics reinforced a strong

preference for decentralized, antihierarchical organizational forms that

the group inherited from other movements, most directly from the

antinuclear direct action movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

ACT UP was structured in a set of “affinity groups” (typically consisting

of five to fifteen individuals), each of which maintained a strong degree

of autonomy within the organization. Few rules or overarching ideas,

other than a general commitment to nonviolence and a desire to bring

an end to the AIDS crisis, limited ACT UP activists. Mobility and flexi-

bility were deemed crucial resources in a cultural environment constantly

in motion.

ACT UP’s postmodernist tendencies are also manifested in the group’s

complicated relation to so-called “identity politics” — the efforts of

groups to organize around specific racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, or other

characteristics. On the one hand, the group understood the necessity to

deploy a “gay” identity at times as an organizing tool. But even as it

demonstrated a willingness to use “identity” politically, members inces-

santly questioned the assumptions through which identities often devolve

into static, homogenizing essences. ACT UP put into play the complexly

ambiguous identity, “queer,” an identity that at once reminds those using

ACTing UP against AIDS 185

it of its oppressive origins as a homophobic epithet, resignifies it as a

positive identity, and articulates a queering (blurring) of the lines be-

tween gay and straight, normative and oppositional. Thus ACT UP mem-

bers learned to see identity formation as an ongoing collective and

strategic practice, not an unchanging essence.

Postmodern perspectives on the instability of identities also proved

useful, as Joshua Gamson has argued, in dealing with one of the central

contradictions faced by ACT UP: the need to challenge the mainstream,

homophobic view that AIDS was a “gay disease,” on the one hand, and,

on the other hand, the need to mobilize the gay community to see the

AIDS crisis as a community crisis tied to the politics of lesbian and

gay liberation. Rather than becoming stymied by this seeming double-

bind, ACT UP was able, thanks to its postmodern critique of such easy

dichotomies as gay/straight, to treat this contradiction as a useful one

that could challenge dangerous oversimplifications perpetrated by the

mainstream media.5

More generally, ACT UP’s theoretical understanding means that its

members recognize that in addition to fighting government bureau-

cracies, media bias, and corporate self-interest, they are also fighting, as

Gamson phrases it, an “invisible” force: social norms that define what is

normal, natural, and appropriate versus what is abnormal, unnatural,

and deviant. The power of these norms lies precisely in their invisibility,

their deep embeddedness in culture such that they are taken utterly

for granted. ACT UP developed several strategies for bringing these

invisible norms out of the closet and into the open where they could be

challenged.

Cultural Que(e)ries

While it was never an exclusively gay organization, the movement cul-

ture of ACT UP drew heavily upon institutions, forms, and styles within

gay male and lesbian communities. In turn, ACT UP played a significant

role in transforming those communities. A gay culture that had previ-

ously remained largely underground had been strengthened, extended,

and moved above ground by successive waves of movement activity

from the 1950s onwards. Three overlapping waves of activism preceded

the emergence of the ACT UP generation: a “homophile” phase in the

late 1950s and early 1960s that established baseline positions in a style

reminiscent of the NAACP; a more radical “gay liberation” and “lesbian-

186 ACTing UP against AIDS

feminist” phase in the late 1960s to mid-1970s, shaped by revolutionary

models provided by feminist and ethnic radicals; and a “gay and lesbian

rights” phase from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s that consolidated

and institutionalized what the radical movement had begun. In this con-

text, ACT UP and spin-off gay groups Queer Nation and Lesbian Avengers

represent a fourth phase, a reradicalization aimed at both the AIDS cri-

sis and assimilationist elements in lesbian and gay communities. As the

rise of AIDS fueled a new demonization of gays that showed signs of

reversing the modest but important gains of the gay rights era, ACT

UP pushed back on the political and cultural fronts simultaneously.

Each movement phase not only strengthened semi-autonomous gay

culture(s), but also contributed to a process that brought greater visi-

bility to elements of queer culture that were deeply embedded in key

terrains of U.S. high and popular culture. Even as each emergent wave

created new, interwoven institutions for gay people, it also complicated

gay/queer community life by revealing internal differences in race, class,

gender, political orientation, and sexual practices. As waves crash against

the shore, they dissolve and re-form into new configurations; just so,

lines between radical and reformist, integrationist and separatist are

seldom neatly traceable in highly fluid situations. Thus, ACT UP emerged

at a highly complex moment, and its actions were never less than con-

troversial across various lesbian/gay/queer subcultures.

