Season of the Gun

I've written extensively about how the power elite and its security agencies have historically maintained their rule by infiltrating progressive movements and by assassinating our leaders. This is the season of the gun -- the 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination (more on that mother of conspiracies on Monday) and one that Bay Area radicals of a certain age will remember -- the 50th anniversary of the assassination of progressive educator Marcus Foster, the first black superintendent of the Oakland CA public school district. Foster's killing was carried out by the strange radical cult known as the Symbionese Liberation Army, which the leftwing sociologist Todd Gitlin later called "the graveyard of the Bay Area left."

Gitlin was right. I was a Berkeley radical when the SLA burst on the scene with its bizarre targeting of Foster. And I wrote about the SLA years later in my book Season of the Witch. It was a deeply dispiriting time, after the ecstatic hopes and dreams of the '60s.

In his excellent podcast "East Bay Yesterday," my friend Liam O'Donoghue talks to the Oakland curator of a recent exhibit on Marcus Foster and then to me, about 30 minutes in.

Knock me your 'lobes...

Marcus Foster