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Students Confront Race During Birmingham at San Francisco State College, 1963

2014-01-19T00:07:45Z

Alananicole:

''' "I was there..." '''

''By Stephen Vincent''

''This piece was originally part of Stephen Vincent’s master thesis at San Francisco State College called “Poems and Essays: Through the Red Light” published in 1965. The original title of this essay was “Without the President: Some Days in May, 1963 (A Journal).” Over several days in early May, 1963, black and white students met together and separately on campus and discussed in particular the plight of the African American population, during the period in which the police chief of Birmingham, Alabama, the infamous Bull Connor, was unleashing a reign of terror on the city’s black population. President Kennedy remained studiously detached during these days, which pushed Vincent forward, trying to find new ways of relating across the historical chasm between black and white. (ed., 2013)''

May 3, 1963

'''(i)'''

It is midnight. And though it is quiet in what San Francisco calls the Fillmore ghetto, my mind is quite taken with erratic and rampant thought. The activity of the Negro demonstrators in Birmingham has increased to a wondrous, if not terrible degree. On my desk I have a copy of today’s ''New York Times''. On the front page there is a photograph of a Birmingham policeman siccing a dog on a defenseless young Negro. The cop has the dog’s leash in one hand, and the boy’s wrist in the other. The dog is pulled up on its hind legs and is lunging with an open mouth towards the boy’s one free hand. The headline caption reads, “Three Negroes bitten.”

The paper is full of pictures and descriptions of such brutality. Police dogs, fire hoses, clubs, everything, including an armored truck converted into a tank that is being used to stifle a seemingly unstoppable number of demonstrators. This almost biblical flood of Negroes has apparently left the whites with two alternatives: either the humiliation of surrender to the just demands for negotiation or a sadistic war of oppression on a mass of innocent and unarmed people. The whites have obviously taken the latter approach. The public officials seem to be incapable of even pronouncing the word “negotiation.” The Police Chief, Bull Connor, is in full reign of what amounts to a reign of terror.

[[Image:Students parading against segregation May 18 1963 AAK-0871.jpg]]

'''San Francisco State College students parade through the Fillmore District with banners denouncing segregation, May 18, 1963.'''

''Photo: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library''

At this moment my feelings alternate between frustration, anger and guilt. Bull Connor has publicly proclaimed that he acts in the interest and priority of white people. No one of any public significance or power has either openly questioned or sought to act against the Police Chief’s point of view. (The Office of the President informs us that Mr. Kennedy is keeping “an attentive eye on the situation.”) In a way, I know, until I in some way work to oppose Connor’s position, my color now makes me both responsible and guilty for his atrocious actions. Any present abstention from supporting the Negro point of view is a commitment to Bull Connor.

My first impulse is to want to participate in the demonstration. In an imaginary moment I see myself in a Birmingham march. Dogs attack me. Police club me and crush my teeth. It is as if both participation and such punishment will make me pure, cleansed of my guilt.

Right or wrong, I immediately withdraw from this image. There is something too simple, too easy about being humbled with a club. An act against Bull Connor, or what he represents, also means that I will assume a new relationship with the Negro. And I sense that this new relationship, whatever it may be, is not going to be as easy as putting cream into coffee. I have a feeling that things are going to operate on a much more complex level.

'''(ii)'''

A cat has just jumped over the fence. The barbed wire, which is supposed to prohibit such adventures, shakes and jingles. Across the yard I can see the light still on in Mrs. Jones’ place. I wonder if she is reading James Baldwin’s, ''Go Tell It On The Mountain''. I lent it to her when I visited earlier this evening.

She invited me into her reading room and served me a shot of bourbon. We talked about the Birmingham situation. “After sixty-two years on this continent,” she said, “it’s really nothing new or unexpected. I was right there when they did it in Atlanta in 1906, and after the war in Detroit in 1918.” I cannot share her stoicism. It is almost impossible to listen and extricate myself form her use of the word, “they.” How can I consider myself separate from the white people to whom she refers? What have I done to oppose the continuance of such actions? Nothing. Nothing but talk. Again, abstention is commitment.

Another cat has just jumped over the fence.

Monday, May 9, 1963

'''(i)'''

Morning. The news. Birmingham is still terribly tense and violent. More police dogs, fire hoses, hundreds of demonstrators (children and adults) stashed into jail. The Federal Government, the President in particular, has still failed to take a public position. The Associated Press reports that he is “concerned.” Is he also spineless? Bull Connor, at least, is not afraid of commitment.

The President’s reluctance to act frightens me. He had created the personal image of a liberal, a firm supporter of civil rights. And now he fails; he has copped out. The responsibility comes back to me. I feel compelled to speak, to act.

'''(ii)'''

This afternoon was worth a string of dull ones at San Francisco State College. When I arrived at noon, maybe twenty or thirty Negro students were holding what seemed to be a spontaneous demonstration in front of the dining commons. The atmosphere was quite tense. Many of them carried placards which expressed both support for the Negro in Birmingham and, perhaps most significantly, expressions of self pride: “I AM NEGRO—I AM PROUD.” Crowds of people, white and black, tightly collected around the bench that served as the speakers' platform. A tall Negro, Arthur Sheridan, acted as chairman and called on different Negroes to speak.

I felt both attracted and compelled to listen. I imagine that I wanted to find some possibility, some way to redeem or prove myself, to assert my convictions. To the contrary, however, the scene was more like a trial.

There were a variety of views expressed. Hardly any of the speakers dwelled on the particulars of Birmingham. Most of the individuals were more vitally concerned with their own fate in what now seemed to be a questionable future in a “white man’s” America. Though they had different opinions, what unified them all was Birmingham. The situation in that city was made into a vivid metaphor for the present condition of every Negro in relation to the white community. For these speakers, the failure of the Federal Government to defy Bull Connor and to support the Birmingham Negro has become a terrifying proof of the white liberal’s penchant for betrayal. When he is most desperately needed, he fails to arrive. Birmingham has torn the masque off any liberal illusions they might have held about the white man. In a way, these Negroes had become judges, and we, the white people in the audience, stood both accused and condemned.

It was both a beautiful and difficult scene to witness. On the one hand, the Negroes seemed to experience an almost startling realization of independence from the control of the white community. Voices frequently quivered and hands nervously clasped. Birmingham had put them into an exile, and they were beginning to make the most of it. In one way, the removal of the liberal masque had relieved these students from having to put up with the continual deceptions of trying to become a carbon copy of the now dubious requirements of the white middle class. In another way, the tone of relief was combined with fear. Their sudden exile had created a host of unknowns. The question seemed to rest on whether or not to attack and change the white power structure or to attempt to make a life out of separation. The beauty of the scene, however, was the feeling that historically frozen wheels had begun to move. These Negroes were not the traditional Uncle Toms, the Stoics, or the Invisible Men. No, they were publicly and independently alive.

Yet, on the other hand, the scene was also a difficult trial. What is painful to realize is the fact that most of them wanted nothing to do with us. It is not easy to understand that this act of independence is dependent on their liberation from my own liberal views. It is a humiliating thing to look at a placard that says, “I AM NEGRO—I AM PROUD,” and realize that this need for pride is based on a white deprivation, a white cowardice. We were now too late to be judged anything but guilty. The ugly facts of Birmingham, no matter where we are, have nailed us into a position that is blatantly impossible to defend. The Negro speakers finally had the effect of shoving me from a kind of liberal innocence into a contemptible state of impotence.

What ironically provided a small hope, out of a situation of despair, were those whites in the audience who chose to try and defend the reluctance of the present Establishment. The most important of them was the boy who felt worthy enough to speak from the bench. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and looked very grim. For three or four minutes of what seemed like a hell of a long time, he related a life history of personal qualms with the Negro race. “I have even worked with Negroes who felt they were superior to me,” he said, and gave details that I will not repeat on account of their pettiness. His last remark, however, was the one that really cracked the plate. “As far as I’m concerned,” he announced, “the Negroes are going to have to earn their rights.”

