Interview with Roz Payne

Payne, Roz B. (Roz Berkman), 1940- ; McKiernan, Stephen

Roz Payne is an educator, activist, and founding member of an antiwar filmmakers group called Newsreel. She released a 12-hour DVD set titled What We Want, What We Believe on the Black Panthers. She has a Bachelor's degree from UCLA.

2010-10-05

In copyright

2018-03-29

McKiernan Interviews

144:08

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Roz Payne
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 5 October 2010
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(Start of Interview)

SM: Alrighty.

RP: So, what do you actually teach? What class is it?

SM: Actually, I retired.

RP: Oh, okay.

SM: I left the university a year ago in March to work on this book because I could never really... I was too busy. I was the director of student programming co-curricular programs, and I was at the university six days a week, and I just had no time. I have been working out–

RP: [inaudible] At the same university?

SM: I was at the Westchester University for 22 years. Then I was at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia for four. I worked at Ohio University for four years, and then I was out in San Francisco, the Bay Area for six years. I actually was hired at Berkeley, and they froze me out after I was hired. Really frustrated me. So I ended up starting my own entertainment business out there and working all different kinds of jobs. But I had an entertainment business until I was able to come back into higher education.

RP: Entertainment.

SM: Huh?

RP: What kind of entertainment?

SM: Oh, it was basically San Francisco [inaudible].

SM: Ask my first question.

RP: Yep, go for it.

SM: Yep. Could you talk about your early experiences in your background, your growing up years, where you grew up, the influence of your parents and teachers, or any role models who inspire you to become who you are?

RP: Okay. That is a big story. So you might also, let me just say one thing. You should go to my website. Did I send it?

SM: I have read it.

RP: Because there is in the family section, some photographs from that period of time. And some of them, one of them is specifically my mother getting arrested, which describes my childhood.

SM: I saw that. I saw that.

RP: So anyway, I grew up with ... I was born in Patterson, New Jersey. Allen Ginsburg lived a block from us and our parents are friends. And he used to occasionally watch me if my mother ran to the store or something. He was a little older than I was. I do not have any memory of it. I just remember my mother talking about it. But later on when we met, he stayed at my house one night and we went through that whole history. It was really interesting. So my parents were radicals. My father, my mother came from Poland, and she began working in the textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts. And she was very active in unions, and she was one of the leaders. What happened is a lot of textile unions in New Jersey, in Lawrence, and usually one would go out and strike, then everybody would go to another mill and get a job because they needed money and they never could have a general strike. Well, she helped organize a very large general strike with some other people. And I have pictures of her getting arrested from that, which are also my website, which I found in old newspapers and stuff. And my father also was a radical. He and his friend Nick San Tangelo, my father was Italian. My mother was Polish Jewish. And my father's whole family, parents came from Italy in the mountains, close to maybe two hours from Naples. I went and visited there once. And there's a church at the top of the hill in the village that says, "In honor of General Lismo Christiano." Christiano was my maiden name who helped Napoleon. And that is why everybody there has blue eyes.

SM: Oh, wow.

RP: So, my father was a radical in New Jersey. My mother was a radical, in Lawrence, Mass. And my mother spent about two years in jail from getting arrested. And they held her for deportation because she was born in Poland and had never gotten her citizenship papers. So, they tried to return her to Poland, but it did not work out because the borders changed in those days. Where she came from was not exactly in the right place or something like that. And then eventually my mother moved when she got out. She went to a hiking nature club overnight place in New Jersey where she met my father. It was called The Nature Friends. And the Nature Friends came out of Germany, and it was a place for people, workers mainly, not rich people that had country homes. But workers could go and they would have big lodges and communal kitchens, and it would be a place for workers to be able to enjoy nature. And they met there, and there was a pond there. I have pictures of myself when I was a little kid in the pond in the buildings. I actually went back and visited, and it still exists, by the way. When I went up to the Matterhorn a number of years ago, they have a sign with the N and the F, the F coming out of the back part of the N. And they have clubhouses all over the world. But I kept up my membership all these years so you can go. And Hitler put them on the undesirable list and was going to kill everybody because they were socialists basically.

SM: Wow.

RP: So that is what I grew up with. I grew up and my parents moved at some point. Well, we were in Patterson and all my father's family still remained in New Jersey. He was the only, he was the rebel and he left. My mother's family was in LA, so when I was four, they went across country and they went to live in LA. And I went to LA High School, I went to grammar school there. I went to LA High School, I went to UCLA. I went a year before UCLA to Santa Barbara. I did not exactly like it, particularly. I liked UCLA. And I graduated from UCLA in (19)62. And I was going to be an art teacher. I wanted to do art. And let us see what happened? Oh, my high school boyfriend remained to be my college boyfriend. And right after I graduated, we got married. His name was Arnold Payne. And he was a year ahead of me and he was going to Columbia University for graduate school. And so we got married and I moved. I went out to New York to live in New York with him. And let us see. My early days of political activity, by the way, since my mother was ... All those years that I grew up, my mother was held for deportation. And they had a big problem in trying to deport her after that. She was held in jail for that long time in Lawrence. They tried to deport her, but somehow the borders got changed between Poland and other countries and the papers were not ... They could not do it. There's some technological reason, and I cannot remember now what that reason was. And so she was held while I was growing up for deportation. So during my entire growing up, probably every three or four months, the FBI would come to my door and knock on the door. My mother had instructed me, just call her, close the door and do not let them in and call her. And then she would go outside and talk to them. And so, we were... Go outside and talk to them. And so, we were always going to these radical parties growing up, of the Hollywood Ten people and-and a lot of radical lawyers. People would bring my parents new political newspapers in brown paper bags. And I went to special schools at times or camps where with a lot of the Hollywood Ten kids. So, it was like people that I did not have to hide anything. The kids that I went to, like LA High school and stuff, I never talked about my political part, of that part of my life with them. And I learned not to cross picket lines. There was a group that sold, it was called Pep Boys, Manny, Moe and Jack was the name of this place that sold car repair material.

SM: They are all over the country today.

RP: Yeah. It was a big chain. There was a strike there and we were never allowed to go into that store. I remember things like that that happened. And my parents were not religious. My father grew up Italian Catholic. My mother grew up Jewish Polish. And so we would go to my mother's family for the Jewish holidays and eat and celebrate them. And then we always had a Christmas tree. We always had a lot of parties and lots of people in the house, in and out. And I used to take off for Jewish holidays. I would go to school the first day and then take off a second day to hang out with my friends or something. Right. It was like we were never religious, but I made use of the holidays so I did not have to go to school.

SM:
Was that experience of growing up in the (19)50s there and you saw what was going on with the Hollywood Ten, you saw what happened in Germany. Was there anything of those experiences growing up as a kid that got you interested in civil rights? One of the things that I have asked many people in the interview process, many of them were red diaper babies and they said their parents were communists because of the fact that the Communist party was the only one that showed any kind of empathy toward people of color, particularly African American.

RP: Might be true. But also my mother especially was very strong about people of color. And for example, when Emmett Till got killed, I was 13 at the time, I believe, and there was a memorial service in downtown Los Angeles. My mother took me to it. We were the only white people. It was in a very old building with a lot of balconies. I remember going up, we were sitting in the very top part and we were the only white people in the entire building that I remember. My mother had black friends and I had black friends and I had Japanese friends. I had a Japanese friend in grammar school who had been sent away to one of those internment camps where they put all the Japanese in the desert. She was there for a while.

SM: Internment camps, yeah.

RP: Yeah. Linda Fukuyama. And also, by the way, I just read a book summer, my Italian relatives have a house in Acapulco for the winter they use. And I went down there and somebody had left this book about Italian internment camps. Did you ever hear that?

SM: No.

RP: Oh my God, you should see how many there were. When you went down to the wharf in San Francisco, the first people they picked up were the fishermen who had the boats in San Francisco. They picked them up first and then they picked up a lot of these truck farmers, Italians. What an incredible story about these guys.

SM:
What year was that?

RP: It was the same time, it was the Japanese were being picked up and the Italians were being picked up.

SM: Oh my gosh.

RP: My cousin gave me ... My cousins that are there, they're not political at all, but so many thought they would enjoy reading the book because it was Italian and neither of them really read it. My cousin's wife read it a little bit, so I could not believe it when I read it.

SM: That had to do with Mussolini probably and the fascism and all that other stuff going on.

RP: Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

SM: How did you become interested in civil rights even before you could [inaudible].

RP: I got brainwashed into it.

SM: Connection with a-

RP: My parent, all my life I heard about the Scottsboro boys. For example, there's a left wing, I do not know if it's communist, I do not know what kind of magazine it was that my mother had a copy of, that had a story about the Scottsboro boys. And it all had a story about when she got arrested. And it's the same time. So, my mother also had black friends. I mean, LA is a pretty integrated neighborhood. We lived in a white neighborhood, but my mother had a few black friends and my high school had black students in it because LA High School, if you went to the south, it was very interesting. From the high school, if you went south, it was a Mexican and black neighborhood. You went east, it was a Japanese neighborhood. If you went north they're gigantic white mansions. And there was one black person that lived there, Nat King Cole. There were private streets with guards at houses at different streets, so you could not go in there, gigantic mansions. I had some friends that lived there. And then if you went west, it was mixed up, a lot of Jewish neighborhoods and white and working class and more until it got further west, then it got to be fancier again. Where I happened to live was a very integrated school. And so I just grew up having black friends and Japanese friends. It's how the neighborhood was.

SM: When you look at those early, late (19)50s and early (19)60s, even before the Black Panthers or even a thought, I just want to list these things and whether you personally or your parents or your family were linked to any of these. Let me list them first and then you can comment.

RP: Okay.

SM: And of course, the civil rights movement that was real strong in the (19)50s, Dr. King's Montgomery bus boycott, the I Have a Dream speech in Washington. We all know what happened with the lunch counters and down south, Freedom Summer of (19)64 when so many of the students-

RP: Do I need to interrupt you or let you go through all of those?

SM: Yeah, I am going to go through them and then the Chaney, Schwerner, Goodman situation, the church bombing of the little girls, Emmett Till, James Meredith's march. And of course, groups like SNCC, NAACP, CORE, the Urban League and the race riots that were all like Watson (19)64. Any thoughts on any of those?

RP: Oh, I have a lot of thoughts because I know all ... It's a mixed bag because I grew up knowing about all of that because my parents got radical newspapers and magazines, you got to understand they were often brought in in shopping bags. But for example, when the Scottsboro boys got arrested, in the same issue of this communist magazine, I cannot think of the name, maybe it was not communist, but it was definitely a left-wing magazine, was an article my mother being in jail, being held for her strike activities in Lawrence. And the Scottsboro boys were also in that issue. So for me, that was part of my history. You named so many. I was going to tell you specific stories that happened around some of them, and I cannot remember.

SM: Well, why do not I just, the first one, Dr. King and the Montgomery bus boycott.

RP: Okay. I just thought of what the one I was going to tell you. So, 1962, I got married, I think it was (19)62. And after my wedding, a bunch of people, and in fact, one of my bridesmaids was going on one of the freedom rides, and she actually went to North Carolina, I think it was. And this guy, Joe Gerbracht, who's now a lawyer in California, went to see, he was not going, he was not that radical, but he got really drunk at my wedding and he went to say goodbye to a bunch of people on the bus. And he went on the bus and passed out and woke up, he was on his way to Mississippi.

SM: Oh my gosh.

RP: So that happened. Both of those two things happened. And just recently, my friend Carol, who kept a scrapbook of everything that happened when she went, she actually went to North Carolina or South Carolina, I cannot remember, one of them, during those Freedom Rides. And she's now very ill. But I visited her in the hospital and with her husband there about four or five months ago, and he gave me her whole scrapbook of that period of time. It included all of her photographs and leaflets and things about do not go out at night or you will be hung, posters that were put up and all this stuff. So, I grew up with, that was part of my day-to-day normal stuff somehow. And of course, it was very moving, the whole civil rights period, and I did not do it. Why did not I do it? I almost did it. I almost got on that bus, but I went to see Mrs. Clark, my stupid, I am not saying stupid, my counselor at LA High School. It was my last year, and I told her I was thinking of doing it and I wanted her advice. And she said, "Well, if you do, you may never be able to teach."

