Interview with Dr. Bettina Apthker
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Contributor
Apthker, Bettina ; McKiernan, Stephen
Description
Dr. Bettina Apthker is a political activist, radical feminist, academic, and author. As a former member of the Communist Party USA she was active in civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960's and 1970's, and has worked in developing feminist studies since the late 1970's. Dr. Apthker has a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz.
Date
ND
Rights
In Copyright
Date Modified
2017-03-14
Is Part Of
McKiernan Interviews
Extent
61:26
Transcription
McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Dr. Bettina Apthker
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: Kimberly F Mourao
Date of interview: ND
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(Start of Interview)
00:02
SM: Testing, one, two testing. And we can take a break too if you want to.
00:07
BA: Well, actually, I have other things I have to do today so, and since Will Song was late, which you are very gracious in waiting, but-
00:15
SM: Okay, when you think of the (19)60s and the early (19)70s, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?
00:21
BA: Huge crowds of people and protests, demonstrations.
00:25
SM: Can you kind of give a little detail, were you connected to those?
00:30
BA: Yeah. You know, the first thing that I mean, in the, just in the context of this conversation, the, we had very, a week of very dramatic rallies at UC Berkeley, in the climax of the Free Speech Movement, in which I co-lead with Savio. And, and there is this, many moments there. But when I when I think about it, you know, if you asked me what I remember, was, so you probably know this incident, but we had all been arrested, and we had been released, after we had occupied the administration building. And President of the University was Clark Kerr. And he had assembled everybody from the campus at the Greek Theater, it was December 7th. And the objective was to take back control of the university from those of us that had disrupted it, get the faculty on the stage, all the chairs of different committees and everything like that. And he gave a speech. And in his speech, he said, you know, invoke the idea of the university as a center of light and learning. But he did not, he did not concede the major point on freedom of speech, which was why we had sat in in the first place, right. So, when he was done, Mario and myself, and I think it was Art Goldberg got up. And we approached the stage. And Mario, his intention was to make an announcement that the Free Speech Movement will hold its rally on the steps of Sproul Hall, which was our traditional place, the administration building, immediately following and ask everybody to come down there, and we will give our response. And as Mario approach the podium, police officers rushed out from the back of the stage grabbed him by the throat, actually the tie’s tie. And, and, and arrested him, pulled him back away from the microphone. And of course, pandemonium broke out in the, in the theater there were 20,000 people. And Kerr was still on stage. He was in the back looking, he knows it is a mistake, he was looking to shoes, he still had his written notes in his hand, and Art, and I faced the crowd, and it was like, there was going to be a riot. And so, we took up a chant, “let him speak, let him speak,” you know, and the crowd took it up. And then moments later, Mario was released, and he was up, and they turned the microphone back on. And he stood up. And he said, he just said to everybody, “come with us to Sproul Hall where the FSM will hold its rally.” And I think he said, “Let us leave this disastrous place.” So, we all left then. And so, the image in my mind is, there were 20,000, maybe more people in Sproul Hall Plaza immediately following. And so, if you know that Plaza, which you do cause you are from the Bay Area. So, you know, it is huge, and every single space was taken, and they were kids up on the, on the roof of the Student Union Building, across the way and the, I mean, it was called the Bears the, the restaurant, there was a restaurant there too. And there were people on the roof of the restaurant and every, every imaginable thing, we had our microphones set up and we gave a rally to great cheers and so forth. So that is like a moment that I completely identify with that period of, of my life in that period of the (19)60s.
04:26
SM: Would you say that moment more than any other shaped you when you were young? Was there something you did? Well, is there, is there one event that made you who you are even before you got to Berkeley?
04:38
BA: Well, in my case, that is a hard question because I came from such a, you know, my father, my parents were communists, and I came from a radical family already. So, I was already shaped in terms of politics in a certain kind of way. But there is a particular moment that, that was very personally empowering for me. In the, in the fall of protest, and that was October. I think it was October 1. Yes, it was the night of October 1. So, this was the start of the Free Speech Movement. And we had set up tables of the civil rights organizations right in the center of Sproul Plaza. And the police had come, and they had arrested Jack Weinberg, who was sitting at the table for the Congress of Racial Equality. And they brought a police car at 12 noon. I mean, I do not know what they were thinking. And so, everybody was coming out of class. I mean, they were just thousands of people coming out of class and did not know anything, you know. And they arrested Jack, and they put him in this police car, and I was there on the plaza, you know, hundreds and hundreds of other people and somebody shouted, “sit down.” So, we all sat down around the police car. And we prevented them from moving and from arresting Jack. And that is the start of the Free Speech Movement. Well, that night, the night of October 1, what happened was we used the top of the police car as a speaker's podium. And we would take our shoes off, and we climb up onto the roof of the car. And we were shouting-
06:23
SM: There is that picture that David has on the front of the-
06:25
BA: Yeah, yeah, I think it is picture Mario. Well, that night, I got up to speak at the top of the police car. And I had never given a public speech before. It was the first time I had ever given a public, that was, ever said anything in public. And it was in, it was at night, and, and then I would have been able to see people but the TV cam- the TV crews were there, and the lights were in my eyes. So, I could, I could, I could feel the crowd, but I could not see them. So, it was pitch black, and then another light coming in your eyes. And I started to talk with, with what I hoped was considerable, you know, feeling about the issue of freedom of speech. And, and this, this moment, and I invoked the quote from Frederick Douglass. That power concedes nothing without a demand. And when I said those words, and I said, you know where they were from, the crowd roared back as approval. And as they roared back at me, as they roared back at me, I felt this tremendous sense of empowerment. Just a tremendous sense of empowerment. And it was a glorious feeling. So, it was not, I was someone that had not experienced that before. I do not mean that I felt powerful in quite that way. But I mean, I felt human. I felt heard, I had been heard. And if you know something about my personal background, and you have read into it, politics and so forth, you know that that the emotional significance for me, of actually having my voice hurt. And it was a tremendous moment.
08:14
SM: Wow, wow. What, it is interesting that the three people that I am interviewing yesterday, and today are all born 1944. So, I consider you boomers, even though the classification is (19)46. You know, it is really not clear. But when you look at the young people of that era, with the (19)60s and the (19)70s. What would you consider their strengths, some of their weaknesses?
08:46
BA: Well, I cannot, sorry, for my voice. I cannot give an overview. I cannot give an overall estimate. I just know the people that I knew and the people that I knew from the civil rights movement and the Black Panther, I knew people in the Black Panther Party and of course in the Communist Party. So, one of the points I want to make here is that the Berkeley campus itself was it was almost exclusively white. Because this is before affirmative action. If you go to the Berkeley campus, now it is transformed. But there was a total of 100 black students on the Berkeley campus in 1964. Out of 27,500 students. That is something like the statistic, but I knew a lot of African American folks and, and other people from other races because of my political background, because of the political work that I did. So, I just wanted to make that as an observation. And I would say that the people that I knew in my generation, younger and older, some were a little older than me very idealistic, very much informed by World War II and the Holocaust, it is very, very fresh in our minds. In fact, in one of his speeches, Mario actually invoked the Holocaust, in which he talked about the pictures that he saw as a child, and that he cannot understand that the world has not changed as a result of what happens. I think for a lot of us who are Jewish, like myself, the Holocaust, the experience of fascism, the experience of World War II, was very fresh. And, and, and compelled opposition to racism, and, of course, anti-Semitism. But in this country, racism was very, very prevalent, and a tremendous commitment to never allowing that kind of violence to happen again. And they were very strong. If you actually look at those statistics, you will see that a very disproportionate number of the white people that went south in the (19)60s were Jewish. And I think that it comes out of this feeling. So we were, we were white, but we had this, you know, in this country, a Jew can be a white, but a Jew could also be a person of color, depending upon their skin color. Right, there is Jews who are very dark complected, you know, but I am talking about, you know, Jews who were Ashkenazi who were white like myself, but we were not quite white. A little complicated. And you had that awareness. And so, I found my generation to be very, very idealistic. And if there was a weakness, and I think there was a weakness, and it came out of this idealism, that was also a, among some people, tremendous frustration, at the lack of responsiveness of the power structure, which led I think, people to commit very unfortunate acts in the late (19)60s and (19)70s, part of the Weather Underground and Weathermen, and yeah, I did not agree with that. I have never agreed with those forms of violence, you know. So, I do not think that they were they were a relatively small number of people, overall, in terms of who was involved in, and I put the Black Panther Party in a different category, because in terms of the use of self-defense, you know, because although there has been a lot of publicity about the Black Panthers, having guns and all of that, and they did defend themselves with the police. They were constantly, young black people in that period, were constantly under attack, constantly being arrested, harassed shot, as they still are, I mean, it is still going on. So, they were not engaged blowing up buildings or something like that, which is what the Weatherman did. They were, they were very much engaged in trying to defend and protect their communities. I think that was why the Panthers had such a tremendous draw. So, they also had enormous idealism. I see the idealism that too, it just took a different slightly different form. And you think about the in the Panthers, you know, they, especially the women, like Erica Huggins, and, and Kathleen Cleaver and Elaine Brown, they, they ran breakfast for children, they ran freedom schools, they ran health clinics, they provided people with free clothing. In other words, they really tried to do very concrete, compassionate actions in their home communities. It did not get a lot of publicity. You know, if you think about Panthers, everybody thinks guns, you know, they do not think about all this tremendous daily work that-
14:11
SM: Kathleen, I actually been communicating with her down at Emory. She is working on a book right now. I think she is working on a biography. And she has agreed to be interviewed by me, but not until May. Because she has gotten to concentrate on getting the book done. One of the things, one of the criticisms of the, this era, the, the idealistic young people from the (19)60s and (19)70s, is that they have not followed through as they have gotten older. Now, I know you can only give the experiences of your friends, but have you been disappointed in some of your friends that what you saw at Berkeley, one of the things I like about David, David Lance Goines, is he was so committed he did not even go back to Berkeley. And he had not changed one iota. You know, he is an artist, and he is proud of his artwork and everything, but he has not changed, he is still the same guy he was then. Are you pleased with your peers, or are you somewhat disappointed in them? And the second part of the question is this. One of the things that really gets me is when the Newt Gingrich’s of the world or the George Will’s of the world, whenever they get a chance, will take shots at the (19)60s and (19)70s as the reason why we have problems in our society today, with the increasing divorce rate, the drug culture, the lack of respect for authority, the victim culture, you know, all the bad things happened then, and that is why we have problems today and we are going to try to fix them. So that is kind of a two-part question.
