Bombing of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney

On May 24th, 1990 a pipe bomb exploded inside of the car of environmentalists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. The response of the FBI and media to the bombing had a direct impact on the image of environmentalists in the United States. The bombing also left Bari disabled and disrupted her organizing work in northern California.

Born in Maryland to leftist parents, Bari had a history of labor organizing before moving to California. She had organized union drives and wildcat strikes. She protested against the war in Vietnam and US involvement in Central and South America.

After moving to California she became involved with the environmental movement. She joined Earth First! and organized against the cutting of old-growth redwood forests. In California, less than five percent of these thousand-year-old trees remained, and they were being cut down to be used as lumber. Earth First! was a radical environmental group whose members were using tactics such as road blockades and tree sits to save these trees.

Due to her charismatic nature and her working-class background Bari began to build a relationship between working-class loggers and the environmental movement. Her goal was to create a sustainable logging industry, where environmentalists and loggers would unite and force logging companies to keep jobs available without destroying the forests that the jobs rely upon.

In 1990 Earth First! began to organize a 'Redwood Summer' - named after the civil rights Freedom Summer. The idea was to have a convergence of environmentalists come to Northern California to organize around saving the old-growth forests. Organizers began to reach out across the country, especially to college campuses. Saving old-growth forests became an issue talked about nationwide.

In May of 1990, Bari and Cherney were driving down Park Blvd. near MacArthur Blvd. in Oakland, heading for a speaking event in Santa Cruz when a bomb exploded under the driver's seat. The driver, Bari suffered serious injuries and was disabled for the rest of her life. Within half an hour of the explosion the FBI's San Francisco terrorism squad was on the scene. Bari and Cherney were falsely arrested for transporting explosives.

The FBI released statements to the national media that Bari and Cherney were extremists transporting bombs to be used against loggers. The media tied this bomb to past environmental actions in an attempt to show the extremism of the two activists. Friends and allies of the movement were interrogated. Public relation firms hired by logging companies used the story to paint protesters as violent radicals. The truth is that Bari was outspoken in her dedication to nonviolence.

For two months the police and FBI told the press there was mounting evidence that Bari and Cherney were responsible for the explosion. In late July the district attorney failed to bring a single charge against the two because there was no such evidence.

Bari had received a number of threats from logging supporters before the bombing. These threats intensified as Redwood Summer began to gain publicity. She had reported them to the police and FBI, but they were never investigated. At one point, a few years before the bombing her car was run off the road and physical attacks on environmental protesters were not uncommon in Northern California.

1990 was also the year the California ballot proposition 130 was placed before voters. Dubbed the "forests forever" proposition it would have created major reforms in the logging industry. Though logging companies were spending millions of dollars in attempting to stop the proposition from passing, polls said that before the bombing a majority of voters supported the proposition. After way law enforcement and the media responded to the bombing, the polls flipped and the proposition failed to pass. The public relation companies hired by the logging industry to stop this proposition also published fake Earth First! fliers and press releases calling for violence. A lot of money was going into making Earth First! look violent.

Five days after the bombing a letter was sent to a Santa Rosa newspaper by an anonymous anti-abortionist claiming responsibility for the bombing. Bari had supported a local planned parenthood office. This letter was not investigated.

The supervisor of the San Francisco FBI office at the time was Richard Wallace Held. Held was well known for his participation in COINTELPRO operations against groups such as the Black Panthers. COINTELPRO was documented as having used tactics such as disinformation and assassination against leftist activists.

About a month before the bombing in Oakland, the FBI set up a bomb school in Northern California, on a logging company's land. There agents setup pipe bombs inside of cars, blew them up and investigated them. These practice bombings were extremely similar to the bombing in Oakland. At this school the FBI agents were taught that if a bomb is found inside a car, it is generally being transported by the driver of the car. The same agents who attend this school were the ones who investigated the bombing of Bari and Cherney.

A year after the bombing the FBI was still claiming that Bari and Cherney were the only suspects and refusing to investigate anyone else. Bari and Cherney responded to this with a federal civil rights lawsuit against the FBI and the Oakland police department. The suit charged the FBI and police with attempting to frame the two activists and also attempting to disrupt and discredit their political activism.

The trial stalled for eleven years, but finally, in 2002 a jury was presented with the facts of the case. After two months the jury came back with a $4.4 million settlement against the FBI and police for violating the fourth and first amendments of the constitution. The bombing has never really been investigated and still remains unsolved.

Bari died of cancer in 1997. Darryl Cherney continues his activism, music and a search for those responsible for the bombing. In 2003 the city of Oakland named May 24th as Judi Bari day.