SM: Oh, it was a threat then, early.

RP: Yeah.

SM: Oh my God. Because as we get later into the interview, we talk about the importance of Newsreel and what you did there, but how did the media's coverage of these things that I just mentioned, all these events in the late (19)50s. How did the-

RP: How did they cover?

SM: How did the media-

RP: You got to understand that I had beyond the media we got delivered to the house, the LA Times, and we got the local paper, the Pico Post, and the small little for community stuff. But my parents had, because my mother's was held for deportation, she was always scared they're going to kick her out of the US, that her friends would come to her house with brown grocery bags and inside would be the People's Work World, which was the communist newspaper. We had all that reading material in our house, but it was brought in, not by my parents, but by her friends who had visited in brown paper bags. My parents died, they had the most incredible intensive bookshelves filled with books, radical, every book you can imagine from that period of time, radical.

SM: Do you have those in archives now?

RP: I definitely still have them.

SM: Good.

RP: They're in my bookshelves now. I do not read them, but they're there.

SM: Yeah. Well, what was your thoughts on looking at television back in the (19)50s, that black and white TV and early (19)60s when President Kennedy came in (19)61, what was your thought on the media's coverage of these early events in the Civil Rights movement? They would list them on the evening news and you would see them in the paper. But was that in any way inspiring you to do something more, something more daring, more educational, more revealing?

RP: Well, I was always thought that I was doing daring things. We did support things. We did not have big demonstrations in LA around civil rights that I can remember. But I watched it with in great interest, let me say that. Whatever TV had on, I watched TV all the time. My parents always had the news on, always had the news. 6:00 news it would be on. And then I cannot remember, we ate dinner before 6:00, so we would have to be done by 6:00, or we ate after the news. But I grew up with that. And not only that, but I grew up with all of my parents' radical friends, because my parents are great entertainers. Coming to the house for eating big dinners and arguing you could not imagine and discussing. I did not pay too much attention at times about all the political things happening. When the Rosenbergs were being executed, what year was that? Do you know?

SM: That was in 19 ... Was that (19)54?

RP: I do not know, but I am not-

SM: Think it was around that time at the McCarthy hearings, it was in that timeframe.

RP: Oh, it was? Well, I would rush home from school and watch the McCarthy hearings. My Uncle Norman bought us our first TV very early, and my mother would be there watching. And as soon as I got home, I would be watching the McCarthy hearings. And because some of my friends' fathers who were in the Hollywood movie industry would be testifying sometimes. And I remember Bill Jericho's father was one of them. And so we watched the news. My parents did news all the time, and I watched the hearings and there was one more thing I was going to tell you before I thought of the TV ... I lost my train of thought.

SM: Magazines, or...

RP: Well, we had all the radical magazines in the house. We did not have any garden magazines or anything like that. I do not know why, we did not have that kind of magazine.

SM: Better Home and Gardens, that kind of stuff.

RP: No, none of that was in there. But we did have the LA Times on Sunday. My parents had the commie newspaper People's World. There were ... what other magazines were there?

SM: Well, there was Nation that was very popular.

RP: Oh, we did not have Nation. And big arguments, my parents and their friends on all sorts of political things, which I never paid attention to the arguments. Maybe they were just discussions, I do not know. But that did not interest me in my younger years.

SM: A quote that really stood out in some of the literature I read on you was that you have been quoted as saying that you used to look out when you lived in New York City near the [inaudible]

RP: Out the window?

SM: Out the window.

RP: Watch the sun setting over in New York and wish I was there?

SM: Yeah, that fire. And then the fire from the [inaudible].

RP: What it was, I was living in the New Jersey... This is later I got married. My husband was at Columbia University getting a PhD and he was working at the New York Times in the morgue. The morgue, you know what the morgue is, the newspaper?

SM: You mean the obituary columns?

RP: No, the morgue in newspaper is where they clip all the newspapers. They get all the stories and they file them. So, they have a back load of everything that is ever been written.

SM: Oh, okay.

RP: And that is called the morgue. So we lived in New Jersey. It was about the bus stopped on the corner of our street, and it was about a 15-minute ride to get into 40s, where the bus terminal was, in 42nd Street. And we had found that place because somebody else was a group of four or five little cottages going down on the Palisades overlooking the Hudson River. And it was gorgeous. And as the sunset to my east to the back of me, it would hit all the windows of all the buildings in New York, and it would turn them red on a sunset night. And so that is what I was looking at. And I would look at them and wish that I was there. Is that what I said?

SM: You said, well then you said it was the inspiration that ignited you because you said-

RP: Invited me to go to New York to get involved.

SM: No, you said the GI Zippo lighter on the-

RP: Oh, on the TV, I saw that.

SM: Yeah. And it helped-

RP: Oh yeah, I remember what that was. Okay. That is not nothing about the New York thing. This what really got me totally upset was this GI was in a little village in Vietnam, and the people were in these little straw houses. And first one guy goes and takes this knife and starts cutting open their bags of rice and dumping it on the ground. That was the first thing. That was really upsetting to me. And then this other guy who takes out his Zippo and he lights one of their huts on fire. And that was real. That really incensed me. And it did that somebody would, these poor people had nothing. And there were these just mainly women holding these naked kids in their arms and everybody's crying and screaming, and these guys are doing it. And that is what really ignited me to get really involved in the peace movement, antiwar movement.

SM: When you were a kid at a young adult, did you take pictures and film things when you were real young, before you even knew about Newsreel? Were there-

RP: No. Well, when Newsreel started, I went to the first Newsreel meeting. That happened in 1967 in New York. Well, I had my brownie camera. I took pictures when I went to camp of my friends or a deer or a tree or something, what normal kids would take pictures of. But my father, I will tell you about my father. My father and I never realized this at the time, had a darkroom in our house. We had this small room that had a single bed in it that a guest would sometimes stay there. And this is not my first house, this is towards the end. We lived in a few different places, but it was a little room. And it had the person who used to have that house turned it into a darkroom also. And it had a sink there. And my father had a lot of dark darkroom equipment and he used to take photos and he would develop them there. So that is what happened. And his photos, I have a scrapbook of a lot of his stuff, but they're just like family pictures, what you take of your family kind of, and mountains and stuff like that. But in my bathroom, I have got a beautiful, very large picture he took of a yucca. Do you know what yucca is?

SM: A yucca.

RP: A plant. There's a big white flower on top.

SM: That is the one out in Arizona, or...

RP: Oh, it could be any place. They grow in a lot of places. And he developed and it is just a gorgeous, gorgeous, and he had not colored some of the prints.

SM: And who knows, maybe subconsciously, that is how you really got interested in photography.

RP: My parents always had, I always had cameras. I always had the cheap little brownie type cameras. And wherever we went, if we went to Yosemite, my parents were into nature. We always went camping overnight. There were certain beaches not far from where we lived that you could put up your tent. My parents liked camping. So we put up our tent at the beach with other people, other families, and my father would take pictures. I have pictures of all this stuff. Then we would go to Yosemite and we would camp. Every year we would go to Yosemite and my father would take pictures. And by the way, I had some pine cones. But the main thing is my father belonged to this, I told you earlier, this group called The Nature Friends, that was on the Nazi list as being a socialist. Hitler hated these people and arrested and killed a lot of them. The group started out of Germany, but it spread to Switzerland and Austria and United States. And that is where my parents met, hiking at the one in Midvale, New Jersey. And I still go, by the way, I kept my membership up all these years. I pay my dues every year.

SM: You do not even understand that if you know anything about Hitler, was not he really into staying fit, and the perfect male, or whatever it was there?

RP: That is what all these guys look like in the pictures. They're wearing those little shorts, like Switzerland. But there's a place that is in San Jacinto, the mountain right above next to Palm Springs. My father helped build that cabin there. And as you go through it, a park, a national forest park, and there's a place where you can park your car and then you hike up about, you have to bring all your stuff. You hike up about, well, I do not know, probably a seven-minute walk. And on the top, they built this unbelievable, gorgeous cabin that looks like something out of the German or Swiss Alps. It's all stone on the bottom and then wood on the top and a big sleeping room inside and sleeping porch. Those Germans are so bright. Two miles away, there's water. This is big mountains. The pine cones are two feet big. And they piped in water two miles away, going up and down hills and by gravity fed somehow. And then they built this metal three layer box of frame with burlap over it and with a hose on the top of it. And the water then sprinkles out the top by the pressure coming down. And what's the burlap? And it drips down and the box is made out of mesh wire so animals cannot get into it to eat your food. And it keeps it cool. You're can have cold beer there. And so, they did all this stuff. I have a few films, I did not make them, but I found them in my discovery of trying to do research on this group, and I found films of them building this place. So, I have been around film stuff. We were extras in movies. I cannot even remember what movies. But when they needed audience, somebody sit in the audience or something. Growing up, that Hollywood thing was kind of important to me, living close to it.

SM: Oh, you were not audience for Howdy Doody, were you?

RP: No, but I was in the audience for, there was an Abbott and Costello show.

SM: Oh yeah. And that Art Linkletter had his show too.

RP: Do not know that. But I knew Abbott and Costello. Do you remember those names?

SM: Oh yeah, I remember them well.

RP: Yeah. Well, Abbott and Costello, one of them was born in Patterson, New Jersey, where I am from.

SM: Oh, my golly.

RP: So that was my connection to that.

SM: At your school, what kids or what people did you know that were from Hollywood?

RP: From Hollywood?

SM: Yeah.

RP: Well, it was not really from my school because my school was not in the Hollywood area, but I knew my parents from being radicals. We knew all the commie writers that got blacklisted, like Bill Jericho's kids. And I knew, I am trying to think of the name.

SM: I know there was a movie out on one of them. I forget his name now, the producer. There's a movie out on them a year ago, I remember. And for Zero Mostel was in that group as well.

RP: I will tell you, my parents were not in that group particularly. But we had friends that were in it. And we had individual friends because my parents were, first of all, my parents were workers. And that group was more, but my parents were intellectuals. Got to understand. We had lots of books and did all this stuff. They were still working class. That group was upper middle class or upper class, but from the industry. And they did not mingle that much with working class. Plus, my mother was Jewish and my father was Italian, and most of them were Jewish, I think.

SM: Can you explain how Newsreel began, where and when and-

RP: Exactly. Here is what happened.

SM: Explain how the Boomer generation involvement, why did it start and who were the early people?

RP: So '19, my husband and I broke up. I had friends in New York and I went to look for an apartment in New York, I wanted to move to New York. And I just looked at this apartment on 15th Street, fifth floor walkup. And I looked at it, and when I walked in, the guy says, "I am leaving right now. I am going to France. I got to catch a plane in two hours." And the apartment was filled with stuff, all over the place. And he says, "Here's the keys. If you want to take it, it's not my apartment. The guy whose actually apartment is-is already there. We're going to go work on a film with" ... Do not remember now, but some famous Italian filmmaker. And that is it. "I got to leave, I got a plane to catch." So I looked around and there was a Leica camera lying on the bed or a dresser, and there's a lot of money in change in someplace else. And he was gone. So I took the camera, put it on my shoulder. I decided I did not want that apartment. Fifth floor walkup, forget it, it was too much to walk up. And I walked out and I am walking down the street and I bumped into this guy, Marvin, who I am still friends with, and actually lives here. And Marvin says, "Oh, I am on my way to this film meeting, it's the first meeting of a group of people. And it's down on ..." We were walking down Second Avenue and 14th Street by this time. And do you know New York?

SM: Yes, I do.

