Alice Embree : Anne Lewis' New Website Brings Austin Movement History to Life

Filmmaker Anne Lewis' new website is called Austin Beloved Community.

'Austin Beloved Community':
Anne Lewis' new website
brings movement history to life

'This was designed as cooperative and experimental. It’s really a community organizing art project.'

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / November 19, 2013

Austin Beloved Community is a gift. Movement history comes alive in a digital collage of collective memory -- audio, film, photos and maps, and a rich diversity of local recollection.

This website is a gift from Anne Lewis. Lewis makes documentary film. Notably, she was associate director/assistant camera for Harlan County, U.S.A, the Academy Award-winning documentary about a coal country strike. Her most recent work is Anne Braden: Southern Patriot. In this film, Lewis documents the life of a woman praised as “eloquent and prophetic” by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail.

Anne Lewis came to Austin in 1998 and teaches her film craft at the University of Texas at Austin. She hardly limits herself to teaching. She can often be seen behind a camera at marches or demonstrations or without a camera holding a picket sign.

As an executive board member of the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU-CWA 6186), she is at the forefront of a current struggle against the University’s plan to downsize, consolidate, and outsource jobs -- a plan that would further corporatize the academic community.

I interviewed Anne Lewis about her recently launched website -- what she calls “a journey through time and memory.” Lewis, who also is a contributor to The Rag Blog, describes the site as “a shared space between organizations, artists, and all who hold close ideas of liberation, equality, and just society.” She reaches back to the 1880s and takes you forward to the present. She even includes a Google map that pinpoints where events occurred and organizations were born.

This is not Austin from the point of view of SXSW or Formula 1 promoters. This is the history of the struggle for social justice told by participants who know that the struggle isn’t over.

Anne Lewis.

Alice Embree: You’ve been in Austin since 1998. Can you tell us what brought you here?

Anne Lewis: Jim [Branson] and I were living in Whitesburg, Kentucky (1,499 people and one grouch) and had a young son. The Texas State Employees Union wanted Jim to come to work as an organizer for the union. I had been [producing films] with Appalshop for 15 years. I could bring my work with me, and the idea of a change seemed good. We were typical Appalachian migrants -- jobs, school, city life -- and we moved as much of our family here as we could, but if we could have gone back every weekend, we would have.

You cover a lot of hidden history -- African Americans, Chicanos, women, the LGBTQ community, labor organizers. How did you get so much input?

This was designed as cooperative and experimental. It’s really a community organizing art project. The project began by picking the kind of folks you name -- their organizations -- and asking each to contribute five uprisings or victories in Austin that mattered to them. We added a number of individuals. People and organizations are on the about page. That meant that we got everything from Homer the Homeless Goose to Mooning the Klan to convict labor at the Capitol and Lady LULAC.

I deliberately put priority on African American, Chicano, Women, LGBTQ, working class organizations -- and made rules for myself like no national organizations unless the Austin chapter was strong and independent, no group on campus, no political groups, no primarily service organizations. I managed to keep myself non-judgmental on events. Anything that was a people’s uprising or victory went on the map. Also I decided not to even try to build a database. I wanted it to be subjective, quirky, open-minded, and fun.

Your work has been with film -- as director, producer, cameraperson and teacher. What prompted you to create a website?

Well I’m not much of a cameraperson but the rest hold. I hate websites -- all those little boxes and all those tabs inside of tabs. I don’t like the idea of clicking as interactivity and I don’t really enjoy choosing my own adventure. Huge qualities of factual information leave me cold and anxious. But on the other hand I knew a wonderful visual artist, Jeanne Stern, and wanted to work with Tom Hammond’s style of tonal shifts of wind for sound design.

I also wanted to bring Anne Braden’s ideas to Austin without driving myself crazy trying to market the film and make people show it. The City of Austin helped fund the Anne Braden film, and helped fund this project as well. So in many ways the start was an animation film idea with social justice events over time as folks remembered them and a tie to Anne Braden’s ideas. The rest developed from the process of arriving at content -- organizations and mapped events, still photographs, a calendar to give back.

I know people will tell you about history that was left out. Is there a way to make this an ongoing effort?

It is already. It’s strange to say this but I want to hear from people about what I left out and what needs correcting. It’s fun doing it. The movement history is still growing. All I need is date, place, event, and a paragraph or link and it can go up. The organizational map is similar. The calendar of events is current. People need to send their events to me though -- especially the strange stuff that goes on here. The stars on the organizations are still slowly lighting up. Resistencia and PODER are the only ones on right now. Then there’s a Facebook page.

What do you hope people learn from viewing Austin Beloved Community?

To trust their own experience. To remember the good stuff and share it around. To join in community. I guess none of that is learning like reading a book (which would be a very good thing to do right now) but I’m getting way too touchy-feely already and hesitate to talk about a city that so many other people know so much better.

If you only browse this site briefly, I suggest you go to Justice Animation. There is a link to a gallery of photos, including the Birth of The Rag. Then watch the short video. Turn the sound on. It begins in silence, but will soon surprise you. Some time in the future, when you are feeling hopeless about what can be done, watch it again.

[Alice Embree, a contributing editor to The Rag Blog, is a long-time Austin activist, organizer, and member of the Texas State Employees Union. A veteran of SDS and the women's liberation movement, Alice is a former staff member of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) and of underground newspapers The Rag in Austin and RAT in New York. She now co-chairs the Friends of New Journalism. Read more articles by Alice Embree on The Rag Blog.]

• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's February 22, 2013, Rag Radio interview with documentary filmmaker Anne Lewis.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Father-Daughter! Newsman Dan Rather & Environmental Activist Robin Rather

Dan Rather and Robin Rather on Rag Radio, Friday, September 27, 2013, in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas. Photos by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Legendary newsman Dan Rather
and environmental activist Robin Rather

Their first ever father-daughter interview is a funny, far-ranging discussion spiced with lively anecdotes, sharp political insights, and touching family memories.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / October 21, 2013

Legendary newsman Dan Rather and Austin-based environmental activist Robin Rather join Thorne Dreyer for their first-ever father-daughter interview. The incisive, far-ranging, and frequently funny session was originally broadcast live on Rag Radio, Friday, September 27, 2013.

Rag Radio is a weekly syndicated radio program produced and hosted by long-time alternative journalist Dreyer and recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download the podcast of Rag Radio's interview with Dan Rather and Robin Rather here:


Texas-born newsman and former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, who was recently honored with the prestigious Trustees Award of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and his daughter, Robin Rather, an Austin-based environmental activist and sustainability advocate who chaired the city's historic Save Our Springs Alliance, join us in a lively discussion, spiced with oft-funny anecdotes and personal reflections.

Dan talks about his early career in Houston, including his stint as a play-by-play announcer for the minor league Houston Buffs (in road games they "recreated" the on-field action in the studio by reading from a telegraph ticker tape) and his dramatic and innovative coverage of Hurricane Carla in Galveston in 1961 that led to his hiring by CBS News.

He also discusses his controversial exit from CBS; his blogging about Aaron Sorkin's HBO series, The Newsroom; and his take on larger contemporary issues including the increasing corporatization and concentration of ownership in the news business and what he considers to be an endemic lack of courage in today's news reporting.

