The heart just insists: in the struggle with Elizabeth "Betita" Sutherland Martinez.

Platt, Tony

There is no separating my life from history.

--Betita Martinez

We Shall Not Be Moved

I AM VISITING MY OLD FRIEND BETITA MARTINEZ ON HER 87TH BIRTHDAY. For almost two years she has been living in a residential facility in San Francisco, her body retreating, her faculties unspooling. She is quite frail, her hearing truncated, her short-term memory whittled away by strokes. She's legally blind, yet can spot a dog yards away. Conversation has become an ode to the everyday, not the grand political discourse it used to be. Now it's a struggle for her to speak just the right words that once flowed in Spanish and French, not to mention sharply chiseled English.

If Betita's commitment to "destroy hatred and prejudice" was her "sacred duty," as she put it in a manifesto written when she was sixteen, it was language and writing--the ability to "tell people what I wish to tell them"--that was her passion. (1) So it must have felt like a defeat when, not too long ago, physical and cognitive limitations forced her to give up a true love of some eighty years: the written and read word.

There are moments, however, when past and present coexist. Today, she rises to the occasion of her birthday, blowing air kisses to a small gathering of well-wishers, and singing along with Barbara Dane on "We Shall Not Be Moved," just as she had done in Cuba in 1966 with hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters. (2)

Betita and I have known each other for forty years, from the time we worked together on a radical pamphlet about the police, through our years as comrades in a Marxist organization, and during the last two decades as recovering leftists struggling to find our way through the dystopian gloom.

She's always been more optimistic than me about the future of humankind. "Hey," she responded to my political melancholy during the Bush dynasty, "I just finished watching a documentary about the Donner Party and, believe me, things could be worse."

While most of us licked our wounds and picked up our interrupted lives, she protested alongside anybody who would march in the 1990s and was never without a sheaf of leaflets in the 2000s. She'd lived, as she puts it, through five international wars, six social movements, and seven attempts to build socialism around the world? (3) There was no stopping her now. She kept the faith, while mine wavered. "The heart just insists on it," she once explained.

Betita looms large in my memory as a professional revolutionary who managed on a few hours of sleep and an occasional steak, with little time for small talk. "It was nothing to work twelve hours a day, seven days a week," recalls Mary King, a comrade of Betita's in the 1960s. "We were exhausted half the time." (4) More like thirteen hours, according to Betita.

She wasn't always a committed political activist. At one time she was a child of privilege, on the fast track to professional success.

Child of Privilege

Elizabeth Martinez, the only child of a "mixed marriage," grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in Chevy Chase, the white, middle-class section of Washington, DC's segregated suburbs. Her parents called her "Betita" for short. Her dark-skinned father, Manuel Guillermo Martinez, who had witnessed the Mexican Revolution as a young man, worked his way up from a clerk in the Mexican Embassy to professor of Spanish literature at Georgetown University. Her blue-eyed, American mother, Ruth Sutherland Phillips, got a master's degree from George Washington and taught advanced high school Spanish. Ruth was a local tennis champion, accomplished pianist, and bridge enthusiast. "Few people love life more than she did," wrote Betita after her mother's death. (5)

"My physical life was easy," Betita recalls about her materially comfortable youth. "I remember dinners at home. The three of us would sit around a big mahogany table in the Gracious Dining Room. Mother would tinkle a little bell for the maid to bring in more of this or that." (6) But she also got a taste of working-class jobs during the summer: a clerk-typist at an insurance company, waitress at an ice-cream store, and copy girl at the Washington Post.

Emulating her parents' hard work ethic and recreational skills, she achieved high grades at school, learned how to play the piano, rode horses at the weekend, and became a decent bridge player in her teens. She was a good girl. "My father never hit me. But then he didn't need to. I never misbehaved." She was also an athletic tennis player: "I loved the motion of it, my sense of power, the confidence in my feet." (7)

But young Betita never felt comfortable in her own skin in Chevy Chase's "never-never land." (8) She felt racism in the air, "but I did not have words for it then." (9) Her father didn't talk about it either when he and Betita were told to sit at the back of a bus in Washington, DC. "Aloneness was harmful to my personality. I had almost no social life as a result of being a freak brown child in a white suburban world. So I read my parents' books and listened to the radio alone." The girl next door was not allowed to play with her "because I was Mexican," and her only close friend died suddenly. (10) She felt at odds with her school. "Betita seems to be growing around her, more closely each day, a little shell that is keeping her and her knowledge of things far out of our reach," observed her elementary school teacher in 1935. (11)

Confused by the etiquette of race relations, Betita got into trouble with her parents when she tried to eat with a black maid in the kitchen. "No, baby, that wouldn't be right," her father instructed her. Yet she was also "ashamed of father talking Spanish, but knowing I should learn it." (12) Many years later, sorting through boxes of childhood memorabilia, she could not find any traces of her father's Mexican past. "It's as though that didn't exist." Visiting her parents in her twenties, she felt embarrassed eating dinner at the University Club surrounded by "WASP diners" who made it "hard for me to swallow my food. But what can I say to them, my parents? They would never, never, never understand why I am not happy that the black doorman remembers everybody's name." (13)

Straddling Two Worlds

A career in journalism was on Betita's mind from a very early age. Only nine years old, she was already writing, editing, and laying out a newsletter ("The Daily News") for family and friends. "It was fun," she told a local newspaper after she won second prize and $75 in a national essay contest for elementary school students in 1937, "because I'd always liked to write fiction." (14) The summer before she went to college as an unusually precocious sixteen year-old, she knew she wanted to earn her living as a writer.

As the first Latina at Swarthmore--a private, liberal arts college that combined rigorous education with a commitment to social justice--Betita threw herself into campus life: playing tennis, writing for the campus newspaper, The Phoenix, and later becoming its associate editor. She was proud of her alliterative headlines (in particular, "Sharp Spellers Snatch Shoe Store's Spoils") and deft turns of phrase, an editorial knack that she honed over the next sixty-plus years. Her wicked sense of humor was still at work in titles of her journalistic reporting in the 1990s: "Caramba, Our Anglo Sisters Didn't Get It," "Levi's, Button Your Fly--Your Greed Is Showing," and "For Whom the Taco Bell Tolls."

