Marilyn Buck
Biography
Marilyn Buck was a Texas-born, white anti-imperialist revolutionary, the only white member of the Black Liberation Army, and a poet whose work won a 2001 PEN Prize. Originally convicted in 1973 for purchasing ammunition for the BLA, she escaped from federal prison in 1977 while on furlough and went underground, where she participated in the 1979 prison liberation of Assata Shakur and the 1981 Brink's robbery. Arrested in May 1985, she was ultimately convicted of the Brink's-related RICO conspiracy (1988) and the Assata Shakur escape, then pled guilty in 1990 in the Resistance Conspiracy Case. She received a cumulative 80-year sentence; she was paroled July 15, 2010 after a cancer diagnosis and died of uterine sarcoma on August 3, 2010, twenty days after release. Marilyn Buck was a Marxist, feminist poet and antiwar activist whose politics grew out of 1960s organizing, including work in Students for a Democratic Society and women’s liberation efforts. She participated in anti–Vietnam War and anti-racist organizing, edited movement publications (including The Rag), and later worked with Third World Newsreel on political media and solidarity campaigns.
Her activism led into repeated arrests and major federal prosecutions. In 1973, she was convicted of using false identification to buy ammunition and received a 10-year sentence; after a prison furlough in 1977, she went underground. She was arrested in Dobbs Ferry in 1985 and later convicted for roles linked to the 1979 prison escape of Assata Shakur, the 1981 Brink’s robbery, and a series of politically motivated bombings associated with the May 19 Communist Organization (including the 1983 bombing that damaged Senate offices at the United States Capitol after warning calls). She ultimately received an 80-year sentence. Buck wrote and published extensively while incarcerated and was released in July 2010 from Federal Medical Center, Carswell shortly before her death.
The demonstration report prints a prison solidarity message identifying Marilyn Buck at New York Metropolitan Correctional Center. This is evidence of the institution at the time of the April 1986 report; it supplies no exact transfer day and does not change a later or earlier institution in the existing case. Source: Report on the Marion/Lexington demonstration, April 19, 1986, PDF page 21. https://freedomarchives.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/3.report.demo_.4.19.1986.pdf#page=21
Green Anarchy's Fall/Winter 2001 prisoner update reported that Marilyn Buck, Sundiata Acoli, Leonard Peltier, Philip Berrigan and Carlos Alberto Torres had been moved into isolation units following September 11. This is a contemporary advocacy publication's account of their historical conditions of confinement, not an official determination or a present-day custody report. Its report specifically says Buck was not receiving mail, could not make telephone calls and could not communicate with her lawyers.
Her earlier federal ammunition prosecution produced an imprisonment period separate from the cases following her 1985 arrest. Seize the Time reported her confinement at Terminal Island, six months at Cook County Jail and a transfer to Alderson in October, where she was placed in a restrictive behavior program. The Ninth Circuit’s 1977 appeal identifies the false name Mariann Turner and affirms the ammunition convictions. A 1985 court opinion describes the earlier ten-year total sentence and her failure to return from an Alderson furlough in 1977.
Seize the Time, Vol1No5, February1975, PDF page 6; Seize the Time, Vol1No5, February1975, PDF page 7; openjurist.org; openjurist.org.
Sinister Wisdom 61 identifies Marilyn Buck’s poem “Clandestine Kisses” as the work that received her national PEN poetry award.
The Winter 1987 newsletter reported that Buck had returned to the general population at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center after thirty days in segregation for refusing a urine sample.
Breakthrough’s June 1988 account dates Buck’s RICO conviction with Mutulu Shakur to May 11, 1988. It describes sentencing as still prospective.
The Justice Department’s 1985 annual report records Buck’s August 2, 1985 Alderson-escape conviction and a five-year sentence consecutive to six years remaining on her earlier term.
The revived Wild Poppies project remembers Buck’s poetry and more than twenty years in United States prisons. Bowers’s separate recollection on page 22 says nineteen days between her release and death; this attributed interval is not used to overwrite independently dated endpoints. Neither passage reports a new custody episode.
The Dragons Fire, National Jericho Movement Newsletter, vol. 6, July–August 2018, PDF page 20.
The chronology distinguishes an April 12, 1984 federal indictment from actual FBI/task-force arrest May 11, 1985. Indictment did not itself begin custody. The appendix separately reports departure from Alderson after a furlough in June 1977, rather than an authorized final release, and the report describes Bedford Hills security documents as investigators’ claims.
Report of the New York State Policy Study Group on Terrorism, November 1985, PDF page 66.
