By Natalie Chen
On May 10, 2024, Billie Jean King addressed the graduating class of The Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. On this day, valedictorian Asna Tabassum would have delivered a speech to her peers at the commencement ceremony which would have occurred, if not for the cited “safety concerns” following international upheaval and movement in universities around the world — “Free, free Palestine!” is heard amidst violence and outrage.
Amongst the crowd of caps, gowns and tassels, Professor Alan Mittelstaedt listened attentively, anticipating any mention of Middle Eastern conflict, police misconduct, or poor leadership. He came up empty.
King stood some 200 yards from where more than a hundred LAPD officers in riot gear had charged onto campus in the small hours of just five days prior, resulting in the demolition of the pro-Palestine encampment. She did not mention the 93 arrests made en masse on April 24, nor the swells of outrage toward the administration.
In a piece posted on Annenberg Media’s general Slack channel, Mittelstaedt writes: “Without delving into the unresolved issues on our minds, she still touched on all of them. She did so in nearly every sentence.”
King, in an electrifying timbre, had declared with a resolute sincerity:
“Be authentic, and don’t let others define you. Do not let others define you. You define yourself.”
“What that means to me is, you can’t let your job, you can’t let your pursuit of whatever you think will make you happy define who you are,” says Mittelstaedt. “You need to ask yourself in the present moment: what is it that brings value to your life? Why are you on this planet and what can you do worthwhile in the short time that you’re here?”
And yet, he is not quite sure he’s found the answers to his questions. Alan Mittelstaedt turns 68 next month, and he likes not having it figured out.
“Well, I kind of became a journalist by accident. I went to a liberal arts college, St. John’s College, and left without knowing what I wanted to do with my life, so I lived in the desert and had landscaping jobs.”
It had snowed one day. He took photographs of the snow and brought them to the office of the local weekly paper, which published them.
“The editor called me up and said, ‘Hey, would you like to shoot photos for us every now and then?’ So I did freelance photography for them, until one day they called me up and said, ‘Hey, would you like to be a reporter?”
For a year and a half in 1982, Mittelstaedt ran a one-man newsroom for a 22-page weekly paper in Desert Hot Springs until he advertised for a reporting job and met his wife-to-be.
“We offered her the job, but she turned it down because she hated me. Ended up going to work at a daily paper in San Luis Obispo, and three months later I ended up getting a job at that same paper.”
They married in 1985 at a local Episcopal church in Pasadena, California. In traditional mise en scéne, a wedding march played at the chapel with a small reception ensuing at the bride’s house. It was a low-budget affair. Looking back, Mittelstaedt admits that it wasn’t a very good wedding but, ever the optimist, has found reasons to enjoy them.
“Sometimes I think about becoming a wedding photographer for a year or so. Because I like seeing people when they’re really happy, and people are really happy at their weddings. I shot my nephew’s wedding last June in Philadelphia and that was really fun.”
On August 8, 1973, Nixon announced his resignation in a televised address to the country, and a teenage Mittelstaedt was obsessed. He procured an old tape recorder, recording hours of footage from Richard Nixon’s impeachment hearings onto oversized reels, which remain stored in his house to this day.
Journalism had always held a beloved seat in the back of Mittelstaedt’s mind. He dreamed of writing for a newspaper and reporting big events, yet ended up at a landscaping job in the desert.
“What was in the front of my mind? I never really took decisive steps to become a reporter, it just kind of happened. I guess what was in the front of my mind was, ‘I’m not really sure what I want to do.’”
“I was always interested in government and politics, and I wanted to do something important but I wasn’t quite sure what it would be. I was always driven by trying to expose wrongdoing.”
In the early hours of May 5, during the police sweep of USC’s encampment, LAPD violated the LA County Press Code by preventing media from reporting “within reasonable viewing distance and audible range of the event.” In a video amassing over two thousand likes on Instagram, Mittelstaedt dons a yellow corduroy hat and a bright red windbreaker while quarreling with a police officer. Citing the 2000 civil rights case Al Crespo v. City of Los Angeles, he explains the LAPD’s legal obligation to provide a reasonable viewing area for media coverage.
“Your area’s right here in front of Bovard,” says the LAPD Officer.
“That’s too far away.”
“That is where you have to stay.”
“No, that’s why we need to talk to your information officer. By law you have to-”
“By law you gotta get out of the way, okay?”
Facing dozens of armed officers, Mittelstaedt and other members of Annenberg Media repeatedly requested to speak with a Public Information Officer, only to be met with blank stares. Later, he phoned the police department’s business line three times with the same request, resulting in “three of the most fruitless conversations I’ve ever had in my life.”
“I kept telling myself, make sure you don’t use any bad language, because if I had said ‘I have every fucking right to be here,’ that just doesn’t reflect very well. It felt like I had a lot of responsibility for these students — I had to be a role model for them. But I was really upset because I like to take photographs.”
