An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  To survive it, to hold fast, to keep a part of one’s self free from that process of disintegration takes an enormous effort. But people do it. I did it; I resisted one moment at a time. All my life I had responded to injustice by asking how do I live with this and how can I do something about it. What our society says about history and oppression and what the reality is remain so divergent. From an early age, I felt that my role was to expose that contradiction and to take a stand on one side of the equation—on the side of social justice. I made good decisions and many bad decisions along the way. I inherited the history of America and then I chose my path, as best I could, to be a part of the radical and very human thread of it. I went on an incredible and terrible American journey. I found the resistance that has always existed in American history. I found it in living in the most disenfranchised community in this country—the African American community. I found it in the solidarity that black women, one after another, gave to me in prison, whether it was throwing an orange into my cell, or giving me their turn in line to get medication, or when they and others stood up to authority, over and over again, to demand their dignity. I saw it as I was moved from the prison cells in the mountain ranges around Tucson, Arizona, to the green hills of Lexington, Kentucky, to the Washington, D.C., jail that “warehouses” thousands of black and Latino prisoners just blocks from the White House. It came to me when again and again someone inside or outside forced me to remember that I was not frozen in my worst or most extreme acts and that I could still create and resist and find my own humanity.

  I survived, my thinking changed, my consciousness changed, and I got to the other side. I made it out. I am out only because of years of a movement’s support, brilliant and unyielding legal help, astute political strategy, parents who never ceased fighting, and ultimately the mercy of a president. It is all of them that I must thank. Now I am consumed by the business of living. I am for the most part intact. I have a new life, including a family and work that has value. I am valued. And I am especially grateful that I was able to make good on my promise to my late father that I would get out of prison and one day take care of my mother. I have written this book because I am the exception to the rule: I was released. For the most part, our society does not believe in second chances. We say that we do, but the truth is that we don’t. And yet we should.

  Today, there are 2.4 million men and women in jail, the majority of whom are nonviolent offenders. It is possible to challenge our propensity to punish. It is possible to have mercy. We can.

  Notes

  Chapter 1: Explosives

  1. Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard): Lifelong activist and continuous target of the U.S. government. Beginning in the 1960s, Shakur was a participant in the student movement and (as a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army) the struggle for black liberation. In 1973, at the height of the government’s attack on the black liberation movement, state troopers ambushed Shakur, along with two other members of the BLA, on the New Jersey Turnpike. One trooper, Werner Foerster, and one of the men Shakur traveled with, Zayd Malik Shakur, were killed. Shakur sustained two bullet wounds and, along with her other passenger, Sundiata Acoli, was captured and indicted for first-degree murder. Her treatment, which included significant amounts of state-inflicted torture, incited public scrutiny. In 1979, members of the Black Liberation Army successfully freed Shakur from the Clinton State Correctional Facility for Women. After a period of living as a fugitive in the United States, Shakur was granted political asylum by the government of Cuba and has been living in exile there since 1984. Sundiata Acoli remains in prison.

  2. Mario Savio: A founder of the 1964–65 Free Speech Movement (FSM), in Berkeley, California. The FSM was a student protest movement that demanded students’ rights to free speech and academic freedom. It was an early divestment movement against the military-industrial complex.

  3. The Young Lords: Founded as an anti-gentrification street gang in Chicago in the 1960s, the Young Lords evolved into a significant Puerto Rican nationalist organization with active chapters operating across the United States, organizing for Puerto Rican independence abroad and against the racist conditions of Puerto Rican people living in the U.S. Inspired by the ideology and actions of the Black Panthers as well as other radical community organizations, the Young Lords implemented neighborhood programs addressing community realities such as housing rights, education, nutrition, and protection from police violence. They influenced a generation of poets, musicians, and artists. In turn, they, too, became targets of and were subject to the systematic efforts of COINTELPRO to eradicate community organizations working toward the end of racial oppression and injustice. As a result, the Young Lords dismantled in 1976, only to resurface two years later wherein members established a variety of political community projects and continued to act in solidarity with activists and organizations fighting for Puerto Rican independence.

