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Controversial Energy Policy Widely Criticized: N.A.A.C.P. Under Attack

(Washington, D.C.) - The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is embroiled in a storm of controversy over its recent stand on a national energy policy that is strikingly similar to the position of the oil industry.

The NAACP board of directors' position paper has been widely publicized as a pro-oil industry break with the Carter administration over the need to deregulate oil and to develop nuclear energy resources.

The stand spuriously links higher gas prices with more job opportunities for unemployed Blacks.

On the other hand, in a major statement on energy policy, National Urban League (NUL) Executive Director Vernon Jordan opposed deregulation and suggested that "price controls and regulations be extended to all domestic gas and oil."

The Congressional Black Caucus (CBO) took a similar stand, directly opposed to the NAACP's. "How on earth could deregulation be in the interests of Black people?" Representative John Conyers asked. "Obviously we are the relatively largest unemployed and would be the most adversely impacted by increased energy costs."

Controversy has arisen over the fact that the NAACP report was drafted by persons closely connected to the oil industry and strongly backed by Black oil executives, many of whom belong to the American Association of Blacks in Energy (AABE).

Tempered criticism has also pointed with some concern to NAACP Board Chairperson Margaret Bush Wilson's membership on the board of directors of the Monsanto Corporation, a company in the thick of the energy industry.

In a recent interview, Mrs. Wilson denied that her Monsanto connection had anything to do with the energy policy or that it was developed -- as some have suggested -- under irregular procedures,

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to do with the energy policy or that it was developed -- as some have suggested -- under irregular procedures.

"There is nothing in my career that says I can be co-opted for money," Mrs. Wilson said.

Questions have also been raised by two prominent Black journalists and New York City's influential Village Voice.

COLUMNIST

Syndicated columnist Carl Rowan noted, "NAACP leaders have swallowed the line that they can forge an alliance with 'big oil' that will produce greater profits …with Blacks reaping jobs and prosperity."

Syndicated columnist Bill Raspberry wrote an article in the Chicago Sun times headlined, "Big Oil Gives NAACP a Grease Job." Raspberry's commentary began:

"…The NAACP's recent energy conference suggest that; a) the organization has suddenly joined the ranks of the free marketers; b) that it is prepared to pay unconscionable social costs for job production, or; c) it has been had by a handful of Blacks who work for 'big oil.'"

The Village Voice last month printed a front-page probe by Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway entitled "Big Oil's Black Allies," which thoroughly detailed the events leading to the adoption of the NAACP policy.

"By buying the industry line," wrote Ridgeway and Cockburn, "The NAACP has, in pursuit of job expansion, unerringly selected a sector of the economy -- oil, nuclear and synthetics -- which is capital-intensive and which promises to reduce rather than increase jobs available."

The Village Voice account begins in mid-November when some 400 delegates to the NAACP's energy conference met in Washington, D.C. Two task forces were formed. One, dealing with consumer demand, was chaired by Lee White, the former chairperson of the Federal Power Commission.

White has widely been identified with consumer interests. His task force of 25 or 30 people consisted mostly of rank-and-file members of the NAACP. Liberation News Service reports.

The second task force, on supply, was quite different. It was headed by Robert Bates, formerly a staff assistant to Senator Edward Kennedy in charge of minority affairs, and now a lobbyist of Mobil Oil.

Bates' group also included members of Standard Oil of California, Arco, Southern California Gas, Con Edison, Arthur D. Little, and people from the federal Department of Energy. This task force echoed the industry line.

TASK FORCES

When the two task forces met for a discussion of their reports, according to Ridgeway and Cockburn, it was the first task force's report, in opposition to the industry line, that was voted on and accepted. But the report that was finally written up and released was the work of the second task force.

Ridgeway and Cockburn traced the change in reports to the leadership of the NAACP and Mrs. Wilson's intimate relationship to the oil industry.

Hobart Taylor, a Washington, D.C., lawyer and member of the board of the NAACP, is a director of, among other corporations, Standard Oil of Ohio, Westinghouse (a producer of nuclear reactors) and Aetna Life and Casualty.

His law firm's clients include Standard Oil of Ohio, Westinghouse, Textron, Pan American, and Owen's Illinois. Taylor is in charge of the NAACP's special contribution fund.

Another contributor to the NAACP's revised energy position, Andrew Brimmer, is notorious for his opposition to the idea of any minimum wage law. Brimmer a former member of the Federal Reserve Board, now sits on the boards of Dupont and United Airlines.

He is also the financial consultant to the largest and most successful Black-owned oil firm in the United States, Wallace and Wallace.

The NAACP's controversial stand has brought it some strange new bedfellows. The Wall Street Journal, for example, editorialized, "…. for the first time in memory the NAACP has sided emphatically with the free-marketers instead of the interventionists on a major question of public policy."

Vernon Jordan expressed a worthy opinion of the Black and poor community sentiment in the conclusion of his NUL energy report:

"If we can be sure about anything in this unpredictable world, it is that the poor will suffer from whatever plan emerges from Washington in 1978."

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Pipe Ceremony On Alcatraz, Rally In Sacramento: Indians Begin “Longest Walk”

(Alcatraz Island, Calif.) -- About 500 Native Americans and their supporters gathered here Saturday, February 11, to consecrate the start of a 3,000-mile winter trek to Washington, D.C., to protest 11 pieces of anti-Indian legislation.

