Before I knew Elizabeth Martinez.

Davis, Angela

ATTEMPTING TO PAY TRIBUTE TO A MAJOR FIGURE IN THE WORLD OF RADICAL political movements makes me realize that "greatness" is not so much a characteristic of individuals, as of the deeply symbiotic relations between individuals and their struggles. Because Elizabeth Martinez's life and work span so many generations, communities, and causes, she has enabled conjunctions and convergences that would have been inconceivable if not for her innovative ideas and bold undertakings.

As I reflect on her remarkable life, I realize now that long before I met Betita, and even before I became familiar with the published writings of Betita Martinez, the work of Elizabeth Sutherland helped to shape my understanding of the world. I am deeply indebted to her in more ways than I had ever imagined.

First, I had no idea until recently that one of the most treasured books of my early adulthood, the 1964 collection of photographs depicting the Black freedom struggle, with text by Lorraine Hansberry, entitled The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality, was a direct product of Betita's tenure as an editor at Simon and Schuster. Growing up in the Deep South, I had always thought that I would personally witness the dismantling of the structures of segregation that were so pervasive in my life. Indeed, my parents had made sure that their children understood the impermanence of this racism. But in an ironic turn of my own personal history, I left the South to study in the Northeast precisely at the moment when the most momentous challenges to Jim Crow began to develop. I was in high school in New York during the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides.

The Freedom Rides continued during the fall of my first semester at Brandeis University, so I was only a vicarious activist. The 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, happened when I was a participant in a Junior Year Abroad program in Paris. I felt that I was missing the most dramatic moments of the freedom struggle. The visual urgency of The Movement assuaged my sense of grief at having failed to be a part of the world-historical changes in the United States.

Several decades passed before I realized that it was Betita Martinez who, as Elizabeth Sutherland and an editor at Simon and Schuster, had been charged with keeping abreast of developments in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was the person pivotally responsible for the publication of The Movement. She not only managed to get this book released by a major publishing company, but also made sure that all the royalties went to SNCC. What a remarkable feat! There is no doubt a close connection exists between the work she did on this documentation of SNCC's work in 1964 and her later documentary histories: Five Hundred Years of Chicano History (1991) and Five Hundred Years of Chicana Women's History (2008). This kinship between publications on black radical movements and Chicana/o radical movements is an important backdrop to the black/brown unity upon which Betita never failed to insist.

Some years later, when I read Black Power (1967) by Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and Charles Hamilton, I was also entirely unaware that Betita's editorial prowess had played an important part in the shaping of this book. As it turned out, shortly after she finished The Movement, she had left her position as an editor at Simon and Schuster to become involved in SNCC full-time. As a SNCC member, she also worked on one of my most favorite memoirs of the era, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (1972) by Jim Forman.

During this period I myself was a member of Los Angeles SNCC and worked closely with Jim Forman. I was living a political life that was only separated by a few degrees from the woman I later came to know as Elizabeth Martinez. As a matter of fact, when I came to know her as a friend and we shared biographical information, it turned out that she had visited Brandeis University when I was a student there. We realized we had common friends at Brandeis and had probably run into each other on more than one occasion during the early 1960s.

My first direct encounter with Elizabeth Sutherland's writings came during a rather turbulent period in my own life. Having made my first trip to revolutionary Cuba during the summer of 1969, I returned to the San Francisco Bay Area only to discover that Ronald Reagan and other conservative politicians had targeted me and were determined to deny me the right to teach at UCLA. Amidst the chaos of trying to retain my job, I was trying to integrate the extraordinary impact of the Cuban Revolution into my general political consciousness.

At this moment in my life, I discovered a new book on Cuba by Elizabeth Sutherland, The Youngest Revolution (1968). I had no idea who the author was--and at that point I did not know about her work with SNCC--but reading her book led me to recognize that ! had just been on one of the most important journeys of my life. I had wanted to visit Cuba since I had celebrated the triumph of the revolution with Cuban youth in the streets of Helsinki, Finland, during the Eighth World Festival for Youth and Students. Who was this Elizabeth Sutherland, I wondered, who had such a careful eye, a great sense of irony, and most importantly, I thought, a way of translating her anti-imperialist perspective into lucid and easily understandable language?

When the women's liberation movement emerged and Robin Morgan published an anthology, Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970), one of the two essays that I most treasured was "Colonized Women: The Chicana" by Elizabeth Martinez. (I did not realize then that she was the same person as Elizabeth Sutherland.) The other essay was "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female," by Frances Beal.

