An American Radical:. Susan Rosenberg
shipped out any day. Every visit was charged with intense emotion because we did not know if it would be the last time we would see each other. We felt we had been living in hell since our arrest and it was almost impossible to deal with the idea that we would never meet again. There were several people visiting us that day. Our lawyers, who had heard the rumor, too, had come to say good-bye to Tim. They were joined by paralegals from various groups that had supported us during our trial.
Someone said that we needed to file a notice of appeal. There was a thirty-day deadline for filing from the time of sentencing, and the clock was ticking. Tim, at one end of the table, said no, he did not want to file anything, because there was no expectation of justice. Everyone at the table weighed in on this one way or the other and several people agreed with Tim. I looked around the table and thought, Wow, these people don’t have to do fifty-eight years. We do. I want options. We have to fight this sentence. Our trial had been on many levels a farce, in part because of the drama we had chosen to create. I had begun to realize that the question of how to challenge the criminal justice system has almost as many answers as the number of people who are caught up in it. I said, “I want to file. I want to fight the sentence every way we can, through an appeal, through parole, through political pressure. Even though we said the system would not last as long as our sentence, I am not sure I believe that at all.” Tim said nothing, and the appeal was filed.
Ironically, the charges related to the Brink’s case that had sent me underground in the first place, were dropped by then U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani. The U.S. attorney’s office said they were dropped because I had such a long sentence from my conviction. But I and my lawyers believed that the charges had been dropped because of lack of evidence.
By 1985, there were many other people who had been arrested from various radical political movements. The list included sixteen Puerto Ricans from an armed group called Los Macheteros1; the Ohio Seven2, four men and three women from a clandestine collective against apartheid, racism, and economic injustice charged with the bombing of U.S. military and corporate targets; the New York Eight who included African American revolutionaries, who together had been targeted in the post-Brink’s investigation and subpoenaed to a grand jury but had refused to testify; Joe Doherty, an Irish Republican Army member who had been involved in one of the most spectacular prison escapes in Northern Ireland, who had been caught in New York and was now being held on extradition charges to be returned to Ireland; and Marilyn Buck, a revolutionary who spent all of her adult life supporting the black liberation struggle and who had been in and out of prison as a result, and Linda Evans, a member of SDS, and later the Weathermen, women from the group with which Tim and I were involved. Marilyn was wanted on the Brink’s charges, and Linda had been indicted for harboring Marilyn.
Almost forty political prisoners were being held in the MCC. It was a security nightmare for the authorities to have so many political prisoners together in one facility, but for us it was a moment of incredible solidarity. All the women, housed on the same floor, had daily access to one another.
In September 1985, we were facing our prison terms or future trials, and we all knew that the time we had together in detention was limited. I was twenty-nine years old. Each one of us had a story behind why we were there. We were a diverse group. We were activists and revolutionaries and all of us were motivated to act against the government because we thought it was our responsibility to right the injustices and wrongs as we saw them. I was one of the seventeen people who were wanted stemming from a federal indictment alleging association and conspiracy with the group that carried out the Brink’s New York robbery. In 1981, the Black Liberation Army3, a small outgrowth of the Black Panther Party, had carried out an armed robbery of a Brink’s truck in Nyack, New York. Two police officers, Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady and a Brink’s guard, Peter Paige, were killed in the shootout that followed the robbery. Four people were arrested near the scene, one of them a good friend of mine. The Joint Terrorist Task Force, a group made up of members of the New York Police Department, the FBI, and other intelligence agencies, began an investigation that led to two major federal conspiracy trials and a New York State trial. Scores of people were imprisoned for refusing to testify and cooperate with grand juries, and anyone identified through political association with those arrested or named by the government investigation was targeted. It was a terrible and dark time and we felt as if we were living in a raging war. I had never experienced this kind of repression, and there was a dangerous escalation of the stakes and consequences, for all involved. It was frightening.
I knew and had worked with several people who were under investigation. My longtime teacher and friend Dr. Mutulu Shakur was wanted by the FBI and the New York Police Department, and I was fearful that his life and work would be snuffed out. He had been an organizer in the black community and a revolutionary his entire adult life. He was a health worker in the South Bronx at Lincoln Hospital, and he later became a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture as a way of fighting the terrible heroin epidemic that was ravaging his brothers and sisters in the community. His FBI file was already thousands of pages. Now he was followed and harassed by FBI agents who would walk up to him in the street and open their jackets to reveal their guns and imitating the shape of a gun with their empty hands, pretended to shoot him. People would drive by his mother’s house in Queens and then run into the house and fire their weapons. His mother was blind and lived alone, so she could not identify the perpetrators. But there was nothing secret about the doings of the FBI. As their investigation grew and evolved, I became a target, too.
In 1977, I was working as a drug counselor at Lincoln Hospital. In high school, I had watched one of my best friends become a heroin addict and end up dying from an overdose. By the time I was working in the Bronx, the community had been plagued by a massive heroin addiction, which many people thought was government sponsored, at least in the sense that the police looked the other way and used the presence of drugs as an excuse to criminalize the entire community. I was not sure if that analysis was accurate but I certainly witnessed the devastation that drug use caused and saw that no one was doing anything about it. Wanting to stop the vicious cycle of poverty and drugs, I began to study acupuncture and Chinese medicine with other community-based health workers at the Lincoln Hospital Detox Center. Dr. Shakur was one of them. He had gone to China and seen how with the use of acupuncture millions of opium addicts were effectively treated. In 1980, after a three-year course, we passed our doctoral exams at the Montréal Institute of Chinese Medicine and moved our practice from the South Bronx to Harlem. We were part of the beginning of the New Age holistic health movement. We were led by former revolutionaries and activists from the late 1960s and 1970s, people of color from what had been the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, a U.S.-based Puerto Rican Independence and advocacy organization, and White Lightning, a poor people’s community organizing project. We treated drug addiction, diabetes, asthma, and all the diseases afflicting the poorest of the poor. We called ourselves the “sneaker doctors” after the “barefoot doctors” movement in China, which had been a project that trained a quarter of a million Chinese people to learn acupuncture to detoxify several million opium addicts.
In March 1982, I was on my way to work. I rounded the corner on 147th Street and Eighth Avenue walking toward the Harlem Institute of Acupuncture. As I looked down the block I saw an Army tank coming toward me with a huge gun rolling down the one-way street in the wrong direction. I had never seen a tank except in the movies. It looked obscenely out of place on the quiet deserted residential street. I had no idea what would trigger the men inside to start shooting. I knew that they could not have driven it to this Harlem block for show. Then I looked up and saw flak-jacketed sharpshooters wearing face masks and lying down or crouching on all the rooftops of the buildings next to the clinic. There wasn’t a soul out on the street. No one was standing on the corner. No little children were stepping off their stoops to go to the park or to school. There were no patients standing in front of our office, I realized thankfully. I was the only one, a white person out of place, amid all the cops with guns. I knew that they were there to search the clinic and I hoped they were not specifically looking for me. I did not feel that I merited a tank and certainly not sharpshooters. Not wanting to find out how far down the block I would get before someone either shot me or simply grabbed me, I about-faced and walked as fast as I could short of a breakneck run to the corner, then around it, and down into the subway. I did not start breathing freely again until I was