Free The Burglary by Betty Medsger Page B

had often seen since 1955 on the evening news on the televisions in their living rooms, was alive today. Courage wasRosa Parks refusing to go to the back of the bus. It was hundreds of black students quietly refusing to obey orders to leave segregated lunch counters in Nashville. It was black children walking through club-wielding mobs of spitting, screaming, face-scratching white people in Little Rock who didn’twant black children to go to school with white children. Courage was Martin Luther King writing a “Letter from Birmingham Jail” urging people to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience against unjust laws, and then insisting, despite scars from being beaten, that “one who breaks an unjust law must do it openly, lovingly.” Courage wasMichael Schwerner,James Chaney, andMichael Goodman, three young civil rights workers, two of them white and one of them black, who were savagely lynched, murdered, and buried in a dam in Mississippi in the summer of 1964—Freedom Summer it was called, but it was not freedom for them.
    Because courage had become more visible, more people found it. If it hadn’t, thousands of young men probably would not have refused to serve in the Vietnam War. If courage had not become more visible, the Berrigan brothers and others in theCatholic peace movement probably never would have raided draft boards. If courage had not become more visible, Davidon and the other burglars probably never would have even thought of doing what they were about to do in Media.
    Still, even in the context of the courage that had become visible in that era, an act of resistance as extreme as burglarizing an FBI office was something very few people would have been willing to do. Resistance this extreme was so rare that it seemed like something only fools or saints would attempt. However laudable the goals might have been, normal people did not train themselves to become amateur burglars in order to break into an FBI office. But these people, who were neither saints nor fools, agreed to do just that.
    In the end, their decision to engage in this extraordinary act of resistance came down—as such decisions had for historic leaders of nonviolent resistance, including Gandhi and King—to this:
    Fully aware that what they planned to do could, whether or not they achieved their goal, take away their freedom, perhaps even endanger their lives, they decided that their desire to stop injustice—the destruction of dissent by the FBI—was more important to them than their desire to lead a normal, uninterrupted life.
    They moved forward.

4
The Burglars in the Attic
    F ROM THE BEGINNING , the Media burglars worked in total secrecy. “We pulled the curtains around us,” Bonnie Raines recalls. As they closed the curtains, they recognized that the break-in they were about to plan might be more dangerous than anything any of them, or anybody they knew, had ever done. They intended to keep the curtains drawn before, during, and after the burglary.
    Closely maintained security was new to all of them. Security had been loose, almost casual, in the draft board break-ins. Unlike the draft board raiders, the Media burglars would be silent and the group would be small. At their first meeting as a group in late December 1970, when they chose their name—the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI—they all agreed that no one else would be invited to be part of the group. It would be only as large as necessary to accomplish their goals: get inside the Media FBI office, take as many files as possible, review the files, and, assuming they contained information the public needed, distribute them to the public.
    The strict secrecy rules were not easy to maintain, especially about something they knew their friends in the antiwar movement would find riveting. Secrecy was against their nature. They enjoyed talking with friends about politics and about what they were doing as activists.