15:38
BA: Well, the first part, no, I am not at all disappointed in my generation. One of the things that you do not understand when you are young is that you have a life to live, a full life. So, David, for example, goes on to become a great artist. He is a tremendous graphic artist. Jack Weinberg, was the other example. Which is now one of the key leaders of Greenpeace. Very important. Jackie Goldberg, was one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement, taught school for a long time in Los Angeles, then ran for the school board and ran for the LA City Council then joined the California State Legislature. She did tremendous work, built tremendous coalition of gay, lesbians, blacks. Chicanos, you know, Latino community, made a real coalition and was a very radical progressive person in Sacramento for twenty years. She recently retired. You know, if you look at Mario, even Mario himself, he was very, he was the same guy in terms of his activism, up until the time of his death, which was in (19)96. He was involved in the struggles to protect immigrants, you know, to reform immigration law. He did remedial mathematics teaching at Sonoma State College, in order to help mostly working-class kids of various races to be able to succeed in the university. I continued to be very critical of university hierarchy. And, you know, the politics that existed there, he was also a brilliant physicist. So, you know and say myself, I have taught for thirty years at UC Santa Cruz, I taught a very popular introduction to feminism class that had an annual enrollment of five hundred. And it was a course that my students filmed. So, it is available on DVDs now, but, but my point in talking about it is that it was it was to infuse students with a sense of empowerment, especially women, because I am part of the feminist movement, and activism, and what it means and now I am teaching a class called socialism, I am, excuse me, not socialism, called feminism and social justice. So, but I just started, you know, a new class. And so that is in myself, you know, and everybody. Margot Adler, who was part of the Free Speech Movement, is the, is a leading journalist for NPR. She is the head of the NPR in New York, she published a book many years ago called Drawing Down the Moon, which is a study of Wicca. And in the United States, you know, the resurgence of, of Wicca and the spirituality in that book is still in print. It is like, you know, one of the major texts, very progressive, very important journalists, NPR, as we all know, is plays a critical role. So, when I think of, or Angela Davis, if we want another person, you know, Angela has been out there in the trenches for thirty, thirty-five, forty years. She almost single handedly launched a national, international movement against the prison system. And the way it was set up and was finishing a book on that subject. She taught in the history of consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz, where I am for quite a number of years training graduate students to engage in radical intellectual work. She is, she is one of the she is one of the few recognized public intellectuals in the United States and internationally, you know, as public intellectual. So, I mean, these are examples, we could go on, but these are examples of people-
19:59
SM: So, what the George Will’s, and I do not single them out. But it is very obvious that when you see their writings, they love to take shots at the era. And that the permissiveness, the all the things that I had just mentioned, the drug culture-
20:17
BA: You know, that is also a very stereotypical view of that period. Because what, what the mass media did in a certain kind of way is focus on the drug culture, you know, the so-called permissiveness and free love and all of that. But, you know, try to give a little historical perspective, okay. The changes in sexual behavior had to do with the invention of the pill, which made it possible for women to engage in in sex, premarital sex. Without the continual fear of pregnancy. It is revolutionary, it was revolutionary. Did people get pregnant when they did not intend to? Yes, of course. And then the other thing that happens is the legalization of abortion in 1973. I know we are still fighting about it. But it made it possible for people to engage in sexual union without, you know, guys have been doing it. You know, it is, from a feminist point of view it is very interesting, you understand? Guys have been doing this forever. Guys. I am on tape. So, guys fool around, like, there is no tomorrow, you know, especially young guys. And I mean in, everywhere in the world, as far as I know. And there are no consequences, right? Because they do not get pregnant. So, they can just, you know, have a good time. feel like it is great. And all this sort of stuff they want to, but then, and then you look at, you want to talk about promiscuity, guys are promiscuous. But when women became promiscuous, then we have a promiscuous generation. Why is that? Because there is a double standard. And guys like Wills and these other, you know, these other commentators. That is it. That is really what you are talking about? What happens to the women, that is what they are talking about? They never say that because women are always invisible. But that is really what that movement is about.
22:30
SM: How have you or even Angela, could you know, or how have you been able to deal with the critics like David Horowitz and, and others who label certain individuals, obviously, the experiences you had when you were young, you kept your idealism, your sense of empowerment and your belief system, you kept it, whereas others have given in maybe, and accepted the status quo again. How have you been able to handle the critics like that, you know, and I know David, David used to be in the ramparts I interviewed him for the book too. And he is a real good speaker, he is a real good guy, he changed and everything, but he is really out there. He has got that book on the one-hundred professors-
23:13
BA: I am in it.
23:13
SM: Yeah. And Larry Davidson's on his list from West Chester University, but not in that book, but he has got Larry on his list, along with Bill Hewitt from West Chester, but how do you? How did you and Angela, how do you handle that?
23:28
BA: Well, I cannot speak for Angela, so I am not going to do that. I do not pay much attention to it. That is just nonsense. It is just nonsense. So, I just, you know, I mean, if you look at Horowitz’s book, for example, everything, almost everything he says about me, is, is untrue. It is, I am not saying I do not know whether he lies, whether, whether this is deliberate lies, or whether there is just an incompetence of research. I really do not know. But virtually every so-called facts in the paragraphs about me were wrong. I mean, even basic, innocuous information was wrong. I do not have it here, you know, it is in my office there, I can go, I mean, so I do not pay much attention to it. He was on Fox News not very long ago, and he was attacking me on Fox News. And I came into class the next day, and I told my students, you know, and I get a cheering ovation. I mean, they think it is funny. It is nothing. And most of this is nonsense. And the other thing I would say about it, and whenever I have come under attack, I do not give it much energy. It is, you do not put, do not put energy into it. This is like sort of advice to no energy because that just fuels it. So, he can have whatever viewpoint he wants to have. He has freedom of speech; he can publish whatever he wants. That is his business. I know-
24:56
SM: I know he had a very big problem with the Black Panthers because one of his associates came on our campus. One of the things I want to ask you, when did the (19)60s begin, in your opinion, your view? And when did it end?
25:10
BA: Well, I think the (19)60s in terms of the civil rights movement, myself, and I think it began in the mid (19)50s. With you know, this is always, I am a historian. So, when did something begin? Well-
25:31
SM: I am a history major, political science double major.
25:35
BA: Because then this led to this, and then that led to this, you know, I am saying, but I usually think about it from the point of view of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in (19)50, you know, the winter of (19)55, (19)56, there is stuff before then. But I usually, I mean, you could go back to the integration schools, you know, Arkansas, Little Rock, you know, you could, maybe, maybe there, but I usually think I will tell you why with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, because that was the first definable visible mass action, mass, you know, hundreds, thousands of people involved. And, and I do want to say that the women, the black women in in Birmingham and Montgomery were the backbone of that movement, because they, they provided the carpools that that arranged for people to get to doctor's appointments and get to work and, you know, provided food, and I mean, they, they were just it was the committee of one hundred. Committee of one-hundred black women. But anyway, I date it from them. Then the first march for integration on Washington was in (19)57. I was on it. There was a second one in (19)58. I was on that, too. And these were, you know, I do not know if there were thousands of people, but there were hundreds of people, we took buses, we camped out-
27:07
SM: Dr. King was in (19)57.
27:09
BA: Yes he was. Yeah. And, and then of course, by (19)60, you have the lunch counters, (19)60, (19)60, (19)61, the Freedom Rides, and then you are off, you know, and then the voter registration is (19)63, (19)64. And I think this is another thing in terms of how people view the (19)60s in the, in the sort of media type view of the (19)60s is they see it as white. But see, the backbone of the (19)60s was black.
27:50
SM: You raise a good point, because the fact that I have met with the individual, three or four interviews ago, said when I when I saw that you were doing something on the boomer generation, I think of boomers as white. And I do not, and then I tried to explain to him that I am trying to get boomers from all ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations, you name it, and then I understand what you are trying to do now. But when I first see that term, Boomer, I think white and white male.
28:19
BA: Yeah, absolutely. Because that is the dominant media image, you know, that is absolutely right. You know, so that is why I say what I am, you know, what I am saying is, the (19)60s is, is a fundamentally in many ways, a black era.
28:36
SM: When did it end? Was there a was there a watershed moment when you date it. You know a lot of these young people moving on in jobs and careers, and they are still doing great things as leaders of different organizations. But was there something where you thought “it is over”?
28:54
BA: Well, you can mark it from different moments. I mean in the context; I would use is the fierceness of the repression. See, by the time Reagan comes in, as governor, Nixon comes in as President, Hoover, of course COINTELPRO, the mobilization of federal and state authority to crush this movement. It takes it a while to mobilize because it took them by surprise, but the effort to crush them when you think about what COINTELPRO did, you know and the numbers of young black people who were murdered, like Fred Hampton, for example, and Mark Clark in Chicago, I mean it is, or, or Bunchy Carter and John, John Huggins in Los Angeles. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. The deliberate murder, assassinated, they were assassinated. This is horrific. So, the movement took one blow after another. People were arrested. You know, think about Mumia still in jail. You know, Mumia Abu Jamal. It took one blow after another. And then there was a there was an anti-war protest that was inadequate. It was in Washington, DC and an SDS had organized it-
30:34
SM: (19)69. David Hawk, I interviewed him yesterday.
