Radio Activists Speak Out!

He was quite unusual in being of working-class origin. In the 1960s, it was rarer to find the son or daughter of a working person at the University of California, than it was even to find a black person at the University of California, and there were damn few of either. Mario and others, including one of my sons, was down South and people were killed, more black than white. When Mario came back to school, he and the other students who had been there simply wanted to set up card tables here at the University of California where they could organize support for the people of Mississippi. Simple as all that! The University in those days had this crazy old rule that they called in loco parentis; that's Latin for acting in lieu of parents, since students were not considered grown up. Students had to be treated like children, and the UCB Administration said you can't do a table. Imagine, my son had spent his honeymoon with a pistol and a chamber pot under the bed in some little town down South, and he was being treated like a child. When you've been through that, you are not going to take any bullshit from University administrators saying you can't speak. The consequence of this was a struggle that not only changed the face of university education in this country, but quite literally began the Sixties. The Sixties began in two places. It began with black students in the South sitting in at lunch counters saying that we want to be able to buy a cup of coffee and with the white kids up here demanding freedom of speech.

Mario was a very modest person. He spoke with a stutter, but when the chips were down, he was a Martin Luther King. He was a great orator. He was a tactician. Here was a kid of maybe 19 at that time who was able to sit one on one with the President of the University of California and bargain things out. I was involved with the Free Speech Movement along with Mario a little over 30 years ago. Because he led the Free Speech Movement, Mario represents the spirit of what we are trying to do here, and, to me, the dedication of this conference in his memory is a totally appropriate way of saying that we are going to carry on the fight that he, among others, initiated.

I believe that determination is a message that we must leave here and let these people know that, regardless of the outcome of Stephen Dunifer's case, they are not going to silence, nor stop, nor hinder the microradio movement. It's important that we take it upon ourselves to do everything that we can to make people understand that this is not about if this is going to be won in court. This is going to be decided by the people. It's going to be decided by whether or not we have the courage to fight a system that is so out of whack, so out of control, that we don't have a voice in the mainstream media. I think it's stupid to sit back and recognize people who are oppressing you or follow their rules for coming out from under their oppression. I think it's important that each and every one of us get the word out immediately that we are watching Stephen Dunifer's case and, if anything, the courts will make it worse by deciding that we shouldn't broadcast.

I intend to put as many radio stations on the air as I can. As a matter of fact, I was visited by the FCC last week and they asked me under whose authority was I operating. I told them, I guess, God. I ain't having no problem keeping it up or keeping it going. I can't really tell you whose authority. They wanted to come in and inspect the station. I told them, 'Inspect it for what?' 'To see if you're operating legally,' they said. I don't want to operate legally! See, I don't want to be approved by a system that is messing me over. I speak on the radio like people hanging out on the corners. As a matter of fact I go out of my way to come up with curse words. I have made 'bourgeois handkerchief-headed-nigger' and 'low-life-racist-cracker' household words (applause) in the city of Decatur, Illinois. It would take a low-life-racist-cracker to separate and persecute two black kids from a black mother, with her standing in the hallway wanting her kids back, for no other reason than his hatred of Napoleon Williams and a radio station. It would take bourgeois-handkerchief-headed-niggers to let something like that go on right under their nose.

We are a popular station because we are a voice telling people that if we don't stand up we gonna suffer sooner or later from the things that are going on around us. We don't have the option of standing by and doing nothing. If you just stand by and do nothing you'll get caught up in the whirlwind. We must get active. We must leave here and do everything that we can for this movement. If you can, put a station on the air. Just last month I was referred to as the Rosa Parks of Decatur, Illinois because I have refused to be messed over. I have refused to shut up. I use the radio station to get a message out to the people that each and every one of us should refuse to be fucked over and we should refuse to shut up.

People would ask me from time to time 'What do you think about what's going on?' I said, it's long overdue because corporate America is determined to make sure that you and I do not enter into the competitive arena with them. That and censorship is what the whole game is about. They want to make sure that you don't get a chance to get some of the goodies. Brother Napoleon alluded to it a little earlier. I take the position that he does about licensing. I refuse to accept their license. I will not apply because to me a license is giving up a right for a privilege. Once I do that then I destroy everything that I've said that I believe in and I say that what I believe in is a lie. Then too, I refuse to be censored by someone who means me or my community no good. Their intention is really no good (applause). I listen to the speakers here and I think it's not about the black community, the brown community, the white community; it's about the community of people. It's about humanity. In this country what we see in this room is very dangerous. It's not supposed to take place. The powers that be don't want us to get together. Broadcast radio is an agent for the powers that be. So you're not going to get any sympathy from them. The National Association of Broadcasters is not going to sympathize. Individuals amongst the ranks might sympathize, but, as a collectivity, they're not going to come out in support because they want to keep their licenses. They're willing to play the game.

