Citizens Band Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, and Social .docx

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
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| 317Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, and Social Movements
© 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
| 318 American Quarterly
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

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
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
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.

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
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
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

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.
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
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 only to the civil
rights movement’s
Figures 3 and 4.
Notes from SNCC copy of the FCC study guide for the
examination for Radiotelephone Third Class
Operator Permit.
security and communications; it shaped and was in turn
redefined by the
movement’s strategies, organizing, and philosophy.
CB played a key role in SNCC’s efforts to merge technical and
political
education through the Radio Tougaloo project. Radio Tougaloo
aimed to

“make available to the people of Mississippi the knowledge,
skills and resources
necessary” to operate community radio stations that would
broadcast relevant
news, educational and cultural programming, including civil
rights struggles
that commercial stations suppressed.61 Technical and political
education would
fuse through interrelationships between Radio Tougaloo and the
SNCC Free-
dom Schools, which addressed Mississippi’s racist public
education system
through a curriculum of civics and history of the Black
liberation movement,
as well as reading, writing, and math. Servicing the movement’s
CB systems—
themselves a product of technical and political skills building—
would be “a
step-stone to the ability to oversee a highly powerful, many
faceted radio sta-
tion.”62 Like the Freedom Schools, the SNCC CBs were to be a
pipeline for
Black Mississippians to community radio engineering and
production. The
State Sovereignty Commission crushed Radio Tougaloo before
it passed the
planning stage. Nonetheless, it regenerated with much of its
leadership and
equipment intact as the Public Radio Organization (PRO) to
develop low-
power neighborhood AM radio.63
Organizers Isaiah and Nettie Sellers especially exemplify the
fusion of
technological and political network building through CB. Isaiah
and Nettie

“traveled throughout the hard core rural areas of the South
organizing [CB]
radio systems at SNCC projects” while struggling to support
their family.64
This meant painstakingly picking up, repairing, installing, and
delivering
equipment throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama,
including the
tent cities sheltering Black tenant farmers and sharecroppers
displaced for
their political activism.65
Isaiah built and maintained CB and other audio systems for two
major
efforts to empower African Americans through party politics:
the multiracial
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) formed by
COFO in 1964
to challenge Mississippi’s white supremacist Democratic Party,
and the Black
independent Lowndes County Freedom Organization formed by
Alabama
organizers and SNCC in 1966. In Atlanta Isaiah led staff
training at SNCC’s
national office, and he set up its thousand-dollar audio room,
including “two
Magnerecorders, one Westinghouse recorder and a splicing
device,” to produce
tape recordings of SNCC news for radio stations to air.66 The
quality of Isaiah’s
Atlanta work strengthened the conduit between rural and urban
radio activ-
ism: impressed by Isaiah’s audio room and repairs to the
Magnecord reel tape

recorders, the Public Radio Organization offered to lend “more
audio and test
equipment . . . to Mr. Sellers to be similarly serviced and kept
functioning by
SNCC until it is required by PRO.”67
As assistant secretary of the MFDP, Nettie campaigned for
welfare relief
and jobs for Jackson County, documented the harassment of
African Ameri-
cans, picketed segregated schools and businesses, participated
in sit-ins, co-led
political education workshops and meetings, spoke on the DC
radio station
WOL about the MFDP, and coordinated a “Black Christmas”
boycott of white-
owned stores.68 In a letter to the MFDP newsletter, Nettie
militantly urged
Black Americans, “fight if it is by law, physical, spiritual and
stand up for your
rights.”69 Nettie’s political leadership and Isaiah’s
technopolitical expertise led
them to fight by radio along with legal, physical, and spiritual
means.
Extending citizens bandwidth into the struggle for citizens’
rights, the Sell-
erses fostered technopolitical agency in Moss Point. As I
discussed above, the
Sellerses fundraised “to set up workshops and train worker [sic]
how to use the
short way [sic] radios.”70 Isaiah reported to SNCC, “We meet
every week on

Saturday nights. We [have] about 25 people mostly men who
participate in
the committee.” The Sellerses envisioned that the radio
committee would “do
other things locally, such as political and economic to service
the needs of the
people,” including supporting “a Negro police man who can
arrest whites [who]
has been layed off [sic] because one of the white officers says
he was cursing.”71
Moss Point radio committee members affirmed their ties to one
another and
the broader civil rights movement through dues that went to
both in-house
expenses—a members’ savings club, a base station operator’s
salary—and to
SNCC. Moss Point CB’ers thus accomplished the translocal
technopolitical
movement building that SNCC attributed to amateur radio
broadcasting: CB
was key to “developing in local communities networks of
communication and
giving local citizens a sense of being a part of a movement
which exists in more
than their own isolated area.”72
SNCC’s urban organizing literally built on rural southern radio
activism as
the organization pivoted to developing urban Black power
through local gov-
ernment in the mid- to late 1960s.73 SNCC’s Atlanta Project,
which centered
on the working-class African American Vine City
neighborhood, borrowed
audio equipment intended for Radio Tougaloo and relied on
Isaiah Sellers for

