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Welcome back for the second installment on Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, a history of violent radicalism in 1970s America. It’s a long book that covers a lot of ground, so I’ve divided my account into two parts. Part I covered some general features of the era, the sociology of rebellion, and gave a summary of some major radical organizations. This part goes over the history of these organizations in more detail.
1. The Black Liberation Army
BLA Begins
When we last left off, the Black Panthers had fragmented into two major factions. Most on the East Coast supported Eldredge Cleaver, who operated from an embassy in Algeria. Their opponents supported Panther founder Huey Newton.
The FBI actively fanned the flames of the Black Panther civil war, sending false information to each side. The 1971 killing of an East Coast, pro-Cleaver Panther might have been the direct result of their machinations, much as they cooperated with local officials in the 1969 assassination of Chicago Panther Fred Hampton.
But as much as they hated The Man, the slain Panther’s comrades blamed the killing on Newton-supporting Panthers. These comrades included Dhoruba Moore, Sekou Odinga, and Lumumba Shakur — men who were part of the infamous Panther 21 on trial for a conspiracy. Now out on bail, they swore vengeance and started recruiting others to their side. Most of these came from three neighborhoods where Odinga and Shakur were from and where Moore had worked as a Panther recruiter.
This was the core of what would soon be called The Black Liberation Army. Ironic, then, it was first formed to fight other black militants. In fact, their first action was the torture and killing of a black man — Sam Napier, who ran a pro-Newton Black Panther newspaper. He was bound, tortured, killed, and his corpse burned.
You’d think this would have led to further escalation with the Newtonite Panthers, but oddly enough it did not. Instead, the group swung back toward the goal that had attracted many of them to the Cleaver-era Panthers: Killing cops.
That May, they ambushed and shot two policemen. Two nights later they ambushed another pair, killing one. Media, including the NYT, received letters announcing that the killings were “revolutionary justice” carried out by the Black Liberation Army.
BLA Organization
By July there were fifty or sixty former Panthers in the BLA, with one major cell in Brooklyn and another in the Bronx. The group would never be very well-organized. While Cleaver styled himself leader of the BLA, he was too distant to have much say in day-to-day events, and also had to maintain some plausible deniability with the Algerian government. He soon began to fade into irrelevance.
Each of the BLA cells was to act completely independently of the others. The theory was that this made the group resilient — if one cell was infiltrated or captured, the others would still be safe. In practice, it led to confusion, including a fiasco where two different cells showed up to the rob the same target at the same time.
The robberies were necessary for funding. In their early phases the BLA mostly targeted drug dealers, though later on they would turn on more respectable targets like banks.
Though one might think that assassinating police officers would bring the hammer down swiftly, an upcoming election made the mayor eager to downplay the violence — stories of race war in the streets would be bad publicity. And for a long time coming, officials would debate whether BLA was even a real organization or just a fashionable name to attach to unrelated killings. But eventually the heat would turn up.
BLA On the Road
When a BLA cell led by John Thomas got into a shootout with cops on the street — killing a cabbie in the crossfire — they decided to head down to Atlanta. There Thomas set up a school for training in guerilla warfare, where members practiced and shooting and hand-to-hand combat.
After a successful bank robbery to secure some cash, Thomas dispatched two members on a mission to hunt and kill policemen. They ambushed a police officer as he was eating a snack in his car, shooting him to death and taking his badge and gun as trophies.
Four days later members of the cell went out on another hunting expedition. Only before they could set up an ambush, an officer spotted their guns and arrested them.
With four of his group in jail, Thomas took the rest North. But a deputy stopped his car in North Carolina, leading to a shootout that left the deputy paralyzed, one BLA soldier dead, and Thomas in custody. The remainder of his cell scattered to the winds.
Another cell, led by Ronald Carter, also got out of New York, heading south for Miami. There they robbed a bank and began using the funds to set up safe houses in various cities. They made their way to Cleveland, where they absorbed three members of the scattered Thomas cell. They planned to use the Midwest as their base while continuing to launch attacks in New York.
They soon followed through by killing two more NYPD officers. The victims were former Marines, one black and one white, who had served together in Vietnam and requested to be partners on the force. As they lay dying, the killers shot one in the eyes and the other in the groin. One exhilarated attacker “reportedly danced a jig over the dead men’s bodies, firing his pistol into the air Wild West-style.”
Decline and Fall
At this point the BLA had attacked ten officers and killed seven of them in the course of nine months. They’re the deadliest of the groups Burroughs details, but they didn’t have staying power. Soon the Carter cell got into a shootout with police that killed Carter and led to most of the rest being arrested.
When another gunfight at a lounge killed two more BLA soldiers, the New York cell led by Joanne Chesimard decided to take revenge. They ambushed and shot a pair of policemen — as it happens, two brothers. But the patrolmen were able to escape to a hospital and survived.
Two nights later the Chesimard cell went hunting again, wounding two more officers in a shooting ambush.
The mayor called the situation a crisis and pledged extra officers on the streets. Feeling the heat, Chesimard’s group made the bad decision to leave the city by driving on the New Jersey turnpike at night.
Driving while black on the turnpike in the early 70s was a good way to get pulled over by state troopers, which is exactly what happened. When the troopers searched the trunk they found a clip from an automatic weapon. As soon as Chesimard and company realized the jig was up, they drew and started firing.
In the ensuing struggle one state trooper and one BLA member were killed. Another trooper was wounded. Chesimard and another BLA member were arrested.
Arrest and shootouts had taken their toll, and the BLA was dwindling. A series of raids and arrests in New York and other cities effectively broke the organization. Though, notably, founder Sekou Odinga was still at large, and would soon find new allies.