30:37
BA: Yeah, no, there was mass arrests. At that protest, the way I remember it, they released everybody afterwards. But they rounded everybody up, they rounded up thousands of people. And then they, then they did not know what to do with them. And I do not know where they put them, and then they let them go. Because they could not process that many people or do anything about it. Kent State 1970, Jackson State, same time. So, the movement is still I think, you know, there is still momentum, there is still momentum. And then I would mark the end of the movement with Angela Davis's freedom. We won her freedom in (19)72. And then I think the momentum after that is much diminished. Even though even though you have to say, the mobilizations against the war in Vietnam continued until (19)73, When the war ended.
31:36
SM: That is when Vietnam Veterans against the war come and took it over.
31:39
BA: Yeah. So, right. Nixon ends the war in (19)73. So, we are still out there. I was still part of the mobilization committees and things like that. So (19)72, (19)73, Angela’s acquitted on June 4, 1972. You know, and the war ends in (19)73. Right? Remember it is December or something? (19)75.
32:00
SM: (19)75 is when helicopter on the roof on April 30th. The very end. Well, it is interesting. I-
32:09
BA: So that is about when I end the era.
32:11
SM: I know, I know, the whole thing. When I was in my first job with George Jackson, the books and everything. And while I was in California, I actually did a concert in San Quentin Prison, and we broke a janitor by the San Francisco child's fancy, because I know the Bread and Roses group, Joan Baez’s sister had been able to do concert there. But they were really limiting the concerts. And so, I tried. And then finally, within a year, I was able to get in there with the jazz group, and it was one heck of an experience. Machine guns, the loved them, they loved the janitor, there is a rock group that came, and they booed them and threw apples at them and within five minutes, but that whole scene out there, I do remember, I want to, I got two parts here, one of the one of the general questions or one or more specific, and that is the second side. But I want to ask you about the boomer women. That is your age group. And that group that through 1964. Your thoughts on boomer women, all colors, sexual orientation, you name it, because one of the things that I found through studying history is the sexism that took place within the movements, within the anti-war movement, within the civil rights movement. And then I am, now I am even asking more about and now I, when David mixtures says “oh yeah it has been in the gay and lesbian movement. Oh, yeah.” And the Native American movement, the Chicano movement, and there was some of that because I have already spoken to a couple people of Chicano movement the same way. What is it about all these great, these very important movements that evolved in the early or late (19)60s, early (19)70s? And they use the example of civil rights movement. And women were in secondary roles. We all know, the women's movement kind of evolved from there, but is there truth to that. And in your views, what do you think about all these movements?
34:09
BA: Well, men were tremendously sexist. Just tremendously sexist. And they had no clue they were completely clueless. But in fairness, which I have to say, is some of the women you know, consciousness evolved slowly. And in particular conditions and circumstances. So, one of the things you have to acknowledge or you have to say is that Betty Friedan’s book was published in (19)59. I think it was the Feminine Mystique. When Kennedy ran for office, President Kennedy, he wanted Eleanor Roosevelt's endorsement and she said, I will give you your, my endorsement if you promise to establish a Commission on the Status of Women when you become president and investigate the institutional discrimination against women. So, President Kennedy said: Yes, I will do that, she endorsed him. She was the titular head of that commission when he came into office. And it was actually headed by Esther Peterson, who, as you probably know, was in FDR’s cabinet. And Peterson did a thorough study of institutional discrimination against women in housing, employment, education, everything. So, there was a tremendous report came out in (19)62. So, I remember those things. I did not read the Feminine Mystique until later. But I remember Mrs. Roosevelt, and I remember the, you know, the Peterson report, the commission report, I remember all of that. And I remember thinking about it. Because so I, here is what I am trying to say is the men ridiculed any kind of feminists or women centered movement, these are radical progressive men. I remember conferences of SDS, they were awful, they ridiculed, they booed, they hiss, they did not want to hear anything about it, they made jokes about it, and so forth. This was true in the Communist Party, also, except in the Communist Party, there had always been an understanding of the inequality of women in the workplace, equal pay for equal work and that sort of thing. So, there was a, there was a tradition in the communist movement of understanding, discrimination against women. But they saw it as a function of class, class struggle, not as something that had an independent existence. nobody talked about violence against women. We had all experienced it, but nobody talked about it, because it was to the woman's shame. Now. So, I think all these things are true. And if you look at the histories that have been written about the (19)60s by men, and you talked about it, Todd Catlin, and stuff like that. If the women's movement enters those histories at all, it is as a minor point. And they hardly talk about any of the women who were leaders of the movements. It is amazing. It is amazing to me, somebody just published a book on the left, I just got it on my email. And I do not know the name of the book, it must be the History of the Left in the (19)60s and (19)70s and does not mention any of the women's radical organizing that was going on. This is hundreds of pages, and there is no mention of it.
38:09
SM: Even when the Vietnam Memorial was built, Diane Carlson Evans had to fight to get the Women's Memorial. And a lot of people they do not know the battles behind the scenes, where she was called every name in the book, but she will not be, and she was just trying to get the Women’s Memorial.
38:23
BA: Yeah so, so my point is, yes, sexism was very deep and very profound. And it infused everything in all of the movements. And it was true, regardless of racial designation. But there were differences. For example, in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, black women held leadership positions, and lead field projects. white women in SNCC did not, the white women in SNCC were, they did voter registration work, they did dangerous work like that. They did office work, and so forth. They were voter registration workers, but most of the leadership, of course, it was black in general. But, so, black women have not, it was different, it is not that there is not sexism among black men there is, but it has a different history. So, I do not want to just lump everything together. And no, that is not true. Like Ella Baker, for example, Fannie Lou Hamer as another example, they are like key leaders, about civil rights movement, often unsung. Now, now they are known, you know, but there is, there is definitely on the part of men, which is, the women are just invisible. They are just there, but they are invisible. So, and then the other thing I am trying to say is that those of us as women who were involved in these movements, slowly developed the consciousness about sexism. It is not like we had it all at once or something. But because we were involved in freedom struggles for everybody else on the planet, it occurred to us at some point that we did not have very much. And people, you know, women began to talk to each other. And the so-called consciousness raising groups formed, you know, in the late (19)60s and the (19)70s, which were very important, informal groups in which women started actually talk about their own lives. And out of that experience, a feminist theory emerged, which had to do with the idea of there was something called “patriarchy” and it had a history. And there was something called “violence against women” and most women or a very large percentage of women had experienced it. And you know, and we began to define what you know, and then we gobbled up the Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir. You know, these other things, and everybody all of a sudden discovered, Rosa Luxemburg, and what is the other woman? I am trying to. Emma Goldman. You know, and all of a sudden, we are like, Holy smokes, you know, and then there is the suffrage. You know, the saying “you discover your history” is what happened.
41:21
SM: You know Johnnetta Cole who was president of Spelman-
41:23
BA: Yeah, I know Johnnetta quite well.
41:24
SM: She wrote a great book when she was president there. And then there, she talked. And she talked about the women that, from the (19)60s and (19)70s, about the split that took place between the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement, and that Kent State, like there was no students there of color. They were all told not to be there, there was a split happening. I know, at Ohio State when I was there, I saw the split. And so, she talks about that, too. But she also talks about Boomer women, or women as a whole who were black, who were, they wanted to identify more with racism, and not with the, the anti-war, and certainly not with gay and lesbian issues, and she did a tremendous job in that book of describing the conflicts, which I still see today at the university, that we all come together in a time of crisis like 9/11, and we were all standing there. But how many other times do we come together? You know, and because I know African American men who were gay at West Chester, who were afraid to walk across the hall to the gay and lesbian office for fear of being labeled, and it shows that there is still that happening within the community. And I always question what are the boomers gone to who are now reaching sixty-two. And then that particular age and kind of doing what they were doing in the (19)60s, helping these people along, their children and their grandchildren. Do you see that as there is still some conflicts within the boomer African American female community and in the areas of sexual orientation?
43:05
BA: Well yeah because the problem is, you see that. So my first point that I was trying to make to you was just that our own consciousness had to develop. That was where I was going with, my prior comments, now. And then every community was different, you know. So, I mean, there are two kinds of feminists, for example, who are coming out of their own experience in the struggle of Lavasa, you know, on the west coast and in the southwest, so, beginning to react to the sexism that they were experiencing and beginning to talk to each other, because liberation is contagious. Now, the other part of what you are asking about is, there were tremendous contradictions in these movements. For example, white women had almost no experience with race, or racism. Black woman that was what was in their face all the time, it was not that black women were not aware of sexism, especially. I mean, they bore the brunt of violence, especially for white men. So, it was not like they were not aware of it. But they tried to figure out how they were going to unite with black men in order to confront racism. You know, it was very complicated. All I am saying is, it was a complicated struggle. So, it is not a lack of consciousness about sexism. Any more than, I mean, they are perfectly aware of the sexism. And I think, you know, if you think about Ntozake Shange’s play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide.” That play was a groundbreaking breakthrough play, came out in (19)78. Because it named the violence against women in the black community. And it was a very controversial play and in (19)82 when Alice Walker published “The Color Purple,” a lot of black guys went nuts, attacking her and everything else, but there too she was naming, in that case its incest and, and violence against black women. So, it is not a lack of awareness. It is like, “Where is the priority?” I mean, you are one human being and how many battles can you fight? But white women will completely, almost, almost completely I mean, white women like me who are not but many white, let us put it that way, completely unaware of racism, even women who had been in the south thought “Well, the Klan is racist, but I am not.” You know, not thinking about all their assumptions, you know, it is, these are complicated questions.
45:50
SM: I can remember my first boss, Betty Mensen, after Betty Mensen. She has passed on now, but she the Equal Rights Amendment, why did I say that? I think actually we were, we were halfway through.
