Diamond Dave Whitaker, Rest in Power Brother!

The first time I ever saw "Diamond" Dave Whitaker, he was wearing this ratty-assed army style olive jacket with a huge round patch on the back with a peace sign, with a rainbow hued tie-dye background, at the top announcing "Four Generations of Hipstory,” with four words around the outside: BEAT, HIPPIE, PUNK, SKINS. He took a lot of shit for that last one, so he always qualified it by saying he aligned with SHARP = Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice.

That was in 1989 at the peace encampment of the U.S. Department of Energy's nuclear test site outside Mercury, Nevada. The weeklong anti-nuclear protest was served by a mobile collective kitchen and as we awoke each day from our tents, wandered to the central gathering place for our meals served out of a converted Seattle public bus, Dave would be the soundtrack of the morning, reciting a running monologue announcing the events of the day to inspire us, always ending with his anthemic poem that ended with "don't panic, go organic." By all appearances, he was a living caricature of a Haight-Ashbury hippie, circa 1967. Yet he emanated charisma and an impassioned optimism that made everyone around feel that we could truly make the world a better place. That's the memory of him I'll always cherish.

Now the warts-and-all part of my history with Dave. We had a falling out in early 2010. My comrades and I, consciously identifying ourselves as working class militants, attempted to organize a statewide strike of public service workers in California to resist the austerity being imposed by Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger. His massive budget cuts were in reaction to the world economic crisis that began in September 2008. I got laid off from my public library job, where I'd worked for 6 years, and Schwarzenegger's cuts were causing massive cutbacks to California public schools at all levels, from K-12 to colleges and universities, along with massive layoffs of workers in those sectors (much of the story of this organizing was documented in the discussion forums here on libcom). But cuts affected all levels of government services, from state parks to nearly every statewide agency, with "Furlough Fridays" decreasing the workweek from five days to four.

My faction conceived our actions as class struggle as we organized a strike of public sector workers statewide, like myself, to resist the austerity. Diamond Dave was a perennial City College San Francisco student almost the entire time I knew him, including being elected a representative to the Student Union when he was in his 70s. Dave wanted to resist the attacks on public education with a music festival, ostensibly to "raise awareness," on the CCSF campus. My organizing crew was calling for a walkout on March 4, 2010 with strikers converging at central places in cities and towns across the state. The San Francisco meeting spot was Civic Center Plaza at 9:00 a.m. on the 4th.

A few weeks before, Dave called me on the phone and was quite upset. He was emphatic that the action must be "fun." I didn't disagree, but conceived it as a strike, not a concert and rally. Dave went kind of ballistic, called me a "fucking Trotskyist," at which point I hung up on him. If anyone knows me (or has seen my writings on libcom), I'm the furthest one can be from an advocate of the 4th International. We didn't patch things up until the Occupy Movement reached San Francisco 2 years later, when we ran into each other at the original encampment on the sidewalk in front of the San Francisco Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank on Market Street. What brought my reconciliation with Dave was a mutual attempt to soap box throughout the city's Financial District to critique austerity and to articulate an anti-capitalist response, along with another Bay Area legend street comedian Stoney Burke, and to his credit Dave apologized for calling me a Trot.

I never saw Dave much after that, except running into him at explicitly radical events like the (now defunct) San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair or the current Howard Zinn Bookfair. Dave and I always greeted each other with a hug and a feeling of mutual respect, having put the conflict behind us.

Now for some anecdotal Diamond Dave memories around when he lived in a Victorian flat above a corner liquor store at 24th and Alabama Streets in the heart of the city's cultural Latine Mission District in the early 1990s. His flat mates were my close left communist comrades who put out the journal The Poor, the Bad and the Angry. It was 1992 and I was living in Berkeley but took one of the first trains of the day to San Francisco to meet the PBA comrades to travel to a Situationist-inspired action by some friends at a college in the suburbs. I arrived right after 6:00 a.m. when the liquor store was legally able to sell alcohol. The proprietor was unlocking the chain on the door to start his business day, but standing nearby were two local vatos who wore the colors and had the tattoos of a neighborhood street gang. Right next to the store's entrance, I rang the bell of the door of their second floor flat, Dave came staggering down the stairs, obviously still drunk from a nightlong bender. He went right up to the two Latine dudes, did some kind of ritualized handshake with both, who cheerfully said "Wha's up, Diamond Dave?," who responded "hey brother, give me a couple bucks." Immediately, one of the guys reached into his pocket and gave Dave a handful of change that was enough for him to go into the store to buy a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor (fortified beer), and then he guided me back upstairs to my waiting comrades. Dave had this amazing talent of befriending literally everyone, and I saw this countless times. He had the rare gift of fearlessly talking to anyone he encountered. Like these two thuggish and intimidating looking gangsters, who turned from somber to friendly upon seeing Dave.