2. Weatherman
Enter the Weatherman
The BLA make an interesting contrast to Weatherman (later known as Weather Underground and sometimes just called Weather). The former were black radicals, mostly radicalized through the prison pipeline, who mostly relied on shooting. The latter were white radicals, radicalized through the college pipeline, who mostly relied on bombing.
Weatherman was a splinter group of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). SDS formed in 1961 to assist in the Civil Rights struggle and was organized “somewhat like a social fraternity” with “a string of campus chapters linked by a national office” that attempted to direct them “with mixed degrees of success.”
SDS members engaged in civil rights and anti-war demonstrations, but by 1966 many expressed a sense of frustration and failure and began to speak of escalation. That year one leader first spoke of SDS seeking “revolution” and in 1966-67 the slogan “from protest to resistance” became popular. Shortly after embracing resistance one SDS leader said, “we are working to build a guerilla force in an urban environment.” He quickly recanted, but that was indeed the direction it would go.
At this point in the decade things escalated very quickly. Burrough is rightly fascinated by the pace:
“One of the most striking characteristics of radical thought during the late 1960s was the flash-fire speed with which it evolved: An idea could be introduced, accepted, popularized, and taken to the ‘next level’ in a matter of months, sometimes weeks.”
In 1968, the same year MLK and RFK were killed, there was a wave of protest and revolution around the world, and some became convinced that a single, global revolution of the oppressed was underway. Left-wing revolutionaries sought to emulate Castro, Lenin, and Mao in the US. Says one former member of Weatherman:
“We actually believed there was going to be a revolution….We believed the world was undergoing a massive transformation. We believed Third World countries would rise up and cause crises that would bring down the industrialized West, and we believed it was going to happen tomorrow, or maybe the day after tomorrow, like 1976.”
Radicals preaching immanent revolution rose to prominence in various SDS chapters. It was at Columbia that a one group of radicalized SDS students formed Weatherman, taking the name from a Bob Dylan lyric. The group was initially led by Mark Rudd, John “JJ” Jacobs, and Bernadine Dohrn.
Their core beliefs were Marxist, with the twist that JJ prophesized that it would be a black revolution that weakened the US government enough to spark the great proletarian revolution. It was the duty of all white revolutionaries to help their black comrades in this endeavor. These college radicals idolized black revolutionaries even more than their heroes Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. One member later said that “in our hearts, what all of us wanted to be was a Black Panther.”
Dohrn and JJ set their sights on taking over leadership of the entire SDS. They produced a manifesto — “a nearly impenetrable blizzard of Marxist jargon” — that the core members all signed. Then they headed to Chicago for the big SDS convention. There they bumped heads with another radical faction — a bunch of Maoists called the PL.
The PL made the fatal mistake of wanting to focus more on workers as such, rather than on the black struggle. This prompted a delegate from the Black Panthers to take the mic and denounce PL as “counterrevolutionary traitors.” Given how highly the white radicals regarded the black ones, this was a heavy blow. Dohrn then gave a speech calling the PL reactionary, anticommunist, and racist, and demanding they be expelled.
When it was all said and done Weatherman came out with control of the SDS, a national organization of college students.
A Marxist Cult
During the next six months the SDS became more extreme. Aggressive leaders like Dohrn and Jeff Jones muscled aside the less aggressive ones like Rudd. And the leaders engaged in a lot of tough talk, disparaging any moderation as weakness.
In Understanding Terror Networks, Marc Sageman describes a similar mutual radicalization captured in recordings of young Muslim men who formed a Salafi jihadist group. Relatively isolated from outside influence, the tight-knit circle radicalized one another in a process of one-upsmanship.
As the group became more extreme, leadership committed to transforming the SDS into an “urban fighting force.” Dohrn actually led a group to Cuba to meet with the Castro regime, who gave them some instruction on conducting an insurgency.
Weatherman grew increasingly totalitarian and cult-like. They adopted the Maoist practice of intense criticism/self-criticism sessions, which amounted to “a marathon all-night interrogation in which members were accused of every conceivable human weakness, from cowardice to insubordination.”
To continue transforming themselves into a “cadre,” the Weathermen leadership decreed that all couples in the organization must break up — the idea being that none should have any meaningful relationship “except that with the group itself.” As part of the new “Smash Monogamy program” members had to participate in orgies.
In the last installment I spoke of The Movement having some sense of common cause. But as much as the Weathermen (which I’ll call them since everyone else does) idolized the Black Panthers, the affection wasn’t always reciprocal. In 1969 the Chicago Panthers “stormed the SDS office, jammed a gun into a girl’s face, beat up the SDS printer, Ron Fliegelman, and ransacked the office, making off with typewriters and other equipment.”
Burrough isn’t too clear on why exactly the two radical groups had a falling out, but an internet Marxist archive has this gem from 1969 in which the Panthers blast the SDS for not supporting their resolution for community-controlled police. Get this: The Panthers called for every community, black, brown, or white, to have a locally controlled police force. Weatherman objected that allowing white communities the same privilege as black communities was fostering white supremacy!
Yes, the white radicals thought that embattled black radicals weren’t sufficiently woke to the problem of white supremacy. And so of course the Panthers responded by calling the white radicals Nazis.
I guess if you subscribed to the right newspapers, life before Twitter wasn’t so different after all.
The Day of Rage
All along Weatherman had been planning its first big event: A National Day of Action, later known as the Day of Rage. It was to take place on October 8, 1969. The plan was to gather thousands of like-minded radicals in the streets of Chicago to launch the great Revolution. Weatherman leader Bill Ayers said that while they weren’t urging people to bring guns, “we’re also going to make it clear that when a pig gets iced, that’s a good thing, and that everyone who considers himself a revolutionary should be armed.”
