What is a terrorist? According to the Oxford dictionary, a terrorist is "a person who uses unlawful violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims." By that definition and almost any other, the people in this article would most certainly qualify. My intention is neither to glorify nor demonize them but to simply share their story as part of the larger cultural context of political violence in America & hopefully spark a conversation on how we view terrorism committed by our own citizens.
Remember when I said that violent, radical crime was utterly ubiquitous throughout the late 20th Century? For instance there was one bank robbery every HOUR in Los Angeles in the 1980s. That's to say nothing of all the airplane hijackings, government office break-ins, domestic bombings, kidnappings & assassinations of prominent figures. Violent crime was so common that many of the stories of those who committed it were almost completely lost to the sands of time. Well, here's one of those little known stories of a woman whose life was deeply intertwined with some of the most notorious characters in the radical Leftist groups of the 1970s. Enjoy.
Marilyn Jean Buck was a white middle class woman born to a nurse mother & Episcopal minister father in Midland, Texas circa 1947. Despite these WASP-y beginnings, Marilyn became radicalized after her family was harassed with burning crosses on their lawn because her father opposed segregation. She became involved in anti-war, anti-racist activities on her college campus as well as supporting Palestinian liberation, women's lib, Native American movements & other progressive causes of the day... all totally honorable & normal for the time. It wasn't until 1973 that she incurred her first legal charge for purchasing ammunition with a fake ID, earning her a 10 year prison sentence from which she absconded & went underground in 1977 while on furlough.
And this is where the story goes left. Far Left.
May 19th Communist Organization
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| (L to R): Susan Rosenberg, Judy Clark & Betty Ann Duke of May 19th Org |
Around this time Marilyn joined the May 19th Communist Organization, referred to by Politico as the "first all-female terrorist group in the U.S.A." Their objectives were threefold: free all political prisoners in the U.S., appropriate capitalist wealth via armed robberies to fund the 3rd stage and initiate a series of bombings & attacks leading to a revolution that would spark the switch from capitalism to a communist state. Pretty lofty.
The group was comprised of former Weather Underground members as well as members of the Black Liberation Army, the Black Panther Party & the Republic of New Afrika. This multi-racial collective, loosely referred to as "The Family," was armed, highly organized & not fuckin' around. Notably, Marilyn was also the only white member of the Black Liberation Army. Despite their eventual turn to violence the May 19th ladies started off benignly as the Madame Binh Graphics Collective, whose job it was to produce propaganda posters like the one shown below.
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| Poster by the May 19th Communist Organization in Chicago, 1977 |
May 19th was organized & led entirely by women, who made the bombs, picked the targets & implanted the devices themselves. Working alongside Marilyn were Susan Rosenberg (student of a progressive private school on the Upper West Side, and also a lesbian), Judy Clark (daughter of a high-level member of the Communist Party in NY) & Laura Whitehorn, a Brooklyn-born activist with a Master's Degree from Brandeis University. This faction of The Family referred to themselves as "the white edge," but leader Mutulu Shakur allegedly called them "the crackers". In any case, they largely paid for the safe houses & drove the getaway cars so as to throw police off the scent of the group. Mutulu ran an acupuncture wing in a radical methadone clinic where he preached leftist propaganda, telling addicts that methadone was "poison" to the Black community. That's where he met & trained Susan Rosenberg in acupuncture & various revolutionary terrorist tactics.
After a couple successful armored car robberies, Marilyn Buck & Co. were successful in another big way: helping Joanne Chesimard--better known as Assata Shakur, godmother of the legendary Tupac Shakur--escape from Clinton Correctional Facility & flee to Cuba where she resides to this day as a political refugee. Assata was being held in a male prison, the only female inmate to ever be housed in such conditions, after being convicted of shooting a New Jersey State Trooper in 1973. (Though there's serious debate about whether Shakur was actually guilty of the murder. While she was definitely on the scene of the crime, she claims her hands were in the air at the time of the shooting & no gunpowder residue was present on her body according to the State Police's own investigation. Also, none of her fingerprints were found on any of the weapons at the scene).
The group took two guards as hostages in the melee; Marilyn Buck acted as the getaway driver. The book "Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol" by William Rosenau goes into greater detail on how they pulled off their daring prison break & got Assata out of the country. In 2017, President Trump placed Assata Shakur on the FBI's Most Wanted List, making her the first woman in history to ever make the list. He did so on Tupac's birthday.
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| North wing of U.S. Capitol bldg. after '83 bombing (left); May 19th members on right |
The Family's next couple of Brinks truck robberies were unfortunately very violent, with 2 police officers & 2 guards being killed in 2 separate robberies in 1981. They were also very lucrative, netting around $1 million--equivalent to $3 million in 2022 currency.
