U.S. political prisoner freed after decades in prison

MARILYN BUCK

U.S. political prisoner freed after decades in prison

http://www.workers.org/2010/us/buck_0729/

Jul 26, 2010 9:43 PM
by staff writers at fightbacknews.org, July 17.

Marilyn Buck, a political prisoner in the U.S., was released July 15
from the federal prison medical center in Carswell, Texas, according
to her support group, Friends of Marilyn Buck. She is paroled to New
York. As of the writing of this article, no further details about her
release have been made available.

Life-long commitment to anti-racism and anti-imperialism

Buck started her commitment to fighting against racism and U.S.
imperialism as a student activist in the 1960s, when she was a member
of Students for a Democratic Society at the University of Texas.
There she organized against the Vietnam War and against racism, and
she was one of the women who helped make women's liberation a central
part of SDS's politics.

In the 1970s Buck worked to support revolutionary anti-imperialist
movements around the world, while also actively supporting the Native
American and Black liberation movements within the U.S.

Despite great personal suffering, including decades in jail, Buck
maintained her commitment to anti-imperialist and anti-racist
politics, including supporting those fighting against imperialism and
for national liberation.

Decades in prison

Buck spent four years in prison in the early 1970s, allegedly for
helping Black revolutionaries buy firearms. After she was furloughed
from jail, she went underground to resume her political activism
against U.S. imperialism and in support of Black liberation.

She was captured again in 1985, and has been in prison ever since. At
that time she was accused of actions such as helping Black
revolutionary Assata Shakur successfully escape from prison in 1979,
as well as conspiracy in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Senate building
in response to the Reagan administration's invasion of Grenada, which
had a leftist government at the time.

With her capture in 1985, Buck became part of the Resistance
Conspiracy trial. This was a prominent trial in the 1980s against
seven white anti-racist and anti-imperialist activists who were
accused of conspiring "to influence, change and protest policies and
practices of the United States Government concerning various
international and domestic matters through the use of violent and
illegal means."

The seven were accused of supporting armed Black revolutionaries
within the U.S. and accused of a series of bombings of U.S.
government and military buildings in protest of U.S. foreign policy
in Central America and the Middle East.

Buck received an 80-year sentence in the case.

While in prison, Buck became a prolific writer of political articles
and poetry. She wrote, "The trials, those years of intense repression
and U.S. government denunciations of my humanity had beat me up rather badly.

"Whatever my voice had been, it was left frayed. I could scarcely
speak. For prisoners, writing is a life raft to save one from
drowning in a prison swamp. I could not write a diary or a journal; I
was a political prisoner. Everything I had was subject to
investigation, invasion and confiscation. I was a censored person. In
defiance, I turned to poetry, an art of speaking sparely, but flagrantly."

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