Kopkind Colony

Be there tonight, Saturday, July 22, as Kopkind features the fascinating, moving, funny, profound and all-around wonderful work of Belden Hill Movie Makers, people who live and work in the immediate vicinity of the Kopkind Colony. We will screen little- or never-before-seen short work from five terrific filmmakers: Chuck Light, Mac Christopher, Olivia Wiggins, David (“Cubby”) Hall and John Scagliotti. A Home Movie Night of vast dimension!

Time: 7:30 pm

Place: The Organ Barn at Guilford, 158 Kopkind Road, Guilford, Vt. 05301

This is a free public event, which concludes the Kopkind/Center for Independent Documentary Film Camp.

Back in March we announced here the death of our friend and tender comrade Kevin Alexander Gray. We said we might write more but never could summon the words. Kevin died suddenly on March 7, a shock. July 1 is his birthday. He would have been 66 today. He loved his birthday, and would sometimes send his friends presents of songs to mark the occasion. “The politics begins in the music,” he once said. That sums up the experience of a lot of people growing up his age in the Sixties. So here are some songs for him, in memory; and for everyone out there, with pleasure, because, to borrow a word he used to characterize one great, formative political experience, they are “glorious.”

Kevin was talking by Zoom to journalists and activists at Kopkind last year about what it was like to be part of a class-conscious, black-led, multi-racial, anti-imperialist, social-movement-based, barnstorming national electoral campaign. He’d been a founding member of the Rainbow Coalition, had worked for Jesse Jackson’s 1984 campaign, and was South Carolina coordinator for the ’88 campaign. “It was glorious,” he said. It was. Andy Kopkind covered it for The Nation. Some of the magazine’s staff volunteered. Steve Cobble, Frank Watkins, Jack O’Dell, Anne Braden, Gwen Patton, Ron Walters, Kevin — people who had worked in the background — became important interlocutors for anyone, journalists especially, who was thinking about the relationship between left movements and electoral politics. An all-star band, all gone now.

He died raking leaves. Working. Outdoors, free. His heart, we think. It had been a good day, an ordinary day. He’d opened a barbecue restaurant in 2020, which he wrote about here, in “Scenes From a Pandemic,” but March 7 was a Tuesday, and the restaurant is closed on Tuesdays. He drove to a garden nursery that morning. There was a joyful ease in his voice then. He was thinking about plants. He was only a little irritated with other people. A couple of hours before he died he talked about preparing for his next phase, the next book to write, a stretch in DC. He always thought he had time. 

Sade may not have been on Kevin’s twitter page singing this particular song, but like music videos of Aretha and Prince and all the artists here, hers would pop up in his tweets, amid news of the black and left world. Anyone who died after contributing to the sweet or just side of life, especially if obscure or unsung, Kevin would recognize. Who died today? you could ask yourself. What happened on this day in (often black Southern) history? Likely, Kevin would have a tweet about that. NASA names a mountain on the moon for Melba Mouton, the mathematician at the center of Hidden Figures: Mons Mouton. Nikki Haley is being credited (or reviled) for removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse grounds; let’s remember the decades of people’s agitation and action against the flag. Jeff Beck dies; here’s his great live version of “People Get Ready,” with Rod Stewart. It’s Christmas and the anniversary of James Brown’s death; here again is Kevin’s terrific essay, “The Soul Will Find a Way,” vividly capturing the texture of life in the segregated South in which Kevin and James both grew up, the roots of the music. The scroll of his old tweets is like raw footage for a documentary of his personality and his work. “I write about what I see and experience,” Kevin states in the preface to his collection, Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics. It’s what made his best writing and public talks so rich — the threads of history, personal stories, political analysis/reporting, cultural references, the mood of the streets, all interconnected. And of course, South Carolina: “You know James Jamerson came from Edisto Island, right?” (The great bass guitarist appears in the video below at 1:24 and throughout.)

Any road trip with Kevin was a musical extravaganza. He had binders of CDs, with music of all genres, which he’d curate while driving, knowing the exact location of every disk and smoothly popping it into the player. He’d been a radio deejay in his youth, and never lost the touch. He knew the words to the most obscure songs. And he was a marvelous storyteller. He seemed to know the backstory of every inch of South Carolina. His own account of burning the Confederate flag in front of the statehouse was many times told, and always landed with effect. He’d had the flag stitched to a Nazi flag, which went up dramatically. Meanwhile, the battle flag resisted the lighter fluid and the flames from mechanical clickers, as counterprotestors joyfully sang, “Our flag won’t burn, our flag won’t burn…” to the tune of “Dixie.” Finally, the hated polyester rag melted. Kevin always ended this story with a piece of advice: “If you’re going to burn a flag, make sure it’s cotton.” He moved through life as a wildly original combination of anger and optimism. A beautiful soul. Rest in power, brother.

A lot is happening: Kopkind kicks off its summer season with our CineSLAM festival of short LGBTQ+ films, Saturday, June 24, 4 pm, The Latchis Theater, Main Street in Brattleboro, Vt. Click here for tickets and more info. Kopkind/CID Film Camp then commences for a week on July 16, followed by our week-long seminar/retreat for political journalists and organizers, beginning July 29. There’s a war on, against our youth, our bodies, our being, our families, our future. Kopkind has always been part of the fight-back and the liberating vision. Please help us with a donation by clicking the DONATE button above. It will mean so much.

