Yippie Girl: Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI

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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 activityfrom protests in Peoples 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 ofand struggles withher fellow radicals Jerry Rubin, Anita & Abbie Hoffman, Eldridge Cleaver, Paul Krassner, Stew Albert, and more, detailing their experiences in radical protests. 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 Gumbos 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.

Reviews

Whether you lived through the Sixties or afterwards, this book is a fun read. Informative, thoughtful and entertaining. Senior Women Web

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, mens group, voting rights and Indivisible co-members; daughters, Mother, in-laws, spouse, lover, sorority sisters and best friends. Wyndy Knox Carr, Berkeley Times

"A superb and delightful book. Intimate and comprehensive in its telling, Yippie Girl stays true to the politics of the radical left of the sixties while reflecting on its mistakes, successes and tragedies." Morning Star

There is no better guide to the mood and tumult of the counterculture revolution of that time than Judy Gumbos 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. Berkeleyside

Candid, informative, fascinating, detailed, impressively organized. . An extraordinary memoir of an extraordinary woman in extraordinary times. Timely in that contemporary political activists can draw inspiration from this member of a previous general of protestors, and timeless in that much of what was being protested about remains in controversial issues relevant today. Midwest Book Review

A brilliant memoir of an important period in American history OPED News

"Gumbo delivers a sharp-edged memoir of years of protest and resistance . . . A welcome addition to the literature of radical activism in the age of Johnson, Nixon, and beyond. Kirkus Reviews

Yippie Girlis a marvelous memoir by the continually evolving woman known variously as Judith Lee Clavir, Judith Lee Hemblen, Judy Gumbo and just Gumbo.No one has recreated the Sixties more vividly than she, more compassionately or with a more delicious sense of humor. BuyYippie Girland let it blow your mind as it did mine. Just Do It! Jonah Raskin, author, For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman

In Judy Gumbos Yippie Girl, she shares her adventures as one of very few Yippie girls with her fellow travelers including my father Phil Ochs. The Yippies unending creativity and courage provided the sardonic wit, wisdom, insight, and brutal honesty in the form of political music and theater needed for the revolution of the 60s. Judys stories effortlessly dance between playful and profound and always deeply personal. With the world fractured by orchestrated divisiveness, Yippie Girl is a healing balm. Meegan Lee Ochs, daughter of Phil Ochs, Artist Relations Manager, ACLU of Southern California

Judy Gumbo was a friend and ally of the Black Panther Party back in the dayshe is my friend and ally now. Like me, Judy believes in All Power to the PeopleBlack people, white people, brown people, yellow people, blue, red, green and polka dot people. The theater that Yippies and the left radical protest groups pulledit was great. To be satirical about everything! I loved it. Peoples Park was about land equity against the power structure. It was democratic and socialized. Then I was put on trial at the great Chicago ConspiracyTrial of which I was the eighth defendant. I heard Bill Kunstler tell the other defendants: if youre not going to rise for Judge Hoffman youre going to jail. I told the defendantsYoure my buddies. I dont want you dudes in jail. I want you out on the streets speaking upsaying Free Bobby! But the FBI repressed all those great moments that we were involved in. We have to get our history right. So young folks can see where we were coming from. These stories have got to be told. And Yippie Girl tells it like it is. Bobby Seale, founding chairman and national organizer of the Black Panther Party

Judy Gumbo has written an irreverent, yet intimate, insiders romp through the most dramatic events of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yippies, Black Panthers, Chicago 8 defendants, the Capitol bombing, and FBI agents populate this politically important, feminist work that also provides the setting for a passionately powerful love story. A fantastic trip that the reader will delight in taking. Robert Meeropol, son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg; founder, the Rosenberg Fund for Children; author, An Execution in the Family

Judy Gumbo was and is quite a dame. Her new book is splendid. Hurrah for her. Susan Brownmiller, feminist, activist, author, Against Our Will, Men, Women and Rape