A couple years later I was working in downtown San Francisco as a bicycle messenger, along with a handful of other comrades. One of the PBA comrades still lived in the flat with Dave and his girlfriend and this comrade would have a potluck every Monday night. On one of these evenings, some French guests joined us who'd been involved with publications like Le Brise-Glace, and they'd brought some fancy wine to accompany our meal. After one too many glasses, Dave was pretty wasted and started rambling about his familiarity with the French ultra-left. Nearly all of us, me included, started calling bullshit. Dave was a poet, a hippie and a stoner. Sure, as all the obits will say, he turned Bob Dylan on to Woodie Guthrie's Bound for Glory, reading Kerouac, and smoking pot. But we thought Dave was just drunk and making shit up. The French guy asked who Dave had met, to which he responded "Cornelius Castoriadis," to which everyone exclaimed a loud "bullshit!" The French guy demanded that Dave describe him and explain further. So, he said he was in Paris in the late 1950s and went on to hold up his hand and say, with slurred speech, "Castoriadis was yay high, was bald and was a chain smoker." The French guy said something like, "Holy shit, Mr. Diamond David you're correct!" Our contempt transformed to awe, and I realized that that despite his inebriated ramblings, Dave was pretty damn honest and he had had more varied experiences than any of us had ever imagined. We knew he was close to the San Francisco Diggers, but never knew his international contacts.

Another time in the early 1990s, I was sitting upstairs in Vesuvio bar in San Francisco's North Beach, having a beer with Dave and friends and looking down out the window at the alley that separated it from legendary City Lights Books. Dave pointed and said, "See that boarded up doorway?" and went on, "That's where I used to get high with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy." By this time, I knew it was true and was again incredibly impressed. Dave was a human bridge to those previous generations. And he was like a living history book, helping connect all of us to these past traditions.

This next story involves a convoluted plot twist. In 2007 I went to a Labor & Working Class Studies Association conference at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, organized by professor Peter Rachleff, who'd also been Root & Branch member. At the conference, I gave a photo presentation of the 1946 Oakland General Strike accompanied by the narrative of Stan Weir, who'd been a firsthand participant, as well as a personal friend of Rachleff's. As I finished my presentation, a local old-timer came up, introduced himself, and said he was an activist working on a "general strike for peace." I thought, "whatever, nice sentiment," and gave him my contact info and never expected to hear from him again. About a year later, I got an email from him, reminding me his name was Marv Davidov. He was in the Bay Area giving an interview on KPFA, a local public radio station in Berkeley, about his general strike for peace campaign and asked if I wanted to meet for lunch. I said sure and told him to meet me at a cafe near the radio station a few weeks later, when he'd be in town.

A couple days later, I was at the Bernal Heights branch of the San Francisco Public Library just browsing new books when I saw Diamond Dave. He was effusive about a new labor history he'd just read, which was so in character for him personally as he was such a voracious reader, but a little surprising as I had never realized how deeply he kept up to date with history books about social movements. He asked what I'd been up to, and remembering his hometown, I mentioned I'd just been to a labor history conference in the Twin Cities and asked if he'd known Marv Davidov. Dave grew excited and said he'd lived in an apartment above the Social Workers Party bookshop down the hall from Marv. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) were the legendary Trots who led the Teamster Strike that spread into a general strike in Minneapolis in 1934. It then dawned on me why Dave knew so much about labor history.

But Dave went on to say that that's where he -- and Marv -- were living when a musician named Robert Zimmerman moved in. He was writing sappy love songs and Dave and Marv constantly reminded him that Civil Rights activists across the entire South were in a protracted struggle that he needed to plug into. Turning him onto Guthrie, Kerouac and weed are legendary, but more importantly they encouraged him to connect with the social movements of the day.

At the library, Dave asked more about Marv and cooked up a plan. Dave, unannounced, would be sitting at the cafe with me when Marv walked in. And sure enough, Marv saw me waving, walked over, spotted his old comrade, and in a state of shocked excitment literally yelled, "David Whitaker, you son of a bitch, I haven't seen you in 50 years!" Over lunch for the next several hours, I heard them catch up with a half century of their lives. But I relished the retelling of how they turned corny songwriter Robert Zimmerman into Bob Dylan, one of the greatest lyricists of his generation, whose influence on the movements of the 1960s was profound. I could've listened to the same tales again and again, endlessly. I was riveted.

It turns out that Marv was as legendary as Dave. He'd been a Freedom Rider, who was busted in Mississippi in 1961 and served a brutal 40-day sentence with other Riders in that state's infamous maximum-security Parchman Prison Farm. Like Dave, he had a colorful reputation. At the time of his arrest, he was labeled "a 29 year old army veteran, beatnik Jew and self-described 'art dealer' from Minneapolis." Howard Zinn called him "the apostle of nonviolent direct action." Sadly, Marv passed away at the age of 80 in 2012. The movement for liberation lost another one of its heroes.

I asked Dave if he went on the Freedom Rides, to which Marv laughed and said, "Your girlfriend was pregnant and you had to stay with your new family in the Twin Cities." I don't know how many kids Dave had, but it was quite a few by quite a few women. I'll leave that to the historians. Dave had also been an out-of-control drunk, until he linked up with an intertribal group of Native Americans in Oakland and got sober in their recovery program. This encouraged me to follow a similar path. He quit drinking 25 years ago and regained his poetic sharpness.

As Dave got older, at times he lost his ability to read the room and know when to shut up. But his longwinded harangues always included gems of wisdom, and his lifelong perseverance earned him the right to share his knowledge as a beloved elder. I truly learned so much from him and will always be grateful for all he shared. He was the living embodiment -- and the bridge -- connecting radical traditions of the past with revolutionary possibilities today. He will be sorely missed.

Diamond Dave Whitaker—¡Presente!