An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  There were twenty-eight women in the class ranging from twenty to sixty years old, eighteen of them from the southeastern section of Washington, D.C. The others were from Ghana, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and New York. The educational level spanned from seventh grade to college. The experiential divide—my whiteness, their blackness, my age, their youth—was enormous. The hardest thing of all was to get everyone to think beneath the surface, to move beyond the obvious. What my students did not know astounded me and what they did know seemed to me a terrible reduction of history. They didn’t not know about Marcus Garvey. Garvey was a national hero from Jamaica who lived from 1887 to 1940 and was a black nationalist, journalist, and organizer who founded the Universal Negro Improvememt Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). He was an important proponent of the back-to-Africa movement, which encouraged those of African descent to return to their ancestral homeland. This movement would eventually inspire other movements and become the largest mass movement of African Americans in American history. At its peak, the UNIA had more than four million members.

  My students did not know Robert Williams, the author of the book Negroes with Guns. Robert Williams organized African American armed self-defense in the South. President of the NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina, he led the black community in preventing Klan attacks and opposing the racism of governmental agencies. He was falsely accused of kidnapping charges by the FBI and was forced into exile. Williams lived in Cuba and China from 1961 to ‘69. From Cuba, he broadcast Radio Free Dixie, which aired the message of black liberation to the Southern U.S. He built strong relationships with world leaders like Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Mao Tse-tung and he organized international support for the human rights struggles of African Americans. The women in the class were shocked to find out that there were people who had preceded the Panthers’ stance of the right to self-defense, about which they were aware only in the vaguest of terms. They had not heard of Bobby Seale, a founder of the Black Panther Party and a codefendant in the Chicago 8 trial. They had not read El-dridge Cleaver’s book Soul on Ice. We read Malcolm X’s crucial text On Afro-American History as a way to analyze the impact of not knowing one’s own history. Working with all these black women, and seeing how little they had been exposed to black struggle, was Malcolm X’s very point about how much easier it is to enslave a people when they are cut off from their history.

  The historical figures they knew something about were Harriet Tubman, Dr. Marin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks. When we finally got to the mid-1960s, it was difficult to deal with the topics about power and freedom in the environment that we were in. We read Stokely Carmichael’s article “Power and Racism: What We Want,” which was the first written statement coming out of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) about Black Power after the march to Jackson, Mississippi. It was after this march that SNCC argued that white people’s main responsibility was to fight racism among whites. It was 1966, and it was part of the black movement’s transformative process of becoming a revolutionary movement, like many of its counterparts around the world, particularly in Africa and Latin America.

  I had previously underestimated the moral component of the early civil rights movement and its importance in forcing the condition of black people onto the world stage.

  Teaching the African American history class to the Danbury prison community brought into sharp relief the fact that the United States has always been in the business of human bondage, first through slavery and now through the criminal justice system. This had not changed. The people I was living with had been robbed of the intellectual tools they were entitled to as human beings and the students ate up the knowledge that we offered in that class. They made the intellectual link between the plantation and penitentiary for themselves; we did not have to lecture about it. That it was impossible to close the gap between the parallel lines along which black people and white people had developed was a truth I could see around me every day.

  When Howard Gutman had said that he wanted to appeal Judge Haight’s decision to deny me parole, I said no. I had had enough of stirring an empty pot. I was in my cell writing Howard a letter when I thought about Bill Clinton. I recalled that, while watching his inaugural in 1993, I had thought that he might be a president who could understand my motivations and consider clemency. During his two terms he had freed the Puerto Rican prisoners, he had sent Silvia home, and he had apologized for slavery. Figuring that I had nothing to lose, I wrote to Howard that I wanted to apply for a presidential pardon, or a clemency, or a sentence commutation. I also mentioned this letter to Mary, Shirley, Rabbi Matalon, and my old friend Jane Aiken, who was now the head of the prisoners’ rights teaching clinic at Washington State University Law School, in St. Louis, Missouri.

  It seemed like such a long shot, and I was skeptical that it would work, especially because putting in an application to the Office of the Pardon Attorney was usually done years in advance. It was late—Clinton was leaving office in less than a year—and it would be a risky proposition for him to grant such a pardon. But, from my vantage point, looking at another fourteen years, all I could think was, Why not give it a try? I realized that it would be an enormous amount of work, and I felt bad asking people to again work on my behalf. But the people around me all recognized that if there was a president who might possibly grant such a request, it was Bill Clinton.

  My friends, lawyers, and supporters rose to the occasion and mounted a strategy to apply for clemency. There were differences of opinion about whom to work with, how to work with them, and how to keep the request under the public radar screen yet build support at the same time. My feeling about other campaigns that had been carried out by the left in defense of political prisoners was that they were narrow and sectarian, and that as a movement we had not learned how to appeal to the broadest segments of society. But despite my feelings and opinions about this, I did not feel that I could arbitrate the differences that emerged within the groups of people supporting me. Ultimately, it was agreed to be as quiet as possible about the application. Shirley argued and Mary agreed that conducting a public campaign would draw the ire of the opposition and make it more difficult for President Clinton to go against the tide.