training, repair, and maintenance.74 SNCC Atlanta furthermore
investigated
the “possibility of establishing a neighborhood radio station
operating on a
citizen band” featuring entertainment, news, community
programming, and
local MCs.75 Atlanta’s CB radio station never hit the airwaves;
SNCC instead
reached Vine City’s ears through sound trucks equipped with
speakers and
phonographs.76 Nonetheless, the idea of organizing and
conducting political
education through CB community radio demonstrates the reach
of rural south-
ern Black technopolitical agency to obviate punitive
broadcasting regulations; to
meet the needs of urban organizing; and to foment Black Power
through radio.
Community Patrols and Rural Labor Radicalism: Dark
Sousveillance
beyond the South
Although the range of CB transmission was generally limited to
twenty miles,
its technopolitical reverberations emanated throughout the US,
extending the
Black radical tradition’s influence to encompass technology as
well as philoso-
phy, praxis, and the arts. The skills, tactics, and equipment of
civil rights CB

sousveillance constituted a practical blueprint and material tool
kit for the Black
Power, Chicanx and Filipinx farmworker, and American Indian
movements.
While two-way radio created telecommunications networks
within groups,
the lending of radio equipment produced symbolic and material
networks of
solidarity between different groups. Reporting on radio activism
and sous-
veillance, the movement press articulated the connections
between different
struggles for political rights, economic justice, and self-
determination. Here I
briefly limn this wider geography of dark sousveillance to show
how organizers
adapted CB sousveillance in the Deep South to other rural and
urban guerrilla
liberation struggles against police occupation, white
supremacist terrorism,
and hyper-exploitation.
Southern Black CB sousveillance spread through organizing
networks and
media coverage. The Deacons for Defense and Justice raised
national aware-
ness of two-way radio organizing conjoined with armed self-
defense. Founded
in 1964 in Jonesboro, Louisiana, and quickly multiplying in
other states, the
Deacons arose out of the African American community’s need
to protect itself
and CORE organizers.77 As Deacons leader Earnest Thomas put
it, the group
fought white supremacist groups on their terms: riding armed
with pistols and

rifles in radio-equipped cars or patrolling on foot with walkie-
talkies.78 Ten
percent of the two-dollar monthly membership fees went to the
Jonesboro
parent organization, which then equipped local chapters with
CB radios.79
Armed with these radios in cars and homes, chapters created
regional defense
networks for assistance and news dissemination.80 Similar to
but broadening
the scale of the Moss Point radio committee, the Deacons’ CB
sousveillance
facilitated translocal organizing and shaped its tactics.
The Deacons’ actions and fundraising trips garnered national
media coverage
of Black armed self-defense and sousveillance.81 Although the
Deacons’ guns
were of greatest interest and concern, their deployment of CB
was noted by
the press and contributed to their image. One UPI story began
by detailing
the Deacons’ radio-enabled security for the Mississippi leg of
James Meredith’s
1966 March Against Fear, calling attention to a “disciplined
young Negro” in
the rear ranks of the march who “raised a portable two-way
radio to his lips,
pressed a button and spoke quietly into the set. Further up the
marching line,
another young Negro raised his own radio to his ear and

listened.”82 Ebony
drew its African American middle-class readers’ attention to the
Deacons’ ra-
dio communications in its September 1965 profile, which would
have drawn
heightened interest in the wake of the August Watts uprising.
Image and text
amplified radio’s place in the Deacon arsenal. Ebony noted the
acquisition of
“weapons, ammunition and citizens band radios” in the
Deacons’ founding,
and visually paralleled a Deacon’s rifle barrel with the whip
antenna of another
Deacon’s walkie-talkie (see Figures 5 and 6).83
Emphasizing that “their fight against racial injustice includes
not one, but
two foes: white reactionaries and police,” Ebony reinforced
connections between
rural civil rights and urban Black Power movements that
African Americans in
Watts had made during the recent uprising: as they threw rocks
at motorists
and firemen, they reportedly shouted, “This is for Bogalusa!”84
Building on CB civil rights organizing in the South, two-way
radio sous-
veillance shaped the Black Power phase of the Black Liberation
Movement.
Mobilizing against police occupation of their communities,
African Americans
in Watts and Oakland adapted the black panther iconography of
the Lowndes
County Freedom Organization (LCFO) of Alabama and the
SNCC two-way
radio network to which it belonged.85 The people of Watts

implemented com-
munity control through radio automobility the summer after the
1965 upris-
ing had been sparked by California Highway Patrol officers
pulling over and
beating a young unemployed African American man, Marquette
Frye. From
the ghetto’s ashes the Temporary Alliance of Local
Organizations (TALO)
formed to address anti-Black police terror. The catalyst for
TALO’s formation
was the police murder of Leonard Deadwyler, shot to death with
impunity
by officers after being stopped for speeding to drive his
pregnant wife to the
hospital. TALO took the black panther “symbol of independent
Negro power,”
befitting its plans for “the South Central Colony” to secede
from LA and form
a Freedom City with its own police force.86
TALO also deployed SNCC radios to enact its first initiative, a
Citizens
Alert Patrol (CAP) established in June 1966 “to protect and
observe,” in their
appropriation of the Los Angeles Police Department motto.
Watts CAP was
inspired by Seattle’s African American patrols, which had
emerged the previ-

