May Day (Black Panthers)
Black Panther Party
"On May 1, 1969 the Black Panther Party held a massive rally in San Francisco. Speakers Kathleen Cleaver, Bobby Seale, and Charles Garry present the rally's demands for the release of Huey Newton and all political prisoners. The film includes footage of the police raid on Panther headquarters in San Francisco a few days prior to the rally and the Panther's Breakfast for Children Program." (Roz Payne Archive) <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rD8hKpFDIIo" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Newsreel Films
YouTube
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1969
film
Fred Hampton
Black Panther Party
This poster, created by Black Panther Party Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas, ca. 1969, features Fred Hampton, leader of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party. Hampton was murdered by the FBI after a raid on Panther headquarters in Chicago on December 4, 1969. The poster includes two quotes. The quote at the top reads "You can jail a revolutionary/ but you can't jail the/ revolution. You can run a/ freedom fighter around the/ country but you can't run freedom/ fighting around the country. You/ can murder a liberator, / but you can't murder/ liberation." The second reads "Fred Hampton Deputy/ Chairman Illinois Chapter/ Black Panther Party/ Born August 30, 1948/ Murdered by Fascist Pigs/ Dec. 4, 1969."
Emory Douglas for the Black Panther Party newspaper
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1969
poster
Liberated Guardian Supplement, April 15, 1971
New Left
The National Guardian was a radical, left newsweekly published out of New York City from 1948-1992. The paper was established by James Aronson, Cedric Belfrage, who were committed activists for the Progressive Party and Henry Wallace presidential campaign, as well as John McManus and Josiah Gitt, both liberal newspaper men, though Gitt quickly dropped out. In addition to the Progressive Party, the newspaper also held ties with American communists and the labor movement. The Cold War took a toll on the newspaper, with the decline of the Progressive Party and the rise of McCarthyism in the U.S. During the post-WWII era, the newspaper focused coverage on opposition to the Cold War and militarism, support for emerging anti-colonial struggles around the world, defense of those targeted by McCarthyism, advocacy for the black freedom movement. The newspaper continued to hold a cozy relationship with the Communist Party U.S.A., though it did break with the group over some issues, particularly support for independent political action beyond party control. The 1960s-era brought a new period of political rancor within the editorial ranks of the newspaper. In the end, the periodical changed leadership and renamed itself The Guardian. The Guardian took an increasingly Maoist line, supporting armed struggles against colonialism. During this period, the newspaper attempted to forge ties with SDS and SNCC, writing that "The duty of a radical newspaper is to build a radical movement.” "We are movement people acting as journalists," the Guardian′s staff now proudly declared. The Liberated Guardian formed out of a workers strike at The Guardian newspaper in New York City in the Spring of 1970. The Liberated Guardian was notable for it strong stand in favor of armed struggle. An ideological and political split within the ranks of the Liberated Guardian staff led to the newspaper’s demise in late-1973. The original Guardian pressed on and took on a more hard-line Marxist-Leninist ideology in the late-1970s, eroding that newspaper’s reputation for investigative journalism. Readership and support for The Guardian declined through the 1980s and the paper ceased publication in 1992.
These pages are from an 8-page supplement focused on revolutionary art, COINTELPRO and FBI files, and debate within the anti-war movement over strategy.
Liberated Guardian
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
April 15, 1971
underground press
The Black Panther, Summer 1991
Black Power
Printed in the Summer of 1991, this issue of The Black Panther commemorates the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party. This special edition publication begins with letters sent in from supporters in New Jersey, New York, California, and Oklahoma that aim to raise the consciousness of the black community. Also highlighted in this issue is the continued police brutality in the Los Angeles area, student protests at the University of Vermont and the City University of New York, a tribute to fallen members of the Black Panther Party and a call for release of political prisoners associated with the Black Panther Party that are still serving time due to COINTELPRO related crimes. Most of the issue is focused on the legacy of Malcolm X, expressing the significance of his struggle for liberation, a timeline of his life, and the evolution of his ideology throughout the movement. There are also short international news briefs, a section on “Fallen Comrades,” a historical analysis of the slave plantation and prison system, as well as book reviews and a reading list.
The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
summer 1991
underground press
National Lawyers Guild
Social Justice, Civil Rights
The National Lawyers Guild was established in 1937 as "an association of progressive lawyers and jurists who believed that they had a major role to play in the reconstruction of legal values to emphasize human rights over property rights." The Guild, which continues its work today, is considered "the oldest and most extensive network of public interest and human rights activists working within the legal system."
