“She saw seven men in suits and her roommate, who mouthed, “It’s the F-B-I.”

In 1973, Vicki Gabriner lived in an Atlanta lesbian collective house at the corner of Euclid Terrace and Euclid Avenue. The house in Little Five Points had an ornate glass window on the front door and was one of a handful of neighborhood homes where members of the newly formed Atlanta Lesbian/Feminist Alliance (ALFA) lived. At seven o’clock on a May morning, there was a knock at the door. Vicki pulled up the shade and looked out. She saw seven men in suits and her roommate, who mouthed, “It’s the F-B-I.” Vicki knew they were coming for her. She had been in Atlanta for three years, during which time she wrote for the Great Speckled Bird, an alternative newspaper, joined the Atlanta Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Front, and helped found ALFA. In the 1960s, Vicki did civil rights work in West Tennessee, became part of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and, for a year, in 1969, joined Weathermen. She was not in hiding, but she knew the government monitored antiwar groups like SDSand Weathermen. In 1971, antiwar activists broke into a Pennsylvania FBI office and revealed the existence of cointelpro, a secret counterintelligence program that gathered information on domestic groups via covert, often illegal, projects to disrupt, discredit, intimidate, and infiltrate.