An American Radical

by Susan Rosenberg

  I inspected all the crevices and corners and saw no cameras. It was completely quiet and no one was peering at me through the slot in the door. I lay down on the bench and stretched all my muscles. Alone in that first of what would be hundreds of bull pens, I began to bargain, with whom I cannot say, but I began to talk to another party outside of myself. It wasn’t prayer exactly; it was more like the beginning of what would become a mantra. I wasn’t talking to God. It was not God that I prayed to; for me, it was the consciousness of being human. That was my God. The ability to locate beauty in the hideous, to create something in the face of devastation (man-made or otherwise), to determine one’s own fate—those were my commitments and, in a spiritual sense, they were the things that I looked to for strength. I did not know that then, though. At the time, I drew on more radical examples of people who had been in the revolutionary struggle before me. I thought, How do I resist? I thought of people from the national liberation struggles who had raged throughout history, people like Bobby Sands1, who had died on a hunger strike in prison while fighting for Irish independence; Lolita Lebrón2, who had spent twenty-five years in U.S. prisons for the cause of Puerto Rican nationalism; and John Brown, the greatest ally to the black freedom struggle in American history, who had been vilified by the government and then hung from the neck. As I lay on that bench I retreated even further into the mental ritual I would go through again and again in the years that would follow, circling back to my beginnings in order to locate myself somewhere in the history of radicalism. And in search of an answer as to why I had made the choices that had landed me in that bullpen.

  I was born in 1955, in the aftermath of the Second World War. I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, an only child. My father, known to his friends as Manny, short for Emanuel Rosenberg, was a World War II veteran and a dentist. His dental practice was in Spanish Harlem, where he worked with the most underserved and marginalized communities. There were occasions when he got paid in goods and services rather than money, and he would bring something home that had “fallen off the back of a truck.” He had traveled to Selma to help during the civil rights movement and had always volunteered his skills. My mother, Bella, was a theatrical producer and former film editor. She helped struggling visual artists and writers to begin their careers. My parents believed in civil rights, the early anti-nuclear movement, and they were against the Vietnam War.

  In 1964, when I was eight years old and attending the Walden School, Andrew Goodman, who was to become one of its most famous alumni, was slain by the Klan for his participation in the voter registration drive in Mississippi. Even though he was my senior by more than ten years, his younger brother was in the class ahead of me, and his family was very active in school affairs. The school became a base of support for the civil rights movement, raising money and recruiting people to go south. James Chaney was assassinated along with Andrew Goodman. His family was from Mississippi, and his brother Ben, who was twelve years old at the time, was sent north and later enrolled at Walden. He became my friend, and for the next several years I acutely watched events with the added perspective of what I imagined to be Ben’s experience.

  I continued at Walden through high school, during the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement. At first I went to anti-war demonstrations in New York with my parents. But, by 1970, I was attending with others from my school. That year, I went to the big anti-war mobilization in Washington and I got separated from my friend Janet and walked into a police action against people who had raised a North Vietnamese flag on the Justice Department building. I had never seen people getting beaten with clubs and dragged into wagons, except on television. Then the police let loose tear gas to disperse the crowd of thousands. I ran to get away from the gas and the police until I fell on a grassy slope and pressed my head into the grass to stop the searing pain and tears that I had gotten from just a small whiff of it. When I returned home, I discovered that other Walden students had been beaten up by the police. Furious, I joined the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, an anti-war group that was organized by college students who were members of Students for a Democratic Society. My high school chapter organized teach-ins and actions against the war in schools all over the city. The Vietnam War, specifically what our government was doing against the people of Vietnam, was predominating all of my thinking about the world and my own responsibility in it. Daily, I watched on TV the carpet bombings, the napalming of whole villages, and the tiger cages that were built out of bamboo that were smaller than a bathtub and used to torture pro-Vietcong villagers. As the body counts got higher and higher on both sides, I groped for any justification that made sense.

  I was fifteen in 1970, and along with millions of other people across the globe, I wanted to make change, stop war, and build a peaceful and just world. It seemed possible because there were clearly drawn sides between war profiteers and supporters of the establishment and the majority of people who were resisting and demanding transformation.

  Perhaps my choices and life course were the result of a combination of nature and nurture. Despite being surrounded by middle-class privilege, I seemed to be aware of injustice and inequities around me. At the age of five I had first seen a legless man on a skateboard and refused to go into a store to buy shoes, because, as I angrily explained to my mother, how could I buy shoes when the man had no feet. Maybe from that moment when I understood the oppression of others, followed by the images from Selma, Alabama, and Haiphong, Vietnam, and the rows and rows of burned-out houses along Morris Avenue in the Bronx, my skin had become so thin that the pain and suffering of others penetrated my own blood and mingled with it and drove me to an agony of distraction that meant I had to act.

  Fourteen years later I still believed in the need for change. I began to converse with all those radical spirits, comparing what I imagined they had gone through to what was happening to me. I thought, If it isn’t worse than this, I can manage it. But then it got much worse.

