This is very interesting reading.
I was too small to give a fuck or know anything when this happened but this is an interesting event that occurred in 1972.
Crystal City, Alexandria, Annandale...
Bank robbery...
Commies working in the Federal government....
Hijacked planes to Cuba....
I copied an exert, the rest can be reached at the link at the end of the snip.
On October 17, 1972, Charles Tuller turned in his resignation from his middle management job at the Department of Commerce. He would go on a leave of absence until the resignation became official on November 4. Tuller cited his diabetes and recent double hernia surgery as his reasons for stepping down. Colleagues had noted he looked like “death warmed over” so it didn’t come as a shock. Tuller was dedicated and worked hard at his job delivering government aid to minority businesses and many coworkers knew him as thoughtful and considerate. On the other hand, he had acquired odd views and had become obsessed with communist revolutionaries. Tuller’s coworkers and supervisors didn’t realize that the resignation was the catalyst that put in motion a carefully choreographed sequence of events.
On October 21, Charles’ son Bryce went on a three day pass from Ft. Bragg and would go AWOL when he didn’t return. Another son, Jonathan, called in sick from his lineman job at Vepco complaining of flu symptoms. William Graham, a family friend and former classmate of Bryce at TC Williams, went AWOL from his truck repair job at Ft. Benning. The four men gathered at Charles Tuller’s apartment at 3807 Executive Avenue in Alexandria, but they were short one man that backed out at the last minute when he realized they were serious about their plot to start a revolution in the United States. The Tullers had just moved into the apartment, which was in a building full of transient Washingtonians.
On October 24, Bryce and Charles went to American International Rent-a-car in Crystal City and procured a car. Charles signed as himself while Bryce signed his alias, J. Santino Wilson, a name also listed on their apartment’s lease (mysteriously, the clerk at the rental car place was adamant that Bryce’s picture did not look like the J. Santino Wilson who signed the rental agreement). Probably that evening, the plotters stole a C&P truck and uniforms from the lot at 115 S. Floyd St.
The next morning, William Graham and Charles Tuller drove their rental car towards Crystal City after leaving their brown 1967 Mercury Cougar at 20th and S. Fern St. The two Tuller sons, dressed in C&P uniforms, drove the stolen C&P truck and parked it on the corner of S. 20th and S. Clark St. next to a manhole that contained the telephone lines for the Crystal Plaza Complex. Amid the hustle of the morning rush, the two men would have been inconspicuous as they climbed into the hole and cut off the phones and alarms for entire area. However, as they worked the Assistant Residential Manager for the Crystal Plaza apartments peered down the hole out of curiosity. One of the men told him that water had “got into the splicing.”
Meanwhile, inside the Arlington Trust Company at 2001 Jefferson Davis Hwy something seemed strange when the phone lines suddenly went dead. One customer joked to the assistant manager “it’s a perfect time for a robbery.” Inside, Charles waited for his two sons and inquired at the Crystal World Travel Agency about the Alleghany Airlines schedule that day. At 10:30 AM on October 25, 1972, the Tuller sons, dressed as telephone repairmen entered the bank and told the manager they were there to repair the phone lines.
As they entered the bank, Charles followed and sat in the bank lobby unnoticed in the typical Washington dress of a shirt and tie sat. William Graham stood outside the back door near the getaway car. The two Tuller sons told the bank manager, Harry Candee, that they needed to get to the telephone box, so he escorted them to a back room. They entered the room, shut the door and told Candee it was a hold up. Candee resisted and they hit him with a blackjack. A teller, on her break in the back room, began to panic and may have screamed. As Candee continued resisting, one of the Tullers fired his gun, which mortally wounded Candee and grazed the bank teller.
