John McMillian : For Manning Marable

Manning Marable. Photo by Mario Tama / Getty Images.

Renowned African-American scholar, Dr. Manning Marable, 60, died April 1 of complications from pneumonia, three days before the publication of his long-awaited biography of Malcolm X, a book he had been working on for the last 15 years.

Marable was founding director of the Department of African American Studies at Columbia University. Since 2002 he had directed Columbia’s Center for Contemporary Black History.

According to National Public Radio, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, “introduces new information that could reshape the widely accepted narrative" of Malcolm's life.

For Manning Marable

By John McMillian / The Rag Blog / April 7, 2011

In hindsight, this is embarrassing to admit, but here goes. When I first met Manning Marable in 1996, at age 26, I was nervous. Partly I was on edge because I was trying to make a big decision: Should I pursue a Ph.D. in African-American history at either Rutgers or Michigan, where I’d been offered full funding? Or, should I go to Columbia (my first choice), with no money upfront, but with some vague possibility of securing a teaching fellowship down the line?

Months before, Manning had already written me to say that if I were admitted to Columbia, he’d be keen to take me on as one of his graduate students. (That was a thrill unto itself!) Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but wonder (and this is the embarrassing part): did he know I was white? And if so, would he have any doubts about my commitment to Black Studies, or my intellectual authority to work in the field?

Keep in mind, by then I’d read virtually all of Manning’s major works, including the earlier, more polemical stuff, like How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, where he declared, “Progressive white Americans must succeed in overturning their own racism.”

No problem there, I chuckled. I’d long made a point of challenging racism in others, and I’ve always tried (to the best of my ability) never to tolerate it in myself. But then, he added this:

“Nothing short of a commitment to racial equality and Black freedom such as that exhibited by the militant white abolitionist John Brown will be sufficient.”

Oh.

There was only one way to gauge Manning’s attitude, and that was to show up at his office. I made the haul all the way from mid-Michigan to New York City in my Chevy pickup truck. At that point in my life, I’d never been anywhere near an Ivy League campus. My first memory of the area around Columbia comes from driving up and down Broadway, Amsterdam Avenue, and perhaps a dozen cross streets in-between, again and again, trying to find a parking space.

As soon as I met Manning, though, all of my anxiety melted away. As anyone who knew him would agree, one of his most striking qualities was his affability. And although I probably would not have said this in print while he was still alive, the plain fact is, he really did look a lot like a teddy bear.

One thing I remember from that day is how vigorously he stressed the fact that he saw himself as both a scholar, and an activist. For him, the two vocations were inseparable. What’s more, he wanted me to know that when he became the founding director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) a few years earlier, he’d envisioned it as fundamentally a community resource.

And by “community,” he pointed out, “I don’t mean just Columbia, or even Morningside Heights.” He gestured toward the window of his sixth floor office, which afforded views to the north and the east. “We’re not in Morningside Heights. We’re in Harlem!”

To this end, he had a remarkable capacity for making time for virtually anyone who wanted something from him, even including the conspiratorial-minded guy with the rusty stains on his shirt (or was it blood?) who would occasionally show up unannounced at Manning’s door, asking to bend his ear.

Then there was this other fellow: he was never around, except for on the periodic occasions when the Institute would lay out a very nice buffet in honor of some distinguished guest speaker, in which case he would always be there, first in line, testing the capacity of his Styrofoam plates with enormous mounds of chicken wings, mini-quiches, cocktail shrimp, and whatever else. (Okay, I’ll confess: I once watched as Manning observed this guy from the corner of the room in silent disbelief, before finally sighing and rolling his eyes.)

Manning also seemed like one of the hardest workers in all of academia. In the mid-to-late 1990s, you might recall, a contingent of “black public intellectuals” was suddenly gaining more exposure than they’d probably ever dreamed of. After a long period during which black scholars were more likely to toil away in obscurity, with their contributions being slighted or overlooked, now at least a few of them -- through a combination of intelligence, charisma, and moxie -- seemed to be everywhere.

And while some celebrated the new visibility of people like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Cornel West, and Michael Eric Dyson, others sensed a certain entrepreneurialism in their approach. Sure, they could all talk a very good game, people used to grouse. Hell, put them in range of a microphone, and they’ll talk about anything! But when it came to scholarship, what did they actually do?

That was never quite my own view, but regardless: nobody ever credibly said such a thing about Manning. True, he made TV appearances and gave paid lectures (oh, how he must have loved Black History Month). But he was also an author of god-knows-how-many books and articles, the great bulk of which showcased his immersion in fields as diverse as history, sociology, political science, economics, and even literature.

