Research Description:

For David Gilbert and the Role of Radical Media in Social Movements

My research will rely heavily on oral history interviews with political radicals who have used and continue to use media as an organizing tool. In the summer of 2002, I will travel to New York, Boston, Burlington and Philadelphia to conduct interviews with several radical journalists. In New York, I will go to the New York University Bobst Library's Tamiment Center to view and analyze original copies of SDS and Black Panther papers. I also will travel to the Attica Correctional Facility to interview a political prisoner with whom I have corresponded for the past three years. David Gilbert, incarcerated for the past twenty years for his participation as a white ally to the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers, is a former member of the Students for a Democratic Society. In the 1960s, Gilbert was involved in the production and distribution of New Left Notes, the SDS newspaper, and Osawatomie, the newspaper of the Weather Underground, an offshoot of SDS. He is currently completing a book compiling his writings from the past 20 years to be published by Montreal-based Solidarity Publishing (expected: 2002), to which I will contribute a jacket blurb. In Philadelphia, I will interview people involved with the Independent Media Center, a hub of the burgeoning IndyMedia movement, which began in Seattle during the 1999 demonstrations against the World Trade Organization. IndyMedia has been at the forefront worldwide of redefining and reshaping the form and content of media in the twenty-first century. In Burlington and Boston, I will view more document archives from the 1960s and 70s movements and speak with more political activists active in media production.