At the same moment, the Cuban-born Arlington police officer Israel Gonzalez entered the bank and walked past Charles Tuller. Stories differ on why Officer Gonazalez entered the bank. He was either alerted by an employee unnerved by the dead phones or he was doing his routine check of the bank. Whatever the reason, he walked through the door as shots were fired in the back room. Gonzalez drew his gun and came into a glass hallway where he saw the Asst. Bank Manager open the door to the break room. Out of the room dashed the Tuller sons and Gonzalez fired two shots before the Tullers returned fire. When Charles Tuller saw this, he drew his gun and ordered the employees and customers on the ground. As Gonzalez and the Tuller sons exchanged fire, Charles Tuller shot him in the back causing Gonzalez to fall through glass doors leading to the back of the bank. As he lay dying from six gunshot wounds, Gonazlez managed to fire his gun and shoot Jonathan Tuller in the hand.
In a panic, the Tuller sons headed out the door towards 20th St. while Charles Tuller ran out the door leading to the apartment building. All three joined Graham on S. Clark St. and they piled into the getaway car. They left behind $160,000 in the bank vaults and a bloody scene of panicked customers and employees. With Jonathan bleeding from his wounded hand, the four men drove on S. 20th St., crossing Jefferson Davis Highway to S. Fern St. where they exchanged cars. Once they got into their other car, they headed south rushing away from the scene with their original plan in tatters. At some point they arrived in Winston-Salem where a friend of Bryce unwittingly gave them a new car. The generous girlfriend would arrive home to find her house surrounded by police hot on the trail of the bank robbers.
Charles Tuller remembered from his business travels that there was a surgeon in Houston he could trust. As the four men sped 1500 miles south west, they were in constant fear of the police. At one point, in Georgia, a state trooper passed them with his lights flashing and as he drove by, they held their loaded weapons ready to kill. Later, they stopped at a truck stop and one of the robbers, with a gun in his jacket, ran right into a police officer. There was tense moment before the officer said “excuse me.”
Five days after the robbery, the four men showed up at the Houston airport on October 30 and approached the gate of an Eastern Airlines plane boarding passengers headed for Atlanta and Syracuse. They waited until all the passengers had boarded the flight and Charles Tuller, leading the others, stormed the ramp of the plane. A ticket agent named Stanley Hubbard tried to stop Charles and they fell to the ground wrestling over his gun. Charles was able to pull the gun away and shoot Hubbard in the stomach. As Charles got up, Bryce Tuller shot Hubbard in the head. Hubbard lay dying, still holding Charles’ jacket as the four men rushed the plane. Outside, Wyatt Wilkinson refueled the plane when the engines suddenly started. Realizing the extreme danger of fuel and running jet engines, he ran into the terminal to get the plane to shut off where he found Hubbard and called an ambulance. He rushed down the ramp where he was met with gunfire and was hit three times, but survived the wounds.
The four hijackers stationed themselves throughout the plane and ordered the pilot to fly to Cuba. They told passengers to keep their hands on their heads for the entire 4 hour flight while Charles ranted over the intercom about his revolutionary leanings declaring “the revolution has started!” One African American passenger, Ron Pinckney, news director at WOL radio, had a gun pointed to his head and Charles asked him “What’s the matter black man? Are you afraid to die? Blacks who do not fight and give into the white man are slave niggers.” Charles then turned to another man and asked him what he did for a living. The man replied that he worked for IBM to which the Tuller replied “I didn’t like your looks when you got on! I should have killed you then!” The plan flew to New Orleans for refueling and went on to Cuba where the hijackers got off the plane and released the crew and passengers. The terrified hostages made it back to Miami the next afternoon. The four hijackers went into Cuban custody with no resistance.