Native American leader Dennis Banks explained, "Congress represents those forces which want to legally take over our land and natural resources. Each bill chips away at the sovereignty of our people."

Before embarking on what they are calling, "The Longest Walk," Indians gathered on grounds east of the old prison buildings on the site of an earlier Indian occupation of Alcatraz which ended in June, 1971.

The demonstrators then went to Sacramento to stage a rally before beginning the cross-country winter journey which is expected to last six months By February 13, the group had reached Reno, Nevada.

Of the 11 pieces of repressive legislation, the primary focus of attention has been on H.R. 9054, the deceptively named "Native American Opportunity Act," introduced by Representative Jack Cunningham of Washington state.

H.R. 9054 provides not only for the abolishment of all treaties entered into with Indian tribes by the U.S. but also for the abrogation of all rights and protections guaranteed to Indian people by these treaties, such as the rights to hunt and fish. In effect, it will terminante all federal protections of Native Americans.

A strong force behind "The Longest Walk," Banks declared at the Alcatraz gathering, "Indians consider themselves equal to other nations. We are not subordinate or a

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subculture. We negotiate treaties which somehow are not being enforced by the more powerful nation, the United States."

A fugitive from South Dakota, Banks is wanted for sentencing on his conviction on trumped-up charges in connection with the 1973 Custer Courthouse Indian uprising. California Governor Jerry Brown, however, has refused to extradite Banks. As a result of these circumstances, Banks was forced to drop out of the march when it neared the California border.

Banks said 24 persons have pledged to walk the entire distance but non-Indians may swell the ranks of walkers to 200 or 300 from time to time.

ALARMED

Meanwhile, Indian organizations throughout the country are alarmed by the recent upsurge of vocal, anti-Indian reservations, and the repercussions these groups are causing in the nation's capital, reports Liberation News Service.

Wassaja, a national Indian newspaper, describes supporters of these anti-Indian groups as "(non-Indian) residents of Indian reservations who feel threatened by the prospect of Indian self-government.

The paper also names "commercial fishermen [and] some sports fishermen who have been led to believe the Indian tribes threaten their fishing privileges."

Many groups in question belong to the "Interstate Congress for Equal Rights and Responsibilities." This multi-state organization includes mainly "well-financed farmers, ranchers, cattle interests, water interests, timber interests, energy interests, hunting and fishing interests."

These organizations, according to Wassaja, have found sympathetic ears in Washington -- most notably Washington state veteran Representative Lloyd Meeds and first-termer John Cunningham.

A bill introduced by Meeds in November amounts to a broadside attack on Indian water rights. The Quantification of Federal Reserved Water Rights for Indian Reservations Act (H.R. 9951) provides that tribal water rights be limited to the maximum amount of water the tribe has used annually during the last five years.

Since in many cases, tribes are currently able to use only a small fraction of their legal entitlement because of the federal government's past and continuing failure to enforce their treaty rights, the bill would in effect ratify the theft of Indian water that has already taken place.

A long line of Supreme Court decisions stretching back to the 1908 case of Winters vs. U.S. has repeatedly; held that Indian tribes are entitled to enough water to make their reservations viable.

However, the development of coal and other natural resources in the West is impossible without water, and many energy corporations now view Indian reservations as the last remaining source of uncommitted water.

On the same day he introduced the water bill, Meeds introduced another -- the Omnibus Indian Jurisdiction Act of 1977 (H.R.9950) -- that would limit the rights of tribes to exercise legal jurisdiction on their reservations.

Although least likely to become law, the intentions of Cunningham's bill, H.R. 9054, is the most ominous.

"It is the hope of Congressman Cunningham that Indians will no longer be super-citizens in the U.S. that they'll all be brought into the mainstream of American society," says Bruce Addison, Cunningham's legislative assistant.

The bill would also end what Addison described as the system of "Indian welfarism where Indians [are] protected from cradle to grave through different health programs, different education programs, and housing programs."

The facts contradict Addison's assumptions, however, For example, the average income for Indian families on reservations is $1,500 unemployment is 45 per cent and the average number of years of schooling is only eight, according to government figures.

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EDITORIAL: Support “The Longest Walk”

"The Longest Walk" has begun. Under seige from reactionary forces throughout the U.S., Native Americans and their supporters are marching across the country to the nation's capital to protest the vicious attack on their human rights.

Reminiscent of the legal onslaught against the rights of the newly freed slaves in the Reconstruction era, Congress has concocted an 11-bill legislative package designed to "chip away" at the sovereignty of the Indian people.

The most repressive of these bills is H.R. 9054, the so-called "Native American Opportunity Act." If passed, the bill would abolish all U.S. treaties with Indian people and deny all their rights guaranteed by these treaties. In short, Native Americans would once again become non-citizens.

Alongside the slavery of Black people, the brutal, systematic genocide of the Indian population, starting with the arrival of the first European colonizers on American soil and continuing to this day, ranks as the most sordid history of the U.S.

Native Americans have never been accorded the honor due them as the first "Americans." Instead, they have been treated as the scum of the earth, as non-people, as serfs in the land where they lived long before White people knew that North America existed.