For a moment there was an embarrassed sense of quiet. A few Negroes repressed snickers of disgust and a few whites moaned. “How did you earn your rights?” I exploded. Immediately it caught fire with a few white people around me. “How did you earn your rights,” we chanted, while others jeered.

Arthur Sheridan, perhaps to the good fortune of the now pale boy, handled him quite gracefully. In what seemed to be an unconsciously paternalistic gesture, he reached his arm up behind the boy. “Now, now,” he tried to calm us, “I can’t blame this fellow; I can understand his point of view.” Whether he was serious or not, his whole tone and gesture just about patronized the kid into ashes. A minute later, when the audience’s eyes were away from the bench, the boy looked up at Sheridan, meekly smiled, shook his hand, as if he was scared to death, and then walked away from the crowd.

The only possible beauty or hope to be derived from this incident is that it suggested the first and possibly the only turn away from both the failure of a liberal innocence and the now guilt of impotence. “The Negroes must earn their rights.” Perhaps before today, and in any other circumstances, I would have met the boy’s ridiculous statement with indifference or silent contempt. However, today, in front of what are now our Negro judges, I felt compelled to act. “How did you earn your rights?” ''In a way'', it was a public act of murder. (The boy could have been Bull Connor himself.) Our reaction both embarrassed and destroyed his position.

The Negroes, in their present position of power, had ironically turned and forced us back upon ourselves. The real significance of the scene, I think, was that it enabled me and the other whites to make a public act of commitment. It was a definite move away from a part-time liberalism, or the liberalism of the present Birmingham betrayal. Instead of indifference, we had met the boy head on. As “good” whites we had perhaps made the first step in beginning to prove ourselves.

What I find paradoxical to this new act is that I think I received my strength to act from the “exiled” Negroes. On the one hand, it is difficult to accept their rejection and desire for separation. However, on the other hand, I feel it was this separation, perhaps the moral justness of this separation, that somehow compelled me to act. And yet after, when I looked at the black faces about me, I could feel and see that we were still worlds apart.

'''(iii)'''

At one point in the demonstration, a Negro, dressed carefully in a suit and tie, stood up on the bench. He seemed to ignore Sheridan. “I didn’t want this to become a debate,” he said. “If you have any more questions,” he addressed the white people," turn to your black neighbor. He will explain.” The young man stepped off the bench into the crowd.

For a moment there was quiet. I did not turn to the Negro beside me, nor did I see any other whites do the same. “I am a little more liberal than my colleagues,” Sheridan said, with a hand gesture, restoring the situation to a public event, or what I think was a drama. White people again began, somewhat foolishly to try to defend either themselves or the Kennedy Administration. And again and again, they were met by rebuff from the Negroes, the whites or both.

It is interesting to speculate on what would have happened if I, and the other white people, had responded to the demand of the Negro. “Turn to your black neighbor. He will explain.” I know I was afraid to face either the black girl or the black boy that I could see from the corners of my eyes.

In one way such a confrontation could have meant an easy resolution to the tensions that now divided us, a kind of impossible return to innocence. It might have been just coffee and cream. In another way, however, an honest confrontation with my “black neighbor” could have been very difficult. His honesty might have worked only to deepen my present sense of separation, and guilt. To me it is dubious if this situation would produce some kind of reconciliation, or at least a real dialogue of equals. In any case, even Sheridan, who restored the scene to a public drama, was unwilling to take that risk.

In effect, whatever is taking place at San Francisco State seems fated to take place on a public level of action. It is as though we have a ritual to perform. The rules and form seem to be unknown. Actions, such as what happened today, however, seem to spring spontaneously out of some preconceived order.

'''(iv)'''

I had one relaxed, even amusing hour in The Gallery Lounge this afternoon. Wright Morris read from his new work, ''A Cause For Wonder''.

'''(v)'''

The cats are quiet tonight. The light is off in Mrs. Jones’ window.

Tuesday, May 10, 1963

'''(i)'''

Morning. Violence continues. The President has still made no statement. ''The New York Times'' continues to report that it is keeping “an attentive eye on the situation.” According to James Reston, the President and his colleagues are madly placing telephone calls to the industrialists, businessmen, and lawyers of the economically powerful concerns in the City of Birmingham. Their message is to persuade these men to compel the public officials to take a more moderate stand, at least settle for preliminary negotiations.

The whole position of the K Administration is morally disgusting. Why, especially in the ugly face of such blatant injustice, is the President incapable of taking a public stance? As long as he is afraid to at least make a moral response to the conflict, Bull Connor will continue to rule as the reality of the white conscience. Until the President publicly condemns the police chief, I and every other white person is forced into the terrible position of identification with the forces of Negro oppression.

'''(ii)'''

Midnight. Same place. Things at school were different today. Events took on a more highly organized form of ritual. At noon about fifty Negro students, carrying signs of both protest and pride, began a march. They walked through the Administration Building, The Gallery Lounge and the different dining halls. In the Commons they formed a circle around the tables. A white girl sitting next to me at a table asked a Negro girl passing by, “Why don’t you go downtown and do this; we know what you mean.”

“Yah, you know,” the colored girl sneered and walked on. The white girl pounded the palm of her hand against her forehead in disturbed exasperation.

After a perhaps forced applause of recognition, the circle divided and they walked out the front door onto the lawn to a place not far from the speakers' platform. It was at this point that I sort of joined the group as it formed another circle. This time, however, instead of facing towards the large body of white observers in front of the Commons, the group turned in.

Gregory Baines, the leader of the march, stepped to the center and spoke in a soft, almost pleading voice. “We’ve got to start walking sometime,” he said. “Believe in me, yourself, and everyone around you. Let people see what’s happening.” When he paused, tears trickled down the side of his cheek. “I just can’t think of the words,” he concluded. The circle, after a moment of quiet, broke up.

There were about ten white people who had fully participated in this demonstration. There were conflicting rumors before the event began. Some people said the Negroes wanted no white participation. Others said they welcomed it.

On the one hand, I wanted to participate to both protest Birmingham and to express my support for civil rights. Absence from the demonstration gave me the ironical guilt of supporting the conservative point of view. On the other hand, however, I am convinced that this kind of demonstration has something to do with the Negroes’ own sense of liberation. It is a realization that has to take place apart, or divorced from a white involvement. I imagine the question is how to get on the bandwagon without wrecking it.

'''(iii)'''

This afternoon, the man with the words arrived.

After my two o’clock class I walked towards the Commons for a cup of coffee that I never bought. In front of that building there was a thick circle of people around a small group of Negro students. What had apparently begun as a private conversation had turned into a public event, a kind of theatrical performance.

A short young man named Wilton Smith was in the center of the circle. He sat carefully balanced on one knee and the sole of the other foot. From this almost athletic position he was using his friends and his opponents to project his views onto the audience. “Never have I seen anything more beautiful,” he was saying, “than those black students who walked out onto the lawn today. Wallace Stevens, William Merwin or any other ‘diddely-ass’ poet could not have described the circle they formed, and how, when they made that circle, they did not turn out, but turned in.” He curved one hand into a circle out of which he managed to somehow magically convey the illusion of what he termed “the essence of blackness.”

His manner immediately both attracted and offended me. I thought it was phony to try to push those poets into some backdrop of decadence (especially when one of them is a favorite). However, I was impressed by Wilton Smith’s own poetic power of voice and description that was somehow able to encircle a seemingly privileged and spiritual space occupied only by blacks.

“Don’t you think love and our sense of humanity can solve this problem?” A white boy seemed to plead.

“I don’t see where your love and humanity have gotten my people any jobs.” Wilton did not even look up at the boy. He rested on both knees. “The Jews love us, the white liberals love us.” With a smile on his face, and a slight giggle, he looked at the Negroes around him. “Everybody loves us.”

It was from these perhaps two different points of departure that for the next two hours I listened to Wilton Smith who spoke from the middle of a circle that was frequently changing, but always large.

