​Dr. Alan Berkman’s Case Revisited: Part 2

Despite the FBI’s increased illegal surveillance of the above-ground May 19th group members involved in constitutionally protected political activity in the last years of the 1970’s, Professor Reverby’s Co-Conspirator For Justice book notes in chapter 7, however, that “alliances with Black and Puerto Rican revolutionaries were cemented” by May 19th group members during the same period; and “on the international level, anti-imperialism was ascendant” because in the late 1970’s the “Sandinista National Liberation Front had overthrown the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua,” the Shah of Iran’s dictatorship had been overthrown in Iran and Zimbabwe had won its independence (by means of armed struggle).

Yet a footnote to the same chapter also observes that after the six men and five women who were arrested by police in Evanston, Illinois on Apr. 4, 1980 were identified by the FBI as “long-sought members of the FALN” group of revolutionary Puerto Rican nationalists (whose struggle May 19th members had expressed solidarity with at the public meetings the May 19th group organized), the name of Dr. Berkman’s wife and May 19th member, Barbara Zeller, also “comes up many times between 1981 and 1982 in the FBI M19, Batches 1 and 2” of de-classified FBI surveillance files on the May 19th group; including de-classified FBI reports indicating she was under FBI surveillance while doing political support work in Chicago for the FALN defendants in the early 1980’s.

Chapter 8 of Co-Conspirator For Justice then attempts to historically summarize what happened on Oct. 20, 1981 in Rockland County, New York, when a member of the above-ground May 19th group and the above-ground John Brown Anti-Klan Committee (that May 19th members had taken the lead in creating and in which Dr. Berkman was also involved), Judy Clark, was arrested; after she participated, under the leadership of some armed members of an underground early 1980’s Black Liberation Army [BLA] unit, in a politically-motivated action that resulted in the deaths of a Brink’s guard and two policemen, prior to her arrest.

Professor Reverby also notes that (according to Dr. Berkman’s unpublished memoir and an Oct. 21, 1989 letter he wrote to a friend while imprisoned), later in the evening of Oct. 20, 1981 Dr. Berkman was asked to provide needed medical attention for another white woman anti-imperialist left activist who participated in the BLA-led action, Marilyn Buck (who had accidentally shot herself in the leg while driving away from the scene of the Oct. 20, 1981 shoot-out with police in Nyack, New York). And after agreeing to do so, Dr. Berkman was eventually driven to the underground BLA unit's safe house in Mount Vernon, New York even later that evening, where “he saved Marilyn Buck’s life.”

In its “Immediate Aftermath,” “Defense, Conspiracies, and The Grand Jury,” “Alan, The FBI And The State” and “One More Step” sections of chapter 8, Co-Conspirator For Justice indicates how the FBI and local police then utilized the politically biased, “trial by press”-type, corporate media coverage of the Oct. 20, 1981 action to arrest or jail above-ground Republic of New Afrika [RNA] and May 19th members, above-ground BLA supporters and even above-ground former Weather Underground members, who “had done nothing except be friends or in political groups with those who had” been arrested for participating in the Oct. 20, 1981 BLA-led action.

As Professor Reverby recalls, “FBI and local police swooped down on” an RNA leader “outside Jackson, Mississippi, with tanks, guns and helicopter,” one above-ground May 19th organizer was “jailed for 17 months until the grand jury’s work was finished,” and “thirteen more men and women from the BLA, May 19th, and the remains of Weather would also be jailed for refusing to cooperate” with the grand juries. According to Dan Berger’s 2006 book, Outlaws Of America, “people were jailed for periods of 7 to 18 months for refusing to co-operate” with grand juries; and 1970’s WUO leader Bernardine Dohrn, for example, “spent 7 months in jail,” even though she had no information to give and disagreed with the Brink’s action, because she refused to testify before a grand jury.

So, not surprisingly, Dr. Berkman was also imprisoned between May and November 1982 as a grand jury resister, before going underground in February 1983, after being indicted for having provided life-saving medical care on Oct. 20, 1981, for the now-deceased longtime U.S. political prisoner Marilyn Buck (who, nearly three decades later, died of uterine cancer less than two weeks after her release from prison in 2010). Chapter 9 next gives readers some indication of how Dr. Berkman and the other anti-imperialist left members of the clandestine revolutionary group, which he then joined (that included Marilyn Buck), operated underground between 1983 and the arrest of its members in 1985; and it also describes what kind of politically-motivated “armed propaganda” actions the group was responsible for in the 1980’s.