Why this sudden nationwide blitz against Indians? In recent years, led by such groups as the American Indian Movement (AIM). Native Americans have been demanding that the U.S. government honor the hundreds of treaties it has made with them, treaties which, if enforced, would make the sovereignty of the Indian nation a reality.

The power structure is enraged because the Indians have dared to take their fight to the United Nations. They have dared to ask the world body to move to protect the human rights of their people, to end their vicious genocide.

"The Longest Walk" is an act of a people angry and weary of over three centuries of repression in a country which they settled. It deserves the support of all freedom-loving people in this country and the world.

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Letters to the Editor

NIGHTMARE IN ELMIRA N.Y.

Dear Editor,

I am writing in hopes that what I have to say might help and warn some of my young brothers and sisters who might find themselves in a situation similar to one that I am now in.

I moved to Elmira, New York, from Kansas City, Missouri. Elmira is a small town in middle-state New York. It is a town that has only one country judge, who has held the position for over 20 years, and a district attorney, who also has held his post for quite some time.

At the time I got to Elmira, I really liked living here, but now it has turned into a nightmare.

It started March 7. 1977, when I was arrested for a murder I didn't even know happened. I was charged with second degree murder along with a co-defendant, Dennis Godwin.

First we were told exactly what we were wearing the night of the murder. We were told that there was blood on our clothes and shoes. They were sent to the FBI for analysis. Everything returned negative -- no blood, hair, skin or anything that connected us with the crime. (The victim was beat, kicked and cut from ear to ear.)

We were still held by the district attorney even though we had witnesses to our whereabouts.

Finally, the D.A. said he had a witness who could identify us. He said that this man has seen us arguing with the victim before he died (about 15 minutes later). When he came to court he said we were not the men he had seen. Because that was one more thing in our favour, the D.A. wanted to have his testimony stricken from the records (his own witness)

Later he wanted our palm prints and hair samples (prints were found at the murder scene along with a wool cap). These things again were negative.

With everything pointing to our income, the district attorney, or the city police, paid two girls to say they saw us commit the crime.

One girl testified that she saw a group of men beating and kicking a White man. She told what they were wearing, which did not match any single item that we had on or what the police said we had on. She also said that it could have been us because two of the men were tall (I'm 6',1 1/2 " and Goodwin's 6' 2 1/4") but so are lots of men here. Then she stated. Under pressure from

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Goodwin's lawyer, that the police had promised to pay if she said it was us.

The other woman (prostitution is her main source of income and she has four children to support). was the biggest liar of all -- or as the one-sided newspapers called her, the best witness. She said she saw everything including the color of the victim's eyes from over 50 feet away, behind a twelve-foot wall.

Goodwin's lawyer asked her to read one of the six statements she had made. She said she couldn't see it because she didn't have her glasses. He asked how long she has been without glasses. (She earlier asked the judge for a recess so she could get her glasses.) She then said she had lost them about a year ago.

Then Goodwin's lawyer wrote on a piece of paper his name and the word "lawyer." all in letters about six inches high. She still said she couldn't see what was written. yet she claims she could see a man with brown eyes, the color of our clothes from behind a twelve-foot wall from over fifty feet away at night, on a street with no lights.

Well at this point the D. A. knew he was losing, so he offered me a misdemeanor and immediate release if I would testify against Goodwin. I told him that I couldn't put a man in jail by telling a lie and that is just what it would have been because I wasn't there and I didn't know who killed the man.

But the D.A. had another card left to pay. He was able to place on the jury personal friends of his. Out of 50 prospective jurors. I'd guess that 95 per cent of them were personal friends of his.

Only two Blacks, one of whom the D.A. knew was a friend of Goodwin's, were among the prospective jurors.

Of the rest, one woman had known the D.A. for over 20 years and another the D.A. had helped buy a home, he co-signed.

Goodwin's lawyer asked the judge for a mistrial on these grounds but was retusea.

When the jury went out for a verdict, the D.A. offered Goodwin an assault charge if he would confess. Goodwin said not on your life because he didn't do it.

Then the jury wanted to here the statements of the two prosecution witnesses. The D.A. agreed, but stipulated that they could not read the cross-examination testimony, which showed that the women were lying.

To everyone's surprise (even the D.A. s) the all-White jury returned with a verdict of guilty of second degree murder.

Durign the trial, a man who was born her confessed to the murder. When he told city detectives, they just laughed and said that they had the men they wanted to convict on this murder an then they physically threw him out of the station.

I am sure this will make good and truly unbelieveable reading just to see how racist places like Elmira can be. To confirm this you could read the transcripts or contact Goodwin's lawyer. Samual J. Castellino, 414 Church Street, Elmira, New York. 734-2966

Thanks for reading this and I hope it makes you curious enough to at least check it out.

Thank you.

Rebert A. Tucker

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COMMENT: Tribute To Malcolm X-“Let My Death Bring Light to The Truth”

February 21 marks the 13th anniversary of the assassination of a truly great Black leader, Malcolm X. In honor of Brother Malcolm's commitment and dedication to the struggle of Black people for freedom and liberation, THE BLACK PANTHER this week reprints excerpts from the final chapter of "The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written in conjunction with the widely-acclaimed author of Roots, Alex Haley.

