Case to use: remember make up the info that you need about the patient
DX: OCD (obsessive compulsive behavior). DSM-5 300.3 (F42)
the patient is a 20-year-old female who came to the clinic for a follow-up. The patient has a history of OCD. At the last visit, the psychiatrist put her on oral Prozac 40 mg per day. The patient is goal-oriented, and she denied suicidal thoughts, hallucinations, and delusions. She is very calm, and clean. She claimed that she can focus on her schoolwork, and her GPA is good now. She is also able to enjoy music and reading which are the activities she likes.
Medications: Continue with Prozac 40mg daily by mouth
Plan: continue individual therapy for an extra 3 weeks Week (enter week #): (Enter assignment title)
Student Name
College of Nursing-PMHNP, Walden University
NRNP 6635: Psychopathology and Diagnostic Reasoning
Faculty Name
Assignment Due Date
NRNP/PRAC 6635 Comprehensive Psychiatric Evaluation Template
CC (chief complaint):
HPI:
Past Psychiatric History:
General Statement:
Caregivers (if applicable):
Hospitalizations:
Medication trials:
Psychotherapy or
Previous Psychiatric Diagnosis:
Substance Current Use and History:
Family Psychiatric/Substance Use History:
Psychosocial History:
Medical History:
Current Medications:
Allergies:
Reproductive Hx:
ROS:
GENERAL:
HEENT:
SKIN:
CARDIOVASCULAR:
RESPIRATORY:
GASTROINTESTINAL:
GENITOURINARY:
NEUROLOGICAL:
MUSCULOSKELETAL:
HEMATOLOGIC:
LYMPHATICS:
ENDOCRINOLOGIC:
Physical exam: if applicable
Diagnostic results:
Assessment
Mental Status Examination:
Differential Diagnoses:
Reflections:
References
2020 Walden University
Page 1 of 3 Week (enter week #): (Enter assignment title)
Student Name
College of Nursing-PMHNP, Walden University
NRNP 6635: Psychopathology and Diagnostic Reasoning
Faculty Name
Assignment Due Date
NRNP/PRAC 6635 Comprehensive Psychiatric Evaluation Template
CC (chief complaint):
HPI:
Past Psychiatric History:
General Statement:
Caregivers (if applicable):
Hospitalizations:
Medication trials:
Psychotherapy or
Previous Psychiatric Diagnosis:
Substance Current Use and History:
Family Psychiatric/Substance Use History:
Psychosocial History:
Medical History:
Current Medications:
Allergies:
Reproductive Hx:
ROS:
GENERAL:
HEENT:
SKIN:
CARDIOVASCULAR:
RESPIRATORY:
GASTROINTESTINAL:
GENITOURINARY:
NEUROLOGICAL:
MUSCULOSKELETAL:
HEMATOLOGIC:
LYMPHATICS:
ENDOCRINOLOGIC:
Physical exam: if applicable
Diagnostic results:
Assessment
Mental Status Examination:
Differential Diagnoses:
Reflections:
References
2020 Walden University
Page 1 of 3
SHOW MORE…
Class Discussion
One Page single spaced synthesis of clear & concise writing on the reading, Cheryl Higashida, Citizens Band- Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, and Social Movements
Reading attached below in the PDF
Due by Thursday, October 13, 2022, @ 9:45 EST
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
https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0021
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/860927
| 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 CBers adding significantly to these
figures.4 The FCCs 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 Fouch
uses reconception to refer to the active redefinition of a technology that
transgresses that technologys designed function and dominant meaning.9
In response to their communities needs, Black freedom fighters reconceived
two-way radios 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 Brownes 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 traditions 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
| 319Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, and Social Movements
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 CBs
restricted reach and simpler setup did not prevent organizers from imagin-
ing ways that it could feed into community radio broadcasting. Nonetheless,
two-way radios 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-
rorismfrom 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 fields general privileging of visuality is evident in field-defining books like
the Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies and David Lyons 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
| 320 American Quarterly
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 FCCs predecessor)
and later the FCC commissioner who envisioned a Citizens Radio Commu-
nications Service that led to CB.24 Jetts 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 allwar. Lamenting the difficulty of coordinating air-raid
| 321Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, and Social Movements
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 radios 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 services 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
womans race is unspecified by the text, an accompanying photograph featured a
young white female sitting demurely on her cars 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.
| 322 American Quarterly
The caption puts the reader in the white womans 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 garageor if its just a flat tireto
your husband. Jetts heroine dials the Citizens Radio distress frequency to
reach a state trooper who presumably arrests the offending driver while saving
white life. Privileging Citizens Radios 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.
Jetts 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 nations citizens by the
federal government, citizens band denotes the restricted spectrum27 mhz
in the shortwave bandof mostly privatized radio bandwidth within which
broadcasting is illegal.28 Citizens band thus contrasts with citizen radio, the
term for World War Iera 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 CBers 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 usersnot 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
| 323Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, and Social Movements
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 Partys 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 (195671), 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 surveillantand sousveillantcitizens. The ease of surveil-
lance of and by CB proliferated opportunities for electronic eavesdropping:
communications on any one of CBs 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 CBs uses
and meanings, southern Black organizers and their allies coordinated direct
action, voter registration drives, and Freedom Schools; defended themselves
| 324 American Quarterly
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. Mississippis 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 COFOs accrual of CB provoked a radio arms race:
Greenwoods 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 SNCCs Greenwood Freedom Summer headquarters
reported continued and continuous trouble with the citizens band radios
including signal jamming and the use of Greenwoods 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
| 325Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, and Social Movements
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 organizations
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.
| 326 American Quarterly
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 CBs dominant functions and purposes of main-
taining social control through panauditory surveillance; of serving the mobile
privatization of the white citizenrys 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 CBs
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 Lawyers
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 COFOs McComb office through one
radio set in his bedroom; another in his car. Lowndes County sharecroppers
| 327Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, and Social Movements
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 CBer 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 CBs technicality in the telecommunications sec-
tion of a working paper likely authored by Morton Schiff, the radio project
director who installed many of the organizations 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 requires [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 SNCCs 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
SNCCs 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 movements
| 328 American Quarterly
| 329Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, and Social Movements
Figures 3 and 4.
Notes from SNCC copy of the FCC study guide for the examination for Radiotelephone Third Class
Operator Permit.
| 330 American Quarterly
security and communications; it shaped and was in turn redefined by the
movements strategies, organizing, and philosophy.
CB played a key role in SNCCs 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 Mississippis 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 movements CB systems
themselves a product of technical and political skills buildingwould 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 Mississippis 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 SNCCs
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 Isaiahs
Atlanta work strengthened the conduit between rural and urban radio activ-
ism: impressed by Isaiahs audio room and repairs to the Magnecord reel tape
| 331Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, and Social Movements
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 sto