later that it was the sla. patty hearst was kidnapped by a small, violent revolutionary group called the sla. to understand the sla, you have to understand berkeley in 1973. and to understand berkeley in 1973, you have to understand the 60s and what san francisco became. if you were radical in the 60s and early 70s, if you wanted to change the world, you were at least giving a passing thought to going to berkeley. it had become a huge melting pot for young people who wanted a brighter, more beautiful future. there was so much turmoil in those years. there had been the civil rights movement and then the anti-war movement. and young people were rebellious, they were protesting and they had a sense of power that we can make a difference, that we could end the war in vietnam.
at berkeley. and i was living with my boyfriend. you know, and i was just like a dumb 19-year-old. that s about it. we lived in a two-story townhouse. there was still kind of a dicey street scene in berkeley, petty crime, it was fairly rampant. i think three days before the kidnapping, a couple showed up at night looking a little bit sketchy asking about rentals. it didn t seem right. in retrospect, obviously, they were checking us out. but at the time we just dismissed it as a random berkeley kind of thing. but we weren t at all paranoid. we had just finished having dinner, watching a tv show and getting ready to study. there was a knock on the door. there was a woman at the front door. there was a person standing there. and i had moved into the kitchen.
do it too hard. i close it slightly and start looking for her. she s like not there. i look around. sure enough, she s hobbled into the [ bleep ] garage. go and grab her, throw her in the trunk. i must have made too much racket. neighbors situated across from her and next door to her came out of her department. defreeze came around, blast fourd or five rounds to get them to back off. that woke up nancy, sitting shotgun in emily s car. she got off a few rounds, too. we re ready to boogie. pull out of the spot. we make it around the corner. all of a sudden out of nowhere, here comes a berkeley cop who stops the vw with willie in it.
since berkeley was the epicenter of the protest movement, it was a place where radicals wanted to try to spread the gospel to prisons. and the nearest prison was vacaville. and so you had this pipeline where students and ex-students at berkeley would go to vacaville sort of as teachers, but really as political organizers. one prisoner really stood out as the leader of the political group in the prison, and that was donald defreeze. donald defreeze was basically a professional criminal. he had been in and out of prison his whole life, but what landed him there for the last time was when he beat up a prostitute, stole a check from her and tried to cash it. and he got caught.
herself are going about their everyday business in berkeley, the sla is starting to form in a very different place, in a prison. one of the key aspects of the political environment in the bay area was the prison movement. for a lot of radicals in the 70s, prison symbolized everything that was wrong with american society. its racism. its violence. its oppression of poor people. and the radicals saw the prisons as a place where they could foment revolutionary change. at that time joe and russ were doing work inside the california prison system. it s inherently political if the process of the system hammers people of color more than white people. this is the beginning of things like mass incarceration. this is how we deal with poverty. we lock it up.