An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  Rosenberg’s arrest in 1984 while driving a truck loaded with hundreds of pounds of explosives on the New Jersey Turnpike led to her conviction in a possession of weapons and explosives case in 1985. “I knew … I had a fifty-eight-year sentence and a minimum of twenty years. But it wasn’t life,” she wrote. “Though it seemed unlikely, I had an outside chance of parole. I couldn’t allow myself to think of dying in jail.” Her memoir details the sixteen years she spent in women’s prisons as a political prisoner.

  A deep tone of solidarity, commitment, and love that the revolutionary women prisoners shared vibrates through these lines, as Rosenberg tells about their fight to save their sanity and each other’s lives. She writes from the shadowy underbelly of prison, those dungeons within federal prisons created for specified prisoner types. She and the other radical women were confined away from the rest of the prisoner population in places labeled “high-security unit,” “control unit,” and other euphemisms. They provided structured conditions of psychological deprivation and torture to force the prisoner to renounce her ideological convictions or political views. This treatment reserved for the revolutionary or “subversive” prisoner reads like some secularized version of the Inquisition. While Rosenberg was incarcerated in Kentucky at the federal prison in Lexington, a report the ACLU issued on its high-security unit stated that when the measures fail to produce in prisoners “the state of submission essential for ideological conversion,” the unit’s “next objective is to reduce them to a state of psychological incompetence sufficient to neutralize them.” These facilities were designed and functioning before the current use of Guantanamo Bay as a prison for captives in the “War on Terror” for similar purposes.

  A lawsuit against the conditions Rosenberg and other political prisoners were subjected to in Lexington eventually led to her transfer to the women’s prison in Marianna, Florida. About Marianna, she wrote, “One of the deepest commitments I had made to myself was that I would not allow prison or repression to erode my soul, and I felt that my soul was more deeply threatened than at any time before. For the first time, I felt that my political will was not enough to give me the daily strength to survive.” Susan’s inner balance was shattered; she plunged into the deepest place of her creative being, and resurfaced with a new consciousness of herself.

  The voice you hear in An American Radical did survive the barbaric cruelty of her maximum-security hell holes, and it is clear, fierce, and compassionate—a voice that continues in these pages to speak truth to power.

  KATHLEEN NEAL CLEAVER, a senior lecturer at Yale University and at Emory Law School, has been involved in the human rights movement since high school. She quit college in 1966 to work full time in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and then joined the early Black Panther Party in California, where until 1971 she was the party’s communications secretary. She has worked to free many imprisoned political activists, including Geronimo (Pratt) ji-Jaga, released after serving 27 years for a crime he did not commit, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, who remains on death row. Cleaver and George Katsiaficas co-edited Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party (2001), and she edited Target Zero: A Life in Writing (2006) by Eldridge Cleaver. She is currently completing a memoir entitled Memories of Love and War.

  Acknowledgments

  TO ALL THE prison writers everywhere.

  To all who encouraged me to write, Sue Gambill, Bell Chevigny, Fielding Dawson, Professor Floyd R. Horowitz, Susie Waysdorf, Henry Bean, Doris Schwerin.

  To all who relentlessly fought for my release, thank you.

  To Mary O’Melveny, for whom there are no adequate words.

  To Blue Mountain Center, who provided invaluable support.

  To PEN American Center Prison Writing Program.

  To Professor Donald Goodman, Dr. Richard Korn, Buzz Alexander, Rabbi Joshua Saltzman, Rabbi Rolando Matalon, Ron Kuby, Kathleen Cleaver, Jane Aiken.

  To Ona Mirkinson, whose research and notes completed the historical record.

  To Shirley Cloyes, my friend and editor who worked from beginning to end, without whom this book would not have been written.

  To my editor Richard Ember, who made it happen.

  To Marilyn Buck and Dr. Alan Berkman, in loving memory.

  To my mother, Bella Rosenberg.

  And to Molly and Dawn, who continue to make it all worthwhile.

  Part One

  Arrest and Trial

  Chapter 1

  Explosives

  DANGER, HIGH WINDS. The signs on the New Jersey Turnpike were flashing red-and-yellow directions to all the motorists. It was cold and getting dark and the road was filled with post-Thanksgiving traffic. Cars swerved from one lane to the other and then crawled past us as the speed limit got lower and lower. I was frightened. Our twenty-foot U-Haul truck, filled with guns and dynamite, was swaying back and forth in the wind. I looked at Tim as he gripped the wheel and he didn’t look like his usual calm and collected self. While the brush of his crew cut was gleaming and his suit and tie were perfect, there was sweat glistening on his upper lip, wetting his small brown mustache. As I scrutinized him, he was almost unrecognizable in his “Officer Bill” disguise, as he had jokingly nicknamed himself after recoiling from a look in the mirror. “What are we doing here?”—the question kept whirling around in my head. What we were doing was driving hundreds of pounds of dynamite, fourteen guns, and hundreds of pieces of false identification to a storage space in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

  “Bill, shouldn’t we get off the highway?” I asked. I was calling him “Bill” because that was his illegal name. The name he used in the underground. It seemed silly, because he was indelibly Tim to me, but for security purposes I complied. “Jo,” he answered back, “I think we should stay on this road until we have to get off, even if we have to drive slowly. I think that the back roads will be worse and filled with lots more people.” “Okay, but the space will be closed. We’re pretty late,” I answered. “You have the storage combination, right?” Tim asked. I nodded yes.

