13 Oct Cheryl Higashida, Citizens Band- Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, and Social Movements?
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Citizens Band: Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, and Social Movements
Cheryl Higashida
American Quarterly, Volume 74, Number 2, June 2022, pp. 317-344 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI:
For additional information about this article
[ Access provided at 1 Sep 2022 01:22 GMT from Old Dominion Libraries & (Viva) ]
https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0021
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/860927
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© 2022 The American Studies Association
Citizens Band: Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, and Social Movements Cheryl Higashida
In the mid-1960s, African American civil rights organizers Nettie and Isaiah Sellers wrote to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) requesting funds for a two-way radio committee in their home-
town of Moss Point, Mississippi. Nettie and Isaiah were at the forefront of struggles for social, political, and economic justice in the Deep South. Nettie was assistant secretary of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), formed in 1964 to challenge the suppression of Black political participation. Her husband, Isaiah, a master electrician and TV repairman, built and main- tained the citizens band (CB) two-way radio systems that SNCC relied on for communications and protection against police and vigilante violence. These two-way radios were of tremendous interest to the Moss Point community. As Isaiah reported to SNCC, “They were talking all kinds of terms of getting people involved in the organization of radios so we have tried that and it is working.”1 Through organizing the Moss Point radio committee, the Sellerses also planned to organize their community around “political and economic [issues] to service the needs of the people.”2 The Sellerses and the Moss Point radio committee are one of many convergences of grassroots political organiz- ing and technological training in the US southern civil rights movement. By analyzing movement records and media coverage, I argue that a goal of the long civil rights movement was to develop grassroots technopolitical agency through two-way radio.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) established CB radio service in 1958 to provide “low-cost, short-distance, voice-communications service for business, necessary personal, and specified emergency uses.”3 CB licenses grew from 49,000 in 1959 to 300,000 in 1962 and 745,000 in 1965, with an unknowable number of unlicensed CB’ers adding significantly to these figures.4 The FCC’s ideal CB users were “the professional man (such as the doctor and the engineer), the small businessman, and the plain citizen.”5 In mass media and popular culture, typical CB users were stranded drivers call- ing for help, farmers radioing their barn from the field, housewives reaching husbands on the road, and above all, freewheeling truckers.6
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However, SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Deacons for Defense and Justice deployed CB in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana for communications, self-defense, and mutual aid in voter registration drives and community organizing.7 Part of the “southern diaspora” of people, orga- nizations, and ideas, rural African American CB organizing gave rise to the community police patrols at the roots of Black Power on the West Coast.8 Reconceiving technology designed without regard for, and in negation of, their bodies and lives, Black grassroots organizers and their comrades transformed their daily lives, political strategies and tactics, and dominant conceptions of mediated communications.
Theorizing Black vernacular technological creativity, Rayvon Fouché uses “reconception” to refer to “the active redefinition of a technology that transgresses that technology’s designed function and dominant meaning.”9 In response to their communities’ needs, Black freedom fighters reconceived two-way radio’s dominant function and symbolism: panauditory police sur- veillance. The surveillant dragnet of two-way radio was recast to create social networks of “dark sousveillance,” Simone Browne’s term for the critique of racial surveillance through Black epistemologies of antisurveillance, counter- surveillance, and other freedom acts.10 These dark sousveillant CB networks were essential to Black self-defense in organized and guerrilla struggles against white terrorism. CB dark sousveillance discloses that such struggles, often demonized and criminalized, are coextensive with mutual aid strategies that support, empower, and connect vulnerable communities through alternative infrastructure developed by and for the people.11
Dark sousveillant CB networks, then, were also ones of solidarity, mani- festing the Black radical tradition’s principled generosity and generativity in stimulating other freedom struggles. Civil rights CB sousveillance was integral to the beginnings of the Black Power, Chicanx and Filipinx farmworker, and American Indian movements. Along with the accessibility of two-way radio, its intentional use for organized dark sousveillance made it as essential as cars and guns to the civil rights and self-defense movements that thrived and in- tersected in the 1960s and 1970s. According to a 1971 study of twenty-eight self-defense groups,
The most frequently reported types of equipment were walkie-talkies and car radios, and 14 percent of the groups (most of which had young members) wore identifying shirts, berets, or jackets.12
Spreading from the Deep South through organizing and media coverage, Black CB sousveillance became integral to Black, Chicanx, Filipinx, and Native
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people fighting differentially shared conditions of racial capitalist and colonial violence in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Delano, California, and Minneapolis.
