Judy Gumbo Albert

Cuba Trip

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:04:40 -0800

https://picasaweb.google.com/judygumboalbert/CubaTop30?authkey=Gv1sRgCLnzmKjQiZOzVg&feat=email

Yom Kippur sins for Occupy 2011

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 09:59:44 -0700

The Al Cheit (Al Hayt) is a prayer that enumerates sins individuals have committed during the year for which they ask forgiveness at Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Stew & I wrote this prayer, revised it each year to respond to a changing world. Until Stew's death in 2006 we read it at Havurah Shalom in Portland.

In 2011 our prayer became part of Occupy Kol Nidre services -- at Wall Street, in Portland Oregon & in Canada. Perhaps other places. I was delighted. As Stew would have been.

Many thanks to Aharon Varady of the Open Siddur Project http://opensiddur.org. Feel free to adopt, adapt & re-distribute under the Creative Commons Attribution/ShareAlike license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Creative Commons By Attribution ShareAlike (CC BY-SA)

We have sinned
By yielding to confusion and falling into passivity
By indulging in fear
By giving in to anger
By not standing up for ourselves
By thinking about Jewish values only on holy days
By tolerating global warming, global disease and global poverty
By being cynical about repairing the world
By not defending Israel
By not defending Palestine

Stew and John Lennon on Colbert

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 12:24:56 -0700

Yippies In Love: The Musical

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 09:17:53 -0700

Borrowed from a True Story

By Bob Sarti

Cast

ANDY, ex-draft dodger.

JULIE, ex-yippie

CHORUS REBECCA

CHORUS BING

CHORUS EMILY

KEYBOARDIST

GUITAR PLAYER

CHORUS REBECCA, CHORUS BING, CHORUS EMILY each play multiple characters, including:

Daniel, a yippie. (French accent)

Bernadette, a yippie

Corky, a two-year-old.

The Wizard

Reader of the Scrapbook*

Julie’s Mother

Andy’s Mother

Andy’s Father

Bratface

Various Yippies

Various cops

Border Guard

Reporters

Mayor Tom Campbell*

Judge Les Bewley*

Che Guevara*

John Lennon*

* All quotes verbatim from public sources.

When the two main characters are in dialogue with each other, the text is in italics. When they are speaking to the audience, the text is standard.

There is a big trunk centre-stage, which cast members draw props out of. There is also a screen, for visuals. The musicians are on stage, to one side.

Scenes are punctuated with blackouts and one minute of newsreels and music from the coming scene, presaging the events enacted in the scenes.

Opening Song – Welcome To the Show

Love Poems of Stew Albert (1939-2006)

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 18:49:34 -0800

Stew and Judy, 1968

In our house we celebrated Stew's birthday as if it was a national holiday. Here for the first time, on the fifth anniversary of Stew's death, are poems Stew wrote for family occasions. I'd cry every time he gave me a poem, so my selection criteria for what's below is that the poem still makes me tear up. I hope you find in them the same universality I did.

   Judy Gumbo Albert
                              1/25/2011

To My Old Flame

Judy was born 49 years ago.

She’s been told that and believes it.

Judy doesn’t remember very much about being alive

until she met me.

I remember more than she does.

But I don’t remember anything better than meeting her.

Judy is my old wife,

my best friend and lover

and the wisest woman I ever knew.

I don’t think life is fair.

Mostly we get cheated out of necessity

but Judy is so good she might cheat fate,

she might get justice, get what she deserves,

get recognition, get appreciation.

Whatever happens

at least Judy will know one true thing.

Judy will know

she was really loved.

By Stewey, June 25, 1992, Happy Birthday

Chanukah After All These Years

Judy gave me first Christmas in Toronto.

In the big mean house I played at Joy Noel.

In Brooklyn I grew up jealous

of what was under Willy’s crowded tree

and the happiness of TV specials.

I lit candles on Chanukah, said blessings,

got dimes and socks and underwear.

They told me I was lucky.

Judy gave me Christmas in the Catskills.

Gun Show After Tucson

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:07:34 -0800

Armed to the Hilt with Peaceful Thoughts

Also published on The Rag Blog.

Like most Americans, I’ve been wrestling – no, agonizing – about guns. Then I heard about a gun show at San Francisco’s Cow Palace. I go. To confront my inner turmoil. Back in the late 1960s, I passionately believed the revolution had come. It was, like the Black Panthers said, time to pick up the gun. John Lennon sang sweetly in the background: ‘Happiness is a warm gu-hu-hun’. My anti-war cohort and I went to a gun show in Contra Costa County. We bought low-end rifles, a shotgun, a handgun. We cleaned ‘em. We went to the Chabot Gun Club and shot ‘em. We cleaned ‘em again. My cheap 22 Italian rifle against my shoulder made me feel as powerful as Superman.