If they rule against Stephen, heaven help them because we're not going back. We're not turning around, and you attorneys back there [Alan Korn and Peter Franck] will have more troops. I mean if they shut down one, ten will spring up. So, it's not going away. They don't think that they can afford to let us win, but they can't stop us. If they rule against him, it's out of their hands, and if they don't, it's out of their hands. As far as I'm concerned it is a win/win situation for us and a lose/lose situation for them. Now, we're going to experience hard knocks. They're going to get very brutal. Some of us sitting here have already experienced it. They're going to intimidate, threaten us, and the corporate broadcasting entities can get violent with the blessings of the FCC on the quiet side. The FCC will turn a blind eye to it, but they will commit acts of violence because we're talking big bucks even though I've never tried to make anything in broadcasting myself. Things are going to get rough, but I think we can pull it off if we keep coming together, bringing brothers and sisters together like this and recruiting more people. All I can say is pray for the best. I know we're gonna win!

Stephen Dunifer (Free Radio Berkeley): As an anarchist and a Wobbly, I don't have any faith in the system, but we take our battles where we find them. It was the FCC who took us to court, not us taking them to court. Thanks to members of the National Lawyers Guild's Committee on Democratic Communications, we were able to bring off a victory of sorts in that arena that's held so far. Actually, an historical precedent was set on that fateful date of January 20th, 1995 when we appeared in court with the FCC. The FCC thought it was a slam-dunk operation. They had this attorney out from D.C. who was real full of himself. He was possessed of the opinion that he was coming out to clean up Dodge City, and it was going to be a cakewalk. Well, within five minutes of that court proceeding beginning, it became rather apparent that he was not going to get what he wanted. He spouted off about it, saying that if I was allowed to continue broadcasting there would be chaos and anarchy on the air waves. [Applause]

I said to myself, 'Well, we already got chaos, what we need is a lot more anarchy.' I'm distinguishing those two things because people tend to try to equate anarchy with chaos, violence and general dysfunctionality. What we really have is chaos in the society. Chaos comes from the Greek for gaping mouth. Our society has a broadcast media propaganda machine, made up of corporate and government thought control operations, which creates an insatiable hunger in people for whatever is the newest goody or commodity. It's an insatiable hunger that can never be fulfilled by the means which they offer to you, and that's the whole intent and purpose of it. It's like a McDonald's meal. It fits the propaganda of what your taste-buds have been accustomed to, but it in no way provides for the nutritional requirements of your body. Your body is always left hungry because it's not getting the balanced amount of nutrients it really requires to function in a healthy manner. So therefore you have these perpetual cravings for more, and that's what this whole system is about. That to me is a chaotic system because it is a gaping mouth system; a gaping mouth that is always demanding to be fed more and more shit.

We've come a long way thanks to many people in this movement: pioneers like Black Rose, like Mbanna Kantako, like Napoleon Williams and many other people have made this whole thing possible. Things like this are built incrementally and built on the experience and the energy and the dedication of those who fight for their rights and fight for the rights of everyone. I am particularly glad that we are dedicating this conference to the spirit of Mario Savio because what we are doing represents not just one point in isolation but is part of a continuum in the history of struggle by people for self-determination, free speech, and the right to live their own lives as they damn well please. This means free of coercion, free of repression, and free to be themselves. It means to live their lives as fully as they possibly can do so, and hopefully spend many hours sitting under a tree somewhere eating blackberries. Instead, the system wants to grind us down, wants to keep us running all the time. We can't hang ten and relax somewhere. The free speech movement at Berkeley was spurred on by people with a vision and a heart like Mario and many other people before him in this continuum of struggle who would not put up with the status quo, with the repression in their lives, with the working conditions to which they were exposed, or to whatever odious offenses against their humanity that were thrust upon them by the state and the corporations who own it.

What we are doing now with free radio is the free speech movement of the Nineties. In the early nineteen hundreds, there was a militant labor union known as the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, still functioning today. They pioneered what were called the free speech fights. Free speech as a public right in a park was not recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court until the Thirties even though we have a Constitution which claims free speech as a right for all people in this country. That document is two hundred years old. Yet only sixty years ago did the Supreme Court say it was OK to speak your mind in a public park without threat of reprisal. The Wobblies would come into a town to organize against oppressive working conditions, working conditions that would maim and kill, that would put children to work under those conditions. They would speak out against this situation by getting up on a soapbox on a corner somewhere. Then the local powers that be, the plutocrats, who owned the sheriff and owned the town would direct their minions to go arrest these people for having the temerity to speak truth to power on a street corner.