Years ago, 1977 to be precise, Andy Kopkind wrote an article about the rise of what was then called the New Right for New Times magazine. (It appears in his vital collected work, The Thirty Years’ Wars, under the title “Culture Clash.”) He begins on the outskirts of Bensenville, Illinois, talking to a woman who “sells sweet corn by the street side.” Her politicization came via opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion and the perceived lesbian menace—an introduction to a well-coordinated politics of fear which raised the spectre of unisex bathrooms and demise of the family in order to organize a base for a far more pedestrian backlash agenda in the wake of the Sixties movements.

“Sooner or later,” Andy wrote, “pro-family activists find themselves pro: death penalty, Laetrile, nuclear power, local police, Panama Canal, saccharin, FBI, CIA, defense budget, public prayer and real estate growth. More likely than not, they are anti: bussing, welfare, public employee unions, affirmative action, amnesty [for draft resisters], marijuana, communes, gun control, pornography, the 55 mph speed limit, day-care centers, religious ecumenism, sex education, car pools and the Environ-mental Protection Act.”

Some of the references may be whiskered with age (and as Andy noted then, “of course, there are exceptions everywhere”), but the general pattern has been remark-ably sturdy, as witnessed today by thunderous campaigns against the dangers of drag brunches, trans youth, abortion everything, sex ed, ‘saying gay’ and so on, promoted by Ron DeSantis and his confederate governors, legislators, political aspirants, propagandists and grifters. Whether they believe any of it is beside the point; it’s power politics, baby.

The left, such as it is, has been spotty, to say the least, at recognizing that the right’s body politics is the spearpoint for its broader agenda, and thus, that in the struggle for a humane future, nothing is marginal.

In the 1970s, the black radical lesbian Combahee River Collective argued for recognizing people’s complex experience, and the multiple oppressions, based on sex, class, race, gender, geography etc., that are interconnected. In a way, that analysis was an update/elaboration on Dr. King’s “triple evils” of racism, war and economic exploitation. To our detriment, it was the road less traveled.

As filmmaker John Scagliotti, Andy’s life partner and Kopkind’s administrator, wrote in The Nation about the 1980s, “Straight progressives could not see that the contra war was intimately linked to the culture war; that the culture war was what was drawing the foot soldiers whose votes and organizational zeal emboldened the right to do pretty much whatever it wanted anywhere in the world; and so long as straight progressives were afraid to stand up against the real political dynamics that fed this growing monster in America, they would continue to lose.” Forty years later we’re still debating what is central, what is marginal.

Earlier this month, Laura Flanders (Kopkind mentor, 2018 and 2019) did an excellent segment of The Laura Flanders Show with Imara Jones, who founded TransLash Media and has mapped the connections between the anti-abortion movement and the anti-trans movement, underwritten by the same institutional funders and strategists. Some have been at work since the fright organizing against sex ed of the late 1960s morphed into organizing against the ERA and abortion and the gay rights movement; they now undergird the profusion of anti-trans rhetoric and legislation: 549 bills in state legislatures in 2023, 73 passed so far. For the right, the target changes; the objective does not.

This is the culture arm of the billionaires’ economic and political agenda for tax cuts, privatization, deregulation, union-busting, weapons-making, more pelf for themselves and growing immiseration for the rest. Its fruits were on display at a recent conference of right-wing Christian women, resurrecting the ghoulish memory of 1970s anti-ERA icon Phyllis Schlafly, a nuclear war hawk who saw political opportunity in redefining ‘equality’ to mean child and family endangerment. In attendance, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to rouse the faithful against the supposed witch-hunt against Donald Trump. That got some applause but nothing like the hair-on-fire enthusiasm that greeted the verbal bashing of trans people, trans visibility. No matter; for Greene, it was all the same, because harnessing emotion is the tactical necessity. From Anita Bryant’s anti-gay “Save Our Children” campaign in the late Seventies to the Heritage Foundation’s current “Promise to America’s Children” to QAnon frenzy about “cannibal pedophiles” to gerrymandered right-wing legislative majorities to laws that target doctors and abortion assisters and trans people and basic being—these are all part of the great crimes behind great fortunes.

The headline to this post, “Bodies are the first site of liberation,” is from Imara Jones. Its inverse was offered by a Malaysian gay activist in an interview with Scagliotti for his 2003 film Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World: “Visibilty attracts the bullet.” Action brings reaction. Backlash does not happen without preceding gains. At Kopkind we talk about the long walk to the Freedom to Be. It is one fight.

Laura Flanders and JoAnn Wypijewski will be talking on these themes and more at the 22nd Century Conference in Minneapolis (July 6-9)—their session, titled “Anti-Sex, a Tool of Authoritarianism: Why Media Matters,” on Friday, July 7 at 4 pm.

ALSO: for people in the New York area, at 6:30 pm on Thursday, June 22, The People’s Forum, 320 West 37th Street in Manhattan, will be showing Kopkind/CID Film Camp alum Amir Amirani’s wonderful documentary We Are Many. The film is a history of the February 2003 protest to prevent the US war in Iraq, a momentous global event, and its legacies.

If not yet officially, summer is upon us, with June, with peonies and Pride Month, which also means with Kopkind’s CineSLAM festival of short LGBTQ+ films. June 24, at 4 pm, The Latchis Theater on Main Street in Brattleboro, Vermont. Mark your calendars, and watch this site for more details!

For today, for every day, let us raise a song for the Freedom to Be. Herewith, a bit from Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric”:

I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough, 

To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, 

To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough, 

To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then? I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.

