Days of Rage (80 page)

No one said a thing.

“You’re looking at a fucking revolutionary!”

The FBI men just stared. It was November 4, 1984. In two days Ronald Reagan and George Bush would be reelected to the White House. The word “revolutionary” no longer had any meaning in America, if it ever truly had. Lying there on a cold Ohio lawn, Ray Luc Levasseur was a spitting, snarling anachronism, a radical equivalent of the aging Japanese infantrymen found in Pacific caves well into the 1970s, men still fighting a war everyone else knew only from history books.

After a minute the agents flopped Gros down beside him. One wrapped the three girls in bulletproof vests and walked them over to say good-bye to their parents. “Where will you go?” Carmen asked her mother, tears welling in her eyes. Rosa and Simone stared at their feet.

“We’ll probably be close by you,” Gros said from the ground. “Give the men Grandma’s number. You remember it, don’t you? Don’t let your sisters out of your sight. Stay together. And be brave.”

The agents hustled the three little girls into the back of a squad car. Carmen rolled down the window, pushed back her long brown hair, and, as the car moved away, yelled, “I’ll be brave, Mommy.”

 • • • 

They arrested Laaman and Curzi and Williams later that day. The Manning family hadn’t arrived yet, and quickly disappeared. They would remain at large for nearly six more months, eventually captured at their new home in Norfolk in April 1985.

EPILOGUE

On a cool evening in November 2010, two hundred people gathered at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Center in Harlem for a memorial service celebrating the life of Marilyn Buck, who had died of cancer that summer, just a month after being released from federal prison. She had served twenty-five years.

The audience was a Who’s Who of the old underground movement. Weather’s Cathy Wilkerson sat in a rear corner beside her attorney, Elizabeth Fink. Beside them stood chiseled Ray Levasseur, looking fierce in a black knit cap. Kathy Boudin stood alone at the back. A BLA attorney, Robert Boyle, wandered among the crowd, shaking hands. Up front sat a tall African American man, Levasseur’s old comrade Kazi Toure. One after another old friends rose to praise Buck—as a poet, as a friend, as a comrade. Someone read aloud a letter from Sekou Odinga. Amazingly, in more than an hour, no one said the words “bombing” or “bank robbery” or “murder” once. Buck’s attorney was the only one who even came close, joking about what Buck would have thought of the Chase Manhattan branch that sat on a street corner outside.

A string of special guests was introduced. Linda Evans, the onetime Weatherman who was arrested with Buck in 1985, jogged down the aisle,
smiling and waving her hands, as did two of the FALN women, friends from prison.

After about an hour Wilkerson and Fink rose to leave. “This is just too much,” Wilkerson muttered. “This is ridiculous.”

“This movement is dying, and no one here seems to know it,” Fink agreed. “These people are just deluded. This is crazy.”

No one that evening was in the mood to provide an honest assessment of what, if anything, the 1970s-era underground had achieved. But in terms of tangible successes, of hard-won political or moral victories, the short answer has to be: not much. They had launched a kind of war on America, and they had lost. Talk to the underground’s veterans today—many of them in their sixties, most mellowed, some not—and almost all are hard pressed to point to any lasting impact the underground had on American society, short of metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs. While it drew the attention of law enforcement for more than a decade, the underground did little to force changes in the way America acted or was governed. Looking back across a chasm of forty years, those who pursued “armed struggle” might best be compared to the German “Werewolf” guerrillas who briefly attempted to resist Allied forces after the end of World War II, or to those Japanese infantrymen who emerged dazed from Pacific island caves decades after the war’s end, not realizing that the fighting had stopped years before.

“It was all a mistake,” Sekou Odinga admits today. “People weren’t ready. People weren’t ready for armed struggle. One of the things we now know, and should’ve known then, is we were way out in front of the people. A little more study would’ve made that clear. You can be a vanguard in the struggle, but you have to have the people behind you, and they weren’t.”

Asked what she and her peers achieved, Silvia Baraldini closes her eyes. “These things we did, they were in service of our politics.” She looks down. “Sometimes I ask myself, was armed struggle necessary? Not necessarily. That’s all I can say. But we thought so at the time. We thought so at the time. What matters is what we thought at the time.”

