litical prisoners was regarded as more effective than working within the established political parties. Even so, as Judy Greenspan told me, the cause was never widely adopted: “I think what really hurt the political prisoner movement, and continues to hurt it, is the lack of a mass movement. The prisoner movement, apart from political prisoners, has always been impacted by what was going on outside of prison—by what was going on in the streets.” By the 1980s and ’90s, outside of antiimperialist and anti-racist groups, organized activism for incarcerated people remained on the fringes. In what would become known as the Resistance Conspiracy Case (RCC), a group of seven anti-imperialist activists— Susan Rosenberg, Linda Evans, Laura Whitehorn, Marilyn Buck, Alan Berkman, Tim Blunk, and Betty Ann Duke—were all charged with conspiracy. Groups they were associated with carried out bombings of government and military sites across the U.S. from 1983 to ’85 in protest against deadly U.S. intervention in Central America. While the bombings destroyed government property, no one was harmed during these incidents. Along with their comrades, lesbian revolutionaries Rosenberg, Evans, and Whitehorn had histories in several clandestine groups, such as the Weather Underground, Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, and the May 19th Communist Organization. Despite these charges and subsequent lengthy sentencing, the U.S. government would later reveal “there was no direct proof that the individual activists were involved in the bombings.” In the late-1980s, Greenspan worked as the HIV Information Coordinator of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Washington, D.C., when they learned that “a group of political prisoners had been brought to the D.C. jail and charged with this outrageous conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government by force or violence.” Greenspan, familiar with several defendants from past political organizing, visited the D.C. jail and decided they could offer support from the outside, stating: “I could play a role in terms of ... orchestrating the case to the political movement on the outside. Because there were a lot of misconceptions.” Greenspan explains: “There was a lot of resentment and a lot of fear … nobody wanted to touch them, and so my job was not to convince people that bombing buildings was the right approach necessarily, but that this attack is an attack on the entire movement and we needed to respond and that you could respond even if you did not approve of their tactics.” Soon after this visit, Greenspan organized the first activist response to defend those indicted in the RCC. Since Rosenberg, Evans, Whitehorn, Buck, Berkman, Blunk, and Duke had histories with other activist groups, there was a small but determined network of revolutionaries, many of them lesbians on the margins of the mainstream LGBT movement due to their anti-racist and anti-imperialist commitments. Stated Greenspan in a speech: “The mainstream LGBT movement was not concerned about these issues and was certainly not even concerned about prisoners, much less political prisoners in their own ranks.” An unwavering prison abolitionist, bo brown traced her political consciousness to a group of Black women with whom she was incarcerated during the early 1970s. After the murder of George Jackson, brown witnessed this group of women organize a work stoppage, one that continued through the prison uprising in Attica, New York, and the subsequent murder of the prison resisters there. After her release from jail, brown joined the George Jackson Brigade (GJB) and began robbing banks to support the group financially. Termed a “gentlemen bank robber,” a phrase capturing both “her butch style of dress” and “polite way of demanding funds,” brown was arrested again in 1978. Upon her second release, brown immediately began organizing with the activist group Revolting Lesbians, which brown described as “the leftist lesbian arm of the San Francisco Coalition, which participated in the politics of the 1980s.” By 1987, with bo’s help, Revolting Lesbians published the first edition of its booklet “Political Women Prisoners in the United States,” which served as a broad primer on women incarcerated for a wide swath of political actions, including information about activists from organizations such as MOVE, the Ohio Seven, Puerto Rican prisoners of war, and women incarcerated for retaliating against physical and sexual abuse. Revolting Lesbians intended for the publication to serve as a bridge to a broader LGBT movement by illuminating the stories of women political prisoners. Recording the experiences of incarcerated lesbians, the publication revealed that there were “countless imprisoned lesbians” who “struggled to improve the conditions of other women prisoners.” However, the article explains how “very few [of these] struggles have been recorded,” a truth that applied even more to “poor and working-class lesbians and dykes of color.” It argued that prisons were “totalizing institutions” where racism, classism, and sexism were amplified and that seeking carceral solutions to violence, particularly gendered violence, through the state was not a viable solution: “Do we go ask ‘the enemy’—the state, the police—to 28 TheG&LR Poster from Greenspan’s run for the Madison, WI, school board in 1973.
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