It was in college during World War II that she also became finely attuned to global issues, especially the horrors of Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews of Europe and of the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here she began a lifelong friendship with fellow student (and later renowned economist) Andre Gunder Frank, a Jewish scholarship boy from Europe who, like Betita, knew what it felt like to be in exile, never feeling quite settled anywhere. And it was at Swarthmore that she realized her personal experiences with racism were not an anomaly. "Only the blindest of persons could refrain from crying aloud with the injustice of racial relationships," she wrote in a paper titled "Behold, Thy Neighbor" after reading W.E.B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk. (15)

Graduating with honors in history and Spanish in 1946 and in pursuit of a career in the "Eurocentric publishing world," Betita Martinez became Liz Sutherland (adopting her mother's vaguely British middle name) and plunged into the postwar ferment of New York's cultural scene. (16) With her contacts from Swarthmore opening doors to institutions typically closed to Latinas, jobs came quickly and easily: as clerk, translator, and researcher at the United Nations (1946-54), administrative assistant to Edward Steichen in the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art (1957-58), editor at Simon and Schuster (1958-64), and Books and Arts Editor at The Nation (1964).

During this period, Liz had one foot in the world of upwardly mobile diplomats and the scribbling class, the other in the demimonde of outsiders, leftists, and Lower East Side rebels. And for a few years, she managed to straddle the divide. While working at the UN, she helped her boss, "a beautiful subversive guy, feed information to the Third World delegates with which they could embarrass the colonial powers." (17) At Simon and Schuster, she used her insider status to lobby for publication of an extraordinary photographic record of The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964). It opens with three tranquil, rural images of the Deep South, followed by a carnival scene of a lynching in graphic detail. "To support SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee]," said Betita, "I convinced S & S to publish The Movement." (18) As a reporter for The Nation, she sympathetically covered the "youngest revolution" in Cuba, the struggle for civil rights from the frontlines of the Deep South, and the "great stupidity--not to mention immorality"--of the arms race. (19)

Her personal troubles as a lonely child trailed her into adulthood, first in two marriages that didn't survive the postwar tectonic shifts in family life, and then in a series of relationships that brought "heartbreaks, setbacks, and disappointments." (20)

When she was twenty-three and still a virgin, she married Leonard Berman, a man she didn't know very well. That he was Jewish was an attraction since she shared his idealism about the recently formed state of Israel. It seemed such a "very beautiful thing" at the time that the newly weds even considered going to Israel "with the idea of making gardens in the desert." But they stayed in New York and the marriage quickly unraveled when she met the "very glamorous" Hans Koningsberger. (21)

In 1952, Liz divorced Berman and married Hans Koning (as he would become known), an accomplished and politically committed writer. For Hans she quit her job at the UN and moved to Mexico for a few months so that he could complete the first of forty novels and nonfiction works. Like Berman, Koning was Jewish. Born in Amsterdam, the grandson of socialist poet Abraham Eliazer van Collem, he fled occupied Holland during the war. His father David, he later found out, was murdered in Mauthausen in 1942. Hans joined the Resistance and fought with the British army before immigrating to the United States in 1951. Later, during the Vietnam War, he was a founder of Resist, the direct-action, anti-draft movement.

Notwithstanding their mutual interests and politics, Liz's marriage to Koning ended after seven tumultuous and increasingly unhappy years, awash in recriminations and mutual distrust. Nevertheless, they were lifelong comrades and--not only because he was Tessa's father--she always respected his "hard-hitting politics" and literary talent. "Koning was an artist," she wrote in an appreciation after his death in 2007, "ferocious and devastating, but not without beauty." (22)

During the early 1960s, Elizabeth hobnobbed with cutting-edge artists and literati (including Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and Diane di Prima), moving easily between the "world of Beat poets, junkie painters, and LSD experiments" and Fifth Avenue soirees hosted by chic patrons. (23) This ability to function in very different social worlds would serve her well later in life when she had to fundraise for grassroots causes and translate radical rhetoric into palatable liberalism for middle-class audiences.

Among her friends were photographers Edward Steichen and Robert Frank and the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whom she first met in Moscow. When Yevtushenko arrived in New York in 1966 with a rock-star entourage, he and Liz escaped his State Department and Soviet Embassy handlers for a couple of wild nights. "The whole thing was just so carefree and expensive and Great Gatsby, very good for my pinched soul." (24)

She was attracted to immigrant artists such as Robert Frank who, like Liz, recognized that there is a hefty price to pay for going against the grain. "They don't give you nothing for nothing," as Frank succinctly observed. (25) "I had more wondrous and disastrous relationships than you can count," she admitted in 1998. "With poets, artists, revolutionaries, junkies, and various combinations thereof." (26)

As a woman who clearly looked "Mexican," Elizabeth Sutherland had to work trebly hard to be noticed and taken seriously by New York's male, white literati. Despite or maybe because of her personal demons, she pushed herself to exhaustion. Her productivity was prodigious, her range of interests extraordinary. For example, in the three years between 1960 and 1963, when she was working at Simon and Schuster, she reviewed movies for Horizon and Film Quarterly, reported on her visit to Cuba in The Nation and Manchester Guardian, wrote about a labor dispute for the The Nation, edited a book of screenplays, translated a French novel, reported in Evergreen Review on her trip to Moscow to interview leading Russian poets, edited a SNCC pamphlet illustrated with Danny Lyon photos, wrote a hilarious column for the National Guardian about her appearance before HUAC, and sent a letter to the New York Times criticizing their coverage of the state of Soviet theatre--and still found time to do political work with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and Friends of SNCC, and endorse Robert Williams' advocacy of self-defense in North Carolina's black communities. (27)

She was a "woman in a world dominated by men," but she could more than hold her own with the big boys, whether it was the cut-throat world of publishing or the reviewing of French New Wave and English kitchen-sink movies in la-di-da film magazines. (28) Her first published article, an essay on the New York movie scene, put her in the company of Arthur Koestler and Walter Kerr. (29) Her second publication appeared in the prestigious Film Quarterly. (30)

Unusually for somebody still in her thirties, she had cultivated the literary talent of an accomplished editor, the sharply aesthetic eye of a rigorous graphic designer, and the ability to write lucid, passionate prose in an original voice. Most of us working in this arena hope to be good at one of these skills in a lifetime. She did them all really well. She was a perfectionist. In addition to being bilingual in Spanish and English, her French was sophisticated enough to translate a serious novel, The White Stone, into English. (31) Also, her "fertile suggestions, industry and enthusiasm" impressed the Russian translators of a screenplay by Sergei Eisenstein (1962).

