Symbionese Liberation Army

The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a small group of militant revolutionaries based in California during the 1970s, owes nearly all its notoriety to the kidnapping and subsequent indoctrination of Patty Hearst, the newspaper heiress. Much of the short life of the group was lived in the media spotlight, making SLA one of the more infamous revolutionary groups of the era, though one of the least respected politically.

The SLA began as a collaboration between convicts and prison activists in 1973. Led by General Field Marshal Cinque (né Donald DeFreeze), an escaped convict and initially the only black member of the SLA, the seven other members—white, middle-class men and women—adopted Swahili names and took up arms for the self-styled Symbionese Federation. The group's motto, “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people,” signed off each of their communiqués.

The SLA's first significant action, on November 6, 1973, was the assassination of Marcus Foster, the first black superintendent of schools in Oakland. Foster was working to improve education in Oakland, but because his plan included mandatory ID cards, the SLA targeted him as a “fascist.” By murdering a prominent black leader, the SLA alienated the Black Panther Party and other revolutionary left groups (although the SLA was later hailed by the waning Weatherman, by then called Weather Underground). In January 1974, when SLA members Russell Little and Joseph Remiro were arrested for Foster's murder, the group began to plan another violent act.

On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, then a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley, was kidnapped from her apartment by three SLA members. Three days later, the SLA sent a communiqué denouncing the “establishment” and claiming Hearst as their “prisoner of war.” On February 12, KPFA radio aired a tape in which Hearst demanded that her family distribute food to the poor in exchange for her release. Ten days later, the Hearsts funded a program, People in Need, which eventually supplied food to more than 30,000 people, at the cost of $2 million. Patty Hearst then denounced her parents as “capitalist pigs” and joined the SLA, taking on the revolutionary name “Tania,” after Che Guevara's companion.

With Hearst as Tania, the SLA robbed the Hibernia Bank on April 15, 1974, where Hearst's transformation to a revolutionary was captured by the surveillance camera. The group then fled to southern California. On May 16, Hearst and Bill and Emily Harris, known then as Teko and Yolanda, attempted to rob a sporting goods store in Inglewood, California. The following day, police blasted 5,000 rounds into the SLA hideout in South Central Los Angeles, which then went up in flames. Six members—DeFreeze, Angela Atwood, Nancy Ling Perry, Willie Wolfe, Pat Soltysik, and Camilla Hall—were killed. Hearst and the Harrises watched the events on television from a motel room in Anaheim.

The remaining SLA members robbed two more banks—one in Sacramento, on February 25, 1975, and another in Carmichael, California, on April 21, 1975. Myrna Lee Opsahl was shot and killed in the latter robbery. That September, in San Francisco, Hearst, the Harrises, and two minor SLA members were captured. All were tried, convicted, and served prison sentences for their SLA-related activities; upon release all returned to relatively mainstream lives.

Kathleen Soliah, who joined the SLA after the police shoot-out in Los Angeles, remained a fugitive until she was apprehended in 1998; she was charged with planting bombs under police cars in August 1975. Two days before Soliah was sentenced for the bomb charges, she and the four remaining SLA members—Bill Harris, Emily Harris, Michael Bortin, and James Kilgore—were charged with the first-degree murder of Myrna Opsahl. Kilgore is still at large.

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