Rebels in White Gloves (15 page)

An only child, Janet was her father’s pride and joy. When she was
three, he taught her how to count money. For twelve years, he sat with her every day for two hours while she practiced piano. Former UN ambassador Andrew Young, who grew up with Janet and calls her his “country cousin,” teases her that she is a BAP—a black American princess. Janet’s parents were intensely protective. To insulate her from the racial strife in the public schools, they sent her to Catholic school with the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, who devoted their lives to teaching blacks and Indians. By the time efforts at school desegregation turned intensely violent, Janet was safely at Wellesley. Janet interviewed for Wellesley with a former Mardi Gras queen, who did little to veil her surprise at the girl’s scholarly aspirations but failed to humiliate her nevertheless. “My parents taught me that we were separate but superior, that whites had more to learn from me than I did from them. I knew about white people from TV, but they didn’t know about me.”

The McDonalds had high hopes for their daughter. “But my parents were outraged and bitter about the circumstances of their own and their friends’ lives. They believed that discrimination diminished everyone’s quality of life, deprived the whole society of the rich contributions black people can make. A lot has changed, but ask my son, Grant [Hill]. He’ll tell you that a lot hasn’t changed.”

In 1961, the year the Freedom Riders first set out from Washington, D.C., heading for New Orleans, Janet’s father became active in grassroots civil disobedience and encouraged his daughter to get involved. On the steps of city hall, father and daughter together joined picket lines protesting the continued denial of voting rights to portions of the black populace. During one such demonstration in 1962, the same year the New Orleans Citizens Council offered free one-way transportation to blacks wishing to move north, Janet was arrested with a group of other teenagers. Only the intervention of a sympathetic judge kept her from landing in jail.

When the women of ’69 say, “I always expected to have my mother’s life,” they are often describing an ambiguous frame of mind, both happy anticipation and dread. Women could blame on their mothers the feminine self-effacement they despised in themselves, see in them colluders with a society that restricted women. “What had our mothers been doing then,” wondered Virginia Woolf, chafing at her exclusion as a
woman from the lawns and libraries and “High Tables” of Oxbridge, “that they had no wealth to leave us?”

The contempt for her mother’s capitulation might propel a girl to outdo her. At the same time, to reject her mother’s example was to be a traitor to her love; to step out into the larger world might arouse a daughter’s guilt and her mother’s rage. Literary historian Carolyn Heilbrun has argued that the heroines of most novels by women have no mothers, or ineffectual ones, because they reflect the female dream of taking control of one’s life without injuring the much loved and pitied mother. Outside of fiction, the dilemma was not so easily resolved. For most of the women of ’69, their relationships with their mothers are a work in progress. As they reach middle age and each hears her mother’s voice in her own, she can still feel compelled to resist the vortex of her feminine history. More often, both women have evolved toward each other and a grateful peace.

Before that rapprochement was possible, however, their break with the past required a good number of these women to give the pendulum a hard swing. In the years that followed Wellesley, in that loose-bordered epoch typically called the sixties (though it spilled well into the seventies), a number of the women of ’69 chose exile or estrangement, taking off like runaways with no forwarding address, moving into communes or marriages so unacceptable as to guarantee broken ties. Like George Eliot’s fall from austere bluestocking into mistress of a married man, which made it possible for her to write, a woman wanting to escape the conventional role into which she was cast had to transgress.

CHAPTER THREE
 
 
Rebellions and New Solidarities

I
n the summer of 1970, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms special investigators Clyde Curry and Robert d’Orsa and Sgt. Ronald Andrade of the Fall River, Massachusetts, police department testified before Senator Strom Thurmond and the Senate Subcommittee on the Internal Security Act. Their topic was the “Extent of Subversion in the New Left.” Though the testimony ranged widely, the questioners were most keenly interested in the members of the Regional Action Group (RAG), who had settled into several communes in Fall River in order to conduct political education and organize among the mostly white working-class residents. “The landlords complained that these individuals were using narcotics and wanted to overthrow the country,” Mr. d’Orsa reported.

The “red squad” listened with grave concern as the witnesses testified about a twenty-two-year-old female, Dorothy Devine Gilbarg, who had recently returned to the collective after traveling to Cuba with the Venceremos (“We shall overcome”) Brigade for reasons she subsequently described to the
Providence Journal:
“We helped break the U.S. information blockade, supported the Vietnamese struggle and advanced the cause of Internationalism.” RAG was devoted, she said, to “the destruction of U.S. imperialism and to the eventual communization of the world.”

Mrs. Gilbarg’s Cuban sojourn was what “brought the heat on the collective,” she believed. “The ATF told our neighbors we were dangerous, and enjoined them to rent their front bedroom so they could set up cameras to monitor our activities.” The investigators’ pictures—shot with a long lens, they are grainy and gray and clumsily composed—were posted in the Fall River Police Department with a warning that the
young woman might be dangerous. Dorothy’s lank hair is tied back in a bandanna. Otherwise, she is much the same soft, shy girl who smiled out of her Wellesley yearbook in a picture taken just twelve months earlier.

A year and a half had passed since her father had forced her down the aisle; Dorothy was cut off from her parents, but she was still struggling to make her new home. Swept into Dan’s leftist circle, the young bride was repeatedly frustrated in her wish to have time alone with her husband to solidify their new marriage. Though for a time the couple had their own apartment, they never made dinner together at home. Every night they were at someone’s house, “organizing.” Their thorough entanglement of the personal and political greatly enlarged Dorothy’s world, but it also menaced her sense of safety and would eventually sabotage her efforts to create a lasting intimate bond with her husband.

