Kate Coleman, an iconoclastic Bay Area journalist, began her career as a left-wing radical, writing about patriarchy, politics, and polyamory, but went on to write reports that shined a harsh light on the Black Panthers and the environmental movement. The man who turned his former comrades into enemies, died Tuesday in Oakland, California. She was 81 years old.
Close friend Carol Pogash said her death at the memory care facility was due to complications from dementia.
For decades, Ms. Coleman was at the heart of a passionate community of journalists and activists in and around Berkeley. Like her, most of them attended the University of California in the 1960s and helped define the campus as a hotbed of political and social activism.
Most of her subsequent writing career has been as a freelancer for dissident publications such as Ramparts and the Berkeley Barb, and national newspapers such as Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times, going through various stages of initial idealism. Tracked the evolution of the American left. From violent extremism to late-stage disillusionment.
Like Yves Babitz and Joan Didion, she sees herself as a young woman who can simultaneously immerse herself in the moment and stand outside of it, with a keen eye for the ironies and excesses of America's “left coast.” I positioned myself as a writer.
As an undergraduate at Berkeley, Coleman was an early participant in the university's free speech movement, and was among the hundreds of students arrested for occupying Sproul Hall, the campus administration building, in December 1964. I was alone.
After graduating in 1965, she spent three years at Newsweek in its New York headquarters, where she was one of the few young women allowed to occasionally write for the magazine. (In 1968, a few years after she left, a group of female employees successfully challenged Newsweek magazine's discriminatory policies.)
Ms. Coleman succeeded by offering something different at Newsweek magazine. While most of the staff came from staid East Coast universities, she came with a free spirit of news from the West.
“She was a hippie, she was a Berkeley radical, and she was proud of it,” Harriet Hoover, who worked with Ms. Coleman at Newsweek, said in a telephone interview.
Upon returning to the Bay Area, Coleman established himself as a freelance writer and radio producer. Among her other work, she wrote a column for The Berkeley Barb. It was a must-read magazine among the region's counterculture.
She used this column to explore various topics that occupied the minds of young people and hipsters in the late 1960s and early '70s, including Watergate, second-wave feminism, free love, radical politics, and sexually transmitted diseases. I covered the topic.
She wrote in a casual tone, steeped in the hippie vernacular of the time, tinged with profanity, but without getting too carried away. Includes her one “ain't” in the column of Strunkian grammatical precision.
She was also willing to go further than most reporters. In 1969, Coleman was covering the Altamont Speedway Free Festival at a racetrack east of San Francisco. Members of the Hells Angels biker gang were employed as security guards there (the scene where one of the bikers stabbed a man to death). While waiting backstage for the Rolling Stones to appear, she witnessed a biker punching a concertgoer. When she intervened, her man grabbed her and slammed her repeatedly into her Volkswagen van.
In a 1971 Ramparts article on prostitution, she not only placed herself in a brothel on Manhattan's Upper East Side, but also pulled off some tricks herself.
“When you're in Kate's presence, you can't help but be impressed by her sass,” Steve Wasserman, publisher of Heyday Books in Berkeley, said by phone. “But it would also get her into trouble with her opinionated allies.”
In 1977, the Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news station, commissioned Ms. Coleman and another reporter, Paul Avery, to investigate the unsolved murder of Betty Van Patter, a former bookkeeper for the Black Panthers. .
After nine months of reporting, a 1978 article published in New Times magazine, “The Party Is Over,” revealed that the Panther leadership, particularly one of the party's founders, Huey P. It was concluded that there is a high possibility that he ordered the murder of Mr. This was because he was trying to expose corruption within the organization.
Coleman received death threats and went into hiding for several months. She bought her handgun and window grills and submitted them as expenses.
She created a new antagonist in her 2005 book, Judy Barley's Secret War: Car Bombs, the Battle of Sequoia, and the End of the Earth First!
Judy Barre was one of the most respected radical figures in the environmental movement until her death from cancer in 1997. However, according to Ms. Coleman, she was a “tyrannical diva” who was paranoid and obsessed with her own martyrdom.
The book prompted protests from Bari's defenders, some of whom interrupted Coleman's book tour. At least one restaurant canceled its appearance. “Is activist Judy Barre's biographer a right-wing stooge or just a skeptical liberal?” read a San Francisco Chronicle headline.
“Why not focus her energies on right-wing issues?” writes the article's author Edward Guzman.
Mr. Coleman replied: “There are too many problems on the right to even begin reporting. I don't want to study it. It's not something I knew intimately. It's something I know from afar.”
Kate Ann Coleman was born on December 7, 1942 in Rutherford, New Jersey. Her father, Robert, was an engineer for a machine tool company. Her mother, Lillian (Anson) Coleman, became blind after surgery when Kate was three years old, and she was mostly confined to her home.
Mr. Coleman has no immediate survivors.
Kate's parents divorced when she was 10 years old. Soon after, she, along with her mother and her older sister Susan, moved to Encino, California to live near her mother's wealthy brothers.
Her political awakening occurred in the early 1960s, shortly after her arrival in Berkeley. The House Un-American Activities Committee was in San Francisco for an on-site hearing into allegations of communist subversion in the Bay Area. Hundreds of people showed up to the protest, which ended when police directed fire hoses at the crowd without warning.
Ms. Coleman joined Slate, a progressive campus political party, and eventually joined the Free Speech Movement, led in part by Mario Savio. She graduated in 1965 with a degree in English Literature.
Her writings were not entirely political. Like most freelance journalists, she wrote whatever came to her mind. She wrote celebrity profiles, personal essays, restaurant reviews, and even chronicled her rather active sex life, which she discussed in far too explicit terms for a family newspaper.
For a time, she worked once a week as a host at Chez Panisse, the famous Berkeley restaurant founded by Alice Waters.
Later in life, she turned to open water swimming, primarily in San Francisco Bay. She regularly won races among her peers and once a year swam from Alcatraz Island in the middle of the bay to San Francisco.
Just wear your swimsuit and jump in. Wetsuits are for sissies, she said.