How do farm workers conduct a strike where there are no factory gates? How can Gls be contacted and organized
outside the military bases? How do you create an independent, Black political party? What are student strikers facing on
other campuses? The answers were nowhere to be found in the mass media. The corporate journalists who peered into
the invariably "shabby" centers of radical organizing were interested in maintaining the status quo, not in aiding a rent
strike or a boycott on grapes. From the start, The Movement defined.itself specifically as the medium for events and
issues the mass media tended to trivialize or ignore.

Despite this political core, the paper valued art, poetry, music, and drama. Frank Cieciorka's artwork charged covers
and feature stories with a graphic line that made his wood-engraved clenched fist a radical icon of the era. Poems by
Worth Long, Diane DiPrima, and Judy Grahn and music reviews, stories about community theater and dance
companies, and reports on innovative cultural projects were all seen as part of the act of political creation.

How was The Movement staff able to accomplish what it did? The location helped. As one of the epicenters of the
movement, the Bay Area was distinguished by a radical past and present. San Francisco was still a "Labor Town" that
proudly recalled the 1934 General Strike; labor militants blacklisted in other parts of the country were welcomed on the
San Francisco docks. Elements of the Old Left, wounded by McCarthyism but still active, maintained a fairly
nonsectarian and helpful attitude toward their New Left counterparts, many of whom were their children. Large,
politically sophisticated Black communities were active on both sides of the Bay. A few hours away, hard-fought
campaigns to organize agricultural workers in the thirties were reawakened by Cesar Chavez' United Farm Workers
Association. U. C. Berkeley, long a center of progressive politics, was joined by campuses in San Jose, San Francisco,
and Oakland. A broadly liberal middle-class provided political and financial support. People, resources, and contacts
were accessible.

The Movement staff spent a lot of time maintaining direct contact with the field. A typical month's schedule might
send two staff members out of town for several weeks, often across country, to attend meetings, report on major events,
or organize. A ten-day editorial frenzy of writing, editing, layout, paste-up, printing, and shipping capped the month.
There was no institutional funding. Money was raised through a network of sustainers, periodic fund-raising events,
and mailings. Most staffers were volunteers; others lived on subsistence pay, like the organizers on whom they
reported. (During one insolvent period, a staff member kept the paper afloat by monthly visits to Reno, where he played
a successful system of Blackjack until invited to leave by casino henchmen.)

The editorial board that ran The Movement aspired to be both democratic and collective, to break down the old dis-
tinctions between leaders and followers, between mental and manual work. It was a constant struggle. In the early
years, men tended to write and women tended to do office work. Some board intellectuals balked at having to bundle
papers or type change of address cards. But, in general, the staff took seriously the participatory democracy called for
by the broader movement. Everyone knew they were expected not only to write, edit, and discuss, but to typeset, lay
out, paste down, bundle, and ship. Otherwise, the paper could not have been produced.

Most important, it was the unique network of movement activists, organizers, and leaders -- in Chicago, New York,
Atlanta, Seattle, Madison, New Mexico, Detroit, Austin, and Washington, D.C. -- that gave The Movement national
scope and influence. The network widened after 1966, when a number of campus-based activists were added to the
staff, including Joe Blum, who became editor in 1967. When he left, to organize workers in the paper's last year, he
was succeeded by Assistant Editor Arlene Eisen Bergman, a student and an anti-war activist. The staff included those
with roots in both SNCC and SDS, who were involved in and trusted by numerous radical groups in the Black, white,
and Latino communities, including the Black Panther Party, Rising Up Angry, Young Lords, Alianza Federal de los
Pueblos Libres, the SDS/ERAP projects, and League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

As that network expanded, the paper began to fill with detailed analytical articles written by activists explaining to
themselves and others how they understood their work and organizations -- while they were being constructed. The
editorial board maintained an extensive correspondence with the writers, framing and defining questions, discussing
issues, sharing information that came from others in the field, shaping articles as they were written and revised. As
debates over strategy and tactics became more frequent, the paper came to be seen as a forum where a lively diversity of
ideological and political views could be aired, a place where organizers could describe how they grappled with
everyday problems in their communities, while trying to build movements for racial equality at home and to end the
brutal war abroad.

Many questions needed to be debated. Should anti-war organizers focus on large-scale demonstrations or less visible
long-term work? Should demonstrations be nationally coordinated? How militant should they be? Should long-term
work in the community be based on multiple issues or focused on stopping the war first? What should be the strategy in
the northern Black ghettos: organizing in the community over police repression and control of local institutions or
focusing at the worksite on jobs? Other debates concerned the relative importance of working-class organizing, the
relationship among Blacks, whites, and Latinos within The Movement, and the connection between the political
movement and the counter-culture.

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