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Jeffrey Nightbyrd talks fast, like he's two steps ahead of you. He walks with a swagger that lets you know he probably isn't surprised very often. The walls of his South Austin talent agency are covered mostly with the head shots of beautiful women. But the spot right next to his door, where guests are sure to look as they leave, is reserved for the pictures of his time with Oliver Stone.
For the movie "Born on the Fourth of July," Stone used him to help coordinate a Vietnam protest scene set in Miami. Nightbyrd participated in the real protest years earlier and negotiated between the protesters and the authorities.
"We all fasted for days. Everyone was sick of the war," he said.
Dressed now in khakis and a buttoned-down, flowered beach shirt instead of his old jeans and T-shirt, his appearance has changed since his days as a young radical. But he's still a radical underneath. He travels frequently, most recently to Iquitos, Peru, the biggest city in the world without roads. Nightbyrd spent his time there with a shaman and under the influence of ayahuasca, a native drug that, as Nightbyrd describes it, "makes you fly out of your body."
"I didn't stop when all of the beatniks died," Nightbyrd said.
Days spent as a youth
He never really knew how to conform. In the 1960s, Nightbyrd's name was Jeff Shero, and he was a Daily Texan columnist. After the staff advisor censored his column for the fifth or sixth time, he got fed up.
"If I wrote about the racism prevalent in and around the campus or about drugs or gay rights or even the Vietnam War, our advisor would always make up some reason it couldn't run," Nightbyrd said.
He quickly left the Texan and, along with a group of other liberal-minded students, some from Michigan State and the rest from UT-Austin, started a weekly called The Rag.
Just two blocks from the still-segregated stores of the Drag, in a one-bedroom apartment, a dozen or so students pounded out their radical opinions on a handful of typewriters. Subjects ranged from campus and citywide issues, like ex-Texan Editor Kaye Northcott's criticism of the paper's new editor, to human rights. A first-person account from a private at Fort Hood described the feeling of knowing he would be shipped off to Vietnam soon.
The Dec. 12, 1966 Christmas issue heading read "Merry Christmas: Buy a War Toy," and was followed by the chorus from Tom Paxton's song "Buy a Gun for Your Son":
Buy a gun for your son right away, Sir.
Shake his hand like a man and let him play, Sir.
Let his little mind expand, place a weapon in his hand.
For the skills he learns today will someday pay, Sir.
The Rag started as one page, printed on a single-sheet lithograph copier and distributed by hand for 10 cents a copy.
Its popularity grew. By the end of 1966, two months after the first publication, the staff was already having to send out to have the weekly printed. And instead of a single sheet, it grew to the size of a supermarket tabloid and gained a circulation of 14,000.
Danny Schweers, a former "ragger" still living in Austin and working as a typesetter, recounted his time at The Rag in the book "No Apologies: Texas Radicals Celebrate the '60s."
"If any traditional politics had a place in our community," Scheers wrote, "it was Anarcho-Syndicalism, the belief that the workers in a business should own that business, and all should have equal say in its management. This is the way The Rag was run."
The Rag had no official leaders, so each week, someone else volunteered to coordinate the next issue. The staff box had first names only, which Schweers said provided them with the anonymity they needed, given the fact that "They" were watching.
As circulation grew, the staff could no longer keep up by only selling the paper by hand, and metal boxes containing The Rag with a place to drop a dime appeared around the campus. The design of the boxes meant that one could get a paper without paying.
"Good food stores and eateries had the most honorable people. But UT Law was the worst," Shweers wrote. "You were almost guaranteed a 30-cents-on-the-dollar return."
Making waves
Though The Rag had built a readership on campus by 1969, students weren't the only ones reading.
The UT System Board of Regents and its chairman, Frank Erwin Jr., were notorious for their dislike of student activism and the student press. According to Dave Richards, who represented the paper in legal battles, "the hippies and their Rag were some of Frank's prime targets."
Richards, once married to former Gov. Ann Richards, wrote about the conflicts in "Once Upon a Time in Texas: A Liberal in the Lone Star State."
To get rid of The Rag, he wrote, the regents amended their rules to ban commercial solicitation on campus. Such a rule change should have included the Texan, which was full of advertising, and the University had a great deal of trouble with enforcement.
After telling the students their paper could not be kicked off campus, Richards wrote, he thought they would face some "leisurely UT administrative process." But what happened next caught him and The Rag off guard.
The regents filed suit in Travis County district court. They named the New Left Education Project, along with a dozen or so people identified with The Rag. They singled out the NLEP because of its association with the leftist movement and the fact that it would be difficult to sue The Rag, as it had no clear hierarchy or even membership. The case was put before Judge Tom Blackwell, who had a reputation of hostility toward new-left activists.
Knowing he didn't stand a chance, Richards went on the offensive. He filed suit against the regents in federal court, saying the rule change was unconstitutional and infringed on The Rag's First Amendment rights.
The federal court ruled in favor of The Rag. The paper continued to be sold on and around campus until the end of its 10-year run in 1976. The regents spent three years making appeals - twice to the U.S. Supreme Court - and eventually amended their rules.
Life beyond
In college, Nightbyrd had visited New York and taken a cab to Harlem to watch Malcolm X speak at a Nation of Islam mosque.
"The cabdriver couldn't believe he was dropping a skinny white kid off in the middle of Harlem," he said. "But the black Muslims were fine; they sat me in the front row."
After leaving The Rag, he was in New York again. He had changed his last name from Shero. And he had started one of the first underground newspapers not run by students: The New York Rat.
It was in the Rat that William S. Burroughs was first interviewed. Nightbyrd, Alan Ginsberg and a host of writers such as W.H. Auden and Abby Hoffman spent their time publishing liberal opinions while trying to stay out from under the nose of the FBI.
On July 5, 1968, just before then-President Nixon's re-election, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover issued a 12-point plan titled "Counterintelligence Program Internal Security, Disruption of the New Left." At the bottom a footnote was attached: "This to all field officers."
The plan included various ways to discredit radical underground newspapers, students and university professors. One tactic was drawing up anonymous letters portraying left-wing intellectuals in a negative light, then sending the letters to their parents and neighbors and to the parents' employers.
The program encouraged ridicule as one of the strongest weapons. By erroneously publishing that a New Left event had been cancelled or moved, the agents could confuse their organization.
The FBI directive also instructed field officers to work with local authorities with the specific purpose of finding narcotics violations among the radicals.
Nightbyrd said that despite FBI harassment, his time in New York was an exceptional part of his life.
"John Lennon used to come up to my apartment a lot, and one time he had been working on a song about John Sinclair, who had been locked up for years over just one joint," Nightbyrd said. "I told him about Leotis Johnson down in Texas, who was in the same situation. Lennon used Johnson in the song, and so now I get the credit."
Finally, the harassment became too much. Nightbyrd returned to Austin and began work on his next project, The Austin Sun. He eventually left the newspaper business, but he has stayed in Austin, where he owns one of the largest talent agencies in the state.
Sitting now in his leather desk chair, recounting his travels while the next wannabe waits outside of his office door to be discovered, Nightbyrd finishes laying down his philosophy.
"If you want to find the shaman, just be sincere and ask around; the people will eventually take care of you," he said. "It's the same way I found Malcolm X. Being dropped off in Peru is the same as being dropped in Harlem."
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