FILM / Jonah Raskin : Reviewing 'Fruitvale' and Remembering the Panthers

Reviewing Coogler's Fruitvale Station
and reflecting on the Black Panthers

Fruitvale Station shows how far we’ve traveled since the days of the Panthers, and how little we’ve traveled.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / August 12, 2013

The only Oakland, California, African-Americans I’ve ever known belonged to the Black Panther Party founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland in 1966. In my mind, Oakland and the Panthers are as one. I can’t think of the city -- its streets, churches, and parks -- without thinking of Panthers. And I can’t think of the Panthers without also thinking of the city.

Of course, I know that Oakland’s history includes much more than the Panther past. I know, too, that Oakland has continued to be a place of rebellion and defiance without the Panthers. The Occupy Movement rocked the city and the city rocked the movement. Violence has long stalked the city and its residents.

Not surprisingly, no Panthers appear in Ryan Coogler’s 85-minute feature film, Fruitvale Station, which recounts the life and the death of Oscar Grant III, the 22-year-old Oakland African-American who was shot and killed by an Oakland police officer on January 1, 2009.

The slaying of Grant would not have surprised Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, who are, of course, dead and who were well aware of police brutality in their own time, and saw the police as an occupying army in black neighborhoods. I doubt that Bobby Seale and Dave Hilliard, two living Panthers, would be surprised, either, by the murder of Oscar Grant.

The avant-garde American writer, Gertrude Stein, noted apropos Oakland, “There is no there there.” Unfortunately, there is a there there, and, now as in the past, it’s the there of violence and death.

The release of Coogler’s movie, Fruitvale Station, coincided with the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. George Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges on July 13, 2013. The movie was released July 28, 2013.

News about the trial and the verdict gave the film a boost at the box office and reminded audiences that white officers of the law have been murdering young black men for years and have gotten away with murder, too.

Oscar Grant III might have joined the Panthers had he been alive in 1967 or 1968. Newton and Seale might have tried to recruit him. After all, he’d been to prison -- he served time at San Quentin -- and he had street smarts. The film depicts him as a well-meaning young man who tries and fails to get his life together.

He’s a fuck-up but he’s not evil. Unable to keep a job, or to tell the truth consistently to friends and family members, he’d like to do the right thing and doesn’t. In the film, he deals marijuana, lies to the mother of his daughter, drives around Oakland in an old car, and hangs out with the boys in the ‘hood.

He doesn’t set his sights much further than tomorrow and he doesn’t look much further than the street around the next corner. His worldview is limited; he doesn’t seem to know his own personal history, the history of Oakland, its African-Americans, or the Black Panther Party.

His family members and his friends care about him and try to help him. They rally around him. They’d like to save his life and bring him back to life after he’s shot and killed.

The film offers a steady stream of images in which Grant and his friends hug one another, high-five one another, and talk the rhetoric of togetherness. They don’t have much tangible togetherness beneath the surface. They don’t go to church together, don’t have a clubhouse, don’t have anything at all that resembles the Black Panther Party, and don’t know a single older person who embodies the legacy of the Panthers.

Bobby Seale, left, and Huey Newton at Black Panther headquarters in Oakland. Image from Babylon Falling.

I didn’t take my eyes off the screen in the theater where I saw the film, but I found Oscar and his friends sad and even pathetic. I don’t doubt that the film accurately reflects Grant’s life. Ryan Coogler had the cooperation of the lawyer for Grant’s family. What I don’t know for sure is how typical or representative a figure Grant was and is.

I suspect that he is rather typical and that a great many young African-American men in Oakland share his sweetness and his anger, his desire to be something better than he is, and who, like him, lack the ability to get out of the traps in which they find themselves.

There’s something fatalist about the film. From the start, you know that he’ll be shot and killed on January 1, 2009; the film begins with documentary footage of his murder. You watch and you know that nothing will prevent that act from taking place.

The movie moves depressingly through Grant’s last day, and, because it’s depressing I can’t really recommend it. At the same time, I wouldn’t say stay away. If you want to see a movie made by a living African-American filmmaker about a dead African-American then by all means see the picture.

The director hasn’t aimed to make a big statement or to offer a plea for change. That speaks well for him. He mostly lets the story tell itself. But he hasn’t lifted his sights as a filmmaker beyond Grant’s individual life and beyond the lives of those in his immediate circle. That struck me as a lapse in filmmaking. It left me with a sense of disappointment.

I didn’t want slogans or sloganeering. I didn’t want Panthers to suddenly appear in the movie and to analyze and explain the situation. That would have been unreal. But I would have liked some acknowledgement that once upon a time in the West the Panthers made a difference.

Fruitvale Station shows how far we’ve traveled since the days of the Panthers, and how little we’ve traveled. It does seem to reflect the feelings of young people in Oakland today: their sense of injustice and powerlessness, too. The world is fucked up and there isn’t much to be done about it now, except go to movies like Fruitvale Station and go about one’s life.

The same week that I saw the film, I also saw at exhibit at Mills College in Oakland that focused on the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Part of the space was allocated to the posters of Emory Douglas, which had many of the slogans from the heyday of the Panthers such as, “All power to the people” and “We shall survive without a doubt.”

I thought that I could hear those slogans echoing in the distance, and I knew that I would never hear them again in my own lifetime.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professor emiritus at Sonoma State University. Raskin is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the Making of the Beat Generation. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : The Panthers and 'Black Against Empire'

Black Against Empire:
The legacy of the Black Panther Party

"We didn't preach to the people, we worked with them." -- Former Black Panther Mumia Abu Jamal

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / February 12, 2013

[Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr. (George Gund Foundation Imprint in African American Studies) (2013: University of California Press); 560 pp; $34.95.]

Once again, it’s Black History Month in the United States. Since the inception of this celebration, its meaning has unfortunately been diminished as the myth of post-racialism becomes gospel, even though it shares none of a gospel’s truths.

In schools and libraries, well-meaning teachers and library workers create displays, bring in speakers, and teach lessons on the history of African-Americans. All too often, this means a look at the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., a discussion of the Emancipation Proclamation, and maybe a lesson about Rosa Parks. Only rarely, do students and library patrons get a look beyond these conventional topics that are usually taught in a manner that highlights white America’s tolerance and sense of fair play.

This is why books like the recently released Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party are so important. They remove the pretense that the Black liberation movement in the United States was something everyone except the KKK and its allies supported. Books like this tell the truth. Blacks Against Empire does so concisely, engagingly, and honestly.

Black Against Empire is a political history that is simultaneously objective and radical. Despite the efforts of historians to obfuscate and obliterate the party from history, describing it as a hate group and gun-obsessed when mentioning it at all, the fact is the Panthers' legacy is unique and important to not only the history of Black America, but to the history of the entire United States. It is best described in the words of Mumia Abu Jamal: "We didn't preach to the people, we worked with them."

The relationship between the primarily white New Left and the Panthers is explored in a fair-minded and realistic manner, as is the relationship between the Panthers and other Third World revolutionary organizations, both in the United States and around the world. The authors expand the narrative of the movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam, showing clearly the early involvement of black organizations, especially that of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). It was this organization that actually began resisting the draft, months before the predominantly white anti-war movement.

Furthermore, as the authors make clear, opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam was one of the Black Panthers' fundamental positions.

Like most revolutionary organizations the Panthers struggled with issues of gender and sexuality. While the participation of men in the breakfast programs sensitized them to the realities of child-rearing and associated aspects of human life (think of the film Salt of the Earth, when the women replace men on the picket lines and the men take over household tasks forcing them to see the relationship of domestic tasks to the capitalist dynamic), the living situations of many Panthers reinforced traditional gender roles.

Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., the authors of Black Against Empire, have written a comprehensive and compelling history of the Black Panther Party. As close to complete as one text can possibly be, it is the book I would recommend to anyone wanting to read just one book about the Black Panthers. The book concludes with a chapter speculating as to why the Black Panthers developed when they did, why they commanded the support they did, and why their influence waned so quickly.

