13 December 1947 – 3 August 2010
I began writing to Marilyn Buck in 1998 after finding out that she received Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! in a California prison. Marilyn was a revolutionary communist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist and a political prisoner. Ten years later in 2008, Marilyn ended a card to me with the words ‘Perhaps we’ll meet one day!’ But on 3 August 2010, less than three weeks after her release from prison, she died from cancer aged 62, having served 25 years. Her lawyer had taken legal action to get medical tests when her illness first struck and her post-operative chemotherapy treatment in the prison medical facility was delayed. I will never embrace Marilyn, but her unrelenting political integrity and revolutionary optimism will remain an inspiration.
Marilyn had an upper middle class private school education in Texas, where segregation between blacks and whites prevailed. When her father, an Episcopalian minister, desegregated his congregation, crosses were burned on their lawn and he was removed as minister. At university, Marilyn became active against the Vietnam war and against racism. In 1967 she joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and moved to Chicago, where she edited the group’s magazine New Left Notes.
Back in San Francisco, she became part of a radical film-making and propaganda collective, Third World Newsreel, campaigning in support of Native Americans, Mexican migrants and the black liberation movement in the US, and internationally in support of Palestinian liberation and against US intervention in Vietnam and Iran. This coincided with the rapid nationwide emergence of the Black Panther Party (BPP), founded in Oakland, California in 1966, which, while using constitutional means of protest, was quickly categorised by FBI director J Edgar Hoover as ‘the greatest threat to the internal security of the country’. Like the BPP, and even civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Marilyn became a target of COINTELPRO, an FBI programme to ‘neutralise’ dissent, be it peaceful reformism or militant activism.
Marilyn was arrested in 1973. Convicted of purchasing sold-over-the-counter bullets and being a member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) she was sentenced to ten years, the longest sentence ever given for that crime. Granted temporary release in 1977, she did not return to prison, but joined the revolutionary underground. After her recapture in 1985, she faced four trials for charges including robbery, assisting the escape of political prisoner Assata Shakur and bombing US military and political targets in protest at the US invasion of Grenada and bombardment of Lebanon from US warships. (Warnings were given and no one was hurt in the bombings.)
In what became known as the ‘Resistance Conspiracy Case’, Marilyn and three female co-defendants pleaded guilty in order to secure the release of a male co-defendant suffering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The 1988 indictment accused Marilyn and her comrades of attempting ‘to influence, change and protest policies and practices of the United States government concerning various international and domestic matters through the use of violent and illegal means’. Marilyn was sentenced to a total of 80 years.
In prison, Marilyn continued her political activism and engagement with world developments. In late 2008, as the capitalist crisis struck the imperialist heartlands, she wrote to me that ‘Now is a wonderful time for the formerly colonised world to repudiate the debt. Latin America is definitely breaking the chains. I suspect chains are being sawed at in other parts of the world. Africa needs solidarity and to get rid of the war machines. The devastation of humanity there undermines the enormous potential that lies in the hearts and minds of the African peoples.’
Marilyn also studied, receiving a Masters degree in Fine Arts in 1999, and became a published, acclaimed poet and translator. She taught hundreds of women prisoners to read, analyse and survive in prison.
Marilyn’s contribution to the anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggle will not be forgotten.
Helen Yaffe
FRFI 217 October/November 2010