His new, nearly 600 page opus, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, is already being celebrated as an exhaustively researched tome, one that will completely upend our understanding of that fabled leader.

What an incredible exercise in self-restraint it must have been to keep plugging away on that biography for 15-odd years, all the while sitting on so many explosive revelations. I remember him excitedly making a few vague allusions to the discoveries he was making, way back in the day. Now we all know just what he was onto..

The past few days, I’ve been sad about the fact that I didn’t stay in better touch with Manning in recent years, though I can take some solace from the fact that about six weeks ago, I sent him a warmly inscribed copy of my first monograph. I have so many fond memories from the three-year period that I worked for him, but I’ll always treasure that first meeting the best. After listening to my concerns, putting me at ease, and making me laugh, he said something I did not expect: “I might be able to help you out.”

Five months later, I’d relocated to Manhattan, and I was meeting a considerable portion of my grad school expenses by working as his research assistant. (We collaborated on two books.) Without him, I’m not sure I’d have mustered the courage to go to Columbia, something that later turned out -- without question -- to be one of the great blessings of my life.

And yet whenever I tried to thank Manning for anything -- whether for helping to pay for my education, or for buying me a sandwich (as he sometimes did), I always got the same response. He’d shrug, smile impishly, and say, “Hey, what do you expect? I’m a socialist!”

[John McMillian is Assistant Professor of history at Georgia State University. His most recent book is Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford, 2011).] A version of this article was published at The Atlantic.]

Manning Marable. Photo from the New York Daily News.The Rag Blog

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John McMillian : Gimme Shelter: Altamont and the Underground Press

Hell's Angel takes the cue. The contrasting coverage of the disastrous Altamont rock festival by the Berkeley Tribe and the San Francisco Examiner tells us much about why the underground press became such a force. Image from morethings.com.
When America was up for grabs:
What media coverage of Altamont teaches
us about the Sixties underground press

By John McMillian / The Rag Blog / February 24, 2010

[The following is an excerpt from John McMillian's excellent new book, Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, published in January 2011 by Oxford University Press. Much has been written about the underground press and its seminal role in the Sixties cultural revolution, but this may be the definitive work on the subject. To say nothing of the fact that it's a very exciting read!]

“STONES CONCERT ENDS IT,” blared the front-page headline of the underground Berkeley Tribe, dated December 12-19, 1969. “America Now Up For Grabs.”

The Rolling Stones concert that the Tribe described was supposed to have been a triumphant affair. Coming just four months after half a million hippie youths drew international attention by gathering peaceably at Max Yasgur’s farm, some had even hyped the free, day-long event -- which was held at Altamont Speedway, some 60 miles east of San Francisco, and which also featured Santana, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Flying Burrito Brothers -- as “Woodstock West.”

But this was no festival of peace and love. As almost everyone knew, the idea for the free show only came about after the Stones were nettled by criticisms that they had alienated fans with exorbitant ticket prices and arrogant behavior on their 1969 American tour. What’s more, Altamont proved to be a dirty, bleak space for a rock festival, almost completely lacking in amenities for the 300,000 concertgoers. Asked to guard the performers -- allegedly in exchange for a truckload of beer -- the Hell’s Angels went on a drug-and-booze soaked rampage, assaulting countless hippies with weighted pool cues and kicks to the head.

When the Stones finally started their set after sundown, they found it impossible to gain momentum; they could only play in fits and starts, as the Angels roughed up spectators and commotion swirled around them. Albert and David Maysles’ classic documentary, Gimme Shelter, captured Mick Jagger nervously trying to soothe the crowd: “Brothers and sisters, come on now. That means everybody -- just cool out.” “All I can do is ask you -- beg you -- to keep it together. It’s within your power.” “If we are all one, let’s fucking well show we’re all one!”

But Jagger’s entreaties were in vain. Just as the Stones were starting “Under My Thumb,” the Angles set their sights on an African-American teenager in a flashy lime suit: Meredith Hunter. By one eyewitness account, the whole thing began when a heavyset Angel was toying with Hunter, laughing as he yanked him by the ear and by the hair. Then, when Hunter pulled himself away, he ran into a pack of perhaps four more Angels, who started punching him.

Trying to escape, Hunger whipped out a long-barreled revolver and held it high over his head; in an instant, an Angel plunged a knife between his neck and shoulder. Autopsy reports confirmed that Hunger was tweaking on methamphetamines when he was killed. His last words, supposedly, were: “I wasn’t going to shoot you.”

