Carnegie Mellon University MARIANNA BROWN DIETRICH COLLEGE OF HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCES DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements Doctor of Philosophy For the Degree of Of Prisons and Polities: The Black Panther Party, Irish Republican Army and Radical Socio-Political organization, 1966-1983 Title RACHEL ALAYNA OPPENHEIMER, B.A., M.A. Presented by History Accepted by the Department of David Miller August 2, 2017 Readers (Director of Dissertation) Date Nico Slate August 2, 2017 Date Joe W. Trotter August 2, 2017 Date Approved by the Committee on Graduate Degrees Richard Scheines August 3, 2017 Dean Date Of Prisons and Polities: The Black Panther Party, Irish Republican Army and Radical Socio-Political organization, 1966-1983 by Rachel Alayna Oppenheimer, B.A., M.A. DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of the College of the Marianna Brown Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences of Carnegie Mellon University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY August 1, 2017 Copyright © 2017, Rachel Alayna Oppenheimer ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A dissertation requires considerable support to complete, and I have been fortunate to have such support in excess. From people who offered emotional support, to those who read partial drafts and chapters, my work has benefitted greatly from numerous outside sources. The following deserve to be mentioned by name. I must first thank my committee, Doctors David W. Miller, Nico Slate, and Joe Trotter. Their knowledge and patience has been invaluable. My thanks also go out to Doctors Kate Lynch and Wendy Goldman who both served as director of the graduate program during my time at CMU and who have provided advice and guidance along the way. I am also thankful to Dr. Donna Harsch for offering me temporary housing when it looked as if I might need it, unexpectedly. I must also thank numerous friends and colleagues. Kaaz Naqvi, Andrew Ramey, Jay Roszman, and Cassie Miller all read and provided feedback for early chapter drafts. John Weigel, and Avigail Oren provided considerable moral support and helped me move apartments in the midst of finishing a dissertation draft. Lizeth Whaley checked up on me and encouraged me. Sarah Rodgers, Susan Moore, and Jenny Raterman, Annie Donley, and Debbie Lowman kept me laughing and reminded me that there was a world beyond my dissertation. Erin Eilbeck Sykes, Stacie Niemesch, and Sarah Emerson Honkala asked about the progress of my work, and helped me get back to work after my mother’s death. I will be forever grateful. I owe a considerable debt to the staffs of the Wisconsin Historical Society, and Stanford Special Collections and University Archives. Each helped to make relatively i brief archival visits disproportionately beneficial to my dissertation. I thank Stanford’s staff, especially, for their help in photocopying and mailing materials to me. The archives I visited in Belfast could not have been more welcoming and helpful. Ross Moore and Alistair Gordon of the Linen Hall Library did the literal heavy lifting for my project, bringing me box after box of material in addition to teaching me the ways of various stubborn Linen Hall Library photocopy machines. I also owe thanks to much of the PRONI staff. Claire Mawhinney was the first person I met at the Public Records Office, and she helped to orient me, welcome me to the archive, and remained a friendly and welcoming face throughout my time there. Wesley Geddis and Alan Robertson pointed me in the right direction at various times, helping me to find new material. David Huddleston helped in this vein and assisted me in securing a visit to the Maze/Long Kesh. Graham Jackson aided me in my attempts to gain access to freedom of information documents. I thank Kelly Copeland, Ryan Bowman, Craig Murray, and Andrew Toland who, subsequently, had to order all those freedom of information files for me, got me in touch with staff members to help with my research, and answered all manner of questions that I probably could have just googled myself. Marie Lennon, Paul Rea, and John Rea copied forests’ worth of paper on my behalf and never complained about switching my seat. I owe special thanks to Gavin McMahon for all the work he did for me, (see getting files, copying, and answering obvious questions) while making me, and later, my sister, feel at home from the very beginning. It’s the rare archive where the historian can get music recommendations alongside their documents. My thanks go also to Jack Duffin and Séanna Walsh at Coiste na n-Iarchimí for helping me to secure interviews for this project. Thank you to Coiste and Tar Anall for ii providing meeting places for these interviews. I thank Mr. Walsh, Joe Doherty, Phil McCullough, Jim McVeigh, John O’Hagan, and Sinéad for taking the time out of their schedules