46:12
BA: Well, the equal rights amendment was introduced in 1923. Then it gets blocked and blocked and blocked and blocked, it is exactly the same history is suffrage. And another thing that needs to be said, I just want to, I am trying to make a point here, but say that the women's suffrage Okay, we get it in 1920, it was introduced first in about what 1868? Forty- or fifty-year struggle for almost forty years, I think.
46:57
SM: Patriarchy is deep. And men do not want to give up their power and, and privilege. Then say that the suffrage movement, it got intertwined with Southern white Dixiecrats not wanting to extend suffrage at all because they wanted to take it away from black men. So, the major opposition to suffrage, to this to the women's suffrage. The major opposition was from Southern racists, white racists, were trying to prevent it from being passed. So, you needed two thirds of the states, right? Or was it three fourths? Is it two thirds of the state, two thirds, whatever it is to pass it right? So, the last state to endorse women's suffrage and only men are voting, right? So, it is only men in the state legislatures. The last state to pass it is Tennessee. Okay. And it wins by one vote. And who was the guy, this guy named Huberts. I happen to know his history, the guy named Huberts voted for it. And when he was asked by a historian named Eleanor Flexner, “why did you vote for women's suffrage?” He said, “because if I had not, my mother would have killed me.” Now, so the way that women organized the suffrage campaign was, they went to speak to the wives, mothers, daughters of every man in the state legislatures, and then organize the women to pressure the men. That was how they won that campaign. Now, you say the Equal Rights Amendment, right? So that was introduced in (19)23, that was supposed to be a simple constitutional amendment. And it is logjammed at every possible point, it is about patriarchal privilege. That is how I see it. It is about not wanting, not truly wanting equality, because equality is a very deep concept. What would equality mean in a marriage? I mean, if you look at what does equality mean, in a marriage? What does equality mean in the workplace? What does equality mean in education? It is not just you know, if we really believe in equality, then women should have as much to say, as men about everything, the arrangement of human affairs. That is my definition of feminism. Women should have as much to say about everything in the arrangement human affairs, well, that is not true, is it? Who does who is the- who are the architects to design the buildings, who designs the cities, who, who decides allocations if there is going to be allocations for childcare, healthcare, for God's sake, you know, which is going on right now? You know, who is it that takes up the slack when the kids get sick? It is the, it is the women who stay home almost 90 percent, 100 percent of the time. Who takes care of the elderly? I am talking about average families that cannot afford fancy nursing homes. It is the women. Some women have a family, including their husband’s mothers. But a lot of times they cannot stand, moved in because well you cannot put them out. You cannot put them out in the hot in the you know, in the in the desert somewhere, you have to take care of them. So, you say these are very feminist issues, this healthcare things, very feminist issue. But it is always women who take up the slack. It is always women are doing these, performing social services, basically, these are all, this is all interesting.
50:55
SM: Do you think the Equal Rights Amendment will ever be passed.
50:57
BA: I do not know.
50:57
SM: Because I do not see any effort to bring it up again,
51:00
BA: No, it is kind of got dead. After the, there was a big push in (19)70s and then it kind of died, you know, and it, but the opposition to it, you know, the opposition to it is really about the, my point where I was going with this is it is the implications of what equality means. And if you have a constitutional fact like that, then a woman could sue and say, the conditions of my employment are not equal. I am not getting equal pay, then we are talking about economics then we are talking about restructuring the whole economy. No. So all this fluff about the Equal Rights Amendment, like how we got to have unisex toilets and all that, that is just fluff. That is just, that is not really what the issue is.
51:49
SM: Yeah, I see a lot of them on university campuses.
51:51
BA: What? Unisex? Yeah, I mean, you know-
51:54
SM: In the airport and everywhere. I want to read this question. Now, this is two basic issues that I want to deal with here. And one of them is the issue of healing and the other is trust. Qualities that I am not sure, I would like your opinions on, I have to read this. We took a group of students to see Senator Muskie about a year and a half before he died. And we asked this question to him, because the students thought that he was going to respond to the 1968 convention he was at. Do you feel that the boomer generation is still having problems from healing from the divisions that that tore this nation apart in their youth, divisions between black and white, male and female, gay straight, divisions between those who supported the verdict and those who criticize it, division between those who supported the troops and those who did not? Kind of a preface here what did the Wall playing in this process? And do you feel that the boomer generation will go to its grave like the Civil War generation, not truly healing? Am I wrong in thinking this? Or has thirty-five to forty years made this statement “Time heals all wounds” a truth? Basically, what I am saying is, do you think that that generation of students who were at Berkeley in (19)64, the students that went through the (19)60s that at the moratorium in (19)69. And we are talking now about a generation of, I am not even sure they know the exact number of boomers I hear its seventy to seventy-eight million. So, there is, so we are talking about quite a few people here, and probably 15 percent were involved in some sort of-
53:25
BA: I was going to say the vast majority were not involved.
53:26
SM: Yeah, but still 15 percent is a lot. And actually, I am a firm believer that this, that all of them were affected, subconsciously, you could not live through this period without having some sort of a feeling and to share whatever it might be and or come to some sort of revelation later in life that this really did influence me. But your thoughts on whether this is an important thing, or it is just impossible to heal, is healing it problem here in America? Oh, yes, he-
54:00
BA: Oh yes, healing is a problem. We carry our grudges. It is an interesting question. And-
54:15
SM: Let me say that Jim Scruggs wrote the book “To Heal a Nation,” which is his book, I am sure it is probably in here some place, which was “To Heal a Nation” obviously, the Vietnam Memorial was built to help the veterans and certainly their families and the people who died in the war and so forth. It is done a pretty good job. And I have been to the Wall twice. Yeah, I go to the Memorial Day and Veterans Day, have been doing so since (19)94. There is a lot of black ideals on there. I mean, still it helps, but I know a lot of Vietnam vets, I cannot even go there. So, but on to the next statement healing a nation and the question is whether what, what is the Wall done for the nation? And maybe the boomer generation and what and then of course, it is a general question. I asked on healing overall because of all these other divisions.
55:03
BA: Well, my opinion about healing is that it is an individual process. And it has to do with the willingness of individuals. You cannot heal a nation unless individuals heal themselves. Healing begins in the heart. And it really is, it is an individual process, you can create certain conditions that facilitate healing. But and, you know, you can watch, like myself, for example, I try to be very careful about what I say, and to whom I say it and how I say it, and to have what the Buddhists call” right speech.” In other words, not to, I try not to attack, you know, and try to be very careful about anger, you know, very hard, these are hard practices. Building a wall, oh it is fine. I mean, that is not fundamentally where healing happens. In my opinion, healing happens in the individual hearts of people. And it requires intensive work. Nobody can heal you, you must heal yourself. And part of the healing process for each individual is a decision that you are making about the quality of your own life. When you carry anger, when you carry hatred when you carry wounds, you are injuring yourself. And so, the, the ability to, to heal is your own decision. I am an incest survivor, for example. And I write about it in my memoir, and I had to make a decision to forgive my father.
57:23
SM: He is a Big Nicky; I have one of a couple of his books.
57:26
BA: And I had to make that decision. Otherwise, I was going to carry the hatred. The anger, it was more anger was not so, I do not know if it was hatred, but anger, frustration, and other things that it was all part of a constellation of things, because he never saw me as I really was, as I truly was, he only saw me as an extension of himself in my opinion. So, what I said earlier about standing up on top of a police car and making that speech of being heard, that is what I meant. That was a healing moment for me to be heard. Because I was never heard as a child. I was always an extension of my parents. So, what I said had to conform with what they believed, then I could be heard, but then I was not really heard was I? Now, my father helped me to forgive him by asking me to forgive him. So, I had, I was, I was very fortunate in being able to talk to him. I was very fortunate in his response to me, for other people it does not happen that way. But the decision to forgive is your own decision. Now-
58:42
SM: Could you like for example-
58:43
BA: So, you have, so Angela Davis tells an interesting story in public. Very interesting story. When she was a little girl, she was in Birmingham, Alabama. She was one of the, she lived in a, in a home that was called Dynamite Hill. There it was called Dynamite Hill, because there were black families as they moved in the Klan would bomb their homes. So, you know, little kid, right? She was a little kid grows up with feelings about white people. So, she tells the story, I just, she just told that the other day, and remember this the bombing of the Birmingham church. Right and all that, she was, she was a child when that happened. I mean, she remembers it. She remembers bombs going off when she was a little kid, you know, like brushing your teeth in the morning, and she would hear the explosions. So, she told the story. She said the doorbell would ring and she would go to answer the door. And then the person would say, you know, is your mother home or whatever, and she would yell out: Mama, there was a white guy at the door. Or there was a white man at the door, something like that. And her mother would come in and very gently she would say, “Angela, there is a man at the door.” Angela was saying to us, you know, my mother did that. Because my mother did not want me to hate white people. She was teaching me, so, so then but I am just saying, so then that is trying to, you know, in terms of healing here, that was a very important moment that Mrs. Davis was doing for her children, not just Angela, but all of her children, because she had a different consciousness. She was a very radical woman. She was a political activist. She wanted her children to understand that not all white people were enemies. So that so that they would not internalize all that stuff and have to heal from it. See? So, yeah, that is what I am trying to get at there.
1:01:04
SM: It is very well said. Like, I know Alan Canfora at Kent State is trying to meet with some of the guard. Of course, one and finally he met with had passed away of a heart attack. So, I think one of the things is to try to, I guess it is tough for him to be in the room with them, but he is trying to come to terms and, and certainly,
1:01:23
BA: Give me another example-
1:01:24
SM: Senator Muskie said that we had not healed since-
(End of Interview)
Interview with: Dr. Bettina Apthker
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: Kimberly F Mourao
Date of interview: ND
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)
00:02
SM: Testing, one, two testing. And we can take a break too if you want to.
00:07
BA: Well, actually, I have other things I have to do today so, and since Will Song was late, which you are very gracious in waiting, but-
00:15
SM: Okay, when you think of the (19)60s and the early (19)70s, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?
00:21
BA: Huge crowds of people and protests, demonstrations.
