Radio, Race, And Audible Difference In Post-1945 America: The Citizens Band 3030318400, 9783030318406, 9783030318413

Table of contents :
Preface......Page 5
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Contents......Page 13
Chapter 1: America in Color: The Postwar Audible Spectrum......Page 14
Chapter 2: The Sounds of White Vulnerability......Page 28
Chapter 3: Mobilizing Black Technoculture......Page 52
Chapter 4: Queering the Spectrum from Radio to Local TV......Page 76
Bibliography......Page 89
Index......Page 97

Citation preview

Radio, Race, and Audible Difference in Post-1945 America The Citizens Band

Art M. Blake

Radio, Race, and Audible Difference in Post-1945 America

Art M. Blake

Radio, Race, and Audible Difference in Post-1945 America The Citizens Band

Art M. Blake Ryerson University Toronto, ON, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-31840-6    ISBN 978-3-030-31841-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31841-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

“Go back to where you came from!” “Send her home!” As I sit at my computer completing this manuscript in the summer of 2019, American and international news resound with racist and xenophobic voices, in particular those of President Donald Trump and his supporters. Trump’s verbal attacks on four recently elected members of Congress, all of them women, all racialized and all on the progressive end of the Democratic Party’s limited political spectrum, represent the most recent example of tighter limits being drawn around who supposedly belongs and who does not belong in the United States. Although all four women are American citizens, and only one was born outside the United States, their president and almost all members of the Republican Party use the women’s racial and political difference as grounds to reject them as Americans, as fellow citizens. While “citizen” and “citizenship” are legal terms linked to constitutional and political status and rights, they are also terms used colloquially to indicate a person who belongs or is entitled to experience a state of belonging—being the right type of person in the right place. Citizenship and mobility are also connected, legally and metaphorically, especially at this juncture in the twenty-first century, with larger numbers of people than ever before on the move globally as refugees and other migrants. In response, as the migration crisis deepens, some of the better-resourced nation states and their leaders use their legal and political power to demonize the migrants, to deny citizenship, to reduce the numbers of newcomers, migrants and refugees already within their borders and to severely restrict who can stay or enter their countries. The members of the British v

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parliament and their constituents remain in an unresolved political limbo after a vote to take the United Kingdom out of the European Community passed by a narrow majority in 2016. The so-called Brexit, as a vote and as one of the most contentious issues in British politics since World War II, has shown clearly the xenophobia and national “status anxiety” shaping British politics and daily life. Brexit has resulted in efforts to categorize people living within the United Kingdom around standards of citizenship rooted less in legal process and more in the application of narrow notions of “Britishness,” based on spoken language, accent, skin color, access to employment, mobility, as well as legal loopholes such as those which entrapped the “Windrush generation” of Caribbean migrants in deportation orders after a lifetime of work and residence in Britain. I wrote this book as a way to explore, through sound, questions of difference and belonging that have always found a central place in my research because of their resonance with my life experience. As someone raised in England in a very class-conscious family and society, I was trained from early childhood to hear class difference in accent, in intonation as well as in the vocabulary a person used to refer to everyday objects; and I was supposed to apply that knowledge to categorize those around me, including other kids and their families. The first question my parents would ask about a new friend was always “Are they PLU (people like us)?” As a middle-class white kid I found this attention to class and the resulting prejudices and exclusions very uncomfortable; I squirmed inwardly at this demand to place a playmate in a hierarchy. In my almost entirely white home town, I was on the “winning” end of a spectrum in which racial difference barely appeared, making class differences perhaps even more finely granular, the turn of the screw minutely calibrated. Moving to the United States for a year of undergraduate study, for work and eventually for graduate school positioned me in a far more diverse society but one in which perceived racial difference, not class, formed the most powerful ordering system. Working and going to graduate school in Washington DC, the effects of American racism were obvious: DC was an African American city, inhabited by generations of black people, many originating from Virginia and South Carolina; others had arrived to work in the expanded federal government of the New Deal and World War II eras. A black mayor led DC’s majority black city council. Yet, the mostly white members of Congress and the leaders of international organizations such as the World Bank dominated the economy of the city and benefited from a local population disenfranchised by virtue of living in

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the capital city. Washington DC, as a federal city, elects no Member of Congress just as a nonvoting delegate; neighboring white suburban areas of Maryland and northern Virginia, connected to DC by subway, bus and roadways, all enjoy full representation. The thousands of Central American refugees and “illegal” migrants who arrived in Washington during the 1980s settled into this disempowered black city, reminders to those on Capitol Hill of the human costs of U.S. foreign policy. My British accent drew attention from Americans enamored of what they heard as a cute or particularly cultured way of speaking, affording me immediate status in their eyes and ears as intelligent, likeable and worthy of their generous attention. Such Anglophilia made me cringe. I rapidly learned to modify my speech to sound less British and more American. I just wanted to fit in, to belong; I did not want special attention, especially not in a form that echoed the class hierarchies of my birthplace. I felt more “at home” in Washington, DC, Manhattan and later Los Angeles because in each place I lived in the midst of multiple forms of difference. My white and middle-class privilege had given me access to education and thus the ability to make choices as a young adult that led to my international mobility and rapid inclusion in workplaces, higher education and professional social circles. My vocal shifting was my choice to refuse the privilege accorded a British accent; but had I lacked the other advantages of whiteness and class, I could not have so easily made that choice. As someone designated female at birth and raised as a girl, I lived rather uncomfortably in that gender, and shifted between sexual identities, until I transitioned to male in my mid-40s. Gender-affirming surgery and hormone treatment with testosterone produced a changing body shape and thickening vocal cords. My voice changed again, acquiring some of the lower frequency of voices we hear as “masculine” though, as is the case for many transmen, without the full adult cisgender male physical resonance and depth that usually come from cisgender male puberty. My voice sounds younger than my chronological age; I think I am also heard as “gay,” even when not consciously expressing my sexuality vocally or by vocabulary. From my vocal sound over the telephone I am sometimes assumed to be a woman by, for example, taxi dispatchers. Expecting that mistake now, when I need to have a phone conversation with people I do not know, I consciously make an effort to lower my pitch, to talk more slowly and in a more “matter of fact” manner, adopting a flatter affect and rhythm. Sounding masculine, as we will see in this book, is a more ­complicated matter than a person might think unless they had ever had to consciously edit their vocal qualities.

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In this book I draw on a range of historical evidence to argue that the cultural work of audible difference is contingent on time and place, on who is listening and for what reasons, and the sonic properties of a person’s voice are not stable or “natural” but produced from within structures of race, class, gender and sexuality and their intersections. Chapters 2 and 3 function as companion case studies of citizens band (CB) radio in the United States during the 1970s; Chaps. 1 and 4 examine forms of audible difference operating outside the parameters of visually framed racialization. I based the book’s content and much of its argumentation on men and forms of masculinity in the post-1945 period. Another scholar could write a counterpoint book centering women and forms of femininity. As the dominant, normatized humanity of the postwar United States, white masculinity centered itself within politics, community formation, technological development and the multiform manifestations of power. My book takes that white male norm and questions its security and actual capacity to dominate in a period of significant, effective challenges from women and African Americans and to some extent from queer Americans. I hope readers of this book will further complicate my argument and its evidentiary base by researching and writing their own work on women and feminine-identified people’s use of voice, listening, perceptions of difference and communication technologies to disrupt the masculine spectrum discussed here. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the operation of racialization in the United States in the post-1945 period in part by discussing the Puerto Rican migration to Manhattan in the 1950s as an instance of audible difference that disrupted mid-century conventional racialization. The chapter takes the work of sound recordist Tony Schwartz, who documented the Puerto Rican migration, as a way to demonstrate the connections between sound, hearing, migration, mobility and ideas of belonging. The chapter then introduces citizens band radio as a mid-century federally sanctioned communications medium designed to enable U.S. citizens to enhance their safety through mobile communication. I explain how and when this public access project took on mass popularity about 20 years after its initial availability. Chapter 2 argues that citizens band radio reached its peak popularity in the mid-1970s and its wide adoption by white male drivers of passenger cars, particularly in Los Angeles, in response to white fears of black mobility. As a tool of white racial ­self-­defense, CB radio technology enabled white supremacy on the roadways, providing a form of surveillance and security in a period of chal-

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lenges perceived by white, male heterosexuals to their longstanding dominance. Chapter 3 shows how and why African Americans first adopted CB radio in the 1960s to support local self-defense efforts against white racist threats but later, from the 1970s onward, adapted the technology and their use of it to enable black audiomobility as an aspect of black cultural community formation. Chapter 4 tunes in to queer voices, particularly gay male voices, and discusses their absence from corporate as well as community airwaves in the mid- to late twentieth century. But I argue that such seeming inaudibility is a misrepresentation for how gay male communication worked “off the spectrum,” creating audibility and mobility by means of “gay spectrum” produced by a shared set of vocal and verbal signals over many decades. The chapter discusses the importance to gays, and other marginalized Americans, of nonprofit radio and public access cable television programming in the 1980s. The content and format of these “citizen”-based media form the precursors to the early years of the World Wide Web and Internet, which also provided individuals, community groups and special interest groups with the means to produce and disseminate content of no interest to profit-based corporate mass media. Our present era of social media and podcasting provides opportunities for scholarly study of technologies and communications that purport to offer citizen-led content but whose embedding in ongoing structures of racialization and other forms of power provide examples, like CB radio, of both the upholding of, and resistance to, exclusions to being heard. Toronto, ON

Art M. Blake

Acknowledgments

I have thought about, and worked on, this book’s contents in locations and institutions in the United States and Canada. In all places I have benefited from the support, advice and expertise of librarians, curators, colleagues near and far, and students. Those locations and people include the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress; archivist and scholar Mike Mashon, Head of the Moving Image Section, Library of Congress; the librarians at the Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress; the Program in American Studies and the Department of Communication at Miami University of Ohio, with particular thanks to Peggy Shaffer; David Suisman and Susan Strasser at the University of Delaware who organized the Hagley Symposium on sound studies at which I first presented my research on CB radio; the Faculty of Arts at Ryerson University, especially the leadership of Jean-Paul Boudreau and Pamela Sugiman as consecutive deans who strengthened the research culture in Arts and supported me as an interdisciplinary scholar; my undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Toronto, Miami University of Ohio and Ryerson University who have taken various versions of my sound studies seminar and helped me think through histories and theories of sound, and have experimented alongside me with learning and teaching methods. The research for this book was made possible by various grants and fellowships. I express my deep thanks to the following institutions and agencies for their support: Ryerson University, Dean’s Office in the Faculty of Arts for the Special Projects Grant to fund assistance with the indexing and final manuscript preparation in summer 2019; a Standard Research Grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) xi

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2007–2010 (Principal Investigator); the Coca-Cola Fellowship for the Study of Advertising and World Cultures at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, 2005; two SSHRC Institutional Grants from the University of Toronto, 2002, 2004 (Principal Investigator); and a SSHRC Image, Text, Sound and Technology Grant, 2004–2006 (Co-Applicant). Some parts of the book’s content have been previously published: a version of Chap. 2 was previously published as an essay, “An Audible Sense of Order: Race, Fear and CB Radio on Los Angeles Freeways in the 1970s,” included in Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, edited by David Suisman and Susan Strasser (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); an earlier version of Chap. 3 first appeared as an article, “Audible Citizenship and Audiomobility: Race, Technology, and CB Radio,” in American Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 3, September, 2011, pages 531–553; excerpts of Chap. 4 appeared as “Finding My Voice While Listening to John Cage” in Sounding Out! on February 23, 2015, as part of a special blog forum on gender and voice edited by Liana Silva. I am very grateful to the original publishers for their permission to reproduce those materials here. My conversations over the last almost 20 years with other scholars of sound, both in person and in print, have provided me with a robust scholarly community that I lacked when I began to research urban sound back in 2002. In particular I am indebted to the brilliance and generosity of Jennifer Stoever, Dolores Inés Casillas, Jonathan Sterne, David Suisman and Elena Razlogova, who have all provided me with essential feedback, companionship as well as examples through their published work of the very best in research and writing about the significance of the sonic and the audible. I am also grateful to the two anonymous peer reviewers for Palgrave Macmillan who generously provided warm encouragement as well as very helpful suggestions for clarifying aspects of the book and situating my research in relation to other scholarship. Megan Laddusaw, History Editor at Palgrave Macmillan, responded quickly and enthusiastically to my out-­ of-­the blue pitch to her, and secured peer reviews and the approval of the editorial board at lightning pace. Christine Pardue, Assistant History Editor at Palgrave Macmillan, provided friendly and clear guidance through the processes of manuscript preparation and submission. Ali Aird, a gifted creative writer and scholar, having just submitted her brilliant MA project at Ryerson University, then undertook the detailed work of copy-­ editing and index-making, which made completion of this book possible.

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At Ryerson University I have learned from, and enjoyed the company of, some fabulous colleagues. In particular I am grateful for the mentorship provided to me by Dr. Denise O’Neil Green, Vice-President, Equity and Community Inclusion at Ryerson, and her example of courageous and patient leadership. In the Office of the Vice-President, Equity and Community Inclusion, I thank Tamar Myers, Toni De Mello, Darrell Bowden, Tracey King, Heather Willis, Monica McKay and Dayo Kefentse from whom I continue to learn so much, and whose work helps me function more effectively as a teacher and scholar. Lisa Barnoff, Jennifer Mactavish, Rachel DiSaia, Laurie Stewart, Dani Gomez-Ortega, Tony Conte, Marco Fiola, Imogen Coe, John Beebe, Ben Barry, Alison Matthews David and Marty Fink have stood by me and made life at Ryerson queerer, more trans positive, more feminist and more fun; History Department colleagues Katherine Zubovich, Rob Teigrob and Catherine Ellis have stepped in and shown up for me at key moments of challenge; Paul Moore, Jamin Pelkey, Stéphanie Walsh Matthews and Jason Boyd continue to do all of the above as well as championing the importance of interdisciplinarity through their excellent work as teachers and researchers. I completed the final stages of writing this book in the company of my dog Biscuit, who I adopted in the freezing month of February 2019. As we ventured together out into the neighborhood dog park we both built new friendships that sustained me and provided a sense of belonging I really needed. So thank you to our dog park friends and neighbors Marbles, Molly, Asher, Ace, Sophie, Hank, Finn, Georgia, Loki, Nico, Walter, Hazel, Willow, Gus, Piper, Becket, Perla and Amelia. And their humans! Throughout my years of thinking about sound and questions of difference, and living my own experiences of them, I have benefited always from the love, humor and encouragement of Elspeth Brown and Asa Blake-­ Brown. Their examples of passion and perseverance kept me going.

Contents

1 America in Color: The Postwar Audible Spectrum 1 2 The Sounds of White Vulnerability15 3 Mobilizing Black Technoculture39 4 Queering the Spectrum from Radio to Local TV63 Bibliography77 Index85

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CHAPTER 1

America in Color: The Postwar Audible Spectrum

Abstract  Listening to the Puerto Rican migration in the late 1940s and the 1950s, I provide in this chapter an example of the larger context in which audible difference operated in the era preceding CB radio’s mass popularity. The first major postwar migration from outside the mainland United States began in 1948, when many thousands of Puerto Ricans left home for New York City in search of economic mobility and better opportunities than their island territory could offer. New York had not experienced a mass migration of this sort since the turn of the twentieth century. So when Puerto Ricans came to New York in large numbers from 1948 to 1958, their presence represented certainly an audible, if not always a visible, sea change in many working-class neighborhoods—places already under increasing pressure in that same decade from urban planning initiatives to rid the city of “blight” by demolishing vital, if poor, tenement neighborhoods. Keywords  Migration • Puerto Rican • Audible difference • Urban • 1950s If you see or hear an actual citizens band (CB) radio, via mass media or in real life depending on your age (mostly), you may not know what it is or your mind may jump to an association with the United States in the 1970s, the movie or song “Convoy” and the question “I wonder what happened © The Author(s) 2019 A. M. Blake, Radio, Race, and Audible Difference in Post-1945 America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31841-3_1

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to ….” CB radio holds a place in some of our minds as a sort of one-hit wonder of communications technology or an awkward phase between the omnipresence of old terrestrial media and the emergence of new digital media. But in this book I argue that CB radio is worthy of more lasting attention from scholars and students of media and communications history. In fact, as I will show, CB radio, as deployed in the United States, was both representative of, and a player in, urban race relations, gendered and racialized uses of technology, a changing image and national role for the American South, the dwindling power of major post-1945 social movements, and American citizens’ responses to forms of mobility and immobility in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Big claims for a simple mobile communications technology! But as other scholars in the history of technology and media have shown us, the cultural work performed by devices (from many eras but particularly those in the electronic age) goes far beyond their intended function.1 Scholars can frame urban history and the history of popular culture around histories of technology and invention just as much as they can frame such research around histories of migration, race, economics or gender. As a cultural historian I am interested in the resonances among time-place-­ people-things; in how a building or a pervasive idea or a change in perspective can reshape other stories far beyond that original starting point. For example, I have written about how the development of New York City’s skyscraper “landscape” at the turn of the twentieth century helped “Americanize” the city in the eyes of Americans who had thought the city too “foreign” both by sensibility and due to its large population of immigrants. So, similarly, I dug into the history of CB radio as part of a larger research project on sound in cities. What I learned from archival research in films, television shows, advertisements, and magazine and newspaper articles led me to understand CB radio as a catalyst for my own questions about histories of listening, aural perceptions of different voices and the role of nonmusical sound in shaping senses of belonging or marginalization especially in urban settings undergoing demographic change. When, why and to whom might the audibility of race and other forms of difference matter? As scholars of visual culture have argued, questions of the visual legibility of “identity” have mattered most at times of social-­ political change when the previously stable visual markers of, say, gender, class, sexuality or race became blurred; so too with questions of audible identification and its uncertainties. Mark Smith extensively documents in

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his book How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses the ­significance of all senses in the construction of race and the practice of racism in the southern United States from the antebellum period through the immediate postsegregation years after the 1954 U.S.  Supreme Court Brown vs. Board of Education decision mandating the desegregation of public schools. Smith argues that examining the history of the southern racial sensorium shows that “it was no accident that the most vicious sensory stereotypes whites applied to blacks occurred when certainty in the identification of race was evaporating.” Smith’s skillful examination of the interplay of the histories of the senses and of race and racism buttresses my own arguments here that the racialization of CB radio technology requires us to consider the history of the audibility of race.2 The audibility of race, and other forms of difference rendered in relation to white Anglo supremacy and heteronormativity, resonated with particular sharpness in the post-1945 social movement efforts to reorder America’s racial and other hierarchies. The voices of women, Latinx, queer and trans people in addition to those of African Americans began to reverberate through both reformist and liberation movements, in mainstream media attuned to stories of political and social disruption, through residential urban neighborhoods, and in street protests and marches. Post-­ World War II America sounded quite different than the preceding pre-war version. As this book will demonstrate, mobility—geographic, physical, social, economic, intellectual, cultural—produced audible difference by moving bodies, voices and ideas with a rapidity as well as a reach not seen (or heard) before the war, moving them into spaces, territories and ears not previously entered. The uses of citizens band radio provide stark examples of the interaction among mobility, audibility and difference, in particular with reference to the racial construction of “white” and “black” in mid- to late twentieth-century America. But that interaction exemplified through CB radio is better understood, and also complicated, by considering a larger context for audible difference and an expanded idea of “technology.” In this chapter I provide a first example of that larger context of the operation of audible difference preceding the era of CB radio’s mass popularity by listening to the Puerto Rican migration in the late 1940s and the 1950s; in the last chapter of the book my example again extends the audibility of difference to include queer Americans and expands the idea of “technology” to encompass the queer sensory intuition known colloquially as “gaydar.”

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The first major postwar migration from outside the mainland United States began in 1948, when many thousands of Puerto Ricans left home for New York City, in search of economic mobility and better opportunities than their island territory could offer. New York had not experienced a mass migration of this sort since the turn of the twentieth century. Immigration restriction legislation passed against Chinese immigrants in 1882, and subsequent laws targeting southern and eastern Europeans in the 1910s, and culminating in the 1924 National Origins Act had closed America’s doors to most sources of immigration other than western and northern Europe. So when Puerto Ricans came to New York in large numbers from 1948 to 1958, their presence represented certainly an audible, if not always a visible, sea change in many working-class neighborhoods—places already under increasing pressure in that same decade from urban planning initiatives to rid the city of “blight” by demolishing vital, if poor, tenement neighborhoods. In one of those neighborhoods, on Manhattan’s west side, beginning in 1948, commercial sound recordist Tony Schwartz undertook a series of personal recording projects. One of these local sound portraits ultimately resulted in a 1955 record album Schwartz entitled “Nueva York,” a project that emerged from Schwartz’s listening to his own changing neighborhood. Around 1948–1949, Schwartz had noticed a particular change in the cadences of his neighborhood—Spanish-language conversations on the street, merengue tunes and Puerto Rican folk ballads on the candy-­ store juke boxes, and the shrill complaints from his Euro-American neighbors about “those Puerto Ricans.” Recalling his father’s stories of his grandparents’ immigrations from Europe to New York at the turn of the century, especially the hardships they faced from discrimination, the confusion of a new language and the hostility of so-called native New Yorkers, Schwartz realized, he said, that he “had a chance to document a migration of a people to New York.” Recorded in a mixture of Spanish and English, Schwartz’s “Nueva York” album, distilling eight years of recording into a set of distinct tracks, was released on the Folkways Records label during the peak years of the Puerto Rican migration and New Yorkers’ varied responses to it.3 Listening to “Nueva York,” it becomes clear that the public spaces of the neighborhood cafes and candy stores offered some of Schwartz’s richest local environments for recording the Puerto Rican migration to the city’s west side. For example, he liked to record songs found on the stores’ jukeboxes written and performed by local migrants. Since he knew little

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Spanish himself, he would ask around the store or cafe until he found a Puerto Rican person who would provide him with a simultaneous translation of a song. Schwartz would put money in the jukebox and then place his microphone close to the translator while recording the jukebox song clearly enough in the background. An example of one such recording episode made it onto his “Nueva York” album. It is entitled “I’m Contagious.” You can listen to this album, and others by Schwartz, for free on the Smithsonian’s Folkways Records website. While you listen to the song, try to place the sounds you hear in a simple west side neighborhood cafe in the early 1950s. As you listen to the voice of the translator, think about what we can learn from the sound of his translation as well as the content he relays into Schwartz’s microphone. What we hear is a ballad-style song, played by a band consisting of trumpet, drums, guitar and maracas, drawing on lyrical and musical traditions inherited from colonial Spain as well as from Puerto Rican folk traditions. The song we hear tells of a migrant’s disappointment in his New York life, and he vows to return home to Puerto Rico. The singer says, according to the translator, he has become “contagious” since he came to New York—apparently infected with bad habits picked up from New Yorkers. The singer thus reverses the early twentieth-century association between immigrants and disease: in this case it is America that makes the migrant ill, not the other way around.4 What can we learn from listening to this recording that we might not learn from simply reading a translation? For example, we can get an impression of how the translator feels about the content of the song he is translating—what some might call his “affect” or emotional expression. The translator’s voice becomes more animated as the song continues, as though he identifies more openly with the singer’s feelings and experiences; he seems to move from the position of uninvolved translator to one where the words are almost his own. His accent also gets a little stronger as he relaxes and becomes more emotionally involved in the song’s lyrics; he gets pulled back into the Spanish language while still having to concentrate on providing a translation for Schwartz, standing next to him, microphone in hand. Relaying to an Anglophone American audience a song that would commonly have remained within the migrant community empowers the translator; he gives voice, in a way that non-Spanish speakers can hear and understand, to the feelings of a migrant, a figure frequently misunderstood and silenced by differences in power as well as differences in language.