Figures 5 and 6.
The Deacons for Defense and Justice featured
in Ebony, September 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.
ous year with support of the city’s CORE
chapter in response to police killings of
Black people there.87 In turn, Watts CAP
influenced the formation of the Black
Panther Party for Self-Defense.88 CAP’s
Black Power ethos manifested in its shared
headquarters and leadership with SLANT
(Self-Leadership for All Nationalities Today), a Black youth
organization with
the motto BURN (Brotherhood-Unity-Responsibility-
Nationwide).
Watts CAP’s fleet of radio cars, featuring black panther bumper
stickers,
countered the police panauditory surveillance dragnet with a
panauditory
sousveillance safety net. This posed enough of a threat to Los
Angeles Police
that, according to CAP field supervisor Lenair Eggleston, cops
“[kept] changing
frequencies on their radios. . . . They think we have some
fantastic power to
be everywhere.”89 Indispensable to CAP’s “fantastic power,”
its two-way radio

cars expanded the patrol’s scope; “the beat of the Patrol
extend[ed] way beyond
Watts” to maximize coverage of the “meeting places for young
Negroes and
potential hotspots of police harassment.”90 Through two-way
radio sousveil-
lance, Black youth reclaimed their streets and mobility.
Elsewhere in California, southern civil rights CB sousveillance
was adapted
by the mostly Chicanx workers of the National Farm Workers
Association
(NFWA) and Filipinx workers of the Agricultural Workers
Organizing Com-
mittee (AWOC). After supporting the NFWA’s 1965 rent strike
in Tulare
County, California, SNCC aided the 1965–70 Delano grape
strike organized
by AWOC with critical support from the NFWA. In addition to
leading
workshops on nonviolent resistance and sending volunteers to
picket lines,
SNCC provided “indispensable” two-way radios so that
farmworkers could call
for help when attacked and monitor strikebreakers over one
thousand square
miles of fields in the “guerilla [sic] warfare in the grapes.”91
Tracking SNCC/NFWA radio networks, SNCC’s newspaper the
Movement
educated its readers on multiracial working-class solidarity. A
few months into

the strike, the Movement published a letter contending that “to
support the
negro in the South is a worthwhile project—to support striking
farm workers
a ridiculous, irresponsible waste of time, energy & money. If
they are hungry,
let them go to work!”92 In rebuttal, the Movement juxtaposed
this letter with a
fundraising plea for NFWA radios on the heels of a story
tracking SNCC and
CORE radios from Mississippi and Louisiana to Delano and
back to the South:
“SNCC could ill afford to part with them, but the situation in
Delano is so
much like the Mississippi delta that a short term loan of the sets
was made.”93
The radios’ movement between movements amplified
connections between
Black voter registration in Mississippi and the striking Mexican
and Filipino
American farmworkers in Delano’s grape fields, manifesting the
entwinement of
struggles against political disenfranchisement and capitalist
hyper-exploitation.
Meanwhile, Black radio patrols influenced the 1968 formation
of the
American Indian Movement (AIM) by Ojibwe activists in
Minneapolis for
whom the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense served as a
model. As in Watts,
Native Americans in the “red ghetto” of South Minneapolis
faced pervasive
policing and incarceration, extending the settler colonial
processes that had
forcibly relocated them to the city. Police routinely swept the

Native bars on
Franklin Avenue that served as de facto social centers.94 Once
arrested, Native
people were often sentenced to unpaid “community service.”95
Consequently, one of AIM’s first projects was a community
patrol outfitted
with walkie-talkies, radio cars, cameras, and tape recorders.96
Similar to Watts
CAP and the Panther patrols, the AIM patrol decolonized urban
communi-
ties through sousveilling “the cops who had long been known as
a brutal and
oppressive occupying force in our neighborhoods.”97 The AIM
patrols visu-
ally signaled authority through their red cars, shirts, and jackets
with “Indian
Patrol” sewn on the back, along with their walkie-talkies.98
AIM’s panauditory
sousveillance produced a drop in arrests of Native Americans to
citywide aver-
ages, and a 60 percent decline in the number of Native
Americans in jails.99
Illustrating the convergence of guerrilla struggle and mutual
aid, AIM’s subse-
quent community programs built on these patrols, from which
emerged many
of the Native youth, women, and men who led and staffed these
programs.100
CB sousveillance undertaken by Black Power, Chicanx and

Filipinx farm-
worker, and Native American groups constituted organized
technopolitical
responses to distinct yet shared conditions of settler colonialism
and racial
capitalism. Mexican, Filipinx American, and African American
farmers and
farmworkers all faced discrimination, hyper-exploitation,
physical displace-
ment, and rural poverty. Patrick Wolfe has argued that spatial
segregation and
mass incarceration are settler strategies that were extended from
Native to US
Black populations rendered surplus by postindustrialism.101
But in turn, the
audio technologies that emerged through US imperialism and
racial capitalism
gave rise to CB dark sousveillance by African Americans of the
rural South,
a strand of movement organizing that fostered Chicanx,
Filipinx, and Native
American struggles. Their CB sousveillance exemplifies the
technopolitical
agency engendered by contradictions between media’s
transformative, demo-
cratic potential and efforts to delimit, commodify, and
criminalize technological
access and data.
Coda: Networks New and Old
The analog audio organizing of Cold War–era movements
appears an era apart
from internet activism; Manuel Castells asserts that “the
networked movements
of the digital age represent a new species of social