  Chapter 4

  Conviction

  OUR TRIAL, IN April to May of 1985, was a three-week accelerated collision between the prosecution and us. In the months leading up to the actual court proceeding, we remained housed in New York City. Every time we went to the federal court, in Newark, New Jersey, escorted in a high-security caravan that included helicopters and police of every type, the Holland Tunnel was closed down. If we were not already misunderstood or despised, our impact on thousands of harassed commuters would have been enough to spark an instant mass hatred. The outcome of the trial was a given even before the jury was selected. We did nothing but escalate it.

  The security team responsible for us was assembled out of the Joint Terrorist Task Force, which included U.S. marshals, FBI agents, and local New York police. One member of the team was Bernard B. Kerik, who many years later would become New York City’s police commissioner under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and later still go to jail on charges of tax fraud and perjury. The first time we were due in court for pretrial motions, we were taken to the underground garage of the detention center, where one of the waiting cars was a black Mercedes-Benz. A member of the security team told me to get in. I had over forty pounds of chains wrapped around me, which was standard transport attire. I looked at him and said, “I refuse to get into that Nazi car.” The officers thought that was very funny. One retorted, “This is the car we use for officials; you don’t know how lucky you are.” Then, several of them picked me up and put me headfirst into the backseat. That was the end of the discussion.

  Our trial was a venomous and hostile drama. The judge was Frederick B. Lacey. He had been a naval officer, and then the U.S. attorney for the district of New Jersey from 1969–71. He was appointed a U.S. district judge by President Richard Nixon, and his reputation was that he was tough. He was also a member of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. This was the court that heard FBI and CIA applications for international wiretaps in cases pertaining to national security. Judge Lacey w
as as highly politicized in his way as we were in ours. We tried to present a necessity defense, saying that the government was guilty of war crimes against people in the developing world and at home. We had lawyers who helped us research and prepare our brief. Judith Holmes, an attorney who had experience in defending other political activists, worked with us for weeks as we organized our own defense. We said that we were part of an organized illegal resistance movement and that we were acting out of conscience. We opposed the covert U.S. involvement in Central America, the government’s backing of the Contras in Nicaragua, and the illegal sale of arms to the right-wing paramilitary groups throughout Latin America. We also opposed the racist regime in South Africa and wanted an end to apartheid. We argued that the United States had waged an illegal war via the FBI’s cointelpro(Counter Intelligence Program) against the radical and progressive movements for freedom and liberation among black people, Native People, the people of Puerto Rico, and other oppressed people, forces, and groups. We believed that as a result of cointelpro the civil liberties and human rights of thousands of citizens had been abrogated.

  The prosecution, however, asserted that because we were apprehended with hundreds of pounds of explosives, numerous guns, and extensive amounts of false identification, we trafficked in violence (although they did not link any of the materials found to any actual activities) and therefore could not talk about politics. We were simply terrorists. It was their court and their outcome.

  Our lawyers, Susan V. Tipograph and Mark Gombiner, both lawyers who were part of the legal community that fought to uphold constitutional rights and defend extremely unpopular defendants, believed that if we put on a necessity defense we would face the wrath of the court, and so we fired them the day our trial began in order to represent ourselves. Still, they sat with us and acted as our legal advisers, and when sentencing came, their hopes took over and they predicted that we would get fifteen years. But Tim and I knew differently—the lawyers had been right in the first place about the anger of the court and we expected stiffer sentences.

  We were each convicted of eight counts of conspiracy to possess and transport explosives, guns, and false identification across state lines. We were each sentenced to fifty-eight years in federal prison for possession of weapons and explosives. It was the longest sentence ever given for a possession offense. Judge Lacey compared us to Russian spies during the cold war and instructed us to read The God that Failed, a classic collection of essays by six prominent thinkers who had become disillusioned with communism and through their ideological rebirths became militant anti-Communists.

  About a week after our sentencing we were in the visiting room at the MCC. The rumor was that Tim was being shipped out any day. Every visit was charged with intense emotion because we did not know if it would be the last time we would see each other. We felt we had been living in hell since our arrest and it was almost impossible to deal with the idea that we would never meet again. There were several people visiting us that day. Our lawyers, who had heard the rumor, too, had come to say good-bye to Tim. They were joined by paralegals from various groups that had supported us during our trial.

  Someone said that we needed to file a notice of appeal. There was a thirty-day deadline for filing from the time of sentencing, and the clock was ticking. Tim, at one end of the table, said no, he did not want to file anything, because there was no expectation of justice. Everyone at the table weighed in on this one way or the other and several people agreed with Tim. I looked around the table and thought, Wow, these people don’t have to do fifty-eight years. We do. I want options. We have to fight this sentence. Our trial had been on many levels a farce, in part because of the drama we had chosen to create. I had begun to realize that the question of how to challenge the criminal justice system has almost as many answers as the number of people who are caught up in it. I said, “I want to file. I want to fight the sentence every way we can, through an appeal, through parole, through political pressure. Even though we said the system would not last as long as our sentence, I am not sure I believe that at all.” Tim said nothing, and the appeal was filed.