I must be honest. Negroes-Afro-Americans -- showed no inclination to rush to the United Nations and demand justice for themselves here in America. I really had known in advance that they wouldn't. The American White man has so thoroughly brainwashed the Black man to see himself as only a domestic "civil rights" problem that it will probably take longer than I live before the Negro sees that the struggle of the American Black man is international.

And I had known, too, that Negroes would not rush to follow me into the orthodox Islam which had given me the insight and perspective to see that the Black men and White men truly could be brothers. America's Negroes -- especially older Negroes -- are too indelibly soaked in Christianity's double standard of oppression.

So, in the "public invited" meetings which I began holding each Sunday afternoon or evening in Harlem's well-known Audubon Ballroom, as I addressed predominantly non-Muslim Negro audiences. I did not immediately attempt to press the Islamic religion, but instead to embrace all who sat before me:

"-- not Muslim, nor Christian, Catholic, nor Protestant… Baptist nor Methodist, Democrat nor Republican, Mason nor EIK! I mean the Black people of America

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-- and the Black people all over this earth! Because it is as this collective mass of Black people that we have been deprived not only of our civil rights, but even of our human rights, the right to human dignity…."

My thinking had been opened up wide in Mecca. In the long letters I wrote to friends, I tried to convey to them my new insights into the American Black man's struggle and his problems, as well as the depths of my search for truth and justice.

"I've had enough of someone else's propaganda," I had written to these friends. "I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole."

Largely, the American White man's press refused to convey that I was now attempting to teach Negroes a new direction. With the 1964 "long, hot summer" steadily producing new incidents. I was constantly accused of "stirring up Negroes." Every time I had another radio of television microphone at my mouth, when I was asked about "stirring up Negroes" or "inciting violence," I'd get hot.

DYNAMITE

"It takes no one to stir up the sociological dynamite that stems from the unemployment, bad housing, and inferior education already in the ghettoes. This explosively criminal condition has existed for so long, it needs no fuse; it fuses itself; it spontaneously combusts from within itself…."

They called me "the angriest Negro in America." I wouldn't deny that charge. I spoke exactly as I felt. 'I believe in anger. The Bible says there is a time for anger." They called me "a teacher, a fomenter of violence." I would say point blank, "That is a lie. I'm not for wanton violence, I'm for justice. I feel that if White people were attacked by Negroes -- if the forces of law prove unable, or inadequate, or reluctant to protect those Whites from those Negroes -- then those White people should protect and defend themselves from those Negroes, using arms if necessary. And I feel that when the law fails to protect Negroes from Whites' attack, then those Negroes should use arms, if necessary, to defend themselves."

"Malcolm X Advocates Armed Negroes!"

What was wrong with that? I'll tell you what was wrong. I was a Black man talking about physical defense against the White man. The White man can lynch and burn and bomb and beat Negroes -- that's all right: "Have patience" …"The customs are entrenched"…"Things are getting better."

I tried in every speech I made to clarify my new position regarding White people -- "I don't speak against the sincere, well-meaning, good White people. I have learned that there are some. I have learned that not all White people are racists. I am speaking against and my fight is against the White racists. I firmly believe that Negroes have the right to fight against these racists, by any means that are necessary."

But the White reporters kept wanting me linked with that word "violence." I doubt if I had one interview without having to deal with that accusation.

VIOLENCE

"I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American Black man's problem -- just to avoid violence. I don't go for non-violence if it also means a delayed solution. To me a delayed solution is a non-solution Or I'll say it another way. If it must take violence to get the Black man his human rights in this country, I'm for violence exactly as you know the Irish, the Poles, or Jews would be if they were flagrantly discriminated against. I am just as they would be in that case, and they would be for violence -- no matter what the consequences, no matter who was hurt by the violence."

White society hates to hear anybody, especially a Black man, talk about the crime the White man has perpetrated on the Black man. I have always understood that's why I have been so frequently called "a revolutionist " It sounds as if I have done some crime! well, it may be the American Black man does need to become involved in a real revolution.

Sometimes, I have dared to dream to myself that one day, history may even say that my voice -- which disturbed the White man's smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency -- that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even a fatal catastrophe.

The goal has always been the same, with the approaches to it as different as mine and Dr. Martin Luther King's non-violent marching, that dramatizes the brutality and the evil of the White man against defenseless Blacks. And in the racial climate of this country today, it is anybody's guess which of the "extremes" in approach to the Black man's problems might personally meet a fatal catastrophe first -- "non-violent" Dr. King, or so-called "violent" me.

Every morning when I wake up, now I regard it as having another borrowed day. In any city, wherever I go, making speeches, holding meetings of my organization, or attending to other business, Black men are watching every move I make, awaiting their chance to kill me.

SUDDENLY DIE

I know, too, that I could suddenly die at the hands of some White racists. Or I could die at the hands of some Negro hired by the White man. Or it could be some brainwashed Negro acting on his own idea that by eliminating me he would be helping out the White man, because I talk about the White man the way I do.