RP: Okay. So I was at 15th near Second. Between First and Second, no, between Second and ... Anyway, it does not make a difference. It was a one block over. And I was walking down with Marvin. And all of a sudden this wild guy comes running up with us to us. And he said, "Oh my God, I am so glad to bump into you." And he sees my camera. He says, "Oh, good. You're a photographer. Well, I got to tell you, this is the first meeting right now that is happening. Immediately you have got to go to, of all these radical filmmakers. It's happening in this loft." And he told us, he says, "I am going there right now. Just follow me and da da da da da." It was Melvin Margolis, who is in our film group. He's in a lot of our films. And he was a great organizer. And he filmed some of the great shots in the Columbia University takeover film. When the black students kicked all the whites ... Do you know that film at all?

SM: No, I do not know the film, but I know all about it because I had friends that went there.

RP: Okay. Well, the black students took over the president's office and then kicked all the white students out at some point. And we filmed it, by the way. And Melvin, this guy that who ran up to me in the street, that said, "You got to go to this meeting, the blacks kicked all the whites out of that building." And he convinced them that is the most important thing that they were doing that has ever happened, and he has got to stay to film it. And they let him stay. He was the only white person that was allowed to stay in that building. So he filmed them soaping, putting liquid soap on all the stairs. Because there's a tunnel the cops are going to make come through the basement and come up the stairs, so they would slip on the soapy stairs. And he filmed all the notes on the blackboard about so-and-so's mother called and blah, blah. He was great. He was a really great wild man. He's dead now. He died of cancer some years ago. But anyway, so he led us to this meeting, his first meeting. And that was the first gathering of, I walked into this room. It was a basement, and it could have been either Bill Jersey or ... It was somebody else's loft. I cannot think of his name. Maybe it was not even a loft. It was in the basement. Very dark. And I looked around and they were all these really interesting people. And I said, "Oh my God, this looks like my gang of people that I want or hang out with." And I sat down and that was the first Newsroom meeting So that is how it happened. And then I kept going to the other meetings, and I finally found an apartment to rent on 15th Street. And I had friends, this old couple who lived on the second floor, and mine was on the fourth floor, I think. It was a one bedroom, a living room, a kitchen kind of dining area. And then there was a little alcove that you could put another bed in. So at times, somebody in Newsreel always needed a place to stay. So I would let them stay there. And it was a great building. I wish I did not give it up. We won it in a rent strike against the guy who owned it, and I would have owned it now.

SM: How did you finance all this? In the very early-

RP: I immediately, we rented a newsreel, rented an office on Seventh Avenue in the Garment District, and they needed somebody to run the office. And somebody, I think maybe Robert Kramer, somebody asked if I wanted to work in the office, because I was not working. In New Jersey I was teaching school, public school, by the way, and I began hating it. It was elementary school and I hated it. And there miniskirts were getting fashionable. I came to school in a miniskirt, and the principal sent me home one day and I said, "That is it. I am out of here." So I quit teaching and that is when I moved to New York to look for this place. I needed a job, and so they hired me at $65 a week to open. I went and there was another woman that got hired, the two of us. We would go in the morning, we would go at, I do not know, 8:00, 9:00 or whatever time, and unlock, walk up the two flights of stairs, or maybe we were on the second floor, Seventh Avenue and 18th Street, I think it was. Or 27th Street or something. It was in the garment area. That is all I can remember. Because people were pushing those things of clothing. And we would open it up and we would open the mail and then Newsroom people would start coming in. People are making films. Somebody would start bringing equipment in a movie and start editing something or somebody. We began just making films, immediately. Just people who had had equipment began sharing their equipment, and people who had money began paying the rent and paying for labs. And it was a very diverse group of people.

SM: When you did that first one, the Columbia protests, how would you find out about it and how would you get access to-

RP: Oh, that was really simple. So here we are. I come from New Jersey with my little red Volkswagen that I had when I taught school. And my husband and I had broken up and I kept the car. So, I am living on 17th Street, the place I just described to you. So, I am there and all of a sudden, the same guy that I told you when I was walking down the street with Marvin and this guy walked up to us and said, "Hey, there is this first Newsreel meeting happening," he told Marvin and I. Marvin calls me up, he says, "Roz, Columbia's just been taken over. I just heard about it. Get your car down here and pick me up and the cameras and we will go up there."

SM: Wow.

RP: So, I drove down, he loaded up cameras and film and stuff, and we drove up and parked the car there, and I never left during the protests. It was so much fun. It was one of the most fun things I have ever done.

SM: Were you a little fearful though, that you were getting involved in a situation that-

RP: I am never fearful like that.

SM: Did they force you out too, along with the students when they took over, or the police or whatever?

RP: Well, okay. Did you see the film?

SM: I have not seen the film, no. But I know.

RP: You should look at some of the film, will tell you so much. We will talk about that later. But what happened was, first one building was taken, then another, and then before you know it, the math building was taken in, all the math teachers were on strike. And then Margaret Meade at the anthropology building, and it was thousands. We were the majority, I never get scared of things like that. Things like that never bothered me. And I also always felt that I was safe because I was not one of them. I was documenting it. I was a filmmaker... documenting it. I was a filmmaker, so my camera kept me safe. I always felt that way. That is not necessarily true, but that is what I felt.

SM:
Did you film the... Again, I have not seen it, but I know the scene, the historic scene of the students in the President's office.

RP: No, I did not film that, but you know who filmed it? Melvin.

SM: Oh my God.

RP: This is what happened. The Black students... Everybody took over the place, and Melvin was there, and he was filming it. And there were a few other, maybe another neutral person, and they opened up his cognac or his wine. And they began going through all of his files and his girly magazines. But finally, they asked all the white... The Blacks asked all the whites to leave and go take over other buildings. Everybody left except Melvin, who convinced them he had to film what they were doing because it's the most important thing. So, they allowed Melvin to stay in that building. And he filmed them soaping the stairs, this liquid soap stuff they had, and they put it down... There was a tunnel that led from another building, underground, into that building. So they thought the cops are going to come through this tunnel, so then the steps would be all slippery and slimy from the liquid soap. And we have all that on film, in our Columbia film. It is all there.

SM: Of course, I am going to just briefly mention some of your other films here. But the Chicago (19)68, you were there and you covered that as well with photography and with film. I would say that must have been a scary situation too.

RP: I was scared once in a while there. I will tell you, it is not like I am not ever not scared. I feel pretty good, actually, with a camera. I always feel like it's protection, but I have been hitting the head with a tear gas grenade in Washington, D.C. at a demonstration once. And that was really scary. And I immediately ran... It did not hit me hard. It came across the side of my head, but Robert Kramer had already left. He ran fast. As soon as he saw them, he got out of there and left me and this other guy there. And the other guy and I ran around for a while, and we have some great shots from that. And then we left.

SM: What stands out from that experience?

RP: Which one?

SM: Chicago (19)68. Is there any scenes? Or just [inaudible]-

RP: If you saw the films that I made, my photographs... Well, the first thing was, I went there with a group of people. Newsreel had three different groups that were making three different films on Chicago. My group was going to find some young, innocent people who get involved and then all of a sudden the cops are going to be... There's going to be all this stuff. They get disillusioned, and they're going to get beaten up and stuff. Well, we found our couple... And the next day, we lost them in the crowd. We never could find them again. And then we were on our own, and we just began filming. And I hung out a lot in Lincoln Park, which was one of the staging grounds for stuff. And that is where a lot of these Chicago young bikers hung out. I think they were called the head hunters. And there's this one kid, I think his jacket said banana on it. And we did some long interviews with them. And it was interesting to talk to alternative types of people that were in Chicago that were not the political, not the Rennie Davises, not the FBS. I hung out at night a lot in the movement center, the FBS Movement Center. And that is where everybody got together and talked about strategy, and we filmed all this, by the way. This is in our film. You got to look. You got to look at some of our films. Do you have a video machine?

SM: Yes, I do.

RP: Okay. Because it is hard to explain all this stuff because it is so intense. But it was really scary... Sometimes it was really scary, and sometimes it was just absolutely fun. Because I had my gang of people. I had two gangs. I had Newsreel... There were a lot of Newsreel people. My best friend Jane is too scared. She does not like to be out when there's cops and all that fighting, but she was very important. She stayed near a phone in somebody's apartment, and she manned the phones. So, whatever anybody needed, or if somebody got in trouble, or somebody got busted or something, she was there to take down all the information, and make the contacts, and everything. And at the end... I never get arrested, by the way. My mother always told me, "Do not get arrested." Because my mother got arrested and spent time in jail for her union organizing. She said, "It's a waste of time. It drains you. It is a waste of time." She says, "Just escape. Try to escape." And I always followed her advice, and I always got out of there really fast if I thought I was going to be busted. My friend Jane, who is still by the way, my best friend. I speak to her every day. She lives up here, not far from me. She did not go out the streets at all. She was at the phones in case somebody had trouble. And going home from Chicago, the cops stopped her car. And why? Because she had Tom Hayden and some other people in her car.

SM: Oh, no.

RP: Because Tom is a really good friend of ours. And so, the cops were probably looking at him and watching him. Saw him get in the car, stopped the car... And inside her car, somebody had hidden under the seat these little balls that had nails in them that you stick under the tires of the cops as they move forward, which she did not do. She never would do anything like that. She's very proper, wealthy girl who would not do anything like that. So, she got arrested. I do not know. You just never know.

SM: The other one that really fascinates me is the 1967 protest at the Pentagon.

RP: Oh, yeah. See, that was the scariest one. I was so frightened at that one.

SM: Yeah, because there was a march all the way across the bridge, I believe. And then they walked up to the Pentagon? Is that what-

RP: Well, what happened was we were at the... Where were we? At the Reflecting Pool? Or someplace... Where Dave Dellinger and the usual gave the speeches, and then there was a march. We filmed all this, by the way. And then we marched... Maybe we went across a little bridge. I remember a bridge, but I cannot remember that. But then I remember, somebody cut through some field. And we went up this hill, and it led us right to the Pentagon.

SM: Oh, wow.

RP: And that was scary. That was really scary. See, I never sit down in demonstrations. I am taking pictures. I am not going to be one that sits there and let us cops come and hit me on the head. That is scary for me. So people sat down. And the marshals, not even the cops, it's the marshals that were just violent. The marshals went after people and people would not get up. They had their arms locked, and they would just bang them with these long wooden police sticks that they had. And there was tear gas, and a lot of people had bloodied heads.

SM: I think there were 100,000 people at that.

RP: Yeah, they were little old ladies and all sorts of stuff. I have got thousands of photographs.

SM: That is the one where that picture of the guy with the flower in his gun... I think that came from there.

RP: Yeah, it did. Exactly.

SM: That one of your pictures, or?

RP: You know what? I do not know which ones you're talking about exactly. I remember a picture with... The kid had put a flower in the end of the gun.

SM: When I look at all these, you were... Boy, it's amazing the things that you covered, beginning with Chicago. I saw the entire list, but up against the Wall, the Miss America. You did-

RP: That was great. That was really my most fun thing. We got on a bus in New York, and there was this great Black woman, one of the very first Black women lawyers who's now dead, but she got on our bus with us. And I was always a fan of hers. She's very radical. And we went down to, where was it? Asbury Park, or? I am trying to think where it happened.

SM: Atlantic City?

RP: Where?

SM: Was it Atlantic City?

RP: Yeah, Atlantic City. And it was a group of women... I went as a photographer. You got to understand, I was not the organizer of this event. But Beverly Grant, who worked in the office with me in Newsreel, she is a member of Newsreel, was also part of the group that organized this. So her part of this was to go inside. They got tickets and a certain time. They had stink bombs, whatever that means. It's something that you... There's ammonia, and it smells like ammonia, and they were going to let them go inside where the pageant was being held. And the person with Beverly got arrested immediately for some reason. Maybe they saw her doing it. And Beverly did take some photographs, and I was outside the entire time. And I, basically, was taking photographs outside. And they brought a sheep, and they began comparing Miss America to the sheep. And we made a short little... Maybe 15-minute film about that event.

SM: The other one that I really have to see is Bess Myerson speaking at the Women's-

RP: Another Mother for Peace.

SM: When I saw the that on the list, I went immediately to-

RP: That was not a Newsreel film. That was a film that we found, somebody gave us. And I just kept a copy. I made Bess Myerson a copy for it. She found out about it. I made her a print of it.