But the Wobblies were well organized, and what would happen is when two or three would be arrested for speaking out on a street corner word would go out and within a week the town would experience an invasion of Wobblies. Hundreds would show up, maybe more. In fact, sometimes there got to be so many riding the rails that you had to produce your Little Red Card to prove your membership in the IWW in order to get on a boxcar to get somewhere in time for a free speech fight. They would all show up in that town and pick a street corner. They'd line up by the hundreds and start speaking. The sheriff would be there and his deputies. They'd start arresting people. These free speech fights occurred in Fresno, San Diego, Portland, Seattle, all up and down the West Coast. The sheriff would have these people arrested one by one. All you'd have to do was say, 'Fellow Worker', and it was off to the hoosecow.

So the jail or the school or wherever they had to house hundreds of these Wobblies would be filled to the breaking point. If it's one thing the Wobblies are known for it's for singing and chanting and generally raising hell. So, they'd stay up all night long and chant and sing. In many cases the judges and municipal authorities lived near the jail facilities, and the towns were small enough so they could be heard. They'd keep them up all night long, and this was how they were able to break the back of the prohibition of free speech. Those towns learned that if they cracked down on two or three people speaking on a street corner there was a very good possibility that within a week their town would be overflowing with militant labor activists speaking out and filling their town's holding facilities, and they had to be fed too. That's how the struggle for free speech was really won. By people willing to take the abuse that came about in cold winter conditions when the cells holding people would be flooded with fire hoses. People would be in there with water up to their ankles, up to their knees. People were beaten, killed, but they kept on doing it.

This is the same sort of spirit that underlies any struggle for self-determination or free speech. We can compare that situation with the situation of those civil rights activists at the lunch counters who were dragged off and beaten, as Mario Savio probably experienced first hand. We see the same thing now with what we are doing with micropower radio. We intend to do the same things as the Wobblies did, the same thing as people at the lunch counters did. That is, to force the system to the breaking point. We must engage in this struggle in such numbers and with such energy and intensity that there is no way that the system can accommodate us. That's the only way we can win. I have no illusions about the court process. It has been a great PR vehicle. Our court case has brought this issue out to people, but our legal strategy must be coupled with a campaign of civil disobedience and direct action just like what happened in the South. The court action gives you a certain degree of credibility that the other doesn't, but one doesn't preclude the other. And, in my opinion, it's direct action and militant action that gets the goods. If you are not willing to fight, there's no point to begging your oppressor for a small crumb off the table. No more of that. We don't want another slice of the pie. We want the whole damn pie shop. That's really what's happening here.

We are seeing a struggle going on in this country for self-determination that is similar to the one in Chiapas, in El Salvador or in Haiti. We live at a time when the corporate yoke of what I call neo-feudalism, the powers that be call it neo-liberalism, is descending upon the neck of everyone on this planet. They think they have it made, but I got news for them. People are fighting back!

The situation right now is critical because of the conflict in the area. We have two radio stations there and both of them are in the conflict area. The Mexican Federal Army interferes with our signal so we have to change our frequency very often. They then change the interfering frequency too. We have to move all over the FM dial trying to avoid the interference they are sending. They don't want us to broadcast our truth words.

We want to link the process of building an independent radio, a free radio, with other sustainable development. For example, using the radio to make agricultural proposals on what to plant at certain times of the year. We try to contribute to the development of the community and the people in general through the radio. Our priority in broadcasting is, first of all, information. We don't yet have access to the Internet, but we would like to have it because then we could get La Hornada, an alternative newspaper from Mexico City, and we could spread the news. We also have special programs for human rights so people can know their rights and they can demand respect for their rights. We're also interested in health. A lot of children are dying of diarrhea, and some sicknesses which don't exist anymore here in the First World. We teach how to dig latrines and to boil the water so as not to get sick. We try to contribute to the preservation and the development of the culture by broadcasting in the oral tradition about the history of the Mayan people.

Autonomous radio in Chiapas has a lot of possibilities, but economically our situation is kind of fucked up. We have to travel by donkey sometimes through the mountains because there is no road. It's hard to carry all the radio equipment even though it's pretty small equipment and its not that heavy. You get tired very fast if you are walking with all these things on your back. So, we travel usually by donkey when we can or if necessary we carry all the stuff ourselves. We still have a lot of equipment needs. We just have one mixer and two tape decks. We don't have any CD players. We would like to get a computer for being on the Internet. Because our radio station is not commercial, there's no way to generate money. There's no way to make the radio autosustainable. It has to depend on contributions from the people of the communities which we reach. They can contribute food, corn and beans, but not money to buy tapes.