  4. Franz Fanon (July 20, 1925–December 6, 1961): Revolutionary, psychiatrist, philosopher, recognized for his theories and analysis of the complex socio-political and psychological consequences of colonization and occupation. This theory, entrenched in Fanon’s colonial experiences, first in his native Martinique, then as a soldier in France during the Algerian war, and then as a practicing psychiatrist, produced his most highly regarded work, The Wretched of the Earth.

  5. George Jackson (September 23, 1941–August 21, 1971): In 1960, at the age of eighteen, George Jackson was given a sentence of one year to life for stealing seventy dollars from a gas station. During his incarceration at the Soledad prison, he organized several groups, including the Black Guerilla Family. He was eventually appointed as field marshal of the Black Panther Party. On January 17, 1970, he, along with two other men, was charged with the murder of a prison guard. These three men became known as the Soledad Brothers. George Jackson authored two seminal and widely read books—Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson and Blood in My Eye. On August 7, 1970, George Jackson’s younger brother, Jonathan, entered a courtroom armed with the demand that the Soledad Brothers be released. Jonathan was killed as he drove away from the courthouse. On August 21, 1971, armed guards at San Quentin prison assassinated twenty-nine-year-old George Jackson in an open courtyard under the auspices that they were thwarting his escape. It became common knowledge that this was a lie and that George Jackson had been assassinated in an effort to silence a voice that was eminently successful at publicizing the corrupt prison system and organizing incarcerated men and oppressed communities into political consciousness.

  6. COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program): A United States government operation established by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to target, disrupt, and eradicate political organizations and individuals deemed as threats to U.S. national security. Secretly active between the years of 1956 and 1971, until a group of radicals discovered the files during a break-in of FBI offices. From its inception, COINTELPRO operatives (FBI agents and police forces) were instructed to exploit their governmental power and resources to implement a series of illegal intelligence-gathering methods, including surveillance, infiltration, legal entrapment, physical force, and torture. The results of these actions dismantled radical organizations, caused the lifelong imprisonment of activists as a result of unprecedented sentences and the extra-judicial assassinations of many other activists, mostly people of color, who were gaining significant power during this period. Although COINTELPRO is no longer an official program, the methods once considered illegal during its period of operation have now been legitimized by the judicial system, affecting laws regarding torture, surveillance, imprisonment, and repression.

  7. Ernesto “Che” Guevara (June 14, 1928–October 9, 1967): Well-known Argentinean revolutionary leader whose political consciousness initially arose in response to the poverty he observed during his travels as a doctor in Guatemala. Guevara eventually developed an established revolutionary ideology rooted in a convergence of Marxist principles and the direct e
xperiences of U.S. imperialism in Latin America. He eventually met Fidel Castro and joined the struggle against the U.S.-backed dictatorship in Cuba, wherein he played a significant role in the ultimate victory. Guevara was then appointed to a number of significant governmental offices until he left Cuba in 1965 in an attempt to bring the revolutionary accomplishments in Cuba to the Congo and Bolivia. He was captured and assassinated in Bolivia by the CIA in 1967. Guevara still remains one of the most prominent figures representing successful international revolution.

  Chapter 3: Detention

  1. Bobby Sands (March 9, 1954–May 5, 1981): Member of the Irish Republican Army, writer and commanding officer of IRA Prisoners of War. Bobby Sands was arrested and tortured multiple times before he died (along with ten others) in Long Kesh (the Maze) prison on day sixty-five of a political prisoner-led hunger strike. The hunger strike was in protest of brutal prison conditions, as well as a response to the retraction and elimination of the previously held, government-sanctioned status given to political prisoners, an assignation that had been won in IRA–British Forces negotiations that had granted said prisoner rights and privileges according to the Geneva Convention.

