Common Ground: Dressing for the Revolution

October 2004

Dressing for the Revolution

As the Free Speech Movement celebrates its 40th Anniversary one activist recalls what she wore to the sit-in.

by Kate Coleman

There were plenty of “red diaper babies” — children of Commie parents — in lefty politics at Berkeley in the 60s, but I was not among them. I was a Valley Girl from Encino, California. John Wayne lived on my corner. Patty Andrews, one of the Andrews Sisters, lived across the street. My parents were divorced when I was ten. My mother was blind from the time I was three with health problems, giving me a kind of benign neglectful upbringing. It bothered me as a kid that, if I tore a hem or ripped a lining, I was the safety-pin queen well before that punk style was cool. Still, we did move into my rich uncle’s discarded old house in the Valley.

He’d moved on to Beverly Hills. You could say I was bourgeois, given my neighbors and address, but I suffered from a Cinderella complex because we were poor relations and my mother couldn’t see to dress me. I worried a lot about being presentable, even within the parameters of my growing disaffection with authority at Berkeley and before.

My rebel v. Valley Girl tensions began in high school, foreshadowing the lefty I would become: I was sent to the principal’s office for refusing to “Drop” during a nuke “drop drill.” I thought it was a stupid exercise in futility; and I wrote for a mimeographed poetry magazine which the principal banned for the lines: “I’d like to kiss just left of center of her breast/Then I’d try the other side.”

More to the sartorial point, I dressed like a beatnik, but a neat one, in black skirt, tights and, my favorite plaid corduroy vest. My black hair and long bangs completed the picture.

Such high school nonconformity was a prelude for Berkeley, and I went gaga when I got there, hooking up with SLATE, the on-campus issues-oriented political party that opposed ROTC (military training on campus), capital punishment and nuclear testing. They also provided free birth control on demand. SLATE stood for a “slate” of candidates, a lefty rival to the frat rats and had in its membership then a rather large pool of very smart, very lefty grad students — mostly male — whom I, quite frankly, worshipped and sought to emulate politically and intellectually. They had beards, wore blue work shirts and baggy corduroys.

The tonic for my inchoate lefty yearnings and unformed ideology came in the spring of 1960, when HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee came to San Francisco. The Commie-hunting committee subpoenaed a Cal student and SLATEnik, along with Archie Brown, the fiery labor leader. The protest that exploded at City Hall massive student demonstration in the North(to balance the earliest Civil Rights demonstrations the South) and was a heady brew imbibed by this coed in huge gulps.

Zap! I went over to the “dark” side, happily pitching myself under the aegis of student activism. Of course, along with my commitments to civil liberties and civil rights, came an attendant discarding of the virgin fetish. A sympathetic, wise Berkeley physician was then giving diaphragms to Cal coeds and sometime after I’d lost my hymen, I finally was fitted for one. Talk about dressing for any circumstance: I was so horrified by the thought of getting pregnant — I’d previously gone unprotected — I wore my diaphragm everywhere, even to the market. After all, you never knew when you’d be jumped. (A scant two years later, the pill came out and revolutionized everything, but that’s another story).

In between HUAC and the Free Speech Movement (FSM), there were a couple of years of militant Civil Rights demos calling for an end to Jim Crow practices. I joined the marches at Jack London Square and the Lucky supermarket “shop-ins.”

The shop-in at Lucky’s was a devilish tactic of loading up carts, bringing them to the counter and then not buying, forcing them to restock the mess. When local black youth, CORE members from Oakland, threw fresh produce around the store, I was horrified. But one day, a little old Berkeley lady rammed her shopping cart into my Achilles heel, and I buckled to the floor. “Why did you do that,” I wailed painfully. “I used to be for CORE,” she hissed, “but not any more.” That got me over the property thing. I started throwing cabbages myself.

So I was radicalized in my five years at Cal, culminating in the FSM, which took place in my senior year. After all these years of being a student activist, I’d noticed one thing about the world beyond the campus: they were always categorizing us as dirty beatniks, filthy students and the like. I was dismayed by these descriptions in press and television accounts since I, for one, was fastidious and always conscious of my appearance.