In 1960, only two years into her job with Simon and Schuster, she was given the responsibility of working with the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman on the publication of Four Screenplays (including "Wild Strawberries" and "Seventh Seal"). She saw the landmark book "through from start to finish," she told a reporter for Saturday Review. (32) During a visit to Sweden to meet Bergman, they had lunch together on a set. "What was it like to talk with him, what's he like," I once asked her, wide-eyed. "He said I had nice legs," she replied.

A couple of years later, she was off on assignment to Moscow, where she sat in a packed auditorium listening to the country's leading rebel poets read between the official lines. "People ask," said Yevtushenko, "why we are always knocking Stalin--he saved Russia during the war and prepared the way for the future. Well, if he was preparing anything for Voznesensky and me, it was a nice spot in Siberia." Following the raucous event, Andrei Voznesensky, a leading new wave poet, showed up for an interview at Betita's hotel with "roses and a warm smile."

After a lively back and forth that was published in Evergreen Review, Betita wandered out into Red Square at three o'clock in the morning, where she mused about "this huge nutsy country with its bloodstained past and wide-open future, where books of poetry sell out 100,000 copies in a few weeks and poets are as famous as spacemen, where you see women working pneumatic drills in the street and others sweeping the trolley tracks with brooms by Rembrandt, where some of the shops have muzak but the cashier still uses an abacus." (33)

Movement Cadre

Elizabeth could have stayed at Simon and Schuster, climbing the corporate publishing ladder, but she knew deep down, "privately," that "there was something wrong: I mean, I was their kept oddball." (34) And she was similarly uneasy as The Nation's Books and Arts Editor in 1964, despite the work being "meaningful and well-paid." (35)

In the mid-1960s, now in the prime of her life, she made the shift from publishing and reporting to joining the Movement, giving up a sure-thing life of privilege for long hours and low pay for the next forty-five years. It wasn't a sudden decision, but the result of the pull of revolutionary politics and the push of her "sacred duty" over several years of activism.

If there was one turning point in Elizabeth's political development, it was her trip to Cuba in 1961 to attend the National Congress of Cuban Writers and Artists and to meet with filmmakers creating a "cinema of revolution." (36) "When Cuba declared itself socialist, so did I." (37) It was this declaration that got her flagged by the FBI for associating with "far leftist groups" and subpoenaed by a HUAC subcommittee investigating pro-Cuban propaganda in the United States. (38)

In 1965, she quit her job at The Nation and became director of SNCC's New York office. She had already committed herself to SNCC's politics, serving as its representative in a 1964 Wall Street coalition organized to protest Chase Manhattan Bank's involvement in South Africa's apartheid regime. (39) Now she was in the furious hub of public relations and fundraising for organizing going on in the South. The work was grueling, especially for a single parent. Often short of money, she freelanced as a journalist and got financial help from her parents when she was in dire need. She lived the rest of her life close to the poverty line. "Hustling survival as a self-declared Chicana socialist," she told me just before her eighty-second birthday, "just ain't that easy." (40)

In the mid-1960s, when she wasn't getting the word out, organizing speaking events for SNCC's leaders, and raising half a million dollars from well-off sympathizers, she was on the road in the South. Her preteen daughter "endured many lonely hours and TV dinners" when her mother was traveling with and interviewing civil rights workers. "Tessa understands about Mississippi." (41)

For at least a year, SNCC offered Elizabeth "a sense of effectiveness and a minimum of lies, maximum of truth." (42) She didn't pay much attention to her ethnicity. "I did not grapple with my particular identity then, with being half Mexican and half white," she recalled many years later. "The work said who I was." (43) Some of her African American comrades didn't even think of her as Latina. (44)

It troubled her, though, that too many SNCC cadres were in "a state of collapse" and that community organizers did not appreciate the office staff. (45) And she "felt very cold and fearful" when she was discouraged from reviewing a book for the Jewish magazine Midstream. "Do I need to fear writing something positive about some aspect of the Jewish struggle just because some SNCC people put down the Jews for their policy toward Arab nations?" (46) But she kept her doubts private, recognizing that revolutionary politics entails great human cost. "It's a time for tough people and opportunists; few others survive. Lord have mercy," she wrote to herself in 1966. (47) It was not until some thirty years later that she chose to fully and publicly express her views on this matter.

It's no surprise that in the 1960s sexism permeated the middle-class world of publishing, but Liz also encountered a Left that tried to silence women's public identities. In the SNCC-sponsored book on The Movement that she acquired and edited for Simon and Schuster, Lorraine Hansberry gets credited for the introduction, as do Danny Lyon, Roy de Carava, and others for their photographs, but Elizabeth Sutherland's name is nowhere to be seen. She was similarly unacknowledged for her editing role in Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton's Black Power (1967), another iconic Movement publication. One chapter, she claimed, was in such bad shape that she had to "turn it into prose." (48)

This tendency to effacement--by others and self-imposed--became something of a habit: you need a magnifying glass to find Betita's name on her impressive bilingual book about revolutionary artist Rini Templeton (1987). She did get her due, however, for working as an editor with Jim Forman on one of the most significant memoirs of the civil rights movement, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (1972). Holed up in a house in Puerto Rico, she not only improved his writing, but also broadened his understanding of "the dynamics of the Chicano movement" and "the vast and deplorable role of the United States government in suppressing the rights of all nonwhite people." (49) And, later, Forman acknowledged that Betita had chided him for his failure to adequately acknowledge the importance of "women's liberation." (50)

As a writer, always a writer, Elizabeth Sunderland fought to retain her own voice in the world of male literati, toughing it out against the odds. Her 1965 book Letters from Mississippi, an important chronicle of the struggle for racial equality, was reprinted in 2002 with an introduction by Julian Bond. Her popularly pitched piece for Mademoiselle in 1967 ("... because he was Black and I was White ...") discussed a topic of widespread gossip that nobody but she wrote about: gender, sexuality, and race within the Movement. And her first-person account of revolutionary Cuba (The Youngest Revolution, 1969) had an impact on activists such as Angela Davis, who appreciated her anti-imperialist perspective and "careful eye." (51)

Nothing to Lose but Our Men

Beginning in 1967, a conjuncture of three pivotal events propelled Elizabeth Sutherland in new directions: SNCC's turn to black nationalism, the compelling presence of a radical feminist tendency in New York, and the rise of the Chicano movement in New Mexico. She emerged from this political moment with a new identity and a new name.

