On Oct. 20, 1981, a band of militant zealots armed with automatic weapons tried to rob a Brink’s truck in a shopping mall in Nanuet in Rockland County, N.Y. Before it was over, two armored-car guards were shot and two police officers — one black and one white — were gunned down at a roadblock. The crime was one of the last spasms of ’60s-style, left-wing violence. To the militants, it was an “expropriation” for something they called the Republic of New Afrika, a place that existed mainly in their fevered dreams.
Judith Clark’s Radical Transformation
Right: Nan Goldin for The New York Times. Left: Associated Press.
Then and now: In her militant days and at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in 2012.
By TOM ROBBINS
Published: January 12, 2012
Judith Clark was one of four people arrested that day for armed robbery and murder. She was 31, a veteran of the white left who traveled the radical arc from student protest to the Weathermen to the fringes beyond. A new single mother, she kissed her infant daughter goodbye that morning, promising to be home soon.
No one ever accused Clark of holding or firing a gun that deadly afternoon. But she was there, a willing participant, at the wheel of a tan Honda getaway car. Over the next two years while she awaited trial in jail, Clark became a fiercer warrior than she was on the day of the robbery. During court hearings, she told the judge she was a “freedom fighter” who didn’t recognize the right of imperialist courts to try her. She called court officers “fascist dogs!” when they clashed with her supporters.
Her better-known co-defendant, Kathy Boudin, arrested at the scene of the shootings after having been a fugitive since a 1970 bomb blast in a Greenwich Village town house killed three of her Weather Underground comrades, sat mutely beside her. At trial, Clark and two other defendants — David Gilbert, a Weather Underground member, and Kuwasi Balagoon, a former Black Panther — boycotted the courtroom, listening to the piped-in testimony from their basement cells. The defendants insisted on representing themselves; no one cross-examined witnesses on their behalf. When Clark appeared in court to make a closing argument, she merely confirmed her guilt. “Revolutionary violence is necessary, and it is a liberating force,” she told the jury.
Judge David Ritter of the Orange County Court sentenced Clark to a minimum of 75 years in prison. He saw no chance for future rehabilitation. “They hold society in contempt and have no respect for human life,” he said. Clark wore a mocking grin that day, the same one she wore when photographers snapped her picture the night of the crime. “One thing about Judith Clark I will never forget,” says John Hanchar, whose uncle, a Nyack Police sergeant named Edward O’Grady, was killed, “was her smiling face as she was led out of the police station in Nyack into the back of that car.”
On Oct. 6, 1983, clenching a fist of solidarity, Clark was sent to the maximum-security prison for women at Bedford Hills in Westchester County to begin the rest of her life.
Like many who knew Judy Clark before that terrible October day, I wanted nothing to do with her after the crime. I shuddered at the same photos that chilled the victims’ families. Clark was the former high-school sweetheart of a good friend. She went to Brooklyn’s Midwood High School; my friend Allan to Erasmus Hall. They met as student civil rights activists walking picket lines outside Woolworth’s in Flatbush. But after being expelled from the University of Chicago for student protests, Clark moved steadily to the left’s outer reaches.
She was part of the wild tribe of radicals who smashed windows in the streets of Chicago in a 1969 antiwar demonstration called Days of Rage. Charged with riot, she went underground only to be captured by the F.B.I. while sitting in a Manhattan movie theater. She served nine months in prison.
By the time I met her in the mid-’70s, she was a stalwart of something called the May 19th Communist Organization. A dogmatic offshoot of the Weathermen, May 19th’s members believed that a black-led revolution in America was in the offing. The correct role for white radicals, they held, was to follow that lead, wherever it took them. Even those of us who cared about the issues the May 19th crowd trumpeted — racism, poor housing, deaths in police custody — were often suspect for not showing proper fervor.