According to the NLG website, "In the 1960s, the Guild set up offices in the South and organized thousands of volunteer lawyers and law students to support the civil rights movement long before the federal government or other bar associations were involved. Guild members represented the families of murdered civil rights activists Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, who had heeded the Guild’s call to join the civil rights struggle and were assassinated by local law enforcement/Ku Klux Klan members. Lawsuits initiated by the National Lawyers Guild brought the Kennedy Justice Department directly into the civil rights struggle in Mississippi and challenged the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention. Guild lawyers defended thousands of civil rights activists who were arrested for exercising basic rights and established new federal constitutional protections in ground-breaking Supreme Court cases such as Dombrowski v. Pfister, which enjoined thousands of racially motivated state court criminal prosecutions; Goldberg v. Kelly, the case that established the concept of “entitlements” to social benefits that require Due Process protections; and Monell v. Department of Social Services, which held municipalities liable for brutal police officers. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Guild members represented Vietnam War draft resisters, antiwar activists, and the Chicago 7 after the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. Guild offices in Asia represented GIs who opposed the war. Guild members argued U.S. v. U.S. District Court, the Supreme Court case that established that Nixon could not ignore the Bill of Rights in the name of “national security” and led to the Watergate hearings and his eventual resignation. Guild members defended FBI-targeted members of the Black Panther Party (including Angela Davis), the American Indian Movement, and the Puerto Rican independence movement and helped expose illegal FBI and CIA surveillance, infiltration, and disruption tactics that the U.S. Senate Church Commission detailed in the 1975-76 COINTELPRO hearings and that led to enactment of the Freedom of Information Act and other specific limitations on federal investigative power."
The button reads, “…more dangerous than those… who throw the bombs.”
National Lawyers Guild
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
undated
Button
Physical Object
"The Story of the Murder of Fred Hampton," John Kifner
Black Panther Party
Chairman of the Black Panther Party in Illinois, Fred Hampton was murdered on December 4, 1969 by Cook County police by the order of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Chicago police as he slept in his apartment. His death functioned as a catalyst for protests on police corruption and government oppression in the North. This article by John Kifner, reprinted from San Francisco-based magazine, Scanlon's, addresses biased media reporting on the death of Hampton and surveillance of him by state and federal authorities.
written by John Kifner, originally published in Scanlan and reprinted by Committee to Defend the Panthers
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1969
article
"Prisoners of War: The Case of the New York Three"
Black Panther Party and Prisoner's Rights Movement
On May 21, 1971, two New York police officers, Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini, were shot and killed in a Harlem housing project. The killings took place within the broader context of growing black militancy and governmental repression against the Black Panther Party. Initially, five men were arrested and charged with the crime, Anthony (Jalil Muntaqim) Bottom, Albert (Nuh) Washington, Herman Bell, Gabriel and Francisco Torres. Charges were later dismissed against the Torres brothers. Bell, Bottom and Washington were members of the the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army and all targets of FBI COINTELPRO operations. The Black Liberation Army was an underground wing of the Black Panther Party. The group's program was to wage war against the United States Government. Its stated goal was to "take up arms for the liberation and self-determination of black people in the United States." Some believed the killings of the two police officers was retaliation for the killing of George Jackson during an attempted break-out from Attica Prison a few weeks earlier. Richard Nixon and other members of his administration, along with J. Edgar Hoover and other members of the FBI worked with New York Police in a special operation, called, "Newkill," to apprehend the perpetrators of these killings. The trial was controversial and included a number of questionable practices by local and federal law enforcement. All three were convicted and sentenced to long prison sentences. In 2012, Herman Bell admitted to the New York Parole Board that he played a part in the killings. He was released in April 2018. Washington died of cancer while still imprisoned in 2000. Bottom remains incarcerated.
This pamphlet, published by Friends of the New York Three, provides an overview of the case and broader context on COINTELPRO.
Friends of the New York Three
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. mid-1970s
pamphlet
FBI agents (1 image)
Black Panther Party/COINTELPRO
Photographs of FBI agents, William A. Cohendet and Charles Bates, along with their wives and Roz Payne. The agents helped Payne piece together some of the information related to COINTELPRO and the Black Panther Party when she was working on the DVD release of the Newsreel films on the Panthers in the late-1990s.
Roz Payne
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1999
Stay in the Streets, Free the Panthers
Black Power
This Black Panther Party button addresses the effort to free Black Panther members imprisoned by the state and federal government during the Black Power era. The Panthers were subjected to widespread repression and a particular target of the FBI's COINTELPRO programs, which categorized the organization as a domestic terrorist group. To movement activists and allies, these prisoners were more accurately described as political prisoners.
Black Panther Party
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. late-1960s
Button
Physical Object
Free the Panther 21
Black Power
In April of 1969, after a lengthy, coordinated effort by local and federal law enforcement to infiltrate and disrupt the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party, District Attorney Frank Hogan indicted 21 members of the organization, claiming a widespread conspiracy to murder policemen and blow up four police stations, five department stores, railroad lines, the Queens Board of Education building, and the Bronx Botanical Gardens. Ultimately, 13 Panthers, including Afeni Shakur and Dhoruba Bin Wahad, stood trial in a case that became a cause celebre among black militants and the broader New Left. For ten months prior to the trial, the jailed Panthers were held in solitary confinement with lights on 24 hours a day and denied reading materials, recreational facilities and family visitation. Several were not given mattresses and the two female Panthers were limited to four sheets of toilet paper per day. It was also reported that prison officials harassed Panther attorneys. Famed composer, Leonard Bernstein, helped raise bail money for the “New York 21.” During the court proceedings, District Attorney Hogan referred to the Panthers as a “terrorist organization,” read from Mao Zedong’s “Little Red Book.” showed jurors the film, “The Battle of Algiers” and attempted to introduce political posters from one of the defendant’s apartment into evidence. In what was, at the time, the longest and most costly trial in New York state history, the Panthers were acquitted of all 156 charges on May 12, 1971. In the wake of the failed prosecution, local law enforcement and the FBI continued to target the New York Black Panther Party.