Elizabeth moved quickly from a central position in SNCC to the status of an outsider. The organization had, as she put it, "an identity crisis" and decided it "should be an all-black organization." (52) Stokely Carmichael made clear in a speech given in Berkeley in 1966 that "we cannot have white people working in the black community." Black nationalism changed the rules of participation. "Liberal whites," said Carmichael, "want to run from Berkeley to tell us what to do in Mississippi; let them look instead at Berkeley." (53) No one "white-baited me to my face," says Betita recently, but to most of the SNCC staff she was "classified as white." (54)

SNCC's formal position, first articulated in May 1966, talked about whites organizing in white communities and blacks in black communities, but Elizabeth did not think that SNCC was serious about organizing in white communities, "so the decision in effect signaled: get out." (55) While some white cadre left SNCC immediately, Elizabeth stayed for several months as a "technical assistant" until she too, frustrated and angry at her demeaned status, moved on. (56) For many there was "a feeling of being cut loose from all familiar moorings." (57)

Elizabeth struggled politically and personally with SNCC's decision to become a black-led organization. Overall, it left her embittered and disappointed, though she understood the strategic necessity for nationalism. Her sense of malaise was aggravated by bouts of depression, fuelled by her inability to sustain personal relationships. At nights, after days of "high drudgery, work that has to be done, and people needing me," she had to face the "low truths." (58)

Publicly, she advocated the new party line, "Black is right," but privately she seethed: "I don't think that whites should be forced out by being made so miserable that they resign or hang on unable to function," she wrote to a fellow cadre. "They aren't colonial powers, they're Movement people." (59) It was a painful separation. In a bitterly satirical memo, possibly shared with Jim Forman, she proposed that "all former white volunteers come to Room 802 and don blackface with Afro wigs. Thus disguised, they can do the accumulated typing, filing and other work." (60)

For a while feminism filled the space once occupied by SNCC. Elizabeth and several other refugees from SNCC contributed to "an energized convergence of women in New York City" and were in on the ground floor of the women's liberation movement. (61) She "looked hard" at the sexism within the movement and didn't like what she saw: images of "our women/ in postures of maternity, sadness, devotion/tears for the lost husband or son/ our women, nothing but shadows/reflections of someone else's existence/ BASTA!" (62)

Long before she joined the feminist movement, sexism had been on her mind. Here's an exchange she had with Voznesensky in Moscow in 1962:

E.S.: And women? What do you think about the artist and human relationships?

A.V.: Well, poets don't always have the energy for both. They give to people in a different way. If I'm late for a date, it could be because I'm writing a poem.

E.S.: Listen, I'm not talking about being late for a date, I'm thinking of some third-rate artists I know who are rats to their wives or won't pay for an abortion. How good does an artist's work have to be to justify his treating people badly?

A.V. (stumped): Let's hear those questions you have to ask. (63)

Feminist Elizabeth became a member of the New York Radical Women's collective--a group that included Joan Brown and Shulamith Firestone--and contributed an article (with Carol Hanisch, instigator of the celebrated protest of the Miss America pageant in 1968) to the first issue of Notes from the First Year, a theoretical journal of radical feminism, priced fifty cents to women and one dollar to men.

The Hanisch-Sutherland essay, which follows fight after Anne Koedt's "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm," is organized as a series of answers to typically asked questions about feminism. For example, don't some women "naturally want to be housewives?" To which the authors of "Women of the World Unite--We Have Nothing to Lose but Our Men!" reply: "Anyone who thinks she feels good as she surveys her kitchen after washing the 146,789th batch of sparkling dishes isn't being 'natural'; she's literally lost her mind." (64)

From that moment on, there was no separating the political struggles against racism and sexism. "The two cannot be honestly divided," she believed. Years later, she could recall Shulie Firestone's "sad, angry eyes" when she talked about going to an orthodox Jewish school where the boys prayed, "Thank you, Lord, for not making me a woman." She could also recall "with anguish and anger" the meeting of a women's group that went on with business as usual the evening of Martin Luther King's assassination. (65) This incident, as well as the squabbling and "core group cultism" of the predominantly white collective, kept her on the lookout for a new organizational home. (66)

Politically, Liz wasn't a fan of the nuclear family. "It usually turns out lonely runners in a rat-race rather than members of a human community," she observed in 1968. (67) Yet she kept looking for a comradely mate. "It constantly amazes me that after working the kinds/of days I work, turmoil and people, frenzy and friends, I/still have energy left over/for 'love' of another sort." (68) But she remained lonely and self-defeating in her relationships, at odds with feminism. "I remained trapped inside that old-time internalized sexism," she admitted in her 70s. "If a man walked out on me, I was devastated."

Meanwhile, Liz and Hans's only child fended for herself. "I didn't define myself as a mother," says Betita. (69) "I did not learn good parenting," says Tessa. "As a child I heard things that I didn't need to hear and saw things that I didn't need to see--things that weren't good for me." (70)

Becoming Betita Martinez

Elizabeth's affinity for what would become the Chicano movement did not come out of the blue. For a SNCC fundraiser in 1965 she had organized the first public showing in New York of Salt of the Earth, a film that dealt with a Mexican-American miners' strike in New Mexico. Later that year, she was a member of a SNCC committee responsible for building support in New York for the Delano grape pickers strike, led by Cesar Chavez's Farm Workers Association. (71) The image of "the lazy Mexican always asleep under his sombrero," she wrote in the Village Voice, "has received its deathblow." (72)

The trauma of being excluded from SNCC's inner circle on the basis of racial identity also rekindled a reconnection with her childhood experiences in Chevy Chase. "One day I found myself unable to vote in SNCC because I was 'white.' When I was a child, the girl next door wasn't allowed to play with me because I was Mexican. Remembering this and other experiences, something seemed mixed up .... To be categorized by skin color rather than by your mind and work is to be dehumanized. Who knows this better than black people?" (73) She drafted "Some Thoughts on the 'Black-White' Issue" and, for the first time, signed it Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez. "That's my full name up there," she wrote, testing her new identity. (74)

