The serendipity that brought me into Linda Evans' presence a second time was a glance into the window display of the Midnight Special Bookstore, a radical haunt on the Santa Monica promenade, which featured anti-Bush posters and Noam Chomsky tracts, along with choice events on the progressive calendar. Among the books in the display, I noticed an announcement that Evans would be presenting a film and talk that evening about "political prisoners."

When my wife and I entered the store, we saw that about 30 people had seated themselves on folding chairs in the back to watch the film, which was now almost over. At its conclusion Evans took a seat herself and asked the audience to form a circle. I had remembered her as a small, fiery, blond woman, with a pretty face hardened and flushed by revolutionary fervor. She was softer now, actually teary-eyed from watching the film of her "comrades" (as she called them) who were still in prison. There was no hard edge in her voice as she began to explain how people were oppressed in prison and oppressed in America, and how their oppressors were white racism and imperialism. I wondered to myself how the other listeners computed this dark picture with the carnival of Saturday night revelers that was going on outside. But Evans gave no thought to this cognitive dissonance at all. Instead she pursued her tales of social woe, speaking about one of her prison comrades who had been denied even the ability to attend her pottery classes because of "the arthritis in her hands," as if this were yet another injustice inflicted by the System.

Her soft speech and solicitous presence suggested a help group for the victims of unspeakable crimes that nobody else dared to care about. In addition to the most famous "political prisoner" on her list, Mumia Abu Jamal, she mentioned three comrades, in particular, who were in need of people's support. These were Kathy Soliah (aka Sara Jane Olson) Jamil Al-Amin (aka H. Rap Brown) and Kathy Boudin.

The very first questioner asked what it was that these individuals had done to be singled out for such punishment. Evans seemed a little uncomfortable with the question -- as though the fact that they were "political" prisoners should have said enough. She chose to talk about Olson and Brown because both had trials scheduled for the fall. Olson, she said, was accused of attempting to "fire -- bomb" a police car, hesitating over the words "fire" and "bomb" as though it was still an effort for her to lie about these things. In fact it was pipe bombs that Olson had randomly planted under two police cars, which would have killed the occupants if they hadn't malfunctioned first. "It didn't even go off," Evans whined, as if to cover that particular base with anyone in the audience who may still have had doubts.

The effort was hardly necessary, but Evans continued. The oppressor was so intent on prosecuting a woman who had lived an exemplary life these last 25 years as the wife of a doctor that the court was charging her with all the crimes of the Symbionese Liberation Army whose partisan she had been. Sara Olson's attorney, Shawn Chapman, who was conveniently in the audience, rose to second these observations. What neither woman got around to explaining was that the SLA had assassinated Marcus Foster, the first black superintendent of Oakland's public schools, and had murdered an innocent bystander in the course of a bank robbery, and that Sara Olson had embraced the SLA and its crimes in the name of "social justice." If prosecutors had evidence linking her to the conspiratorial organization that planned such acts, it was perfectly legitimate to charge her for their consequences.

Evans then talked about H. Rap Brown, whom she pointed out was an "Imam" in his Moslem temple in Atlanta, a community worker who helped the drug addicted and the poor. She indicated that this was the reason the police had targeted him. "There was a shootout," she said, introducing the events that led to his arrest. Two police officers had gone to Brown's home at night with a warrant for traffic tickets. "Who arrests people at night for traffic tickets?" Evans asked in the most suspicious tone she could muster. One of the officers was killed in the "shootout" that followed. The surviving officer had reported that the fleeing gunman had been wounded and was bleeding. But when police tracked Brown three days later to another state, Evans said, he had no wound. Key facts that Evans omitted were that both officers were black, that they had not anticipated trouble and consequently were not wearing vests, and had been ambushed with a firearm that was found in Brown's possession and identified as his. Evans did not attempt to explain why an innocent man should flee for three days until a massive manhunt tracked him down, or why the Atlanta police force, whose chief was a black woman and which served a liberal city whose mayor was also black, would want to murder or falsely imprison a community holy man named H. Rap Brown.

When an elderly man in a straw hat sitting near me asked Evans how she defined "political prisoners," she answered, "every prisoner in American jails is a victim of political circumstance." I immediately thought of the Night Stalker, a psychopath who had raped and murdered 40 men, women and children, or Nikolay Soltys, who had recently killed six members of his own family with a knife, including his pregnant wife and 3-year-old son. In Linda Evans' eyes, the twin devils white racism and corporate capitalism made them do it. Thus are the guilty made innocent, while innocents who happen to have the wrong skin color (white), or the wrong nationality (American) or the wrong gender (male), or the wrong income status, are damned as guilty before the fact.

Recent Stories