Robin talks about growing up as the daughter of a famous reporter and media star; about her seminal work in the movement to protect and sustain Austin’s unique environment; and about the daunting challenges -- especially to the region's fragile ecosystem -- caused by the city’s current unprecedented growth spurt. And they each reflect on the other's accomplishments and their close relationship over the decades.

Rag Radio's Thorne Dreyer with Dan Rather and Robin Rather in the KOOP studios.

Dan Rather, now managing editor and anchor of Dan Rather Reports on AXS TV, went to work at CBS News in 1962 and was anchor of the CBS Evening News for 24 years, from 1981-2005. Born in Wharton, Texas, in 1931, he began his career as a full-time journalist with Houston's KTRH radio and KHOU-TV.

The recipient of numerous Emmy and Peabody awards, Dan joined the illustrious company of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite when he was honored with the prestigious Trustees Award of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in New York City on October 18, 2013. Rather's new book is Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News. Dan and his wife, Jean Goebel, to whom he’s been married since 1957, maintain homes in New York City and Austin, Texas.

Robin Rather is an Austin-based environmental activist and sustainability consultant. She is the CEO of Collective Strength where she consults on projects involving renewable energy, water conservation, health care, and community values. Robin was chair of the board of the historic Save Our Springs Alliance, established in 1992 to advocate for Austin's iconic Barton Springs and the Edwards Aquifer ecosystem. Robin was also co-founder of Liveable City, Hill Country Conservancy, and Envision Central Texas, and serves on the advisory board of the Sustainable Food Center.

Born in Houston in 1958, she is the daughter of Dan Rather and Jean Goebel.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. (CDT).

The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

[Thorne Dreyer edits The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio, and is a director of the New Journalism Project. Dreyer was a founding editor of The Rag in Austin in 1966 and Space City! in Houston in 1969. He was on the editorial collective of Liberation News Service (LNS) in New York, was general manager of Pacifica's KPFT-FM in Houston, and was a correspondent for the early Texas Monthly magazine. Dreyer can be contacted at editor@theragblog.com]

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, October 25, 2013: Feminist pioneer and Houston Area NOW president Frances "Poppy" Northcutt, veteran of NASA's Mission Control and first Houston Women's Advocate (1972).
Friday, November 1, 2013: Singer-Songwriter Slaid Cleaves.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Thorne Dreyer : Houston Was an Unlikely '60s Hotbed

The staff of Space City!, Houston's late '60s-early '70s underground newspaper. Cover photo -- from the paper's June 8, 1971, issue -- by Jerry Sebesta. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Boys From Houston:
Bayou city was unlikely '60s hotbed

Houston may not have had a center, but it certainly had a heart. Montrose, still one of the great neighborhoods of the world, and long a haven for artists, homosexuals, and iconoclasts, became a bohemian mecca in the Sixties.

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / August 15, 2013

[The following is reprinted from Vicki Welch Ayo's new book, Boys From Houston, about the city's thriving '60s music scene. Houston native Dreyer, now editor of The Rag Blog and host of Rag Radio, was active in alternative media and community organizing in late '60s-early '70s Houston. Also see Ivan Koop Kuper's Rag Blog review of The Boys From Houston.]

Houston was a fairly unlikely Sixties hotbed. A sprawling adolescent boomtown, the city had no real center and little sense of actual community (unless you were River Oaks old money and/or in the oil bidness). Austin, on the other hand, had long been a focus for literate and iconoclastic traditions and populist/left activism, geographically and culturally tied to the campus of the University of Texas.

Austin was a major point of origin for the massive student rebellion against the War in Vietnam, for the psychedelic music phenomenon, and for the underground press and comix movements. Austin, too, was très cool; it was beautiful and progressive and everyone in Texas who was born with the weird gene wanted to head for the hills of Central Texas.

Houston, not so much.

But by the late 1960’s/early ‘70s, Houston was really where it was happening in the Texas counterculture. There were several factors that played into this transformation (including an “us-versus-them” attitude that made for a strong and cohesive community).

First, lots of important music talent grew out of or was nurtured in Houston and East Texas, and Houston had a vital, organic club scene that provided outlets for that talent. Mike Condray, George Banks, and the Jubilee Hall-Family Hand-Liberty Hall continuum of clubs played an especially critical role in showcasing cutting edge roots-music talent from the region and around the country, and Anderson Fair -- which from its inception served as an organizing site for progressive politics -- would become one of the nation’s most important acoustic venues.

Billy Gibbons with Vicki
Ayo's Boys From Houston.

Although I first saw Janis Joplin in Austin -- at the UT student union’s weekly folksinging circle -- it was Houston’s Jubilee Hall that initiated me into the transformative experience that was the Thirteenth Floor Elevators; Liberty Hall where I first saw Lightnin’ Hopkins and Bruce Springsteen; and Anderson Fair where I discovered Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, and a raft of progressive folkies.

The Old Quarter was a pioneering acoustic venue, and David Adickes’ Love Street Light Circus held court to the psychedelic crowd and the likes of Bubble Puppy, Fever Tree, and Billy Gibbons’ Moving Sidewalks. Of Our Own brought in Phil Ochs and the MC5.

These weren’t just places to go hear music. They were an integral part of the scene; there was little separation between them and the community they served.

Second, Houston may not have had a center, but it certainly had a heart. Montrose, still one of the great neighborhoods of the world, and long a haven for artists, homosexuals, and iconoclasts, became a bohemian mecca in the Sixties, with a sense of community and a tolerance for diversity that were unique in the city.

It was an eclectic mix of elegant old houses and ramshackle apartment complexes, head shops and boutiques, strip clubs and burger joints, lively music venues and gay bars. There were galleries, museums, and folk art sites, hippie communes and esoteric enterprises like the Pagan Church, plus a Greenwich Village-type strip of bars and bistros with European fare. There were always block parties and outdoor concerts and guerrilla theater actions and anti-war demonstrations -- and longhairs, dude, abode!

And, if you really looked, you could find a place to live for well under $100 a month. With indoor plumbing!

Logo from Houston Scene.

Finally, and perhaps most important, was the role of underground newspaper Space City! -- with a significant assist from Pacifica radio station KPFT -- in spreading the word and creating an environment where the counterculture could thrive. Space City! (originally Space City News) helped to pull together “pockets of resistance” throughout the massive metropolitan area, provided otherwise-isolated hipsters with a sense of belonging, and was a primary source of information about community activities.

In the community-at-large, Space City! became the face of Houston’s thriving counterculture, as hundreds of young kids peddled the newspaper throughout the city -- at the corner of Montrose and Westheimer, on the University of Houston campus, at Hippie Hill in Hermann Park, and downtown at Market Square and Allen’s Landing.

Not only did the offices of Space City! serve as a de facto community center, but the paper also spun off a number of auxiliary counterculture institutions, including a drug crisis center, a food coop, several high school underground newspapers, and a community-run nonprofit rock ‘n roll hall, Of Our Own.