00:25
SM: Can you kind of give a little detail, were you connected to those?
00:30
BA: Yeah. You know, the first thing that I mean, in the, just in the context of this conversation, the, we had very, a week of very dramatic rallies at UC Berkeley, in the climax of the Free Speech Movement, in which I co-lead with Savio. And, and there is this, many moments there. But when I when I think about it, you know, if you asked me what I remember, was, so you probably know this incident, but we had all been arrested, and we had been released, after we had occupied the administration building. And President of the University was Clark Kerr. And he had assembled everybody from the campus at the Greek Theater, it was December 7th. And the objective was to take back control of the university from those of us that had disrupted it, get the faculty on the stage, all the chairs of different committees and everything like that. And he gave a speech. And in his speech, he said, you know, invoke the idea of the university as a center of light and learning. But he did not, he did not concede the major point on freedom of speech, which was why we had sat in in the first place, right. So, when he was done, Mario and myself, and I think it was Art Goldberg got up. And we approached the stage. And Mario, his intention was to make an announcement that the Free Speech Movement will hold its rally on the steps of Sproul Hall, which was our traditional place, the administration building, immediately following and ask everybody to come down there, and we will give our response. And as Mario approach the podium, police officers rushed out from the back of the stage grabbed him by the throat, actually the tie’s tie. And, and, and arrested him, pulled him back away from the microphone. And of course, pandemonium broke out in the, in the theater there were 20,000 people. And Kerr was still on stage. He was in the back looking, he knows it is a mistake, he was looking to shoes, he still had his written notes in his hand, and Art, and I faced the crowd, and it was like, there was going to be a riot. And so, we took up a chant, “let him speak, let him speak,” you know, and the crowd took it up. And then moments later, Mario was released, and he was up, and they turned the microphone back on. And he stood up. And he said, he just said to everybody, “come with us to Sproul Hall where the FSM will hold its rally.” And I think he said, “Let us leave this disastrous place.” So, we all left then. And so, the image in my mind is, there were 20,000, maybe more people in Sproul Hall Plaza immediately following. And so, if you know that Plaza, which you do cause you are from the Bay Area. So, you know, it is huge, and every single space was taken, and they were kids up on the, on the roof of the Student Union Building, across the way and the, I mean, it was called the Bears the, the restaurant, there was a restaurant there too. And there were people on the roof of the restaurant and every, every imaginable thing, we had our microphones set up and we gave a rally to great cheers and so forth. So that is like a moment that I completely identify with that period of, of my life in that period of the (19)60s.
04:26
SM: Would you say that moment more than any other shaped you when you were young? Was there something you did? Well, is there, is there one event that made you who you are even before you got to Berkeley?
04:38
BA: Well, in my case, that is a hard question because I came from such a, you know, my father, my parents were communists, and I came from a radical family already. So, I was already shaped in terms of politics in a certain kind of way. But there is a particular moment that, that was very personally empowering for me. In the, in the fall of protest, and that was October. I think it was October 1. Yes, it was the night of October 1. So, this was the start of the Free Speech Movement. And we had set up tables of the civil rights organizations right in the center of Sproul Plaza. And the police had come, and they had arrested Jack Weinberg, who was sitting at the table for the Congress of Racial Equality. And they brought a police car at 12 noon. I mean, I do not know what they were thinking. And so, everybody was coming out of class. I mean, they were just thousands of people coming out of class and did not know anything, you know. And they arrested Jack, and they put him in this police car, and I was there on the plaza, you know, hundreds and hundreds of other people and somebody shouted, “sit down.” So, we all sat down around the police car. And we prevented them from moving and from arresting Jack. And that is the start of the Free Speech Movement. Well, that night, the night of October 1, what happened was we used the top of the police car as a speaker's podium. And we would take our shoes off, and we climb up onto the roof of the car. And we were shouting-
06:23
SM: There is that picture that David has on the front of the-
06:25
BA: Yeah, yeah, I think it is picture Mario. Well, that night, I got up to speak at the top of the police car. And I had never given a public speech before. It was the first time I had ever given a public, that was, ever said anything in public. And it was in, it was at night, and, and then I would have been able to see people but the TV cam- the TV crews were there, and the lights were in my eyes. So, I could, I could, I could feel the crowd, but I could not see them. So, it was pitch black, and then another light coming in your eyes. And I started to talk with, with what I hoped was considerable, you know, feeling about the issue of freedom of speech. And, and this, this moment, and I invoked the quote from Frederick Douglass. That power concedes nothing without a demand. And when I said those words, and I said, you know where they were from, the crowd roared back as approval. And as they roared back at me, as they roared back at me, I felt this tremendous sense of empowerment. Just a tremendous sense of empowerment. And it was a glorious feeling. So, it was not, I was someone that had not experienced that before. I do not mean that I felt powerful in quite that way. But I mean, I felt human. I felt heard, I had been heard. And if you know something about my personal background, and you have read into it, politics and so forth, you know that that the emotional significance for me, of actually having my voice hurt. And it was a tremendous moment.
08:14
SM: Wow, wow. What, it is interesting that the three people that I am interviewing yesterday, and today are all born 1944. So, I consider you boomers, even though the classification is (19)46. You know, it is really not clear. But when you look at the young people of that era, with the (19)60s and the (19)70s. What would you consider their strengths, some of their weaknesses?
08:46
BA: Well, I cannot, sorry, for my voice. I cannot give an overview. I cannot give an overall estimate. I just know the people that I knew and the people that I knew from the civil rights movement and the Black Panther, I knew people in the Black Panther Party and of course in the Communist Party. So, one of the points I want to make here is that the Berkeley campus itself was it was almost exclusively white. Because this is before affirmative action. If you go to the Berkeley campus, now it is transformed. But there was a total of 100 black students on the Berkeley campus in 1964. Out of 27,500 students. That is something like the statistic, but I knew a lot of African American folks and, and other people from other races because of my political background, because of the political work that I did. So, I just wanted to make that as an observation. And I would say that the people that I knew in my generation, younger and older, some were a little older than me very idealistic, very much informed by World War II and the Holocaust, it is very, very fresh in our minds. In fact, in one of his speeches, Mario actually invoked the Holocaust, in which he talked about the pictures that he saw as a child, and that he cannot understand that the world has not changed as a result of what happens. I think for a lot of us who are Jewish, like myself, the Holocaust, the experience of fascism, the experience of World War II, was very fresh. And, and, and compelled opposition to racism, and, of course, anti-Semitism. But in this country, racism was very, very prevalent, and a tremendous commitment to never allowing that kind of violence to happen again. And they were very strong. If you actually look at those statistics, you will see that a very disproportionate number of the white people that went south in the (19)60s were Jewish. And I think that it comes out of this feeling. So we were, we were white, but we had this, you know, in this country, a Jew can be a white, but a Jew could also be a person of color, depending upon their skin color. Right, there is Jews who are very dark complected, you know, but I am talking about, you know, Jews who were Ashkenazi who were white like myself, but we were not quite white. A little complicated. And you had that awareness. And so, I found my generation to be very, very idealistic. And if there was a weakness, and I think there was a weakness, and it came out of this idealism, that was also a, among some people, tremendous frustration, at the lack of responsiveness of the power structure, which led I think, people to commit very unfortunate acts in the late (19)60s and (19)70s, part of the Weather Underground and Weathermen, and yeah, I did not agree with that. I have never agreed with those forms of violence, you know. So, I do not think that they were they were a relatively small number of people, overall, in terms of who was involved in, and I put the Black Panther Party in a different category, because in terms of the use of self-defense, you know, because although there has been a lot of publicity about the Black Panthers, having guns and all of that, and they did defend themselves with the police. They were constantly, young black people in that period, were constantly under attack, constantly being arrested, harassed shot, as they still are, I mean, it is still going on. So, they were not engaged blowing up buildings or something like that, which is what the Weatherman did. They were, they were very much engaged in trying to defend and protect their communities. I think that was why the Panthers had such a tremendous draw. So, they also had enormous idealism. I see the idealism that too, it just took a different slightly different form. And you think about the in the Panthers, you know, they, especially the women, like Erica Huggins, and, and Kathleen Cleaver and Elaine Brown, they, they ran breakfast for children, they ran freedom schools, they ran health clinics, they provided people with free clothing. In other words, they really tried to do very concrete, compassionate actions in their home communities. It did not get a lot of publicity. You know, if you think about Panthers, everybody thinks guns, you know, they do not think about all this tremendous daily work that-
14:11
SM: Kathleen, I actually been communicating with her down at Emory. She is working on a book right now. I think she is working on a biography. And she has agreed to be interviewed by me, but not until May. Because she has gotten to concentrate on getting the book done. One of the things, one of the criticisms of the, this era, the, the idealistic young people from the (19)60s and (19)70s, is that they have not followed through as they have gotten older. Now, I know you can only give the experiences of your friends, but have you been disappointed in some of your friends that what you saw at Berkeley, one of the things I like about David, David Lance Goines, is he was so committed he did not even go back to Berkeley. And he had not changed one iota. You know, he is an artist, and he is proud of his artwork and everything, but he has not changed, he is still the same guy he was then. Are you pleased with your peers, or are you somewhat disappointed in them? And the second part of the question is this. One of the things that really gets me is when the Newt Gingrich’s of the world or the George Will’s of the world, whenever they get a chance, will take shots at the (19)60s and (19)70s as the reason why we have problems in our society today, with the increasing divorce rate, the drug culture, the lack of respect for authority, the victim culture, you know, all the bad things happened then, and that is why we have problems today and we are going to try to fix them. So that is kind of a two-part question.