Of course, the role of the government counterinsurgency program called COINTELPRO is discussed; the frame-ups, misinformation, jacketing, and murders. In light of current concerns about domestic “terrorists," one wonders if the Panthers would be considered drone assassination targets under the current Justice Department guidelines if they were around today?

Other reasons provided by the authors for the Panthers’ demise borrow from the Italian Antonio Gramsci's thoughts on revolutionary movements and end up asking more questions than they answer.

Long Distance Revolutionary

Back to Mumia Abu Jamal. One of the youngest Panthers in the nation, he continued his revolutionary activism and reportage long after the Black Panthers had become history. Indeed, his post-Panther trajectory could serve as a microcosm of many leftist revolutionaries who came of age during the Panthers' heyday.

He didn’t give up his radicalism while pursuing a career after the Party. Because of this, he ended up paying for his history and his refusal to compromise. He continues paying even today. For those who have forgotten (or never paid attention), Mumia has been on Pennsylvania’s death row for more than two decades. Accused and convicted of killing a Philadelphia policeman in a prosecution involving the sketchiest of evidence and numerous prosecutorial and judicial missteps, Mumia’s life and situation is the subject of a new feature film titled Long Distance Revolutionary.

When I was helping organize antiwar activities in the late 1990s and the 2000s, I learned that many of the younger radicals I was working with came to their politics after learning of Mumia's case. Thanks in no small part to his eloquence and the support of popular musicians like Rage Against the Machine, these young people saw through the intense desire of the State to keep Jamal in prison and kill him. This understanding opened their eyes to the realities of the system and made them radical.

As the film shows, this trajectory is similar to Jamal's. Mumia is a political prisoner. The Panthers were a political organization. The story of both is a story that needs to be heard. The film is part biography, part commentary from supporters and Jamal himself, and part drama. The sum of these parts is a film that provokes and entertains.

The Black Panthers were bold. The Black Panthers were smart. The Black Panthers were anti-imperialists. The Black Panthers were revolutionaries. This book and this film remind us of that. They also remind us that this world, this nation, could use something with the Panthers' appeal and power now. Read this book, ask your library to buy it; watch this film.

Black history isn't just for black people. It's for everyone who wants to understand the history of the United States.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Aaron Dixon's 'My People Are Rising'

My People Are Rising:
A Black Panther memoir

Aaron Dixon was both a leader and a foot soldier; an intelligent black man in the mid-century United States who knew racism first-hand and wanted to end it.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / October 15, 2012

[My People Are Rising: Memoir of a Black Panther Party Captain by Aaron Dixon (2012: Haymarket Books); Paperback; 384 pp; $17.95.]

The Black Panthers were arguably the most important revolutionary organization in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their presence was an inspiration to millions of men and women around the globe, especially those living in colonial and neocolonial situations.

Furthermore, the Party was a key element in the movement in the United States against imperialism and its manifestations of war and racism. It was because of this latter truth that the Party was also the target of a brutal campaign of repression organized at the highest levels of Washington, D.C.'s security apparatus. Surveillance, false charges and arrests, the use of informants and provocateurs, and outright murder; nothing was out of the question when it came to destroying the Black Panther Party.

Begun in Oakland in 1967, the Panthers organized chapters in Los Angeles and Seattle, and Washington soon afterward. The Seattle chapter would become one of the Party's longest lasting chapters and an integral part of the African-American and leftist community in that city. Founded and led by a young Seattle native named Aaron Dixon, the legacy of the Seattle chapter is still present in that city.

Like many young people discovering leftist politics in the late 1960s, my experience was greatly influenced by the Panthers. For better and worse, their leather jackets, berets, and guns -- combined with a media presentation as badasses -- appealed to me and many of my compatriots.

One instance in my political education that remains indelible in my mind occurred during the summer of 1970. I was attending summer school at the U.S. high school in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. We had just spent a class discussing the very recent U.S. invasion of Cambodia, the student strike, law enforcement murders of young people at Kent and Jackson State, and the meaning of Nixon.

Class had been dismissed and I was hanging out in Gruneburg Park next to the school. There was a lawn in the park where German hippies hung out and smoked hashish. Young travelers from around the world often ended up on this lawn, playing guitars and drums, smoking dope, meeting up, and discussing politics and music.

That afternoon my friend and I ended up in a circle of people discussing the Black Panthers. The discussion was more or less being led by an African-American man around 20. I had seen him in the park before, but had never talked with him. As he continued to talk, about half of the people drifted away, either too stoned to listen to his politics or just too apathetic. I stayed.

Eventually, there were only three of us: me, a black girl I knew from high school, and the aforementioned young man (who seemed old to my15-year-old self). He took out some literature from his backpack and handed us each a packet. As it turned out, he was a GI recently discharged from the Army who was traveling around Europe. He had ordered several copies of Mao Ze Dong’s Little Red Book and a quantity of other literature from the Panthers' Oakland office to distribute on his travels.

He suggested a couple articles to read in the issue of the Black Panther newspaper he had given us and for the next several days, the three of us met in the park and discussed what we had read. He continued on his travels, and the girl and I stayed on, occasionally hanging out at school the following year despite the different circles we traveled in.

I relate the previous story as an example of the influence the Panthers had. The recently released memoir by Aaron Dixon tells a much more compelling story while providing a history of the Party through the eyes of one of its long-term members.

Dixon was both a leader and a foot soldier; an intelligent black man in the mid-century United States who knew racism first-hand and wanted to end it. As a young teen he occasionally participated in protests against racism while learning the streets of Seattle. His parents worked hard to maintain an approximation of a middle class life for their children while biting their tongues all too often when they ran into racism in their daily lives.

Like many others of his generation, it was the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 that convinced him that nonviolent protest was no longer the only option. If there was to be real change in the United States, it would have to be of the kind put forward by the newly found Black Panther Party.

Dixon and several others traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area for a Black Student Union conference and he joined the Panthers. Simultaneously, he was made captain of the Seattle branch.

Dixon's book, titled My People Are Rising: Memoir of a Black Panther Party Captain, goes on to tell a tale of protest, gunfights with police and their stooges, and political change. The reader is presented with a story full of action, love, and politics. The Black Panther Party's rise and fall is revealed through the experiences of Aaron Dixon and those men and women he worked and lived with during his time in the party.

Moments of victory and moments of defeat fill these pages, both personal and political. The narrative reads like an action thriller. Dixon's writing is even, descriptive, and urgent. Whether describing the preparations for an attack by police on a Panther house or the organization of the Panther breakfast program in Seattle, My People Are Rising keeps the reader in the story, curious as to which way the events described will turn.

The Panthers eventually fell apart. The power they represented in the African-American community diminished midway through the 1970s in their primary base of Oakland and much earlier in other parts of the United States. Much of this can be attributed to the repression carried out by law enforcement under the aegis of COINTELPRO.

Other factors that caused the disintegration of the party were related to the nature of the Party itself. During the heyday of their organizing drive, many people who joined saw the Panthers as just another street gang and used it accordingly: selling drugs and pimping women.

When the Party leadership got wind of such activities carried out in the Panthers name, they dealt with it quickly and harshly. Indeed, when the Party began to shrink in size, Dixon was called to Oakland and became a member of one of the cadres that engaged in such activity. A questionable program was begun to chase dealers and pimps from the streets of Oakland's neighborhoods. I say questionable not because the pimps and dealers should have stayed but because the money, guns, and violence involved invited corruption.

Meanwhile, the political wing of the Party had involved itself in electoral politics, running and endorsing candidates for political office in Oakland. Unfortunately, no Panthers were elected, although some of the candidates they endorsed did. By 1978, though, the party was essentially finished.