Two-way radio enabled a strand of grassroots organizing entwined with but distinct from broadcast radio, which has received much more attention in scholarship on media and movements.13 As transmedia organizers, civil rights workers worked across print, television, and radio in its mass broadcast and person-to-person forms to raise public awareness and mobilize support.14 CB’s restricted reach and simpler setup did not prevent organizers from imagin- ing ways that it could feed into community radio broadcasting. Nonetheless, two-way radio’s low-tech ordinariness, in conjunction with its brief, mundane interpersonal communications, have relegated it to the less audible range of the historical spectrum. More so than mass broadcast radio receivers that dis- seminate commercial and public content, two-way radiotelephony has become one of those quotidian technologies that “constitute much of what it means to be human” yet “disappear in a fog of familiarity.”15 But it is precisely as an accessible instrument for interpersonal mobile communications that CB sustained the everyday work of movement building.
Two-way radio organizing of the Cold War era expands surveillance, social movement, and sound studies to account for the obscured yet generative acts of people of color and Native people who reconceived tools and cultures of listening that developed through long histories of aural surveillance and ter- rorism—from the banning of drumming by the African-descended and their enforced listening to acts of torture, to the wiretapping of dissidents and the weaponization of music in military prisons.16 Attention has been given to late twentieth- and twenty-first-century activists using mobile computing devices to engage in sousveillance and political resistance. Scholars of race and tech- nology have shown how seemingly neutral or beneficial digital technologies reproduce the slow violence of discriminatory and criminalizing surveillance.17 But as Browne shows, racializing surveillance and dark sousveillance extends from the era of slavery when the policing, immobilization, and exploitation of Black bodies required their hyper- and in-visibility.
Two-way radio organizing amplifies the audiopolitics of racializing surveil- lance and dark sousveillance, which have been marginalized in a field of study etymologically deriving from the French words for “over” (sur) and “watch” (veiller).18 While ocularcentrism is clearest in panoptic surveillance studies, the field’s general privileging of visuality is evident in field-defining books like the Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies and David Lyon’s Surveillance Studies: An Overview, with its sections “Viewpoints,” “Vision,” and “Vis- ibility.”19 However, as Jennifer Stoever makes clear, audio technologies and listening practices are crucial not only to policing the “sonic color line” but also to challenging it.20
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Sound studies scholars, including Stoever and Jonathan Sterne, provide methods for apprehending two-way radio organizing by shifting exclusionary focus on white male “fathers” of invention to historicized study of the social con- structions and everyday cultures of sound and listening. Building on Raymond Williams, I examine CB technology “as being looked for and developed” out of “known social needs, purposes, and practices to which the technology is not marginal but central.”21 Meanwhile, two-way radio organizing addresses sound studies’ uneven attention to grassroots, collective technopolitical agency, which has led foundational sound studies scholarship to overemphasize hegemonic sound culture, including its distortion or silencing of marginalized and resistant sounds.22 Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian people are not merely victims of technological progress. CB sousveillance is part of a long ongoing history of marginalized communities collectively surviving and reimagining racist policing, disenfranchisement, discrimination, displacement, and elimination by recon- ceiving the technologies that emerge from and refract these structural realities.
From Citizens’ Radio to Citizens Band
Civil rights two-way radio organizing emerged from the entwinements of policing and popular culture, militarization and media, the carceral system and commerce. In the 1930s two-way police radio revolutionized modern policing by increasing responsiveness, naturalizing what Kathleen Battles calls “the dragnet effect” of police omnipresence across time and space.23 As Battles shows, citizens came to accept police authority as surveillance, which infiltrated the domestic sphere and leisure time through popular radio crime dramas that heavily featured the sounds of two-way police radio.
The “father of two-way radios in police cars” was Ewell Kirk Jett, then assis- tant chief engineer of the Federal Radio Commission (the FCC’s predecessor) and later the FCC commissioner who envisioned a Citizens’ Radio Commu- nications Service that led to CB.24 Jett’s career elucidates the imbrications of radio telecommunications, militarization, and policing.25 Jett began working in radio in the US Navy during World War I when the navy had nearly ex- clusive control of the airwaves. As FCC commissioner during World War II, Jett wanted to adapt for civilian life the “remarkable progress achieved during the war,” resulting in “a large variety of new applications of radio,” including walkie-talkies and Handie-Talkies used by soldiers, and mounted radio for tanks and other military vehicles. Jett envisioned Citizens’ Radio would use surplus war equipment, employing “thousands of veterans [who] should be able to capitalize on their war radio experience and become ace repairmen in civilian life.”26 Citizens’ Radio would further serve a key role “in the greatest emergency of all—war.” Lamenting the difficulty of coordinating air-raid
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defense after Pearl Harbor, Jett postulated that there should be a “civilian- defense system of communications which would function without delay in the event of another conflict.”27 Thus, while “Citizens’ Radio” distinguished between civilian and military telecommunications, its material and political development undermined this division. The militarized bases of and rationales for Citizens’ Radio persisted in two-way radio’s use for white civilian defense in racial warfare against African Americans criminalized for rising up in the mid-1960s against de facto segregation, chronic unemployment, economic exploitation, racist inferior education, and police brutality.