Forty years later comes Tucson. Other massacres precede it. I react with horror and empathy like the rest of the world. How do I explain my past self in the present? ‘You’re not the Teabag Hat lady, you have completely different moral values, an opposite worldview,’ I tell myself each time I see her on TV with her pals, rifles carried openly at their sides. I once loved guns. After Tucson, the duality is driving me crazy.

Yippie Movie

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 13:26:35 -0700

Yippie Movie produced and directed by Abbie Hoffman in 1968.

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Fellow Travelers

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 10:19:56 -0700

I recommend these websites heartily. They made the list because each belongs to a personal friend. If you want to be one of Judy's fellow travelers, contact her.

The Rag Blog
one of the best political blogs. Out of Austin Texas. If you want to find out what's going on with me and my political friends, search here!
Liberated Zone
An exciting, interactive project from Terry Cannon, a former member of the Oakland Seven.
The Labadle Collection at the University of Michigan
the oldest collection of radical history in the United States. The collection contains many important anarchist papers including those of Emma Goldman. Stew's and my archives are housed there. Our collection includes our writings, papers, letters, FBI files and artifacts. Go to the website, then in the Search box in the upper left go to Catalog and search by Stew's or my name. You will find the Stew Albert and Judy Gumbo Albert Papers. The documents themselves are not on-line but you'll get a terrific sense of what's in there and why it may be worth your while making a visit to Ann Arbor Michigan. For more info, contact: Julie Herrada jherrada@umich.edu
The Rosenberg Fund for Children
one of my favorite non-profit organizations. Robby Meeropol, son of Julius & Ethen Rosenberg who were executed in 1954 for allegedly passing atomic secrets to the Russians, runs a fund where he makes grants to children of imprisoned and targeted activists or to children who themselves have been targeted as a result of their progressive activities. Check it out and donate now!
It's About Time
A very comprehensive website that includes photos, essays, newspapers and memorabilia of the Black Panther Party. Also includes current Panther news and events. Run by Billy X. out of Sacramento, CA.
Bobby Seale
The website of Bobby Seale, former Chairman of the Black Panther Party.
Paul Krassner
Yippie founder Paul Krassner's website where you can buy his many published works. This year Paul is receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN a writer's organization that protects free expression and celebrates literature.
The Pieman
Aron Kay's (The Pieman's) website contains all the Abbie Hoffman links and information you'll ever need.
Truth Trubadour
Check out Phil Och's FBI files.
Tom Hayden
Current thoughts and musings by Tom Hayden on all the political issues of our day.
Disturbing The Universe
The website for Sarah and Emily Kunstler's award-winning film Disturbing the Universe about the irrepressible life of their father Stew's and my wedding.
Robert Greenwald
I first met Robert in 2000 when he was producing Steal This Movie about the life and times of Abbie Hoffman. Robert now uses his considerable talents to produce incendiary documentaries that organize people to take on Fox News, the Iraq War and all the major issues of our day.
Bolerium Books
The best bookstore for anarchist, progressive and labor history. Located in San Francisco's Mission district and also on line.

The Way We Were

by Chellis Glendinning

I plopped down onto the sidewalk in the first row of cross-legged protestors, eye-level with the shin-guards of the first row of National Guardsmen. My hair dropped down my back in a braid, and I was wearing a shirt made of an Indian-print bedspread. The blonde next to me leaned over and disclosed that she was on acid, in fact that she took acid every day.

I know all the details because a photograph of us showed up in Newsweek a few days later: me, the acid head, the dudes with their gas masks and rifles. It was snapped by photojournalist Peter Barnes, who later broke from the “objectivity” of press work, wrote a book on the oppression of soldiers, founded the progressive credit-card company Working Assets, wrote some more books -- and even later than that, by 20 years and wild providence, became lovers with the subject of his camera aim whose Indian-print shirt had long since shredded into compost.

Jessica and Dan's Wedding

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 11:21:43 -0700

October 17, 2010

Napa, California

My name is Judy Gumbo Albert and I am the MOTB – mother of the bride as Hillary Clinton calls it.

I want to wish Jessica & Dan all happiness, love, contentment for the good times and the bad. in the life they are about to embark on together. I’d like to begin my toast with a few stories about Jessica’s early life with me and Jessica’s late father Stew.

Jessica was a good girl. I can recall only one occasion which prompted Stew and I to send her to her room. It may have been that infamous incident where Jessica and two boys who shall remain nameless, (you and your mothers know who you are) were playing nerf ball inside our house and accidentally broke Stew’s mother’s antique pie crust table. Jessica recognized she’d done wrong, but insisted, absolutely and unequivocally that the only way she’d go to her room is if I sayed with her right outside the door. Which I did. So Dan, if you don’t know it already, you just married an incredibly good woman with the heart of a little girl.