To round out the list of books that influenced my own development and, unknown to me, bore the stamp of Betita Martinez's ability as a graphic designer, I must mention the 1977 edition of an important work on the American policing, The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove." An Analysis of the U. S. Police. First published by radical criminologists associated with the Center for Research on Criminal Justice, this book helped to create the foundation of what is now a thriving movement against over-incarceration, one which seeks to dismantle the prison-industrial complex.

From civil rights and black liberation to women's rights and prison abolition, I can practically narrate the story of my political life using Betita's work as anchoring points.

Many years later, when I became friends with Betita and began to work with her on a number of projects, I felt the same ease with language in our conversations as I had when I first read her work. It seemed I had known her for a very long time. We worked together with the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism during the early 1990s and around the same time began to share our ideas about the meaning of feminism. At that moment she was a key figure in the Women of Color Resource Center in Oakland and I was the faculty advisor of the Research Cluster for the Study of Women of Color in Collaboration and Conflict at UC Santa Cruz. As the two groups attempted to move across campus-community borders, she and I had a number of conversations about cross-racial alliances and on various initiatives by feminists of color to produce coalitions bringing together Black, Latina/o, Asian, and Native American women activists. Her words powerfully resonated with me and all the others who had the privilege to hear her then, and they continue to resonate with me today.

In her own politics and in her own activist efforts, Betita totally embodied this call to build cross-racial alliances. But as a Chicana, her link to black freedom struggles was about much more than building alliances. She dramatically refuted assumptions that racial or ethnic identities are always the anchors of antiracist movements. In fact, there are few black people whose commitment and contributions to the black movement have surpassed Betita's. Not very many people who joined SNCC or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were also involved in the defense of Robert F. Williams. In 1959 and 1960, Elizabeth was one of the leading members of the effort to defend the head of the NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina, who was not only targeted by the Ku Klux Klan, but also singled out for prosecution by the government for defending his community. I had read his book Negroes with Guns, which was published after Williams fled with his wife Mabel to Cuba. Not many people know that the Robert Williams story, along with the Deacons for Defense, inspired Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to create the Black Panther Party. Betita's work in defense of Robert Williams, who argued for armed defense of his community, at a time when legitimate black activism was required to assent to nonviolence, was indicative of her radical vision. In fact, she would later develop important connections with the Black Panther Party.

After devoting her energies to the black movement and SNCC, Betita became a founder of the first Chicano newspaper, El Grito del Norte. She brought to the emergent Chicano movement a breadth and depth of experience and perspectives that were anti-imperialist, antiracist, and antisexist. She is indeed one of the great pioneers of today's feminism that insists on analysis of class and race as well as gender and sexuality. Just recently I learned about the very interesting material connection between El Grito and the newspaper of the Black Panther Party, The Black Panther.

In an oral history taken by Loretta Ross, Betita pointed out that Beverly Alexrod, who worked with her on El Grito in New Mexico, had been involved in the initial production of The Black Panther and, as it turned out, the first issues of both papers were produced on the same typewriter. Moreover, the wicker fan-back chair in which Huey Newton was photographed for what would probably be the most circulated image of the Panther leader, had also made its way--with Beverly Alxerod--to New Mexico.

That was our furniture, right! So it was kind of all very continuous. And the paper also, it didn't stick to just Chicano and Chicana issues. We dealt a whole lot with other issues, all kinds of land struggles in different places around the world, and also what was happening in the country, the Black Panther movement, Angela Davis, the San Quentin Six.... (Ross 2006)

I quote this section of the oral history as a way of framing a concrete example of the black/brown unity that Betita always insisted upon, one which constituted a pivotal moment in the story of my trial and of the movement that ultimately secured my freedom. When my attorneys and I filed for a change of venue of the trial, we argued that virtually everyone in Marin County, California, a majority white county, would be so convinced of my guilt from the outset that I could not possibly receive a fair trial. However, we did not expect that we would end up in Santa Clara County. Ultimately, the trial would take place in the city of San Jose, which at that time had such a minute black population that we could expect a small pocket of black support, but certainly no representation on the jury.

Admittedly, black organizers did a herculean job of mobilizing. However, it was progressive white and Chicano communities that provided the numbers we needed. Victoria Mercado, an amazing organizer who had worked with the Brown Berets, spoke out passionately for black/brown unity and drew vast numbers of Chicanas and Chicanos to the campaign for my freedom. Whenever Betita speaks up for black/brown unity, it is clear to me that this unity helped to save my life. And because there are no words to appropriately acknowledge Betita's phenomenal life and work, I close with a simple thank you.

References

Ross, Loretta 2006 Interview with Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northhampton, Massachusetts (August 6).

Angela Davis *

* ANGELA DAVIS (email: aydavis@aol.com) is distinguished professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz. Her most recent book is The Meaning of Freedom (2012).