Judy Gumbo

Judy Gumbo, one of the last surviving founders of the Yippies and a lifelong feminist activist, died on September 14, 2026, at a memory care facility in Berkeley, California, at the age of 83. Her death was due to complications related to dementia, and was confirmed by her family in an obituary published by Berkeleyside.

Born Judith Clavir in Toronto to a family of Canadian radicals, Gumbo arrived in Berkeley in the fall of 1967 and quickly became part of the city's activist community, working at the underground newspaper the Berkeley Barb and later helping to found its offshoot, the Berkeley Tribe. In the spring of 1968 she joined the newly formed Youth International Party, or Yippies, in Chicago, where she helped run a pig named Pigasus for president as a piece of protest theater outside that year's Democratic National Convention. She became one of the few women at the center of a movement whose most visible leaders, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, along with her own husband at the time, Stew Albert, were men.

Her nickname came from Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver, who had first addressed her as "Mrs. Stew" and, when she objected to being defined by her husband's surname, renamed her Gumbo, reasoning that gumbo goes with stew. The name stayed with her for the rest of her life. Alongside her Yippie organizing, Gumbo was an outspoken feminist who helped stage the 1969 People's Park protests in Berkeley and worked with W.I.T.C.H., a satirical guerrilla theater group focused on women's liberation. Her activism drew the attention of federal authorities: an FBI file from 1972 described her as one of the people most dangerous to the internal security of the United States, and she later discovered that her home had been bugged and her car tracked. She became part of a lawsuit that successfully challenged warrantless government wiretapping.

In 1970, while the Vietnam War still raged, Gumbo traveled with two other Yippie women to North Vietnam as an act of antiwar solidarity, and she returned to a unified Vietnam in 2013 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords. She was married four times, to actor David Hemblen, to fellow Yippie Stew Albert with whom she had a daughter, to Berkeley Co-Housing co-founder David Dobkin, and finally to historian Arthur Eckstein. In 2022 she published a memoir, Yippie Girl, recounting her journey from a difficult first marriage into the radical politics and feminist awakening of 1960s Berkeley, and reflecting candidly on the sexism she encountered even within the movements she helped build.

News of her death brought tributes from journalists and fellow activists who had known her through decades of organizing. Writing in CounterPunch, one longtime friend recalled her as a woman who carried the discipline of the Old Left into the freewheeling world of the Yippies. Her funeral was held on September 18 in Portland, Oregon, where she had lived for many years before returning to the Bay Area.