Dorothy tried to play homemaker for her radical husband, valiantly hanging new Marimekko curtains and laying their breakfast table with Danish-modern flatware. She also dutifully supported her husband’s career, following him to Fall River though she had no work of her own there, and reliably parroting his political ideas. Her husband taught at a community college; he teaches there still. “His idea, ‘our idea,’ was that working-class people would change America, that if the working class wanted blacks to have equal opportunities and they wanted the war to end, then the world would change. We’d find real alienated Vietnam vets and talk to them about how they got used,” says Dorothy, “or try to get street toughs hanging on corners to not just be punks but to want to change their country and their town.” Several of the street kids, she believes, later informed on them to the ATF and FBI.

There are at least three versions of the life Dorothy lived as Dan’s wife and a member of RAG. The first is that described by the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Subversion. Dorothy and her comrades, in the committee’s rendering, were seditious and highly dangerous. The group was out to indoctrinate children: Dorothy and occasional RAG associate Susan Hagedorn (a former member of the Weather Underground) frequented the YMCA to show Boston Newsreal Co. documentaries about the Black Panther party and labor unions and Vietnam. Hagedorn, a youth counselor and teacher at the Fall River junior high, also consulted with Dan on “revolutionary propaganda” with unalarming titles that she might sneak into her class. “She said ‘I cream my jeans when I think of
the stuff I can show the kids,’ ” reported Sergeant Andrade, adding that he didn’t much cotton to her “trooper’s language.” Andrade reported further that Dan had distributed leaflets to workers in the garment industry. When a worker he’d recruited at the King Phillip Mill complained that his co-workers called him a Communist, the sergeant said, Dan had snapped back: “Well, what the hell do you think you are?”

The witnesses described a progressive turn toward violence in the group. “The members of RAG were advised by their Cuban companions as to the best tactics for revolution and informal indoctrination,” the investigators told the Senate. Venceremos Brigadiers “have a propensity toward the use of bombs and incendiaries.” In a New Bedford demonstration in November 1969, the ATF agents said, RAG member Michael Kevin Riley (whom they inaccurately identified as chairman of the Weatherman faction of SDS) burned a live pig. They produced as evidence leaflets they said were being produced by Mike Ansara, “one of the twenty most dangerous white revolutionaries in the U.S.” and distributed by Dorothy. The leaflets advocated violence, condemning the “Amerikan government’s attempts to suppress dissent” and calling for the emulation of Third World revolutions, “where poor people are taking what’s theirs.” “The Man is out to pull a fast one,” reads one of the leaflets reproduced in the report, “accusing us of being duped by outside agitators. We are going to take power back to the people. We are going to drive the cops, politicians and bloodsucking businessmen out. Free Bobby Seale. The black struggle against the rich rulers is white working people’s fight too.”

The investigators’ account grew increasingly alarming. By the spring of 1970, they testified, just a month after two members of the Weather Underground blew themselves up building bombs in a Greenwich Village town house, the collective began planning a violent May Day demonstration in Fall River. Sergeant Andrade reported that Dorothy and another woman had been caught in the police station and could offer no explanation for their presence. “They are suspected of reconnoitering to take it over or to bomb it on the night of May 1st, 1970.” The police said they had also detected an unusual number of sales of gasoline in small containers and road flares called fusees, exactly like those that had been used to ignite buildings in Harvard Square. An informant who claimed to have infiltrated the collective reported that the group was anticipating
“heavy action” on May Day. This was the same group, he claimed, that had organized the “April window-smashing riot” in Cambridge; now they “wanted the Hell’s Angels and the Panthers in their May Day parade, and were not afraid of a shoot-out. David Miller [another RAG member] thought he might die, and Dan Gilbarg said he would take some pigs with him.” Claiming that the group had threatened to kill him if they found him, the informant absconded. The group did not renounce violence, according to the police; the next month, they claimed, Mike Riley bought a semiautomatic gun.

The second version of those years comes from Dorothy’s ex-husband, Dan Gilbarg, a straightforward, reflective man who still teaches at the community college in Fall River. Dan disputes much of the Senate report. Though there were some in the group who wanted to be “militant,” what that meant was “chanting loudly while we marched, instead of singing folk songs or ‘Give Peace a Chance.’ If there had been anything like bombs, guns, or Molotovs, I would have been gone.” The burned pig, Dan says, was made of papier-mâché and decorated with the names of all the corporations making money in Vietnam. The two women arrested in the police station were strangers to the group. And the informant, Dan says, must have been someone at the fringe of the group, given how wrong most of his information was; alternatively, he may have exaggerated RAG’s violent intentions to curry favor with authorities eager for a rationale for a harsh police response. The Fall River city council president did in fact promise to “take the wraps off of the police,” insisting he would not be bound by the rulings of “a senile kangaroo court [a reference to the U.S. Supreme Court] supporting the radicals.” That promise came despite the fact that RAG had no contact with the Black Panthers at all prior to the May Day march in 1970, according to Dan; it was the police who spread rumors that armed Panthers would be “landing on the beach at Westport,” causing frightened residents to begin buying guns. It was that influx of guns, in turn, that caused RAG to call off the demonstration, fearing someone would get hurt. “The pig power structure tails us and stakes out our home,” RAG announced. “They sent us bomb and death threats, told us they’ll use their clubs and guns.” The event effectively marked the end of RAG, Dan says. Most members decided their efforts to mobilize the workers were hopeless, and turned away from politics to their private lives. Dan sought to recast
his appeal: “Rather than expect the locals to get interested by talk of the Panthers, I started to speak to people about their everyday concerns.”