Coda: In 1978 a friend and I were hitchhiking in Oakland. We were headed to Santa Cruz. An African-American man driving a Buick Regal picked us up. Once we got in the car he asked us where we were headed. I told him Santa Cruz and he said he would take us there.

First, though, he needed to stop at a house in the Oakland Hills. My friend and I shrugged our shoulders and went along for the ride. He found the house, went inside for 15 or 20 minutes and came out in a hurry. We left that house and made our way to Highway 17 towards Santa Cruz.

Once we were on the highway he pulled out a big joint and lit it. We smoked the weed and sat back. He handed me a pint of brandy and asked me to open it. After a few sips, our tongues loosened and we got to talking about Oakland.

My friend and I had only been in California for five months and told him so. He told us he had grown up there. As the conversation somehow turned to politics, the subject of the Panthers came up. He dismissed them out of hand. I objected, telling him the story I related at the beginning of this piece.

He chuckled and said; yeah he was like that once, too. After working for the Chairman, though, all he was going to say was that the Panthers had turned out to be nothing more than another bunch of gangsters. I didn't argue and I didn't agree. We changed the subject.

Aaron Dixon's memoir is the first of many Panther memoirs I have read that honestly addresses the demise of the Panthers. He discusses the role of COINTELPRO, the descent into gangsterism, and the end of the revolutionary aspect of the Party. He does not mince words, nor does he disavow what the Party meant to millions and means in history.

In the book's final paragraph, Dixon apologizes for nothing, remembering the Black Panther Party as "men and women rising in unison to...write a new, bold future for Black America." That, I believe, is the truth found in this book and the truth revealed by history.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard : scott crow's 'Black Flags and Windmills'

Black Flags and Windmills:
Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective

scott crow's book tells of the abandonment of a great American city by the powerful, the refusal of its poorest and most vulnerable citizens to lay down and die, and the necessity for community self-reliance that is Katrina's great lesson.

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / December 13, 2011

[Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective by scott crow; foreword by Kathleen Cleaver (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011); Paperback; 223 pp.; $20.00.]

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, a Category 3 storm, the sixth strongest recorded to date, scored a direct hit on the City of New Orleans. Over the next days and weeks, as neglected levees failed and federal and state governments and aid agencies floundered, Katrina became the costliest natural disaster, and fifth deadliest, in U.S. history.

Katrina affected millions, changed the lives of hundreds of thousands forever, and called some to rise above all personal considerations and give themselves to the Herculean task of saving the Gulf Coast and its people.

Among the latter was a Texas anarchist, a lanky East Dallas white guy who looks like he's from way over in East Texas, easy-going but hard-bitten. And while the person he was before Katrina may still be, he was forever changed by what he witnessed and achieved in Louisiana.

scott crow, like the poets raul r. salinas and e.e. cummings, doesn't capitalize his name. This is one of those odd contradictions, wherein a desire to de-emphasize an individual's importance to, say, an international movement for compassionate autonomy, births the need to explain that this particular person doesn't do something most everyone does, thus making it necessary to consider her or him individually.

Well, humility can't help but call attention to itself, if only by its contrast with the egocentric world-at-large. As I told scott recently, I've been wanting to read his autobiography since I met him.

I knew his name before we met because a nonprofit foundation that I serve as a board member gave money to hurricane relief work, beginning, I think, in 2006. But I didn't know he and his life partner, Ann Harkness, were living in Austin until they came to my book release party that fall with former Louisiana political prisoner Robert King and a couple of his other friends.

Both Ann and scott have been valuable change-makers in Austin since moving here shortly before Katrina. scott is Director of Ecology Action, the grassroots community organization that pioneered recycling in Austin while he was in grade school. Ann is a gifted, witty photographer. Both are active in many community groups and the core of a lively social scene that also embraces King, antiglobalization worker Lisa Fithian, and other activists who date their lives in Austin from Katrina's floods.

Our community has also seen them undergo the very public trauma of having a former friend and sometime-colleague exposed as an FBI informer, in this reviewer's opinion responsible for inciting two younger activist friends to plan violence at the 2007 Republican National Convention.

Black Flags and Windmills, crow's first book, focuses on Common Ground Collective, an anarchist-based relief organization he helped found when official disaster relief efforts not only failed to meet the needs of affected residents along the Gulf Coast, but seemed intent upon criminalizing them.

But that wasn't what he set out to do. While millions sat stunned, weeping at televised images of a drowned metropolis, as mythic to the American psyche as Atlantis to the Greeks', scott crow drove from Austin, Texas, to New Orleans to look for a stranded friend.

Black Panther Party matriarch Kathleen Cleaver's insightful introduction sees this as the fulcrum, asking, "What deep motivation drives anyone to travel by boat across an unfamiliar flooded city looking for a friend under life-threatening circumstances?"

The answer comes from another BPP icon, Geronimo ji Jaga: "Revolutionaries are motivated by great love for another world."

It is that love that most illuminates scott's character and the pages of this work. From details of organizational process-building among a shifting cast of residents, volunteers, and core activists, to gritty descriptions of clearing long-clogged storm sewers and scraping dead animals from the streets, the bottom line is that he doesn't leave anyone behind.

It almost doesn't matter that the friend he went to find was Robert King, former BPP activist who served 29 years in solitary confinement in Louisiana's notorious Angola Prison. scott and Ann Harkness met King shortly after his 2001 release. scott may not see it this way, but I think he would have done the same thing for any number of other friends and comrades.

King's particular circumstances and his exemplary humility and dedication -- he continues to work for the release of his Angola comrades, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace -- certainly helped draw crow back to New Orleans after a first failed, frightening, surreal sortie.

The courage of NOLA residents who were also there at the beginning, Common Ground co-founders Malik Rahim and Sharon Johnson, kept him there for months under incredibly demanding circumstances. But the initial determination to help a friend underlies all of scott's work, pre- and post-Katrina, and has made him something of an icon, if a reluctant one, to antiglobalization activists around the world.

As an autobiography, Black Flags and Windmills is unconventional; one must look to the "About the author" addendum to discover scott's age. He spends 15 pages on his childhood and youth. A small, loving section on his Mom, Emily, shows the origins of his empathetic nature. It reminds me of cousins and classmates, perhaps a couple of years younger and drawn to the 1960s subculture in which I participated. Emily came to womanhood before the words "women's" and "liberation" ever met, when racial segregation had but recently fallen, and "race mixing" was still rare.

Scott was born in 1967; the Vietnam war was still escalating. Emily, a single mom, wasn't an activist -- but she surely knew people who were. She wanted a better world for her son. I knew young parents in Austin then who sent their children to the "hippie school" in the country, or helped in a free breakfast for schoolchildren program inspired by those of the BPP. Emily sent scott to an East Dallas preschool run by former BPP activists. While the preschool was not overtly political, the BPP's 10-Point Program is in his book and is a cornerstone of his activism.

Between East Dallas and New Orleans, scott recounts his evolution as a "libertarian anarchist," a phrase I applaud in theory but find somewhat wanting in rigor. Despite having been influenced by socialists and socialist-influenced activists, he expresses more anti-communist views here than anti-capitalist ones, although it may be that a critique of corporate capital is implicit in the work as a whole.

He seems to view communism and/or socialism solely as political systems -- authoritarian, anti-democratic ones at that -- rather than economic ones. This leads him, IMHO, into the error of rejecting a priori tools that could serve a libertarian anarchist society rather well, and this is a topic I plan to pursue with him and with Ann in time.

Most of the narrative of Black Flags and Windmills, however, is not analytical but tells one man's story -- a man careful to "leave room for other stories" -- of the abandonment of a great American city by the powerful, the refusal of its poorest and most vulnerable citizens to lay down and die, and the necessity for community self-reliance that is Katrina's great lesson.

Government cannot help you. Government seeks to control you. In any disaster or emergency, help yourself and those around you. Many tasks cannot be performed by one person, thus, make principled alliances, work cooperatively, share decision-making and resources. Ask what people need; don't assume. Express your own needs clearly.