Two nights before the event the Weathermen conducted their first bombing, blowing up a statue in Haymarket Square. Then came the gathering in Lincoln Park on Wednesday night. It was their first glimpse of how out-of-touch their group had become: They expected thousands, but only a couple hundred showed up.
It was a big flashing neon sign that their revolution wasn’t as popular as they thought, but they ignored that particular implication. Instead, they decided to press on and launch the attack.
Police were there to keep an eye on what they thought was a demonstration in the park. They were caught off guard when the two-hundred or so Weathermen let out war whoops and ululations, then charged from the park into the wealthy neighborhood known as the Gold Coast. There they set about smashing windows and bashing cars while chanting the name of Ho Chi Minh. Residents retaliated by throwing ashtrays and flowerpots at them.
Eventually Weathermen ran into a police roadblock, and the police responded by beating the hell out of them. At least thirty were beaten to the pavement, another six shot, and when it was all over a dozen went to jail.
The action was a failure, but rather than call off the revolution the Weathermen decided to double down on it. Dohrn proposed they go underground. She and the most aggressive leaders, including a death-obsessed guy named Terry Robbins, were committed to a real violent struggle. Thus the Weathermen dissolved the SDS and went underground.
Wannabe Killers
They also doubled down on the weird cultish behavior, with more attempts to break down the individuality of their members through criticism/self-criticism sessions and LSD-fueled orgies.
In December of 1969 the police assassinated Black Panther Fred Hampton, shooting him in bed after an FBI informant drugged him with a barbiturate. This demanded vengeance, and the Weathermen held a meeting they billed as the National War Council, or Wargasm. At one point, Dohrn gave a speech praising the Manson cult’s murder of actress Sharon Tate and her unborn child.
Dohrn, by the way, wound up a college professor.
Weatherman leaders chose soldiers from the members of various groups, only selecting those committed enough to leave family and work ties behind. The result of the purges was that Weatherman was reduced to three collectives, or tribes: One in NYC, one in San Francisco, and one scattered across several cities in Midwest. Bill Ayers oversaw the Midwest collective, Robbins led in New York, and the rest of the leadership stayed in San Francisco.
During talks about targets the leadership agreed that they would kill people, and that police were the optimal target. They did this in solidarity with the Black Panthers and other black radicals. Their own experience with police brutality during their arrest in Chicago added personal grievances of their own.
Weatherman’s first bombing attack on people was at a Berkely police complex. They timed the explosion to happen during a shift change, so as to maximize fatalities. Despite their best efforts none were killed, though several were badly injured, and the Weathermen considered the action a success.
Under Ayers, the Midwest group plotted other bombing and kidnapping targets. With his encouragement, they settled on bombing the Police Officers Association in retaliation for their funding the defense of three officers charged with killing three black youths during the 1967 riot. Some objected that the bomb might kill bystanders, including black people, but Ayers was dismissive, saying that “collateral damage” is part of any war.
Ayers, by the way, wound up a college professor.
They planted the bombs, but Detroit police found and defused them before they could go off. Ayers’s group followed up by detonating a bomb at the home of a detective who was the president of the Fraternal Order of Police.
Robbins led the NYC group to firebomb the home of a judge presiding over a trial of Black Panthers. The firebombing with Molotov cocktails had little impact, though, so he got his hands on some dynamite. The next target was a dance at Fort Dix, where they could kill numerous soldiers and soldiers’ wives and girlfriends.
The main reason the Weathermen haven’t gone done in history as mass-murdering terrorists is their incompetence. They tried mass killings of cops but couldn’t pull it off. And their plan to kill soldiers went awry when, as Robbins worked on the bomb in the townhouse where his cell lived, it prematurely blew up. The bomb levelled the townhouse. Robbins and two other members died.
Responsible Terrorism
After this the group shed a lot of its members. Some drifted away altogether, but others became useful “aboveground” supporters of those who remained underground. The remaining Weathermen leadership gathered in San Francisco.
They had suddenly lost their taste for lethal violence, and Dorhn proposed a new rule that they wouldn’t use their bombs to kill people. Weatherman began a new bombing campaign that sought to avoid casualties by bombing empty buildings or phoning warnings in advance of the explosion.
They also started adopting some of the language and look of the popular hippie movement. The laid-back hippies were increasingly prominent in the New Left, while the dead-serious Marxism that drove Weatherman was falling out of fashion. In a bid to stay relevant to the youth, Weatherman communiques drifted away from Marxist jargon and toward language and tropes with currency among the hippies. And their next big venture was breaking Timothy Leary out of prison. This had little to do with black rights, a Marxist revolution, or anti-war activism — but that Leary was popular with the kids.
Dorhn also released a message promising a string of bombings across the country, and the group managed to follow through. The bombings inspired many copycat threats and resulted in tighter security at airlines and military installations, as well as new regulations on the sale and storage of dynamite.
Dissension in the Ranks
The group’s cachet was waning. The Movement itself was no longer really the Movement. It was beginning to fragment as people clustered around different causes: The environmentalists here, the feminists there, the gay-rights activists over yonder. The public was now getting fed up with the bombing. Particularly damaging for public opinion was when a radical group in Wisconsin set off a bomb that killed a young father of three.
While what Weatherman was selling was not popular, they did have patrons. Unlike other radical groups they never resorted to armed robbery. Instead, they relied on donations from well-off sympathizers, especially radical attorneys in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and LA. Because of this the leaders could live quite well, in comfortable beach houses, houseboats, and vacation homes.