When Jessica was six or seven years old she insisted I buy her Barbie dolls. I consider myself a feminist but none the less I buy the dolls, the pink plastic Barbie house, the Barbie car – although I do draw the line at the swimming pool. In this one mother’s opinion, living with unrequited Barbie lust could have damaged Jessica’s body image way more than having Barbies to play with. One morning, when Jessica was maybe ten, I woke up to discover her bedroom strewn with scribbled-over Barbie bodies, unattached arms, Mohawk heads; a wasteland of dismembered, shaved, heavily tattooed tiny plastic corpses.

“I don’t like them any more,” Jessica tells me. “They’re boring.”

I think Jessica understood at that moment all the beauty that he has inside herself. Honey, you have grown into a beautiful, attractive and sexy and very wonderful woman.

It’s no secret that Stew and I, in our Yippie days, smoked pot. Half-smoked joints of pot are commonly called “roaches,” In our house we used the term roaches for any kind of leftover. A mostly used up bottle of ketchup or stick of butter we called a roach. . When Jessica was in her second year at Barnard, she lived in an apartment with roommates – and a kitchen. One day she opened the refrigerator and said “Wow! Look at all those roaches.” This being New York, roommates screamed, thinking the fridge was full of creepycrawlies.” “Doesn’t everybody call leftovers roaches?” Jessica asked innocently.

Jessica and Dan met on J-date. Before she went on line, Jessica asked me to help her with her J-date profile and take the photograph for her profile. Which I did. The photos I took were fabulous, if I do say so myself. But the first draft of the profile she wrote began something like this.

I want to find someone with whom I can debate, argue, fight, stand up for my own point of view.

Jessica, I said to her, No. You’ve got begin more gently. Show how sweet you really are. The fight, argue & debate stuff comes later. And thus she met Dan. After, I believe, the 2^nd date she told me she thought she’d met a wonderful man, maybe even “the one.” As Jessica likes to say, “I’m a very good shopper.”

Jessica’s father Stew died four and a half years ago. I know he would have wanted from the depths of his being to be here today at the wedding of his only dearly beloved daughter.

Now I want everyone now to take a deep breath – and imagine this scene – what could have happened if Stew had been alive and Dan decided to ask Stew for Jessica’s hand in marriage.

Imagine this:

Stew, Jessica, Dan and I are in our roomy NE Portland home. Stew is sitting in his favorite large puffy flowered chair, his blond curls in their usual disarray. He’s wearing his trademark fuzzy blue longsleeved shirt. Dan in a white shirt and jeans, sits across from Stew. Dan’s a little nervous. Stew and Dan have met in San Francisco a number of times, but never before have they had a conversation of such import..

Stew, Dan says, there’s something I want to ask you.

“Who are you again?” says Stew.

Stew’s just being playful but Dan isn’t quite sure how to take this.

“I’m kidding, Stew says. “I know who you are. You’re Jessica’s boyfriend.’ “Well?

Dan, not often at a loss for words, hesitates, then he begins.

‘You know Stew, Jessica and I have known each other for over two years.” Dan says, suppressing the urge to end his sentence with “sir.” Jessica has warned Dan that being called “sir” won’t go over well with her Yippie father.

Stew leans back in his chair and strokes his beard, the way he always does when he’s thinking something through.

Attorney Dan jumps in. He has a case to argue – maybe the most important case of his life.

Stew, Dan says confidently, I’m in love your daughter. I’m a well respected lawyer. I make a good living. What I want (this time Dan easily suppresses the “sir” urge) is to ask your permission to marry Jessica.

Silence.

It’s hard for Dan to tell if Stew is thinking things over or if Stew, because he’s slightly deaf, couldn’t hear what Dan just said. Dan stands up, perhaps to ease the queasiness in the pit of his stomach. In response, Stew lumbers slowly out of his chair. Stew looks Dan in the eye, then reaches out with his long arms and gives Dan a giant bear hug. Jessica and I, who have been watching the whole proceeding from our hideaway in the stairwell, start to laugh and cry. We hear the sound of two men slapping each other (clap clap) on the back, the way men do.

“Welcome to our family” Stew says.

So that’s what I like to imagine would have happened, had Stew been alive.

Now here is what actually happened in the real world. About two years ago, David and I, Jessica and Dan, visited Stew’s grave in Portland Oregon. Buried alongside Stew are Oregon pioneers and members of our synagogue, Havurah Shalom. I remember it being one of those beautiful Oregon days, blue sky, bright sun, white clouds. Stew is buried under a large, sparkly pink tombstone. David went up to it, put his hand on it and, out loud, David asked Stew’s permission to marry me. I have it on good authority that, at that exact same moment, Dan silently asked Stew’s permission to marry Jessica. And I have to tell you, I could feel Stew give us all his blessing, there in Jones Pioneer Cemetery, while the sun drew lacy patterns on his grave.