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The various elements of this sonic artifact—the song itself, the voice of the translator, Tony Schwartz’s role as sound collector, and the time and place of the recording—tell us about one migrant’s story, about the role of song in the Puerto Rican migrant community, about the novelty to New Yorkers such as Schwartz of these newcomers and about how hidden much of that migrant culture was from other New Yorkers. The artifact thus provides evidence crucial to our understanding of place and time— 1950s Manhattan, the city’s west side—and the impact of the Puerto Rican migration on a specific neighborhood. Although Schwartz’s recordings offer a valuable primary source for research, we cannot know just by listening the extent to which it is representative of this community. “Nueva York” serves, however, at least as a representation of one white American’s perception of the migration’s impact on his neighborhood and the efforts of the newcomers to find their place in the city. Schwartz’s “Nueva York” project also, in effect, marks the post-World War II construction of “whiteness” that has prevailed since then and began with a shift in the racialization of American Jews such as Schwartz himself from immigrant “non-white” “others” in the early twentieth century to post-1945 American “whites.” This shift in the postwar racial economy occurred in response to the migrations of African Americans and Puerto Ricans into traditionally white working-class jobs and neighborhoods starting in the late 1940s. Jews, seen according to an early twentieth-­ century racial lexicon as part of the non-white immigrant masses, became incorporated into “whiteness” after the war to swell the ranks of so-called Caucasians resisting demographic and cultural change in order to buttress white racial supremacy. The role played by Puerto Ricans in this shift in the racial economy, usually interpreted as part of a visual economy of race (seeing difference), must be understood as part also of a sonic economy of race. Many Puerto Ricans in 1950s New York looked no different than their Italian-American and Jewish-American tenement neighbors—both populations by then classified as “white.” As we hear in Schwartz’s recordings, white Americans most easily marked Puerto Ricans’ difference audibly not visually. Four stories and their varied voices—of Tony Schwartz, the hit musical “West Side Story,” the changes in the local soundscape wrought by demographic change and the physical remaking of the west side resulting from “urban renewal”—began to converge physically and audibly on Manhattan’s west side around 1959 and 1960, bringing together in harmony and cacophony some of this chapter’s main actors. In the

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­ eighborhood where Tony Schwartz had recorded the jukebox song, and n where the fictional Jets and Sharks gangs clashed in “West Side Story,” New York City’s chief urban planner Robert Moses oversaw the demolition of those west side streets to make way for the city’s new arts center named Lincoln Center. In May 1959, as President Eisenhower broke ground at the planned site of Lincoln Center, the conductor of the New  York Philharmonic orchestra, Leonard Bernstein, led an on-site orchestra and choir in a rendition of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” bringing a vigorous assertion of the sounds of European high culture into the soundscape of a multicultural tenement neighborhood on the verge of destruction. Possibly the only force powerful enough to halt Robert Moses, and to interrupt the joyous chorus, even temporarily, was Hollywood: The next year, 1960, Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, the co-directors of the movie version of “West Side Story,” with a musical score by Leonard Bernstein, filmed the movie’s “Prologue” on location at West 61st Street in the middle of Moses’ demolition zone, requiring a halt to the tearing down of streets from which actual Puerto Rican and “white” working-­class residents had already been evicted. The musical and choreographical interventions of Bernstein, Robbins and the story’s writer Arthur Laurents in the unstable landscape of New York’s west side represented the recently precarious presence, in place since the 1920s, of gay Jewish men in the establishment of a twentieth-­ century “American sound” in tonal classical music. That network, stretching from Aaron Copeland to Bernstein, Paul Bowles and Ned Rorem, had adapted the training and traditions of European (especially French) composers to construct a classical soundscape for the United States that at times fused the indeterminate “racial” status of Jews in America with iconographic “Americana” while navigating what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called the “epistemology of the closet.” Historian and musicologist Nadine Hubbs analyzes the benefits and the dissonances of this compositional network from the turn to the middle of the twentieth century. As she shows, by 1961, when Bernstein and Robbins halted Robert Moses’ worksite, the “gay daddy” of the network—Aaron Copland—had already felt the sting of the Cold War backlash against leftists, Jews and homosexuals.5 The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated Copland as part of the anti-Communist “red scare” in the 1950s, resulting in the composer’s blacklisting and placement on the bureau’s list of over 100 artists with suspected Communist connections. Organizers of President Eisenhower’s inauguration in January 1953 removed Copland’s composition “Lincoln

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Portrait” from the celebrations, based on the composer’s damaged political reputation. Senator Joseph McCarthy and his chief counsel Roy Cohn questioned Copland in Washington DC that same year and continued actively investigating him for a further two years. The image of Leonard Bernstein, one of Copland’s protégés, effectively trouncing his mentor’s place in the American compositional hierarchy, as he waved his baton while that same President who had rejected Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait” put shovel to ground six years later, to initiate construction of the Lincoln Center, speaks to Bernstein’s occlusion of his homosexuality through (among other strategies) the performance of a heterosexual marriage. Bernstein’s ability, and willingness, to safeguard his musical career through marriage should not surprise us. Using marriage and sometimes fatherhood as a tactic to avoid detection of one’s homosexuality comprised a strategic move for gay men in an era when even the suggestion of sexual nonconformism could result in professional and personal ruin. Copland’s deliberate resistance to a personal performance of normativity posed greater risks, manifested in part by his professional vulnerability during the anti-Communism and institutionalized homophobia in the United States in the first two decades after the end of World War II. In 1961, the year the movie West Side Story was released, Jane Jacobs, champion of an older version of neighborhood vitality, published her urban planning manifesto, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs was particularly critical of the Lincoln Center project, which she saw as inhabiting a “planning island” designed to “decontaminate itself from the ordinary city.” Once again, we hear the metaphors of disease and contagion, taking us back to the Puerto Rican migrant’s song of decline, conveyed to Tony Schwartz in that same neighborhood. In 1950s New York, a negative interpreter of the west side’s changing demographics might well have seen and heard mutual “contaminations” under way. As a carrier of culture, sound is particularly vulnerable to metaphors of infection and contagion. Sound moves, often unbidden, across distances, through walls and windows, across streets and neighborhoods, and enters the body. We can shut our eyes to unwanted sights but we cannot shut our ears to sounds, or shield our bodies from their vibrations. How we interpret uninvited sounds, especially the sounds of change and difference, is subjective but shaped by our larger context. Do we hear them as pollutants, as carriers of cultural infection? Or do we hear them as evidence of vitality, progress? Jacobs’ book, like Tony Schwartz’s sound portraits, heard difference and diversity as the “keynotes” and “soundmarks” of the

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city’s urban public culture, connected to a larger continuing history of New York as a city of migrants, immigrants and mobilities.6 Jane Jacobs managed to stand up to Robert Moses as part of her efforts to defend the eclectic mixture of people, sounds and sights comprising older urban streetscapes, such as that of her home neighborhood in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. She defended Greenwich Village and nearby Washington Square Park from the destruction threatened by Moses’ proposed Cross Manhattan Expressway. One can hear her emphasis on movement, and her famous characterization of neighborhood urbanism—through the image of the everyday “ballet” of Hudson Street—as a call for a melodic intervention in mid-century planning’s monotone.7 Jacobs’ voice calls for a rhythm of urban life defined by a mix of the familiar and the occasionally strange; musically speaking, she calls for “variations” on a theme, a composition intended for dance and costume, for her everyday “ballet.” But Jacobs’ choreography left little room for improvisation or chance as she had no tolerance for indeterminacy. Neighborhood areas where public and private spaces lacked differentiation she referred to as “gray areas.” Jacobs, in her need for determinacy, could not sense the value of urban indeterminacy in parts of New York. Some of the “gray” areas near Jacobs’ west side Greenwich Village home formed crucial quiet, dark areas where gay men could cruise at a safe distance from the police as well as from Jacobs’ and her neighbors’ heteronormative “eyes on the street.” Jacobs’ suggested method for safeguarding urban “villages” (like her own Greenwich Village) centered on the watchfulness of local residents, able to spot a stranger and supposedly visibly distinguish the “good” stranger from the “bad.” The Hudson River piers and, moving north up the west side, the meatpacking district and the Chelsea piers represented gray/gay areas of indeterminacy. In such dark, quiet semi-industrial areas gay men could deploy their differently honed senses, listening for approaching footsteps and offering their own audible cues to strangers in the darkness—a whistle, a greeting, the offer of a light.8 The competing mobilities represented by Moses’ efforts to increase automobility in the city, Jacobs’ grassroots campaign to thwart Moses and preserve pedestrian mobility and the decade of the Puerto Rican migration and the remapping of major cities (and their working-class populations) such as New York through “urban renewal” overlapped with the first era of a new mobile communications technology for Americans: citizens band (CB) radio. The bandwidth made available for the citizens band service by

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the federal government, and the development and marketing by American corporations of the required radio equipment, represented a postwar nexus of scientific and technological research and production. It also represented a shift in communications policy to include citizen-led uses of radio, and a recognition of the vital role of electronic communications for the facilitation of security as well as economic progress—a literal and figurative mobilization, if you will, of America’s resources to dominate the second half of the twentieth century and “win” the Cold War, though at the cost of significant political repression of racialized and nonconformist Americans. Citizens band radio, its nomenclature invoking concepts of legal personhood bound to a history of white supremacy, as well as a postwar vision for American democracy standing in contrast to wartime fascism and postwar communism, materially embodied the contradictions of late twentieth-century America. As I will argue in the coming chapters, how American “citizens” used CB radio and why some Americans were not welcome or heard on that system enacted those same contradictions. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) first offered citizens band radio to the American public in 1948, but CB was not truly feasible for mass use until 1958 when the FCC set aside 23 channels for the service. The FCC’s idea was to use low-bandwidth frequencies to offer a way for motorists, isolated farmers or boaters to contact each other or emergency personnel in times of need. It was designed for brief, urgent communication, not for personal conversations of the sort conducted via telephone or in person.9 Long-distance truck drivers accounted for about a third of CB users before the CB radio craze of the mid-1970s. CB also proved useful for those whose work or leisure activities could be made safer or more efficient by mobile communication with a home base or with others involved in similar activities. Such users included farmers, sport fishermen and inshore boaters.10 CB radios achieved sudden mass popularity in the mid-1970s as a result of the publicity surrounding the December 1973–January 1974 independent truckers’ strike that followed on the heels of the 1973–1974 Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo. Newspapers, television and radio reported how truckers used their CB radios to contact each other and form illegal convoys, disrupting traffic and blocking highways, or to share information about police and highway patrol activity, and about gas stations with available and affordable gasoline. In 1974 Congress introduced the new national speed limit of 55 miles per hour (the “double nickel,” in CB slang) as a fuel

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c­ onservation measure, adding more pressure on independent truckers and increasing motorists’ desire to use CB to avoid officials enforcing the new speed limit.11 Sales of CB radio sets grew from two million in 1974 to five million in 1975, to a peak of approximately ten million in 1976. But by 1978, CB radio sales dropped abruptly, signaling that the CB craze had definitely waned.12 Market saturation and, more importantly, the congestion of CB channels by large numbers of users contributed to the decline of the CB fad. During the 1970s, popular and consumer culture quickly picked up on the CB fad. An epidemic of CB-related movies, television shows including NBC’s Movin’ On (1974–1978) and novelty items became popular in the United States between 1974 and 1978. Movies like Convoy (dir. Sam Peckinpah, 1978), Breaker! Breaker! (dir. Don Hulette, 1977), White Line Fever (dir. Jonathan Kaplan, 1975) and Smokey and the Bandit (dir. Hal Needham, 1978) provided a series of handsome, lovable rebels. All white, male southerners, these heroes drove 18-wheelers or fast cars and used their CB radios to outwit pesky sheriffs, corrupt judges and cops. Country-­ western singer C. W. McColl’s hit song “Convoy”—one of many popular songs about CB radio that received extensive airplay in the 1970s— inspired Peckinpah’s movie of the same name. First Lady Betty Ford got into CB while campaigning for her husband Gerald in 1976—with the adopted “handle” (or CB radio-user nickname) “First Mama.”13 Rumor has it that Gerald Ford’s favorite television show was NBC’s Movin’ On, so perhaps Betty Ford’s dabbling in CB helped connect her not only to the latest fad among the electorate but also to her husband’s interests.14 In stark contrast to its popular image as the tool of trucker culture, working- and lower-middle-class white men driving ordinary passenger cars formed CB’s largest market. The majority of articles about, and advertisements for, CB radio appeared in such publications as Popular Mechanics, Popular Electronics, Hot Rod and Car and Driver, which at the time assumed a male readership. By 1977 drivers of passenger vehicles outnumbered truckers as CB users by about five to one.15 CB’s appeal to this market’s population of tinkerers, geeks and auto enthusiasts lay partly in the technology’s association with the hypermasculine, renegade image of the long-distance truck driver—certainly the main users of CB radio before its wider marketing in the mid-1970s. One might speculate that participating in a technoculture supposedly rooted in the butch world of truckers appealed to white working-class and lower-middle-class men in the mid-1970s looking for ways to assert themselves in an America shaped by

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a decade or more of civil rights, feminism, gay rights, black power and defeat in Vietnam. To cap it off, the nation’s leading white male—President Richard Nixon—had just been caught in his own shameful web of political scandal. The backlash against the rights- and cultural identity–based politics of the 1960s and early 1970s coalesced particularly among straight, white men who saw the dominance of their race, gender and sexuality challenged by formerly marginalized and disempowered women, blacks and gays. CB’s association with manly truck drivers no doubt contributed to its appeal to straight white men but, as I will show, their enthusiasm for this technology drew on deeper political and cultural trends of mid-­ 1970s America.

Notes 1. One excellent example of such work is Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 2. Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 10. On race in sound studies, see also Gustavus Stadler, “Never Heard Such a Thing: Lynching and Phonographic Modernity,” in Social Text, no. 102 (Spring 2010): 87–105. 3. Tony Schwartz quote from record sleeve notes, “Nueva York: A Tape Documentary of Puerto Rican New Yorkers,” New York: Folkways Records and Service Corp., 1955. Schwartz’s work has received very little attention from scholars though I hope that will change. The other scholar who has published on Schwartz is Jennifer Lynn Stoever. See her article “Splicing the Sonic Color Line: Tony Schwartz Re-Mixes Postwar Nueva York,” Social Text 102, vol. 28, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 59–85. She and I both presented on Tony Schwartz at the 2006 American Studies Association annual meeting though unaware of each other. Stoever’s article on Tony Schwartz is notable also for her early articulation of the terms “sonic color line” and “listening ear” she goes on to deploy so effectively as analytical tools in her book The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016). 4. Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century immigration to the United States, and the negative portrayals of those immigrants, is covered extensively in works such as Matt Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Angela (now Art) M.  Blake, How New  York Became American, 1890–1924 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

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5. Nadine Hubbs, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 6. I use the terms “keynote” and “soundmark” here in the manner developed as part of an analytical lexicon developed by R.  Murray Schafer, the Canadian composer and one of the first scholars of sound, in his groundbreaking work The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (originally 1977; Toronto: Destiny Books, 1993). 7. Jacobs, Death and Life, 153. 8. The history of cruising, like the history of effeminacy, is not well developed in academic studies despite the large body of scholarship on various aspects of gay, lesbian and queer histories and cultures. An academic history of hustlers’ sexuality can be found in Barry Reay, New York Hustlers: Masculinity and Sex in Modern America (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010). See also Mark Turner, Backward Glances: Cruising Queer Streets in London and New York (London: Reaktion Books, 2004). 9. For a detailed account of the FCC’s intentions regarding citizens band radio, see Carolyn Marvin and Quentin J.  Schutze, “The First Thirty Years” [“CB in Perspective,” special section], Journal of Communication 27 (Summer 1977): 104–77; especially 109. 10. Citizens Band Radio and the Future of the Portable Telephone (New Canaan, Conn.: International Resources Development, 1977), 54–55. 11. Most magazine and newspaper articles about CB radio published at the height of national interest in CB, from 1975 to 1977, made reference to the recent introduction of the speed limit, the truckers’ strike and the use of CB to avoid police and highway patrol speed traps. See, for example, “The Bodacious New World of C.B.,” Time, 10 May 1976, 78–79; “Citizen’s-­Band Radio: Danger of Air Pollution?” U.S. News and World Report, 7 March 1977, 76–77; “Hey Good Buddy: CU Rates CB Radios,” Consumer Reports 42, no. 10 (October 1977): 563; Brock Yates, “One Lap of America,” Car and Driver, February 1975, 27–30, 75–77; “Nuisance or a Boon? The Spread of Citizens’ Radios,” U.S.  News and World Report, 29 September 1975, 26–28; William Jeanes, “Tuning in Justice on Your CB Radio Dial,” Car and Driver, July 1975, 10. 12. Articles about CB radio published during the years of the building CB craze commented on the rapidly rising sales of CB radio sets. See, for example, “The Newest Hobby: Kibitzing by Radio …,” Forbes, 15 July 1975, 16–17; J. D. Reed, “A Big 10–4 on the Call of the Wild,” Sports Illustrated, 29 March 1976, 36–38, 47–48. 13. “The Bodacious New World of C.B.,” 78. 14. An article written a few years after the CB craze of the 1970s discusses the gender politics of CB handles: J.  Jerome Smith, “Gender Marking on

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Citizen Band Radio: Self-Identity in a Limited Channel Speech Community,” Sex Roles, 7, no. 6 (1981): 599–606. The author argues that “differential analysis of a sample of male and female handles reveals that men project virility, while women collectively refrain from any significant degree of gender marking” (599). The choice of a handle bearing a close connection to one’s “real” identity was not always typical among CB users in the 1970s. Many CB users chose handles that achieved a certain amount of reimagining and repackaging of themselves. The power to rename oneself as an adult within this new communications environment of (potentially) total anonymity provided CB users the chance to reinvent themselves in the oral/aural nonvisual world of CB. The use of handles also served to connect CB users to the intrigue associated with other uses of code names, such as the world of spies and secret agents; for some CB users, renaming themselves through a handle might have served to override the memory of unchosen names they had been given in their lives, such as unwanted nicknames from childhood. This aspect of CB culture also anticipates the widespread use of online user names on the Internet and of carefully constructed “avatars” in online games such as Second Life. On the construction of online identities, see Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Michael Rymaszewski et al., Second Life: The Official Guide, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, N.J.: Sybex, 2008); Jesper Juul, Half Life: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005). 15. Citizens Band Radio and the Future of the Portable Telephone (New Canaan, Conn.: International Resources Development, 1977), 60.