SM: My golly. Well, I got to definitely see that, because I would have never thought that-

RP: But all she did was... It was the Beverly Hills Women's Group, Another Mother for Peace, a luncheon in a fancy hotel. She gave this great speech.

SM: Well, you covered all these major things. You were up at Harvard dealing with the ROTC. You were-

RP: It was not all me. It was my group.

SM: Yeah, it was your group, but-

RP: So, I did not... The group, various people did various things. I am not going to take credit for doing all those things.

SM: The Earth Belongs to the People was another one.

RP: First ecology film, that was the very first ecology film ever made.

SM: 79 Springs of Ho Chi Minh.

RP: That, by the way, was made by Santiago Álvarez, a great Cuban filmmaker. We distributed it.

SM: Troublemakers was one. Yippie, you did a short one-

RP: Oh, Yippie has a lot of footage... It's a spoof on the Chicago convention, and it is hilarious. Daley got scared that the Yippies were going to put LSD in the Lake, park. And so Abbey Hoffman and a few other people worked on that film. I did a little work on it with this guy, Bill Jersey, in his studio. Was not a Newsreel film, but it should have been because it's one of our more popular films. And that shows them in a... Keystone cops, 1930s car. And they're all dressed up like cops. And they have their big billy clubs out, and they're hitting the water to try to get rid of the LSD in it.

SM: My gosh.

RP: It is hilarious.

SM: Yeah. And another thing too is, this is an area which I have not been able to get a whole lot of information on, is the Young Lord's film and the Puerto Rican-

RP: That was my favorite group.

SM: And the Puerto Ricans-

RP: In Newsreel, we had different groups that you hung out with. I am still friends with these Young Lords, by the way. Do you ever watch Amy Goodman on PBS?

SM: Yes, I have.

RP: On Democracy Now! It's Amy Goodman and Juan González.

SM: Yes.

RP: He was one of the leaders, he was actually my boyfriend at that time, of the Young Lords.

SM: Well, that is the one area that I have not been able to get anybody to talk about. I emailed a couple scholars, and they did not respond.

RP: The Young Lords?

SM: Somebody who teaches at different universities, to talk about the Puerto Rican movement, the Young Lords, that actually followed the Black Panthers in many respects.

RP: That is right. And they took their berets, the Black Berets. And they were very much like the Panthers. And we made this great film because they did a takeover of a church in the Puerto Rican community in New York that was never used. Only on Sundays was it used, and the people had already moved out of that community because they went to nicer communities. Because that community was... Gotten really trashed and was really poor. And it's on the edge of Harlem. And so, they demanded that the church be able to be used for a free breakfast program. And the minister would not let them do that, so they ended up taking over the church.

SM: If you have any contacts from the Young Lords, I would love to talk to them because I would like to-

RP: Juan González.

SM: Would he ever speak to me though?

RP: Why would not he?

SM: Well, he is a TV personality.

RP: Oh, I do not know. I have got another guy who is really good. His name is Mickey Melendez.

SM: N-I-K-K-I?

RP: Friend. He and I are... Well, Juan was my boyfriend actually at one point. So, I do not know. Maybe he would speak to you, maybe he would not. What do I know? Because I am not really good friends. He is very quiet and shy, and I do not see him very much. But Mickey Melendez was very important in that takeover. And he lives in... I have his phone number. I will give you his phone number. And you can use my name if you want. If you want me to, [inaudible]-

SM: Can you email that to me?

RP: Let me just give it to you right now.

SM: Okay, let me-

RP: You have a pen?

SM: Yep.

RP: Give me a minute. I am just going to pull it up. I am pulling it up on my cell phone. Mickey... Mickey, come on. M-I-C-K... Why do not I have it here? Oh, here it is. It's is easier for me to do this, like this, right now. Because if you ask me to do something later, I may not do it. Are you ready?

SM: Yep.

RP: 646-251-7745. So tell him what you're doing. You're writing this book. Is that what you're doing?

SM: Yes.

RP: And just who you are, and that I gave you his phone number.

SM: And his name is Mickey Melendez?

RP: Melendez. And he is very important in the Young Lords. He plays a big part in the takeover of the church. The other thing the Young Lords did was they... We had a bunch of radical doctors, who I actually just saw them, one of them, this guy Michael. And Lincoln Hospital, which is in the Bronx, where all the Puerto Ricans and Blacks would be sent... Mickey worked with doing a lot of medical stuff with Puerto Ricans, and making use of that hospital, and training people to be first aid stuff and things. And one of the great things they did is the Young Lords stole a New York City Health van, and brought it down into Spanish Harlem and did lead poisoning of the kids, testing for it.

SM: Oh.

RP: Because those vans used to just sit there. They did really great actions like that.

SM: How do you spell his first name?

RP: M-I-C-K-E-Y, Mickey.

SM: Oh, just like Mickey Mantle.

RP: Miguel.

SM: Just like Mickey Mantle.

RP: Yeah, or Miguel is his real name, but I call him Mickey.

SM: How did you become linked to the Black Panther Party? In other words, how did you develop their trust as a white person?

RP: Okay, now I know. I had to think a minute. So, I always cared about Black people, and I loved the Black Panther Party when they came out.

SM: Let me switch my tape here. Hold on one second.

RP: ...another book, number one. Number two, she has got six relatives-

SM: Oh.

RP: That she is taking care of, somebody in her house. She has got a lot of problems. She has got kids that she has got to deal with. She's got grandkids. She has got a full plate, plus she teacher. And I am pretty good friends with her, actually.

SM: She said not to contact her until she finished her book, and she said it was going to be done by October.

RP: I do not know. October, this coming October?

SM: Yeah, right now. How did you become linked again to the Black Panthers?

RP: All right, this is what happened. I am in radical Newsreel, the film group, and I began filming every time a group of... Every time the Panthers did anything... They were our counterpart. Newsreel, we were all radicals. We had a lot of film, so I started going up to the...I was asked by one of the leaders of the Black Panther Party in New York, if I would come up and show Newsreel films to educate the new recruits of the Panthers in their office. So once a week, every Monday night I think it was, I would leave the office. I would carry this very heavy, turquoise blue projector. I cannot tell you how heavy it was. And I would take one or two films under my arm and my purse, and I would take the subway up to 127th Street. Get out, and I would walk down to...I cannot remember if it was Seventh Avenue, the street that the Panthers' headquarters were on. And this guy, he was in charge of the headquarters and the building space, exactly, and who also was in helping with the new, young recruits, the new, young high school kids, and people who came in. And he would help set me up, and I would show... How I am talking to you about the films, I would talk to these kids about what the films were about. And we would show a film, and we would have a political discussion. And I did that once a week. It would be dark by that time, so then he would walk me back. His name was Zayd Shakur. You heard of Afeni Shakur?

SM: Oh, yes.

RP: Assata Shakur?

SM: Yeah, the [inaudible]-

RP: [inaudible] Shakur? Zayd's grandfather also has the name Shakur. Their family name is Shakur. And I love Zayd. He was the kindest, softest, nicest young guy that you could ever imagine. And Afeni Shakur, Tupac Shakur-

SM: Yes.

RP: They are all part of the same family.

SM: Oh, wow.

RP: And they took that name. Some of them were born into it, but they took the name. And when they would have reunions and parties, I always got invited. And even from Vermont, years later when I left, I would get invited. And I went to the cake company here in Burlington. And I had a cake that said... Made a big sheet cake to bring down for the party that was being held in Connecticut that said, "All power to the people." So I said to the woman who is the baker, I said, "Do you know what that means?" She says, "Does it have something to do with electric company?" And that was the end of that. I tried to explain. So, I always was close to the Black Panthers. I loved the Black Panther people that I met. And to this day, they're still really kind to me, gentle to me. And Zayd Shakur got killed on a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike. And he was really a neat young man, but he worked with the new young students who came into the party. And after I would show the film, and talk about the film, and what was happening in the country, he would walk me back to the subway to make sure I would get on the subway safely. And that was my relationship with him.

SM: I think it's important because there's a lot of misperceptions out there on the part of people who have read history or maybe do not know or do not want to know. Please explain the Panther links to white people and the partnerships they have with Asian Americans, and Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans. Because I do not think a lot of people... I think they isolate them into this one group, and they do not really see the relationships that they had with other people. Could you talk a little bit about that?

RP: Well, I just told you one story about me going down there. And still to this day, when they have reunions, I go to the reunions. And there's that time... I have done a lot of work around other things. You got to understand that this is not all I have done. Because I became friends with a lawyer by the name Elizabeth Fink. Do you know that name?

SM: Yes.

RP: So, Elizabeth Fink worked a lot on Dhoruba Bin Wahad's case. He was a Black Panther member. And I was in her law office, that she shared with a bunch of other people, when they had requested a whole bunch of documents on this whole case and on the Panthers to come. And I was there when they arrived, and there was something like 500,000 documents, big boxes, and boxes, and boxes of stuff. And then they went through the stuff... I never saw that much stuff. And it included all the counterintelligence documents, all the dirty tricks the FBI did that you have only heard about, but it's written down there in black and white. And I said, "Oh, this is incredible." So then, they did an appeal, and a lot of things are blacked out. So the lawyers in the office, Bob Boyle, Elizabeth Fink, and Bob Bloom, they did an appeal. And they asked that all the blacked out materials be un-blackened so we could read and see what it says. Sometimes there would be a whole page blacked out, so you did not know exactly what... So they did this, and they won. And I had this brilliant idea... I always get these brilliant ideas that then cost me years, that I would go through and... Because they were not in any order, anything. They're just how the FBI put it together as things went on. But you would be reading something about some incident, and then maybe 300 pages later, it would go on about that incident, what happened. So, I organized the project here at the University of Vermont. I brought it up for my students and other people in the community. I had a big meeting. I gave them instructions. Each person got one FBI book of documents that covered a certain period of time, maybe let us say 100 or 200 pages of documents. And I gave them a coding form. I worked with a coding form with the computer department. You would say, what was the volume it was from? What page was it? What's the number? The FBI has code numbers on each thing that they do. What is it about? Is it about starting problems between different groups? Is it about schools? Is it about education? Is it about workers? Is there something about race in it? It had about maybe 70 different things that you could mark, the time, the dates, the city that it happened in... And so, I did this. And after a number of years, we collected all this material. And then, we got the computer department at the University of Vermont to enter all the data. And it printed out everything in this order, so we could tell exactly what different things the FBI had done, going through all these 100,000 pages-

SM: Wow.

RP: Documents.

SM: And it was pretty bad, was not it?

RP: Yeah, it was really bad. And the thing is that when we got these documents, so much of the stuff was not marked out. It was not blacked out because... Some of the documents were blacked out. And then Liz Fink, and Bob Boyle, and the attorneys would go to court and demand that certain things be not blacked out. And then, the FBI would have to release things that showed, really, what happened.

SM: Wow.

RP: And so, we would get then better documents that showed us more and told this us more. And then sometimes, you would be reading a document and you did not know what really happened. And then you would read maybe five books later... Let us say, it's 300 pages, 400 pages later. You would come across something else that would fill in the information to tell the story completely. And so, that was a really big project that I did. I got totally obsessed around that because I could not believe that the FBI actually wrote all that stuff out. And not only did they write it out, but then they allowed the lawyers and the clients to see all that. It's just shocking to me. And I got totally turned onto the FBI. And there was one agent who was the biggest sexist... And great writer, brilliant writer, but he is very racist, very sexist. He liked to make jokes about Black people and everything when he made all his comments and his initials. See, we never knew the names of the FBI agents, but the FBI agents on each page, or when they did the reports, would put their initials. And his initials were WAC. So, we called him Agent WAC.

SM: Wow.

RP: And years later, I am reading through some other files, and I see that... Oh, I know what happened. I had gotten some files from the FBI in San Francisco. And when they were duplicating the files for me, or for the lawyers actually, for Liz Fink, they included... I found a page as I was reading it that had all the present-day... Somebody else must have gone to the Xerox machine and said, "Oh, I need a list of everybody who's working in the office right now." And they made a copy of all the FBI agents, with their names and present phone numbers.

