Word: tankersley
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Among the radicals who once fleetingly held center stage is Anthony Tankersley, a former Berkeley graduate student convicted of the Sept. 1, 1968, terrorist bombing of a Pacific Gas & Electric Co. high-tension tower. Tankersley, the son of a Navy officer, then fled to join the U.S. expatriate community in Canada. For 18 months, Tankersley and his wife Susan re-examined their political philosophy. As a result, last February he turned himself in to federal authorities as his own "statement against violence" and is now serving a one-to five-year sentence in a California prison. From his cell, Tankersley...
...Tony Tankersley was just beginning his graduate studies when he discovered political activism: "At first I mixed with a loose-knit group of Old Lefties and Black Panthers, but it did not take long for me to make the transition to the hip radical world-a world I could identify with." His first encounter with the New Left came during the Oakland Induction Center riots of 1967, when he "saw the brutality perpetrated against the demonstrators and thought it unjust. It was then that I began seeing myself as a violent revolutionary." From a follower to a leader...
...Tankersley dynamited the 60-ft. tower, then abandoned a cache of explosives just ahead of the police and made his way to Montreal. There, as a fugitive, he began to rethink his political role: "I was far enough away from the movement to reflect on my own actions without interruption. Nobody was there to remind me whom I could talk to and whom I couldn't. I drew on liberal ideas and conservative ideas and found that I didn't know everything. I had been wasting all of my energy figuring out how to destroy, when I could...
Although he could have stayed in Canada, reasonably secure from imprisonment, he chose to return. For Tankersley, return has been a "rebirth. I feel freer now in prison than I did when I was a radical...