It is impossible to render everything that happened. Perhaps the experience is still too close to me for me to suffer through it once more. In short, the scene was a heightened and professionally articulate affirmation of what I felt yesterday. It was both trial and battle.

Wilton, in effect, I believe, performed both a creative and a destructive act. On the one hand, he had an audience of white people who were undoubtedly drawn to listen out of the guilt created by the events in Birmingham. The President’s failure to act had put us at the peak of desire to change our relationship with the Negro (as well as to affirm our love for Ray Charles, jazz—anything and everything Negro). And yet, when white commitment seemed so possible, when I’m sure many of us could even paint ourselves black, Wilton performed the act of throwing us all off the ladder. There was going to be no cream in his coffee; we partook of a kind of death that he did not want.

It was his ostensible point of view that Negro and white relationships are historically and presently futile. To a pedantic degree (that is, page number and publisher) he is armed with facts to disprove the white man’s desire for Negro freedom or integration. (This can involve quoting the real views of such “liberals” as Thomas Jefferson.) But on the more domestic level he is an expert at giving vignette descriptions of the failure of integration.

“The blood,” he said, “who hits on white girls inevitably ends up with a scroungy-haired, frigid neurotic. And did you ever see how they get next to any of us? And the black girl, watch how she straightens her hips when she goes walking with that white boy. On top of that, she knows she can’t marry him.” After the pause, he laughed. “And now, they’re all frigid.”

Yet, other than working to dispel the liberal myth of integration, Wilton’s performance, I believe, was a creative act, creative in the sense that he was striving to both affirm and establish the area he had encircled for blacks only. This involved everything from creating an awareness of the history of the Afro-American, as well as trying to suggest a spiritual and linguistic impression of what might be called a black mystique. What was important to this act, though the particulars might be questioned, is the assumption that a Negro can stand by himself, free from the bonds or the grips of the white man. In any case, Wilton’s performance seemed to be a living embodiment of this assumption.

My reactions to this performance have gone through at least two stages since this afternoon. The first was negative:

At first I was especially impressed by Wilton’s capacity as an actor and a poet. I was taken with the spontaneity and wit of his response. Without any preconceived plan he seemed to be able to jump from idea to idea, and from image to image. (Or, as they say, he blew and he blew and he blew.) The language seemed capable of taking any pose, either straight or satirical. Colloquial Negro street talk could suddenly switch to a complicated classical prose, and then just as quickly into a caricatured sociological jargon.

However, as a white member of the audience, it was not an easy experience. Both his tone and sense of authority, for lack of a better word, are irksome. The tone of language seems purposefully intended to both intimidate and alienate. When he speaks with an almost patent command of black vernacular, the tone becomes excruciating. He has formalized the idiom so that it is both public and private at the same time. It is made so a white audience can both understand and simultaneously be attacked. For example, I am sure that the sensibilities of even the most liberal white girls were offended to hear about “the bloods hitting on frigid ‘fay chicks’.” In a way, the tone becomes a malicious attack that works to divide the speaker from the audience.

I immediately resented his sense of authority. I was antagonized by the absolute character of his judgments. It’s not fair, I thought, to eliminate the possibility of a healthy interracial relationship. But finally it was not so much the quality of his judgment, but his position of authority that disturbed me.

As did the speakers yesterday, Wilton presented himself as a black exile within American society. It is a position that gives him an immense amount of leverage. In short, it gives him the power to take critical potshots at any aspect of American society without having to bear the responsibility of his judgments. For example, he can satirize American capitalism into the ground, “They can’t survive unless they have a war every ten years.” Instead of concern, his attitude is one of humor or pity, combined with a sense of innocent disengagement.

What was devastating, however, was that his position made it impossible to challenge or agree with his judgments. We, the white members of the audience, were the mere “other of (his) self-constellation.” We were the guilty oppressors who were trying to violate, to destroy his existence. Any rapport with us would be a denial of his personal freedom. History, in his terms, has shown that communication with the white man has only led to a mutually destructive neurosis. The effect of Wilton’s authority was first to reinforce instead of liberate the audience’s sense of guilt. But, as yesterday, there were a number of whites who tried to deny this guilt as well as refuse Wilton’s freedom. At one point in the performance, a large white boy addressed Wilton from the outer edge of this circle. “Can I say something,” he said. He looked as though he was about to explode.

“I guess,” Wilton answered. “It’s Land Grant grass, isn’t it?” He snickered and looked down at the lawn.

“I want first to say,” the boy shook a gun-like finger at Wilton, “I think you’ll go a long way, baby, if you just be careful.” Wilton appeared unmoved by this questionable tribute to his intelligence and eclectic knowledge. “But, baby, when I hear you talking you know what I see, I see prison camps, concentration camps, ovens and more ovens.” At this point his syntax broke down into nothing but inarticulate emotion. Wilton’s composure did not change. In fact, he kept looking at the Land Grant grass while voices in the audience sort of perked up. Some yelled yes, some no. I think most of us were painfully astonished. It was sort of a senseless thing to say in view of all the Negroes being stashed into Birmingham jails. Wilton finally looked up and chuckled, “Maybe he’s trying to hit on me.” In short, by sexualizing the young man's attack on his position, Wilton had further amplified the traditional role of the white man as a sexual exploiter of the Negro.

At five-thirty, Wilton invited all black people to a rally at Fillmore and Post next Saturday morning at ten-thirty. He stood up and looked around the audience. “Where are you,” he laughed. Out of about seventy-five people there were maybe ten Negroes in the audience.

And, perhaps, this is the key to my positive response.

'''(iv)'''

Since this performance, approximately three hours ago, I’ve made at least three white enemies and no Negro friends.

On the bus home, a blonde girl with blue eyes sat next to me. “Isn’t it horrible what's happening to the Negroes in Birmingham,” she said. I nodded my head. “I just wish they weren’t such a dirty people.”

“They look washed to me.” I suggested she look at the Negroes on the bus.

“I don’t mean that,” she said. “I mean they’re so sexually oriented.”

“Are you frigid or something?” I said. She quickly changed seats, as if I was the plague.

Near home I met one of the white boys who had been in the noon march. “Why weren’t you in the parade this morning?” he asked.

“Why were you in the parade?” I asked.

“For the masses,” he said. “The revolution is right around the corner; this is just the beginning. With the support of the Negro we’ve got it made. There’s going to be another parade tomorrow. Why don’t you stand in?”

“You’re full of crap,” I said. “Take your color blind opportunism elsewhere.”

Mother called from Richmond this evening. She said she had just been nominated to a new city commission for the “culturally deprived.”

“What are you going to do? Deprive the depraved?”

“It’s to raise their cultural horizons, dear,” she said “We’re going to try and establish reading and writing programs and see that they get taken to cultural events, such as concerts.”

“Has anybody mentioned Ray Charles,” I asked, “or Leadbelly, or Coltrane, or anybody?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Do you really want the Negro to imitate you in every way?” I asked. “If you are going to provide them with what you presently called culture, how are you going to teach a black person how to segregate?”

“If the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it,” she said.

We soon hung up.

'''(v)'''

The trick of the performance has begun to play. In short, Wilton deprived and then enraged. As an actor he deprived me and the white audience of any trace of human nature. In the eyes of Wilton we were without sensibility, intelligence, or comedy. We were only guilty and despicably incapable of action. Such an accusation could only, I think, enrage. However, because in this case the accuser is innocent, rage can only go in the other direction—against the accused. Redemption is only achieved through the transformation of the actor’s opposition (the “other,” or that in me and in the white audience that makes his position possible).

In a way, Wilton has both forced and empowered the white audience with the responsibility of changing the ethics and myths of the Establishment. On the one hand, he dramatically forced us to relinquish our possession of him or any other Negro. And, on the other hand, he rubbed our liberal noses into a ground of guilt (with a little humor so things didn’t get too nasty). He left us with two alternatives: to act to transform ourselves, or be dead (metaphysically).

