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Alan Berkman (1945–2009) was a medical student and doctor, who became radicalized by his experiences at the Wounded Knee takeover, at the Attica Prison uprising, and at health clinics for the poor. He provided covert care to members of revolutionary groups, participated in bombings of government buildings and was eventually captured and served eight years in some of America’s worst penitentiaries. After his release in 1992, he returned to medical practice and became an HIV/AIDS physician, teacher, and global health activist. He worked to change U.S. policy, making AIDS treatment more widely available in the global south and saving millions of lives around the world.

Using Berkman’s unfinished prison memoir, FBI records, letters, and hundreds of interviews, Susan Reverby sheds fascinating light on questions of political violence and revolutionary zeal in her account of Berkman’s extraordinary transformation from doctor to co-conspirator for justice. Reverby has had a long and productive career in the Women’s & Gender Studies department at Wellesley College. Her 1987 book, Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, brought the perspectives of the “new” labor history to nursing. She continued to explore the American medical system, editing Tuskegee’s Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (2000) and writing Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy (2009).

She will be engaged in conversation with three members of the ESFL community who have read Co-Conspirator for Justice:

Colette Hyman teaches US History at Winona State University and is the author of Staging Strikes: Workers’ Theatre and the American Labor Movement in the 1930s (1997) and Dakota Women’s Work: Creativity, Culture & Exile (2012).

Art Serotoff is a long-time anti-racist activist based in south Minneapolis.

Sara Olson spent seven years in a California prison for charges related to her involvement with the Symbionese Liberation Army in the 1970s. She is an activist with the Women’s Prison Book Project.