"They looked to me like robots marching in lockstep, illuminated by globules of white light like landing lights on an alien spacecraft," Judy Gumbo said of the Chicago police she watched advance on protesters outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention. "I did not feel afraid. Just the opposite, I reveled at the thrill of being in a live action anti-war documentary." Gumbo, a founding-generation member of the Yippies who spent decades turning protest into performance, died September 14, 2026, in Berkeley, California. She was 83.

Born Judy Clavir in Toronto on June 25, 1943, she arrived in Berkeley in 1967 and found her way to the Berkeley Barb, the city's underground newspaper, just as the antiwar and countercultural movements were reaching their height, J. The Jewish News of Northern California reported. She joined the Youth International Party in its founding generation and became one of its few prominent women, working alongside Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and her future husband, Stew Albert. Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver gave her the nickname that stayed with her for the rest of her life, explaining simply, "Gumbo goes with Stew," according to Berkeleyside.

In Chicago that August, Gumbo helped the Yippies stage one of the era's most recognized stunts, nominating a pig named Pigasus for president outside the convention. Several Yippies were arrested at the press conference announcing the candidacy, and Gumbo, who stayed on the edge of the arrests, helped raise the bail that got them released. The following year she helped start the Berkeley Tribe, an underground weekly, and volunteered answering phones for the legal team defending the Chicago Seven.

Her activism made her a target. FBI agents placed a tracking device on her car and broke into the Berkeley Hills house she shared with Albert seven times in a single year to plant listening devices and a phone tap. She and Albert sued the government over the surveillance, and the case became part of a broader legal challenge to warrantless wiretapping of political dissidents, ending in a monetary judgment against the FBI.

Gumbo's decades in the movement ran alongside a full personal life. She married Albert in 1977, and the couple raised a daughter, Jessica, in Berkeley until his death in 2006. She was later married to David Dobkin, a co-founder of the Berkeley Cohousing community, and, from 2017, to historian Arthur Eckstein. She also co-founded the feminist guerrilla-theater group W.I.T.C.H., took part in the People's Park protests, taught sociology at UC Berkeley and Mills College, traveled to North Vietnam during the war, and later raised funds for Planned Parenthood in Oregon, where she lived for about 30 years.

In 2022 Gumbo published her memoir, "Yippie Girl: Exploits in Protest and Defeating the FBI," revisiting a side of the movement that rarely made the history books. "All the inner core of the Yippies were Jewish," she said. She was candid, too, about the movement's blind spots: "Women were left out of the decision-making processes in the early Yippies," she said. "You could speak out as a woman, but the guys simply didn't listen." Of the contradictions in a life built on upending convention, including four marriages, she liked to say a friend called her "the Liz Taylor of the Yippies."

Gumbo is survived by her husband, Arthur Eckstein; her daughter, Jessica; son-in-law Dan Epstein; and grandson Simon. Her funeral was held September 18 in Portland, Oregon, the city she called home for three decades. What persists is the record she helped build and then set down in her own words: the Berkeley Tribe's run of countercultural front pages, the legal precedent against warrantless wiretapping that grew out of her own bugged bedroom, and "Yippie Girl," the memoir that gave the women of the Yippies, not only the men who became famous, their own telling of the 1960s.