Larry Gossett Interview 1. A Larry Gossett Q - Interviewer

Transcription

1 Larry Gossett Interview 1. Q: The intelligence ordinance in Seattle was passed in response to the events leading up to it. Can you include some of your own personal experience of being surveilled by the Seattle Police Department? Can we start back when the Seattle police were conducting this kind of surveillance activity of people who were involved in activities that are legal under the First Amendment back in the 1960s and 1970s? Can you talk about that era and the kinds of things that were going on at that time? A: Back in 1967, I joined Seattle s SNCC [pronounced snick ] Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. This was just seven months after the national president of SNCC, Stokely Carmichael, had come to Seattle and talked about black power and what that meant. It lit a fire under the African American community here, particularly its youth. And hundreds of youth started looking at ways in which we could get involved in the political movement aimed at getting power for black people. So I joined Seattle SNCC. Later, in January 1968 I joined the Black Student Union. And then in April of 1968 the Black Panther Party was organized in Seattle. I didn t join it specifically, but all of my friends were in it, because most of the leadership were young people that had been working with me in SNCC and the Black Student Union. It was during that time that we started discussing and talking about the police and the FBI following us. We felt it happen but we had no concrete proof. That didn t come along until later on. PAUSE FOR TECHNICAL ADJUSTMENT Q: For people who didn t live through that era, can you talk a little bit about what the political climate was like? There was a lot of grassroots organizing going on at the time. A: One of the amazing things about Seattle is that most of the whites up here have the illusion that Seattle is not like the rest of the nation. And they actually thought race relations were pretty good. So they were completely set aback, astounded, surprised, when the first sit-in in Seattle took place at Franklin High School on May 29, And they said, How could this happen in our city? But the powers that be didn t know how to deal with it so they sent half of the Seattle Police Department to surround Franklin High School at that time for a sitin. And what was novel about it, it had never happened in Seattle. And of course as all of us in this room know, sit-ins by black activists and militant youth had been taking place all across the country in the earlier years in the 1960 s. But it shocked Seattle. And the powers that be got together and said, What can we do? What can we do? And their thing was it must be outside agitators coming in and influencing our Negroes. They did not think about or do very adequate intelligence work. If they had, they would have found that all of the leaders, Larry Gossett, Aaron Dixon, Elmer Dixon, were all born and raised in Seattle, Washington. We were not from the outside coming in.

2 Larry Gossett Interview 2. But because they didn t understand that, on the morning of April 4 th, 1968, they arrested three University of Washington Black Student Union leaders for organizing and causing trouble at Franklin. And that was the first time that I had ever been in the King County Jail. It was also, historically speaking, the day that Martin Luther King was killed. So we went to jail 8:30 in the morning. Martin was killed at 1:30 in the afternoon Seattle time. And the black community really exploded that evening. There was a lot of violence. And then the next morning the King County Courthouse had the largest number of black people visited in support of a trial, a political trial that it had ever seen either before or since. Somewhere between 1,300 to 1,500 black people came to the arraignment of Larry Gossett and Dixon and Carl Miller on the morning of April 5 th. And that was combined because Martin had died the night before so this uproar they didn t know what to deal with. I think that Seattle police, FBI and other authorities started trying to figure out who are the leaders of this movement here in the city and what can we do to learn more about them, because they might cause a lot of trouble. Not what are the issues that they are raising, how is it that we as a community that prides itself on being liberal can do something about? Q: How did you eventually became aware that the Seattle police had had specific files on you? You had suspected it for a while, but can you talk about the discovery? A: Right. We suspected it. Some of the Black Panther Party leaders here in Seattle had had letters sent to one another with almost exactly the same handwriting. And it was a tactic of COINTELPRO and the FBI to get Black Panther Party leaders fighting against each other, accusing the other of messing with his girlfriend. And there was some agent provocateur activity going on that most of the activists. PAUSE FOR AIRPLANE NOISE A: The other thing that gave me suspicion that the police were trying to disrupt our movement was that we had new people coming in to both the Black Student Union and the Black Panther Party that nobody knew. And all of a sudden they would come to these meetings and act like they were blacker than everybody else. Yeah, what we should do is tear down, burn the mother down. And trying to get people involved in criminal activity where they could be led into a setup. The other thing that happened in around 1970 was the brutal killing of Larry Ward that made people very suspicious. Larry Ward was a young guy that was associated with the Black Panthers, Vietnam veteran. Had not yet joined really, but he allegedly - the police said was going to firebomb Hardcastle Realty on 24 th and Union. And for some reason the police said they d just been driving by, but it looks like they were already set up there. And when he went up to put a box or something in front of Hardcastle s, he was brutally assassinated. Those are the kinds of things that made us think, you know, the FBI and the police were using