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1969-1971
Button
Physical Object
NLG v. FBI
Civil Liberties and Legal Justice
The National Lawyers Guild was formed in 1937 as a network of progressive lawyers interested in “human rights over property rights.” During the 1930s and 1940s, the NLG was involved in defending labor rights, fighting fascism in Spain and helping prosecute Nazis during the Nuremburg Trials. They also fought for racial justice and helped draft the U.N.’s Declaration on Human Rights. In the late-1940s and 1950s, the NLG pioneered storefront law offices for low-income people and defended many victims of the McCarthyite attacks on civil liberties, the Rosenbergs and Hollywood Ten.
According to the NLG website, “In the 1960s, the Guild set up offices in the South and organized thousands of volunteer lawyers and law students to support the civil rights movement long before the federal government or other bar associations were involved. Guild members represented the families of murdered civil rights activists Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, who had heeded the Guild’s call to join the civil rights struggle and were assassinated by local law enforcement/Ku Klux Klan members.
Lawsuits initiated by the National Lawyers Guild brought the Kennedy Justice Department directly into the civil rights struggle in Mississippi and challenged the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention. Guild lawyers defended thousands of civil rights activists who were arrested for exercising basic rights and established new federal constitutional protections in groundbreaking Supreme Court cases such as Dombrowski v. Pfister, which enjoined thousands of racially motivated state court criminal prosecutions; Goldberg v. Kelly, the case that established the concept of “entitlements” to social benefits that require Due Process protections; and Monell v. Department of Social Services, which held municipalities liable for brutal police officers.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Guild members represented Vietnam War draft resisters, antiwar activists, and the Chicago 7 after the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. Guild offices in Asia represented GIs who opposed the war. Guild members argued U.S. v. U.S. District Court, the Supreme Court case that established that Nixon could not ignore the Bill of Rights in the name of “national security” and that led to the Watergate hearings and his eventual resignation.
Guild members defended FBI-targeted members of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and the Puerto Rican independence movement and helped expose illegal FBI and CIA surveillance, infiltration, and disruption tactics that the U.S. Senate Church Commission detailed in the 1975-76 COINTELPRO hearings, which led to enactment of the Freedom of Information Act and other specific limitations on federal investigative power.” (https://nlgmass.org/nlg-national-history/)
National Lawyers Guild
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
late-1960s or early-1970s
Button
Physical Object
Bank of Amerika Check
Anti-Vietnam War Movement
On February 25, 1970, radical New Left attorney, William Kunstler, gave a talk at Harder Stadium on the campus of the University of California-Santa Barbara. At the time, Kunstler was the defense attorney for the “Chicago 7,” who were charged with conspiracy to instigate a riot during the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention. During his speech, Kunstler noted recent local controversies, including the firing of Anthropology Professor, Bill Allen, as well as scattered violence between students and police in the student enclave of Isla Vista. During his remarks, Kunstler said, “I have never thought that breaking of windows and sporadic, picayune violence is a good tactic. But, on the other hand, I cannot bring myself to become bitter and condemn young people who engage in it.” The crowd whistled and applauded. Following the talk, as those in attendance walked toward a park in Isla Vista for a rally, police, who patrolled Isla Vista in what was termed a “saturation patrol technique,” arrested Rich Underwood, mistaking a bottle of wine he was drinking for a Molotov Cocktail. When Underwood resisted, police beat him. The arrival of more riot clad police set off clashes with students who shouted and threw rocks and bottles. Santa Barbara City College student and radio broadcaster, Malcolm Gault-Williams, explained, “Imagine being in Harder Stadium and having the lawyer of a high-profile national trial … draw connections between what has been happening nationally with what has been happening on campus. And then imagine a large part of those attendees leave the stadium and … watch as police not just arrest a student but beat the shit out of him.” Another student, John Riley, echoed that interpretation, saying, “Cops arrested this guy and set everything off. It was like throwing a match into a gasoline can, everybody just went nuts.”
That evening, the unrest spread, as student broke the windows of several real estate agencies, set police cars on fire, and then began targeting the Isla Vista Bank of America building, ultimately burning it down. UCSB Sociology Professor, Dick Flacks, recalled, “By evening I would guess hundreds of people were in the street and at some point people lit a trash dumpster and pushed it through the bank doors.” During the incident, several waves of riot-clad police were repelled by protesters. As one student recalled, “All of the sudden, all you heard out windows of the houses right next door was the Rolling Stones’ ‘Street Fighting Man.’”
It was the second consecutive night of disturbances in Isla Vista. The previous day, 150-200 people set trash cans on fire and vandalized local real estate offices, including the front window of the Isla Vista Bank of America branch, after the arrest of “Lefty” Bryant, a well‐known black student radical, and three other campus activists, Greg Wilkinson, Jim Trotter and Mick Kronman.
