Bettina Aptheker has a very long and fascinating history in the Left. Her father was the famed U.S. Communist Party historian Herbert Aptheker. Such historic figures as W.E.B. Dubois and Paul Robeson were regular guests in her house growing up in Brooklyn.
Bettina was a key leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964 and the movement to defend Angela Davis, who was the same age and a childhood buddy. She left the Communist Party in 1981, and remains active on the West Coast in the wider Left, Antiwar, Women’s and Gay Rights movements.
Here, Bettina reads from her controversial book Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel. The reading took place on March 20, 2009 at Bluestockings bookstore on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. This edition of Steal This Radio is built around that reading. (Thank you Jim Krivo for recording it, and to Bluestockings Books http://www.bluestockings.com for hosting it. Bluestockings hosts a wonderful lineup of authors and activists just about every night.) The book not only is a wonderful tour de force through recent U.S. social movements, but a very personal memoir about sexual abuse that the Left (and everyone) needs to address in our organizations as well as in our everyday lives.
EXTRA:
Near the end of this week’s show, we hear a song performed by Nalini Lasciewicz, words written by Mitchel Cohen, the host of Steal This Radio. That’s followed by a song performed by Judy Collins, and then Mitchel reads his poem sans music. We are reposting the words here — a poem called “Steffie’s Song,” for Steffie Brooks who died last month. We invite you to put it to your own music (as Nalini did) and send it in, to mitchelcohen@mindspring.com .
Songs in this show:
- Mario Savio, at Berkeley, 1964
- Jefferson Airplane, Volunteers
- Claudia Schmidt, Make It Across the Road
- Nina Simone, I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free
- Nalini Lasciewicz, Steffie’s Song (written by Mitchel Cohen)
- Judy Collins, Pack Up Your Sorrows
- Mitchel Cohen, Steffie’s Song (poem)
Steffie’s Song (for Steffie Brooks)
I dreamed that you were standing
On a broken field of glass
Rallying the daffodils
To lead the working class
And from this vantage shivering
In a world that time forgot
They rise anew to greet you
In your communistic plot
I dreamed we were imprisoned
In Eternal Now of youth
Racing to the barricades
So certain of the Truth
And as we aged truth became
Contextualized by fear
Of life’s insignificance
As though we were never here
But here / we / stand
The endgame of our days
Take / my / hand
And do not be afraid
Truth still lives
Beyond us and it will
Always thrive
In this roar of daffodils
- Mitchel Cohen