3 Larry Gossett Interview 3. extralegal means to combat what we felt was our right in terms of exercising our right to say America needs to change, needs to be reformed, and black people needed to have power. Q: You made a point that I want to follow up on. A lot of people don t necessarily know that there was not only surveillance during the 1960s and 1970s, where political groups were being surveilled, but there were active attempts to disrupt them. A: Yeah. Specific attempts to disrupt the activities. Later the FBI has admitted COINTELPRO activities to disrupt political groups that they perceived to be a danger. In 1969 as a matter of fact, J. Edgar Hoover said that the number one enemy of the United States of America was the Black Panther Party for Self- Defense, a primarily political group that believed in self-defense, while all of its work was legal: serving people in the black community, raising contradictions. So they did a lot of other things besides wiretap or follow. They actually tried to disrupt and destroy these organizations, and in some cases they were successful. Q: We won t have an introduction about COINTELPRO, so if you could talk about what that was and then again just follow up with the fact that it included both surveillance and activity by agents provocateur. A: COINTELPRO was a program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and some police were involved with them, and some people think even the LEIU, the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit. Trying to figure out how we can be more effective providing surveillance over these organizations, but also in disrupting them. And they used tactics like wiretapping, following people, but actually sending people into the organizations to be spies, to be provocateurs, to cause problems, and to report the intelligence. They would even write letters and say that two members were messing with the same girl to try to get them fighting amongst each other, particularly the leadership. They even tried to created problems between the Black Student Union and the Panther Party by sending the written message to the BSUs that the Black Panther Party thinks they re blacker than you and you all are just a bunch of students, and that kind of stuff. That s how COINTELPRO worked. Q: There was an attempt here locally to reform this kind of surveillance activity on the part of the police. Can you talk a little bit about the committee of which you were part? A: I joined in the mid 76, 77, I can t really recall the exact year. The Community Coalition Against Government Spying, whose aim it was to get the Seattle police, the Seattle FBI office, to release files they had compiled on people who were civil, human rights, black power activists who were not committing any specific crimes, so that we could show the general public the extent to which our basic civil liberties, civil rights and human rights were being violated by the very

4 Larry Gossett Interview 4. people in our community that were supposed to be responsible for upholding the law. And we were successful here in Seattle. And, I don t know if we were the first city in the country, I know that I was one of the first people ever through the Freedom of Information Act that grew out of some of our legal battles in court. When we took our battle to court the Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the ACLU and the civil liberty workers that were asking to have these files opened. And the Seattle police, we found out later, immediately sent a lot of their files to the Law Enforcement Intelligence Units, something that we had never heard of, in California, for safe keeping. Somehow we found out through information some lawyers got and they had to send those files back up. And it was at that time when I got my files that I learned how absurd this spying had become. For example, they had categorized me, in terms of my so-called criminal activity as it said modus operandi: advocate for Third World causes. So in their mind, someone who advocated for black, Latino, Asian and Native American peoples coming together for common cause to create a better life for their people, and a more level playing field in this country, was criminal. And I said that s absurd. Our police have to be more accountable to the citizens that they serve. Q: Can you talk about community reaction to the revelations that your committee was able to bring to light? A: O.K. The community revelations brought, I think, were fortuitous for the movement. We were also able to expose that they had a file on the person that had just become the mayor in the fall of 1977, and that was Charles Royer, who had been a commentator a little earlier for KING-TV. And he had done a critical opinion piece against the police, the Seattle Police Department, and they had started a file on him. That s how crazy it got. And that caused a lot of public brouhaha, which led to the Seattle City Council, the first such legislative body in the country that passed a strong intelligence ordinance, prohibiting the Seattle Police Department from spying on citizens because of their basic political beliefs - and asked the police to do their job of protecting, not violating, civil liberties. And it was one of the strongest it was very strong, it was used as a model in other cities later. Q: Could you could just recap about, in the wake of revelations about police spying, the city council enacted this ordinance. A: In the wake of the controversy that was being built by the Community Coalition Against Government Spying, many people in the community became outraged over the extent to which the Seattle police were spying on citizens. They were doing nothing more than exercising their basic rights to express their position and beliefs. It got so absurd that they even - it was discovered that they even had a file on a person that had just been elected mayor, Charlie Royer, who had been a commentator on KING-TV before and did a critical piece on the Seattle police,

