Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  “You’re sure?” she asked.

  “Same white car. Same guys.”

  “Sam, if you know it’s the bomb squad, then don’t go out. Stay here until they leave.”

  He gave her a long, lingering hug. “I can’t stay,” he said. “I promised George I’d meet him.”

  Then he kissed her once more, picked up his knapsack, slung it over his shoulder, and left. Inside the bag were four ticking bombs.

  • • •

  This time they saw him. An FBI agent atop a neighboring building watched as Melville and George Demmerle emerged onto the roof and scrambled across six adjacent rooftops before sliding out a doorway onto East Third Street. Melville was wearing an olive-drab air force uniform, Demmerle work pants and a denim jacket. Once on the street, they split up.

  FBI agents trailed Melville as he trotted down into the subway. Taking the No. 6 train north, he emerged onto the platform at Twenty-third Street. Above, two FBI agents and an NYPD detective named Sandy Tice were waiting in a battered blue Chevrolet. They watched as Melville popped out of the subway entrance and strolled east on Twenty-third. The Chevrolet slowly followed, fifty yards back. At the end of the block, Melville turned left, onto Lexington Avenue. Tice got out and followed on foot.

  It was 9:45 p.m. Keeping well back, Tice followed Melville almost all the way to Twenty-sixth Street, when he spotted George Demmerle lingering on the corner at Twenty-fifth, presumably serving as a lookout. Tice stepped to one side, studying the menu outside an Armenian restaurant, as Melville disappeared around the corner onto Twenty-sixth, heading straight toward the armory, where three army trucks were lined up along the curb.

  A minute ticked by. Demmerle remained moored in place. Tice meandered back south a block, fearing he would be seen. After another minute or so, Melville reappeared on the corner of Twenty-sixth and Lexington. To Tice’s relief, he still had the knapsack slung over his shoulder.

  A moment later Demmerle followed Melville back down Twenty-sixth Street. This time Tice ran forward to follow. When he turned left onto Twenty-sixth, he was startled to see the two barely twenty feet in front of him. Ahead, on the south side, loomed the enormous redbrick armory. The block was nearly empty; certain he was about to be spotted, Tice looked for cover. Just then a man in a tight suede suit walking a tiny Pekinese strode by. Thinking fast, Tice winked at the man and asked, “Sir, can you tell me where a man might find a little action around here?”

  Ahead, Tice could see Melville squatting down beside one of the trucks, digging for something in his knapsack. Before the man with the Pekinese could answer, Tice spotted his two FBI partners, guns drawn, sprinting toward Melville from the far end of the block.

  “Drop it!” one yelled as Melville hefted the knapsack.

  Tice broke into a run.

  “No! No!” he shouted. “Don’t drop it, for Christ’s sake!”

  Melville froze. The two FBI agents shoved him and Demmerle against one of the trucks as Tice ran up and snatched the canvas bag. He put his ear to it. He heard ticking.

  “Where’s the bomb squad?” Tice shouted.

  The FBI men began searching Melville, who made a face. “Relax,” he said. “They’re not set to go off until two o’clock.”

  • • •

  News coverage of Melville’s arrest spawned another wave of bomb threats across the New York area the next day, with more than three hundred that Friday alone. Dozens of buildings had to be evacuated, including the New York Stock Exchange, Lincoln Center, the General Post Office, the Union Carbide Building, both the New York Times and the Daily News buildings, the Newsweek building, the Queens Criminal Court, the U.S. Army Military Ocean Terminal in Brooklyn, the Susan Wagner High School on Staten Island, and three schools in Great Neck, Long Island.

  By then police had already arrested Jane, who joined Melville and George Demmerle in jail. All but Melville made bail. Not long after, Demmerle was revealed to be the FBI’s informant; he had been working for the Bureau since 1966. Melville and Jane’s friends in the Movement, meanwhile, hailed the couple as heroes. As Jane was led out of court, a crowd of supporters raised fists and shouted, “Right on!” which the Times identified as “a new left, black revolutionary phrase of support.” The applause continued two weeks later during a rally at a Times Square hotel, where 350 supporters listened as Allen Ginsberg read his poetry and the actress Ultra Violet, Andy Warhol’s muse, sang.