The paradigm-shifting policing powers of radio telephony that Jett unleashed in the 1930s fed his vision for Citizens’ Radio Communications Service in the 1940s. Jett introduced the idea to the public in a 1945 Saturday Evening Post article, “Phone Me by Air.” Jett illustrated the service’s potential through the hypothetical case study of “a young woman motorist riding alone at night on a lonely road just outside a city” who is sideswiped by another car. While the woman’s race is unspecified by the text, an accompanying photograph featured a young white female sitting demurely on her car’s bumper with her Handie-Talkie:
Figure 1. E. K. Jett, “Phone Me by Air,” Saturday Evening Post, July 28, 1945. Photo- graph by Bob Leavitt © SEPS licensed by Curtis Licensing Indianapolis, IN.
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The caption puts the reader in the white woman’s position of reliance on police and heteronormative domesticity, a reliance enabled and shaped by the intimacy of two-way radio: “You merely spin a dial on your handie-talkie and tell your troubles to the state police or your favorite garage—or if it’s just a flat tire—to your husband.” Jett’s heroine dials the Citizens’ Radio distress frequency to reach a state trooper who presumably arrests the offending driver while saving white life. Privileging Citizens’ Radio’s function to reach the police, Jett not only demonstrated that US Americans would shift from “mere listeners or spectators” to “active participants” but suggested that they would be intimate participants in the radiotelephonic dragnet of police authority.
Jett’s vision of Citizens’ Radio Communications Service was realized when the FCC established two-way Class D, or CB radio, service in 1958. Enmeshed in the contradictions of US citizenship, CB engendered tensions between its populism (accessibility, ease of use) and its policing (the policing of CB in conjunction with its policing functions). If citizens band implies access to “the public airwaves via a service provided to the nation’s citizens by the federal government,” citizens band denotes the restricted spectrum—27 mhz in the shortwave band—of mostly privatized radio bandwidth within which broadcasting is illegal.28 Citizens band thus contrasts with “citizen radio,” the term for World War I–era amateur radio broadcasts of Morse code, music, and talk across the spectrum of US airwaves.29 Even as it radically delimited the public sphere of citizens band and amateur radio, the FCC increasingly if unevenly tackled what it called in its 1963 report the “baffling policing problem” of CB misuse.30
CB widened the dragnet of racial surveillance and the production of sur- veillant white citizens through two prominent functions in the 1960s and 1970s: emergency roadside assistance and neighborhood watch programs. Programs like REACT (Radio Emergency Associated Communications Team), established in 1962 with the sponsorship of a CB manufacturer, and HELP (Highway Emergency Locating Plan), proposed a few years later by the Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, encouraged CB’ers to monitor civilian distress channels and contact law enforcement and rescue agencies. Angela Blake argues that CB became a “technology of white rescue” among its majority users—not rebel truckers but working-class white male drivers of passenger cars.31 By the 1970s, these suburban commuters relied on CB for protection against people of color increasingly criminalized in response to their movements and urban uprisings.32
Concomitantly, suburban and urban neighborhood watch programs prolif- erated from the late 1960s. The historian Richard Maxwell Brown noted that
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these “neovigilante” groups’ main activity was “patrol action in radio-equipped automobiles (linked to a central headquarters) for the purposes of spotting, reporting, and discouraging criminal acts.”33 Anti-Blackness was foundational to two of his three paradigmatic cases: the Maccabees of Brooklyn for whom “the crime problem was mostly by teenage Negroes coming into Crown Heights from adjacent areas,” and the North Ward Citizens’ Committee of Newark, “organized to conduct nightly radio patrols for the dual purpose of spotting and discouraging criminal activity and repelling, should the need arise, an incursion of Negro rioters and looters from the adjacent Central Ward of Newark.”34 Community patrolling went to new levels in cities like Oakland, where in 1968, two years after the Black Panther Party’s founding, the Chamber of Commerce coordinated twenty companies, including “advertising agencies, public utilities, newspapers, telephone companies, taxi companies, construction firms and trucking companies,” to marshal radio-equipped vehicles to cooper- ate with police.35 Complementing COINTELPRO (1956–71), two-way radio proliferated, popularized, and signified racist surveillance, criminalization, and police collaboration.36
Citizens’ Radio and CB thus were not merely established for US citizens: they interpellated surveillant—and sousveillant—citizens. The ease of surveil- lance of and by CB proliferated opportunities for electronic eavesdropping: communications on any one of CB’s forty channels could be heard on another radio transceiver tuned to that channel. Yet civil rights organizers seized on these very properties of two-way radio to create dark sousveillant networks of self-defense, mutual aid, and solidarity in their struggles for liberation.
