The Life and Times of Fay Stender, Radical Attorney for the Black Panthers, Part 4

Go to Part 1.
Go to Part 2.
Go to Part 3

Fay at Loose Ends: Feminism and Gay Rights

Fay was disenchanted and depressed. She had turned forty. She had lost her female lover, was losing her husband, and her most cherished political cause had blown up in her face. It was 1973, and the entire “Movement” had sputtered to a halt and was in the process of metamorphosing; the radicals had lost their faith in militant activism outside “the system” and began to enter that system in droves to work from within. The process was not smooth; many leftists spent years coming to terms with the collapse of the movement.

Since any facet of society could be turned into a “cause,” Fay would not be adrift for long. Soon she turned (along with many other radical Jews) to feminist and homosexual issues. She entered another relationship with a woman, called “Katherine” by Pearlman. One of the cases she became involved with helped push California law into accepting the “rights” of lesbians in custody cases.[i] Another gash in the fabric of Gentile society.

In 1978, Fay went on a tour of Europe with her old friend Hilde Stern. It was a soul-searching jaunt. She wanted to ponder her future direction, and whether to try to save her marriage. Once in Europe, her Jewish identity rose to dominate her consciousness. She visited the synagogues and places of Jewish interest wherever she went. In Athens, viewing the ancient structures on the Acropolis, she felt only “an overwhelming urge to reaffirm her own heritage” and peevishly wondered “why her professors had never credited ancient Jewish culture with any lasting influence on Western tradition.”[ii]

In Geneva she visited friends and gifted them, as if it were a priceless artifact, a letter she had kept from George Jackson. She went to Stockholm for a UN conference on children. There she began to do push-ups in imitation of the imprisoned Jackson, who had done hundreds every day, and worked on manuscripts about Jackson and feminism.[iii] She thought about living permanently in Sweden, but it troubled her that Sweden had continued its relations with Germany during World War II. She proceeded to Warsaw for another conference; she had read up on the Warsaw uprising of 1943, and was angered to find so little commemoration of the event in the city. She was well aware of the Jewish history in Poland and was in high dudgeon against Polish “Anti-Semitism.” At the Warsaw Symphony she was “anguished by the absence of any musicians who looked even faintly Jewish.”[iv] (Would she have any sympathy for Whites, who in the near future will look in vain for fellow White faces in their own nations? Would she see the contradiction if she did not?)

She also thought about her sexual identity. She decided to break up with Marvin for good and reunite with her lesbian lover. In early 1979, she returned to Berkeley. She and Marvin ended their marriage amicably, and Fay kept the house and the children, who lived at home in their young adulthood. Fay resumed her relationship with “Katherine.”

The End

May 28, 1979. The doorbell rang, well after midnight. Fay’s son Neal, used to unexpected visitors, opened the door. A Black man stuck a gun in his face and demanded Fay Stender. Neal led him upstairs and roused his mother from bed. The man demanded an answer to a chilling question: “Don’t you feel you betrayed George Jackson?” Fay calmly denied it. He ordered her to write a dictated note and sign it: “I, Fay Stender, admit I betrayed George Jackson and the prison movement when they needed me most.” She protested but finished writing. He pocketed the note then demanded money; Fay escorted him downstairs and gave him some from her kitchen drawer. He walked past her to the door as if to leave, then wheeled, crouched, and shot her five times with hollow-point .38 caliber bullets.[v]

Fay suffered terrible damage to her liver, chest and arms; she was paralyzed from the waist down. She would face months or years of rehabilitation and would never again lead a normal life. She didn’t leave the hospital until late July, going straight into a rehabilitation center.

The shooting shocked the radical community in the Bay Area. The police shared with reporters a purported “hit list” with the names of Fay and others on it. Fay’s family and friends were terrified; some of them asked for police protection. Marvin obtained a gun permit and sent their children into hiding. A few radicals began to suspect the truth about convicts.

Despite her depression and pain, she resolved to put her assailant away. To find justice, she would need the help of—exquisite irony—Lowell Jensen, still District Attorney. Jensen, incredibly, bore her no ill will, and assigned her case to a good prosecutor.