In his wonderful essay on the origins and spirit of May Day, posted on May 1, below, Peter Linebaugh mentions Linton Kwesi Johnson. Everyone can use a spirit-lift, so here’s the song. A reminder, if any is needed, that time is a person’s most valuable possession. Listen, enjoy, and, if you haven’t already, read Peter on the historic desire for time to live.

The great historian Peter Linebaugh, Kopkind mentor (2014), guest (2019) and friend, remembers May Day every year in stories and songs. Many of his previous essays on the lifeblood of International Workers Day are collected in The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day. Today, we reprint excerpts from the beginning of his “May Day and Abolition,” which we retitle here, but you can read in its entirety on CounterPunch. Gather round the May pole, friends, figuratively or—for our Guilford neighbors—literally! For ‘jollity and gloom’ yet contend, and we know which side we’re on. (That is not Peter above; read on for more about the Green Man in history.)

by Peter Linebaugh

“Murther, murther, murther, murther …” shouted Free-born John Lilburne from a seventeenth-century prison.  “M’aidez, m’aidez,” says the international distress signal.  Murder is the crime, and help is the need.  That is the dynamic of the day, May Day.  Its methodology therefore requires answers to two questions:  Who?  Whom?

We remember los martiros, that is the martyrs who were hanged for their support of the eight-hour day and the police riot at Haymarket, Chicago.  That struggle commenced on May 1, 1886.  Who? Whom?  

The bosses hanged the workers.  Their names were August Spies, Albert Parsons, Adolph Fischer, George Engel.  Their hanging was judicial murder, or state sponsored terror.  “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.”  Their last words, our prologue.  The Haymarket hangings were preparation for mass murder at Wounded Knee (1890).  Who? Whom?  The army massacres the Lakotas.

The tendency of capitalism is the global devaluation of labor, an abstraction covering over the four-fold murders of war, famine, pestilence and neglect that characterize our neoliberal, incarcerating, planet-wrecking times.  It is the widespread whisper, the secret thought, the unindicted accusation as more and more are shot, gassed, get sick, starve, drown, burn or have to move out so that entrepreneurial gentry may move in.  Call it expropriation, call it exploitation, combine them and you have X squared; add extraction and you have X cubed, or the formula of capitalism.  No matter what you call it, we live in murderous times.  

The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Nay, come, let’s go together. (I.v.188-90)

So, to all the Hamlets out there suffering from cursed spite, remember Shakespeare’s wise words, “let’s go together.”  It’s May Day!  The day of pleasure, the day of struggle. A day for the green, a day for the red.  We want more time, as Linton Kwesi Johnson sings.  More time in both senses referring to the years of our lives and to the seven generations hence. More personal time, more human/species/historical time.  

The Maypole and the Hydra

Thomas Morton and a boatload of indentured servants arrived in Massachusetts in 1624.  They settled in Passonagessit, or what became Merry Mount (modern day Quincy, just south of Boston).  In 1627 they celebrated May Day by erecting an 80-foot May pole.  The following year the Puritans destroyed it and the settlement.

The Puritan governor of Massachusetts, William Bradford, describes what happened.  “They also set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together, (like so many fairies, or furies rather,) and worse practices. As if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of the Roman Goddess Flora, or the beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians. Morton likewise (to show his poetry) composed sundry rimes and verses, some tending to lasciviousness, and others to the detraction and scandal of some persons, which he affixed to this idle or idol May-pole.”

The dance around the Maypole included former indentured servants from England, a Ganymede, several Algonquin people, youth and age, men and women.  The dances were inspired by animals of the forest.  Perhaps a morris dance or “Moorish” dance.  Puritans had been fighting it for years.  A poem was made, “Bachanalia Triumphant,” in 1629, a year after the destruction of the settlement.

Nathaniel Hawthorne later called it “that gay colony,” where “jollity and gloom contended for an empire.”  In his story “The Maypole of Merry Mount” (1837), he describes “the Salvage Man, well known in heraldry, hairy as a baboon, and girdled with green leaves.”  Twice he refers to rainbows: once on the ribbon of the May pole, and once on the “scarf of a youth in glistening apparel.”  Nathaniel Hawthorne alludes to the great Peasants Revolt in central Europe a century earlier, 1526, when the rainbow was the sign of those fighting to retain access to the life-giving rivers and forests, the commons. Thus, the rainbow was the earliest flag of the settler-indigenous encounter and suggests an alternative to the bloody flag of war or the white one of surrender.  

Of May Day, Philip Stubbes reported in The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), “I have heard it credibly reported (and that viva voce) by men of great gravity and reputation, that of forty, three score or a hundred maids going to the wood overnight, there have scarcely the third part of them returned home again undefiled. These be the fruits which these cursed pastimes bring forth.”  The Puritan Christopher Fetherston fulminated against cross-dressing in his Dialogue Against Light, Lewd and Lascivious Dancing (1582): “For the abuses which are committed in your May games are infinite. The first whereof is this, that you do use to attire men in women’s apparel, whom you do most commonly call May Marions, whereby you infringe that straight commandment which is given in Deuteronomy 22.5.  That men must not put on women’s apparel for fear of enormities.”   

Puritans saw only “enormities” and “cursed pastimes.”  These seem to have disappeared by the Victorian era.  Alfred Tennyson did much to domesticate the tradition with his long poem “The May Queen” (1855): 

So you must wake and call me early, call me early mother dear,
Tomorrow’ll be the happiest time of all the glad New Year,
Tomorrow’ll be of all the year the maddest, merriest day,
For I’m to be Queen of the May, mother, I’m to be Queen of the May!

