{"id":139381,"date":"2021-05-16T06:45:46","date_gmt":"2021-05-16T14:45:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=139381"},"modified":"2021-05-16T14:52:04","modified_gmt":"2021-05-16T22:52:04","slug":"days-of-rage-americas-radical-underground-the-fbi-and-the-forgotten-age-of-revolutionary-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=139381","title":{"rendered":"Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

From this 2015 book<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* What the underground movement was truly about\u2014what it was always about\u2014was 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 Central America, the black cause remained the core motivation of almost every significant radical who engaged in violent activities during the 1970s. \u201cHelping out the blacks, fighting alongside them, that was the whole kit and caboodle,\u201d says Machtinger. \u201cThat was all we were about.\u201d
\n \u201cRace comes first, always first,\u201d says Elizabeth Fink, a radical attorney in Brooklyn who represented scores of underground figures. \u201cEverything 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\u2019s 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.\u201d
\n The underground groups of the 1970s were a product of\u2014a kind of grungy bell-bottomed coda to\u2014the 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 \u201960s and into the \u201970s-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 \u201960s, it was violent black rhetoric that galvanized the people who went underground.<\/p>\n

* Apocalyptic revolutionaries represented a strident new voice in the Movement, but they were able to draw from a wellspring of ideas that weren\u2019t entirely new: philosophies, arguments, books, and films that had sprung up around armed-resistance movements worldwide. They studied Lenin and Mao and Ho Chi Minh\u2014it went without saying that revolutionaries were almost always communists\u2014but their favorite blueprint was the Cuban Revolution, their icon Ernesto \u201cChe\u201d Guevara, Castro\u2019s swashbuckling right-hand man. A handsome doctor, Che represented the thoughtful, \u201ccaring\u201d revolutionary who resorted to violence only to fight an unjust government; by 1968 his poster could be found hanging in dormitories across America. The apocalyptic revolutionary\u2019s favorite movie was The Battle of Algiers , a 1966 film that portrayed heroic Algerian guerrillas doing battle against their French occupiers. In time, once people actually began going underground, their bible would become Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla , written in 1969 by a Brazilian Marxist named Carlos Marighella; it outlined dozens of strategies and tactics, analyzing weapons, outlining ways to organize a guerrilla cell, even describing the best ways to rob a bank. A number of underground newspapers would excerpt Marighella\u2019s manual.<\/p>\n

* JJ [John Jacobs] fatefully fell in with another up-and-comer, a strikingly attractive twenty-six-year-old law student named Bernardine Dohrn. Dohrn was destined to become the glamorous leading lady of the American underground, unquestionably brilliant, cool, focused, militant, and highly sexual; J. Edgar Hoover would dub her \u201cLa Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left.\u201d A high school cheerleader in her Wisconsin hometown, she graduated from the University of Chicago in 1963 and, while working toward her law degree, began assisting a host of protest groups, including SDS.
\n Clad in a tight miniskirt and knee-high Italian boots, Dohrn burst onto the scene at Columbia, where she helped arrange bail bonds. Everyone who met her\u2014every man, at least\u2014seemed mesmerized. \u201cEvery guy I knew at Columbia, every single one, wanted to fuck her,\u201d remembers one SDSer, and Dohrn knew it. She liked to wear a button with the slogan CUNNILINGUS IS COOL, FELLATIO IS FUN. She and JJ were immediately smitten with each other. \u201cBernardine would be arguing political points at the table with blouse open to the navel, sort of leering at JJ,\u201d an SDSer named Steve Tappis recalled. \u201cI couldn\u2019t concentrate on the arguments. Finally, I said, \u2018Bernardine! Would you please button your blouse?\u2019 She just pulled out one of her breasts and, in that cold way of hers, said, \u2018You like this tit? Take it.\u2019\u201d Another SDSer, Jim Mellen, recalled, \u201cShe used sex to explore and cement political alliances. Sex for her was a form of ideological activity.\u201d 2 Yet even many SDS women soon idolized Dohrn. Everyone \u201cwanted to be in her favor, to be like her,\u201d a Weatherman named Susan Stern said years later. \u201cShe possessed a splendor all her own, like a queen . . . a high priestess, a mythological silhouette.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Weatherman\u2019s taste for orgies proved short-lived, petering out within months. Mark Rudd thought all the sexual experimentation\u2014from Smash Monogamy to orgies to homosexuality\u2014was \u201cdisastrous,\u201d fostering petty jealousies, driving people out of the collectives, and introducing a level of sexual confusion that did little to focus cadres on the revolution. Worst of all, he recalls, was a resulting epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, from gonorrhea and pelvic inflammatory disease to crab lice and genital infections they called Weather crud. For Rudd, the final straw came when he was having sex with a woman and noticed a crab in her eyebrow.<\/p>\n