  Six months later Jane and Melville pled guilty to conspiracy charges. Melville was sentenced to thirteen years on a federal complaint and eighteen on state charges. He was sent to the Attica Correctional Facility, outside Buffalo, where he wrote a series of letters that were published as a book, Letters from Attica. After the prison erupted in a massive rebellion in September 1971, police characterized Melville as one of the inmate leaders. On September 13, as state troopers stormed the prison, he was killed in Attica’s D Yard. State officials claimed he was shot as he prepared to throw a Molotov cocktail. Later, lawyers for the inmates insisted he had been murdered. Even before his death Melville had been an inspiration to many young revolutionaries who dreamed of a war against the U.S. government. He was the first, the trailblazer. In death he became perhaps their greatest martyr.

  Jane Alpert, meanwhile, didn’t go to prison. Instead, like dozens of other young radicals that spring, she went underground.

  02

  “NEGROES WITH GUNS”

  Black Rage and the Road to Revolution

  The United States has a long history of political violence, from its birth in revolutionary battles to a bloody civil war to two centuries of occasional race riots, draft riots, and labor riots. Acts of political terrorism, at least until the past twenty-five years, have been comparatively rare; before the modern era, the most significant was a series of bombings by an anarchist group that climaxed in the September 1920 attack on Wall Street. With the possible exception of the Ku Klux Klan, the United States until 1970 had never spawned any kind of true underground movement committed to terrorist acts.

  There are so many myths about the 1970s-era underground. Mention today that an armed resistance movement sprang up in the months after My Lai, the Manson family, and Woodstock, and the most common response is something along the lines of “Oh, wasn’t that a bunch of hippies protesting the Vietnam War during the sixties?” This couldn’t be more wrong. The radicals of this new underground weren’t hippies, they weren’t primarily interested in the war, and it wasn’t the 1960s. The last years of that decade did see a rise in campus violence, it’s true, but the first true protest-bombing campaign, by Sam Melville’s group, didn’t arrive until mid-1969, and headline bombings didn’t become widespread until 1970. And while Melville and his peers certainly embraced the counterculture, they were the furthest thing from hippies, who tended toward hedonism and pacifism. The young radicals who engaged in bombings and the assassination of policemen during the 1970s and early 1980s were, for the most part, deadly serious, hard-core leftists. Members of the Black Liberation Army read Mao as part of their mandatory daily political-education classes.

  An even more prevalent myth, however, is that the radical violence that commenced in 1970 was a protest against the Vietnam War. In fact, while members of this new underground were vehemently antiwar, the war itself was seldom their primary focus. “We related to the war in a purely opportunistic way,” recalls Howard Machtinger, one of the Weather Underground’s early leaders. “We were happy to draw new members who were antiwar. But this was never about the war.”

  What the underground movement was truly about—what it was always about—was the plight of black Americans. Every single underground group of the 1970s, with the notable exception of the Puerto Rican FALN, was concerned first and foremost with the struggle of blacks against police brutality, racism, and government repression. While late in the decade several groups expanded their worldview to protest events in South Africa and Ce
ntral America, the black cause remained the core motivation of almost every significant radical who engaged in violent activities during the 1970s. “Helping out the blacks, fighting alongside them, that was the whole kit and caboodle,” says Machtinger. “That was all we were about.”

  “Race comes first, always first,” says Elizabeth Fink, a radical attorney in Brooklyn who represented scores of underground figures. “Everything started with the Black Panthers. The whole thrill of being with them. When you heard Huey Newton, you were blown away. The civil rights movement had turned bad, and these people were ready to fight. And yeah, the war. The country was turning into Nazi Germany, that’s how we saw it. Do you have the guts to stand up? The underground did. And oh, the glamour of it. The glamour of dealing with the underground. They were my heroes. Stupid me. It was the revolution, baby. We were gonna make a revolution. We were so, so, so deluded.”