…

Thomas Morton was the wildest person on that May Day of 1627, according to Hawthorne.  “Up with your nimble spirits, ye morris-dancers, green men, and glee maidens, bears and wolves, and horned gentlemen!  Come; a chorus now, rich with the old mirth of Merry England, and the wilder glee of this fresh forest, and then a dance.”

Morton told the story in a book that could not be printed or published in England, The New English Canaan, published in Amsterdam in 1637.  The English authorities confiscated four hundred of the books on import.  We don’t know that Free-born John Lilburne, the great Leveller and radical pamphleteer, had a hand in the smuggling, though he might have because time and place were right.  More anon.

The Green Man, that gentle soul of the earth and growing things, appears on the invitation for the coronation for King Charles III and Queen Camilla (the billionaires), designed by heraldic artist and manuscript illuminator Andrew Jamieson. 

The royal website explains this inclusion: “Central to the design is the motif of the Green Man, an ancient figure from British folklore, symbolic of spring and rebirth, to celebrate the new reign. The shape of the Green Man, crowned in natural foliage, is formed of leaves of oak, ivy and hawthorn, and the emblematic flowers of the United Kingdom.” 

A fertility figure or a nature spirit, the Green Man provides curious ornamentation to medieval churches, abbeys, universities, furniture and fixtures – oak leaves disgorged from mouths, leaves sprouting from eyebrows, hawthorn leaves spewing from ears, nostrils and eyes. Foliage crowns, leaf heads.  These sculptures grimace, leer, smile, brood or scowl.  They make mischief or anguish and stir up mysteries, making us think of Roman fauns, the wodewose or hairy wild man of the Dark Ages, the Hindu kirtimukha or the Puck of the woodlands.  The ancient Egyptian god Osiris is commonly depicted with a green face representing vegetation, rebirth and resurrection. Robin Hood and Peter Pan are sometimes associated with a Green Man.  The Green Man was adopted by Church and Monarchy as a kind of peripheral iconography.  

The Puritan parliament in 1644 banned the erection of May poles, declaring them ‘a heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness.’  Under Cromwell’s Protectorate the May revels were shut down everywhere. In Oxford the antiquarian Anthony Wood reported: ‘1648 May 1. This day the Visitors, Mayor, and the chief officer of the well-affected of the University and City spent in zealous persecuting of the young people that followed May-Games, by breaking of Garlands, taking away fiddles from Musicians, dispersing Morrice-Dancers, and by not suffering a green bough to be worn in a hat or stuck up at any door, esteeming it a superstition or rather an heathenish custom.’

May Day celebrations were revived in 1660. When Charles II returned to England, common people in London put up May poles “at every crossway,” according to John Aubrey. The largest was in the Strand, reaching over 130 feet, half again taller than Merry Mount’s May pole.  It was blown over by a high wind in 1672, when it was moved to serve as a mount for the telescope of Sir Isaac Newton.  Thomas Hobbes, who tutored Charles II in math, believed the May pole was a leftover from the time the Romans worshipped Priapus.  But the earliest reference to a May pole in England is from the time of the peasants’ revolt of the 14^th century.

The Maypole revelers in Massachusetts were defeated by Myles Standish and Governor Endicott.  Morton was arrested, exiled and imprisoned.  Some were suspected of witchcraft, and whipped. The May pole became a whipping post.  

The Boston Puritans compared these folk to the many-headed Hydra, frightened “of Hydras hideous form and dreadful power” … no sooner was one head cut off than others grew in its place.  This was so frequent a charge against the landless people of the world, the crowds of its towns, and the ships’ crews in the era of settler colonialism and primary accumulation, that Marcus Rediker and I took it as a symbol for the circulation of struggles among the various components of the nascent proletariat against their rulers and oppressors.  Evidently we were not the first to do so!  

We the working class, or we the people, or we commoners determine what we make and not just how we make it or who does the making, and that this is required in the face of climate change and what geologists term “planetary perturbations.”  Human society must find its nature in an ecology that saves the waters, saves the soil, saves the air for purposes of life.  This is why, as the Red Nation teaches us, indigenous sovereignty (Land Back!) and decarbonization require us to look again at history with a view of the commons.  Morton was among people who were commoning, bringing together various forms of mutuality based upon English celebration and indigenous commons.  Here is Morton’s testimony:

“The more I looked, the more I liked it. And when I had more seriously considered of the beauty of the place, with all her faire endowments, I did not think that in all the known world it could be paralleled, for so many goodly groves of trees, dainty fine round rising hillocks, delicate faire large plain, sweet crystal fountains, and clear running streams that twin in fine meanders through the meads, making so sweet a murmuring noise to hear as would even lull the senses with delight a sleep, so pleasantly do they glide upon the pebble stones, jetting most jocundly where they do meet and hand in hand run down to Neptunes Court, to pay the yearly tribute which they owe to him as sovereign Lord of all the springs.  Contained within the volume of the Land, [are] Fowles in abundance, Fish in multitude; and [I] discovered, besides, millions of turtledoves on the green boughs, which sat pecking of the full ripe pleasant grapes that were supported by the lusty trees, whose fruitful load did cause the arms to bend: [among] which here and there dispersed, you might see Lilies and of the Daphnean-tree: which made the Land to me seem paradise: for in mine eye t’was Nature’s Masterpiece.”

