CREATING A MOVEMENT WITH TEETH A Documentary History of the George Jackson Brigade edited by Daniel Burton-Rose Creating A Movement With Teeth: A Documentary History Of The George Jackson Brigade Edited by Daniel Burton-Rose This edition © PM Press 2010 ISBN: 978-1-60486-223-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2010927765 Cover design by Josh MacPhee/Justseeds.org Interior design by Josh MacPhee/Justseeds.org 10987654321 PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org Printed in the USA on recycled paper. Contents Permissions 8 Acknowledgments 9 Preface, Ward Churchill 11 Introduction, Daniel Burton-Rose 17 Conventions 25 I. PROFILES OF THE GEORGE JACKSON BRigADE 27 i. Law Enforcement Perspectives Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information Act Document, “Domestic Security” 34 Seattle Police Department Intelligence Division, “George Jackson Brigade” 35 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “RE: GEORGE JACKSON BRIGADE,” January 4, 1978 38 ii. Difficult to Digest: The Corporate Media on the George Jackson Brigade Walter Wright, “Ed Mead: Two Faces of a Dangerous Man” 47 Walter Wright, “Pages in the Life of Bruce Seidel: Two Sides of a Revolutionary” 51 Neil Modie, “Janine and Jori: The Two Faces of a Jackson Brigade Suspect” 54 Community Response: Chris Beahler et al., “Open Letter To Dr. Jennifer James” 57 John Arthur Wilson, “Sherman—‘Ready When the Time Comes’” 59 iii. Invisible People: A Working Class Black Man and a White Dyke Michelle Celarier, “Does the State Conspire? The Conviction of Mark Cook” 65 rita d. brown, “a short autobiography” 71 II. COMMUNIQUÉS 75 Olympia Bombing, June 1, 1975 77 Capitol Hill Safeway, September 18, 1975 “We Cry and We Fight” 80 Community Response: Left Bank Collective 83 New Year, 1976 84 Communiqué Fragment, “On the Weather Underground . .” 86 International Women’s Day, March 1976 “We’re Not All White and We’re Not All Men” 90 Community Response: snapdragon, “A Letter to the George Jackson Brigade” 95 May Day, May 12, 1977 97 Community Response: TheWalla Walla Brothers 104 Summer Solstice, June 21, 1977 105 Capitalism is Organized Crime, July 4, 1977 107 “Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories,” July 4, 1977 110 Community Response: Vinegar Beard Collective 112 Community Response: Stagecoach Mary Collective, August 10, 1977 114 Open Letter to the John Brown Book Club, September 1, 1977 117 Bust the Bosses, October 12, 1977 122 Letter to the Automotive Machinists Union Local 289, October 16, 1977 124 You Can Kill a Revolutionary, But You Can’t Kill a Revolution, November 1977 126 An Open Letter to Bo (Rita D. Brown), November 1977 “To Bo Wherever We May Find Her” 129 Open Letter To Jailers Spellman and Waldt, December 23, 1977 133 Bust the Union Busters, December 24, 1977 137 Our Losses Are Heavy . Easter Sunday 1978 140 III. THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE IS THE SOURCE OF LiFE 143 The Power of the People Is the Source of Life: Political Statement of the George Jackson Brigade 147 History and Summation of Brigade Unity 148 The Left 151 Weather Influence 152 The Police (and Other Backward Elements) 153 Terrorism 155 The Road Forward—Strategy 156 Tactics 159 Anti-Authoritarian Statement 164 “Serve the People—Fight for Socialism” 169 Chronology of Brigade Actions 178 Community response: The Valerian Coven 184 IV. WHEN IS THE TiME? SEATTLe’S LEFT COMMUNITY DEBATES ARMED ACTION 189 John Brockhaus and Roxanne Park, “Ed Mead Speaks from Prison” 193 Roxanne Park, “Terrorism and the George Jackson Brigade” 202 Michelle Whitnack, “On Armed Struggle: A Continuing Dialogue” 210 Left Bank Collective, “We . Support Armed Action . Now” 214 Ed Mead, “Ed Mead Replies” 222 Roxanne Park and Emmett Ward, “Grand Jury: Three Who Refused to Speak” 231 Papaya, “More Than ‘Critical Support’ for GJB” 240 Bill Patz, “Captured Members Explain Their Politics” 241 V. PROCESSINg 251 Daniel Burton-Rose, A Collective Interview with George Jackson Brigade Veterans Bo Brown, Mark Cook, and Ed Mead 253 Notes 269 Selected Newspaper Articles on the George Jackson Brigade, 1975–1978 293 Selected Bibliography 303 Index 306 Permissions Walter Wright, “Ed Mead: Two Faces of a Dangerous Man,” copyright Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Reproduced with permission. Walter Wright, “Pages in the Life of Bruce Seidel: Two Sides of a Revolutionary,” copyright Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Reproduced with permission. Neil Modie, “Janine and Jori: The Two Faces of a Jackson Brigade Suspect,” copyright Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Reproduced with permission. John Arthur Wilson, “Sherman—‘Ready When the Time Comes,’” copyright Seattle Times. Reproduced with permission. 