San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Free Speech veteran wrote courageous exposés
Inspired by Berkeley protests, she took on controversial topics, including Black Panthers and Earth First
As the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley reached its culmination with a sit-in at the administration building on Dec. 2, 1964, Kate Coleman sat on the curved marble steps inside Sproul Hall, double-teaming peanut butter sandwiches with Joan Baez to feed 1,500 hungry protesters.
At some point Coleman, a senior English lit major from Encino, left her sandwich station to investigate the contents of a file cabinet that had been liberated in the course of the all-day, all-night occupation. The documents therein revealed that administrators were involved in sneaky agribusiness deals that exposed a level of hypocrisy Coleman could not abide. She got arrested and jailed for her nosiness, but also found an exciting and often dangerous career path to pursue once she graduated in June.
“It was a big thing for me to be prowling around where I didn’t belong, finding out things that had been hidden,” she later recounted in an oral history compiled by the University of California. “I think that’s what got me into investigative journalism: If you do only what you’re allowed to do, and ask questions only where you’re supposed to ask them, you never find out the truth.”
As a freelancer, Coleman had the nerve to carve out territory she had access to — the anti-war New Left — and to go where the truth took her, which was often to reveal corruption and inconsistencies within the very causes she had fought for. Working in both magazine and book form, she took on the Black Panther Party over the mysterious death of a staff bookkeeper, and the militant environmental group Earth First after a car bomb gravely wounded its leader, Judi Bari.
There were consequences. After the Panther exposé, she kept a gun at home and put bars on her windows, and after the Bari exposé she was met with hecklers and harassment on her book tour. It was a cold world always having to hustle freelance gigs, but Coleman left enough of a paper trail that Stanford University has accepted her archive.
This will ensure a legacy for Coleman, who died April 2 at a memory care facility in Oakland. Cause of death was complications due to dementia, said her close friend Carol Pogash, a journalist who had medical power of attorney. Coleman was 81.
“Kate Coleman was indefatigable and a pit bull of principled tenacity in pursuit of the truth,” said Steve Wasserman, publisher of Heyday Books. “She had a charismatic personality and was undaunted in the face of obstacles that would have defeated a less courageous and determined reporter.”
Never married, Coleman lived alone in a cottage in the Berkeley flats. She liked to entertain both at home and at her home away from home, Chez Panisse, where she worked as the Tuesday upstairs dinner hostess in the ’70s and ’80s.
When freelance writing work started to dry up, she put her energy into long-distance swimming, training four days a week with the Cal Aquatic Masters program at her alma mater and in San Francisco Bay as a member of the Dolphin Club. She took part in the annual New Year’s Day swim from Alcatraz to Aquatic Park. Her lips would be blue and she looked like she needed defrosting when she came out of the water, but she said “wetsuits are for wusses,” according to Pogash.
“There was something about open-water swimming that she viscerally understood,” said her longtime coach at Cal Aquatic Masters, Kendall Young, noting that she was at the top of her age group well into her 70s. “She was known for being fiercely competitive but more interested in building community with other swimmers than anything else,” Young said. “Kate was equal parts vinegar and honey.”
Her best stroke was the impossibly difficult butterfly. Toward the end of her life, her friend Pogash asked what resuscitation measures she would want, if necessary.
“Throw me in the water,” she responded. “If I do the butterfly, save me.”
Kate Ann Coleman was born on the first anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1942. Her parents divorced when she was 10 and her mother, who was blinded by an illness, moved her two daughters into a house provided by a proverbial rich uncle in Encino.
In an essay titled “Dressing for the Revolution,” which was included in the anthology “The Free Speech Movement,” Coleman noted that John Wayne’s home was on the corner and one of the Andrews Sisters lived across the street.
“You could say I was bourgeois, given my neighbors and address,” she wrote, “but I suffered from Cinderella complex, in part because we were poor relations and my mother couldn’t see to dress me.”
She graduated from Reseda High School in 1960 and arrived at Berkeley as a “Valley Girl,” she later said. She had a sense of style and could easily have fit into sorority life, but instead she joined Slate, an on-campus political organization endeavoring to get ROTC kicked off campus. This led to her participation in the Free Speech Movement, which at its core was a three-month protest over the right to leaflet for any political cause on Sproul Plaza, which is university property but has always functioned as an open-air bazaar.
On the 50th anniversary of the FSM, in 2014, Coleman recounted her involvement in an interview with the Chronicle. Asked to be reflective about the accomplishments of the movement, she responded in her usual frank and irreverent manner.
“It liberalized college rules that were ridiculously paternalistic,” she answered. “But the nanny state still exists. Students don’t really have free speech because everybody is expected to be nice.”
That was one thing Coleman did not overdo — niceness. She was kind, but that’s different.
“When I first met her I didn’t like her. I thought she was a foul-mouthed virago,” said Danice Bordett, who dates that meeting to the early 1970s when Coleman was part of an organization of freelancers who formed the Media Alliance in hopes of gaining health insurance and bargaining power.
Coleman and Bordett bonded over a cigarette break shared on the hood of a car during a KQED party and stayed friends. Coleman could be counted on to listen to a problem, and to cook soup to be served during the listening, in her cottage decorated with exotic masks and textiles from travels in Africa.
“When she knew you and was fond of you, she had an enormous heart,” Bordett said. “She would take care of people and try to help them out when they needed support.”
As a writer, Coleman’s most consistent byline was at the underground Berkeley Barb, where she had a column that was so freewheeling it even veered into her own sexual adventures.
But her most impactful story was probably one that ran in the periodical New Times, where she and former Chronicle Zodiac Killer beat reporter Paul Avery were put together by the Center for Investigative Reporting to probe the reign of terror at the Black Panthers under cofounder Huey Newton.
The resulting article, “The Party’s Over,” published on June 10, 1978, included allegations regarding the unsolved 1974 Berkeley killing of Panther employee Betty Van Patter. After the article’s publication, Coleman continued to investigate the death of Van Patter despite a death threat that caused her to go into hiding.
“It marked her life,” said Tom DeVries, a former reporter at KQED’s “Newsroom,” where Coleman also did reporting. “It was considered a betrayal that not only pissed off the Panthers but pissed off some of the people on the white left. So it was very brave to do that kind of journalism.”
That was Coleman, who fought her battles and did her writing with style.
Her essay “Dressing for the Revolution” ends with a description of how not to put together an outfit to participate in a sit-in, get arrested at 3 a.m. and be hauled off to jail. Don’t wear rubber pants, as she had. Also, don’t wear tight leather boots. Both are prone to overheating.
“Wear cotton. Wear open shoes. They breathe,” she wrote. “We might even say they breathe freely, which was, after all, what the FSM was all about.”
“When she knew you and was fond of you, she had an enormous heart, she would take care of people and try to help them out when they needed support.”
Danice Bordett