Students targeted Bank of America as a symbol of American capitalism. Bank of America had branches in Vietnam, helped fund the war industry and also side with California grape growers, rather than striking workers in the United Farm Workers. Becca Wilson, a student and editor of El Gaucho, explained, “It was the biggest capitalist thing around. It was a symbol of the corporations that benefited from war and were oppressing people all over world, in whose interest government was acting.” Another student, Greg Desilet, offered a slightly different interpretation, “The day afterwards a lot of it was rationalized as anti-war. The bank was seen to be in league with defense corporations providing armaments for Vietnam. That was the rationale given, but in my view it was more. It was locally centered with a lot of local anger toward police that had developed over time. People were just pissed off. They were really pissed off.” The Isla Vista Bank of America incident received national media attention, prompting Governor Ronald Reagan to declare a state of emergency and call in the National Guard, who made an estimated 300 arrests.
On April 18, 1970, unrest again hit Isla Vista, this time with tragic results. The Bank of America had established a new temporary branch and students again protested. Police arrived in armored trucks, dressed in riot gear and armed with tear gas. Radical activists over-turned cars and again began burning buildings. As Gault-Williams recounted, “The college’s student body president called on more moderate students to head down to the protest to try to calm some of the more radical students who were rioting and lighting fires. Kevin [Moran] and his roommates headed down to the scene. After helping put out a fire in a Taco Bell, Kevin ran to Bank of America, which had also been torched. While the students attempted to put out the fire, police officers moved in and began tossing tear gas into the crowds. During the confusion, police reported at the time, an officer’s rifle accidentally went off and fragments of the bullet struck and killed Kevin.” Initially, local police claimed a sniper bullet killed Moran, but ballistic tests showed that it came from an officer’s rifle. He was later exonerated. In June, 17 students, most well-known campus activist leaders, were indicted for the Isla Vista unrest, despite the fact that several had solid alibis. That same month, a third incident of unrest struck Isla Vista, prompting a harsh response from Los Angeles police. That police response attracted a rebuke from conservative writer, William F. Buckley, in the Los Angeles Times.
In his 1979 tell-all book, Deep Cover, former FBI agent, Cril Payne, claims the FBI was very active in Santa Barbara at the time and played a role in instigating the burning of the Isla Vista Bank of America building as a part of their COINTELPRO operations.
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1970
bank check
Asylum for Kristina Berster
New Left
On July 16, 1978, West German, Kristina Berster, and two American accomplices were picked up by U.S. Border Patrol officials in Vermont for illegally crossing into the United States from Canada. Initially, the FBI and other law enforcement claimed Berster was a terrorist on the lamb from Germany, where she was a member of the Baader-Meinhof gang, also known as the Red Army Faction.
Baader-Meinhof was a radical, left-wing organization established in 1970 that engaged in a series of bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, bank robberies and shoot-outs with police over the course of three decades, though their activity peaked in 1977. Stefan Aust, who wrote a book about the history of Red Army Faction, detailed the background and emergence of the group, “World War II was only twenty years earlier. Those in charge of the police, the schools, the government — they were the same people who'd been in charge under Nazism. The chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, had been a Nazi. People started discussing this only in the 60s. We were the first generation since the war, and we were asking our parents questions. Due to the Nazi past, everything bad was compared to the Third Reich. If you heard about police brutality, that was said to be just like the SS. The moment you see your own country as the continuation of a fascist state, you give yourself permission to do almost anything against it. You see your action as the resistance that your parents did not put up.” As Red Army Faction member, Gudrun Ennslin, is reported to have said after the death of one his comrades, “They'll kill us all. You know what kind of pigs we're up against. This is the Auschwitz generation. You can't argue with people who made Auschwitz. They have weapons and we haven't. We must arm ourselves!” Aust went on to explain the appeal of Baader-Meinhof to some West Germans, “The Baader-Meinhof Gang drew a measure of support that violent leftists in the United States, like the Weather Underground, never enjoyed. A poll at the time showed that a quarter of West Germans under forty felt sympathy for the gang and one-tenth said they would hide a gang member from the police. Prominent intellectuals spoke up for the gang's righteousness (as) Germany even into the 1970s was still a guilt-ridden society. When the gang started robbing banks, newscasts compared its members to Bonnie and Clyde. (Andreas) Baader, a charismatic action man indulged in the imagery, telling people that his favourite movies were Bonnie and Clyde, which had recently come out, and The Battle of Algiers. The pop poster of Che Guevara hung on his wall, (while) he paid a designer to make a Red Army Faction logo, a drawing of a machine gun against a red star.” Red Army Faction was organized into cells and practiced what Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella called the “urban guerrilla.” According to Marghella, an urban guerrilla, was “A person who fights the military dictatorship with weapons, using unconventional methods... The urban guerrilla follows a political goal, and only attacks the government, big businesses, and foreign imperialists.” In response, West German authorities initiated a growing clamp-down on left-wing activists and lawyers, as well as critics of the government, generally.