Also playing a key role in making Houston a happening place were noted painter Margaret Webb Dreyer, a peace activist and a prime mover in the Houston art scene, and her journalist husband, Martin. (Full disclosure: they also doubled as my parents.) Their Dreyer Galleries had, since the 50’s, been a gathering spot for Houston’s arts, literary, and academic types -- and liberal politicos like Houston’s young progressive mayor, Fred Hofheinz -- and now it became a center for the burgeoning peace movement.

Thorne Dreyer in the mid-Sixties. Photo by Robert Simmons. Image from Vicki Welch Ayo's Boys From Houston.

(Avant garde rockers the Red Krayola played [blasted!] at one Dreyer Galleries art opening, and legendary Houston folkie Don Sanders sang at the 1976 memorial homage to Maggie Dreyer, held at Houston’s Rothko Chapel.)

Houston was also home to an active -- and actively violent -- chapter of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. (It would later be revealed that the KKK had built a strong and abiding presence inside the Houston police department.) The Klan targeted the Houston counterculture, with most of the city’s peace organizations feeling its wrath. Klansmen shot bullets through the front door of Dreyer Galleries after throwing yellow paint on the front wall of the converted old house on San Jacinto. The offices of Space City! were bombed and some of the paper’s advertisers were threatened and their shops riddled with bullets. Pacifica radio was twice bombed off the air by right wing nightriders.

Ironically, the work of the KKK scared nobody off, and if anything, the violent acts just seemed to strengthen the commitment of the peace activists and counterculture denizens -- and made the radical community even more cohesive and purposed.

To say nothing of providing a lot of free publicity!

[Thorne Dreyer is the editor of The Rag Blog and host of Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin. A Houston native, Dreyer was a founding editor of underground newspapers The Rag in Austin and Space City! in Houston and was general manager of KPFT-FM, Houston's Pacifica radio station.]

• Also see "Vicki Welch Ayo's 'Boys From Houston' Documents a Thriving '60s Music Scene," by Ivan Koop Kuper in The Rag Blog.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Beverly Baker Moore : May Day Memories, or Consciousness-Raising Through Vegetables

Rally during May Day demonstrations, Washington, D.C., 1971. Image from Waging Nonviolence.

May Day memories, or
Consciousness-raising through vegetables

The cop riding shotgun stayed behind the wheel while his out-of-control buddy leapt out screaming. He was all blown up, beet-red in the face and (literally) spitting mad.

By Beverly Baker Moore / The Rag Blog / August 1, 2013

Not counting the people who’ve died too young since 1971, there should be at least one good story out there from each of the 7,000 or so people who went to Washington on May Day that year. This is one.

Our four-person Sattva staff cell was one part of the larger Austin Armadillo contingent that year. Turned out disrupting DC traffic was the main, but not the only, thing we did. There were a couple of Washington evenings spent in heart-to-hearts with plaintive bureaucrats. There was a wild incident with cops and irate neighbors. And on the way home we adopted a Japanese hitchhiker.

Ahem. Before I came to the movement I spent some time trying to change the system from within. I gave that up for good in 1970 after working as a field rep for the poverty program’s Austin office. There were some real good people there and they had me out in rural communities where I would sit down with local folks and hear about the projects they believed would help them. My job was to capture their visions on federal forms and submit them for approval. The bureaucracy was a drag but taking the money back to the people was great.

Alas, Nixon got elected in ‘68. He closed the Austin office and cut the national program way back. Some staffers relocated to Dallas to do what they could within the more restrictive guidelines. Some tried other government jobs in the better karma agencies like AID, VISTA, or the Peace Corps. Some, like me, stayed in Austin and got involved in other kinds of community effort.

The first people in Austin’s underground community I fell in with were staff writers and cartoonists for the the Texas Ranger humor magazine. Through them I met a larger local group of “creative anarchists” big into street theatre. One of the most creative of these particular anarchists was Curtis Carnes and he had a plan for a community restaurant. One night he told us all about his vision for Sattva and asked if we’d join him. A week later, Jay, Jane and I were sharing a house with him and spending our mornings chopping vegetables.

The Sattva concept was simple. Good tasting, healthy, affordable meals. Anything not sold was given away. We were given space first in the Jewish, then the Methodist, student centers. The food was vegetarian. Macrobiotic was always on the menu for those who believed in it but we believed in spices! We served soups, beans, rice, casseroles, salads, and desserts to 600 people a day. We used no processed foods...ever.

As commune members we were paid minimal amounts of money for subsistence and a share of the food. In return we chopped hundreds of pounds of vegetables and fruit five mornings a week but not by ourselves. Friends came by to help. When your recipe starts with “25 pounds of potatoes, 10 pounds of onions...” and has to be ready by noon more hands are a blessing.

In what became a distinctive morning routine, a loose affiliation of friends from the community wielded butcher knives and talked politics beside us. Together we diced and mixed and stirred and poured for hours so people could have a three- or four-course meal that day for about a dollar.

Anyone who had trouble with the dollar was welcome to show up at the end of the meal and help us clean up in return for eating as much as they could hold for free. Seriously unique and celebratory after-work kitchen events arose as those folks worked and played and cleaned. For these celebrations we got to be the audience.

In Spring 1971 Sattva was coming to the end of a successful first year. We talked it over and decided to celebrate by going to Washington with our friends.

Meanwhile, my former boss at the poverty program office had become national head of VISTA and lived in a fine Georgetown house provided by that agency. He and his wife invited us to stay with them on one condition: their friends and co-workers in Washington wanted to sit and talk with us. So we swapped conversation for lodging.

The discussions were deep and heartfelt but, in the end, positions remained unchanged. The bureaucrats were kindly souls who cared about the same things we did and really wished they could join us but, but, but...

Eventually they decided to show their solidarity by taking vacation days during the demonstration so as not to actually contribute to the government during the time we were there. After that, I suppose, they opted to return to work to wait for the country to evolve into a meritocracy. We, of course, opted to hit the streets.

After earning our lodging, we bedded down on sleeping bags amid the family washer, dryer, and ping pong table that night, then set out for our selected destination the next morning. During our walk we witnessed firsthand the steady progression from Georgetown’s brick streets and sculpted shrubbery to the more distressed real estate that makes up most of the neighborhoods in DC. We passed blocks and blocks where mostly African-American folks gathered on porches and street corners, calling out greetings and encouragement.

New York Times coverage of 1971 May Day actions. Image from The Exiled.

We felt good about the street action that first day. We had huge numbers and did what we came to do...the streets were a mess around the traffic circles. I remember some angry-faced motorists but just as many, it seemed, looked faintly pleased. By afternoon we had escaped the cops and were crossing back through the African-American neighborhood from that morning, when two cops ran their patrol car up onto the sidewalk, nearly taking out the fire hydrant right next to us.

The cop riding shotgun stayed behind the wheel while his out-of-control buddy leapt out screaming. He was all blown up, beet-red in the face and (literally) spitting mad. Apparently, he’d not had a good morning.

He screamed at us. Caught by surprise, we just stared at first. Then he lunged at me. He grabbed my coat collar and jerked me off my feet. Scared the crap out of me at first.

We were in front of the picture windows of a corner café as the cop threw open the back door of the patrol car and tossed me in. We were prepared to be arrested so we didn’t argue with him for long. Instead, a young pregnant Black woman pushing a baby stroller on the block inserted herself into the confrontation.