A second trip to Cuba in 1967 that put her in contact with an inspirational gathering of revolutionaries from the region gave her new confidence. "We of Latin America have no need to latch on to the black man's struggle," she wrote in a memo intended for her SNCC comrades. "We are proud of our own struggle." (75)

"I am lonely," she wrote in 1967 in one of many memos to herself. "It's time for me to search for my identity." She was ready to leave the East Coast. "It's time to go home to my Mexican-Americans," she asserted, even though by this time in her life she had little in common with Mexico, her father's birthplace. (76) And several years later, after her Chicana identity had been clearly established, there were still cultural tensions with her Mexican comrades. (77)

In 1968, attracted by the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, an organization led by Reies Lopez Tijerina, Betita Martinez moved to New Mexico. The Alianza's armed takeover of the courthouse in Tierra Amarilla and struggle to recover lands that had once been communally owned received national attention. She arrived in New Mexico, she admitted, "totally ignorant of the Southwest, almost totally ignorant of Chicano culture and life." (78) But as a voracious reader and quick learner, it didn't take her long to become deeply knowledgeable about the Southwest and its history, and to feel a cultural connection that had eluded her all her life. She was 42 years old. "The ground of my life was shifting, stretching."

When she got off the plane and "saw the silhouetted mountain range called Blood of Christ, Sangre de Cristo, there was no doubt: I smelled Home." (79) "A voice inside of me said, You can be Betita Martinez here." (80) Other places had attracted her, but the town of Tierra Amarilla was the one: "I know you by instinct, town/know your ancestry of failure/ your angers and hungers/and the bloody dream in your guts." (81)

Along with Beverly Axelrod, a movement attorney, Betita created a newspaper, El Grito del Norte (Cry of the North) that initially was designed as a vehicle for the Alianza. But her Left politics and insistence on women's leadership of the newspaper didn't sit well with Tijerina's nationalism and old-style chauvinism. Many men, recalls Sofia Martinez, "felt intimidated by her knowledge, power, and confidence," (82) but not the women, who welcomed Betita as a mentor. A young Valentina Valdez was "floored" when Betita sought out her opinion on a matter being discussed in the office. (83)

Although El Grito was published in Espanola, a "hotbed of struggles for social justice," (84) it quickly became independent of the Alianza and moved beyond nationalist politics. "El Grito's favorable coverage of Vietnam, Cuba, and China left no doubt that it was pro-socialist," wrote Betita. "It sent reporters to all these countries." (85) Betita herself was the first Chicano organizer to visit North Vietnam in 1970. The paper reached many people beyond New Mexico: in New York, the writer John Nichols read it assiduously in preparation for his move to the Southwest; (86) and on the West Coast, it caught the attention of Chicana activist Olga Talamante, then a student at Santa Cruz. (87)

As Elizabeth Sutherland became Betita Martinez, she made sure in her public persona that issues of gender were not put on the back burner. But it wasn't easy. She held off distributing for four years a statement exposing sexism and homophobia within the Chicano movement. "The super-macho," she wrote, "is haunted by the need to prove his manhood." (88) Yet in 1970, she was willing to go public with "Colonized Women: The Chicana," her contribution to Robin Morgan's Sisterhood Is Powerful, an anthology that became required reading for a generation of feminists. Today, Morgan quickly recalls Betita's "intensely feminist intelligence and commitment. Her stubborn insistence on freedom and power for all members of communities of color--including, surprise!, women--got her into a lot of hot water. But that never stopped her." (89)

When El Grito ended in 1973, Betita moved to Albuquerque and with a group of like-minded leftists established the Chicano Communications Center (CCC) as a "multimedia, educational barrio project." (90) The CCC set up a Marxist study group, studied revolutionary theory, and did grassroots organizing. Leading a chaotic demonstration at the courthouse in Albuquerque, Betita "exuded an air of serene authority that I had rarely seen in a woman," recalls Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. (91)

But Betita's euphoria was short-lived. The CCC quickly became entangled in the internecine battles of the Marxist left and wracked by "vanguardism and sectarianism." Because she didn't share the view of some comrades that Chicanos constituted a "nation," she was once again marginalized in an organization that she had helped to build. (92) She left New Mexico in 1974, politically defeated and personally devastated. While she had wanted New Mexico to become her cultural home, she also felt uncomfortable as a single, middle-aged parent and cosmopolitan leftist "with a horrible amount of education and verbal skills," surrounded by young working-class families deeply rooted in the local communities. The nasty breakup of another relationship added to her sense of alienation. "Nothing fits," she concluded. (93) "Mental health is a political necessity, not just a personal need," she wrote in her farewell letter. (94)

Fail Again, Fail Better

In 1974, Betita made the third and final major geographical move in her life, this time to the San Francisco Bay Area, the site of leftist ferment and activism. By now she was a committed Marxist, looking for an organization that would transcend identity politics, take women seriously, and demand full-time commitment. Her new organizational home, like mine, was the Democratic Workers Party (DWP), a Leninist organization led by women, with a world-systems framework, dedicated cadres, and a wide variety of projects. Betita quickly moved into a leadership position and kept up a furious pace of activity that at least matched her work for SNCC--editing and designing the party's newspaper, running for Governor of California on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in 1982, speaking at conferences, and much more, always on the go.

By 1986 the DWP, as well as the rest of the Marxist-Leninist left in the United States, had imploded, leaving in its wake a sense of impotency and bitterness among former cadres. When Betita finally slowed down enough to think deeply about how she had spent the last ten years of her life, she realized that "in the name of fighting for freedom, many [Left] collectivities organize with great un-freedom." It made no difference that women led the DWP "if the women act like men," said her old friend Gunder Frank. (95) She agreed: "Experience indicates that democratic centralism tends to become all centralism and no democracy, so leftists need to find reasons why It Ain't Necessarily So--or alternative organizing principles." (96)

Most people at Betita's age, now close to 60, would be satisfied with four decades of political activism, punishing work routines, and almost no time for a personal life. But there was no stopping her now. She helped to build new organizations--The Institute for MultiRacial Justice in San Francisco--and new publications--CrossRoads magazine and War Times. (97) Still ahead were five books, more than one hundred published articles, a video, not to mention countless conferences, guest lectures, and public speeches. She also returned to grassroots activism, searching for ways to bring communities of color together, speaking out fiercely against racism, sexism, and war--saying "NO to any definition of social justice that does not affirm our human oneness." (98)

