The Missing Activist

By Jessi Dillard

In April, 1973, an American civil rights activist named Perry Ray Robinson traveled from Alabama to South Dakota to participate in a resistance led by the American Indian Movement (AIM) on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. His family never saw or heard from him again, and his wife was convinced that he'd been killed during an incident at Wounded Knee – possibly by the very organization he'd been trying to help.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trellis Publishing
• Release date: Jul 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201376833

Book preview

THE MISSING ACTIVIST

JESSI DILLARD

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE MISSING ACTIVIST

APRIL PITZER

MAURA MURRAY

BETHANY DECKER

MISSING JOYCE

FINDING JODI

PATRICIA MEEHAN

KELSIE SCHELLING

NATALEE HOLLOWAY

JENNIFER KESSE

TARA CALICO

In April, 1973, an American civil rights activist named Perry Ray Robinson traveled from Alabama to South Dakota to participate in a resistance led by the American Indian Movement (AIM) on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. His family never saw or heard from him again, and his wife was convinced that he’d been killed during an incident at Wounded Knee – possibly by the very organization he’d been trying to help.

Somebody out there know what happened to the black, civil rights activist who entered the American Indian Movement-occupied village of Wounded Knee in April 1973, and then vanished, said author Stew Magnuson in an opinion piece that appeared in the Native Sun News in April, 2011.

It’s time for the wall of silence to come down.

A dedicated activist

Born September 12, 1937, in the community of Bogue Chitto, Alabama, Robinson grew up attending segregated schools before becoming a prize fighter – benefiting from his natural strong, athletic stature. Once he left boxing, Robinson became an avid follower of Martin Luther King, Jr., and started to develop his own brand of civil rights activism.

In 1963, he was a part of the March on Washington, where he heard King deliver his notable I Have a Dream speech – an inspirational moment for any civil rights advocate. When three civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi in 1964, Robinson dutifully attended each funeral. Then, in 1968, Robinson helped organize the Resurrection City camp, which took place at the Washington Mall in an effort to raise awareness about the treatment of people of color within the United States.

He was quite forthcoming and very vigorous and willing to take risks, said Bradford Lyttle, who founded the United States Pacifist Party. He put himself out in front of the project. And we decided we would take him on into the South.

The first black female judge in Alabama, Faya Ora Rose Touré (then known as Rose Sanders), said Robinson was called to the civil rights movement.

He was a true soldier, she said. He was a true liberator. He really believed all people should be free.

Robinson was also a supporter of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, an organization which was created in 1967. At an anti-war rally held in 1966 in Madison, Wisconsin, Robinson met a young woman named Cheryl Buswell. Despite being brought up in a Republican household, Cheryl had become motivated by political activism, and had even dropped out of college to pursue her passion for peace, love, and equality.

He was a worker in the movement, Cheryl recalled. I wanted to get involved in the civil rights movement.

After a brief courtship, Robinson and Cheryl were married. She returned with him to Alabama, and the two began focusing their activism by contributing to a variety of grassroots movements promoting education and nutrition. The couple resided in the town of Selma, Alabama, and welcomed three children between the years of 1967 to 1972.

At a Vietnam Veterans Against the War meeting in 1973, Robinson learned about AIM’s extended occupation of Wounded Knee, at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

AIM was founded in 1968, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The advocacy group was initially created to address ongoing issues of American Indian sovereignty, spirituality, leadership, and treaties – while also examining increasing incidences of racism and police harassment involving Indian Termination Policies, which forced Native Americans to move away from reservations and give up their traditional tribal culture. The ultimate objective of the organization was to move toward real economic independence for the Indians.

By the 1970s, the group was seeking involvement in events specifically to gain additional public attention and ensure AIM’s goals were being represented to a broader audience. In 1973, the organization was asked to help moderate some political and law enforcement issues on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation – which eventually resulted in AIM leading an armed occupation of Wounded Knee on that reservation.

The group was looking for supporters to help in their efforts to protest the harmful policies initiated by the federal government. According to Cheryl, Robinson made the decision to travel to the reservation to provide assistance with the occupation and endeavor to align the civil rights movements of the two groups of people of color.

Robinson was a veteran of the black Civil Rights movement and an adherent to Martin Luther King Jr.’s principles of non-violence. He made his way – like many other activists, white, Indian, and black – to the occupied village to support the cause, stated Magnuson in his 2011 column about the disappearance. His presence at Wounded Knee during the occupation is one of the few verifiable facts in this case. After that, things become murky.

Four African Americans went from Alabama to the Pine Ridge Reservation that April, but only three returned.

Bury him where no one will know.

When Robinson never made it home, his wife filed a missing person’s report with the FBI. A few months later, when she still hadn’t heard anything new about the case, she traveled to AIM offices in both Rapid City, South Dakota, and St. Paul, Minnesota, but was still unable to find out anything significant about the fate her husband had befallen. In fact, when Cheryl spoke to them in October of 1974, most AIM spokespeople flatly denied even knowing if Robinson had been a part of the occupation of Wounded Knee.

Finally, Cheryl decided to hire a private investigator to look into her husband’s disappearance. After some digging, Barbara Deming was able to learn that to avoid being caught at any checkpoints, Robinson had gotten into Wounded Knee by backpacking late at night. According to one account she heard, he’d been shot for failing to follow an order given to him by one of the AIM leaders.

