YIPPEE! I think I saw it move! Did you see it move!?!?

Nancy Kurshan, a founding member of the Yippies and lifelong activist, is coming to Bird & Beckett with her new book.

“EQUAL PARTS REVEALING MEMOIR, VALUABLE HISTORICAL DOCUMENT, AND GALVANIZING GUIDE TO FOLLOWING ONE’S BELIEFS.” – Publishers Weekly

The Oakland author and lifelong activist shares her bold, candid memoir of a life on the front lines of American protest.

Climate activist China Brotsky will join her in conversation.

Nancy participated in the civil rights and peace movements from her high school years in the early 1960s. While a student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, she joined Friends of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Core (the Congress of Racial Equality) and participated in the April 17, 1965 Washington, D.C. demonstration against the Vietnam War organized by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) which kicked the nascent movement to end the war into high gear. Pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology at UC Berkeley, she met fellow activist Jerry Rubin and worked with the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE) on the October 17, 1967 March on the Pentagon, with its centerpiece effort to levitate the Pentagon, she and Rubin formed the Yippies (the Youth International Party, or YIP).

Concurrently, she, Robin Morgan, Sharon Krebs and Roz Payne started a guerrilla theater women’s group called W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell). When Rubin appeared in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) dressed as an international guerrilla, she joined him, appearing as a witch to put a hex on HUAC. At the conclusion of the trial of the Chicago 8, she and Anita Hoffman burned judges’ robes during a press conference as a denunciation of the guilty verdict. Kurshan, her colleagues in W.I.T.C.H. and other allies sought to free themselves from the male domination of the left and their male partners, and in 1970 she 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, she left Rubin and went on to join the Weather Underground as a public member until its demise.

She participated for years in efforts to free political prisoners such as the Puerto Rican political prisoners, Sundiata Acoli, Geronimo Pratt, and many others and became active in the fight against control unit prisons (often referred to as prisons within prisons) including Security House Units or Special Housing Units (SHUs) and other solitary confinement arrangements as a founding member of the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown. Her essay “Women and Imprisonment in the United States” has been used in many texts and books about prisons and repression In 2013, the Freedom Archives published Out of Control, her book about the battle to end control unit prisons.