15:38
BA: Well, the first part, no, I am not at all disappointed in my generation. One of the things that you do not understand when you are young is that you have a life to live, a full life. So, David, for example, goes on to become a great artist. He is a tremendous graphic artist. Jack Weinberg, was the other example. Which is now one of the key leaders of Greenpeace. Very important. Jackie Goldberg, was one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement, taught school for a long time in Los Angeles, then ran for the school board and ran for the LA City Council then joined the California State Legislature. She did tremendous work, built tremendous coalition of gay, lesbians, blacks. Chicanos, you know, Latino community, made a real coalition and was a very radical progressive person in Sacramento for twenty years. She recently retired. You know, if you look at Mario, even Mario himself, he was very, he was the same guy in terms of his activism, up until the time of his death, which was in (19)96. He was involved in the struggles to protect immigrants, you know, to reform immigration law. He did remedial mathematics teaching at Sonoma State College, in order to help mostly working-class kids of various races to be able to succeed in the university. I continued to be very critical of university hierarchy. And, you know, the politics that existed there, he was also a brilliant physicist. So, you know and say myself, I have taught for thirty years at UC Santa Cruz, I taught a very popular introduction to feminism class that had an annual enrollment of five hundred. And it was a course that my students filmed. So, it is available on DVDs now, but, but my point in talking about it is that it was it was to infuse students with a sense of empowerment, especially women, because I am part of the feminist movement, and activism, and what it means and now I am teaching a class called socialism, I am, excuse me, not socialism, called feminism and social justice. So, but I just started, you know, a new class. And so that is in myself, you know, and everybody. Margot Adler, who was part of the Free Speech Movement, is the, is a leading journalist for NPR. She is the head of the NPR in New York, she published a book many years ago called Drawing Down the Moon, which is a study of Wicca. And in the United States, you know, the resurgence of, of Wicca and the spirituality in that book is still in print. It is like, you know, one of the major texts, very progressive, very important journalists, NPR, as we all know, is plays a critical role. So, when I think of, or Angela Davis, if we want another person, you know, Angela has been out there in the trenches for thirty, thirty-five, forty years. She almost single handedly launched a national, international movement against the prison system. And the way it was set up and was finishing a book on that subject. She taught in the history of consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz, where I am for quite a number of years training graduate students to engage in radical intellectual work. She is, she is one of the she is one of the few recognized public intellectuals in the United States and internationally, you know, as public intellectual. So, I mean, these are examples, we could go on, but these are examples of people-
19:59
SM: So, what the George Will’s, and I do not single them out. But it is very obvious that when you see their writings, they love to take shots at the era. And that the permissiveness, the all the things that I had just mentioned, the drug culture-
20:17
BA: You know, that is also a very stereotypical view of that period. Because what, what the mass media did in a certain kind of way is focus on the drug culture, you know, the so-called permissiveness and free love and all of that. But, you know, try to give a little historical perspective, okay. The changes in sexual behavior had to do with the invention of the pill, which made it possible for women to engage in in sex, premarital sex. Without the continual fear of pregnancy. It is revolutionary, it was revolutionary. Did people get pregnant when they did not intend to? Yes, of course. And then the other thing that happens is the legalization of abortion in 1973. I know we are still fighting about it. But it made it possible for people to engage in sexual union without, you know, guys have been doing it. You know, it is, from a feminist point of view it is very interesting, you understand? Guys have been doing this forever. Guys. I am on tape. So, guys fool around, like, there is no tomorrow, you know, especially young guys. And I mean in, everywhere in the world, as far as I know. And there are no consequences, right? Because they do not get pregnant. So, they can just, you know, have a good time. feel like it is great. And all this sort of stuff they want to, but then, and then you look at, you want to talk about promiscuity, guys are promiscuous. But when women became promiscuous, then we have a promiscuous generation. Why is that? Because there is a double standard. And guys like Wills and these other, you know, these other commentators. That is it. That is really what you are talking about? What happens to the women, that is what they are talking about? They never say that because women are always invisible. But that is really what that movement is about.
22:30
SM: How have you or even Angela, could you know, or how have you been able to deal with the critics like David Horowitz and, and others who label certain individuals, obviously, the experiences you had when you were young, you kept your idealism, your sense of empowerment and your belief system, you kept it, whereas others have given in maybe, and accepted the status quo again. How have you been able to handle the critics like that, you know, and I know David, David used to be in the ramparts I interviewed him for the book too. And he is a real good speaker, he is a real good guy, he changed and everything, but he is really out there. He has got that book on the one-hundred professors-
23:13
BA: I am in it.
23:13
SM: Yeah. And Larry Davidson's on his list from West Chester University, but not in that book, but he has got Larry on his list, along with Bill Hewitt from West Chester, but how do you? How did you and Angela, how do you handle that?
23:28
BA: Well, I cannot speak for Angela, so I am not going to do that. I do not pay much attention to it. That is just nonsense. It is just nonsense. So, I just, you know, I mean, if you look at Horowitz’s book, for example, everything, almost everything he says about me, is, is untrue. It is, I am not saying I do not know whether he lies, whether, whether this is deliberate lies, or whether there is just an incompetence of research. I really do not know. But virtually every so-called facts in the paragraphs about me were wrong. I mean, even basic, innocuous information was wrong. I do not have it here, you know, it is in my office there, I can go, I mean, so I do not pay much attention to it. He was on Fox News not very long ago, and he was attacking me on Fox News. And I came into class the next day, and I told my students, you know, and I get a cheering ovation. I mean, they think it is funny. It is nothing. And most of this is nonsense. And the other thing I would say about it, and whenever I have come under attack, I do not give it much energy. It is, you do not put, do not put energy into it. This is like sort of advice to no energy because that just fuels it. So, he can have whatever viewpoint he wants to have. He has freedom of speech; he can publish whatever he wants. That is his business. I know-
24:56
SM: I know he had a very big problem with the Black Panthers because one of his associates came on our campus. One of the things I want to ask you, when did the (19)60s begin, in your opinion, your view? And when did it end?
25:10
BA: Well, I think the (19)60s in terms of the civil rights movement, myself, and I think it began in the mid (19)50s. With you know, this is always, I am a historian. So, when did something begin? Well-
25:31
SM: I am a history major, political science double major.
25:35
BA: Because then this led to this, and then that led to this, you know, I am saying, but I usually think about it from the point of view of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in (19)50, you know, the winter of (19)55, (19)56, there is stuff before then. But I usually, I mean, you could go back to the integration schools, you know, Arkansas, Little Rock, you know, you could, maybe, maybe there, but I usually think I will tell you why with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, because that was the first definable visible mass action, mass, you know, hundreds, thousands of people involved. And, and I do want to say that the women, the black women in in Birmingham and Montgomery were the backbone of that movement, because they, they provided the carpools that that arranged for people to get to doctor's appointments and get to work and, you know, provided food, and I mean, they, they were just it was the committee of one hundred. Committee of one-hundred black women. But anyway, I date it from them. Then the first march for integration on Washington was in (19)57. I was on it. There was a second one in (19)58. I was on that, too. And these were, you know, I do not know if there were thousands of people, but there were hundreds of people, we took buses, we camped out-
27:07
SM: Dr. King was in (19)57.
27:09
BA: Yes he was. Yeah. And, and then of course, by (19)60, you have the lunch counters, (19)60, (19)60, (19)61, the Freedom Rides, and then you are off, you know, and then the voter registration is (19)63, (19)64. And I think this is another thing in terms of how people view the (19)60s in the, in the sort of media type view of the (19)60s is they see it as white. But see, the backbone of the (19)60s was black.
27:50
SM: You raise a good point, because the fact that I have met with the individual, three or four interviews ago, said when I when I saw that you were doing something on the boomer generation, I think of boomers as white. And I do not, and then I tried to explain to him that I am trying to get boomers from all ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations, you name it, and then I understand what you are trying to do now. But when I first see that term, Boomer, I think white and white male.
28:19
BA: Yeah, absolutely. Because that is the dominant media image, you know, that is absolutely right. You know, so that is why I say what I am, you know, what I am saying is, the (19)60s is, is a fundamentally in many ways, a black era.
28:36
SM: When did it end? Was there a was there a watershed moment when you date it. You know a lot of these young people moving on in jobs and careers, and they are still doing great things as leaders of different organizations. But was there something where you thought “it is over”?
28:54
BA: Well, you can mark it from different moments. I mean in the context; I would use is the fierceness of the repression. See, by the time Reagan comes in, as governor, Nixon comes in as President, Hoover, of course COINTELPRO, the mobilization of federal and state authority to crush this movement. It takes it a while to mobilize because it took them by surprise, but the effort to crush them when you think about what COINTELPRO did, you know and the numbers of young black people who were murdered, like Fred Hampton, for example, and Mark Clark in Chicago, I mean it is, or, or Bunchy Carter and John, John Huggins in Los Angeles. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. The deliberate murder, assassinated, they were assassinated. This is horrific. So, the movement took one blow after another. People were arrested. You know, think about Mumia still in jail. You know, Mumia Abu Jamal. It took one blow after another. And then there was a there was an anti-war protest that was inadequate. It was in Washington, DC and an SDS had organized it-
30:34
SM: (19)69. David Hawk, I interviewed him yesterday.
30:37
BA: Yeah, no, there was mass arrests. At that protest, the way I remember it, they released everybody afterwards. But they rounded everybody up, they rounded up thousands of people. And then they, then they did not know what to do with them. And I do not know where they put them, and then they let them go. Because they could not process that many people or do anything about it. Kent State 1970, Jackson State, same time. So, the movement is still I think, you know, there is still momentum, there is still momentum. And then I would mark the end of the movement with Angela Davis's freedom. We won her freedom in (19)72. And then I think the momentum after that is much diminished. Even though even though you have to say, the mobilizations against the war in Vietnam continued until (19)73, When the war ended.
31:36
SM: That is when Vietnam Veterans against the war come and took it over.
31:39
BA: Yeah. So, right. Nixon ends the war in (19)73. So, we are still out there. I was still part of the mobilization committees and things like that. So (19)72, (19)73, Angela’s acquitted on June 4, 1972. You know, and the war ends in (19)73. Right? Remember it is December or something? (19)75.