Here is the green vision, idle for sure, idol not at all…

To read the full story, go to CounterPunch here. Peter Linebaugh is the author, most recently, of Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Gespard (University of California Press), as well as The Many Headed Hydra, with Marcus Rediker, The London Hanged and more. He gives thanks here to Michaela Brennan, Tim Healey, Joe Summers, Janie Paul, and all my friends at Retort, ECI, and Under the Bus. 

July 1, 1957 – March 7, 2023

With broken hearts and gratitude for the depth and joy he brought to the world, we share the news that our beloved friend and comrade Kevin Gray died suddenly in the late afternoon of Tuesday, March 7, in Columbia, South Carolina. Over the two decades-plus of Kopkind’s camps and special events, Kevin was a mentor (2002 and 2008), a periodic guest for informal talks after dinner, a featured speaker. He was an organizer, a writer, a thinker, a worker, a historian of black life and politics in the South in particular, a lover of music, an encyclopedia of cultural ephemera, a space maker, a beautiful soul. His life was bigger than any bio can contain, as this interview for the Julian Bond Oral History Project attests.

We may have more to say down the road. When words fail, there is music.

Holiday greetings! Please help Kopkind feed the future by enriching the thought, work and spirit of political journalists, activists and documentary filmmakers today. Your holiday-season gift means so much to us, and to people and projects like those discussed below. Kopkind is part of the infrastructure of political and cultural change. Where there’s a fight, our people are in it. We’re bringing you this annual newsletter digitally again this year because printing and mailing costs weigh too heavy.

Continuity and Change

Kopkind returned after two years, with intense, ranging, feisty conversations under blue skies at day and fairy lights at night. No one got covid. That was the fundamental achievement of summer 2022, upon which all others depended. But before going further a pause is required, to remember someone we lost this year.

“Billy took his own life yesterday.” I woke up to the text on October 1. Groggy, wondering, Billy…? Then I recognized the New Orleans area code. It felt like it was raining all over the world. 

Billy Sothern was a death penalty lawyer. That’s how he represented himself when he applied to Kopkind in 2005. He didn’t say innocence lawyer. He had been in New Orleans for only four years at that point, having left New York for the Southern Death Belt right out of law school, and he was tired. He was thinking of quitting, but … He wanted to write, but so much got in the way. He quoted poetry and told stories. Even the funny ones often had a sly or mournful streak. Oh, Billy was charming. 

“What impressed me at the time was that he didn’t seem to be driven by anger. He carried a lot of sadness,” Jeff Sharlet, one of the mentors in 2005, remembered. “Sadness is in the work, what you do when you have no idea what the solution is, but … We shouldn’t kill these guys. He wasn’t romantic about his clients. He understood brokenness. He knew he was breakable.”

Billy didn’t quit criminal defense work after that summer. When he died, a New York Times obituary eulogized him as “a defense lawyer renowned for taking on some of Louisiana’s toughest capital cases—including the wrongful conviction of Albert Woodfox, who spent 42 years in solitary confinement for a crime he didn’t commit.” Woodfox and the other members of the Angola 3, who spent more time in solitary than anyone in US history, were not formally condemned to death; they were subjected to an institutional regime that tried to destroy them by torture. Two of them had previously organized a chapter of the Black Panther Party inside to oppose brutal conditions in the former slave plantation turned prison. They survived because of solidarity, shouting to one another from their cells, teaching one another and looking to the outside, as Woodfox said, “to keep our focus on society.” There, an international campaign and lawyers like Billy fought alongside them for their release. It was a celebrated case where most are not; we use the term ‘victory’ because there is none to characterize the mix of elation, over a person’s release from bonds, and dread, contemplating the depths to which systems and persons will go to deny another’s humanity.

Albert Woodfox was released in 2016 and died of covid on August 4, 2022. He was 75. Billy contracted covid in the spring of 2020 and suffered severe damage. His friend Katy Reckdahl (Kopkind 2002), an excellent journalist in New Orleans, said that after getting off a ventilator he couldn’t walk, he couldn’t speak properly and had to teach himself those things again. His wife told the Times that he was also dealing with thyroid cancer and depression. He was 45.

That summer of 2005 religion and politics was Kopkind’s theme, a constant through American history. A few weeks on, as officials in Louisiana implored citizens to “pray down” an approaching hurricane, one of the biggest stories of the decade would find Billy. We introduced him to The Nation, and his dispatches in the wake of Hurricane Katrina were intense and original; they later became the basis for his book, Down in New Orleans: Reflections From a Drowned City.

For all the seriousness and deep explorations of that camp, I wish to enter into the record of remembrance one moment of ecstatic joy. As a warm-up for a morning’s seminar, Jeff broke our assembled camp into three groups, giving each a singing assignment. To one: Om ben zar sa to sa ma ya, a Tibetan Buddhist mantra. To the second: There is power, power, wonder-working power in the precious blood of the lamb, from a sturdy Christian hymn; Jeff and his co-author on Killing the Buddha, Peter Manseau, had encountered it being sung at a vengeance church praying for an execution in Florida. To the third, which included Billy: Out here in the fields, I fight for my meals; I don’t need to be forgiven!, an elision of lyrics from The Who’s “Baba O’Reilly”—the song often mistakenly called by its refrain, “teenage wasteland,” a subject with which Billy was also intimately acquainted.