Unfortunately, hijacking was a rather routine event in 1972, but Washingtonians would be shocked to learn that this band of radicals were locals living a typical Washington life, at least superficially. Since 1968, the US alone had 364 airliner hijackings with most of them being diverted to Cuba, but these hijackings had roots in a CIA tactic in which planes were hijacked from Cuba to the US to sow fear and confusion in the communist regime. After the CIA employed the tactic, leftists in the US began copying it as a way to gain entrance to the closest communist country. Cuban authorities considered these hijackers either CIA patsies or mentally ill, so they usually ended up in prison. The Tullers hijacking would accelerate FAA security changes already in the works leading to a comprehensive bill would pass Congress the next year. The changes brought universal screening procedures including bag inspection and scanning of passengers. As part of this comprehensive package, the CIA ended the use of hijacking as a covert action in Cuba and the US reached agreement with Cuba to prosecute or extradite hijackers. The Tuller group would be among the last hijackings on US soil and the deadliest, but a new wave would begin shortly, by radical Muslims borrowing tactics developed by leftist revolutionaries.
In addition to being among the last hijackings in the US, the Tuller band was the part of the rear guard of a fading movement. Communism was all but dead in the US and even among student radicals, communist philosophy held sway among only small militant groups. Nonetheless, the actions of the Tuller group would resuscitate quiescent fears of communist infiltration in government that were fading in Washington under a rising obsession with the deficit. By 1972, Washington was changing as conservative ideas began surpassing the New Deal, which was struggling to revive the economy. The old liberal constituencies were moving out of the mainstream of Washington as the once mighty coalition splintered. The splintered left brought out increasing frustration in the far left and this frustration bubbled into a series of violent events in the seventies. Tullers’ militant cell emerged out of nowhere in Alexandria, apparently disconnected from any other left-wing organization.
Tuller considered his group patriotic and the New York Times described him as “a handsome, aggressive, $26,000 per year bureaucrat who apparently believed the American dream could belong to everyone and worked to make it so.” However, beneath this hard working middle manager was anger at “the system” and its “oppression of blacks.” Racked with diabetes, Tuller became mentally unstable over the years and began turning to militancy as he became less satisfied with how the United States treated African-Americans. Tuller worked hard and could be charming, but could sputter with rage if “the system” held him up.
Tuller grew up comfortably in Toledo, OH, but when he was 9 his 4 year old brother was run over by a truck for which Tuller’s dad blamed him. Tuller later claimed, as his dad was on his death bed, he told Charles he would never forgive him for the death of his brother. This event shaped Charles’ life and would slowly erode his rationality. For years Charles would see a psychiatrist in New York as he dealt with his racking guilt. Despite this, Charles showed much promise in life as a man dedicated to helping others. Sometime in the early fifties, perhaps while attending college in New York City, he became involved in the civil rights movement. Living in Newark, NJ, he rose to a leadership position in the local chapter of the Congress on Racial Equity while working as a welfare case worker. Eventually he joined Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s Justice Department despite some concerns about his emerging leftist views (ironically Ramsey Clark would go on to become a Stalinist as the head of the International Action Center). Tuller would move through a few government jobs before landing in the Commerce Department where he specialized in helping minority businesses. He pursued the job with vigor, but he began to feel that his work was treating “symptoms and not the causes” of poverty and inequality.
By the late sixties he grew to hate white people and believed in standing with black and brown Americans over white Americans. A neighbor said “he was always ‘aginer’ and “against everything and everybody.” Around this time he embraced the philosophies of leftists like Mao Tse Tung and Che Guevara. Tuller probably found in Mao and Guevara a theory of empowerment for disenfranchised people and a way for them to organize to take over the power structures that oppressed them. Mao was leader of the Chinese revolution who developed a set of theories based on independence from the Soviet Union and distinctly Chinese solutions to problems. The revolution in China led to a new communist superpower that would not be subservient to the Soviet Union and would lead to global break-up of the communist movement. Mao introduced the “Three Worlds Theory”, which placed the US and Soviet Union in the first world, Europe and other developed countries as the second world, and the poorest unaligned nations as the third world. Mao believed the oppressed people of the third world would lead the Marxist revolution and, by extension, people of color were the revolutionary masses while white people were the people of privilege and counter-revolutionists.