movement.”102 The civil rights
movement has been a touchstone for differentiating traditional
movements
from today’s networked movements. Malcolm Gladwell notably
indicted the
“weak ties” of internet activist networks in opposition to the
“strong ties”
exemplified by the student sit-ins and the Mississippi Freedom
Summer.103
In making her case that “the revolution will not be tweeted,”
Barbara Ransby
contrasts contemporary social media activism with the radical
democratic praxis
of lead civil rights organizer Ella Baker.104 These critiques of
cyber-utopianism
propagate notions of a pre- or nontechnological civil rights
movement.
Yet fostering vernacular technopolitical agency was a key
accomplishment
of the civil rights movement. Civil rights workers found CB
useful for many of
the reasons that activist netizens find social media
indispensable to organizing.
An earlier form of wireless social media, CB enabled activists
to directly com-
municate and document events on the ground as they happened,
preliminarily
approaching what is done with cell phones (themselves a type of
two-way radio)
and Twitter. Through CB, activists strove to fulfill radio’s

potential to “mak[e]
possible mass participation in a social and socialized productive
process” of
mediated communications, a possibility associated primarily
with digital social
platforms.105 Before the Arab Spring’s so-called Facebook and
Twitter revolu-
tions instigated uprisings around the world, two-way radio
sousveillance spread
from the US South across the nation through social networks.
Thinking about continuities between CB sousveillance and
digital activism,
rather than positing a decisive break or necessary progression
between old and
new media, questions the uncritical embrace of the latest,
fastest technology,
which can work against collective action while reinforcing
racial and class
inequities. The deployment of old and new media is a signal
feature of trans-
media organizing that Sasha Costanza-Chock theorizes through
the immigrant
rights movement in Los Angeles from 2006 to 2013. Low-wage
workers and
youth from Latin America and the Caribbean integrate critical
digital media
literacy and participatory media production with community
organizing “by
any media necessary,” including print, compact discs, radio,
mobile phones, and
computers.106 Vivek Bald’s documentary Taxi-Vala/Auto-
biography depicts CB
community formation and organizing among South Asian taxi
drivers in New
York in the 1990s.107 Like earlier civil rights workers,

immigrant taxi drivers
appropriated CB to share news, tips, and gossip and come to one
another’s aid.
In the process they created what Bald calls “‘virtual
communities’ that predate
the use of that term in relation to the Internet by five or ten
years.”108 These CB
communities formed the basis for a 1993 mass protest in
response to a series
of driver murders and an even larger 1998 strike for which the
New York Taxi
Workers Alliance mobilized multiple ethnolinguistic CB groups.
Organizers
continued using CB alongside cell phones for the communal
networking that
individualized cell phone connections could not provide.
Costanza-Chock’s and
Bald’s accounts of organizing illustrate the ongoing
effectiveness and advantages
of low-tech sound media in the broader media ecology of the
information age
to reach, mobilize, and organize via music, storytelling, and
native and heritage
language broadcasting.
The discontinuities between Cold War–era civil rights CB
sousveillance
and the networked movements of the information age also bear
examination.
Social movements have been qualitatively transformed by the
internet and
other digital communication technologies: “The more
interactive and self-
configurable communication is, the less hierarchical is the
organization and
the more participatory is the movement.”109 Digitally

networked movements
are said to be horizontalist—leaderless, interactive,
decentralized, spontane-
ous, eschewing hierarchical coordination by formal political
parties, unions, or
organizations. These tendencies present obstacles to as well as
opportunities for
transformative structural change. Horizontalism can obscure de
facto leadership
and imbalances of access and knowledge through ungrounded
assumptions
of leaderlessness and interactivity; lack of structure can hinder
accountability
and sustainability.110 Ransby insists that we still need the
radically democratic
leadership and structure that Baker fostered in SNCC to build
on mass mo-
bilizations and spontaneous actions, and “to craft specific goals
and demands
wedded to a social justice agenda built on the needs and
aspirations of the
most oppressed sectors of our communities.”111 An
implementation of radical
democratic praxis, two-way radio organizing of the civil rights
movement can
provide insights into using media and technology to develop
group-centered
leadership and structure straddling embodied and virtual
spaces—through,
for example, the Sellerses, who organized their community
around its interest

in radio, thereby connecting local, tangible concerns to the
SNCC network,
merging technical training and political education, and
entwining guerrilla
struggle with mutual aid.112
Neither the technological driver of social change nor a single
factor among
many, two-way radio became an essential tool reconceived by
democratic and
insurgent struggles. In turn, CB paved the way for movements
to develop
tactics, subjectivities, and solidarities from the technological
possibilities, mate-
rial forms, and symbolic meanings of participatory social
media. This history
contests the Eurocentric technological determinism with which
movements
around the world are reduced to Twitter, Facebook, and iPhone
revolutions,
effacing vernacular technopolitical agency and the racializing
surveillance that
information and communications technologies proliferate. The
long histories
of dark sousveillant CB networks offer a praxis for
appropriating technology
to support those communities and movements most vulnerable,
and resistant,
to the velvet glove of digital surveillance and the iron fist of
state and extralegal
violence.
Notes
This essay would not have happened without the insights,
research, feedback, and support of Angelica