She stepped up to the cop told him we were doing nothing, just walking down the street. He responded by jabbing her in the stomach with his club. That’s when the young Black men started coming out of the café, hot at the cop for threatening the woman. People on doorsteps across the street got up and began yelling too.

Back in the patrol car, the cop in the driver’s seat gave up and got out, obviously pissed at his partner for getting him into all of that trouble. I was inside the patrol car watching the surreal scene. My friends had backed off and I could no longer see the cops for all the angry neighbors.

That’s when I found the patrol car doors were not locked. It occurred to me that staying in an unlocked police car waiting to be taken away by two cops who didn’t look like they would live through the day was idiocy. I mean, they hadn’t even checked my ID. I flung open the car door on the street side, leapt out, and ran to the folks beckoning me from their stoops on the far side.

I made it across the street unnoticed by anyone else (even my friends, as it turned out). A beautiful white-haired Black man motioned me onto his porch and through his front door. Inside a grinning old woman waved me through their house and out their back door. I sprinted across two small yards and into another shotgun house as more people showed me the way through. I cleared several blocks this way and have this tale to tell about it all.

Back in the Georgetown living room that night the TV news showed the arrival of a couple of our leaders. We heard them say that on day two the demonstrations would be concentrated on fewer areas, then they announced which ones.

We disagreed with the strategy and the Sattva staff decided to spend the next day helping first aid workers and rescuing arrested people (some 1,400 of them) from RFK stadium. (Helpful hint for next time: LOTS of people will say their name is Karl Marx -- some 144 on that first day alone.)

The wild-eyed cop who attacked me was a preview of what people encountered that second day. It was so bad the national news media blazed headlines calling it a “Police Riot.” If we stirred up that much trouble we must have done something right.

A couple of days later we were on IH-35 in downtown Waco, almost home. Stranded on the median was a young Japanese hitchhiker. He was so thrilled we stopped to pick him up he wouldn’t quit bowing and we all nearly got blown away by semis before we got him into the car.

Back on the road he told us he was a Japanese graduate student on the last leg of an around the world adventure. He’d saved America for last, he said, before he returned to Tokyo to finish his degree and go into the family business.

He had been involved in Japanese student movements and was excited to hook up with us. He about cried when we served him the home-made Miso soup. He left us a couple of weeks later in the middle of another anti-war demonstration, freaked out about the Texas Rangers who showed up and ringed the park where we’d gathered for that one.

Before he left he explained that Japanese police did not carry weapons so he had no trouble joining street events there. He was scared to death by the well-armed Rangers, though. He said we were very, very brave and that he worried about us because we were protesting in the face of such violent authorities in such a violent country. He wished us good luck in Japanese.

[Beverly Baker Moore is an Austin-based writer, teacher, and activist.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Bob Feldman : The Rise of the Klan in Texas, 1920-1930

Flyer for "Ku Klux Klan Day," October 24, 1923. Image from The Portal to Texas History.
The hidden history of Texas

Part 10: 1920-1930/1 -- The rise of the Klan in Texas

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / December 12, 2012

[This is the first section of Part 10 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

Between 1920 and 1930, the number of people living in Texas increased from over 4.6 million to over 5.8 million, and the percentage of Texas residents who now lived in urban towns and cities with populations above 2,500 people increased from 34 to 41 percent.

By 1930, over 292,000 people lived in Houston, over 260,000 people lived in Dallas, over 231,000 people lived in San Antonio and over 163,000 people lived in Fort Worth -- although the number of people living in Austin in 1930 was still less than 54,000.

Between 1920 and 1930 the percentage of farmers in Texas who were now just tenant farmers also increased to 61 percent. And in Texas during the "Roaring Twenties,” as Randolph Campbell recalled in his book, Gone To Texas:

Thousands upon thousands of farmers continued to live in destructive poverty as tenants and sharecroppers. Giant corporations still wielded monopoly power because anti-trust and regulatory laws had always aimed more at "foreign" businesses... Laws protecting children in industry... went unenforced... The doctrine of white supremacy ruled race relations, and in South Texas Anglo bosses exploited Texans of Mexican descent politically and economically...

Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans, observed:

Mob violence increased in the early 1920s with the rise of the new Ku Klux Klan... Klansmen branded a black bellhop in Dallas with acid and castrated a light-skinned Negro accused of relations with a white woman. They raided the office of the Houston Informer and threatened the Dallas Express, both black papers. Hooded groups beat a black youth in Texarkana, removed two Negroes from the Denton jail to flog them, and forced black cotton pickers near Corsicana to end their strike for higher wages...

In addition, during the 1920s, “the new Klan, which claimed over 100,000 members in the state, proved powerful enough... to help elect Earle B. Mayfield, a Klansman, to the United States Senate from Texas,” the same book noted.

According to Gone To Texas :

The KKK arrived in Texas in September 1920 when a kleagle came to Houston and recruited 100 men into the state’s first local chapter. "The initial roster represented literally a glossary of Houston ’s Who’s Who," wrote one observer. The charter members were silk-stocking men from the banks, business houses, and professions...

From its Houston beginning, the Klan spread rapidly across the state. In January 1922, when membership reached more than 75,000, Texas was organized as a realm of the "Invisible Empire" under its own grand dragon, A.D. Ellis, an Episcopal priest from Beaumont. That same year women... obtained a Texas charter as the Women of the Invisible Empire of America. In June 1923, 1,500 masked and robed klanswomen held a parade through Fort Worth. Eventually male membership alone stood at approximately 150,000.

Some opposition to the KKK’s growing influence in Texas electoral politics began to develop within Texas white power structure and political establishment circles (who then backed state-wide candidates that were able to defeat some KKK members who ran against them) by 1924. But as Merline Pitre’s In Struggle Against Jim Crow noted:

The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s was a viable force in Houston and throughout the state. In Texas, this vigilante group occupied a position of power and influence unequaled in any other state, giving Texas the designation of Star Klan State. Houston was dubbed as the Star Klan City...

In 1921, Houston Klansmen, led by Deputy Sheriff George E. Kimbro, attacked and castrated a black dentist and beat a white lawyer who represented him. Several years later, the Klan tarred and feathered a black physician. In 1928, a Houston mob dragged a black man, accused of killing a white police officer, from his bed in a local hospital and hanged him from a bridge -- a murder for which no one was ever convicted. Additionally, a Klan newspaper, Colonel Mayfield’s Weekly, circulated throughout the city.

[In Houston ] in 1920, backed by a city ordinance, the American Legion excluded blacks from the annual Armistice Day parade. Blacks also were prohibited from voting in the municipal elections of February 1921. In 1923 and 1924, respectively, blacks were banned from standing in the same lines as whites to purchase stamps at the post office and to pay property taxes at the Harris County Courthouse. In 1925, the Electric Company excluded blacks from riding its buses, while in 1926, the Majestic Theater refused to admit blacks on weekends.

In 1921, Houston ’s Democratic Party also passed a resolution "allowing only whites to vote in the upcoming Democratic primary;” and in 1923 the Texas state legislature passed a law stating that “only white Democrats and none other” could vote in primary elections, according to the same book.