Jessica & Dan, in closing I want to give you Dr. Judy Gumbo Albert’s three principles for sustaining a long, happy, healthy & miraculous life together. Are you ready?

1) Never criticize each other in public.

2) Never go to bed angry.

3) Sex is good.

I love you honey. I love you Dan. To Jessica & Dan and the wonderful life they will make, with and for each other. L’chaim.

Adventures with the FBI: The More Things Change...

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 10:45:09 -0700

FBI Tracking Device on my car

L to R: Stew Albert, Attorney William Kunstler and me.

Wide World Photos 12/14/75

October, 2010

A story surfaced about Yasir Afifi, a 20 year old Egyptian American student, who discovered an FBI homing device on his car. Thirty-five years ago, the FBI put a homing device on my car. To my surprise, given current technical advances in miniaturization, my device appeared to be not much larger than the one Afifi found. I discovered my device because a wire hung down suspiciously, so did Afifi. Both devices were attached to our cars by magnets. FBI agents visited Afifi to retrieve their device; in my case, the FBI stole it back out of our lawyer’s office. The agent did this, I learned subsequently, because the cost of the missing device came directly out of the agent’s pocket.

In 1975, putting a homing device on my car without a warrant was against the law. My late husband Stew Albert and I sued the FBI. Bill Kunstler and the Center for Constitutional Rights represented us. Defendants in our lawsuit were Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray, Mark Felt of Deep Throat fame and Assistant Director Edward Miller. In 1978, Gray, Felt and Miller were indicted for approving such illegal acts. Gray resigned because of Watergate, Felt and Miller were convicted then subsequently pardoned by President Reagan.

My daughter is the lawyer in the family, not me, but I believe what the FBI did last week to Yasir Afifi is entirely legal today under the US Patriot Act and FISA.

The air around my ancient white Volvo felt charged with negative ions. I couldn’t put my finger on it, exactly. Perhaps my queasiness came from a half-formed memory of a man in a beige trench coat and fedora who I may or may not have spotted the night before lurking in a semi-dark stairwell, next to Bill Kunstler and Margie Ratner’s red brick home on Gay Street in the Village. This is New York, I tell myself, everybody lurks in New York.

Stew and I return to our Volvo before tow-away alternate side of the street parking kicks in. A man in what I hallucinate to be a black trench coat, scurries down the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street..

Gumbo, are you going nuts or what? Then I notice it. Smack in the middle of the Volvo’s rear bumper is a well-defined white patch, serene amid the spewed up brown dirt the car accumulated on yesterday’s drive down from our beloved isolated cabin in the Catskill Mountains. Hanging down in the very center of the clean spot is a 6 inch long wire.

Judy and David's Wedding

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 19:30:11 -0800

September 6, 2009 in Berkeley, California

Wedding Video

Wedding Photos

Wedding Flyer

Other people's photos

Brave New Life

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 10:15:41 -0800

At the time the Oakland 7 were arrested and charged with attempting to shut down the Oakland Induction Center, I still lived in my hometown of Toronto, Ontario Canada. America was at war with the tiny nation of Vietnam. Draft-age men were fleeing the States to come and live in my home country. I believed passionately that the war was wrong, but my experience of demonstrations was limited to marching in peaceful protest with my first husband outside the US embassy in Toronto demanding an end to “Canadian Complicity in the Vietnam War.” The slogan End Canadian Complicity represented everything about Canada that had motivated me to leave: Boring. Too far removed from the action. Not out front. Not direct. Not like STOP THE DRAFT! Not like PEACE NOW!

I moved to Berkeley from Canada in late 1967, hungry to explore my brave new world. Apart from my roommates on Keith Street, I knew only one other person in town. A rally for the Oakland 7 would, I figured, be a lot more exciting place to meet people than outside a US embassy in stuffy old Toronto.

Red Diaper Yippie

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 10:03:22 -0800

RED DIAPER YIPPIE

My hero? Hardliy.

Back then, I couldn’t really grasp the essence of ironic Yippie politics. What blocked me was my tendency to take everything literally; a survival mechanism, I’ve come to believe, left over from growing up in a Communist Party family. The world of my childhood felt highly political and very serious. I have a ten year olds’ memory of picking up the yellow kitchen wall phone to call the White House and tell the operator to ask President Eisenhower not to execute the Rosenbergs. My father, Leo Clavir, was the first person to import Soviet films into the North American continent, so my formative movie experiences consisted of first run, private screenings upstairs in my grandmother’s living room, of what were to me the terrifying Eisenstein classics Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible. At our dining room table I sat directly across from the family bookshelves that contained not just Marx and Lenin, but also my mother’s prized volumes of Walt Whitman and John Dos Passos. Topping my list of permitted reading from these shelves was Anton Semyonovich Makarenko’s leather bound, brick-red, gold and black embossed tome Road to Life, a visionary socialist saga in which young boys learn to work diligently, act responsibly and accept, for the greater good, limits on their individual rights and privileges. Comic books were forbidden because comic books were evil, as spelled out in the fear-mongering screed (also forbidden, third shelf from the top) Seduction of the Innocent. Why then can I still recall its artistic illustration of a dagger being plunged into the eye of a screaming woman? Don’t ask.

