TALK ABOUT easy targets. The SLA was the hapless crew of self-styled revolutionaries that made headlines, if little sense, in the mid ’70s. The group was foolish, pathologically self-important, arrogant for no reason, and terribly wrong — which is exactly what a lot of the East Bay’s graying radicals told me last week. And the closer they once were to the SLA, the louder they said it.
The SLA first surfaced in 1973 to claim responsibility for the senseless assassination of Oakland school superintendent Marcus Foster. Nobody had any idea who these people were or why they’d just killed a popular black educator. A communiqué said only that the group was out to eradicate "the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people." Activists were horrified by Foster’s murder, and most leftist circles hurled criticism at the new group. A few months later, the group reappeared, kidnapping 19-year-old Patty Hearst from her Berkeley apartment. She was a member of one of California’s wealthiest, most storied, and most reactionary families. An army of federal agents descended on the Bay Area, and the fabulous, unforgettable saga of Patty Hearst was under way.
She was held — ransom or death — until she denounced her father and joined the revolution. The SLA invented a world of its own that, had it not collided with the real world, would have just been hilarious and surreal. It issued threats, orders, and edicts in a style that combined a Stalinist lack of humor with a Norma Desmond feel for life — and this was a group that paid attention to detail. Each soldier was given a new name and a cabinet post; the group had an anthem and a logo, too — as if Spanky and Our Gang had organized a game of Let’s Play Terrorist.
Hearst called herself Tania and was shown on TV toting a carbine in a bank robbery. People tuned in, followed the action and looked forward to the next show. I was driving in Oakland when KSAN-FM announced Hearst’s walk to the wild side; I nearly crashed the car.
"My first thought when I heard about the Marcus Foster killing," Calvin Welch says, "was that they were FBI agents. I mean, what the fuck was this?" Welch is a long-time community activist who now works with San Francisco’s Council of Community Housing Organizations. He’s passionate and practical when he talks about local issues. "Then came the kidnapping of Hearst," he says. "That was just so bizarre. I laughed. I mean, was this a movie or what?"
"At that time I was at KPOO-FM, and we got communiqués from the SLA," Welch continues. "And we had to decide if we were going to turn them over to the FBI, who were a very real presence because we ran a draft-counseling service. The FBI and the SFPD frequently came around to our house and threatened us with crazy things like accusing us of transporting people to North Vietnam. They lied, stole, kicked your ass, and you didn’t want to deal with them. And then, with the SLA thing, you couldn’t turn around without hitting a spook. It was just insane."
Dan Siegel, now an attorney and president of Oakland’s school board, was a student leader in the ’60s and a familiar face in radical circles in the years that followed. "The SLA was so strange," he says. "Think about this: they killed the last decent school superintendent Oakland had until [current incumbent] Dennis Chaconas was hired.
"But if you were around radical circles then, you could see how this kind of thing developed — as wrong and crazy as it was. And I’ve heard it said that almost everyone knew someone connected with the SLA."
He’s right on that score, though few people will air it in public. And who can blame them? The SLA’s legacy is nothing but trouble. In those days its members were too visible, too stupid, and after the Hearst kidnapping they attracted an army of government agents. Still, in some ways, SLA members weren’t much different from anyone else: Joseph Remiro, the Vietnam vet who, with Russell Little, was arrested for the Foster murder, was active in the hugely influential Vietnam Veterans Against the War/Winter Soldier Organization. My friend Edward knew Pat "Mizmoon" Soltysik at UC Berkeley, and two friends at the post office where I worked knew Angela Atwood.
The factors that created the SLA were part of the intense, often very strange political brew cooked up in the early 1970s in the Bay Area. Increasingly, prisoners and ex-prisoners — most of them black or Latin — were becoming part of the scene. Their status as "heavy," stemming from a connection with street life and conflicts with police, was further enhanced by their race. It was a fact that nonwhite Americans had powerful, bitter experiences that brought them to the political struggle — but this truth, in the hands and heads of largely white, generally middle-class radicals, generated thinking that was sometimes so fuzzy it would have been great comedy had it not had tragic consequences. Then there was the debate around guns and the use of violence.
It started back in 1967, when members of the Black Panther Party marched onto the floor of the state assembly in Sacramento carrying empty (and perfectly legal) weapons to protest a proposed law to restrict their right to bear arms. It was quite an event, and crucial to understanding the changing world of radicals and revolutionaries. In 1969 the Weatherman faction of SDS was formed, urging that the struggle take a more militant, sometimes violent turn. By the early 1970s, Venceremos, a prominent group led by ex–Stanford professor Bruce Franklin that believed America’s black and Latin populations were increasingly ready to use arms against the government, was active in the Bay Area. The SLA, like Venceremos, was consumed with the romance of black and Latin culture, and its members were impressed with themselves for brushing up against prison machismo. In 1972, when future SLA members met a convict named Donald DeFreeze, they were at a disadvantage: their heroic, misguided notions of armed violence were combined with a self-conscious and confused understanding of race so crippling that when they looked out at the world, they couldn’t see beyond themselves.
DeFreeze, renamed Cinque, became their leader. They followed him into a serious mess.