At the same time in the U.S., legislators and law enforcement were growing increasingly concerned about “terrorism” and looking for legal and social bases to tighten strictures on so-called “terrorists.” One point of concern was the northern border with Canada. In this context, many saw the Kristina Berster case as an opportunity for U.S. law enforcement in the post-1960s era to promote this new anti-terrorism agenda. At first, the FBI Press Officer claimed the arrest “marked the first time a member of the notorious urban gang has been caught trying to enter the country.” In Burlington, Vermont, Assistant U.S. Attorney, Jerome O’Neill, stated that Berster was one of the 34 most wanted persons in the world. These were explosive claims that were picked up and repeated by national press across the country, including the New York Times. Quickly, though, those grand assertions began to unravel. West German authorities corrected FBI statements, saying that Berster was not, in fact a member of the Baader-Meinhof gang, and that they may not even be interested in extraditing her, prompting a corrected statement by the FBI. Yet, the cat was out of the bag in the U.S. media and the retraction did not change the overall tenor of coverage in the case, with most media continuing to refer to Berster as a “terrorist.”
American journalist Greg Guma has written extensively about the Berster case. In an article titled, “How disinformation turned Kristina Berster into an ‘enemy of the state,’” he described the context of growing radicalism in Germany when Berster entered the university:
“WHEN KRISTINA Berster, then 20, arrived in Heidelburg in late 1970, the student movement was well underway. The young in Germany were restless and angry, mostly about Vietnam. The rhetoric had turned revolutionary since the days of ‘Ban the Bomb!’ and the Berlin Wall. Student radicals numbered over 170,000, some of them turning gradually to Communism or Maoist ideology.
In a sense, German youth were emulating American dissent. The New Left in the US had reached a crisis point with the police riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago and the Days of Rage, which sparked the formation of the Weather Underground. German protest erupted with demonstrations in Berlin and the bombing of two empty department stores by Andreas Baader and Gudrin Ensslin.
The purpose of the bombings, said Baader, was ‘to light a beacon’ against the consumer society. As Ensslin explained, ‘We set fires in department stores so you will stop buying. The compulsion to buy terrorizes you.’ The analysis was superficial, but it struck at the core of German complacency in an era of intensive economic development.
With their accomplices, the couple was caught and convicted on arson charges, but they found support from one of Germany’s leading leftist journalists, Ulrike Meinhof.
When they were released in 1969, pending appeal of their cases. Baader and Ensslin went underground with help from Meinhof, and on September 29, 1970, the Red Army Faction (RAF) was officially born with the robbing of three West Berlin banks. Baader said the first problem of ‘the revolution’ was finding financial support.
By early 1971, West German police were turning to automatic weapons and brutal tactics at demonstrations. Anyone who looked like a nonconformist risked a spontaneous interrogation. New search, arrest and gun laws were passed; roadblocks were a common sight on the Autobahn. The excuse for the broad extension of police powers was a nationwide search for the Baader-Meinhof group, even though the political fugitives were responsible for only five out of 1,061 bank robberies committed during their heyday. The first suspect killed by police was a 20-year-old hairdresser named Petra Schelm.
Berster was interested in psychology and grew increasingly alarmed at what she viewed as the isolation, atomization and alienation of people in West German society, as well as the frightening new psychological tactics authorities were developing against political dissidents. Berster was deeply influenced by radical concepts of therapy articulated by people like Thomas Szasz, who wrote, “The parallel between political and moral fascism is close. Each offers a kind of protection. And upon those unwilling to heed peaceful persuasion, the values of the state will be imposed by force: in political fascism by the military and the police; in moral fascism by therapists, especially psychiatrists.” After Berster was implicated by an informant as a left-wing sympathizer, she was detained and imprisoned for six months. During that time, she saw first-hand the erosion of legal rights in the West German system, as her lawyer was targeted and sanctioned by the state.
When Baader and Meinhof were arrested in 1971, they were placed in what was called “wipe-out detention.” As Guma explained, “It was a world of total sterility: luminous white, with fluorescent lights always on and all windows covered. The cells were soundproofed and filled only with white noise. In the ‘Dead Wing’ there were no visitors except lawyers and relatives. Reading materials were censored and other prisoners were never seen nor heard. When Jean-Paul Sartre saw Baader after two years in the ‘Dead Wing,’ he said, ‘This is not torture like the Nazis. It is torture meant to bring on psychic disturbances.’
Berster called this form of solitary confinement ‘the most effective way to destroy personality irreversibly. Humans are social. When you cut that off, when people are not able to talk or relate to others, an internal destruction begins. You become catatonic; somatic problems begin.’”
