Citizens Band: Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, and Social Movements

This essay argues that technology, specifically sound reproduction, was a crucial terrain of struggles for civil rights, farmworkers’ rights, and Indigenous self-determination in the 1960s. Two-way radiotelephony including citizens band (CB) mediated the civil rights movement’s development and formative connections with the Black Power, Chicanx and Filipinx farmworker, and American Indian movements. Through archival research of movement records and media, I show that a goal of the civil rights movement was to develop grassroots technopolitical agency through CB communications, self-defense, and movement building. Part of the “Southern diaspora” (Donna Murch) of people, organizations, and ideas, rural African American CB activism shaped West Coast farmworkers’ and urban social movements in the mid-1960s. I further demonstrate that Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous adaptations of CB constitute important, overlooked acts of technopolitical “reconception”: “the active redefinition of a technology that transgresses that technology’s designed function and dominant meaning” (Rayvon Fouché). While associated with freewheeling truckers, two-way radio emerged from and proliferated military and police violence. However, Black, Latinx, Filipinx, and Indigenous organizers reconceived two-way radio’s criminalizing technology of surveillant citizenship to create networks of “dark sousveillant” solidarity (Simone Browne). This media history from below expands conceptions of historical and contemporary social movements, surveillance, and media.