And so it was that, on the eve of December 2, 1964, contemplating the culminating sit-in in Sproul Hall that night, I was wracked with indecision. How was I going to dress for the revolution in such a way that I would reflect well upon the aesthetics of a movement about which I was very passionate?

I had just the outfit—crimson print Swedish ski sweater (tight weave), black shiny tight pants that looked like patent leather but were really cheap-chic rubber through and through, and a pair of matching shiny faux leather black rubber boots up to the knee.

I’d be slick, cutting edge, warm and encased in protective — RUBBER! Was I out of my mind!?!

I thought I’d be in Siberia. I was wrong. The night of the sit-in, I was upstairs in the corridor, side by side with folk singer Joan Baez, smearing peanut butter on white bread for the hungry hordes of fellow demonstrators. We were jammed body to body up there. No, I didn’t join the others breaking into any of the offices — I was a Valley Girl, remember? But I was angry hearing the purloined secret contracts with big growers and UC read aloud to us.

Did I tell you it was HOT up there?

At some point in those wee hours, the cops charged in wedge formation and grabbed recognizable leaders out of the crowd and carted them off. It was selective arrest. I recall that, shortly thereafter, a naïve fellow demonstrator stood up and yelled, “now that they’ve got the leadership, we might as well cooperate in our arrests.”

NO WAY! With my booming voice I urged everyone to stay seated, stay limp and to resist passively — not “cooperate.” Just then, the officiating cop pointed in my direction and yelled: “Get her!” They grabbed me and dragged me off, twisting my arms painfully to keep me upright. I was vaguely aware of sweating more in fear than from the very real physical anguish that I was feeling, especially when they flung me onto the floor of an elevator. I lay in a heap of bodies as we went down, down to the basement of Sproul where they’d set up a temporary-processing center. I was photographed and fingerprinted.

And then a police matron ushered me into a teeny closet-sized room and closed the door. There was barely room for the both of us. She ordered me to strip to my underwear and remove my boots. It was a struggle, in that confined space, to peel down my wet rubber pants, to tug at my tight boots, which encased my feet like a sauna. As I detached each article of clothing from my sweaty body, yet another emanation filled the cubby with a rank odor.

I was dying there in a puddle of embarrassment and humiliation while the matron remained adamantine and severe. She ran her hands under my bra, searching for hidden — what — razor blades? Soap? Oh, a girl could dream. And she repeated it along the waist and leg bands of my underpants. Oh, the horror! as Joseph Conrad would have said, I’m sure, had he caught a whiff of my stewing body juices.

With difficulty, I tried to resist my own exploration of what she must be thinking of me at that moment. To her I must be the cesspool of the FSM. But so mortified was I, that something in my thinking began to shift. It was not my fault that they were arresting me; it was theirs — no, hers. For she was there every bit as voluntarily as I. And if she chose to frisk me in a closet after I’d sat-in all night in a dubious outfit better designed for the North Sea, than that was her choice. “Fuck her if she can’t take the smell!,” was my next thought.

Somehow, I lived through the search. At the end, I’d managed to transform my humiliation into a triumph of smell-o-rama weaponry. I wore my odors now as a badge, a rite of passage, and did so all though my succeeding stints at the Oakland City jail drunk tank, followed by the San Leandro armory and finally at Santa Rita jail, where I remained until I was bailed out two days later.

I arrived home exhausted and undressed. Even with the windows open in my tiny bedroom, it was too much. I tossed the pants and rubber boots out on the roof outside and shut the window. After a shower and long sleep, I awoke the next morning resolved to take the offending clothing directly to the trash.

But they were gone, covertly whisked to Washington, I believe to this day, by the secret sniff squad of the FBI.

Of the many lessons I learned during the FSM, not the least of them was what to wear to the revolution: Wear cotton. Wear open shoes.

They breathe. We might even say, they breathe freely. Which was, after all, what the FSM was all about.

Journalist Kate Coleman authored the recently published The Secret Wars of Judi Bari: A Car Bomb, the Fight for the Redwoods, and the End of Earth First! (Encounter Books).

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