As a result of her own experience and the treatment of members of the Red Army Faction, Berster became increasingly interested in and involved with the prisoner’s rights movement in her country through the Socialist Patients Collective. In 1972, West German political leaders passed repressive new legislation against radicals, heightening concern that Berster and others would not receive fair trials. At the same time, growing debate divided the New Left in West Germany over the necessity of armed struggle. Berster later told supporters in Vermont that she had “problems with violence… I can’t shoot someone. I could never do violence.” As the 1970s pressed on, Berster decided to flee West Germany, spending time in Yemen, obtaining an Iranian passport and then ending up in Montreal. At her trial, Berster explained why she had crossed over to the U.S. in Vermont, “When I was in Paris, I was told that to get into the States, all you had to do was walk through Vermont’s northern border… They gave me a plan, with a map they drew, to enter from Noyan, Quebec, to Vermont.” Berster hoped to receive asylum in the U.S.
The Berster case attracted the support of a group of New Left activists in Vermont, including Roz Payne, as well as famed radical lawyer, William Kunstler, who represented Berster and saw in her case an opportunity to press back against increasing legal attacks against leftist lawyers in Germany, as well as new forms of political repression in the U.S. “This case goes far beyond Kristina Berster,” Kunstler told the press. “I am very concerned with West Germany’s treatment of so-called terrorists and the so-called left wing lawyers who defend them.” Kunstler also expressed concern over the “panic” reaction in the U.S. over the “terrorist” label, which resulted in $500,000 bail for Berster, to date the largest amount ever set for a border charge. The Berster Defense Committee in Vermont conducted a regional survey to assess public perceptions of the case and mounted rallies in support of Berster.
In October of 1978, after the longest jury deliberation in Vermont history, Berster received a mixed verdict, convicted on a felony and misdemeanor charge related to her border crossing, but acquitted of the more serious conspiracy charge. Several jurors were clearly sympathetic to Berster’s political plight and expressed hope after the trial that she might still win asylum in the U.S. The judge sentenced her to 9 months in jail, all but two weeks of which she had already served. The prosecutor in the case continued to stoke public fears about Berster, revealing to the media that Berster had spent time in Yemin. Immediately, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service initiated deportation proceedings against Berster. Roz Payne worked as an investigator and paralegal for attorneys Bill Knsutler, Jesse Berman, Bill Kittel and Chris Davis on Berster’s immigration case. Ultimately, in 1979, a deal was brokered between U.S. and West German officials to drop the original charges against Berster and allow her to return home without a deportation order.
Reflecting on the case years later, Guma wrote:
“What to make of the Kristina Berster case? In one sense, it was a matter of human rights. Victimized by shifting international politics, a student activist whose only crime was crossing a border to seek asylum had spent almost two years in prison, in Germany and then the US.
But there was more to it than that. Berster’s case demonstrated how a campaign against terrorism can easily go off the rails, threatening anyone who actively tries to change the way society is run – from civil libertarians and prison reformers to anti-nuclear protesters and feminists. Across the country, despite claims that the days of COINTELPRO were over, reports were surfacing – harassment, covert agents provoking violence in nonviolent groups, wiretapping, political grand juries, and intrusive surveillance. As the 1970s wound down a chill was setting in, and terrorism was becoming an excuse for virtually any tactic the government found effective…
[Berster’s] US stay had revealed a few things — for example, that officials, working in and with intelligence agents, were ready to lie in court and sanction illegal surveillance, and that some media could be used to distribute rumors and falsehoods; The evidence remained circumstantial, but it also looked like Vermont had witnessed the manufacturing of a terrorist scare, an attempt to warp public perceptions for political gain. The FBI had lied, so had the prosecutor. Anyone who supported the defendant was targeted for surveillance. Then there was the simulated terrorist ‘siege.’
In essence, it looked like a concerted effort to influence public opinion, what would soon be labeled ‘perception management’ in a Defense Department manual. Basically, this tactic involves both conveying and denying information ‘to influence emotions, motives, and objective reasoning.’ The goal is to influence both enemies and friends, ultimately to provoke the behavior you want. ‘Perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations,’ according to DOD.
In the Reagan years this type of operation was euphemistically labeled ‘public diplomacy,’ which was officially expanded to include domestic disinformation during the Bush I administration. In those days it was mostly about stoking fear of communism, the Sandinistas, Qaddafi, and anyone else on Reagan’s hit list. Clinton modifications were outlined in Directive 68, which still showed no distinction between what could be done abroad and at home. When Bush II took office, the name was changed again, this time to ‘strategic influence.’
Kristina Berster Defense Committee
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1978
poster
Assata Shakur - Free All Black Liberation Fighters
Black Power
Assata Olugbala Shakur is a political activist, author, fugitive and aunt of hip-hop artist, Tupac Shakur. She was born in 1947 in New York City, JoAnne Deborah Byron. Following her parents’ divorce, Byron spent much of her childhood moving between her grandparents and other family in Wilmington, North Carolina, and New York City, where her mother moved after she remarried. As a student at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and then City College of New York, Byron was exposed to African American history and Black Nationalism, which made a significant impact on her political development. She met her husband, Louis Chesimard, and began participating in the student movement, anti-war activism and the struggle for black liberation. In 1970, while visiting Oakland, California, Byron met members of the Black Panther Party and joined the Harlem branch upon her return to New York, where she worked with the breakfast program. Frustrated with the Black Panther Party’s unwillingness to work with other black radical organizations, Byron left the party in 1971 and joined the Black Liberation Army, an underground Black Power group whose goal was to “take up arms for the liberation and self-determination of black people in the United States.” In her autobiography, she wrote, “the Black Liberation Army was not a centralized, organized group with a common leadership and chain of command. Instead there were various organizations and collectives working together and simultaneously independent of each other.” The group believed "the character of reformism is based on unprincipled class collaboration with our enemy" and asserted the following principles:
1. That we are anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist.
2. That we must of necessity strive for the abolishment of these systems and for the institution of Socialistic relationships in which Black people have total and absolute control over their own destiny as a people.