Betita's 2008 book, 500 Years of Chicana History, included a defense of "mujeres who love women" and a resolute critique of homophobia. (99) Again, this was not a new concern. "Queer-baiting," she and Carol Hanisch had written 40 years earlier, "is no different from Red-baiting." (100) And in 1990, she chided the New York Times Book Review for failing to recognize the writings of Chicana lesbians. (101)

Betita's message of unity resonated with a new generation of activists, whom she tirelessly mentored as though their lives depended on it. She had a deep impact on academics looking for ways to escape the binaries of race, gender, and sexuality. (102) For this work, the National Association of Chicano/Chicana Studies recognized her as "scholar of the year" in 2000. (103) Speaking from her own experience, she alerted young Chicanas in particular to how hierarchical forms of leadership can "destroy social justice movements from the inside out." (104)

While illness limited Betita's mobility when she reached her 80s, she kept on writing, as she'd done all her life. Without a university base or philanthropic support, she has accomplished what most academics never do in a lifetime: she has written several books that left a deep impact on readers searching for socially relevant, well researched, and thoughtful history and commentary. She also left her mark as an editor, imposing her rigorous and sometimes exasperating standards on hundreds of writers, myself included. (105) "She took nothing lightly," says Alejandro Alvarez, "not even a squabble." (106)

Among her lasting intellectual contributions are Letters From Mississippi (1964), The Youngest Revolution: A Personal Report on Cuba (1969), 500 Years of Chicano History (1976), The Art of Rini Templeton (1986), and 500 Years of Chicana Women's History (2008), not to mention hundreds of journalistic essays. In 2000, she received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater--but not the private pension, home ownership, and other perks that typically crown an academic career.

During the last decade of her activist life, before the limitations of age and illness took their toll, Betita began to look more deeply and honestly into the self-inflicted wounds that can't simply be blamed on "the man"--what she calls "the human toll of righting wrong." (107) Back in the 1960s, she recognized that sometimes "the enemy is within as well as without," but she kept this concern private. (108) It troubled her that "sometimes/in this here movement/you go down, down, down/dragged by the smallness of people," but she was careful not to wash the movement's dirty laundry in public. (109) Later in life, returning to her feminist roots, she felt a duty to speak out and, for the first time, "had the sense just to listen" to her daughter's deeply buried grievances. (110)

It troubled her that for too long the Chicano movement was seen as a subsidiary of the African American movement; that women in SNCC and Chicano organizations were typically considered subordinate to "male warriors" and assigned housewifely duties; that in the name of fighting for a "humanist society," revolutionary Marxist groups treated its cadres so callously and other progressive organizations with sectarian venom.

Betita herself wasn't the easiest person to work with or under. "I have made myself hard to relate to, a 'difficult woman,'" she once admitted. (111) She could be imperious and churlish with comrades, a requirement of leadership in the nationalist and Marxist lefts. And while she gave all to her extended political family, she now "deeply regrets neglecting another identity: being the mother of a young daughter who needed much more attention than she received in those years." (112)

Now it's the mother who needs and gets much more attention from her daughter. A stroke makes it hard for Betita to see, hear, and remember yesterday's visitors, yet she insisted until recently on living by herself with her dog Honey in a small rented apartment in San Francisco's Mission District, surrounded by books, posters, mementos, and rows of filing cabinets. "I never met a dog that I didn't like," she told Mike Miller. "I can't say that about people." (113) But she's always delighted to see visitors, and disappointed when we leave.

The Sweet Parade

In her late sixties, Betita was embarrassed to let people know her age and didn't want her friends to hear her asking for a senior discount at the movies. She berated herself for succumbing to the prevailing ageism and a "panicky desire for individual immortality." The dread of death, she observed in 1992, was getting to her, "growing like weeds, all the dreads that make getting older so fearsome, so bitter." (114) But with her typical gutsiness, she faced this dread, first sharing it with friends, then writing an article for Ms. Magazine about "death with dignity [as] the final civil right." (115)

Betita's extraordinary experiences in five decades of movements for social justice are a window into the American Left, with all its passion, sacrifices, missteps, and contradictions. Her own political worldview is a complicated mix of Leninism, civil libertarianism, and populism. She joined vanguard organizations in the belief that structural change in the "belly of the beast" is only possible with steeled cadres in hierarchical, quasi-military organizations leading the way. Yet, her experiences in these organizations left her highly critical of the abuse of cadres and lack of internal democracy. She defended communist and socialist regimes in the hope that one day the world system would tip in their favor. Yet, there wasn't one state socialist regime that she really admired. Visiting Cuba soon after the revolution, she felt a "unity with the Cuban night," not Fidel, and was glad to see that a "tolerant spirit" still prevailed, including the showing of The 400 Blows and Brigitte Bardot at the movies. (116) In the USSR in 1962, she hung out with dissident poets rather than party apparatchiks. In 1989, she welcomed the pro-democracy movement in China, siding with demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

Despite long bouts of personal depression and political despondency--"feet chained deep in shit and no wings," as she put it in a 1971 poem (117)--Betita retained an affinity for the singing landscape, the road that glitters, the everyday pleasures of life. There's "no trace of sackcloth" in her public persona. We remember her "dressed to the nines," her mini-skirts and "bold fashion sense" in New York; her silver accessories, bright red lipstick, and Go-Go boots in New Mexico; dancing, swilling gin Martinis, and having a "ruckus of a good time" in California. I still think of her as the person who loved A Hard Day's Night for its celebration of the "sweet parade" of life--"parading the streets, trailing your coat, bowling along and living!"--and who once described love as "a bright parade of tributes." (118)

During my visit with Betita to celebrate her eighty-seventh birthday, she shakily signs my copy of her latest and probably last publication. The impetus for this impressive anthology of essays, We Have Not Been Moved, was a speech given by Betita to the War Resisters League in New York City in 2004, in which she berated the antiwar movement for "seeing racism as a separate, secondary issue." (119) It's fitting that her last call to action--a quest for threads of unity in a movement frayed by the damage we do to ourselves--echoes the promise she made to herself at age sixteen: "Something in me wants to make people all over the world love each other and know each other and laugh with each other." (120)

For the rest of the visit, I stick to the past. Her memory of the just now is almost blank, yet she can recall not only her affair with a Polish playwright in Warsaw in the 1950s, but also how to spell his name: Ireneusz Iredynski. "How come I can remember him, but can't remember the name of the person who helps me every day?" We stop talking for a moment, pondering the marvelous trickiness of the brain.