CB Surveillance and Sousveillance in the Deep South
This section shows that CB widened the panauditory dragnet around civil rights organizers who were unremittingly surveilled by police, the Klan, Citizens’ Councils (groups of “respectable” white supremacists), individual vigilantes, and local and federal government agencies. But in responding to CB surveillance and the needs of African Americans in the rural South, activists widened the reach, capacity, and forms of civil rights organizing. CB was suited for rural, often-isolated Black communities such as those of Jonesboro, Louisiana, and Amite County, Mississippi, that lacked telephone service.37 As SNCC recog- nized, farmers had “long found two way radios more convenient than phones and are well equipped to receive and send messages.”38 Reconceiving CB’s uses and meanings, southern Black organizers and their allies coordinated direct action, voter registration drives, and Freedom Schools; defended themselves
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against racial terror; quantitatively and qualitatively transformed communica- tions; and fostered participatory democracy and technopolitical agency. This history of rural southern Black two-way radio organizing counters our under- standing of technological innovation primarily through white, male, urban, and/or elite individuals, and through research and development abstracted from society. It offers an example of redeploying technology through an eth- ics of mutual aid “to create an alternative infrastructure based in left values of democracy, participation, care, and solidarity” for those rendered most vulnerable by racial capitalist and colonial domination.39
Acquiring CB, while offering significant protection to civil rights groups, invited further monitoring and repression. Mississippi’s State Sovereignty Commission closely noted the acquisition of CB and walkie-talkies by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), which coordinated the voter registration projects of SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP during the 1964 Freedom Summer.40 And COFO’s accrual of CB provoked a radio arms race: Greenwood’s Citizens’ Council “also stocked up on walkie-talkies and could be seen practicing with them.”41
Consequently, COFO organizations essayed to keep their CB systems under wraps. The SNCC CB manual for its Jackson office stressed that con- fidentiality of its contents, including “absolute cosmic top secret” base code names and channels, was “essential if we are to have any dependence on the radio network at all.”42 Their caution was justified. Police bent the antenna at the Natchez project.43 SNCC’s Greenwood Freedom Summer headquarters reported “continued and continuous trouble with the citizens’ band radios” including signal jamming and the use of Greenwood’s call letters by unauthor- ized individuals.44 In conjunction with audio surveillance, white supremacist forces engaged in sonic terrorism through radiotelephony, blowing a trumpet over COFO channels and hurling racist epithets over CB at George Walker, president of the Port Gibson, Mississippi, Deacons for Defense and Justice.45
Civil rights workers were further surveilled by the FCC, which referred to its monitoring as such.46 FCC surveillance of CB usage coincided with southern voter registration drives in the mid-1960s through the 1970s, encompassing the proliferation of nationwide community patrols. In 1964 the FCC noted “the increasing importance of radio monitoring and direction-finding opera- tions in the southeast sector” of the US.47 In 1965, as CB violations reached an “all-time high,” the FCC limited interstation communications from the full twenty-three channels to seven and stipulated that interstation communications be kept below five minutes with a five-minute wait between transmissions.48 Such rules helped criminalize people of color and activists like Cosetta Jackson, an African American man “arrested for possession of a concealed weapon and for owning a citizen band radion [sic] not registered with the federal government.”49
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The fight for African American enfranchisement thus took place on technological as well as social, cultural, political, and legal fronts. Civil rights organizations prioritized CB acquisi- tion, system building, and training. A refrain in SNCC and CORE fundrais-
ing appeals after the 1964 Freedom Summer was that CB could have prevented the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Th rough donations, loans, and extension of credit from an electronics dealer, SNCC acquired sixty-two CB radio transceivers by 1965 in Mississippi and Alabama.50 To communicate with projects within and across states, SNCC
Figure 2. SNCC staff member in one of the organization’s radio cars, featured in Ebony, July 1965. Credit Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy Ford Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Smithsonian Institution.
