Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  In 1970, not long after DeFreeze arrived, Vacaville formally approved the charter for a two-year-old Black Culture Association. The BCA, as it was known, met two nights a week in the prison library, one for informal classes in black history, literature, and similar topics, the second a social evening, typically with a presentation by a guest speaker, poetry, music, or a film. BCA meetings came wrapped in the full regalia of black liberation; each began with clenched-fist salutes, a Swahili chant, and the hoisting of a Black Liberation Army flag. Almost to a man, BCA members adopted African-sounding names that some could never quite learn how to spell. After DeFreeze joined, he began calling himself “Cinque M’tume,” usually shortened to “Cin.”

  With the BCA’s help, DeFreeze, like scores of other inmates, soon lost himself in a world of revolutionary fantasy, imagining that he would escape from prison and lead the urban revolt his idol, George Jackson, called for. As one of the BCA’s white tutors put it:

  There were inmates at Vacaville who had mapped out the revolution from beginning to end, leaving nothing out in between. They knew what time the revolution would start in the morning and what day. They knew how to form a vanguard and how it would split up into cadres from the east and the west and the north and the south. To hear them talk you would think that they knew exactly how to do away with the system. The guards would hear this shit twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. There were people who could quote long passages from Che and Mao and Marx and revolutionaries that I had never heard of.3

  DeFreeze was Exhibit A of this kind of prisoner, and it was in the BCA that he met many of the white volunteers he would eventually lead underground. He briefly lost touch with these friends, if not his revolutionary dreams, after being transferred to Soledad in December 1972. Then, on the night of March 5, 1973, as the police in far-off New York swept the streets in search of Joanne Chesimard and the remnants of the BLA, a Soledad guard in a prison truck dropped DeFreeze off at a collection of boilers at the fence line. It was 12:15 a.m., the first—and last—shift of DeFreeze’s new job as a boiler attendant. The guard was to check on him through the night. But the moment he drove off, DeFreeze jogged to the twelve-foot-high wire fence, climbed it, tearing his jeans in the process, and dropped to the far side. By the time the guard returned, at 12:40, he had vanished into the night.

  At that moment DeFreeze became a free man, an escaped prisoner, and, his fevered mind was convinced, the leader of the bloody revolution that would soon sweep America. A hundred miles north, in Berkeley, in San Francisco, in the ghettos of Oakland, vanguard troops were waiting for his command; he knew it. He just had to reach them. In the cold, damp hours before dawn, DeFreeze walked east to Highway 101, where he flagged down a man driving a Ford pickup who took him ten miles north to the farming town of Gonzales. A Chicano laborer, accepting his explanation that he had been robbed, took DeFreeze into his home, gave him a bowl of soup, and, after he took a nap, allowed him to telephone friends in the Bay Area Left.

  It was early; most weren’t home. Finally one, whose identity was never divulged, drove down with a change of clothes and picked up DeFreeze after lunch. On the drive north, DeFreeze spoke of the joys of reading Fanon, Debray, Marighella, Lenin, and others, especially George Jackson. With Jackson gone, DeFreeze remarked, the revolution had no leader. It was clear who DeFreeze thought Jackson’s replacement should be. Arriving in Oakland, DeFreeze took out a list of names, people who had visited him in prison and spoken fervently of the need for a revolutionary alliance of black prisoners and white radicals. Here, however, he got his first sense of the yawning gap between cell-block sloganeering and 1973 America. Of the four or five people he managed to find that first day, not one would take him in.

  “Hide you out?” one Berkeley student asked in exasperation. “I can’t be harboring no convicts. That’s cops-and-robbers shit.”4

  Finally, late that night, DeFreeze’s friend dropped him off outside Peking House, a revolutionary commune in Berkeley whose members had volunteered at Vacaville. According to lore, when the door was opened, DeFreeze’s first words were “Looka here, you know, I’m here. Let’s start the revolution.” A friend of a friend allowed DeFreeze to sleep in her apartment that first night. It was on the second night that Donald DeFreeze, soon to anoint himself “General Field Marshal Cinque” of the Symbionese Liberation Army, found his way into the bed of his first recruit, an attractive twenty-two-year-old pharmacist’s daughter named Patricia Soltysik. Her family called her Pat. She preferred “Mizmoon.” She was a sometime Berkeley student, a sometime lesbian, and a self-avowed revolutionary feminist. She was also a janitor. When she wasn’t mopping floors, Soltysik would become DeFreeze’s partner in their revolutionary assault on America.

