Kate Coleman, an iconoclastic Bay Space journalist who started her profession as a left-wing radical, writing concerning the patriarchy, politics and polyamory, then made enemies amongst her erstwhile comrades when her reporting solid a harsh gentle on the Black Panthers and the environmental motion, died on Tuesday in Oakland, Calif. She was 81.
Carol Pogash, an in depth good friend, mentioned her loss of life, in a memory-care facility, was brought on by problems of dementia.
For many years Ms. Coleman operated on the middle of a fervid group of journalists and activists in and round Berkeley. Like her, most of them had attended the College of California within the Nineteen Sixties, serving to to outline the campus as a hotbed of political and social activism.
Her subsequent writing profession, most of it as a freelancer for anti-establishment publications like Ramparts and The Berkeley Barb in addition to nationwide retailers like Newsweek and The Los Angeles Instances, tracked the transit of the American left via its many phases, from early idealism via violent extremism to late-stage disenchantment.
Like Eve Babitz and Joan Didion, she positioned herself as a younger feminine author who was each immersed within the second and capable of stand outdoors it, casting a gimlet eye on the ironies and excesses of America’s “left coast.”
As an undergraduate at Berkeley, Ms. Coleman was an early participant within the college’s Free Speech Motion and was among the many a whole lot of scholars arrested in December 1964 for occupying Sproul Corridor, a campus administration constructing.
After graduating in 1965, she spent three years at Newsweek, in its New York headquarters, the place she was among the many few younger girls allowed to write down often for the journal. (A number of years after she left, in 1968, a bunch of feminine workers efficiently challenged Newsweek’s discriminatory insurance policies.)
Ms. Coleman succeeded at Newsweek by providing one thing totally different: The place many of the employees got here from buttoned-up East Coast faculties, she arrived bearing information from the free-spirited West.
“She was the resident hippie, the resident Berkeley radical, and she or he was pleased with it,” Harriet Huber, who labored with Ms. Coleman at Newsweek, mentioned in a telephone interview.
Returning to the Bay Space, Ms. Coleman established herself as a contract author and radio producer. Amongst different gigs, she wrote a column for The Berkeley Barb, a scrappy journal that was required studying among the many area’s counterculture.
She used the column to cowl a gamut of matters that occupied the minds of the younger and hip within the late Nineteen Sixties and early ’70s: Watergate, second-wave feminism, free love, radical politics, venereal illness.
She wrote in an off-the-cuff tone, tinged with however not drenched within the hippie vernacular of the time — profanity, however not an excessive amount of; a single “ain’t” in a column of in any other case Strunkian grammatical precision.
She was additionally keen to go additional than most reporters. In 1969, Ms. Coleman was at a racetrack east of San Francisco masking the Altamont Speedway Free Competition, the place members of the Hells Angels biker gang had been employed as safety (and the place one of many bikers stabbed a person to loss of life). Whereas backstage ready for the Rolling Stones to return on, she noticed a biker beating a concertgoer. When she intervened, he grabbed her and slammed her repeatedly right into a Volkswagen van.
For a 1971 article on prostitution for Ramparts, she not solely embedded herself in a brothel on Manhattan’s Higher East Facet but additionally turned a trick herself.
“You couldn’t be in Kate’s presence with out being impressed by her brashness,” Steve Wasserman, the writer of Heyday Books in Berkeley, mentioned by telephone. “However it might additionally get her in bother along with her dogmatic comrades.”
In 1977, the Middle for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit newsroom, commissioned Ms. Coleman and one other reporter, Paul Avery, to look at the unsolved homicide of Betty Van Patter, a former bookkeeper for the Black Panthers.
After 9 months of reporting, their 1978 article, “The Social gathering’s Over,” printed in New Instances journal, concluded that the Panther management, specifically Huey P. Newton, one of many occasion’s founders, had almost definitely ordered Ms. Van Patter’s killing as a result of she was about to disclose corruption inside the group.
Ms. Coleman acquired loss of life threats and went into hiding for a number of months. She purchased a handgun and bars for her home windows — then submitted them as bills.
She made a brand new set of antagonists in 2005 along with her guide “The Secret Wars of Judi Bari: A Automobile Bomb, the Battle for the Redwoods, and the Finish of Earth First!”
Judi Bari, till her loss of life from most cancers in 1997, had been one of the revered figures within the radical wing of the environmental motion. However in Ms. Coleman’s telling, she was a “tyrannical diva,” paranoid and obsessed along with her personal martyrdom.
The guide drew protests from Ms. Bari’s defenders, a few of whom would interrupt Ms. Coleman throughout stops on her guide tour. At the least one retailer canceled her look. “Is the Biographer of Activist Judi Bari a Device of the Proper — or Only a Skeptical Liberal?” requested a headline in The San Francisco Chronicle.
“Why not focus her energies on issues of the proper?” the writer of the article, Edward Guthmann, wrote.
Ms. Coleman responded: “The proper has too many issues for me to even start to start out masking. I don’t wish to analysis that. It’s not what I knew intimately. It’s what I do know from afar.”
Kate Ann Coleman was born on Dec. 7, 1942, in Rutherford, N.J. Her father, Robert, was an engineer for a machine-tools firm. Her mom, Lilian (Anson) Coleman, went blind after surgical procedure when Kate was 3 and was largely confined to their house.
Ms. Coleman leaves no instant survivors.
Kate’s dad and mom divorced when she was 10. Quickly after, she moved along with her mom and her older sister, Susan, to Encino, Calif., to be close to her mom’s rich brother.
Her political awakening got here in early 1960, quickly after she arrived at Berkeley. The Home Committee on Un-American Actions had come to San Francisco for a area listening to into allegations of Communist subversion within the Bay Space. Lots of confirmed up in protest, which ended with the police turning hearth hoses on the group with out warning.
Ms. Coleman joined Slate, a progressive campus political occasion, and finally the Free Speech Motion, which was led partially by Mario Savio. She graduated in 1965 with a level in English literature.
Her writing was not fully political. Like most freelance journalists, she wrote no matter got here her means: movie star profiles, private essays, restaurant evaluations, even accounts of her fairly lively intercourse life, which she mentioned in phrases too express for a household newspaper.
For a time she additionally labored as soon as every week as a number at Chez Panisse, the famed Berkeley restaurant based by Alice Waters.
And he or she was a later-life convert to open-water swimming, largely within the San Francisco Bay. She routinely received races in her age group, and every year she swam from Alcatraz, in the midst of the bay, to San Francisco.
She would dive in sporting only a swimsuit. Moist fits, she mentioned, had been for wimps.
