Documentary details Marin attorney’s life as a fugitive after being wrongly accused in San Quentin massacre
On Aug. 21, 1971, Stephen Bingham visited Black Panther leader and San Quentin inmate George Jackson, who was working on a new book after his best-selling “Soledad Brother.” Bingham, a young Yale-educated lawyer who dedicated his life to working on racial and social issues, was the last person to visit with Jackson.
What happened after that — the bloodiest episode in California prison history — sent Bingham into hiding with a fake identity for 13 years until he was acquitted by a Marin jury of charges that he concealed a gun in a tape recorder and gave it to Jackson, triggering what the government called a riot and that left Jackson and five others dead, including three prison guards.
Bingham’s story is told in “A Double Life,” a documentary by award-winning filmmaker Catherine Masud, Bingham’s niece, making its world premiere at the 46th annual Mill Valley Film Fest, which runs through Oct. 15.
“People tend to remember it but they remember it wrongly,” says Bingham from his home in Marin, where he’s lived since 1994. “It’s a story that belongs to the world and it’s a story in my opinion and many others’ of government malfeasance. It’s not just blood and gore and the tragedy of what happened at San Quentin.”
Told in Bingham’s own words along with interviews with friends, family and his legal team, the documentary follows Bingham’s path from when he began to embrace progressive causes to his life in exile, his trial and acquittal in 1986, the tragic death in 2009 of his daughter, and his dedication to racial and justice work since.
The ‘radical blue blood’
Dubbed the “radical blue blood,” Bingham grew up in a politically prominent Connecticut family. Coming of age during the intersection of the civil rights, anti-war, Black power and prison-rights movements, he became involved in politics and justice issues at Yale, volunteered in the Mississippi Freedom Summer civil rights project, spent two years in the Peace Corps in West Africa, marched with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, and volunteered with Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. But it was his work with the Freedom Summer that sealed his desire to be a progressive lawyer and to work with the Black Panthers.
Fearing that he wouldn’t get a fair trial after the death of Jackson, Bingham took on a new identity, Robert Dale Boarts, and fled. Living in exile wasn’t easy, even in Paris, where he ended up after some time in Eastern Europe. He lived in fear of being out in public and struggled with the possibility of spending his life alone, never being able to have a family of his own, never seeing his family and friends again, and never being able to be involved in working with the the poor and disenfranchised as he did before. It was exhausting pretending to be who he wasn’t for so long. “I want to be me,” he wrote in his diary. And even some of his family members began to question if he was guilty.
Bingham worked as a house painter in Paris and studied film and photography for 10 years at the university in Vincennes and continued his work as an activist, making a film on a union struggle in a small steel producing town in France. He asked a fellow student, Françoise Blusseau, to work with him on the sound and the two became romantic partners.
But he wanted to come home. He called a friend, a former law school classmate turned journalist, Henry Weinstein, and they met for a few days in Toronto, always in public so it wouldn’t seem that Weinstein was harboring a fugitive. Weinstein’s article ran on the front page of the New York Times on Sept. 22, 1974, letting Bingham’s family and friends know that not only was he alive and OK, but that he was continuing his social justice work as best he could overseas.
Weinstein also arranged for him to briefly visit with his parents. After Bingham’s mother died three years after the visit, he knew he needed to return to the States and marry Françoise, which would require him to reclaim his real name. He turned himself in to U.S. authorities in 1984.
Born of tragedy
Masud was just 8 years old at the time her uncle suddenly “disappeared,” too young to understand what had happened.
“My brother and I were just told not to talk about him at all, to anyone. So I grew up being very curious to understand what had really happened to Steve, and to know what he had done during those long years of living underground,” she says by email. “Later, when I began making films, that seed of curiosity that had been planted in my childhood began to germinate into the idea of making a documentary on my uncle’s story, and I’m grateful that he was willing to be a part of the project.”
Even though Masud had long mulled the idea of making the documentary, it was the tragic death of her husband and some of her film crew in a road accident in South Asia that prompted her to finally make it happen.
“We both shared the scars of having lost loved ones to traffic violence, and we both had dual identities from having lived a second lifetime overseas — in his case unwillingly, of course. So for very personal reasons, the film ended up happening when it did, although against the broader backdrop of ongoing racial violence against Black and brown people, revelations about high-tech state surveillance of ordinary citizens, and the ever-increasing levels of mass incarceration in this country, the moment for making the film seemed especially timely,” she says.
“This is a story I’ve known about through my entire career,” says Abby Ginsberg, an attorney turned award-winning filmmaker based in Berkeley and the documentary’s producer. “I felt like it was an important story to tell and to tell right.”
Although retired from Bay Area Legal Aid in San Francisco, Bingham still continues his advocacy work. He’s helped draft recommendations for a Marin sheriff’s oversight board in the aftermath of the beating of San Rafael resident Julio Lopez, whose violent arrest by two San Rafael police last year sparked a huge public outcry. And he and his wife have dedicated themselves to making roads safer for cyclists ever since their daughter Sylvia, a Terra Linda High grad, was killed by a truck at age 22 while riding her bicycle to work in Cleveland, Ohio. They set up the Sylvia Bingham Fund, which gives money to various progressive causes in Marin and elsewhere.
Important message
“The political backdrop to everything that happened is a tremendously important story,” Bingham says. “And it’s basically unknown by the younger generations, the history of the left in general tends to get lost.”
He hopes the documentary brings it back to the forefront.
Masud sees her documentary has having multiple layers, personal and political. And it’s timely, she believes.
“Our story, told through the lens of a White activist who put his privilege where his mouth was, raises questions about the historical role of White, middle-class allies in confronting mass incarceration, state repression, and the criminal justice system’s targeting of Black men, and examines how that role has evolved to meet the contemporary challenges of post-George Floyd America,” she says. “The United States is not only the country with the highest incarceration rate worldwide, but is also home to 25% of the world’s prisoners, who are disproportionately Black men. … We hope that the film will provide a more nuanced understanding of the historical injustices in our institutions that continue to contribute to a broken prison system.”
It’s also a personal story with universal themes of hardship, loss and perseverance. “Throughout it all, Steve retained his sense of purpose and his enduring resilience, which I think is an inspirational story for us all.”
“One of the things the film does is it draws some attention again to conditions of confinement in prisons, which has been the subject of enormous amounts of litigation, first around medical care and then how people are kept in solitary,” Ginsberg says. “Gavin Newsom has sort of identified San Quentin as a place that’s going to be some sort of showcase of rehabilitation. All I can say is, when you look at some of the images in our film, there’s a long way to go before San Quentin is a model place for anything. But it’s a good moment in time to be talking about reform in prisons.
“You have to have a notion that this is a long struggle. You may not see the results of it in your lifetime, but that does not mean that you aren’t obligated to participate in the struggle for change. And that’s what this film meta-messages.”
• Details: Tickets to “A Double Life” are available at rush for 2:45 p.m. Oct 8 at Rafael 1 and 11:30 a.m. Oct. 15 at Rafael 2. The film is available for streaming from Oct. 16 to 22. For information, go to mvff.com/program/a-double-life
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