  In those early days, with no one looking that hard for DeFreeze, the two were free to drift through the bizarre bazaar that was 1973 Berkeley, a college town deep in a post-1960s intellectual hangover, a haven for aging radicals who could still talk eagerly about the coming revolution but no longer had the energy to do much about it. Berkeley’s Free Speech movement had helped launch the Movement in 1964, but its best and brightest had long since moved on to other causes; in their absence, the calls for revolution had fallen to the wayward souls who still flocked to Berkeley from across the country: the street preachers, the deluded, the lost. The Bay Area Left remained as vital as ever, still teeming with radicals devoted to every conceivable cause, but those who clung to the idea of “armed struggle” and the viability of an underground now ran less to the brainy Ivy Leaguers of the Weather Underground than to the escaped convicts, janitors, runaways, and angry lesbians who would eventually, under DeFreeze’s leadership, become the Symbionese Liberation Army. America had changed that much in three short years. In 1970 those who called for violent revolution were viewed by many as an intellectual vanguard; in 1973 they were widely dismissed as lunatics.

  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 taken even the slightest bit seriously. A dozen or so flyspeck 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. A few, however, tried to mount isolated actions. During DeFreeze’s time in Berkeley members of a radical commune called the Tribal Thumb Collective were arrested for a bank robbery. Police tied another group, the August Seventh Guerrilla Movement, to a series of murders and a bizarre incident in which a cabdriver was briefly kidnapped; the ransom note demanded that Bay Area cabbies go on strike to force the release of radical convicts. This kind of violence was woven deeply into the fabric of the Bay Area in 1973. San Francisco’s mysterious Zodiac Killer was still at large. The SLA’s exploits would parallel a series of fourteen Bay Area murders by a small group of black militants dubbed the Zebra Killers.

  In this environment DeFreeze and Mizmoon had little trouble gathering a guerrilla cell of their own, including a former lover of hers and DeFreeze’s friends from the Vacaville BCA. Most of their recruits were in their twenties and active in the prison movement. A few had worked with Venceremos. All believed that, with the help of black prisoners, they could use U.S. ghettos to launch the kind of urban warfare that their hero George Jackson had prophesied. Eventually they would number eight:

  Nancy Ling Perry, “Fahizah”: Tiny, barely four foot eleven, the daughter of conservative parents, Perry grew up in Santa Rosa, California, and earned an English degree at Berkeley in 1970. A heavy drug user, reeling from a broken marriage, she was selling juice from a gypsy cart on campus when she was drawn into the SLA.

  Willie Wolfe, “Cujo”: Raised in Connecticut, the son of a wealthy doctor, Wolfe graduated from a Massachusetts boarding school before drifting west to enroll at Berkeley in 1971. Quiet but committed, he lived for a time at Peking House and spent every free hour working with inmates at Vacaville.


  Camilla Hall, “Gabi”: Originally from Minnesota, Hall, a heavyset lesbian with short blond hair and thick glasses, arrived in Berkeley in 1971, taking an apartment on Channing Way. Mizmoon was her upstairs neighbor; they had been lovers.

  Russell Little, “Osceola”: A University of Florida dropout, Little washed up in Berkeley in 1972, rooming with his best friend, Willie Wolfe, at Peking House. Drawn into the Vacaville BCA “to search out the revolutionaries, political prisoners and prisoners of war,” he became convinced that underground warfare was still tenable, that groups like Weather had failed in large part because they were afraid to take lives.