People's Park: Still Blooming

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:10:00 -0800

A fresh new book visually chronicling People's Park's amazing story just came out. This book was created, published and is being distributed from the grassroots community that has nourished the Park. Be sure to get one and please help spread the word to anyone who may be interested. It is a beautiful book.

Click here to Learn more

Order a single copy on-line of using snail mail

ISBN: 978-0-9841208-0-2

Known bookstores carrying People's Park: Still Blooming:

East Bay

* Moes Books - Telegraph and Dwight, Berkeley

* Book Zoo - Telegraph at Alcatraz, Oakland

* Pegasus Books - Shattuck and Durant, Berkeley

* Pegasus Books - Solano, Berkeley, Oakland

* Pendragon - College near Rockridge BART

* Mrs. Dalloways - College and Russel, Berkeley

* Analog Books - Euclid near Hearst, Berkeley

* Long Haul - Shattuck at Woolsey, Berkeley

* Ecology Center - San Pablo near Dwight, Berkeley

* Diesel Books - College Avenue near Rockridge BART, Oakland

The FBI Greek Chorus

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:50:39 -0800

Companeros & Companeras -- Here is a chapter from Yippie Girl that will appear toward the end of my book, right after the chapter about the years Stew and I lived in a tiny cabin in the Catskill Mountains -- and I discovered a homing device on my car.

Does this chapter work? Please let me know -- honestly! Thank you -- Judy

Par-a-noia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
Step out of line the man come and take you away.

Stop, children
What's that sound
Everybody look what's goin down.

(Buffalo Springfield, Stop, Hey, What’s That Sound)

I’m no playwright. The closest I ever came to the stage was when I starred in The Heiress in my final year at Harbord Collegiate Institute in Toronto. Yet it came to me recently that, in the interests of fairness, I wanted to give those FBI agents who burglarized my Catskill mountain cabin where Stew and I lived in the 1970s, an opportunity to tell their side of the story, and that the theatrical form of a Greek Chorus might lend itself to this endeavor. The words in my little play come directly from transcripts of interviews conducted internally by the Bureau in the late 1970s. Every sentence is a verbatim quote, including the agents’ insistence on referring to me by that hideous last name “Hemblen,” the cheating first husband who refuses to go away. I have changed for dramatic purposes the order in which the agents’ words were spoken. No names have been changed to protect the innocent.

My Body, My Story

Fri, 22 May 2009 09:38:22 -0700

Also Appeared In...

A version of this story is in On The Issues magazine.

Women Unite

IN MEMORY OF DR. GEORGE TILLER

Talk show host Rachel Maddow recently called on the forty-five million American women who’ve had abortions to speak out, in response to the murder of abortion care provider Dr. George Tiller. I’m very grateful to be among that forty-five million, so, Rachel, here is my abortion story. But I wouldn’t criticize any woman for dealing with her unintended pregnancy differently than I did. It is, after all, your choice.

By the spring of 1972, I’d become a leader of the countercultural group known as the Yippies. I’d dedicated my life to ending the war in Vietnam and had just arrived in San Diego, to organize anti-war protests at the upcoming Republican National Convention. By then, more than 50,000 American lives had been sacrificed and more than 3,000,000 Indochinese – including women and children – had been poisoned, burned, maimed or killed. Yet the war raged on. It would take three more years of intense bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, continued resistance on the ground combined with increasingly violent demonstrations at home, for the Nixon Administration to finally admit defeat.

In Search of Spring at Mid-Space

Fri, 22 May 2009 09:38:22 -0700

Nguyen Trai 1923-2010

Nguyen Trai was a poet and songwriter who I met in 1970 when he was a “people to people” emissary from North Vietnam to the American Peace Movement.

Here is one of his sayings: "Be good to friends who are good to you, even be good to friends who are bad to you, for only friends will come with you on the long road to revolution."

Here's another, addressed to all of us: “My father used to recite to me a very significant verse when I was a child." You must not wait until the score is achieved to know who is the real hero." I repeated this sentence when I buried him, and pledged to look at life with the same eye. I would not wait until change has come to know that you represent the future.”

IN SEARCH OF SPRING AT MID-SPACE

In my mind, Spring symbolizes the holy moment and space where Heaven and Earth, Yin and Yang, meetto realize the most beautiful thing in life, which is Love. The famous poem by Nguyen Du, “Writing tocall up the souls” i.e. “Funeral Oration for Tenkinds of living beings” can be interpreted to meanthat Spring resides in every person even it is stolen by Nature and our philistine society, making manlive all his life in search of hope.