to meet with me and for agreeing to share their stories. Le Meas, go raibh maith agat. I am also thankful to Louis West who met my sister and me in a remembrance garden, and, upon finding out about my project, invited us into his home for tea and sources. I will not forget that unexpected kindness. Finally, I owe to my family more thanks than a simple acknowledgements section can hold. To my mother, Reneé Oppenheimer, I am profoundly sorry that I did not finish this before you passed away. Thank you for never making me doubt that you would be proud of me. Bruce and Devon Oppenheimer have held me together through this project. Thank you, Dad, for taking care of Rawley while I finished writing, and doing everything else in your power to make sure I could complete the dissertation. Thank you, Devon, for fielding late night phone calls, calling to make sure I woke up when I needed to, helping to convince insta-friends to give me sources in Belfast, and about a million other things. If I have missed thanking anyone, please consider it a symptomatic of a brain winding down from the intensity of writing a dissertation, not a personal slight. I thank you all for the support you have shown me. It only makes me more likely to feel that I can call on your assistance and friendship again someday. Consider yourselves warned. Rachel Oppenheimer July 15, 2017 iii ABSTRACT Of Prisons and Polities: The Black Panther Party, Irish Republican Army and Radical Socio-Political organization, 1966-1983 This dissertation uses the idea of a moral polity as an organizing concept to help understand how the Irish Republican Army and Black Panther Party understood their own actions and the imprisonment of large numbers of their members. In referring to the “moral polity” this study describes socio-political structures and relations created by people who are animated by a series of collectively held ideas about how authorities and populations should interact. The collectively held ideas that provide the foundation for a moral polity emphasize reciprocities between authorities and a population living under those authorities, fairness and justice between these two parties, and trust between the authorities and that population. Moral Polities promote human dignity and the welfare of the community, and the beliefs that undergird them are formed in opposition to established socio-political structures. The first chapters reveal the moral polities created by the BPP and IRA, looking first at precursors of these moral polities and then focusing on the opposition their creators faced from the governments and security forces of the United States, Northern Ireland, and Britain. As the Panthers and IRA espoused a radical reordering of society based on their collectively held beliefs, they threatened power structures who resorted to counterintelligence and internment without trial in their attempts to quell the threats they saw coming from the BPP an IRA, which in turn resulted in in large numbers of prisoners. The last chapters examine the decline of the Black Panther Party and the rise of the Irish republican prisoner. The BPP was unable to overcome the divisions within their party which the FBI exploited in the years before 1973. This left them unable to uphold the moral polity they had created around chapters across the nation. Although some members of the Party struggled to keep the Party and its envisioned society afloat, the BPP did not last beyond 1982. Conversely, when British authorities revoked special category status in Northern Irish prisons, and therefore, destroyed the IRA’s reordering of prison society, the IRA embarked on five years of sustained protest which resulted in a recreation of their moral polity. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements . i Abstract . iv Introduction . 1 Chapter 1 “We hadn’t a Policeman to Protect Us:” Building a Moral Polity and Encountering the Prison System, 1966-1969 . 48 Chapter 2 “Jails of Babylon:” Repression and Expanding Moral Polities, 1969 -1971 . 95 Chapter 3 “The Lowest Circle of Hell is Reserved for Those Who Betray Their Comrades:” Division and Change in the Moral Polity, 1971-1973 . 143 Chapter 4 “When a People’s Soldier is Captured:” the Divergent Fortunes of the BPP, IRA, and their moral polities and prisoners, 1973-1975 . 210 Chapter 5 “The Real Revolution Has Just Begun:” IRA Prison Wars and the Last Years of the Black Panther Party, 1976-1982 . 279 Conclusion . 411 Glossary of Terms . .426 Bibliography . .427 v 1 Introduction If you read the newspapers at the end of the 1960s it appeared that a volatile specter had emerged in the United States in the autumn of 1966. In the face of cozy ideas of racial progress, this specter argued that there was unfinished business surrounding the civil rights movement, problems that integration, voting rights, and non-violent agitation could not solve.