Starting with three people and $50, Common Ground helped thousands of individuals and families, saved and rebuilt entire communities, and raised over a million dollars in small contributions in two years, an astonishing feat in the nonprofit world.

scott's ruminations on privilege -- his privileges of being white, male, able-bodied, etc. -- illuminate an ongoing contradiction of radical organizing: a person on the edge of starvation has little time for considering organizational culture, yet such consideration is vital for long-term success. His solution is to use whatever social privilege he has for the benefit of those who have none.

Stretched to his physical and emotional limits, sleeping on the ground in sticky Louisiana heat, eating bad food, surrounded 24-7 by the stench of decay, death, and constant crisis, scott's "privilege," one may argue, is what kept him up late writing and rewriting the organizational principles, procedures, and other expressions of self-determination necessary for group cohesion.

Expecting certain rights also motivates one to demand them. scott's experiences in New Orleans, a white outsider in a black community rightfully skeptical of offers to "help," made me recall a personal white-girl introduction to in-your-face racism: I was furious because a friend of mine was insulted, my anger not for his humiliation, but mine. That was an expression of privilege, you betcha! -- but also a time-release capsule of truth, exposing just how limited such privilege was and its unacceptable costs.

Racism continues to fester beneath public civility and political correctness today, finding sustenance in toxic, chaotic situations. The privilege of opposing it remains with the white moiety from whom it springs and whose deception is among its aims. The illusion that white skin, male gender, a college diploma, or other privileges are proof against oppression and exploitation remains a primary obstacle to social change.

crow's frank, no-nonsense discussion of armed self-defense is also a valuable contribution; recommended. As a young man, he feared guns and had to overcome the phobia to become a good marksman when the need became clear. The East Texas in him seems to have won out here; his attitude is more that of a farmer who would resolutely drop a wild hog ripping up his crops than of a poseur power-tripping on fancy weaponry.

Again BPP principles are seen, not only in Common Ground's acceptance of self-defense as legitimate but in the determination to keep resources gathered for the community from being stolen or destroyed.

scott is as frank in discussing Common Ground's internal issues as its external challenges, and while his desire not to personalize problems can be frustrating to the nosy reader, the conclusions he draws are surely of more long-term value.

We don't need to know who wanted to, "Damn everything but the circus!" to recognize the "type" scott describes in a section so subtitled: the loudmouth who shows up to "volunteer" with their own, most often self-serving agenda. Sometimes, after due consideration and an often numbing amount of talk, you just have to show them the door.

In this regard, the book is also notable for what is doesn't include: long explanations of why scott was right and other people wrong, or details of endless debates over points that later were seen to be pointless. Through principled, shared decision-making, Common Ground has been able to grow through its occasional and inevitable disagreements relatively unscathed. It apparently furthers one to have someplace to go!

In sharp contrast to this overall amicability, crow's brief criticism of the racist, sectarian New Black Panther Party is well-founded and pulls no punches. Two so-called "socialist" sects also come in for a well-deserved basting; a disaster area is not a place to sell your newspaper! Leaders have to speak against bullshit even when it wears a revolutionary cloak.

Yes, I said the "L" word, and so does scott: "Leadership happens when someone is given permission by the rest of the group to lead." Accountable, anti-authoritarian leadership must be demanded, and taught. The notion that leadership is always to be avoided, a major dilettante cop-out of the 1960s, has hopefully been relegated to the dustbin of history!

Black Flags and Windmills is chock-full of juicy quotes from rebels, poets, and rockers, and has whetted my appetite to hear a bunch of bands I somehow missed, perhaps during my deeply reggae years, such as Ministry, Skinny Puppy, the Replacements, the Coup, and more.

But I was most struck by this quote from the early Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose chords are echoed today by Occupation troubador Makana:

"Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few."
-- from "The Mask of Anarchy"

Another contribution of crow's book is its Appendices, including notes, memoranda, and both internal and external Common Ground communiqués. Here are appeals to the world outside for money and materiel, desperate descriptions of need, calm accounts of the unresponsiveness and outright hostility of government and other "official" disaster personnel to the agile, popularly-based, collaborative self-help afforded by and through Common Ground.

These documents may not only be useful to historians of the future who seek to understand the impact of Katrina, or the failures of the G.W. Bush administration, but to today's activists who seek to build new institutions, new processes, and a new culture.

No matter how dire the circumstances, it seems, this process is not easy nor always harmonious. A great deal of sweat and inconvenience is involved. Troublesome details must be constantly addressed. The more you bite off, the more you must chew. This book will help you sharpen your teeth.

Black Flags and Windmills combines hands-on information about what it really takes to change this world, one big mess at a time, and a seeker's vision of a better world. Well done!

[Mariann G. Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a contributing editor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles and poetry by Mariann G. Wizard at The Rag Blog.]

• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's August 5, 2011, Rag Radio interview with anarchist and author scott crow.
• Read "White Vigilantes and the Battle of Algiers," by scott crow, in The Rag Blog, September 8, 2010 (adapted from a draft of Black Flags and Windmills).

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Jonah Raskin : Don Cox, the 'Wistful' Panther

Former Black Panther Field Marshal Don Cox -- shown with his son in exile in Algiers -- died last month. Image from Black Bird Press.
Donald Cox, 1936-2011:
The beauty of the moon
and the passion of the Black Panthers

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / March 15, 2011

It was sad news that former Black Panther, Don Cox, died in France, February 19, 2011, at the age of 74, but I had to laugh at The New York Times obituary by Bruce Weber that described the Panthers as “the socialist movement founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, Calif., in 1966.” True, the Panthers were founded by Newton and Seale in 1966 in Oakland, but they were not a socialist movement, not by any stretch of the imagination.

They did for a time provide breakfast for children and they did want community control of institutions, such as police departments and schools, in black neighborhoods, but they did not advocate socialism.

They were part of the Black Nationalist movement that made allies with young, radical whites, and they also shared optimism and the political tactics of the anti-colonial upsurges that spread across the Third World in the 1960s.

I met Donald Cox -- “DC” as we called him -- and got to know him, briefly, in Algiers in 1970. I had gone to Algiers with a group of Yippies to meet Eldridge Cleaver and Timothy Leary, both of whom were wanted by U.S. authorities and were living in exile.

DC was the mellowest. DC was the coolest, and much less of a megalomaniac or egomaniac than Cleaver or Leary. In fact, he wasn’t a megalomaniac or an egomaniac at all. He didn’t want to change the world with guns or LSD and he didn’t want to run it either. Like Cleaver and Leary, he was also wanted by the FBI and considered “dangerous,” but he seemed wistful to me.

From left, Black Panthers Big Man, Don Cox, and June Hilliard at Panther national headquarters, Oakland, California, 1970. Image from gothamist.
In Algiers, he was concerned about the security of the Panthers and their Embassy because CIA agents monitored their activities. He was also a gracious host who took us -- Stew Albert, Anita Hoffman, Brian Flanagan, Jennifer Dohrn, Marty Kenner and me -- on a tour of the city, pointing out historical landmarks. He brought us one afternoon to the Place du Martyrs and explained that the French had executed suspected Algerian guerrillas here and then dumped their bodies into the harbor.

He turned to Jennifer Dohrn and asked her, “What color is that water?” She looked down. I looked down. We all did. “It’s reddish-blue,” Jennifer said. And indeed it was. It looked like the sea was awash in blood. “The Algerians say that it’s their blood that gives it that color,” DC explained. “The red blood of the guerrillas changed the color of the Mediterranean.”

At a feast at a seafood restaurant, DC was our official host and sat at the opposite head of the table from Cleaver. He ordered food for everyone -- shrimp and fish and white wine. DC was also made uneasy by two African Americans at the bar who said they were from San Francisco, and whom he suspected worked for the CIA. Sekou, one of the Panthers, spoke softly.