There are those who were anti-war activists in the 60s and 70s - and then there is Judy Gumbo. She lived it, 24/7.Always a powerful life force, Judy has turned into a powerful writer about herself, about the movement, and about life as a target of the FBI. Her own FBI file serves as a grand reminder of how activists were spied on back then.In Yippie Girl, Judys remarkable memoir of her life events, she takes us back to an era that redefined the country, and redefined the lives of so many (then young) Americans. Bill Ritter, news anchor, WABC-TV New York

Vivid, sexy, heartbreaking, jubilant; Judy Gumbos Yippie Girl tells a story of living the Sixties: changing your life, adopting new values and fighting the Man. She broke from her Canadian upbringing and Communist parents while embracing liberation. Judy and her Berkeley boyfriend and eventual husband Stew Albert followed the Black Panthers while trying to politicize the hippie movement. A founding member of the Youth International Party, she fought to overcome Yippies male-dominated culture. And her love affair with the Vietnamese Revolution literally is all here, told realistically and without apology. Jeff Jones, Consulting for Good Causes; and Eleanor Stein, JD, LLM in Climate Change Law

Judy Gumbo stood where the Black Power and Anti-Vietnam War movements intersected. She participated in the Chicago 68 protests. Youve read of her infamous comrades: Jerry Rubin & Abbie Hoffman. Now comes the first-ever female Yippie memoir and its a scorcher! Her words hit hardyet shes reflective and insightfulwhich male autobiographies lack. Gumbo tramples through the war torn jungles of Vietnam and emerges to push womens rights of the 1970s and beyond. Read this, then start your own movement. Pat Thomas, author, Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary and Listen Whitey: Sounds of Black Power

Judy Gumbo was, and is, a badass. Yippie Girl chronicles, with passion and charm, her years on the front lines of the 1960s resistance movement. Theres so much to know and learn about in these pages. My advice to every young revolutionary, young feminist, future badass out there looking to heal this troubled world STEAL THIS BOOK! Alexandra Styron, author, Steal This Country: A Handbook for Resistance, Persistence and Fixing Almost Everything and Reading My Father: A Memoir

At last! We so need to hear more voices of women involved in the 1960s youth and anti-war movement. Zelig-like, Judy Gumbo seemed to be everywhere, with an insiders vantage point on key protest events and personages of the late Sixties and early Seventies. More importantly, she brings a clear-eyed but unjaundiced feminist perspective on the blithe misogyny of the movements male heavies. Nevertheless, Gumbos fun-loving Yippie ethos continues to burn bright in the pages of her memoir: Yippie Girl provides a rollicking read, entertaining as well as instructive to a new generation of youthful social change activists. As a Sixties historian, I learned much I didnt knowand cant wait to introduce Judy Gumbo to my students. I think theyll love her as much as the FBI loathed her. Aniko Bodroghkozy, Professor of Media Studies, University of Virginia; author, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement

Judy Gumbo is a badass, and Yippie Girl is a badass book. Intersectional before the term existed, Judy, born Clavir and later dubbed Gumbo, has led a life shaped by her opposition to racism, sexism, imperialism, and war and by her commitment, as she puts it, to being where the action is. Yippie Girl chronicles that life, setting the authors quest to define herself and the growth of her capacity to love in the context of her activism in the anti-war and feminist movements of the 1960s and beyond. Bearing witness to the many ways that the personal is political, Yippie Girl is an important addition to the archive of twentieth-century protest movements and a crucial document in the history of American feminism. Louise Yelin, Professor Emerita, Literature and Gender Studies, Purchase College SUNY, feminist and anti-war activist

Love the writing: VERY live, immediatethis does not feel like ancient history, it's living and breathing in our lives right now. It's part of our power, people power. Kris Welch, host, The Talkies, KPFA-FM

Weve all read about the counter-cultural adventures of the Yippie Boys Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Paul Krassner and Ed Sanders. Now we finally get to hear the real deal stories from the other side of the cisgender divide. And who better to deliver them than Judy Gumbo, activist extraordinaire Her memoir is a rollicking ride through the 60s and 70s and an honest appraisal of the some of our youthful excesses. All I can say is Yippie! Larry "Ratso" Sloman, author of Steal This Dream: Abbie Hoffman & the Countercultural Revolution in America

