Not surprisingly, the manner of Stender’s death and its implications for the left were mostly ignored. It was as if they intuited our fairy-tale fantasies, our dreams of the hero in the heart of the beast …” Axelrod, judging by her subsequent career, seems not to have taken it to heart. They had believed that they had “discovered the hidden brilliance of Cleaver and Jackson … but it was nothing compared with their psychological genius. And admitted that those who had ridiculed them for their infatuation had not all been “right wing bigots.” She referred to Axelrod having rewrote Cleaver’s semi illiterate rants for Ramparts and his autobiography. Beverley Axelrod, is a fitting epitaph to a life largely wasted in pursuit of ultra leftist nihilism. Her last testament, contained in a letter to another former defender of the Panthers and Jackson and the Weather Underground. One of Stender’s former comrades on the legal left Linda Castro described Brook’s treatment over the shooting of her “friend” as racist.Ī year after the attempted murder which left Stender severely disabled, she committed suicide in Hong Kong. Brooks was later murdered in Folsom prison, of Johnny Cash fame, in a dispute between the revolutionaries over drugs and the rape of other prisoners who the gangs controlled as prostitutes. In May 1979 Stender was shot by a Black Guerrilla Family member Edward Brooks who forced her to sign a statement admitting having done badly by George. Her “betrayal” of Jackson, who had been shot dead in an August 1971 attempt escape during which he murdered another five people. Davis, who bought the guns for Jackson’s 16 year old brother Jonathan before he was killed in a hostage taking, has also stolen her thunder on that great notion. Stender continued to be part of the far left into the 1970s, and wrote an essay in a legal journal in 1974 advocating the abolition of prisons. For once Jackson had encountered someone who was even more self serving in their devotion to the “revolution.” It has served her well up until the present day. She was replaced in his scheme by Angela Davis. Stender was at one time so besotted with Jackson that she became intimate with him, but he disowned her when she apparently demurred at smuggling weapons into prison for him. In one of Jackson’s prison letters, which perhaps Stender forgot to edit, he attacks his father as a man who spent his whole life working instead of holding up gas stations or preying on his neighbours.
The white petit bourgeois new left and the black criminals posing as revolutionaries shared a contempt for decent people of all colours. Just as Jim Fitzpatrick’s cartoon of Guevara made an icon of a mass murderer. Perhaps her worst act, in concert with others in the San Francisco left was to edit their writings in a way that made them plausible.
NO GOODDEED GOES UNPUNISHED SERIAL
She became famous as one of the lawyers who defended the despicable Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers, who claimed that his serial rapes had been a political act, and the even more horrific jail psychopath George Jackson. It was a question that one of the tragic figures of the American left posed to herself just before she took her own life.įay Stender had been one of the stalwarts of the California left in the 1960s and early 70s.
Read the book if you can, but I have chosen from it part of her preface, as an introduction to the main character in this tale: “What on earth was the matter with us all?”
They included Daily Worker editor Bill Rust, whose daughter Rosa had been sent to the gulag but who defended it all to his death. The book is well worth reading for its human insight into how many people doggedly stuck to their illusions despite all. There is a little known but brilliant book, The Death of Uncle Joe, by Alison Macleod who worked for the British Communist Daily Worker in the 1940s and 1950s until eventually seeing sense and leaving.
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