SM: Oh my gosh.

RP: So, I got that document, and there's my Agent WAC. And I get his name for the first time. I only knew his initials were W-A-C. His name was William A. Cohendet, D-E-T at the end of his name, Cohendet, but it's Cohendet. And so, I get really excited. And I finally figure out, I am going to call the FBI office and see if I could talk to this guy. But then I do not have my nerve. And then I have this friend who is working for Mike Wallace at CBS. She went through a lot of my stories with me. She said, "Well, let me try... Give me that information. Let me see if I can do it, because maybe CBS will do a story on him." So, she calls me back a week later. And she says, "Well, you know what? That list was a list of the present-day FBI agents." This is years later. This is 20 years later. And that is his son who is also an FBI agent. And his son works there, and he's retired. But she gave me the son's home phone number, so I called up the son. No. She called up the son's home-home number, said it was from CBS. And she spoke to his wife. And his wife said, "Oh, that is his father who worked in those days. I will give you the phone number." So, we got the phone number of Agent WAC. By the time I pulled together a camera team, I pulled together somebody who was Steven Spielberg's cameraman and did all the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. And it was one of the same camera... He had a lot of camera people, but this was one that did them in France, I believe, that survived. I got him, and I got a friend of mine who's a very good sound person, and I called up the number. And I told him we would like to do an interview with him, and he got thrilled. We showed up, it was his 89th birthday. And he was so happy that he got to tell his story and be a star.

SM: Oh my God.

RP: So, we were there all day long, from morning until it started to get dark, and I interviewed him. Part of that interview is on my DVD. You should get the DVD. The story's there.

SM: Yeah, I am definitely going to get it, definitely.

RP: So, I have the interview with him on the DVD, part of it. Edited it, obviously. And then I also have another interview with another FBI agent that I fell in love with... Love meaning just through the paperwork. It's this other guy, Wesley Swearingen, who turned against the FBI at some point. And he got very interested... He was trying to figure out a lot of things. Because he came out to help Geronimo and some other people, and then he thought the FBI was maybe going to kill him. And he had retired already. He got really scared. And he had been in Hawaii, and he lived on a boat for many years. He now lives in Southern California. But anyways, I got him... I wanted to interview him, so I got the University of Vermont to pay him money and bring him to the university to talk about his being an FBI agent, which they did.

SM: Wow.

RP: And I got him a hotel, took him out for dinner with my friends, and we hit it off really well. And the following year, he called me up. And he said, "Roz, I am visiting my in-laws who live in the southern part of the state. And can we come and visit you?" I never have any of my documents. I never saved anything. And this FBI agent is this guy who I think maybe I messed up two of the stories, combined them a little. But this FBI, this is Agent WAC who I am talking about now. And his in-laws, he said, "Oh, my in-laws live in Pittsford." I said, "Oh, I know Pittsford." Because as a joke, some years earlier...I live in this little town, and we have a constable in our town that is elected position. And nobody was running that year. And as a joke, 32 of my friends did not tell me, but they wrote my name in. And I got the most votes so I became Constable in the town.

SM: Oh my gosh.

RP: And then they sent me for a week at the Police Academy to study all the laws of police laws and everything, which is in Pittsford, Pittsfield. And that is where the Police Academy was. So, I said to the guy, "Well, I have been there because I was elected constable, and I went there to study for a week." He says, "Well, meet my wife and all my family and we will take you out to the Radisson for dinner." So I did meet him, and we had dinner. And the first thing his wife says to me is, "You appreciate him more than his own children." And then, we became these immediate friends. I got what I call my costume. I got all dressed up. I changed how I normally look a little, and made myself very proper. And so, it was... a little and myself very proper. And so, that is how I got to know these two agents. And through them, I got a lot of information. And they're both on my DVD. I did two interviews with both of them. This DVD, besides having just some newsreel films, the extras is the main thing. It's nothing that you sit and watch all the way through because there's like maybe a PDF file at the very end. You turn off the DVD player and you look at it. There's a way of having to look at a PDF file on a DVD. And there's probably like, I do not know, 500 items on it, which includes all the Panther position papers and FBI documents that they wrote about them and all sorts of stuff.

SM: Did not you have even yourself have an FBI record of over a thousand pages?

RP: I have FBI [inaudible]. It's kind of boring. It's basically that I was seen at this event or seen at that event.

SM: Oh, okay.

RP: I never really did anything. I mean, I am not brave like a lot of people. I never got in trouble. I never got arrested. I was there as a camera person or as a demonstrator. My mother told me, "Do not get arrested. Escape if you can." And that is what I always followed, her words. Because being arrested is not fun.

SM: One of the things I wanted to ask is why did the Black Panther party begin? No, you already talked about that. Why do a lot of people believe that they were a violent group like the Weathermen? I have talked to a lot of different people, and I cannot pick on any specific person, but when they talk about how the anti-war movement and civil rights and how the movements all went negative toward the end of the (19)60s and early (19)70s, they bring up the Weathermen, they bring up the American Indian movement, which went violent at Wounded Knee, and they bring up the Black Panthers. Now-

RP: All right, let me speak to that.

SM: Yeah.

RP: I mean, I know your question, but let me do Wounded Knee first [inaudible]. Wounded Knee, these Native people were on their own land at Wounded Knee. And who was surrounding them? Who had a blockade that kept food from coming in? Do you know?

SM: Well, I would think it would be the police.

RP: Yes. So, that was Native land. I mean, in this country, you have a right to defend yourself.

SM: Right.

RP: All right. So, I am not even going to get into that. You can go online and read what Bill Cussler, their attorneys, and various other people have written about that and what they have written about it themselves. That was their land. And there's no reason at all that the US government should have been there. My opinion. All right. The second thing about the Panthers. The Panthers and Black people have been killed for years. They have been lynched, they have been hung, they have been beaten, they have been horribly treated, and they have a right to defend themselves and not allow themselves to be lynched and hung and beaten like that. And in this country, you have a right to carry a gun. You have a right to self-defense. And none of those Panthers ever shot, to my knowledge, at anybody unless the cops were shooting at them. Actually, there's a film out right now, and we're showing it at our film festival. It's the son of one of the Black Panthers that was involved in the LA shootout of the Black Panther headquarters. He's a young man. He studied film editing at USC, and his father and his father's friend, one of them had gotten shot when the police came and just did not like the Panthers, so they're going to shoot up their headquarters. They went to South Central LA and shot up. The father's a minister, and his friend still walks with a limp from being shot in the leg. He was on the roof, and there were no guns there at all. White people carry guns. You're allowed to go hunting, you're allowed to protect yourself. There's gun control that Blacks cannot have guns, and only whites can have guns. Only police can have guns. There were some Panthers that did bad drugs, and some of them maybe did things that were not too cool. I am not going to mention names or anything, but there were Panthers that were violent. But then you have to take each case and each thing by itself and you cannot link a whole group of people like all men or all white women or whatever it is, or all Weather people did this because it was not all. Sometimes there's somebody who does something that is not a good thing. And so, I think what happened is the Panthers, as soon as the media... And I blame the media for some of this, got a hold of the Panthers when they had guns to protect themselves. You know how many Black people were killed before Panthers had guns? They felt like they have a right in this country, have a right to have a gun. I mean, people in my town, I live in Vermont, there was a girl that lived here, and we used to walk around with a... What are they called? Around your waist. You have a holster. Is that what they're called?

SM: Mm-hmm.

RP: There was a gun in it. And during the hunting time, there's guns. Everybody has guns in their racks of their cars. But if they were Black people, I bet you it would be another story.

SM: And they forget the fine things that they did do, which is certainly the lunch program for poor kids, the sickle cell anemia drives to raise funds for that. There's a lot of issues that were very positive. Do not you somewhat blame the media though here? Because the media... I am just throwing a question out here. The media has a tendency to show the sensational every time. It's the sensational, the black berets, the intimidation, the guns, which is part of it. And two specific instances stand to mind. One was when the Black Panthers in California surrounded the Alameda County courthouse.

RP: I was there, by the way.

SM: Oh, were you?

RP: Yeah. And it's one of our films, on my DVD about... My big box set on the Black Panthers, it has that film in it.

SM: Well, it was that scene and then the one we all know at Cornell in 1969, which was the students coming out of the union there with guns.

RP: Do you have a picture of that? We cannot find these picture... And I remember seeing one picture, but I-

SM: I have the magazine front cover of, I think it's Newsweek, that I will send you.

RP: I would love to see it because I am trying to figure out... Because it was the anniversary of that, and I was trying to figure out where... There was a film made about it, but I cannot even find that anymore.

SM: I know Harry Edwards was the graduate student there who was kind of the advisor of that group. Of course, Harry went on to be a sociology professor at Berkeley and wrote Black Students, which is a great book. He's retired now. But those are the two scenes. You see students at Cornell and you see the Black Panthers at Alameda County courthouse. And what-

RP: Alameda County courthouse, I have a whole film. It's on that DVD. But there were no guns at that. There were no guns at all. There was marching around the courthouse.

SM: Okay. Well, the picture was seen all over the place.

RP: I might have to change phones. This phone is starting to go dead, the battery.

SM: Is that your cell phone?

RP: I got find my other telephone because this one's starting to go dead, I think.

SM: All right.

RP: Oh, here. Maybe this one will work better.

SM: Okay. You're still coming through pretty strong.

RP: No, but I hear it be starting to beep. It's warning me. Hold on a minute.

SM: Okay.

RP: Can you hear me?

SM: Yup.
RP: Okay, let me try this phone. I have got four phones downstairs on the same line.

SM: All right.

RP: The one I was talking to you starts beeping, so it gives me a warning that it might go dead.

SM: Could you, in your own words, talk about the fine things that the Black Panthers did do? I know I listed them. But it's my understanding too, because I have read about President Johnson, did not he take the food program and try to incorporate that into a program within the federal government? There's something there that they-

RP: [01:51:34] sounds familiar about it. But they did start the breakfast program. There had never been a breakfast program. Because kids were hungry going to school in the morning. You cannot think if you do not have a good breakfast. And they would have grits and eggs and blah, blah. That is why the Young Lords had that fight over taking over the church because they wanted to also have the breakfast program there.

SM: Right. When you look at the unique personalities of the leaders of the Black Panthers, Black Panthers are never looked upon, in my understanding, as a... They did not have weekly meetings.

RP: They did.

SM: Did they have weekly meetings?

RP: Oh, yeah.

SM: Did they have membership drives?

RP: Well, I do not know that they had a membership drive, but they were always having new recruits coming in.

SM: Yeah, well-

RP: Because I actually did a PR class with new recruits one time. I showed them the old Panther film, and there was somebody else... In fact, that is what I was going up to Harlem with the projectors, to show the film to new recruits. I did it weekly.

SM: There's about seven or eight personalities that were nationally known that were leaders of the party. The ones that seem to have the positive image, I will mention them first. Kathleen Cleaver seemed to have a more positive image in the minds of many people, as did Eldridge Cleaver, because he was also a writer. And even David Horowitz will say that he was a very good writer, when Soul On Ice was written. And actually, he said he did not have as much of problem with Eldridge as he did with everybody else.

RP: David said that?

SM: Well, David, I interviewed him over a year ago, so I am trying to think of... But it seemed like the only one-

RP: Only one you cannot imagine. David and I debated each other, by the way, at an academic conference on popular culture. And he's just horrible around the Panthers. And I will tell you why I think he's horrible. This woman, Kay... Kay Spender, maybe. Kay something. She was white, and he brought her over to do bookkeeping for the Panthers. He brought her over to Oakland. There's a bar there that the Panthers used to hang out. It was very close to where Huey's penthouse apartment was. He would sometimes get take-out food sent up to his place. I know a lot of this from the FBI files, reading them, by the way. And Kay Spender one day disappeared. She was at the bar, she left to go home and she was never seen again. No body, nothing. And David was the one that brought her over to the Panthers. David Horowitz, that is. And got her set up to be their bookkeeper. And he blamed, this is my opinion, he blamed himself for her disappearance and her probably death. And what happened to her? Who knows? Because there was never any sign of anything about what happened. It could have been that she was drunk walking home and passed out or some guy grabbed her or she drowned in the water. I mean, who knows? I do not know anything. I cannot imagine why Panthers would do anything because she used to do their bookkeeping, unless she knew something that she should not have known. I do not know.

