Yippie Girl: Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI

by Judy Gumbo

“A welcome addition to the literature of radical activism.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A fun read and a valuable political document, long overdue.” —Counterpunch

Lifelong activist Judy Gumbo, an original member of The Yippies, a 1960s anti-war satirical protest group, offers an insider feminist memoir of her involvement with the Yippies, Black Panthers, women's rights, environmental actions, and a life of activism.

In 1968, a 24-year-old woman moved to Berkeley, California and immediately became enmeshed in the Youth International Party, aka The Yippies, an anti-war satirical protest group. In the next few years, Judy Gumbo (a nickname given her by Eldridge Cleaver), was soon at the center of counter-cultural activity—from protests in People’s Park, to meetings at Black Panther headquarters, to running a pig for President at the raucous Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a protest that devolved into violent attacks by the police and arrests that led to the notorious Chicago Conspiracy Trial.

In this historical account, Gumbo reveals intimate details of—and struggles with—her fellow radicals Jerry Rubin, Anita & Abbie Hoffman, Eldridge Cleaver, Paul Krassner, Stew Albert, and more, detailing their experiences in radical protests and her own skirmishes with unwarranted FBI surveillance. This deep dive into her activism includes details of her organization of a national women's rights group, her visit to North Vietnam during the war, her travels around the globe to promote women's liberation and anti-war protest, and her environmental activism. It also includes extensive excerpts from illegal wiretaps and surveillance by the FBI.

Yippie Girl explores Gumbo’s life as a protester to show that, while circumstances always change, protesters can stay loyal to the causes they believe in and remain true to themselves. She also reveals how dogmatism, authoritarianism, and interpersonal conflict can damage those same just causes, offering a timeless and strategic guide for activists today protesting against injustice in all its forms.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Biography Memoir, Politics, Memoir, Biography

360 pages, Paperback

First published May 3, 2022

About the author

Judy Gumbo is one of the few female members of the original Yippies, a satirical protest group founded in the 1960s and involved in organizing Chicago 1968 protests that led to arrests, and the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. As part of her activism, Judy was invovled in notorious feminist organizations, radical environmentalism, visited North Vietnam during the war, and traveled the globe agitating against the war and for the liberation of women. Her activism led to illegal surveillance by the FBI; she later successfully sued to obtain copies of their extensive records on her. Judy has a Ph.D. in Sociology and spent the majority of her professional career as an award-winning fundraiser for Planned Parenthood. She currently lives in a co-housing community in Berkeley, CA.

Reviews

[Mal Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unless you’re old enough to remember the Black Panther Party, the Weather Underground, and the Yippies, you can’t imagine the sheer sense of unlimited possibility felt by many young Americans in the closing years of the 1960s and the beginning of the 70s. For hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, the Revolution seemed just around the corner. And there is no better guide to the mood and tumult of the counterculture revolution of that time than Judy Gumbo’s memoir, Yippie Girl. In an often amusing account of her years as a would-be revolutionary, she opens a window on a time that has passed into legend.

AN “ORIGINAL YIPPIE” WHO WAS IN THE CENTER OF THINGS
Gumbo was an “original Yippie,” a leading member of the Youth International Party, that group of young counterculture revolutionaries most commonly associated with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Together with her partner and later husband, Stew Albert, she was deeply involved in such pivotal events as the protests in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic Convention, where the Yippies ran a pig for President in the face of a police riot. She was also a central player in the Yippie alliance with the Black Panther Party—and believed by the FBI to be involved with the violence-prone Weather Underground as well. (She was not.) Later, Gumbo became an outspoken campaigner for women’s equality, often clashing with the men who were invariably identified as the Yippie movement’s leaders.

CRINGEWORTHY REVELATIONS AND QUOTES FROM HER FBI FILE
Gumbo’s recollection of her experiences more than a half-century ago is astonishing. Either she was working from a remarkably detailed diary or she has a prodigious memory that would be a marvel in anyone in her late 70s. And her memoir includes a full complement of cringeworthy revelations, in the confessional spirit of tell-all books.

