KATHLEEN SOLIAH & JAMES KILGORE SLA/FREEDOM FRONT FBI WANTED POSTERS *PLS OFFER

Description

UP FOR AUCTION, IS A VERY RARE, IMPOSSIBLE TO GET, ORIGINAL FBI WANTED POSTERS OF TWO OF THE MOST INSTRUMENTAL MEMBERS OF THE SYMBIONESE LIBERATION ARMY KATHLEEN SOLIAH (NOW KNOWN AS SARAH JANE OLSEN) AND JAMES KILGORE.  SOLIAH (OLSEN)
was a member of the
Symbionese Liberation Army
(SLA) in the 1970s. She grew up in
Palmdale, California
, the daughter of
Norwegian-American
parents,
Elsie Soliah (née Engstrom
]
and
Palmdale High School
English teacher
and coach Martin Soliah.
She went into hiding in 1976 after having been indicted in a bombing case. She has lived much of her life in
Minnesota
under the alias Sara Jane Olson, which is now her legal name. Arrested in 1999, she pleaded guilty in 2001 to two counts of possessing explosives with intent to murder, and in 2003 to second-degree murder, both stemming from her SLA activities in the 1970s. She received a sentence of 14 years in prison.
She was mistakenly released for five days in March 2008, due to an error made in calculating her parole, before being rearrested.
She was finally released on parole on March 17, 2009
.
KILGORE
is a research scholar at the
University of Illinois
,
who was involved with the
Symbionese Liberation Army
(SLA), an American
left-wing terrorist
organization. After the arrest of the core SLA members in 1975, Kilgore went underground for 27 years. He lived most of that time in Southern Africa. During his time on the run, Kilgore rejected the politics of violence, building a career as an educator, researcher and activist in
Zimbabwe
and
South Africa
. He wrote a number of books and academic articles during that period under the pseudonym
John Pape
. He was arrested in
Cape Town
, South Africa, in November 2002,
extradited
to the United States and subsequently served six and a half years in prison in
California
. During his incarceration he wrote several novels. The first of these,
We Are All Zimbabweans Now
, was published a month after his release in 2009 by Umuzi Publishers of Cape Town. He now lives in
Champaign-Urbana, Illinois
, and teaches at the Center for African Studies. In 2015, he published a non-fiction book,
Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People's Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time.
Involvement with the Symbionese Liberation Army
After graduating from college, Kilgore and Olson moved to
Oakland, California
, where he became involved in various political activities. He also visited a number of political activists who were in prison, including Willie Brandt, convicted for his role in anti-war bombings in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In 1974 Kilgore became connected to the
Symbionese Liberation Army
, the group that kidnapped heiress
Patricia Hearst
. According to Hearst's memoir,
Every Secret Thing
, Kilgore, Olson and other friends of theirs assisted Hearst and her compatriots, William and
Emily Harris
(
née
Montague), to escape the
FBI
after six members of the group were killed in a shootout with police on May 17, 1974. Hearst also reported that Kilgore took part in a number of crimes in the
San Francisco Bay Area
in 1974 and 1975, including a bank robbery in
Carmichael
, California, where a customer was killed. Hearst, Harris and Montague were arrested in September 1975.
In 2002, Kilgore, along with Harris, Montague and Olson were indicted for their participation in the Carmichael bank robbery mentioned by Hearst. Hearst was not indicted. The defendants, including Kilgore, subsequently pleaded guilty to second degree murder and all served time in California state prisons for this offense. Kilgore was released in 2009, the last of the defendants in the case to leave prison.
Underground years
After the arrest of Hearst and the others, Federal authorities charged Kilgore with possession of an explosive device and he went underground. He remained on the run for 27 years until November, 2002 when he was arrested in Cape Town, South Africa. According to reports by British journalist Gavin Evans,
during his time as a fugitive, Kilgore constructed an alternative identity as Charles "John" Pape and worked as an educator and researcher in Zimbabwe and South Africa. During that period he married Teresa Barnes and the couple had two children. He also lived in Australia for two years where he enrolled in
Deakin University
and eventually earned a Ph.D. in his new name, writing a dissertation on the history of domestic workers in Zimbabwe.