The police quickly apprehended a suspect, Edward Brooks. He was an ex-con and a member of a prison gang co-founded by George Jackson, the Black Guerrilla Family. He had shot Fay from a sense of loyalty to Jackson and other prisoners whom Fay had supposedly betrayed.[vi]

The shooting of Fay highlighted the hypocrisy in the radical community. Almost all of them now supported the police and district attorney and wanted the shooter prosecuted, even though they had “spent their professional lives denouncing the criminal justice system as an instrument of racial and class oppression and defending accused criminals as social victims.”[vii] The hypocrisy reached a greater poignancy when a former colleague of Fay’s, a member of the Prison Law Project, appeared on the shooter’s defense team, stating later, “I was just seething at the way the White Left reacted to Brooks’ arrest. It was racist. They had never taken this attitude . . . in the past. . . . And yet, when one of their own was shot, they immediately cooperated with the cops.”[viii]

Fay was plunged into despair, alternating between self-pity and bitter anger over how the Blacks had repaid her ministrations. She could barely play the piano and could not sit up for long; she found relief only by lying on her back. She sent her Sapphic lover away, unable to have (what amounted to) abnormal relations. She really wanted Marvin back for his steady strength, but he had a new woman and declined her hints. She resolved to commit suicide, but wanted to see Brooks put away first. She would have to summon the strength to testify against him, in the same courtroom she had defended Huey Newton so long before.

On January 18, 1979, Fay took the stand. Charles Garry was in attendance, but not a single Black recipient of her aid showed up to support her. The jury quickly found Brooks guilty, and a few weeks later he was sentenced to seventeen years.[ix]

Fay then burned all her papers, moved to Hong Kong, and after a good deal of hesitation and anguish, killed herself on May 19, 1980. She was forty-eight. Her body was brought back for a Jewish funeral, attended by 300. David Horowitz, former editor of Ramparts, was present; he was struck by how few Blacks attended. (He would write a long article on Fay, based on his conversations with Eve Pell, who had worked with Fay on the Prison Law Project.) Another radical in attendance observed, “no matter what you do, if you are White, it doesn’t matter if you spent your whole life working for Blacks.”[x]

Huey Newton did not attend the funeral; the next month he would earn a sham Ph.D. from UC-Santa Cruz (submitting—perhaps even writing— a paper entitled “War Against the Panthers: a Study in Repression in America”[xi]). He would be shot dead on an Oakland street in August 1989, also by a member of the Black Guerrilla Family. He was forty-seven, the same age as Fay when she was shot.[xii]

The saga of Fay Stender thus sputtered to an end.

Conclusion

Fay’s life perfectly illustrates the nature of radical Jewish activism and the immense harm that it can inflict upon society. Her work amounted to nothing more than “disruption of White society.” Her Jewish perspective could not register the rationales that underlay the compromises between perfect justice and practicality that form the myriad bonds of a Gentile culture. White society is not perfect; it is not perfect because man’s nature and the world are not perfect. However, it is on balance just, and, above all, workable. To strain mightily to “perfect” the solid patterns of a settled society is to create tensions that inevitably build to an explosion. The explosion in Fay’s case saw guards massacred in San Quentin and five bullets pierce her own body.

Fay Stender indicted the entire justice system as “racist” without bothering to regard the nature of Black social pathology, or the damage that her activism could cause to a society that had settled itself around a workable solution to pervasive Black crime, or the personal danger that she risked for herself and her family.

One last note on personality. I believe that Fay possessed a measure of charity; that is, a will to do good. No one is purely evil, of course, and somewhere in the thicket of ego, ambition, leftist ideology, and blind selfishness that was Fay Stender, there was at least a small core of good intentions. Unfortunately, her good will labored under defects greater than these failings. First, unhampered female emotion crimped her ability to see a reasonable approach to problems. (A Gentile spouse of that era would certainly have forced her to accept far tighter boundaries on her activity.) There was the contempt she felt—possibly amounting to hatred—for Whites and their society. Most importantly, the nature of her Jewish radicalism, as applied to a Gentile society, could be nothing but deleterious. If a mathematical formula could be found to represent the harm that an activist Jew can do to a White society, it would have to incorporate a special symbol representing “one Fay Stender.”


[i] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 313-14.

[ii] Ibid., 330.

[iii] Horowitz and Collier, 50-52.

[iv] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 342-43.

[v] The shooting is described by Pearlman in Call Me Phaedra, 355-58, and by Horowitz and Collier, 52-55.

[vi] Horowitz and Collier, 56.

[vii] Ibid., 56.

[viii] Ibid., 57-8.

[ix] Ibid., 62-3.

[x] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 430.

[xi] Pearson, 287.

[xii] Pearlman, Call Me Phaedra, 440.

24 replies
  1. Max West
    Max West says:

    This was a very well done (and important) case study of Jewish activism. In Fay, we can see the racial archetypes – the ‘ideal types’ – more clearly, especially with respect to the underlying dynamics of Jewish involvement in fostering a Coalition of the Fringes against white Gentile society. While misguided & deadly in Fay’s time, this dynamic has today permeated/sublimated itself into a wider/deeper culture of liberal white pathology.