Che Guevara admired Mao and believed he could extend his revolutionary theories to the peasants in South America. Admirers of Mao and Che in the US applied these ideas to say that white people in the US were the beneficiaries of “white privilege” and because of this they would tend to be counter-revolutionary. Thus, any good Maoist would align themselves with black and brown people because these people are the true proletariat. This simplistic view of American society led many Maoists to naïve views of poor and working class Americans which hampered their organizing. In other words, not many black folks want to overthrow capitalism and most white people are not fascists, which leads to a rapid breakdown of political theory for Maoists operating in the U.S.
Tuller didn’t embrace the American Maoists and sought an independent road. Perhaps viewing himself as a communist philosopher in his own right, Tuller never joined a communist organization because he felt they were too much in service to foreign governments. He took Mao’s nationalist independent views and applied them to the US where he hoped to recruit a revolutionary coalition of small farmers, small business owners and poor people to rise against the powers. True to the tactics of Mao and Che, he hoped, by organizing a small cadre, there would be a mobile and agile group of revolutionaries able to help local people take direct action. He considered his views to be “100% American”, patriotic and improving the lot of the people at the bottom of the heap.
Charles’ militancy and mental deterioration caused problems in his personal life. His wife, Edith, whom he married in 1949, put up with torrents of emotional abuse. If Charles needed someone to yell at, he would call Edith and tell her she was “a no good bitch”. Charles associated Edith with “the system” and had affairs with black women. He played out his frustration with whites by flaunting black girlfriends in front of coworkers and his wife challenging the sensibilities of the still very southern Washington area. When Tuller traveled to Houston on business he showed up at an office Christmas party with a black woman as his date causing uproar in this deep southern city. After the incident, his superiors had to ban him from travelling to Houston, which may have been part of his motivation for returning to the city and hijacking a plane. Tuller’s erratic behavior and infidelity forced his wife out of the house in March 1969 and their divorce became final in October 1971. Edith gave Charles custody of Bryce and Jonathan, who were attending high school at the time.
Read the rest here- http://ourredneckpast.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-12-26T11:34:00-05:00&max-results=7
I was too small to give a fuck or know anything when this happened but this is an interesting event that occurred in 1972.
Crystal City, Alexandria, Annandale...
Bank robbery...
Commies working in the Federal government....
Hijacked planes to Cuba....
I copied an exert, the rest can be reached at the link at the end of the snip.
On October 17, 1972, Charles Tuller turned in his resignation from his middle management job at the Department of Commerce. He would go on a leave of absence until the resignation became official on November 4. Tuller cited his diabetes and recent double hernia surgery as his reasons for stepping down. Colleagues had noted he looked like “death warmed over” so it didn’t come as a shock. Tuller was dedicated and worked hard at his job delivering government aid to minority businesses and many coworkers knew him as thoughtful and considerate. On the other hand, he had acquired odd views and had become obsessed with communist revolutionaries. Tuller’s coworkers and supervisors didn’t realize that the resignation was the catalyst that put in motion a carefully choreographed sequence of events.
On October 21, Charles’ son Bryce went on a three day pass from Ft. Bragg and would go AWOL when he didn’t return. Another son, Jonathan, called in sick from his lineman job at Vepco complaining of flu symptoms. William Graham, a family friend and former classmate of Bryce at TC Williams, went AWOL from his truck repair job at Ft. Benning. The four men gathered at Charles Tuller’s apartment at 3807 Executive Avenue in Alexandria, but they were short one man that backed out at the last minute when he realized they were serious about their plot to start a revolution in the United States. The Tullers had just moved into the apartment, which was in a building full of transient Washingtonians.
On October 24, Bryce and Charles went to American International Rent-a-car in Crystal City and procured a car. Charles signed as himself while Bryce signed his alias, J. Santino Wilson, a name also listed on their apartment’s lease (mysteriously, the clerk at the rental car place was adamant that Bryce’s picture did not look like the J. Santino Wilson who signed the rental agreement). Probably that evening, the plotters stole a C&P truck and uniforms from the lot at 115 S. Floyd St.