Between 1920 and 1930, the KKK was also visibly active on the streets of Austin, Texas . In 1921, for example, “500 white-robed and hooded Ku Klux Klansmen from Austin and San Antonio marched single file in silence up and down Congress Avenue, while thousands of spectators looked on,” according to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History. The same book also observed:

Capital City Klan No. 81 was organized in 1921 and a year later had 1,500 members including the sheriff of Travis County and apparently other highly placed city and county police officials. The Klan thrived in Austin in the early and mid-1920s... In the mid-1920s the Klan even purchased a sizable piece of property off South Congress Avenue and erected a hall or "Klan haven"…

So, not surprisingly, Austin’s “1928 city plan recommended that East Austin be designated a `Negro district’ and that municipal services for blacks, such as schools and parks, be confined to this district” and so “thirteen-acre Rosewood Park in East Austin provided recreational facilities for blacks, but other city parks were closed to them,” according to Austin: An Illustrated History.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Interviews with Activist David MacBryde; Author Jan Reid

Berlin-based activist David MacBryde in the KOOP studios in Austin, Texas, Friday, November 9, 2012. Photo by Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio. Inset photo below, from left: Rag Radio's Tracey Schulz and Thorne Dreyer and guest David Macbryde. Photo by Charlie Martin / KOOP.
Rag Radio podcasts:
Our man in Berlin David MacBryde
and Ann Richards biographer Jan Reid

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / November 1, 2012

David MacBryde -- a Berlin-based correspondent for The Rag Blog -- offered a progressive perspective on developments in Germany and the Eurozone to the Rag Radio audience on Friday, November 9.

And on Friday, November 2, Ann Richards biographer Jan Reid shared the story of the legendary late Texas governor. He was joined on that show by radio journalist Frieda Werden, who worked with the Ann Richards-initiated Texas Women's History Project.

Listen to Thorne Dreyer's interview with David MacBryde here :


and listen to our interview with Jan Reid and Frieda Werden here :


Rag Radio is a syndicated radio show produced in the studios of KOOP-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas. It is broadcast live Fridays at 2 p.m. (CST) on KOOP, 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the Internet, and is rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA., on Sunday mornings at 10 (EST).

David MacBryde, a former Austin peace and justice activist, is a faith- and economics-based social activist with roots in the Quaker church. Much of his work in Germany has involved the “Swords to Plowshares” movement, especially in the work of converting military bases to peaceful civilian use, and with the anti-war American Voices Abroad in Berlin. He discussed the European Occupy Movement and economic justice and environmental activities among other topics.

MacBryde studied physics and mathematics at Yale and philosophy at the University of Texas, was a staffer at The Rag, Austin’s influential ‘60s underground newspaper, and worked with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and with Austin’s Armadillo Press, an IWW union print shop. He was also a UT shuttle bus driver and worked with the drivers' union, ATU Local 1549. David MacBryde moved to Germany in 1981.

David also reported on the October 31-November 2, 2012, conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, honoring the 50th anniversary of the Port Huron Statement, which he attended, and discussed how the SDS concept of "participatory democracy" influenced his life and his politics.

Author, journalist, and Ann Richards biographer Jan Reid, in the KOOP studios, November 2, 2012. Photo by Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio. Inset photo below, from left: Tracey Schulz and Thorne Dreyer of Rag Radio, Frieda Werden of WINGS, and author Jan Reid. Rag Radio photo.
Jan Reid, the author of Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards, is a senior writer for Texas Monthly and his writing has appeared in Esquire, GQ, Slate, and The New York Times. His other books include The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, The Bullet Meant for Me, Rio Grande, Texas Tornado: The Times and Music of Doug Sahm, and two award-winning novels, Deerinwater and Comanche Sundown.

Also joining us on the show was Frieda Werden of WINGS, the Women's International News Gathering Service. Austin native Werden is also the Spoken Word Coordinator at the Simon Fraser Campus Radio Society near Vancouver, British Columbia.

When Ann Richards delivered the keynote at the 1988 Democratic National Convention (“Poor George, he can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth”), she instantly became a media celebrity.

In 1990, Richards became the Governor of Texas. She was the first ardent feminist elected to high office in America; her progressive achievements and the force of her personality created a lasting legacy that far transcends her rise and fall as governor of Texas.

In Let the People In, Jan Reid draws on his long friendship with Ann Richards, interviews with her family and many of her closest associates, her unpublished correspondence with longtime companion Bud Shrake, and extensive research, to tell a very personal and human story of Richards' remarkable rise to power as a liberal Democrat in a conservative Republican state.

Former President Bill Clinton wrote, “Jan Reid gives us new insight into Ann Richards, whose wit filled any room with laughter, whose candor chased away every smoke screen, whose heart was as big as Texas...”

Rag Radio features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. The show, which has aired since September 2009, is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

The host and producer of Rag Radio is Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

All Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts and can be listened to at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, November , 2012: Singer-Songwriter -- and multiple Austin Music Awards winner -- Guy Forsyth.

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

JIm Simons : Remembering Cam Cunningham

Former Movement lawyer Cam Cunningham passed away this month. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Defending the Movement:
Remembering Cam Cunningham

In 1971 we cleaned out our firm bank account and took off by car to the May Day action in Washington, D.C., where we started out as participants... to 'shut down D.C.' in protest against the Vietnam war and wound up lawyering to get our comrades out of jail.

By Jim Simons / The Rag Blog / July 15, 2012

Jim Simons will join his former Movement law partner Brady Coleman (now an actor and musician) and Brady's band, The Melancholy Ramblers (who will perform live) as Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio, Friday, July 27, 2-3 p.m., on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the Internet.

AUSTIN -- Cameron McPherson Cunningham was a lawyer nonpareil. Although he succumbed to cancer in July 2012, he will be long remembered in Texas and California, even on the national stage, because he chose to be a lawyer for the people, not for the corporations.

It is not so uncommon now for young lawyers to go into public interest law, or legal services, or even to become radical lawyers, as Bill Kunstler described himself in his memoir. When I was Cam's law partner for the early years in Austin -- 1969 to 1978 -- we both thought of ourselves and self-identified as radical lawyers. As did other partners who came aboard the rollicking ship of our law firm, unlike most all the legal vessels of the time. We meant it to be that way. And I can tell you it was damn good fun in addition to being deadly serious politics.

It all started in Montreat, North Carlolina, in late August or early September 1969. Cam had graduated from the University of Texas Law School in 1967. He received a Reginald Heber Smith fellowship which paid all or part of his salary at a designated legal services program. For him it was the DNA Navajo legal services program, federally funded as part of the War on Poverty, located in the four corners in Arizona. DNA is an acronym for the Navajo phrase Dinébe’iiná Náhiitna be Agha’diit’ahii -- which means “attorneys who work for the economic revitalization of The People."

I had met Cam when he was still in law school and I was with the OEO Regional Office in Austin. (OEO being the federal agency that ran the War on Poverty). Over the next couple of years we became friends. The Movement had galvanized a large segment of young people in the U.S. I opened my solo practice in 1968 and was immediately swamped with cases arising from anti-war demonstrations, the military draft, and civil rights.