    • Junghans
      Junghans says:

      It sure has, Max. In fact, this subversive Jewish dynamic has intellectually poisoned several generations of credulous White people.

  2. eric smith
    eric smith says:

    Thanks so much for this very illuminating series of articles. It clearly demonstrates that the problem is the jewish “culture” and not just Zionists as is oft pronounced and that there are many “good” jews. This lady and the countless other “instinctual instigators” of hate, destruction and death have brought our planet to the edge of mass extinction, totalitarianism and the destruction of humanity. From Marx to Al Goldstien to Kissinger to Trotsky to Alenski to Freud to Gloria Stienam to Disreali…. the list is endless. They are a criminally groomed mega mafia that operates by instinct at this point after thousands of years of careful grooming within their families and culture. They do not need to conspire, plan or communicate their actions (though I’m sure they often do). Again, at this point it is instinctual. They are the most dangerous group of humans on the planet. They will destroy us.

  3. Lucius Vanini
    Lucius Vanini says:

    I express Stender’s fate best in two words: POETIC JUSTICE.

    In a comment relating to Part 2 of this sordid story, I said that typically Jews take the side of the “oppressed” only when “it’s good for the Jews.” But what they do is NOT so good for Jews in the long run, notwithstanding their thinking it is.

    Those who convince themselves that they’re protecting Jewry by making common cause with other supposedly oppressed minorities, usually non-Whites, against a hostile European or European-descended (as in the case of the USA) establishment, are slow to realize how non-Whites perceive them–which is as very privileged White people who support a foreign state existing at the expense of an exceedingly downtrodden population.

    I keep informed of the trouble they are having from non-Whites, especially blacks, and from Muslim Asians. There’s been a continuous threat from black violence in the de facto capital of world Jewry–NYC–one which is causing them problems beyond physical injury: they’d love to bring it to the attention of all the world in lurid terms, but as the White goyim are their chosen enemy, the people they demonize, and the blacks their “oppressed and innocent” pawns, they can’t bring themselves to do it. They want to blame “White supremacism” but it’s not the Whites who are attacking them. Even Bari Weiss attested to the inconvenient situation. NY Jews have to continue being assaulted without getting their accustomed international sympathy….

    Similarly, in Europe the main threat to Jews’ safety is from irate Muslim Asian immigrants. And there are Jews in Europe who consequently don’t like Muslim immigration into our ancestral Continent. It’s not only Daniel Pipes. I read in the JEWISH TELEGRAPH AGENCY about the Algerian/French Jew (whom the article calls the “Ann Coulter of France,” though he’s a male), who recently uncovered the fact that the p.c. French law-enforcement/justice system has hidden from public notice 2000 attacks on Jews by Asian Muslims. There too the violence is NOT inflicted principally by “White supremacists” or WNs.

    For their intendedly self-serving aid to blacks, Jews not only are being re-paid with street assaults but are daily execrated by anti-Jewish organizations like the Nation of Islam and the Black Hebrew Israelites. The two large groups represent tens of thousands of authentic antisemites, people to whose minds NO Jew can have redeeming qualities; and certainly their rhetoric inspires such hatred as overflows into deeds…. Where is the White anti-Jewish organization that combines their size and virulence?

    I seem to see here an opportunity for WN, if WNs can get past counterproductive mindsets preventing even using the enemy’s problems to further WN objectives, such as stopping Asian Muslim invasions of our ancestral Continent.

    • Antishemeticalistic
      Antishemeticalistic says:

      “…authentic antisemites”.

      Your comment was probably okay up until this point. ‘Antisemite’ is not acceptable terminology, and simply jewish gobshite!
      Besides, most of these absurd negro ‘Israelites’ no doubt simply consider jews (jews don’t capitalise ‘Whites’, why would I capitalise ‘jews’) to be White.

      “Hatred”, “virulence”… you’re perhaps carelessly veering into the realm of jewish argumentation here. It should be avoided.

  4. Lucius Vanini
    Lucius Vanini says:

    I think that this series is one of TOO’s very best contributions. I don’t know who this Nemmersdorf is, but I think he’s first-rate, at least in this instance.

    As someone whose politics are principally defined not by hatred of other groups but by love of my own, I well appreciate that Nemmersdorf refrains from demonizing Stender on the score of her merely being Jewish, and that he shows how Jewish subversion can boomerang into Jews’ faces. But intermittently he reminds us that Stender’s story is an instance of an evidently compulsive lust on the part of too many Jews to attack the West.