3. That in order to abolish our systems of oppression, we must utilize the science of class struggle, develop this science as it relates to our unique national condition.
It was also at this time that Byron changed her name to Assata (“she who struggles”) Olugbala (“love for the people”) Shakur (“the thankful”).
In 1972, the FBI issued a warrant for Shakur’s arrest for alleged crimes committed by the BLA and was the subject of a multi-state manhunt by law-enforcement. During a traffic stop on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973, Sundiata Acoli Zayd Malik Shakur and Assata Shakur got into an altercation with two police officers, Werner Foerster and James Harper. The incident resulted in the deaths of Zayd Shakur and Foerster. Harper and Assata Shakur were also wounded in the shoot-out. Over the next few years, beteen 1973 and 1977, Shakur was charged with a variety of crimes related to the 1973 incident and others, including murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, bank robbery and kidnapping. Six of the charged were ultimately dismissed, though she was convicted of Foerster’s murder and seven other felonies related to that incident in 1977 and sentenced to life in prison plus thirty years. Many black liberation and New Left activists argued that Shakur did not receive a fair trial. In 1979, three members of the BLA helped Shakur escape from prison. For the next few years, Shakur lived underground, ultimately fleeing the U.S. for Cuba in 1984, where she was reunited with her daughter, who had been born in prison while she was on trial. Shakur continues to live in Cuba and remains on the FBI’s list of “most wanted terrorists.”
The quotation printed on this poster is from a letter Shakur wrote on July 4, 1973 from prison. The full letter is here:
Black brothers, Black sisters, i want you to know that i love you and i hope that somewhere in your hearts you have love for me. My name is Assata Shakur (slave name joanne chesimard), and i am a revolutionary. A Black revolutionary. By that i mean that i have declared war on all forces that have raped our women, castrated our men, and kept our babies empty-bellied.
I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heart-less robots who protect them and their property.
I am a Black revolutionary, and, as such, i am a victim of all the wrath, hatred, and slander that amerika is capable of. Like all other Black revolutionaries, amerika is trying to lynch me.
I am a Black revolutionary woman, and because of this i have been charged with and accused of every alleged crime in which a woman was believed to have participated. The alleged crimes in which only men were supposedly involved, i have been accused of planning. They have plastered pictures alleged to be me in post offices, airports, hotels, police cars, subways, banks, television, and newspapers. They have offered over fifty thousand dollars in rewards for my capture and they have issued orders to shoot on sight and shoot to kill.
I am a Black revolutionary, and, by definition, that makes me a part of the Black Liberation Army. The pigs have used their newspapers and TVs to paint the Black Liberation Army as vicious, brutal, mad-dog criminals. They have called us gangsters and gun molls and have compared us to such characters as john dillinger and ma barker. It should be clear, it must be clear to anyone who can think, see, or hear, that we are the victims. The victims and not the criminals.
It should also be clear to us by now who the real criminals are. Nixon and his crime partners have murdered hundreds of Third World brothers and sisters in Vietnam, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. As was proved by Watergate, the top law enforcement officials in this country are a lying bunch of criminals. The president, two attorney generals, the head of the fbi, the head of the cia, and half the white house staff have been implicated in the Watergate crimes.
They call us murderers, but we did not murder over two hundred fifty unarmed Black men, women, and children, or wound thousands of others in the riots they provoked during the sixties. The rulers of this country have always considered their property more important than our lives. They call us murderers, but we were not responsible for the twenty-eight brother inmates and nine hostages murdered at attica. They call us murderers, but we did not murder and wound over thirty unarmed Black students at Jackson State—or Southern State, either.
They call us murderers, but we did not murder Martin Luther King, Jr., Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, George Jackson, Nat Turner, James Chaney, and countless others. We did not murder, by shooting in the back, sixteen-year-old Rita Lloyd, eleven-year-old Rickie Bodden, or ten-year-old Clifford Glover. They call us murderers, but we do not control or enforce a system of racism and oppression that systematically murders Black and Third World people.
Although Black people supposedly comprise about fifteen percent of the total amerikkkan population, at least sixty percent of murder victims are Black. For every pig that is killed in the so-called line of duty, there are at least fifty Black people murdered by the police.
Black life expectancy is much lower than white and they do their best to kill us before we are even born. We are burned alive in fire-trap tenements. Our brothers and sisters OD daily from heroin and methadone. Our babies die from lead poisoning. Millions of Black people have died as a result of indecent medical care. This is murder. But they have got the gall to call us murderers.
