A Short History of the Phrase, "Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker"

By way of contemplating that the right has been twice as likely as the left to commit acts of political violence even when you factor in the famously tumultuous 1960s and early 1970s.

A May 1968 poster by Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, an anarchist group.

I’ve been investigating the etymology of the phrase “Up against the wall motherfucker.” It appears to derive from a 1967 prose poem by LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) titled “Black People!” Interestingly, in Baraka’s poem “motherfucker” is rendered as two words (“mother fucker”).

The hyphenated term “mother-fucker” had been in use since the 19th century, according to a learned 2013 Slate piece by Forrest Wickman, with the earliest known citation in testimony in an 1889 murder trial. The epithet appears to have been invented by a white man in the Lone Star state, a hot-tempered Texan named J.M. Joiner. Joiner was justice of the peace in the East Texas railroad hamlet of Bremond. Campaigning for re-election on November 3, 1888 (a date that would be designated Motherfucker Day if I had any say in the matter) Joiner stepped into Schmidt’s saloon, knocked back 31 whiskies, then shared his opinion with several witnesses that one Marshall Levy, who did not support Joiner’s candidacy, was a “God damned mother-fucking, bastardly son-of-a-bitch.” Joiner further said that he would “fix him [i.e., Levy] before night,” adding, “I want some of his friends to go and tell him what I say.” This was a tactical error. Informed of Joiner’s insult, Levy hoisted his double-barreled shotgun and shot Joiner dead in the street.

Levy was very possibly history’s first motherfucker, or anyway the first to be so designated. As a person of Jewish extraction, I can’t help suspecting that somebody called Marshall Levy would have been a Jew. That would mean history’s first motherfucker was … a Jewish motherfucker! Which would be perhaps a shanda fur die goyim, or perhaps a point of ethnic pride, depending on whether you interpreted “motherfucker” to mean “low-life” or “badass.”

But I digress.

Levy was moved to violence by Joiner’s insulting his mother. Interestingly, though, Levy does not appear to have acted in response to Joiner’s neologism. “I will kill any man who calls me a son-of-a-bitch!” Levy said after killing Joiner. “I am no son-of-a-bitch, and my mother is no bitch!” Possibly the phrase “mother-fucker” was too puzzling an insult for Levy to process. Nine years later, though, according to Wickman, the phrase was deemed so insulting that a different murder defendant, also in Texas, cited being called “a mother-fucking son-of-a-bitch” as a mitigating circumstance at his trial.

Jim Dawson, in his seminal 2009 text The Compleat Motherfucker: A History of the Mother of All Dirty Words, reports that the word “motherfucker” goes back many centuries in other languages, and originated possibly in an account by Pliny the Elder, a Roman, of one Hipponax, a Greek, writing a poem that called his enemy a “μητροκοίτης” (metrokoites, i.e., “motherfucker”). And of course the concept, if not the term for it, is a central plot point in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex (429 B.C.).

According to Dawson, “Mother-fucker” makes its earliest appearance in American literature (as “mother-------”) in John O’Hara’s 1934 Appointment in Samarra, perhaps the single greatest American novel never to have been adapted into a film. Counting the dashes confirms that O’Hara intended to convey “mother-fucker” and not “motherfucker.” Dawson also reports, fascinatingly, that the 1949 R&B hit “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” written by Granville “Stick” McGee with several of his buddies in a Virginia Army barracks during World War II, was originally titled, “Drinkin’ Wine, Mother Fucker, Drinkin’ Wine.”

As noted, the phrase, “up against the wall, motherfucker” is attributed to Amiri Baraka, writing as LeRoi Jones in 1967. To wit:

You can’t steal nothin from a white

man, he’s already stole it he owes you

anything you want, even his life. All

the stores will open if you say the magic

words. The magic words are: Up against

the wall mother fucker this is a stick

up!

The Jefferson Airplane then further popularized the phrase in its 1969 song, “We Can Be Together,” which it performed on The Dick Cavett Show in August of that year, marking the first time (according to Songfacts.com, which probably hasn’t done a comprehensive search) that anybody said “fuck” on television. The lyrics were taken from a tract by a Dada-influenced anarchist group that, starting in 1968, called itself Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers in tribute to Baraka.

What led me to this research? The memory of late 1960s/early 1970s radicalism and its occasional penchant for violence, expressed most memorably in the phrase, “Up against the wall, motherfucker.” I had this epoch in mind as I reported my latest New Republic piece, which is about the radical right’s penchant for violence. I presumed this to be a recent phenomenon, but it turns out that even going back all the way to 1948 the right has been nearly twice as likely as the left to commit acts of political violence. I invite you to read my piece (“‘We’ Don’t Have A Political Violence Problem. Republicans Do”).

Correction, 4:45 p.m.: Alert Backbencher reader Erik Tarloff reports that Kenneth Tynan said “fuck” on British television in 1965, predating the Jefferson Airplane. It was November 13, 1965, according to the BBC. Erik, incidentally, just published his fifth novel, Tell Me the Truth About Love.