Part I

Profiles of the George Jackson Brigade

This section is divided into three ways in which the Brigade was seen and made visible: i) the clipped and error-prone reports of law enforcement on the group as a whole; ii) press coverage from major print media corporations; and iii) accounts in the countercultural press focusing on statements published by supporters. The latter two are intertwined to a certain extent in that the corporate press did at times give significant space to interviews with Brigade members in custody and even printed communiqués.

The first section, "Law Enforcement Perspectives," begins with a chronology of Brigade actions, prepared by Intelligence Division of the Seattle Police Department. It is undated but can be no earlier than late December 1977: i.e., three months before the arrest of the last remaining Brigade member. It is a small fragment of a file weighing in at approximately 750 pages.

The following report, by an anonymous agent of the Seattle offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (regional headquarters for the Pacific Northwest), provides an overview of the George Jackson Brigade that is conceptual as well as chronological. It dates to the days before the final arrest when the ideology and the membership of the organization had become gradually clearer but members were still at large and presented an immediate threat. The report is rife with inaccuracies: George Jackson was killed August 21, not 11, 1971; CONvention, not "Convention Movement"; "The Family" at the Washington State Prison in Walla Walla began in 1973. Yet for all these faults, the author(s) of this document also understood something of the distinctiveness of the George Jackson Brigade — that it grew out of the prison movement, and, as the report states, did "not envision itself as an 'elite' faction for an ultimate revolutionary government."

The proverbial "Agent Smith," or group of agents, completely missed other elements. For example, he (there were no female agents in the office) referred to "the writer for the GJB," though the Brigade's political statement, which was released two months before this report was completed, was so clearly a collective project that it contained separate statements of two distinct ideological perspectives: antiauthoritarian and socialist. The assertion that "The communiques and notations written by the GJB indicate a strict dedication to the precepts and disciplines included in the writings of KARL MARX" would make an orthodox Marxist cringe, though the agent is correct in observing that the Brigade's Marxism-Leninism had been processed through South American revolutionaries (the Brazilian theorist-practitioner Carlos Marighella more so than Che Guevara, while Asian and African theorist-practitioners influenced them as well). Note, as well, that the author finds the Brigade's activities so reprehensible that he does not even permit them ideals, only "imagined ideals."

The Bureau apparently still remembers the Brigade as a major case, and has chosen to post their entire file on the Brigade on their website. The author of the introduction to the Brigade, however, seems to have read the file too literally, claiming for example that the Brigade carried out an attack against a "custom house," when the object of their attention was the adjacent FBI offices.

The next section, "Difficult to Digest: The Corporate Media on the George Jackson Brigade," contains mainstream press profiles of Ed Mead, Bruce Seidel, Janine Bertram, and John Sherman, all of whom were in custody — or in Seidel's case, deceased — at the time. The stories are framed as explorations of the "two-faced" character of revolutionaries: the journalists struggle to reconcile friends' and family members' testimonies to the warmth and humanity of the Brigade members with prosecutors' and law enforcement officers' condemnation of the violence inherent in their chosen path.

The tone of the coverage varies by the class background of the Brigade member under scrutiny. Bertram and Seidel came from middle class backgrounds. Appropriate to the demographic of daily newspaper readers, their profiles reveal a discernable undercurrent of parental introspection: 'What did we do wrong?' Ed Mead came from a working class background, and is placed at a further remove from the reader; he is more of an ominous curiosity than a prodigal son. Sherman hovers in between: his golden tongue clearly won a degree of sympathy from the reporter.

The last section "Invisible People: A Working Class Black Man and a White Dyke," deals with the members of the Brigade the corporate press could not perceive as multidimensional people. The mainstream press paid significant attention to Mark Cook, but he also remained a mystery to them for reasons they could not have overcome. Unlike Mead, who claimed responsibility for Brigade actions and declared his politics to anyone who would listen, Cook kept his own counsel, and consistently denied membership in the Brigade. Cook exhibited an equal respect for, and commitment to, aboveground and underground work. This was not schizophrenia, as implied in the press profiles in the second section, but a focus on a purpose which — in the perception of Cook and his peers — demanded to be realized by the distinct, but complementary, means too often categorized simplistically as "reformist" and "revolutionary."

The irony of Cook's case is that, though guilty as charged, he was also framed. He was pulled in by police because he was on a watch list of African-American radicals known informally as the "crazy nigger list." He was then released and rearrested several days later after being fingered by a former friend from his days in the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, Autrey "Scatman" Sturgis. Cook states that he never disclosed his involvement in the Brigade to Sturgis, and speculates that Sturgis, also in custody and in forced withdrawal from heroin, followed the leads of investigators in asserting that Cook had confessed to him. Because he maintained his innocence, a full portrait of Cook was thus not possible until 1999, the year he acknowledged his past involvement in the Brigade and was released from prison. Michelle Celarier's article included here gives a thorough overview of the prosecutorial dirty tricks in the case, and reflects the understandable uncertainty of the aboveground Left as to the degree of Cook's involvement in the Tukwila robbery attempt.

Rita "Bo" Brown, a butch lesbian as well as a proletarian, was even more difficult for the press to digest than was Cook. According to Brown, law enforcement officials, concerned by the press coverage that had been received by Mead and Sherman, obstructed press access after her arrest. Facing trial in Portland, Oregon, she was also far from her base in Seattle. As a result, no...