  My main role was to write a letter explaining why I was requesting presidential intervention and what I thought of my actions then and now. I worked on this letter for months, writing draft after draft until we reached the filing deadline set by the Department of Justice.

  Shirley began to quietly lobby all her congressional contacts. She made the case for my release in writing and made phone call after phone call to convince both Democrats and Republicans to support my release. She strategized about who on the White House staff might take my request directly to the president. The argument ran that I was being denied parole on the basis of dropped charges and that it was a violation of my right to due process that those charges were being used to deny me release. Shirley pointed out that my codefendant was out on parole after having been convicted of the exact same charges as I was. She also mentioned the disproportionate sentencing in our case, highlighted my changed views on violence, and detailed my years and years of good work while in prison.

  Mary was in frequent contact with former officials from the administration. Jane Aiken had written the clemency petition and then re-worked it with Mary and others in order to file it on time. Barbara was coordinating the administrative work and providing indispensable practical and emotional support to me and my mother. Other friends who knew politicians or policymakers were trying to contact them. William Wardlaw was helping to fund it all, and my mother was holding the fort. It was altogether a Herculean effort.

  One day, I got a letter from the short-story instructor at my Antioch program. I had learned a lot from her and had liked her. She had come to visit me at the prison several times during the course, and I appreciated her effort. The letter said that her husband, John Marks, had followed my case for a long time, and that he had wr
itten a novel about left-wing radicals in Germany around the time the Berlin Wall had fallen. Coincidentally, I had read this novel several years earlier and had liked it. He was now a producer for CBS’s 60 Minutes and was interested in doing a piece about me and my case. I later found out that he had gotten the press kit about my case and first spoken to Shirley and then met with Shirley and Mary in Washington, D.C., to determine if I would do an interview or not.

  I reeled as I read the letter. My first thought was, No! The media is not my friend. While the film Through the Wire had done an enormous amount to help me and the others at Lexington, and had brought the issue of political prisoners to an international community, it had also been a personal nightmare. I hadn’t wanted to be center stage, ever, and couldn’t see how being on television could help me now. Then I got another letter from the senior producer of the team, Steve Reiner. Both Steve and John visited me, and Steve told me that he had been a member of Students for a Democratic Society, the most prominent student anti-war organization of the 1960s and ‘70s. He said that he had been on a similar page with me back then, and was now sympathetic. He assured me over and over that he would do an honest piece and put out my side of the story. It seemed risky, given that there were so many factors beyond my control, maybe even beyond Steve’s control. It was also obvious that if the timing of the piece itself was not good, it could undermine my clemency application. Others argued that, conversely, it could support my release.

  In the end, I agreed to be interviewed for the program. I spent four hours with Morley Safer, who asked me every question under the sun about my crimes, my charges, my role, my beliefs then and now, prison life, and on and on. It was one of the most intense and pressured exchanges I had ever had with anyone, let alone a television reporter. I could not imagine how the broadcast would do anything but hurt my chances.

  Six weeks later, the episode of 60 Minutes aired with my brief segment on it. I watched it in the communal TV room along with everyone else in my living unit. I remember thinking that Mary looked terrific on TV and was totally clear in her discussion. The segment was sympathetic toward me; the Parole Commission person seemed rather oafish, and no one from the court of the Southern District had deigned to appear. Despite my incredible anxiety, the piece did no harm. But whether it would help me get out was still an open question.

  On December 19, 2000, the Clinton administration released its list of the first round of pardons. The list contained more than seventy names, including that of my dear friend Kemba Smith. I had expected her to get clemency because of the merits of her case and the skillful way in which her supporters, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, had been able to organize. They had framed Kemba’s case as an example of the terribly unjust federal drug sentencing laws that had been enacted as part of mandatory minimum sentencing.

  Kemba, a girlfriend who had answered the door at her boyfriend’s apartment and let in a man who purchased several grams of cocaine, had been handed a twenty-seven-year sentence. Her beautiful parents had never given up on her for one second and galvanized parts of the black community to make her case a cause célèbre. Before Christmas, she walked out of the prison and into the waiting arms of her son and her parents.

  I was not on the list, but I expected another list to be released before the end of President Clinton’s term. Though my friends were counseling caution, I for some totally inexplicable reason was convinced of it. I had been sending some of my books and papers home. As the days went by and the end of the Clinton administration got closer and closer, every action I heard about or piece of news that I received became laden with greater meaning and I got more and more nervous. When I heard that an important congressman had seen President Clinton at a dinner and had handed him a letter from Rabbi Matalon that contained another letter from Elie Wiesel asking to grant me a pardon, I thought I might really get out. Yet I swung wildly from one extreme to the other.

