Eleanor Raskin

Eleanor E. Raskin (née Stein; born March 16, 1946) is a former member of the Weathermen. She is currently an adjunct instructor at Albany Law School. She was an administrative law judge at the New York State Public Service Commission.

Background

Eleanor E. Stein was born on March 16, 1946. Her parents, Annie Stein and Arthur Stein, were Jewish and belonged to the Communist Party. Her father was an economist in the New Deal and her mother was active in promoting social causes such as civil rights. Before Stein was five years old, her mother, who was the secretary of the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the D.C. Anti-Discrimination Laws, allowed her to arrange pastries on a large platter before every meeting. Stein looked forward to the arrival of Mary Church Terrell at these meetings, because Terrell would usually bring a small present for her. introduced her to communism by reading to her a Soviet children's book, The Story of Zoya and Shura.

When Stein was a student at Erasmus Hall High School, she was a member of the honor roll, the editor-in-chief of the school's student newspaper: Dutchman, captain of the debating team and secretary for the mathematics team. As a junior high student, she wrote a poem with political inflections called "The North Star." The opening lines are as follows: poemquote| A heavenly guide for refuge, The way to freedom For those escaped from the shackles of slavery And martyrdom. where she met Jonah Raskin, a graduate student in the English Department. On August 28, 1964, they were married at the Foley Square Courthouse, and hours after the wedding, the couple boarded a plane to Manchester, England. She enrolled in undergraduate courses at the University of Manchester.

Anxious to return home after three years in England, Stein finished her thesis which earned her the distinction of being the first American Studies graduate from Manchester to earn first-class honors. In the summer of 1967, they returned to New York where she applied for law school at Columbia University.

SDS and Weatherman

A year before joining Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Eleanor Stein and Annie Stein participated in the protest at the Pentagon in 1967. More than 700 students, including Eleanor Stein, were arrested. She was charged with criminal trespass, fined $25 and released without bail. By March 1969, she led more than two hundred students in pickets of Columbia buildings. The Bust Book is a handbook for political activists and legal defendants. In August 1969, Stein and fellow Weatherman members: Bernardine Dohrn, Ted Gold, Dianne Donghi and Diana Oughton traveled as SDS delegates to Cuba to meet with representatives of the Cuban and North Vietnamese governments.

On September 3, 1969, Stein and about 75 women stormed a Pittsburgh high school called South Hills and participated in a "jailbreak" to advertise for the Days of Rage. Weather women spray painted "Ho Lives" (in reference to spiritual and political North Vietnam leader, Ho Chi Minh who had recently died)

In early November, shortly before leaving Jonah Raskin, she wrote a letter to the Dean of Columbia University: Dear Sir: I would like to apply for a leave of absence for a year, 1969-1970. I am sorry to apply so late, but I have been in jail in Pittsburgh, Pa., for political activities. I would like to use this critical year to employ my legal skills in aiding in the defense of political prisoners, such as the Conspiracy Eight and others in Chicago. The shortage of lawyers doing this kind of work, and the need for it, makes me feel the urgency of helping in these major criminal defenses. I would be glad to give more details if necessary. Thank you very much, Yours, Eleanor Raskin Stein was ending her old life to begin a revolution.

Underground

After the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion on March 6, 1970, which claimed the lives of Weatherman members Ted Gold, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins, she helped disguise Cathy Wilkerson, one of the two survivors of the explosion, by dyeing her hair to transform her appearance from hippie to secretary. The FBI launched an extensive manhunt to capture affiliates of the organization, and Stein sought safety by relocating with Weather comrade Jeff Jones to the Catskills Mountains to establish a new network. It was there that they fell in love.

The next trace of Jones and Stein was in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1979, when police raided an apartment where materials for making bombs were found. They were charged with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution in New Jersey on charges of unlawful possession of explosives.

On December 11, 1981, a week before Jones was sentenced, the couple were married in the Municipal Building in Lower Manhattan.

All charges against Stein were dismissed.,

Life after Weatherman

After having placed her education on hold for thirteen years, Stein attempted to finish her law degree at Columbia Law School. In 1982, her request to be reinstated was denied. For ten years she served as an Administrative Law Judge at the New York State Public Service Commission in Albany, New York, where she presided over and mediated New York's Renewable Portfolio Standard proceeding, authoring in June 2004 a comprehensive decision recommending a landmark state environmental initiative to combat global warming with incentives for renewable resource-fueled power generation. She is the author of Book Review: The Philosophical Foundations of Environmental Law: Property, Rights and Nature, and Ecological Sensitivity and Global Legal Pluralism, forthcoming in SOCIAL AND LEGAL STUDIES, London; Global Warming: An International Human Rights Violation? Inuit Communities Petition at the Inter-American Commission On Human Rights, forthcoming in GOVERNMENT, LAW AND POLICY JOURNAL; The New York Renewable Portfolio Standard: Case Study in Process and Substance, 16 ENV. L. IN NEW YORK 3 (February 2005); and To Be of Use: W. Haywood Burns, 106 YALE LAW JOURNAL 753 (with Michael Ratner).

After the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, Stein disappeared with Jeff Jones in the Catskills Mountains, On January 1, 1981, daughter Coco Jones was stillborn. Arthur Jones, named after Stein's father, was born on September 22, 1982. On December 11, 1981, a week before Jones was sentenced, the couple were married in the Municipal Building in Lower Manhattan. After the two-minute ceremony, their son, Thai Jones showered them with brown organic rice.

Legacy

Thai Jones wrote a book released in 2004 called A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience which chronicled his parents' experiences with Weatherman.