CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Make Trouble, Not War: Nancy Kurshan Tells Her Story

Anita Hoffman and Nancy Kurshan burning judges robes after the Chicago 8 verdict, 1968.

The first time I heard about the Yippies, I was almost thirteen.  The Democratic Convention was going full swing in Chicago in August 1968.  I delivered the Washington Post back then and read the reports from the Chicago streets each morning before I began my route.  Cops were beating on everyone with the full support of Chicago Mayor Daley.  A few months later, I saw a photo of Abbie Hoffman with the word FUCK scrawled across his forehead.  A year later, I discovered that there were women Yippies, too; a fact that the men in the group didn’t talk about and neither did the mainstream press. A few months after that, I remember seeing a picture of her and Anita Hoffman burning judges’ robes after the verdict in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial was delivered.  I was living in Germany then and I’m pretty certain the photo was in a British underground paper sold at one of the newsstands downtown, but it might have been somewhere else—perhaps the Frankfurter Rundschau, a German student paper or maybe even the newspaper for the US military called Stars and Stripes.  Anyhow, it made an impression.

In her new book, a memoir titled Levitating the Pentagon and Other Uplifting Stories, Kurshan writes about the influence the antiwar and Black liberation movements had on high school and junior high students in the 1960s and 1970s, acknowledging that it was part of the movement’s intention to recruit them.  Groups like the Yippies understood this and realized that the counterculture was a point of entry.  Speaking for myself, it was an important element in my move to radical left anti-imperialist politics.  My experience was repeated thousands, if not millions of times over.  Kurshan’s text describes what it was like from her particular perspective; a perspective perhaps best described as being part of what could be considered leadership, but........

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