  I felt my paranoia level rising. I was talking on the phone more than I had ever done and I was increasingly feeling that my phone conversations were being monitored. The sound booth monitor was a woman officer with several years of seniority who worked for the Special Investigative Service. Whenever I saw her on the compound, she stared hard at me. I tried not to talk about the request for clemency on the phone or mention the president’s name, because I believed that whenever I did a red light went off somewhere, a buzzer sounded, and someone was put on alert.

  One day I was standing outside the education building, just watching the compound and smoking a cigarette. Without thinking about it, I suppose I was listing to one side. The sound booth monitoring officer was standing in front of the lieutenant’s office, also smoking and staring at the compound. She turned and said, “Are you all right?”

  I realized that I was leaning and said with a laugh, “It’s the weight of incarceration.”

  She walked toward me and said, “Can I tell you something?”

  I nodded.

  She said, “Don’t take this wrong, but I have always wanted to congratulate you on your master’s degree.”

  I stared at her, taken aback, and then said, “Thanks.”

  “I know about it because I heard you talk about it on the phone.”

  I did not reply; I simply stared back at her and I could see that she was getting uncomfortable.

  “How is your pardon going?” she asked.

  “It’s a long shot, but so far so good,” I answered, thinking that this woman must have been listening to my every word. I was feeling more than violated by this exchange, but she was oblivious to my emotions.

  “I hope you get it.”

  I turned and looked directly into her eyes and asked, “Why?”

  “I read your file. I usually don’t read anyone’s file, but I wanted to see yours because the staff talks about you and I wanted to see for myself.”

  “I’m sure reading my file doesn’t create a lot of sympathy for me.”

  She said, “I think the Southern District is wrong, and it blew me away that your codefendant is out on parole.”

  In the end she said, “Staff is running four to one in your favor. You know that, right?”

  I told her that I had to go teach my class and went back upstairs. After years of constant vigilance under surveillance in order not to reveal anything of myself to the authorities, I was shocked that someone could have gotten into my business like that.

  Chapter 20

  The Hill

  I WAS COUNTING the days. I was barely living through them. Every night after dinner I would go to the weight room and lift the heaviest weight I could find. Then I would go play Scrabble with my coworker Mary in the game room, return to my cell to talk to Jane, and then exit for a cigarette in the smoke room, trying not to fall apart in front of anyone else. President Clinton was leaving office on the morning of January 20, 2001. The 17th came and went, and the 18th came and went.

  On the morning of the 19th, I woke up and tried not to think or feel anything. I refused to succumb to the utter panic that was a scratch away. I went to work at the early morning work call. I did not want to sit by myself. My coworkers were agitated and wound up but trying to contain themselves. A few hours into our shift, our boss, Mr. K., yelled from his office to ours, “Rosenberg, in here.”

  Not one of the five of us in the room moved or said a word for several seconds. I got up, shaking inside, as if going to my execution. There was a big glass window between Mr. K.'s office and ours, and so everyone could always see what happened on either side. I left the door open so that everyone could hear, as well.

  “You have to go to R&D now.” Still no sounds from the other room.

  I kept my cool. “Why? Did I make the list?”

  “You have to go and pack out,” he said.

  “Am I being released?” I said, raising my voice.

  “I don’t know about that. Just get out of here and go,” he insisted, trying to be stern.

  I had the oddest response. “No
way, unless I know I am leaving. I am not going to go pack out in front of the whole prison unless I am not coming back.”

  Exasperated, Mr. K. looked at me as if I had lost my mind. “Rosenberg, get out of my office and go to R&D.”

  I walked out of the office back into our area. No one said anything for about thirty seconds. At last, Mary said, “Susan, you are acting a bit irrationally. Go to R&D and find out what is happening.”

  I wanted to tell her to stop being a shrink (she had been a psychiatrist in her preprison life), but then four SWAT officers walked in. “Come on, right now!” one of them demanded.

  I stood up and went with them across the compound. As we walked from one end of the inner prison complex to the other, prisoners came out of their units or stopped picking up cigarette butts or clipping bushes to watch me walk across the yard.

  At R&D, the SWAT group deposited me in the main room. Mr. Shelton, the CO in charge of R&D, smiled at me with what I took as a genuine smile.

  “Am I on the list?” The question had become my litany.

  Mr. Shelton eyed me again and said, “I am giving you two duffle bags and boxes. Go fill them up and bring them back here. We want you packed.”

  I didn’t move.

  Then he said, “We don’t have a list. But we want you packed since tomorrow is Saturday and no one will be here. In case you make it, we don’t want any R&D staff to have to do overtime.”

  I just looked at him. Now I wanted to punch those upturned lips. “No overtime,” I said incredulously. “That’s unbelievable.”

  He handed me two duffle bags. I walked to my unit with them. My fellow inmates were all over me. I kept shrugging and explaining that I wasn’t on the list, but that they were packing me out in case, and I thought how humiliating it would be to have to unpack. It was now three o’clock and the work shift from the factory was returning to the housing units. Jane helped me carry the bag and boxes to R&D. Then we went to the education building and she helped me pack up some papers and books. We carried some of them to our cell and left the rest in the office. Then we locked down for the four o’clock count.