However, Gumbo is able to quote at length and verbatim from her FBI file. The book’s subtitle is Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI, and it delivers on the promise. Passages from the file appear throughout the book and reveal the depths to which the agency stooped in its illegal COINTELPRO program. They also show the Bureau’s cluelessness about the intentions of the people they surveilled at such obviously great cost. Through COINTELPRO, the FBI aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic American political organizations, most prominently anti-Vietnam War protestors, feminists, civil rights and Black Power groups, environmentalists, and counterculture revolutionaries who violated their sense of propriety. The program ended only when Congress forced a stop to it in 1976, four years after the death of its architect, J. Edgar Hoover.

AN ALLY’S LOOK AT THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY
Some of the most eye-opening passages in the book are those describing Gumbo’s relationship with Black Panther Party leaders Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver and Bobby Seale. Gumbo’s partner, Stew Albert, was especially close with Eldridge, and over the years they met frequently as friends. Through their conversations, and Gumbo’s participation in Black Panther study groups, we gain a balanced view of the Party. She upends the widespread impression that its members were thugs intent on violence against White people. In fact, the Panthers were alone among Black Power groups in actively seeking an alliance with radical White groups such as the Yippies. And their extensive social service programs in African-American communities, especially their iconic Free Breakfasts for Children, established the Party as an effective social change agent.

Most of the principals in Gumbo’s story have long since passed into history. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Stew Albert, Eldridge Cleaver, Tom Hayden, William Kunstler, all dead. Gumbo writes lucidly and knowledgeably about them all. The courageous and often foolish young woman who tells their stories half a century later has made a significant contribution to our understanding of their time—and hers—in the spotlight.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Judy Gumbo emigrated from Canada in the final stages of completing her PhD in Sociology at the University of Toronto. She made her way to Berkeley in 1967 and in short order joined the small group of left-wing activists who called themselves Yippies. She partnered with and later married Stew Albert, another original member of the group. They were together for nearly 40 years, minus a couple when they weren’t speaking. Gumbo was born in 1943 in Toronto, Canada, and raised by her Communist parents. (She was what used to be called a “Red Diaper Baby.”) Today Gumbo lives in Berkeley with her fourth husband.

[Marti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this mademe want to rewatch The Trial of the Chicago 7 because it points out some of the inaccuracies in the film. [Not that it wasn't an entertaining film].

It almost reads like a fairy tale as everything seemed to come so easily to the author. She basically runs away from her hometown of Toronto to Berkeley on a whim (because there was a meeting of Communists she had heard about). Instead meets up with Eldridge Cleaver and the Yippies at Berkeley on her first day. She also stumbled into a fabulous apartment with cheap rent, and a job as an adjunct professor at the University (which she gave up up to be a professional activist). She either had a very compelling personality, or life really was much easier then.

Although women in the movement were somewhat marginalized, it's boggles the mind that someone who was not world famous like Jerry Rubin or Abbie Hoffman, had an entire file in the FBI archives. They seemed to have informants everywhere, even documenting a time when her car broke down somewhere in Texas. This surveillance was ultimately a good thing, she said, because it helped her write the book.

[Bob Schnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Yippie Girl" is the memoir of Judy Gumbo, the feminist of the Nixon-era anti-war activists. She stood alongside of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver, Paul Krassner and her lover Stew Albert, but she never got the same name recognition. I certainly was not familiar with her or her story. Now I will be looking for her in any documentary about the Yippies, Black Panthers, etc. and their exploits.

This may be the only book I've ever read where the author thanks the FBI. Her 20-pound file provided a unique counterpoint to her recollection of events. Gumbo also digs deep into her personal life to help us understand how and why a Canadian Jewish teenager set off to find herself and her calling in California just before the Summer of Love. She doesn't pull any punches and the reader is compelled to admire and loathe (sometimes simultaneously) almost everyone in the book. She saves her harshest criticisms for herself, admitting when she acted foolishly but also taking credit for actions that have been historically attributed to the men.