Here is how this exercise went: each group sang its part alone once; then all three groups sang at the same time, three times. A “Cacophony Choir,” Jeff called it. At the end he said, “This is the sound of religion in America.” Horrible, wonderful; consider the agreement to sing with your neighbor every week, whether or not they can sing, or sing the right way. I was in Billy’s group. He had been reserved the previous days, but he leaned hard into the lyric, passionate and free, inspiring the rest of us to do the same. Out here in the fields, I fight for my meals; I don’t need to be forgiven! he bellowed. Billy would spend much of his life on behalf of people in need of forgiveness, people reduced to the worst thing they’d ever done, declared forever irredeemable. He was brave and beautiful, and it seems he embodied, for as long as he could, that raucous, defiant howl. 

* * *

The relationship between social movements and electoral politics was the theme of 2022’s political camp. It’s a subject that Andy Kopkind had written about a lot, notably in his reporting on Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition campaigns of the 1980s, and that in various fora Kopkind had addressed across about twenty years. “A complete movement creates useful activities and a political culture that will carry its members through the long years on the margins of power,” Andy wrote in 1988; it organizes itself while working to shift consciousness beyond its dedicated base, thereby expanding that base, at least potentially, and working for tangible gains because, as the ’60s civil rights movement used to say, “the people need victories.” For anyone who takes seriously the dictum to engage in every area of struggle, the electoral arena cannot be ignored. 

If all that seems obvious now, electoral strategy had fallen into disfavor on the left when Jack O’Dell was a mentor at Kopkind in 2004, talking about linkages between the postwar labor organizing, socialist organizing and civil rights organizing that had laid the critical ground for his later involvement with the Rainbow. Skepticism was high in 2008 when Obama had tapped the national mood, and filmmaker Shola Lynch gave a public screening of her documentary Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbowed. A tempest knocked out the power that night, and we talked by lantern light in the barn about candidates’ tendency to take their personal gains but leave the people disempowered. The questions raised then—about organizing and collective leverage—weren’t settled in 2015, when Kevin Gray, a past mentor (who discussed his Rainbow experience in a Zoom conversation with campers this year), analyzed Bernie Sanders’ campaign at a Kopkind public talk, and audience members wondered aloud: How is it that someone is in progressive politics for thirty years but when he’s at his kitchen table sketching out his presidential campaign where’s the black friend, the gay friend, the latino friend, the Arab friend, the women’s liberationist friend—not diversity face cards but people with deep relationships to help build a coalition of all the constituencies that need change most and might fight for it the hardest? So many questions about electoral engagement aren’t settled now (as the Zapatistas say, “we walk with questions”), but the necessity of a politics that acknowledges that people experience class in multiple dimensions, and the importance of an electoral strategy as part of that politics to shift power to the many from the few, is no longer just a history lesson.

In 2022 we had people in residence who’d worked for Bernie’s second, more conscious campaign; people who worked on tenants’ rights, workers’ rights, reproductive justice and cross-border campaigns; people working in print, digital media, television (shout out to The Laura Flanders Show) and film. Some had covered legislative or other political moves; all had come up against the evidence of the left’s electoral weakness, especially in local and state bodies, and were chipping away, thinking of ways to build popular power.

Aaron Fernando, the Kopkind/Nation fellow for 2022, sketched out the twinned media and electoral strategy that housing activists in Ithaca, New York, were developing. He shared his outline for a Guerrilla Media Field School to train people in under-represented communities to amplify their issues/voices by creating their own media, with low overhead, high quality and high independence. Filmmaker/activist Jing Wang took us into the world of immigrant Chinese delivery workers in New York with a camera mounted on a driver’s bike, visually linking working conditions with organizing for legislative change where voting is not an option. Sarah Hurd and Pamela Allen of DSA Chicago and New York, respectively, discussed the practicalities, highs and lows, of running candidates for office as part of a politics for human values versus market or military values. Our mentor, Harper Bishop, a force of nature rooted in Buffalo’s social and economic justice efforts, was in the midst of a fight over a gerrymandered city redistricting map, which even the status quo-ite local newspaper said “makes a hash of the city, splitting neighborhoods, disrespecting minorities and all but ignoring the requirement to keep districts compact and with regular shapes. The resulting map looks more like an incumbent protection program.”

The story Harper diagramed at camp exemplifies the movement/electoral nexus. The coalition he helped found, Our City Action Buffalo, grew out of the same organizing tradition that had spurred India Walton (Kopkind 2019) to challenge the city’s four-term incumbent mayor in 2021. When India won the Democratic primary, shocking the mayor, the political establishment and hopeful leftists too, Harper and OCAB organized door to door. When she lost the general election, he wrote a thorough, unsentimental analysis, and OCAB went after a source of systemic disempowerment, the Common Council district lines. It did political education. It used the council’s map to illustrate structural neglect and the dilution of black voting power (by extension, people’s power to shape decisions affecting their lives). It worked with experts to draw up an alternate map based on equity and geographic logic. When the council insulted their coalition and ignored their arguments, people mobilized by OCAB loudly warned the councilmen (they are all men) that their jobs weren’t safe. Recently, a judge ruled that the council broke no laws in adopting a self-serving gerrymander. So OCAB lost this round. Meanwhile, more people are organized, engaged in creating the “useful activities and political culture” of which Andy spoke. Since India’s run, city and state officials have discovered that the long-ignored black East Side is in need of public investment, but people aren’t just waiting on promises.

This story is not finished.

