Donna Borup: A printmaker and dedicated revolutionary with an IQ of 164
As May 19th coalesced, three other women became part of the group’s core.
Silvia Baraldini was born into a well-to-do Italian family in Rome on December 12, 1947. Silvia’s father was a brooding presence in the household. He’d spent seven years as a prisoner of war after being captured in Ethiopia, and the experience had scarred him mentally and physically. Still, Silvia and her sisters had a great childhood. “I lived a very privileged, protected life,” she said.1
This pampered existence didn’t last, though. There was some kind of reversal in the Baraldini family’s fortunes, and when Silvia was twelve, they all left for the United States as economic migrants. There were a couple of tough years up in the Bronx and then a relocation to Washington. Silvia hated parochial school, and she persuaded her parents to send her to the local public high school, Woodrow Wilson, in northwest DC. She described herself as an outsider.
In 1965, Silvia enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an emerging center of student radicalism. She was antiwar, antiracist, a part of what was called “the movement.” She joined Students for a Democratic Society, and she heard Black Panther Party deputy chairman Fred Hampton speak on campus. After Chicago cops gunned him down on December 4, 1969, Silvia, like thousands of other students, was outraged—it seemed as though the state was at war with its own people. “The government would stop at nothing to kill the movement,” she said. Later, she joined a Weather Underground front called Prairie Fire, and she was one of the few outsiders trusted by the violent Puerto Rican separatist group Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, or FALN.
• • •
Unlike Silvia, with her once pampered lifestyle, Donna Joan Borup had a modest childhood in South Amboy, a small New Jersey town that she left right after high school. She moved to New York, earned a bachelor’s degree and got jobs as a graphic artist, and taught part time at Cooper Union. According to the FBI, she was a speed reader with a photographic memory and an IQ of 164.
Donna Borup: A printmaker and dedicated revolutionary with an IQ of 164
Susan Vicki Tipograph also linked up with the group in New York City. Born in Brooklyn on October 12, 1950, she grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey. “Tip,” as she was nicknamed, was a “slightly overweight, bespectacled tomboy,” according to one newspaper profile.2 In college, the Vietnam War and the killing of students at Kent State and Jackson State pushed her to the political left. “As the years went by, I got more and more radicalized,” she said. “I realized there were people in the world who were fighting for their liberation.”3 After graduating from New York Law School in 1975, she passed the bar and set up shop, specializing in criminal defense work. As a “movement” lawyer, she took on radical clients: “She can be as charming in conversation as she can be ferocious in the courtroom,” according to another profile.4 Silvia, Susan Rosenberg, and another woman, Eve Rosahn, wound up working as paralegals in Tip’s law office, which was run as a collective. Tip and Susan were particularly close. The two women, a federal judge said, “are more than just attorney and client. They have been associates, companions, and roommates.”5
And then there was a fourth, secret member. Her exploits with the Black Liberation Army, her time behind bars, and her status as a federal fugitive have made her a legend among ultraleftists. One of her comrades praised her as “a bad sister, a woman totally about the get-down for the struggle.”6 She was a major addition to the fledgling group that was forming as the women connected, and her arrival augured new revolutionary possibilities.
• • •
Marilyn Jean Buck, born on December 13, 1947, grew up in Austin, Texas. The oldest of four children, she was the daughter of Virginia and Louis Buck. Her father, once a veterinarian, had become an Episcopal priest. The tall, 350-pound, sandal-wearing Reverend Buck cut an imposing, if eccentric, figure.
His politics are even more unusual—he was a certified liberal and integrationist in a reactionary and segregated city. In Buck’s opinion, his church didn’t have the guts to take a stand and fight against American apartheid. He told his bishop that his fellow clergymen were “wearing lace on their panties.”7 Louis drew national media attention in 1961 when he organized public protests against the exclusion of blacks from church-run schools. Local segregationists burned a cross on the Buck family’s lawn.
By the mid-1960s, Episcopal leaders finally agreed to integrate church institutions, but by then Buck had worn out his ecclesiastical welcome. The church had tired of his outspoken support for civil rights, his prickly personality, and his vaguely beatnik vibe, so they took away his parish. He returned to veterinary medicine and part-time work as a U.S. Department of Agriculture meat inspector. His wife, Virginia, went to work as a secretary.
