The Navy Recruiting Center at 117 West Lake Street lay in ruins. Spray paint covered the façade. Four plate glass windows had been shattered and there were scorch marks on the door. The front of the building had been pelted with eggs. Inside the recruiting station lay a mannequin dressed in a Naval officer’s uniform; the model was impaled on a flagpole.(1) In the midst of the wreckage lay a bowling ball.
Two days earlier, U.S. paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division had landed in Honduras. For the people of Minneapolis, March 18, 1988 marked the beginning of the war at home...
IN THE BEGINNING…
Anarchism is the bastard child of failed liberal values.(2)
- Patrick Hughes
The story of the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League has its origins in the anti-war movement of the early 1980’s. But it really begins with the first issue of Jailbreak!, an underground newspaper published by Chris Gunderson and Barry Maurer.(3)
The year was 1982. After years of decline, the high school underground press was experiencing something of a renaissance, spurred on by the increasing availability of copy shops and self-serve photocopying machines. Unprompted (and mostly unaware of) the existence of fanzines, Twin Cities high school students had started cranking out their own clandestine newspapers at an alarming rate; tiny rags with names like Renegade Press, Tour de Farce, Minneapolis Alternative Scene, Urge to Spit… and Jailbreak!.
Coming on the heels of highly publicized student walkouts at Central High School and Anthony Jr. High, rags like Jailbreak! struck a nerve. With no e-mail—and no World Wide Web—such papers were one of the only outlets for creative self-expression or political dissent. Students’ rights were a recurring theme (including freedom from school dress codes), as was censorship –and the right to distribute an independent newsletter on campus (such papers were routinely confiscated by high school administrators; their editors suspended).
An anarchist newspaper distributed in 23 local high schools, Jailbreak! called for the creation of a high school students’ union, a ban on Army recruiters, and an end to “excessive hall monitors” and rent-a-cops.(4) By 1984, the editors were distributing 1,500 to 3,000 copies of every issue,(5) with coverage of local protests; fact sheets on Apartheid and nuclear weapons; information on “un-schooling”; and poetry. Similar anarchist newspapers were circulating at St. Paul’s Highland High School and Central High School.(6)
An outgrowth of the anti-nuke movement and the burgeoning punk scene, these early anti-militarist newspapers were pretty tame. But as the wars in Central America progressed, the politics of these youth began to harden. Taking their cue from the older Marxist study groups, a group of younger radicals had begun to coalesce around the back room of the May Day revolutionary bookstore. There, the publishers of Jailbreak! were joined by former-members of Arachne’s Veil (a pagan-anarchist group).(7) This became the nucleus of Back Room Anarchist Books.
According to Kieran Frazier Knutson, a founding member of Anti-Racist Action (ARA) and a former member of the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League:
There had been anarchists active in the anti-war movement and co-op movements in Minneapolis in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but the link between them and the new wave of anarchists that came up in the mid-80’s through the punk scene was pretty thin. The young people that ran the Backroom were pretty much on their own.(8)
One notable exception was Don Olson, co-founder of Northern Sun Alliance/ Northern Sun News, and a veteran of the Seventies co-op movement. Olson was one of “the Minnesota Eight” –war resistors imprisoned for sabotaging rural Draft Board offices during the Vietnam War.
Whitney Clark was a member of the Back Room Anarchist collective and the Progressive Student Organization.
Whitney Clark:
Don Olson has been a constant through all of this. Don was always on the periphery of the Back Room. He’s a distributor of magazines—that’s his business—so we bought a lot of literature from him. He supplies all of the progressive periodicals to every place in town that sells them, from May Day Books, to the co-ops (and other bookstores). But Don is also a self-identified anarchist, of the nonviolent persuasion.
Anticipating the North American info-shop movement of the early 1990’s, the Back Room Anarchist bookstore (in)formally opened for business in 1985.
THE BACK ROOM ANARCHIST CENTER
Whitney Clark:
I sort of gravitated towards the anarchists, and became involved in a local collective called RABL [Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League]. We put out a newsletter called Gray Zone. We had a bookstore in the back of the May Day Bookstore, called Back Room Anarchist Books. We sold a few books and did anarchist organizing around it.
Drew Miller was (and is) the bassist for Boiled In Lead. He is the founder of Omnium Records, a world music label.
Drew Miller:
I hung out there. It was a place to hang out and drink beer and plot revolutions. A lot of drinking beer! As one might expect, it never really made sense as a bookstore. Or as a business. It was originally in the back room at 3200 Chicago Avenue. That was where the name ‘the Back Room’ came from.