  2. Lolita Lebrón (November 19, 1919–August 1, 2010): Lifelong Puerto Rican Nationalist leader and hero who served twenty-seven years in Alderson prison for an armed attack on the U.S. House of Representatives on March 1, 1954. The attack was intended to publicize the struggle for Puerto Rican independence, Lebrón, along with Puerto Rican Nationalists Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero, and Irving Flores Rodriguez occupied the House and unloaded their weapons into a group of legislators discussing an immigration bill. All four were found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. The activists were released in 1979 after President Carter issued pardons to all parties involved. Lebrón resided in Puerto Rico until she died on August 1, 2010.

  Chapter 4: Conviction

  1. Los Macheteros: Radical Puerto Rican organization rooted in the historic traditions of resistance against European and American colonization. Initiated in the 1970s amid a countrywide movement for independence from U.S. colonization, Los Macheteros carried out a number of actions in both Puerto Rico and the United States including, most famously, a Wells Fargo Bank robbery, the money from which was used to buy toys for children in Hartford, CT and Puerto Rico. Los Macheteros were and continue to be a target of government repression and murder. Most recently, sixty-seven-year-old Avelino Gonzalez-Claudio, was arrested and sentenced to seven years in U.S. prison for his alleged participation in the Hartford Wells Fargo expropriation twenty-five years ago. Founder and leader Filiberto Ojedo Rios was hunted by the FBI for decades and was assassinated by U.S. forces in Puerto Rico in 2005 at the age of seventy-two.

  2. The Ohio Seven: A group of activists engaged in the United Freedom Front, a clandestine organization founded in 1975 in solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles in Central America and anti-apartheid movements in South Africa. The Ohio Seven, two of whom are still incarcerated as political prisoners in the U.S. (Jaan Laaman and Tom Manning), carried out and were convicted on charges relating to a series of targeted bombings against the U.S. military and corporations.

  3. Black Liberation Army (BLA): Originally formed as the clandestine armed wing of the Black Panther Party, the BLA ascribed to Marxist-Leninist ideologies of armed resistance, which pro posed armed struggle as a crucial element in the fight for liberation of oppressed peoples. The U.S. government effectively infiltrated and created internal strife within the Black Panther Party, thus causing an organizational split, leading the Black Liberation Army to break off as its own faction. As a result, the BLA succeeded the party in a series of bank expropriations and prison liberations, most notably that of the Brink’s robbery in Nyack and the freeing of Assata Shakur. Many members were and are exposed to conditions of torture and unprecedented lifelong sentences within United States prisons.

  Chapter 7: Lexington High Security Unit

  1. Dead wings: Dead wings utilized single cells in otherwise empty areas within German prisons consigned for the particular detainment of captured members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in 1970s Germany. In an effort to defeat the political movement, dead wings were developed to systematically destroy the solidarity between and the humanity of political prisoners. Captured activists were exposed to extreme conditions of state-funded, meticulously researched torture, including twenty-four-hour isolation (absolutely no contact with other humans), sensory deprivation, and both physical and psychological abuse.

  2. Stammheim Prison: Built as a high-security prison in Germany in the early 1960s, Stammheim became famous when leaders of the Red Army Faction (RAF) were incarcerated in a special section built within its general structure in 1975 for the explicit internment of political prisoners. On October 18, 1977, a group of the imprisoned leaders were found dead. Prison officials reported the deaths as suicides. One survivor, however, maintains that they were extra-judicially killed as political prisoners.

  Chapter 8: Litigation

  1. The Wilmington Ten Conspiracy Case: In 1971, Reverend Benjamin Chavis, Southern regional program director of the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, was called to Wilmington, North Carolina, to lead a community of African American high school students who were attempting to boycott the New Hanover Public School System. The boycott developed in response to an upsurge in the occurrence of Klan-led racial violence resulting from an ill-conceived government effort to desegregate public schools. In that same year, police advanced on Chavis and nine young activists in the church that had become their headquarters. They were all accused of arson and were all given twenty-nine to thirty-six years in prison. In 1976, Amnesty International took up their case, publicizing Chavis and the youths as the first instances of political prisoners in the United States. After nearly five years in prison, the Wilmington Ten were all exonerated.

  Chapter 10: AIDs Epidemic

  1. Robinson Randall, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, New York: Plume/Penguin Putnam, 2000.