Screed 12: CINQUE'S INDICTMENT
The tape cassette which accompanied the above typed "arrest order" introduced General Field Marshal Cinque to the American public. The name is variously pronounced. As a Spanish name it is Syn-Kay to purists; to Anglos it looks like Sink or Seenkw; its bearer and most other Blacks called it Syn Kew. As the Hearst food program began, it appeared in hero-worshipping grafitti as "Sin Cue." The original Cinque was a Wendi leader, enslaved and enroute to America, who led a sucessful mutiny onthe slave-ship L'Amistad in 1839. The legal actions which followed this mutiny were important to the whole nineteenth-century American antislavery movement, and the incident is one of the gems of Black History and Black Identity programs.
The new Cinque was immediately identified in newspapers as Donald David DeFreeze. DeFreeze, an outgoing man of 30, had compiled a record of violent and near-violent crimes in the Middle West and then in California. Most of his activity was merely fiscal, while some, including a bomb incident, was political. During his experience in and out of jails, DeFreeze became interested in Black aspirations. At the beginning of the 1970's he was a leader and lecturer at the Vacaville prison branch of the semi-revolutionary Black Culture Association, or BCA. Two of his associates in that enterprise were Thero Wheeler, 29, a Black prisoner, and Russell Little, one of the white men arrested in Concord and charged with the shooting of Foster and Blackburn. Little, a graduate of the University of Florida, in Philosophy, had been working as a visiting instructor in the BCA program at Vacaville.
Early in 1974, DeFreeze escaped from Soledad Prison and Wheeler from Vacaville: Both immediately joined Little, Remiro, and other pioneer SLA people in Berkeley and Oakland. Shortly after their arrival in the East Bay, DeFreeze put his great personal force behind the idea of a militant SLA as opposed to a slower-moving Symbionese Federation. There was a change in personnel, and many of the former Federation people were so frightened as to leave Berkeley or go into hiding. Dc-Freeze, by then familiar in the East Bay as Cinque, startled the leadership of other radical organizations by offering himself and the SLA as semipro hit men who would eliminate designated enemies on contract. Rejected, he, with his colleagues, seized the opportunity offered by the chaotic Oakland School Board discussions of security in the schools. The attack on Foster and Blackburn further alienated the Bay Area revolutionaries, and at the time of the Hearst kidnapping the SLA stood almost alone.
In his indictment of the Hearsts, which is presented as Screed 12, Cinque nevertheless sticks to the wrongs voiced en masse by the left-radical organizations of Berkeley and environs. His voice on the tape projected as calm and secure, with hints of pleased irony, in accents typical of literate and articulate American Negroes.
To those who would bear the hopes and future of our people, let the voice of their guns express the words of freedom: Greetings to the people, fellow comrades, brothers and sisters.
My name is Cinque, and to my comrades I am known as Cm. I am a Black man and representative of Black people. I hold the rank of general field marshal in the United Federated Forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Today I have received an order from the Symbionese War Council, the Court of the People, to the effect that I am ordered to convey the following message in behalf of the SLA, and to insert a taped word of comfort and verification, that Patricia Campbell Hearst is alive and safe.
The Symbionese Liberation Army is a federated union that maintains political elements of many different liberation struggles, and of many different races. Our unified purpose is to liberate the oppressed people of this nation and to aid other oppressed people around the world in their struggle against fascist imperialism and the robbery of their freedom a n d homeland. Since this is the purpose and goal of the SLA, it is therefore clear to us, as it will be to all oppressed people, that our interest is to serve and defend the people and not ourselves, since the people shall always come first, themselves.
The SLA has arrested the subject [Patricia Hearst] for the crimes that her mother and father have, by their actions, committed against we [sic], the American people, and oppressed people of the world. In understanding this charge, we must first understand who the Hearsts are, and who they serve and represent.
Randolph A. Hearst is the corporate chairman of the fascist media empire of the ultra-right Hearst Corporation, which is one of the largest propaganda institutions of this oppressive military dictatorship of the militarily armed corporate state that we now live under in this nation.
The primary goal of this empire is to save and form [sic] a necessary propaganda and smokescreen to shield the American people from the realities of the corporate dictatorship t h a t Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford represent. This network of propaganda programs and confusion has succeeded in hiding the truth from the people; that truth being that this nation has suffered its first military coup and that the Constitution, which some of us still believe in, has been overthrown.
