An American Radical:. Susan Rosenberg
“Did we do something bad?” I asked. “Are we bad? Did we kill them first?” No. “Did you know other people in the camps?” Yes, my mom knew other people, and I knew some of them, as well. She explained that many of the people from our family had been exterminated in the camps. Exterminated? Like the termites in the house, like the TV commercial? I wondered. Her answers did not make me fully understand, but learning about genocide when I was eight years old dug into my soul so that, twenty years later, chained to a chair in the New Jersey State Police barracks, my wrists were aching and I recalled that tattoo on my friend’s mother’s arm.
Next in my mind, the picture of a young black man hanging by the neck appeared. I was remembering an old newspaper photograph on the cover of an album. My aunt was explaining it to me. Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” about “the lynching of black people in the South and the tattoos and Nazi concentration camps were part of the same thing,” she had said. White people and black people, Nazis and Jews, in my eight-year-old mind it was a strange but simple equation.
Images started tumbling, each one faster than the other, and memories of being Jewish that I had long forgotten. Upstairs in the synagogue in the back with all the other women. Why did we have to sit behind an ugly curtain? My grandfather swaying back and forth, praying one morning while I hid behind the door and spied on him. Standing on the boardwalk watching hundreds of old people walk to the water to wash away their sins and remember the dead. (Even then I understood that sin was doing bad.) Then lighting the candles for the dead. Hearing a mix of Yiddish and English sounds both foreign and familiar, with my grandmother’s sweet chicken soup spread before us.
As I sat in the barracks under interrogation, waiting to be identified, my own relationship to my Judaism was irrevocably changed. Calling me a kike, this is Jew hating, I thought, and it is the beginning of my captured life. An internal vista opened in my head, and in that instant I owned it. I smiled at those government agents, those hateful, racist, anti-Semitic white men, because with their bigoted selves they had enabled me to shore up a wealth of inner resistance. When the FBI agent sneered, “Rosenberg,” I shot back, “That’s right.”
I was labeled not just a “kike,” but a “terrorist kike”—a label that was never to change. In the government’s lexicon at the time, the only thing more extreme than a “kingpin narco-trafficker” was a terrorist, particularly a leftist terrorist. When it became known that I was a wanted fugitive in the Brink’s robbery case and was on the FBI’s most wanted list, my fate as far as the criminal justice system was concerned was sealed.
AFTER WHAT SEEMED like an eternity, the next morning Tim and I were taken to our arraignment in Camden, New Jersey. The courtroom was filled with more armed agents than I had ever seen in any other courtroom before. We were charged with conspiracy to possess and transport weapons, explosives, and false identification across state lines. We pled not guilty and said we were revolutionaries. At first, bail was set for each of us at five million dollars, but later in that same proceeding bail was revoked and we were held over, pending a formal indictment. Some time after the arraignment was over, Tim and I were bundled into cars and driven at one hundred miles an hour to the New York Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan. The building, a large concrete structure amidst many government buildings, including the courts, sits in downtown Manhattan. Bordering it on one side is the Brooklyn Bridge and Chinatown on the other. It had a brutal appearance to me as we drove down the back street to the underground entrance. Helicopters buzzed overhead, and the blaring sirens and flashing lights pierced through the late-night quiet. Our arrival was being announced. We were the prize catch and everyone had to be made aware of it.
We had not eaten or washed our hands or been alone for two days. Tim and I had not been able to speak to each other. We had only gazed at each other in abject shame, with profound feelings of defeat and an occasional burst of defiance. We had been screamed at continuously and beaten up. We were emotionally and physically exhausted. Earlier someone had lifted me off the ground by my handcuffs, so as we stood at the elevators my arms, cuffed behind my back, were aching. When no one was looking, I slipped out of the cuffs. One hand at a time came out easily. It was my first mental game with capture, and it made me feel alive to give in to the thrilling desire to escape. Up until that moment, for most of the time, I had had the overwhelming desire to be dead.
Our identification with wanted black revolutionaries had provoked the police and the FBI into a state of frenzy. Their adrenaline production was in overdrive and they wanted to dispose of us so that they could get to work hunting down our associates. After we were booked, photographed, and deposited into detention, they locked us up in the bull pens. It was time for “cold cooking,” a term I did not know then, but a reality that I would come to experience again and again. It meant being left to stew in a cold, isolated, and extremely uncomfortable environment. It could last for two or three days. Here I was shoved into a federal holding cell, empty, dark, and enormous. It had a closed front, the wall only marked by a heavy metal door with a very small window in it. Several marble benches, incongruous amid the dinginess, ran the length of the walls; two more sat in the middle of the room. The architecture was imperial decay, which struck me as funny, particularly when I noticed the steel toilet in a corner caked with urine and filth. There were messages carved wall to wall—tito was here, sam, shit, pete fucks agnes—all with distinct markings. As I examined them, it occurred to me that they were the modern equivalent of hieroglyphics. I understood the need to make a mark, to leave a message, to scream out loud in this disembodied hole, “I was here. Don’t let me disappear.” Then I saw one that read long live black liberation. It relieved me greatly to see this one. I was not the first political person who laid on that bench. It was such a simple thing, yet it gave me much comfort. It was a sign that allowed me to temporarily put aside all the terrible feelings of pain and loss—the agony over the possibility that others would get caught as a result of our mistakes—that I had experienced since my arrest.
I inspected all the crevices and corners and saw no cameras. It was completely quiet and no one was peering at me through the slot in the door. I lay down on the bench and stretched all my muscles. Alone in that first of what would be hundreds of bull pens, I began to bargain, with whom I cannot say, but I began to talk to another party outside of myself. It wasn’t prayer exactly; it was more like the beginning of what would become a mantra. I wasn’t talking to God. It was not God that I prayed to; for me, it was the consciousness of being human. That was my God. The ability to locate beauty in the hideous, to create something in the face of devastation (man-made or otherwise), to determine one’s own fate—those were my commitments and, in a spiritual sense, they were the things that I looked to for strength. I did not know that then, though. At the time, I drew on more radical examples of people who had been in the revolutionary struggle before me. I thought, How do I resist? I thought of people from the national liberation struggles who had raged throughout history, people like Bobby Sands1, who had died on a hunger strike in prison while fighting for Irish independence; Lolita Lebrón2, who had spent twenty-five years in U.S. prisons for the cause of Puerto Rican nationalism; and John Brown, the greatest ally to the black freedom struggle in American history, who had been vilified by the government and then hung from the neck. As I lay on that bench I retreated even further into the mental ritual I would go through again and again in the years that would follow, circling back to my beginnings in order to locate myself somewhere in the history of radicalism. And in search of an answer as to why I had made the choices that had landed me in that bullpen.
I was born in 1955, in the aftermath of the Second World War. I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, an only child. My father, known to his friends as Manny, short for Emanuel Rosenberg, was a World War II veteran and a dentist. His dental practice was in Spanish Harlem, where he worked with the most underserved and marginalized communities. There were occasions when he got paid in goods and services rather than money, and he would bring something home that had “fallen off the back of a truck.” He had traveled to Selma to help during the civil rights movement and had always volunteered his skills. My mother, Bella, was a theatrical producer and former film editor. She helped struggling visual