Still, life was good for the Buck family, which enjoyed a secure, upper-middle-class existence in midcentury America, complete with private-school education for the children. Marilyn was an ideal midcentury American girl—pretty, personable, and fully in synch with the zeitgeist. She wanted to fit in, and she did, both at home and at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School. She was in the honor society, worked on the school paper and yearbook, and joined the drama club. A knitting and crocheting enthusiast, she was also an excellent shot, having received firearms instruction from her father, an avid hunter.8 She harbored premarriage career ambitions to become a “woman stockbroker . . . [but] it wasn’t really what I was interested in,” she said.9
At St. Stephen’s, Marilyn graduated at the top of her class and got offers from Brown, the University of Texas flagship campus in her hometown, and the University of California at Berkeley.10 She picked Berkeley for its high academic standards, which was fine with her father, who was happy to have her avoid UT—Louis was a liberal, but in his view, crazy student radicals were running the show in Austin.
In 1965, seventeen-year-old Marilyn enrolled at Cal. It was her first time away from home. Apparently, her father hadn’t been following the news: Berkeley, the home of the Free Speech Movement, was the white-hot center of the country’s left-wing student movement. The campus’s turbulent politics aroused Marilyn’s bred-in-the-bone sense of social justice. She made a lifelong commitment to waging war against what she called the “warmakers [and] white-skinned haters.”11
Berkeley’s freedoms were “too much for her,” Marilyn’s mother said, after she saw the effect that her new environment had on her, insisting that she had been “an innocent girl.”12 Louis agreed, and persuaded her to leave Berkeley after her first year.13 She transferred to UT and moved back in with her parents.
Given her striking looks, considerable charm, and taste in knee-high boots, Marilyn no doubt drew the attention of the young men around Austin. She was “stunning and statuesque,” as someone described her.14 But she wasn’t interested in distractions. In 1967, she was already committed—to the Students for a Democratic Society.
Nominally a Russian major, Marilyn didn’t spend many hours curled up with Anna Karenina. The antiwar movement and the burgeoning countercultural scene took up most of her time. While campus Greeks were getting blitzed at keg parties, Austin’s hippies were holding “Gentle Thursdays.”15
Marilyn marched steadily leftward. Stokely Carmichael, the fiery leader of the Black Power movement, spoke at UT in early 1967. At speeches at college campuses around the country, Carmichael had electrified audiences with blistering oratory that linked racism at home with the war in Vietnam. “Why should black folks fight a war against yellow folks so that white folks can keep a land they stole from red folks?” he said in 1966. “Ain’t no Vietcong ever called me nigger.”16
She did manage to find time for Robert Pardun, a Students for a Democratic Society organizer, and when he decided to move to Chicago in March 1967, Marilyn went, too. She got a job in the SDS national office, where she coedited the group’s newsletter, New Left Notes.
By July, Marilyn had won a seat on the SDS National Administrative Committee—and begun attracting FBI attention that would persist for nearly two decades.17 In 1968, Bureau officials considered placing her on the “Agitator Index,” a list of more than 1,000 radicals deemed worthy of special Bureau scrutiny.
But even as she continued to find work among the young radicals she admired, she was still a lonely feminist voice within the male-led, macho SDS organization. At a national conference, Marilyn walked on stage to deliver a report on women and revolution. A foul-mouthed, jeering chorus greeted her: One SDS member recalled that “men hooted and whistled, threw paper planes at the stage, and shouted out such gems as ‘I’ll liberate you with my cock.’ ”18 Preternaturally calm and apparently unfazed, she ignored the sexist abuse and finished her presentation.
The Vietnam War was heating up; nearly 500,000 U.S. troops were in the country, the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese army were racking up hundreds of American casualties every week, and a large swath of the Vietnamese population was on the receiving end of U.S. artillery fire, napalm, and air-delivered five-hundred-pound bombs.
On October 21, 1967, Marilyn joined more than 100,000 antiwar protestors at the Pentagon. On the nightly news, all of America saw a parading rabble of peace creeps, potheads, and assorted deadbeats. But the protest also included habit-clad nuns, suited and sober Protestant preachers, and literary figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, and Dwight Macdonald. The irrepressible Norman Mailer, also in attendance, described the Pentagon as it came into view: the building “rose like an anomaly out of the sea from the soft Virginia fields . . . its pale yellow walls reminiscent of some plastic plug coming out of the hole made in flesh by an unmentionable operation.”19
For the antiwar throng assembled outside, the Pentagon was the ultimate symbol of an increasingly deranged U.S. military, a force that seemed hell-bent on incinerating the Vietnamese people or, for that matter, anyone else who resisted the rampaging American golem.
