Stew Albert

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Steward Edward Albert (December 4, 1939 – January 30, 2006) was a co-founder of the Yippies, an anti-Vietnam War political activist, and an important figure in the New Left movement of the 1960's.

Born in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, NY to a New York City employee, he had a relatively conventional political life in his youth, though he was among those who protested the execution of Caryl Chessman. He graduated from Pace University and worked for a while for the City of New York welfare department.

In 1965, he left New York to go to San Francisco where he met the poet Allen Ginsburg at the City Lights Bookstore. Within a few days he was volunteering at the Vietnam Day Committee in Berkeley, California. It was there he met Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman with whom he co-founded the Youth International Party or Yippies, Bobby Seale and other Black Panther Party members, and became a full-time political activist of whom Rubin once said that he was a better educator than most of the professors.

Among the many activities he participated in with the Yippies were throwing money off the balcony at the New York Stock Exchange, the Exorcism of the Pentagon and the 1968 Presidential campaign of a pig named Pigasus. He was arrested at the disturbances outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention and was named as a co-conspirator in the Chicago Seven indictments but never indicted himself. His wife, Judy Gumbo Albert, claimed, according to his New York Times Obituary, this was because he was working as a correspondent for the Berkeley Barb.

After Timothy Leary escaped from a California Jail, he arranged for him to stay with Eldridge Cleaver in Tunisia. In 1971, he was called before several grand juries investigating the planting of a bomb in the U. S. Capitol and an alleged plot to bomb a Manhattan bank. He was not charged in either case. In the early 1970s, he and his wife sued the FBI for planting an illegal wiretap in his house. They won a $20,000 settlement and, in 1978, two FBI supervisors were fired for this action.

In 1984, he and his wife moved to Portland, Oregon. Two days before his death he posted on a blog, "My politics haven't changed." The cause of death was liver cancer, said his wife.

Stew's website can be found at stewalbert.com