"Yippie Girl" should be on the reading list of any aspiring revolutionary or those who study them.

[David Abravanel · Rating 5 out of 5]

While the Yippie movement predated the proposal of intersectionality as a concept, Judy Gumbo embodied and observed these struggles for progress and liberation. As a woman in a male-dominated progressive movement, a white ally to The Black Panthers, and an activist with the rare opportunity to visit Vietnam during the war, Gumbo never stops examining both herself and those around her. There's a tireless fight for justice and humanity throughout this book.

There is also a lot of fun - an important matter for Yippies. Gumbo illustrates that, even amidst both personal and political struggles, progressive activism does not preclude a life of fun and fulfillment. Looking at pivotal moments in the history of both the US and the world through lenses that are feminist, anti-racist, and intersectional, Gumbo models the Jewish tenet of Tikkun Olam in this engaging and vital read.

[Steve Carter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rolling in late, comes this 1960s movement memoir.

Late because we are deep into the 21st Century now and embedded into someone's World Order in a way that can feel not much more than. . .hopeless.

This memoir could be a joyous read had the movement it is about not been a total failure.
The 1960’s Anti-war and black liberation movements could not build the class solidarity of the temporarily successful labor movement of the early 20th century. That type of massive solidarity was what was necessary to bring change when the power system was vulnerable after the 1929 economic collapse. The 60s movement never had that solidarity or collapse. It was a time of general prosperity, and no matter how nostalgically some of us feel about the youthful exuberance of the “revolution is just around the corner” things are far far worse today than they were in 1970. The movement for economic justice is a failure.

The book is an example of this collapse of common cause solidarity since much of it is really an old comrade saying that she was there and part of it but being a woman was kept on the margins. I have no doubt that this was true and Judy Gumbo has every right to toot her horn and ask for acknowledgement. OK, but now what? And what happened after? She mentions being a very good fundraiser in later life but we hear no more about that. The story kind of ends with the 60s events and the VietNam war. Being a successful fundraiser for Planned Parenthood might be a more heroic story to leave behind than memories of a flashy youthful failure of a movement.
But then I probably wouldn’t have read Fundraiser Woman so the circle is complete I guess and sensation sells.

She comes into the yippie movement directly out of the old movement. She is a Canadian Red Diaper Baby, her father a lifelong career Communiest Party type who built a successful livelihood out of it as a promoter of Soviet Union concert performers in Canada.
This transition from Red Diaper Baby to yippsterville is not really explained. She wasn’t particularly a hippy or acid head, she was a divorcee who dumped her hubby really quickly when she discovered him in bed with another woman. (No hippie Free Love for Gumbo. Later in the story, polyamory was considered and rejected for monogamy.) It seems that she became a Yippee because she became the girlfriend of one of the three main OG yippies, Stew Albert.
From this origin information one could conclude that she went from old school commie daddy to cutting edge for-the-hell-of-it Yippie daddy. But telling it that way kind of derails the neo-feminist train and so it’’s best to not look at it that way. We all have to do what we have to do and times are different than walking a mile in anyone else's one toe loop authentic Indian sandals.
Why does she repeatedly mention the infidelity of her first husband? It seems a sore point even now 60 years, or whatever, later.

I don’t know, for decades it all seemed so recent and immediate, but now just very remote, far away. That movement now seems like an echo of an after shock, of the big somewhat successful movement before it. But we all will remember the hit, rather than the spin off with the kids in charge every week jumping the shark to get attention while sinking to the bottom of the what matters chain in the neo-liberal world that dominates and gained power in the last 60 or so years. The hit movement being the early 20th century movement that brought us SS, The kids movement, the Yippies 30 years later making a splash then passing on while I still have the benefit from the earlier movement. Monthly Social Security.