  The underground groups of the 1970s were a product of—a kind of grungy bell-bottomed coda to—the raucous protest marches and demonstrations of the 1960s. If the story of the civil rights and antiwar movements is an inspiring tale of American empowerment and moral conviction, the underground years represent a final dark chapter that can seem easier to ignore. To begin to understand it, one needs to understand the voices of black anger, which began to be noticed during the 1950s. All of it, from the first marches in Alabama and Mississippi all the way to the arrest of the last underground radical in 1985, began with the civil rights movement, a cause led by black Americans. And what was true at its inception remained true through the ’60s and into the ’70s-era underground: Blacks, for the most part, led, and whites followed. It was black leaders who initiated the first Southern boycotts; black leaders who led the sit-ins and gave the great speeches; black leaders who, when other avenues appeared blocked, first called for violence and open rebellion. At the end of the ’60s, it was violent black rhetoric that galvanized the people who went underground.

  It started in 1954. By that point American blacks, especially those laboring under Jim Crow in the South, had been subjected to almost a century of oppression, police brutality, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and lynching. They were, by and large, second-class citizens living in poverty, denied access to the best jobs and schools and subjected to intermittent atrocities, from the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 to that of the activist Medgar Evers eight years later. While groups like the NAACP had been campaigning for equal rights for decades, the modern civil rights movement gained momentum with 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that overturned school segregation.

  A year later came the boycott of public buses in Montgomery, Alabama, a protest that vaulted a minister named Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence. A group he formed with other ministers, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, emerged as an umbrella organization for black protests. King’s movement gained momentum during the fight to desegregate schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, and then burst into international consciousness with a series of “sit-ins” that began in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960. A new medium, television, broadcast images of enraged Southern sheriffs dragging away black protesters that mobilized an entire generation of white people, many of them college students, who would come to define the 1960s. Then came the Freedom Riders, Bull Connor’s snapping German shepherds in Birmingham, Alabama, the March on Washington, Selma. Along the way “the Movement” was born.

  Through it all, King famously counseled a Gandhian policy of nonviolent resistance as the surest way to overcome ingrained Southern racism. From the beginning, however, his hymns of peace were accompanied by a deeper, angrier, little-noticed bass line throbbing ominously in the background of the civil rights symphony. This was the siren song of what many blacks termed “self-defense” but which a generation of wary whites saw simply as a call to violence, to shotgun blasts in the night, to rioting, to black men rampaging through streets of burning white homes and businesses. This music began softly, barely audible, in the late 1950s, then rose in volume through the early 1960s until becoming a full-throated chorus in 1966 and 1967. By 1968 it was a battle song. “Self-defense” became “struggle,” then “resistance,” then “Black Power,” then revolution and guerrilla warfare and death.

  In some ways, it was a very old song. Calls for black uprisings date at least to the slave revolts of Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey, and cries for black militancy and separatism surfaced as early as the late 1800s. Modern black militarism dates to the years before World War I, when shadowy groups such as the African Blood Brotherhood and later Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association advocated the formation of paramilitary “self-defense units.” Garvey’s Universal African Legions were rifle-toting pseudo-soldiers in navy uniforms who marched through Harlem in the 1920s. These were fringe movements at best, barely noticed outside the black community.

  The notion of a violent struggle against White America received little currency during the 1950s; King’s message was the only one most Americans, black and white alike, were able to hear. But the specter of racial violence was always there, and as the years wore on with little sign of the seismic changes many blacks demanded, the voices of militancy grew louder. Between 1959 and 1972, the torch of “self-defense” was passed between five consecutive black men and their acolytes.