To the protesters, the five-sided structure seemed to throb with pure evil. Hippies conducted ancient Aramaic exorcism rites in the hope of driving out war-making “demons” from the building. Floppy-haired activists dropped daises into the bayoneted rifles wielded by the troops called in to deter potential mayhem. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, in the throes of a nervous breakdown, monitored the spectacle from the roof.
After Marilyn’s relationship with her SDS boyfriend ended, she left Chicago for the San Francisco Bay Area, familiar territory that had become the West Coast epicenter of political and cultural rebellion. In May 1968, she landed a job as a clerk at the U.S. Postal Service’s Ferry Annex. A year later, she was fired for chronic absenteeism. It’s not surprising she got the sack—she was deeply involved with Newsreel, a filmmaking collective specializing in political documentaries.I
The films didn’t do much at the box office, but that was hardly the point. The filmmakers were provocateurs and cultural assassins who wanted to weaponize the medium. Unlike the consensus-oriented liberals who dominated mainstream American life, Newsreel wasn’t interested in offering policy solutions—rather, it wanted to showcase political, social, and economic evils and heighten the cultural contradictions.20 As Marilyn said, “In our hands film is not an anesthetic, a sterile, smooth-talking apparatus of control. It is a weapon to counter, to talk back and to crack the facade of the lying media of capitalism.”21
In 1968, Marilyn helped helm a documentary about the Black Panther Party and later moved into a house owned by someone close to the party. She and some Panthers read Mao and screened political films such as The Battle of Algiers, the gripping, lightly fictionalized account of the Front de Libération Nationale’s underground campaign against French colonial rule. For budding insurrectionists, the documentary provided operational as well as political inspiration—in the words of one cultural critic, The Battle of Algiers “offered invaluable instruction in the language of communiqués, organization of cells, placement of terror bombs, and the value of cop killing.”22
Like many in her cohort, she romanticized Third World revolutionaries, but she wanted to do more than just cheer on the forces of national liberation. “On an ideological level and practical level we felt we had to become guerrillas.”23
It was time to become an urban insurgent.
• • •
In the early 1970s, the Bay Area’s political landscape was rapidly destabilizing. The Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA, led by Donald DeFreeze, an escaped convict who adopted the nom de guerre Field Marshal Cinque Mtume, murdered Oakland’s first black school superintendant, robbed banks, and kidnapped the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst.II The SLA’s slogan: “Death to the fascist insect that preys on the life of the people.”
The equally bizarre and violent Tribal Thumb group was led by another charismatic ex-con named Earl Lamar Satcher, who peddled a home-brewed ideology that fused socialism with Reichean sexual psychology. It had a ranch in Honeydew, 180 miles northwest of San Francisco. In a crass and crude account of life in the group, one former member recalled lots of “revolutionary white girls,” “beautiful non-armpit-shaving sexy-ass sisters,” and plenty of “hot, hairy revolutionary pussy.”24
Tribal Thumb drew recruits from the SLA, the Black Panther Party, and Charles Manson’s murderous “Family.” Sara Jane Moore, the would-be assassin who popped off a round at the hapless President Gerald Ford in San Francisco on September 22, 1975, reportedly used the Honeydew ranch for her target practice.
Adding to the Bay Area’s early-1970s derangement was the presence of the Black Liberation Army, or BLA. Eldridge Cleaver, the leader of a major Black Panther Party faction, had ordered his followers to forget the party’s moves toward mainstream legitimacy—running for political office, community empowerment, and feel-good, free-breakfast programs for neighborhood kids. Cleaver’s faction formed the nucleus of a new, loosely knit underground organization. It was time to start killing cops, Cleaver said. “[This is] retaliation for ongoing atrocities,” said Black Liberation Army leader Sekou Odinga, formerly known as Nathanial Burns.25 The old Panther slogan—“Off the Pig”—was no longer mere revolutionary rhetoric.