Despite and because of this complexity, it is clear that queer cultural

connections and styles enabled and shaped virtually all dimensions of

ACT UP, from the social networks that it recruited from, to the sites

chosen for meetings, to fundraising sources, to, most pertinently, its

graphic images, slogans, costumes, and highly theatrical demonstration

style. The rise of gay, lesbian, and queer studies in the universities; the

creation of gay bookstores, coffeehouses, movie theaters, and health clin-

ics; the expansion of the gay press: all these provided material-intellectual

resources of great importance to ACT UP. These institutions made more

available a set of gay cultural codes that could be deployed positively in

organizing and parodically used against a mainstream “white, male,

heterosexual” world.

A sense of how a playfully gay cultural coding worked in the move-

ment is apparent in the group’s name itself. The acronym ACT UP has

multiple meanings. It clearly signals a sense of the need to act, to act

defiantly, and to stand up against oppression. At the same time, this

ACTing UP against AIDS 187

rather macho sense of activism is undercut both by an echo of the phrase

acting up (in the sense of not working right) and acting up (in the sense

of a child behaving badly). And, of course, the emphasis on acting clearly

signals a sense of performing or pretending that is supposedly the op-

posite of serious political action. The name thus suggests a characteris-

tic political seriousness in ACT UP that was entangled with an equally

serious and equally political playfulness (for example, wrapping antigay

Senator Jesse Helms’s home in a giant yellow condom).

A pointed example of how gayness played politically appears in one

of ACT UP’s first demonstrations. During the Washington demonstra-

tion in June 1987, District of Columbia police officers displayed their

homophobia and hysteria about “catching” AIDS (or gayness?) through

casual contact, by wearing bright-yellow rubber gloves as they arrested

several dozen ACT UP members who were engaging in civil disobedi-

ence. As Crimp and Ralston report it, the “activists, many looking unusu-

ally respectable in conservative business clothes, raised a very queer

chant, ‘Your gloves don’t match your shoes! You’ll see it on the news!’ ”

Amid the campy humor, the chant is perfectly designed to “out” the

police hysteria. The point is made more memorable through its catchy,

rhymed phrasing. It was just the kind of chant (connected to a visual

image) that would make sure that not just the police, but also the pro-

testers, would see themselves “on the news.”

Another contribution of gay culture to ACT UP actions is hinted at

by the reference to “conservative business suits” in the passage above.

This particular costume in part reflects the professional class and busi-

ness world in which many members spent their “day jobs.” Some activists

sometimes used this mode of dress straightforwardly, as it were, to reflect

their class similarity to those they were protesting against. At other times,

however, group members used this costume as a disguise, as what they

called “Republican drag.” This ability to “pass” sent a message about the

ubiquity of gayness and the contingency of “normal” identity. It also

served activists well in such efforts as “zapping” the New York Stock

Exchange or “crashing” international AIDS medical conferences. In con-

servative drag ACT UP could infiltrate the audience, for example, and

pepper gathered scientists with the kind of troubling questions from

which they were often insulated in their academic or corporate ivory

towers. At still other times, the drag employed was the more traditional,

cross-dressing kind, and was used to express an unrepentant otherness

188 ACTing UP against AIDS

in gay culture and gay humor, symbolized by the favorite chant of ACT

UP’s cousin Queer Nation: “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.”

Campy humor informed other dimensions of the organization as well.

