Act Two/Scene Two of a Complex Apology:  A Police Murder

It was after the summer of 1968 that her first Fred joined the Black Panther movement and Joy met folks in the Weather Underground.  It was an easy and natural extension of the civil rights movement and anti-war movement.  It was not reneging on a commitment to be anti-violent, but rather a reckoning with the reality of 1960s America, of government-sponsored violence, even shooting college kids on campuses across the country, not to forget 50,000 Americans killed in Viet Nam.

And Joy had a good understanding of justice.  It was watching the Chicago 8 trial, where exercising First Amendment Rights to oppose a war was jiu-jitsued into being charged as a criminal for conspiring to riot and commit mayhem, that Joy felt reminded of the stories she’d read in history class about the Haymarket Riot and Chicago in the 1890s, where innocent men were hung for allegedly orchestrating the murder of a police officer when in fact they were simply leaders of the labor movement who had called a labor rally.  It was the opinion of many that the government had started the shooting at Haymarket Square in 1886, and, with her first-hand experience in Grant Park in 1968, it was now also Joy’s firm opinion that government leaders were indeed capable of instigating violence, of taking the law into their own hands, and that justice was not to be counted on in a court of law.  Wrong, and sad, but true.

Joy had learned well in Civics Class about how necessary it was that America fought a revolutionary war to gain freedom and how important the First Amendment is to preserving freedom.  So it wasn’t anything but with the best of intentions that Joy started hanging with Black Panthers and the Weathermen.

Fred Hampton

After the police executed her first Fred in a raid on a Black Panther headquarters, Joy went to Grant Park to protest the police killing, took the microphone, and said “Now you’ll have to deal with me.”  Shortly after that one of her waitress friends moved to LA to be closer to the acting scene and Joy went along, still furious about the death of Fred.  She took on an assumed identity in Los Angeles and then did several things that led to a life-long struggle with her conscience about whether to apologize for her behavior or stick to her guns that what she did was justifiable.

Tomorrow:  Act Three