People's Park And Our Sixties Legacy

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:35:38 -0700

New book on People's Park

Berkeley's Peoples' Park Remembered and Zayd Dohrn’s play, Magic Forest Farm

I repeat this phrase, loudly and with more emphasis: 'Our politics have not changed.' Suddenly, with no conscious effort on my part, in an atavistic, Monty Pythonish gesture, my left arm -- and clenched fist -- shoot straight up in the air.

By Judy Gumbo Albert / The Rag Blog / April 29, 2009

[This is the second of two articles written for The Rag Blog by Judy Gumbo Albert, a founder of the Sixties countercultural protest group the Yippies, on recent activities in California commemorating the work of Sixties radicals. See her previous article here.]

Sunday around 3 p.m. I find myself in Berkeley’s People’s Park, in front of a crowd of at least 500 what, back in the day, we called hippies and freaks, letting their freak flags fly. Actually, the crowd was maybe 50% hippies and freaks, and the other 50 % just plain folks: men, women, children, neatly dressed students, Vietnam vets, homeless women and men, belly dancers, bongo drummers, black, white and multi-ethnic, one crowd, together, happy under the warm California sun. Sitting on remarkably well tended and clipped grass, with the unmistakable sweet odor of that other grass thick in the air. Just like I remember.

Building People’s Park led to Berkeley’s largest community uprising of 1969. And gave Ronald Reagan a platform on which to build his greed-driven, free-market, laissez-faire, capitalist-loving presidency -- whose upshot is, at least in part, the global financial crisis we suffer today. The economic “chickens” that Malcolm X first warned us about at the time of the Kennedy assassination have “come home to roost.”

In April 1969 a few thousand of us, including my late husband Stew Albert and I, along with many, many others, created a green, eco-before-it-was-fashionable community out of a muddy parking lot owned by the University of California. We dug the earth, laid sod, planted gardens, cooked food, played music, built stuff, and just enjoyed. There were no official or elected leaders, just strong personalities; most of us felt empowered to be our own leader, some of us ended up more “leadership” than others. Decisions (such as they were) were made by consensus (such as it was in those days). At least that’s what I recall.

Shortly after we seized the Park, the Berkeley police sealed it off with a barbed wire fence. Police and National Guard tear gassed the entire city, battled thousands of us in the streets, and, for the first time that I know of in the 1960s, used deadly force against white demonstrators, wounding 100 protestors and killing a young man named James Rector.

Forty years later, it’s easy to spot Michael Delacour. Mike, one of the Park’s originals, is always recognizable by his craggy face and long formerly black now silver hair falling way past his shoulders. He is, as far as I can tell, one of the unofficial keepers of the park’s flame.

He asks if I want to speak. How can I decline?

I start by quoting the Berkeley Liberation Program which a group of about 40 of us put together in an Oakland hotel because, in the immediate aftermath of the Park uprising, the City of Berkeley banned gatherings of more than a few people. Naturally, we model our program on the 10 point Platform and Program of the Black Panther Party. The people of Berkeley, I begin, passionately desire human solidarity, cultural freedom and peace. No reaction from the crowd. Not interested? Too stoned? Time to move on -- I’ll talk about Stew’s death. I urge anyone with Hepatitis C to get tested. I tell the story of how, two days before he dies, Stew asks me to type on his blog: “My politics have not changed.” I repeat this phrase, loudly and with more emphasis: “Our politics have not changed.” Suddenly, with no conscious effort on my part, in an atavistic, Monty Pythonish gesture, my left arm -- and clenched fist -- shoot straight up in the air.

It’s just like driving or riding a bike. There are some things you never forget.

I feel great. The crowd doesn’t exactly roar but at least I’ve caught their attention. Stewie would have been really happy.

Wavy Gravy is the event MC. By now his trademark clown outfit is a bit worn, yet he’s still the same kindly, funny person who used to unintentionally scare my young daughter if he turned in her direction. Which leads, in some roundabout, two degrees of separation way, to Zayd Dohrn’s play Magic Forest Farm, which I saw recently at the Marin Theatre Company. Zayd was born when his parents, Weather Underground folks Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, were underground. His play directly addresses the question: “How do kids raised in the shadow of the Sixties keep the parts of that experiment that were healthy -- the idealism, the hope, the courage -- while getting rid of the narcissism and silliness that had the potential to undermine it?”

How indeed? It turns out that some of our most cherished, countercultural values—”do your own thing,” dope, nudity, sexual experimentation—had, at least in Zayd’s fictional recreation of Magic Forest Farm, negative, dysfunctional consequences for some -- not all -- of the kids who lived there. I don’t doubt for a moment that the play speaks an inconvenient truth -- especially because, immediately after the play, I meet a total stranger in the woman’s bathroom who feels compelled to spill her story to me. The headline is that, as her mother lay dying, this woman was finally able to forgive her for raising her in such a commune.

