Yippie co-founder Stew Albert dies

Yippie co-founder Stew Albert dies
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg.../01/ALBERT.TMP

- Seth Rosenfeld, Chronicle Staff Writer

Wednesday, February 1, 2006

Stew Albert, a prominent anti-Vietnam war activist, an early supporter of the Black Panthers and a founder of the Yippie radical protest group, died Monday at age 66 in Portland, Oregon. The cause was cancer.

Mr. Albert was a catalytic figure in the Bay Area's emerging New Left political movement of the 1960s, helping to combine white anti-war activists with Black power advocates and hippies.

In 1967, Mr. Albert and fellow radicals Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman formed the Youth International Party, melding serious protest with outrageous street theater satire to stage events that became icons of the era.

They ran a real pig named Pigasus for President in 1968, showered dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in a protest against greed, and tried to levitate the Pentagon to exorcise what they called its "evil spirits."

Todd Gitlin, a professor of sociology at Columbia University who has written extensively on the sixties, described Mr. Albert as thoughtful man who embodied the humor and insouciance of the New Left. "He was an original," Gitlin said.

Stewart Edward Albert was born Dec. 4, 1939 in Brooklyn. His father was a city clerk who kept a pail of sand in the front hall to put out fires in case Japan bombed their house. As Mr. Albert wrote in his wry 2004 autobiography, "His was the unspectacular childhood of a not especially promising kid."

After graduating from Pace College in New York City, Albert worked briefly as a clerk. But in 1965, lured by the legend of bohemian writer Jack Kerouac, he rode a bus cross country to City Lights book store in North Beach.

Within days, Mr. Albert had smoked marijuana with the beat poet Allen Ginsberg and was working for the Vietnam Day Committee in Berkeley, where he slept on the floor and helped organize some of nation's first mass protests against the war.

He became close with Rubin, a co-founder of the Committee, and immersed himself in the counterculture, experimenting with the still-legal psychedelic drug LSD. Increasingly, his protests bent toward events calculated to generate surreal images and media myth.

Reflecting on the incident in which he showered dollars on the lunging stock traders, Mr. Albert later wrote that he was delighted at finding "a new way to demonstrate, a theatrical turn of politics that invaded sacrosanct places and turned them into a stage set full of props for our use."

Bobby Seale, a founding chairman of the Black Panther Party who met Mr. Albert in 1969 and became a life-long friend of his, said he was among the earliest white supporters of the Black Panther Party.

Mr. Albert was arrested several times during protests. He was named but not charged in the so-called Chicago Eight Case, in which Rubin, Hoffman, Seale and Tom Hayden were indicted for conspiring to incite a riot during protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The case ended with no convictions.

In 1970, after LSD advocate Timothy Leary escaped from a California prison, Mr. Albert helped arrange his stay with fugitive Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers.

Returning to Berkeley, Mr. Albert wrote for the Berkeley Barb underground newspaper and organized efforts to turn a vacant lot owned by UC into a "People's Park." He ran unsuccessfully for sheriff of Alameda County but won 65,000 votes and carried the city of Berkeley.

In the early 1970s, Mr. Albert and his wife, the activist Judy Clavir Albert, sued the FBI for harassment and won a $20,000 settlement.

In 1984, the Alberts moved to Portland, Oregon, where he remained active in progressive causes and wrote his memoir, "Who the Hell is Stew Albert?"
Unlike some former radicals, Mr. Albert never abandoned his ideals. He remained defiant until the end, writing on his blog two days before his death, "My politics haven't changed."

He is survived by his wife, of Portland, and his daughter Jessica Clavir Albert, of San Francisco.

The family requests donations in his name to Planned Parenthood in Portland, or the Rosenberg Fund for Children, 116 Pleasant St,, Ste 3312, Easthampton, MA 01027 .


Stew Albertâ??s web site/reading list:
http://members.aol.com/stewa/stew.html