Lawson, Stephen Charbonneau, Emmanuel David, Lori
Emerson, and the University of Colorado
Media Studies Reading Group, Shu-Ling Berggreen, Jennifer
Stoever, Alan Gross, Frank Paro, Lauren
Adler, Raúl Melgoza, Aly Corey, Matthew Tettleton, Dani Won-
gu Kim, and American Quarterly’s
anonymous readers.
1. Nettie and Isaiah Sellers, “A Proposal,” n.d., SNCC press
contacts, press releases, and correspondence,
folder 252253-013-0713, SNCC Papers, Black Freedom Struggle
in the Twentieth Century: Organi-
zational Records and Personal Papers, Part 2, ProQuest History
Vault (hereafter cited as BFS).
2. Isaiah Sellers, “Report from Moss Point, Miss.,” n.d., SNCC
Special Events Department records, folder
252253-036-0777, SNCC Papers, BFS.
3. Federal Communications Commission, Report to the Congress
by the Comptroller General of the United
States: Actions Taken or Needed to Curb Widespread Abuse of
the Citizens Band Radio Service, [US General
Accounting Office], 1975, 1.
4. Tim Allen Scherrer, “The Citizen’s Band Radio and American
Culture” (master’s thesis, Truman State
University, 2000), 68; Carlos Valle Roberts, “Two-Way Radio
Communication Systems for Use by
the General Public” (master’s thesis, University of Colorado–
Boulder, 1975).

5. Federal Communications Commission, “Permissible
Communications in the Citizens Radio Service,”
SS Bulletin 1001c, January 1964, 2.
6. Representative Frank T. Bow wrote, “The typical Citizens
Band licensee might be a farmer who would
install a transceiver in his home, another in the barn, a third in
his truck or automobile so that he
might be in touch with his family and they with him on matters
of business arising during the day”
(“Dear FCC—Hands Off CB!,” S9 CB Journal, August 1965,
10).
7. CORE was founded in 1942 in the North to fight segregation
through nonviolence. SNCC was
founded in 1960 in the South to build on the student sit-in
movement.
8. Donna Murch, “When the Panther Travels: Race and the
Southern Diaspora in the History of the
BPP, 1964–1972,” in Black Power beyond Borders: The Global
Dimension of the Black Power Movement,
ed. Nico Slate, 57–78 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
9. Fouché theorizes different levels of technological agency:
“reconception,” “redeployment,” and “re-
creation.” The importance of radio surveillance and
sousveillance to African American technological
agency is evident in Fouché’s examples of reconception,
including Mbanna Kantako’s “inverted
‘neighborhood watch’” on his pirate Black Liberation Radio
station. See Fouché, “Say It Loud, I’m
Black and I’m Proud: African Americans, African American
Artifactual Culture, and Black Vernacular
Technological Creativity,” American Quarterly 58.3 (2006):
639–40, 654. See also Nettrice R. Gaskins,

“Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation across the
African Diaspora and the Global South,” in
Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and
Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, ed.
Ruha Benjamin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019),
252–74.
10. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of
Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2015), 21–23. Extending Steve Mann’s work on sousveillance—
the appropriation of technologies of
surveillance by disempowered people to thwart efforts to
monitor and control them—Browne shows
how surveillance is “practiced, narrated, and enacted” through
blackness (9). On sousveillance, see
Mann and Joseph Ferenbok, “New Media and the Power Politics
of Sousveillance in a Surveillance-
Dominated World,” Surveillance and Society 11.1–2 (2013):
18–34.
11. Dean Spade, “Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid for
Mobilization and Survival,” Social Text 38.1
(2020): 131–51.
12. Gary T. Marx and Dane Archer, “Community Police Patrols
and Vigilantism,” in Vigilante Politics,
ed. H. Jon Rosenbaum and Peter C. Sederberg (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976),
133.
13. Brian Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the
South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2004). Art Blake’s Radio, Race, and Audible Difference in Post-
1945 America: The Citizens Band (Cham,
Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2019) examines CB’s shaping of
US neoconservatism and African Ameri-

can counterpublic spheres. On grassroots civil rights history and
historiography, see John Dittmer,
Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994);
Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The
Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom
Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
Charles E. Cobb, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get
You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement
Possible (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2014).
14. Sasha Costanza-Chock, Out of the Shadows, into the
Streets! Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant
Rights Movement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).
15. Eric Schatzberg, Technology: Critical History of a Concept
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018),
5.
16. On aural terrorism and white supremacy, see Jennifer Lynn
Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and
the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York
University Press, 2016).
17. In addition to Benjamin, see Safiya Noble, Algorithms of
Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce
Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018).
18. As Browne observes, the “apparent overreliance on the
Panopticon in the field of surveillance studies
. . . leaves the role of visibility overstated” (Dark Matters, 58).

19. Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty, and David Lyon, eds.,
Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies (New
York: Routledge, 2012); David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An
Overview (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).
Lauri Siisiäinen theorizes panauditory surveillance in Foucault
and the Politics of Hearing (London:
Routledge, 2013).
20. Stoever, Sonic Color Line.
21. Whereas Williams’s “The Technology and the Society”
focuses on the broadcast radio industry’s resolu-
tion of industrial capitalism’s contradictions, I tune in to two-
way radio users’ heightening of these
contradictions. See Williams, “The Technology and the
Society,” in Theories of New Media: A Historical
Perspective, ed. John Thorton Caldwell (London: Athlone,
2000), 39.
22. Radio studies is attuned to sound media and social
movements. Additionally, recent work like Michael
Denning’s Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World
Musical Revolution (London: Verso, 2015) and
Shana L. Redmond’s Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound
of Solidarity in the African Diaspora
(New York: New York University Press, 2013) bring media
studies to bear on the rich scholarship on
the music of social movements. But foundational work on sound
studies such as Jonathan Sterne’s
The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003)
and Stoever’s Sonic Color Line sidestep relevant social
movement history.
23. Kathleen Battles, Calling All Cars: Radio Dragnets and the

Technology of Policing (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2010); Battles, “The Sonic Roots of
Surveillance Society: Intimacy, Mobility, and
Radio,” Sounding Out!, October 27, 2014,
https://soundstudiesblog.com/2014/10/27/the-sonic-roots-
of-surveillance-culture-intimacy-mobility-and-radio/.
24. “WMAR-TV’s Jack Jett, Former FCC member, Dies at
Seventy,” Broadcasting, May 3, 1965, 76.
25. On CB’s military roots, see Scherrer, “Citizen’s Band Radio
and American Culture,” 8–14.
26. E. K. Jett, “Phone Me by Air,” Saturday Evening Post, July
28, 1945, 16–17, 43, 46–47.
27. Jett, 17.
28. Art M. Blake, “Audible Citizenship and Audiomobility:
Race, Technology, and CB Radio,” American
Quarterly 63.3 (2011): 545.
29. Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting,
1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1997), 41–44; Susan J. Douglas, Listening In:
Radio and the American Imagination
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 55–82.
30. Federal Communications Commission, Twenty-Ninth
Annual Report for the Fiscal Year 1963 (Wash-
ington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), 6.
31. Angela Blake, “An Audible Sense of Order: Race, Fear, and
CB Radio on Los Angeles Freeways in
the 1970s,” in Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,
ed. David Suisman and Susan Strasser
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 159–78,
162, 169.

32. On REACT, see Scherrer, “Citizen’s Band Radio and
American Culture,” 38–41.
33. Richard Maxwell Brown, “The American Vigilante
Tradition,” in Violence in America: Historical and
Comparative Perspectives; A Report to the National
Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence,
June 1969, ed. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (New
York: Signet Books, 1969), 192.
34. Brown, 187, 190.
35. FBI Files on Black Extremist Organizations, Part 1: FBI
COINTELPRO surveillance files for Octo-
ber–December 1968, folder: 101094-002-0001, Black Freedom
Struggle in the 20th Century: Federal
Government Records, ProQuest History Vault.
36. Racialized CB surveillance complemented other applications
of audio technology for criminalizing
people of color. The sound spectrograph, or “voiceprint,”
developed by a former Bell Telephone Labo-
ratories engineer was used as evidence against Edward Lee
King, an African American man tried for
burglary and arson during the Watts uprising. See Terence
Cannon, “‘Voiceprint’ Rejected in Watts
Arson Case,” Movement, January 1967, 3.
37. Elizabeth Sutherland notes, “There were a few projects in
rural areas which had no telephone; for
them, the two-way radios installed at the end of July had special
importance” (“The Cat and Mouse
Game,” Nation, September 14, 1964, 106).

38. SNCC, “Good Communications Saves Lives,” n.d., SNCC
Papers, 1959–1972, folder 25223-014-
0467, SNCC Papers, 1959–1972, Black Freedom Struggle in the
20th Century: Organizational
Records and Personal Papers, Part 2, ProQuest History Vault
(hereafter cited as BFS).
39. Spade, “Solidarity Not Charity.”
40. 9-31-2-81-1-1-1 Informant X report, dated October 29,
1964, Sovereignty Commission MDAH. See
also Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 266–67.
41. Sutherland, “Cat and Mouse Game,” 106.
42. Citizens’ Band Radios and SNCC Radio Manual, 1964, R.
Hunter Morey Papers, 1962–1967, Archives
Main Stacks, Mss 522, box 3, folder 2, Wisconsin Historical
Society Freedom Summer Collection
(hereafter cited as WHS).
43. Sutherland, “Cat and Mouse Game.”
44. Ruth Schein to Hunter Morey and Bill Robinson, August 7,
1964, memo, R. Hunter Morey Papers,
1962–1967, Archives Main Stacks, Mss 522, box 3, folder 2,
WHS.
45. Schein to Morey and Robinson; Lance Hill, The Deacons for
Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil
Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2004), 209.
46. The 1962 FCC annual report states, “Loose, irresponsible
operations by class D licensees in the Citi-