I tell Betita about our new dog and describe a trip to North Africa that I took a few years ago. "You must bring Buster here," she says. "We must all go to Morocco to see the camels." She laughs at the absurdity and attractiveness of the possibility.

REFERENCES

Alpert, Hollis 1960 "Bergman as Writer." Saturday Review (August 27).

Bergman, Ingmar 1960 Four Screenplays. Translated by Lars Malmstrom and David Kushner. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Boxer, Sarah 2002 "An Untamable Outsider Who Speaks in Riddles." New York Times (August 26), B5.

Carmichael, Stokely 1966 "What We Want." The Movement 2(10) (November).

Carmichael, Stokely and Charles V. Hamilton 1967 Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Random House.

Coccioli, Carlo 1960 The White Stone. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Eisenstein, Sergei 1962 Ivan the Terrible. Translated by Ivor Montagu and Herbert Marshall. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Forman, James 1972 The Making of Black Revolutionaries: A Personal Account. New York: Macmillan.

1997 The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn (ed.) 1998 A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Hanisch, Carol and Elizabeth Sutherland 1968 "Women of the World Unite--We Have Nothing to Lose But Our Men!" Notes from the First Year (June).

Hansberry, Lorraine 1964 "Introduction." In The Movement: Documentary, of a Struggle for Equality. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Kelly, Christine A. 2001 Tangled Up in Red, White and Blue: New Social Movements in America. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

Koning-Martinez, Tessa 1996 "A Daughter's Story." In The Conversation Begins: Mothers and Daughters Talk About Living Feminism," edited by Christina Looper Baker and Christina Baker Kline, 40-45. New York: Bantam Books.

Martinez, Elizabeth Sutherland 1970 "Colonized Women: The Chicana." In Sisterhood Is Power rid: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan. New York: Vintage Books, 423-26.

1987 The Art of Rini Templeton. Seattle: The Real Comet Press.

1993 "Going Gentle into That Good Night." Ms" Magazine 4(1) (July): 65-69.

1990a "The Democratic Workers Party: A View from the Left," unpublished paper (October 1990).

1990b "Letter to the Editor," New York Times (August 12), BR 30.

1996 "A Mother's Story." In The Conversation Begins: Mothers and Daughters Talk About Living Feminism, edited by Christina Looper Baker and Christina Baker Kline, 33-39. New York: Bantam Books.

1998 "History Makes Us, We Make History." In The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation, edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow, 115-23. New York: Three Rivers Press. Martinez, Elizabeth Sutherland

2002 "A View from New Mexico: Recollections of the Movimiento Left." Monthly Review 54(3): 79-86.

2007 "With Thanks to Hans Koning." Monthly Review (June): 56-57.

2008 500 Years of Chicana Women's History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

2010 "Neither Black nor White in a Black-White World." In Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, edited by Faith S. Holsaert et al., 531-40. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Martinez, Elizabeth, Matt Meyer, and Mandy Carter (eds.) 2012 We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century. America. Oakland: PM Press.

Olson, Lynne 2001 Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970. New York: Scribner.

Ross, Loretta 2006 "Interview with Elizabeth Martinez." In Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA.

Sutherland, Elizabeth 1961a "New York's New Wave of Movie Makers." Horizon, 3(4) (March), 12-19.

1961b "Letter from Havana." The Nation (November 4), 358-61.

1961c "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning." Film Quarterly 14(4) (Summer), 58-59.

1961d "Cuban Faith in Castro." Manchester Guardian (December 5), 2.

1961e "Castro's Work for the Peasants." Manchester Guardian (December 6), 7.

1961-62 "Cinema of Revolution--Ninety Miles from Home." Film Quarterly 15(2) (Winter), 42-49.

1962 "Republic Aviation: Juggernaut in Reverse." The Nation (April 14), 323-27.

1963 "Interview with Andrei Voznesensky." Evergreen Review 7(28) (January-February), 3743.

"A Day in the Committeeroom." National Guardian (June 13): 12.

1964 "The Cat and Mouse Game." The Nation (September 14), 105-8

"Theatre of the Meaningful." The Nation (October 19), 254-56.

1965 Letters from Mississippi. New York: McGraw-Hill.

1966 "The Grapes of Wrath Begat a Movement." The Village Voice (May 5).

1967 " ... because he was black and I was white: Six Young Women Discuss Their Various Experiences in the Civil-Rights Movement." Mademoiselle (April), 224-25, 24245.

1969 The Youngest Revolution: A Personal Report on Cuba. New York: Dial Press.

NOTES

(1.) "Last Night I Was a Dreamer," 1942, Sutherland Martinez Papers (hereafter cited as SMP).

(2.) Dane, "Solidarity Forever," infra.

(3.) Martinez, "History Makes Us," 1998, 115.

(4.) Greenberg (1998, 129).

(5.) Martinez, "Going Gentle," 1993, 66.

(6.) "Letter to Joaquin," 1972; "Autobiography," 1970, SMP.

(7.) "Autobiography," 1970, SMP.

(8.) Memo, c. 1967, SMP.

(9.) Martinez, "Neither Black nor White," 2010, 532.

(10.) "Autobiography," 1970, SMR

(11.) "Pupil's Report," SMR

(12.) "Autobiography," 1970, SMP.

(13.) "Letter to Ernest," c. 1966, SMP.

(14.) The Sunday Star, April 18.

(15.) "Swarthmore," 1943, SMP.

(16.) Martinez, "History Makes Us," 1998, 116.

(17.) "Letter to Jim Forman," December 1966, SMP.

(18.) Martinez, "A Mother's Story," 1996, 55.

(19.) Sutherland, "Republic Aviation." 1962, 324.

(20.) "Letter to Rees," April 1972, SMP.

(21.) "Letter to Joaquin," 1972, SMP.

(22.) Martinez, "With Thanks," 2007, 57.

(23.) Martinez, "History Makes Us," 1998, 116.

(24.) "The Mood Is upon Me," 1966, infra.

(25.) Boxer (2002, B5).

(26.) Martinez, "History Makes Us," 1998, 116.

(27.) Ross (2006).