Austin's Movement lawyers: From left, Cam Cunningham, Jim Simons, and Brady Coleman, at Austin's Saxon Pub for the first public performance by The Melancholy Ramblers in 1991. Photo by Tom Moriarty.
In December of 1968 Austin activists, including Martin Wiginton and Greg Calvert, with input from Cam in Arizona, organized a conference of lawyers and Movement people at a dude ranch in Wimberley, Texas, just outside of Austin. The purpose was to nudge fee-charging lawyers into pro bono representation of the multitude of arrestees and military resisters.

As a result of the conference, Cam was “hired” as a roving organizer or liaison with the progressively-inclined lawyers in Texas identified at Wimberley. I doubt that much money for living expenses was ever paid but at some point Cam left the legal services program to take on his new task.

He and his wife, Cris, moved into the rented house where my wife and I lived on the east side of Austin. We became closer friends, so to speak. But we did enjoy the companionship and it was the Sixties. I recall that Cam got a part-time position at the law school with the penal code revision project, in part thanks to law professor and friend, Fred Cohen, known facetiously by other faculty folk as “Fred the Red."

By 1969 Cam was committed to devoting his considerable energies and abilities to Movement law. At summer’s end we got wind of the lawyers’ confab known as the Southern Legal Action Movement (SLAM) to be held at Black Mountain near Montreat, North Carolina. Cam convinced me to go although I had been in informal rehab from the law that summer.

Like Wimberley, the Montreat conference was wild and wooly. All the Movement lawyers we ever heard of were there. From the New York Law Commune we found a model for what Cam wanted to do in Austin: a law commune. And so it was born in the wee hours one night in a long whiskey conversation between the two of us. He had the vision and I at least had some experience in such cases, which did not make me enthusiastic at first. We followed the New York lawyers up to New York after the conference and learned a lot.

Those idealistic principles seem a tad naive now. Like income limitation, legal workers and lawyers all with the same say and voice in the operation, fee cases to pay the way for Movement work, and so on. By the time we got back to Austin I did share Cam’s zeal to proceed with it; he had won me over. We rented a small suite near the University of Texas campus. We had one legal worker, Julie Howell (she is a lawyer now). But it really did not go too well.

Cam was trying to keep the penal code revision job and still practice law. We did defend Richard Chasein at a general court-martial at Fort Hood, after he declined training for riot control in American cities. This was a Movement case we did without fees. Other cases that should have generated fees didn’t. Money was a big problem that fall. I took a job at Dallas Legal Services Project in the spring of 1970. Cam soldiered on. In a few months I returned.

That summer the Radical Lawyers Caucus was formed for a run at the State Bar of Texas convention. With Bill Kunstler as our main speaker and other speeches by Maury Maverick, Jr. and Warren Burnett -- both great progressive Texas lawyers -- we made a splash at the convention. Before the convention the bar’s official journal declined to accept our paid ad about the Radical Lawyers Caucus. The suit we wanted to file was sent to Cam in Austin. I came back in time to brief the law and try the case which we won in federal court.

Our early struggles, stops and starts, changed for the better when a trial lawyer from East Texas contacted us -- or we contacted him after we saw his ad in the Texas Observer. In the fall of 1970 Brady Coleman became the third musketeer and our course was set. For the next couple of years we three were very close. We joked that we were closer to each other than to our wives, which was probably no joke. All three marriages ended in divorce in the early ‘70s.

In court: Com Cunningham, center, in beard, with Brady Coleman, right, successfully defended John Kniffen, left, a former Vietnam Marine who was beaten by Austin cops at an anti-Vietnam war demonstration. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Brady had a lot of trial experience and he and Cam became a lethal trial team. Cases all around the state sent us into battle: Dallas, Houston, South Texas, and West Texas. Fort Hood kept us hopping. Busts on a large scale happened around the university. Cam was loving the practice of Movement law. He especially took to the criminal law. He and I defended a black activist charged with setting the UT ROTC building on fire.

Cam and Brady tried some murder cases (not political) and we all represented those charged with drugs. Brady and I tried civil cases against the city, police, even one against Ma Bell, the proceeds of which funded a great party that we dubbed the Last Annual Ma Bell Counter-Ripoff Wild Boar Feast.

In 1971 we cleaned out our firm bank account and took off by car to the May Day action in Washington, D.C., where we started out as participants in the action to “shut down D.C.” in protest against the Vietnam war and wound up lawyering to get our comrades out of jail. Later that summer we went to the riotous National Lawyers Guild convention in Boulder, Colorado, where it was decided amid great controversy that legal workers, jail house lawyers, and law students could be members of the previously all-lawyer Guild, the progressive bar association through the decades representing the Movement.

One thing we always did on these trips: have a big old good time. Cam was the leader of this fun, with all of us singing at the top of our lungs, quaffing any available spirits, toking and talking the talk, later recalling the great stories repeatedly even when they made us look bad -- especially when they made us look bad! We were doing exactly what we wanted to do in a time when it counted for more than any other time.

If Cam was the leader of merriment, Brady was the provider of mellow entertainment with his guitar and voice. I tried to crack jokes, often so droll Cam did not recognize the joke and took it literally, as a Midwesterner is wont to do. (He often spoke of growing up in Detroit.) This was the beginning I guess of small rifts between us.

One night sitting at the old Villa Capri Motel dining room in Austin, Cam excoriated both Brady and me for the conventional, sell-out law we had been guilty of prior to coming under his tutelage. It got so bad we all three slammed out of there in different directions. At a time when there was definitely a bit of tension, we were saved again by adding legal ballast to the firm. We were lucky enough to gain two great new partners, Bobby Nelson and John Howard in fall 1972 at the old 15th Street law office. And soon we were back to doing what we set out to do, representing the Movement.

Anti-war GI's and other activists gathered at the Oleo Strut GI Coffee House in Killeen, Texas, 1971. Cam Cunningham, in inset at right, with long dark hair. Brady Coleman is to his right. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
In 1972 Cam and Brady were part of the legal team that represented the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in a trial in Gainesville, Florida. The Gainseville 8 were charged with conspiring to blow up the Republican convention. In 1974 John Howard and I represented a defendant in the Wounded Knee occupation (as we might call it now). There had been a siege of 71 days to a standoff with blazing guns. The Indians and their allies who held the store against the FBI were charged with multiple felonies in federal court.

I am unsure of the year, but in that same period, Bobby Nelson was part of a delegation to Cuba. We all had our Movement cases in and around Austin involving defense of GI’s, SDS members, civil rights activists, lawsuits concerning women’s rights, gay rights, and the counterculture in myriad legal battles. The law firm was an institution in the community of Movement groups and people from that Montreat beginning -- Cam’s vision and determination -- to the end of the firm in 1977, the year Cam moved to the Bay Area of California.