It is a position in which I feel both obligated and free. In my present sense of rage, I feel compelled to transform those conditions that allowed Wilton Smith to perform on the lawn in the way that he did today. I feel compelled to eliminate the conditions that make it possible for him, or any other Negro, to assume the position of an exile within this country, and to have the devil-joy job of pricking my guilty conscience. It was a performance that now compels me to want to fight for a society in which the Negro and I can hold a position of responsibility and power.

However, it is an obligation that also gives me a certain freedom. At least I feel liberated from that coffee and cream vision of America. That is, on a most simple level, I feel free from the compulsive problem of decorum with my “Negro friends,” (free from the enslavement of saying, “I like jazz,” ad infinitum.) And, in acting to transform the presently closed society into an open one, I sense that not only I, but every black and white person involved will be liberated from the sexual and economic nightmare that, as Wilton illustrated, must take place in just about every inner-racial relationship.

And, at the same time, I sense a certain freedom to become whatever might be my real self. The energies of the imagination that have for so long gone into controlling the Negro can start to work to deliver me from my own personal experience.

And finally, it will perhaps only be after this getting off one another’s back—that is, black and white each standing on his own feet, that we will have something honest to say to one another.

'''(vi)'''

The evening radio says the President has become “very concerned.” What will happen when he restores at least the image of a moral order? What if he again becomes responsible, at least enough to say the proper platitudes? At this moment, San Francisco State has become a kind of reality for me. My judgments are based on what is happening here. What will happen if the President again assumes control, if he restores at least the illusion of order? Will the effect of Wilton’s performance be diminished? I wonder if I will give up my new sense of responsibility or commitment if the President, or even the NAACP for that matter, is able to restore a myth of business as usual? Certainly, in view of the struggle ahead, that is the struggle to change both the economic and mythological assumptions of this country, such a myth might be an easy way out.

'''(vii)'''

Over to Mrs. Jones for some bourbon and TV.

[[Image:Police picking out demonstrators from the lobby of the Sheraton Palace Hotel March 7 1964 AAK-0899.jpg]]

'''Police picking out demonstrators from the lobby of the Sheraton Palace Hotel, March 7, 1964.'''

''Photo: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library''

[[Tracy Sims and the 1964 Civil Rights Protests|Prev. Document]] [[Segregation and the Civil Rights Movement in San Francisco |Next Document]]

[[category:African-American]] [[category:racism]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:SFSU]] [[category:Western Addition]] [[category:OMI/Ingleside]]

Tracy Sims and the 1964 Civil Rights Protests

2014-01-18T23:00:47Z

Alananicole:

''' Historical Essay '''

''Originally titled “Tracy Sims or the Necessary Devil”

''By Stephen Vincent, July, 1964''

It is difficult to generalize about the participants in the [[Segregation and the Civil Rights Movement in San Francisco|Civil Rights demonstrations]] that have taken place in San Francisco this past spring and during the recent Republican convention. The direct-action projects taken against the Hotel Employer’s Association, the automobile agencies, Bank of America, and the Republican platform, whether led by C.O.R.E., the NAACP, or the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination, have drawn people from most colors and walks of life.

However, in spite of the fact that it is difficult to generalize about the majority of the participants, the leadership and its most dedicated following hardly bear much likeness to either the ''Ebony'' or the ''Life'' magazine image of the middle class Negro or his white counterpart. Frequently, newspaper editorials describe these young men and women as “disgusting,” “beatniks,” “filthy,” and “unemployable.” And, in a way, it is true that the militant, irreverent, and unconventionality garbed character of the hard core demonstrator would make him unqualified for a position as bank teller, car salesman, or hotel clerk. And, in general, the white community, instead of looking on these people as peaceful agents of a long overdue change, look upon them almost as if they were a source of some great mythological danger. Certainly it is a fear that has been made definitely concrete in the current court handling of over five hundred cases of civil disobedience. On charges of trespassing and disturbing the peace, these participants have received up to nine month sentences, two hundred dollar fines, and stiff probation restrictions about further involvement in Civil Rights demonstrations.

[[Image:Tracy Sims walking the picket line at Bank of America May 25 1964 MOR-0399.jpg|left|thumb|240px|'''Tracy Sims walking the picket line at Bank of America, May 25, 1964;''' ''Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library'']] Tracy Sims, a nineteen-year-old Negro girl who is chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee, does much to create this terror, or at least strong quivery, in the white community. Though Bill Bradley of C.O.R.E. and Dr. Nathaniel Burbridge of the NAACP are strong leaders, Tracy definitely gives the movement its mystique and perhaps its most powerful tool of change. She is not only a kind of born leader, capable of sensing and commanding the attention of a large group of people, both black and white, but she seems to have an intuitive grasp of the secret weaknesses of the white power structure and its particular psyche. She comes not only armed with the necessary statistics to approach blatant cases of unfair hiring practices, she is endowed with something else; that is, she is an articulate black woman with a strong touch of the "poet as devil". And it is a touch strong enough to make the courts of San Francisco want to keep her in jail for the next two years.

However, Tracy is no easy devil to describe. In appearance she is a short, hefty girl with a face that is not so beautiful as it is capable of a quick variety of moods and expressions that range from that of the innocent child, to a deep anger, to a kind of adult hymnal leftiness. On picket lines it is a face given added strength by her rough attire. She is usually dressed in leather boots, dark toreador pants, a tough suede jacket, and a silk scarf.

Her manners suggest a cross between the Negro of the northern ghetto and a Negro of the southern church. That is, she seems to combine both a certain unspoiled religiosity of the south and the often defensive ways and walks of the northern ghetto. Side by side within her there is, one senses, both the southern hymn and the sounds of the local rhythm and blues station. Without self-consciously verbalizing it, she seems to express everything of what black nationalists or separatists now frequently celebrate as “soul.” And it is perhaps the lack of this particular kind of self-consciousness, combined with a large sense of "join me" generosity that enables her to attract a large number of white people.

[[Image:C.O.R.E. sergeant Tracy Sims with crowd demonstrating outside the gates of the S.F. County Jail June 5 1964 AAK-0890.jpg|right|330px|thumb|'''Tracy Sims demonstrating outide gates of SF County Jail, June 5, 1964;''' ''Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library'']] However, the popular expression “to the nitty-gritty” perhaps says the most about Tracy’s character. In a way she represents a life that is both unafraid and undeceived by the rationalizations and the often cunning appearances of the white world. In fact, she is notorious for refusing to submit to their game. Last April, when she and some friends were arrested on a somewhat dubious curfew charge, the police and the newspapers were quite sensitive to how she verbally tore into the cops who made the arrests. It is only representative of her compulsive knack to get right down to the real, or the “nitty-gritty,” and say how it really is.

In turn, this background and character contribute to a special kind of picket line when led by Tracy. That is, she, or her rapidly growing group of both black and white imitators, give such a line a certain tone and rhythm. There is the offbeat clap of hands, the snaking two step, or lope step, and the often religious tone of the freedom song becomes biting and militant. And a walking that is often sheer drudgery becomes spirited, sharp and penetrating. Indeed, one thinks twice when Tracy, who has a powerful voice, leads the chorus, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the first next time!”

[[Image:Cadillac dealership August 1964 AAD-4658.jpg|left|240px|thumb|'''Cadillac dealership, August 1964;''' ''Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library'']] The “nitty-gritty” quality of Tracy Sims and such a picket line, of course, runs deeply counter to the artifice that forms the façade of the operation of the Bank of America, the Sheraton-Palace, or the Cadillac Agency. Yet, strangely enough, it is perhaps this very quality that has succeeded in providing more job openings for Negroes in the last six months, than has twenty years of well-dressed successful black men either begging or arguing with members of the white power structure to help train and give their people jobs. Whether consciously or not, Tracy Sims seems to know a few things about how to handle those white men that her black fathers do not.

