[News] Judi Bari, Ten Years Gone

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/roselle03062007.html

March 6, 2007


Her Work and Warnings Prove True


Judi Bari, Ten Years Gone

By MIKE ROSELLE

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the day Judi Bari died on 
March 2nd in 1997 from cancer. On May 24, 1990, Judi was severely 
injured by a motion-triggered pipe bomb which exploded on the floor 
directly under the driver's seat of her car as she and fellow Earth 
Firster Darryl Cherney traveled through Oakland, California, on an 
organizing tour for Redwood Summer, a campaign of nonviolent protests 
focused on saving old growth redwood forests in northern California. 
I first met Judi in San Francisco at a rally against Pacific Lumber; 
now know as Maxxam in 1989. She was a dedicated lefty labor activist, 
not the usual type of organizer who goes up against the timber 
industry over logging in a small economically depressed logging town. 
Yet she worked tirelessly until her death on behalf of both the 
workers and the forest. At the time of the bombing she was attempting 
to break the deadlock that had developed in Humboldt County over the 
fate of California's last large stand of unprotected Redwood trees. 
The situation was dire, and local activists had exhausted every 
avenue to keep Maxxam from liquidating the ancient forests to service 
the debt Charles Horowitz had acquired during a hostile takeover of 
the venerable Pacific Lumber Company, which had been locally owned 
and operated for over a century.

Judi's idea was an organizing campaign based on Freedom Summer, the 
Mississippi Civil Rights campaign that brought in activists from 
across the country to break the deadlock on voting rights for African 
Americans in the South. After hundreds of arrests, demonstrations and 
the death of several activists, the civil rights workers of 
Mississippi were exhausted, and put out a call for outside help. 
Three of those who chose to answer the call were later found buried 
in an earthen dam in rural Mississippi. The uproar over these brutal 
killings helped galvanize support for the eventual passing of the 
Voting Rights Act in Congress in 1965. As in Mississippi, Judi 
understood that this campaign would have to be nonviolent, but that 
did not mean it would not be dangerous.

The night before Judi and Daryl were bombed, I was at a meeting with 
them at the Seeds of Peace house in Oakland. Seeds had volunteered to 
help with, among other things, the logistics of the campaign, 
primarily the care and feeding of the hundreds of expected activists 
who would arrive that summer. The meeting went late into the night, 
and I left early for my home in Berkeley. I had a river trip planed 
on the Wallowa River with Mike Howell the next day, and we had to 
drive north early in the morning. We stopped in Chico to see Michelle 
Miller, another organizer on the campaign, who had also been 
receiving death threats from various anti-environmental groups over 
the last few months.

When Howler and I pulled my VW bus into Michelle's driveway, she came 
running out the front door in her night clothes. I will never forget 
that moment.

We knew something big was up even before Michelle uttered those words 
that would change the course of the campaign, and change the lives of 
everyone who was working on it. "Judi and Daryl have been bombed in 
Oakland. They are in the hospital. The FBI has arrested both of them 
and raided the Seeds of Peace House". I spent the next six hours at 
Michelle's house answering phone calls from reporters from around the 
world. We had a small office in San Francisco with one phone line so 
it made more sense to stay put and work the phones than to spend the 
next four hours on the road incommunicado. When we caught up a bit on 
some of the hundreds of phone calls we would field that day, Howler 
and I drove back to my house in Berkeley.

The rest, as they say, is history. Daryl escaped serious injury but 
Judi's pelvis was fractured in many places. She would be able to walk 
only with the aid of a cane for the remainder of her life. Whether 
the injuries she suffered in the blast cause her early death from 
cancer we may never know. Her attacker has never been identified. But 
even from her hospital bed in Oakland, Judi's remained involved in 
the campaign, working tirelessly to build a bridge between 
environmentalists and timber workers in her community.

In 2002, after a lengthy campaign by Judi, Daryl and a team of 
pro-bono lawyers a jury in their federal civil lawsuit against the 
FBI and the Oakland Police Department exonerated Bari and Cherney by 
ordering four FBI agents and three Oakland Police officers to pay a 
total of $4.4 million to Cherney and to Bari's estate for violation 
of their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and for false 
arrest and unlawful search and seizure. Unfortunately, Judi died 
before her exoneration.

Of all of the people who have been involved in the Earth First! 
Movement, Judi's story is the most complicated. A divisive and 
combative figure in life, in death she has achieved a degree of 
martyrdom seldom seen in the environmental movement. Depending on 
where you stand, she is either a working class hero or an 
environmental extremist. An energetic organizer, or the one 
responsible for the end of the Earth First! movement. Redwood Summer 
was a tremendous success or it was a total disaster. But it's not 
that simple. It never is.

Judi did not fit the mold of the early Earth Firster. A self 
described eco-feminist red-diaper baby, she clashed often with the 
Buckaroo faction of the western conservation movement. While she 
devoted her life to working with labor, labor never came around to 
her way of seeing things. And at the time of her death, much of her 
work remained unfinished. Yet today, she has been exonerated by a 
jury of any involvement in the bombing that maimed her. Later 
activists such as Julia Butterfly Hill and John Quigley would be 
inspired by her life to continue the struggle. Maxxam filed for 
bankruptcy last month and the company's employees are just now 
wishing they had paid more attention to the warnings of Judi and the 
other conservationists that the company planned to cut and run, 
leaving the workforce high and dry.

I spoke with Daryl Cherney yesterday and he thought that Judi would 
most want to be remembered as someone who fought the FBI and won. 
Indeed, she identified strongly with the victims of police repression 
around the world. But I also remember her as a hippy girl, the mother 
of two wonderful children, musician and soapbox preacher, a firebrand 
with a wicked sense of humor, and most importantly, a friend of the trees.

Mike Roselle is the publisher of <http://www.Lowbagger.org/>Lowbagger.org.


The Freedom Archives
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San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
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