[Jim Simons practiced law in Austin for 40 years, representing many movement activists, including anti-war GIs. Jim served as a counsel for members of the American Indian Movement who were arrested at Wounded Knee in 1974. After he retired he published his memoir Molly Chronicles in 2007. Read more articles by Jim Simons on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Mariann Wizard's Odyssey

Above, Mariann Wizard at Threadgills, Austin, Texas, 2012. Photo by Gloria Badilla-Hill. Inset below: Mariann with former cable television commissioners, Jack Hopper and Tommy Wyatt, at ribbon-cutting ceremony to launch Austin's public access TV. Mariann was the chair of the Commission. Photo by Stuart Heady.
A Rag Blog Interview:
Mariann Wizard's Odyssey

“I love my country, but not always my Nation. I am a child of Mother Earth and loyal to her alone.“ -- Mariann Wizard

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / June 22, 2012

Wizards really do work wonders and Mariann Garner Wizard -- an icon of Austin’s radical movements and countercultural institutions -- is no exception.

The feisty co-author of two popular books -- the legendary underground comic, The Adventures of Oat Willie, and a classic study about the Sixties-era G. I. movement, Turning The Guns Around -- Wizard was also a contributor to No Apologies: Texas Radicals Celebrate the '60s, and to Paul Buhle's Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History.

She has worked her wizardry all over Texas for most of her life, and especially in Austin ever since she moved from Fort Worth to attend UT.  These days she works that wizardry, more often than not, on the Internet -- as a professional science writer specializing in natural therapies, and as a contributing editor to The Rag Blog.

A writer for The Rag and later for The Daily Worker, she joined SDS in the 1960s, and later belonged to the Communist Party of the United States. Her activist life didn’t leave much room for studying and she left UT before she earned a degree. On July 23, 1967, her husband, George Vizard, was shot and killed in Austin, and, though 45 years have passed since then, she has never forgotten the murder that day or her own youthful self.

By the time that she went back to college, and graduated from Juarez-Lincoln University with a B. A. in communications, Texas wasn’t the same and the United States wasn’t, either. The War in Vietnam had ended, legal segregation was a thing of the past, and American women had liberated themselves from the narrow roles that had confined them in the 1950s. Wizard herself had been transformed by the waves of rebellion and resistance that broke all around her.

For her whole life, she has rarely if ever accepted any of the preordained roles that others might have tried to impose on her. Even as a child, she had a free, independent spirit. In the last half century, she has been the author of her own ongoing Odyssey, delivered her own irreverent lines, written and performed her own brand of satirical poetry, helped to give birth to Austin’s public access TV station, and served as a mainstay in a community that has sustained her for decades.

Loyal to friends and to family, she’s as much a part of Texas traditions as Molly Ivins, Ann Richards, and Marilyn Buck, a friend of 45 years until her death two years ago, in August 2010.

I met Wizard for the first time eight months ago, spent several days with her in Austin, where she introduced me to her son, Matthew, and her former partner, Michael Kleinman, one of the prime movers and shakers behind Seattle’s annual Hempfest.

We ate Mexican food, listened to homegrown music, and gazed at the stars at night. I think we may have had a margarita or two. Mostly we talked from early morning to late at night about Austin, burritos, cannabis, UT, the weather, the Yippies, and more. We’ve gone on talking ever since then. This is our first public conversation.

Mariann Wizard (left) with Marilyn Buck at Dublin FCI in 1996. Inset below, from top: Mariann Vizard in 1968; with husband George selling The Rag on the Drag in 1966; the artist as a young woman; Oat Willie comic; Mariann reads her poetry.
Jonah Raskin: Wizard sounds like an unusual last name. Where does it come from?

Mariann Wizard: After my first husband, George Vizard, died and after my divorce from my second husband, Larry Waterhouse, I adopted the nickname “Wizard” that Alice Embree had given me. I made it my legal last name. I probably took the name in part because of "Mr. Wizard" who was featured on a science program for kids on TV when I was growing up.

Your husband, George Vizard, was shot and killed on July 23,1967. That’s 45 years ago. How does that event touch you today?

On a very real level, I will be "the widow Vizard" until the day I die. I was 20 years old, and although I've given it the good old college try on several occasions, there has never been another man who made me feel so totally secure, or so immensely proud that of all the girls in Texas, he picked me to be his wife. He was really somethin' else! I would not be the person I am today had I not known him.

You were born in Fort Worth. What was it like growing up there after World War II?

It was a great town in part because as a little white girl I didn't get segregation. The city had and still has a great library system, parks, art and history museums, public transit, and a feeling of unlimited opportunity. We also had something called "winter" with snow days, snowmen, winter coats, and winter wardrobes.

Were you a child of the Cold War?

The whole red terror was a part of my childhood. In high school, they gave us cardboard discs to write our names and pin them on our shirts in case of nuclear attack. That was the beginning of the end of my confidence in authorities.

When do you think you woke up and began to see what was happening in America?

When I saw black kids on TV fire-hosed in Alabama for doing what I did every Saturday: sip a soda at Woolworth's. I thought it could be fixed if people would simply remember what they taught us in Sunday school about Jesus loving all the little children. I didn’t look deeper into the workings of our society until on TV I saw the bombing of Vietnam and the Vietnamese and made a connection between the war there and racial injustice at home. Thank goodness for TV!

Why did you join Students for a Democratic Society?

A very brilliant, now deceased Austin anarchist organizer, and Navy veteran known as Bob Speck -- whose real name was Bob Baker -- got me to staple booklets for a Vietnam teach-in when he found me drinking coffee in the Chuck Wagon, the UT Student Union hangout for beatniks, bikers, international and Negro students, civil rights workers, and assorted weirdos. A week or so later, I went to an SDS meeting and was blown away.

And why was that?

I’d been in girls' organizations all through high school and knew that girls and women could decide things as well as boys and men. I had also been in mixed-gender groups where girls sat back and let the boys do the talking and pontificating. At the SDS meeting, two beautiful women -- both of them hooked up with cute, smart, influential guys -- stood up, spoke up, and got their points across. Even their men folk were pleased. That was Alice Embree and Judy Schieffer, who had been a civil rights worker in Mississippi, weighed about 80 pounds dripping wet, and was fearless.

Did you think that SDS would go on and on, forever?

As I came to know SDS people and "to participate" with them, I had the sense that our relationships would last forever, based not on some casual propinquity, money, or the bonds of high school, but because we believed in things worth struggling to achieve, struggling without cease, and perhaps without even a glimpse of the promised land. We had to learn to be kind to each other, to accept each other as we were, to love for real, and to keep the faith. Bob Dylan was a big help. I reckon he still is.

Do you think Texas is more violent than any other place in the States?

Hell no!... Do you want to step outside and ask that question again, Mr. Raskin? We aren’t a violent people. We’re just emotional. I support the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I have a Goddess-given right to self-defense by any means necessary.

When you think about Texas, do you consider it a part of the United States, or is it its own separate country?

Greater Tejas -- say, the 1718 boundaries, when Mission San Antonio de Bexar was founded -- is a vital geopolitical part of Mesoamerica, ripped from Madre Mexico by Yankees. The hideous border fence is an insult to Nature as well as Humanity. Imagine the influence of Mexico today if Texas had remained part of its Republic! Viva Zapata! Viva Juarez! Y Viva la Reconcuesta de Paz that we now witness in our changing demographics! If you can't beat 'em, outbreed 'em. The most popular name for baby boys in 2011 in Texas, and several other current U.S. states, was Jose.