Anyway, now, each day I live as if I am already dead, and I tell you what I would like for you to do. When I am dead -- I say it that way because from the things I know. I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form -- I want you to just watch and see if I'm not right in what I say: that the White man, in his press, is going to identify me with "hate."

He will make use of me dead, as he has made use of me alive, as a convenient symbol of "hatred" -- and that will help him to escape facing the truth that all I have been doing is holding up a mirror to reflect, to show, the history of unspeakable crimes that his race has committed against my race.

You watch. I will be labeled as, at best, an "irresponsible" Black man. I have always felt about this accusation that the Black "leader" whom White men consider to be "responsible" is invariably the Black "leader" who never gets any results. You only get action as a Black man if you are regarded by the White man as "irresponsible." In fact, this much I had learned when I was just a little boy.

And since I have been some kind of a "leader" of Black people here in the racist society of America, I have been more reassured each time the White man resisted me, or attacked me harder -- because each time made me more certain that I was on the right track in the American Black man's best interests. The racist White man's opposition automatically made me know that I did offer the Black man something worthwhile.

Yes, I have cherished my "demagogue" role. I know that societies often have killed the people who have helped to change those societies. And if I can die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help to destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America -- then, all of the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine.

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La Peralta Tenants Consider Lawsuit In Fight For Decent Housing

MILLIONAIRE SLUMLORD VIOLATES COURT SETTLEMENT

(Oakland, Calif.) -- Tenants of the La Peralta apartments here, angered over millionaire slumlord William Nickerson's reneging on a court settlement requiring him to make repairs in the rundown, roach-infested structure, are scheduled to meet at week's end to consider filing a lawsuit against the real estate tycoon.

The predominantly Black tenants launched a rent strike on December 15 of last year to protest the indecent living conditions in the downtown Oakland residence. As a result of the strike, Nickerson signed an agreement in Municipal Court on January 17 in which he pledged to act on dozens of tenant complaints.

Not only has the wealthy slumlord -- author of the bestselling book, How I Turned $1,000 Into A Million In Real Estate In My Spare Time -- flagrantly violated the agreement, but he continues to evict tenants who are participating in the rent strike

Other matters that have the tenants up in arms concern a recent string of break-ins and thefts in the building, the rapid turnover in the management, which has proved to be highly incompetent, and Nickerson's blatant efforts to divide the tenants.

Information provided exclusively to THE BLACK PANTHER has revealed that Nickerson is the business partner of real estate speculator Albert J. Lowry. Lowry owns numerous properties in the Fruitvale and East Oakland areas. (See last week's issue of THE BLACK PANTHER.)

Together, the two men operate the Las Vegas, Nevada-based Education Advancement Institute which features "Lowry/Nickerson Seminars." The two men travel across the country lecturing on "real estate investor training."

AGREEMENT

Under the court agreement worked out for the La Peralta Tenants Association by attorney Geoffrey Etnire, Nickerson agreed to the following:

- To cease pending or prospective eviction proceedings against tenants based on acts or events which took place before the agreement;

- To offer the agreement to each tenant who had been involved in the rent strike or occupied an apartment in need of repairs or other maintenance;

- To provide monthly exterminating services;

- To empty garbage in the two garbage areas on each floor on a daily basics, with the exception of Sundays and five holidays; and

- To provide heat and plumbing in accordance with the Oakland Building and Housing Codes applicable to the La Peralta.

In addition to this general agreement available to all tennants, Nickerson made several individual court settlements with tenants who had particular grievances.

In one case, the apartment window of tenant Renee Todd that had not closed several weeks

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prior to the rent strike still has not been fixed, despite the agreement Mr. Todd made with Nickerson.

To show their good faith that Nickerson would live up to the agreement, the tenants agreed to pay their rents in a trust account.

The city Housing and Conservation Division completed an inspection of the La Peralta on January 25 and found some 88 Building Code violations.

Among them were filthy garbage chutes; unapproved and improper electrical wiring; a leaky pressure valve in the heating system: poorly painted halls and lobby areas; broken windows; and defective toilets.

Tenant spokesperson Kirmet Rooney said that security in the building is very poor, as evidenced by the recent rash of mysterious break-ins and burglaries. Many tenants believe the break-ins are "inside jobs" designed to promote suspicion among themselves and thereby weaken the rent strike.

In a recent incident, a woman tenant was viciously manhandled by the Oakland Police Department after ex-apartment manager John Ford charged her with assaulting his wife.

The incident occurred when Ms. Betty Crumpter went to ask if she could help a fellow tenant whose apartment had been broken into while he was sick in the hospital in Los Angeles.

Ford's wife told the tenant. Mr. Morris, a 33-year employee of Amtrak, not to talk to Mr. Crumpter. When Morris refused and Ms. Crumpter protested at Mrs. Ford's interference. Ford called the police.

Upon their arrival, they barged into Ms. Crumpter's apartment dragged he out. Handcuffed her and beat her brutally as they took her to a waiting paddy wagon. She was placed in a "mental" hospital but later released.

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Will Assume Student-Teaching Job This Month: Huey Returns To Merritt College

(Oakland, Calif.) - Huey P. Newton returns to Merritt College.

Following the unamious vote of the Peralta Community College District Board of Trustees last week, the Black Panther Party President will assume a non-paying student teacher job sometime later this month.

