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Aux Arms?
indsight yields no consensus on the armed experience. "Americans are a very violent people, as a nation, with a very violent history," says Jonas Raskin, a professor of Communications Studies at Sonoma State University at Santa Rosa, who was a "fellow traveler" with the Weatherman (although usually referred to as the Weathermen, later called the "Weather Underground"). "People like identifying with outlaws. But if you have people on the sidelines cheering, that’s not really what you want. You want people to be doing things wherever they are."
The Weatherman was formed in the late ‘60s by members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) who wanted an immediate end to the war in Vietnam, as well the broader goal of revolutionary change. Their philosophy was captured moderately well by Weatherperson Bernardine Dohrn’s impatient declaration, "The best thing that we can be doing for ourselves, as well as for the (Black) Panthers and the revolutionary black liberation struggle, is to build a fucking white revolutionary movement."
The Weatherman saw taking some of the heat as the best way to aid other domestic and foreign liberation struggles. They were also quick to write off the American working-class as hopelessly reactionary and strike more-radical-than-thou postures with fellow members of the New Left who didn’t immediately (or in some cases ever) embrace their politics or tactics. The momentum of the group was depleted by the mid-‘70s.
"My experience with the Weather Underground was that they didn’t really allow for people, wherever they were, to do some kind of political activity, whatever was appropriate for the situation," says Jonas Raskin. "They wanted everybody to drop out and leave institutions and be guerrillas. In a total war I suppose that happens. [But] it wasn’t a revolutionary situation. It wasn’t total war."
Mead and Brown are still staunch supporters of armed struggle (Brown keeps several stuffed gorillas in her car. "My favorite animal," she confides, chuckling.) They also both respect their own pasts. Though Mead sometimes sounds as if he is speaking disparagingly about his years as a member of TUG (The Urban Guerrillas), it’s because the costs of the activity were so high while so little was visibly won. The Brigade’s losses include the death of Bruce Seidel, an early Brigade member and Mead’s most beloved friend. (Seidel was killed on January 23, 1976, in the same bank robbery in which Mead was arrested. After police shot Seidel twice, they left him to drown in his own blood before finally taking him to a hospital an hour later). Of the six Brigade members that were eventually apprehended, none were able to have children or steady family lives. And Mark Cook, the only black member of the Brigade, remains in prison in Washington state for his involvement in the March 10, 1976 jailbreak of Brigade member John Sherman, in which Sherman’s guard was shot in the chest as he reached for his gun.
But were the Brigade’s actions a mistake? "Fuck it," says one activist who was in Watts during the tumultuous ‘60s. "We thought the revolution was coming. So we were wrong. Is that such a big deal?"
"One of my favorite quotes from Lenin goes, ’Be as radical as reality itself,’ says Alexander Cockburn, frequent columnist to The Nation. "So you look at reality, you make your estimates, and you’ve got to be radical."
Former Brigade member Bertram has moved away from her earlier brand of militancy. "When I was an urban guerilla I was really impressed by Che [Guevara]’s quote, ‘The true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love.’ But I don’t think we were. Not internally. There was an absolute love of the people, and an absolute commitment to fighting capitalism and fighting injustice. But we were angry and we weren’t loving."
Barbara Lehman served eight years as a member of the United Freedom Front, which fought apartheid and US-sponsored murder of revolutionaries in Central America in the ‘80s. She’s now an activist in Boston. "I don’t necessarily think bombing things is the best way to change the world," she says, and believes there’s no simple blueprint for achieving radical social change. She also notes the alleged crimes of she and her co-defendants—four of whom are still in prison serving very long sentences—were nothing compared to what they were fighting against. "Everything we did was a teardrop in the fucking ocean compared to what they were doing," she says passionately.