  “This is awful. I wish we could go back,” I whispered. But we could not go back; there was no place to go back to. We had been driving for twelve hours and had crossed state lines. We had to make it to the storage place and get all the stuff put away. We could not keep driving around with it. If we got hit by another vehicle, in the windy weather, well, it wasn’t just us who would be killed. It was impossible to think about that.

  After another forty minutes and fifteen miles, Tim said, “Maybe we should get off. Look at all these troopers; maybe there will be fewer off the highway.” My scalp was itching under my wig and I envied Tim’s short hair. I thought of Tim five years earlier when we had first met and he had had long blond hair and a quiet beauty about him. He looked his age then, twenty-two. Before all the weight training and iron pumping, he had a lithe dancer’s body. Now he looked older than his years. He had been a progressive social activist and a student leader at a college in the northeast valley in Massachusetts. I had gone there to organize a public meeting against the Ku Klux Klan. He was part of the group of students who wanted help organizing a national movement. I was a member of a small group called the John Brown anti-Klan committee, which had developed to stop the KKK from organizing guards in the New York state prisons. Our very first conversation had been about Latin American literature. I liked him from the moment we met. His smile was glorious and his sense of humor alternated between high sarcasm and whimsy. We had flirted a lot, but we ended up being friends with bonds that deepened over time. This dangerous mission made them even deeper. The U-Haul lurched again in the wind. We looked at each other and without speaking, Tim moved us toward the exit ramp.

  It was 1984. Anyone who was black or a political activist knew that the New Jersey State Troopers had the highest arrest rates of black drivers in the nation. It was a bad road to be on. I had been underground for two years. I was on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s most wanted list. In 1982, I had been indicted
in a federal conspiracy case, charged with participation in the prison break of Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard)1 and the Brink’s robbery. I was accused of being part of a group of white radicals who aided and abetted a group of black revolutionaries in their attempt to build a revolutionary organization. The Brink’s robbery had been a devastating blow to the Rockland community, where two local police officers, Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown, died along with a Brink’s guard, Peter Paige. The subsequent investigation into this robbery and multiple deaths led to several prosecutions, grand juries, indictments, trials, and convictions. Many people who were both remotely and closely connected to the events were targeted and I was one of them. The government was looking for me. And the FBI orders for all of us were “considered dangerous, shoot to kill.”

  I had been a political activist for fifteen years, from the time I was a teenager in the late 1960s. I had been in the anti–Vietnam War movement as I believed that, as an American, I was responsible for the acts of my government and that voting for politicians who were against the war had not been enough to stop the war. I did not accept the U.S. claim that what was happening in Vietnam was a civil war between the North and South. I thought that the Vietnamese people were fighting a just war of national liberation. Seeing the B52s dropped from planes, watching the burning of civilians with napalm and Agent Orange, reading about the incarceration of Vietnamese militants in cages only big enough for tigers made me furious. In watching the terrible violence of the war against Vietnam and hearing Vietnamese people talk about the war, my consciousness and understanding of the way to end the war led me to believe that opposing the war simply by demanding U.S. troop withdrawal would not by itself be enough to end the war. I believed that one had to try to stop the machinery of war. There had been a call stemming from the earlier student movement that I had agreed with: “You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.”2

  Later, I worked with some of the most radical people in the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords,3 and the Weathermen. I had been a part of the political and social movement that developed throughout the 1960s and 1970s. It was a worldwide revolutionary movement for peace, equality, and liberation. Everywhere one looked in those years, there were counters and alternatives to the predominant culture. People were challenging the draft, the war, their social relations, gender roles, and all the norms of society. There were popular movements in almost every country. Revolutions that had begun in the developing world in the 1950s actually succeeded in the next decade. Countries were throwing off colonialism and building independence. All over Western Europe, students and workers were taking over universities and factories. It actually seemed possible to challenge the power of the rulers and the governments and bring about a different and better world. The civil rights movement showed us, showed me, that we lived in a segregated society, in a divided country where black people were still slaves and millions of poor people were unemployed and went to bed hungry. The power of the black struggle woke up my generation to look around and see the divisions and the injustice. Sit-ins, marches, boycotts, and demonstrations were responded to with water hoses, jailings, and killings by racists with direct ties to the police. In turn, revelations of the true conditions in the Southern United States exposed the myth of the country’s rhetoric about democracy. It moved a whole generation to act. I considered myself an ardent supporter of revolution and was under the influence of people like Franz Fanon, a psychiatrist, revolutionary, and one of the twentieth century’s most important theorists of the African struggle for independence,4 and George Jackson,5 an American revolutionary who had become a member of the Black Panther Party while in prison, where he had spent the last eleven years of his life. Jackson was one of the founders of the U.S. prisoners’ rights movement. His books, Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye, were read around the world.