32:00
SM: (19)75 is when helicopter on the roof on April 30th. The very end. Well, it is interesting. I-
32:09
BA: So that is about when I end the era.
32:11
SM: I know, I know, the whole thing. When I was in my first job with George Jackson, the books and everything. And while I was in California, I actually did a concert in San Quentin Prison, and we broke a janitor by the San Francisco child's fancy, because I know the Bread and Roses group, Joan Baez’s sister had been able to do concert there. But they were really limiting the concerts. And so, I tried. And then finally, within a year, I was able to get in there with the jazz group, and it was one heck of an experience. Machine guns, the loved them, they loved the janitor, there is a rock group that came, and they booed them and threw apples at them and within five minutes, but that whole scene out there, I do remember, I want to, I got two parts here, one of the one of the general questions or one or more specific, and that is the second side. But I want to ask you about the boomer women. That is your age group. And that group that through 1964. Your thoughts on boomer women, all colors, sexual orientation, you name it, because one of the things that I found through studying history is the sexism that took place within the movements, within the anti-war movement, within the civil rights movement. And then I am, now I am even asking more about and now I, when David mixtures says “oh yeah it has been in the gay and lesbian movement. Oh, yeah.” And the Native American movement, the Chicano movement, and there was some of that because I have already spoken to a couple people of Chicano movement the same way. What is it about all these great, these very important movements that evolved in the early or late (19)60s, early (19)70s? And they use the example of civil rights movement. And women were in secondary roles. We all know, the women's movement kind of evolved from there, but is there truth to that. And in your views, what do you think about all these movements?
34:09
BA: Well, men were tremendously sexist. Just tremendously sexist. And they had no clue they were completely clueless. But in fairness, which I have to say, is some of the women you know, consciousness evolved slowly. And in particular conditions and circumstances. So, one of the things you have to acknowledge or you have to say is that Betty Friedan’s book was published in (19)59. I think it was the Feminine Mystique. When Kennedy ran for office, President Kennedy, he wanted Eleanor Roosevelt's endorsement and she said, I will give you your, my endorsement if you promise to establish a Commission on the Status of Women when you become president and investigate the institutional discrimination against women. So, President Kennedy said: Yes, I will do that, she endorsed him. She was the titular head of that commission when he came into office. And it was actually headed by Esther Peterson, who, as you probably know, was in FDR’s cabinet. And Peterson did a thorough study of institutional discrimination against women in housing, employment, education, everything. So, there was a tremendous report came out in (19)62. So, I remember those things. I did not read the Feminine Mystique until later. But I remember Mrs. Roosevelt, and I remember the, you know, the Peterson report, the commission report, I remember all of that. And I remember thinking about it. Because so I, here is what I am trying to say is the men ridiculed any kind of feminists or women centered movement, these are radical progressive men. I remember conferences of SDS, they were awful, they ridiculed, they booed, they hiss, they did not want to hear anything about it, they made jokes about it, and so forth. This was true in the Communist Party, also, except in the Communist Party, there had always been an understanding of the inequality of women in the workplace, equal pay for equal work and that sort of thing. So, there was a, there was a tradition in the communist movement of understanding, discrimination against women. But they saw it as a function of class, class struggle, not as something that had an independent existence. nobody talked about violence against women. We had all experienced it, but nobody talked about it, because it was to the woman's shame. Now. So, I think all these things are true. And if you look at the histories that have been written about the (19)60s by men, and you talked about it, Todd Catlin, and stuff like that. If the women's movement enters those histories at all, it is as a minor point. And they hardly talk about any of the women who were leaders of the movements. It is amazing. It is amazing to me, somebody just published a book on the left, I just got it on my email. And I do not know the name of the book, it must be the History of the Left in the (19)60s and (19)70s and does not mention any of the women's radical organizing that was going on. This is hundreds of pages, and there is no mention of it.
38:09
SM: Even when the Vietnam Memorial was built, Diane Carlson Evans had to fight to get the Women's Memorial. And a lot of people they do not know the battles behind the scenes, where she was called every name in the book, but she will not be, and she was just trying to get the Women’s Memorial.
38:23
BA: Yeah so, so my point is, yes, sexism was very deep and very profound. And it infused everything in all of the movements. And it was true, regardless of racial designation. But there were differences. For example, in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, black women held leadership positions, and lead field projects. white women in SNCC did not, the white women in SNCC were, they did voter registration work, they did dangerous work like that. They did office work, and so forth. They were voter registration workers, but most of the leadership, of course, it was black in general. But, so, black women have not, it was different, it is not that there is not sexism among black men there is, but it has a different history. So, I do not want to just lump everything together. And no, that is not true. Like Ella Baker, for example, Fannie Lou Hamer as another example, they are like key leaders, about civil rights movement, often unsung. Now, now they are known, you know, but there is, there is definitely on the part of men, which is, the women are just invisible. They are just there, but they are invisible. So, and then the other thing I am trying to say is that those of us as women who were involved in these movements, slowly developed the consciousness about sexism. It is not like we had it all at once or something. But because we were involved in freedom struggles for everybody else on the planet, it occurred to us at some point that we did not have very much. And people, you know, women began to talk to each other. And the so-called consciousness raising groups formed, you know, in the late (19)60s and the (19)70s, which were very important, informal groups in which women started actually talk about their own lives. And out of that experience, a feminist theory emerged, which had to do with the idea of there was something called “patriarchy” and it had a history. And there was something called “violence against women” and most women or a very large percentage of women had experienced it. And you know, and we began to define what you know, and then we gobbled up the Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir. You know, these other things, and everybody all of a sudden discovered, Rosa Luxemburg, and what is the other woman? I am trying to. Emma Goldman. You know, and all of a sudden, we are like, Holy smokes, you know, and then there is the suffrage. You know, the saying “you discover your history” is what happened.
41:21
SM: You know Johnnetta Cole who was president of Spelman-
41:23
BA: Yeah, I know Johnnetta quite well.
41:24
SM: She wrote a great book when she was president there. And then there, she talked. And she talked about the women that, from the (19)60s and (19)70s, about the split that took place between the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement, and that Kent State, like there was no students there of color. They were all told not to be there, there was a split happening. I know, at Ohio State when I was there, I saw the split. And so, she talks about that, too. But she also talks about Boomer women, or women as a whole who were black, who were, they wanted to identify more with racism, and not with the, the anti-war, and certainly not with gay and lesbian issues, and she did a tremendous job in that book of describing the conflicts, which I still see today at the university, that we all come together in a time of crisis like 9/11, and we were all standing there. But how many other times do we come together? You know, and because I know African American men who were gay at West Chester, who were afraid to walk across the hall to the gay and lesbian office for fear of being labeled, and it shows that there is still that happening within the community. And I always question what are the boomers gone to who are now reaching sixty-two. And then that particular age and kind of doing what they were doing in the (19)60s, helping these people along, their children and their grandchildren. Do you see that as there is still some conflicts within the boomer African American female community and in the areas of sexual orientation?
43:05
BA: Well yeah because the problem is, you see that. So my first point that I was trying to make to you was just that our own consciousness had to develop. That was where I was going with, my prior comments, now. And then every community was different, you know. So, I mean, there are two kinds of feminists, for example, who are coming out of their own experience in the struggle of Lavasa, you know, on the west coast and in the southwest, so, beginning to react to the sexism that they were experiencing and beginning to talk to each other, because liberation is contagious. Now, the other part of what you are asking about is, there were tremendous contradictions in these movements. For example, white women had almost no experience with race, or racism. Black woman that was what was in their face all the time, it was not that black women were not aware of sexism, especially. I mean, they bore the brunt of violence, especially for white men. So, it was not like they were not aware of it. But they tried to figure out how they were going to unite with black men in order to confront racism. You know, it was very complicated. All I am saying is, it was a complicated struggle. So, it is not a lack of consciousness about sexism. Any more than, I mean, they are perfectly aware of the sexism. And I think, you know, if you think about Ntozake Shange’s play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide.” That play was a groundbreaking breakthrough play, came out in (19)78. Because it named the violence against women in the black community. And it was a very controversial play and in (19)82 when Alice Walker published “The Color Purple,” a lot of black guys went nuts, attacking her and everything else, but there too she was naming, in that case its incest and, and violence against black women. So, it is not a lack of awareness. It is like, “Where is the priority?” I mean, you are one human being and how many battles can you fight? But white women will completely, almost, almost completely I mean, white women like me who are not but many white, let us put it that way, completely unaware of racism, even women who had been in the south thought “Well, the Klan is racist, but I am not.” You know, not thinking about all their assumptions, you know, it is, these are complicated questions.
45:50
SM: I can remember my first boss, Betty Mensen, after Betty Mensen. She has passed on now, but she the Equal Rights Amendment, why did I say that? I think actually we were, we were halfway through.
46:12
BA: Well, the equal rights amendment was introduced in 1923. Then it gets blocked and blocked and blocked and blocked, it is exactly the same history is suffrage. And another thing that needs to be said, I just want to, I am trying to make a point here, but say that the women's suffrage Okay, we get it in 1920, it was introduced first in about what 1868? Forty- or fifty-year struggle for almost forty years, I think.