The movement that pushed the government into Social Security was a great movement.
Its gains have been attacked by those always opposed and now they are winning. Finally destroying what was left in the New Deal era, the legitimately helpful Big Government. Meanwhile the corporate welfare and military goverment is growing and giving out even more power to those already in control.

So yeah, we boomers can look back at the glory days of the Chicago 8 show or whatever but we failed to even protect The New Deal.
Most of us have been well placed enough to ride out whatever insanity the USA comes up with. We survived Reagan, the Bushes.
No problem, we are still here if we can set our tolerance for the unacceptable ever higher. We have to tolerate the USA for 20 years tearing apart Afghanistan for really no good reason at all and now leaving them starving. We have to tolerate that voting rights are being taken away in favor of Republicanism. We have to tolerate the loss of abortion rights.
We have to tolerate the trickle down of death from the military-industral-news/entertainment complex that is in control of most of the national money, power, and consciousness.

We have to tolerate this or else die in our isolated social distant despair.
So we tolerate it. We are physically comfortable enough to not let it all get to us too much, plus that is that interesting new cutting edge series we are all streaming. And weed is sort of legal here and there. All is more or less well for the aging white baby-boomers.
Maybe there were a million deaths in our name in the past 20 years but it doesn’t affect us enough to really do something about it.

I’m really complaining about our time through looking back at what we may have wanted it to be. There is nothing wrong with the book. It just hits me at a particular moment of hopelessness about The Revolution.

Stew Albert, the eventual spouse and babydaddy, was close to Jerry Rubin so there is more of the Jerry angle of things than the Abbie Hoffman side. They were often at odds and took their personal followers with them. Albert was also friends with Elldridge Cleaver, Black Panther leader. The stories about him are perhaps the most interesting in the book.

Back then I was a Abbie Hoffman Yippie, or identified as such. I even met him for a moment at a big MayDay rally on New Haven Green 1970.
I was brought into the movement, as much as I ended up participating, which wasn’t a lot, by seeing Abbie Hoffman in the mass media when I was still in high school (Merv!) and wanted to be a hippy, now Yippee! But we still had hair length rules in high school, Bummer. Abbie was always very funny. He organized me. Brought me into the movement still as a kind in Ohio.
Later, after high school, I took LSD as soon as I was offered and loved it. I still love it and use it occasionally. In the book Judy Gumbo says she tripped only three times and the last years ago. Time for a booster granny!

The book has one very sad story about insane Phil Ochs who at the end of his life visited them for a day, part of the time as his evil alter ego John Train. But nothing about Phil in his prime of any of the other movement performance people reviewed. Phil Ochs was particularly dear to me in my youth, he was a suicide at 35 and I kept on singing his songs for years. So, yes, a sad story in the book.
Phil and Abbie much later, both suicides.

Fine addition to some ancient history herein, although not really searching or personally deep and revealing.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this first-person account of the ‘60s anti-war movement from counterculture insider Judy Gumbo. While detailing some of the Yippie’s most significant acts of protest, Gumbo paints detailed portraits of many of the movement’s most significant figures, revealing virtues as well as vulnerabilities (including, admirably, her own). This book is a significant contribution to the history of the era, and also just a really fun romp through an exuberant and hopeful time.

[Stan Prager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review of: Yippie Girl: Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI, by Judy Gumbo
by Stan Prager (2-12-23)


