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Radical Women and Freedom
Socialist Party Statement
In commemoration of revolutionary feminist political prisoner
Marilyn Buck (1947-2010)
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August
19, 2010
The
world has lost another heroic freedom fighter. Marilyn Buck died on August 3,
at the age of 62, just two weeks after being paroled from a prison medical
center in Texas. Ms. Buck spent the last quarter-century of her life
imprisoned because she was dedicated to fighting injustice.
All her life she fought against capitalism and imperialism. She was a staunch
advocate of Black, Native American, Puerto Rican and women's liberation, and
social and economic justice for all the afflicted.
From a very young age Buck protested against the Vietnam War; she was a
member of Students for a Democratic Society, pressing it to take women's
freedom seriously. She actively supported the Black Liberation Army, aiding
in the escape of Black Panther leader Assata Shakur.
Because of her militant activism, Buck became a target of COINTELPRO, the
infamous FBI program that conducted a secret war against domestic political
dissent in the 60s and 70s. Prosecutors later charged her and others with
involvement in an armored car robbery, and in a series of non-injury bombings
at military and political sites, in protest of U.S. foreign policy in the Mid
East and Central America. She pleaded guilty only to conspiracy and
destruction of government property. Her sentences amounted to 80 years in
federal prison.
Buck continued her organizing work and journalism while she was in jail. She
denounced any and all crimes of the U.S. government. She helped her comrades
in prison, especially Black and Latina inmates, combat the "U.S. prison
plantation system," as she accurately dubbed it.
She was also an artist who wrote magnificent and moving poetry. "I was a
political prisoner ... a censored person," she wrote. "I turned to
poetry, an art of speaking sparely, but flagrantly." Buck won the poetry
prize from the PEN Prison Writing program in 2001. She published a collection
of poems titled, Rescue the Word, and translated from Spanish the book, State
of Exile, by Cristina Peri Rossi.
The U.S. criminal justice system locked up Marilyn Buck because she was an
anti-capitalist radical activist. It killed her through grossly inadequate
medical care for her uterine cancer. Through it all, she saw her role as an
imprisoned leftist clearly and selflessly:
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"Being a political prisoner is not my only work. We still
have world views based on long years of experience. . . political subjects
and comrades in an ongoing political struggle against imperialism,
oppression, and exploitation. . . In many struggles many militants have been
exiled yet they have still been considered part of their struggles, not
merely objects. We here could be considered internally exiled. Don't lock us
into roles as objects or symbols."
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Today
Radical Women, the Freedom Socialist Party and countless other activists can
honor Marilyn Buck by continuing our work in the movements to free political
prisoners such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, Lynne Stewart, the Cuban Five, Leonard
Peltier, and many more. And we can steadfastly organize against racism and
sexism, for a society that seeks to fulfill the potential of all
freedom-loving people.
Marilyn Buck, we salute you.
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