zens Radio Service have become a major monitoring
surveillance problem” (Federal Communications
Commission, Twenty-Eighth Annual Report Fiscal Year Ended
June 30, 1962 [Washington, DC: US
Government Printing Office, 1962], 138).
47. Federal Communications Commission, Thirtieth Anniversary
Report for the Fiscal Year 1964 (Washing-
ton, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1964), 140, 137.
While earlier FCC reports note violations
by CB operators, its annual reports from 1962 and 1963 indicate
a shift from more benign language
in 1961 about CB’ers “forming clubs to promote self-regulation
and encourage compliance for the
benefit of all” (123) to the 1963 report’s remarks on “rampant
violations.”
48. Federal Communications Commission, Thirty-First Annual
Report for the Fiscal Year 1965 (Washington,
DC: US Government Printing Office, 1965), 151.
49. CORE, “Summary of Events in Jonesboro, Louisiana, March
8 through March 16,” March 16, 1965,
CORE press releases, periodicals, and clippings, folder 001355-
001-0625, BFS. On criminalization,
see Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness
and the Criminalization of the Unprotected
(New York: New York University Press, 2012).
50. Working Paper, [n.d.], SNCC press releases and reports,
folder 252253-013-0713, SNCC Papers,
BFS.
51. Working Paper.
52. In “The Technology and the Society,” Williams theorizes
mobile privatization with respect to broadcast

radio (47), but it applies to two-way radio as well.
53. Holly Springs Freedom Day radio log, July 25, 1964, 15,
SAVF-SNCC Social Action vertical file,
circa 1930–2002, Archives Main Stacks, Mss 577, box 47,
folder 4, WHS.
54. SNCC press releases and publicity materials, folder:
252253-056-0433, SNCC Papers, BFS.
55. Friends of SNCC Memo, from Northern Coordination,
March 18, 1966, “Tent Cities,” SAVF- SNCC
Social Action vertical file, circa 1930–2002, Archives Main
Stacks, Mss 577, box 47, folder 6, WHS.
56. Patronizing characterizations of CB users appear in FCC
reports as early as 1961 and worsen over the
years.
57. Handwritten notes in Federal Communications Commission,
Special Study Guide and Reference Ma-
terial for Examination for Radiotelephone Third Class Operator
Permit with Broadcast Endorsement for
Operation of Certain Broadcast Stations, March, 1966, folder
252253-021-1105, SNCC Papers, BFS.
58. Working Paper.
59. Transcript, “An Oral History with Dr. Peter Orris,”
University of Southern Mississippi Center for
Oral History and Cultural Heritage, 12, accessed September 21,
2020, https://usm.access.preservica.
com/uncategorized/IO_051ec247-514f-4b45-9f72-1affff40b8fc/.
60. Alan Cohen, “Rights’ Workers Tell of Progress, Failure in
Mississippi,” Reporter Dispatch, September

10, 1964.
61. Christopher Koch, quoted in Ward, Radio and the Struggle
for Civil Rights, 268. On Radio Tougaloo,
see Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 266–73.
62. Robert C. McNamara to Lucy Montgomery, January 29,
1965, Lucile Montgomery Papers, 1963–1967,
Historical Society Library Microforms Room, micro 44, reel 1,
segment 8a, WHS.
63. Marilyn Lowen to James Forman, February 6, 1966, memo,
SNCC “K” and “L” Files, folder 252253-
007-0397, SNCC Papers, BFS.
64. SNCC, “Good Communications Saves Lives.”
65. Issiah [sic] Sellers, report, Communications, n.d., SNCC
Special Events Department records, folder
252253-036-0777, SNCC Papers, BFS.
66. Sellers; Betty Garman, Memo re: Mississippi Summer
Project Fund-raising, n.d., SNCC memoranda,
folder 252253-024-0690, SNCC Papers, BFS.
67. David Finkelstein to James Forman, letter quoted in March
22, 1966, letter from Fay D. Bellamy to
Forman, SNCC Press Releases, folder 252253-014-0467, SNCC
Papers, BFS.
68. On Nettie Sellers’s activism, see WATS Report, December
18, 1965, no. 212, MFDP-General papers,

1965–1971, part 2 (MFDP records, 1962–1971, Historical
Society Library Microforms Room, micro
788, reel 2, segment 2, part 2); Morey—COFO Legal
Coordinator—Legal Cases, 1962–1966 (R.
Hunter Morey papers, 1962–1967, Archives Main Stacks, Mss
522, box 3, folder 12); WATS report
February 20 and March 9, 1965, Freedom Information Service—
WATS reports, January–March 1965
(Freedom Information Service records, 1962–1979), Historical
Society Library Microforms Room,
micro 780, reel 1, segment 11-13; MFDP News Letter, April 4,
1965, Walker—MFDP (Samuel
Walker Papers, 1964–1966, Archives Main Stacks, Mss 655,
box 1, folder 10) (all WHS).
69. MFDP Newsletter, July 7, 1964, SNCC files on MFDP,
folder: 252253-059-0799 SNCC Papers,
BFS.
70. Nettie and Isaiah Sellers, “A Proposal,” n.d., SNCC press
contacts, press releases, and correspondence,
folder 252253-013-0713, SNCC Papers, BFS.
71. Sellers, “Report from Moss Point, Miss.”
72. SNCC financial data, July 15, 1963, SNCC memoranda,
folder 252253-024-0690, SNCC Papers,
BFS.
73. Prospectus for an Atlanta Project, 1966, Mendy Samstein
Papers, 1963–1966, Archives Main Stacks,
SC3093, WIHVS260-A, WHS.
74. Prospectus for an Atlanta Project, 4.
75. Winston Grady-Willis, Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta
and Black Struggles for Human Rights,

