Poet Marilyn Buck Freed After 25 Years in Prison
http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/thorne-dreyer-poet-marilyn-buck-freed.html
19 July 2010
Thorne Dreyer
Poet and political prisoner Marilyn Buck
Freed after 25 years in federal prison
AUSTIN -- Marilyn Buck is free.
Marilyn Jean Buck, 62, who served 25 years of an 80-year sentence in
federal prison for crimes related to her actions in support of the
black liberation movement, was released from the federal prison
medical center in Carswell, Texas, July 15, 2010. She was paroled to
New York City.
Buck, who was considered to be a political prisoner, became a
respected and widely published poet while incarcerated.
Last December Buck -- who grew up in Austin -- was diagnosed with a
rare form of cancer, a uterine sarcoma. She underwent surgery and
chemotherapy for the cancer in prison, but treatment was eventually
suspended after it was determined that her body could tolerate no
more chemotherapy.
Representatives of her support group, the Friends of Marilyn Buck,
announced on July 15:
Our beloved sister, friend and comrade, Marilyn Buck, is out free!
She was released from the prison hospital this morning and is on her
way to New York.
The Rag Blog's Mariann Wizard spoke with Buck shortly after her
release. Wizard reports:
She is elated, she is exhausted. Her spirits are high, in large part
because of the strong support she has received through the years from
hundreds of people around the world. She asked me to "please thank
everyone" for their support.
The crimes for which Marilyn Buck was convicted included assisting in
the 1979 escape from a New Jersey prison of Assata Shakur, who was a
Black Panther and a member of the Black Liberation Army. She was also
charged in the 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored car in which $1.6
million was stolen and two police officers were killed, and in the
"Resistance Conspiracy" trial in which six activists were charged
with several bombings, including a 1983 bombing of the U.S. Senate
building. These bombings were preceded by warnings and involved only
property damage.
There is substantial precedent for considering Marilyn Buck a
political prisoner, even though some of the crimes for which she was
convicted might not be viewed as explicitly political. Courts have
determined that crimes committed with political motives or in a
political context should be treated differently from other crimes.
Mariann Wizard, Marilyn's friend since 1966 -- and also a poet -- was
the primary organizer of a highly successful community-wide benefit
for Marilyn Buck on June 25 in Austin, calling for Buck's immediate
release for humanitarian reasons. It featured live music, poetry
reading, an art auction, a healing ceremony, and remarks of support
from former Black Panther Robert Hillary King, who spent 32 years in
Angola Prison as part of the Angola 3.
Wizard wrote a feature story, "Warrior-Poet Marilyn Buck: No Wall Too
Tall," that was published in The Rag Blog on May 19 and has been
widely republished. In the article Wizard discusses the crimes for
which Buck was charged, and places them in the context of the times
in which they occurred.
Mariann wrote:
Marilyn was accused of sensational acts of insurrection... Many
otherwise liberal-minded Americans are unable to get past the
violence of the confrontations between the police and the small
groups of Black and white revolutionaries with whom Buck was linked.
Many committed leftists criticized the militants as foolhardy adventurists.
Neither give due weight to the extraordinary repressive measures
undertaken by the U.S. government to crush lawful dissent against
unjust policies at home and abroad. Behind the shadow of COINTELPRO
(the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program), law enforcement agencies
operated outside the rule of law against Movement activists...
To be an African-American dissident, especially, meant walking
around with a "shoot-to-kill" sign pinned on your chest.
While acknowledging that many, including Marilyn, now question or
reject some of the tactics used at the time, Wizard said, "She dared
to support with deeds what we only said we supported: the right of
oppressed people to defend themselves."
In 2001, Marilyn Buck told Monthly Review:
I think about the vision I had when I was a nineteen-year-old of
justice and human rights and women's equality. It was a wonderful
vision. I think [that] how... we became rigid and rhetorical within
that -- took away from that vision. But without a vision, you can't go forward.
Wizard wrote in The Rag Blog:
Reading her letters, poems, and essays over all these years, I've
seen her extraordinary evolution, witnessed the maturation of an
articulate, responsible, disciplined, ethical mind.
Marilyn Buck earned a masters' degree while incarcerated.
Her poems can be found in many collections, in her chapbook, Rescue
the Word, and on her CD Wild Poppies. She was awarded the P.E.N.
American Center poetry award in 2001. In 2009 City Lights Books
published her translation of Uruguayan poet-in-exile Cristina Peri
Rossi's collection, State of Exile.
Her political writings have also been widely published.
Marilyn Buck was born in Temple, Texas, but grew up in Austin where
her father, the late Louis Buck, was an Episcopal priest and a civil
rights activist who was removed from his ministry after he
desegregated his congregation.
As a student at the University of Texas she became involved in civil
rights organizing and in the movement against the war in Vietnam. She
was active with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and
worked with Austin's underground newspaper, The Rag.
She later edited the SDS national newspaper New Left Notes and worked
in the women's movement. In the 1970s she became increasingly
involved in the fight against racism and in opposition to U.S.
imperialism, and committed to active support for the black liberation struggle.
Mariann Wizard reports:
Marilyn is now on parole in New York -- and with her 80-year
sentence that is unlikely to change -- so her first tasks are to
comply with her parole requirements and try to stabilize her health,
but it is very clear that she still has much to contribute to the
struggle for human rights and economic justice, as well as to poetry.
It has been a very long road to freedom.
--
[Thorne Dreyer lives in Austin where he is a director of the New
Journalism Project, edits The Rag Blog, and hosts Rag Radio, a weekly
radio show on KOOP 91.7 FM. He was active in SDS in the Sixties and
was a founding editor of The Rag in Austin and Space City! in
Houston. He can be reached at tdreyer@austin.rr.com.]
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