On the one hand, she certainly knows that white businessmen are obviously not by nature inclined to change. Regardless of statistical arguments about the cost of supporting Negroes on unemployment and social welfare, and the cost of taking care of Negroes in prison and juvenile centers, these men are reluctant to transform their hiring practices on anything except a token level. Whatever their excuse, they are afraid to take the initiative on their own accord. If the situation were different, changes would have started taking place a hundred years ago.

Yet, on the other hand, Tracy appears to have an intuitive awareness of the very weakness within the white establishment that can create a positive change. In her own special way, or the way of "the devil", she knows how to threaten to pull the keystone out of the arch in spite of the apparent strength of the powers that be. And it is this knowledge, or power, that has made her become the devil of the white community, and makes its public breathe with relief each time she is sentenced anew for forty-five or ninety days for trespassing or disturbing the peace.

[[Image:Picketers demonstrating in Hall of Justice corridor Nov 4 1963 AAK-0878.jpg]]

'''Tracy Sims, center left, in midst of demonstration in Hall of Justice corridor, November 4, 1963.'''

''Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library''

This power, though often sensed and feared about the girl, does not often come into full play. In a way, it seems to be held back, ominous and reserved, and serves its purpose in that way by its potential instead of its use. Yet, occasionally, it reveals itself and its possible effect. Once, for example, it became terribly present right after a picket line in front of the Chrysler Automobile Agency.

Tracy had led the line for an hour and a half. It had been a spirited one, full of a variety of songs and a quick, energetic step. For the duration of the picketing, a salesman watched the action through the front window where his desk was placed. He represented the epitome of the would-be Aryan, with his direct cold blue eyes and his blond hair combed straight back. Most of the time he stood with one foot on his chair, leaned forward on his elbow, and stared. His only purpose was apparently to intimidate; however, as it happened, the intimidation was a little more than reciprocal.

Behind the salesman, at a desk farther back in the showroom, was a newly hired Negro. He was dressed, as the rest of the men were, in a neat suit; he appeared to be somewhat nervously relaxed. (The picket line had stopped all business.) On the surface, there was no “soul,” rhythm and blues, or anything “nitty-gritty” about him, just a difference of color. Tracy, however, was dressed in a black Frisco working pants and a Hickory shirt, a garb much similar to what the garbage man usually wears.

At six o’clock, when the circular line broke up, she continued the feeling and the offbeat movement of the walk. By chance she was parallel to the blond salesman behind the window. Snapping her fingers, she turned on him with a back and forward snake step and kept humming the remains of the last freedom song. The salesman, momentarily paralyzed, physically cringed and turned away, much in the way many white people do when they are first confronted with the voice of Ray Charles.

In short, it was intimidation, but not a simple kind of intimidation. It is perhaps too easy to say that Tracy plays upon or depends upon the sexual paranoia of the white man in the face of the Negro. However, it is perhaps true that she is able to return and enforce all those myths that have been invented by the white males and females about the Negro woman. She has the kind of attitude, I think, that says, “If they say we got rhythm, let’s show them we got rhythm.” What some white people have created at the expense of the loss of their own sense of rhythm, she brings or threatens to bring right back into their own being. And if these men of the white power structure still refuse to change something as cold and simply objective as a hiring practice, Tracy, as the good devil, makes them pay a crippling price. It’s either join me or fall, there are no “token” in-betweens. Such is her power, and it is this power to cripple or pull the keystone out of the arch that has made much of the white community shiver; but most importantly, it has been a very definite element in making businesses reconsider and change their employment policies.

Such intimidation as a tactic, or Tracy the devil as a tactic, is not so often debated, as secretly felt and perhaps worried about. Even people most committed to progress in Civil Rights can become queasy about her power. Her capacity to taunt, challenge and tease the very core of the problem, makes one paranoiacally wonder if, instead of positive changes, her manner of action could lead the whole structure to crumble, or to wonder whether such a crumbling might not be necessary. Certainly, from the terrifying effect of Tracy, it has become obvious that the white community is going to have to suffer a number of transformations before the possible creation of a genuinely open society. Hopefully, perhaps, the great number of white participants in these demonstrations are indicative of the coming of such a change.

[[Image:Tracy Sims (wearing glasses) in court with her attorneys Malcolm Berstein (left) Beverly Axelrod and Patrick Hallinan MOR-0405.jpg]]

'''Tracy Sims (wearing glasses) in court with her attorneys Malcolm Berstein (left), Beverly Axelrod, and Patrick Hallinan.'''

''Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library''

[[Image:Tracy Sims in courtroom June 1964 MOR-0403.jpg]]

'''Tracy Sims in courtroom, June 1964.'''

''Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library''

[[Image:Tracy Sims .jpg|190px|right|thumb|Tracy Sims]] In any case, one can say that up to this point, in spite of the actions of the courts to put Tracy away almost for good, her actions have helped lead to positive and progressive changes in hiring practices, changes that might save San Francisco from the explosions that have taken place recently in Harlem and Rochester, New York. And one must also add that her kind of force can lead to a change of tone and attitude in the hiring of black people. That is, it is possible that the new Negro employee will not have to feel that he has been given a job out of the white man’s missionary pity or charity. Backed by such an outside power, that is in a way similar to a union, he can feel he has a right to a job. And instead of having a sense of self denial, he can have a sense of dignity within his job.

Finally, one can only say that such has been the power of [http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aaw/sims-tracy-1945 Tracy Sims]. It is a difficult position for anyone to hold, let alone a girl who has just turned nineteen. The fact that, at the time of this writing, after having been given a week by the court to visit her mother who is sick in Texas, she has been unable to return for four weeks, perhaps suggests the burden of such a return. One can only hope that the City of San Francisco will come to its senses and begin to make changes of its own accord and allow Tracy, and give the hundred other people who have been arrested and subjected to the indulgences of the courts, return to a sane, hopefully fuller life, free of the need of even such a good devil.

''From an unpublished Master’s Thesis “Poems and Essays: Through the Red Light” submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State College, May 1965.''

[[The Black Press |Prev. Document]] [[Students Confront Race During Birmingham at San Francisco State College, 1963 |Next Document]]

[[category:African-American]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:Western Addition]] [[category:Bayview/Hunter's Point]] [[category:Civic Center]] [[category:racism]][[category:Dissent]]

A Time for Assessment—The Late 1970s-Early 1980s

2014-01-18T22:24:44Z

Alananicole:

The New Diversity—The Early 1970s

2014-01-18T22:15:53Z

Alananicole:

''' Historical Essay '''

''by Stephen Vincent, originally published in "The Poetry Reading: A Contemporary Compendium on Language & Performance," edited by Stephen Vincent & Ellen Zweig, published by Momo's Press in 1981 in San Francisco.''

Part IV

In the early 1970s, important shifts began to take place in what was heard. Historically these shifts may have marked the end of a certain renaissance of what was essentially white, middle-class activity. Out of whatever despair, in the spring of 1970 Lew Welch walked off into the Sierra, apparently in an act of suicide. Janis Joplin was dead. And it was hard to want to hear another record by the Jefferson Airplane. It was, however, the beginning of a genuinely multicultural alteration in what had been a primarily City-based, white-male-centered poetry.

[[Image:Grahn.jpg|left|Judy Grahn]] [[Image:SandinoPoster6.jpg|340px|right]] In the East Bay, taking the lead from Judy Grahn and Alta, a strong body of feminist writers began to emerge. In San Francisco, propelled by the promotional and organizing energies of Roberto Vargas, there began a whole series of readings by Third World writers of Latin, Asian, and black origin. Writers up and down the Coast began to command attention. Bolinas had become a refugee center for a number of New York-identified writers, including Tom Clark, Bill Berkson, and Lewis MacAdams, as well as Joanne Kyger and David Meltzer from the City. Later they would be joined by Robert and Bobbie Creeley. Down the Coast at Santa Cruz, a number of writers, including Mary Korte, Morton Marcus, and George Hitchcock, got active in readings and publications, including George's already well-established ''Kayak'' magazine. In the City, in addition to Third World activity, a large number of writers (graduates of State, North Beach surrealists, people who had not been burnt out by the narcotic ravages of the late 1960s) began to make their work public.