“I got us all covered,” he said. And indeed he did. I looked under the table and saw that he had a gun in his hand. I was confident he’d use it if need be. He had hijacked an airplane at gunpoint to get to Algiers.

DC didn’t have a gun in Algiers. I never saw him with one, either under a table or on his own person, though I did see Cleaver with an AK-47 in his lap. In 1970, DC expressed concern about living in exile. He hoped that he would not have to remain for the rest of his life outside his own native country. He missed San Francisco.

He did live in exile for the next 40 years of his life; his widow noted that before his death, exile had begun to wear on him. I’m sure it did and yet what strikes me most about DC now is his longevity. He lived longer than many of the Black Panthers, such as Huey Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver, who became a born-again Christian, a Republican, and a crack-head in the 1990s in Oakland.

DC never turned his back on his ideals, his passion for justice or his appreciation of beauty.

One night, we all looked up at the moon and admired its beauty.

“In Babylon, you can’t appreciate the moon’s beauty,” DC told us. “But here you have the time and space to dig on it.” That’s the way I’d like to remember DC, the Black Panther Field Marshal, who lived more than half his life in exile, and who learned in exile to appreciate the beauty of the moon.

[Jonah Raskin teaches at Sonoma State University and is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman.]

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Felix Shafer : Mourning for Marilyn Buck, Part II

Mourning for activist, poet, and political prisoner Marilyn Buck, shown at three stages of her life.
The blue afterwards:
Mourning for Marilyn, Part II

By Felix Shafer / The Rag Blog / January 13, 2011

Part two of three

[On December 13, Marilyn Buck, U.S. anti-imperialist political prisoner, acclaimed poet, former Austinite, and former original Ragstaffer, would have been 63 years of age. Scheduled for parole last August after nearly 30 years in federal prisons, Marilyn planned to live and work in New York. She looked forward to trying her hand at photography again, taking salsa lessons, and simply being able to walk in the park and visit freely with friends.

Instead, after 20 days of freedom, Marilyn died of a virulent cancer.

In the first part of this essay, Felix Shafer wrote about the pain of losing his friend and artistic collaborator, Marilyn Buck, to cancer, and his determination to mourn her in some way appropriate to her life, accepting and experiencing grief as fully as great friendship demands.

He evoked the heady, seemingly revolutionary days of the late 1960s, and Marilyn’s simultaneous coming of age with a generation that wanted to change the world for the better and instead found itself criminalized in the councils of government and power. Buck’s experiences, and her fundamental identification with people over profits, led her increasingly to seek effective ways to oppose injustice, and, inevitably, brought her under official scrutiny.

But the 1960s proved to be a pre-revolutionary decade, and, along with others who refused to read the repressive writing on the wall, Marilyn Buck became an “internal exile”: a political prisoner of the State.

-- Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog]


keywords: revolutionary. enemy of the state. Alive !

After the terms revolution, liberation, resistance, freedom were thoroughly drained of signifying power by the predatory, vampire-like cartels in advertising and Hollywood, they could be banished to the merely unfashionable passé. It's not solely a question of who "speaks" like this anymore but where in our society are these goals even considered to have meaning?

Today, enemy of the state probably sounds more like a dark shiny movie title or an album download than something serious and politically contentful. Its most likely association is to enemy combatant -- people whom U.S. state power locks up and can torture in lawless offshore dead zones like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. After 9-11 they stripped a huge layer of constitutional protection off.

Yet throughout history, empires and their regimes have singled out for attack and removal all who stood up for the disempowered to challenge the obscene "order of things." It remains a point of historical fact that Marilyn Buck was an enemy of empire and an enemy of the state. The national security state (laws, courts, prisons, police, FBI, military intelligence, and other armed/security bodies) has long treated her, and the other political prisoners, as people to be buried alive.

To get a sense of this it's instructive to look at a very abbreviated account of what the government charged and convicted her of:


1 In 1973 Marilyn was convicted in San Francisco of two counts of buying two boxes of legal ammunition while using a false ID. At that time, her sentence of 10 years in federal prison was the longest -- by far -- for this offense in U.S. history. Many people believe that this disproportionate sentence came because the government was well aware of her close support for the freedom struggle of black people in this country, particularly the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. During the early 1970's, the Black Panthers were under military, political, and media attack by the FBI's COINTELPRO, as of course was Marilyn.

Marilyn was particularly hated because she was a young radical white woman from the South who crossed the line against racial privilege and white supremacy. She was unwilling to stand on the sidelines while good people were being hunted down and destroyed by our government. She was explicitly seen as a race traitor, a "n----r lover" by the FBI/police, and the state moved to make an example of her to frighten others, especially radicalized white women, from following this path.

It was during this time that the FBI began to characterize Marilyn as the "sole white member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA)." And, in typical J. Edgar Hoover character assassination style, the bureau began saying that she had a "Joan of Arc complex."

Inside the Alderson, West Virginia, federal prison, Marilyn met the great Puerto Rican political prisoner and national (s)hero Lolita Lebron -- who along with her comrades would be pardoned in 1979 by President Carter after they'd served 25 years. (1)

Marilyn integrated herself into the community of women prisoners who did their best to support each other. She worked at staying attuned to outside events, from Watergate to the persistence of radical movements and the U.S. withdrawal in defeat from Vietnam. After serving four years of her sentence, Marilyn received a furlough in 1977 and did not return to prison. Between 1977 and 1985 we must assume that she lived and worked underground.

2 Recaptured in 1985, at the height of the Reagan era, Marilyn underwent a total of four trials, including two prosecutions for conspiracy, based on charges from the clandestine years. As a member of the "Resistance Conspiracy" case she, along with Linda Evans, Laura Whitehorn, Susan Rosenberg, Tim Blunk, and Alan Berkman, were accused of taking actions to

influence, change and protest policies and practices of the United States Government concerning various international and domestic matters through the use of violent and illegal means.

Among the alleged actions (in which no one was injured) were bombings of: the U.S. Capitol building to protest the illegal invasion of Grenada; three military installations in the D.C. area to protest U.S. backing of the Central American death squads; the apartheid-era South African consulate; the Israeli Aircraft Industries building; and the Patrolman's Benevolent Association (to protest police murders of people of color).

While underground, Marilyn was also charged with conspiracy in the successful 1979 liberation of political prisoner Assata Shakur (2) and the 1981 expropriation of a Brinks armored car in which two police officers and a security guard were killed. The government contended that the conspiracy brought together black and white North American radicals, under black leadership.

To my knowledge, this was the first time since the pre-Civil War era of John Brown that blacks and whites stood accused of joining together to conduct guerrilla activities. In this case, Marilyn was convicted of conspiracy; however, neither she nor her co-defendant Dr.Mutulu Shakur (stepfather of slain musician and actor Tupac Shakur) was convicted of any murders. Dr. Shakur was an original member of the Republic of New Afrika and a founder of the Lincoln Detox center in New York, which pioneered the use of acupuncture to help break drug addiction in the black and brown communities.

I feel a certain defensive avoidance about commenting, in shorthand, on this era's underground movements of the left, which, after all, came to their historical end many years ago. This is an essay of mourning and homage to Marilyn Buck who lived this struggle for many years; it's not an assessment of politics and strategy. Her clandestine years are held in protective secrecy by those who shared them. For her to have kept a journal would have been to put collective security in unacceptable jeopardy.

Nonetheless, at minimum, it seems to me, we ought to recognize more about these contributions than a basic recitation of her charges and convictions. But the post 9-11 "war on terror" has had a chilling effect on such conversations, despite the fact that these organizations had absolutely zero in common with Al- Q'aeda or similar terror killers.

