judi bari

[Dan Scanlan <coolhanduke@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Counterpunch - Mar 6, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/roselle03062007.html

Judi Bari, Ten Years Gone

Her Work and Warnings Prove True

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 ]
---------


I Saw Judi Bari
©1996-7 Dan Scanlan


I saw Judi Bari singing in the crowd
Not but five foot tall, damn! she sings loud
She gave her voice to the redwoods
Giant silent proud.
Yes, I saw Judi Bari singing in the crowd.

Woman born of labor labors to give birth
Spreading wide with fervor, damn! she fights with mirth
She organized the struggle
Fought the rampant Maxxam dearth
Yes, woman born of labor labors to give birth.
       	
Her broken body battered by a bomber's blast    	
Then cancer at full gallop grabbed her by the breast            	
The press spit out bold lies — It's own and the FBI's         	
They said she bombed herself, they said she faked her cancer            	
But standing strong as redwood, non-violence was her answer     	
Her eagle spirit soars far above the bomber’s blast
And even in her death she has them all outclassed.

I saw Judi Bari singing in the crowd
Not but five foot tall, damn! she sings loud
She gave her voice to the redwoods
Giant silent proud
Yes, I saw Judi Bari singing in the crowd.




Dan Scanlan
coolhanduke@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.coolhanduke.com

"We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious  
is the first duty of intelligent men." — George Orwell