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Memoir by Kay Ebeling, featuring Nancy Pelosi and the Black Panthers
In 1968 at age twenty, I was probably the youngest paid
staffer in the Peace and Freedom Party. A few years earlier riding around San Gabriel Valley passing joints with a car full of friends, one fellow who’d just returned from Vietnam badly damaged went on a rant that lasted several
minutes describing what fighting that war had been like. He said, “We were dropping napalm trying
to recapture Michelin Plantation” and I interrupted him: “Wait,” I said, “you mean
the U.S. is fighting this war to protect corporations like Michelin tires?” He
stopped, took a moment to think, then said, “Well yes ma’am I guess we
are.”
Soon I was volunteering at Peace and Freedom Party headquarters
on Western Avenue in Los Angeles, having become so passionate about stopping the war that I’d show
up when the office opened and stay until it closed. So they gave me the title L.A. County Secretary and
a small salary.
Because I was good at taking notes and typing them up as “minutes”
I went to several state wide Peace and Freedom Party meetings, although I was so
young and inexperienced, I often was not even sure what they
were saying.
I do remember at one meeting in San Francisco encountering Nancy Pelosi.
The auditorium was dark, like a movie theater, the audience
was full.
Nancy Pelosi showed up dressed sharp with two young men and took the stage. People
around me wondered who she was, most had not seen or even
heard of her before. The murmurs around
me were that she was a rich girl from back east, highly connected, and for some reason
she was now in a position of power at the top of Peace and Freedom Party California, even though
no one in the audience seemed to know much about her.
She was with two men. They spoke to us with authority and
told the crowd we had to stop being confrontational for the good of the future
of the party. Most of the activists around me WANTED to be confrontational, as it was the
Vietnam war that had driven us into politics and it was showing no signs of ending
soon. We were chomping at the bit to
continue being confrontational.
I remember the murmurs going through the crowd, “Who is
this woman?” “Who put her in charge?” "Who the f--- is she?" (God I wish I remembered better.)
However, Pelosi and the two guys with her pretty much took over
the meeting, announcing to a roomful of persons who’d
been demonstrating against the war together for months that the tone of our
demonstrations had to change. They told us we were defeating our purpose by
shouting things like “Hey Hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today” at rallies
outside the then president’s hotels.
Voices of protest rose from those of us in the theater seats and were
ignored.
This meeting may be where the idea of Peace and Freedom
Clubs was born. Instead of anti war marches, P&F Clubs were neighborhood groups that
met in homes over coffee and snacks, a kinder gentler way to protest war and
racism and economic disparity, so that nobody would get mad at us.
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Another time in 1968, I was jammed into a car with members of a Peace and Freedom club that met in the Los Feliz district riding from L.A. up to Richmond California for a
statewide meeting. Almost all of us wore Birkenstock sandals and
natural colors and voted P&F or Socialist in election precincts near Griffith Park, Pasadena, and the Hollywood Hills. At the meeting venue,
our carful of riders joined several others from L.A. and filled several rows in
the auditorium where we listened to speakers from Berkeley and San Francisco,
who always seemed to me to be smarter than people from L.A.
Suddenly at the back of the room, the doors
burst open loudly and several members of the Black Panther Party arrived. They
wore jackets and berets and three or four of them carried long guns (I'm pretty
sure they carried guns, but I'm age 74 now and my memory may be tainted).
They scared us. A murmur of shock spread through the audience
as the young black men stomped through up to the stage and took over, literally forcing the
white guys in Birkenstock's off the stage.
Intimidating and threatening, one of the Panthers took the microphone
and said, “We're taking over” and "We all need to be more confrontational" and a lot more forceful snide and derogatory things that I cannot now remember well enough to quote.
That day in late 1968 the Black Panthers took over the California Peace and Freedom Party and stayed in
charge for quite a while.
The meeting ended in discord, and the suburbanite progressive
thinkers I came with were shaken and shocked as we headed out of the auditorium
and down the highway home.
.
I wish I could remember more. Today I Googled around and phoned a few
places trying to find someone who was at either one of those meetings and got responses
such as “1968? You've got to be kidding.” I hope someone who was there will read this blog
post and get in touch with me and help jog my memory about what happened
at those meetings, what was said, how the participants reacted. Email Kay Ebeling at cityofangelslady @ yahoo
dot com.
Driving home from Richmond to Pasadena that night, most the
passengers in our car were not happy with what happened and only broke the silence
a few times to say they would probably not have anything to do with the Peace
and Freedom party again after that.
I didn't know what to think.
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Now days I keep remembering both incidents, especially the appearance
of Nancy Pelosi. I remember commenting at the time that she did not seem to me
to be that smart but she was highly connected, like she is today.
And the anti war movement DID become less confrontational
after that meeting, and less effective.
I can't help making the connection now that in 2009 Nancy Pelosi
was Speaker of the House, again, as Obama started his presidency.
Congress had an opportunity then to investigate George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
for war crimes, and from what I saw, most Americans wanted to find out what the
truth was behind our engagement in Iraq.
But Nancy Pelosi was in charge and announced that Congress would
not be confrontational, that now is not the time to create divisiveness by investigating
Bush and Cheney, let's try to work together and put the past behind us.
We all see how well that worked out.
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In 1969 I left L.A. and went to live in a commune in Laguna
Canyon where Timothy Leary often dropped in to pass a pipe. Back then a lot of “dropouts” aka “hippies”
were people like me who’d grown disenchanted with how ineffective our efforts had
been to stop the war in Vietnam, what now is known officially to have been an illegal war thanks to leaks such as The Pentagon Papers, disenchanted with how the persons in
power even in activist groups would not be as confrontational and forceful as they needed to
be to get results.
Wonder if people in
their twenties are starting to feel that same frustration now.
Wonder if a new kind of counter culture will develop
now.
***
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| Photo Courtesy D.C. 1968 Project |
Posted by Kay Ebeling
Producer of City of Angels Blog since Jan 2007
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The city of angels is everywhere
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