My new neighbor Judy Gumbo Albert was an original Yippie, directly involved in the anti-war protests around the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Her former husband, Stew Albert (1939-2006), was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Chicago Seven. She helped lead the movement, alongside Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Phil Ochs, Paul Krassner, and other names made famous through history.
This week, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the battles and parallels to today's politics and the just-concluded Democratic Convention, she published on CounterPunch an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, "Yippie Girl."
Join me below the fold for a time trip stretching back 40 years (no pooties, but Pigasus makes an appearance), to a park smothered in tear-gas by police with "shoot to kill" orders, and face your fears, share your comments, memories, and inspirations; Judy will be here, so join the conversation.
(unless otherwise attributed, all quotes are from Judy's CounterPunch piece, with permission of the author; emphasis and links added)
My neighbor Judy coauthored The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (Greenwood Press, 1984) and The Conspiracy Trial (Bobbs Merrill, 1970).
While it is not unusual to find community organizers, activists, teachers, nonprofit managers, city council/school board members and others actively working to change the world in cohousing neighborhoods like this one, I find it enormously motivating in my own work here and elsewhere to be able to sit down to dinner a few times a week with someone I admire who inspires me, to get firsthand reminders that these folks we hold up as cultural icons are real people, just like you and me, who, through hard work and living their intentions and happy coincidence, changed the world. If we can learn from their experience, see what they set out to do and the net result, we can be more effective in our own efforts.
Judy's opener:
Forty years ago this week I was in Chicago at the Democratic Convention– not as a delegate but as a member of the theatrical, countercultural, media-savvy protest group known as the Yippies. Then, as now, the Democratic Party was severely internally divided -- about race rather than gender, but especially over the war in Vietnam. We – Yippie leaders Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Nancy Kurshan, my then boyfriend and later husband Stew Albert, the folksinger Phil Ochs and journalist Paul Krassner -- came to the Convention to hold a Festival of Life and nominate a pig for president. Our candidate, Pigasus, would, we believed, be infinitely more attractive to young people than the Democrat’s pro-war candidate Hubert Humphrey. Abbie, Anita, Jerry, Phil and Stew are all gone now, and, although I don’t expect the events described here to occur in Denver, our country is, as in 1968, engaged in an immoral and illegal war overseas that has been used by our current elected officials to put more draconian restrictions on dissent and freedom of speech than I once faced confronting the Democrats in Chicago. What follows is my recollection of those events.
Judy chronicles day-by-day the week of August 22, 1968, documenting both the the actions taken (with police responses) and the internal ideological and logistical fights that threatened to fracture the young movement:
Abbie, Anita and Paul want a tiny cute pig. Jerry gets incensed. It violates his sense of effective Yippie marketing: to adequately represent the candidates and all they stand for, the Yippie pig needs to be big, fat, ugly and mean. Jerry calls a meeting and, disregarding Stew’s advice to let it be, reads a statement out loud to Abbie, Anita and Paul, denouncing Abbie as a media-hungry “ego tripper”. Jerry even threatens to hand his statement out as a leaflet in Lincoln Park, if Abbie doesn’t relent about the size of the Yippie pig.
This is what a serious ideological split in the Yippies comes down to – the girth and poundage of our presidential candidate.
When all but one of the bands scheduled for the Yippie Festival of Life (contrasting the Dems' "Convention of Death") fail to show up, scared off by media threats of riots (has anything changed?), Judy captures Abbie's feelings of betrayal, alongside the practical challenges, like running a 300-foot extension cord to a nearby hot-dog stand to pwer the amps.
As the gas-wielding cops approach, Judy writes, the threat brings them closer together:
But I’m not afraid. Stew is looking out for me, we’re running, together, side by side, propelled by an urgent imperative to get away. The tear gas unites us in a brand new kind of intimacy and commitment.
I feel protected.
I feel courageous.
I am powerful.
I’m fighting for what I believe.
This is fun!
There's lots more, including a deconstruction of the "baby-killer" shouts at the attacking guardsmen, love, celebrity, and patriotism. Go read the piece to see it all.
For me, the abiding lesson of the piece is Judy's chronicling of the way it emboldened her life, finding the inner courage to take control:
Forty years later, this is what I’ve come to understand about my time in Lincoln Park: In every woman’s life, opportunities will arise to face your fears. I’m not suggesting throwing a can of paint at a police car – only that it is very important to recognize when you’re actually in that unique “face my fear” moment. In such circumstances, take action. Don’t delay. Don’t procrastinate. Don’t over think the consequences. By facing your fear, you will discover inside yourself the courage to put your life– and your freedom -- into your own hands.
I never turn back.
Where have you found the courage to face your fears?