To many Americans in, say, New York or Berkeley, the idea that Texas has a counterculture and a radical movement seems implausible.

It's not just Texas that leftists on the effete coasts don't see, hear, or respect! They don't know what's going in Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, or Arkansas, either! That's why SDS had to have a "Prairie Power" movement. Texas is the Heartland, but all y'all bi-coasters just fly over it or motor through it looking for hicks.

How has feminism unfolded in Texas in ways that would surprise East Coast and West Coast feminists?

Hmmmm... Roller Derby, maybe? With the Internet, Grrrrl Power is everywhere.

How do you define yourself politically these days?

I don't have a party; sometimes I think of myself as an unaffiliated working-class libertarian Marxist-Leninist, but I am more than that, too. I write satiric and outraged poetry, howling to the best of my ability at the moon of our discontent, trying to keep some sense of language alive wherein words have meaning beyond the convenience of the moment.

I hope that the generation coming into their prime now will embrace new paradigms of social and economic intercourse, redefine happiness as something that cannot be bought at a store, learn it's okay to live on beans and bread, and put into practice a lot of what my generation dreamed.

You've been involved in the movement to decriminalize and legalize cannabis. What ideas do you have now to further the cause?

The legalization movement has allowed itself to be stigmatized as a kind of Cheeto-munching-couch-potato-smart-ass-white-boy-jerk. The public face of the movement is all too often exactly that. NORML's new Women's Alliance is a welcome development and one that we’ve been advocating for years. Grown-ups smoke cannabis, too. Until users start supporting professional, well-planned public interest campaigns, we can all go on reveling in our image as "rebels."

You’ve been through several incarnations, if you can call them that, as a radical. Is there a cause or a movement that you belonged to and feel proudest about it?

I have always been an advocate and practitioner of the First Amendment. I’m a Free Speech and a Free-to-Assemble loyalist to the bottom of my soul. To speak and associate freely with people of like- and unlike minds is the essence of freedom. I’m a proud supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Texas Civil Liberties Union, and have a long and proud roster of free speech causes, publications, and occasions.

What are some of your Austin activities?

I spent a good 14 years involved on a daily basis as a volunteer with public access television in Austin, and at the state-of-the-art television studio that I and a small group of people demanded be built in East Austin. When visitors ask me for a tour of "my town" it’s the first place I show them. Every day people at the studio learn to deconstruct the mass media and construct their own media. Public access is free speech television!

What about your involvement with the Communist Party, U.S.A.?

I joined in 1966 in part because it was then illegal under Texas law to do so. I was not then and never was a secret member, but a proud and open one. The CPUSA taught me critical thinking to go with my own critical feelings.

When you’re away from Texas what do you miss most about it?

My family, the big sky, the back roads, Mexican comida y cultura, and my own pad.

When you leave Texas what is it that you most want to get away from?

Nothing. I am going toward something special when I leave, not running away!

If you look at the whole state, in what part of it can one see the most glaring inequalities in terms of wealth and poverty?

I think it’s pretty well spread out, though the Valley is the poorest. Houston, Dallas, and Austin have enclaves for the super-rich juxtaposed with hairy areas where people live hand-to-mouth. Rural areas and small towns also show deterioration in the quality of life, but at the same time new construction is bringing in new populations.

Texas went from LBJ to George Bush; was that a big step backward or just a change of names and party designations?

Damn, don't blame Texas! A lot of other states supported George I! And a lot of others supported LBJ, too! Texas liberals -- many of them very sweet people -- have a propensity for shooting themselves in the foot perhaps more than any other group. If there’s a way to lose, they’ll find it.

Even in Austin you’re aware of the border aren’t you?

Every town with a significant Hispanic population is a target for la Migra. We absolutely see it here. Austin was a sanctuary city, although the feds took that away from us. Many immigrants come to Austin because there are resources here. Barbara Hines, part of the Austin Rag community, is an internationally-known advocate for immigrant rights and we’re all really proud of her! Casa Marianella is a local group that helps people who are fleeing political and social persecution.

Austin is a cultural oasis, and an anomaly isn’t it. I guess that’s why you live there.

Well, it was, but not so much now, I don't think. There are lots of towns where people are cooking Asian-Latin fusion food, where people talk with soft Caribbean accents, and where you can hear reggae. Of course, cannabis is everywhere, and sometimes more available in Boonietown, Texas, than here in the big bad city. And that has made all the difference culturally!

What about cowboy culture?

We still have unregenerate rednecks, and that's their right and their freedom as much as yours or mine. I have conservative religious people in my family and we get along okay -- though we can sure disagree -- because we’re family first and commissars of political correctness much further down the line. I lived in a rural north central Texas county for seven years, between 1997-2004, and really enjoyed most everything about it.

You’ve known some famous Texas radicals including Marilyn Buck and Lee Otis Johnson, both of whom spent big time in prison. What do you remember most about them?

Buck was my friend for 44 years and I only now understand what a privilege that was and what an extraordinary person she was. I miss her very much. I longed for her freedom and hoped until the very end that we would meet again in this life; I wasn't allowed to visit her for the last 14 years of her life. However, I feel her spirit very strongly moving in the world now. She’s a revolutionary icon for me with the same power as Che and George Jackson, forever young and beautiful, an inspiration to more people than we will ever know.

And Johnson?

I knew Lee Otis only briefly before his long tragic incarceration and only briefly after his release. Before, he was gallant, charming, bold, and beautiful, an articulate student leader at a repressive black campus where the Uncle Toms of tomorrow were taught. Instead of shooting him, they busted him for passing a joint at a party and gave him 45 years in prison on a first offense. I was one of those who advocated for his release for many years. A local movement law firm secured his freedom and there was a huge, heartfelt party for him.

What happened after his release?

Years of imprisonment, torture, and isolation messed him up, and it wasn't long before he pulled the welcome mat right out from under himself. Today, we would understand, I hope, that he suffered from PTSD and had other serious medical issues. He got himself back in order, with the help of his family, before he passed away, but the prison system broke him, and we didn't know how to help him get it together again.

You have ties with prisoners and ex-prisoners, don’t you?

These days I'm really happy to have Robert King as a friend, a former prisoner in Louisiana's Angola State Prison and one of the "Angola 3." He’s the only one so far to be released. King is an asset to our progressive community; a wise man who spent 29 years in solitary confinement, he doesn't hate anyone, and continues to battle the system in a principled, disciplined way.

Are you the un-Texas Texan and the un-American American?

I love my country, but not always my Nation. I am a child of Mother Earth and loyal to her alone. Borders are drawn by men on maps, but they don't exist in nature. Nation-states are social formations that have arisen as civilization has (presumably) advanced, built on specific types of economic interactions.

But when you walk the paths of Tikal, or other ancient Mayan cities, or think about the civilizations that have risen and fallen in the Near East, it seems clear that borders are impermanent. Different economic patterns bring different sorts of social interaction, and no doubt will again, as the world turns. Maybe our descendants will be nomads, hunter-gatherers, or live in the kinds of space colonies that Ray Bradbury imagined in his science fiction.

Find articles and poems by Mariann Wizard on The Rag Blog.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is the author of Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Women: Portraits of a Generation. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...