  Joseph Remiro, “Bo”: Remiro was the ultimate angry Vietnam veteran, a hyperactive, hotheaded former infantryman who returned to the United States determined to strike back at the government that sent him overseas. He spent much of his time holding weapons classes for Bay Area radicals. When Little and Wolfe left Peking House, they moved in with Remiro.

  Bill Harris, “General Teko”: The oldest of the recruits at twenty-eight, Harris was another Vietnam veteran. After returning and earning a master’s degree in urban education at the University of Indiana, he moved to Oakland in 1972 in search of a teaching job. A heavy LSD user, Harris ended up sorting mail at the Berkeley post office and spent his spare time volunteering with black prisoners at the Vacaville BCA.

  Emily Harris, “Yolanda”: Married to Bill, Emily was a peppy Chi Omega at Indiana University until falling for Harris and internalizing his radical politics. She worked as a typist at Berkeley.

  Angela Atwood, “General Gelina”: A flamboyant young actress from the New Jersey suburbs, Atwood met the Harrises while studying theater at Indiana. She joined the couple in Oakland and, between roles in local plays, worked as a waitress at the Great Electric Underground restaurant. When her marriage broke up, in 1973, she moved into the Harrises’ spare bedroom.

  Pieced together from the most committed of those at Peking House and their friends, this group came together in fits and starts during mid-1973, gathering momentum once DeFreeze and Mizmoon moved into an apartment on East Seventeenth Street, in a ghetto section of Oakland, that June. Nancy Perry was the first to join, bringing along Willie Wolfe and his pals Russ Little and the angry Joe Remiro; before DeFreeze appeared, the four, all BCA volunteers, had formed a nascent underground cell of their own with prisoners at Vacaville; the “Partisans’ Vanguard Party,” however, existed only in their minds.

  These recruits found DeFreeze brimming with ideas for a revolutionary army. He and Mizmoon had been scribbling organizational charts and rules for weeks. From the beginning there was a surreal quality to the aborning SLA, an exaggerated sense of deluded grandiosity, of playacting. DeFreeze envisioned not only a Symbionese Liberation Army—“symbionese” was derived from the word “symbiosis”—but a Symbionese Federated Republic, a Court of the People, and units labeled mobility, medical, provision, and communication. The SLA’s ideology, however, was even hazier than its imagined structure. It sought to abolish prisons, marriage, and rent while attacking “racism, sexism, ageism, capitalism, fascism, individualism, possessiveness, competitiveness and all other institutions that have made and sustained capitalism.”

  In practice, DeFreeze and his acolytes did their best to mimic routines pioneered by Weather: the calisthenics, the weapons training, the study of Marxist texts, even the grueling “crit/self-crit.” But all of it was in service to a worldview that veered between comical and truly insane. Where Weather’s leadership now called itself the Central Committee, DeFreeze styled himself General Field Marshal Cinque—pronounced “sin-kay.” Where Weather took banal code names—Jack, Molly, Mike—the SLA chose monikers out of some imagined African revolution: Fahiza, Cujo, Teko. Where Weather’s communiqués alternated between hippie jargon and sober Marxism, the SLA’s would arrive unmoored from all reality, a notion enshrined by its favored salutation, a line that sounded as if uttered by the villain in a 1930s-era Buck Rogers serial: “DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT THAT PREYS UPON THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE!”

  It’s entirely possible that the SLA would have remained just a fixture of Donald DeFreeze’s fevered imagination if not for the sudden arrival of yet another escaped prisoner, this one from Vacaville, in August. His name was Thero Wheeler. Wheeler was a friend of DeFreeze’s and an inmate leader, every bit as revolutionary-minded but a tad more level-headed.

  When Wheeler was brought to a rendezvous in Palo Alto, he was surprised to see DeFreeze waiting; he had no idea that his old pal had helped arrange the escape. Wheeler and his girlfriend, a young heiress and Venceremos associate named Mary Alice Siem, began hanging out with Mizmoon and Nancy Perry. There, Wheeler told reporters months later, DeFreeze eagerly brought out a notebook adorned with the SLA’s symbol, a seven-headed cobra, in which he had scribbled detailed organizational and battle plans for his new underground army. “He handed me this book, you know, with all these cobras on the cover,” Wheeler remembered. “He asked me to read it. I did and I thought, man, this is really shit. I told him it was a bunch of garbage, it wasn’t realistic as far as revolution was concerned. Actually, it was bullshit, it was suicide.”