As I recall, the women’s movement was just coming into full flower in Berkeley during People’s Park. We were not especially sympathetic to mothers of young children. Nor did it occur to us -- or me at least -- to empathize with the mothers of those teenagers we so warmly welcomed in People’s Park. The Free Speech Movement’s Jack Weinberg coined the phrase: “Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty” which morphed into Yippie leader Jerry Rubin’s “Kill Your Parents” -- a slogan which, Jerry later admitted, didn’t work because people thought he meant it literally. But symbolically Jack and Jerry were right -- to change the system and completely re-invent ourselves, we had to break from the repressive, war-mongering, right wing, dysfunctional values of our parent’s generation.

The kids of 1960’s parents I know today are terrific people. They are teachers, lawyers, parents, playwrights, writers, documentary film makers, professors, health care professionals, entrepreneurs. But there are also some who didn’t make it, kids who tragically ended up in jail or dead by their own hand. Despite all the humane, positive and progressive values we passed on to our children, our 1960’s activism also gave them difficult stuff to work through. And resent. And rebel against. This may be the moment when our 60’s generation’s chickens are coming home to roost in their own right.

I’m glad that Stew and I were able to pass our Yippie values to our daughter. I’m saddened if they caused her grief or harm in any way. Still and all, my politics have not changed.

Celebrate 60's Radicals Week

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 09:36:29 -0700

Power to the People!

In California this week, book signings, an historic poster exhibition, a theatrical event and a 'Champion of Justice' award all shine a light on Sixties activists and their progeny.

By Judy Gumbo Albert / The Rag Blog / April 22, 2009

For some cosmic reason, this is Celebrate 1960s Radicals-And-Our-Children week in California. On Saturday April 18, in Oakland, I and at least 600 others witnessed my friend Steve Bingham get the National Lawyers Guild’s prestigious Champion of Justice Award. On Sunday I attended the opening of the Berkeley Historical Society’s “Up Against the Wall” exhibit of 1960’s posters and artifacts. Last night, in downtown Berkeley, former Weatherman Mark Rudd spoke and signed his long-awaited book Underground.

Friday will be the world premiere in nearby Marin County of Zayd (son of Weather leaders Bernardine Dohrn and Billy Ayers) Dohrn’s play Magic Forest Farm, advertised as a young woman’s journey back to her past to confront the truth. Next Wednesday, Chesa (raised by Bernardine and Billy, the son of former Weather person Kathy Boudin and still imprisoned David Gilbert) Boudin, will be in San Francisco signing Gringo -- his coming-of-age work which recently provoked a disgustingly arrogant and mean-spirited review in the New York Times.

Not too shabby for us Bush-battered 1960s types!

It’s difficult for me to convey how heart-warming and deeply emotional Steve’s recognition event turned out to be. Steve Bingham, you may recall, spent almost 14 years underground in Europe after being charged with five counts of conspiracy murder for allegedly smuggling a gun past metal detectors into San Quentin so that prison leader George Jackson could “escape” -- and be shot to death. In 1984 Steve resurfaced in the Bay Area with his wonderful wife Francoise, and, after a trial lasting six months -- one of the longest, if not the longest trials ever in the State of California -- Steve was completely exonerated.

It felt like a miracle seeing this tall, sweet, gentle man, flying silver hair somewhat trimmed for the occasion, wearing a deep reddish/pinkish crushed velvet shirt and garlanded with a lei, get a long, enthusiastic standing ovation recognizing his lifelong contributions to social justice -- not just the 1960s struggle, or his survival underground, but also for his last 20 years at Bay Area Legal Aid protecting the rights of the imprisoned, the poor and the homeless. For me this was time-travel—back to the day when we proudly used the words radical and revolutionary as self-descriptors. It felt a lot like coming home.

Next day, I ran into Gus Newport, the well known African-American former mayor of Berkeley at the poster exhibit. Many posters came from the remarkable collection of the late FSM (Free Speech Movement) activist turned children’s science teacher and author Michael Rossman. One, the Berkeley Liberation Program, is the exact same poster I gave to the Stew and Judy Gumbo Albert Archives at the Labadie Collection at University of Michigan. My late husband Stew Albert, SDS founder Tom Hayden, I, and a large contingent of Berkeley radicals collectively wrote the Berkeley Liberation Program during the 1969 People’s Park uprising. We begin by making a declaration that still resonates:

Un-convention-al: 40 years ago: The Battle of Chicago

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 13:41:20 -0800

Chicago, 1968

(by Judy's neighbor Raines, originally published on Daily Kos just at the very moment the Palin pick was being announced, so missed by many)

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.

CAPBOM Revisited

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 13:10:46 -0700

We are forces of chaos and anarchy
Everything they say we are, we are
And we are very
Proud of ourselves.