With characteristic level-headedness, Brown points out that "If you haven’t done this your whole life—which of course none of us have—and there ain’t really no schools, then it’s all guess work. Actually, if you reflect on it, it’s amazing how so few people has such an impact." She cites one example of a tangible victory. Prisoners in Walla Walla—Washington state’s most notorious maximum-security prison—were in the process of staging the longest prison strike in the history of the state. Though the strike regularly received front-page coverage in the mainstream media, a prisoner was never interviewed in the forty-plus days of the strike, and their reasons for striking were never seriously discussed. So the Brigade placed two bombs in safe deposit boxes in two different branches of the Rainier National Bank, in the affluent Seattle suburb of Bellevue. Rainier National Bank had an interlocking directorate with the Seattle Times. In their accompanying communique, the Brigade stated that they would continue to bomb Rainier until the Times learned to balance their journalism. The next day, the Times interviewed a prisoner, and the conditions at Walla Walla were revealed to be so brutal and medieval that the warden of 25 years was soon fired, as was the head of the Department of Corrections. (None of the several old-timers at the Seattle Times who were contacted for this article had sufficient recall or inclination to offer any additional information.)
A Striking Tenacity
s so many of their movement compatriots burned out, retreated to academia, or got straight jobs, many of the former guerrillas simply kept organizing. For Brown, an irrepressible butch, activities included sitting down all the tomboys in the Alderson, West Virginia federal women’s prison and talking to them about why they felt they needed to beat their girlfriends to keep them. She asked whether they wanted to replicate the violence they’d experienced earlier in their lives, in their own relationships. While at Alderson, Brown, a successful "jailhouse lawyer," succeeded in intimidating the administration into changing the policy that permitted male guards to watch female prisoners bathe. "We had a hootch (improvised prison alcohol) party after we won that one," Brown recalls brightly.
Ed Mead was arrested relatively early in the Brigade’s trajectory, so he spent much of his organizing time behind bars. In his close to twenty-year sentence, Mead led work strikes, filed petitions, and generally did his best to fan the flames of discontent wherever he went. This made him something of a scourge to prison administrators, who bounced him through state and federal penal systems, moving him along whenever his organizing efforts began to bear fruit.
One of his more notable efforts was Men Against Sexism (MAS), a group of "tough faggots" who forcibly stopped the buying and selling of prisoners by prisoners for the purpose of sexual exploitation in Walla Walla. During the group’s zenith in 1978, MAS proved so effective that a feminine male prisoner could wear a dress around without threat of violence. MAS backed up their work with homemade grenades, single-shot rifles, and a willingness to die to stop prisoner-on-prisoner rape. "Of all the political work that I’ve done," says Mead, Men Against Sexism is what I’m most proud of. (The group effectively disbanded after a foiled escape attempt in 1978 involving Mead, several other prisoners and an array of homemade weapons.)
Mead created a lasting legacy in 1990 (while still imprisoned) when he started Prison Legal News (PLN), a monthly magazine with a deceptively dry legal cover that helps ease it past prison censors. [Prisoner’s reading materials are routinely subjected to rigorous and often fickle censorship that frequently turns away political material while allowing an unimpeded flow of pornography-ed.] Mead co-founded the magazine with Paul Wright, a politicized prisoner incarcerated for murder, and after Mead was released in October of ’93, his friend Dan Pens filled his spot. Prison Legal News has never skipped a month, and now has a circulation of more than 3,000.
Dystopia Armed
n a law-and-order nation that’s increasingly defining itself against "the criminal," many of the ‘70s veterans have seen their worst fears confirmed. "The poor have gotten poorer, the rich have gotten richer. The prisons are getting fuller," says Brown. "I think they crushed and killed and put down a lot of people. And then they kind of brainwashed a generation or two there."
"Things were so bad then that I was willing to risk death or imprisonment rather than exist under those circumstances," says Mead. "Things are way worse now."
Ida McCray Robinson is another now middle-aged revolutionary. In an act of what she now calls "adventurism," she and her then-partner—a member of the Republic of New Africa—hijacked a plane to Cuba in 1972. She stayed in Cuba for four years, and lived as a fugitive for another twelve. She was captured in the U.S. in the mid-‘80s and served nine years at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California.
Robinson now heads Families with a Future, a program that works to keep imprisoned mothers connected to children the government decides to place (often as a punitive measure) in foster care programs. She, like many other longhaul activists, is working to expand the nuggets of good discernible in the current state of affairs. As she puts it, "I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t have hope." 
