Nancy Ling Perry
Nancy Ling Perry (September 19, 1947 – May 17, 1974) was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a Marxist-Leninist terrorist group that carried out assassinations, kidnappings, and bank robberies in California during the early 1970s to incite revolution against the United States government.[1][2] Born to conservative upper-middle-class parents in the San Francisco area, Perry initially supported Republican causes as a teenager before undergoing a profound ideological shift amid the counterculture and anti-Vietnam War movements.[3][1] Perry attended Montgomery High School in Santa Rosa, where she excelled academically and served as a cheerleader, and later studied English literature at Whittier College and the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1970.[3][2] In 1967, she married Gilbert Perry, an African American jazz musician, though the union ended in separation.[1] Following college, she engaged in radical activities, including demonstrations against the Vietnam War, organizing food communes, and working odd jobs such as a topless dancer and blackjack dealer in San Francisco.[3][4] By 1973, she had joined the SLA under the alias Fahizah, emerging as a key theorist who co-authored the group's Maoist-influenced communiqués and propaganda critiquing American society.[1][2] As an SLA operative, Perry participated in violent operations, including the November 1973 assassination of Oakland school superintendent Marcus Foster and the April 1974 armed robbery of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco, during which Patty Hearst—kidnapped by the group months earlier—served as an accomplice.[1][4] She was among six SLA members, including leader Donald DeFreeze, killed on May 17, 1974, in a fierce shootout with the Los Angeles Police Department at a South Central hideout, where intense gunfire preceded a fire that consumed the building and an arsenal of weapons.[2][3] Her death marked a significant blow to the SLA's campaign of urban guerrilla warfare.[1]