  The first, and least remembered, was Robert F. Williams, head of the NAACP chapter in the Ku Klux Klan stronghold of Monroe, North Carolina. A grandson of slaves, Williams spent his early years working in Detroit factories, where he became a labor organizer. Returning home in 1955, he wasted little time confronting Monroe’s white power structure, boycotting whites-only lunch counters and demanding in vain that black children be allowed to use the town pool. After watching a Klansman force a black girl to dance at gunpoint, Williams formed the Black Armed Guard, arguing that “armed self-reliance” was necessary in the face of Klan “terrorism.” Its members were mostly NAACP men who started carrying guns. “If the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution cannot be enforced in this social jungle called Dixie at this time, then Negroes must defend themselves, even if it is necessary to resort to violence,” he once told reporters.

  Williams became an international figure during 1958’s infamous “Kissing Case.” Two black boys, aged seven and nine, had participated in a schoolyard kissing game in which a white Monroe girl gave one of the boys a peck on the cheek; the boys were arrested for molestation, jailed, beaten, and sent to a reform school. Williams led a defense effort that eventually included Eleanor Roosevelt and, after a British newspaper exposé, demonstrations in Paris, Rome, and Vienna; in Rotterdam the U.S. embassy was stoned. Soon after, the boys were released. Williams, in turn, emerged as a minor celebrity, feted by Northern progressives in Harlem and other black strongholds.

  During and after the case, Williams gave newspaper interviews in which he openly advocated black self-defense; if the Klan attacked a black man in Monroe, he swore, there would be retribution. “We must be willing to kill if necessary,” he told one reporter. Alarmed, the NAACP suspended him. Williams was unrepentant. Then, in 1961, when Freedom Riders came to the area to register black voters, a white couple drove into an angry black crowd. Williams took the couple into his home, then briefly refused to let them leave, saying it would be unsafe. Afterward, prosecutors charged him with kidnapping. When Williams fled, the FBI issued a warrant charging him with unlawful interstate flight. With the help of radical friends in Harlem, he made his way to Canada and then to Cuba, becoming among the first, but far from the last, U.S. radical to be warmly welcomed by Fidel Castro.

  In Cuba Williams became a one-man factory of anti-Americanism. It was there he wrote the book that became his legacy, Negroes with Guns, in which he argued that North Carolina authorities began protecting blacks only after they armed themselves. Between 1962 and 1965 Williams churned out a stream of bellicose writings, many in a se
lf-published newspaper, the Crusader. Castro even gave him a radio show broadcast into Southern states, called Radio Free Dixie. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Williams called on black servicemen to engage in armed insurrection. Even at the height of his notoriety, however, he remained a marginal figure, familiar mostly to other radicals and the FBI. He all but disappeared after moving to China in 1965.

  The second, and vastly more influential, messenger of black militancy was a charismatic Harlem preacher named Malcolm Little, better known to history as Malcolm X. Unlike Williams and King and most other black leaders seen on American television, Malcolm was a native of cold Northern slums, where blacks faced conditions every bit as daunting as those in the Jim Crow South: poverty, widespread unemployment, poor housing, and rampant police brutality. A black man arrested in Harlem in the 1960s could routinely expect a beating; when policemen killed a black citizen, there was rarely a successful prosecution. It was no accident that when underground groups began forming in 1970 and 1971, their targets were rarely slumlords or army barracks or politicians. They were almost always policemen.

  Focusing on these issues, Malcolm X had an exponentially greater influence on blacks than on whites. This was in large part because he never seriously engaged with the Southern civil rights movement (always the primary focus of white interest). He spent much of his career performing in a rhetorical theater that few whites even knew was open.

  Malcolm was born in Omaha in 1925, one of eight children. His father, Earl, was a Baptist lay preacher and an ardent member of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association; from an early age, Earl’s sense of black pride and self-reliance was instilled in Malcolm. Legend holds that the Klan harassed Earl Little for his views and forced the family to flee Omaha; they settled in Lansing, Michigan, in 1928.