Ever since, writers and historians have found it tempting to describe Altamont as a generation-shattering event, the proverbial “end of an era.” If the early Sixties was a time of gauzy idealism, characterized by JFK’s youthful vigor, righteous lunch-counter sit ins, and the first flush of Beatlemania, then the Altamont disaster ranks alongside the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots, the Manson Family murders, and the Weather Underground’s townhouse explosion as evidence of the era’s swift decline.

Less well known, however, is that the trope arose in the underground press. “Altamont … exploded the myth of innocence for a section of America,” wrote 21 year old George Paul Csicsery (now a respected filmmaker) in the Tribe’s lead article. Just a little while earlier, he said, it had been “cool” for large groups of youths to assemble at parks and rock festivals. “People would play together, performing, participating, sharing and going home with a feeling that somehow the communal idea would replace the grim isolation wrought on us by a jealous competitive mother culture.”

But on the bleak, dry hills around Altamont, the feeling was entirely different: “Our one-day micro society was bound to the death-throes of capitalist greed.” The Angels’ violence had “united the crowd in fear” while Jagger strutted the stage like a “diabolical prince.” To Csiscery, the concert was a metaphor for a society on the brink: “Clearly, nobody is in control. Not the Angels, not the people. Not Richard Nixon, or his pigs. Nobody.”

Elsewhere in the Tribe, readers could find several more pieces on the Altamont debacle, all of them written by participant-observers, all of them done in a familiar, even informal style. Several writers made liberal use of the editorial “we” (as in, “We’re turning into a generation whose thing is to be an Audience, whose life-style is the mass get-together for ‘good vibes.’”) Others sprinkled their reports with song lyrics, hallucinatory images, or whimsical asides.

The Tribe also featured an elliptical poem about the Altamont debacle, as well as a comic strip by the artist Greg Irons that skewered a local radio station for irresponsibly hyping the event and then fulminating against it after things went bad. Almost all of this material struck a portentous tone; the Tribe’s radical politicos and youth-culture aficionados who caravanned to Altamont came away feeling grubby, mortified, and concerned. “I realize some people just had a good time,” said one writer. “Me, I saw a guy get killed.”

Altamont received front-page attention in the San Francisco Examiner, too, but nothing like the blanket coverage that was found in the Tribe, and besides, the Bay Area’s leading evening paper completely missed the concert’s significance; its reports and analysis could not have been more wrong-headed.

On December 6, the Examiner stressed that the biggest problem associated with the concert was the traffic headache it caused on Interstate 5/580; it specifically added that the police reported “no violence.” The next day, the paper mentioned that one person had been killed, but in fact four people died: two were run over by a car while sitting at a campfire, and another drowned in a swift-moving irrigation canal while zonked out on drugs.

“But for the stabbing,” the Examiner reported, “all appeared peaceful at the concert... The record-breaking crowd was for the most part orderly, but enthusiastic. The listeners heeded the advice of the Jefferson Airplane: ‘We should be together.’”

Then on December 9, the paper’s editorial writers fumbled to explain why 300,000 youths would even want to attend a free rock festival headlined by the Rolling Stones in the first place. They literally could not come up with an explanation that they deemed fully satisfactory.

Finally, on December 14, Dick Nolan, an op-ed columnist, stressed that the event had been a disaster for the counterculture, but his tone was so priggish and excoriating that it’s hard to imagine very many younger readers taking him seriously. “Maybe it’s wishful thinking,” he wrote. “But to me that Altamont rock fiasco looked like the last gasp of the whole hippie-drug thing.”

There were the Stones, he said, “peddling their idiot doggerel and primitive beat” before that most mindless of animals, the human mob. Altamont was just another manifestation “of the rock-drug-slobbery cult,” to which Nolan could only say good riddance.

This is not a book [Smoking Typewriters] about Altamont, of course. But by quickly glancing at how two local newssheets covered the Stones concert, we can begin apprehending the powerful appeal of the underground press in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Issue of the underground paper, The Berkeley Tribe. Image from zomblog.
Amateurishly produced by a collective of unabashed radicals, the Berkeley Tribe had a fleet of reporters who actively participated in the events they covered. Lacking any pretense of objectivity, they put across forcefully opinionated accounts of events that mattered deeply to them -- that grew out of their culture -- and they used a language and a sensibility of their own fashioning; their hip vernacular was something they shared with most of their readership.

By contrast, the professionals who staffed the Examiner -- the flagship of the Hearst newspaper chain -- approached Altamont with a prefabricated template. Their first instinct was to cloak the free concert in gooey, Woodstock-style sentimentalism. Then after that proved untenable, their editorialists proved totally uncomprehending of the rock and youth cultures they sought to explain.

