Martinez, Elizabeth "Betita" Sutherland

MARTINEZ, ELIZABETH “BETITA” SUTHERLAND (1925- ). Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez participated in and wrote about four important left movements in the post-World War II United States: civil rights, feminism, Chicano liberation, and Marxism. She devoted the rest of her political life to mentoring a new generation of activists.

Daughter of a Mexican-born professor and a high school teacher, Martinez grew up in racially-segregated Chevy Chase and was the first Latina student at Swarthmore. After graduating with honors, she plunged into the post-war ferment of New York’s cultural scene and she worked as a clerk, translator, and researcher at the United Nations (1946-1954); an administrative assistant to Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art (1957-1958); an editor at Simon and Schuster (1958-1964); and Books and Arts Editor at The Nation (1964).

At Simon and Schuster, Martinez used her insider status to lobby for publication of an extraordinary photographic record of The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964). As a reporter for the Nation, she sympathetically covered the “youngest revolution” in Cuba and wrote about the struggle for civil rights from the frontlines of the Deep South and against the arms’ race.

In the years between 1960 and 1963, Martinez reported on her visit to Cuba in the Nation and Manchester Guardian, wrote about a labor dispute for the Nation, edited a book of screenplays, translated a French novel, and edited a SNCC pamphlet illustrated with Danny Lyon photos. She also wrote a hilarious column for the National Guardian about her appearance before HUAC, worked with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and Friends of SNCC, and endorsed Robert Williams’s advocacy of self-defense in North Carolina’s Black communities.

In 1965, Martinez became director of SNCC’s New York office, where she organized public events, raised half a million dollars from well-off sympathizers, and reported first-hand on struggles in the South. Her Letters from Mississippi (1964) is an important chronicle of the struggle for racial equality.

Beginning in 1967, a conjuncture of three pivotal events propelled Martinez in new directions: SNCC’s turn to black nationalism, the compelling presence of a radical feminist tendency in New York, and the rise of the Chicano movement in New Mexico. She left SNCC and emerged from this political moment with a new mission.

For a while, feminism filled the space once occupied by the civil rights movement. Martinez and several other refugees from SNCC became members of the New York Radical Women’s Collective. Dissatisfied with sectarianism in the women’s movement and inspired by a gathering of Latin American revolutionaries in Cuba in 1967, she moved to New Mexico to join the Alianza Federal de Mercedes. Here, she restored her childhood nickname, Betita. Along with Beverly Axelrod, she created the newspaper El Grito del Norte that moved beyond nationalist politics to cover events in Vietnam, Cuba, and China. She also kept issues of gender on the front burner. In 1970, she contributed “Colonized Women: The Chicana,” to Robin Morgan’s path-breaking anthology Sisterhood is Powerful.

When El Grito ended in 1973, Martinez moved to Albuquerque and with a group of like-minded leftists and established the Chicano Communications Center (CCC) as a multimedia, educational barrio project. The CCC set up a Marxist study group, pursued revolutionary theory, and did grassroots organizing. When it split over the National Question in 1974, Martinez made the third and final major geographical move in her life, this time to the San Francisco Bay Area. Here, she joined the Democratic Workers Party (DWP), a Leninist organization led by women. Martinez assumed a leadership position, editing the party’s newspaper and running for Governor of California on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in 1982.

By 1984, the DWP, as well as the rest of the Marxist-Leninist left in the United States had imploded, leaving a sense of impotency and bitterness among former cadre. Martinez concluded that organizations from SNCC to the DWP had too much centralism and not enough democracy.

In her last decade of political activism, Martinez helped to build new multiracial organizations. Still ahead were five books, more than one hundred published articles, public speaking, and teaching. She also returned to grassroots activism, searching for ways to bring communities of color together, speaking out fiercely against racism, sexism, homophobia, and war – saying “NO to any definition of social justice that does not affirm our human oneness.” Her message resonated with a new generation of activists. In 2000, Martinez received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater.

Platt, Tony, ed. “Elizabeth Betita Sutherland Martínez: A Life in Struggle,” Social Justice Vol. 39, #2/3(2013), pp. 26-48.

Preliminary Guide to the Elizabeth “Betita” Sutherland Martinez Papers. Department of Special Collections and University Archives. Green Library. Stanford University. https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8vm4fjj/entire_text/