After outgrowing their original space in the back of May Day Books, the Back Room relocated to the corner of 27th and Nicollet in 1986, setting up shop at #2 E. 27th Street.
Whitney Clark:
The bookstore was never a very prominent bookstore. We sold, like, four books a day. But it was a great center for cultural activity and organizing.
In the early days, it was an anarchist collective, but there was more of an emphasis on the theoretical and the intellectual underpinnings of the movement. Hence, the emphasis on books… We had study groups where we would read some articles, and get together and discuss them.
Joe Hart, currently a writer for Utne Magazine, was active in the Back Room Anarchist collective and the Progressive Student Organization.
Joe Hart:
It was part anarchist reading room, part social hangout. There was a guy named Rob who lived there and was always working on his motorcycle.
We used to have bands down in the basement, and fundraisers for RABL and the bookstore. We’d throw rent parties to keep the place going. It was not strictly punk rock, either.
Whitney Clark:
Anarchists had always been a minority, but a visible and vocal minority (or constituent element) of the larger anti-war movement. But when we moved over to 27th, that’s when things really started to gel in terms of an action component, the protest component. That was when the anarchism was becoming the center of activity. Not in all things, but it became a more dominant component.
There were a lot of people who hung out there who weren’t necessarily [revolutionary anarchists]. They were sort of cultural anarchists… So I didn’t always know everybody’s name.
Drew Miller:
I used to call myself an “anarcho-capitalist,” whatever that means… I subscribe to some parts of the overall libertarian philosophy, which is: LEAVE ME ALONE! Don’t legislate against things that people do that don’t hurt anyone.
Whitney Clark:
There were hippies; there were out-of-towners. Radicals from around the country would be passing through town, and they would stop at the Back Room and maybe stay there for a day. It made it a rich place. Anytime you walked in there, you didn’t know who you were going to find, you didn’t know what was going to be happening, or what new forces were going to be there.
I had a regular volunteer shift—we had hours of operation when we would sell books—and I remember going in for my shift with a sense of anticipation. Is this going to be one of those quiet times when I just sit here and read Bookchin and Bakunin all afternoon? Or is it going to be one of those times when there’s people I don’t know having a drum jam? The unpredictability and the dynamism of that place was a lot of fun.
It was from out of this counter-cultural stew that the Twin Cities anarcho-punk scene emerged.
AGENTS PROVOCATEURS
In 1986, an FBI informant named Michael Fitzpatrick infiltrated the Back Room Anarchist collective. According to a sworn affidavit, Fitzpatrick provided beer for younger members of the Back Room, while urging them to engage in acts of senseless violence –such as spraying bullets at polling places on Election Day.(9) Former bookstore workers recount how Fitzpatrick showed up brandishing a shotgun, saying that they needed to increase their militancy.(10) Police raided the Back Room shortly thereafter, seizing a can of police-grade mace that Fitzpatrick had planted in the store.(11)
Chris Gunderson:
If I recall correctly [Fitzpatrick] came around in the fall of ‘86 and was gone by December. I believe he participated in our first “Warchest Tour,” which was in September or October of ’86, and that was where we first saw him. He scrapped with the cops and then showed up at the Back Room and started peddling his shit. There is a New York Times article circa 1995 that is based significantly on an affidavit that I wrote…
Michael Fitzpatrick was a former member of the Jewish Defense League (JDL)—a right wing terrorist organization—who had agreed to testify against two fellow-members of the JDL in exchange for leniency in the bombing of a Russian-language bookstore.(12) After leaving the JDL, Fitzpatrick is alleged to have infiltrated the Communist Workers Party.(13) Fitzpatrick eventually relocated to Minneapolis, where he was placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program.
Whitney Clark:
As I recall, we were kind of wise to him. We were always wise to some of the classic signs of a provocateur: somebody who talked really tough; somebody that wasn’t connected to other people we knew, who talked really radical.
I never knew any anarchists at that level who were even thinking about using weapons or bombs or anything like that. That was beyond the pale. That never came up. People would joke about it, and there was a certain infatuation with Earth First! tactics—ecotage—but I don’t know that anyone from our group ever actually did anything like that.”
For decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had been spying on the leaders of the Civil Rights movement and other domestic political groups.(14) Acting as America’s own KGB, J. Edgar Hoover’s agents had kept tabs on everyone from future-Vice President Walter Mondale (then a member of the U.S. Senate), to the League of Women Voters. According to a Senate investigation committee chaired by U.S. Sen. Frank Church:
The FBI kept files on 1 million Americans, including Mondale, and investigated half a million suspected subversives without producing one conviction… The FBI maintained a list of 26,000 people—including novelist Norman Mailer and civil rights leader Martin Luther King—to be incarcerated in case of a “national emergency.”(15)
Under the auspices of the domestic counter-intelligence program COINTELPRO, Federal agents targeted anti-war activists, feminists, Black Panthers, and the American Indian Movement (AIM) in an attempt to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" their political activities.(16) When the extent of these abuses finally came to light in 1975, Congress passed a number of reforms, which—theoretically—prohibited further spying on American citizens.
Though they no longer called it “COINTELPRO,” Federal harassment of political activists continued unabated.
From 1983-1985, the FBI kept tabs on the members of CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) and their associates, opening secret files on “thousands of names of people and organizations.”(17) According to the Associated Press, FBI Director William Sessions: “…conceded that the FBI overstepped its bounds by conducting domestic surveillance of political groups allied with CISPES.”(18)
But it was the fringe groups—such as the Back Room anarchists, the Nation of Islam, and the radical environmental movement—that came in for the heaviest scrutiny. Here, the Feds were not content to simply rifle through their mail or ransack the filing cabinets. The police were looking for a pretext to have these people arrested and sent away to prison. And the most effective way to accomplish this was to encourage the enemies of the State to engage in reckless and stupid acts of political violence.
This is not mere speculation. In a 1991 interview published by Arizona Daily Star, former-FBI informant Ronald Frazier Kermit confirmed that he had accepted $54,000 from the FBI and $6,000 from the owners of the Snowbowl Resort to infiltrate Earth First!(19) To prepare him for the role, Kermit was trained in the use of explosives.(20) In 1990, Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman and four other members of the radical environmental group were convicted of conspiring to sabotage chair lifts and electrical powerlines, after being egged-on by Federal informants.(21)
Viewed in such a light, Fitzpatrick’s antics at the Back Room bookstore make perfect sense. Perhaps he was hoping to earn a commission by sending a couple of teenagers to prison.
Michael Fitzpatrick resurfaced in 1994, when Malcolm X’s daughter Qubilah Shabazz was arrested in Minneapolis on charges of conspiring to murder Louis Farrakhan (the leader of the Nation of Islam). Fitzpatrick appears to have orchestrated the entire plot: after seducing Shabazz (the two of them were planning to get married), Fitzpatrick offered to avenge her father’s death.(22)
He sought out Shabazz, whom he’d known since high school, lured her from New York City to Minneapolis, convincing her his interests were romantic, then planted the idea of arranging to have Farrakhan killed, according to court records.(23)
- The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Nov. 23, 1998
The prosecution was based on 20 secret tapes, in which Fitzpatrick offers to be the hit man, and Shabazz objects on the grounds that innocent people might be hurt.(24) Fitzpatrick later testified that the FBI had offered to pay him “$45,000 plus living expenses,” in exchange for his testimony.(25) But the informant may have had another—far more pressing—motive: Fitzpatrick was facing a five-year sentence on drug charges.(26) Turning state’s evidence was Fitzpatrick’s best hope for staying out of prison.
As the trial drew near, Chris Gunderson submitted a written statement to Shabazz’s defense team, detailing Fitzpatrick’s outrageous behavior at the Back Room: “We came to the conclusion that he was a provocateur, and banned him from the bookstore.”(27)
When news of Fitzpatrick’s activities began to surface in the press, Federal prosecutors called for a gag order in hopes of silencing defense attorney William Kunstler.(28) But their star witness had already been discredited. Tales of “A Man Living on the Edge” and “Snitch-o-cracy Gone Wild” made national headlines. An officer from the NYPD’s undercover unit testified that he had “warned the FBI years ago,”(29) that Fitzpatrick was trying to initiate violent acts. Louis Farrakhan—the supposed target of the alleged assassination plot—spoke out publicly against the Federal conspiracy trial. “I do not believe that Qubilah is an evil woman,” said Farrakhan, who blamed the entire incident on “a trained set-up artist.”(30) Farrakhan urged his followers to donate money to Shabazz’s defense.
On the eve of Qubilah Shabazz's trial, all charges against her were dropped. As a face-saving measure, Shabazz was ordered to undergo treatment for drug and alcohol abuse.
Such events raise a difficult question: How much money is our government actually spending to encourage law-abiding citizens to commit violent acts?
|