It is little wonder, then, that many New Leftists never bothered to read daily newspapers, at least not when they wanted to know what was going on in their own milieu. Instead, beginning in the mid-1960s, in cities and campuses across the country, they began creating and distributing their own radical community newssheets, with which they aimed to promote avant-garde sensibilities and inspire political tumult.

Amplitude and conviction were hallmarks of the underground press: this is where they set forth their guiding principles concerning the unfairness of racism, the moral and political tragedy of the Vietnam War, the need to make leaders and institutions democratically accountable, and the existential rewards of a committed life.

And their success was astonishing. According to cultural critic Louis Menand, underground newspapers “were one of the most spontaneous and aggressive growths in publishing history.” In 1965, the New Left could claim only five such newspapers, mostly in large cities; within a few years, several hundred papers were in circulation, with a combined readership that stretched into the millions.

In addition to trying to build an intellectual framework for the Movement’s expansion, New Leftists imbued their newspapers with an ethos that socialized people into the Movement, fostered a spirit of mutuality among them, and raised their democratic expectations.

The community-building work that New Leftists brought about in this way was neither incidental nor marginal. Instead, it played a crucial role in helping youths to break away from the complacency and resignation that prevailed in postwar America, in order to build an indigenous, highly stylized protest culture.

Given the obstacles confronting those who have attempted to build mass democratic movements in the United States, this was a considerable achievement. Simply put, much of what we associate with the late 1960s youth rebellion -- its size, intensity, and contrapuntal expressions of furious anger and joyful bliss -- might not have been possible without the advent of new printing technologies that put the cost of newspaper production within reach of most activists, or without the institutions they built that allowed their press to flourish.”

[John McMillian is Assistant Professor of History at Georgia Sate University. His latest book is Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, published by Oxford University Press.]

John McMillian, author of Smoking Typewriters, will be our special guest at a Rag Blog Happy Hour, Friday, Feb. 25, 2011, 5-7 p.m., at Maria's Taco Xpress, 2529 S. Lamar Blvd., Austin. The public is welcome. John will also appear at BookPeople, 603 N. Lamar Blvd, Austin, at 7 p.m. Friday for a reading and book-signing. And John McMillian will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, March 4, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP-91.7 FM in Austin, and streamed live on the internet.

Also see:

• BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : John McMillian's 'Smoking Typewriters' by Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / February 21, 2011
• Pressing for change: John McMillian's 'Smoking Typewriters' charts history of underground newspapers by Anis Shivani / The Austin American-Statesman / February 20, 2011

The Rag Blog

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BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : John McMillian's 'Smoking Typewriters'

John McMillian, author of Smoking Typewriters, will appear at BookPeople, 603 N. Lamar Blvd, Austin, at 7 p.m., Friday, Feb. 25, 2011, for a reading and signing of his book about the Sixties underground press. John will also be our special guest at a Rag Blog Happy Hour, Friday, Feb. 25, 5-7 p.m., at Maria's Taco Xpress, 2529 S. Lamar Blvd., Austin. The public is welcome. And John McMillian will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, March 4, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP 91.7FM in Austin, and streamed live on the internet.

The curious case of the 1960s papers:
John McMillian's Smoking Typewriters

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / February 21, 2011

[Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, by John McMillian (Oxford University Press, Feb. 17, 2011); Hardcover; 276 pp.; $27.95]

Art Kunkin was born into a Jewish family in New York in 1928. A brainy kid, he attended Bronx High School of Science, became a follower of Leon Trotsky, moved to Southern California, and recreated himself in the burgeoning bohemian world of Venice.

He would probably not be remembered today and he would certainly not appear in John McMillian’s Smoking Typewriters were it not for the fact that he founded the L.A. Free Press -- the Freep -- and became one of the curious fathers of the underground newspapers of the 1960s.

McMillian writes about Kunkin and the Freep near the very start of his new book in which he tells his version of the 1960s through the eyes and ears of its loud, colorful, unconventional papers such as the Freep, Rat, The Seed, The Great Speckled Bird, The Barb, The Rag, and many others with equally provocative names.

Smoking Typewriters provides a fast-moving narrative about the birth, the death, and the second life of the newspapers that were spawned by the upheavals of the 1960s and that were also spurred on by those upheavals. Part agitprop in a radical American tradition that went back at least as far as the 1930s, and part agitpop in the unique style of the 1960s, papers such as The Barb, The Seed, and Rat sparked the rebellion of a generation, even as they reported the latest news, gossip, and rumors from the barricades, the communes, the rock concerts, and the on-going spectacle of the streets.