5 Larry Gossett Interview 5. and they started a file on him. That led to Seattle being the first city to pass a strong intelligence ordinance prohibiting the spying on citizens of this city on the basis of a political belief, religion, ethnicity, etcetera. The police had to have some strong evidence that someone was involved in criminal activity before they could start wiretapping, following, gathering other information on individuals and groups. Q: Recently, in the wake of 9/11, there s been an attempt locally to have that ordinance repealed. Can you talk about that controversy? A: One morning our whole city woke up and read an article that was on the front page that said that the police chief, the Western regional head of the federal prosecutor s office, what s his name? Michael I can t think of his name right now - and Seattle Mayor Greg Nichols saying we need to revisit our intelligence ordinance because we ve been meeting with government officials who say that it s a barrier to carrying out the Patriot Act and gathering information on people who may become suspected terrorists. And immediately, and in my opinion, I was proud of this, many civil liberties groups, remembering the 60 s and 70 s, led by the ACLU and the NAACP and others said, No way, Jose. We re not going to change our intelligence ordinance. Then City Council Member Heidi Wills drafted a resolution aimed at reinforcing the city council s intent to maintain a strong intelligence ordinance. It went before Nick Licata s committee, who recommended to the city council as a whole that we reaffirm strongly our support for our existing ordinance. And the vote was something like 9 0, saying that we are going to maintain that ordinance. I haven t heard anything from the mayor, the police chief and the prosecutor for the federal government on that since. Q: What was the rationale by law-enforcement for wanting to do this? You mentioned that there was a federal tie-in. A: They claimed that officials of the United States Justice Department had been meeting with them about how to be more effective in counterterrorist activities in protecting the general public. And they had said that, Seattle s ordinance is so strong, you all might have to violate the law to get funds from the federal government to do the kind of surveillance that we think is necessary. And they kind of mentioned that, Your existing laws might be a prohibition against you getting these federal funds. And that upset the chief of police, Gil Kerlikowske, and the mayor. And they said, We may have to look at changing it so we can be effective at counterintelligence and countering terrorists. I believe that the Seattle Police Department, the FBI, and the mayor have ample means and technology by which they can surveil, follow, and gather information on people who may be involved in terrorist or criminal activity - that they don t have to violate our basic civil rights as citizens of Seattle by amending the Seattle intelligence ordinance.

6 Larry Gossett Interview 6. Q: Can you describe the problems that arise, in a general sense, when law enforcement crosses the barrier of conducting intelligence on criminal activities and starts to collect politically motivated intelligence on people who are conducting legal political activity? Can you talk about the general problems that arise for the First Amendment, and any examples from the 1960s and 1970s of people you knew who had been impacted by this in a specific way? A: By allowing those who we grant police authority and power to to gather this kind of evidence and information on citizens just because they are exercising free speech; if it s not challenged, it will lead to a gradual dilution of what we call democratic rights and freedoms that this country is supposed to be built upon. And I think there are many, many examples of where that has happened. I mean the most overt, obvious case is witnessed by that of African American history. Any time any black preacher, black leader, locally in Seattle or anywhere else started saying, We want to change the power relations between whites, privileged classes and the oppressed, disadvantaged blacks, they would immediately be pounced upon by the police, sometimes on very trumped up charges and scared and jailed and sometimes killed or run out of town. That happened throughout the entire civil rights and black power movements in the South as well as other parts of our country. And if the general public in America allow that to happen to the blacks, and earlier to the Japanese, then the public could get upset with those who don t go to church and express themselves as atheists, and move against them. If we don t say something, then people, there will just be a few people not being controlled by the police. And there won t be anybody else here to raise concerns. That s why I think it s important that we challenge any threat to civil liberties whenever it raises its head. Q: Do you have advice for other cities? I know New York City is going through this second situation now, where there are attempts to repeal their consent decree ordinances. Would you have advice for other cities like that that are going through this situation? A: Yes. Stand strong. Reach out to the ACLU, the innumerable black civil and human and political rights organizations in New York City, Puerto Rican liberation organizations. I think that all of them should get together and say, Not in our city, in a forceful unified voice, because if they don t, then the police will maybe in the next few years mostly use these new powers against the Muslim religious communities that they perceive are causing problems. But if they allow that to happen, then they ll start moving against Puerto Ricans that are trying to build a political base, and the African Americans and then the Jewish Left. And pretty soon the people of New York will be scared to say anything. What kind of life is that in what is supposed to be the most democratic, freedom-loving country that the world has ever known? Q: you have a prescription on how to strike the appropriate balance between the needs of law enforcement to gather information on criminal activity, and making

