Biography
Clayton Van Lydegraf was a longtime communist, labour and anti-imperialist organiser who had belonged to the CPUSA, the Progressive Labor Party, Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground before becoming a leader of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and its Revolutionary Committee faction. On November 19, 1977 federal agents arrested him in Houston, Texas, with Judith Bissell and Leslie Mullin; Michael Justesen and Marc Perry were arrested simultaneously in Los Angeles. Prosecutors accused the five of conspiring to bomb the Fullerton office of California State Senator John Briggs and of possessing explosives and firearms. Van Lydegraf was extradited to California and held in the Los Angeles County Central Jail under $500,000 bail. He later pleaded no contest to conspiracy and possession of explosives and spent approximately two years imprisoned before his release in 1980. The investigation arose from a lengthy FBI infiltration of the organisation.
On the arrest date: the strongest contemporaneous source gives Saturday, November 19, 1977. Some later histories give November 20, apparently because the arrest photographs ran in the Sunday, November 20 Houston Post.
On his affiliation at the time: he is often listed simply as Weather Underground, but he had been expelled from the principal Weather organisation around 1974. At the time of this arrest he is more accurately identified with the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and the Revolutionary Committee faction that emerged from the Weather Underground's final split.
