It was a story that made national and international headlines over decades.

In 1971, lawyer Stephen Bingham had visited prison-rights activist George Jackson, an inmate at California’s San Quentin State Prison, to talk about filing a lawsuit against the state’s Department of Corrections about the mistreatment of prisoners.

On Aug. 21, 1971, though, Bingham — who grew up in Salem and whose family has a long and hallowed history in the state — was at San Quentin for another reason. He was asked by the Black Panthers to help ensure an investigator on Jackson’s legal team was able to get in to see him. Jackson, whose book “Soledad Brother” detailing racism and abuses in the prison system was a best seller, was working on another book. The investigator was bringing a draft of that, as well as a tape recorder that had been inspected by guards. When she wasn’t allowed in, Bingham went in her place, bringing the draft and tape recorder, and left.

Not much later, violence exploded in the prison. Authorities said that Jackson hid a gun in an afro wig and tried to break out of San Quentin. Jackson was shot dead by a guard in a watchtower. Three white guards and two white prisoners were killed, too. It has been called the bloodiest day in California prison history.

The authorities accused Bingham of smuggling a gun to Jackson and setting off the melee. He was indicted on five counts of first-degree murder. A no-bail warrant was issued for his arrest.

This was an era when the FBI wanted to stifle activist lawyers like Bingham. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover said that the National Lawyers Guild was more dangerous than the people throwing bombs, and the FBI counterintelligence program was targeting that group.

Bingham went underground, believing that, considering the tumult of the times, he’d likely be convicted if put on trial, and he’d be in danger if he ended up in prison — he was held responsible by police and guards for the San Quentin deaths.

He stayed gone for 13 years, using an assumed identity while hiding in Europe. But he always kept an eye on what was happening in the U.S., hoping for a time when he could safely return.

In 1984, he did. He was put on trial. And acquitted.

A new documentary directed by Bingham’s niece, filmmaker Catherine Masud, delves into this complex story. “A Double Life” had its premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival in California in October.

From California, where he resides, Bingham spoke with The Day about the movie and his life.

Looking back at the events of Aug. 21, 1971, and the following years, Bingham said, “August 21 and all the rest of it is not me. It’s what happened to me. … I’ve been doing a lot of things for the last 40 years that I consider who I am. And necessarily there wasn’t time for that in the film. I sort of joke about it and say, ‘Well, nobody wants to go to a film to learn about the life of a legal aid lawyer.’”

Legal aid is help for people who cannot afford to pay for a lawyer, and it focuses on such issues as housing evictions, public benefits, family law and health issues.

Bingham, 81, had made notes of his own experience over the years, thinking he might someday write a book, but he never found the time.

He said he implicitly trusted his niece to make the movie.

“That doesn’t mean there aren’t things I would have liked to see differently. It’s a balance because a film is done by a filmmaker, and you have to respect how the artist/filmmaker approaches it. At the same time, I tried to make sure there weren’t elements in there that were somehow misleading,” Bingham said.

Past and present

Masud, who lives in Salem, teaches at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, where she holds a joint appointment with the Department of Digital Media and Design within the School of Fine Arts and the Human Rights Institute at UConn.

Her films have included “Matir Moyna,” which she produced and co-wrote with her late husband Tareque Masud, who directed; it won the International Critics' Prize at Cannes in 2002. Many of her films have addressed economic and social justice issues, war and genocide, and the conflict between religious and cultural identity.

Masud always thought that Bingham’s story would make a really interesting film, whether a feature or a documentary. Bingham had been approached by Hollywood producers about doing a movie of his life story, but nothing was made.

Masud, who lived in Bangladesh for more than two decades before returning to the U.S. full time in 2015, said, “I was away for many years, and when I came back, I was sort of trying to figure out what I wanted to do next, literally, and it was Francoise (Bingham’s wife) who suggested to me, ‘Why don’t you make a film on Steve? Maybe he’s ready to be much more open about it’ because he had been kind of reticent to talk to us.”

Masud was 8 when Bingham disappeared. Afterward, FBI agents would show up regularly at her family’s home in Chicago (her mother, Alfreda, is Stephen’s sister). Masud remembered being told not to use Stephen’s name or to say anything related to him when on a call because the phones were tapped.

The FBI’s visits slowly petered out, and Masud said, “We assumed he was dead. We didn’t think he was ever coming back.”

The date was Aug. 21

In “A Double Life,” Bingham noted that Jackson and he were both 29 in 1971, but they were born into dramatically different lives. He said Jackson was “a young, headstrong, kind of tough kid growing up in Los Angeles with an unbelievably racist police force back in the ’60s. It was almost inevitable he was going to end up in jail.”