  DeFreeze was crestfallen but undeterred. He needed Wheeler badly, because Wheeler had the contacts—to Venceremos, to the Black Panthers, to people who could sell them guns—that he didn’t. DeFreeze was uncomfortably aware that, other than the nine recruits he had fielded so far—some still of uncertain loyalty—not a single other radical group they had approached had shown the slightest interest in joining forces with them. He pressed ahead nonetheless. They stole weapons, burglarizing the homes of leftists they knew. Up in the Berkeley hills, Joe Remiro showed them how to fire the guns; he taught them karate, too.

  All through the fall they debated their first action. An attack on an Avis rental car office—for supporting the “fascist governments” of Portugal, Israel, and others, a draft communiqué explained—was planned but then postponed, as was an assassination of the director of the California prison system, Raymond Procunier. Finally, one evening in October, Thero Wheeler launched into a rant about Marcus Foster, the superintendent of the Oakland school system. Foster, the city’s first black school administrator, was a nationally respected figure, but he had angered the Black Panthers and other radical groups by suggesting that police be brought in to curb school violence and by proposing that students carry identification cards. In Wheeler’s mind this amounted to a fascist plot against black youth.

  DeFreeze listened, then leaned forward, and in a tone that halted any further discussion, breathed, “That nigger is gonna die.”

  • • •

  The unofficial birth of the Symbionese Liberation Army came on November 6, 1973, just eight days before the killing of Twymon Meyers and the unofficial death of the Black Liberation Army. No one would ever be entirely sure who the participants were; according to most accounts, it was DeFreeze, Mizmoon, and little Nancy Perry. Whoever it was, they were in place a few minutes after seven that dark, chilly evening, two of them in the parking lot of the Oakland Board of Education, leaning against a wall. A third was crouched in nearby foliage. Just then two men emerged from the building. The first, a deputy superintendent named Robert Blackburn, glanced at the pair in the shadows as he passed, his car keys already in his hand. His best friend, Marcus Foster, the superintendent Oakland had hired away from Philadelphia, was walking just a few steps behind him when the first shots rang out.

  Blackburn whirled around just in time to see the muzzle flashes as the two figures behind him began firing into Foster. There was an explosion, and Blackburn felt a searing pain in his back, a load of buckshot fired from the bushes. He lurched forward just as a second blast struck him a glancing blow. Blackburn staggered, nearly falling, before stumbling almost sixty feet to an outside door. Inside, he slumped to the floor and shouted, “Help! Get help!”

  Police were on the scene within minutes. They found a group of sch
ool officials standing over Foster’s dead body. Blackburn, taken to the hospital, survived. The shooters had vanished, but detectives found footprints in the bushes and bullet casings. When they examined a spent slug, they noticed something odd: The tip had been drilled out. Chemists would later discover that each of the bullets fired at Foster that night had been filled with potassium cyanide. The superintendent had been shot to pieces, five bullets fired into his back, two more in the front, the last hitting him in the leg.

  The Symbionese Liberation Army’s “war” against the United States had begun, but the reaction to its first attack was not at all what DeFreeze had expected. Far from drawing cheers from Bay Area radical groups, Foster’s assassination provoked near-universal condemnation. Black leaders denounced the murder of one of their own; thousands would turn out to attend one of three memorial services. The Panthers decried the “brutal and senseless murder” and initially suggested that “powerful fascist elements” were behind it. Not until the next day did the strange communiqué with the seven-headed cobra arrive at a Berkeley radio station, KPFA. It was from the “Symbionese Liberation Army Western Regional Youth Unit,” and it explained Foster’s murder as the result of his “fascist” student-identification program. “To those who would bear the hopes and future of our people,” it read in part, “let the voice of their guns express the words of freedom.”