FoundSF

Historical Essay

by John Curl, Part Ten of an excerpt from a longer essay “Food for People, Not for Profit: The Attack on the Bay Area People’s Food System and the Minneapolis Co-op War: Crisis in the Food Revolution of the 1970s”

Peoples Food System at the US Bicentennial parade, 1976.

“I envy you. You North Americans are very lucky. You are fighting the most important fight of all—you live in the heart of the beast.”

—Che Guevara, 1964

Until 1977, very few people in the People’s Food System would have recognized the names Earl Satcher and the Tribal Thumb. Satcher never belonged to any of the collectives or co-ops. But he had an enormous impact on the fate of the organization.

A mainstream glimpse into the Bay Area’s radical netherworld in that era is provided by the cover article of Time magazine, Oct. 6, 1975, entitled, “Radicals: California’s Underground.” The immediate impetus for the article was two recent attempts on President Gerald Ford’s life in San Francisco, and the bizarre saga of Patty Hearst and the [[:|Symbionese Liberation Army]]. It does not even mention the Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland but by that time decimated by the FBI and police. The article draws sketches from federal and state “dossiers” of a number of small revolutionary groups operating in the Bay Area, including the Tribal Thumb: “Tribal Thumb. With 25 members, predominantly men, the group is centered in Palo Alto. Its leader is Earl Satcher, a reputed black karate expert and ex-con with an 18-year criminal record. When some members were arrested for parole violations recently, they were found to have quantities of revolutionary tracts. But one member said that the pamphlets were for show; he asserted that the organization sought money from radicals but actually is chiefly interested in nonrevolutionary crime.”(121)

Satcher founded Tribal Thumb in Long Beach, California in the early 1970s. In a letter to the Berkeley Barb of August 8, 1975, he expounded on what he claimed to be the Thumb’s aims, although the rhetoric may have been mostly a smoke screen for a very different agenda: “[T]he dangerous task of bringing down oppression in all its forms yet prevails and we intend to participate in destroying it. Our regards to all the strong men, women and children fighting to attain the new world.”(122)

According to an article in Grassroots, a Berkeley community newspaper, Satcher, about thirty-five years old at the time of the Food System incidents, had a criminal record dating back to 1960.(123) While imprisoned on charges of auto theft and armed robbery, he apparently became politicized, or picked up the language of the revolutionary movement. Released from prison in the mid-’60s, he got involved in the Black Panthers and attracted the attention of the FBI, which asked the Department of Corrections to keep them informed of his movements. In 1969, Satcher joined forces with Bennie S., who had also served time and later worked for Veritable Vegetable.

During the 1960s, many Black Panther leaders were imprisoned, and articulate convicts such as George Jackson became radicalized while in prison. This resulted in the Left tending to idealize all prisoners as vanguard revolutionaries. A widespread slogan of the time stated, “All prisoners are political prisoners.” Satcher insinuated that he was a friend of George Jackson and San Quentin Six member Hugo Pinell, and belonged to the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF), but none of that was apparently true. Far from it. The Black Guerrilla Family was an African-American prisoner organization, which George Jackson and others founded in 1966 at San Quentin State Prison, with a revolutionary Marxist ideology and the stated goals of eradicating racism, maintaining dignity in prison, and overthrowing the government.(124) BGF and Tribal Thumb became bitter rivals.

Meanwhile, a number of ex-convicts got jobs at Ma Revolution. According to Katherine Fusek of Ma Revolution, “Many of these people who were involved with the prison movement were very articulate and intelligent. Some of them worked at our store, then they’d bring a friend of theirs who was part of the prison movement. They had been very politicized while they were in prison. They were young. They saw some of the bigger picture. They were trying to educate us that all prisoners are political prisoners, and we were starting to get that kind of talk at our collective meetings. It got a little difficult, because some of it didn’t seem to fit. Some people wanted to just deal with accessibility to food, and support the small farmers and venders, and didn’t want to enlarge that mission.”(125) Among the people who had been political activists while in prison, and then joined the Ma Revolution collective, was Willie Sundiata Tate, who had actually been a member of the San Quentin Six and truly a close friend of George Jackson. Tate and the others in his group were well aware of the history and reality behind Satcher’s Tribal Thumb.

