Katie Budin, who as a member of the radical Weather Underground of the 1960s and 1970s was involved in the murderous capture of an Brink armored truck in 1981 and then, in prison and after her release two decades later. later, he helped prisoners struggling to save their lives on the road, died Sunday in New York. She was 78.
The cause is cancer, said Zaid Dorn, whose family adopted Mrs. Budin’s son, Chesa Budin.
One day in March 1970, Mrs. Budin was bathing in a townhouse on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village when an explosion destroyed the walls around her. She and other extremists made bombs there, believed to be the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey. Three of them were killed on the spot. Naked Mrs. Buden managed to escape with a colleague and found clothes and a short shelter in the home of a woman living in the neighborhood.
Then she disappeared.
Within a few years, so did Weather Underground. A breakaway faction of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society faction is called Weatherman, borrowing from Subterranean Homesick Blues, a 1965 song by Bob Dylan with the lyrics “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Where the Wind Blows.” The name evolved into Weather Underground.
In that era of turmoil over civil rights and the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, the group dropped bombs on the United States Capitol, New York City Police Headquarters and other buildings. If nothing else, she was more adept at issuing long manifestos loaded with references to Karl Marx, Che Guevara, and Ho Chi Minh, and affirming the world’s “main struggle” as “between American imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it.”
After Weather Underground faded into the mid-1970s after the end of the war, its leaders, one by one, emerged from hiding to face the legal consequences of being on the wanted list. of the FBI.
Not Mrs. Budin (pronounced bu-DIN). “Underground status itself was my identity,” she recalled years later in an interview with The New Yorker at Bedford Hills Penitentiary in Westchester County, New York, where she came to be imprisoned. She continued: “I did not make a difference in any way, so then I raised the fact that I am underground to great importance.
That ended in October 1981, when she joined forces with armed men from another radical group, the Black Liberation Army, to hold Brink’s truck in Rockland County, New York, earning $ 1.6 million. Gunmen killed bodyguard Peter Page during the attack. They transferred the money to a U-Haul truck waiting about a mile away. Mrs. Budin was in the cab of the truck, a 38-year-old white woman serving as bait to confuse police officers looking for black men.
U-Haul was stopped by police during a blockade. Mrs. Buden, who was not carrying a weapon, immediately surrendered with her hands up. But gunmen jumped from the back of the truck and opened fire, killing a sergeant. Edward J. O’Grady and Officer Waverly L. Brown. Although some have accused her of using tactics to get the police to drop their weapons before being attacked, Ms Buden insisted that was not the case.
More than half a dozen suspects were arrested, and most received prison sentences long enough to reach life sentences. Among them was David Gilbert, whom Mrs. Buden married after their arrests and by whom she had a son, Chesa, who was 14 months old during Brink’s work. Divorced during their imprisonment, they reunited in 2021 after Mr Gilbert’s 75-year sentence was overturned and he was released. Chesa Buden, raised by the Weather Underground couple Bernardine Dorn and Bill Ayers, was elected San Francisco District Attorney in 2019. Her husband and son survived.
Following rounds of litigation, Ms. Budin pleaded guilty in April 1984 to first-degree robbery and second-degree murder in Mr Page’s death. Although unarmed and not even at the scene of the guard’s murder, the judge agreed with prosecutors that she was responsible and sentenced her to 20 years in prison.
In passing sentence, she addressed the relatives of the victims. “I know that everything I say now will sound empty, but I express my deepest sympathy to you,” she said. “I’m in real pain.” As for her motives, “I was there because of my commitment to the black liberation struggle and its underground movement. I am a white man who does not want the crimes committed against blacks to be done in my name. “
She proved to be a model prisoner in Bedford Hills, mentoring other prisoners, serving AIDS patients, writing poetry and expressing remorse for her role in the death of Brink’s robbery. In September 2003, after 22 years behind bars, she was released on parole.
Not everyone was happy. Diane O’Grady, Sergeant O’Grady’s widow, wrote in The New York Post that she “did not believe there was a drop of guilt, shame or remorse felt by prisoner Buden.” But Ms. Budin had enough support, including from several Bedford Hills staff. Even arch-conservative William F. Buckley Jr. signed a letter to the Early Release Commission, expressing his belief in “opportunities for rehabilitation and human transformation.”
In a 2004 article for a magazine called Fellowship, written before she left prison, Ms. Budin said she had come to “embrace the enormous human responsibility: I supported and was part of a robbery that risked and then destroyed human life”.
A graduate of Bryn Mawr in 1965, she received a master’s degree in adult education and literacy from Norwich College while in prison, and then, five years after her release, a doctorate from the College of Teachers at Columbia University. After prison, her work focuses on current and former prisoners, especially women, helping them get early release and preparing them for life outside, to basics like how to behave at job interviews.
She was also the founder of the Center for Justice in Colombia, researching the social consequences of mass imprisonment. What many people fail to appreciate, she said in an interview with this 2021 obituary, is that “there are huge resources waiting to be realized in those that too often define themselves as people to be thrown away.”
Cathy Budin had been acquainted with radical politics almost since she was born in Manhattan on May 19, 1943. Her father, Leonard B. Budin, was a civil rights lawyer with a list of clients who represented the left who was who, including Paul Robson and Daniel Ellsberg. and anti-war doctor Benjamin Spock. Her mother, Jean (Roiman) Buden, was a poet. Her great-uncle was Louis Buden, a prominent civil rights lawyer, and her uncle was the liberal journalist I.F. Stone.
In addition to Mr Gilbert and her son, she is survived by her son’s two adoptive parents, six grandchildren and an older brother, Michael, a retired federal appeals judge and political conservative, Mr Dorn, one of the adopted brothers, said on Sunday. .
Ms. Budin attended Little Red Schoolhouse and Elizabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village, graduating in 1961. In her final year, she visited Cuba, a country she traveled to again in 1969 with fellow radicals.
At Bryn Mawr, she majored in Russian, earning a bachelor’s degree by correspondence as she studied in Moscow. During the summer she worked in a hospital, in a camp for children with disabilities and in a blood bank. She later became a community organizer in Cleveland.
Her militancy is constantly growing. She joined the Days of Rage in October 1969, smashing windows in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood by anti-war extremists. She and others were charged with conspiracy and violating riot laws, and the cases were eventually dismissed on the grounds that the government had obtained evidence illegally. Around this time, she co-authored The Bust Book, which offered advice on what to wear to a demonstration and what to do if arrested.
Hiding after the explosion in the town hall, Ms. Budin adopted various pseudonyms and took low-paid jobs in New York, including as a waitress and as an employee of a catering company at the US Open tennis tournament in Queens. She was “very sociable,” a company official said.
Then came Brink’s detention. “Repentance will always lead me,” she wrote for the Fellowship. “It’s a very personal journey with stops along the way. It’s a never-ending journey. “
Alice Lukpat contributed to the report.
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