A new order of writing was gradually established. No close identification was apparent among the poets. The initial diversity made things potentially fiery and exciting. Magazine and book publications were still few. The reading was a way of getting work to the public as a form of oral literature in which audiences began to speak about poems they had ''heard''. (This was yet a few years before National Endowment for the Arts small press grants began flooding stores with everybody's books!) In the fall of 1970 I began teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. In the library, with its great view of the Bay, Jacob Wiener and I started a reading series. We made a habit of inviting three or four poets every other week from all aspects of the community: Bolinas, the East Bay, graduate students at State, people from the Mission and North Beach. Both of us were amazed at the late Friday afternoon turnouts of fifty to one hundred people. We were definitely involved in a new surge.

[[Image:L t R--Allen DeLoach Tom Pickard Ron Silliman Lawrence Ferlinghetti Robert Creeley 1683733 a54edc40a9.jpg]]

'''Left to right: Allen DeLoach, Tom Pickard, Ron Silliman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Robert Creeley.'''

The spirit of the readings was initially tentative. Occasionally you could sense a kind of competition to give a sensational reading, to capture a crowd. But poets were still unsure as to whether or not the reading was a viable form. No one wanted to get into an imitation Ginsberg or repeat the evangelical tone of Welch and the other Beats. Prophecy seemed archaic. At the same time, especially among feminists and Third World writers, an anger and urgency, a sense of pronouncement was growing. The question was how to relate to an audience in a compelling way. Most of the poems were centered in the voice, the processes and sounds of speech—whether declarative or conversational—and sometimes the work moved into song. Physical presence and a sense of dialogue with the listener seemed required. That possibility of exchange raised the audience's energy. In addition to attending to style, and the integrity of the sound of the poet's voice, people were coming to deliver and hear content. It was the beginning of the assumption of differences: the world of Bolinas, women, Latinos, Asians, blacks, City, country, and eventually the world of gays. Depending on where you were coming from, the new work could be liberating or threatening or, at least, amusing. It was definitely a new and diverse turf.

It was also the beginning of an enormous eruption of activity. In the fall of 1971, the Berkeley Poets Commune organized a large three-day poetry festival at the University Museum in Berkeley. The festival marked the first real attempt to unite at one occasion both established writers such as Robert Creeley and Joanne Kyger with the divergent groups of emerging, younger writers. Among several readings, Judy Grahn read with Alta and Susan Griffin as a feminist testament. And, equally important, a large Third World presentation included the work of Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn, Thulani Davis, [[Fillmore Black Ghetto by Al Robles from rappin' with ten thousand carabaos in the dark|Al Robles]], and Janice Mirikitani. [[Image:Janice mirikitani 4861.gif|left|thumb|Janice Mirikitani]] It was the first large exposure of new writers who had previously been heard only in small readings. The festival set up some of the main currents that constituted Bay Area writing for the next several years.

From 1972 on, readings began to spring up everywhere. In Berkeley a regular Wednesday night series was started at Cody's Books. It still continues. In San Francisco, Tuesday readings were begun at the Intersection, a nondenominational coffeehouse. They were coordinated by Tom Cuson with the eventual assistance of Steve Shutzman and Barbara Gravelle (who began a Monday night series for women's work). A few blocks away, on Grant Avenue, Carol Lee Sanchez took over the Wednesday night open mic to start a popular series at the Coffee Gallery. Another series began at Panjandrum Press on Saturday nights. In addition to the regular on-campus series, the Poetry Center began to stage large readings at the San Francisco Museum of Art. City Lights Bookstore, until Fire Department regulations intervened, held massive readings at [[Live/Work Spaces for Artists: A Historical Perspective|Project Artaud]], a warehouse artists' community, drawing up to 2,000 people for Allen Ginsberg and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, on one occasion, and Andrei Voznesensky on another. Between 1972 and 1976, rarely was a day of the week free of a reading or poetry event somewhere.

The activity made possible the publication of ''Poetry Flash''. Initially the ''Flash'' was a two-sided mimeographed flyer with a calendar of Bay Area readings and events. Edited by Jon Ford, it came out monthly and was distributed free in bookshops and coffeehouses. By 1973 an estimated 500 to 1, 500 people were attending readings each week. In addition, Poetry in the Schools, a project of the Poetry Center, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (and, at the time, under my coordination), was placing poets in the schools all over the Bay Area and Northern California to do regular workshops and readings. It was by far the largest burst of activity since the middle 1960s.

An intensity and drive to be heard probably transcended the desire to be published. Fifty to a hundred people at a reading could initially be a much greater pleasure than the slow process of publishing and book sales. But pleasure was not the word to describe the tone. Much of what was being read was connected to a new political stance. The eruptions of 1968 had produced a constant source of personal transformation that found root and support in revolutionary politics. At its best, the language was attacking the very tissue of the country's social organization, whether racial, sexual, ecological, economic, or political. No situation was spared, nor were the ruling elites of poetry. Behind the attack was the spirited assertion of a liberated and changing identity, both individual and cultural.

[[Image:Nina serrano victor hernandez cruz roberto vargas alejandro murguia y amiga 37416 1519922284469 1426890670 31377569 1632915 n.jpg|right|thumb|Nina Serrano, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Roberto Vargas, and Alejandro Murguia, early 1970s]] You could hear the new tone when Susan Griffin read "On Being Asked by a Man What He Could Do for Women's Liberation," when Judy Grahn read "Edward The Dyke," when Paul Mariah read "One Mad Queen," when Roberto Vargas read "Elegy Pa Gringolandia," or when Gary Snyder, one of the few engaged survivors of the 1960s, read his "Smokey the Bear Sutra." The language had a satiric, often savage bite. The intent was no less than to restructure radically what constituted acceptable American thought, behavior, and belief. The work was performed with and against the backdrop of intense moves and counter-moves in this country's political history. Not only was the Vietnam war raging, but events revolved around George Jackson, Angela Davis, and the San Quentin Six; the Weathermen; the struggles to bring ethnic relevancy into schools and colleges; the initial gay and feminist protests and demonstrations; Watergate and the Nixon administration; the coup in Chile; the invasion of Cambodia, and on and on.

The mixed poetry reading became a place in which all the battles might be engaged. It would be wrong, however, to assume that all that was read went in the direction of the various liberations, or that white men, feminists, gays, and Third World writers were not without serious divisions. White writers (products of writing programs, or those with special affinity to Surrealist, Black Mountain, and New York school writers) often faced Third World criticism that their work was too "interior" or self-serving. The view was that such writing lacked social context, relevance, and political commitment. It was writing as end in itself. Such writers were told that their work was racist, or, from a feminist point of view, the work was misogynistic, for refusing to acknowledge and respond to the new issues raised by women and Third World writers. Non-Third World writers would sometimes respond that writing done primarily from a racial and political base was limited because it could not engage the whole range of human issues and possible concerns of language. And both white and Third World male writers were damned by the women when they rejected feminist writing as unwomanly. It was a hot circle of writers and writing, to say the least. Nevertheless it was a period of contact, no matter how often blunt and bruised, in which the writing scene was not fragmented, as it currently seems, into several separatist camps of concern. At that time, on most any night of the week in North Beach, at Vesuvio's, [[SPEC'S: A Durable Legend|Spec's]], the Intersection, or Malvina's, it was possible for several kinds of writers to run into each other over drinks. The reading as a place of engagement with issues was played out all over the City and the Bay Area into the mid-1970s.

[[Image:Allende-neruda-memorial-reading-at-glide-church-1973.jpg]]

'''Allende Neruda Memorial Reading at Glide Church, 1973.'''