46:57
SM: Patriarchy is deep. And men do not want to give up their power and, and privilege. Then say that the suffrage movement, it got intertwined with Southern white Dixiecrats not wanting to extend suffrage at all because they wanted to take it away from black men. So, the major opposition to suffrage, to this to the women's suffrage. The major opposition was from Southern racists, white racists, were trying to prevent it from being passed. So, you needed two thirds of the states, right? Or was it three fourths? Is it two thirds of the state, two thirds, whatever it is to pass it right? So, the last state to endorse women's suffrage and only men are voting, right? So, it is only men in the state legislatures. The last state to pass it is Tennessee. Okay. And it wins by one vote. And who was the guy, this guy named Huberts. I happen to know his history, the guy named Huberts voted for it. And when he was asked by a historian named Eleanor Flexner, “why did you vote for women's suffrage?” He said, “because if I had not, my mother would have killed me.” Now, so the way that women organized the suffrage campaign was, they went to speak to the wives, mothers, daughters of every man in the state legislatures, and then organize the women to pressure the men. That was how they won that campaign. Now, you say the Equal Rights Amendment, right? So that was introduced in (19)23, that was supposed to be a simple constitutional amendment. And it is logjammed at every possible point, it is about patriarchal privilege. That is how I see it. It is about not wanting, not truly wanting equality, because equality is a very deep concept. What would equality mean in a marriage? I mean, if you look at what does equality mean, in a marriage? What does equality mean in the workplace? What does equality mean in education? It is not just you know, if we really believe in equality, then women should have as much to say, as men about everything, the arrangement of human affairs. That is my definition of feminism. Women should have as much to say about everything in the arrangement human affairs, well, that is not true, is it? Who does who is the- who are the architects to design the buildings, who designs the cities, who, who decides allocations if there is going to be allocations for childcare, healthcare, for God's sake, you know, which is going on right now? You know, who is it that takes up the slack when the kids get sick? It is the, it is the women who stay home almost 90 percent, 100 percent of the time. Who takes care of the elderly? I am talking about average families that cannot afford fancy nursing homes. It is the women. Some women have a family, including their husband’s mothers. But a lot of times they cannot stand, moved in because well you cannot put them out. You cannot put them out in the hot in the you know, in the in the desert somewhere, you have to take care of them. So, you say these are very feminist issues, this healthcare things, very feminist issue. But it is always women who take up the slack. It is always women are doing these, performing social services, basically, these are all, this is all interesting.
50:55
SM: Do you think the Equal Rights Amendment will ever be passed.
50:57
BA: I do not know.
50:57
SM: Because I do not see any effort to bring it up again,
51:00
BA: No, it is kind of got dead. After the, there was a big push in (19)70s and then it kind of died, you know, and it, but the opposition to it, you know, the opposition to it is really about the, my point where I was going with this is it is the implications of what equality means. And if you have a constitutional fact like that, then a woman could sue and say, the conditions of my employment are not equal. I am not getting equal pay, then we are talking about economics then we are talking about restructuring the whole economy. No. So all this fluff about the Equal Rights Amendment, like how we got to have unisex toilets and all that, that is just fluff. That is just, that is not really what the issue is.
51:49
SM: Yeah, I see a lot of them on university campuses.
51:51
BA: What? Unisex? Yeah, I mean, you know-
51:54
SM: In the airport and everywhere. I want to read this question. Now, this is two basic issues that I want to deal with here. And one of them is the issue of healing and the other is trust. Qualities that I am not sure, I would like your opinions on, I have to read this. We took a group of students to see Senator Muskie about a year and a half before he died. And we asked this question to him, because the students thought that he was going to respond to the 1968 convention he was at. Do you feel that the boomer generation is still having problems from healing from the divisions that that tore this nation apart in their youth, divisions between black and white, male and female, gay straight, divisions between those who supported the verdict and those who criticize it, division between those who supported the troops and those who did not? Kind of a preface here what did the Wall playing in this process? And do you feel that the boomer generation will go to its grave like the Civil War generation, not truly healing? Am I wrong in thinking this? Or has thirty-five to forty years made this statement “Time heals all wounds” a truth? Basically, what I am saying is, do you think that that generation of students who were at Berkeley in (19)64, the students that went through the (19)60s that at the moratorium in (19)69. And we are talking now about a generation of, I am not even sure they know the exact number of boomers I hear its seventy to seventy-eight million. So, there is, so we are talking about quite a few people here, and probably 15 percent were involved in some sort of-
53:25
BA: I was going to say the vast majority were not involved.
53:26
SM: Yeah, but still 15 percent is a lot. And actually, I am a firm believer that this, that all of them were affected, subconsciously, you could not live through this period without having some sort of a feeling and to share whatever it might be and or come to some sort of revelation later in life that this really did influence me. But your thoughts on whether this is an important thing, or it is just impossible to heal, is healing it problem here in America? Oh, yes, he-
54:00
BA: Oh yes, healing is a problem. We carry our grudges. It is an interesting question. And-
54:15
SM: Let me say that Jim Scruggs wrote the book “To Heal a Nation,” which is his book, I am sure it is probably in here some place, which was “To Heal a Nation” obviously, the Vietnam Memorial was built to help the veterans and certainly their families and the people who died in the war and so forth. It is done a pretty good job. And I have been to the Wall twice. Yeah, I go to the Memorial Day and Veterans Day, have been doing so since (19)94. There is a lot of black ideals on there. I mean, still it helps, but I know a lot of Vietnam vets, I cannot even go there. So, but on to the next statement healing a nation and the question is whether what, what is the Wall done for the nation? And maybe the boomer generation and what and then of course, it is a general question. I asked on healing overall because of all these other divisions.
55:03
BA: Well, my opinion about healing is that it is an individual process. And it has to do with the willingness of individuals. You cannot heal a nation unless individuals heal themselves. Healing begins in the heart. And it really is, it is an individual process, you can create certain conditions that facilitate healing. But and, you know, you can watch, like myself, for example, I try to be very careful about what I say, and to whom I say it and how I say it, and to have what the Buddhists call” right speech.” In other words, not to, I try not to attack, you know, and try to be very careful about anger, you know, very hard, these are hard practices. Building a wall, oh it is fine. I mean, that is not fundamentally where healing happens. In my opinion, healing happens in the individual hearts of people. And it requires intensive work. Nobody can heal you, you must heal yourself. And part of the healing process for each individual is a decision that you are making about the quality of your own life. When you carry anger, when you carry hatred when you carry wounds, you are injuring yourself. And so, the, the ability to, to heal is your own decision. I am an incest survivor, for example. And I write about it in my memoir, and I had to make a decision to forgive my father.
57:23
SM: He is a Big Nicky; I have one of a couple of his books.
57:26
BA: And I had to make that decision. Otherwise, I was going to carry the hatred. The anger, it was more anger was not so, I do not know if it was hatred, but anger, frustration, and other things that it was all part of a constellation of things, because he never saw me as I really was, as I truly was, he only saw me as an extension of himself in my opinion. So, what I said earlier about standing up on top of a police car and making that speech of being heard, that is what I meant. That was a healing moment for me to be heard. Because I was never heard as a child. I was always an extension of my parents. So, what I said had to conform with what they believed, then I could be heard, but then I was not really heard was I? Now, my father helped me to forgive him by asking me to forgive him. So, I had, I was, I was very fortunate in being able to talk to him. I was very fortunate in his response to me, for other people it does not happen that way. But the decision to forgive is your own decision. Now-
58:42
SM: Could you like for example-
58:43
BA: So, you have, so Angela Davis tells an interesting story in public. Very interesting story. When she was a little girl, she was in Birmingham, Alabama. She was one of the, she lived in a, in a home that was called Dynamite Hill. There it was called Dynamite Hill, because there were black families as they moved in the Klan would bomb their homes. So, you know, little kid, right? She was a little kid grows up with feelings about white people. So, she tells the story, I just, she just told that the other day, and remember this the bombing of the Birmingham church. Right and all that, she was, she was a child when that happened. I mean, she remembers it. She remembers bombs going off when she was a little kid, you know, like brushing your teeth in the morning, and she would hear the explosions. So, she told the story. She said the doorbell would ring and she would go to answer the door. And then the person would say, you know, is your mother home or whatever, and she would yell out: Mama, there was a white guy at the door. Or there was a white man at the door, something like that. And her mother would come in and very gently she would say, “Angela, there is a man at the door.” Angela was saying to us, you know, my mother did that. Because my mother did not want me to hate white people. She was teaching me, so, so then but I am just saying, so then that is trying to, you know, in terms of healing here, that was a very important moment that Mrs. Davis was doing for her children, not just Angela, but all of her children, because she had a different consciousness. She was a very radical woman. She was a political activist. She wanted her children to understand that not all white people were enemies. So that so that they would not internalize all that stuff and have to heal from it. See? So, yeah, that is what I am trying to get at there.
1:01:04
SM: It is very well said. Like, I know Alan Canfora at Kent State is trying to meet with some of the guard. Of course, one and finally he met with had passed away of a heart attack. So, I think one of the things is to try to, I guess it is tough for him to be in the room with them, but he is trying to come to terms and, and certainly,
1:01:23
BA: Give me another example-
1:01:24
SM: Senator Muskie said that we had not healed since-
(End of Interview)
Date of Interview
ND
Interviewer
Stephen McKiernan
Interviewee
Bettina Apthker
Biographical Text
Dr. Bettina Apthker is a political activist, radical feminist, academic, and author. As a former member of the Communist Party USA, she was active in civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s and 1970s and has worked in developing feminist studies since the late 1970s. Dr. Apthker has a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz.
Duration
61:26
Language
English
Digital Publisher
Binghamton University Libraries
Digital Format
audio/mp4
Material Type
Sound
Description
1 Microcassette
Interview Format
Audio
Subject LCSH
Civil rights movements—United States--20th century; Peace movements—United States--20th century; Feminists; Political activists--United States; Apthker, Bettina--Interviews
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Keywords
Protests; UC Berkeley; Free Speech Movement; Communist Party; Civil Rights; Police; Holocaust; WWII; Black Panthers; Weathermen; Feminism; Activism; Contraceptives; Montgomery Bus Boycott; Baby boom generation; Sexism; Equal Rights Amendment; Patriarchy; Women's Suffrage; Equality; McCarthy; Government Corruption; Fear of Activism; Vietnam Memorial; Kent State; Jackson State; Watergate; Summer of Love; Woodstock; 1968; Bobby Kennedy Assassination; Hippies and Yippies; Vietnam Veterans
Files
Citation
“Interview with Dr. Bettina Apthker,” Digital Collections, accessed April 27, 2024, https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/847.
