Susan Rosenberg papers

Susan Rosenberg was born in New York City in 1955, the daughter of Emanuel and Bella Rosenberg, both of whom were progressive leftists. Her father was a dentist who practiced in Spanish Harlem and her mother was a theatrical producer; they regularly took their only child to rallys in support of the civil rights movement and to demonstrations againt the war in Vietnam. Rosenberg grew up on the Upper West Side and attended the very liberal Walden School from grade school through high school by which time she was actively engaged in the anti-war movement. After high school, she initially attended Barnard College but transferred to the less elitist City College, earning a degree in history. She later went to Canada to become a doctor of Chinese acupuncture and holistic medicine.

Rosenberg worked first as a drug counselor in Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx and by the early 1980s was working at the Harlem Institute of Acupuncture where the ancient Chinese practice was used to treat drug addiction. The Institute was founded by the Black Nationalist Mutulu Shakur who had worked alongside Rosenberg at the Lincoln Hospital. Like Shakur, Rosenberg was much involved in several radical political movements of the day. She was active in the New Afrikan and Puerto Rican independence movements and even more active in the May 19 (in honor of the birthdays of both Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh) Communist Organization, a coalition of sorts consisting of one faction of the former Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army.

In 1982, accused of assisting in the 1979 prison escape of Assata Shakur, Rosenberg went underground. She was also accused of driving the getaway car in the 1981 Brinks robbery that led to the deaths of two police officers and an armored-car guard in upstate New York. She was captured in 1984, along with Timothy Blunt, while transferring guns and explosives from a car into a Cherry Hills, New Jersey storage unit. Found guilty of the illegal possesion of firearms and explosives, Blunt and Rosenberg were each sentenced to fifty-eight years in jail. Many at the time felt the unusually long sentences were due to the revolutionary beliefs both expressed throughout their trial. She served sixteen years before President Bill Clinton pardoned her on his last day in office, January 20, 2001.

While in prison, Rosenberg was one of the first immates assigned in 1987 to the newly opened High Security Unit for Women in Lexington, Kentucky. Located underground, below the Federal Correctional Institution there, this was an experimental program aimed at "political prisoners," subjecting them to sensory deprivation, isolation and frequent strip-searches. After several groups brought a law suit, a federal judge ordered the Unit closed in 1988. That same year, Rosenberg was one of six people charged with the US Capitol bombing in 1983, along with several other bombings in Washington, DC and New York City in which no one died but there was property damage. In what became known as the Resistance Conspiracy Case, many again felt the charges were politically motivated. Eventually, these charges against Rosenberg were dropped and she was then transferred to a federal prison in Florida, later to California and served out the end of her sentence in Danbury, Connecticut at the Federal Correctional Institution.

Also while in prison, Rosenberg earned a Master's degree from Antioch College, wrote a screenplay, published poetry and essays, taught her fellow immates courses on Black history, worked as an AIDS activist and as an advocate for more humane treatment of prisoners, in particular, female immates. Throughout her time in prison, her mother and father (until his death in 1993) worked tirelessly to gain their daughter's release, an effort that many others joined, including attorneys who volunteered on the Rosenberg case. Clinton's pardon in 2001 was not without controversy as some Americans saw her not as a political prisoner but as a homegrown terrorist. After complaints were made in 2005, Rosenberg's adjunct contract was not renewed after two years of teaching at John Jay College, a CUNY school. A year earlier there was so much objection from alumni and parents of current students to an invitation to serve as a visiting professor at Hamilton College that Rosenberg herself declined the offer. Her memoir, published in 2011, has engendered similar negative responses from the right and praise from more liberal reviewers. Entitled An American Radical: A Political Prisoner in my Own Country, her autobiography focuses on her time in prison, her struggles there and those of others to maintain a sense of self-worth and humanity in a system designed, she contends, to do exactly the opposite.