Nikki Craft

“I heard Nikki Craft is leaving town,” Wren said, uncharacteristically aware of current events.

“I saw that in the Sentinel. Pretending to be ridden out of town on a rail.”

Like many feminists in Santa Cruz, Kelsey had been uplifted by Nikki Craft’s artistic, satirical, and poignant activism, all of which demonstrated how men tolerate their violence against women.

I mention Nikki Craft in A Circle Outside because I have admired her since my earliest days as a feminist.

In 1983, I was writing for the UC Santa Cruz student newspaper when Nikki Craft walked into U-Save Liquors store on Mission street, tore up a pornographic magazine, and wrote “Violence in Media = Violence in Society” in chalk on the sidewalk outside. She continued walking across town, down Mission, downtown, and all the way to Live Oak (about six miles away) writing “Violence in Media = Violence in Society” in chalk, on the sidewalk, along the entire route.

When she got to a liquor store in Pleasure Point, she tore up another magazine, and got arrested. She paid for the magazines, of course. The crime was tearing it up, and defacing public property. With chalk.

She spent the night in jail. I met her the next morning as she left with her plastic bag full of personal belongings. She took three steps, fished out a nubbin of chalk and wrote “Violence in Media = Violence in Society” on the sidewalk.

That’s the story I remember anyway.

Nikki Craft is notorious for pouring chocolate syrup over cheap promotional copies of photographs at the UCSC Special Collections. You can read the librarians’ perspective in this interview with Rita Bottoms. Search on “Stack O’Wheat.” My perspective is that the librarians called Nikki’s betrayal of their trust “rape,” but her political protest was not rape. As bad as betraying the trust of a librarian is, it is not the same as rape. Rape is rape.

Here’s Nikki Craft’s website. Here is De Clarke’s brilliant contemporaneous essay.