Jefferson Airplane – We Can Be Together

By Judy Gumbo Albert

This piece was first published in the November 1-15, 2008 issue of Counterpunch, and appeared on counterpunch.org on December 25, 2008). Read it there. Add your comments near the top of the left column of this page.

Stew Albert, Judy Gumbo and Jerry Rubin, May, 1971

This is the inside story of how my late husband Stew Albert and I became prime suspects in CAPBOM, which is the FBI codename for the 1971 Weather Underground bombing of the United States Capitol Building in Washington D.C. Sarah Palin and her cohort of extreme right-wing really, really scary people used the Capitol bombing to link President-elect Obama with the not nearly as scary 1960s Weatherman and 1997 Chicago Citizen of the Year Bill Ayers. At the time, my widely quoted take on the Capitol bombing was: “We didn’t do it, but we dug it.”

As a former 60’s protestor, celebrating with everyone else the results of this historic election, I’d like to give my personal point of view about the attacks on the 1960s that were made during the campaign – specifically “guilt by association” and “domestic terrorism.” And also to reflect a bit on how I feel about those issues today.

Steve Hamilton of the Oakland 7

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 14:54:27 -0800

Stew, Art and Steve

Support the Steve Hamilton Activist fund

Contributions in Steve’s memory can be made to The Steve Hamilton Activist Fund for scholarships to send young activists to Wellstone Action!

Just follow these simple instructions to donate on the web via credit card without creating a Paypal account.

Or send your check to Steve Hamilton Activist Fund, c/o US Bank, Kaiser Center, 344 20^th Street # 117, Oakland CA 94612.

Celebrate the life of

Our dear friend and comrade

Steve Hamilton

2 p.m., Saturday, May 16

Finnish Brotherhood Hall

1970 Chestnut Street

At University Avenue, Berkeley

Welcome

Mike Smith – Oakland 7

Opening

We Shall Not Be Moved:

Barbara Dane & Johnny Harper

Remembrances from Steve’s sister Shirley Hamilton Metcalf

read by Judy Gumbo Albert

Personal Memories

F.J. Bardacke, Terry Cannon, Karen Jo Koonan, Mike Smith

The Internationale

Barbara Dane & Johnny Harper

Steve Hiatt -- BASOC

Tomiko Aya

Aids Activist

Roman Esser

Closing

Joe Hill

Barbara Dane & Johnny Harper

Refreshments & Open Mike

Steve Hamilton died on February 1, 2009, age 64. Steve was a radical political activist who remained committed to core progressive ideals for his entire life. Born into a working class family, Steve initially considered becoming a Christian minister, but soon got caught up in the political ferment that was Berkeley in the 1960s. He joined SLATE, the Free Speech Movement (FSM) the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and the Revolutionary Union (RU). In 1966 he was dismissed from the University of California for protesting the University’s attempt to take away the gains and protections of the Free Speech Movement. In 1968 he was indicted as one of the Oakland 7 for blocking access to the Oakland Induction Center. By the mid 70’s Steve was a member of BASOC (Bay Area Socialists of California).

Who The Hell Is Stew Albert?

Wed, 23 May 2007 10:06:43 -0700

Who the Hell is Stew Albert?
Signed Copies Available
Contact Judy for info

Stew Albert is an almost-nice Jewish boy who grew up in Brooklyn between World War II and the Cold War. Many of us remember hiding under desks during practice nuclear attacks, but Stew remembers the brass pail in his vestibule filled with white sand in case the Japanese bombed his house and there was a fire. Yes, Stew grew up very bored in Brooklyn-and got out in a hurry. His was the unspectacular childhood of a not-especially-promising kid. He wasn t good at punch ball, spelling, math, geography, or kick-the-can; although he did have some surprising skill swinging a stick at a spaldeen. He wasn t particularly popular nor was he disliked he was invisibly normal. He did, however, have one very distinguishing characteristic: he was, and still is, a very blond Jew. Stew frequently daydreamed about outlaws and tough guys, as did his father, who worked as a city clerk for fifty years. By all rights, Stew should have followed in his old man s footsteps. But instead, we find a young man stoned and hanging-out, in bed with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, shvitzing in the Luxor Turkish Baths with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, drunk in Santiago, Chile with Phil Ochs and blasted with Allan Ginsberg on a manic drive through San Francisco s hills. An alert CIA agent would have easily recognized our former loser on an Algerian beach acid-tripping with Timothy Leary. Can this childhood mediocrity-outstanding only for his hair color-be the same guy showing off his Chicago riot head wounds to William S. Burroughs? Can it be him amidst the chaotic siege on the Pentagon in 1967, giving a speech to the 82nd Airborne about the Lone Ranger? How did this putz kid reinvent himself? Instead of taking a civil service test, he started taking his daydreams seriously. But why? It must have been the sixties-that brief period of time when everything seemed possible and the future was up for grabs…