* * *

Regina Mahone stepped onto the deck during a seminar break on July 19 with a live feed from C-Span on her phone. Renee Bracey Sherman (Kopkind 2015), Regina’s collaborator on a book-in-progress about abortion stigma, structural racism and the struggle for reproductive freedom, was about to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Renee founded We Testify in 2016 to take the shame out of abortion and emphasize people’s experiences and rightful power of decision-making. Her prepared text promised to describe the protocol for a self-managed abortion—likely the first time such a plainspoken instruction had ever been broadcast.

Near the end of her remarks, Renee did just that:

“It is one mifepristone pill followed by four misoprostol pills dissolved under the tongue 24 to 48 hours later, or a series of 12 misoprostol pills, four at a time, dissolved under the tongue every three hours. There’s no way to test it in the blood stream and a person doesn’t need to tell the police what they took. I share that to exercise my right to free speech, because there are organizations and legislators who want to make what I just said a crime.”

The tension in her voice was unmistakable. A month or so earlier I had got a call from a Kopkinder who is involved in an underground network that distributes the pills Renee mentioned from activists in Mexico to US activists in ‘safe’ states to people in states where abortion has been banned or virtually banned. The network includes people skilled in helping women take the pills and accompany them through the process. Renee’s reference to criminalization was not hyperbole. Community care, represented by thousands of volunteers, like Renee, linked to local abortion funds to support others seeking abortions, is under threat or outright attack. It’s too risky for me to name that other Kopkinder, who lives in a reproductive police state. Back in 2020, the Kopkind/Nation collaboration “Scenes From a Pandemic” included a story from a Mexican doctor specializing in sexual and reproductive health, a Kopkind mentor in 2011, who wrote under a pseudonym because abortion was largely prohibited. That is no longer the case in Mexico, where feminists tell their US counterparts, When we needed solidarity, you were there; now it’s our turn.

That moment of Renee’s testimony condensed our theme, telescoped across time. At one end is Roe v Wade, the 1972 decision carried along by the spirit of the time but bereft of the radical ethic of women’s liberation and the other ’60s-era freedom movements. (Read the decision; the Supreme Court put the doctor in the driver’s seat.) At the other end is the persistence of reproductive rights organizers that would be evidenced electorally a few weeks later, on August 2, when voters in Kansas rejected a ballot measure that would have banned abortion in the state; and evidenced again in the midterms, when every ballot measure on abortion resulted in an affirmation of reproductive rights. Vermont, California, Michigan, Kentucky.

Between those two poles has been the long backlash—the right’s combination of grassroots organizing, electoral strategy and blunt exercise of political power—and the efforts by liberationist scholars, writers and activists, centering the experience of black women, to defend abortion rights but also push beyond them, to make a fundamental claim on freedom. Regina and Renee are in that tradition. Our late beloved Pamela Bridgewater Toure—a Kopkind participant (2001), guest speaker (2004), mentor (2006) and board member—argued for reproductive freedom under the 13th Amendment, given that forced birth was a condition of slavery. Following the leak of Justice Alito’s opinion in the Dobbs decision, Pamela’s legal scholarship has had a new life in public discourse. Two notable examples: articles by UMass professor Laura Briggs, author of How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics in The Washington Post and a Harvard Law School blog.

As John Scagliotti, Andy’s life partner, gay media pioneer and our administrator, has long emphasized in Kopkind discussions on the cycle of liberation and backlash, there is no contradiction in pressing for legal and political reform while also demanding, Why are some people’s rights considered valid grist for opinion polls? Why are some people’s lives votable? “Everyone loves someone who has abortions,” Renee told Congress. “Ask yourself: who do you love that you’d be willing to lock up simply because they had abortions?” In the wake of the midterm victories, she told the press, “We’re doubling down.”

* * *

Cheryl Furjanic, a wonderful filmmaker whose Op-Doc on the Stonewall riots we discussed here a few years ago, came to film camp, Kopkind’s collaboration with the Center for Independent Documentary, to workshop a film-in-progress about miscarriage. She’s been working on it for some years, inspired by personal experience. It never occurred to her when she had a miscarriage, or even when she started working on the film, that she might have been suspected as a criminal for seeking medical treatment, depending on where she lived, what color she is, the caprice of health and law enforcement professionals. But that’s a reality now. How the political moment might affect the film’s future isn’t something that gets settled at film camp—the workshops are typically part of the progress of a work, not its endpoint—but it made for provocative conversation on a subject that has in so many ways, and for so long, been shrouded in silence.

That’s how it is with film camp: people come at first with technical questions, distribution questions, story questions, etc. Invariably, politics enters the conversation. This year we had filmmakers telling stories about K-pop fan rituals, and a collab-oration between hippies and blues musicians in segregated Memphis; about Gifted ed programs, and a ’60s-era game show; about a loner remaking an old ghost town in the West, and Shirley Clarke, the only woman at the dawn of the avant garde film movement; about a solitary, eccentric white artist in the Vermont hills, and a curious African American adventurer, experiencing conflicting emotions touring the black diaspora. That’s how it is with movies: in the best case, they make you think and want to talk and talk…

We were gratified by the cooperation and good spirits of all our participants, in both camps, in abiding by our covid protocols. It’s always something of a roll of the dice in a pandemic, but our success in keeping everyone healthy depended on a lot of people. It created some extra effort on the part of everyone who makes Kopkind happen behind the scenes. We want to thank, especially, Mary Lewis, our chef; Tom Gogola, a “Swiss army knife,” as they say in sports, who assisted; Christopher Dawes and Jonathan Jensen, who handled technical issues and projection; everyone who pitched in when a storm destroyed the tent, and everyone from the Packer Corners hill who helped raise it anew. A shout out also to Susi Walsh of Center for Independent Documentary, who worked digitally: we hope to see her in person in 2023!