CHAPTER 2

The Sounds of White Vulnerability

Abstract  Although film, television and mass-market CB radio ephemera represented CB as anti-authoritarian, its use frequently allied it with forces of law and order, certainly with a mostly white, male network of “good buddies” eager to effect control over their individual and community lives. In Los Angeles in particular, the local racial-political context during the years of the CB radio fad—roughly 1975–1978—created an ideal environment for such racialized uses of CB radio. I argue here that working- and lower-middle-class white men in Los Angeles in the 1970s used CB radio to create an audible sense of order. Faced with newspaper articles suggesting high levels of crime committed by black men against white people on L.A. freeways, and feeling a keen sense of isolation and cultural or socioeconomic vulnerability in their daily lives, they derived reassurance from hearing other apparently “white” voices of fellow citizens within the paradoxically vulnerable and impregnable environment of the private car on the public roadway. Keywords  CB • Whiteness • Class • Race • Los Angeles • Fear

The 1977 documentary film CB Radio: A New Hue and Cry, produced with the assistance of retired Los Angeles police officer Lee Kirkwood, opens with a detailed costume drama set in a medieval town. A ship’s © The Author(s) 2019 A. M. Blake, Radio, Race, and Audible Difference in Post-1945 America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31841-3_2

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captain observes a thief stealing from the blind beggar who sits in the busy marketplace. Seeing the theft, the captain and other citizens give chase to the robber, calling out “stop thief!” and gathering an ever-larger crowd as they pursue him through the town, eventually catching him. A male voiceover informs the viewer that in those days “any citizen witnessing a crime was bound by common law to raise what was known as a ‘hue and cry.’ All those who heard this hue and cry were obliged to join in until the authorities were alerted. A simple means of community involvement—of people banding together to make their lives and the lives of those around them safer.” While the narration suggests this is all quite “simple,” in fact what plays out is a conservative representation of community hierarchy, leadership and action to protect the status quo: a powerful male directs the community to act in response to an attack on a vulnerable member of their society. But neither that leader nor the community wishes to change the social status of the victim—they are all happy for him to continue begging at their feet as they go on with their regular trading activities. The screen image freezes on the face of a townsperson in mid-cry while the soundtrack fades in a male voice and then his image as he talks into his citizens band (CB) radio while driving his car. He’s reporting to his neighborhood CB network monitor that there’s a “prowler” outside a house. His call results in a police cruiser arriving and the arrest of the alleged prowler. As the film’s title and opening scenes suggest, the “hue and cry” of a long-ago era is supposedly linked in spirit and effectiveness to the technological “hue and cry” made possible in the 1970s by ordinary townsfolk equipped with citizen band radios. This scenario departs from the popular image of CB radio’s mid-1970s heyday presented in such films as Smokey and the Bandit. Although film, television and mass-market CB radio ephemera represented CB as anti-­ authoritarian, in fact its use frequently allied it with forces of law and order, certainly with a mostly white, male network of “good buddies” eager to effect control over their individual and community lives. In Los Angeles in particular, the local racial-political context during the years of the CB radio fad—roughly 1975–1978—created an ideal environment for such racialized uses of CB radio. I argue here that working- and lower-­ middle-­class white men in Los Angeles in the 1970s used CB radio to create an audible sense of order. Faced with newspaper articles suggesting high levels of crime committed by black men against white people on L.A. freeways, and feeling a keen sense of isolation and cultural or socioeconomic

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vulnerability in their daily lives, they derived reassurance from hearing other apparently “white” voices of fellow citizens within the paradoxically vulnerable and impregnable environment of the private car on the public roadway. The use of CB radio, a newly mass-produced mobile communications device, in 1970s Los Angeles among predominantly white drivers to assist in policing the mobility and mobile behaviors of fellow Angelenos served to reinforce the structures of mobility and immobility that kept white residents feeling secure and unimpeded. Los Angeles, more than other U.S. cities in the late twentieth century, was defined by the idea and the practices of mobility—most obviously automobility, but also social mobility and the mobilities of migration and immigration that continually redefined its demographics and local geographies. However, the historic immobility of the city’s black population—its stasis in South Central and the proximate neighborhoods of Watts and Compton—puts the lie to Los Angeles as the mobility city. Cultural historians and cultural theorists have repeatedly linked motion, mobility and vision as the triumvirate of modernity. The interrelated motions and emotions of driving, specifically freeway driving, most famously represented by Joan Didion’s distraught character Maria in the 1970 novel of Los Angeles Play It as It Lays, are based in the relation between car and driver—or, as sociologist Tim Dant has described it, the “driver-car,” a human-machine assemblage formed during driving. Ideally, the car-and-driver enters into its own symbiosis while traversing the Mobility City (Los Angeles), within an “ecology” described as “autopia” by Reyner Banham in his famous panegyric to Los Angeles. However, such “autopian” experiences are always shaped by race, by class and by gender, factors ignored by Banham in his sensuous response to the motorscape of Los Angeles—though he wrote the initial essays in 1968, only three years after black residents of Watts mobilized violently in the streets to protest their continued social, economic and geographic immobility.1 I argue that the late twentieth-century, mostly white, mobility of freeway driving, defined by the Los Angeles freeways and by an inattentive and unfocused seeing, rendered the audible significant in new ways as each driver entered into his or her desired “autopic” state of self-invention and fantasy. CB radio allowed white drivers to construct and utter aloud their mobile narratives as well as to listen to and comment on those of their fellow CB-connected drivers. This mobile communication, with its peculiar

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slang and accent, its mixture of intimacy and anonymity, offered reassurance by creating an audible community of whiteness. If the motorized journey links us to modernity via the cinematic way of seeing, then the audibility of mobile communications during such journeys completed the connection: CB provided the soundtrack to the silent black-and-white mov(i)es of the L.A. freeways.2 Historical research has shown how southern California, especially the Los Angeles region, proved vital to the growth of “sunbelt” conservatism and its role in the making of the New Right during the 1970s. Historians Lisa McGirr and Becky Nicolaides both argue convincingly for the region’s significance for late twentieth-century conservatism. McGirr’s study of Orange County examines the role of the area’s new suburban communities in moving the Republican Party’s focus away from the specter of communism and toward questions of morality, “law and order” and local autonomy. Nicolaides’ research on the working-class suburbs of Los Angeles, especially South Gate, which abuts Watts, concludes in 1965, showing how questions of race, neighborhood and homeownership shaped the conservatism that then marked those predominantly white communities during the late 1960s and 1970s and conclusively separated them from their black neighbors.3 Historian Matthew Lassiter argues for a spatial and class-based rather than a primarily racial explanation for the rise of the “sunbelt South” in American politics. Eschewing previous studies that have made a southern exceptionalism argument for the political realignments of the 1960s and 1970s, Lassiter argues that the class-based interests of America’s northern as well as southern suburban homeowners drove U.S. politics, and the move to the right, during the late 1960s and the 1970s. Crucially, federal disavowal of civil rights–based measures to support school and residential desegregation came as a result of mostly white suburban voters in both the North and South virulently asserting their will to protect and defend (as they saw it) their (homogeneous) communities. This shared, defensive suburban homeowner politics joined North and South in an effectively racist (but officially “color-blind”) Republican coalition in the 1970s.4 But the sunbelt states and their major cities and suburbs, stretching from Florida to southern California, provided the majority of the electoral demographic that began as the “Silent Majority” and evolved into the New Right under Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The ascendant economy and cultural capital of the South rapidly permeated American popular culture in the 1970s. With the election of

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Jimmy Carter, former governor of Georgia, to the presidency in 1976, the South had a hold on national power—though the many southerners who had moved to the political right by that date (their votes specifically courted by Barry Goldwater, George Wallace and Richard Nixon) may not have shared much common ideological ground with Carter. But Carter’s homely, if inaccurate, image as the peanut-farmer president with the winning smile, and his seeming trustworthiness in the aftermath of Nixon and Watergate, fit with a new national willingness to embrace things southern. Country music, cowboy boots and cowboy hats—southern and southwestern cultural icons previously shunned or mocked by urban northeasterners—became high fashion in New York, Boston and Chicago in the mid- to late 1970s. We should add CB radio, connected at least in popular culture to southern culture and southern masculinity, to this list of imports from below the Mason-Dixon line.5 We should understand the use and popularity of CB radio in the area as part of the armory of white-middle-class self-defense community politics that underpinned the rise of the New Right. As Lisa McGirr has shown, the New Right put down some of its strongest roots during the late 1960s in the sunbelt communities of southern California. Orange County, part of the freeway-connected commuter region with its growing high-tech workforce, some of whom had recently migrated from southern states, proved particularly receptive to the emerging New Right ideology. A focus on “law and order” and the citizen-based defense of middle-class, white communities and their property values lay at the heart of New Right Republicanism. The Los Angeles area formed a fertile ground for the growth of New Right politics because of the growing prosperity of the largely white suburban communities benefiting from the area’s success in new high-tech industries and the presence of a large, increasingly frustrated minority population against whom these white suburbanites felt a need to defend themselves.6 The Los Angeles area formed an especially large market for CB radio during the 1970s. The Los Angeles Times reported in May 1976 that the FCC acknowledged Los Angeles as the CB radio capital of the United States, with approximately one million licensed CB users. Starting in 1964 the FCC required all owners of CB radio equipment to apply for and obtain a license, and to have read a copy of the relevant FCC regulations pertaining to that class of radio equipment, before using their CB radios. U.S. citizens over the age of 18 could obtain a CB license from stores selling CB equipment or from one of the FCC’s field offices. The license

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application required neither special knowledge nor any test of ability, asking only for the applicant’s name, date of birth, address, citizenship status and the number of CB units the applicant planned to have in use. Some popular CB radio handbooks included advice on how to fill out the license forms and reiterated the importance of obtaining the license for legal CB radio use. The FCC gradually modified CB licensing rules during the 1970s, reducing the cost of a CB license from $20 per year to $4 per year and allowing CB owners to start using their equipment while they awaited approval of their license applications. In 1978 the FCC abandoned the CB licensing requirement altogether—most likely because of enforcement problems and, during the height of the consumer craze for CB in the mid-­ 1970s, the swamping of the FCC’s licensing office in Gettysburg (reportedly 200,000 applications a month in mid-1975). Although the FCC and various published popular guides to CB radio use made clear the legal requirement of a license (until 1978), comments in the popular guides and in newspaper and periodical articles suggested that CBers commonly flouted FCC regulations.7 Assuming that some percentage (perhaps as high as 50 or even 80 percent) of CB users never bothered to obtain the FCC license legally required for operating a CB radio, the actual number of CB users in Los Angeles in 1976 probably far exceeded the FCC’s figure of one million.8 CB radio’s popularity during the 1970s in Los Angeles and southern California is not surprising. More than most areas of the United States at the time, Los Angeles was a city of roads and road users, a poly-nucleated city of close to three million people, commuting each day in all directions. By the mid-1970s, the freeway system was almost as fully developed as it is today, the largest, most complex freeway system in the country. The population of the greater Los Angeles area was spread out across about 400 square miles. With virtually no workable public transit system following the demise during the 1940s of the once extensive and well-used streetcars, most area residents had to rely on automobiles for transportation. The completion of the freeway system in Los Angeles coincided with the rapid growth of the city and region after World War II. Although the area’s first freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway, was completed in 1940, most freeway construction did not get fully under way until the 1950s, following the passage of California’s Collier Burns Highway Act of 1947. Some major freeways remained unfinished until the late 1960s. For example, the construction of the Santa Monica freeway took place between 1961 and 1966, and the completion of the San Diego freeway

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did not occur until 1969. Lauded by business interests and most state and local politicians as the latest evidence of “progress,” for many poorer and minority Angelenos the advent of the freeway age meant the bulldozing or division of their neighborhoods, leading to increased spatial isolation from the suburbanized, privatized Los Angeles of the later twentieth century.9 The years of freeway construction, especially its latter stages, also coincided with the emergence of a new phase of racial politics in Los Angeles. The sons and daughters of Los Angeles’s World War II–era black migrants grew increasingly frustrated, as did younger African Americans elsewhere in the United States during the late 1960s and into the 1970s, with their parents’ politics of integration. From the early twentieth century when W. E. B. Du Bois had first written glowingly about Los Angeles as a place of settlement and opportunity for African Americans through World War II, when the area offered decent jobs for African Americans, black expectations of greater success in Los Angeles than in many other parts of the United States had run high.10 But by the mid-1960s, those good jobs had grown fewer in number and those hopes for a good life in the area seemed unfounded for black Americans. As Josh Sides argues in his study of black Los Angeles, just as civil rights leaders had begun to make headway in securing unionized, well-paid blue-collar work for black men, those jobs rapidly disappeared. Manufacturing and industrial plants moved further away from black neighborhoods like South Central to take advantage of cheaper real estate in more middle-class, more “white,” locations in the suburbs. Other jobs moved overseas or disappeared entirely as American businesses faltered in competition with a larger world of industrial production in the postwar period.11 In a city and region defined by “automobility,” connecting police eyes and ears to a population seemingly always in motion posed special challenges. In 1965, the inadequacy of police telecommunications became apparent to officers and to frightened citizens on the first night of the Watts riot when the police dispatcher tried in vain to keep pace with calls for police assistance.12 Beginning in 1974, police departments in the Los Angeles area began developing plans for a technically superior and more coordinated police radio network. The efforts to improve police radio and other emergency communications resulted in part from the telecommunication chaos of the Watts riot. A 1969 study examining the Watts riot revealed that “different police agencies found that they could not easily communicate with one another.”13 Clearly, improved mobile radio

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communications would be a key technology for the police in the decade following Watts. Police, highway patrol officers and white citizens experimented with various forms of radio communications in post-Watts Los Angeles for surveillance of the city’s main arteries of population movement and circulation—the freeways. In the early 1970s, the L.A. police force still had an inadequate radio network. The system allowed officers to call from their police cars into their division’s dispatcher to relay information or requests for assistance. Likewise, the dispatcher could contact the police radio cars. But since all communication, emergency and nonemergency, went through the same channel and the same dispatcher, those involved found it difficult to prioritize urgent messages. In addition, the lack of mobile communication for police officers outside of their cars also slowed down the communication between the division and the cop on the beat. In the 1970s the L.A. Police Department still used police street telephones for foot patrol officers to communicate with their division or local department. A federal government push to set up an emergency telephone scheme—what became the 911 system—required all areas of the United States to come up with a plan by January 1, 1975, for how they would create their part of the new communications procedure. The 911 emergency number became active across much of the United States by the early 1980s.14 During the mid-1970s, Los Angeles area residents heard a new sound related to crime control and police communication: regular police helicopter patrols. Initially, some residents experienced more rather than less fear when they heard and saw a police helicopter in their neighborhood. According to the Los Angeles Times, one woman in a North Hollywood neighborhood fled back into her house, fearing “a criminal was roaming nearby,” when she heard a police helicopter overhead and then saw its spotlight illuminating a nearby street corner. As she recalled hearing other helicopter patrols recently, she explained, her next thought “was that crime seemed to be really getting out of hand in the neighborhood.” The article commented on the “added urban anxiety” caused by the helicopter patrols but stated that, despite this, a police survey had found “most people welcome the helicopter. … They know crime is getting out of hand in some neighborhoods and they are glad to see concrete evidence of crime repression.” While such obvious visual surveillance may have comforted some Angelenos fearful about crime in the 1970s, it did not solve the problem of feeling alone and unable to call for help when driving the freeways.15

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In the city’s larger political context, the quotidian task of freeway driving easily lent itself to racial paranoia. Many black men adversely affected by job loss and increasing hopelessness in neighborhoods such as Watts and South Central, and portrayed in the popular media as most likely to get involved in criminal activities, could not afford to own a car, yet the specter of the mobile black male criminal spreading misery and mayhem from his car appeared repeatedly in the press during the late 1960s and the 1970s. Popular news media combined this old American icon of white male fear with the new 1970s icon of the politicized hijacker or kidnapper. Articles in the Los Angeles Times reported stories of black men hijacking commuter buses or private vehicles, or pulling over to assist young white female drivers only to then kidnap and assault them. In early August 1974, three armed black men “terrorized and robbed” the passengers and driver of a Greyhound bus on the Ventura freeway that was bound for San Francisco from Los Angeles. One of the passengers, a tourist from Sweden, reported to the press that “one of the highwaymen kept screaming, ‘I hate you, I hate you, you white sonsabitches. Give me your money.’” The robbers had boarded the bus in the downtown L.A.  Greyhound station— apparently without anyone seeing they had two handguns and a sawed-off shotgun with them. When the men had finished robbing the passengers, the bus had reached Camarillo, about an hour out of Los Angeles. At that point the robbers told the driver to pull the bus over, and they got off the bus and ran to a waiting car that drove back in the direction of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times article reported that police said a similar holdup involving three gunmen had happened a few months earlier, in April, on a Greyhound bus traveling from Los Angeles to San Diego. In early March 1976, the Times reported yet another three-man holdup, this time on the Hollywood “Freeway Flyer” commuter bus. Again, all three armed robbers were described by witnesses as black. In all of these bus holdups, the drivers had no means of getting help or sending out any distress call until they could run to find a freeway telephone or find police assistance after the gunmen had left.16 The fear-mongering about dangerous black men on the L.A. freeways fit with a larger national narrative about the vulnerability of the generally whiter suburbs to encroachments from the generally poorer, more black, inner cities. By the 1970s, freeways, beltways and highways connected the outer- and inner-city areas of large U.S. metropolitan areas. An August 1976 New York Times article referred to a recent FBI report showing a 10

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percent increase from the previous year in serious crimes in suburbs nationwide. Apparently, suburbanites believed that “inner-city minority resident[s] who journey out of the city to find more affluent victims” had caused the problems. Statements from police officers around the country supported the suburbanites’ fears, suggesting that roadways connecting downtowns to suburbs might become criminal conduits. The article quoted Daryl F. Gates, then an assistant police chief in Los Angeles who later became the notoriously hardline chief, as saying “anyone can jump in a car, get on the freeway, rob a house and be back in the inner city in an hour.”17 In the film CB Radio: A New Hue and Cry, a Los Angeles police officer, standing next to a freeway and speaking directly into the camera, states that although the freeways were “designed for safety and efficiency … when emergencies do occur, [this] can be a lonely and isolated place.” Therefore, he suggested, freeways were “just a natural place” for drivers to use their CB radios. In Los Angeles, a city defined for white suburbanites by daily use of the freeways, and under these historic circumstances of urban-suburban anxiety, the rapid deployment of CB radio in passenger cars suggests its use as a technology of white rescue. The potential victims of freeway crime were, as implied in the newspaper stories referred to earlier, white. Drivers’ inability to call for help—to set up a “hue and cry”— created particular fears on the freeways. With their fellow citizens sealed off behind their own car windows, their eyes staring at the road ahead and their ears perhaps “tuned” to a music radio station, motorists in distress had little means of attracting reliable help on the freeway. To many white freeway drivers, installing CB radios in passenger vehicles may have seemed the best protection.18 Given Angelenos’ dependence on roadways, newspaper stories about crime and violence on the freeways exacerbated the local version of a broadbased urban anxiety at play in the postwar American city. The race riots in U.S. cities during the 1960s firmly connected race, the city, crime and violence in the minds of most Americans. During the same decade, larger postwar changes such as economic restructuring, urban renewal and the growth of suburbs lent credence to the status of American cities as zones of crime and fear. By the late 1970s many white Americans had a heightened fear of crime against both person and property. In Los Angeles, some fear connecting the freeways with violent crime seemed justified based on the reporting of violent, unsolved murders in the 1970s. Front-­page articles in the Los Angeles Times in 1977 reported stories about new victims from what the police viewed as the work of two serial killers, thought

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to have begun in 1975. In both series of killings, the police found the victims’ bodies near major roads and freeways.19 The connection between the freeway—upon which a large population relied so heavily—and violent crime made that transportation system a zone of fear and danger. By the 1970s, Los Angeles’s system of automobile circulation—unmatched in the United States—had started to earn a reputation as a zone of lawlessness, danger and possibly a racial battleground. The larger context of U.S. urban concerns during the 1970s provides a framework for interpreting the use of CB radio to combat white urban fear. Motivated by events like the notorious murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens, New York, in 1964, in which citizen/neighbor inaction purportedly contributed to the crime, communities began to form groups— loosely allied with local police forces—to take steps to provide citizen-to-citizen security in urban neighborhoods.20 The efforts began in the 1960s and grew in strength and numbers through the 1970s and 1980s, exemplified in the Neighborhood Watch system. Through Neighborhood Watch programs, citizens attempted to address their feelings of fear and insecurity in urban neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs’ argument for the role played by “eyes on the street” in keeping small urban neighborhoods safe for their inhabitants became a popular rallying cry not only for those trying, like Jacobs, to prevent the redevelopment of intimate older urban neighborhoods, but also for those frustrated with the lack of effective policing of local streets to prevent casual street crime such as purse-snatching and mugging. The notion of designing residential buildings and neighborhoods as “defensible space” also contributed to this discussion about ways to combat urban crime and feelings of fear and insecurity. A 1987 article looking back at earlier studies of Neighborhood Watch programs found that such efforts had done little to solve fear and urban crime issues. Furthermore, residents of relatively low-crime, middle-­ class, white neighborhoods most frequently formed Neighborhood Watch groups. In some instances, the community meetings and door-to-door visits by Watch proponents actually increased levels of fear and anxiety about crime and personal safety.21 As citizens took steps to defend and secure their homes and neighborhoods, the relative insecurity of their private automobiles became apparent. While cars had seemed to represent a defensible, safe, private space, the unpredictable and sometimes dangerous realm of the public urban roadways threatened that automobile safety. Essentially a mobile private environment, the car bridged the securable spaces of home and work.

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During the high-crime and fearful urban 1970s, the car’s (and therefore the driver’s) exposure to strangers traveling at high speeds along ­inadequately surveilled roadways suggested the need to seek contact and community among trustworthy strangers with whom one hoped to share the roads. The problem was how to identify them. Based on her extensive fieldwork in large U.S. cities, urban sociologist Lyn Lofland argued in 1973 that the modern city had become “a world of strangers,” that its inhabitants struggled to create order because they could no longer use codes of visual appearance to distinguish between a good stranger and a bad stranger. Modern city dwellers relied, she argued, on a system of spatial ordering to replace an older pre-industrial system of visual ordering.22 In this spatial system, anxiety occurs when someone tries to function socially outside their normal territory or when they see a “stranger”—someone unfamiliar in that space, someone “out of place.” According to Lofland, the modern city dweller had to possess the ability to create some kind of order out of the apparently disordered urban environment. Given the large city’s necessary production of mobility, especially via public roadways, locational ordering had limited usefulness. To create a deeper and more reliable sense of order, Lofland argued, the individual must “privatize public space” to limit the unsettling sense of living in a “world of strangers.”23 The creation of “home territories” within unpredictable urban public spaces “contribute[d] to the overall spatial order on which the modern urbanite depends.”24 However, the necessity of moving between “home territories” (the individual’s actual home, neighborhood or usual workplace) that characterized the life of the large-­ city resident itself created the necessity of forming what Lofland calls “mobile ‘homes.’”25 “The traveling pack”—a group of friends or family members making their way through and into public spaces as a group— might form such a “mobile home.” But, since most urbanites had to move through and inhabit public spaces as “loners,” they had to change the nature of their relationship to public space by “creat[ing] … a symbolic shield of privacy.”26 The loner thus adopts the affect of impassivity, of emotionlessness, avoiding physical and eye contact with others; the loner remains aloof.27 Accepting Lofland’s evidence and analysis, one can see that the appeal of using CB radio on the public roadways of a large, sprawling city such as Los Angeles lay in the ability to use that technology to create community, “home territory” and order, and to negate the effect of affectlessness (or aloofness) adopted by urban dwellers in the 1970s in response to the prevailing fear of, and insecurity among, strangers.