8 Acknowledgements Thanks are due first of all to Jamie of Abraham Guillen Press in Quebec, whose reprinting of the Brigade’s Political Statement and com- muniqués precipitated this expanded collection. Dan Berger prompted fuller editorial comment with his pointed queries on the manuscript, as did André Moncourt, who also read through, corrected, and comment- ed on the manuscript. Moncourt and J. Smith’s monumental documen- tary history of the Red Army Faction also inspired fuller annotation. I am grateful to Alyssa, Ava, Lauren, Sha, and Trinh for keying in the communiqués, articles, and editorial commentary. I realize it’s a blast from the sexist past to thank a number of women for typing ser- vices, but as an e-gimp with a persistent repetitive strain injury, hiring assistants was better than suffocating silently. Josh MacPhee provided the engaging cover, and more than a de- cade ago played a catalytic role in putting me on the path of encoun- tering former Brigade members. Thanks as well to Ramsey Kanaan and Craig O’Hara, who enthusiastically greeted this project. I am also in- debted to Ward Churchill for his preface. Despite the slander campaign directed against him after his essay “Some People Push Back” attracted the attention of Fox News et al., he remains one of the most careful and knowledgeable scholars of 1970s social movements and the re- pressive forces arrayed against them. 9 Preface ReVisioning a Movement with Teeth Ward Churchill The government of the U.S.A. and all that it stands for, all that it represents, must be destroyed. This is the starting point, and the end. We have the means to this end; the problem is to develop ac- ceptance of their use. —George Jackson, Blood in My Eye here was a time, not so long ago, when an appreciable segment of Tthose professing opposition to the policies pursued by U.S. élites proved capable of transcending the banality of liberal analysis, arriving at a genuinely radical understanding both of what they were up against and what would be required to transform it. Thus were the obtund con- straints of “responsible” protest discarded in favor of armed struggle undertaken not only by such iconic organizations as the Black Panther Party and the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), but also a host of other groups around the country, many of them tiny, highly localized, and now all but forgotten. Considered in light of Santayana’s famously irrefragable observa- tion that those unknowing of their history are doomed to repeat it, the “forgotten” dimension(s) of the armed struggle waged against the domestic status quo during the late 1960s and early ‘70s represents a problem of genuine significance. If we may agree that to draw reason- able conclusions from or about any phenomenon, historical or other- wise, it is essential to have as complete and accurate an apprehension of it as possible, the nature of the deficiency should be clear. Its rami- fications are no less apparent in the discourse of the few who might presently assert that armed struggle constitutes the signifier of revolu- tionary purity and the sole means through which fundamental change can be precipitated as it is in the anodyne catechism mouthed by the multitudes who smugly dismiss recourse to arms as being both “unre- alistic” and “self-defeating.”1 While much good work, and no shortage of bad, has been done in documenting and assessing the strengths, weaknesses, and potentials of the Panthers and Weather Underground over the years,2 nothing of the sort can be said regarding the welter of autonomous entities that followed more or less comparable trajectories during same period. 11 Creating a Movement with Teeth Indeed, it is arguable that the degree of attention afforded the former has to some extent precluded anything resembling a proper analytical emphasis being placed on the latter. The result has been, and remains, a decided skew in how the interplay of sociopolitical elements in the struggle has been perceived by those seeking, often urgently, to dis- cern its meaning. They have in a sense been placed in the position of the proverbial three blind men attempting to determine and describe the physical characteristics of an elephant. The magnitude of the imbalance is indicated, though by no means defined, by the facts that during the fall of 1968, there were at least 41 political bombings on U.S. campuses alone—an undetermined number of others occurred off-campus—and that this nearly doubles the number carried out by the Weather Underground during the en- tire seven years of its operational existence. The spring of 1969 saw a further 84 on-campus bombings, making a total of 125 for the school year. During academic year 1969–1970, the tally of bombings on U.S. campuses rose to 174.3 At least seventy off-campus corporate facili- ties were also bombed in 1969, as well as several military facilities; on November 11 that year, a small, non-Weather-affiliated collective in New York—having already bombed the Whitehall Military Induction Center, the Federal Building, the offices of United Fruit, and a Midland Marine Bank earlier in the fall—hit the corporate offices of Chase Manhattan, Standard Oil, and General Motors, all on a single day.4 From 1970–1975, while the number of political bombings at- tributable to “the Left” underwent a noticeable decline, there was an equally-noticeable rise in proficiency, both technically and in terms of target selection.