The teaching position was made in agreement with the University of California, Santa Cruz campus, where the BPP's chief theoretician is enrolled as a Ph.D. candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies, a post-graduate doctoral course covering the fields of history and social consciousness (philosophy, psychology and sociology).

The course Huey will teach at Merritt involves psychology and Black Studies.

It was while he was an undergraduate at Merritt College (then on Grove Street in North Oakland) in the mid-1960's that Huey formed the Black Panther Party (for Self-Defense) in October, 1966.

Although Merritt has since been moved to a spot overlooking the city, a famous Black History mural -- which includes portraits of early Black Panther Party members, including Huey and Bobby Hutton, the first BPP member and the first slain by the police -- was preserved and also moved to the college's present site.

Huey's brother, Melvin Newton, is a professor at Merritt and is chairperson of the school's Liberal Arts Department.

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Corporate Lobbying Effort Called “Frightenig”: Big Business Defeats Consumer Agency Bill

(Washington, D.C.) -- The House of Representatives last week killed a bill to create a federal office of consumer representation, legislation sought by leading consumer advocates for over a decade.

The legislation's defeat, by a 227 to 189 vote, was bitterly denounced by prominent consumer advocate Ralph Nader. "The corrupting influence of big business campaign contributions, promised or withdrawn, has never been more clear than in the last few days….," said Nader in blasting the House for foresaking consumer interests in the face of a massive lobbying effort by business interests to defeat the bill

"Those members who today voted against the consumer should know that consumers will organize to vote against them tomorrow," Nader warned.

The bill would have shaken up the widely criticized federal consumer bureaucracy by abolishing 26 consumer interest offices and creating instead a more potent centeral agency empowered to intervene on behalf of consumers to make government regulatory agencies more accountable and responsive to consumer interests.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce spearheaded the fight against the consumer bill.

"I've been up here for 25 years and have never seen such intensive lobbying," said Speaker of the House Thomas P. O'Neil. Jr. In a last minute appeal the House Speaker urged his colleagues to forget whatever promises they may have made to business interests opposing the legislation.

Following the defeat of the measure, White House consumer aide Esther Peterson was moved to comment, "The big black suits have been in the corridor." The aide to President Carter said she was frightened by this show of "corporate power."

Ms. Peterson said the White House would continue to support consumer representation in government, possibly by executive order. However, House supporters of the legislation charged that the White House had done little effective work after announcing that the bill was a high priority. They charged that Carter had helped defeat the bill by his own campaign complaints about too many government agencies and too much regulation, conservative clinches echoed repeatedly by House members who opposed the legislation.

Those who argued in favour of the bill, which was considerably watered-down from what its supporters were seeking even last year, said that the agency was necessary to give some balance to the overwhelming ability of business to influence the regulatory process and other governmental functions with lawyers. public relations experts, lobbyists and other paid officials.

"The imbalance is 50 to 1; 100 to 1 on most issues, "Representative Toby Moffett of Connecticut said in debate.

Three times previously the consumer agency bill has been taken up by Congress without being enacted. The last time, in 1975, similar measures were adopted by both nouses. But, after President Ford said that he would veto the measure, the houses did not attempt to reconcile the differences between their bills and send a final measure to the White House.

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This Week In Black History

February 21, 1965

Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 19, 1925, the future Black leader spent his early childhood in Lansing, Michigan. His father. Rev. Earl Little, was a Baptist minister, and, in his son's words, "a dedicated organizer" for Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association. Rev. Little died mysteriously in 1931. his body cut in half after being placed on a railroad track. His family believed that he was attacked by White racists.

Following Rev. Little's death. Malcolm and his seven brothers and sisters were split up. The state welfare agency claimed that Mrs. Little was mentally incapable of taking care of her children and put her in a mental institution.

After finishing the eighth grade, Malcolm moved to Boston, his older, half-sister Ella taking legal custody of him. Never returning to school. The teenage Malcolm held numerous jobs. He eventually moved to New York where he turned to petty crime, alternately living as a hoodlum, thief, dope peddler and a pimp.

While serving a nearly seven-year sentence in a Massachusetts prison, Malcolm became a convert to the then Nation of Islam (now the World Community of Islam in the West). Upon his release from prison in 1952. he became a minister in the Nation, rising to become its fiery chief spokesperson before being suspended by the late Elijah Muhammad in November, 1963.

A holy pilgrimage to Mecca led to Malcolm's conversion to Orthodox Islam in 1964. Later that year, he founded the Organization of Atro-American Unity (OAAC), which embodied self-determination and self-defense for Black people.

He was assassinated on February 21, 1965. in Hartem's Audubon Hotel.

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“Artichoke”: Latest C.I.A. Disclosure: Involuntary Assassins

(Washington, D.C.) A 1954 CIA project to carry out political assassinations committed by persons unknowingly subjected to mind-control drugs was revealed in newly released government documents last week.

The plot was disclosed in a series of 1954 memorandums made public under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents were prepared as part of a project sometimes known by the code name "Artichoke," one of four CIA programs to conduct mind-control experiments from 1949 to 1974, when the efforts were allegedly terminated.