  Ironically, the charges related to the Brink’s case that had sent me underground in the first place, were dropped by then U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani. The U.S. attorney’s office said they were dropped because I had such a long sentence from my conviction. But I and my lawyers believed that the charges had been dropped because of lack of evidence.

  By 1985, there were many other people who had been arrested from various radical political movements. The list included sixteen Puerto Ricans from an armed group called Los Macheteros1; the Ohio Seven2, four men and three women from a clandestine collective against apartheid, racism, and economic injustice charged with the bombing of U.S. military and corporate targets; the New York Eight who included African American revolutionaries, who together had been targeted in the post-Brink’s investigation and subpoenaed to a grand jury but had refused to testify; Joe Doherty, an Irish Republican Army member who had been involved in one of the most spectacular prison escapes in Northern Ireland, who had been caught in New York and was now being held on extradition charges to be returned to Ireland; and Marilyn Buck, a revolutionary who spent all of her adult life supporting the black liberation struggle and who had been in and out of prison as a result, and Linda Evans, a member of SDS, and later the Weathermen, women from the group with which Tim and I were involved. Marilyn was wanted on the Brink’s charges, and Linda had been indicted for harboring Marilyn.

  Almost forty political prisoners were being held in the MCC. It was a security nightmare for the authorities to have so many political prisoners together in one facility, but for us it was a moment of incredible solidarity. All the women, housed on the same floor, had daily access to one another.

  In September 1985, we were facing our prison terms or future trials, and we all knew that the time we had together in detention was limited. I was twenty-nine years old. Each one of us had a story behind why we were there. We were a diverse group. We were activists and revolutionaries and all of us were motivated to act against the government because we thought it was our responsibility to right the injustices and wrongs as we saw them. I was one of the seventeen people who were wanted stemming from a federal indictment alleging association and conspiracy with the group that carried out the Brink’s New York robbery. In 1981, the Black Liberation Army3, a small outgrowth of the Black Panther Party, had carried out an armed robbery of a Brink’s truck in Nyack, New York. Two police officers, Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady and a Brink’s guard, Peter Paige, were killed in the shootout that followed the robbery. Four people were arrested near the scene, one of them a good friend of mine. The Joint Terrorist Task Force, a group made up of members of the New York Police Department, the FBI, and other intelligence agencies, began an investigation that led to two major federal conspiracy trials and a New York State trial. Scores of people were imprisoned for refusing to testify and cooperate with grand juries, and anyone identified through political association with those arrested or named by the government investigation was targeted. It was a terrible and dark time and we felt as if we were living in a raging war. I had never experienced this kind of repression, and there was a dangerous escalation of the stakes and consequences, for all involved. It was frightening.

  I knew and had worked with several people who were under investigation. My longtime teacher and friend Dr. Mutulu Shakur was wanted by the FBI and the New York Police Department, and I was fearful that his life and work would be snuffed out. He had been an organizer in the black community and a revolutionary his entire adult life. He was a health worker in the South Bronx at Lincoln Hospital, and he later became a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture as a way of fighting the terrible heroin epidemic that was ravaging his brothers and sisters in the community. His FBI file was already thousands of pages. Now he was followed and harassed by FBI agents who would walk up to him in the street and open their jackets to reveal
their guns and imitating the shape of a gun with their empty hands, pretended to shoot him. People would drive by his mother’s house in Queens and then run into the house and fire their weapons. His mother was blind and lived alone, so she could not identify the perpetrators. But there was nothing secret about the doings of the FBI. As their investigation grew and evolved, I became a target, too.

  In 1977, I was working as a drug counselor at Lincoln Hospital. In high school, I had watched one of my best friends become a heroin addict and end up dying from an overdose. By the time I was working in the Bronx, the community had been plagued by a massive heroin addiction, which many people thought was government sponsored, at least in the sense that the police looked the other way and used the presence of drugs as an excuse to criminalize the entire community. I was not sure if that analysis was accurate but I certainly witnessed the devastation that drug use caused and saw that no one was doing anything about it. Wanting to stop the vicious cycle of poverty and drugs, I began to study acupuncture and Chinese medicine with other community-based health workers at the Lincoln Hospital Detox Center. Dr. Shakur was one of them. He had gone to China and seen how with the use of acupuncture millions of opium addicts were effectively treated. In 1980, after a three-year course, we passed our doctoral exams at the Montréal Institute of Chinese Medicine and moved our practice from the South Bronx to Harlem. We were part of the beginning of the New Age holistic health movement. We were led by former revolutionaries and activists from the late 1960s and 1970s, people of color from what had been the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, a U.S.-based Puerto Rican Independence and advocacy organization, and White Lightning, a poor people’s community organizing project. We treated drug addiction, diabetes, asthma, and all the diseases afflicting the poorest of the poor. We called ourselves the “sneaker doctors” after the “barefoot doctors” movement in China, which had been a project that trained a quarter of a million Chinese people to learn acupuncture to detoxify several million opium addicts.