The next morning, William Graham and Charles Tuller drove their rental car towards Crystal City after leaving their brown 1967 Mercury Cougar at 20th and S. Fern St. The two Tuller sons, dressed in C&P uniforms, drove the stolen C&P truck and parked it on the corner of S. 20th and S. Clark St. next to a manhole that contained the telephone lines for the Crystal Plaza Complex. Amid the hustle of the morning rush, the two men would have been inconspicuous as they climbed into the hole and cut off the phones and alarms for entire area. However, as they worked the Assistant Residential Manager for the Crystal Plaza apartments peered down the hole out of curiosity. One of the men told him that water had “got into the splicing.”
Meanwhile, inside the Arlington Trust Company at 2001 Jefferson Davis Hwy something seemed strange when the phone lines suddenly went dead. One customer joked to the assistant manager “it’s a perfect time for a robbery.” Inside, Charles waited for his two sons and inquired at the Crystal World Travel Agency about the Alleghany Airlines schedule that day. At 10:30 AM on October 25, 1972, the Tuller sons, dressed as telephone repairmen entered the bank and told the manager they were there to repair the phone lines.
As they entered the bank, Charles followed and sat in the bank lobby unnoticed in the typical Washington dress of a shirt and tie sat. William Graham stood outside the back door near the getaway car. The two Tuller sons told the bank manager, Harry Candee, that they needed to get to the telephone box, so he escorted them to a back room. They entered the room, shut the door and told Candee it was a hold up. Candee resisted and they hit him with a blackjack. A teller, on her break in the back room, began to panic and may have screamed. As Candee continued resisting, one of the Tullers fired his gun, which mortally wounded Candee and grazed the bank teller.
At the same moment, the Cuban-born Arlington police officer Israel Gonzalez entered the bank and walked past Charles Tuller. Stories differ on why Officer Gonazalez entered the bank. He was either alerted by an employee unnerved by the dead phones or he was doing his routine check of the bank. Whatever the reason, he walked through the door as shots were fired in the back room. Gonzalez drew his gun and came into a glass hallway where he saw the Asst. Bank Manager open the door to the break room. Out of the room dashed the Tuller sons and Gonzalez fired two shots before the Tullers returned fire. When Charles Tuller saw this, he drew his gun and ordered the employees and customers on the ground. As Gonzalez and the Tuller sons exchanged fire, Charles Tuller shot him in the back causing Gonzalez to fall through glass doors leading to the back of the bank. As he lay dying from six gunshot wounds, Gonazlez managed to fire his gun and shoot Jonathan Tuller in the hand.
In a panic, the Tuller sons headed out the door towards 20th St. while Charles Tuller ran out the door leading to the apartment building. All three joined Graham on S. Clark St. and they piled into the getaway car. They left behind $160,000 in the bank vaults and a bloody scene of panicked customers and employees. With Jonathan bleeding from his wounded hand, the four men drove on S. 20th St., crossing Jefferson Davis Highway to S. Fern St. where they exchanged cars. Once they got into their other car, they headed south rushing away from the scene with their original plan in tatters. At some point they arrived in Winston-Salem where a friend of Bryce unwittingly gave them a new car. The generous girlfriend would arrive home to find her house surrounded by police hot on the trail of the bank robbers.
Charles Tuller remembered from his business travels that there was a surgeon in Houston he could trust. As the four men sped 1500 miles south west, they were in constant fear of the police. At one point, in Georgia, a state trooper passed them with his lights flashing and as he drove by, they held their loaded weapons ready to kill. Later, they stopped at a truck stop and one of the robbers, with a gun in his jacket, ran right into a police officer. There was tense moment before the officer said “excuse me.”
