We began planning for the RFC’s 20th anniversary over two years ago. We’d produced several large-scale dramatic readings interspersed with music to mark prior milestones such as the 40th and 50th anniversary of my parents’ execution or the RFC’s 10th anniversary, but this time we wanted to do something different. Rather than one big event on or near the anniversary date (September 4th, 2010), we decided to hold 20 events, in 20 cities, over 20 months (our 20/20/20 program).

My family was among the most well-known victims of the McCarthy period. Our story has been told in books, films, plays, poems and songs. However, as we approach the 58th Anniversary of my parents’ execution, I’d like to chronicle another family’s ordeal. I share this as an example of the thousands who suffered from the anti-communist hysteria of the late 1940’s and early 1950s’s.

Geronimo “ji-Jaga” Pratt died last week. He spent 27 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. It took place in Los Angeles while he was 350 miles away under FBI surveillance. Pratt was a target of the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO program, along with hundreds of other Black Panthers, Puerto Rican Nationalists, American Indian Movement members and other anti-imperialists and radicals.

I remember walking around my neighborhood in upper Manhattan without my winter coat one unusually mild January day in 1956. That night a cold front swept through and the next day was frigid. The sudden change captivated me and kindled a life-long fascination with the weather.

Aside from my parents’ case, United States v. Dennis is perhaps the most famous McCarthy Era Red Scare legal action. In that case the government convicted the leaders of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) of conspiring to organize a revolutionary movement. Once the hysteria abated, the Supreme Court decision upholding that conviction became one of the more embarrassing episodes of our judicial history.