Nancy Kurshan | |
---|---|
Born | February 4, 1944 |
Occupation | Founder of Youth International Party |
Known for | Activism |
Nancy Sarah Kurshan (born February 4, 1944, in Brooklyn, NY) is an American activist, raised as a "red diaper baby", and best known for being a founder of the Youth International Party (whose members were popularly known as Yippies).
Kurshan was a participant in the civil rights and peace movements as far back as high school. During her college years in Madison, Wisconsin, she was a member of Friends of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and CORE, and participated in the first demonstration against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C., in April 1965. She then began to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology at UC Berkeley where she met Jerry Rubin. She dropped out to join Rubin in New York where they worked for the Mobe (National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam) on the 1967 demo to shut down the Pentagon.
Kurshan initiated a guerrilla theater women's group called W.I.T.C.H. (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) along with Robin Morgan, Sharon Krebs, and Roz Payne. [1] When Rubin appeared in front of HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) dressed as an international guerrilla, she joined him, appearing as a witch to put a hex on HUAC.[ citation needed ] At the conclusion of the "Chicago Conspiracy Trial", when all the defendants were initially found guilty, Kurshan and Anita Hoffman burned judges' robes during a press conference as a denunciation of the guilty verdict (which was later reversed on appeal). Photos of this action appeared on front pages all across the world.
Robin Morgan wrote about Kurshan in her famous essay entitled "Goodbye to All That". Morgan suggested that Kurshan and many other women (Morgan among them) needed to free themselves from the male domination of the left and their respective partners. In 1970 Kurshan traveled to North Vietnam on an all-women's trip that included Judy Gumbo and Jeanne Plamandon of the White Panther Party.
Not long after, Kurshan left Rubin. She then went on to join the Weather Underground as a public member until its demise. She participated for many years thereafter in the efforts to free political prisoners such as the Puerto Rican political prisoners, Sundiata Acoli, Geronimo Pratt, and many others. She was active in the fight against control unit prisons as a founding member of the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown. She has also authored a popular analysis called "Women And Imprisonment in the United States", which has appeared in countless texts and books about prisons and repression,[ citation needed ] and in 2013, the Freedom Archives published Out of Control, her book about the battle to end control unit prisons.
Along the way, Kurshan married Chicago epidemiologist Steve Whitman, raised two children, got a master's degree in social work and worked for 20 years as a social worker in the Chicago Public Schools. Whitman died in 2014. [2]
Mayim Bialik plays Kurshan in the 2011 film The Chicago 8 .
Abbot Howard Hoffman was an American political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ("Yippies") and was a member of the Chicago Seven. He was also a leading proponent of the Flower Power movement.
Jerry Clyde Rubin was an American social activist, anti-war leader, and counterculture icon during the 1960s and early 1970s. Despite being known for holding radical views when he was a political activist, he ceased holding his more extreme views at some point in the 1970s and instead opted for a successful career as a businessman. In the 1960s, during his political activism heyday, he was known for being one of the co-founders of the Youth International Party (YIP) whose members were referred to as Yippies, and standing trial in the Chicago Seven case.
The Youth International Party (YIP), whose members were commonly called Yippies, was an American youth-oriented radical and countercultural revolutionary offshoot of the free speech and anti-war movements of the late 1960s. It was founded on December 31, 1967. They employed theatrical gestures to mock the social status quo, such as advancing a pig called "Pigasus the Immortal" as a candidate for President of the United States in 1968. They have been described as a highly theatrical, anti-authoritarian, and anarchist youth movement of "symbolic politics".
The Chicago Seven, originally the Chicago Eight and also known as the Conspiracy Eight or Conspiracy Seven, were seven defendants – Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Lee Weiner – charged by the United States Department of Justice with conspiracy, crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot, and other charges related to anti-Vietnam War and 1960s counterculture protests in Chicago, Illinois during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The Chicago Eight became the Chicago Seven after the case against codefendant Bobby Seale was declared a mistrial.
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W.I.T.C.H., originally the acronym for Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, was the name of several related but independent feminist groups active in the United States as part of the women's liberation movement during the late 1960s. The W.I.T.C.H. moniker was sometimes alternatively expanded as "Women Inspired to Tell their Collective History", or "Women Interested in Toppling Consumer Holidays", among other variations.
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Stewart Edward "Stew" Albert was an early member of the Yippies, an anti-Vietnam War political activist, and an important figure in the New Left movement of the 1960s.
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Linda Sue Evans is an American radical leftist, who was convicted in connection with violent and deadly militant activities committed as part of her goal to free African-Americans from white oppression. Evans was sentenced in 1987 to 40 years in prison for using false identification to buy firearms and for harboring a fugitive in the 1981 Brinks armored truck robbery, in which two police officers and a guard were killed, and Black Liberation Army members were wounded. In a second case, she was sentenced in 1990 to five years in prison for conspiracy and malicious destruction in connection with eight bombings including the 1983 United States Senate bombing. Her sentence was commuted in 2001 by President Bill Clinton because of its extraordinary length.
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The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), popularly the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives, created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having fascist and communist ties. It became a standing (permanent) committee in 1946, and from 1969 onwards it was known as the House Committee on Internal Security. When the House abolished the committee in 1975, its functions were transferred to the House Judiciary Committee.
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Judy Gumbo Albert, known as Judy Gumbo, is a Canadian-American activist. She was an original member of the Yippies, the Youth International Party, a 1960s counter culture and satirical anti-war group, along with fellow radicals Anita and Abbie Hoffman, Nancy Kurshan and Jerry Rubin, and husband Stew Albert
Sharon L. Krebs was an American political activist, member of the feminist group W.I.T.C.H, and co-founder of the Free University of New York. In 1971 she was convicted of second-degree conspiracy for attempting to firebomb a bank in New York City as part of a Weather Underground plot.