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Introduction the SLA Was Almost a Cultural Test Tube, a Specimen

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Introduction the SLA Was Almost a Cultural Test Tube, a Specimen Introduction The SLA was almost a cultural test tube, a specimen sample from a bitter side of the sixties that marched apace after virtually all their comrades veered aside. Yet they marked time oddly, retracing rather than resolving the past. Culturally rootless, out of their time, they leaped into the social void¾and in an eerie half-life of their plunge, among themselves, if nowhere else, they recreated something of the pained and pimpled adolescence of the New Left. Vin McLellan and Paul Avery, The Voices of Guns The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), as it existed originally, endured for a brief 192 days. It formed in in the months leading up to November 1973 in Oakland, California, and saw its first major action with the assassination of the first African American superintendent of schools, Marcus Foster, on November 6. Its first phase ended on May 17, 1974, in Los Angeles, in a shootout that proved fatal to all but three of its members. A year before the SLA took shape, the radical New Left splintered into many different factions, the most violent of which, the Weathermen, went underground. With the landslide reelection of President Richard Nixon in November 1972 and the announced end in January 1973 of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, the circumstances that had produced the antiwar movement began to fade away. As the war winded down, protest movements began to focus on civil rights issues, particularly through the lens of California prison reform. Berkeley, which remained a bastion of the counterculture atmosphere and lifestyle, was the epicenter of these movements. Indeed, Berkeley would give rise to the Symbionese Liberation Army, though the SLA would not remain there through its demise, less than a year after it formed Not until the SLA assassinated Marcus Foster would it find itself isolated from other revolutionary groups within the New Left and treated as pariahs by stalwart figures such as Huey Newton, Angela Davis, and Jerry Rubin.1 In fact, if a leftist revolution had ever truly erupted in the United States, it would have been from August 1973 through August 1974, when the revelation of a taping system in the White House led to a year- long constitutional crisis and ended with the resignation of President Nixon. Despite the national calamities that flared up during this time, the revolution that the SLA sought never started. Even though the group made nationwide headlines almost daily from February through mid-June 1974, droves of revolutionaries did not flock to join it. Instead of leading a revolution, the SLA became a distraction—America’s first reality television show disguised as news. The Berkeley Protest Movements After 1964 and the launch of the Free Speech Movement (FSM), Berkeley served as a model of student dissent on college campuses nationwide. Students initially fought a stringent administration policy that restricted their rights to hand out political literature on the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph Avenues. Many FSM leaders had spent the previous summer involved in the civil rights movement, bravely facing down the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the Deep South as they worked to register black voters. As a result, the protests at Berkeley over students’ right to hand out political literature expanded into a greater struggle for the right to free speech for all college students. The arrest of Jack Weinberg on October 1, 1964, at Sather Gate, just outside the entrance to the University of California, Berkeley sparked a powerful student protest movement.2 Berkeley student Mario Savio—most famous for his FSM speeches atop a police cruiser—exacerbated the student protest movement when he declared in the fall of 1964, “Last summer I went to Mississippi to join the struggle for civil rights. This fall I am engaged in another phase of the same struggle, this time in Berkeley.”3 Savio directly challenged the status quo often associated with the Eisenhower administration when he told the University of California Board of Regents and administrators in December, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.”4 At that time, Savio probably did not realize that his words encapsulated the growing discontent of a generation of college students. Although over 200 colleges and universities were represented during the Freedom Summer of 1964, nearly 60 percent came from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Berkeley, Michigan, and Wisconsin.5 The growing counterculture elite, which would form the backbone of the student protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, had established their credentials during the civil rights movement. On March 3, 1965, John Thomson, a nonstudent radical from New York heavily influenced by the Free Speech Movement, undertook his own protest. Thomson wanted to make a statement: “F-U-C-K.” These four letters, written on a piece of paper, led to the “Filthy Speech Movement.” The students and the agitators who lived in and around Berkeley were increasingly viewing its professors and administrators as overbearing and conservative, and this movement was an attempt to push back. According to W. J. Rorabaugh, these campuses were protesting the notion of in loco parentis—that is, the concept that the “university should maintain parental supervision over the student.”6 The Berkeley students were going to fight autocratic power as they saw it, whether it was exerted in Mississippi or in their own backyard. By August 1965, the Berkeley student protesters had shifted their focus to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which was approved by Congress with little debate in August 1964, led to America’s longest war and provided student protestors with an issue to rail against. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement continued to be an important facet of the student protest movement, but not its only mission. Rather, students in northern California embraced the entire counterculture movement, and the many different movements within it. The San Francisco Bay Area, in particular, would be forever linked with the student protest movements of the 1960s. The region also served as home to 1967’s Summer of Love and the development of the Black Panther Party. There, students at San Francisco State University held a 134-school-day strike over the issue of low minority student admissions, and it was there where one of the first African American Studies departments opened. The San Francisco Bay Area was also the scene of the People’s Park riot, the closure of the University of California, Berkeley in response to the invasion of Cambodia, and hundreds of symbolic bombings aimed at the destruction of property. At its 1969 national convention, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) split into various factions.7 The battles over the future of the New Left included squabbles over “action versus political organization” and “Mao versus Lenin.” As a result, the national organization that provided leadership to the New Left and direction to student protestors ceased to exist. In its place arose the Weathermen and the Progressive Labor Party. The action-oriented, violence-prone Weathermen served as a model for other organizations, such as Venceremos, which was founded in 1970 from a merger of the Chicano Brown Berets and a faction from the Revolutionary Union, which had split from SDS in 1969.8 Venceremos became a leader of New Left politics in the Bay Area through the spring of 1972. It was the largest and most radical group in northern California.9 In 1971 the organization had been actively involved in the antiwar movement throughout the Bay Area. Like many of the other New Left groups in the post-SDS period, Venceremos unraveled over leadership and organizational issues. Out of this power vacuum within the New Left arose a new, more violent revolutionary group. The Symbionese Liberation Army grew out of the Berkeley/Oakland radical political culture, particularly in the streets surrounding the University of California, Berkeley campus. Future members of the SLA witnessed the collapse of the New Left because of disagreements about theory and action, along with the angry debate over the relevance of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and George Jackson. This new revolutionary group was enthralled by the film State of Siege, and hoped to be the vanguard of a violent revolution against the “fascist Amerikkkan state.” In taking armed action, it sought to emulate the Tupamaro rebels of Uruguay. Many members of the SLA had served as members of the Maoist, direct action–oriented Venceremos organization, which has disintegrated entirely during the summer of 1973.10 Venceremos should not be confused with the Venceremos Brigade, which had ties to Cuba and the SDS. The group that some future SLA members had been involved in functioned only in California. The SLA: Its Origins and Acts of Revolution The story of the SLA is one of violence, tragedy, and failure. The founding members of the SLA¾Bill and Emily Harris, Angela Atwood, Russell Little, Joe Remiro, Patricia Soltysik, Camilla Hall, Nancy Ling Perry, and William (Willie) Wolfe¾can best be described as a small clique of young, self-absorbed, guilt-ridden, emotionally scarred white men and women who found their salvation in the ideas held by a black escaped convict, Donald DeFreeze. While an inmate, DeFreeze was befriended by Russell Little and Willie Wolfe, who were active in the prison reform movement. After his assisted break from prison, DeFreeze, the self-styled “Fifth Prophet,” would serve as General Field Marshal Cinque Mtume of the SLA until taking his own life in May 1974.
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