Evans reported that Kilgore moved in 1991 to South Africa, where he became the Director of
Khanya College
in
Johannesburg
, a small institution that prepared black youth for university. In 1997, he and his family moved to Cape Town, where he took a position as co-director of the International Labour Research and Information Group (ILRIG), a unit affiliated with the
University of Cape Town
which specialized in education for union members. Upon his arrest, a number of people in South Africa came forward to claim that Kilgore was a changed man. South African activist
Trevor Ngwane
noted that everything Kilgore "did in South Africa showed that he had broken with terrorism as a method of struggle, preferring the hard patient slog of building among ordinary workers, in the trade unions and among working-class youth. He exchanged his guns and masks for pen and paper. He stopped living between the cracks and in the night; he built a new life, took care of his family and contributed to the struggle of the workers."
Other statements of support for Kilgore came from the
South African Municipal Workers' Union
, Khanya College, the
University of Cape Town
, the
Nelson Mandela Foundation
and
Nobel Peace Prize
laureate Archbishop
Desmond Tutu
.
US authorities had a very different perspective.
US Attorney General
John Ashcroft
noted that the arrest of Kilgore proved that "terrorists can run and they can try to hide overseas, but in the end we will find them and bring them to justice."
Kevin Ryan, US Attorney in the San Francisco Federal Court, where Kilgore was charged, echoed Ashcroft's sentiments, "The arrest and prosecution of James Kilgore, the last of the fugitive SLA members, represents the Department of Justice's commitment to bringing terrorists, be they domestic or foreign, to justice. We will never forget their acts, and the passage of time will not diminish our resolve or our vigilance."
After being extradited to the United States, Kilgore pleaded guilty to both the possession of explosives charge and his role in the bank robbery in Carmichael. He was sentenced to ten years in prison in California. After six and a half years in prison, he was released on parole, against Los Angeles police objections.
Kathleen Soliah (SARA JANE OLSEN) was born in
Fargo, North Dakota
, while her family were living in
Barnesville, Minnesota
. When she was eight, her conservative
Lutheran
family relocated to Southern California. After graduating from the
University of California, Santa Barbara
, Soliah moved to
Berkeley, California
, with her boyfriend,
James Kilgore
. There, she met
Angela Atwood
at an acting audition where they both won lead roles. They became inseparable during the play's run. Atwood tried to sponsor Soliah into the SLA. Regardless, Soliah and Kilgore, along with her brother Steve and sister Josephine, followed the SLA closely without joining.
When Atwood and other core members of the SLA were killed in 1974 during a standoff with police near
Watts, Los Angeles
, following their murder of the Oakland school superintendent, the Soliahs organized memorial rallies, including a rally in Berkeley's Willard Park (called
Ho Chi Minh
park by activists) where Soliah spoke in support of her friend Atwood, while being covertly filmed by the
FBI
. At that rally, Soliah said that her fellow SLA members had been:
viciously attacked and murdered by 500 pigs in L.A. while the whole nation watched. Well, I believe that Gelina [Atwood] and her comrades fought until the last minutes, and though I would like to have her with me here right now, I know that she lived happy and she died happy. And in that sense, I'm so very proud of her. SLA soldiers – I know it is not necessary to say; but keep on fighting. I'm with you and we are with you!
[
She asserted that Atwood "was a truly revolutionary woman ... among the first white women to fight so righteously for their beliefs and to die for what they believed in".
Now a fugitive, founding SLA member
Emily Harris
disguised herself and visited Soliah, who was on the job at a bookstore. Soliah later recalled, "I was glad she was alive. I expected them to be killed at any time." She felt sorry for the group and agreed to help the remaining group hide from the police and FBI. She assisted them by procuring supplies for their San Francisco hideout and birth certificates of dead infants that could be used for identification purposes.
THEY WERE ISSUED JUNE 20TH, 1978. .    THERE WERE VERY FEW OF THESE POSTERS MADE. WHICH TRULY MAKES THIS A PIECE OF HISTORY. NO ONE HAS THEM, AND YOU CAN LOOK LONG AND HARD, YOU WILL NEVER FIND THEM.  THESE POSTERS ARE IN PRISTINE, NEAR MINT CONDITION AS YOU CAN SEE.
PLEASE MAKE US YOUR BEST OFFER, WE WILL ACCEPT ANY REASONABLE OFFER..
THANK YOU VERY MUCH
..