Symbionese Liberation Army

The SLA emerged from a specific place: the Black Cultural Association at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville — a prison program that brought outside volunteers from Bay Area universities into contact with incarcerated Black men for "consciousness raising" sessions. The program's intentions were educational. Its effect, in one specific case, was to put a charismatic and manipulative escaped convict named Donald DeFreeze in contact with a network of white radical Bay Area women who were looking for a Black revolutionary vanguard to follow.

Donald DeFreeze — who renamed himself "General Field Marshal Cinque Mtume" — was born in Cleveland in 1943, had a long criminal record, escaped from Soledad Prison in 1973, and had been a police informant. That last fact — confirmed after his death — has never been fully resolved into a coherent account of the SLA's origins. Whether his informant past meant the SLA was a police operation, a case of an informant going rogue, or simply a complicated biographical detail remains genuinely unclear. What is clear is that he was not the revolutionary theorist his followers believed him to be.

The core SLA membership was largely white, largely female, and largely drawn from the Bay Area's radical left networks: Berkeley, Stanford, anti-war organizing. Patricia Soltysik, Nancy Ling Perry, Camilla Hall, Angela Atwood, and William and Emily Harris. They adopted a seven-headed cobra as their symbol, the slogan "Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people," and the name "Symbionese" from the word "symbiosis" — organisms of different kinds living together. The multiracial coalition the name implied was almost entirely theoretical. In practice, the SLA was overwhelmingly white people following a Black man who had been a police informant.

The SLA's first major action was the assassination of Dr. Marcus Foster on November 6, 1973, in the parking lot of the Oakland school district headquarters. Foster was shot with cyanide-tipped bullets.

Marcus Foster was the first Black superintendent of Oakland's public schools. He was one of the most respected educators in California, a man who had come up from North Philadelphia, taught in the Philadelphia public schools, turned around a failing high school through sheer force of will and relationship, and arrived in Oakland as a genuine community figure — trusted by Black parents, by teachers, by community organizations. He was 46 years old.

The SLA's stated rationale was that Foster had supported a proposal to introduce student ID cards in Oakland schools, which they characterized as a proto-fascist measure. The characterization was false. Foster had not supported mandatory ID cards; he had discussed a voluntary identification program in a context of school safety. The SLA killed a Black community leader based on a misreading of a school board meeting.

On February 4, 1974, SLA members broke into the Berkeley apartment of 19-year-old Patricia Campbell Hearst — granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, daughter of Randolph Hearst, a college student — dragged her out in her bathrobe, and drove away. The abduction was witnessed by her fiancé, who was beaten and left behind.

The SLA's ransom demand was not money. It was food: they demanded that the Hearst family fund a free food distribution program for poor Californians. Randolph Hearst agreed. The "People in Need" program was established with an initial $2 million donation. The distribution was a logistical disaster — chaotic scenes at distribution points, lines stretching for blocks, fights breaking out. The SLA declared it inadequate and demanded $4 million more. A second distribution was attempted with similar results. The food program fed people who needed food. It did not achieve the revolutionary consciousness-raising the SLA intended. The poor people of Oakland had come for groceries, not radicalization.

Patty Hearst, held in a closet for weeks, announced on April 3, 1974, that she had joined the SLA, renamed herself "Tania" after Tamara Bunke (Che Guevara's companion), and released a photograph of herself holding a carbine in front of the SLA's seven-headed cobra symbol. On April 15, she participated in a bank robbery in San Francisco, photographed by the bank's cameras. Whether her participation was the result of genuine political conversion, Stockholm syndrome, coercion, or some combination of all three has been debated ever since. She maintained it was coerced; the jury at her 1976 trial disagreed.

After the bank robbery, the SLA moved to Los Angeles. On May 16, two SLA members shoplifting at Mel's Sporting Goods in Inglewood were identified and confronted. Hearst and the Harrises escaped; the incident led police to a house on East 54th Street in South Central Los Angeles where DeFreeze and five other SLA members were hiding.

On May 17, 1974, the LAPD surrounded the house with several hundred officers. A gun battle began. The house caught fire. Los Angeles television stations broadcast it live. DeFreeze and five SLA members — Patricia Soltysik, Nancy Ling Perry, Camilla Hall, Angela Atwood, and Willie Wolfe — died in the burning house. The live broadcast made it one of the most-watched events in California television history at that point. The SLA had set out to make revolution; they died on television, in a house fire, surrounded by police, while most of America watched.

Hearst was not in the house. She and the Harrises heard the broadcast on a car radio in Anaheim. She wrote later that she screamed and screamed. She and the Harrises continued as a remnant cell, conducting robberies and bombings for another year.

Patty Hearst was captured on September 18, 1975, in San Francisco. She gave her occupation as "urban guerrilla." She was tried in 1976 for the April 1974 bank robbery. Her defense attorney F. Lee Bailey argued she had been brainwashed. The jury convicted her after deliberating for 12 days. She was sentenced to 7 years in prison. She served 22 months before President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence in 1979. President Bill Clinton issued her a full pardon in 2001.

William and Emily Harris were convicted of multiple crimes and served prison sentences. Emily Harris was paroled in 1983. William Harris was paroled in 1983 as well, later convicted again for his role in an unrelated kidnapping, and paroled again in 1999.

Marcus Foster's death received a fraction of the media attention of the Hearst kidnapping. He left behind a wife and three adopted children. Oakland named an elementary school and an educational institute after him. The people who killed him are remembered primarily as a footnote in Patty Hearst's story.

The SLA is useful to this archive not because it was significant — it was not — but because it is illuminating as a negative case. It represents the absolute terminus of a politics that had lost any connection to the material conditions of the people it claimed to be fighting for. The Weather Underground, for all its failures, maintained a principled commitment to not killing civilians and timed its actions to specific government crimes. The SLA killed the most respected Black educator in Oakland based on a misreading of a school board meeting and called it revolutionary action.

The response from Black organizations was not ambivalent. It was unanimous condemnation. The Black communities the SLA claimed to be liberating did not want them. The poor people who came to the SLA's food distribution wanted groceries. The Black political organizations that had actually built community power — the Panthers, the NOI, SNCC — rejected the SLA's politics completely. What the SLA actually represented was a small group of mostly white people cosplaying revolution, led by a man who had been a police informant, who murdered a Black leader and called it liberation.

The contrast with the Weather Underground is instructive. Both were white radical organizations willing to use violence. The Weather Underground was shaped by political relationships with actual Black liberation organizations, maintained a no-civilian-casualties commitment, and framed its actions in direct response to documented government crimes. The SLA had no such relationships, no such commitments, and no such grounding. The difference between them is the difference between a political mistake and a political catastrophe.

Marcus Foster deserved better than to be a footnote. He was the most important figure in this story.