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Used as a tool to create community and order and to combat fear, CB radio also broke open the private, commodified, passive listening space of the car. CB radio in cars signified a permeation of the barrier between public and private—a barrier that had defined driving, as well as broadcasting and commercial radio practices. “The public” normally existed outside one’s car—the other people enclosed in their own private cars, on the public roadway, often feared simply because they were “strangers.” The public-while-private environment of CB radio offered a way to connect with strangers—a practice that, for some citizens in the 1970s, may have seemed especially fraught with danger. As one CB-using commuter put it, in a New York Times article during the fall of 1977, “People in their cars feel more secure and less threatened about reaching out to one another. Each individual CB-er on the road is, collectively, a member of a fraternity. … Outside of the protective isolation of my car, I’m not too likely to speak to a stranger in an elevator or on the street.”28 One joined a passive, commodified public by tuning into commercial radio and music production via AM-FM car radio. With CB installed in the car, the driver invited into that private space a largely non-commodified, active public of fellow “citizens”—with CB, “public” became “community.” Of course, that “community” remained an imagined one until put to the test by the needs of one of its members. But, as one study found, CB users regarded other CBers, even those entirely unknown to them, as more “friendly” than other strangers. Perhaps driven by a particularly strong desire for “community,” the Times article suggested, CB users assumed that even in the absence of any evidence to support the claim, fellow CBers were, in fact, their “good buddies.”29 Of course, CB radio did not entirely remove fear and suspicion of strangers. A CB user had no guarantee that the person behind the voice matched his apparent audible identity.30 The “good buddies” of a driver’s audible community might be the “commuter criminals” he so feared. As one 1977 academic study suggested, “[t]he distressed motorist one stops to aid, or the motorist who comes to aid the one in distress may be a mugger or rapist.”31 The construction of, and reliance on, such audible community required a leap of faith grounded in a fear deeper than the fear of being misled. Crucial to any understanding of the cultural work of CB radio is, then, a sense of why and how CB radio users constructed a sense of “public” and “private” on the road different from that adhered to by non-CB-using Americans during the 1970s. In Los Angeles, the nation’s CB radio capital,

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for the city’s mostly white CB radio users on the freeways, “public” and “private” connoted “black” and “white.” The public comprised the strangers one feared or mistrusted. In that context, African Americans comprised the “public” most feared by whites. Therefore, CB users transformed “public” from its connotation of “fear–stranger–black” into the more positive “safety–friend–white.” To reimagine “the public” as friendly and safe required reimagining that public, those strangers, as white. It seems clear that part of what was at stake for CB users, and what they therefore constructed, consisted of a transformation of “public/black” into “community/white.” The actual sound of CB radio contributed, in part, to this transformation and reimagination. CB’s actual sound became, in a sense, its message and contributed to the formation of white, male community on the freeways. The sound quality of CB radio transmissions and the sonic performance of CB users defined CB radio in the 1970s. That sound differed markedly from the sound of broadcast radio, particularly as commercial stations moved from AM to FM, acquiring a clearer broadcast signal. CB radio sound involved varying amounts of static (depending on proximity to electromagnetic interference—especially in urban areas). Also, because the technology did not allow users to talk and listen at the same time, it fostered a staccato speaking style, making conversation halting as each party logged on and off the channel. But the poor sound quality and on-off style that mitigated against smooth conversation constituted part of CB’s appeal. These features reinforced the amateurish and community-based aspects of CB radio that added to its “outside the mainstream,” non-commercial, maverick identity.32 In addition, as part of CB radio’s paradoxical character, that sound-­and-­ style combination connected the CB user to an imagined world of law enforcement inspired by years of radio and television police dramas featuring police officers tersely communicating crucial information over crackly police radios. Beginning in 1949 with the radio version of Dragnet, the police show set in Los Angeles and made with the cooperation and involvement of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), the dramatized sound of crime prevention and the maintenance of law and order had become quite familiar to Americans. Dragnet moved to television in 1951 and established the genre on that new medium. Highway Patrol, a syndicated television show (1955–1959), shot on location in southern California with the assistance of the California Highway Patrol, picked up on the trend. Another Los Angeles–based police drama, specifically centered on police radio cars, Adam-12, aired on NBC from 1968 to 1975. By the mid-

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1970s, a number of television shows reinforced the sound of radio as an anti-crime technology. Jack Webb, involved as an actor, writer, director and producer with both Dragnet and Adam-12, produced Emergency (NBC, 1972–1977), a show following the daily lives of Los Angeles’s fire department paramedics. Other L.A.-based police and law enforcement dramas from the 1970s included Police Story (NBC, 1973–1978; written by then LAPD Detective Sergeant Joseph Wambaugh), CHiPs (NBC, 1977–1982; a show about the California Highway Patrol) and Police Woman, starring Angie Dickinson (NBC, 1974–1978). These television shows, so numerous in an era of fear about crime and the city, strongly associated mobile radio communication with the effective suppression of crime. CB sound’s most salient feature, its distinctive slang, developed partly out of necessity, given the fractured nature of most exchanges and the requirement to be brief. The lingo came from two sources: the “ten” codes—such as “10-4” meaning “OK” and “10-20” meaning “location”—used for decades by police forces around the United States, and the slang used by truckers to disguise the contents of their CB conversations from all but fellow truckers. One academic author linked the use of CB slang in the creation of a CB community to traditions of ethnic or racial self-defense: “In this new group … the individual CB-er finds self-­ fulfillment, like a member of an ethnic minority who in his language reserves his pride. … The metaphors of CB language arise from the same aspirations that induce metaphors in racial argot—self-defense, hostility, and desire for identity and solidarity.”33 CB radio’s “insiders” language formed one important aspect of its gendered and racialized exclusive community.34 The popular press frequently gave brief examples of a CB radio exchange to demonstrate the importance of learning the slang if you wished to join the CB craze. For example, a May 1976 article in Time magazine began with a paragraph written in CB slang. It read, in part, thus: “This cotton-­ picker name of Red Vine from the Dirty Side was rolling a pregnant skate through Watergate town the other day when he passed the home twenty of lady breaker First Mama.” The author then offered this translation: “a non-trucker from New York City, whose CB nickname is Red Vine, was driving his Volkswagen through Washington when he passed the White House, home of fellow CB-owner Betty Ford, who[se] radionym is First Mama.”35 Learning CB radio slang was undoubtedly part of the fun of having a CB “rig,” but it also committed one to participating in a language community with rather conservative politics.

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Participating in CB meant, for example, tacitly accepting the overt misogyny of the slang. CB user guides and slang dictionaries readily educated the neophyte CB user in sexist “lingo.” These reference books gave the meanings of commonly used slang words and phrases such as “beaver” (“Gal, other half, female CBer”), “Check the seatcovers” (“Watch out for a car with a pretty female driver or passenger”), “Go-Go Girls” (“Loads of [actual] pigs”), “Hag feast” (“Group of female CBers on the channel”) and “Warden” (“The wife, The FCC”). The use of sexist language reinforced the masculine aspect of CB radio while also suggesting the extent to which American men participating in CB culture felt it necessary to draw boundaries separating them from, and defending them against, women. The class of men most involved in CB during the 1970s constituted the same demographic most threatened by the rise of second-wave feminism and the successes of the women’s movement during the 1960s and 1970s. Gains for women, enforced with varying degrees of vigor and success, included securing government support for equal pay and equal employment opportunities, and Title IX’s funding for women’s sports. In addition, second-wave feminism managed to make some inroads challenging everyday uses of sexist language and sexual harassment, empowering some American women to challenge the patriarchies of their daily lives. These various acts of government support for women’s progress nipped at the heels of blue-collar and lower-middle-class men who occupied a socioeconomic sector with the fewest possibilities for job security and economic mobility. Losing power—in the job sector or in daily interactions—to women posed as much of a challenge as did encroachments in housing, schools and jobs by black men and their families. Both sources of CB’s slang—the police and long-distance truck drivers—came from communities placing a high value on (audible) privacy and the exclusion of “outside” listeners. The coded language of CB radio provided those who understood it with the key to enter and participate in what was, despite CB culture’s populist rhetoric, an exclusive, selective community. One mass-market CB radio slang dictionary contained a foreword describing CB as a “communication medium that is tax-free, toll-­ free, and almost legislation-free.” CB, the foreword claimed, was “a growing weapon against potential elements of tyranny,” and the language was distinctly American—“Can you imagine a language like this springing up in Russia … or China … or Kuwait?”36 The claims to fight “tyranny” and promote freedom from “governmental restraint” reinforced the image of CB users as right-wing rebels, as nonconformists. In the 1970s, the

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quasi-libertarian rhetoric of CBers’ rebellion allied them with Richard Nixon’s not-so-silent-majority of the white backlash and the burgeoning New Right.37 Like the sound and the slang, CB radio users’ vocal performance served to create an exclusive community on the roadway. Contemporary newspaper and magazine writers, as well as sociologists and other academics, remarked on the use of southern accents and southern-sounding idioms. The press sometimes described the CB accent as “Arkahoma,” referring to its invented rather than regionally accurate character.38 Popular phrases associated with southern speech that formed part of the CB lexicon included exclamations such as “mercy sakes,” “cottonpicking” as well as the ever-present “good buddy.” Given that the majority of Los Angeles’s post-World War II African American migrants hailed from the urban South (the largest numbers coming from Texas and second-largest numbers from Louisiana),39 the dominant adoption of—however vaguely construed—a style of speech and accent reminiscent of the white South may have served to exclude or at least to discourage African Americans from participation in the new virtual community of CB radio.40 The brief mass popularity of CB radio, combined with the urban-racial context of its flowering, moved the audible to the sensory foreground of U.S. politics during the 1970s. Just as the Neighborhood Watch initiatives, developed in response to Jane Jacobs’ call for “eyes on the street,” addressed one set of urban fears, so CB radio put “ears on the freeway” to help motorists create an audible community of “good buddies” with whom they felt both safe and empowered, in an environment of limited visual security. CB Radio: The New Hue and Cry ends with an upbeat and would-be “hip” sequence: to the lilting strains of “tune in, turn on and help each other along,” the chorus of a song written and sung by the film’s co-producer Kirby Timmons, a series of CB-equipped drivers on L.A. freeways—including the film’s one African American character—happily cruise the roadways, relaying useful information to their fellow CB-connected drivers. The song’s lyric echoes Timothy Leary’s 1966 advice to Americans to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” But Timmons’ lyric modifies Leary’s call for drug-induced narcissism, instead championing a form of conservative 1970s citizen self-help that predicated the formation of community on the policing of public space in the presence of racial difference.41 Black participation seems to have varied regionally and, more significantly for this discussion, may well have sounded quite different from

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mainstream “white” CB.  An article in Ebony magazine in 1976, “10-4, Bro,’” suggested that an organized black CB radio presence existed in Cincinnati, Evanston, Chicago and Atlanta—all of which had black CB radio clubs. The author makes a passing reference to white Americans’ use of CB to mobilize against blacks for what the article called “vigilante purposes” in Boston, Louisville and Chicago during conflicts around fair housing and busing, but the article emphasized the potential to create black community using CB radio.42 The adoption of a distinct non-white CB radio language certainly contributed to this potential: “Most blacks use a different kind of lingo” on CB radio, the author stated, on a CB channel available locally in all parts of the nation called “the superbowl.” The article quoted a black CB radio user from St. Louis as saying “If you can’t talk the soul bro’ talk, then you don’t need to be on the superbowl.”43 CB radio had thrived in African American communities since the early 1960s, before a mass white market for the technology developed. But, as the next chapter shows, African Americans used CB radio in a different manner and for different purposes than their white counterparts, and thereby created a system of mobility far removed from, and in opposition to, that of the white “good buddies” talking into their radios as they cruised America’s roadways.

Notes 1. Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970); Tim Dant, “The Driver-Car,” in Theory, Culture and Society 21, no. 4/5 (2004): 61–79; Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (London: Penguin Press, 1971). Banham initially published his responses to his time in Los Angeles in the BBC’s publication The Listener, in August and September 1968, following talks he had given on BBC radio. See also Edward Dimendberg, “The Kinetic Icon: Reyner Banham on Los Angeles as Mobile Metropolis,” Urban History 33, no. 1 (2006): 106–25. 2. On connecting mobility and cinematic ways of seeing, the seminal text remains Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 3. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), and Becky M.  Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class

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Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 4. Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). 5. For the growing secondary literature on the United States in the 1970s, especially that addressing the rise of the “sunbelt” South, see Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Da Capo Press, 2002), especially chap. 4, “The Rise of the Sunbelt and the Reddening of America”; Andreas Killen, 1973: Nervous Breakdown (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), especially 221–26; Edward D.  Berkowitz, Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), especially chap. 8, “The Me Decade and the Turn to the Right.” 6. On gender and race in the 1970s, see Eric Porter, “Affirming and Disaffirming Actions: Remaking Race in the 1970s,” in America in the Seventies, ed. Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), especially 64–70; on masculinity in the 1970s, see Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2001), especially 177–85. For an analysis of the reassertion of American masculinity in the 1980s, based in the gender politics of the New Right, as represented in popular film, see Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994). 7. Number of license application figures from “The Newest Hobby,” 16; on licensing see, for example, “The Drivers’ Network,” Time 22 September 1975, 48–49; “Citizens Band Radios,” Changing Times: The Kiplinger Magazine 130, no. 1 (January 1976): 41–42. 8. Beth Ann Krier, “‘The Radio That Ate Los Angeles,’” Los Angeles Times, 2 May 1976. For an example of the popular dissemination of FCC regulation of CB and licensing procedures, see Forest H. Belt, Easi-Guide to CB Radio for the Family (Indianapolis: Howard W. Sams & Co., 1975), chap. 3. 9. A 1973 article in the Los Angeles Times reported on a survey about Californians’ attitudes about freeway construction conducted for the newspaper in February of that year. The survey showed that southern Californians were more enthusiastic than northern Californians about continued freeway building. In the combined data from northern and southern California, whites were fairly evenly divided about more building with or without environmental constraints, but “those interviewed with Spanish or Mexican surnames were even more favorable to unrestricted construction.” Blacks polled expressed the least enthusiasm for more freeway construction: 53 percent “were for moderate cutbacks”; 13 percent “wanted

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drastic controls to discourage auto use and further growth”; and 2 percent said they “would stop all freeway construction.” Since the survey gave a racial-ethnic breakdown only in the combined data from northern and southern California, we cannot read it very accurately for its applicability to Los Angeles’s white and non-white populations. It is possible that Latino residents of Los Angeles, if included in the survey among “those … with Spanish or Mexican surnames,” may well have represented a generation less negatively affected by freeway construction, since many of the predominantly Mexican and Mexican American communities in East Los Angeles torn apart by freeway construction had suffered those assaults during the late 1950s. The continued resistance to and resentment toward freeway construction by black Californians speaks to their communities having been most negatively affected by such construction projects and reaping the fewest rewards from the completed freeways. See Ted Thackerey Jr., “Californians Still Like Freeways—With Restraints,” Los Angeles Times, 11 March 1973; see also Eric Avila’s Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) for an insightful analysis of the development of Los Angeles freeways and their impact on black and Latino city residents; see in particular 206–15. 10. W.  E. B.  Du Bois wrote his comments praising Los Angeles in the July 1913 issue of NAACP’s publication The Crisis. For a discussion of such early twentieth-century “boosting” of Los Angeles by some in the African American community, see Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), chap. 1. On the United States, and Los Angeles in particular, as a site of various “republics of sound,” see Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 11. Sides, L.A. City Limits, especially 183–89. 12. To hear part of a recording of the police dispatcher, go to: http://harrymarnell.net/1965.htm. 13. Robert J. Allan, “Police Push Study for ‘Buck Rogers Age’ Radios,” Los Angeles Times, 17 March 1974. 14. Through grants established in connection with the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1970, the federal government supplied the vast majority of the funding to improve police telecommunications. 15. Doug Smith, “Nothing to Fear from Cop(ter) on the Beat,” Los Angeles Times, 31 July 1975. See also “Bird’s Eye Look at Street Crime,” Los Angeles Times, 20 September 1977. Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn campaigned throughout the 1960s and 1970s for installing emergency telephones on freeways. Hahn persuaded the local police, sher-

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iffs and highway patrol departments, as well as the California state government and the FCC, to work together on legislation for the new system, leading to the gradual installation of emergency telephones. Correspondence with local residents, memos from Hahn’s office and the responses from the phone companies and state legislators can be found in the Kenneth Hahn Collection, Manuscripts Division, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 16. “3 Gunmen Terrorize and Rob 35 Aboard L.A.-to-S.F. Bus,” Los Angeles Times, 12 August 1974; “Holdup on Freeway Flyer,” Los Angeles Times, 3 March 1976. A July 1973 Los Angeles Times article reported a San Diego incident in which Gary Raphael, a black plumber, picked up his white boss to drive him to work but then pulled a gun on him and ordered him to drive around the city. Raphael then stopped his car at the home of a white couple unknown to him, kidnapped them and put all three of his hostages in the white couple’s van and drove to the Mexican border. Raphael killed his female hostage and, according to his two surviving victims, he had “vowed” to “get as many white people as possible,” and had said “I want to get out of the ghetto.” See “Kidnapper Shot to Death After Slaying Woman,” Los Angeles Times, 16 July 1973. Additional articles relating freeway-based crimes, some of which explicitly identified the perpetrators as black, include “Woman Kidnapped on Santa Ana Freeway,” Los Angeles Times, 22 January 1966; “2 Cyclists Rob Driver on Freeway,” Los Angeles Times, 12 July 1967; “Girl Sighted Talking to Man on Freeway Before She Vanished,” Los Angeles Times, 18 November 1970; “A Holdup Victim Cries for Help—Then Waits 2 1/2 Hours,” Los Angeles Times, 24 April 1972; “Anatomy of a High-­Speed Chase,” Los Angeles Times, 26 September 1977; “Rock-Throwing ‘Phantom’ Tracked to Lair, Arrested,” Los Angeles Times, 12 November 1977. 17. Paul Delaney, “Suburbs Fighting Back as Crime Rises,” New York Times, 30 August 1976. 18. The use of CB radio to quell fear of crime by helping citizens feel safer should also be considered within the context of the development of nonlethal weapons and self-protection devices—for example, the Florida-based Mace Company’s development of pepper spray as a self-defense product mass-marketed primarily to urban women. Pepper spray had been developed originally in Canada to repel bears, and was adopted by the U.S. Postal Service in the 1970s to provide defense against aggressive dogs. 19. “Headless Body of Youth Found in Canyon Identified,” Los Angeles Times, 21 April 1977, and “Tenth Girl Found Dead; Nude Body Discovered by Freeway,” Los Angeles Times, 23 November 1977. 20. Historian Carrie Rentschler’s analysis of the Genovese murder in relation to visual perspectives and filmic representations of the locations, under-

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scored by her research into bystander engagement, updates received knowledge about the murder and its contemporary meanings. “Filmic Witness to the 1964 Kitty Genovese Murder,” Urban History 43:4 (2016) special issue “Visual Culture and Urban History.” The article is published in Scalar and can be viewed in full at: http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/ urban-sights-visual-culture-and-urban-history.... 21. For an analysis of the politics of the neighborhood during the 1970s, see Suleiman Osman, “The Decade of the Neighborhood,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008); Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961; New York: Vintage Books, 1992), especially pp. 35ff.; C. Ray Jeffery, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (Beverley Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1971); Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972). Dennis P. Rosenbaum, “The Theory and Research Behind Neighborhood Watch: Is It a Sound Fear and Crime Reduction Strategy?” Crime and Delinquency 33 (1987): 103–34. See also Joe R. Feagin, “Home Defense and the Police: Black and White Perspectives,” American Behavioral Scientist 13, no. 5/6 (May–June 1970): 797–815. A 1974 article in Public Opinion Quarterly analyzed poll data collected since the late 1960s concerning Americans’ fears of crime and violence. In short, the data suggested that women from all backgrounds and poor, racial minority urban residents (male and female) had the most fear of crime and violence in their neighborhoods. These were the groups most likely to be victims of such crime and violence but not the most likely to form or to benefit from Neighborhood Watch groups. Hazel Erskine, “The Polls: Fear of Violence and Crime,” Public Opinion Quarterly 38, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 131–45. 22. Lyn H. Lofland, A World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Public Space (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 66. 23. Ibid., 118. 24. Ibid., 131–32. 25. Ibid., 137. 26. Ibid., 140. 27. Ibid., 151–55. 28. Quoted in Mary-Lou Weisman, “Good Buddies: Walter Mitty Rides the Merritt,” New York Times, 4 September 1977. 29. The article referred to here is Harold R. Kerbo, Karnie Marshall and Philip Holley, “Reestablishing ‘Gemeinschaft’? An Examination of the CB Radio Fad,” Urban Life [now Journal of Contemporary Ethnography] 7, no. 3 (October 1978): 337–58. 30. Ibid., p. 6.

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31. W. Dale Dannefer and Nicholas Poushinsky, “Language and Community,” Journal of Communication 27, no. 3 (Summer 1977): 126. 32. See, for example, the dedication (“This book is dedicated to a new breed of individualist … the American CBer!”) and the foreword to a popular CB slang dictionary published in 1975 and reprinted in 1976. The author, listed only on the copyright page as Wayne Floyd, calls it “exciting” that CB is a medium “not controlled or administered by private monopolies and—owing to its fantastic growth—is virtually free of governmental restraint.” He continues: “We American people have found a remarkable instrument for expressing our individuality and, in so doing, preserving our individual freedom.” Jason’s Authentic Dictionary of CB Slang (Fort Worth, Tex.: Jason Press, 1975), 6. 33. Richard David Ramsey, “The People Versus Smokey Bear: Metaphor, Argot and CB Radio,” Journal of Popular Culture 13, no. 2 (1979): 342, 343. 34. The 1970s saw the proliferation of identifiable “subcultures” coming out of the social and cultural movements of the preceding two decades. Most of these subcultures used some kind of distinctive slang. Correct and fluent use of a subculture’s slang signified membership or the potential for membership. The 1970s also saw a renewed academic interest in subcultures. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham proved an especially important site for such studies. Two books from the CCCS in the 1970s became foundational texts to subsequent Marxist cultural studies in the United Kingdom and elsewhere: Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson’s collection Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain in 1975, and Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style in 1979. For a concise introduction to the historical and theoretical development of subculture studies, see Ken Gelder, Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice (New York: Routledge, 2007). 35. “The Bodacious New World of C.B.,” 78. 36. Jason’s Authentic Dictionary of CB Slang, 5–6. 37. For a historical account of the populist rhetoric of the American Right, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998). 38. “The Bodacious New World of CB,” 78. 39. Sides, L.A. City Limits, 38. 40. See “From Muskogee to Luckenbach: Country Music and the ‘Southernization’ of America,” by James C.  Cobb. Journal of Popular Culture 16, no. 3 (1982): 81–91. 41. The voice in the car, and the transmission of one’s voice over CB into others’ cars—their mobile “home territories”—connects CB not only to the

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Nixonian surveillance and self-surveillance epitomized in the President’s White House tapes but also to the development of more recent automobile technologies that simultaneously offer increased “safety” through voice communication and (self-) surveillance. The disembodied but supposedly reassuring voices of satellite- and Internet-based automobile guidance and assistance systems (the OnStar system as an early example) represent another outcome of the marriage of cars, driving, fear and mobile communications. 42. See “Police Battle Busing Foes Marching in South Boston,” New York Times, 16 February 1976; “Boston Whites March in Busing Protest,” New York Times, 28 October 1975; “Teen-Agers in Boston Toss Rocks and Bottles,” New York Times, 17 February 1976; “Large Wallace Vote Reflects Depth of Antibusing Sentiment in Boston’s Working-Class Neighborhoods,” New York Times, 8 March 1976; “Blacks’ Anger Rising in South Boston as Violence over Schools Spreads,” New York Times, 2 May 1976; “School Buses in Louisville Will Carry Guards Today,” New York Times, 8 September 1975. 43. Shawn D. Lewis, “10-4, Bro,’” Ebony 31, no. 12 (October 1976): 120–22, 124, 126.