“You have to understand, the underground, it became a cult,” says Fink. “Weather, it was a cult. The SLA. The sixties drove them all crazy, all of us. All they did was listen to their own people, their own opinions. By ’74, ’75,
when the war is over, you should have said, you know, ‘What the fuck? The revolution isn’t happening.’ But they were crazy. I was part of that craziness. I know this to be true. It’s just like the Middle East today, Al Qaeda, a lot of crazy people doing all this very bad shit.”

One of the few positive legacies of the underground struggle, some of its adherents argue, is the example its leading figures set for young radical activists today, such as those in the “Occupy” movement. Young radicals today may not agree with, or be able to make sense of, the idea of protest bombings, but many clearly admire the passion and extreme commitment people like Bill Ayers devoted to trying to change America for the better. Ayers, who remains perhaps the most visible veteran of the underground struggle, is today an active author and lecturer; at bookstores and shopping malls young activists line up to get him to sign their books. The irony is lost on few of his peers. Ray Levasseur, who has completed his own memoir, wryly notes that articles he publishes on the Internet receive exponentially more exposure than any of the communiqués he issued after his many bombings.

What matters most about the underground, people like Cathy Wilkerson insist, is simply that it existed, that it demonstrated the lengths to which passionate Americans would go to confront what are now viewed, correctly, as Richard Nixon’s corrupt government, an unjust war, and rampant racism at large in America. Three years after talking with her in that Brooklyn diner with her grandson, I asked Wilkerson what the underground had achieved. In an e-mail she replied:

For the hundreds if not thousands of whites who engaged in some form of armed resistance, it mattered that we
chose
to step out of the encasing, protective cover of privilege—class and/or race—and take equal risk with those who had no choice but to fight for a better future. That our strategic choices were corrupted by the inherited arrogance of privilege is of secondary importance—both to me, looking back at it now, and to the many young people who continue to revisit our choices as a way to center themselves for the present. Few if any would argue we had some advanced insight into the mechanisms of political change, but many still take strength from the fact that we chose to identify with the victims of oppression and in that commonness to wrestle with questions of social change, of some more beneficial course in relation to each other and to our planet.

She went on:

The “Good German” metaphor hung over us, what happens if one doesn’t pay attention. How easy, almost inevitable, it was to be complicit with the death and poisoning and starvation that resulted from exploitation. That is still true. To be complicit made us feel desperately unclean, rotting from within. While in retrospect our strategic choices were rooted in arrogance and ignorance, there are no regrets about the choice to do our best to acknowledge that rot and to rid ourselves of it. With age, we recognize that the struggle against the exterior forces—be they the laws of corporate profit, the advantages of racism, the inequality of resources—is co-joined with our inner struggles to live up to the best of human capacity both individual and social, our yearning for roses as well as bread, and our need to celebrate together. We didn’t get this at all back then.

Those with privilege really do not hear or see. The oppressed ask, what does it take to be listened to? The youth ask, what does it take to change things tomorrow—not in ten years or twenty. Does that ever really change? The issues we grappled with seem relevant today even if our solutions were lacking. We at least brought some of these issues to a larger public and since then a great many young people have thought about them as well.

This is perhaps the kindest way to view the underground struggle, as a well-meaning if misguided attempt to right America’s wrongs. There are other observers, however, who argue persuasively that the crimes the underground committed overwhelm any altruistic motivations. The most insistent advocate of this view is a forty-nine-year-old New Jersey banker and writer named Joseph Connor, whose father, Frank, was one of those killed at Fraunces Tavern in 1975. In recent years Connor has launched what amounts to a one-man crusade to counter those who might applaud any aspect of the underground’s legacy. He has testified against Oscar López’s parole, appeared on Fox News to call Bill Ayers a “punk,” and pressured the City College of New York
to back off student-generated plans to name a building after Assata Shakur and Willie Morales.