1960–1977 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006),
237n31; Prospectus for an Atlanta Project,
7.
76. Charlie Cobb, “Ain’t That a Groove,” in Black Fire: An
Anthology of Afro-American Writing, ed. LeRoi
Jones and Larry Neal (New York: William Morrow, 1968), 519–
24.
77. Hill, Deacons for Defense.
78. FBI surveillance files on the Deacons for Defense and
Justice, October 1965–July 1966, folder 101094-
007-0329, BFS.
79. “‘Negro ‘Deacons’ Claim They Have Machine Guns,
Grenades for ‘War,’” Los Angeles Times, June 13,
1965; Hill, Deacons for Defense, 47.
80. Hill, Deacons for Defense, 105, 167, 209.
81. Hill, 132, 162.
82. James K. Cazalas, “Deacons for Defense Play Unannounced
Role in March,” Commercial Appeal, June
26, 1966.
83. Hamilton Bims, “Deacons for Defense,” Ebony, September
1965, 28.
84. Bims, “Deacons for Defense,” 25–26; Hill, Deacons for
Defense, 235.
85. Isaiah Sellers installed LCFO radios. See SNCC Press
Release, “Two Shootings in Lowndes County
the First Night of Tent City,” December 31, 1965, SNCC
Miscellaneous Publications, Pamphlet
Collection, 68-1510, WHS.
86. “Will Watts Secede?,” Movement, July 1966.

87. “There Is a Movement Starting in Watts,” Movement,
August 1966; Jennifer Taylor, “The 1965 Freedom
Patrols and the Origins of Seattle’s Police Accountability
Movement,” Seattle Civil Rights and Labor
History Project, accessed February 25, 2020,
https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/freedom_patrols.
htm.
88. Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black against
Empire: The History and Politics of the Black
Panther Party (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016),
39.
89. Bloom and Martin.
90. Terence Cannon, “A Night with the Watts Community Alert
Patrol,” Movement, August 1966.
91. Lauren Araiza, To March for Others: The Black Freedom
Struggle and the United Farm Workers (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 11–41;
Terence Cannon, “Guerilla [sic] Warfare in
the Grapes: How a Rural Strike Is Fought,” Movement, October
1965, 4.
92. “Letters to SNCC,” Movement, December 1965, 7.
93. “SNCC Radios Go to CORE, Delano Strike: Two-Way Radio
System Saves,” Movement, December
1965.
94. Christine Birong, “The Influence of Police Brutality on the
American Indian Movement’s Establish-

ment in Minneapolis, 1968–1969” (MA thesis, University of
Arizona, 2009), 35.
95. Julie L. Davis, Survival Schools: The American Indian
Movement and Community Education in the Twin
Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 31;
Clyde Bellecourt, The Thunder before
the Storm: The Autobiography of Clyde Bellecourt (St. Paul:
Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2016),
54.
96. On the AIM patrol, see Fay Cohen, “The Indian Patrol in
Minneapolis” (PhD diss., University of
Minnesota, 1973).
97. Objectives of the American Indian Movement, February
1970, 54, American Indian Movement News/
Newsletter, Minneapolis, Minnesota: The Organization, 1970–
1971, Microfilm No. 1555, Minnesota
Historical Society Library.
98. Marx and Archer, “Community Police Patrols and
Vigilantism,” 146; Davis, Survival Schools, 32;
Cohen, “Indian Patrol in Minneapolis,” 57.
99. Bruce E. Johnson, Encyclopedia of the American Indian
Movement (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood,
2013), 23.
100. Cohen, “Indian Patrol in Minneapolis,” 59, 134, 226; Nick
Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing
Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition
of Indigenous Resistance (London: Verso,
2019), 179–80.

101. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of
the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research
8.4 (2006): 404.
102. Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social
Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge, UK: Polity,
2012), 15.
103. Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change,” New Yorker, October
4, 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/
magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell.
104. Barbara Ransby, “Ella Taught Me: Shattering the Myth of
the Leaderless Movement,” Colorlines, June
12, 2015, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/ella-taught-me-
shattering-myth-leaderless-movement.
105. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, quoted in Martin Spinelli,
“Radio Lessons for the Internet,” Postmodern
Culture 6.2 (1996). Castells writes that “mass self-
communication” is the fundamental change in
communication wrought by the internet (Networks of Outrage
and Hope, 6).
106. Costanza-Chock, Out of the Shadows, into the Streets!
107. Alondra Nelson and Thuy Linh N. Tu interview, Vivek
Bald, “Appropriating Technology,” in Tech-
niColor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life, ed. Alondra
Nelson, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, and Alicia
Headlam Hines (New York: New York University Press, 2001),
88–99.
108. Nelson and Tu, 92.
109. Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope, 15.
110. For a critique of horizontalism, see Paolo Gerbaudo,

Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Conteporary
Activism (London: Pluto, 2012).
111. Ransby, “Ella Taught Me.”
112. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom
Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Durham,
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

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