The typical American family of 1968 sitting back to watch the nightly news on their nineteen-inch televisions could be excused for sometimes gripping their armrests as events unfolded before them—for most in living color, but for plenty of others still on the familiar black-and-white sets rapidly going extinct. (I was eleven: we had a color TV!) The first seven months of that year was especially tumultuous.
There was January’s spectacular Tet Offensive across South Vietnam, which while ultimately unsuccessful yet stunned a nation still mostly deluded by assurances from Lyndon Johnson’s White House that the war was going according to plan. Then in February, the South Carolina highway patrol opened fire on unarmed black Civil Rights protestors on the state university campus, leaving three dead and more than two dozen injured in what was popularly called the “Orangeburg Massacre.” In March, a shaken LBJ announced in a live broadcast that he would not seek reelection. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, sparking riots in cities across the country. Only two days later, a fierce firefight erupted between the Oakland police and Black Panther Party members Eldridge Cleaver and "Lil' Bobby" Hutton, which left two officers injured, Hutton dead, and Cleaver in custody; some reports maintain that seventeen-year-old Hutton was executed by police after he surrendered. Later that same month, hundreds of antiwar students occupied buildings on Columbia University’s campus until the New York City police violently broke up the demonstration, beating and arresting protesters. In May, Catholic activists known as the Catonsville Nine removed draft files from a Maryland draft board which they set ablaze in the parking lot. In June, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. In July, what became known as the “Glenville Shootout” saw black militants engaged in an extended gunfight with police in Cleveland, Ohio that left seven dead.
In August, just days before the streets outside the arena hosting the Democratic National Convention deteriorated into violent battles between police and demonstrators that later set the stage for the famous trial of the “Chicago Seven,” a group of Yippies—members of the Youth International Party that specialized in pranks and street theatre— were placed under arrest by the Chicago police while in the process of nominating a pig named “Pigasus” for president. In addition to Pigasus, those taken into custody included Yippie organizer Jerry Rubin, folk singer Phil Ochs, and activist Stew Albert. Present but not detained was Judy Gumbo, Stew’s girlfriend and a feminist activist in her own right.
Known for their playful anarchy, many leaders of the New Left dismissed Yippies as “Groucho Marxists,” but for some reason the FBI, convinced they were violent insurrectionists intent on the overthrow of the United States government, became obsessed with the group, placing them on an intensive surveillance that lasted for years to come. A 1972 notation in Gumbo’s FBI files declared, without evidence, that she was "the most vicious, the most anti-American, the most anti-establishment, and the most dangerous to the internal security of the United States." She was later to obtain copies of these files, which served as an enormously valuable diary of events of sorts for her (2022) memoir, Yippie Girl: Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI, a well-written if sometimes uneven account of her role in and around an organization at the vanguard of the potent political radicalism that swept the country in the late-sixties and early-seventies.
Born Judy Clavir in Toronto, Canada, she grew up a so-called “red diaper baby,” the child of rigidly ideological pro-Soviet communists. She married young and briefly to actor David Hemblen and then fled his unfaithfulness to start a new life in Berkeley, California in the fall of 1967, in the heyday of the emerging counterculture, and soon fell in with activists who ran in the same circles with new boyfriend Stew Albert. Albert’s best friends were Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver and Yippie founder Jerry Rubin. She squirmed when Cleaver referred to her as “Mrs. Stew,” insisting upon her own identity, until one day Eldridge playfully dubbed her “Gumbo”—since “gumbo goes with stew.” Ever after she was known as Judy Gumbo.
Gumbo took a job writing copy for a local newspaper, while becoming more deeply immersed in activism as a full-fledged member of the Yippies. As such, those in her immediate orbit were some of the most consequential members of the antiwar and Black Power movements, which sometimes overlapped, including Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Nancy Kurshan, Paul Krassner, Phil Ochs, William Kunstler, David Dellinger, Timothy Leary, Kathleen Cleaver, and Bobby Seale. She describes the often-immature jockeying for leadership that occurred between rivals Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, which also underscored her frustration in general with ostensibly enlightened left-wing radicals who nevertheless casually asserted male dominance in every arena—and fueled her increasingly more strident brand of feminism. She personalized the Yippie exhortation to “rise up and abandon the creeping meatball”—which means to conquer fear by turning it into an act of defiance and deliberately doing exactly what you most fear—by leaving her insecurities behind, as well as her reliance on other people, to grow into an assertive take-no-prisoners independent feminist woman with no regrets. How she achieves this is the journey motif of her life and this memoir.