During Marilyn's powerful memorial celebration in Oakland, California, on November 7, 2010, it was revealing to hear members of the Black Panther Party tell how her underground skills helped them survive the onslaught of COINTELPRO. Marilyn's tribute in New York was held a week later at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Center (formerly the Audubon Ballroom) in Harlem. As nearly 500 people jammed the room where Malcolm was assassinated, a moving message was read from political prisoner/POW and freedom fighter Sekou Odinga -- who was also convicted for the liberation of Assata:

She was someone who would give you her last without any thought about her own welfare. I remember one time when she shared her last few dollars with a comrade of ours, and later I was in her kitchen and opened her refrigerator to find nothing in it and almost no food in the house. I told her she had to let comrades know when she was in need, and stop giving when she didn't have it to give. But she never stopped because that's just who she was.

There have been very few actions to liberate PP/POW's and Marilyn was involved with more than one. The roles she played were critical in not only liberation of POWs, but also in making sure they remained free, never thinking about the great threat and danger to herself.

For the most part, what remains of the left today dismisses these efforts as worthless adventurism or ignores them altogether. While there's much of real value and importance in some of these critiques, the fact that empire rests on its capacity to inflict unlimited violence with impunity is rarely mentioned as something to organize against.

Isn't it frankly obscene that ex-President Bush and high officials -- obvious war criminals -- who illegally invaded Iraq under a web of lies, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, can walk free and add to their fortunes? Or that the top CIA executives who destroyed more than 90 hours of videotape (an illegal act in itself) showing their torture of suspects in contravention of International Law, won't be prosecuted by the Justice Department.

Isn't it beyond acceptable that central components of the permanent government, the CIA and Pentagon, stand exposed before the entire world as conducting an illegal, organized program of torture against prisoners, deemed "enemy combatants," yet for which no one is brought to trial? Marilyn thought so. In her last year and a half she began writing a novella, partially set in Guantanamo, about torture and imprisonment.

The many-sided crisis of global capitalism, run-away environmental damage, and the decline of the U.S. empire, makes it likely that we are entering a new age of rivalry and upheaval. Not only is the U.S. deeply at war(s) in the Muslim and Arab world, conducting or backing counterinsurgency campaigns in many more regions, but the rise of both Blackwater style mercenaries and a mass gun-glorifying, fascistically-inclined Tea Party movement means that real violent momentum is on the right.

On an immediate note, as I write this in late 2010, the news comes in that Johannes Mehserle, the white terroristic cop, whose murder of Oscar Grant, an unarmed prone and handcuffed African-American, at an Oakland BART Station on New Years 2009 was captured on video, has been sentenced to only two years in jail. Counting the 140 days he already did before making bail, he is expected to serve in the neighborhood of just six months. In contrast, the African-American football star, Michael Vick, got four years for the violent crime of organizing brutal dogfights. This isn't a post-racial society. Once more the obvious: it's open season on black and brown people.

Although I'm not aware of any formal written self-evaluation of her underground political strategy, I do know that Marilyn engaged in ongoing reflection and complex dialogues with trusted comrades about this. When possible she tried to convey lessons to today's new movements facing infiltration, grand juries, and conspiracy trials as a result of their militancy. Marilyn didn't romanticize the underground struggle and counseled activists strongly against militarist and adventurist approaches. She changed as times changed AND she stuck to her principles.

Marilyn Buck at Dublin FCI, 1994. Photo by Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog.

keywords: Midlife- art and cutting through

By the end of the 1980's, while many of Marilyn's contemporaries were going through midlife crises, occasioned by our fortieth birthdays, she faced the ugly, cramped, totalitarian, arbitrary, cruel, violent, life-sucking, and repetitive regime of prison life. After all the court trials, she would be sentenced to 80 years.

What she had hoped was the bright glow of a revolutionary dawn would turn out to be the brief, fiery sunset of the passing era which had launched her.

Marilyn Buck was becoming a member of that extraordinary global minority: people who are imprisoned by the state for their political actions and beliefs. She sustained and was, in turn, sustained by this community of comrades and their strong webs of outside supporters and friends.

In the Bay Area her diverse circle grew wide, warm, and deep. The group Friends of Marilyn Buck was formed over a decade ago and is going strong today. Members of her family reconnected with her. While her physical range was totally restricted, the world came to her through amazing visitors from many continents and people's movements.

She loved and mentored the children of activists, some of whom grew up visiting her. She helped raise her godchildren, Salim, Tanya, and Gemma. Day in day out, Marilyn participated with, learned from, mentored, and hung out, suffered, and stood with women -- social prisoners and politicals -- in every prison where she lived for the past quarter century. And she is being mourned behind those walls by people who knew her and those who knew of her.(3)

When she was captured and imprisoned in 1985, I was a member of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and spent time in Washington, DC, working as a paralegal on the Resistance Conspiracy case. Around this time, I began to bring my three year old daughter Gemma on social visits with Marilyn. Over the next 25 years, the tender alchemy of love between them grew into a strong family relation of their own.

I imagine that many people spoke with Marilyn about what, along with political solidarity, might help sustain her over the long haul. Prisons are soul-murdering places and it is a testament to human creativity and spirit that many, many prisoners refuse to give in.

From early on we shared poetry and she sent me this poem, beloved by political prisoners the world over. Written in 1949, it's by the Turkish revolutionary poet Nazim Hikmet. In its entirety:

Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison

If instead of being hanged by the neck
you're thrown inside
for not giving up hope
in the world, your country, your people,
if you do ten or fifteen years
apart from the time you have left,
you won't say,
"Better I had swung from the end of a rope
like a flag" --
You'll put your foot down and live.
It may not be a pleasure exactly,
but it's your solemn duty
to live one more day
to spite the enemy.
Part of you may live alone inside,
like a tone at the bottom of a well.
But the other part
must be so caught up
in the flurry of the world
that you shiver there inside
when outside, at forty days' distance, a leaf moves.
To wait for letters inside,
to sing sad songs,
or to lie awake all night staring at the ceiling
is sweet but dangerous.
Look at your face from shave to shave,
forget your age,
watch out for lice
and for spring nights,
and always remember
to eat every last piece of bread--
also, don't forget to laugh heartily.
And who knows,
the woman you love may stop loving you.
Don't say it's no big thing:
it's like the snapping of a green branch
to the man inside.
To think of roses and gardens inside is bad,
to think of seas and mountains is good.
Read and write without rest,
and I also advise weaving
and making mirrors.


I mean, it's not that you can't pass
ten or fifteen years inside
and more --
you can,
as long as the jewel
on the left side of your chest doesn't lose it's luster!

Marilyn Buck read poetry and wrote hundreds of poems in her lifetime. She's beloved by poets both within and beyond the borders of this country.


keywords: transformation is her talent for living

The high tide movements in this country and worldwide, which so moved Marilyn to transform herself, had definitively ebbed. Not only had the political maps changed but also the rate of change accelerated. She kept abreast by reading voraciously, talking with visitors, and conducting a far ranging correspondence.

While by no means a traditional Soviet-style leftist, she watched the Berlin Wall fall in 1989 and then the consequences of the Soviet Union's collapse. The Reagan-Daddy Bush era death squads and counterrevolutionary wars, from Central America to Angola, had bathed regions in blood to blunt popular revolutionary initiatives and, with the Chinese government and party's embrace of greed, the "socialist alternative" all but disappeared. Revolutionary forces laid down their arms. Marilyn loved Cuba and followed events on this brave, unrepentant island closely. The bombs of the first Iraq war rained down.

Even from behind the wire there were bright moments. On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela walked out of a South African prison and shortly thereafter was resoundingly elected president of his country. I remember visiting Marilyn in 1990 at the Marianna, Florida, maximum-security prison with my young daughters, Ona and Gemma, and cheering his release.(4) As we slowly walked from the visiting room that day, they said, as they had many times before and would into the future, "We want her to come home with us."