Sufficiently funded by this point, the collective turned their focus to the final "revolutionary" leg of their plan: the bombings. They started in 1983 with the U.S. Capitol (photo above) & National War College in D.C. They would commit their final attacks in 1984 at the Washington Navy Yard followed by the South African Consulate in NYC. Paranoia had set in hardcore by this point as it tends to do when committing federal crimes at this level. The group were living in run-down apartments in Baltimore, New Haven & other cities, earning their living doing office work & other semi-skilled labor. They were constantly changing wigs & aliases in an attempt to avoid detection.
But it all came crashing down in 1985.
Flashback: Bombing of the U.S. Capitol
The Fall
The first 2 members of May 19th were arrested in 1984, with Susan Rosenberg going down in November of that year. She & comrade Timothy Blunk were indicted on Federal charges after a giant cache of explosives was found in their possession. This led to a safehouse raid & the discovery of numerous damning documents including personal info on two dozen corporate execs & top NY & NJ police officials. They even found a detailed file on former President Nixon's houses(!) By 1985 all members were arrested. All except Elizabeth Duke & a woman named Donna Joan Borup, who the FBI has referred to as "highly intelligent with a photographic memory." Duke remains a fugitive & Borup is on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist List as of 2022.
As for Marilyn Buck, she would remain incarcerated on an 80-year sentence from 1985 until 2010 when she was released due to advanced uterine cancer. She died only 3 weeks after release. While locked up she was allegedly a model prisoner, receiving a Bachelor's degree in Psychology & writing much poetry. She also contributed interviews & articles on solitary confinement, women in prison, political prisoners & other topics to a number of publications including Monthly Review & Sojourners Magazine. The articles can be read at the links above.
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| Marilyn with Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture) circa 2001 |
Who Is a Terrorist?
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| U.S. terrorists from 2018-2019 (all white males) - Source: FBI |
Circling back to the original question, it's clear that the tactics Marilyn & the other "Family" members used were indeed those of terrorists. Nobody's disputing that. From shooting cops to bombing national landmarks in order to "send a message," these are the actions of a textbook terrorist. If they'd done those things in our post-9/11 world they likely would've gotten even harsher sentences including potentially the death penalty.
When clinic bombings, doctor assassinations or other forms of violence are carried out against law abiding abortion providers in the U.S, the perps are referred to as "pro-life radicals" or "right wing extremists" rather than terrorists or representatives of the much larger problem of Christian fascism festering in our Christian community & Republican party. The list of these incidents is long yet they're mostly swept under the rug & into the dustbin of history, likely because the perpetrators are white American men just doing what their pastors are firing them up to do every Sunday. And said pastors belong to one of the 2 major parties that run this country--the so-called "Moral Majority" or religious right. Some of them are cash cow campaign donors who deliver a reliable voter base to the polls like clockwork too. All a candidate has to do to win their support is run on a platform of "traditional family values" plus some combination of God, patriotism & other Christ-like values such as tax breaks for the rich & the "freedom" of U.S. citizens to be outnumbered by firearms.
Not only are these Christian leaders violating the Johnson Amendment with this obscene blurring of church-and-state boundaries, they're being given preferential treatment by our media & powerful parts of the D.C. establishment (see: The Fellowship, National Prayer Breakfast). Compare this to Muslims who are often portrayed by our media as rabid Jihadists led by fatwa-issuing imams like Ruhollah Khomeni. In reality, the conservative wings of these Stone Age Abrahamic religions have a lot in common. A LOT. Despite the widespread violation of the tax code, only one church has ever had its tax exemption revoked by the IRS. One.
American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel (Christian Nationalism)
And what of all the mass shootings committed by manifesto-writing "lone nut" racists & incels like Payton S. Gendron, Elliot Rodger & Jake Davison who commit their crimes with the explicit aim of triggering a race war or killing off those deemed inferior (women, gays, etc)? In the vast majority of instances, they're not actually lone nuts but members of larger communities who share their twisted views. But the media stops short of calling them terrorists, as does the FBI & other agencies. If that isn't terrorism, I'm not a socially awkward shut-in with an affinity for drugs.
Then there's the bioterrorism caused by burst oil pipelines on public lands, polluting the water & killing native species of birds, fish & other marine life while the guilty corporations ban journalists from filming the fallout. This is not unlike when generations of Indigenous Canadians are poisoned with mercury by industrial pollution that could've easily been prevented by just NOT dumping it into the water, contaminating the fish they relied on as a food source. These & other large scale environmental crimes certainly would be labeled terrorism a foreign nation was doing it.