CHAPTER 3

Mobilizing Black Technoculture

Abstract  The historical significance of African American use of citizens band radio rests in its functioning as a nexus for, and challenge to, various histories: of the politics of black speech and oral culture; of the role of radio programming in the creation of black cultural identity; and of race and technology. Black CB also shows how “community” and “identity” do not necessarily originate through direct contact and communication. As this chapter shows, its users built on an already existing black aural public sphere—rooted in black-interest broadcast radio, jive talk, and jazz and blues lyrics—and adapted CB technology to combine with that aural-­ oral sphere to connect geographically and socially diverse individuals. Black CB thus indirectly created a technologically mediated community based on perceived audible racial identity. Keywords  Black • Race • Public • Mobility • Community • Technology

Note: Because some of the activities or technologies used in contemporary superbowl activities may violate FCC regulations, some technological and personal details (such as legal names) related to current participants have been omitted from this chapter. © The Author(s) 2019 A. M. Blake, Radio, Race, and Audible Difference in Post-1945 America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31841-3_3

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The historical significance of African American use of citizens’ band radio, despite its absence from scholarly studies until now, rests in its functioning as a nexus for, and challenge to, various histories: of the politics of black speech and oral culture; of the role of radio programming in the creation of black cultural identity; of race and technology. Black CB also shows how “community” and “identity” do not necessarily originate through direct contact and communication. As this chapter shows, its users built on an already existing black aural public sphere—rooted in black-interest broadcast radio, jive talk, and jazz and blues lyrics—and adapted CB technology to combine with that aural-oral sphere to connect geographically and socially diverse individuals. Black CB thus indirectly created a technologically mediated community based on perceived audible racial identity.1 The emergence of a distinct black CB culture by the 1970s epitomizes how black use of CB, as a form of what I call “audiomobility,” circumvented white prohibitions against black mobility and audibility, denied white assumptions of technical and verbal superiority, as well as internal black class politics around accent, vocabulary and speech styles—about “sounding black.” Black use of CB developed in the postwar period to counteract the immobilities produced by the specific circumstances of racism in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, black CB use responded to the early adoption of the technology by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the South at the moment of segregation’s faltering power, and worked in the 1970s to counteract its use as an organizing tool by northern opponents of school busing. From these origins, as an audiomobility network counteracting racism directly as well as indirectly, black CB evolved into an intraracial competitive arena, a technocultural practice suited only to the audibly toughest competitors. Through “shooting skip” (communicating via CB over long distances), black CB created an audible black geography, offering a way to connect in real time, across cities and regions, black individuals and their localities—a networking opportunity especially important in the 1960s and 1970s when differences in regional cultures, practices and histories of race and racism shaped black politics. The regional diversity of the audibly black voices and speech styles heard over CB radio confirmed to listeners the variety as well as the size of the black CB community and, by implication, of black America.2 Black CB signified a process of tuning in, with great skill, to an invisible disembodied shared blackness, a shared black sound and a black technoculture. In the already heavily commercial, corporate broadcasting context

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of 1970s America, black CB also signified the creation and demarcation of black radio space (black spectrum), the drowning out of the “white noise” of not only the dominant commercial culture but also of racism and segregation through distinctively black speech backed by necessarily self-­ sufficient black technical prowess. Black CB was a trickster act, cunningly, playfully and freely “throwing” black voices back and forth across states, regions, the nation and sometimes beyond—the radio hardware acting as ventriloquism’s middleman. Unlike black bodies or even the words and actions of black political leaders, the immateriality of (black) sound eluded capture, control or blockading. A technology used by whites in the civil rights and black power eras to enhance their security while enjoying their unrestricted mobility became, in the hands of African Americans, a device that allowed them to throw off their physical and political immobility by mobilizing their sound, their voices, even while their bodies stayed unobtrusively in place.3 Black involvement in CB radio was, by the CB craze of the mid-1970s, far more long-standing than that of most whites. As early as 1959, African American CB radio enthusiasts founded the Rooster Channel Jumpers, an organization that established a nationwide network of black CB users. With official chapters in major American cities in the North, South and East, a formal governance structure at every level and blue and gold uniforms for its members, the Rooster Channel Jumpers operated in the same manner as many popular postwar civil and fraternal organizations familiar to middle-class communities and drew on the long-standing club tradition of the African American middle class. One can get an idea of the eventual size of the organization and the commitment of its members by noting that, in late June 1978, an estimated ten thousand African American CB radio enthusiasts gathered in Dallas, Texas, for the fifth annual convention of the Rooster Channel Jumpers. The keynote address, given by Dr. Berkeley Burrell, president of the National Business League (formerly the Negro Business League, founded by Booker T.  Washington in 1900), urged all black CBers to join together in a national black radio operators organization to promote the use of CB channels specifically for black economic organizing and mutual benefit. Although it seems Burrell never met that goal, since it may have seemed redundant given the strength of the Rooster Channel Jumpers, he continued to promote the idea that “nearly sixty percent of the Black population in this country can be reached through this powerful medium” and that “Black CBers can develop sufficient political clout to have a major impact on political and economic

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­ ecisions that are routinely affecting their lives.”4 Burrell’s vision fit with d some of the gains he and other business leaders had begun to wring from the federal government via President Richard Nixon’s Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE) and other programs created in the wake of the urban crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s. But for many black CBers, even those at the Roosters convention, Burrell’s vision clashed with their regular flouting of FCC regulations to achieve the distinct social and communications goals of black CB radio practice.5 Black CBers made CB radio exciting and significant for themselves in the 1960s and 1970s by using their radio equipment to communicate across long distances—an activity referred to in CB slang as “shooting skip”—what ham radio enthusiasts have always called “DX-ing.” By shooting skip, black CB operators sent their signals much farther than the 150 miles permitted for the citizens’ band by FCC regulations. “Skip” is a naturally occurring phenomenon whereby radio signals bounce off the ionosphere and back down to earth at a distance far greater than the normal field of the transmitter. To talk long distance, CBers use a directional antenna to deliberately bounce their signal so that it lands hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles away. Shooting skip successfully requires favorable atmospheric conditions, the skills and technical know-how to build and use a directional (horizontal) antenna, luck and patience. Base stations (home-based as opposed to mobile vehicle–based stations) running more power to boost their antenna’s signal often dominate the process, but not necessarily. Stories abound of big base stations being “cut off” by smaller stations or even by someone in a car who can make the most of the “conditions.” By flouting FCC regulations limiting the signal distance of the CB radio service, African American CBers joined together via an invisible and mostly unsurveilled communications network. This network of users, partly because of the skill required to talk over long distances, then developed its internal elite practitioners who, by the mid-­ 1970s, took over CB channel 6 as their domain and named it the “superbowl.” The superbowl differs not just in sound but also in purpose to mainstream, mostly white, CB. Taking its name from what football enthusiasts see as the ultimate annual battle of champions—the Superbowl game between the year’s top-ranked NFL teams—which began in 1967 and continues to shape football fan culture in the United States, the naming of the superbowl CB channel suggested it was the arena in which the best, most skilled and toughest men would compete. No other CB channel

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bore such connotations. Superbowl enthusiasts do not call themselves “CBers”—they call themselves “superbowl operators” or “radio operators.” Unlike white mainstream CBers, they do not focus on local, conversational exchanges with other CB enthusiasts. Instead, the superbowl works as an arena for not only shooting skip but also competing with other superbowl operators to reach a far-off third party. Who wins is determined not only through a technical contest to get one’s signal heard but also through verbal dominance, and the ability to tease or insult the other operator(s) so effectively that they drop out of the exchange. As discussed in the previous chapter, American dependence on roadways and newspaper stories about crime-ridden freeways, increasing pressure from the African American civil rights movement for political and social change, urban race riots among disenfranchised black urban residents, all enhanced white Americans’ anxiety about crimes against property and people in postwar American cities. From the perspective of African Americans, the late 1960s and the early 1970s posed a far greater threat to person and property given the rate of physical and verbal violent challenges to anyone associated with the civil rights movement. After the Watts riot in August 1965 and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in April 1968, the situation of urban blacks only worsened and white opposition hardened as black nationalist and black power groups developed a more powerful presence in the movement for black civil rights.6 Given the overwhelming domination by the mid-1970s of most CB channels by white users, and the charged racial-political context of that and the preceding decade, it is not surprising to hear accounts of African Americans experiencing racism on CB channels. One current superbowl user, whose on-air “handle,” or CB nickname, is “Prime Minister”—in real life, a rapper from the 1980s and 1990s—whose involvement goes back to the mid-1970s when he was 12 years old, says he has heard stories from older men involved in black CB suggesting that the distinctive slang and style of black CB evolved partly as a defense against over-the-air racism: When African American operators finally found somewhere they could talk to one another, they were constantly harassed by … they used to call them “appliance operators.” … They were primarily southern guys, and … I remember being a kid listening to Maestro talking in skip and here comes one of these appliance operators, he’s from Mississippi, he cuts off the guy Maestro’s talking to in Texas, and he just goes on this racist rant, and you can hear Maestro going, “Look man, we left, we’re not on your frequency,

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we came here, we’re having fun,” and this guy just, “You son of a bitch black bastard blah blah blah.”7

As far back as the late 1960s, and certainly by the mid-1970s, as a result of racism on CB channels, increasing numbers of black CBers simply opted to gather on two underused channels in the CB range and thus hoped to avoid harassment by white CBers: channel 5 became the place for local talk; channel 6 became reserved for skip—for talking over long distances. By the early 1970s, channel 6 had become known as “the superbowl,” and its purpose, sound and style came to define African American CB. Historical traces of the superbowl and its participants are almost nonexistent. My research on the topic started from a single mention of the term “superbowl” in the previously mentioned 1976 Ebony article titled “10-4, Bro.” Current participants in the “bowl” form the main “archive” for this sonic subculture and possess any existing artifacts or ephemera related to its history. Since much of the activity of the superbowl, and the supporting technology, breaks FCC regulations, users have no publications or retail outlets that would make their activities easier to document. Superbowl operators are also understandably wary of sharing some aspects of their activities with outsiders. As mentioned in the last chapter, the author of a 1976 Ebony article on black CB stated, “[m]ost blacks use a different kind of lingo” on CB radio—different from white CB slang. One of the author’s interviewees, a black CB radio user from St. Louis, told him, “If you can’t talk the soul bro’ talk, then you don’t need to be on the superbowl.”8 The article did not elaborate on exactly how this channel differed from regular CB channels or what “soul bro’ talk” actually sounded like. Perhaps readers of Ebony in 1976 were presumed to know what “soul bro’ talk” sounded like? Referencing “soul bro’ talk” carried a specific cultural and political weight by 1976. To the mostly middle-class African American readers of Ebony magazine, that talk might not have been a style of speaking they engaged in, but it might have been a style they once adopted or aspired to, or one they objected to, depending on their political position concerning black identity and culture as manifested through black vernacular speech. The politics of “sounding black” and using “black” language stretched back more than a century by 1976, but the closest roots of the superbowl sound and style can be found in the development of black radio in the 1940s and 1950s. Through the 1960s the emergence of black nationalism and the assertion of “black pride” provided encouragement for African

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Americans to deploy more overtly and publically the type of black speech that had, until then, mostly remained spoken and heard only within black communities. The superbowl’s racial exclusivity, its distinctive slang and verbal style, link it to the histories and controversies, inside and outside the African American community, about sounding black—a debate about distinctive black speech styles, black accents and vernaculars going back to the late nineteenth century.9 Since emancipation, if not before, blacks who wanted to advance socially or educationally within the black community, and certainly those who wished to achieve any degree of social mobility among whites, learned to assimilate their speech style and their voices—to make an effort to “sound white.”10 What white sounded like depended on locality—local white accents, speechways and vocabulary. And sounding white usually involved sounding middle class—sonic assimilation has always been as much about class as about race.11 Through the 1970s, during the peak of CB’s popularity among blacks and whites, some articles in the black press criticized the sound of blacks on CB radio. A 1976 article in the African American newspaper the Chicago Defender used a spoofed conversation between the author and an imagined old friend to compare the style and spoken content of black men on CB in the Chicago area to the sound and content of the characters on Amos and Andy, the radio and then TV show famous for promoting the supposed comedic value of uneducated black men. As the article’s author, Bob Dixon, pointed out to his imagined interlocutor, Amos and Andy had been banned from the airwaves after pressure from black civil rights groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). But the other man reminds him of how, when they were younger, living in the small town of Cairo, Illinois, they used to gather around the radio to listen to the Amos and Andy show. Then he adds: “You and I can hear that A & A talk and dialect any evening we choose— right here in Chicago!” The man then gives an example of what he means, reproducing what he says he hears when he tunes into blacks on CB radio in Chicago: “Cornhusker—calling Cornhusker. Dis is Chicken Plucker. Do you read me?” “Dass a ten-foe, Chicken Plucker. I reads you well, ovah?” “Say, you got all de ribs an’ trimmins for de week-end, Ole Buddy, or is you still not going out dere wid us? Ovah?” “Uh, ten-foe Plucker; well, I dunno effen I

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kin make it dis week-end. My ole lady might hafta go someplace and she won’t try to drive de car. Kin I git a ten-foe on dat?”12

In producing this imagined CB conversation, Dixon mocks southern black vernacular speech. He associates the two men, inhabitants of one of the nation’s major cities, and arguably the most significant “black metropolis,” with black rural life by giving them handles associated with menial agricultural labor—plucking chickens and husking corn. He has the participants discuss their plans for a weekend that involves not the commercial entertainments of the metropolis but a casual get-together involving southern food favorites such as “ribs an’ trimmins.” And he throws in the possibility that Cornhusker’s apparently unsophisticated and killjoy wife, because of her refusal to drive the car, may derail the men’s plans for such simple pleasures.13 In all, this and other articles voiced long-standing criticisms reportedly made by middle- and upper-middle-class blacks of working-class blacks: that the voices and speech styles of working-class blacks, and their vocal and social behaviors, brought discredit to the black community as a whole. Historians James Grossman and Davarian Baldwin have documented the articulation of such tensions in Chicago when, on the arrival of poorer, rural blacks from the southern states during the first “great migration” immediately after World War I, the “old settlers” struggled to find ways to assimilate and incorporate the new black population into the urban northern world they had made for themselves. As Baldwin in particular shows, the tensions between the old settlers and the newer migrants did not involve a straightforward class struggle. Much of the vibrancy of the new “black metropolis” came from the commercial and mass entertainments, leisure activities and styles of dress and self-expression emanating from the working-class neighborhoods of the newer migrants. To form the black metropolis they desired, the old settler “New Negroes” of Chicago had to adapt their tastes and their version of a progressive black modernity to include such styles and pleasures, or risk historical (and racial) irrelevance.14 So when, in the 1970s, Dixon and other gatekeepers of black middle-class identity heard the sounds of black CB radio, they heard the sounds of another migration—an unchecked migration of working-class black voices across the city, in and out of class-bound neighborhoods and cliques, and spreading out across state lines via the relatively free public airwaves. The sound of black dialect and black slang moving so freely through the airwaves via CB may have alarmed middle-class commentators like

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Dixon, but by 1976 this was simply a new venue for such voices, though one much less controlled than anything heard before. The sound of black voices on the radio speaking in what the Columbia University linguist John McWhorter has called a “blaccent,” and using a vocabulary similar to those used by their mass black listenership, had grown rapidly since the 1940s.15 William Barlow documented the development of black radio and the politics of sounding black in his now classic work Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio. Barlow shows how, starting in the 1940s, as radio programming directed at a black audience spread out across the United States and beyond the larger urban centers, radio stations hired more black DJs and gradually “allowed” them to sound less white by permitting the use of local black slang and speaking styles. Those black DJs of the 1940s and 1950s made race audible in ways that began to liberate “sounding black” from its earlier supposedly negative connotations of low-class status and lack of education, and to link it with the black mobility wrought by participation in, and value to, a mass commercial economy. Radio was big business by the 1940s and the black mass audience an increasingly recognized demographic for the advertisers who underwrote American broadcasting.16 Barlow’s examples include Al Benson, known by his nickname “Old Swingmaster,” who started his broadcasting career as the Reverend Arthur Leaner with a gospel radio program on station WGES in Chicago. By the late 1940s Benson had shifted into his secular Swingmaster persona, enjoying over eight hours of airtime per day on WJJD as well as WGES. Like many of his listeners, the Mississippi-born Benson spoke with a southern accent, used black slang and played the popular “race records” of the day.17 The next step forward in the specifically black sound of late 1940s radio came when black DJs used the “rhyming” and “signifying” traditions of black oral performative culture. Barlow defines signifying as “the art of humorous verbal warfare in which the combatants employ a range of devices—from ridicule to cockiness—in order to humiliate their adversaries and enhance their own status.” A participant’s power is further enhanced, his performance made more impressive, with his ability to rhyme his sentences.18 According to Barlow, the first DJs to introduce rhyming and signifying into their radio performances were Holmes “Daddy-O-Daylie” Bailey in Chicago and Lavada “Doctor Hep Cat” Durst in Austin, Texas. As I discuss later, the most impressive voices on the black CB arena of the superbowl gained prestige and respect largely by also deploying “humorous verbal warfare.” The loudest cultural echo

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heard through the superbowl is that of the much older African American verbal cultural form known as “the dozens.” The cultural studies scholar Robin D. G. Kelley has argued that this verbal game has been much written about but much misinterpreted by white sociologists and anthropologists. What they miss, Kelley argues, is that the “goal of the dozens and related verbal games is deceptively simple: to get a laugh. The pleasure of the dozens is not the viciousness of the insult but the humor, the creative pun, the outrageous metaphor.” The dozens, and the superbowl, demand that a participant be able to stand his (occasionally her) ground, talk and joke creatively in the moment, all improvised, while ready to listen and respond to competitors and deal with the presence of other listeners, who are skilled peers, not simply an audience. The verbal skills of the dozens and the superbowl can also be heard in rap “battles” in which two rap artists face off against each other, taking turns to creatively “diss” each other, the winner declared most often by the enthusiasm of the audience.19 The growth in the popularity of black DJs and the recognition of a growing black consumer market led to the development of “black appeal” stations—radio stations that committed entire broadcast schedules to programming by and for African Americans.20 Station WDIA in Memphis, Tennessee, led the way as the first black-appeal radio station, though its owners were white.21 WDIA’s influence grew markedly in 1954 when the station got permission to increase its power to 50,000 watts. Such power, and its geographic location, meant that the station’s programming reached approximately ten percent of the nation’s African American population, heard from southern Missouri all the way through the Mississippi Delta to the Gulf of Mexico.22 The timing of the station’s power boost of course integrated its sound into the black communities of the South most engaged in struggles over desegregation and voting rights. On WERD, in Atlanta, the nation’s first black-owned radio station from its establishment in October 1949, Jack Gibson (aka “Jack the Rapper”) continued the more confidently vernacular trend of postwar black radio initiated by Benson, Bailey and Durst. Gibson, a DJ and community activist, started his career in Chicago and then moved to Atlanta. Gibson became famous for using rhyming vernacular on the air. He founded a monthly trade publication for black radio and, in 1977, launched an annual radio and music festival named “Jack the Rapper Black Family Affair Convention.”23 The black DJs of the postwar period created cultural and commercial capital from sounding black, and forged connections with the growing cadre of black musicians, producers and black-owned record companies who provided

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the foundation for the late twentieth-century vibrant black music scene, as well as the verbal style roots of hip-hop and rap.24 The men who became active in black CB and later on the superbowl, from the late 1960s through the 1970s, some of whom are still active on the bowl today, grew up not only in the dying days of Amos and Andy, as suggested by the Dixon Chicago Defender article quoted earlier, they also grew up in the era of black-appeal radio stations and the growth of black-­ oriented radio programming, both musical and otherwise. Those men, some now in their seventies and eighties, born just before or during World War II, had access during their teenage years to the voices of black-­ sounding black DJs throughout the South as well as in the major urban centers of the North. They came into full adulthood as the civil rights movement faced the challenges of black nationalism and black power, and the sounds of political blackness encompassed a sonic and stylistic spectrum from the church-based oratory and cadences of Martin Luther King to the snappier rhythms of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, to the clipped urban jive and Marxist-Leninist staccato of Huey Newton. The superbowl’s slang (different from mainstream CB slang), in addition to a particular verbal style, has created, since the bowl’s inception in the 1970s, an almost exclusively black communications zone, just as the predominance of white speech styles and the use of phrases and accents from the white South helped keep mainstream CB in the 1970s almost exclusively white.25 The racial exclusivity of mainstream CB, although not usually explicitly stated, created the desire among African American CBers for what became the superbowl. Explaining the impact of a black CB channel for its participants and creators in the 1960s and early 1970s, superbowl aficionado Prime Minister told me: There were guys that were talking in the sixties … they predate the bowl being the bowl. They were trying to find somewhere they could fit. And when I listen to them tell the stories it’s awesome. … You hear Big Motor going, “Yeah, I remember one day I came to channel 6 … and I heard a guy and said ‘god, he sounds like a black guy.’” You … hear him say that and … that’s like … starting humanity and crossing another human.26

Prime Minister’s statement, with its image of two people, each thinking they were alone in the world, accidentally finding each other through the racial audibility of a radio channel, conveys what he has heard from older bowl operators to be the intense surprise, excitement, pleasure and ­cultural

