The San Francisco Public Library handed its microphone earlier this month to a panel of former Weather Underground and Black Liberation Army members who used the evening to praise a convicted police killer's prison break and to talk openly about teaching the next generation of radicals what worked and what did not.
The event, titled A Generation of Political Prisoner Support and Archiving Resistance, was held on November 2, the anniversary of Assata Shakur's 1979 escape from prison, and was slotted into the library calendar between story time and Tai Chi classes. Shakur, a Black Liberation Army member convicted in the 1973 murder of a New Jersey state trooper, fled to Communist Cuba and lived there until her death last year.
The panelists arrived with long records. David Gilbert was convicted in the 1981 Brink's robbery carried out by Black Liberation Army members and former Weather Underground figures, a crime that killed two police officers and a security guard. Herman Bell was convicted of murdering two NYPD officers in 1971 and of voluntary manslaughter in the death of a San Francisco police sergeant the same year. Laura Whitehorn was convicted over a bombing campaign that included the U.S. Capitol and the National War College. Claude Marks was tied by prosecutors to a FALN plot to disrupt the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics with 37 pounds of what he and co-conspirators believed were explosives, during a group campaign of more than 100 bombings in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Most of the speakers kept those years vague. Bell alone addressed his case directly, describing his arrest as being in connection with the officers' deaths. Gilbert referred only to a decade in the underground resistance. Marks said he had spent many years in clandestinity. Whitehorn called herself a former political prisoner. On Shakur, the tone turned admiring, with Gilbert saying he wished he had taken part and calling the escape a beautiful example of what well thought out and carefully planned and brave clandestine action can do.
The event was convened with the Certain Days Collective, a prison abolitionist group co-founded by Gilbert and Bell that sells an annual Freedom for Political Prisoners calendar to fund itself and other organizations. Beneficiaries have included Release Aging People in Prison, the Palestinian Youth Movement, Puget Sound Prisoner Support, NorCal Resist and Addameer, a Palestinian prisoner support group later designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel.
Library records show the event was promoted across the system, with one librarian emailing roughly a dozen colleagues to include it in branch newsletters and noting it fell on an important date for Assata Shakur. Those same records show a companion event fizzled: a book talk with moderator Josh Davidson and Eric King, who served time for firebombing the congressional office of then Black Caucus leader Emanuel Cleaver, collapsed after supervisors ruled the department could not fund a program about a book missing from its own collection. The library was also pursuing a children's program built around a prison abolition picture book.
Whether any of the panelists were paid remains unanswered. Internal emails from May and June show the librarian hunting for an honorarium, discussing what the department could provide, asking presenters to set their rates in a speaker database, and requesting tax forms and invoices. No record shows that a payment was made. The library has declined to discuss the event beyond confirming it is processing a public records request.