The new armed group expanded its list of targets to include the social undesirables preying on communities of color, including “pimps, ho’s [sic], howalkers [sic], trickwalkers, bodyguards, tricks, dope pushers, and owners/operators of trick houses. . . . Anyone found guilty . . . [will] be dealt with.”26
In San Francisco, BLA mayhem included a string of bank robberies and the attempted murder of police sergeant George Kowalski on August 27, 1971. Two days later, a nine-person BLA team mounted an assault on the Ingleside station house. Just before the attack, somebody set off a diversionary bomb blast at a nearby bank.27 Chaos ensued. A gunman killed Sergeant John Young with a shotgun blast to the chest. Another BLA guy drew his 9mm pistol, fired, and wounded Irene Grohman, the station house’s civilian clerk. The BLA team had brought a bomb with them but couldn’t get the fuse to light. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” one of them said.28 (Incredibly, the Young murder case remained open until 2009, when two former BLA members, Herman Bell and Anthony Bottom—already serving life sentences in New York—pled guilty to voluntary manslaughter.)29
Why would the BLA or any other revolutionaries attack a police station? According to former BLA member Sundiata Acoli (né Clark Edward Squire), cops weren’t civilians or noncombatants—they were legitimate targets. The state was oppressing black people, and the pigs were “soldiers for the state,” Acoli said.30
In “Terrorism as Strategy and Ecstasy,” the scholar William F. May offered another explanation: that the plan was to assault the cops in order to invite government repression. “Go for the police station, sharpen the contradictions, because the police will club indiscriminately in retaliation, and thus will radicalize the uncommitted masses.”31
The Ingleside attack didn’t seem to incite any of the masses, but the BLA kept going. The violent campaign would stretch far beyond the Bay Area—it was a “coast-to-coast cop-killing conspiracy,” according to one federal prosecutor.32 Semiautonomous BLA cells targeted police officers in Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.
The FBI grew increasingly alarmed by what it called the “urban guerrilla terrorists.” In an October 16, 1972, memorandum, the acting head of the FBI, L. Patrick Gray, warned about the BLA’s apparent influence in “prisons, ghettos, and many other areas of malcontentment” and urged “full penetrative investigations” of the BLA and its supporters, who were working “to disrupt and destroy existing order in the United States.”33 But the BLA was elusive and next to impossible for the FBI to infiltrate.
The FBI also worried about the BLA’s potential connection with dangerous foreign elements, particularly in the Middle East. The Bureau had received reports that unspecified Arab terrorists were training U.S. blacks in guerrilla operations and that BLA might be involved in an “Arab terrorist plot” inside the United States, according to a May 17, 1973, memo.34 The Bureau reached out to the intelligence community, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. But the spies had next to nothing to report.III
New York City, according to one FBI report, was the “Mecca” of the BLA.35 On May 21, 1971, BLA gunmen carried out a drive-by machine-gun attack that seriously wounded two police officers, Thomas Curry and Nicholas Binetti. The men were guarding the Riverside Drive apartment of Manhattan district attorney Frank Hogan, who had prosecuted many prominent Black Panthers.
Two days later, Officers Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones answered a call in the Colonial Park Houses, a public housing complex built on the site of the old Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan. Bell, Bottom, and a third BLA gunman, Albert “Nuh” Washington, ambushed them. Rounds smashed into Jones’s head and back, killing him almost immediately. Piagentini pleaded for his life. The BLA members took their time, slowly firing twenty-two rounds into his body—it was a torture-murder.36 “It’s open season on the cops in this city,” said the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.37
All told, the BLA murdered at least fifteen policemen.38
Marilyn started working again with former BLA comrades in the late 1970s, and she brought some of the May 19th women along with her. On October 20, 1981, the renewed partnership carried out its most notorious operation, a botched armed robbery in upstate New York that left three men dead.
• • •
The FBI and local cops had long suspected that Marilyn was mixed up with the BLA. The San Francisco Police Department raided her apartment on October 29, 1970, and arrested her after they found a shotgun, an M1 carbine, a couple of 9mm pistols, ammunition, and some bags of weed and other drugs. A judge ruled that there hadn’t been probable cause for the raid and turned her loose. The San Francisco Police Department had to return her weapons.
The cops believed that Marilyn had become pregnant by BLA member Ronald Stanley Bridgeforth and that she had had an abortion. According to the police, she was also a “paramour” of Richard Edward Brown, a purported member of both the BLA and Tribal Thumb.39
Four years later, Bell, Bottom, and Washington were convicted of premeditated murder and each received a sentence of twenty-five years to life. Washington died behind bars in 2000. In 2018, the New York State Parole Board voted to release Bell. He had a “sturdy network of supporters” and was capable of living a “law-abiding life,” the board said. Officer Piagentini’s widow, Diane, said that the board’s decision “devalues the life of my brave husband who was taken from his two daughters and for whom there is no parole.” Bottom remains behind bars.40
In 1968, Bridgeforth shot at three police officers outside the White Front discount store on El Camino Real in South San Francisco. By 1969, he was a fugitive, having jumped bail after pleading no contest to an assault with a deadly weapon. Cops suspected that Bridgeforth was a getaway driver during the Ingleside attack. He would spend four decades on the run—in Senegal, in the Gambia, in Atlanta, and finally, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he taught at a community college under the name Cole Jordan. In 2011, Bridgeforth turned himself in to California authorities, pled guilty to the 1968 shooting, and was sentenced to a year in the San Mateo County Jail.