Austin SDS leader George Vizard, later murdered under questionable circumstances, peddles an early issue of The Rag on The Drag near the University of Texas campus in 1966. At left is his wife, Mariann. (Mariann -- who changed her last name to Wizard -- is now a contributing editor at The Rag Blog.) Image courtesy of Thorne Dreyer, from the photo section of Smoking Typewriters / Oxford Press.
One of the early papers McMillian discusses in depth is Austin’s Rag, the first underground paper in the South. The Rag, now reborn as The Rag Blog, was a model for many papers that would come later, he says, because it was the first to emerge directly out of a radical community, the first to be run collectively, and the first to merge the hippie and New Left cultures.

McMillian puts readers in the cockpit of the era. He conjures up the radical style, the exuberant mood, and the bravado -- no mean feat given the fact that he wasn’t there to live it himself. An historian, he looks back at the era with the benefit of hindsight and with a certain detachment, too, that enables him to tell the story without aiming to grind obvious ideological axes.

He focuses attention on Los Angeles, Austin, and East Lansing, Michigan, as well as on Chicago and New York, and makes it clear that the 1960s as a state of mind and as a way of being in the world, took place everywhere in the United States.

To write his book, McMillian interviewed many of the pivotal figures from that time -- both men and women -- who wrote for and edited the underground newspapers, such as Harvey Wasserman, Allen Young, John Holmstrom, Thorne Dreyer, Alice Embree, Ray Mungo, Sheila Ryan, and others. In Smoking Typewriters he looks at the sexual politics of the papers, and at the tangled, complex relationships between men and women as they played themselves out in newspaper offices.

Smoking Typewriters takes readers from the early days of SDS, through the rise of the anti-war movement, to the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont in 1969 that has often been described as the culminating event of the decade. Ten pages of photos from the 1960s put faces to the names mentioned in the book.

There’s a brief, last chapter that looks at trends in alternative media since 1969, and an afterward that touches on zines, blogs, and bloggers, and in which McMillian predicts that, “we are going to see a collapsing of private space and a diffusion of power around knowledge and information.” For those who would like to dig deeper into the subject, there’s also an extensive bibliography and more than 50-pages of footnotes

The most controversial aspect of the book from my point-of-view as a writer for the underground press and as a contributor to Liberation News Service (LNS) is McMillian’s privileging of SDS and the New Left. SDS was obviously influential; New Leftists changed life on college campuses. I was an SDS member and a New Leftist myself. But I was also a hippie, and a member of the counterculture, and from where I stood the underground newspapers were as much a product of the hippie counterculture as they were of SDS and the New Left.

Thorne Dreyer, now editor of The Rag Blog, and the late Victoria Smith, shown at the offices of Space City! in Houston in 1970. Image from the photo section of John McMillian's Smoking Typewriters, Oxford Press.
McMillian gives more emphasis to the overtly political figures of the era, and to the ideological nature of the papers, and minimizes aspects of the cultural revolution of the 1960s. In some ways, the evidence provided in the book goes counter to McMillian’s own argument. So, for example, he offers a pithy quotation from Abbie Hoffman, one of the founders of the Yippies, who said of the underground press “It is a visible manifestation of an alternative culture. It helps to create a national identity.”

Granted, McMillian discusses nomenclature such as “New Left,” “hippies,” and “politicos” in the introduction to his book. He might have taken the discussion to a deeper level and provided more insight. Still, his book will be appreciated by both ex-New Leftists and ex-hippies because it looks again at the push and pull that took place between those who followed Marx, Mao, and Lenin, and those who followed Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and the Beatles.

Moreover, as McMillian recognizes, there was no clear-cut schism between the hippies and the politicos. So, for example, he offers a useful comment about those two seminal 1960s figures, Marshall Bloom and Ray Mungo, the founders of LNS: “They were a curious duo, dope smoking, hip, full of far-out incredulousness, yet terribly concerned about Vietnam, the urban crisis and politics. ”

In the 1960s, we were all -- if I may speak for a whole generation -- very curious in the sense that we were an odd and unpredictable mix of cultures, values, and identities, especially in the eyes of the Joneses who just couldn’t keep up. As Bob Dylan put it, “something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?”

The writers for the underground press, as McMillian shows, not only knew what was happening, but also provided maps and blueprints for others who wanted to join the happenings, the be-ins, the love-ins, the sit-ins, and the whole spectacle of the cultural revolution.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman, and Out of the Whale: Growing up in the American Left. He teaches at Sonoma State University.

• Also see Anis Shivani's excellent review from the Feb. 20, 2011, Austin American Statesman: Pressing for change: John McMillian's 'Smoking Typewriters' charts history of underground newspapers.

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