Connor’s campaign began that afternoon in January 1975 when, having just turned nine years old, he was waiting for his father to come home early to celebrate his birthday. “I remember my mom was making a meal,” he says today. “It ended up being served to mourners at the funeral.” Ever since, Connor has marveled at efforts to portray certain underground figures as anything other than murderers. “These people—the Weathermen, the FALN—they were deluded, self-motivated, egotistical, what’s the word I’m looking for, people who just think of themselves and nobody else. It was all about them. They knew better than everybody else. You think of them as kids, and they were young for the most part, misguided youth. But they were murderers. Murderers first, revolutionaries second. They appointed themselves my father’s judge, jury, and executioner. He represented something they didn’t like, so they decided they had the right to kill him. Him and others.”

But what truly drives him “mental,” Connor goes on, is the notion that modern terrorism on U.S. soil dates only as far back as the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. “That gets me every time,” he says. “To think that America thinks none of this ever happened, that it’s not even remembered, it’s astounding to me. You know, I blame the media. The media was more than happy to let all this go. These were not the kinds of terrorists the liberal media wanted us to remember, because they share a lot of the same values. They were terrorists. They were just the wrong brand. My father was murdered by the wrong politics. By leftists. So they were let off the hook. That’s what we’re left with today, a soft view of these people, when they were as hardened as anybody. They were just terrorists. Flat-out terrorists.”

 • • • 

The men and women who peopled the ’70s-era underground have gone on to lives as disparate as their backgrounds. Many who escaped prosecution reentered conventional society, embarking on belated careers as doctors, lawyers, and especially educators. Of those who were prosecuted, a dozen or so remain in prison, some more than forty years after their crimes; these include Mutulu
Shakur and his comrades Judy Clark and David Gilbert; Oscar López, the last of the FALN behind bars; Ray Levasseur’s partners Tom Manning and Jaan Laaman; and Herman Bell and Anthony Bottom, now known as Jalil Muntaquim, convicted in the murders of Waverly Brown and Joseph Piagentini. Sekou Odinga was paroled in November 2014.

A number of deaths linked to underground groups, most notably the murders of Sergeant Brian McDonnell of the San Francisco police and the NYPD’s Rocco Laurie and Greg Foster, remain unsolved. A handful of cases have been reopened in recent years, to mixed results. In 2003 the onetime BLA member Fred Hilton, now known as Kamau Sadiki, was successfully prosecuted for the 1971 murder of Atlanta police officer James Greene. Hilton had been living in Brooklyn, working as a Verizon repairman. Less successful was the prosecution of a group of onetime Black Panthers, including Herman Bell and Anthony Bottom, who came to be known as the “San Francisco Eight.” They were indicted in January 2007 for the 1971 murder of Officer John V. Young at the city’s Ingleside police station. Bell and Bottom pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, while charges against the rest were eventually dropped.

Most veterans of the BLA melted into obscurity. Among the few to attract publicity in later years was Dhoruba bin-Wahad. After his first two trials ended in a hung jury and a mistrial, he was sentenced to twenty-five years to life for his alleged involvement in the shootings of patrolmen Curry and Binetti in 1971. In 1975 he sued to overturn his conviction, arguing that the government hadn’t shared all it knew about his case. His litigation forced the FBI to divulge thousands of pages of documents about its notorious COINTELPRO harassment campaign, enough evidence that a judge finally freed bin-Wahad in 1990. After living for a time in West Africa, he resides today outside Atlanta. He turned seventy in 2015. Eldridge Cleaver died in 1998. Donald Cox died in 2013.

Thirty-seven years after her escape from a New Jersey prison, Assata Shakur still lives in Cuba. She operates a Web site, assatashakur.org, devoted to her revolutionary views. Despite periodic sightings around the world, there is no sense that the U.S. government has ever come close to apprehending her. In 2013 the FBI added her to its list of Most Wanted Terrorists, which produced
a good deal of scoffing in some quarters. She remains a polarizing figure among those who knew her in her heyday. Silvia Baraldini, for one, believes that Shakur never did enough to help Sekou Odinga and others imprisoned for helping her escape. “Assata owes Sekou, she really does,” says Baraldini. “In all their years in prison, I’ve never heard her once say, you know, there are people who really helped me, and they need your help. I’ve never heard her say that. And she needs to.”