In 2011, Tamara Kamara – Robinson’s daughter – hired an attorney based out of Buffalo, New York, named Michael Kuzma to submit a Freedom Of Information Act request with the FBI, seeking records regarding Robinson’s disappearance. When Kuzma still hadn’t received the information he wanted, he filed a lawsuit in 2013 in the United States District Court for the Western District of New York to finally gain complete access to all documents concerning the case.

Although no remains have ever been found and a burial site hasn’t been identified, Robinson has been declared legally dead.

As a top leader with the American Indian Movement, Dennis Banks maintained that he’d never met or even seen Ray Robinson – he’d just learned of Robinson’s participation at Wounded Knee through the many inquiries he’d received from members of Robinson’s family.

Over the years, the Robinson name has popped up, and I’m not sure even who would have that information or where it was, he said. That’s a complete blank to me.

However, during a 2001 interview with Darlene (Ka-Mook) Nichols, who’d been his common-law wife in the 1970s, Banks told a different story. Nichols was conducting the interview in an effort to learn more about the murder of an AIM activist named Anna Mae Aquash. At one point during the interview, Banks mentioned something about Robinson – that the activist had been shot by an AIM officer. Since the group was under siege, he told her, they’d been unable to provide him with adequate medical treatment, and so Robinson had bled to death as a result of the wound.

He added that he’d seen Robinson’s body and had commanded a subordinate named Chris Westerman to bury him where no one will know. According to Banks, Westerman was then gone for about five hours, and when he returned, he told Banks that he’d buried Robinson’s body over by the creek.

I was floored, said Rod Oswald, one of the lead prosecutors in the Anna Mae Aquash case. Banks is not only aware of Robinson’s killing, but where he was buried, and he acknowledges his own role in where to bury the body.

But that wasn’t the only interview Banks had given on that specific incident.

In a different recounting of the events, Banks claimed that Robinson had been shot by another activist, Harry Mr. X David Hill. According to FBI records, however, Hill had left Wounded Knee in early March – almost a month and a half before Robinson was allegedly murdered. FBI files also indicated that the bureau was conducting surveillance on Hill at the time of the possible killing.

Other pieces of information have popped up in the years since. During the occupation of Wounded Knee, AIM officials were operating under a high suspicion of any outsiders – and some have claimed that leaders could have believed Robinson to be working as an informant for the FBI. According to one account, Robinson had been described by one former member of the AIM as a loud mouthed nigger who refused to pick up a gun during a firefight, which made him a target of AIM higher-ups looking for reasons to mistrust someone.

In 2001, Robinson’s daughters were told by an AIM leader named Carter Camp that their father had been murdered by a group called the Guardians of the Oglala Nation – or GOONS, as they were more commonly known on the reservation. The group had been created by a reservation leader who was a target of opposition for many activists, prior to the incident at Wounded Knee. However, with no substantive evidence to support the allegations, this has never been proven – and has been criticized for providing an inaccurate history of the event.

In 2014, Robinson’s daughter Tamara Kamara was finally successful in forcing the release of documents related to the Robinson case. These documents confirmed that a black civil rights activist had been killed during AIM’s occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. According to an FBI memorandum from May 21, 1973, an Indian woman who had left the community had stated that the occupation was comprised of around 200 Indians, 11 whites, and two blacks – and Robinson, reportedly, had been in the company of a black woman while at the siege.

In a statement, Kuzma said the files provided by the FBI said that Robinson had been tortured and murdered within the AIM occupation perimeter, and then his remains were buried ‘in the hills.’

Another witness who had been interviewed by the FBI claimed Robinson had spent around a week at Wounded Knee prior to his death. According to this witness, Robinson had shown difficulty complying with the harsh conditions and order that had been imposed during the occupation – constant surveillance, food shortages, firefights (including regular shootings), and discipline by AIM officers for those who refused to comply with commands.

The witness told FBI agents that although Robinson had made several attempts to suggest potential strategies to AIM officials, no one would give him an opportunity to speak or took him seriously at all. When Robinson and another activist began to engage in what the witness implied was a heated exchange, a security team hauled him off to a separate house.

Allegedly, Robinson reached out and pulled a butcher knife off a nearby table, and his security escorts immediately surrounded him.

The next thing, I heard a loud bang and saw Mr. Robinson’s lower leg spin from the knee and rotate outward as he started to fall forward, the witness recalled. His eyes rolled up as he went down.

According to the witness, the members of the security team included, among others, Dennis Banks, Carter Camp, Leonard Crow Dog, Stan Holder, Clyde Hill, Frank Blackhorse, and Harry David Hill – who had already been cleared by the FBI.

Bernie Lafferty, another witness who had admitted that he’d seen Robinson on the Pine Ridge Reservation during the incident at Wounded Knee, said he’d been in attendance at an evening meeting where a number of AIM members – including Holder, Hill, Camp, Banks, and Russell Means – had an open discussion about a black man who they’d murdered and buried somewhere along the side of the hill.

They said they killed him and then one of them said he was a black man, Lafferty said in an interview. I remember them talking about, you know, shooting him, and then they said...they buried him up...on a hillside. And they said, ‘Well, no one will ever find him, you know. No one’s going to miss him.’

According to Lafferty, Robinson wasn’t cooperating with the AIM leaders, which had resulted in the man’s death.

Kept under a tight lid

As Robinson developed his own perspective on civil rights, he leaned toward a philosophy of non-violence. AIM, however, often utilized armed resistance in its efforts to oppose the federal government. This disconnect meant Robinson often found himself at odds with the organization’s leaders, and likely contributed to the existing suspicions the group already had, as he was an outsider to the Indian-led movement. In fact, there had already been increasing internal political strain within