Red-diaper baby-doctoral student turned Yippie Girl, Judy Gumboso named by Panther leader Eldridge Cleaverengagingly recounts her revolutionary travails, including tussles with the FBI and other police operatives, during the Long Sixties. A peripatetic quest lures Gumbo from her native Canada to Berkeley, NYC, the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago, Hanoi, Havana, and innumerable sites in-between. Her captivating memoir proves most illuminating as a feminist corrective to the male centric antics of and accounts by fellow Jewish Yippies Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and the authors sometimes partner-later beloved husband Stew Albert, among others. Running the gamut of emotions, Gumbos story, which she deems narrative or creative non-fiction, sparkles with its revelatory honesty, particularly as she moves out of girlhood into womanhood. Absolutely indispensable for its insights into the antiwar, counterculture, and womens liberation movements. Robert C. Cottrell, Professor Emeritus, History and American Studies, California State University, Chico

Written as narrative nonfiction with the smooth contours of a novel, Yippie Girl provides a comprehensive insider history of early Yippie days. For those of us that arrived late to the revolution, Gumbo gives us a joyous and intimate guide to our roots, bringing us into the lives and homes of countercultural icons. At the same time, she revisits living amidst sweaty hippie machismo and Yippie sarcasm through the lens of a 21st Century feminist, giving us a badly needed window into a time of hopeful chaos and cultural transformation. Michael I. Niman, Professor of journalism, SUNY Buffalo State; author, People of the Rainbow: A Nomadic Utopia

Judy Gumbo is a great storyteller, though it helps that she has a great story to tell. Her tales of Yippie (and Yippie-inspired) political theater should be on the shelf of anyone interested in activism. Craig Peariso, Associate Professor of Art History, Boise State University; author, Radical Theatrics: Put-Ons, Politics, and the Sixties

Gumbo has written a rompbreathless, amazing and terrifying all at the same timethrough an equally divisive time in American history with a you are there energy. Even if you werent there, you will want to know about this and what youth, sexism, and political commitment can, and cannot, do. Dont miss this. Susan M. Reverby, PhD, Marion Butler McLean Professor Emerita in the History of Ideas, Professor Emerita of Women's and Gender Studies, Wellesley College

Yippie Girl is one hell of a good read. Serious, but never sanctimonious, Judy Gumbo takes us into her Sixties world, and what a world it was! A Canadian red-diaper baby, she joined up with the politicized hippies who formed Yippie, was an ally of the Black Panther Party, became a womens liberationist, and, through her antiwar work, had a clandestine affair with a high-ranking North Vietnamese official. Throughout, she was relentlessly surveilled by the FBI, whose role in subverting the Sixties she usefully highlights. Alice Echols, Professor of History, The University of Southern California

"No one has told Judy Gumbo's story before. No one has recreated the Sixties more vividly, more compassionately or with a more delicious sense of humor. Yippie Girl traces Gumbo's marriages, her lovers and her friends and does it without blowing anyone's cover. Gumbo includes portions from FBI documents that describe her adventures in the counterculture and the movement. Abbie Hoffman would say Steal This Book. Jerry Rubin would say Do It! I say buy Yippie Girl, read it and let it blow your mind the way it did mine. Jonah Raskin, author, Beat Blues: San Francisco, 1955

"Yippie Girl is the book that future historians will turn to for the real, true story of women revolutionaries in the1960s. Literary, rollicking and color splashed, this engrossing book tells the story of a complicated, bold Canadian heroine at the heart of the 1960s counterculture and anti-Vietnam war movement; whose rebellion and triumphant feats of defiance, made her push harder and dare more. Written in a vibrant, deeply observant style, Gumbos thrilling treasury of tales recalls the ecstasy, perils and possibilities of those now mythic days. Judy Gumbo is a legend; her book, Yippie Girl lets the sun shine in." Leslie Brody, author, Sometimes You Have to Lie, the Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, renegade Author of Harriet the Spy