SM: Well, I know that... Was not her name Mary Van Petton? Patton?

RP: I do not know, maybe.

SM: I think it was a different name. But he became a conservative as a result of this experience.

RP: Well, he hates the Panthers. He probably hates them as much as he hates me, because I did so well in that... I have debated him a few times and people love what I say, and they tell him to shut up.

SM: Yeah. We had him on our campus a couple times. But looking at these individuals, you have got to admit that Huey Newton does not have a good reputation, from all the-

RP: Huey Newton is not somebody that I loved. He's a high-liver. And he used Panther money. He had a penthouse apartment, he used designer drugs like coke and various other things. A lot of white people did that too, a lot of movie stars did that too, but they did not get harassed by the police. And he was a very good speaker at times, from what I hear. I have heard him speak a few times just on tape, but I do not really know him and I am not into bad-mouthing him or protecting him, because I do not really know. He was West Coast. I only really knew the East Coast-

SM: The other one that has a really bad name is H. Rap Brown, who's actually in jail for the rest of his life, I think.

RP: Yeah. Well, I am not going to get into him, but I do not know him at all.

SM: But Stokely Carmichael seemed to have a lot of respect-

RP: Yeah, he was.

SM: ... because of the fact he had been involved with SNCC.

RP: He was in SNCC. I only heard him speak a few times, and he was very bright, I thought.

SM: And then Kathleen Cleaver seems to have a lot of respect.

RP: Very respectful of people too.

SM: And Eldridge is a sad story in its own right.

RP: Yeah. Well, Eldridge became later a Moonie. You know that?

SM: Yes.

RP: I saw him, he came to the University of Vermont. The Moonies brought him here. And so, I went out in the parking lot waiting for him to come because I wanted him to sign this book I had. And he looked at the book, it was one of the old Panther books. He says, "I ain't signing that shit." He was really pissed. And he got into crack cocaine. I mean, he became a really bad drug addict. And anybody who's a really bad drug addict at some point, you cannot take them [inaudible].

SM: The killing of Fred Hampton was a sad thing too, in Chicago.

RP: Yeah.

SM: Because they said he was [inaudible].

RP: Plus, the cops did that. Right?

SM: Yeah.

RP: And he was a very bright young man.

SM: In the materials I have here, you were at all these events.

RP: I was not at the killing of Fred Hampton.

SM: No, no, no, no. But the Free Huey... There were Free Huey-

RP: Free Huey, off the pigs.

SM: Yeah. And then also Free Bobby at New Haven. And then-

RP: I was there.

SM: And then Free the 21 in New York City.

RP: I was there.

SM: So those are all major trials.

RP: Yeah. Well, I loved the Panthers, number one, and so did all my friends. That is the other thing. It was a big social thing for us. And I loved Afeni Shakur, I still love Afeni Shakur. I remember Tupac Shakur when he was a little baby. And I remember the grandfather. In fact, grandfather, who was his old man, a very dignified man. My politics, my (19)60s politics, I grew up with them. They were there from the beginning of my politics. So it was like I matured with them and I knew them from places and from events. The East Coast Panthers. Then at times, I went out because we started up a San Francisco newsreel. They said, "Hey, you got to come out here and make a film." We said, "You better make your own films. We're going to send some people out and you're going to find some filmmakers, and you're going to learn how to use cameras because we cannot be every place."

SM (01:59:34):
You talked about COINTELPRO. My interview this morning, we talked about it as well. I had another person I interviewed this morning from California. Explain in your own words what was COINTELPRO and what did it do to activists that... In one of the articles that I read on you, [inaudible] talked about Jean Seberg the actress. Then the experience you had with Dr. Curtis Powell, that you had to walk with him into his apartment. What they tried to do to Bobby Seal and Kathleen Cleaver and the Yippies and SNCC and Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

RP: I do not know anything about SCLC or SNCC, really. The counterintelligence program, you should... Have you ever interviewed any FBI agents that-

SM: No, I cannot. I know if anybody would ever speak to me.

RP: Yeah, I know somebody that will.

SM: Oh.

RP: He is a very important guy.

SM: Okay.

RP: You got to get my DVD. I have two FBI agents on my DVD. You will not get better talks than that. You can use any material you want from that.

SM: All right.

RP: The DVD, I have one of the most important FBI agents, and he's written a book exposing the FBI. And the other one is the one that is dead now, that opened up the case in San Francisco on the Panthers, because he was in the San Francisco office and he was assigned it. And he just sat there and he wrote up what happened every day. It was very boring to him. The informers would come in and he would get all these notes and he would just put it in a report. The thing was that he was a great writer. And he told funny jokes and he made fun of people, and he was sexist and he was racist. He wrote all these reports to send to his fellow FBI agent that he knew from the academy when he went to the academy. And he told me right in my DVD, he said, "I was writing the reports for them." They said, "Keep them coming. They're hilarious." He's dead now. I give you permission to use whatever you want from any of my DVD. If you want an FBI agent who wants to talk about it.

SM: Because you see, the book is about the boomer generation and the young people that grew up, but they all experienced all this. They all saw these things. They became influenced by it. And the people that are going to read these oral histories, they're going to be... Well, they may not be reading history books. So, if you could, in just a few words, talk about what COINTELPRO or what they did to the actress Jean Seberg-

RP: Okay. Well-

SM: And-

RP: What COINTELPRO did was it tried to destroy people's lives. It tried to make people look bad. It tried to embarrass people. It told lies and set up situations so that people sometimes could not face the media getting hold of these things. It was, the main thing, was the counterintelligence program to destroy, in this case, the Black Panther party. I mean, they have a counterintelligence program to destroy, let us say, the Young Lord's party or to destroy the Weathermen. The counterintelligence [02:03:26] used dirty tricks to destroy people and the FBI was pretty good at it. And in some cases, they were not very good. But with the Black Panthers, they would send out letters to people saying, "Beware. So-and-so just reported you to the police." Or "Beware. Jean Seberg is carrying a Black baby." When it was born, somebody saw the fetus and it was Black. " And we're going to feed her to the Hollywood gossip columnist..." What was her name? Jean Haber? No. Jean somebody. And some people think that that was one of the reasons that she may have killed herself, if she did kill herself, because she was embarrassed about all that, Jean Seberg.

SM: Was it a Black fetus?

RP: I do not know. I was not there.

SM: Oh, I read it was a white fetus. She went around with it or something like that.

RP: Jean Seberg went around with the fetus?

SM: Yes, she did.

RP: Where did you get that?

SM: I read it in one of the... I will have to email that to you too. It was in one of the articles.

RP: Well, you cannot believe everything you... I mean, I am not-

SM: Yeah.

RP: But what they did is they tried to make people look bad and embarrass people. That is the main thing about it. And sometimes, people could not take it and destroyed their lives and sometimes they killed themselves. Or sometimes they dropped out of being political people because they could not take their families knowing about [inaudible].

SM: What always amazes me is that we do live in a democracy where liberty is always protected. And of course, liberty is divine, is freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion. But here we have this COINTELPRO group that survived through '75. And then we have the FBI and the CIA, that have been infiltrating groups for years, and they destroyed many lives. In a quote that you put down here is that, "Democracy is based on openness and the existence of a secret policy, secret lists of dissident citizens, violates the spirit of democracy." That was a quote from you.

RP: I cannot remember half the things I say or wrote.

SM: Well, I was looking-

RP: I have been looking forward to getting your book. Is it a book you're doing or what?

SM: Yeah. You have time for a couple more questions?

RP: Yeah, sure.

SM: Yeah. You have been teaching, co-teaching, a course at the (19)60s at Burlington College for a while?

RP: Yeah.

SM: How-

RP: Not a co-teacher, I was teaching it alone.

SM: Yeah. How do the students react to courses like this, and how does the administration at the university respond to anything of the (19)60s? Because my experience has been that universities are afraid of the term "activism" due to the memories and the lessons from the (19)60s.

RP: Where do you teach?

SM: Oh, I used to be at Westchester University, not anymore.

RP: Okay. Well, let me tell you, where I teach... Well, I am off right now. But I had been teaching at Burlington College in Vermont. You know who our dean is?

SM: No, I do not.

RP: Do you know who Bernie Sanders-

SM: Oh, I know Bernie. Yes. Former congressman.

RP: Well, his wife was our dean.

SM: Oh, okay. That speaks for itself.

RP: But I was teaching there before she became the dean, and she actually has been very rude to me.

SM: Oh, no.

RP: And she actually is one of the reasons I am not teaching there now. But do not say anything about that.

SM: Oh, no, I will not.

RP: But it's a big long story. But I think I was ready to retire anyway.

SM: Yeah. What did the student protest movement teach universities in the (19)60s? What do you feel the universities learned from it, and maybe what have they forgotten?

RP: This is how I do my class. I give a little talk in the beginning, whatever the subject matter is, and then I show them one of the newsreel films. Because the pictures and seeing the real thing, there's nothing can beat that from that time. So, they see a film every time, and we have a discussion before the film, and we have a discussion after the film, and then they have to write impressions and write papers. That is about how all my classes are. And luckily, I have the whole collection of newsreel films. And the reason that newsreel films are so good is they're not slick Hollywood films. They're like real life. They're a little jumpy, they're running in the street with a camera. Cops are chasing us or whatever it is. And they cannot believe some of the stuff. They love it. They love those films because it's like real life.

SM: Well, the students love them, but do the universities love them?

RP: Yeah, but I am telling you where I teach, I teach at [inaudible] College. The other thing is, the universities love our films because who's the person that buys 90 percent of the films that I sell? The universities.

SM: Yes.

RP: Cornell, Harvard, Syracuse, Princeton, NYU, UCLA, Santa Barbara, SF State. I mean, all these schools have collections of our films because nobody else has done (19)60s like we have done them. We have done the burning of... One of the most radical events that ever happened in Santa Barbara, my first year of college, I went to Santa Barbara. And of course, I was not there when the burning of the Bank of America happened, that was one of the first radical things in Santa Barbara, was all these blonde crew cut boys and little blonde flipped girls burned down the Bank of America in Santa Barbara. Never happened before on our campus.

SM: Why would they do that?

RP: You know story?

SM: Well, I know that it happened, but I cannot remember why.

RP: Because there was a professor, they were going to fire a professor that they liked. And he was a political person. That started it. I mean, there were other issues, I am sure.

SM: Are there any myths about the boomer generation that you would like to comment on from your point of view? Any myth?

RP: Like what?

SM: Oh, that is why I am asking. Are there any myths?

RP: Tell me what you mean by a myth.

SM: A myth is a story that is-

RP: I know, that is not true. But give me an example of something [inaudible].

SM: A hundred percent of the students were activists. That is a myth. It only about 10 percent.

RP: That is not even a truth.

SM: Right.

RP: I do not know about myths, I guess.

SM: Are there any truths about the boomer generation and their times that are still being used to mislead the American public about the times when boomers were young, through today? And that might be linked to the criticisms that the era that the boomers grew up in is often attacked as the era where all our problems started. Because of drugs, sex, rock and roll.

RP: Rock and roll.

SM: Long hair, lack of respect for authority. Challenging your point of view, the welfare state, the isms and all the other stuff.

RP: What's the question around those again?

SM: The question is, are there any truths about the boomer generation, their times, that are still being used to mislead?