There is also a project in Mexico which is for creating a network of alternative communication to which we belong. We have two radio stations in Chiapas, but we want to create a national network of autonomous communication throughout Mexico.

We really have to thank the lawyers who have been helping us because they gave us some good legal advice and we knew we'd have some back-up if we needed it. So, from once a week, we went to seven nights a week and have been doing that ever since. We reach about a ten mile radius. We have our call-in talk shows on Tuesday. Keith McHenry of Food Not Bombs does a call-in talk show, as does Kiilu Nyasha who used to be with KPFA but got bumped off the air during the recent purge. We also have a new animal rights talk show and a Native American rights talk show in the works. Our other programming includes music. We broadcast a lot of hip hop and censored music that you won't hear on mainstream radio plus whatever we can get for free or cheap that's not hatred-oriented. That's probably the one rule we have. We won't broadcast anything that promotes hatred which makes us very different from a lot of stations out there. We also do a lot of Internet news, speeches and announcements. Richard produces a program called The Food Not Bombs Radio Network and sends that out to about 20-25 stations throughout the country. We've got a lot of mail from people who have heard the program and then gone on to start Food Not Bomb chapters where they live and that's been a great inspiration to us. We've even got a pen pal in Italy who heard our show. Richard sends it out on shortwave to about 62 countries. So, we now have a regular contributor who sends us Italian hip-hop music.

In the future I'd like to see even more community participation than there is at this point in microradio. One vision I have is seeing three or four stations in one area sharing the same frequency. If they're all one or two people like our station is, you could have people broadcasting in the morning and other people in the afternoon and other people at night. That way if somebody's antenna gets blown down or something, there's other radio stations that you can still tune into at that frequency. Also, I'd like to see more storytelling on the air. I work with preschool children and I see what a horrendous effect the corporate media has on them! They're all dressed in Walt Disney clothing; it's terrifying! You walk into work and there's 32 little Hunchbacks of Notre Dame smiling at you or Power Rangers. Children are very susceptible to what they see on TV and I think if there were more children's storytelling available we'd be sowing the seeds for a future that's a little more hopeful than what we've got now.

Also in the future I do worry about the corporate crackdown. I see the government giving away the airwaves to large corporations and media outlets. I wonder sometimes if they're doing that just so the corporations will take care of cracking down on us so that they won't have to do it themselves and look bad and spend a lot of money. Maybe Disney will come knocking at our door. I can see Mickey Mouse there with the handcuffs, 'C'mon!' Sometimes I have a little paranoid fantasy that we'll be in their Òprisons-for-profit.Ó It'll be like this revolving cycle where they can arrest people for intruding on their airwaves and they can toss them into their prisons where we can all make bluejeans for virtual wages. So, in the future, I've been thinking maybe we could have more radio stations right outside of prisons. We should get more mobile equipment so we can set up outside a prison and run away if necessary. A friend of mine in the American Indian Movement suggested we seek a permit from them. He said, 'We have sovereignty. We'll give you a permit!' That's a good idea.

We've been on the air for three years and it's a big job. You get home from your day job and then you've got to get the news and wind up tapes and everything. It weeds out a lot of people. Anybody who's an idiot generally will go away after a while because there's no money, there's no fame, and there's a lot of work involved. You have to love what you're doing and the people who love it are mostly nice people. I talk to a lot of people about microradio whenever I'm traveling around, and I have rarely heard anyone complaining. Everybody from left to right wing believes that freedom of speech and microradio is a good idea. The only people who really worry about it are the people who are corporate-types. They are afraid they're going to lose money somehow if we're on the air without a license, but the beauty of it is there is no money in microradio so they have nothing to fear.

We broadcast one day in the week from 11 in the morning until eight in the evening, but we are an action radio station. That means we go on the air whenever needed. It is not only one day a week. We work as a communication device, so when, for instance, the riot cops want to evict squatters, we are going to be on the air to let everybody know where the police are at and what they're doing with the squats. Most of the time the squatters have telephones, and that gets you some very nice coverage when you have a person actually sitting in a squat phoning in to the radio station and telling what the cops are doing outside, how they are trying to get in É Most of the time the houses are well barricaded so you hear them going like É I can not do it but it's a horrible sound that you hear over the phone Ñ and then the cops are in there.

I'm lucky to be here because it's pretty expensive to come all this way and the main thing I want to do here is networking. We like to receive cassettes so we can send them to our colleagues all over the Netherlands. We have about five other pirate radio stations across Holland. It's a very small country. We also have information from the Internet. We translate it and read it for our listeners, but the best thing is to have your voice on cassette on our airwaves. Support your local radio!

- November 8, 1996, Oakland, California