Five days after the robbery, the four men showed up at the Houston airport on October 30 and approached the gate of an Eastern Airlines plane boarding passengers headed for Atlanta and Syracuse. They waited until all the passengers had boarded the flight and Charles Tuller, leading the others, stormed the ramp of the plane. A ticket agent named Stanley Hubbard tried to stop Charles and they fell to the ground wrestling over his gun. Charles was able to pull the gun away and shoot Hubbard in the stomach. As Charles got up, Bryce Tuller shot Hubbard in the head. Hubbard lay dying, still holding Charles’ jacket as the four men rushed the plane. Outside, Wyatt Wilkinson refueled the plane when the engines suddenly started. Realizing the extreme danger of fuel and running jet engines, he ran into the terminal to get the plane to shut off where he found Hubbard and called an ambulance. He rushed down the ramp where he was met with gunfire and was hit three times, but survived the wounds.
The four hijackers stationed themselves throughout the plane and ordered the pilot to fly to Cuba. They told passengers to keep their hands on their heads for the entire 4 hour flight while Charles ranted over the intercom about his revolutionary leanings declaring “the revolution has started!” One African American passenger, Ron Pinckney, news director at WOL radio, had a gun pointed to his head and Charles asked him “What’s the matter black man? Are you afraid to die? Blacks who do not fight and give into the white man are slave niggers.” Charles then turned to another man and asked him what he did for a living. The man replied that he worked for IBM to which the Tuller replied “I didn’t like your looks when you got on! I should have killed you then!” The plan flew to New Orleans for refueling and went on to Cuba where the hijackers got off the plane and released the crew and passengers. The terrified hostages made it back to Miami the next afternoon. The four hijackers went into Cuban custody with no resistance.
Unfortunately, hijacking was a rather routine event in 1972, but Washingtonians would be shocked to learn that this band of radicals were locals living a typical Washington life, at least superficially. Since 1968, the US alone had 364 airliner hijackings with most of them being diverted to Cuba, but these hijackings had roots in a CIA tactic in which planes were hijacked from Cuba to the US to sow fear and confusion in the communist regime. After the CIA employed the tactic, leftists in the US began copying it as a way to gain entrance to the closest communist country. Cuban authorities considered these hijackers either CIA patsies or mentally ill, so they usually ended up in prison. The Tullers hijacking would accelerate FAA security changes already in the works leading to a comprehensive bill would pass Congress the next year. The changes brought universal screening procedures including bag inspection and scanning of passengers. As part of this comprehensive package, the CIA ended the use of hijacking as a covert action in Cuba and the US reached agreement with Cuba to prosecute or extradite hijackers. The Tuller group would be among the last hijackings on US soil and the deadliest, but a new wave would begin shortly, by radical Muslims borrowing tactics developed by leftist revolutionaries.
In addition to being among the last hijackings in the US, the Tuller band was the part of the rear guard of a fading movement. Communism was all but dead in the US and even among student radicals, communist philosophy held sway among only small militant groups. Nonetheless, the actions of the Tuller group would resuscitate quiescent fears of communist infiltration in government that were fading in Washington under a rising obsession with the deficit. By 1972, Washington was changing as conservative ideas began surpassing the New Deal, which was struggling to revive the economy. The old liberal constituencies were moving out of the mainstream of Washington as the once mighty coalition splintered. The splintered left brought out increasing frustration in the far left and this frustration bubbled into a series of violent events in the seventies. Tullers’ militant cell emerged out of nowhere in Alexandria, apparently disconnected from any other left-wing organization.
Tuller considered his group patriotic and the New York Times described him as “a handsome, aggressive, $26,000 per year bureaucrat who apparently believed the American dream could belong to everyone and worked to make it so.” However, beneath this hard working middle manager was anger at “the system” and its “oppression of blacks.” Racked with diabetes, Tuller became mentally unstable over the years and began turning to militancy as he became less satisfied with how the United States treated African-Americans. Tuller worked hard and could be charming, but could sputter with rage if “the system” held him up.