The high living standards of the group’s leadership introduced another rift in the organization:
“While leadership lived in a waterfront home, their followers, many still huddled in a single apartment on Pine Street in San Francisco, were living on the edge of poverty. The resentment would grow in the coming months…”
One former member recalls, “In time the difference between the top and the bottom became really gross. Offensive.” Another speaks of visiting Bill Ayers and being shocked to see butter in his refrigerator: “I couldn’t afford a piece of bread, and they had butter!”
The group began to fragment not only along class lines, with lower ranking members tired of poverty, but also along other cultural and ideological lines. Gays and lesbians complained not enough was done to meet their needs, while many female members began to identify more with feminism than general Marxism and complain of the group being patriarchal. This reflected the larger fragmentation of The Movement into many movements.
Don’t Need a Weatherman
The group kept bombing throughout the early 1970s, striking some high-profile targets — including the US Capitol building and the Pentagon! But still their influence waned. With their dream of a Castro-style revolution fading, they shifted from an offensive campaign to bombing in retaliation for specific events, as when the police killed a black radical.
After a close brush with the Feds, they also started using the children of their sympathizers as camouflage when they cased a bombing target. Having the kiddos around might have been the first inkling for some female members that they wanted kids too. The attractions of a normal life also led to some members getting jobs, and missing Weatherman meetings rather than miss work.
The group’s leadership still managed to write an influential radical book, Prairie Fire. And they launched an arrogant plan to regain their leadership role in radical movements. “Leadership” recalls one former member, “it was like a drug. We really thought we were the Chosen People.”
The idea was to form an above-ground group to distribute Prairie Fire, and for the group to portray itself as separate from Weather while being a vehicle for Weather leadership to gain prominence again. Around this time, they also got good PR in the form of a sympathetic documentary film. With all this in place, they planned a big conference where they would stake their claim as leaders. It did not go as planned.
The Left had moved on, and other radical factions turned on them. Especially the black radicals, who weren’t keen on the white college kids telling them what to do. One female Weatherman recalled of the meeting: “Every time something went wrong, I was constantly being accused of being a racist. This was just devastating to me.”
Weather was accused of prioritizing class issues over race, and there were demands that any overarching radical organization be run by blacks. The idea that the Weatherman would resurface and take charge was arrogant and was seen as such. Under the auspices of another radical leader, Weather’s top members were subjected to a withering crit/self-crit session and purged from the movement as counterrevolutionary and racist.
3. The Symbionese Liberation Army
The Second Wave
By 1973 the BLA was defeated, and Weather was already marginal. But new organizations sprang up in various parts of the country that aped the tactics pioneered by Weatherman and the BLA. They had less connection to the old Civil Rights movement, and more to prisons. For prisoners had been an eager audience for ideas about violent revolution, and prisoners still received a lot of sympathy and even hero worship from white radicals in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Oakland
By 1971 lots of Bay Area radicals were volunteering or protesting at prisons. Some black inmates were genuine converts, others just used the activists to help them make parole or escape. But many radicals continued to believe black inmates were the key to revolution. This is what led to Soledad inmate George Jackson becoming a celebrity.
Like Cleaver, Jackson was a violent man who could write well — only he was even more violent. Fellow prisoners recall that everyone was scared of him, and his own father testified at a 1965 parole hearing that Jackson was better off in prison.
Jackson and three others were charged with the murder of a prison guard as retaliation for another guard having killed three black inmates without warning. Jackson’s case became another cause célèbre. Radical attorney Fay Stender was a key figure in their defense. Despite being married with children, she had an affair with Jackson, just as she had previously had with Huey Newton when she defended him. She made the case that the entire corrupt white system was prosecuting an innocent victim for his revolutionary beliefs. This catapulted Jackon to fame among the Bay Area Left.
Sociologist and inmate rights advocate John Irwin later noted how starstruck, awed, and naïve Stender and her supporters were:
“It was mostly women who were doing the organizing….They had each picked their favorite Soledad Brother and were kind of ooh-ing and ah-ing over them, like teenagers with movie stars. I couldn’t believe it.”
Jackson wrote a book called Soledad Brother that made him an even bigger celebrity. After his little brother died taking a courtroom hostage and killing a judge, he wrote the follow-up book in 1971. Then he himself died after taking eight hostages, killing five of them, and getting shot by a guard while attempting to flee.
The follow-up book, published after his death, was a call to arms that was popular with revolutionary prisoners. And it had a big impact on a prisoner named Donald DeFreeze.
The Walkin’ Dude
I’ve read that Donald DeFreeze was the inspiration for Stephen King’s character Randall Flagg, the mysterious and demonic antagonist of The Stand. Having read about the real Donald DeFreeze I have no idea how this is possible.
I can only surmise that King had some romanticized view of DeFreeze as a charismatic corrupter of souls. But Burrough makes the real guy sound like a delusional screwup who just happened to stumble into a social environment where a guy like him could find a following: 1970s Berkeley.
DeFreeze wasn’t a badass like George Jackson. He wasn’t physically imposing and or a leader in the prison hierarchy. He was a loser who couldn’t keep himself out of trouble. A Cleveland-born black man, he did time for theft, then moved to Newark, got married, and tried to go straight. But money troubles led to his moonlighting as a burglar and armed robber. This trajectory is understandable if not sympathetic, up until he decides to start building bombs.
When one bomb went off at his home, he was indicted by the police, evicted by his landlord, and temporarily fled from Newark to Southern California. He came back to Newark only to be arrested again with another homemade bomb. Then he and his entire family moved to Los Angeles, where he again found legitimate work, with a little gunrunning on the side.
But he still kept getting arrested for homemade bombs!
That, and police found a ton of stolen guns in his house. But don’t worry about him: This is the 1970s, and if you’re a convicted felon with multiple arrests for bombmaking, getting arrested with a houseful of stolen guns and yet another bomb only gets you probation.
