Kathy Boudin, who, as a member of the radical Weather Underground of the 1960s and 1970s, participated in the murderous 1981 robbery of an armored truck owned by Brink and then, in prison and released two decades later, helped inmates struggling to take their own lives. get on track, died on sunday in New York City. She was 78.
The cause was cancer, said Zayd Dohrn, whose family adopted Mrs. Boudin’s son, Chesa Boudin.
One day in March 1970, Mrs. Boudin was taking a shower in a townhouse on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village when an explosion caused the walls around her to collapse. She and fellow extremists had made bombs there, the intended target was probably the army base Fort Dix in New Jersey. Three of them were killed on the spot. A naked Mrs Boudin managed to scramble away with a colleague and found clothes and a brief refuge in the house of a woman who lived down the street.
She then disappeared.
Within a few years, the Weather Underground did too. A breakaway faction of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society, it called itself Weatherman, taken from ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, a 1965 Bob Dylan song that reads ‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows’ . The name evolved into Weather Underground.
In that era of civil rights turbulence and the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, the group dropped bombs on the United States Capitol, New York City Police Headquarters, and other buildings. In any case, it was more adept at issuing lengthy manifestos, laden and leaden with references to Karl Marx, Che Guevara, and Ho Chi Minh, claiming that the world’s “main struggle” is “between US imperialism and the national liberation struggle.” against it.”
As the Weather Underground faded away at the end of the war in the mid-1970s, its leaders emerged one by one from hiding to face the legal consequences of being on the FBI’s most wanted list.
Not Mrs. Boudin (pronounced boo-DEEN). “The status of being underground was an identity to me,” she recalled years later in interviews with The New Yorker at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, NY, where she was incarcerated. She continued: “I didn’t make a difference in any way, so then I gave a lot of importance to being underground.”
That ended in October 1981, when she teamed up with gunmen from another radical group, the Black Liberation Army, to stop a Brink truck in Rockland County, NY, making it $1.6 million. During the robbery, the gunmen killed a guard, Peter Paige. They transferred the money to a U-Haul truck waiting about a mile away. Mrs. Boudin was in the cab of the truck, a 38-year-old white woman who served as bait to deceive police officers looking for black men.
The U-Haul was stopped by police at a roadblock. Mrs. Boudin, who was not carrying a weapon, immediately surrendered, hands in the air. But gunmen jumped from the back of the truck and opened fire, with Sgt. Edward J. O’Grady and Officer Waverly L. Brown. Although some accused her of surrendering as a tactic to get the police to lower their weapons before being attacked, Ms Boudin insisted that was not the case.
More than half a dozen suspects were imprisoned, and most were given prison terms long enough to carry life sentences. Among them was David Gilbert, whom Mrs. Boudin married after their arrests and with whom she had a son, Chesa, who was 14 months old when she worked at the Brink. Separated while in prison, they were reunited in 2021 after Mr. Gilbert was converted and he was released. Chesa Boudin, raised by a Weather Underground couple, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, was elected San Francisco District Attorney in 2019. Both her husband and son survive her.
After legal wrangling, Mrs. Boudin in April 1984 guilty of first degree theft and first degree murder in the death of Mr Paige. Though 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 to life in prison.
When sentencing, she turned to the victims’ relatives. “I know anything I say now will sound hollow, but I extend my deepest condolences to you,” she said. “I feel real pain.” As for her motives: “I was there because of my dedication to the black struggle for liberation and its underground movement. I am a white person who does not want the crimes committed against black people to be borne in my name.”
She turned out to be a model inmate in Bedford Hills, mentored other inmates, cared for people with AIDS, wrote poetry and expressed regret for her role in the robbery at the Brink. In September 2003, after 22 years behind bars, she was released on parole.
Not everyone was satisfied. Diane O’Grady, the widow of Sergeant O’Grady, wrote in The New York Post that she “didn’t believe that inmate Boudin felt the slightest bit of guilt, shame or remorse.” But Ms. Boudin received widespread support, including from some Bedford Hills employees. Even the arch-conservative William F. Buckley Jr. signed a letter to the probation commission claiming to believe in “the possibilities of human rehabilitation and transformation.”
In a 2004 article for a magazine called Fellowship written before she left prison, Ms Boudin said she had come to “fully embrace the enormity of my human responsibility: I supported and was part of a heist that put human lives at risk.” set and then destroyed.”
She graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1965 and received a master’s degree in adult education and literacy from Norwich College while incarcerated and then, five years after her release, a doctorate from Teachers College at Columbia University. After prison, her work focused on current and former inmates, especially women, helping them get parole and preparing them for life outside of prison, to fundamentals such as how to conduct yourself during job interviews.
She was also a founding member of the Center for Justice in Columbia, which researched the social consequences of mass incarceration. What many people don’t appreciate, she said in a 2021 interview for this obituary, is that “there are enormous resources waiting to be realized in those who are too often defined as throwaway people.”
In a statement from Columbia University on Sunday, Mr. Boudin said his mother likes to give back to others.
“She always ended calls with a smile, a habit she had developed during the 22 years of her incarceration,” he wrote, “when she wanted to leave everyone she spoke to, especially me, with joy and hope. She lived redemption and was constantly finding ways to give back to those around her.”
Kathy Boudin was familiar with radical politics almost from her birth in Manhattan on May 19, 1943. Her father, Leonard B. Boudin, was a civil rights attorney with a list of clients who amounted to a left-wing Who’s Who, including Paul Robeson, Daniel Ellsberg, and the anti-war doctor Benjamin Spock. Her mother, Jean (Roisman) Boudin, was a poet. Her great-uncle was Louis Boudin, a prominent civil rights lawyer, and one uncle was the liberal, dirty journalist IF Stone.
In addition to Mr. Gilbert and her son, she leaves behind her son’s two adoptive brothers, six grandchildren and an older brother, Michael, a retired federal appeals court judge and political conservative, Mr. Dohrn, one of the adoptive brothers. . Sunday.
Ms. Boudin attended Little Red Schoolhouse and Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village, graduating in 1961. In her senior year, she visited Cuba, a country to which she traveled again in 1969 with fellow radicals.
She studied Russian studies with Bryn Mawr and obtained her bachelor’s degree in absentia because she studied in Moscow. In the summer she worked in a hospital, in a camp for disabled children and at a blood bank. She later became a community organizer in Cleveland.
Her militancy grew steadily. She took part in the “Days of Rage” in October 1969, a raging frenzy through Chicago’s Gold Coast district by anti-war fighters. She and others were charged with conspiracy and violation of anti-riot laws, cases that were ultimately dismissed on the grounds that the government had obtained unlawful evidence. Around that time, she co-wrote “The Bust Book,” which gave advice on what to wear to a demonstration and what to do if they were arrested.
In hiding after the explosion at a mansion, Ms. Boudin took on various aliases and took low-paying jobs in New York, including as a waitress and as an employee of a catering company at the United States Open tennis tournament in Queens. She was “very sociable,” said a company official.
Then came the robbery of the Brink. “Remorse will always guide me,” she wrote for Fellowship. “It is a very personal journey with stops along the way. It is a road without end.”
Alyssa Lukpat reporting contributed.