San Francisco detectives liked Marilyn for the Ingleside attack; a white woman matching her description had reported a stolen bicycle at the station house a few days before the assault—a reconnaissance mission, no doubt.41
Marilyn was, in fact, working as the BLA’s quartermaster—the group’s “only white member,” according to press accounts.
An FBI bulletin quoted from what the Bureau said was a BLA manual for prospective urban guerrillas: “We do not need to take weapons from iced [killed] pigs, especially those who have been righteously baconized. There are better places to rip-off weapons—not where they can be linked to butchered hogs.”42
Marilyn didn’t steal firearms. She had no need to: she simply bought them at gun stores. Well educated, poised, savvy—not to mention a WASP from Texas—Buck was far less likely than her trigger-happy comrades to draw police attention, or so it would seem.
For a couple of years, nobody could pin anything on her, but evidence started to pile up, and on March 22, 1973, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents and San Francisco cops raided her place at 136 Peralta.43 The charge: using fake IDs to buy more than a thousand rounds of ammunition and 9mm Browning Hi-Power pistols in Arizona, Oregon, and Austin—federal offenses.44
Later, U.S. marshals hauled her to Phoenix to stand trial. Wearing a stylish pink suede coat, Marilyn giggled with her lawyer and spent much of her time in court smiling at two female supporters. “She is very intelligent, very clever, and very dangerous,” the judge said during sentencing. He gave her ten years, the most severe sentence possible under the law—he said he wanted “to save others from being killed.”45
The state saw her as “terrorist and traitor,” a “white woman dangerous to white Amerika,” Marilyn wrote in an autobiographical poem.46 She’d been handed a preposterous, politically motivated sentence, she insisted. Just look at Dean Martin, Jr., busted in 1974 for possessing an illegal arsenal that included machine guns and an eight-foot-long antitank weapon. The son of the celebrity had gotten off with probation.47
In 1974, Marilyn began her sentence at the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, West Virginia. She was assigned to the Special Treatment Unit, the prison’s strictest regime. Prison shrinks did an assessment—she was “seductive and provocative in an intellectual way,” they concluded, adding, “This woman had a strong masculine identification. She tends to equate male strengths with power and is heavily identified with male aggressiveness.”48
Back in the mid-1970s, prison authorities, prosecutors, and judges still maintained the notion that convicts could and should be rehabilitated—prison, in their view, wasn’t just about punishment, and short-term releases were considered therapeutic. In November 1976, Marilyn got a six-day furlough to visit her parents in Galveston, Texas. The following June, she got a second respite—this time to visit her lawyer in New York, Susan “Tip” Tipograph.
However, Marilyn never returned to Alderson and added “federal fugitive” to her list of crimes. She found sanctuary in New York’s radical community and dug into the underground.
I. A typical Newsreel offering: Garbage (1968), a film about the agitprop antics of the Motherfuckers, a colorful New York anarchist horde. In the midst of a citywide sanitation workers strike, the Motherfuckers visited Lincoln Center. Just a few years earlier, the “master builder” and power broker Robert Moses had bulldozed the vibrant Puerto Rican neighborhood of San Juan Hill to create a new home for the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The Motherfuckers went on a preplanned rampage, dumping huge heaps of garbage at the entrances to the gleaming culture palace.
II. Like many terrorist groups, the SLA believed it was at war, but it was hardly an “army”—the organization never had more than thirteen members.
III. FBI investigations involve the relentless accretion of details—after all, it isn’t always clear a priori what information might ultimately prove relevant. During the Bureau’s probes into the BLA, special agents unearthed countless nuggets, including reports that the group’s “Minister of War” (name redacted) had played a bit part as a dope addict in the now classic 1972 “blaxploitation” picture Superfly. FBI, “Black Liberation Army,” New York, NY, May 2, 1973, 8 (FBI FOIA release).