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importance of discovering the possibility of African American contact via CB radio, especially when taking place over the long distances made possible by the phenomenon of skip. Prime Minister’s anecdote is especially interesting since, in the 1960s, African Americans were not necessarily isolated demographically or even technologically given the existence of a well-established black press in many parts of the United States, as well as national and local radio broadcast networks and, for many living in urban areas, the affordability of telephone service. But clearly “finding” one another audibly via CB still held particular power for African American men using that technology. Their apparent sense of isolation, perhaps truly felt only after the fact, in the moment of skip contact, and the superbowl thus as a remedy for that condition, suggests there was something else at stake beyond simple contact. When the U.S. government set aside the bandwidth for CB radio in 1948, it broke open a tiny part of the closely guarded and heavily commercialized American broadcast spectrum. The Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of 1934 had secured American broadcasting as the preserve of commercial corporate networks, removing the possibility that U.S. broadcasting would go the way of the United Kingdom or Canada, nations that established state-supported and (at first) commercial-free radio (and later television) broadcasting. Those U.S. legislative acts privatized and commodified the public spectrum and squeezed out all but a very few opportunities for the American public to have access to the public airwaves as users; the vast majority of the public lost that access and were consigned to the passive role of “listeners,” consumers of the commercial broadcasters’ advertising-based product.27 It had not always been so. Between 1906 and 1917, after the development of crystal radio sets, and before U.S. involvement in World War I when the government asked amateur radio operators to suspend their broadcasts, diverse voices and other sounds populated the American airwaves.28 Tuning your radio dial could bring you the sounds of many other Americans, using their crystal radio sets in their homes to send out Morse code signals, music and (by about 1915) their voices. The world of amateur radio—what became known as “ham” radio—was active and extensive. Such users never anticipated in those early days that they would be so soon banned from their role as broadcasters, restricted to the weakest part of the spectrum, and prevented from broadcasting content such as music, news and sports—the most popular content which commercial broadcasters wanted to reserve for themselves. Organized through national

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­ rganizations such as the Radio League of America and the American o Radio Relay League (which is still in existence), these amateurs called their world of radio “citizen radio.”29 Citizens’ virtual expulsion from the airwaves, starting in the 1920s, makes it all the more extraordinary that the FCC decided in 1948 to set aside spectrum for the new “citizens band” radio channels.30 By 1948 privately owned broadcasting corporations (CBS, ABC and NBC) controlled the nation’s airwaves. In 1958, following an increase of up to 23 channels newly available on the citizens’ band, the service became usable by the American public. CB radio could be used and operated by anyone—one did not need the tuning skills of the ham radio aficionados, and ready-to-use CB radio sets, for installation in one’s vehicle or home, rapidly became available in electronics stores across the nation. The timing of the availability of citizens’ band radio forms a crucial part of the story of its politicization and racialization. CB radio became available for mass use in 1958, just as the mainstream civil rights movement regularly captured headlines across the United States, and right before that movement began to shift toward a more “direct action” approach, with the emergence of sit-ins as a strategy to desegregate lunch counters (which began in Kansas in July and in Oklahoma in September 1958, but gained prominent attention in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960) and the freedom rides in the summer of 1961. The coincidence of the availability of the CB radio service, the mass production and marketing of the technology, and the rise of the civil rights and later black power movements led to the rapid adoption of the technology by citizen groups on both sides of the desegregation and civil rights debates. According to an article in the Washington Post, the Ku Klux Klan began using CB radio in 1961. Klansmen used their radios to better organize their racial terror activities by reporting to each other on the whereabouts of law enforcement or of their latest targets. This report initiated a series of articles in the Washington Post in 1965 and 1966 revealing the extensive use of CB by the Ku Klux Klan and the FCC’s efforts to prevent such usage. In May 1965, as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) prepared to begin hearings on Klan activities, the Washington Post ran a lengthy article on the modern “third” Klan, detailing the Klan’s long history and how it had recently become more active in the face of increased black efforts for civil rights.31 Picking up on the coverage, the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson, in his “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column, wrote an article about the

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KKK’s use of CB radio. “The public,” Pearson wrote, “would be surprised to know … that Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the United Klans, is licensed to operate on a special citizens radio wavelength. He was given the license by the Federal Communications Commission … at the same time … the Justice Department had placed earlier Klan organizations on the subversive list along with the Communist Party.” Pearson added that the Klan held several CB licenses, “all under front names, such as the ‘Alabama Rescue Service’ of Tuscaloosa.”32 After Pearson’s article, the FCC chair E. William Henry initiated an investigation into the possible illegal use of CB radio by the Klan.33 As the HUAC hearings into the KKK continued through 1966, other stories appeared in the Washington Post reporting more detailed accounts of how the Klan used CB radio to organize attacks on individual African Americans or on civil rights organizations.34 Representative Edwin E. Willis, the chair of HUAC, proposed legislation in June 1966, toward the end of the HUAC hearings on the Klan, which sought to curb the Klan’s ability to organize and commit terroristic acts. The bill included a proposal to outlaw the use of CB radios, walkie-talkies and telephones in the commission of federal crimes or in an effort to prevent the detection of such crimes.35 In response to Klan activity and to other forms of racist harassment, blacks organizing for civil rights and freedoms also began using CB radio. For example, the African American organization Deacons for Defense and Justice, started in Jonesboro, Louisiana, in the summer of 1964 to provide armed protection to local blacks and to civil rights workers from the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) based in the area, used CB radios to ensure a rapid response to any apparent or real threat. The Deacons carried their CB radios alongside their guns as part of an effective system of defense.36 Blacks’ use of CB radio to counter white racism helped “turn hegemony on its head,” to quote George Lipsitz, an act connected to long African American political tradition, rooted in strategies such as the acts of resistance to slavery documented in the work of George Rawick and Eugene Genovese and discussed by other scholars of race and ethnicity who have analyzed the counterhegemonic political strategies to build political movements and embolden their actors or observers.37 The use of CB radio to facilitate grassroots social and political movements takes us to the question of citizenship and “the public” at the heart of the meaning of CB radio. Scholarship over the last 20 years on the public sphere has contested and reformulated notions of “publics” and

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“counterpublics,” informed by issues of gender, race, class and sexuality. The idea of a “counterpublic” is helpful to this examination of the meaning of black CB radio use as it helps connect us with these questions of “citizenship” lurking within the nomenclature, establishment and political deployment of CB radio. The participants in the bourgeois public sphere were “citizens,” members of the civil society produced by the conversations and circulating texts of the public sphere. To be part of a public implies that one is recognized by others as a citizen, as an individual whose rights to speak and to listen cannot be dismissed. Use of radio technology to access the public airwaves via a service provided to the nation’s citizens by the federal government encompassed the construction of a public via the concept of citizenship and those citizens’ constitutional right to speech—no matter the content of that speech. This idea of the relation between a public and citizenship is especially important when we look at electronic communications after 1945. The rapid, and early, privatization of the public airwaves in the United States has meant historically that electronic communications have been mostly unavailable to citizens seeking forms of mass communication to use as tools in disseminating the “speech” fundamental to creating and maintaining a “public sphere.” However, the establishment of the “citizens band” radio service soon after the end of World War II created a small, public non-commercial space in the otherwise almost entirely privatized public space of broadcast spectrum in the United States. The access to, and use of, that service implied (and initially required) citizenship. Until 1978 the right to use CB radio depended on possession of a license obtained from the FCC. As discussed in the previous chapter, the license application form asked only for name, address, number of units the applicant wished to run, and if the applicant was a U.S. citizen. Therefore, to participate in the public sphere of CB radio meant laying claim to, and gaining recognition as possessing, citizenship and specifically the right of a citizen to speak and to be heard. Your citizenship was your qualification. What marks the parallel worlds of white and black CB as public versus counterpublic is based not only on the political economy of race in the postwar United States but also on the manner (and meaning) of how those two publics, those two citizen groupings, made use of CB’s distinct communications technology to achieve different versions of audiomobility. The rhetoric of CB radio in its heyday of the 1970s was replete with populist claims to “freedom” and “free expression”—the rights fundamental to the classical (white, male, bourgeois) liberal subject, the h ­ istorical

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participant in the Habermasian public sphere and, the record shows, the main participant in America’s mid-1970s CB radio craze. African Americans, in the 1960s and 1970s, still fighting for legal and quotidian recognition as full equal citizens, comprised what Nancy Fraser and others have called a “counterpublic.”38 Fraser wrote, in her now classic Social Text article, “the relations between bourgeois publics and other publics were always conflictual. Virtually from the beginning, counterpublics contested the exclusionary norms of the bourgeois public, elaborating alternative styles of political behavior and alternative norms of public speech. Bourgeois publics, in turn, excoriated these alternatives and deliberately sought to block broader participation.”39 As public and counterpublic, first-class citizen and second-­class citizen, white and black CBers laid claim to the public sphere of the radio spectrum; whites did so to tweak their relationship to law and order, and to seek mutual protection on the public roadways; blacks did so to circumvent the law (of a federal government that had, at minimum, failed them) and the limits placed on their mobility by white citizens. As with other “counterpublics,” that formed by black CBers was not a universal public sphere. Like white CB, the superbowl operated with de facto exclusivity, aimed at connecting and creating a black citizen public able to master the necessary technological, linguistic and temperamental skills. Like white CB, the superbowl created a specifically aural public sphere and counterpublic based on racial identity. The assertion and promotion of audible racial difference offers a counterargument to established notions of the construction of racial difference that rely on visuality. African American CBers interviewed for this article asserted that they participated in the superbowl because they experienced racism on CB channels used by the majority white demographic of CB radio channels. Clearly, therefore, both blacks and whites “heard” race—and listened for it. This sensory perception formed a crucial aspect of the popularity and use of this technology in the postsegregation United States. We should recall here Prime Minister’s reference to Maestro’s account of his emotional epiphany on suddenly audibly encountering another black man on CB radio in the 1960s. In such moments, Maestro, and others like him, experienced a crucial shift in their relationship to those normally regarded as “strangers.” CB radio, for both blacks and whites, transformed strangers into allies, members of a defined public, a community. This shift forms an essential aspect of the formation of a public (and

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therefore a counterpublic). As Michael Warner has written, in reference to the formation of publics and counterpublics, [p]ublics orient us to strangers in a different way. They are no longer merely people-whom-one-does-not-yet-know; rather, it can be said that an environment of strangerhood is the necessary premise of some of our most prized ways of being. Where otherwise strangers need to be placed on a path to commonality, in modern forms strangerhood is the necessary medium of commonality. The modern social imaginary does not make sense without strangers. A nation, market, or public in which everyone could be known personally would be no nation, market, or public at all.40

He adds: “The development of forms that mediate the intimate theater of stranger-relationality must surely be one of the most significant dimensions of modern history, though the story of this transformation in the meaning of the stranger has been told only in fragments.”41 For African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, audibly black unknown others were heard not as strangers but as potential friends and allies—at a time of intense racialized violence and danger. For whites, that same transformation of “stranger” into “good buddy,” a trustworthy ally on the public roadway, formed the necessary underpinning of the cultural and political work of CB for that demographic in the 1970s—a period when fear and suspicion of strangers ran high, especially in urban-suburban areas.42 While both CB publics, black and white, shared that important stranger-­ to-­ally transformation in their uses of CB radio, black use of CB radio continued to evolve beyond that point, whereas most white users of CB during its mid-1970s heyday dropped the hobby by the late 1970s as the airwaves became too crowded and too filled with interference. Black CB, having established an audible racial community whose audiomobility directly opposed the immobilities of racism and segregation, could then address its internal culture. The emergence of the superbowl on channel 6 represented the achievement of a confident black CB culture, one less focused on issues of self-defense or basic community building. The skills necessary to build and operate a powerful station with a directional antenna to shoot skip created a hierarchy within black CB. The superbowl evolved as an arena in which technological skills combined with vocal style and verbal power to face off in an ongoing championship of audible blackness.

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In the competitive arena of the superbowl, the most popular and respected operators are not only those who can shoot skip to get their “beam” (signal) across a long distance to a specific area or operator but, more significantly, those whose talking style is most impressive, most domineering. Superbowl talk is based on “dissing” the person with whom one is competing to get one’s signal picked up by another person. The two or more operators “fighting” from different parts of the United States to reach, say, an operator in another region, not only compete via the power of their signal, their skill in directing and tuning it and dealing with weather conditions but also in their deployment of well-delivered insults, threats and ridicule directed at each other as they compete to reach the distant operator in the triangle of communication. Each tries to so successfully “diss” the other that his competitor cannot verbally “one up” him, causing the other to bow out of the contest. Such verbal skills must be combined with the technical skills to dominate the transmission—to cut off or at least drown out one’s competitor. Then as now, superbowl operators who can dominate others in a seemingly effortless manner garner particular admiration. A powerful signal combined with the audible evocation of a confident masculine authority has built the reputation of operators such as 766, Nationwide 1000, Crack Carter and others. Prime Minister refers to this dominant style and how he learned to appreciate it. As he says, “The style I kind of try to adhere to is ‘shock and awe.’” He learned this style in the 1970s from an operator in California called Yellow Jacket, about whom he says “if CB were a true family he’d be my dad … he taught me a whole lot, especially about style and talking.” Documenting superbowl battles secures the proof of who beat whom— who, by whatever means, “won” on any particular occasion. On the bowl, one of the three (or more) people involved in competing to reach a particular operator will often record the exchange. These recordings are known in superbowl slang as “Watergates”—a nickname dating the origins of this aspect of the superbowl to the mid-1970s when President Nixon’s taping system in the Oval Office documented his paranoid power games and ultimately provided proof of his guilt in the Watergate conspiracy. The superbowl instruction to “let the ‘gate roll” means to roll the tape or to start recording. At the large meetings of bowl operators, known as “breaks” or “shoot outs,” participants spend a lot of time listening to “Watergates” of particularly entertaining exchanges. For example, in a Watergate of three

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operators trying to reach Outlaw 187, an operator in New Jersey, not only are the three operators (Crack Carter in Texas, and 444 and Bricklayer, both located in Mississippi) trying to reach 187, they are each trying to dominate the transmission so as to push the others out. The references the operators make to “conditions” and to “Mother Nature” indicate the atmospheric conditions they are trying to use; in addition, Outlaw 187 relates messages that he is asked to pass on to one or another of the competing operators, since CB radio requires an on-off transmission—after one person has talked that person must get off the channel to listen. In superbowl slang, the passing of messages back and forth among competing operators is called “passing a five” or “flipping nickels,” and forms the basis of the teasing or insulting exchange. It also allows the operator passing the fives to ratchet up the tension between the other operators by giving their own emphasis to the message they convey. Operators often possess many Watergates, some of them dating back years, and these are prized examples of the best of superbowl culture and form an important community archive. To hear black CB’s audiomobility requires listening to the 1960s and 1970s as a multitrack recording on which one has layered samples from spoken-word male radicals such as The Watts Prophets and The Last Poets, some Martin Luther King, Malcolm X’s “stop singin’ and start swingin’” speech, Huey Newton intoning “The Black Panther Party calls for,” the echoing vocals of Jesse Jackson MC-ing Wattstax in 1972, Muhammad Ali boasting, James Brown in Zaire, old recordings of early black DJs from Chicago and Atlanta and then an instrument track underneath some superbowl Watergates. One can hear the latter segment of that imagined mix on Prime Minister’s unreleased track “No Excuses on the Bowl,” which can be found uploaded onto various sites online, and is required listening for anyone interested in the superbowl. The 15-minute track describes the workings and the spirit of the superbowl, warning against any whining or timidity. The bowl, Prime Minister makes clear, is like a verbal boxing match: if you enter the ring, you had better be prepared to compete as well as to win or lose on any given occasion. The competitive, domineering style builds on the audible presence African American men established during the post-1945 struggle for desegregation and meaningful black citizenship. Based on deliberately misusing the federal CB radio service to create an audible black national community, black CB thus resisted the restrictions placed on black physical mobility by white citizens and by the government; the superbowl also built on the

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diversification of black culture made possible by a parallel resistance to class-based attempts to limit black speech styles and their public dissemination. Both black and white uses of CB radio, and the cultural inheritances they drew on, largely excluded, as speakers and listeners, women and the unconventionally “feminine” and “masculine.” The histories of technology and of identity-building central to both black and white CBers show the persistent absence even by the late twentieth century of women and queer people as users, creators and audibly mobile voices in the United States. Think back to the imagined multitrack recording of the 1960s and 1970s I suggested earlier. All the voices I named came from male speakers and creators. The milieu in which the superbowl and the voices of its users resonated was both male and largely conventionally masculine within the black vocal spectrum of the time. The voices and words of African American women leaders such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm and Angela Davis, of Chicana leader Dolores Huerta and of gay liberation activists Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson remain as thrilling to hear now as I imagine they were at their time of origin, in part because (then as now) they are so rarely heard compared to the voices of the men I named. One set of voices, muted in mainstream media for most of the post-1945 period, mobilized gradually until audible on alternative media in the 1970s, coincidental with CB radio’s mass popularity. The gender non-­ conforming, “effeminate” voices of some gay white men, pathologized in mid-century America, ostracized even within the gay civil rights movement, remained the least mobile male voices. The next chapter briefly explores the audible difference of queer American voices, looking at their occasional, inconsistent emergence in broadcast media in the postwar period.

Notes 1. The term “indirect orality” refers to forms of communication other than those that take place via direct face-to-face speech—the latter usually assumed necessary for the growth of a community. On “sounding black,” see Baugh (1983, 2000). 2. On the formation and use of communications networks among a contemporaneous minority population, see Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s–1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), esp. chaps. 5, 6. On African American

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radio history in relation to community formation see Sonja D. Williams, Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio and Freedom (Champaign, IL.: University of Illinois Press, 2015) and the now classic work by Barbara Savage, Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War and the Politics of Race, 1938– 1948 (Chapel Hill, NC.: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 3. One set of examples comes from the school busing struggles in Boston and Louisville, where antibusing activists used CB radios to better target African American mobility as well as police attempts to control their protest actions. See “Police Battle Busing Foes Marching in South Boston,” New York Times, February 16, 1976; “Boston Whites March in Busing Protest,” New York Times, October 28, 1975; “Teen-Agers in Boston Toss Rocks and Bottles,” New York Times, February 17, 1976; “Large Wallace Vote Reflects Depth of Antibusing Sentiment in Boston’s Working-Class Neighborhoods,” New York Times, March 8, 1976; “Blacks’ Anger Rising in South Boston as Violence over Schools Spreads,” New York Times, May 2, 1976; “School Buses in Louisville Will Carry Guards Today,” New York Times, September 8, 1975. 4. “Rooster Channel Jumpers 1979,” typescript manuscript, folder JJ, box 10, p.  1, Berkeley G.  Burrell Papers, Mugar Library, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Dr. Berkeley Burrell, head of the Booker T. Washington Association as well as president of the National Business League, held strong connections in the 1970s to the small but politically significant African American business and political elite wooed by President Nixon as part of his racially complicated domestic agenda. 5. For a detailed account of the FCC’s intentions regarding CB radio, see Carolyn Marvin and Quentin J. Schutze, “The First Thirty Years,” special section, “CB in Perspective,” Journal of Communication 27 (Summer 1977): 109. 6. On the history of the black power movement, see Ashley D.  Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Peniel Joseph, ed., The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Jeffrey O.  G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 7. Prime Minister, interview with author, March 2009. 8. Shawn D. Lewis, “10-4, Bro,’” Ebony, October 1976, 120–22, 124, 126. 9. On the politics and history of black speech, see H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman, Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language and Race in the U.S. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Geneva Smitherman, Talkin That Talk: African American Language and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999); John Baugh, such as Out of the Mouths of

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Slaves: African American Language and Educational Malpractice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999). African Americans were not the only racialized minority to develop a distinctive slang as part of an assertive cultural response to racism and exclusion. Mexican American youths in the Los Angeles area in the 1940s used a slang called “caló” that drew on Mexican Spanish, English and African American hipster or jive expressions. For an excellent discussion of caló, see Anthony Macias, Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935–1968 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 87–89. On the history and politics of Spanish-­language radio in the United States and its role in community formation see Dolores Inés Casillas, Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 10. Smith, How Race Is Made, 25–26. 11. George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1913), later reinterpreted for Broadway and Hollywood as the musical My Fair Lady, tells one tale of the cruelties and power of class and accent in an early twentieth-century British context. 12. Bob Dixon, “Are Amos and Andy Dead?,” Chicago Defender, September 3, 1975, 21. See also The Falcon, “Smokie City CB News,” Call and Post, May 1, 1976, 8B. 13. In addition to criticism of speech style and accents, and the use of dialect, other articles in the black press criticized the bad manners and selfish behavior of blacks on CB radio (implicitly worse than what was heard of white CBers). See, for example, Jim Cleaver, “The Frustrations of Blacks and Citizens Band Radio,” Los Angeles Sentinel, March 24, 1977, A7. 14. James R.  Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), esp. chap. 5, “‘Home People’ and ‘Old Settlers’”; Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 9–10, 16–17, 233–42. 15. Hear McWhorter discuss “blaccents” with Sarah Jones on Studio 360, October 16, 2009: https://www.wnyc.org/story/108261-sounding-black/. 16. On the importance of an African American radio audience as consumers, see William H.  Honan, “The New Sound of Radio,” New York Times, December 3, 1967, 323. 17. William Barlow, Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 98–99. 18. Ibid., 104. 19. Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 34; and on the history

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of rap culture, see Tricia Rose’s classic Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 55. New scholarship on hip-hop has adopted an intersectional framework, bringing together black and Indigenous cultural practices, gender studies and anti-colonialism. See Kyle T.  Mays, Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018). 20. Barlow, Voice Over, 108. 21. The offices of Martin Luther King shared a building with WDIA. King would occasionally complain about the noise coming up from the radio station below. On the role of radio in the civil rights era, see Brian Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004). 22. On WDIA’s development and significance, see the brief history provided by the Black Past site: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/wdia-radio-station-1947/https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/wdia-radio-station-1947/. 23. Barlow, Voice Over, 138. 24. On the history of the twentieth-century music industry, including the involvement of African American artists and producers, see Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) and David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), esp. chap. 7. 25. See Blake, “Audible Sense of Order,” 176. 26. Prime Minister, interview with author, March 2009. 27. Robert McChesney, Telecommunication, Mass Media, and Democracy— The Battle for Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 18–19, 26–28; Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). More recent scholarship on the history of the radio listener can be found in Elena Razlogova, The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the American Public (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 28. Susan Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899–1922 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 297. 29. Hilmes, Radio Voices; and McChesney, Telecommunication, Mass Media, and Democracy. 30. Thomas R. Kennedy Jr., “New 2-Way Radio Ready for Public,” New York Times, March 24, 1948, 27. 31. Robert E. Baker, “3d Time Up for Hooded Bigots,” Washington Post, May 16, 1965, E1.