* The decision to attack policemen was an unspoken act of solidarity with the group whose approval mattered most to Weatherman leadership: Movement blacks, especially the Black Panthers, who reserved a special hatred for urban police.<\/p>\n

* As sad as it was to his friends, Rudd wrote years later, \u201cJJ\u2019s [John Jacobs] expulsion was a brilliant maneuver that successfully rewrote history. Suddenly no one remembered how universally accepted the old \u2018Fight the people, all white people are guilty\u2019 line was.\u201d No one would remember that they had tried to kill policemen. \u201cWeather\u2019s history,\u201d Rudd wrote, \u201chad been conveniently cleaned.\u201d A myth was born. \u201cThe myth, and this is always Bill Ayers\u2019s line, is that Weather never set out to kill people, and it\u2019s not true\u2014we did,\u201d says Howie Machtinger. \u201cYou know, policemen were fair game. What Terry was gonna do, while it was over our line, it wasn\u2019t that far over our line, not like everyone said later. I mean, he wasn\u2019t on a different planet from where we were.\u201d<\/p>\n

* After a warning call, the bomb finally detonated at 1:30 a.m., demolishing the restroom, heavily damaging an adjacent barbershop, and blowing out windows in a Senate dining room down a corridor. Damage was estimated at $300,000. On ABC News, anchorman Howard K. Smith noted that it was the first attack on the Capitol since the British burned it in 1814.
\n Much like the bombing of New York police headquarters nine months earlier, the Capitol bombing had a lasting and dramatic impact on security measures in Washington. For the first time, Capitol police began inspecting all purses and parcels brought into the building. All employees were issued photo identification cards. Gallery attendants received training in identifying suspicious persons. Seldom-used nooks and corridors were closed off. In the following year, the Capitol police force was increased in size to 1,000 officers from 622. Patronage appointments, until then routine, were stopped. Training was formalized. The department purchased its first bomb-sniffing dogs.<\/p>\n

* The idea of a Black Liberation Army emerged from conditions in Black communities; conditions of poverty, indecent housing, massive unemployment, poor medical care, and inferior education. The idea came about because Black people are not free or equal in this country. Because ninety percent of the men and women in this country\u2019s prisons are Black and Third World. Because ten-year-old children are shot down in our streets. Because dope has saturated our communities, preying on the disillusionment and frustration of our children. The concept of the BLA arose because of the political, social, and economic oppression of Black people in this country. And where there is oppression, there will be resistance. The BLA is part of that resistance movement. The Black Liberation Army stands for freedom and justice for all people.
\n \u2014Joanne Chesimard, aka Assata Shakur<\/p>\n

* Many policemen, along with BLA members themselves, considered the group a murderous black counterpart to the Weathermen. Mainstream politicians, afraid of alienating black voters, played down this talk entirely. Following suit, most of the white-dominated press dismissed the BLA as a ragtag collection of street thugs.<\/p>\n

* \u201cNone of us, the whites I mean, had any clue what was really going on.\u201d<\/p>\n