RP: Oh, I do not know about still being used because I am not really... I do not hang out with people that think like that, so I do not hear that so much. And I do not hear it on TV. I watch a lot of TV. And when I travel, I am talking... For example, three months ago, I got a grant to go to Mississippi to study Mississippi and Tennessee, but mainly Mississippi, to study the Civil Rights period. They're community college teachers, I am with like 40 community college teachers. And when you're teaching community college, you're taking for granted that these students are probably not as wealthy as regular university students, maybe. Or maybe they're not as smart. I mean, I do not know what people would think myth-wise. But the teachers there were some of the most brilliant teachers I have ever met. They talked in a language that the students could understand. And it was really interesting. I spent one week with them living, sleeping, getting up in the morning, eating, traveling. We got on a bus and we went out to the delta and we went and parked in front of the store where Emmett Till went... Where supposedly the girl was there that he whistled at. We hung out there. We went to Fannie Lou Hamer's house. We did all this stuff. And all those people there were community college teachers. I mean, they knew as much, or if not more, politics than I did, some of them. And they were brilliant. They had none of those myths that you would even think about. I never heard anything come out of any of their mouths. And they were from Texas, they were from Florida. Just community colleges. They were just like normal students who got their degree and went to teach in a community college.

SM: When did the (19)60s begin and end, in your opinion? And what was the watershed moment?

RP: Oh, God. Well, I do not know. I am a little confusing around that issue because you got to realize that I grew up political. All my life, I was a political person because I got it from... My parents were political. I knew nothing. I sometimes say I was brainwashed into it because that is what I knew. And that is how they acted and the way that they dealt with Black people or workers or anybody was always like this wonderful way. Did they drink? My mother did not, but my father sometimes would have a beer at night when he got home. He was a working man. I grew up in a working-class family and so, for me, I never had any pretensions of anything except a certain type of life. And you told the truth and you worked hard and you tried to help other people. So, I do not know. I mean, I do not know in my world that I ever actually encountered that. What I did encounter at some point, one of the first things that made me rebel... I do not know. It's hard to say. I do not know. I mean, I grew up in LA and Hollywood. I mean, it's very different than growing up in a normal place.

SM: That is okay for your answer. Some people give a specific event or period or whatever for the beginning and the end of the (19)60s, in their opinion.

RP: Well, I mean, miniskirts was not like the (19)60s - Miniskirts was not like the (19)60s, was it?

SM: Yeah, that was the (19)60s.

RP: What year was that?

SM: It was around (19)63, (19)64.

RP: Okay. Well, one of the things that happened to me, I always liked clothes, was when I was teaching school in New Jersey and the teacher sent me home from school because my skirt was too short. The teacher told me to go home and change. What's that?

SM: That is okay. And that was a watershed moment.

RP: That was a big watershed moment. And that is when I quit teaching.

SM: Another thing...

RP: That is when I decided to move to New York and I looked for that apartment. I told you that story, and then I...

SM: Yes.

RP: But that was a personal attack upon me. The other thing that that school did, here's another thing, the war in Vietnam, now I am thinking about it, the war in Vietnam was going on, and this is in New Jersey. This was in North Bergen, New Jersey, which is the town that I was living in at the time. And the Jersey Journal, I think was the name of the newspaper, but I am not sure. But some local newspaper sent out to all the schools these petitions that say we support our boys in Vietnam. And we were supposed to get all of our students to sign it. Well, first of all, I left it there. I said, if anybody wants to sign it, you can sign it. But then later that afternoon, when they were supposed to turn them in to the office, later that afternoon, I was walking through the office and nobody was there. I grabbed all the petitions and threw them away. So that was pretty intense for me. I knew I was quitting. I think that was probably the day I was quitting, I think. I did not care.

SM: Well, one of the things that you discussed when Newsreel did their films, is revolution is a term that was used by the new left, and the Panthers used it all the time, too. Do you feel though, in the eyes of many, that that term "revolution" hurts the legitimacy in the eyes of critics?

RP: Oh, I never worry about things like that, because what does the word revolution mean? How would you define it?

SM: Like the American Revolution.

RP: Right. That is a positive thing, is not it?

SM: Yes, it is.

RP: I did not understand what you said about critics, then.

SM: Well, for example, when we did the... In 1976 with the bicentennial, there was a group that we brought to campus that was under the leadership of Jeremy Rifkin, and it was the People's Bicentennial Commission. And the basic premise was that the founding fathers were revolutionaries. Well, that really upset people in Ohio, because we had a program with William Pells, one of the professors who came in to talk about the revolutionaries. And we had the Daughters from the American Revolution there saying, how dare you say that these were radicals? And it was a Midwest, and they were very upset with the use of the term "revolution" and "radical". So that was just an example.

RP: Well, I do not know. I do not really know because I am never really fussy about certain things. I am more of an activist. I just do my thing and I have my friends and we do it together. And I am not trying to get any place or be any place, or whatever happened to me was basically not necessarily planned.

SM: We took a group of students to Washington in and to talk about the year 1968, and we met with Senator Muskie, and we thought he was going to talk about the convention of (19)68. And the question was this, that the students asked him, and I will give you his response after I get yours, the question was, due to the divisions that were so intense in the Boomer generation during the (19)60s and (19)70s, do you feel that this generation of 74 million will go to its grave, like the Civil War generation, with bitterness and dislike and hatred toward opponents, similar to what happened during the Civil War in the areas of Black versus white, male versus female, gay versus straight, pro-war, anti-war, pro-troops, anti-troops. And that was a question we asked, and we waited for his response.

RP: What would he say?

SM: I want to hear your response first. Do you think we have a problem? Even within the Black Panthers, is there any healing or is not healing necessary?

RP: They have had healing, yes. Panthers have actually had a lot of healing stuff. And I think you have to have some type of healing stuff go on, somewhat. But you cannot have healing stuff for people who are dangerous and can kill people or kill other people. So, I do not know. I do not really know, because I have never had very many enemies to tell you the truth. For example, I did not like, at the end of Eldridge Cleaver's life, he came to UVM and he was working... The Moonies were paying his salary. I thought that was disgusting. And he said things that were disgusting things, and I would never go to see him again after that. And then he was found in an alleyway doing crack. He ruined his life. He ruined everything that he originally stood for. The people would put out bottles in Berkeley while he was being a crackhead and stuff. And people have picked them up and turned the money and the money went into the free clinic. And he would send out his guys to pick up earlier in the morning to take the bottles so they could keep the money. So there's things like that. I would just ignore the guy. That is the most I could say. He was important at his time when things were happening in the beginning, and then the drugs took over and it made him a bad person, I guess.

SM: There's a couple of quotes here that I want to put in the record. These are your quotes. This is from you: "We produce various films that these groups could use to tell their stories and to use in organizing their own communities and workplaces, hopefully serving as a catalyst for social change." Another very important quote from you, and again, this is for the record: " The only news we saw was on TV and we knew who owned the stations. We decided to make films that would show another side of the news. It was clear that the established forms of media were not going to approach those subjects which threatened their very existence." And then the last one here was...

RP: Where did you get that quote from?

SM: I got that quote from... I would have to send that, too.

RP: No, the reason I am asking, I agree with that statement, by the way it is not that I do not disagree with it. What I think is the language of that-

SM: Hold on one second because my tape is running out here. Hold on, one second. Okay. Let me get my... Bear with me.

RP: Okay, I am not rushing.

SM: Okay.

RP: I am doing my taxes, believe it or not.

SM: Taxes?

RP: Yeah. I screwed up.

SM: Oh, my goodness.

RP: And my whole living room floor has about 30 piles.

SM: Oh no.

RP: I am not doing it right now while I am talking to you, but I have been doing it for three days. I thought I only had to do it around certain business stuff or something else. But now my accountant told me I only have to do it around my film business.

SM: Oh.

RP: So, I have been working for four days on all this stuff because I save every piece of paper, but I do not file it right, organize it. It is all in one thing. So, I have been filing, I have been redoing things. So, I am looking at my living room. It is just unreal. But I think that quote that you just read to me, should I go on?

SM: Yes.

RP: I know that I said that we knew who owns whatever it was. I cannot remember exactly what you said.

SM: Yeah, "I know who owns the stations."

RP: Yes. I am wondering where specifically you got that. When did I say that? Because I am wondering, it sounds like ... I believe it totally. I could have said it, but you know what? So, could a lot of other people in Newsreel said it.

SM: Yeah.

RP: I could have picked it up from something that somebody else said.

SM: Yeah. I actually have all the notes here. Hold on one second. I might be able to find that. Oh, here it is. I think this is it. No, that is it. I might have to email you that too. I will email you.

RP: Yeah. Well, you know what? Because that sounds like to me in the old days, I would say, "Right on." It was a right on quote. But it's sounds a little sophisticated for how I talk. But then maybe sometimes I talk like that.

SM: Well, the last quote here is another one, and that is that, "Newsreel worked to expand the awareness of events and situations relevant to shaping the movement. Our films try to analyze, not just cover. They explore the realities of the media as part of the system always ignores."

RP: It is part that the system always ignores. I could have said that though. I do not know. It is definitely what we think about Newsreel. But it also could have been ... Because I could have been sitting around with a group of my friends who were in Newsreel and that could have been something from one of our leaflets that we wrote or something. I do not know.

SM: I am almost done here. But what happens at Panther reunions? How many come to those, number one? And do you keep track of any of the Panthers who died when they were young and how many continued to fight as they got older?

RP: Okay. Well, I have gone to lots of reunions. I have gone to Washington DC, I have gone to San Francisco, I have gone to New York. I have gone to smaller reunions that have to do with specific chapters. When I go, by the way, I like to hang out with Kathleen Cleaver because I really love her. She is a great talker, very bright. And I have got a few other people, this guy Billy Jennings ... Are you really interested in Panthers?

SM: Oh yeah. I have very interested in Panthers. I got all of Bobby Seale's books. I got –

RP: All right. Let me tell you a website to go to.

SM: Oh, okay.

RP: This guy is the most brilliant, smartest. He is the Panther archivist.

SM: Now, where is my pen? I got too much stuff here.

RP: It is okay. I went and got a pencil. I do not even have it anymore. And I have [inaudible].

SM: Okay, I got it. I got a pen.

RP: All right. His name is Billy Jennings is his name.

SM: Billy...

RP: Jennings. J-E-N-N-I-N-G-S. He is out of San Francisco. No, he is out of Sacramento. But his website is, write this down exactly how I tell you. I-T-S.

SM: I-T-S.

RP: It is about, A-B-O-U-T, time, T-I-M-E, B-P-P.

SM: B?

RP: B as in Black Panther Party.

SM: Right.

RP: P-P. His website is, it is About Time B-P-P, I believe.

SM: All right.

RP: His name is Billy Jennings. And he is the smartest, he's the best archivist of the Black Panther Party.

SM: And how old is he?

RP: He is younger than me. But he is married to a woman now who opened the one of the Black Panther free clinics. She's a doctor. And she is white. And I think they both had separate families at some point. They have been married for a really a long time. And he is basically, for the last 20 years, one of the main organizers of pulling the Panther reunions together. And they are brilliant. And he is brilliant. He is very smart. He knows the history better than anybody.

SM: Does he go out and speak on college campuses?

RP: Yeah, he does a lot of stuff. He is fabulous.

SM: Oh, wow.

RP: He is smart. He is interesting. He knows everything, does trips. And he is not a poor guy, I do not know what he is, but I know that he travels quite a bit. He knows everybody. And if you do not get the website, you would have to email me and I will have to look up, maybe I said it wrong, the site. But you could find out everybody who died, how they died. You can find out about all the programs. You can find out each chapter, the New Orleans chapter, the Sacramento chapter, the whatever. You can find out how many people. My friend Michael Singer who was in Newsreel, and he is writing a book about his, I do not know what he is writing about, maybe his life. But he wanted ask some questions about Panthers. He wanted to know how many Panthers have been killed. So, I sent him to Billy. If anybody asks me a Panther question that I do not know, which are probably 90 percent of them, I send them to Billy. He knows it all, and he is the main organizer of all the reunions. Pulls it together. Very good.

