Vicious, Anti-American, Anti-Establishment, Most Dangerous: A Conversation with Judy Gumbo
Judy Gumbo herself, courtesy Judy Gumbo
In 1967, the Black Panther Party––a revolutionary socialist political organization that advocated for Black self-defense, safety and sufficiency––was just one year old. The Black Power Movement, galvanized by the murder of Malcolm X in ‘65, was in full force. Ronald Reagan had recently signed the Mulford Act into law, repealing the use of firearms in public in direct retaliation to Black Panthers who were following cops on their routes, monitoring for police brutality and misconduct. In just two years, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover would initiate the COINTELPRO program, which was designed to surveil, threaten, attack, intimidate, and murder Black Panther members while draining their resources and ravaging the movement’s public image.
It was this environment into which Judy Gumbo moved to California in the summer of 1967. Gumbo, originally from Toronto, became a leading activist throughout the 60s and 70s––and was at one point described by the FBI as “the most vicious, most anti-American, the most anti-establishment, and the most dangerous to the security of the United States.” She was personal friends with the Black Panther Party luminaries Kathleen Eldridge Cleaver, and worked as an activist with the Yippies, a countercultural anti-war group; and W.I.T.C.H., the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, a leading group who popularized theatrical demonstrations for women’s liberation.
In June, Greta had the opportunity to talk with Gumbo about her life experience and perceptions of social upset today. This is the transcript of Greta and Judy’s call, edited for length and clarity.
Greta: How did you get into activism in the first place?
Judy: Well, I was born and brought up in a Communist Party family, which means that I was imbued with progressive values from literally the day I was born. And when my husband Stew Albert and I had our daughter, Jessica, we took her to demonstrations very early––she would sit on Stew’s shoulder. We took her to demonstrations because we felt that activism, doing something, having direct experience with protest was really the only way to change what we thought was wrong in the society we lived in.
Judy and Stew, credit Judy Gumbo, yippiegirl.com
Greta: And then you became connected with the Black Panther Party and were friends with Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver. How did that connection happen?
Judy: I’ll tell you the story. I married early in Toronto, where I’m from. I came home one day to find my husband in bed with another woman. So that prompted me to leave Toronto, and I came to California, and it was opposite of everything that cold, dark, repressed Toronto was: California was beautiful, warm, summer-of-love-y. When I was there, I met the man who would become the first great love of my life, Stew––and he had two best friends. One was Jerry Rubin, one of the founders of the Yippies, and the other was Eldridge Cleaver, who was the Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party. So I met Eldridge through Stew, and we would basically be hanging out together in this amazing house that I lived in, in the Berkeley Hills. Eldridge had gotten out of jail, and he would be telling us stories of what it was like to be in jail. And Stew and I would basically be sitting at his feet, talking about life and revolution. We would sit around and get stoned and have a good time, but also talk politics, a lot of politics, talk about police oppression and killing of young Black men.
One of the things that Eldridge did that I thought was very defining, although it’s kind of lost now: the Panthers had a lot of white supporters, right? Eldridge came up with a name for it, he called us white mother country radicals. Eldridge always looked at the Black country as an internal colony of the United States, and white people were the mother country. But if you were a Panther supporter, that was okay––you could be a white mother country radical.
You know, when Black Lives Matter protests started a couple years ago, there was originally an issue with young, enthusiastic white men wanting to take the lead. I knew from my experience with the Panthers and Eldridge and Black Panther Party Chair Bobby Seale and the rest of them, I knew that was not the way it ought to be. If you look at the Panther slogans: Power to the People, Panther Power to the Vanguard. What that meant was that all people could, and needed to, exercise their power against the oppressive racist system. But the Panthers were in the lead, and we the white people have to recognize that. And I believe that is still an issue today, in some of the protests.
Edlridge Cleaver, credit Bettmann Archive
Bobby Seale, credit Associated Press
Greta: At one point you wrote: “if the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.” Do you think that’s still relevant today?
Judy: That was the slogan from MayDay, which was in 1971. We were talking about idealism, because that was a very idealistic slogan, right? Stopping the government was beyond anything we were actually able to do, but it motivated people––it motivated people to act. You know, something like 13,000 people were arrested at MayDay, the largest mass arrest in U.S. history. Did we stop the war? No. But we did scare the bejeesus out of President Nixon. This is shown in the FBI files––he was literally thinking that we were going to climb over the fence of the White House and come and get him.
It’s hard for me to say if that slogan––“stop the war or we’ll stop the government”––pertains to today because things have changed so much, but at the same time they haven’t. I think the answer I’d really like to give is that mass protest, the continuation of mass protest like we’re seeing, really does have an opportunity to stop the Trump debacle, the Trump fascistic neo-con.
The fact that we’re seeing today people within both the police and the military establishment that are rising up and saying no, we’re not going to do this––I think that’s an amazing phenomenon.
Greta: Yeah, it’s inspiring to see people say, “You know what? No.” For instance, people are urging police officers to quit right now saying, “You can leave. You can get a new job.” And I like that. It’s true. Just get a new job.
Judy: The thing that’s interesting to me about the whole police brutality issue is that it’s the police unions who are really keeping the old ways in place. Growing up as a child of communists, we were always very pro-union. But in this case, the police unions are a really reactionary force. And I think that defunding is great. Dropping out is great, especially if it violates your moral conscience to stay. But in truth, somehow the power of those police unions has got to be addressed. That would, I think, make a huge difference.
Greta: In some ways, these protests against police brutality seem to be hugely reminiscent of the same protests you were involved with in your own activism. Do you see any connections between your own activism in the sixties and seventies, and what’s happening now?