The fascist Hearst Corporation, composed of, firstly, a national newspaper syndicate which includes the San Francisco Examiner, the Chronicle, and others which jump from California and to as far away as New York and Philadelphia;
Secondly, a magazine monopoly composed of over 13 publications, which include, for example, House Beautiful, Harper's Bazaar, Town and Country and Cosmopolitan;
Thirdly, a TV and radio station empire across the nation, with production and propaganda fields of both national and international use;
Fourth, ownership of vast areas of real estate in the United States and Mexico, forest, grasslands and cattle farms.
All of this is directly connected with Washington and the corporate dictatorship of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. That is to say, the Hearst empire is one of the empires of the ruling class and its interests are the rich [sic] and in direct contradiction with the interests of the people. Therefore, they are enemies of the people.
Mrs. Randolph A. Hearst is a member of the University of California Board of Regents and is responsible along with others appointed by Governor Reagan, for the lowering of funds and the investment of our California tax money in corporations which have interests and do gain profits from the robbery, oppression, genocide carried out by fascist and racist governments around the world, and within the United States itself.
The Regents, with the support of Mrs. Hearst, have time and time again been requested by we, the people [sic], to not invest our money in such fascist corporations as General Motors, Westinghouse, Gulf, Standard Oil, Bank of America and others, who have and do serve and gain profit in the oppression, robbery and murder that is committed against Black people of South Africa, where 70,000 Black children a year die from malnutrition; against white people of Ireland, where U.S.-trained British soldiers shoot down in the streets Irish fathers and mothers and U.S.manufactured tear gas suffocates Irish children as their older brothers and sisters rot in British concentration camps; against the freedom of the Philippine people that the United States and Marco's puppet soldiers used U.S.manufactured napalm to attempt to burn away the spirit of freedom from the hearts and souls of the poor and starving [sic].
The U.C. Board of Regents, one of California's largest foreign investors, supports, through its investments, the murder of thousands of Black men and women and children of Mozambique, Angola and Rhodesia, murder designed to destroy the spirit that all humanity longs for.
With all these crimes placed before the Board of Regents and Mrs. Hearst, with all the pleas from the people to stop supporting these corporations and the murders of thousands of men, women and children, the Board and Mrs. Hearst did not raise one voice in protest, or refuse to be part of these crimes committed against these people, and those committed against the American people. For these acts and others, the Court of the People finds the Hearst family accountable for their crimes and hold that they are enemies of the people.
We of the Symbionese Liberation Army hold [that] the Hearst Corporation and the Hearst family and the Board of Regents, as well as the corporate state which they support and aid, are enemies of the people, and that the people have the legal and human right and duty to attack said enemy according to the forms of war taken by the oppressed people against any enemy or murderer and oppressor to regain their freedom and liberty and to give love to their children and people.
It is therefore the directive of this Court that before any forms of negotiations for the release of the subject prisoner be initiated, that an action of good faith be shown on the part of the Hearst family to allow the court and the oppressed people of this world and this nation to ascertain as to the real interests and cooperative attitude of the Hearst family and in so doing, show some form of repentance for the murder and suffering they have aided and profited from; andthis good faith gesture is to be in the form of a token gesture to the oppressed people that aid [sic? ] the corporate state in robbing and removing their rights to freedom and liberty.
This gesture is to be in the form of food to the needy and unemployed, and to which [sic] the following instructions are to be followed to the letter.
In closing, and speaking personally for myself, and as a father of two children, I wish to say to Mr. Hearst and Mrs. Hearst that I, as also the persons under my command for the authority of the Court of the People, are not savage killers and madmen, and we do hold a high moral value to life [sic]. We value life very deeply, and with all the spirit that we, as human beings, can bring forth in our hearts.
Speaking as a father, I am quite willing to lose both my children, if by that action I could save thousands of white, black, yellow and red children from a life of suffering, exploitation and murder. And! am therefore quite willing to carry out the execution of your daughter to save the life of starving men, women and children of every race; and I, along with the loyal men and women of many races who love the people, quite willingly give our lives to free the people at any cost.
And if, as you and others might so easily believe, that we will lose, let it be known that even in death we will win, for the very ashes of this fascist nation will mark our very grave [sic].