It was not just limited to the relatively small reading situations at the Intersection, Cody's, The Coffee Gallery, Panjandrum, and Minnie's Can-Do club but would periodically explode into larger scenarios, particularly at the Museum of Art, Glide Church, Fugazi Hall, the Longshoreman's Hall, and Project Artaud. The era of "the big reading" was definitely back, as it had been in the mid-1960s. Anywhere from ten to twenty poets were invited, and the evenings stretched from 7:30 to midnight. Different physical locations had various appeals. The Museum of Art put the work in a relatively apolitical context of art and social importance, no matter who was reading. Fugazi Hall in North Beach created resonances with the Beats. Longshoreman's Hall, near Fisherman's Wharf, held progressive "union" political connotations. And Glide, during those years, of all the settings, was undoubtedly the most provocative place in town-politically, socially, and racially.

[[Image:Cecil-and-Jan-early web1.jpg|270px|left|thumb|Cecil Williams and Janice Mirikitani in early 1970s at Glide Church.]] Cecil Williams, one of the progressive Glide pastors, enlivened the church's community-based image. No matter what the event in the secular world—the strike at State, events surrounding the war, the struggles of gays, seniors, blacks, Chicanos, Asians, the demands of the SLA-Cecil was there as intermediary or negotiator, with whatever seemed called for. His services on Sunday, combining music and oratory with an insistence on community involvement and redemption, gave the church a dimension, a large and loaded sense of space in which almost any national or local disease could be put into focus for healing, banishment, or elegy.

The huge Glide readings, usually held on Friday or Saturday night, were often a large spectacle. The church holds about 1,500 people when it is full, both bottom floor and steep balcony. When the house lights are dimmed and the stage light focuses on the performer, the darkness about the place can be absolutely haunting. All the issues of the City and the Republic seem to float through the thick air; no matter who reads, their work is measured in the light of whether or not it grapples with the presence of oppression. In the early 1970s the darkness was loaded with guilt, anger, and grief connected with the war and issues of racism. Whether the reading was in commemoration of Allende and Neruda or a benefit for the bombed Bach Mai Hospital, it was as if the whole continent had tipped into one sanctuary to deal with Death. Whether Stan Rice was reading "Some Lamb" on the dying of his daughter, or Ishmael Reed was recounting his satiric Flight to Canada, the dark side of the country was being tapped. Sometimes, especially during the Bach Mai benefit, the readings would spill into recriminations, with some Third World poets cutting into the ethnic obliviousness of some white poets, arousing guilt and anger. The place could get to feeling really crummy and hostile, until another poet would come on and raise the focus into more constructive directions.

The reading that remains strongest in my memory was at the Longshoreman's Hall. Sponsored by City Lights, it was a benefit for the United Farm Workers. The invited poets included Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg, Whalen, and Ferlinghetti. Before the reading, Roberto Vargas persuaded Ferlinghetti that, given the nature of the benefit, it was strange that no Third World poets were reading. Consequently, Thulani Davis, Jessica Hagedorn, Janice Mirikitani, Serafin Syquia, and Roberto himself were added to the list. The turnout was huge; an audience of 2,000 filled the place. Perhaps because the reading was in support of progressive change and did not possess the elegaic spirit of the usual Glide reading, the whole evening had an up tone to it (with the exception of one crass, mad-mouthed drunk).

[[Image:UFW-poetry-reading-07 0821 096.jpg]]

''Poster image courtesy Oakland Museum of California, All of Us or None of Us collection.''

What turned the reading, however, was the acceptance of the 1950s by the 1970s. The poets from the 1950s had always made clear the influence on their work of jazz, blues, and various La Raza and Asian sources. In the 1960s, however, there was already much criticism, mainly by Third World critics, of Beat indulgence in stereotypical and romantic depictions of Blacks, Asians, and Latinos. The potential tension between the "taker" and the "takee" transformed the occasion into a powerful and various experience of language with a multiple sense of origin, rather than a nostalgic "old boys" benefit. Serafin Syquia's poem about diplomatic ping-pong, the precise sound of the ball hitting the paddle before crossing back over the net, back and forth across the hyphens of America's diverse migratory nations, caught the edge of the evening, the audience riding the various lifts of the ball as it went from one poet to another. People left that place lifted, as if a truth and balance had been struck.

Up until 1976 there was a solid burst of work, both in readings and in publishing. Initially the publishing was secondary to the potential excitement of reading. Books and magazines, if they did at all, followed in the wake of the poet's voice. The emphasis was on performance. The intimate, collective process of getting together as an audience was encouraged by the urgency and the sense of hysteria of the times. It was social and more attractive to get together than to sit at home reading a person's book. That could come later, after the event. Then the poet's voice could resonate and possibly become more complex within the context of the printed page. In the early 1970s, it was quite possible the poet might not have a book. Even if she or he did, the poems in a reading might be totally new or different from those in the book: things were moving that fast, or at least more quickly than most small press publishers.

Given the emphasis on and public success of readings, some poets naturally began to expand the format and shape of their work in order to involve actors, musicians, dancers, and their own instruments. Apart from the challenge of new forms, it was clearly a way to expand an audience that could grow tired of the poet-in-the-pulpit format. Those who were active in the changeover were Susan Griffin, whose play Voices, a poetic drama for six voices, was performed in several Bay Area locations, including a KQED-TV production. [[Image:Ntozakeshange (1).jpg|left|220px|thumb|Ntozake Shange, 1970s]] Ntozake Shange started working with Pamela Moss, the dancer, and from that work came the poems for her play, ''For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf''. They performed the work in progress several times at places like the Intersection, Minnie's Can-Do, and the Bacchanal, totally unreviewed, but before enthusiastic audiences before taking it back to a huge success in New York. Jessica Hagedorn established The West Coast Gangster Choir, a several-piece band with two singers, for the performance of her work. Julian Priester, the composer and jazz trombonist, wrote the musical arrangements; parts of the poems would be broken into refrains for the singers, while Jessica performed the poems from memory, sometimes going into song herself. [[Image:Hagedorn jessica2 by Marion Ettlinger.jpg|right|thumb|Jessica Hagedorn; ''Photo: Marion Ettlinger'']] When Jessica and Ntozake performed their work together, with the dancers and the music, they could stir a crowd to an obsessive frenzy, the language hit such a chord in the time. The Palace Monkeys, a group of poets that included Michael Koch, Renny Pritikin, and Anthony Vaughn, worked with their own instruments and other musicians to raise their poems into song or amplified narratives, with some following and success. The attention to poetry as performance was such that Lewis MacAdams, director of the Poetry Center, asked prospective poets for tapes of their work to hear how they might sound at a reading.

Though public readings were primary, they were ultimately a way of mediating back (or forward!) to the publication of books and magazines. With the exception of a few intensely oral poets, such as Max Schwartz, I have rarely met a poet who is not interested in releasing a book. At this point in history, the book was the way of confirming, or making concrete, what was experienced in the public reading. (It was also a way of taking the poems to audiences geographically distant from the Bay Area.) In any case a variety of new publishers began to flourish. Each one was generally reflective of the different pieces of the literary scene.

[[Image:CruzSerranoVargas1973.jpg|left|300px|thumb|Victor Hernandez Cruz, Nina Serrano, Roberto Vargas, 1973; ''Photo: courtesy Nina Serrano'']] As the 1970s progressed, the Third World presence was increased by the activity of Victor Hernandez Cruz and David Henderson and suffered the tragic loss of Serafin Syquia in 1973. [[Image:Time-to-greez.jpg|right]] Third World Communications published ''Third World Women's Anthology'' in 1973 and, in association with Glide Publications, produced ''Time to Greez!'', a comprehensive anthology of local work in 1976. In addition, during the same period, [[The Tropics of Pocho-Ché|Ediciones Pocho Che]] published double back volumes: ''Primeros Cantos'' by Roberto Vargas with ''This Side and Other Things'' by Elias Hruska y Cortes, and ''Oracion A La Mano Poderosa'' by Alejandro Murguia with ''El Sol y Los De Abajo'' by Jose Montoya. Nationally, Random House published ''Mainland'' by Victor Cruz. And Momo's Press published ''Dangerous Music'' by Jessica Hagedorn. Yard Bird Reader and ''Heirs'' magazines variously also published the new work.