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32. Drew Pearson, “Klan Modernizes Its Terrorism,” Washington Post, October 18, 1965, B11. 33. “FCC Probes Klan Short-Wave Radio,” Washington Post, October 20, 1965, A2. 34. See, for example, Richard Corrigan, “Klansmen Use Citizen Band Radios to Conduct Raids, Committee Told,” Washington Post, January 24, 1966, A3. 35. “Willis Plans Curb on Klan Activities; Bill Sets Penalties,” Washington Post, June 15, 1966, A9. 36. Fred Powledge, “Armed Negroes Make Jonesboro an Unusual Town,” New York Times, February 21, 1965, 52. 37. Lipsitz uses the phrase “turning hegemony on its head” in a few instances. See, for example, George Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 192; and Lipsitz, Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 170. The historiography on hegemony/counterhegemony is extensive and has its roots in the early-1970s influence of European Marxism on American historians. The literature includes such major interventions as George Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973); Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976); Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Joane Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). My thinking about black CB’s connection to histories of race and technology has been informed by Rose’s Black Noise, as well as more recent scholarship on black technocultures and music, such as Alexander G.  Weheliye’s excellent Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), and the special issue “Technology and Black Music in the Americas” in the Journal of the Society for American Music, volume 2, number 2 (2008). 38. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 24.1 (1990): 56–80; Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14.1 (Winter 2002): 49–90. 39. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 61. 40. Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 57. 41. Ibid. 42. Blake, “Audible Sense of Order,” 169–73.

CHAPTER 4

Queering the Spectrum from Radio to Local TV

Abstract  Gay and lesbian voices existed on a small sliver of the American airwaves in the 1970s during the same time CB radio reached its peak popularity among white Americans. In the same Los Angeles area ranked by the Federal Communications Commissions as having the highest numbers of CB radio users, and in the same time period, listeners identifying as gay or lesbian could hear similarly identified presenters speaking to them about their community. Unlike straight, mostly white voices on CB radio, however, queer voices on a small-scale volunteer-run public radio network enjoyed no representation in popular culture or in advertising. If you wanted to hear openly gay or lesbian people on the radio in 1970s America, you would have had a hard time finding them outside a show such as “IMRU.” However, if you knew how to listen and what to listen for, the audibility of queerness and of queer voices had existed for decades. In a manner similar to how black men sought out and heard each other as they tuned their CB radios to listen across long distances, gay men throughout the twentieth century tuned into a communication system “off the spectrum,” a terrestrial embodied “technology” of intonation and shared vocabulary comprising a type of insider language resonant with the connection their heterosexual contemporaries later found through CB radio. The chapter concludes with a discussion of other forms of electronic media that have offered access to public communications to marginalized communities such as public access cable television and, more recently, online social media. © The Author(s) 2019 A. M. Blake, Radio, Race, and Audible Difference in Post-1945 America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31841-3_4

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Keywords  Gay • Voice • Spectrum • Queer • Indeterminacy • Public access In September 1974, the Gay Radio Collective, consisting of Greg Gordon, Enrich Murello and Colin McQueen, formed in Los Angeles, California, in response to flyers placed in the city’s Gay Community Services Center by volunteers from radio station KPFK. The station, southern California’s affiliate to the politically left non-commercial Pacifica radio network, distributed the flyers to reach gay men interested in producing a new show addressing gay issues in the Los Angeles area. The resulting Gay Radio Collective called the first iteration of their show “The Great Gay Radio Conspiracy,” but changed its name to “IMRU” (I Am, Are You?) in February 1975. At first a monthly show, IMRU soon began broadcasting three times a month and eventually became a weekly show in 1995. Within its first few months the collective and the scope of the show expanded to include lesbians. KPFK still broadcasts “IMRU,” making it the longest running lesbian and gay radio show in the United States.1 I give you this morsel of historical information to demonstrate that gay and lesbian voices existed on a small sliver of the American airwaves in the 1970s during the same time CB radio reached its peak popularity among white Americans. In the same Los Angeles area ranked by the Federal Communications Commissions as having the highest numbers of CB radio users, and in the same time period, listeners identifying as gay or lesbian could hear similarly identified presenters speaking to them about their community. Unlike straight, mostly white voices on CB radio, however, queer voices on a small-scale volunteer-run public radio network enjoyed no representation in popular culture or in advertising. If you wanted to hear openly gay or lesbian people on the radio in 1970s America, you would have had a hard time finding them outside a show such as “IMRU.” However, if you knew how to listen and what to listen for, the audibility of queerness and of queer voices had existed for decades. In a manner similar to how black men sought out and heard each other as they tuned their CB radios to listen across long distances, gay men throughout the twentieth century2 tuned into a communication system “off the spectrum,” a terrestrial embodied “technology” of intonation and shared vocabulary comprising a type of insider language resonant with the connection their heterosexual contemporaries later found through CB radio.3 For reasons that require further research, we do not have a similar

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historical record of the vocal or linguistic signals lesbians may have shared among themselves for similar purposes.4 “Gay spectrum,” if you will, traveled through public and private spaces such as streets, bars, cafes and theaters, as well as cruising areas in parks or in less traveled liminal zones of cities. This communication network whereby one could listen for and hear queer identities is based on a “technology” the gay community has for years referred to as “gaydar”—a type of sixth sense or intuition whereby one gay person can see or hear another person’s gayness, supposedly more accurately than could a heterosexual listener or observer. Merriam Webster dates the first known use of the term “gaydar” to 1982 but further research might show the term, or one similar to it, in use at an earlier date. The term gaydar’s conflation of “gay” and “radar” links it to one of the twentieth century’s most significant military surveillance technologies, the radar. Servicemen in the U.S.  Army’s Signal Corps developed the term “radar” in 1939 as they worked to ready such a system for the U.S. Navy. That intuition, or “gaydar,” formed an embodied mobile “technology” that gays could both deploy and tune into wherever they went. In a sense, a true mobile “citizens band” of sensed spectrum.5 The seeming inaudibility of gays, their apparent absence from (or only covert, closeted presence on) systems such as CB radio or from the corporate broadcast networks of mainstream radio does not, as I have suggested, indicate that gays could not be heard or that they were silent—only that the listener needed some proficiency and familiarity with audible queerness whether through homophobic prejudice or a shared sensibility. A listening that heard gayness, and a gayness that could be heard, occupied fraught social (rather than radio) spectrum from the late 1940s through the 1970s. When being identified as homosexual could jeopardize one’s employment, family and social relationships, and possibly result in arrest and criminal charges, queerness constituted a necessarily secret difference for most queers in the post–World War II era. If audible difference most easily identified Puerto Ricans and visible difference African Americans, gay men’s sexual difference could manifest in both ways or in neither, through the eye or ear of the beholder or by the queer person refusing to adopt any disguise. Gay male difference was thus less determinate. That element of indeterminacy made finding and identifying each other more difficult and, at times of criminalization or ostracism, more dangerous; but that same indeterminacy forms a significant part of any understanding of difference and an understanding that the differences that can seem so knowable, so clearly visible or audible, are not

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necessarily so accurate; that among a diverse population in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the intersection of plural identities more accurately represents the complexity of time and place. What follows is a brief exploration of “indeterminacy” as an unsettling factor for post–World War II American systems of categorization, of prejudice and of discrimination, posing a disruption to a system precariously reliant on visible difference. Puerto Rican migrants through a form of audible difference provided one example of such a disruption; queer Americans in their diversity and indeterminacy, represented in this instance by gay men, provided perhaps a greater disruption. On February 24, 1960, avant-garde composer John Cage appeared as a contestant on the popular television game show “I’ve Got a Secret.” Derived from the radio show “What’s My Line” in which a celebrity panel tried to discover a person’s job, in “I’ve Got a Secret” the panel tried to uncover the contestant’s “secret,” normally something unusual or perhaps embarrassing. “I’ve Got a Secret” (CBS, 1952–1967) perfectly channeled concerns about hidden identities at the heart of public and Congressional anti-Communism within Cold War politics in the United States, and the show’s shift from radio to television, from job to “secret,” played on ideas of truth and the means by which to find it. Such a show resonated as an entertaining perversion of the Congressional Army-McCarthy hearings, initially broadcast by radio and then televised, where witnesses subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) withstood questions about their beliefs, defending themselves against accusations of being Communists or having some other “un-American” identity such as being homosexual. The “I’ve Got a Secret” format played with the tension between who knew and who did not know the contestant’s “secret.” After introducing the contestant by name and hometown, the show’s host asked them to whisper their secret in his ear. During the on-camera intimacy of mouth-to-ear divulgence, the text of the revelation scrolled up over the TV screen for the viewers at home and was visible to the studio audience. The panel of celebrity inquisitors could only observe the studio audience’s responses of laughter, shock or titillation. John Cage’s appearance on “I’ve Got a Secret” constituted a performance of his “secret”: Cage had whispered to host Garry Moore that he had made a musical composition using a bathtub, jugs, a blender, radios, a piano, a tape recorder, a watering can and other common household objects.6 In an absurdist version of an industrial efficiency experiment, Cage darted from one object to another, pressing buttons, pouring ­liquids,

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hitting radios, putting flowers in a bathtub, all the while holding and responding to a stopwatch in his hand. Cage performed inefficiency and manic disorder, inviting laughter, the emotional opposite of industrial modernism’s demand for logic, rationality, order and compliance to norms. Cage’s noncompliant, queer performance and composition satirized the efficiency experiments of twentieth-century time-management experts; the “Water Walk” “instruments,” all objects from everyday life, bore no productive relation to each other and were not arranged in a manner productive of any tangible outcome. Cage thus queered the modern, as typified in mid-twentieth-century American industry, corporate capitalism and technophilia. In addition to his performance, Cage’s voice provided an added and unexpected queer flourish to his TV appearance on “I’ve Got a Secret.” The sound of Cage’s voice contrasted with his conventional formal attire and the heteronormative environment of the TV studio. To some listeners, his soft, higher-pitched, lilting, slightly sibilant voice revealed a “secret”—his homosexuality—different from the official “secret” featured on the show. Like most Cold War personal secrets, it was not a secret to him or his close friends but functioned as a secret in that historical context. If you were a gay man watching that episode of “I’ve Got a Secret,” it is likely you would pick up on Cage’s gayness if you were not already aware of it. You might have wondered “Am I the only person watching who can see this guy is gay?” Seeing Cage pass as an acceptable and entertaining guest on a mainstream popular game show, despite the fact that his voice would have, to some ears, revealed his homosexuality, might have surprised a gay viewer. It might also have felt encouraging or given some hope that gays in America would not always be closeted by laws or by social exclusion. Or the reaction of a gay viewer could have been “Well, he’s an artist, an eccentric composer, so he’s never going to get the same scrutiny as the rest of us.” I wonder if seeing Cage’s visible “normality” while hearing his nonnormative voice provided a combined sensory experience that can help us understand the significance of television as a medium for the marginalized. As I have shown in this book, we perceive difference (racial, gendered, sexual) audibly and visually. When the difference that you see and the difference that you hear, and vice versa, do not seem to align in expected ways, you confront an ontological rupture between your learned expectations and what you are seeing or hearing in that moment. Because gay and lesbian people’s difference is not necessarily audible or visual, but can be

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both, neither or either, they complicate, or queer, the sensory spectrum. In the same way, a person who identifies as African American based on their family heritage but who may not be visually “read” as African American by onlookers also queers that spectrum, even more so if they do not speak in a manner commonly (or stereotypically) associated with African American heritage. Two years before his performance of “Water Walk” on “I’ve Got a Secret,” Cage’s composition “Indeterminacy” presaged that presentation in many ways though with less slapstick hilarity. “Indeterminacy” comprised a spoken composition (with accompaniment) consisting of a series of unrelated anecdotes, read aloud by Cage for exactly one minute. Because of the varying lengths of the narratives, Cage’s speaking tempo shifted accordingly—he spoke faster for longer stories and slower with random pauses in the shorter pieces. His accompanist, David Tudor, located in a separate space, simultaneously produced sounds unconnected to the narratives. The listener heard discordant sounds made on a piano, untuned radios switched on and off, objects struck, static distortions and rumbles, all of which at times drowned out Cage’s voice. The lack of relationship between the consecutive one-minute stories and the accompaniment remained constant across performances of the piece. As he would with the objects in “Water Walk,” Cage constructed a relation between them produced only by placing them in proximity to each other across the duration of the piece. Cage’s composition also demonstrated his long-­ standing interest in chance operations, derived from his engagement with Buddhism and using the I Ching as a compositional tool. The one-minute stories Cage told in “Indeterminacy” varied from anecdotes about his childhood in Los Angeles to stories others told him about their lives, to lessons from Buddhist teachings, to accounts of his own performances or other musical interactions. Many of the stories are surprisingly funny, as Cage takes the opportunity to play with avant-garde form as well as content, diverting from the popular image of mid-century artistic modernism as obscure, humorless and highbrow. For example, in Part I of “Indeterminacy,” Cage tells a story about walking along Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles and coming to a stationery store with a mechanized pen and paper roll displayed in the window. An advertisement in the window extolled the perfection of the mechanical pen. “I was fascinated for everything was going wrong,” Cage says. He described how the pen was tearing the paper, and ink had spattered all over the paper and the window. Cage seemed delighted by this modern machine-age

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mayhem, the complete mechanical failure of a system designed to reproduce the very human act of writing with pen and ink, a device designed to enable capitalist efficiency in the office—Alfred Chandler’s “invisible hand” come to (dysfunctional) life. If heard by a 1958 resident of New York City, “Indeterminacy” might have sounded somewhat familiar. The experience of listening to all or parts of “Indeterminacy” resonated with the interruptions, the drowned-out words, the overlapping and oppositional sounds, the proximity of people and machinery, which characterized Manhattan (in particular) in the late 1950s. Cage’s “Indeterminacy” resonated with a fractured, random, unpredictable, diverse sonic world of overheard conversations, bits of radio sound caught in one’s ear while walking along a busy street or passing the open window of an apartment, a cafe or a car, as well as with an era of whispered secrets and deliberate silences. “Indeterminacy” expressed the intersectional heard environment of New York. Within a Cold War context, voices represented an aspect of the suspect-­ self available for investigation, interrogation and pathologizing. While I listen to John Cage’s and others’ voices from this period, I listen for how various Cold War authorities and agencies may have heard them. John Cage’s voice offers indeterminacy itself, hovering in the margins of the tonal, rhythmic and pitch ranges of conventionally “masculine” and “feminine” voices at mid-century. Despite our contemporary resistance to stereotyping, one can hear in Cage’s gendered oscillation, mixing minor chest resonance with the higher, softer, breathier sounds, a definitive type of “gay” male voice—the “sissy” voice. As Craig Loftin has argued, during the 1950s gay men as well as the heteronormative majority produced intense hostility to the archetypal “sissy,” whose voice and body movements marked him as politically problematic in the context of both homophile activism and Cold War homophobia. As scholar Allison McCracken has shown, in her study of popular male “crooning”-style singers in the 1920s and 1930s, American listening for non-normative masculinity began during the gendered insecurities of the Great Depression. The postwar period saw the reemergence of those prejudices within the anxious international context of U.S. efforts to secure global dominance in the face of growing Soviet and Chinese influence.7 Paul J. Moses (no relation to urban planner Robert Moses) argued in his 1954 book The Voice of Neurosis—one of the many works in the field of “personality studies” popular in the 1950s—regarding the development of the adolescent boy’s voice: “He teeters precariously on the brink

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of heterosexuality, not knowing where to fall. Backward is the mother (and homosexuality) and the clinging to a high, childish voice; forward is manhood (and The Girl) and the acceptance of his new deep voice.”8 Moses’ research aimed to analyze personality and latent pathology from the speaking voices of his subjects with a method he called “creative hearing.” Moses began his work in the 1940s, analyzing a male adolescent’s voice through a phonograph recording. His voice analysis concluded that the teenager showed feelings of inadequacy, that he had sadistic and egocentric components to his personality and that he was “effeminate.” Moses’ analysis described the young man as having “a low voice with considerable chest register. However, he does not mix his registers, but exhibits pure chest quality and then ‘breaks’ or switches into an almost pure head register … the total impression from his speech is conveyed by such adjectives as ‘pasty,’ ‘dirty,’ and ‘sticky.’” Moses said the young man’s “[e]ffeminacy is indicated by a ‘glissando,’ avoiding concentration on one single pitch” and by a speech style marked by “exaggerated duration of vowels (‘Isn’t that straaaaange?’).” Moses tied personality to voice, and voice to gender queerness (“femininity” in men), which he in turn tied to homosexuality—a neurosis in his view.9 Moses’ work suggested that the voice revealed the “true” personality, belying a person’s efforts to disguise themselves through dress, work or relationships. Such secrets could be heard, or listened for, through Moses’ “creative hearing.” Of course, when he published his work in 1954, the Cold War made aural surveillance, the use of listening devices as well as the “creative hearing” of expert listeners and suspicious co-workers or neighbors a crucial weapon in a war of secrets. What happens when gay or gender-non-conforming voices no longer function as secrets, potentially freeing the speakers from persecution, shame and exclusion? One result is that such voices become audible to a larger set of listeners through inclusion in everyday public and private spaces—from streets, workplaces, shops, schools—and transit through to virtual spaces with specific audiences such as radio and television programming. When “IMRU” began airing on KPFK in 1974, the American gay and lesbian movement was only five years out from the Stonewall Riot, the communal act of resistance, led by transwomen of color against police harassment in New York City that has become a historic marker of the beginning of the gay liberation movement. To turn the tuner on one’s FM radio dial in 1974 and hear gay and lesbian Americans discuss queer issues

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in a non-pathologized way would have been an extraordinary experience. No sympathetic gay or lesbian characters existed on U.S. television or mainstream radio in 1974, or in government leadership positions. There was no national spokesperson for gays and lesbians, no one the media would invite onto network broadcast media or quote in the newspaper as they had done, or did, with the likes of recognized leaders of the African American, Latino or women’s movements such as Martin Luther King, Betty Friedan, Cesar Chavez; no gay equivalent existed of the Black Panthers or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); there was no National Organization for Women (NOW) or NAACP to lobby Congress or other branches of government on behalf of gays and lesbians (let alone trans people—we are still waiting for that moment). The slow increase of marginalized people appearing on television in the United States provided more opportunity than radio—CB or broadcast— for queering the spectrum. I read John Cage’s appearance on “I’ve Got a Secret” as an early example of queering the spectrum, though such a reading at the time of broadcast was perhaps only understood as such by queer viewers. By the time “IMRU” began broadcasting on KPFK in 1974, a televisual “cousin” of non-commercial radio emerged as a new venue for gays, lesbians, racialized people and others “not ready for prime time” to appear on their community’s television screens: public access cable television. The beginning of IMRU on KPFK marked one example of an emergence, in the 1970s and especially in the 1980s, into community media of gays and lesbians as well as numerous other community and interest groups who would otherwise remain unheard and unseen beyond in-­ person meetings, leaflet and poster campaigns and some alternative print media. We can trace this emergence to another change in FCC policy, similar to that which initiated CB radio: the FCC’s 1972 Third Report and Order required all cable television systems in the top 100 U.S. television markets to provide three access channels—one each designated for educational, local government and public programming. In addition, the cable companies had to provide studio space, equipment and training to any member of the public who wished to create content for these new public access channels. Four years later, in 1976, the FCC’s ruling was amended to cover any community with 3500 or more cable subscribers. Although cable companies challenged the extension of the ruling, and won in 1979 in the Supreme Court case FCC versus Midwest Video Corp, by that point some cities and other areas had already put in place their own

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ordinances (franchise agreements) requiring cable TV companies to provide public access channels to their community members. In 1984, such arrangements were written into U.S. law through the Cable Franchise Policy and Communications Act. The Act permitted local governments across the United States to require cable television companies in their areas to provide “PEG” (public, educational and government) channels. In another win for communities, the cable companies involved in those agreements had no rights to censor or limit the programming content transmitted on any of the public access channels. Before the World Wide Web and Internet became widely accessible in the mid- to late 1990s, public access cable television programming formed a new sector of citizen-produced localized media through which almost anyone could get on television to communicate original content to whoever tuned into their program slot on local cable. Anyone who remembers local public access cable channels from their heyday of the 1980s will recall the peculiar mix of hosts who conveyed content in the overnight hours. But in addition to quirky characters, the programming on public access cable channels also brought local government meetings and news to people’s homes, and it brought the type of special interest programming unavailable by the 1980s on network television (local or national) which depended on advertising support and set restrictions on content. For example, in the 1980s, Chicago’s military veterans could tune in, via local cable television, to “Veteran’s Forum,” hosted by Vietnam Veteran Tom Vasquez; and the weekly show “Labor Beat” brought news from the perspective of ordinary workers and union members. In keeping with the quirkier end of public access’s spectrum, local viewers could also watch “Frank Landon and Zsa Zsa Present,” which provided tips on hair and beauty from local beautician Landon and his pet poodle Zsa Zsa.10 Since the mid- to late 1990s the means to create and disseminate one’s own written, spoken and visual materials, recorded and live, have proliferated. From the slowly loading web pages of the 1990s through to the immediacy of Facebook Live, Twitter Periscope and Instagram Live, people with access to a reliable Internet connection have been able to connect with known and unknown audiences. The CB radio category of “good buddy,” Jane Jacobs’ category of “good stranger” and the notion of a defined community likely to watch one’s public access cable show are anachronisms for history texts such as this book. It is perhaps worth noting here that in today’s CB slang usage, “good buddy” refers to “a homosexual.” The term that has replaced “good buddy” is “good neighbor” or

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simply “neighbor.” Further research might determine if “good buddy” came to denote “homosexual” because the original term suggested too much intimacy and affection between men, and if other CBers went from “buddies” to “neighbors” to defuse that possibility of queerness, or if in fact the higher number of female truckers caused the change from “buddy” to the gender-neutral “neighbor.” As André Brock, Lori Kido Lopez, Dolores Inés Casillas and Alexander Cho argue, racialized, queer, immigrant and other identity groups rendered marginalized by the still-­ dominant white, Anglophone, ableist, heteronormative culture of the United States use social media, in spite of its corporate ownership, to create and sustain community connections similar to those offered by CB radio in the 1970s.11 Access to the means of electronic communication has, since the proliferation of CB radio, marked a form of “citizenship” based on laying claim to a sense of belonging, and asserting the right to speak and be heard. In the last 20 years, first with long-form narrative radio documentaries popularized through shows such as “This American Life,” followed by podcasting, “threads” on Twitter and now the “stories” posted on social media platforms, Americans have been able to narrate, perform, enhance, edit their lives and form an audience for each other in these endeavors.12 These stories, their producers and their consumers enjoy mobilities far beyond that which CB radio’s designers and users accessed in the 1970s. In the 2020s, an approaching era of even greater consolidation of global electronic communication in the hands of a few private corporations, dwindling funding for public broadcasting, but easy access in many parts of the world to technology for creating and sharing one’s own content, we will see where and how wide this century’s citizens band stretches.