Tuller grew up comfortably in Toledo, OH, but when he was 9 his 4 year old brother was run over by a truck for which Tuller’s dad blamed him. Tuller later claimed, as his dad was on his death bed, he told Charles he would never forgive him for the death of his brother. This event shaped Charles’ life and would slowly erode his rationality. For years Charles would see a psychiatrist in New York as he dealt with his racking guilt. Despite this, Charles showed much promise in life as a man dedicated to helping others. Sometime in the early fifties, perhaps while attending college in New York City, he became involved in the civil rights movement. Living in Newark, NJ, he rose to a leadership position in the local chapter of the Congress on Racial Equity while working as a welfare case worker. Eventually he joined Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s Justice Department despite some concerns about his emerging leftist views (ironically Ramsey Clark would go on to become a Stalinist as the head of the International Action Center). Tuller would move through a few government jobs before landing in the Commerce Department where he specialized in helping minority businesses. He pursued the job with vigor, but he began to feel that his work was treating “symptoms and not the causes” of poverty and inequality.
By the late sixties he grew to hate white people and believed in standing with black and brown Americans over white Americans. A neighbor said “he was always ‘aginer’ and “against everything and everybody.” Around this time he embraced the philosophies of leftists like Mao Tse Tung and Che Guevara. Tuller probably found in Mao and Guevara a theory of empowerment for disenfranchised people and a way for them to organize to take over the power structures that oppressed them. Mao was leader of the Chinese revolution who developed a set of theories based on independence from the Soviet Union and distinctly Chinese solutions to problems. The revolution in China led to a new communist superpower that would not be subservient to the Soviet Union and would lead to global break-up of the communist movement. Mao introduced the “Three Worlds Theory”, which placed the US and Soviet Union in the first world, Europe and other developed countries as the second world, and the poorest unaligned nations as the third world. Mao believed the oppressed people of the third world would lead the Marxist revolution and, by extension, people of color were the revolutionary masses while white people were the people of privilege and counter-revolutionists.
Che Guevara admired Mao and believed he could extend his revolutionary theories to the peasants in South America. Admirers of Mao and Che in the US applied these ideas to say that white people in the US were the beneficiaries of “white privilege” and because of this they would tend to be counter-revolutionary. Thus, any good Maoist would align themselves with black and brown people because these people are the true proletariat. This simplistic view of American society led many Maoists to naïve views of poor and working class Americans which hampered their organizing. In other words, not many black folks want to overthrow capitalism and most white people are not fascists, which leads to a rapid breakdown of political theory for Maoists operating in the U.S.
Tuller didn’t embrace the American Maoists and sought an independent road. Perhaps viewing himself as a communist philosopher in his own right, Tuller never joined a communist organization because he felt they were too much in service to foreign governments. He took Mao’s nationalist independent views and applied them to the US where he hoped to recruit a revolutionary coalition of small farmers, small business owners and poor people to rise against the powers. True to the tactics of Mao and Che, he hoped, by organizing a small cadre, there would be a mobile and agile group of revolutionaries able to help local people take direct action. He considered his views to be “100% American”, patriotic and improving the lot of the people at the bottom of the heap.
Charles’ militancy and mental deterioration caused problems in his personal life. His wife, Edith, whom he married in 1949, put up with torrents of emotional abuse. If Charles needed someone to yell at, he would call Edith and tell her she was “a no good bitch”. Charles associated Edith with “the system” and had affairs with black women. He played out his frustration with whites by flaunting black girlfriends in front of coworkers and his wife challenging the sensibilities of the still very southern Washington area. When Tuller traveled to Houston on business he showed up at an office Christmas party with a black woman as his date causing uproar in this deep southern city. After the incident, his superiors had to ban him from travelling to Houston, which may have been part of his motivation for returning to the city and hijacking a plane. Tuller’s erratic behavior and infidelity forced his wife out of the house in March 1969 and their divorce became final in October 1971. Edith gave Charles custody of Bryce and Jonathan, who were attending high school at the time.
Read the rest here- http://ourredneckpast.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2011-12-26T11:34:00-05:00&max-results=7