  As a result of the investigation by the FBI, I was indicted in 1982, and rather then stand trial, I fled and disappeared into the underground. My indictment pushed me in a direction I had been going in for several years—embracing the illegality of a revolutionary movement. The repression by the FBI and Joint Terrorist Task-force (a newly formed law enforcement group) was tearing apart the aboveground movement. They had deemed whole segments of the radical left to be “terrorists,” and they were surveiling, phone tapping, infiltrating, and harassing people who were carrying on legal work, such as community organizing. There was enmity by law enforcement officials against all of us in the left who had exposed them for their own violations of our constitutional rights and who had organized against them. The cointelpro (Counter Intelligence Program) program6 was in full force. I decided that rather than go to what I presumed would be a rigged trial, I would follow my revolutionary heart and risk all.

  The underground, becoming a fugitive, being on the run, however one describes it, is both a physical and mental state of being. The underground, not unlike the French resistance movement during World War II, consisted of a network of people who thought enough like you to risk opening their lives and homes to fugitives in order to protect them from capture by the authorities. In the language of criminal law, their help is defined as “harboring.” In wartime, it would be called “aiding the enemy.”

  By the time I fled, however, whatever underground had existed as a result of the anti-war movement, the anti-draft movement, and the movement to give illegal immigrants sanctuary had all but disappeared. There was nothing romantic or fun about it. The lack of a vital and thriving network of committed radicals willing to sacrifice their careers and possessions should have been enough of a warning to me that I was incorrectly reading the mood of the country. The election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980 by an overwhelming majority should have been further proof that our view of American society was deeply skewed. But I saw only what I wanted to see. I was blinded by my own dedication and extremism. Life underground was lonely and isolating, and this should have been another signal to me that something was wrong with the path I was treading. But, because I had lived through the rise of a mass movement and had felt the power of collective action once before, I still believed it could happen again. And so all the signs that I was moving in the wrong direction didn’t stop me.

  As the country moved to the right, some of us in the radical left went further afield and were increasingly polarized and far from the mainstream. I had been in various projects and organizations over the course of my life, including student groups at Barnard College and later at the City University of New York, as well as solidarity organizations that supported Puerto Rican independence and African liberation both in South Africa and in the United States. The overlapping core of people who built these organizations and many others grew increasingly frustrated with the inability to organize and grow or effect change in U.S. policies.

  It was this core of radical activists that I joined to build the ranks of the underground. We hoped that our actions would help galvanize a militant mass protest against repressive U.S. policies in Central America, in Africa, and at home. We thought that by taking armed actions against government property (including bombing unoccupied government buildings), we would show that despite the power of the state, it was possible to oppose it.

  In order to build an underground, we had to retreat further and further away from our public lives and psychologically further into our own political thinking and commitment than any of us had before. Although living in obscurity was difficult and tedious, there was a feeling of power that came from invisibility. Anonymity was often invigorating and chilling at the same time. For so many years in the left we had been trying to be different, to present an alternative to the norms of regular society. We were in the broadest sense part of the counterculture. This meant that we looked different, acted different, and were different from the accepted models of behavior. So, by our own definition we attracted attention. Going underground demanded a completely
different discipline and relationship to our public appearance. Here the goal was to look exactly like everyone else around you so that nothing stood out, so that nothing would be a visual cue to anyone to remember anything about you. Leave no trace, we said to ourselves, blend in and glide along. We dyed our hair and straightened the curls, bought dresses and skirts and suits and ties and applied makeup and playacted that we were straight, in all senses of the word. For some of us this was easier to do than for others. But all of us found it was a difficult life and dramatically different from how we had formed our identities. We had been organizers, we had been in the public movement, and we had been speechmakers and workers. We had been living our lives for the purpose of helping people and ending society’s inequities. Once underground, we could no longer talk to people or engage in any social work. Suddenly our lives had become the very antithesis of our beliefs, the embodiment of the social alienation that we had been trying to redress. And so, we made jokes to cope with the loneliness and pain. We laughed when the first time we dyed our hair it turned orange, a long-honored tradition of underground participants around the world. The color was called “underground orange” because it would take several attempts to get the color right. While we laughed, nothing about our lives was funny. We were trying to create lives and structures that were in no way connected to the world. We were trying to build identities that could coexist while there was a manhunt in progress for all of us. We were trying to create a look that would never be remembered and with it a capacity to appear anywhere. We were erasing our own identities in an attempt to be invisible.