ABOUT MARILYN BUCK

Read a recent profile of Marilyn by a long-time activist friend at Austin's Rag Blog.

antiracist activism

Marilyn began her antiracist activism as a teenager in Texas. As a college student, she organized against the war in Vietnam and in solidarity with the Black liberation movement. “After less than a decade as a political activist,” she writes,“I went to prison, convicted of procuring firearms for the Black Liberation Army. I faced 10 years in prison — a very long time for a young woman."

clandestinity

After serving four years, Marilyn was granted a furlough from prison and did not return. She spent the next eight years in clandestinity. Marilyn was recaptured in 1985. In addition to charges related to Assata Shakur’s escape, she was convicted of conspiracy to protest government policies (the invasion of Grenada and military intervention in Central America) through the use of violence against government property. Her total sentence was 80 years in Federal prison.

those years of intense repression

“The trials, those years of intense repression and US government denunciations of my humanity had beat me up rather badly. Whatever my voice had been, it was left frayed. I could scarcely speak.” Instead, Marilyn wrote. “For prisoners, writing is a life raft to save one from drowning in a prison swamp. I could not write a diary or a journal; I was a political prisoner. Everything I had was subject to investigation, invasion and confiscation. I was a censored person. In defiance, I turned to poetry, an art of speaking sparely, but flagrantly.”

a different cultural paradigm

She also confronted the artistic repression of rigid political thought. “The artist, as creator, creates the concept and framework for a different cultural paradigm. Political speeches, leaflets and pamphlets that exhort and condemn the old, oppressive order rarely do that. Without the imagination there is little daring to confront the old.”

political prisoners

Marilyn is one of more than 100 political prisoners in this country. Read more about them at www.thejerichomovement.com.

Yuri Kochiyama visiting Marilyn c. 1996

Marilyn with Kwame Ture, former political prisoners Ida McCray, Linda Evans, Carmen Valentín, Dylcia Pagán, Laura Whitehorn, and family members

Marilyn in 2003