By 1993, she was transferred to FCI Dublin in Pleasanton, California -- in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area -- where she would live until the last months of her life. Over the years in Dublin she was incarcerated with many political prisoners.(5) As the 21st century got under her skin, Marilyn grew increasingly into a woman of many voices, passions, and fundamental, lifelong commitments. She somehow bore bitter setbacks and crushing disappointments to the limit, with deliberation.

Tendencies towards dogmatism and rigidity softened and this, I believe, made her stronger. She had the capacity to actively turn from spells of frank despair -- which could go on for a period of time -- towards renewal, creative experimentation, and her practical stance of being of use to others. This capacity to make a small and decisive inner turn away from the soul-murdering, isolating regime of prison towards a freedom of mutuality and care was, I believe, one of her great talents..

At her New York memorial tribute former political prisoner Linda Evans spoke about Marilyn's AIDS educational work among women inside. She also told us about how Marilyn organized a benefit in the prison chapel to raise funds for black churches in the South which were being burned to the ground. This was her practice many times over.

Linked to this was her breadth of interest and penetration of thought. She read widely in natural sciences and literature. People who visited and corresponded with her know how engaged she was in thinking through the decline of revolutionary ideologies and movements over the past quarter-century and how well she knew answers for the future would not come easy.

Fluent in Spanish, she followed with great enthusiasm the new heterogeneous radicalism that has emerged in Latin America -- Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay -- over the past decade or so. When I sent her some photos taken by a friend who documented the FMLN electoral victory in March 2009, she wrote back expressing her joy. In recent times as part of her ongoing effort to grasp how the world was changing beyond prison walls, she studied political economy with a group of women on the outside who were close supporters.

Earlier, somewhere around the late 1990's, I helped Marilyn reenter college. Returning to school in midlife had been good for me and I hoped it could assist her growth in unforeseeable and surprising ways. She enrolled in New College of California where she went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and her Master of Fine Arts Degree in Poetics with an emphasis on translation.

One of her teachers, Tom Parsons -- who coordinated her distance learning process, which involved sending tapes of classes to her so she could hear and do course work -- told me she was the most gifted student he'd seen. Two of her other teachers -- the poet David Meltzer and Latin American literature professor Graciela Trevisan -- spoke at her Bay Memorial Celebration and have played important roles in the publication of her work.

Marilyn’s interest in women and feminism, poetics, literature, science, psychology, and cultural studies began to flourish, allowing new bridges to unfold across the last 10 years of her life. Those of us fortunate enough to visit and correspond with her found ourselves growing along with her in surprising ways. Marilyn, locked down in the totally controlled penitentiary space was, paradoxically, our breath of fresh air.

More to come

[Felix Shafer became an anti-imperialist/human rights activist while in high school during the late 1960's and has worked around prisons and political prisoners for over 30 years. He is a psychotherapist in San Francisco and can be reached at felixir999@gmail.com.]

• See "Felix Shafer: Mourning for Marilyn Buck, Part I" / The Rag Blog / January 13, 2011
• Read earlier articles about Marilyn Buck on The Rag Blog.

Footnotes:

(1)Lolita Lebron, Andres Figueroa Cordero, Irvin Flores and Rafael Cancel Miranda assaulted the U.S. Congress in 1954 to bring attention to the colonial plight and harsh repression of Puerto Rico. Along with Oscar Collazo, imprisoned for an earlier attack on the residence of president Truman in 1950, they were released after serving more than 25 years in prison. Lolita Lebron died at 90 years of age on August 1, 2010 -- two days before Marilyn.

(2)Assata Shakur was freed from prison by an armed clandestine action in which no one was harmed. Granted political refugee status, she lives in Cuba. Her autobiography, Assata, is available for people who want to learn about her life in the time prior to her liberation from prison. The website assatashakur.org contains valuable information. On the day before she died, Marilyn received a tender, personal audio message from Assata deeply thanking her for her life and contributions.

(3)In the soon-to-be published (March 1, 2011) book, An American Radical: Political Prisoner in My Own Country, Susan Rosenberg, Marilyn's co-defendant, writes about daily life in the remarkable communities created by women in prison.

(4)Marilyn was imprisoned in Marianna FL with North American anti-imperialist political prisoners Laura Whitehorn, Susan Rosenberg, and Silvia Baraldini.

(5)Some of the women political prisoners she did time with in Dublin: Ida Luz Rodríguez and Alicia Rodríguez, Carmen Valentín, Dylcia Pagán, Ida Robinson McCray, Linda Evans, Laura Whitehorn, Donna Willmott, and women from the Ploughshares and environmental movements.

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Judy Gumbo Albert : Gun Show After Tucson

Checking it out at Crossroads of the West Gun Show. Image from Spirit of the Sportsman.
Tactically armed citizens:
Gun show after Tucson

By Judy Gumbo Albert / The Rag Blog / January 25, 2011

Like most Americans, I’ve been wrestling -- no, agonizing -- about guns. Then I heard about a gun show at San Francisco’s Cow Palace. So I go. To confront my inner turmoil.

Back in the late 1960's, I passionately believed the revolution had come. It was, like the Black Panthers said, time to pick up the gun. John Lennon sang sweetly in the background: "Happiness is a warm gu-hu-hun." My anti-war cohort and I went to a gun show in Contra Costa County. We bought low-end rifles, a shotgun, a handgun. We cleaned ‘em. We went to the Chabot Gun Club and shot ‘em. We cleaned ‘em again.

My cheap .22 Italian rifle against my shoulder made me feel as powerful as Superman.

Forty years later comes Tucson. Other massacres precede it. I react with horror and empathy like the rest of the world. How do I explain my past self in the present? "You’re not the Teabag Hat Lady, you have completely different moral values, an opposite worldview," I tell myself each time I see her on TV with her pals, rifles carried openly at their sides. I once loved guns. After Tucson, the duality is driving me crazy.

My first thought is: what to wear? Not my black Greek fisherman’s cap with its faux diamond peace pin that I bought in Washington, D.C., at the last gigantic pro-choice rally. Not my gorgeous rust-brown Sergeant Pepper jacket with its epaulets, bronze buttons, and pearl encrusted three-inch wide pink velvet flower pin. I settle on inconspicuous: jeans, white vest and sweater, and a black, Access Capital Strategies cap. Maybe they’ll mistake me for a capitalist. I reject the iPad, but worry that my recycled brown paper notepad with its peace dove and ECOHOPE cover might draw attention.

I park behind a Lexus. There’s a BMW to my right, a yellow Hummer to my left, a lone green Prius sits between two black pick-ups, one of which is a Toyota. Not the America First cars I was expecting. I avoid the outdoor red, white, and blue NRA tent, pay my $10, and go inside a crowded, high-ceilinged shell. American flags are omnipresent but not intrusive. “Wow, this feels familiar,” is my first reaction.

A vendor calls himself "Tactically Armed Citizen" (e-mail TGUNNUT). I stop, breathe, and then approach his stacks of two-foot long thin boxes. On top of each is a different make of rifle, most with elaborate eight-inch black scopes. The front barrel of one rests solidly on a black metal tripod. This gun could mow anything down.

A genial curly-haired white guy with wire-rimmed glasses is explaining the gun to a tall forty-something East Indian customer. Their conversation is casual, friendly, knowledgeable; I pick up no hint of prejudice or fear. The price tag is $1,750. The gun looks heavy. But not larger than life, like in the movies.

“What’s this gun for?” I ask, running my fingers down a sleek black barrel.

“Hunting. Target practice.”

Gun-packing mama? Judy Gumbo Albert, in the day.
I realize that, to work things through, my former gun-loving Judy Gumbo persona needs a voice:

“I’m looking for something for self defense.”

“Self-defense? You need a handgun.”

“No,” I reply, “I’ve never liked handguns. Too hard to aim.”

“How about a shotgun?” he suggests.

“Nahh, too much kick.” The ease with which my minimal knowledge comes back surprises me.