I first met Judy Gumbo at the Chicago Conspiracy Trial where I provided legal assistance to Bill Kunstler and Lenny Weinglass. Im proud that Sorkins movie portrays Fred Hampton as doing my job at the Trial, but Judys Yippie Girl tells it as it actually was. And it aint over yet. Read this book! Marie "Micki" Leaner, activist, Jane, Chicago-based underground abortion service; co-founder, Women's Prison Project and The China Group

In this riveting, intimate memoir, Judy Gumbo, takes her readers on a magical mystery tour with the Yippies, Black Panthers, Weather Underground, Womens Liberation, and the FBI agents who relentlessly perused them. Written with candor, humor, and page-turning suspense, Gumbo transports us to the barricades of the late 60s and early 70s social and political revolutions. From anti-war protests and the Chicago 8 trial, to a lesbian commune in Texas and a peace conference in Hanoi, Gumbo brilliantly brings the passion of the time alive and pulsing on the page. A must read for students of the 60s and anyone who wants a blue print for how to challenge the patriarchy. Clara Bingham, author, Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost its Mind and Found its Soul

A rollicking tale of the radical 1960s, finally told by one of the women who made it all happen. Judy Gumbos insightful, sexy, often-funny memoir of the Yippies is a wild ride through Berkeley, Chicago, Hanoi, and other hot spots of an era that reshaped America. Lawrence Roberts, author of Mayday 1971: A White House at War, a Revolt in the Streets, and the Untold History of Americas Biggest Mass Arrest

The movement against the war in Vietnam was not known for laughs. Except for the Yippies, a band of activists who were determined to combine the counterculture of the hippies, the politics of the radical left and a sense of humor. As Yippie Judy Gumbo reminds us in her important new book, Yippie Girl, the Yippies were Marxistsa mix of Karl Marx and Groucho Marx. Exhibit A: they nominated a pig, Pigasus, for president of the United States as they gathered in Chicago in 1968 for the Democratic National Conventionan event that otherwise was decidedly not funny and was marked by police riots against Yippies and other antiwar protesters. . . . Like many women then, Judy faced a confounding situation: at the same time she strongly opposed the war in Vietnam and injustice at home she also fought the sexist behavior of the men she loved and worked with in the antiwar movement. Her clear-eyed history . . . is evidence of the important role she and other women played despite the efforts of the FBI to silence them and the efforts of movement men to either use or ignore them. Betty Medsger, author, The Burglary: The Discover of J. Edgar Hoovers Secret FBI

In this memoir, Judy Gumbo, a principal figure in the Youth International Party from the late 1960s through early and mid 1970s, establishes her place among those she dubs winners of the Academy Award of Protest. We see how she and her closest comrades negotiated all the contradictions, personal and political, that living as a revolutionary in the United States during those years entailed. Gumbo is revelatory about self, deeply respectful of others (and their privacy, as appropriate), and proudly radical to this day. The happy ferocity that guided Yippie rebellion via theatrical satire stands out vividly. And from those recollections Gumbo leads us to a moving elegy for the dissenters of that period that we have now lost. Howard Brick, Louis Evans Professor of History, University of Michigan

Yippie Girl is a riveting tale of non-conjugal sex, pot, & anti-war protest; illegal government surveillance, wire-tapping, burglary, and harrassment; and outrageously honest feminist self-reflections coming from a Red Diaper Baby of Canadian Jewish heritage. No one else can tell this story but Judy Gumbo herself! Karn Aguilar-San Juan, co-editor with Frank Joyce, The People Make the Peace: Lessons from the Vietnam Antiwar Movement

Author Bio

Judy Gumbo is one of the few female members of the original Yippies, a satirical protest group founded in the 1960s that levitated the Pentagon to stop the Vietnam War, brought the New York Stock Exchange to a halt to ridicule greed and ran a pig named Pigasus for President at the 1968 Democratic Convention, resulting in police violence, arrests, and the notorious "Chicago 7" conspiracy trial. As part of her activism, Judy founded a national women's rights organization, helped organize the world's first Earth Day, visited North Vietnam during the war, and travelled the globe agitating against the war and for the liberation of women. Her activism led to unwarranted 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 Berkeley, California.