SM: Before I ask my very last question, that is that historic picture of Stokely Carmichael with Dr. King, where he's telling Dr. King that his time has passed, that the new Black power is now taking over for non-violent protest, which was with Dr. King and Dr. Abernathy and Bayard Rustin were into. But what what's interesting is when you look at that particular scene from a Black Panther, who was a major person in SNCC, which Stokely was first. It's almost like Dr. King saying to Thurgood Marshall after the Brown versus Board of Education decision was passed in 1954, that your gradualist approach to getting this passed was ... Well, congratulations, but pass the wand because that gradualist approach is no longer going to work because we want our freedom now. And that is what Dr. King said to nonviolent protests and then later on, Dr. King and Bayard Rustin and the group were linked with Stokely Carmichael. And he said, "Your time has passed." And that was before they were even 40 years old. But there's a lot of history there, an awful lot of history. And of course, Malcolm challenged Bayard Ruston in a debate before he died in 1965 too, about the change in Black power. My last question is, when you look at this, do you have any thoughts as a person on the generation that was born between '46 and (19)64, and that means Black, white, male, female, gay, straight, this generation that grew up after World War II, are there any thoughts you have on this generation overall?

RP: Well, that is not my generation.

SM: Well, I know that is not your generation, but you lived and worked with them.

RP: Yeah. That all seem very different than me. I feel like my friends, most of my friends are probably born after '46, and they just seem like one of ours, us.

SM: Maybe it's because the spirit. Your spirit and their spirit are united in so many different causes.

RP: Yeah. Well, that is how most of my friends ... People who are my friends, that is how it is. I played poker with a group of women, and we did not know each other until we all came to Vermont. And we're all involved in a million different diverse things, but we all have this politic that is really a good, clear politic. And it did not make any difference when we were born or anything.

SM: And your activism goes way beyond the Black Panthers according to what I heard.

RP: The Panthers is only a small thing in there.

SM: Yeah. Just list a couple of activist causes you're involved in before we close.

RP: In Bethlehem?

SM: Yes.

RP: Middle East?

SM: Mm-hmm.

RP: Israel and Palestinian, I am in a sister city group in Burlington. We started it with the first sister city that took a Palestinian city, Bethlehem, the Jewish city of Arad with Burlington. And we have a three-way relationship with the three cities. And that was the first that happened. There's something called Sister City International, which hundreds of American cities take cities all over the world to be their sister city. And we knew we would never get a pass in the city council if we had a Palestinian city. So we took a Jewish city and a Palestinian city, and it passed in Burlington City Council. So that is one that I just went to a meeting last night. I cannot stand. It's a losing of that thing. It's very difficult because we cannot even bring exchange students from Bethlehem. They cannot go to the Tel Aviv airport to come here.

SM: Geez.

RP: We cannot bring doctors or medicine to send there. We can bring our things to Arad, which is the near the Dead Sea, the city. But they do not need that stuff so much. So it's really horrible. So that is one thing that I work with in Burlington. And what was your question again?

SM: It's the other areas of activism you have been involved in.

RP: Activism. Well, then for a while, I am not now anymore, but after the sixties or coming out of part of the sixties was the woman's movement somewhat. And what else would I do? Who do I give my money? Legalization of marijuana. I do not smoke now, but I am for legalization of it.

SM: It's a big issue in California.

RP: Yeah. Well, it's a big issue every place.

SM: Right.

RP: Every place. It makes our kids be criminals. That is what I cannot stand about it. And what else do they give money to? Or I still give money to ... Giving money is different than getting involved. I am not involved in the legalization of marijuana, but I send money to when they send me one of their letters. I do not know. I cannot think.

SM: But you have been a lifelong activist though in many things.

RP: Well, race is the key thing. But I live in white Vermont. That is the problem. There's a lot of racist stuff that goes on here. And in Burlington, we have now become one of ... They have a lot of people from African countries that the US is set up what's called Resettlement Cities and Burlington's one of them. So, we have Bosnians, we have Africans, we have people from Iraq. We have got, oh, people from ... We had a few Cubans and people, but they cannot take the weather here. It's too cold for them. And so, they got transferred to warmer places. Impossible. But I am not working with it. I know some of them, the people, they're in my classes and stuff, but I am not really working it. They get a lot of help from resettlement programs around here. I work with film stuff. Right now, we have an International Film Festival that is happening starting next week, so next week I get to ... And what I do is I care about poor people a lot. For example, I get food from places for the Food Shelf. I go to the apple orchard a friend of mine owns, and I picked a lot of apples that he gave me and I brought it to the Food Shelf for poor people. Just things that I do not do it all the time, it's just something moves me about certain things.

SM: Yeah. You...

RP: Vermont's a really poor place. A lot of us have money and stuff, but there's a lot of poor white people here. And it's really pitiful. A lot of old people that are starving to death and freezing to death in their houses.

SM: That is sad.

RP: I am not doing anything about it, to tell you the truth. I donate something, but I am not really...

SM: Are these people who did not plan for the future?

RP: Are what?

SM: Are these people that did not plan for the future?

RP: No. Vermont is one of the poorest states in the country, number one. It looks so pretty on Christmas cards with skiing and stuff, but it's a very poor place. And for people who, there's no jobs, there's no factories here. There's no big cities. There's food stamps. There's not even stamps anymore. You now get it something that looks like a credit card. So, it does not embarrass you when you go with your kids. It looks like you're paying for it with a credit card. But you have money on a card that looks like a credit card.

SM: You said, and this is it, you said the camera is a weapon. Define what you mean by that.

RP: Well, you use a weapon to be able to have things ... If you take a picture of something that is horrible of a GI ... Well, for example, whoever took that picture of that GI burning down that Vietnamese woman who was holding her child tightly in her arms, burns down her hot by lighting it with a Zippo lighter, that destroyed an image of what the US soldiers were doing in Vietnam for thousands of people when they saw that. That one image on TV, that was a very important image.

SM: I think that was Morley Safer.

RP: Is that who it was?

SM: I think it was Morley Safer, 60 Minutes, I think.

RP: Yeah, it could have been that. See, I do not remember those type of things. You got a good memory for that. I remember the image. I could see him right now. I can see every movement he is doing. And I can see the woman there in her shed crying ... Not in her shed outside of her draw little house or maybe her depot where she kept her rice. I read into it, whatever I read into it.

SM: You also lived in a commune for a while. What was that communal experience?

RP: There's my best friend still to this day.

SM: Huh.

RP: I am serious. That was great. I loved it. You know what? I got up in the morning and guess what? Jimmy Nelsey, who taught economics of the University of Vermont, was cooking us breakfast. And there was this other guy whose name I cannot remember, would take the garbage down to the end of the driveway for his garbage time. And I love living with people. I love having people in my house. I like sharing stuff. And I was an only kid, so I did not have any sisters and brothers.

SM: And that commune, how many years were you in the commune?

RP: Oh, well, I was seen in Putney for maybe, let us say six months. And then, oh, I do not know, years. Let us see. Rain was born and Rain went to grammar school, junior high. I do not know how long. It was a long time. But it changed. It turned out at the end, there were four of us only at the end.

SM: With your kids. Was there any generation gap at all?

RP: I have one daughter and well, she's old now. She's in her thirties. And Rain is in her thirties. What do you mean generation gap?

SM: The generation gap in the sixties, in the seventies, was differences over politics and over the war and counter culture and all that other stuff between [inaudible].

RP: Oh no, they both have good politics. It might be a choice over music. Grateful Dead was big time for both of them.

SM: That is a good choice.

RP: That is a best choice. I love them myself. But my daughter got so into it that she wanted to go off on the road and follow them around, and then would get in trouble and I would have to bail her out of trouble and da, da, da. It was not so much fun for me. But she's fine. I have a granddaughter now. But the sixties, I never got arrested in my life. As I told you, my mother said, "Do not get arrested, escape." And I took that to mean that for real.

SM: It's interesting because Dr. King used to always say that if you really want to stand up for something, you cannot be afraid to be arrested and go to jail for it. And –

RP: My mother says, "You get in jail and you waste around and you're not doing what you should be doing."

SM: Right. Different philosophy. This is it. And that is, what do you think the lasting legacy will be of the generation that grew up after World War II, the boomers, that were sewn down the sixties and seventies. Many of them are Black Panthers and people from all walks life. What do you think when the best history books or historians or sociologists write about this period after the 74 million have passed on? What do you think they might be saying about the generation?

RP: I do not know. You could probably answer that better than me, you're a writer. I do not know. It depends on how the stories are told. Because for example, there's this TV film that was made, it's called The Hippies. Did you see it?

SM: No, I have not. And I am going to check it out.

RP: Well, they interview me. They come to my house. They made me look really good. They had a really good camera guy who knew how to put the right type of plastic on the window. So, the light came in beautifully. They did good makeup job. They did. They really knew what they were doing. They had no politics really on some level. They did not know about anything, but they let me talk. And then I decided to talk about some things I wanted to talk about that were not really necessarily true. And one of them had to do with LSD. We were talking at U UCLA that there was a program at UCLA while I was at UCLA that one of my friends, Lenny Leck, who's no longer, he's died, but he was a psychology professor there. And I was in the class. He was our teaching assistant, and he used to do a lot of LSD at UCLA because they had a program run by the psych department and maybe the army to see what it actually did to people. It was under lab conditions. It was a legalized program, which I never did. But I wanted to talk about how it was legal in those days and about this program and stuff, and the importance of it. So, I knew they would not put it on the camera unless I said I did. And I did not. I lied about it for the camera. And it really got me in trouble because that is the thing that everybody in my town remembered. Everybody loved the program, but I should not have lied about it. I cannot remember what your question was.

SM: Just the lasting legacy. What –

RP: Oh, the legacy. So sometimes, like I said something, I do not know what the last lasting legacy is for that group. We tried to have a better life. We wanted a better life for everyone. We wanted to have all the best for our kids, for every nationality, every race. We wanted there to be equality. We wanted there to be an end of war. We wanted there to be peace and justice and all those things that we wanted from the sixties, from that period of time and a lot of us worked for it and tried to live it, and some of us still do.

SM: Well, that is a perfect answer. And I want to thank you. Somehow in some way, I have got to get two pictures of you, because I have to have pictures.

RP: What about from my website? Can you go to my website?

SM: Yeah, I can go to your website.

RP: Take a look. I do not know what's on there. I do not know.

SM: Well, I will check it out. I know there's a good ... Anyways –

RP: Have you been –

SM: I do not need it right now, but I do need two pictures between now and Christmas.

RP: Well look at my website first and see if you can take anything from that.

SM: Okay.

RP: And if they're not good, there's a whole section there of photographs.

SM: All right.

RP: That start with, oh dear, I have not looked at them.

SM: I know there's a picture of you at an airport. I know that.

RP: At an airport?

SM: Yeah. You're sleeping on luggage.

RP: No, that was not at an airport. You think that was at an airport?

SM: I thought either an airport or a bus station. I do not know.

RP: That is interesting. I wonder what it is.

SM: You were with your girlfriend. There's a girlfriend there. Anyways...

RP: A girlfriend? I am going to my website right now. I think I was sleeping, because I used to fall asleep all the time. I was so tired and if I got some place where I could sleep, I would sleep.

SM: Yep. Well, that is a picture of you sleeping. And then there's a picture of you awake, just two pictures of you with two different females. And you're in looks like a bus station or airport.

RP: Well, I am going to go to that site and try to ... If I can even get my computer to work right.

SM: Back then or now?

RP: No, no. Maybe two years, three years ago.

SM: Oh, geez.

RP: And they said these commi something. I cannot remember what it was. It was on a bunch of really right-wing websites. I am trying to go to my website. I cannot get to my website on my computer.

SM: All right. Well, I guess that is it.

RP: All right. But that picture, that was at the alternative media conference. And we have just gotten driven for two days or something to get to Ann Arbor, and I was falling asleep there.

SM: Huh.

RP: I have been known to fall asleep in very important places. I am tired.

SM: All right.

RP: I just fell right out.

SM: Well, Roz, thank you very much for spending this time, we went over...

(End of Interview)

2010-10-05

Stephen McKiernan

Roz B. (Roz Berkman) Payne, 1940-

144:28

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

2 Microcassettes

Audio

Newsreel (Firm); Political activists--United States; Payne, Roz B. (Roz Berkman), 1940--Interviews

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