    Nemmersdorf, at the close, even suggests that our anti-heroine had some sincerely good intentions. That may be true, because I believe a great many Jews don’t really understand what they’re doing. Some seem to be flying on automatic pilot, following an outmoded chart according to which Western Civilization equals pogroms, expulsions, Inquisitions and genocide. In the case of too many of them, attacking the West seems to have become instinct, as instinctive as a larval tapeworm’s automatically attaching itself to the host’s intestinal wall….

  5. Barkingmad
    Barkingmad says:

    That a black man could be so close to his target, fire 5 times, and still leave her alive, is typical. They are notoriously poor shots. In their efforts at terrorism, they have to spray like crazy with automatic weapons to get a handful of people.

    Anyway, this is one hell of an article.

    • Marksman
      Marksman says:

      But then he did mess her organs up, etc. and leave her alive to suffer the glorious irony of her well earned fate. No swift, merciful death for her.
      One might even suggest that the negro’s bullets were divinely guided : )

  6. tadzio
    tadzio says:

    Did Edward Brooks get out of prison in the mid 90s? Has he ‘turned his life around’? He should be c. 67 now. Has anyone ever done a follow up story? If his address could be found a Christmas card would be in order. His life is a basic black cloud for society, but one with a silver lining.

  7. Mari
    Mari says:

    I knew all these people. Marvin was as radical as Faye. She didn’t behave the way she did because she was a woman but because she was a liberal commie Jew like so many of them including David Horowitz liaison between the communist party of the USA and the Black Panthers.

  8. David 'The Diversity Mastermind' Lammey
    David 'The Diversity Mastermind' Lammey says:

    ulation.

    REPLYAGREE/DISAGREE/ETC. MORE…
    David ‘The Diversity Mastermind’ Lammey says:
    November 7, 2019 at 1:57 pm GMT • 200 Words
    Gather round, children. I have a question for all my Yankee friends over there.

    Here in Gross Cuckstain, the 2 Deep State industries with the most highly concentrated vermin infestation – Advertising & perma Home Office – have got together to make a piece of repulsive, pozzed out lying cr…. I mean Public Service Broadcast at the expense of the WM taxpayer.

    Still concentrating, my friends across the Atlantic? Good. Now here comes the Qs:

    In this po… Advert is a warning against bad driving.

    Now assign the demographic (in letters) to the character (in numbers):

    A – A White Man
    B – A dindu Man
    C – A White girl
    D – A black Boy

    1 – the victim of a car accident
    2 – a passenger in a car
    3 – an obnoxious, angry, incompetent driver who causes an accident
    4 – a passenger of a car

    Just listed 4 ARSE lies. There are around 6 million of them but prolly illegal to list then all

  9. bruno
    bruno says:

    It’s too bad that such a story documentation couldn’t be shown to millions. I take my hat off to the author.

  10. ia
    ia says:

    White people never seem to get that other groups quite naturally are going to look out for their own interests. What I would like to know is why are whites, as a group, so suicidal?

    Anyway, a very informative and well-written article. I’d never heard of Stender but she certainly embodied the upheaval of the 60s which as mentioned in the article became a long march through the institutions.

  11. Achilles Wannabe
    Achilles Wannabe says:

    A really fine history. It brought so much back. I lived through this era as a young adult. At the time I was not sensitive to how so many Jews were involved with the radical left. If I had been, I wonder if it would have changed my understanding of politics and society. I doubt it. Like a lot of my boomer peers I was trained not to conceive “The Jews” as an analytic category. We are living with the results of that philosemetic assumption.

  12. JRM
    JRM says:

    I’ll add my applause for this series to the others. Well-written, objective, interesting.

    I would like to see a book published by this author, he can use this title : “Profiles in Subversion”, if he likes it and it hasn’t been used (I just googled it and see someone did use it in 1919).

    One chapter would comprise these articles on Stender, of course. Other chapters would trace the crimes and follies, illusions and deceit of similar folks; mostly Jews, but some key White race-traitors might make for edifying and cautionary tales as well.

    Each chapter would end with a summation of the destruction and loss netted by White Society for the efforts of the subject personage. Figures profiled could be drawn from the worlds of politics and culture.

  13. Sir Lolsalot
    Sir Lolsalot says:

    Subversive jew – – – – shot up by vindictive, low IQ negro {smiling emoji face}!

    Perfect white pill ending. I’ll go back and read the series now ( I might have avoided it otherwise, pretty sick of reading about jewish victories ), knowing the happy conclusion.

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