Gumbo’s behind-the-scenes anecdotes culled from years of close contact with such a wide assortment of sixties notables is the most valuable part of Yippie Girl. There is no doubt that her ability to consult her FBI files—even if these contained wild exaggerations about her character and her activities—refreshed her memories of those days, more than a half century past, which lends authenticity to the book as a kind of primary source for life among Yippies, Panthers, and fellow revolutionaries of the time. And she successfully puts you in the front seat, with her, as she takes you on a tour of significant moments in the movement and in its immediate periphery in Berkeley, Chicago, and New York. Her style, if not elegant, is highly readable, which is an accomplishment for any author that merits mention in a review of their work.
The weakest part of the book is her unstated insistence on making herself the main character in every situation, which betrays an uncomfortable narcissism that the reader suspects had negative consequences in virtually all of her relationships with both allies and adversaries. Yes, it is her memoir. Yes, her significance in the movement deserves—and has to some degree been denied by history—the kind of notoriety accorded to what after all became household names like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. But the reality is that she was never in a top leadership role. She was not arrested with Pigasus. She was not put on trial with the Chicago 7. You can detect in the narrative that she wishes she was.
This aspect of her personality makes her a less sympathetic figure than she should be as a committed activist tirelessly promoting peace and equality while being unfairly hounded by the FBI. But she carries something else unpleasant around with her that is unnerving: an allegiance to her cause and herself that boasts a kind of ruthless naïveté that rejects correction when challenged either by reality or morality. She condemns Cleaver’s infidelity to his wife, but abandons Stew for a series of random affairs, most notably with a North Vietnamese diplomat who happens to be married. She personally eschews violence, but cheers the Capitol bombing by the Weathermen, domestic terrorists who splintered from the former (SDS) Students for a Democratic Society.
To oppose the unjust U.S. intervention in Vietnam and decry the millions of lives lost across Southeast Asia was certainly an honorable cause, worthy of respect, then and now. But this red diaper baby never grew up: her vision of the just and righteous was distinguished by her admiration of oppressive, totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba—and North Vietnam. Like too many in the antiwar movement, opposition to Washington’s involvement in the Vietnam War strangely morphed into a distorted veneration for Hanoi. There may indeed have been much to condemn about the America of that era in the realm of militarism, imperialism, and inequality, but that hardly justified—then or now—championing communist dictatorships on the other side known for regimes marked by repression and sometimes even terror.
Gumbo visited most of these repressive states that she supported, including North Vietnam. She reveals that while there she settled into the seat of a Russian anti-antiaircraft machine gun much like the one Jane Fonda later sat in. Fonda, branded a traitor by the right, later lamented that move, and publicly admitted it. Gumbo will have none of it: “I have never regretted looking through those gun sights,” she proudly asserts [p203]. She still celebrates the reunification of Vietnam, while ignoring its aftermath. Her stubborn allegiance to ideology over humanity, and her utter inability to evolve as a person further points to her inherent narcissism. She is never wrong. She is always right. Just ask her, she’ll tell you so.
Yippie Girl also lacks a greater context that would make it more accessible to a wider audience. The author assumes the reader is well aware of the climate of extremism that often characterized the United States in the sixties and seventies—like the litany of news events of the first half of 1968 that opened this review—when in fact for most Americans today those days likely seem like accounts from another planet in another dimension. I would have loved to see Gumbo write a bigger book that wasn’t just about her and her community. At the same time, if you are a junkie for American political life back in the day when today’s polarization seems tame by comparison, and youth activism ruled, I would recommend you read Gumbo’s book. I suspect that whether you end up liking or detesting her in the end, she will still crave the attention.