With this lucky break he moves his family to Cleveland, where he’s quickly arrested with a load of burglary tools. His wife leaves him, and he heads back to L.A., where in 1969 he commits and armed robbery that results in a shootout with the police. He gets sentenced to prison for five years.
During this stint he became an avid reader, and devoured Jackson’s books. He was helped in learning revolutionary ideas by the Black Culture Association, in which white activist volunteers met with prisoners in the library. DeFreeze befriended the volunteers took to calling himself Cinque M’tume.
Then, in 1972, he escaped and went on the run.
An Army of Eight
Looking for a place to hide, he called up his white contacts from the Black Culture Association. This is how he found at that the prison volunteers who preached violent revolution were squeamish about actually harboring a fugitive. But eventually a friend of a friend allowed him to stay.
Upon arrival, he did what any convict on the run would do: Immediately declared his intent to start a revolution.
Styling himself “General Field Marshal Cinque” of the “Symbionese Liberation Army,” he somehow managed to put together a group of followers. As the author puts it:
“Berkeley was probably the only place the SLA could have been born. It was among the few enclaves left in the United States where the notion of armed struggle was even taken the slightest bit seriously. A dozen or so fly-speck underground groups were scattered through the hills around town; about the only people who heard their calls for revolution were those sitting next to them on the couch.”
His first recruit, and girlfriend, was a part-time Berkeley student and revolutionary feminist called Mizmoon. Their next recruits included Mizmoon’s former lover and some of DeFreeze’s friends from the Black Culture Association (white 20-something prison activists). The “army” topped out at around eight members.
Despite all that, the delusional DeFreeze saw himself not only leading an army but creating a Federated Republic based on a hazy mishmash of far-left tropes. The little cadre practiced Maoist criticism/self-criticism sessions and might never have gone beyond play-acting if not for the arrival of a of another escaped prisoner, Thero Wheeler.
Wheeler made his way to DeFreeze’s group because his girlfriend had been hanging around Mizmoon. The girlfriend directed him to the revolutionaries, and he was surprised to arrive and see his old prison acquaintance DeFreeze nominally in charge.
Unlike DeFreeze, Wheeler had been an inmate leader and was a more practical sort of man. He led the group in stealing weapons and burglarizing the homes of some fellow leftists. He also taught them to shoot.
Then one day he went on a rant about Marcus Foster, the first black superintendent of the Oakland school system. He was mad at Foster’s policies to curb school violence, such as having students carry ID cards. Inspired by his rant the SLA, an organization founded by a black revolutionary to fight on behalf of black America, made its first victim a prominent black man.
They assassinated Foster on November 6, 1973. It did not have the reaction they planned. The Black Panthers condemned it, as did the other Bay Area radicals. Nonetheless DeFreeze sent a communique to the media taking credit for the killing as “Symbionese Liberation Army Western Regional Youth Unit.”
The Hearst Kidnapping
As the manhunt for the killers began, Wheeler fled, leaving DeFreeze again the sole leader. Two members were caught by the police, but the rest escaped.
That February, the remaining SLA members kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst, daughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate.
The case became one of the greatest media sensations of the decade. It’s the main reason anyone remembers this weird little group at all. And the thing that made it most sensational wasn’t just that a rich white girl had gotten kidnapped — it was that after the kidnapping she joined their group. Soon the whole country would see infamous security camera photos of the young heiress training a gun on customers during a bank robbery.
I think David Hines put it best in his review of the same book: “The press was going nuts. Imagine a Kardashian were kidnapped, then resurfaced having become a terrorist. That’s what this was like.”
Hearst’s side of the story is that they kept her locked in a closet and ranted at her for hours on end about their ideology. Then DeFreeze and another male member started raping her regularly. She kept telling the group what they wanted to hear in a bid to save her own life, and they came to accept her as one of the group. She thought if she tried to escape they’d definitely kill her and she had no choice but to go along with their shenanigans. And after a while of this, she started to become the mask.
By threatening to harm Pattie, the SLA was able to pressure her father William Randolph Hearst into spending millions on a program to distribute free food in poor black neighborhoods. The distribution was far from smooth, but it actually happened and won the SLA a little bit of credit in radical circles.
A Last Stand
After some petty shoplifting resulted in more police attention and a shootout, the FBI were able to locate the SLA safehouse. They fled just before the raid. They split into two groups, with DeFreeze’s group stopping at a strange house in a rough black neighborhood because, at 4am, it was the only one with lights on. DeFreeze knocked on the door and asked if he could hide from the cops.
Apparently, this wasn’t such a weird thing to do in this neighborhood. The lady of the house, up late drinking with her friend, let him in. She had some second thoughts when several heavily armed white folks came in behind him and started making Molotov cocktails in the kitchen. But she would wind up spending most of the subsequent day either sleeping off her drunk or starting a new one, so she couldn’t have been all that concerned.
The hard-partying lady’s home wasn’t much of a secret hideout. All the next day her friends and their school-age children were coming and going. One friend stopped by for a “wake-up beer.” Another friend waved off the work supervisor who showed up to take him to work, thinking he could make more money ripping off the weirdo revolutionaries. He was right — DeFreeze gave him a wad of cash to go buy a car for them, only to never see him again.
As the author says:
“As before, DeFreeze made no effort to hide who they were. He seemed to genuinely believe that, because they were fighting in the name of black people, black people would support them, or at least would not alert the police. Told that the neighborhood was dominated by a local gang, the Crips, DeFreeze said he hoped to meet some, pledging to make them right-on revolutionaries.”
DeFreeze, by the way, won’t wind up a college professor.