Affinity groups, the core units used to organize ACT UP, have a long

history of clever self-naming. In ACT UP, this self-naming frequently

took on a decidedly queer quality. For example, one group’s acronym

was CHER, in homage to one of the favorite divas of a segment of the

gay male community. The meaning of the acronym changed frequently,

but one explication is particularly rich: Commie Homos Engaged in

Revolution. This version of CHER at once sends up homophobia and

expresses solidarity with the long-suffering American left against which

the label “commie” had been hurled to dismiss anyone so “deviant” as to

question the U.S. political system. In similar fashion, another colorful

affinity group called themselves the Pinkos. Both names hint at the hyster-

ical connection drawn during the “un-American activities” witch hunts

of the 1950s between deviant politics and deviant sexuality, between the

allegedly “contagious” “spread” of communism and sexual perversity.6

The campy humor of ACT UP underlines the impossibility of sepa-

rating “political” from “cultural” dimensions of a movement. The group’s

humor was both an effective tactic and a mode of defiant assertion of

identity. And even the “expressive” mode was political in that it deep-

ened solidarity in the movement. ACT UP understood that humor

could be disarming and used wit strategically to counter half-witted

messages circulating in the mainstream (when protesting the Catholic

Church’s deadly stand against condom use, members chanted, “Curb

your dogma”). Sometimes, as in the acronym ACT UP itself, they used

humor to make fun of their own emerging ideological rigidities. They

also used it just for fun. But as Crimp and Ralston put it, “ACT UP’s

humor is no joke. It has given us the courage to maintain our exuberant

sense of life while every day coping with disease and death, and it has

defended us against the pessimism endemic to other Left movements,

from which we have otherwise taken so much.”7

Silence � Death

ACT UP’s media savvy and aesthetic sophistication combined to form a

series of remarkably catchy images and slogans, texts to catch both the

media’s and the public’s attention. The group understood that in an

image-saturated, sound-bite culture, getting people’s attention was no

ACTing UP against AIDS 189

easy task. But many ACT UP activists were media veterans, and their

expertise helped the group gain an unprecedented amount of media

coverage.

While the slogan and image “Silence � Death” precedes the birth of

ACT UP, the group quickly adopted the phrase and its accompanying

image, a pink triangle on a black background, which became its most

identifiable image-text. As political slogans go, it is certainly a strange

one, alerting us that there was from the beginning something different

about this particular group of activists. While most traditional activists

would view as a liability the lack of immediate clarity about what the

phrase might mean, to ACT UP that ambiguity was precisely the point.

ACT UP created many brilliantly clear, pointed slogans. But the group

also understood the importance of strategic ambiguity. In this case, the

equation was meant to, and on countless occasions did, evoke the ques-

tion: “What does that mean?” As such, it became an invitation to a pro-

longed discussion of the AIDS crisis. Various answers to the question

were possible, but many would begin by saying that the pink triangle

was fastened on gay prisoners as they were marched to Nazi concentra-

tion camps. Silence about those camps led to millions of deaths. By anal-

ogy, fearful silence about the extent of the AIDS crisis, including fearful

self-silencing by gays and other stigmatized groups, deepened a crisis

they believed would soon reach Holocaust proportions. But this pink

triangle inverted the one gays were forced to wear by the Nazis; this one

pointed up in hope, not down in despair. If silence equaled death, speak-

ing out and acting up could equal new chances for life.

Art Is Not Enough

The Silence � Death graphic eventually found its way into an exhibit at

the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Soho in 1988. By that time

the Silence � Death collective was metamorphosing into the key ACT

UP graphic collective, Gran Fury (named after the kind of cruising car

favored by the gay-harassing police). Entitled “Let the Record Show,”

the exhibition demonstrates both ACT UP’s early targeting of some and

support from others in the art community. As noted above, the pres-

ence of many visual artists, advertising professionals, actors, and play-

wrights in ACT UP seeded the group with aesthetic powers and a visual-

theatrical orientation that proved crucial to its successes. And a particular,

“postmodern” aesthetic then prevalent in part of the art world lent itself

190 ACTing UP against AIDS

well to activism. Much postmodern art and criticism was deemphasiz-

ing the individual artist of genius in favor of a sense of art as a social

process embedded in political contexts. This attitude assisted ACT UP

in quickly recruiting artists and appropriating whatever aesthetic styles

the group believed would further the visibility of the movement. Appro-

priation itself had the imprimatur of the avant-garde, since “appropria-

tion art,” in which the myth of utter originality was being challenged by

artists deliberately imitating or directly copying works by earlier artists,

was all the rage. ACT UP shifted register to the other, emotional defini-

tion of rage, but kept the aesthetic possibilities.

But the art community did not automatically or fully embrace the

fight against AIDS. That support had to be gained by organizing and

acting. ACT UP protested, for example, an exhibit of protest graphics at

the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York that included no

examples of AIDS activist graphics. They believed the museum exhibit

perpetuated a sense of art as above the political fray by emphasizing

formal elements of the protest graphics on display, and by embalming

art objects while excluding living activist-artists like the Silence � Death/

Gran Fury Collective. “Let the Record Show” was a counter to this more

mainstream art tradition and became the first of many shows raising

awareness of and, in benefit form, raising money for AIDS activism.