Several groups have studied the documents from the standpoint of whether they may provide any evidence in the continuing inquiries into the assassinations of President Kennedy or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Members of a nonprofit group, the Assassination Information Bureau. said that the security officer for the "Artichoke" project, Sheffield Edwards. was later the CIA man assigned to form the assassination team that made attempts on the life of Prime Minister Fidel Castro of Cuba.

The Bureau's conclusion is supported by a Senate Intelligence report and CIA docu-released under the Freedom of Information Act.

According to the latest documents, a team from the project, which usually included interrogation experts, drug experts and psychiatrists or psychologists, was asked to "give an evaluation" of the following "hypothetical

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problem" in January, 1954:

"Can an individual of (deleted nationality) descent be made to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily under the influence of Artichoke?"

The memorandum, which like most documents released by the agency has names of individuals, government agencies or locations deleted, described the following "problem.":

"As a 'trigger mechanism,' for a bigger project, it was proposed that an individual, of (deleted) descent, approximately 35 years old, well educated, proficient in English and well established socially and politically in the (deleted) government be induced under Artichoke to perform an act, involuntarily, against a prominent (deleted) politician or if necessary, against an American official."

At another point it noted that "access to the subject would be extremely limited, probably limited to a single social meeting."

The memorandum went on: "Because the subject is a heavy drinker, it was proposed that the individual could be surreptitiously drugged through the medium of an alcoholic cocktail at a social party, Artichoke applied, and the subject induced to perform the act of attempting assassination at some later date.

"After the act of attempted assassination was performed, it was assumed that the subject would be taken into custody by the (deleted) government and thereby 'disposed of,'" the memorandum said.

The project team reported that it did not think the plan feasible because it would have "insufficient control over the subject." Moreover, it said, he would be "unwitting" and the team's access to the subject would involve both "cleared" personnel -- CIA employees -- and "uncleared" personnel.

"Whether it was carried out or not under crash conditions and appropriate authority from head-quarters, the Artichoke team would undertake the problem in spite of operational limitation," the memorandum said.

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Military Aid Continues: U.S. Whitewashes Human Rights Violations Of Allies

(Washington, D.C.) -- While criticizing several of its allies for human rights violations in a carefully worded State Department report released last week, the Carter administration reduced military aid to only one, because of "strategic and political" considerations.

The 426-page document, the second annual report on human rights practices in the 105 countries that receive U.S. aid or buy American weapons, was prepared for Congress and released jointly by the House International Relations Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Israel, the Philippines, the Nationalist Chinese government on Taiwan, South Korea and Iran were among the U.S. allies cited for human rights violations by the State Department. Nicaragua, which is presently undergoing political turmoil due to the popular uprising against the repressive regime of President Anastasio Somoza, was the only country to receive reduced aid from the U.S.

Israel -- described as "a full-fledged parliamentary democracy" -- was accused of "extreme physical and psychological pressure" in interrogating Prisoners in occupied Palestinian territory.

The Philippine government was cited for corruption so pervasive as to hamper aid to the poor and for torturing political prisoners and detaining hundreds without charges or trials.

The Taiwan government, accused by the Carter administration on the one hand of operating under martial law conditions, was praised due to the decrease of reports of cruel, inhuman or degrading forms of punishment.

Despite the notorious reputation of the Iranian government for violating human rights, the State Department report shied away from sever criticism of the Middle East regime.

The report said that he Iranian government "has dealt firmly -- at times harshly -- with persons from both left and right" charged with committing acts against the state. The country's court system was praised for "some potentially significant improvements." Also, the Shah's regime, according to the White House, is "committed to prison reform."

Concerning South Korea, also known throughout the world for its human rights violations, the report alleged that torture is not now "regularly employed" in the Asian country and that the infringement on political liberties is "the heart of (Korea's ) human rights problems."

This year's report is a marked departure from that of last year, which denounced human rights violations in Argentina and Brazil to the point where both Latin American countries responded with outrage. Brazil broke a 25-year-old military treaty with America, and Argentina ended its aid relationship with the U.S.

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While administration officials emphasize Carter's commitment to curbing authoritarian practices by both hostile and friendly governments, they also concede Carter has slowly adopted a more measured, cautious approach to the issue, in part because of the fears aroused by the policy among allies and adversaries alike.

This shift has not gone unnoticed on Capitol Hill, where the administration is coming under attack by both liberals and conservatives.

The human rights report is expected to increase the level of criticism, particularly from those who assert that by making heavy reductions in military aid only to Nicaragua in next year's budget, the administration has turned a blind eye to abuses in nations of far greater political significance, such as Iran, South Korea and the Philippines.

"It is hard to resist the conclusion that the administration is kicking the little guys while they are leaving the big boys alone," commented a Congressional aide.

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Civil Libertarians Score Loopholes: Senate Bill To Curb Intelligence Abuses Introduced

(Washington, D.C) - After three years of investigating the hideous and sometimes murderous crimes of the U.S. intelligence community in the continuing post-Watergate fallout -- among them the notorious FBI CONTELPRO, CIA assassination plots and disruption of progressive Third World governments, and unprecedented, massive political spying and intrusion on civil liberties -- the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last week introduced legislation to curb intelligence abuses.