Naturally word got around. And when one of the homeowner’s friend’s children returned from school, he recognized DeFreeze from television and to his grandmother’s house to tell her. Shortly after the angry grandmother later stormed in and began reprimanding her daughter for being passed out drunk — all the while seemingly ignoring the armed white women making bombs in the kitchen. But soon she ordered them out of the house as well, before taking her grandchildren and going off in search of the police.
The LAPD closed in on the house while all the people inside who weren’t SLA melted away. DeFreeze knew the end was coming. A one point a curious neighbor girl came in to find him drinking Boone’s Farm and swearing to “take a lot of motherfucking pigs with us.”
The macho threat is somewhat undercut by the image him swigging a sweet wine that high school boys use to get high school girls drunk.
The LAPD announced themselves on a bullhorn, but the house remained silent. With nightfall coming, the LAPD, wanting to avoid an overnight siege in a rough neighborhood, fired in teargas. The SLA responded with machine-gun fire.
A firefight ensued, with more tear gas shot into the house. A fire erupted, possible from the gas cannisters setting off the Molotov cocktails stored in the kitchen. Some SLA members tried to shoot their way out and were shot to death. The remainder continued shooting at police from the crawlspace of the house until they burned to death.
SLA Redux
DeFreeze and half the SLA were dead. The surviving members — including Patty Hearst — went searching for safe harbor. They managed to hook up with a radical publisher in the Bay Area who helped round up more recruits.
But this rump SLA group was basically a big unstable polycule with constant fights and fractures over sexual jealousy:
“As they remained marooned inside three grungy Sacramento apartments, the gamesmanship developed into a kind of sexual Lord of the Flies. When Bill Harris began sleeping with Kathy Soliah, Emily retaliated by sleeping with Steve Soliah. When Harris, in a jealous rage, confronted Steve with a gun, Steve left Emily and started sleeping with Hearst. Emily, in turn, began sleeping with Jim Kilgore….everyone was having sex with everyone, it seemed, and everyone was angry about it.”
It's like if Fleetwood Mac robbed banks instead of writing songs.
This dysfunction didn’t stop them from being dangerous. Back up to eight members in strength, they pulled off a bank robbery in which they killed a mother of four who was there to deposit money from her church. On the morality of shotgunning the lady, one member said: “She was a bourgeois pig anyway.”
Taking command, Bill Harris announced his intention to carry on DeFreeze’s work by killing cops. Thankfully the group’s incompetence limited its abilities. One bombing mission degenerated into a three-way fistfight as the bombing team disagreed on which target to choose.
They wound up not causing much more damage before the FBI closed in on them.
Though most Americans viewed them as a tiny, failed cult — which is basically correct — some in radical circles envied their success in the Hearst food program. And their prominence might have helped inspire the four new bombing groups that sprung up in the Bay Area within the next two years. Yes, as long as this post is, Burrough addresses more than I cover here.
4. FALN
Relative Professionals
I noted in my summary that FALN, the Puerto Rican separatist group, was the most competent of those I listed. But it is also the one that I think gets short shrift in Burrough’s account.
I attribute this mostly to the members being more tight-lipped to outsiders. Contrariwise, Weatherman probably gets disproportionate attention because its former members were more verbose. Most of his account, it seems to me, focuses on the attempts of the FBI to bring FALN down, and the FBI spent a lot of its time operating in the dark.
FALN was the latest in a line of Puerto Rican groups campaigning for independence. The last big wave of separatist violence had happened in the 1950s, when a group tried to kidnap sitting president Harry S. Truman and attacked the floor of Congress with a machine gun, shooting five legislators (one in the chest).
Yes, that stuff actually happened.
FALN’s first bombing campaign kicked off in 1974 and included a car bomb in New York’s financial district. They issued statements taking credit for the bomb and demanding the release of those imprisoned for the 1950s attacks.
Their deadliest attack happened in 1975, when the bombing of a Wall Street restaurant, Fraunces Tavern, killed four and badly injured forty more.
Shortly after the Tavern bombing, FALN detonated bombs in Chicago. About a year after their first attack, they set off a string of ten bombs in three cities (Washington, New York, and Chicago) within 12 hours. All told they detonated 25 bombs in the course of the year.
FALN was quiet for about a year, and then in 1976 started bombing again, targeting Standard Oil and First National Bank in Chicago. Three weeks later they bombed the Pan Am building, the NYPD’s 40th Precinct house, and two banks in New York City.
The law was at a loss. Partly this was because of new sensitivities about policing minorities, partly because these guys were actually really good at evading surveillance.
One of the first breaks in the FALN case came when a young burglar from a Puerto Rican neighborhood in Chicago broke into a neighbor’s house hoping to score some construction tools, only to find a big footlocker of dynamite along with guns, walkie talkies, and blasting caps. He took it to a friend who turned informant for the cops. When the cops searched the place, they also found a communique from FALN and brought in the FBI.
Origins of FALN
The apartment was occupied by Oscar Lόpez (Rivera) and Carlos Torres.
Though no one is exactly sure how FALN was formed or how it worked — again, most members were tight-lipped — it seems like Lόpez was a founder and the leader.
He was born in Puerto Rico but grew up in Chicago, in a Polish neighborhood where the Poles didn’t much care for Puerto Ricans. Lόpez and his brother Jose were bright lads, but schooling conditions for kids who didn’t speak English were rough: At the neighborhood school they sat in a walk-in closet while the English-speaking kids got their lessons.
A combination of poverty and anti-Puerto Rican prejudice led Lόpez and his brother to nurse anger and resentment. A friend of the family turned them on to pamphlets from pro-Castro groups, beginning their dream of a revolution in Puerto Rica like the one in Cuba. At some point they must have fallen hard for Communism: FALN would be a Marxist group, its communiques laced with the same dense Marxian language as those of Weatherman.