And we can't forget our warlike military & police. When cops racially profile as a matter of policy, participate in brutal murders of unarmed minorities & throw protesters in unmarked vans before hiding behind a blue wall of silence, what is it if not terrorism? This is gang culture to a T, from the "no snitching" mentality down to the shared badge & gang colors, yet it's allowed to occur in broad daylight all over this country. Meanwhile the perpetrators are portrayed as a domestic army of valiant troops who are practically beyond criticism... the opposite of terrorists. All over the world our (actual) military drone-bombs innocent civilians while we starve their citizens with cruel sanctions (example: Yemen). Again, not a peep about terrorism. Right now our country is backing a nation whose military is filled with openly racist neo-Nazi soldiers. Ukraine was described by Vice News as a "cultural hub for the extreme right" in this 2021 piece. Need I go on?
War! (What Is It Good For)?
The distinction between "radical extremist" and "terrorist" is vital. We don't have a War on Those Things, we have a War on Terror. Being labeled a terrorist is perhaps the only thing worse than being called a racist. Don't think so? Ask yourself which one you'd rather be labeled by the FBI. If you only consider some forms of politically-motivated violence to be terrorism but make exceptions when it's done in the name of a cause you believe in, it's time to check yourself--you may be on the path to enabling a terrorist or becoming one yourself. It's all bad & we should be more evolved as a species by now, dammit.
The mid-to-late 20th Century was entirely too violent, and for what? Most of the lasting good created by groups like the Black Panthers came from their altruistic programs like the Free Breakfast Program, which is now commonplace in all our public schools (despite the Panthers generally getting none of the credit). All these bombings achieved was to increase the security state's surveillance of us & accelerate the loss of our freedoms.* While it may feel damn good to even the scales of justice by "offing a few pigs," it accomplishes nothing in the long run.
Groups like Antifa should remember the fate of these folks the next time they feel like "punching a Nazi". All you're doing is contributing to the climate of hyper-masculine violence that ends with atrocities like the Charlottesville car attack & the inevitable police state crackdown that always follows. Women, children, the elderly & disabled are always the first casualties when men start careless wars. Everyone has the right to express their views with words, even if they're abhorrent. No one has a right to commit physical violence against another. This is a basic tenet of a free & civilized society. Any view worth holding can be effectively promoted with fact-based arguments & positive actions such as leading by example. If you have to resort to imposing your will on others through violence like Hadi Matar--the Muslim terrorist who stabbed author Salman Rushdie--or Robert L. Dear, the Christian terrorist who shot up a Colorado Planned Parenthood, it's because your beliefs AND your method of selling them are shit.
Reflections
If one positive thing can be said about the May 19th & BLA members who carried out these plots, it's that they were extremely dedicated to their cause. It would've been much easier to take that $1 million (worth $3 million today), run off to another country like Cuba with their comrade Assata & live like kings. Or for one of the members to snitch on the others in exchange for a reduced sentence... or steal ALL the money from the others in a stick-up & use it to buy drugs & other vices. (It's said Mutulu had a taste for cocaine, which he called "sniff", though it never rose to the level of a serious addiction).
But they held true to their original plan well into the mid-'80s, a time of staunch conservativism & greed under the Reagan regime. This was long after the revolutionary Age of Aquarius was over & even the most devout Yippie, Hippie, SDS member, Black Panther & White Panther had settled into suburban domestic life. The BLA & M19CO knew that their revolutionary actions would land them in prison (or worse), but they did it anyway rather than compromising their beliefs for a little personal comfort, something you see far too little of these days. You have to admire that in this age of hollow, performative TikTok influencers & fragile sjw's. The true Left didn't let identity politics or differences in immutable traits like sex, race or national origin stand in the way of their organizing & getting goals accomplished, even if those goals weren't always rational, positive or even sane.
* Make no mistake, I don't mean to imply that all Black Panthers or other Leftist groups were engaged in these extremist tactics. Far from it. These factions were a minority within a minority. Fred Hampton himself denounced the violence in this video. He summed it up perfectly, referring to the radical Weathermen as "well-intentioned but reactionary, militaristic & pig-like" in their approach. Of course Fred was later drugged by an informant & gunned down by Chicago police with 90+ shots as he slept, so we see which way the violence flowed in that situation. His murder, which was orchestrated by Herbert Hoover's FBI under the brutal COINTELPRO operation, was one of the contributing factors that set groups like May 19th on the path to violent revolution. The same was true of the ATF's aggressive handling of Waco in 1993, which radicalized Timothy McVeigh & inspired the Oklahoma City Bombing 2 years to the day later. One could argue that terrorists aren't born, they're made.
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| Marilyn Buck, right, with family |
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| With attorney |
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| Talking Mural (La Lucha Continua, San Francisco) |
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