Sandwiched between story time and Tai Chi classes, a taxpayer-funded San Francisco institution recently opened its doors to a most unusual group of guest speakers.
Earlier this month, the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) hosted a panel titled "A Generation of Political Prisoner Support and Archiving Resistance." The lineup featured former Weather Underground member David Gilbert alongside former members of the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican separatist terrorist group FALN, and prisoner-support organizations with close ties to other militants.
Manhattan Institute investigative analyst Stu Smith detailed the event in a report republished by The Daily Wire. According to Smith, the panelists reflected on their revolutionary struggles in America and on how those lessons could be passed on to the next generation.
The date, November 2, was no accident. It marked the anniversary of what panelists called the "liberation of Assata Shakur," a Black Liberation Army militant convicted in the 1973 murder of a New Jersey state trooper.
By "liberation," the panelists meant her 1979 escape from prison. Shakur then fled to Communist Cuba, where she remained until her death last year.
The library, with support from the Friends & Foundation of the San Francisco Public Library, hosted the event despite its obvious celebration of political violence. The panelists' goals, underwritten by public subsidy, were plain from their own words: preserve their movement's legacy, raise money for other "political prisoners" still behind bars, and inspire a new generation of militants.
The event featured the Certain Days Collective (CDC), a prison abolitionist organization that describes itself as anti-imperialist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist. Its founders include Gilbert and Herman Bell, a former Black Liberation Army member convicted of murdering two NYPD officers in 1971.
Bell was also convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the death of a San Francisco police sergeant that same year. He was one of two panelists who once appeared on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
After a brief land acknowledgment, SFPL librarian Charlie Harmon opened the program by highlighting items in the library's collection tied to the speakers. He then handed the floor to moderator Josh Davidson, who identifies as "an anarchist and abolitionist."
Davidson's rsum includes work with the Zinn Education Project, editing a book by a militant Antifa activist, membership in the Certain Days Collective, and a forthcoming children's book advocating prison abolition. He asked the panelists to introduce themselves.
They included Gilbert and Laura Whitehorn, both former Weather Underground members, along with Bell. Also on the panel were Claude Marks, another Weather Underground veteran later associated with FALN, and Dequi Kioni-Sadiki, the widow of Sekou Odinga, who masterminded Shakur's prison escape.
The speakers were notably reluctant to discuss their crimes. Bell was the only one who addressed his directly, though he framed his arrest as being "in connection with" the murders of the two NYPD officers.
Whitehorn did not mention her conviction and imprisonment for involvement in multiple bombings, including attacks on the U.S. Capitol and the National War College. She described herself simply as a former political prisoner.
Gilbert said he had been "in the underground resistance for ten years." He did not mention his role in the 1981 Brink's robbery carried out by Black Liberation Army members and former Weather Underground militants, a crime that left two police officers and a security guard dead.
Marks offered only that he had spent "many years in clandestinity." He did not discuss a plan to violently disrupt the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics to free FALN leader Oscar Lopez Rivera, a scheme involving 37 pounds of what he and his co-conspirators believed were explosives.
Nor did Marks mention FALN's campaign of more than 100 bombings in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He, too, had once been on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.
The conversation then turned to Shakur. Whitehorn said there had been "so much hatred and so much vilification of Black revolution," but that "Assata's Liberation" ushered in "the biggest narrative change ever" and was a "tremendous victory."
Bell and Gilbert also praised the prison break, and Gilbert said he wished he had been there. He called it "a beautiful example of what well thought out and carefully planned and brave clandestine action can do."
Gilbert explained that a central aim of the collective is to educate younger activists and sustain the "continuity of struggles." As he put it, "that entails for us who were political prisoners a responsibility to pass on lessons, both about what we did right and what we did wrong."
That mission is funded in large part through the group's annual "Freedom for Political Prisoners" calendar, which blends revolutionary history with political education. Bell said proceeds not only sustain the collective but also support outside organizations.
Whitehorn confirmed that her own group, Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP), receives money from the collective. "We come out of the revolutionary movement," she said. "We don't take money from like the Ford Foundation and shit."
Yet RAPP operates under the fiscal sponsorship of Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs, a nonprofit through which it solicits tax-deductible contributions. The collective also lists other beneficiaries, including the Palestinian Youth Movement, Puget Sound Prisoner Support, Appalachians Against Pipelines, Cascadia Forest Defenders and NorCal Resist.
In past years, the collective listed Addameer Prisoners Support and Human Rights Association as a beneficiary. Addameer has since been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel.
Panelists also voiced support for Benjamin Song, who, according to the report, was sentenced to 100 years in prison in connection with the 2025 attack on an ICE detention facility in Texas that wounded a police officer. Davidson said he had spoken with Song, who allegedly drew inspiration from the older radicals.
Marks, who co-founded and directs the Freedom Archives, described how the group preserves radical history through recordings, including speeches by Ho Chi Minh and Shakur. "These are the stories that the state would like to wipe out," he told his municipal library audience.
Public records show the event was promoted throughout the library system. In an October 13 email to roughly a dozen librarians, Harmon asked colleagues to feature it in their newsletters, noting it was "held on an important date for Assata Shakur."
Harmon had also pursued a second program with Davidson and Eric King, an Antifa activist who served time for firebombing the congressional office of Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. That plan stalled only after "higher-ups" ruled that his department could not fund a talk about a book not in its collection.
Whether the panelists were paid remains unclear. Internal emails show Harmon looking into "what my department can provide for an honorarium" and explaining that getting "the check to presenters before the program happens" would require W-9s and invoices.
The records do not show whether any honorarium was ultimately paid. Asked directly, SFPL Interim Director of Communications Jamie Wong said, "We will respond to your inquiry via the NextRequest portal, which covers these questions," and the Friends & Foundation did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
At a time of rising political violence, critics argue that taxpayer-funded institutions owe the public far better judgment. A public library exists to provide education and community, not a stage for convicted bombers and cop killers to mentor the next generation of militants.
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