In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (36 page)

That week Galvin-Lewis and Sloan collected the names and addresses of two hundred callers wanting to join the National Black Feminist Organization. By the end of the month they had five hundred names. Concentrating on the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut people, the excited women got free space for meetings at Harlem Hospital and sponsored a huge conference at St. John the Divine with a grant from the Eastman Fund. Thanks to Gloria Steinem’s efforts, they acquired a free midtown office for a time. The core group set up a national board, to which Flo Kennedy, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Shirley Chisholm lent their names and prestige, and accepted the affiliation
of self-starting chapters in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and Newark.

Some of the National Black Feminist Organization’s best work was in rape awareness. The women campaigned with Julia Tucker’s mobile van when it toured through Harlem. (A police detective with the rank of lieutenant, Tucker had set up a Sex Crimes Analysis Squad for the New York Police Department in response to feminist agitation.)

On August 25, 1974, I sat in the auditorium at Junior High School 104 and listened to the New York Radical Feminist–National Black Feminist
Organization Joint Speak-out on Rape and Sexual Abuse. One after another, black women and white women took the microphone to offer their personal testimony. The official tape recording of the speak-out has been lost, but some of the stories appear in
Against Our Will
. I still recall the gutsy black speaker who told of being raped in her housing project when she was twelve: “Four detectives got me in a room and asked how long was his penis—like I was supposed to measure it. Actually they said, ‘How long was the
instrument
?’ I thought they were referring to the knife.
That
I could have told them ’cause I was sure enough looking at the knife.” A second woman of color, tall, slim, and elegant, began, “My girlfriend and I took a vacation to the Virgin Islands,” and then winced. I think the smarmy jokes associated with “virgin” must have flooded her mind. Tossing her head, she started over. “My girlfriend and I went to St. Thomas …”

The testimony that afternoon was powerful stuff, and the movement was never more perfectly integrated than it was that day.

But the National Black Feminist Organization would prove short-lived. Organizationally the NBFO was always chaotic, though no more so than the rest of Women’s Liberation, where new faces showed up at every meeting and old faces vanished. Doris Wright quit the group even before she moved to Wisconsin for her graduate studies. Michele Wallace, soon to embark on
Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman
, black feminism’s strongest book-length statement, had
kept her distance from the outset, and chose to write critically about the organization. Margaret Sloan split town after a blowup at
Ms.
, when she was taken off staff for slighting her magazine duties. “I was hurt by the way
it was done,” Sloan reflects, “but I understood their position. Maybe it was just a big fantasy that you can take somebody in and teach them editorial skills when they’re away four days a week speaking and organizing. I knew I was running amuck and wasn’t being a writer-editor, which was what I was paid to be.”

After the initial flush of excitement, trouble started brewing in the NBFO’s affiliated chapters. The critic Margo Jefferson, a faithful attendee at NBFO meetings, ticks off the usual movement problems—anger at the top-down directives of the New York board, mainstream-left schisms, gay-straight splits. “Some of it,” Jane Galvin-Lewis sighs, “was just oppressed people’s bickering.” The end came in 1975 when the New York board was ousted in what passed into history as the NBFO’s final convention. (Some of the New Yorkers went into Salsa Soul, a group for lesbian women of color. The Boston chapter formed the Combahee River Collective, named for Harriet Tubman’s military action in South Carolina during the Civil War. Writer-editor Barbara Smith of Combahee later joined poet Audre Lorde to found the Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.)

The large place in my life that had been occupied by activism came to be filled by the company of a disparate group of writers who worked every day in the Allen Room of the New York Public Library. In that calm oasis on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Steet where I kept my typewriter, I found a new community of peers, male and female, who were devoted to the slow, steady grind of pounding out pages. Two small foundation grants kept me afloat. When that largesse ran out, I borrowed two thousand dollars from my friend Jan Goodman, by then a founder of the nation’s first women’s law firm. Dolores Alexander offered to put me on the tab at Mother Courage, but the wolf wasn’t that close to the door; Kevin was still sharing the rent, although we were growing apart. Convinced that I needed to study the efficacy of self-defense, I enrolled in a judo class and broke my collarbone while practicing the “forward fall from the running position.” Ouch. The collarbone mended badly but my convalescence coincided with the Watergate hearings, so I managed to catch every word.

While I worked in relative isolation, the rape crisis center movement continued to grow, with every new counseling-service hot line attracting its own local publicity. Operating from her NOW chapter in northern Virginia, Mary Ann Largen almost singlehandedly placed rape on NOW’s national agenda. Jan BenDor in Ann Arbor, a founder of one of the earliest crisis centers, began advancing ideas for new state legislation. Her
Michigan Women’s Task Force on Rape descended on the capitol in Lansing to pioneer an overhaul of sexual assault statutes that had gone unchanged for 117 years.

BenDor’s ideas helped me enormously. Antirape people in several states had begun to lobby for more realistic legislation, but the Michigan Women’s Task Force was amazing. Earlier than most, they saw the need to eliminate the archaic and sexist evidentiary requirements in the criminal codes that virtually guaranteed few prosecutions and even fewer convictions. Two practical goals that activists in many states fought for were the abolition of a corroborating witness rule and a restriction on testimony regarding the victim’s prior sexual history (now called the rape shield law). BenDor’s group was among the first to propose extending the assault statues to cover rape in marriage.