Notes 1. “IMRU”’s archives are housed in the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, in Los Angeles, California. The Online Archive of California provides information about the collection’s scope and access. For a history of Pacifica Radio, see Matthew Lasar Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000). 2. These vocal traits and the use of insider language certainly existed out of necessity in the countries where the medical, religious and legal establishments had enshrined, and subsequently criminalized, the individual identity category of “homosexual” at the close of the nineteenth century: the

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United Kingdom and its colonies, the United States and parts of western Europe. It is beyond the scope of this book to trace similar vocal or linguistic histories beyond those areas.  In the United Kingdom, the gay slang known as “polari” provided gay men with a secret language through which to identify each other and communicate safely, especially useful in the post1945 decades of expanding gay urban communities but continued criminalization of homosexuality. For a recent depiction of polari, see https:// youtu.be/Y8yEH8TZUsk. 3. Some linguists and other scholars were likely aware of gay men’s insider language and its purpose, though not necessarily sympathetic to its necessity as a tool of self-defense and connection, or likely to publish research on the issue. Pioneering academic lesbian-feminist linguist Julia Penelope (formerly Julia Penelope Stanley) published an academic study of gay vocabulary, “Homosexual Slang,” in American Speech Vol. 45, No. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1970): 45–59. Stanley concluded that “homosexual slang is a conscious acquisition on the part of the speaker; it acts as a signal of membership within the group and as a method of unifying the members” (p.  55). Stanley’s glossary at the end of the article offers a great resource from her 1960s research for scholars interested in studying the evolution of gay slang over time. 4. On feminine voices and gender in radio, see Christine Ehrick’s book Radio and the Gendered Soundscape: Women and Broadcasting in Argentina and Uruguay, 1930–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) and her essay “Vocal Gender and the Gendered Soundscape: At the Intersection of Gender Studies and Sound Studies,” Sounding Out! The Sound Studies Blog, February 2, 2015. 5. For theoretical work exploring these notions of embodiment and “technology,” see the developing field of “somatechnics”; for example, the journal Somatechnics published three times per year by Edinburgh University Press. 6. See Cage’s performance on “I’ve Got a Secret” at this YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSulycqZH-U. 7. Craig Loftin, “Unacceptable Mannerisms: Gender Anxieties, Homosexual Activism, and Swish in the United States, 1945–1965,” Journal of Social History 40:3, 2007, 577–596. See also David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (University of Chicago Press, 2006); Allison McCracken, Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), especially chapter 5. 8. Paul J. Moses, The Voice of Neurosis (Psychological Corp., 1954), 29. 9. Moses, Voice, 2–4.

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10. Information on Chicago public access cable shows can be found in this article from the Chicago Tribune https://www.chicagotribune.com/ news/ct-xpm-1987-06-19-8702150767-story.html. During its early years, public access cable inspired genuine hope that America’s media landscape would become more democratic and diverse. See, for example, Barry T. Janes, “History and Structure of Public Access Television,” Journal of Film and Video Vol. 39, No. 3 (Summer 1987): 14–23. Media scholar Douglas Kellner was an early enthusiast of public access cable’s progressive and anti-­hegemonic possibilities, and hosted a public access show in Austin, Texas. See his article “Public Access Television: ‘Alternative Views,’” Humanity and Society, Vol. 9, No. 1 (February 1985): 100–107. An excellent scholarly collection of articles on cable television is Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas, eds., Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting (New York: New York University Press, 2007). 11. André Brock, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (New York: New York University Press, 2020); Lori Kido Lopez, Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship (New York: New York University Press, 2016); Alexander Cho, “Default Publicness: Queer Youth of Color, Social Media, and Being Outed by the Machine,” New Media and Society Vol. 20, Issue 9: 3183–3200, September 1, 2018; Dolores Inés Casillas, Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 12. The twentieth- and twenty-first-century fortunes of sonic narrative, especially on radio, and its relation to literature, are examined brilliantly in Jeff Porter, Lost Sound: The Forgotten Art of Radio Storytelling (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

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Index1

A ABC, see Broadcasting corporations Accents “blaccent,” 47 southern, 31, 47 Adam-12, 28, 29 Advertising, 64, 72 African American CB, see Black CB Ali, Muhammad, 49, 57 Amateur/amateurish, 28, 50, 51 America/American, v–ix, 1–12, 18, 21, 23, 24, 27, 28, 30–32, 40, 41, 43, 47, 50, 51, 54, 58, 64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 73 American government, see Government American Radio Relay League, 51 Anti-communism, 8, 66 See also Cold War; Red scare Archive/archival, 2, 44, 57, 73n1 Atlanta, Georgia, 32, 48, 57

Audible/audibility difference, viii, 3, 58, 65, 66 geography, 40 racial, 49 Audience, 5, 47, 48, 66, 70, 72, 73 Audiomobility, ix, 40, 53, 55, 57 Aural-oral sphere, 40 Automobile, see Car Automobility, 9, 17, 21 B Bailey, Holmes (“Daddy-O-Daylie”), 47 Baldwin, Davarian, 46 Banham, Reyner, 17, 32n1 Barlow, William, 47 Baugh, John, 59n9 Benson, Al, 47, 48 Bernstein, Leonard, 7, 8

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 A. M. Blake, Radio, Race, and Audible Difference in Post-1945 America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31841-3

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INDEX

Black/blackness, vi, 12, 16, 18, 21, 23, 30, 40–58, 64 “sounding black,” 40, 44, 45, 47, 48 Black CB, 32, 40–44, 47, 49, 53, 55, 57 radio clubs, 32, 42, 44, 46, 53 See also Superbowl Black nationalism, 44, 49 Black Panther Party, 57 Black radio “black appeal” stations, 48, 49 black DJs, 47–49, 57 Blues, 40, 41 Boston, Massachusetts, 19, 32, 59n3 Bowles, Paul, 7 Breaker! Breaker!, 11 Broadcasting corporations ABC, 51 CBS, 51, 66 NBC, 11, 28, 29, 51 Broadcast radio, 28, 40 See also Broadcasting corporations Brock, André, 73 Brown, James, 57 Burrell, Berkeley, 41, 42 C Cage, John, 66–69, 71 California Los Angeles; Angelenos, 17, 21, 22, 24; and CB, viii, 16, 17, 19, 20, 24, 26, 27; Mobility City, 17; South Central Los Angeles, 17, 21, 23 southern California, 18–20, 28, 33–34n9, 64 Watts, 17, 18, 21–23, 43 Car, viii, 11, 16, 17, 22–28, 30, 37–38n41, 42, 46, 69 Casillas, Dolores Inés, 73

CB Radio: A New Hue and Cry, 15, 24 CBS, see Broadcasting corporations Channel 6, 42, 44, 49, 55 See also Superbowl Chicago, Illinois, 19, 32, 45–48, 57, 72, 75n10 CHiPs, 29 Cho, Alexander, 73 Citizen/citizenship, v, vi, viii, ix, 3, 10, 16, 17, 19–22, 24, 25, 27, 31, 42, 51–54, 57, 73 Citizens band (CB) network, 16 See also Citizens band (CB) radio Citizens band (CB) radio, 41 accessibility; “became available for mass use in 1958,” 51; “CB could be used and operated by anyone,” 51 CB culture, 14n14, 30, 40, 55 CBers, 20, 27, 31, 41–44, 49, 54, 58, 60n13 popularity, CB craze, 11, 29, 41 See also Citizens band (CB) network; Citizens band (CB) user guides; Technology Citizens band (CB) user guides, 30 City/cities American cities, vi, 24, 41, 43 “black metropolis,” 46 See also Neighborhood; Urban anxiety; Urban race relations Civil rights Black Panther Party, 57 CB radio and, 51, 52, 58; Deacons for Defense and Justice, 52 Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), 52 desegregation, 18, 51 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 45, 71

 INDEX 

postsegregation, 54 race riot, 43; Watts riot, 43 Class bourgeois, 53, 54 middle class, vi, vii, 19, 21, 41, 44–46; black middle-class identity, 46 upper-middle-class, 46 working-class, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 18, 46 Cohn, Roy, 8 Cold War, 7, 10, 66, 67, 69, 70 Communication(s) electronic communication, 10, 53, 73 mobile communication, viii, 2, 9, 10, 17, 18, 22, 38n41 network, 42, 58n2 technology, 2, 9, 53 Communism, 10, 18 Community audible, 18, 27, 31; of whiteness, 18 black, 32, 45, 46, 48 involvement, 16 politics, 19 Commute/commuter, 19, 23, 27 Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), 52 Conservative, 16, 29, 31 See also New Right; Republican Convoy (movie, dir. Sam Peckinpah), 11 “Convoy” (song, C.W. MColl), 11 Copland, Aaron, 7, 8 Corporate broadcasting, 40 “Crack Carter,” 56, 57 Crime cities and, 24, 29, 36n21 crime prevention, 28 fear of, 24, 35n18 freeway crime, 24 Criminal, 22–24, 65 commuter, 27

87

D Dant, Tim, 17 Deacons for Defense and Justice, 52 Didion, Joan, 17 Digital media, 2 See also Internet; Social media Discrimination, 4, 66 Diss/dissing, 48, 56 Dixon, Bob, 45–47, 49 Dragnet, 28, 29 “Driver-car,” 17 Du Bois, W. E. B., 21 Durst, Lavada (“Doctor Hep Cat”), 47, 48 DX-ing, 42 E Ebony magazine, 32, 44 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 7 Emergency, 29 F FCC, see Federal Communications Commission Federal Communications Commission (FCC) policy; Cable Franchise Policy & Comm Act, 72; Communications Act of 1934, 50; FCC vs. Midwest Video Corp, 71; FCC’s 1972 Third Report and Order, 71; Radio Act of 1927, 50 Female/feminine/femininity, vii, viii, 14n14, 23, 30, 35n16, 36n21, 58, 69, 70, 73 See also Gender; transgender/trans Feminism, 12, 30 Film, 2, 15, 16, 24, 31 Ford, Betty, 11, 29

88 

INDEX

Ford, Gerald, 11 “444,” 57 Fraser, Nancy, 54 Freeway, 16–18, 20–25, 28, 31, 33–34n9, 34n15, 43 See also Highway; Roadway G Gates, Daryl F., 24 Gay, vii, ix, 7, 9, 12, 13n8, 58, 64, 65, 67, 69–71, 74n3 men, 8, 9, 64–66, 69, 74n3 See also Homosexuality/ homosexual; Lesbian; Queer, queerness Gaydar, 3, 65 Gay Radio Collective, 64 Gender, vii, viii, 2, 12, 17, 53, 70 See also Female/feminine/ femininity; Feminism; Gender non-conforming; Male/man/ masculinity; Transgender, trans Gender non-conforming, 58, 70 Gibson, Jack, 48 See also “Jack the Rapper” “Good buddies,” 16, 27, 31, 32, 55, 72, 73 Gordon, Greg, 64 Gospel, 47 Government, vi, 10, 22, 30, 34n14, 35n15, 42, 50, 53, 54, 57, 71, 72 Congress, vi, 71 “Great Gay Radio Conspiracy”, see “I Am, Are You?” Grossman, James, 46 H Henry, E. William, 52 Heteronormativity/heteronormative, 3, 9, 67, 69, 73

Highway, 10, 22, 23, 35n15 See also Freeway; Roadway Highway Patrol, 28 Hip-hop, 49 Homophobia, 8, 69 Homosexuality/homosexual, 7, 8, 65, 67, 70, 72, 73, 73n2, 74n3 See also Gay; Lesbian; Queer/ queerness House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 51, 52, 66 HUAC, see House Un-American Activities Committee Hubbs, Nadine, 7 I “I Am, Are You?” (IMRU), 64, 70, 71 Identity, vii, 2, 12, 14n14, 27–29, 40, 44, 46, 54, 65, 66, 73, 73n2 racial, 40, 54 Immigration/immigrant, 2, 4–6, 9, 12n4, 17, 73 See also Migration/migrant IMRU, see “I Am, Are You?” “Indeterminacy,” 9, 65, 66, 68, 69 Insider language, 63, 64, 73n2, 74n3 Internet, ix, 14n14, 72 See also Digital media; Social media Intonation, vi, 64 Isolation, 16, 21, 27, 50 “I’ve Got a Secret,” 66–68, 71 J Jackson, Jesse, 57 “Jack the Rapper,” 48 See also Gibson, Jack Jacobs, Jane, 8, 9, 25, 31, 72 Jazz, 40 Jive talk, 40

 INDEX 

K Kelley, Robin D. G., 48 Kido Lopez, Lori, 73 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 43, 49, 57, 71 KPFK, 64, 70, 71 Ku Klux Klan (KKK, Klansmen), 40, 51, 52 CB use and, 40 See also Race/racism/racialization; White supremacy

89

L Language, vi, 4, 5, 29, 30, 32, 44 insider language, 64, 73n2, 74n3 Lassiter, Matthew, 18 Last Poets, The, 57 Latinx, 3 Laurents, Arthur, 7 Leaner, Reverend Arthur, 47 Leary, Timothy, 31 Lesbian, 13n8, 64, 65, 67, 70, 71 See also Homophobia; Homosexuality/homosexual; Queer/queerness Lincoln Center, 7, 8 Lipsitz, George, 52 Lofland, Lyn, 26 Loftin, Craig, 69 Los Angeles Times, The, 19, 22–24, 33n9, 34n15, 35n16

Manhattan, see New York City/New York/New Yorkers Mass media, see Popular culture/ popular media McCarthy, Joseph, 8 McCracken, Allison, 69 McGirr, Lisa, 18, 19 McQueen, Colin, 64 McWhorter, John, 47 Meeker, Martin, 58n2 Migration/migrant, v–viii, 2–6, 8, 9, 17, 21, 31, 46, 66 See also Immigration/immigrant Misogyny, 30 Mississippi, 43, 47, 57 Mobility/mobilities audiomobility, ix, 40, 53, 55, 57 black, viii, 40, 47 social, 17, 45 See also Migration/migrant; Immigration/immigrant Moses, Paul, 69, 70 Moses, Robert, 7, 9, 69 Movin’ On, 11 Murello, Enrich, 64 Music black music scene, 49 music industry, 61n24 See also Blues; Gospel; Hip-hop; Jazz; Rap

M “Maestro,” 43, 54 Mainstream radio, 65, 71 See also Broadcasting corporations Male/man/masculinity black men, 16, 21, 23, 30, 45, 64 southern masculinity, 19 white masculinity, viii white men, 11, 12, 16, 58 See also Gender

N NAACP, see National Association for the Advancement of Colored People National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 45, 71 National Business League, 41, 59n4 “Nationwide 1000,” 56 NBC, see Broadcasting corporations

90 

INDEX

Negro Business League, see National Business League Neighborhood, 4–9, 16–18, 21–23, 25, 26, 36n21, 46 urban, 3, 25 Neighborhood Watch, 25, 31, 36n21 New digital media, 2 New Right, 18, 19, 31 See also Conservative; Nixon, Richard; Reagan, Ronald; Republican Newton, Huey, 49, 57 New York City/New York/New Yorkers, 2, 4–7, 9, 19, 25, 29, 69, 70 west side, 4–9 New York Times, The, 23, 27 Nicolaides, Becky, 18 Nixon, Richard, 12, 18, 19, 31, 42, 56, 59n4 “Nueva York,” 4–6 O Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE), 42 “Old Swingmaster,” 47 Online, see Internet P Pearson, Drew, 51, 52 Police harassment, 70 L.A. Police Department, 22 law and order, 16, 18, 19, 28, 54 law enforcement, 28, 29, 51 policing, 17, 25, 31 radio/emergency communications/ communication, 21, 22, 28 Police Story, 29 Police Woman, 29

Popular culture/popular media, 2, 18, 19, 23, 64 history of, 2 Postwar period, 21, 40, 48, 58, 69 postwar America, 24, 43 Prejudice, vi, 65, 66, 69 See also Discrimination; Homophobia; Race/racism/ racialization “Prime Minister,” 43, 49, 50, 54, 56, 57 Privacy, 26, 30 The public bourgeois public sphere, 53 CB and the public/CB publics, 55 citizen public, 54 counterpublics, 53–55 Habermas/Habermasian, 54 public sphere, 40, 52–54 Public access, viii, 71, 72 cable channels, 72 Public and private, 9, 27, 65, 70 Public transit, 20 Puerto Rico/Puerto Rican, 4–8, 65, 66 migration, viii, 3, 4, 6, 9 Q Queer, queerness, viii, ix, 3, 13n8, 58, 64–68, 70, 71, 73 See also Gay; Homosexuality/ homosexual; Lesbian; Transgender, trans R Race/racism/racialization “New Negroes,” 46 racial-political context, 16, 43 segregation, 41, 55 See also Ku Klux Klan; White supremacy Radio, viii, 1, 16, 40, 52, 64–73

 INDEX 

See also Corporate broadcasting; Technology Radio League of America, 51 Rap, 48, 49, 61n19 Reagan, Ronald, 18 Red scare, 7 Republican, 18 See also Conservative Resistance, ix, 8, 34n9, 52, 58, 69, 70 Rhyming, 47, 48 Roadway, vii, viii, 17, 24–27, 31, 32, 43, 54, 55 See also Freeway; Highway Robbins, Jerome, 7 Rooster Channel Jumpers, 41, 59n4 Rorem, Ned, 7 S Schwartz, Tony, viii, 4–8, 12n3 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 7 Sense/sensory, 2, 3, 9, 16, 26–28, 50, 55, 65, 73 perception, 54 “766,” 56 Sexuality, vii, viii, 2, 12, 13n8, 53 See also Gay; Heteronormativity/ heteronormative; Homophobia; Homosexuality/homosexual; Lesbian; Queer, queerness Shooting skip, 40, 42, 43 Sides, Josh, 21 Signifying, 47 Slang black, 46, 47 gay/homosexual, 74n3 lingo, 29, 30, 44 mainstream CB, 49 sexist language, 30 See also Insider language; Language; Vernacular; Vocabulary Smith, Mark M., 2, 3 Smokey and the Bandit, 11, 16

91

Social media, ix, 73 Sound, vi–viii, 2, 4–9, 13n6, 15–32, 40–42, 44–50, 68, 69 quality, 28 South, 49 American South, 2 southern states, 19, 46 white South, 31 Spanish, 4, 5, 33–34n9, 60n9 Speech style, 40, 45, 46, 49, 58, 60n13, 70 See also Accents; Slang Static, 28, 68 Stoever, Jennifer, 12n3 Stranger/strangers/strangerhood, 9, 26–28, 54, 55 bad stranger, 26 good stranger, 9, 26, 72 Suburbs/suburban, vii, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24 Superbowl operator, 43, 44, 56 slang, 56, 57 See also Black CB Surveillance/surveil, viii, 22, 38n41, 65, 70 See also Neighborhood Watch T Technology airwaves, ix, 45, 46, 50, 51, 53, 55, 64 AM-FM, 27 antenna, 42, 55 base stations, 42 channels, 10, 11, 28, 30, 32, 41, 42, 44, 51 operator, 41–43, 50, 56, 57 power, viii, 42, 48, 55, 56 rig, 29 technological skills; DX-ing, 42; shooting skip, 40, 42, 43 transmission, 37n41, 56

92 

INDEX

Telephone, vii, 10, 22, 23, 34–35n15, 50, 52 Television (TV), ix, 2, 10, 11, 16, 28, 29, 45, 50, 64–73 Texas, 31, 41, 43, 47, 57 Time Magazine, 29 Timmons, Kirby, 31 Transgender/trans transmen, vii transwomen, 70 Truck drivers/trucker culture, 10–12, 30 Twentieth century, ix, 2, 4–7, 10, 12n4, 17, 18, 21, 34n10, 49, 58, 61n24, 64–67, 75n12 Twenty-first century, v, 66, 75n12 U United States, see America/American United States government, see Government Urban anxiety, 24 Urban planning/urban planner, 4, 7, 8, 69 Urban race relations, 2 V Vehicle, see Car Vernacular, 44–46, 48 See also Slang; Vocabulary Vocabulary, vi, vii, 40, 45, 47, 64, 74n3 See also Slang; Vernacular Voice, v, vii–ix, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 16, 27, 37–38n41, 40, 41, 45–47, 49, 50, 58, 64, 67–70, 74n4

W Warner, Michael, 55 Washington, Booker T., 41, 59n4 Washington Post, The, 51, 52 Watergates, 19, 29, 56, 57 See also Nixon, Richard; Superbowl, slang “Water Walk,” 67, 68 Watts Prophets, The, 57 Wattstax, 57 WDIA, 48, 61n21 WERD, 48 West Side Story, 8 White Line Fever, 11 White supremacy, viii, 10 See also Ku Klux Klan (KKK, Klansmen); Race/racism/ racialization White/whiteness white CB, 28, 32, 42, 44, 54 white voices, 17, 64 Williams, Sonja D., 59n2 Wise, Robert, 7 World War I, 46, 50 World War II, vi, 8, 20, 21, 49, 53 World Wide Web, see Internet X X, Malcolm, 49 Y Yellow Jacket, 56