NOTE: This book was obtained as part of an Early Reviewers program

Review of: Yippie Girl: Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI, by Judy Gumbo https://regarp.com/2023/02/12/review-...

[Wyndy KnoxCarr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yippie Girl: Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI by Judy Gumbo came under the heading “Revolution Then and Now” at the Bay Area Book Festival last spring. Because I lived through some of it, “came of age” in it like the author did in the 1960s and early 1970s, I CAN say that it WAS the “Second American Revolution,” far more than the January 6th 2021 riot was another “1776.” (THAT was more of a “Siege of Ft. Sumter,” kicking off the Second CIVIL WAR,… IF we let it go that far.)
Judy Gumbo of Yippie Girl grew up in an argumentative, politically left-wing family in Toronto. In the chapter titled, “From Communist Party to Hippie Pad,” she attends the American Sociological Association conference in San Francisco, gets a job as a Teaching Associate at Cal, but “had no idea that moving to Berkeley in late 1967 meant I’d be adopting as my hometown an epicenter of hippie counter-culture, free love, and anti-war protest” as well as an “artistic…community that defined Bay Area life and politics.”
Here she found “tables crammed with leaflets” inside the Student Union where “women… argued intensely with each other – about politics!” because, among other things, Lyndon Johnson was battling on in Vietnam using up plenty of young white, black and brown lives and bodies. Women were enjoying the Sexual Revolution, music scene and soft drug culture, but also starting to get angry about being ignored at meetings, handling the phones and typewriters, but never getting the spotlight, front page or bylines we deserved. Gumbo was one of us.
“We will have our freedom. We will not be ignored” entered side-by-side with “Hell, No, We Won’t Go” (fight and die in imperialist wars in poor, non-industrialized countries), Black Power and “the beginning of the Revolutionary Ecology Movement,” even though all these movements were mostly ignored, ridiculed, demonized or downplayed in the mainstream culture and press at the time.
At the fountain by Sather Gate, “cool” “golden eagle” Stew Albert would not only become a “forty-year relationship,” but also introduce her to his two best friends, Jerry Rubin, Yippie co-founder; and Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party, who later gave her the name “Gumbo” when she courageously shouted “I am not Mrs. Stew! I am not Mrs. Anybody! I’m me. I’m Judy….I am a person in my own right!” Yes, the same 6’ tall Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver glowering out from the cover of Soul On Ice (1968), which he wrote while in San Quentin for assault, rape, armed robbery and attempted murder. This woman’s got guts. And she tells it like it is. What it was. What we went through.
Cleaver’s wife and “Communications Secretary” Kathleen, among others, shared Gumbo’s “Yippie sense of the absurd,” using satire and media to shift power from the heavy-handed “Establishment” back to “the People.” Panther Bobby Seale paved the “self-defense only” boulevard in resistance to white supremacy and police brutality while Huey Newton defied the OPD in armed revolt, was jailed and later took a deadly gangsta drug, money and violence path.
Gumbo KNEW that Carol Hanisch was the one who “had revolutionized the east coast women’s movement…spring of 1969” with “the personal is political” because she was on the pulse, held a women’s consciousness-raising group in her Keith Street apartment and Ashby Avenue collective while a lot of the rest of us were slowly floating around amoebically between sex object and personhood. She’d helped build Peoples’s Park, The Black Panthers and Women’s Liberation through her movement connections, support work, activism and at the Berkeley Barb, respected there or not. (The editor published her manifesto as “Why Women are Revolting.”)
“The Movement,” both organized and spontaneously, demonstrated against the Vietnam War in Lincoln Park, met by Mayor Daley’s police riot in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, “And I was there.” A deep desire for radical change moved Gumbo/them/us all to both strategically and spontaneously reframe cultural norms through media, demonstrations and “expose establishment hypocrisy using theater of ridicule,” bring “ultra-democratic” spirit to “Power to the People,” endure “The Great Chicago 8 Conspiracy Trial,” witness the downfall of Nixon while being spied upon night and day, make antiwar missions to Hanoi, Moscow and Havana, stand up for women’s empowerment, autonomy and rights; discover, discourage and eventually dismantle FBI surveillance and many other brilliant, erotic, deadly and harrowing adventures and situations.
Yeah, it was like that. Yes, it WAS like that! The good, the bad, naive, hilarious, curious, courageous, sexy, ecstatic and the just plain painful, confusing, misogynist, annoying and furious narrative Judy Gumbo tells in first-person, glorious detail.
It still IS “like that,” in many ways, and as far as surveillance goes, I think a whole lot worse, due to improved technology and “citizen surveillance.” And Gumbo gives us all the dialogues, scenarios and pivotal events she witnessed in one of the best Bildungsromane of “narrative non-fiction” I’ve ever read.
Yippie Girl is a REALLY GOOD thought-provoking pleasure to read, both for eclipsed histories, present encouragement and future inventiveness. Buy this book, SAVOR IT, loan it to your book club, social action, food shelf, men’s group, voting rights and Indivisible co-members; daughters, Mother, in-laws, lover, sorority sisters and best friends.