Today people forget what a sharp attitudinal reversal these legislative reforms signified. When I began researching law review articles back in 1971, cutting-edge theory on criminal justice was devoted to making arrests and convictions more difficult in order to safeguard defendants’ rights. That was the accepted liberal thrust, in harmony with a string of important Warren Court decisions such as
Mapp
,
Gideon
,
Escobedo
, and
Miranda
. Prospering in that climate, criminal defense lawyers out to win acquittals in rape cases had a field day in court mocking “the prosecutrix,” dragging her through the mud, and plumping the twin dangers of false accusations and mistaken identifications of assailants. The antirape movement, on the other hand, was determined to make the law and the courts work for victims. This stunning break with conventional liberal thinking was not easy for everyone to manage, even inside Women’s Liberation.

I remember when I joined Barbara Mehrhof and Pam Kearon of
THE FEMINISTS
in 1971 to monitor a rape trial in a New York courtroom.
Within a few years monitoring rape trials would be a standard procedure for the antirape movement, but back then it was a novel sensation to be on the side of the prosecution. I also recall that some of the early rape crisis centers were leery about developing cordial relations with the police. Sensitive to issues of police brutality, the support counselors could not shake their distrust of the law enforcers.

Thousands of radical women found another way to articulate their outrage about rape, one that was more in keeping with their antiestablishment values. They rallied around a trio of murder cases that utilized a “rape defense.” The best known of the three cases was the trial, during the summer of 1975, of
Joan Little, a twenty-year-old black woman in North Carolina charged with the murder of her white jailer.

Unable to make bail on a minor burglary charge, Joan Little had been the sole female inmate in the Beaufort County jail when her troubles began their drastic escalation. Clarence Alligood, the night-duty jailer, was found dead in her empty cell one evening with his pants around his ankles and his hand clutching the murder weapon, an ice pick he was known to keep in his desk drawer. Little hid out for a week before she turned herself in, and was represented at her nationally publicized trial by the Southern Poverty Law Center. By her account, she had been subjected to repeated sexual assaults by the sixty-two-year-old jailer, who granted her small favors, such as telephone privileges, in return for her forced compliance. The scenario of murder in self-defense against a background of historic white southern injustice was sufficiently vivid to win Joan Little an acquittal. She was promptly claimed as a heroine by Black Panthers and feminists alike.

Inez Garcia in California was hailed as a movement cause and a heroine from 1974, when her case first surfaced, to 1977, when she was acquitted at her second trial. Garcia had tracked down and then fired six rounds into Miguel Jimenez, the three-hundred-pound accomplice of Luis Castillo, a seventeen-year-old youth she asserted had raped her half an hour earlier, when the two men had been visiting her housemate.

The volatile thirty-year-old beauty of Cuban and Puerto Rican descent
possessed a short attention span and had never learned to read, write, or tell time. After marrying Juan Cardenas Garcia, an anti-Castro Cuban, when she was fourteen, she moved to Miami, where Juan stepped up his anti-Castro activities, and Inez gave birth to a son. When she shot Jimenez, she was renting part of a house in Soledad, California, to be near Juan, then in prison for bombing a branch office of Air France. His right-wing passions notwithstanding, Juan persuaded his family to hire Charles Garry, the famed San Francisco lawyer who represented the Black Panthers, to defend his wife. The prosecution contended there was no evidence of rape, and that Inez had fired her .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle in the aftermath of a violent quarrel over drug territories between her housemate and Jimenez and Castillo.

“To know Inez was to know she was telling the truth,” says Susan Rothaizer, her eyes widening as she recounts the story. One of the mainstays of Berkeley’s Inez Garcia Defense Committee, Rothaizer had been raped while hitchhiking during her sophomore year at Brandeis. “Two steeplejacks from Worcester, Massachusetts,” she winces. “I knew I was in trouble the minute I jumped into the truck. I was a practicing heterosexual then, so when they took me into the woods, I pulled my diaphragm out of my backpack and loaded it up with cream. ‘What’s
that?
’ said one of the guys. ‘There’s no way you’re going to make me pregnant,’ I told him. He said, ‘So lick my balls.’ ” She still shudders at the memory of the humiliation.

Rothaizer did not report her rape, “but I used to fantasize about going to Worcester and finding those guys.” Three years later in Berkeley, when she heard about Inez Garcia, “It crystallized something for me,” she says. “I could channel my rage in a positive way.” She began writing about Garcia for
Plexus
, the Bay Area feminist newspaper.

Several of the core group of eight women on the Garcia defense committee had been raped. “And most everybody was left-leaning,” Rothaizer elaborates. “I was a Red Diaper Baby and I’d marched in every major antiwar demo. About half of us were Jewish and half were lesbians—not necessarily the same ones.” Hedy Sarney, another of Garry’s clients, was out on bail and awaiting her own trial; she had been
dragooned into an ultra-left sect and forced to rob a bank, à la Patty Hearst. Sheila Farrell’s boyfriend helped steal the Pentagon Papers. Stacey Fulton, from Oklahoma, had organized for the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the San Quentin Six. Pat Richartz was Garry’s paralegal, Mary Sundance was in law school, and Nan Blitman already had her degree.

A few weeks before the trial, Garcia moved into a communal house in Berkeley that was shared by some of her supporters. She baked flan for them, appeared with them on radio and television programs, starred at “Viva Inez” benefits, and was iconized on “Viva Inez” buttons and T-shirts. At late-night bull sessions the women traded their life stories. “Inez had grown up with all the usual prejudices,” Rothaizer relates. “She thought Jews had horns and she had never met any lesbians.” For their part, the blue-jeaned militants refrained from criticizing Garcia’s false eyelashes and painted toe-nails.

In August 1974, Garcia went on trial in Monterey, one hundred miles down the coast from Berkeley. Stacey Fulton and Hedy Sarney spread the word via sign-up tables and bulletins on KPFA radio. Susan Rothaizer organized a bus and car shuttle from Provo Park that hauled one hundred supporters to and from the courthouse each day. (Rothaizer’s boss let her do her paying job, a health survey, on the weekends.)