They call us kidnappers, yet Brother Clark Squires (who is accused, along with me, of murdering a new jersey state trooper) was kidnapped on April z, 1969, from our Black community and held on one million dollars' ransom in the New York Panther 21 conspiracy case. He was acquitted on May 13, 1971, along with all the others, of 156 counts of conspiracy by a jury that took less than two hours to deliberate. Brother Squires was innocent. Yet he was kidnapped from his community and family. Over two years of his life was stolen, but they call us kidnappers. We did not kidnap the thousands of Brothers and Sisters held captive in amerika's concentration camps. Ninety percent of the prison population in this country are Black and Third World people who can afford neither bail nor lawyers.
They call us thieves and bandits. They say we steal. But it was not we who stole millions of Black people from the continent of Africa. We were robbed of our language, of our Gods, of our culture, of our human dignity, of our labor, and of our lives. They call us thieves, yet it is not we who rip off billions of dollars every year through tax evasions, illegal price fixing, embezzlement, consumer fraud, bribes, kickbacks, and swindles. They call us bandits, yet every time most Black people pick up our paychecks we are being robbed. Every time we walk into a store in our neighborhood we are being held up. And every time we pay our rent the landlord sticks a gun into our ribs.
They call us thieves, but we did not rob and murder millions of Indians by ripping off their homeland, then call ourselves pioneers. They call us bandits, but it is not we who are robbing Africa, Asia, and Latin America of their natural resources and freedom while the people who live there are sick and starving. The rulers of this country and their flunkies have committed some of the most brutal, vicious crimes in history. They are the bandits. They are the murderers. And they should be treated as such. These maniacs are not fit to judge me, Clark, or any other Black person on trial in amerika. Black people should and, inevitably, must determine our destinies.
Every revolution in history has been accomplished by actions, al-though words are necessary. We must create shields that protect us and spears that penetrate our enemies. Black people must learn how to struggle by struggling. We must learn by our mistakes.
I want to apologize to you, my Black brothers and sisters, for being on the new jersey turnpike. I should have known better. The turnpike is a checkpoint where Black people are stopped, searched, harassed, and assaulted. Revolutionaries must never be in too much of a hurry or make careless decisions. He who runs when the sun is sleeping will stumble many times.
Every time a Black Freedom Fighter is murdered or captured, the pigs try to create the impression that they have quashed the movement, destroyed our forces, and put down the Black Revolution. The pigs also try to give the impression that five or ten guerrillas are responsible for every revolutionary action carried out in amerika. That is nonsense. That is absurd. Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our oppression. We are being manufactured in droves in the ghetto streets, places like attica, san quentin, bedford hills, leavenworth, and sing sing. They are turning out thousands of us. Many jobless Black veterans and welfare mothers are joining our ranks. Brothers and sisters from all walks of life, who are tired of suffering passively, make up the BLA.
There is, and always will be, until every Black man, woman, and child is free, a Black Liberation Army. The main function of the Black Liberation Army at this time is to create good examples, to struggle for Black freedom, and to prepare for the future. We must defend ourselves and let no one disrespect us. We must gain our liberation by any means necessary.
It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Right edge has "Jackrabbit Press 464 Willamette Eugene Oregon" printed in black and a black stamp for the Assatta Shakur Defense Committee.
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1973
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Reading/Performance FBI Letters: The War on Black Americans
Black Power and Repression
As a part of her work on the DVD reissue of the Newsreel Films three Black Panther Party films, Roz Payne collected a trove of primary source materials on the FBI COINTELPRO operations against the Panthers. This event features Payne reading selections from those materials.
FBI
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
unknown
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Free the Panthers
Black Panther party
This poster encourages support for the Panther 21 in New York and includes a quotation from Afeni Shakur: “We will have our liberation or Babylon will have ashes to sleep on.”
In April of 1969, after a lengthy, coordinated effort by local and federal law enforcement to infiltrate and disrupt the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party, District Attorney Frank Hogan indicted 21 members of the organization, claiming a widespread conspiracy to murder policemen and blow up four police stations, five department stores, railroad lines, the Queens Board of Education building, and the Bronx Botanical Gardens. Ultimately, 13 Panthers, including Afeni Shakur and Dhoruba Bin Wahad, stood trial in a case that became a cause celebre among black militants and the broader New Left. For ten months prior to the trial, the jailed Panthers were held in solitary confinement with lights on 24 hours a day and denied reading materials, recreational facilities and family visitation. Several were not given mattresses and the two female Panthers were limited to four sheets of toilet paper per day. It was also reported that prison officials harassed Panther attorneys. Famed composer, Leonard Bernstein, helped raise bail money for the “New York 21.” During the court proceedings, District Attorney Hogan referred to the Panthers as a “terrorist organization,” read from Mao Zedong’s “Little Red Book,” showed jurors the film, “The Battle of Algiers” and attempted to introduce political posters from one of the defendant’s apartment into evidence. In what was, at the time, the longest and most costly trial in New York state history, the Panthers were acquitted of all 156 charges on May 12, 1971. In the wake of the failed prosecution, local law enforcement and the FBI continued to target the New York Black Panther Party.
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1969-1971
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