Gun vendors are outnumbered by people selling peripherals: green, orange, and camouflage hunters' vests; scary looking gun stocks made of lightweight black metal; high strength instant glue; carefully arranged antique and modern military medals in glass-covered display cases; multiple varieties of beef jerky. Vicious hunting knives sit alongside multicolored switchblades.

I see tables covered with sexy curved black magazine clips that, no matter how large they look, are, I’m assured, jiggered to hold California’s legal limit of 10 bullets. The ammo section is conspicuously bare of product. I’d read there’d been a run on bullets since Tucson, fear of increased restrictions.

I feel bizarrely at home in this multi-aged crowd of beer-bellied white guys, short Spanish-speaking men, young hand-holding couples, Asians, Savage Breed motorcyclists, women pushing strollers. I’m just another Grannie looking to defend herself. The t-shirt on a passerby reads: ‘If you know how many guns you have, you don’t have enough.”

I make my way past a vendor who has lethal looking sleek black military-style firearms for sale. His logo is a target. His guns are made in the USA. And Russia. Of airplane grade aluminum. One has a 10” long calibrated sight he says is accurate up to 1,000 feet.

“What’s this gun for?

“Target practice.”

“You need a guy like Castro to take over.” I overhear a longhaired fifty-something vendor trying to talk a group of Chicano men into buying Stetsons. “Make the rich leave. Give the country to the people.” This man wears a Superman t-shirt. A familiar "what else is nu?" gesture accompanies his New York salesperson prose. I wonder if I’ve found a landsman.

In addition to Stetsons, rifles, and handguns he sells hemp bags with images of Pancho Villa. He says the Mormons who run the gun show won’t let him sell his smoking paraphernalia. He tells me a friend in Kingman, Arizona, owns a gun safe that takes up an entire wall. “He comes home at night, opens it, sits in front of it and stares. He isn’t married.”

“What does he do with all those guns?”

“Target practice.”

I visualize millions of bullets whipping across American farmland, or burying themselves deep into targets at gun clubs and ask myself what violent fantasies lie beneath the meaning of the phrase: target practice.

Then I see it. A small, Judy Gumbo kind of gun. Black. Maybe one and a half feet long. Curvaceous clip. The gun calls to me like that slouchy, punky teenage boyfriend my parents hated.

“It’s an AK 47 pattern pistol,” says Mark, the young vendor with twinkling dark eyes. He’s either impossibly earnest or flirting with me.

“It looks like a rifle, but it’s a handgun. It’s sold to shoot only one bullet at a time, but you can legally convert it to semi-automatic.”

“How fast will it shoot?” I ask, lusting in my heart.

“As fast as you can pull the trigger,” he replies. Mark tells me it’s legal to own a machine gun in 33 states.

Uncle Sam Bank. Image from What's it Worth.
I pick the gun up. I nestle it into my left shoulder blade. Wrong. I’m right-handed. I change hands, balance the gun in my left hand and place my right finger on the trigger.

“Nah,” Mark says, “Hold it straight out in front of you. It shoots like a pistol.”

“How much?”

"$829.00”

“What do you use this kind of gun for?"

“Target practice.”

“Thanks,” I tell Mark. “I need to think about it.”

On my way out, I spot an Uncle Sam Bank. It’s 11 inches tall, made of cast iron with "BANK" painted in gold on all four sides of a red base. Uncle Sam stands erect. He wears black tails, striped white pants and a blue top hat with stars. You put a coin in his metal hand, press a metal nail and ‘"fwump," the coin ends up in a red suitcase that, if it weren’t metal, could double for a carpet bag.

I disdained such items in the 1970s as patriotic artifacts of the war-mongering ruling class. In 2011, I buy it for $20. Given the financial crisis, bank bailouts, and profit-seeking patriotism of the arms industry, an Uncle Sam Bank feels like the perfect gun show souvenir.

I was 26 years old in 1968. I’d not yet experienced the death of a loved one or the birth of a child. My late husband Stew Albert and I, the late Abbie and the late Anita Hoffman, the late Jerry Rubin and Nancy Kurshan, plus a few thousand fellow Yippies, coughed our lungs out in Chicago from acrid tear gas lobbed at us for protesting the Vietnam War at the Democratic National Convention.

The following year, in that same city, Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered in their beds. This reality gave birth to my gun fantasies; yet I never used my gun against a living being. Our movement managed, without assault weapons, to end a war and help change lives of people struggling for equality and justice.

Today I wish I had a magic bullet to stop gun violence. And I worry about the big-bellied men I saw at the gun show who claim semi-automatic weapons are just for target practice. It seems obvious to me that their ultra-right-wing fantasies are closer to becoming real than my youthful Yippie romanticism ever was.

I departed the gun show at peace with my past, but very much aware it felt like Tucson never happened.

[Judy Gumbo Albert is completing Yippie Girl, an insider’s memoir of love and friendship among the Yippies and other romantic revolutionaries of the late 1960s. In addition to publishing two books, her work has appeared on CounterPunch, and The Rag Blog. Contact her on Facebook or at her website, www.yippiegirl.com.]

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Friday in Austin : Free Marilyn Now!

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Join us in Austin this Friday:
Free Marilyn Buck Now!

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / June 23, 2010

A benefit for Marilyn Buck this Friday, June 25, will raise funds and gather healing energy for the former Austinite. Slated for release on parole this August, Buck was diagnosed with cancer late last year. Her plans for starting life over at age 62 now must be amended to allow for recuperation and healing.

Marilyn Buck, an award-winning poet originally from Austin, was convicted of politically-motivated crimes in the 1970s and 1980s. She has spent 25 years in prison. She earned two college degrees, taught herself Spanish in order to communicate with and for Latina prisoners, and organized AIDS education and literacy classes in prison. She won respect as a principled voice for the rights of oppressed people, especially women, people of color, and other political prisoners.

Benefit organizer Mariann Wizard shared a moving and personal tribute to Marilyn that appeared recently on The Rag Blog. The benefit will bring together those who knew Marilyn when she worked on Austin’s underground newspaper, The Rag (predecessor to The Rag Blog), and those who have only known of her as a political prisoner.

The benefit will feature music by Karen Abrahams and Riders Against the Storm, poetry by Joe P. Carr, and remarks by Robert King of the Angola 3. Benefit hosts include NOKOA, The Rag Blog/New Journalism Project, Resistencia Bookstore, Ex-pinta Support Alliance, Ecology Action, One Love Kitchen, South Austin Popular Culture Center, and YES, Inc/Phogg. Supporters include the Angola 3, Austin Jail Project, Bookwoman, MonkeyWrench Books, Ruby’s Bar-B-Que, Teatro Vivo, Threadgills, and many more.

The benefit will take place 7-11, Friday, June 25th at 3105 E. Cesar Chavez. $10 at the door is requested and advance tickets are available at Resistencia Bookstore and Planet K stores.

If you can't attend the Austin benefit, you can contribute to Marilyn Buck's support by sending a check to:

Youth Emergency Service, Inc.
P.O. Box 13549
Austin, TX 78711

Make sure to note "for Marilyn Buck" on the contribution.

Robert King and Mariann Wizard on Rag Radio

Robert King and Mariann Wizard were Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin, Tuesday, June 22.

King spent 32 years in Louisiana's Angola prison, 29 of them in solitary confinement, for a crime he didn't commit. King, Albert Woodfox, and Herman Wallace were active in the 1970s with the Black Panther Party while in prison, and came to be known as the Angola 3. An acclaimed BBC documentary, In the Land of the Free, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, was released earlier this year. The film explores the facts surrounding the Angola 3’s incarceration.

Mariann Wizard joined Dreyer and King on the show to discuss Marilyn Buck's case and the upcoming benefit. Tuesday's program is now on the Rag Radio archives, and you can listen to it here.

Rag Radio airs every Tuesday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP 91.7 FM, and can be streamed live on the internet here.

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