The four chapters of Susan Reverby’s Co-Conspirator For Justice book’s Part 3 provide readers with a detailed look at what Dr. Berkman experienced in various U.S. prisons and jails, both before and after he developed life-threatening health issues in November 1985, six months after being arrested while still underground; and how, for a year, Dr. Berkman and the five other 1980’s Resistance Conspiracy Case co-defendants were in lockdown 23 hours a day. In addition, readers can also learn to what degree Dr. Berkman’s views about Movement-building strategies changed or did not change while he was imprisoned.

Dr. Berkman’s co-defendants in the Resistance Conspiracy Case eventually decided to settle the case “with guilty pleas and dropping of some of the charges” in 1990, so that the then-seriously ill Dr. Berkman “would be spared the pressure of a trial;” despite the excessively long sentences or additional sentences Dr. Berkman’s co-defendants received following their guilty pleas in the Resistance Conspiracy Case, according to Co-Conspirator For Justice. As one of Dr. Berkman’s co-defendants in this case (who was not released from prison, herself, until 2001) told Professor Reverby in a March 8, 2016 interview: “Our main goal was to get a deal for Alan so that he had a chance to get parole based on the other cases with lesser sentences. Every minute we thought about how we could get him better medical care.”

Dr. Berkman was finally released from prison in July 1992; and how he re-adjusted to the world outside and spent the remaining 17 years of his life, while continuing to confront and overcome additional life-threatening health issues before his death in 2009, is what the final Part 4 of Co-Conspirator For Justice describes, in an emotionally moving way.

In the prologue to her Co-Conspirator For Justice book, Professor Reverby writes that she “really knew” Dr. Berkman “as a boy and young man,” but “wrote him only once when he was incarcerated” and “did not agree with his political tactics.” Yet her portrayal of members of the 1970’s and 1980’s May 19th and John Brown Anti-Klan Committee above-ground political groups and the underground groups, which Dr. Berkman was part of or supported, is more sympathetic and politically balanced than what one often finds in most other academic press or corporate media conglomerate-published book accounts of this period of U.S. New Left Movement history; or what one usually finds in historical narratives that make reference to May 19th, the BLA or the FALN in the newspapers, magazines and websites of historically politically competing U.S. left groups or sects or in corporate media news sources like the New York Times and New York Daily News.

But in its references to what happened during the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s, unlike Dan Berger’s Outlaws of America book (that also describes what happened in the same decades, yet contains few references to Dr. Berkman’s significant role in Movement history), Co-Conspirator For Justice seems to rely more on white liberal-left academic or mainstream corporate media historical narratives than on 1960’s and 1970’s white counter-cultural underground press, African-American and Puerto Rican newspaper accounts of what happened. And few articles written about the May 19th group and the BLA’s Oct. 10, 1981 action and subsequent-related trial proceedings from 1980’s U.S. radical left publications, like the now-defunct U.S. Guardian weekly newspaper, are cited in the this book’s footnotes.

In addition, only one sentence in the book contains a reference to Republic of New Afrika [RNA] above-ground organizer Ahmed Obafemi, whose political leadership the May 19th group activists generally followed in the late 1970s and 1980’s; and who was often a featured speaker at the late 1970’s and 1980’s public meetings organized by the May 19th group in NYC, in support of the BLA, the FALN and the granting of political prisoner or prisoner of war status and freedom for Dr. Berkman and other excessively sentenced anti-imperialist left and revolutionary nationalist movement activists or combatants. Yet as a posting about Ahmed Obafemi on the internet, for example, notes:

“Following his release from prison in 1976 until 1991 Brother Obafemi worked in the Harlem, New York community. He was a founding member of Freedom Now, a broad base coalition of organizations and individuals exposing human rights violations of political prisoners, which the government refuses to acknowledge, and has represented this coalition at the United Nations in Geneva Switzerland….Ahmed was also a member of other formations fighting against repression, namely the COINTELPRO Task Force on Research and Litigation, the New York Citizen’s Review Commission and the National Black Human Rights Coalition, which held a major rally for self-determination and reparations at the United Nations in New York three days after the liberation from prison of Assata Shakur. He was a key organizer of the grassroots movement that changed Lenox Avenue to Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem, New York….”

Anti-imperialist left political activists on the Upper West Side and elsewhere in the USA who fear that a new case of political repression might develop in the current decade should, especially, consider checking out Susan Reverby’s well-written Co-Conspirator For Justice book (that also avoids using academic jargon). And it might enable them to examine how at least one U.S. physician diagnosed the political repression cases of the 1970’s and 1980’s in the USA and elsewhere; and how his political response to the political repression cases of those decades affected the remaining portion of this U.S. revolutionary physician’s life. (end of article)