The number of women writers influenced by feminism increased dramatically. In addition to Aha, Grahn, and Griffin, new work by Beverly Dahlen, Pat Parker, Jana Harris, Stephanie Mines, and Julia Vose, to name just a few, began to be heard. Significantly, Shameless Hussy Press published Alta's ''No Visible Means of Support''; Mama's Press issued ''Let Them Be Said'' by Susan Griffin; Women's Press Collective published ''Edward The Dyke and Other Poems'' by Judy Grahn and ''Child of Myself'' by Pat Parker. And Momo's Press produced Out of the Third by Beverly Dahlen.

[[Image:Jack Micheline 1974 AAB-9646.jpg|left|280px|thumb|Jack Micheline, 1974; ''Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library'']] The early 1970s also marked the rebirth of North Beach as a center for writers (a position lost for several years to the Haight), with the arrival of Beat-generation characters from all over the world. Harold Norse, after long exile in Europe, Jack Micheline from New York, and Jack Hirshman from Los Angeles, all in their late forties, formed an uneasy neighborhood triumvirate near which writers attracted to the 1950s Beat mythology began to congregate. In the spring of 1975, Bob Kaufman was brought out of a ten-year silence to give a reading at a packed Malvina's coffeehouse on Union Street. Though his voice was cracked with age, he read poems from his City Lights Pocket Book editions with the hypnotic, jagged, hip insistence with which he had undoubtedly read them in the 1950s. A scary experience. It was as though nothing had changed! The event hatched the revival of ''Beatitude'' magazine that again became a neighborhood organ. In addition to ''Beatitude'', Second Coming press and magazine also published North Beach work with a special focus on Jack Micheline and its editor, A. D. Winans. City Lights published ''Hotel Universe'' by Harold Norse and ''Lyripol'' by Jack Hirshman. Public readings went hand in hand with these new publications, as well as the initiation of the annual San Francisco Poetry Festival.

Somewhat simultaneously with North Beach's revival, partly because of the returned presence of Philip Lamantia and the late Pete Winslow, surrealist work began to flourish. Equally important were the presence of Nanos Valaoritis, the Greek expatriate, by way of Breton's Paris, who had begun teaching at San Francisco State, and Andrei Codrescu, the Romanian, by way of Paris, Detroit, and New York, and recent winner of the Big Table Award for his first book, ''License to Carry a Gun''. Jim Gustafson, The Black Tarantula (aka Kathy Acker), Steve Brooks, Steve Shutzman, Tom Cuson, David Plumb, and Beau Beausoleil were all committed in one way or other to establishing an urban, surrealist aesthetic that would be appropriate to the City. Panjandrum press and magazine, Isthmus press and magazine, Grape Press, Smoking Mirror Press, Journal 31, and Gallery Works were crucial publishers for the various writers. Divisions among the surrealists were, of course, rampant. In the work, however, there began to emerge an often harsh, though frequently anarchistically funny, multiple dreamlike image of the City's underbelly. (It was an image that in the later 1970s would connect easily with the local [[PUNK ROCK|Punk music scene]].)

[[Image:RobertGluck.jpg|200px|left|thumb|Robert Gluck]] [[Image:Shurin.jpg|right|200px|thumb|Aaron Shurin]] Assertively open gay work could be found in ''Gay Sunshine'', the new tabloid. It featured important interviews with Ginsberg, John Wieners, and Norse, and included large amounts of poetry with other kinds of reportage. Though not limited to San Francisco, it was the first local publication to provide a focus on gay writing with attention to poetry by Paul Mariah, Robert Gluck, and Aaron Shurin, among others. Manroot press and magazine, edited by Mariah, though diverse in editorial policy, also gave access to much gay writing.

As an editor and publisher of both ''Shocks'' and Momo's Press, I saw myself as a mender. Shocks were the reverberations I felt emanating from just about every writing quarter. The magazine and the press were a way of establishing a larger writing out of intense and conflicting fragments. The sum would be greater than the parts. It was time to break away from the focus on one writer over another, or the myth of the writer as isolated and independent hero. The intention became to establish contexts in which writers could occur in simultaneous situations. This intention was the impetus behind ''The Day Book'' issue of ''Shocks'' No.5 in which six writers of various backgrounds (Andrei Codrescu, Beverly Dahlen, Susan Griffin, Jessica Hagedorn, Roberto Vargas, and myself) each took ten differently placed days over a sixty-day period in February and March of 1974. Each of us had a page per day in which we could write a poem, dream, idea, documentary, or story. The idea was to create a collective journal in which the various writings would vibrate off one another to create a larger dimension. This interfacing of borders and crossings of various writings and writers has remained the most serious intention of the press.

The work of all these various new presses and writers did not eliminate the work of writers established in the 1950s and 1960s. Several new and some of the older surviving presses committed themselves to sustaining the growth of these writers, as well as their responses to on-going events in the body politic. Sand Dollar, Tree magazine and press, Mudra, the Four Seasons Foundation, Grey Fox, and Cranium Press published various works by McClure, Snyder, Welch, Ed Dom (who, in 1973, took up residence in the City for several years), Diane di Prima, and Robert Creeley. Most importantly, in terms of established poets, Turtle Island published Dom's ''Gran Appacheria'' (1974), to be eventually followed by Wingbow's presentation of the complete ''Gunslinger'' (1977). Up the coast in Bolinas, Big Sky magazine and press would take care of much of the New York and local traffic with books by Jim Thorpe, Joanne Kyger, Bill Berkson, and Lewis MacAdams, among several others.

The early 1970s also marked the rebirth of letterpress printing. Influenced strongly by the example and teaching of Clifford Burke at Cranium Press, a number of new printers began to emerge under different logos: Holbrook Teter and Michael Myers' Zephyrus Image, Betsy Davids' and Jim Petrillo's Rebis Press, Wesley Tanner's Arif, Bonnie Carpenter's Effie's Books, and Five Trees original group: Jaime Robles, Cameron Folsom, Eileen Callahan, Cheryl Miller, and Kathy Walkup. Most of these presses were committed to preserving and expanding the traditions of lively and solid poetry printing initiated by David Hazelwood and Graham Mackintosh. True to that tradition, many of the printers, especially Burke, Teter, and Tanner, assisted in designing and printing books by McClure, Welch, Snyder, Creeley, and Dorn, as well as work of some of the younger writers, including Keith Abbott, Jessica Hagedorn, and Beverly Dahlen. Effie's Press, committed to feminist work, also partook of that tradition in making letterpress books by Susan Griffin, Adrienne Rich, and Mary Mackey, among others. In general, however, the letterpress process, for books, was too expensive and often too slow. Most publishers had to work with well-known writers to justify the financial investment. And, in terms of the politics of the time, many presses and young writers thought letterpress work was precious and primarily elitist. This debate was hot among many of the printers, who argued that their knowledge of printing and design gave strength and long-term reading power to a work. That photographic methods of typesetting and printing diminished the power was the corollary argument.

Some printers worked both sides of the fence. Avoiding the precious, but still making the work elegant and popularly available, Michael Myers and Holbrook Teter, for example, often used their shop to stick to the tradition of the 1960s free poem. They made broadsides in combination of language and image that were usually an incisively ambiguous comment on national political events. The work was given away to strangers and friends, most often in The Pub, the neighborhood bar on the comer of Masonic and Geary. (As is done in Japan, their Zephyrus Image series on the Watergate Hearings should be preserved as a national treasure.) In a very real way the argument between letterpress and offset aesthetics always goes back to the tension between whether a poem is to be a sacred enshrined act or a popular and accessible document. That tension is always present in San Francisco in the circumstance of both readings and books.

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[[category:Literary San Francisco]][[category:1970s]][[category:North Beach]] [[category:Tenderloin]] [[category:Mission]] [[category:Latino]]

The Language in Trouble—The Late 1960s

2014-01-18T22:02:51Z

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