While leaving campus following unsuccessful attempts to negotiate with law enforcement, Mittelstaedt had one last encounter with a uniformed officer.
“Is there anything else I can help you with?” the officer had asked, voice drenched in irony.
“If he hadn’t had a gun, I would’ve complimented his sarcasm,” says Mittelstaedt.
He recalls a time he did get arrested, back in 1989. As a young journalist for The San Bernardino Sun, he had approached three covered bodies following a fatal fire, hoping to take photographs. A firefighter intercepted the then 33-year-old Mittelstaedt and placed him under arrest for “interfering with a firefighter.”
He knows better now, and it is no longer 1989.
“What’s changed is that the world is so much more complicated, and we’re inundated with so many things. Sometimes the effect is not addressing some of the most crucial issues head-on. That’s why I’m so happy to see protests on campuses, because finally it seems like we’re waking up.”
In June 1962, 59 delegates, including students from elite universities nationwide, met at Port Huron, Michigan, with the newly formed Students for a Democratic Society(SDS). Their drafted manifesto, “The Port Huron Statement,” called for the growth of participatory democracy across college campuses in support of the Vietnam anti-war movement. The result was the becoming of a new wave of grassroots and campus activism, which led to one of the most pervasive displays of governmental opposition in modern history.
Mittelstaedt’s older brother was among the exuberant youth of the 1960s who led the beginning of this new reckoning. After graduating from Claremont Men’s College — now Claremont McKenna College — in 1969, he became a conscientious objector and entered the Peace Corps. This marked one of Mittelstaedt’s first visits to Los Angeles, accompanying his brother to a meeting with a UCLA advisor about his noncombatant status. At twelve, Mittelstaedt was made acutely aware of the potent power held by young scholars. Even before, he knew to look beyond the superficial.
“Growing up, my father was a Lutheran minister. Sermon after sermon, he’d be railing against money. I guess it’s in the Bible that the love of money is the root of all evil. The more we are driven by material things, the less concerned we are about things that really matter.”
“I’m not gonna be an aesthetic and live in a tent, but I’m not gonna sacrifice what my values are to make a lot of money.”
The cost of higher education in America and its accompanying infrastructure, Mittelstaedt believes, is a leading cause of the drastic administrative action taken on encampments. Boards of trustees, presidents and chancellors must submit to the demands of donors and influential alums, resulting, in some cases, in overaggressive responses toward peaceful encampments.
“If you tally up the bill for the LAPD to mobilize not once, but twice to our campus, and the expense of all the security, how many scholarships would that total?”
On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was shot and killed while riding through a presidential motorcade in Dallas, Texas. Five years later, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated on the balcony of his second-floor room at the Lorraine Hotel, prompting outbreaks of racial violence in over 100 American cities. That same day, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy gave an impromptu dedicatory speech to a mostly Black crowd in Indianapolis, one of the few U.S. cities void of riots in later weeks. Evoking his own grief, he had quoted Aeschylus:
“In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
On June 5, Kennedy was killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. In the Indianapolis park he spoke at just two months prior, now named after King, a memorial sculpture outlines two bronze statues — Kennedy on one side of the path and King on the other, their hands outstretched towards one another.
With each momentous crux throughout American history, there follows reverberating movements of unrest, and to Mittelstaedt, it is these moments that carry the capacity to redefine. It is the stillness after the gunshot that holds the suspense of the entire world. It is the eerie silence at dawn after a street is cleared, tumultuous with riots just hours before. It is a fist held high and a hoarse throat. It is blistered heels after days of marching and the unwavering intention to continue tomorrow. It is the moments in our sleep, when “pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart…”
“It’s that interval, the stuff in between, where the real action takes place,” said Mittelstaedt. “We had the anti-war protest. And the country is alive with young people and activism. And lo and behold, what happens? We end up with Richard Nixon. And that’s the stuff in between. It’s the reaction to those big events.”
“The stuff in between really matters.”
The stuff in between really matters.
In his home in South Pasadena, dainty, picturesque spheres of milkweed bloom as Mittelstaedt gently places a caterpillar upon them. Six weeks later, he watches it emerge as a butterfly. It is fascinating beyond comprehension.
“I like not having it figured out. And I haven’t figured anything out. Human conflict is not as beautiful as butterflies, but it’s mysterious too.”
Then, what is the culmination of a butterfly’s metamorphosis? The swell of the cocoon before it breaks free? The slight quiver of the milkweed after it takes flight?
“It’s the process.”
Mittelstaedt has since rewatched Billie Jean King’s speech at USC Annenberg’s 2024 commencement four times.
“I will leave you with my favorite quote from Coretta Scott King,” said King in the speech’s closing. “‘Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.’”
“And now it’s your turn.”