Lόpez joined the army and fought in Vietnam, while his brother Jose stayed in the states absorbing more radical literature. In 1971 Jose got a job teaching at his old high school, where he was angered by ethnic jokes at the expense of Puerto Ricans and the refusal of the principal to allow beans, a Puerto Rican staple, to be served in the cafeteria. Meanwhile Oscar returned from Vietnam to become a social worker in the old neighborhood.
Together the brothers and their allies from the school and neighborhood campaigned for the betterment of the Puerto Rican community in Chicago. It’s not clear exactly when or how these community activists morphed into violent revolutionaries. But it only took 18 months to go from protests at the high school to the first bombings in New York.
There’s a good chance they were assisted by Cuban intelligence. Castro had set his sights on replicating his Cuban revolution on his island neighbor and had his people training revolutionaries there.
But oddly enough they might have gotten the most useful technical help from Weatherman. The two groups got in touch through mutual acquaintances among radical attorneys. After the disastrous accident that killed three members, Weatherman’s sole technically competent member actually got pretty good at bombmaking. FALN used his bomb design, and he admits that Weather helped train them.
Another useful source of support for FALN was — I kid you not — the Episcopal Church.
Several FALN members, including Lόpez, said on the board of the National Commission for Hispanic Affairs, one of the church’s charity organizations. This allowed them to funnel tens of thousands of dollars in church money into FALN activities.
The church initially cooperated with an FBI investigation into all of this, but then some progressive bishops objected that it was an attempt to stop funding Hispanic groups and started resisting the FBI. All the while FALN was still bombing!
Dangerous Business
In 1977 they bombed of the Defense Department’s office in New York. It was a miracle no one was hurt. A call to the news revealed other bombs had been planted at Chase Manhattan, several Latin American consulates, the American Brands Building, Mobil Oil’s headquarters, and both towers of the World Trade Center.
The bombing at Mobil killed the manager of a small employment agency, left two more victims in critical conditions, and injured several others.
More bombs discovered in New York and Chicago proved to be duds. The dud bombs were a sign that the dynamite FALN was using, all stolen a decade prior, was going bad. Only bad dynamite doesn’t just fail to blow up when you want it to — it also has a tendency to blow up when you don’t want it to. If that happened at wherever FALN was hiding their main stash, it could take out a whole apartment block.
This realization leads an FBI agent to have a sit down with an imprisoned FALN supporters, including Lόpez’s brother. The Fed warns them their dynamite is going bad and can result in their own neighborhoods getting levelled. He offers to swap their bad dynamite for good dynamite, stick for stick. The offer wasn’t honest — the Feds were mixing up a case of fake dynamite for the swap. But the FALN men didn’t go for it.
And the group just kept bombing. Consolidated Edison. A cop car. La Guardia. JFK. O’Hare. The Justice Department.
They might have been relatively competent, but playing with explosives is dangerous. One day the group’s main bombmaker, Willie Morales, is working on a bomb in his apartment in Queens when it goes off in his hands. He’s left a bloody mess with no fingers.
And here is what I mean by these guys having discipline: Despite all this Morales has the presence of mind to use his bloody stumps to start flushing FALN documents down the toilet before the law can get its hands on them. And then he goes to his stove, cranks up the gas, and blows out the pilot light, planning to use a gas explosion to kill any cops who show up.
Fortunately, it doesn’t work, and the police take him to prison. But he won’t be in the stir for long, as his attorney collaborated with another radical group — the Family — to break him out.
Bad Luck and No Remorse
After laying low for a while, FALN started bombing again in 1979. That November they bombed army and marine recruiting stations. A month later they robbed an armored car. Three weeks later they tried to rob a National Guard Armory, hoping to loot military weapons. But the attempt went sideways when the guard on duty couldn’t open the vaults.
Two months later they robbed the campaign headquarters of presidential candidate George Bush and also of candidate Jimmy Carter.
The next month they hit another armored car. After jacking a truck from a rental car place, they ran afoul of some cops on an unrelated surveillance job who found them suspicious. The cops found their weapons and the FBI quickly figured out who they were, leading to several FALN men in prison.
But Lόpez and Morales were still at large, still recruiting, and still bombing. One bomb at JFK airport killed a handyman, Alex McMillan. Then another unlucky police stop led to the arrest of Lόpez.
His group had killed six and maimed many more, but he went to prison unrepentant, proclaiming his status as a political prisoner and rejecting the legitimacy of the legal proceedings. He would later be pardoned by President Obama.
5. The Family
Lincoln Detox
By 1977 it looked like the age of revolutionaries was at an end. But there were still a lot of fugitive radicals floating around, only now they were getting into the great vice of the disco age: Cocaine.
The group known as The Family had its origins in the Bronx, which by the late 70s was a ruin. There, in 1970, local Puerto Rican gang the Young Lords — basically their version of the Black Panthers — occupied Lincoln hospital, demanding more Puerto Rican staff and a drug treatment center. The administration gave in, and let the Young Lords set up a clinic in the auditorium. Thus was born Lincoln Detox, funded by $1 million in taxpayer money.
From the beginning Lincoln Detox was run by a socialist collective and took its volunteers and staffers the ranks of the militant left. Addicts were given methadone along with hefty doses of political education. When the BLA was active, they got their medical supplies from Lincoln.
One of their volunteers was a black radical named Mutulu Shakur, veteran of a small radical group that had gotten busted up the by law. He learned acupuncture from a young doctor at the clinic, before said doctor was found dead of a heroin overdose in the clinic closet. But he kept up on the practice, assumed leadership of Lincoln’s acupuncture program and gained authority within the clinic.