Bingham, on the other hand, grew up in a prominent family. His grandfather was in Connecticut government and was a U.S. senator. His father was an attorney and activist; he served a term in the state Senate as a New Deal Democrat.

After his early years in Salem, Bingham graduated from Milton Academy and Yale University. He went on to be involved in various causes. He spent time in the 1960s in Mississippi helping with voter registration. As a TV reporter in “A Double Life” noted, he organized Mexican farm workers in central California and worked for an anti-poverty office. Bingham was part of a cohort of young lawyers who were very active in supporting social movements at that time.

Then came that fateful day in August. Bingham attorney Paul Harris said the prosecution’s theory was that Bingham smuggled the gun inside the tape recorder, but the recorder had gone through a metal detector and was searched by a guard. Furthermore, Harris said, Bingham was there with the investigator visiting Jackson, named Vanita Anderson, and Bingham hadn’t been going to take the recorder in. When Anderson wasn’t allowed inside, the guard asked Bingham if he was still going to take the recorder in.

“We don’t think there was any gun that any inmate or anyone brought in from the outside. We think it was an inside job,” Bingham said in the film.

Going underground

Bingham was facing charges and fearing the worst. With help from friends, he took on a fake identity and left the country. He spent a year and a half in eastern Europe, where he could live cheaply. He moved every week or two. He did odd jobs. He eventually settled in Paris, where he met Francoise. He studied film there and combined that with his work as an activist.

He made a trio of short trips to the U.S. During one, he secretly met his parents on Long Island.

In a news conference upon his return to the U.S., Bingham said, “I’m real happy to be back. My politically active life has always been dedicated to the idea that change can come about without violence, that violence tends to poison otherwise good motives. The sympathy I want to express to the families of those killed that day is not gratuitous. It is very real. So is my innocence.”

He said that in charging him, authorities never investigated the incident. Bingham said he and his team came across the names of dozens of people who had contact with Jackson on the day in question — and none of those people had been interviewed.

Bingham noted in his talk with The Day that several of the jurors said afterward that not only did they think he was not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt but that they were persuaded enough of his innocence that they held that news conference about it.

Loss of a daughter

The film culminates with another chapter of Stephen’s life — about his and Francoise’s child, Sylvia. But there was a tragic end. At age 22, Sylvia was biking in Cleveland to her job with an organization that helps women succeed in non-traditional jobs. She was hit by a truck and killed.

Bingham tearfully told a TV news reporter at the time that parents should die after their children.

“There is nothing, just nothing to compare this to,” he said.

Bingham told The Day that if “A Double Life” is about him, it was beyond critical to include that segment about Sylvia.

“That’s way more important in my life … than anything that happened to me on Aug. 21. I’m a little disappointed there’s not more of her because she was such an incredible person,” he said.

Stephen and Francoise created the Sylvia Bingham Fund to support organizations that promote bike safety and social causes that reflect the values that Sylvia held.

Beyond the movie

A life distilled into a film that clocks in under an hour and a half means a lot must be left out. One of the stories that didn’t make it in, Masud said: On a secret return to the U.S., Bingham was riding on a Greyhound bus — that’s how he would travel during those underground years — and the vehicle let passengers out to use the bathroom at a rest stop. He had left everything on-board, and when he returned from the bathroom, the bus was gone. He panicked but was able to hop onto the next Greyhound and finally got to a terminal where he could get on his original bus and, amazingly, was able to recover his documents.

“It was a period when he was always on edge,” Masud said. “I really didn’t have an appreciation for what that must have been like before making the film and hearing his stories. … It was a constant state of uncertainty and fear for him.”

Masud now lives in the Salem house that Stephen grew up in — and that had material relevant to the movie. Although it didn’t make the final cut, she took footage of her grandfather’s filing cabinet in the attic with the words “Steve’s trial” and inside the cabinet was, among other things, a file with information from the FBI.

‘Much bigger than that’

“A Double Life” doesn’t address specifically what Bingham or Masud think actually happened in San Quentin that day. Masud said she didn’t want to make the film a whodunnit.

“I felt it was something much bigger than that. … I thought it was much more important to paint a canvas of a life trajectory and of those times and go deeper. What was the path that led him to that meeting with George Jackson, and what was George Jackson’s path that had them converging there? Then, what was the trajectory from that point on? (It was) looking at it more as a pivot point in a life story,” she said.

The next showing of “A Double Life,” which Masud co-produced with Peabody Award winner Abby Ginzberg, will be in early February in the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles. Masud said the hope is to have some one-off screenings locally as well.

k.dorsey@theday.com