Entries by Karl Nemmersdorf

The Life and Times of Fay Stender, Radical Attorney for the Black Panthers, Part 2

Go to Part 1 Legal Work for the Movement When she returned to Berkeley, Fay “felt energized.”[i] So did other returnees. Mario Savio, fresh from Mississippi, launched the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at UC Berkeley that fall, kicking off the wider radical crusade of the 1960s. When the police began to clear Sproul Hall of […]

The Life and Times of Fay Stender, Radical Attorney for the Black Panthers, Part 1

Introduction Fay Stender earned fame as a radical attorney in the 1960s and 1970s, defending two of the most prominent Black Panthers in highly publicized court cases. During the course of her career in left-wing activism, she embraced numerous “causes” with a passion as flamboyant as it was unbalanced. She worked strictly within the stream […]