Tim Blunk, seen here after time spent in Rikers Island, was one of the few male members of M19. Along with several others, Alan Berkman, a Columbia-trained doctor who was one of the few men in the M19 inner circle, was involved with the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. New Yorker Susan Rosenberg, one of M19’s earliest members, traveled to Cuba with the Castro-friendly Venceremos Brigade, and Italian-born Silvia Baraldini was part of a front for the militant Weather Underground. M19 membership typically followed involvement with other far-left groups. Many M19 members’ stories echo Linda’s-college activism (at schools including Cornell, Berkeley, Radcliffe and Hampshire College) shaped their far-left worldviews, and for some, their status as out lesbians put them at odds with a heteronormative, patriarchal society. Who were these domestic terrorists sought by the FBI? Rosenau writes of “self-described ‘corn-fed girl’” Linda Sue Evans, whose politics took a radical turn while attending Michigan State University in the midst of the Vietnam War. Both women's prison sentences were commuted by President Bill Clinton in 2001. Linda Sue Evans, right, hailed from the Midwest. Starting in high school, Rosenberg spent time with members of the Black Panthers and Young Lords, and her politics remained leftist through her brief time at Barnard. Susan Rosenberg, left, was one of M19's most central members in its early years. imperialism or the war machine under various organizational aliases (never using the name M19). Over the course of a 20-month span in 19, M19 also bombed an FBI office, the Israel Aircraft Industries building, and the South African consulate in New York, D.C.’s Fort McNair and Navy Yard (which they hit twice.) The attacks tended to follow a similar pattern: a warning call to clear the area, an explosion, a pre-recorded message to media railing against U.S. Ten minutes later, a bomb detonated in the building’s north wing, harming no one but blasting a 15-foot gash in a wall and causing $1 million in damage. Capitol switchboard and warned them to evacuate the building. on November 7, 1983, they called the U.S. (Both Shakur and Morales remain on the FBI’s wanted lists for terrorism and are thought to live in Cuba.)Įventually, M19 turned to building explosives themselves. In 1979, they helped spring explosives-builder William Morales of the Puerto Rican nationalist group FALN and Black Liberation Army organizer Assata Shakur (née Joanne Chesimard) from their respective prisons. The resulting book, Tonight We Bombed the Capitol, pieces together the unfamiliar story of “a group of essentially middle-class, well educated, white people who made a journey essentially from anti-war and civil rights protest to terrorism,” he says.Īfter their formation in 1978, M19’s tactics escalated from picketing and poster-making to robbing armored trucks and abetting prison breaks. M19’s status as an “incredible outlier” from male-led terrorist organizations prompted Rosenau, an international security fellow at the think tank New America, to excavate the inner workings of the secretive and short-lived militant group. Named to honor the shared birthday of civil rights icon Malcolm X and Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, M19 took its belief in “revolutionary anti-imperialism” to violent extremes: It is “the first and only women-created and women-led terrorist group,” says national security expert and historian William Rosenau. Amidst the social and political turmoil of the 1970s, a handful of women-among them a onetime Barnard student, a Texas sorority sister, the daughter of a former communist journalist-joined and became leaders of the May 19th Communist Organization.
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