* The pivotal figure in these debates was a newcomer to the NYPD, a deputy police commissioner named Robert Daley. Daley had been a New York Times reporter who had attracted the attention of Police Commissioner Patrick Murphy while writing a profile of him; when Murphy offered him the department\u2019s top public-relations job, Daley accepted. He was a divisive figure, a publicity hound who, as the Times itself noted later, \u201cwas always mugging for the cameras.\u201d What Daley loved most was a good detective yarn, and the story of the BLA was one of the best he had seen. Gunsmoke had barely cleared over Foster and Laurie\u2019s bodies when he began arguing that the NYPD had an obligation to go public with its suspicions that the murders constituted a planned assassination by a national conspiracy of black militants.
\n This kind of talk startled aides to Mayor Lindsay, who had announced his campaign for the presidency a month earlier. Talk of black terrorists loose in the streets would undercut his candidacy, inflame race relations, and have every cop in the city looking askance at young black men. Lindsay\u2019s combative press secretary, Tom Morgan, made clear to everyone that he didn\u2019t want to see a single word about black conspiracies in the press.
\n Swarmed by reporters the morning after the murders, the chief of detectives, Albert Seedman, went along, pooh-poohing the conspiracy angle. But the next day, a Saturday, the UPI office received a handwritten communiqu\u00e9, signed by the \u201cGeorge Jackson Squad of the Black Liberation Army.\u201d * Mailed the previous day, it referenced \u201cthe pigs wiped out in lower Manhattan last night\u201d and promised: \u201cThis is the start of our spring offensive. There is more to come.\u201d
\n This was too much for Daley. That same afternoon\u2014even as citizens in far-off Arizona were voting in the caucuses, in which Lindsay placed second to Edmund Muskie\u2014Daley strode into an East Village precinct house and, standing before a bank of microphones, raised Rocco Laurie\u2019s blood-drenched shirt for all to see. He called the murders assassinations, carried out by a conspiracy of urban guerrillas\u2014black urban guerrillas. \u201cAlways in the past the police have been quiet about this conspiracy because of fear of accusations of racism,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it isn\u2019t the black community that is doing this, it is a few dozen black criminal thugs. . . . It\u2019s terribly serious, much more serious than people seem to think. The police are the last barrier before chaos.\u201d
\n Suddenly the rhetorical cat was out of the bag. The mayor\u2019s people were apoplectic. But the New York newspapers, sensing a story too hot to handle, downplayed Daley\u2019s dramatic press conference; the Times buried the story on page 35. Talk of a black conspiracy ebbed for several days as reporters focused on the officers\u2019 funerals, which were massive affairs, with hundreds of uniformed officers lining Fifth Avenue in front of St. Patrick\u2019s Cathedral. But Daley would not let up. In off-the-record chats all that week, he told reporters that there was a true national conspiracy, that the NYPD\u2019s intelligence, gathered over the previous seven months, confirmed the existence of a Black Liberation Army, with hundreds of would-be assassins divided into revolutionary cells. For the most part, no one believed him; no one, at least, printed
\nmore of his theories. It was all too inflammatory, too far-fetched.
\n Finally, a week after the murders, a Times reporter cornered a reluctant Commissioner Murphy. All available evidence, Murphy admitted, suggested that the Foster-Laurie murders were in fact the work not of a national conspiracy to kill police but of roving bands of militants\u2014\u201ccrazies,\u201d Murphy termed them\u2014who moved from city to city, murdering policemen. Daley, however, went much further. He told the Times there was a BLA that was \u201cnationwide in scope,\u201d adding, \u201cWe have here a very, very dangerous and criminal conspiracy. The public really doesn\u2019t seem to be aware of it. The time is over when the Police Department should keep its mouth shut on this kind of thing.\u201d
\n Working with incomplete information, neither man was entirely correct. The BLA was far too disorganized and far too decentralized to be called a true national conspiracy. But it was more than \u201croving\u201d bands of \u201ccrazies.\u201d Daley would not be deterred. Over the vocal opposition of the Manhattan district attorney, Frank Hogan, he persuaded Commissioner Murphy to hold an unusual press conference on Tuesday, February 8, in which Murphy detailed the BLA\u2019s involvement not only in the Foster-Laurie murders but also in the May attacks and the attacks on policemen in San Francisco and Atlanta. He named nine BLA figures sought by police, including Ronald Carter, Joanne Chesimard, and Twymon Meyers. Prosecutors had adamantly opposed going public, arguing that it would complicate any case they brought. The mayor\u2019s office objected as well, finally persuading Murphy not to use the word \u201cconspiracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

* the student was experimenting with gay life, and the habits he developed in San Francisco worried many. \u201cHe would pick up guys at bathhouses and bring them back to the safe houses, and you can\u2019t do that, not without being compromised,\u201d recalls Paul Bradley. After the Encirclement, the student was transferred to New York, where his problems continued. \u201cNone of us had dealt with gay issues at that point,\u201d recalls Fliegelman. \u201cHe would go off and do stuff, and he could be compromised, so he ended up having to leave.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From this 2015 book: * What the underground movement was truly about\u2014what it was always about\u2014was the plight of black Americans. Every single underground group of the 1970s, with the notable exception of the Puerto Rican FALN, was concerned first … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-139381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=139381"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":139391,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139381\/revisions\/139391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=139381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=139381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=139381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}