Judy: Well, I could be wrong, I could be being arrogant, but I like to say that what we did in the sixties––and especially the civil rights movement––seeded a lot of what’s going on today. We’re the older generation now. There are many people who were active in the sixties movements and are now grandparents, who are talking to their children and grandchildren about what we did. The issues are worse today, I think, because of increased economic disparity and more brutal police killings––though believe me, there were plenty of them back in the day.
I have to believe that it’s not necessarily that everybody’s reading books about this or watching it on TV, but that it’s passed down generationally: that sense of the need to resist brutal authority, racist authority. It’s passed down in families.
May Day. credit Brig Cabe, D.C. Public Library Washington Star Collection
Greta: How does that make you feel? On one hand it seems like nothing has changed, but then again you have knowledge continually being passed down through generations.
Judy: Well, what has changed is social media. There is no way we could have got out the information of, say, a Black person being killed within what? Two hours? And have it be picked up all across the world? Our best bet was to stand on the street corner, handing out leaflets and what we’d call underground papers. For our day those were very effective, but I really believe that the advent of social media has qualitatively changed the way demonstrations are organized. That’s not the only reason by any stretch, but that’s one reason they’re so large, so successful.
Greta: In the past, your own type of protest involved these very big, almost prank-like demonstrations. For instance, the W.I.T.C.H.s famously hexed the Financial District, or you ran an actual pig, Pigasus, for president in the 1968 convention––
Judy: I think we should do it again!
Greta: Tell me more about that. Why?
Judy: Pigasus was a rebellion against the Democratic Party establishment. With Pigasus, we were able to joke, right? The point was to hold up to ridicule the injustices that were going on in the United States. All right, Nixon is a pig, Humphrey is a pig, let’s run a real pig for president.
It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, because these times are more––to use a word I really dislike––“serious.” I’ve been thinking about whether it would be possible now to do that type of satiric set-up that we did back in my day. I think it’s very important for people to not just be serious, serious, serious, because protest has joy to it. Protest has fun to it. Protest has excitement to it. And that is one of the reasons that people protest. You asked me what’s the purpose of demonstrations? Well, the purpose of demonstrations is to show strength and a gigantic number of people––in this case, with the anti-racist, anti-police-brutality demonstrations, you get a much better experience if you’re not just writing letters or voting, but actually being out in the streets. You get a sense of power. You get a sense of joy. And for the Yippies, running a pig for president was absolutely that.
Pigasus, credit Getty Images
W.I.T.C.H.s, credit Getty Images
Greta: Speaking of joy––I read your blog, and in one of your posts you wrote that idealism is central to political activism, and that you were influenced by the free love movement when you were first getting into activism. Do you have an idea of what a political free love would look like?
Judy: For me, free love had to do with choice: that you could choose who you wanted to love or make love to, that you could choose to say no, and that it didn’t matter what your gender was or the gender of the person you were choosing to make love to. Then let’s throw contraception into that too, because when I was coming up contraception was available only to married women. What free love did for me was make me understand that the personal, as we always say, is also political: so that my ability to personally satisfy my sexual needs was up to me to make the choices about how and with whom I did it.
Greta: That’s interesting, because you eventually ended up at Planned Parenthood, and you’ve been a part of both movements for racial justice and feminist movements. How do you see movements for racial and gender justice inform one another, or if you’ve had different experiences between the two, how have they varied?
Judy: For me the answer is both – my experiences with the Panthers and in the women’s movement affected me, but differently. The Panthers taught me how to be an anti-racist and let Black people lead; the women’s movement taught me to love myself and fight for any cause or movement that freed me to make choices for myself and with my sisters. Here’s an example: Robin Morgan was an original Yippie, and she left because of the misogyny of the Yippies. In leaving, she wrote a very well-known piece called Goodbye to All That where she excoriated all the Yippie men for their various acts of misogyny, and she was not wrong [ed. note: the essay includes the great line “goodbye to the dream that being in the leadership collective will get you anything but gonorrhea”]. She also put a list at the end of Goodbye to All That: she said “free our sisters, free ourselves.” And she put a list of names of women, and I was on it. I remember looking at this list at the time and saying, well, I don’t know if she’s right or not, but the more I stayed with the Yippies the more she made sense. I still consider myself a Yippie who believes in theatrical acts of protest, but I live every day as a feminist who fights for women to make choices for ourselves.
Greta: So the Yippies had misogyny built into the group, but at the same time they’re doing good work on other fronts. It’s probably impossible to have a completely morally sound group...
Judy: Show me that group!
Greta: Right? So then, how do you participate? As a woman, how do you participate in the Yippies if it’s misogynist––or, if every group is going to be somewhat corrupt, how do you sustain activism without getting burnt out?
Judy: You start out by saying, “I’ll learn.” This is what I did: I learned how the Yippies acted and I learned how they spoke to be effective. I look on that time in my life now as a primarily passive absorption of a masculinist way of thinking – which turned out to be very instructive. The way men spoke––and still speak––is the way society defines how to be heard. Look at our A-hole president to say the least. At a certain point, I said basically, “no longer for me,” but I took those lessons for myself. The question is: how do you know when to leave? The answer is you must recognize inside yourself that you are “mad as hell and just can’t take it any more.” Then go join a women’s group and temper the male-defined ways you learned in the other groups. At the same time, hang onto the good parts––the self-confidence to speak up, to articulate your point of view and make a difference. Then either you come back or you don’t, you devote your energies to women––which is a perfectly wonderful place to be!––or you return to a more mixed movement and continue the fight to be heard and recognized.
Greta: It sounds like you have something to pick up from any activist group, whether you’re in it for the short or long term, and you can bring that with you going forward.
Judy: Exactly.
Judy Gumbo, credit Judy Gumbo, yippiegirl.com