LITMIR.BIZ

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

Part One Arrest and Trial

       Chapter 1 Explosives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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