Around 1976 Shakur’s own cocaine habit got too expensive and he started feeling out fellow radicals who wanted to do some armed robberies to buy drugs to stick it to The Man. He got together with two friends from Lincoln Detox and set about knocking off a bank in Pittsburgh.
Odinga Returns
It was around this time that BLA founder Sekou Odinga resurfaced. For the past few years, he’d been working with a small crew to pull off bank robberies. When his main partner got out of the game, he sought out his old acquaintance Shakur. But he wasn’t sure Shakur was up to real violence, so he sat out the first robbery, even though he let the robbers stay at his place in Pitt.
Odinga wasn’t wrong to doubt their ability. The robbery went South and Shakur was the only one to escape. At this point he begs Odinga to help him. Odinga agrees and they both start recruiting a new crew. Their next robbery, at a meatpacking plant called House o’ Weenies, was more successful.
Odinga still seems to be in the robbery game with an interest in funding The Revolution. Shakur seems to be mostly in it for the cocaine. This will cause trouble eventually.
Meet the Ladies
They then hooked up with a band of white communist women led by Silvia Baraldini, a veteran of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee. Her group included two ex-Weathermen. She’d known Shakur for years, but it was in 1977 he started pressing her to help.
Around the same time, Baraldini also befriended Marilyn Buck, famous as the only white member of the BLA. This gave Buck infinitely more street cred than the Weathermen — Baraldini and co. idolized her. And when Buck revealed she wasn’t going back to prison when her furlough was up, the communist women decided to shelter her. Buck then contacted Odinga to say she wanted back into the struggle.
The combined group, The Family, kept operating out of Lincoln Detox until 1978, when the newly elected Mayor Koch got tired of funding crazies with taxpayer money and cut them off. With funding for the cocaine gone, Shakur steps up his robbery ambitions. At this point the white gals start taking a more active role. Says Baraldini:
“First we did very precise things that were useful, and we did them because we were white…cars, research. The most important Thing was ID. We would buy special cameras necessary to make it…a white girl like me does that, and no one looks twice.”
When Burrough asks her why she did all this, she says:
“We had developed a whole political vision of the U.S., how change would come to the U.S., that his involved the blacks getting their own nation. We thought we were helping people to promote this vision. It’s unrealistic, yes, but we believed it.”
Robberies and Prison Breaks
The group successfully robbed an armored car at a mall in New Jersey. Then in 1979 the Family got in touch with FALN and hatched a plan to bust FALN bombmaker Willie Morales out of prison.
They probably came into contact because Buck and Morales shared the same radical attorney, Susan Tipograph. It seems likely Tipograph is the one who smuggled in the wire cutters Morales would use to open his cell window. Then, despite the lack of fingers, he managed to climb down to where the Odinga and Shakur “Family” were waiting to speed him away.
The Family’s next act was another armored car robbery at another New Jersey mall. They made off with over a hundred grand. It was at this time another former Weatherman, Kathy Boudin, started working with them, lending them a car for the heist.
Boudin, by the way, winds up being a college professor.
Other than fueling Shakur’s coke habit, the money was also intended to help with their next big plan: They were going to do another prison break.
This time they were going to bust out BLA leader Joanne Chesimard, who had been close with Odinga back in the BLA days. Luckily for the Family she was kept in a facility with lazy security. They broke her out and gave her a chunk of change and a fake ID that she used to flee to Cuba.
A Helluva Drug
Six weeks later Shakur’s coke habit was catching up to him. Odinga was against drugs — they were counterrevolutionary — and it led to a rift between them. Plus all the group’s money was going up Shakur’s nose. Without telling Odinga or the white women, Shakur started doing side robberies with some of his cokehead friends.
The white gals were clueless: “To a woman, they believed they were supporting the second coming of the Black Liberation Army.”
Says Baraldini:
“I just though [Shakur] and those guys were hyper, you know, energetic, and they never slept. And I kept thinking, ‘Why are they so pumped up and excited all the time?”
For all that, the Family kept hitting armored cars. A botched robbery in Greenburg, NY. A successful one in Long Island that made off with a cool half million.
Burrough observes that the closing days of the radical age were surprisingly deadly, with seven people killed in 1981, mostly at the hands of the Family. Partly this was because the Shakur and his coked-up “acolytes” were getting increasingly sloppy.
Divisions in the group exacerbated things. Odinga was getting angrier over the drug use. Buck and Baraldini had grown to hate one another. Shakur and Odinga split the group into two teams, a male one to handle the gunplay and an all-woman team who, “despite their strident feminism…largely did as they were told.”
At the next armored car job, in the Bronx, one of Shakur’s cokeheads inexplicably sprayed bullets into two guards who were already lying prone on the ground, killing one of them.
The End Times
The killing brought the heat down on the group. So, just like ill-fated crime movie protagonists, the Family decided on One More Big Job that would allow them all to retire.
It involved hitting another armored car. After a few aborted attempts, Odinga bailed, thinking the plan wouldn’t work. Shakur forged ahead. When he and his crew ambushed the three guards driving the truck, they started shooting without warning. All the guards were wounded, one died. Shakur and co. made off with $1.5 million.
But it wasn’t a clean getaway. A witness called the cops to report seeing sketchy armed people getting in and out of cars, so the cops were on the lookout for the getaway vehicles. One was driven by former Weatherman Kathy Boudin and her husband. When four cops pulled them over, Boudin and her husband got out and distracted the cops, allowing the gunmen in the back to ambush and shoot them. They wounded three of the officers, killing one.
Now the heat was really on. The Family scattered, to be rolled up by the law one or a few at a time over the next couple years. It was the end of a group formed from remnants of prior groups, an agglomeration that combined fading 70s zeal with rising 80s excess. Their demise marked the end of the age of revolutionaries.
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