A Berkeley Barb article reported: “Although it is not clear whether Tribal Thumb was a provocative outfit deliberately set up by police agencies as part of some covert COINTELPRO-style war on the local Left, there is no question that the group’s actions benefited police red squads and the Right wing. It is suggestive that at several crucial points in Tribal Thumb’s history, the intervention of FBI agents and police officials either enabled the group to continue operating or helped it accomplish tasks which ultimately had a devastating effect on radical political organizations.”(126)

In 1972, federal agencies intervened in a parole revocation proceeding against Satcher, allowing him to remain out and relocate to Northern California. The following year, Satcher, living with a group in a Berkeley apartment, organized a robbery of the local Bank of America, apparently to raise funds for the organization. Doing the actual robbery were six women, with Satcher as the getaway driver. But he failed to show up in front of the bank; the robbers fled on foot and were quickly arrested. Satcher was caught with all the loot. But the FBI reported that they lost all the evidence against him, and again he was released. The five women were convicted and sent to federal prison. He set up headquarters at Honeydew ranch in Mendocino county, where he began a business of raising Arabian horses, and which the Tribal Thumb used as a retreat.

In 1974 several Tribal Thumb members became involved in the United Prisoners Union (UPU), where they spread rumors that its chairman, Popeye Jackson, was a police agent, without any evidence, causing harsh internal disruption. Meanwhile, the FBI assigned an agent named Sara Jane Moore to infiltrate UPU. Her FBI “control agent” was Burt Worthington and her San Francisco police department primary contact was Inspector Jack O’Shea. Moore brought Popeye Jackson an offer from Randolph Hearst to pay for his son to go to school in exchange for information about the SLA. According to the New York Times, Moore also claimed to have loaned Jackson $2,000 and let him use her car.(127) Jackson reportedly turned down Hearst’s offer. Meanwhile, up at Honeydew Ranch, Thumb members were learning marksmanship from undercover FBI agent Walter Hansacker, their weapons instructor, including how to fire the pistol that one of them would use on June 8, 1975, to assassinate Jackson around the corner from Moore’s apartment.

The local police found the barrel of the murder weapon at the scene; a Tribal Thumb member turned the rest of the pistol over to undercover agent Hansacker.(128) But for the next eight months, the FBI withheld the hot weapon from police investigating the case. They finally turned it over, the police put the pieces together and charged a Tribal Thumb member with the murder. The Grand Jury named five other Thumb members as co-conspirators, including Bennie S., a woman named E.P., and a man named Gary Johnson, but charges were never filed against them. Johnson was actually another FBI agent. The killer was convicted.

That summer, E.P., one of the un-indicted co-conspirators, moved in with Moore, and both of them spent time at the Thumb’s Honeydew Ranch. At some point during that period, Moore apparently did a bipolar flip: she turned on her employers. On September 22, 1975 in front of the downtown St. Francis Hotel, she attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford. The Assistant U.S. Attorney in charge of the case “refused to confirm or deny the information about the relationship” between Moore and Tribal Thumb.(129) The investigation began and ended with Moore, the most probable reason being the deep involvement of the FBI. Once again, the government let Satcher and the Thumb off the hook.

At that point, the Tribal Thumb apparently set their sights on the People’s Food System. In addition to providing a power base, the Food System offered a ready source of legitimate income and jobs waiting for other associates when they got out of prison. Convicts could get early release on parole if they had a job waiting. The ex-prisoners at Ma Revolution, along with some of the other Food System workers, knew the truth about the Tribal Thumb and their actions against the United Prisoners’ Union, and suspected that Satcher intended to use Tribal Thumb’s foothold in PFS, in alliance with the White Panthers, to take over the Food System.(130)

The Thumb got their first foothold into the Food System through a small vegetarian restaurant called Wellsprings Communion, which was run by a collective. It was listed in the 1976 and ‘77 editions of the Directory of Collectives. It was founded by Herb Jager until he was threatened and driven out when Tribal Thumb took control. Wellsprings was incorporated by three members of the Tribal Thumb as a charitable and educational nonprofit corporation. Unlike any of the Food System nonprofits, they actually received tax-exempt status from the State. Their reported purposes were “to operate a food service providing 1) at-cost nutritionally balanced meals to people of limited income—the handicapped, welfare recipients and their children, the unemployed, the elderly and prisoners; 2) job training for the unemployed in food service; 3) instruction in food cultivation, preparation, nutrition, and health.”(131)

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