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utilized CB in conjunction with Wide Area Telephone Service, a kind of toll-free service, in “a network which has become the very nerve center of the operation in Mississippi,” as a SNCC working paper described it.51 That year, CORE also set up two-way radio systems throughout Louisiana.
In the face of systemic efforts to deny Black technopolitical agency, civil rights activists reconceived CB’s dominant functions and purposes of main- taining social control through panauditory surveillance; of serving the “mobile privatization” of the white citizenry’s “at once mobile and home-centered way of living”; and of defining citizenship through white surveillance of the racially criminalized.52 While civil rights activists took advantage of CB connectivity among homes, offices, and cars, they did so to meet Black collective rather than white individual needs, and to challenge rather than maintain social control: CB roadside assistance for white motorists was repurposed to rescue activists being tailed, shot at, and run off the road while driving through hostile towns, remote roads, and mountains. Through these and other actions discussed below, organizers and activists reconceived CB to be a tool and practice of social media rather than private communication; of community building and movement organizing rather than family home-making; of political education rather than criminalization.
Documentation of anti-Black violence was a key tactic in procuring federal protection and enforcement. In response to this need, SNCC reconceived CB’s person-to-person uses to produce “minute-by-minute” accounts by and about multiple participants of events like the first Freedom Day voter registration drive in Holly Springs, Mississippi.53 Such accounts were distributed not only to national media and the Justice Department but also to the FBI, the Lawyer’s Constitutional Defense Committee, and the FCC. CB telecommunications enhanced documentation of civil rights struggles in real-time, granular detail from multiple perspectives, approaching what is done though digital social media today.
Two-way radio in the white private sphere invited atomized, individual citizens to participate in the panauditory surveillant dragnet from the comfort of their homes and cars. But two-way radio in the southern Black domestic sphere emerged in part from collective sousveillant networks. Jessie L. Sherrod recalls that her father, Foda B. Sherrod Sr., a leader of the Hollandale, Missis- sippi, movement, “allowed our home to house a shortwave radio station used for communication by SNCC students. . . . I assisted with handling the calls through the radio.”54 E. W. Steptoe, leader of the Amite County NAACP in Mississippi, maintained contact with COFO’s McComb office through one radio set “in his bedroom; another in his car.” Lowndes County sharecroppers
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evicted for registering to vote used CB ingeniously with other sound reproduc- tion technology in their tent city “home” to maximize collective intelligence and security:
One family has a t.v. set. The only other communications outlet is a two-way radio in one of the tents, which is manned by Mr. S.’s teen-age sons (one goes to school while the other works the radio; the next day they switch around). A loudspeaker hook-up allows all the families to hear whatever comes over the two-way radio, which is connected to the Selma office and several Negro farmers.55
As this example suggests, CB adaptation involved technological skill and creativity instantiating political resistance. CB technopolitical agency challenges assumptions about nontechnical CB users compared with operators of amateur radio (who needed to know Morse code and radio theory and regulation) or more complex electronics. The FCC reinforced notions of CB’er ignorance by ascribing their violations to their being “unskilled,” “nontechnical,” and “immature” rather than canny rule breakers.56 Yet civil rights CB sousveillance entailed technological knowledge, as notes from a SNCC copy of an FCC study guide for radiotelephone operator permitting show (see Figures 3 and 4).57
SNCC foregrounded CB’s technicality in the telecommunications sec- tion of a working paper likely authored by Morton Schiff, the radio project director who installed many of the organization’s CB transceivers throughout Mississippi:
To some people the complex system of WATS line calls and the citizens band radios (SNCC SIGNAL CORPS) is already technological. Because it is often inefficient, people do not always think of it that way, but it require’s [sic] trained people to use such a network which has become the very nerve center of the operation in Mississippi.58
The working paper noted that SNCC’s sixty-two citizens CB transceivers throughout Mississippi
must first be installed and then maintained by specially trained people, and they are. Some of these people came out of the movement or from the Jackson community. They too are technocrats now. . . . Presumably, expansion into the black belt will mean more of the same.59
SNCC’s reliance on CB led it to extend its philosophy of participatory democ- racy and political education to technical training, engendering technopolitical empowerment: “specially trained people” from local communities are necessary “so that in the long run, local Negroes and whites alike, will run the network themselves.”60 CB thus proved essential not on
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