Voice Lessons by Alice Embree

Abstract

Reviewed by: Voice Lessons by Alice Embree Melissa Hield Voice Lessons. By Alice Embree. (Austin: Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, 2022. Pp. 300. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Voice Lessons is the passionate memoir of a lifelong advocate for social justice, in Austin and at the University of Texas, from 1963 to 2020. Embree’s activism began with 1960s civil rights demonstrations and protests against the Vietnam War, continued in the 1970s in the women’s liberation movement, moved through the 1980s and 1990s with her “working eight to five” (a chapter title) and with neighborhood coalitions, then came to rest with her becoming “a retiree activist” (another chapter title) in the 2000s. Significantly, Voice Lessons is the first account of the 1960s and 1970s in the Lone Star State by a Texas woman who was there. Her point of view fills a gap in the movement narrative, and her book preserves the stories of many activists who have been left out by others. It is also a way for Embree to share her transformative experiences, her voice lessons, with a younger generation. Her first lesson occurred early. Embree grew up comfortably middle class in 1950s Austin with parents who supported school desegregation at a time when there were few African American students in the schools she attended. In 1961, on a field trip with the Austin High School drill squad, she sat in a restaurant with the only two Black members of the squad, who were refused service. As a result, Embree insisted on leaving, and the three left, but no one else did. Shocked that none of the other students or supervising adults joined them, Embree later recalled the event as “an early voice lesson,” one about the need for other voices (29). As a student at the University of Texas at Austin, Embree helped launch and wrote for the underground newspaper The Rag, and joined the newly formed Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), whose members voiced their opinions about issues through direct public demonstrations. In a 1967 anti-Vietnam War rally in front of the Texas Union, Embree was one of six students who spoke out. Administrators put the students on disciplinary probation, thereby sparking the University Freedom Movement and putting Embree “at the center of the storm” (73). UT Board of Regents Chair Frank Erwin labeled her the “Embree girl” when displeased with her (86). She and her partner moved to New York City later that year, where he launched an underground newspaper that Embree named The Rat and [End Page 392] for which she wrote. She also worked for the North American Congress on Latin America, founded by activists who supported the SDS, and through it she met the feminist poet Marge Piercy, who introduced Embree to the New York women’s liberation movement. By 1969, she said, “women’s liberation got very personal,” and when she heard her partner using “derogatory words for women,” her reaction was “volcanic, molten anger” (112). Embree left him and returned to Austin. There she “embraced women’s liberation, and . . . was transformed by it” (117). In 1971, shortly after being among 7,000 antiwar activists arrested in Washington, D.C., Embree and other women, who considered Lyndon Johnson the architect of the Vietnam War, protested the opening of the LBJ Presidential Library by dressing as witches and putting a hex on the library. They were arrested the next day when they continued their hexing downtown. In 1973, she learned how to use a printing press, became a printer, and joined other women to start the Fly-By-Night Printing Collective, which later became Red River Women’s Press. In 1980, Embree married artist Carlos Lowry, a Chilean expatriate living in Austin, and they had two children. To support the family, she worked in the Child Support Division of the Texas Attorney General’s Office and shifted her activism to neighborhood issues, including the “Move It” campaign to move the Austin airport. In 2008, after retiring, she began collaborating on social justice issues with other retirees and young people. In 2017, she was arrested in Austin at a protest of the U.S. Senate vote to repeal the Affordable...