[wade · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the autobiography of a woman who was there during the radiclism of the 1960's and 70's. She is the girlfriend/wife of Stew Albert and through him becomes part of the inner circle of radicals including Eldridge Cleaver, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and many other influencial Yippies. She has major grievances particularly about how women are treated generally and how her efforts were downplayed in the movement. She will have a forty four relationship with Stew which was a roller coaster ride. The book kept me interested.

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was captivated by this book that details both well known and also behind the scenes stories and observations from the 1960s anti Vietnam War era by feminist and activist Judy Gumbo. It has taken a long time for her voice to be heard and seen and counted as essential for the movement that sprung from a tragic war that depended on involuntary draftees. This book helps set the record straight. The daughter of Canadian communists, Judy Gumbo was raised in Toronto and after a failed early marriage found herself in turbulent times in Berkeley, Chicago, DC, Florida, and New York. Her story goes beyond the anti-war movement and details startling and intimate relationships during this period with her future husband and activist Stew Albert as well as a Vietnamese lover and men and women in the movement. The book is cinematic and captivating!

[Ronald Schulz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I admire her candor, revealing the details of her relationships with the men and women in her life, especially the secret love affair with the Vietnamese diplomat, which helps to humanize them and gives us insight to better understand those heady times. While much has been said about the youth movement, personal stories are often glossed over. I came on the scene a bit later and like to read honest accounts of the struggles we all went through. Write on, says I.

[natalie gazzana · Rating 5 out of 5]

the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of both love — and hate.

gumbos perspective of anti-war movements proves that even with the rise of equality-driven protest groups; women have always been and will always be seen as second class citizens.

[Clivemichael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining no holds barred (mostly) inside perspective of the time.

[Tanya Coad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Judy Gumbo could have aptly titled her memoir “Damn the Torpedos,” reflecting her spirited 24-year-old self’s rebellious nature as a pursuer of truth, justice, and cool places to hang out, wherever that bumpy path led her.

Yippie Girl offers insights and an insider’s view of the activist scene of the 60s and 70s, generation-gapping events like the 1968 Democratic Convention and the Chicago 8 trial of ‘69, along with early rumblings of gay rights and women’s lib, all peppered with surveillance high jinx courtesy of the FBI.

Throughout the book, Gumbo touches on ego and gender clashes within Yippie and Black Panther circles, recounting her interactions with rebel legends (and peers) like Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman.

Amongst a growing glut of 60s memoirs, Yippie Girl stands out as a brutally honest, fun, and fascinating ride!

[Linda Jacobs · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book hard to put down. It revealed a very personal and revelatory account of the Yippee movement, Black Panther history and the Vietnam war all in one place. Though I was around during this era and protested the war, I wasn’t very knowledgeable about the backdrop and details. I am now much more enlightened and touched by this wonderfully personal and detailed account of the many “characters” involved in the “Movement.”

[ANDREA WEINBERG · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it. A most unusual love story. In some ways a trip down memory lane, and lots of laughs.

[Abigail · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book by an excellent author! I especially appreciate her first-hand perspective on significant events in American history. Such a great storyteller!

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Important history here.

[Stacie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was interesting because it focused on a time period I'm not very familiar with. However, I found I had to do a lot of side reading/research to really follow what the book was discussing.