7 Larry Gossett Interview 7. sure that they preserve our civil liberties? Are there oversight mechanisms that you would recommend? A: If I had the precise prescription then I probably would have stopped being a politician and gone into consulting and just travel all across the country laying out what ought to be the balance between the needs of us to protect the basic civil liberties of the people, and to be effective in enforcing the laws. So I don t have a specific prescription. All I would say is that when a problem exists in a community, then you have to get all of the stakeholders, all the sectors of the population have to be involved in saying, What is it that we can do to nip in the bud this raise in crime, this terrorist threat, or this big problem that s splitting our community? And not just leave it up to the police, the FBI and security forces to solve the problem. My experience is nationally, internationally, that that is a prescription for chaos, havoc and loss of democracy, not an enhancement in making a democracy more secure and stronger and accountable to the people that it serves. Q: Can you talk about the actual day that you first saw your intelligence file; that you were able to get it, and what that experience was like? A: The day that I got my file, I just laughed. I had been married a couple of years to Rhonda Oden. I said, Come here, Rhonda, come here. They had five sections in it where her brother s name was in it. Her name was Rhonda Oden. Steven Oden is her younger brother. She had four younger brothers and sisters. And it said in 1974 I didn t know they were still following me in 74 that, This man is coming over to Larry Gossett s house. We know his name is Steve Oden, but we can t find anything on him. We think he might be an underground activist. It s just completely clean. And they were scratching and tearing their hair out trying to figure out who Steven Oden was. Simply, Steven Oden was my new first of all he came over while she was my girlfriend, with her sometimes. And then he started coming over when I married her, to see his sister. And this later on impacted his ability to get into the United States Air Force. He did get in, but they said, There are some problems with your record in Seattle. They never got specific with him. But I m very confident that that is what it was. You start gathering this information on people, many of whom are innocent, and you re just suspecting them because of who they are associated with. It s just a complete prescription for doing away with basic liberties that we should do all we can to protect. Q: I just wanted to go back over the beginnings of the Community Coalition Against Police Spying, because, again, I think we missed just the beginning. A: I think that, I can t recall specifically, but I think that ACLU called a lot of progressive groups together, Left political organizations, civil rights groups, groups that advocated for the various minority communities in Seattle and said that, We suspect that the police are spying on all of us. And we said What else

8 Larry Gossett Interview 8. is new? Because we already suspected that. But they said that, We think we can do something about it. And we would like to form the Coalition Against Government Spying. And we said, What the heck? It sounds like a good cause. And it could be beneficial if we re successful. So we joined. It was multiracial. It was broad-based. It was non-doctrinaire. So naturally there were some groups that said, This is a perspective that we must have. This is the ideology that must guide us and the criticism. We said, No, none of that. Let s focus on the extent to which our government is spying on people on the Left, progressive people that are not engaged in criminal activity. And it ended up being successful. Q: Are there any other examples of people that you knew personally that, once they opened up their files had the kind of really misconstrued and inaccurate information that you had in yours? I think it s useful for people to hear those kinds of anecdotes. A: Aaron Dixon. Elmer Dixon. E.J. Brisker. Carl Miller. Q: Any particularly bad information that they told you about in their file that was wildly off the mark or wildly inaccurate, just as an example? A: Yeah. I mean, one of them told me about joining a new church and getting involved in that church, and then all of a sudden, the minister s name gets in his particular file. And this is actually a kind of conservative minister. He was going to the church because he liked this woman that was there, and he found his minister s name in there. That s an example of how absurd and backward and unaccountable this activity becomes when our police and enforcement groups are not held accountable to anyone. END OF INTERVIEW