(28.) Martinez, "History Makes Us," 1998, 116.

(29.) Sutherland, "New York's New Wave," 1961a.

(30.) Sutherland, "Saturday Night," 1961c.

(31.) Coccioli (1960).

(32.) Alpert (1960).

(33.) Sutherland, "Interview," 1963, 37-43.

(34.) "Elizabeth 40," 1966, SMP.

(35.) "Letter to Bill Hall," 1966, SMP.

(36.) Sutherland, "Cinema of Revolution," 1961-62.

(37.) Martinez, "Neither Black nor White," 2010, 532.

(38.) Martinez, FOIA files, SMP.

(39.) Davis, "Elizabeth Occupies Wall Street," infra.

(40.) Personal communication to author, November 24, 2007.

(41.) Sutherland, "Editor's Note," in Letters, 1965.

(42.) "The Absence of Choice," 1966, SMP.

(43.) Martinez, "Neither Black nor White," 2010, 533.

(44.) Allen, "Always Connecting the Struggles," infra.

(45.) "An Open Letter to Jim Forman," 1966, SMP.

(46.) "The Week That Shouldn't Have Been," 1967, SMP.

(47.) "Black, White, and Tan," SMP.

(48.) "The Week That Shouldn't Have Been," 1967, SMP.

(49.) Forman (1972, xi-xv).

(50.) Forman (1997, xviii).

(51.) Davis, "Before I Knew Elizabeth Martinez, infra.

(52.) Martinez, "Neither Black nor White," 2010, 535.

(53.) Carmichael (1966).

(54.) Martinez, "Neither Black nor White," 2010, 533,535.

(55.) "Black, White, and Tan," SMP.

(56.) Greenberg (1998, 11).

(57.) Olson (2001,404).

(58.) "Memo to Self," 1967, SMP.

(59.) "Letter to Bill Hall," 1966, SME

(60.) "Department of Black Humor," c. June 1967, SMP.

(61.) Kelly (2001, 120).

(62.) Martinez, "History Makes Us," 1998, 120.

(63.) Sutherland, "Interview," 1963.

(64.) Hanisch and Sutherland (1968).

(65.) Martinez, "History Makes Us," 1998, 118.

(66.) "In Central Park, the Magnolias Are Budding," 1968, SMR

(67.) Hanisch and Sutherland, 1968.

(68.) "Love of Another Sort," 1958, infra.

(69.) Martinez, "A Mother's Story," 1996, 34, 36.

(70.) Koning-Martinez (1996,41).

(71.) "Report on Delano Farm Workers Strike," December 6, 1965, SMP.

(72.) Sutherland, "The Grapes of Wrath," 1966.

(73.) "Black, White, and Tan," 1966, SMP.

(74.) c. 1966, SMP

(75.) "The Connections," c. 1967, SME

(76.) "Dear Prathia." c. 1967, SMP.

(77.) Alvarez, "Bridging Borders," infra.

(78.) "To my dear companeros and companeras del Centro," February 16, 1974, SMP.

(79.) Martinez, "History Makes Us," 1998, 119.

(80.) Martinez, "Neither Black nor White," 2010, 536.

(81.) Martinez, "Tierra Amarilla at Dusk," 1969, infra.

(82.) Sofia Martinez, "Go-Go Betita," infra.

(83.) Ibid.

(84.) Nichols, "The Right Direction," infra.

(85.) Martinez, "A View from New Mexico," 2002, 82.

(86.) Nichols, "The Right Direction," infra.

(87.) Talamante, "La Amistad Perdura/A Friendship Endures," infra.

(88.) Martinez, "History Makes Us," 1998, 122.

(89.) Personal communication to author, December 22, 2010.

(90.) Martinez, "A View from New Mexico," 81-82.

(91.) Dunbar-Ortiz, "How Betita Saved My Life," infra.

(92.) Martinez, "A View from New Mexico," 2002.

(93.) Martinez, "To whom it may concern," 1973, SMP.

(94.) "To my dear companeros," February 1974, SMP.

(95.) Letter from Andre Gunder Frank to Betita, November 23, 1990.

(96.) Martinez, "The Democratic Workers Party," 1990a.

(97.) Elbaum and Kaiser, "A 21st Century Activist for Peace," infra.

(98.) Martinez, "Neither Black nor White," 2010, 539.

(99.) Martinez, 500 Years of Chicana Women's History, 2008, 181.

(100.) Hanisch and Martinez, "Women of the World Unite," 1968.

(101.) Martinez, "To the Editor of the New York Times," August 12, 1990b, BR 30.

(102.) Lopez-Garza, "Betita: Companera y Mentora," infra.

(103.) Munoz, "A Chicana Icon on the Left." infra.

(104.) Avalos, "Bread and Roses Too," infra.

(105.) Jonas, "Fellow Traveler," infra.

(106.) Alvarez, "Bridging Borders," infra.

(107.) Martinez, "Black, White, and Tan," 1966, SMP.

(108.) Martinez, "Dear Prathia," 1967, SMP.

(109.) Martinez, "The Silver Yes," 1971, infra.

(110.) Martinez, "A Mother's Story," 1996, 39.

(111.) "Letter to Ernest," c. 1966, SMP.

(112.) Martinez, "Neither Black nor White," 2010, 539.

(113.) Miller, "Searching for Common Ground," infra.

(114.) Personal communication to author, April 20, 1992.

(115.) Martinez, "Going Gentle into That Good Night," 1993,67.

(116.) Sutherland, "Letter from Havana," 1961b, 361.

(117.) Martinez, "The Silver Yes," infra.

(118.) Sutherland, "A Vote for the Sweet Parade," 1964, 26: "Love," 1960, infra.

(119.) Martinez, Meyer, and Carter, We Have Not Been Moved, 2012, 2.

(120.) "Last Night I Was a Dreamer," 1942, SMP.

Tony Platt *

* TONY PLATT (email: amplan27@gmail.com), a founding member of the editorial board of Social Justice, is a visiting professor in Justice Studies, California State University, San Jose. This biographical essay is based on interviews with Betita Martinez and her daughter Tessa and on research in the Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez Papers, kindly made available to me by Tessa Koning-Martinez before the collection was deposited at Stanford University, Emory University, and The Library of Congress. I cite a document's title (or first line) and date when available. The collection is cited here as Sutherland Martinez Papers.