At the top of this newsletter is a shot of an al fresco film screening. Amir Amirani happened to be in the US this summer (he lives in London) and happened to be in Brattleboro in July during the political camp, so we asked him to come for a semi-public screening; then he joined film camp. Kismet. We Are Many commemorates one of the most remarkable displays of human solidarity, the worldwide protests of February 15, 2003, which sought to prevent the US war on Iraq. It didn’t. It did, though, affect the lives of many who were part of it, or who witnessed it from afar. The film took eleven years to make and is told in the memories of numerous participants from across the globe. A lot of us remember “the day the world said no to war,” to quote Phyllis Bennis (Kopkind public speaker, 2004). Now on the cusp of the protest’s 20th anniversary, with so much of the world saying yes to war, “Peace on earth” ought to be more than a holiday slogan.

“If you keep coming back,” an activist says in the film, “at some point, you will make the change.” That’s a motto for us all, for Kopkind, for 2023. On behalf of John and the board of directors, I want to thank everyone who has brought us this far. Please keep coming back. For love and solidarity, and making change for the better in the new year, JoAnn Wypijewski, president

And now before you go, please remember Kopkind in this season of presents. You can do so by pressing the Donate button above. (If you’re not using PayPal, enter the amount before entering other payment information.) Or send a check made out to Kopkind, 158 Kopkind Road, Guilford, VT 05301. All contributions are tax deductible to the full extent of the law. Wishing you all the best. To everyone dealing with cold and snow, courage. Happy New Year!

… for a present. We have another Zapatista story to share with you, a whimsical reminder that history is not static. We all have a part, from time to time, in shaping it. For more than 20 years, Kopkind has nourished doers and dreamers—radical journalists, organizers, filmmakers, thinkers and creators all—working toward a more humane world. Please help us if you can. The Donate button is just above. And from our Sometimes family to yours, Happy Thanksgiving.

Forever and Never against Sometimes

September 12, 1998

Once upon a time, there were two times. One was called One Time and the other was called Another Time. One Time and Another Time together made the Sometimes family, who lived and ate from time to time. The great dominant empires were Forever and Never, which, as you would imagine, loathed the Sometimes family. Forever and Never couldn’t stand the very existence of the Sometimes family. Forever could not allow One Time to live in its kingdom, because it would stop being Forever, since the existence of one time means there is no forever. Similarly, Never could not allow Another Time to appear another time in its kingdom, because Never cannot live with one time, much less so if that time is another time. But One Time and Another Time continued to bother Forever and Never time and time again. So it was until Forever left them in peace forever, and Never did not bother them ever again. After that, One Time and Another Time passed their time playing, all the time.

“What is it this time?” One Time would ask, and Another Time would reply, “Can’t you see?” And so, as you can see, they lived happily—from time to time and forever remained One Time and Another Time and never stopped being Sometimes. 

Tan tan.

Moral 1: Sometimes, it is very hard to distinguish between one time and another time.

Moral 2: You must never say forever (well, sometimes it’s okay).

Moral 3: The Forevers and Nevers are imposed from above, but below there appear, time and time again, “the troublemakers,” which sometimes is another name for “those who are different” or, at times, “rebels.” 

Moral No. 4: Never ever again will I write a story like this one, and I always do what I say (well, okay, sometimes I don’t).

Vale y salud, and sometimes Forever and Never come from below (below the belly, for instance).

This is excerpted from Zapatista Stories for Dreaming An-Other World (PM Press), a new translation of timeless tales written between 1992 and 2000 by Subcomandante Marcos, collected by solidaristas around the world, and brought to us now in English with commentaries by the Lightning Collective, among whose members is our dear friend, adviser and supporter Margaret Cerullo. A slim volume with sumptuous resonance, it makes a great present, too! (For a time, PM is offering a 50 percent discount on all titles involving indigenous resistance and stories, with the coupon code GIFT.) Below, a bit from the translators’ introduction:

In the spring of 2021, the Zapatistas launched … a five-continent expedition of learning and solidarity. Beginning with a sea voyage to Europe (reversing the voyage of the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan in 1521), they visit[ed] collectives all over the European continent, returning the extraordinary solidarity that Europeans have shown them over the years, and revealing to many of us an-“other” Europe, below and to the left … The first small group arrived in Vigo, Basque Country, Spain, where Marijose, a trans woman, turning history upside down, proclaimed with characteristic Zapatista humor and seriousness:

‘In the name of the Zapatista women, children, men, elderly, and, of course, others, I declare that from now on this place, currently referred to as “Europe” by those who live here, be called: SLUMIL K ́AJXEMK ́OP, which means “Rebellious Land” or “Land which does not give in or give up.” And that is how it will be known by its own people and by others for as long as there is at least someone here who does not surrender, sell out, or give up.’

A final note about images: the detail above and the illustration at the top are part of what the artist, Beatriz Aurora, calls “painted stories.” Originally from Chile, Aurora went into exile in Spain in the 1970s, following the US-backed coup against Salvador Allende. After spending time in Nicaragua and El Salvador, she settled in Mexico. “Anyone who loves nature has to be a revolutionary,” she has said.