About this item
On a November night in 1984, Susan Rosenberg sat in the passenger seat of a U-Haul as it swerved along the New Jersey Turnpike. At the wheel was a fellow political activist. In the back were 740 pounds of dynamite and assorted guns. That night I still believed with all my heart that what Che Guevara had said about revolutionaries being motivated by love was true. I also believed that our government ruled the world by force and that it was necessary to oppose it with force. Raised on New York City's Upper West Side, Rosenberg had been politically active since high school, involved in the black liberation movement and protesting repressive U.S. policies around the world and here at home. At twenty-nine, she was on the FBI's Most Wanted list. While unloading the U-Haul at a storage facility, Rosenberg was arrested and sentenced to an unprecedented 58 years for possession of weapons and explosives.
About the Author
Susan Lisa Rosenberg (born 1955) is an American radical political activist, author and advocate for social justice and prisoners' rights. Rosenberg was active in many radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s. After living as a fugitive for two years, she was arrested with an accomplice, Timothy Blunk, in 1984 while unloading 740 pounds of dynamite and weapons from a car into a storage locker in Cherry Hill, New Jersey . She had also been sought as an accomplice in the 1979 prison escape of Assata Shakur. She was accused, but never tried or convicted, of driving the getaway car in the Brinks robbery (1981) in which two police officers and an armored-car guard were killed. Rosenberg was sentenced to 58 years in prison on the weapons and explosives charges. She spent 16 years in prison, during which she became a poet, author and AIDS activist. Her sentence was commuted by President Bill…