The legislative package contains an outright ban on political assassinations, and is intended to limit the scope of covert operations abroad and protect the civil liberties of Americans against interference by the intelligence community.

PROPOSALS

The proposals cover the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the intelligence operations of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Defense. It would create a director of national intelligence and formalize a command structure similar to one set forth in President Carter's executive order on intelligence reorganization last month.

If these legislative charters become law, they would supercede Carter's order. Debate is expected to last nearly a year.

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The initial reaction of civil libertarians was critical and underscored numerous loopholes. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued a statement that praised the proposals for containing more protections than Carter's order but added that "unfortunately these important principles,' such as judicial search and eavesdropping warrant requirements and limitations on political investigations, "are nearly overwhelmed by exceptions in the draft charters, and other principle are overlooked entirely."

The package contained the following major proposals:

- In foreign intelligence, the bill prohibits covert activities that "are likely to result in assassination, terrorism, torture…[or] the overthrow of democratic governments." The charter specifically prohibits political assassinations, but -- for some vague reason -- does not bar the killing of foreign agents abroad. The strange specification prohibiting only the overthrow of "democratic" governments is seen as a convenient loophole to intervene in the internal affairs of anti-Western, Third World governments.

- Domestically, The proposal attempts to prevent harassment programs, such as the COINTELPRO program, whose stated objective was to "disrupt, discredit or otherwise neutralize" militant Black organizations, by tightening up on how the agencies retain or distribute information from their files.

It also calls for the government to obtain search and electronic surveillance warrants from one of a panel of selected federal judges. Similar legislation previously submitted by President Carter was denounced by the ACLU for allowing the government to eavesdrop on persons "who are not even reasonably suspected of engaging in criminal activities." Widespread eaves-dropping on such persons as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. by the FBI has been exposed since 1975.

- The charter forbids the intelligence agencies to pay journalists, religious officials or academics in covert operations, but does not bar "voluntary" participation. It permits the establishment of bogus companies and the infiltration of private American institutions of provide "cover." It still allows medical or scientific tests on human beings -- including behavior modification and mind-control experimentations -- under revised safeguards.

- The Bill would create a director of national intelligence, who would have budgetary control over the intelligence community and more centralized power than former directors of the CIA had, but it leaves the powerful National Security Agency under the Defense Department The bill would not prohibit the NSA's large-scale intrusions on domestic and international communications.

The bill calls for stiff penalties for "present or former government employees who deliberately disclose the identity of secret agents." The section is clearly aimed at stopping such leaks as Philip Agee's book, Inside the Company, which identified covert employees of the CIA several years ago.

Regardless the NSA proposals, a joint statement by the ACLU and the Center for National Security Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based civil liberties group, charged that if the charter legislation is approved by Congress if "would for the first time legitimize the use of the super-secret NSA to conduct surveillance of Americans."

The security agency has been embroiled in controversy. In 1976, the Senate Intelligence Committee reported that the agency had developed files on some 75,000 American citizens on the basis of information intercepted by what have been called its "electronic vacuum cleaners in the sky."

The number of employees of the NSA, the size of the budget and how it goes about intercepting and decoding electronic messages are among the most tightly held secrets of the government.

The ACLU/Center for National Security Studies statement said: "The sweeping NSA technology would be limited by a warrant procedure for 'targeting' U.S. persons, but unlike other forms of electronic surveillance the NSA practices would continue to involve routine interception of millions of 'untargeted' private communications."

David L. Watters, the Washington, D.C. representative of the American Privacy Foundation, charged that the proposed legislation would expand the security agency's activities beyond what is currently lawful, develop the equivalent of an "official secrets act" and give the agency a monopoly on methods of preserving personal privacy.

"For all these reasons," Watters said, "the proposed NSA charter represents a profound threat to America's freedom."

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For Informers 'Rights: Webster Confirmed As New F.B.I. Director

(Washington, D.C.) -U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William H. Webster was confirmed by voice vote on February 10 to a 10-year term as director of the FBI.

The nomination of Webster, 53, who will succeed retiring FBI Director Clarence Kelley to become the third permanent head of the Bureau, was strongly opposed by Black groups because of the federal judge's membership in four all-White social clubs in St. Louis.

During two days of testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee's confirmation hearings, Webster said he had no plans to resign from the clubs, which include the Noonday Club, the Mysterious Order of the Veiled Prophets, the St, Louis Country Club and the University Club. (See last week's issue of THE BLACK PANTHER.)

The Carter administration's selection of the appeallate judge for FBI chief was no doubt based on Webster's opinion on FBI informers, handed down last October in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Young Socialist

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Alliance (YSA) lawsuit against government spying and disruption, the Militant reports.

The SWP and YSA have demanded the complete files of 18 informers the FBI admits spied on the two groups. Evidence has already shown that informers not only inform, they also carry out burglaries and COINTELPRO disruption plots.

When Judge Thomas Griesa, who is presiding over the SWP and YSA case. ordered the FBI to show the files to YSA and SWP attorneys, the government appealed to three-judge panel that included Webster.

The three appeals judges decided that they had no legal grounds to reverse Griesa's order. But Webster and Judge Van Graafeiland issued an opinion urging Griesa to reconsider his ruling anyway.

Webster and the other judge felt compelled to "express our concern" that allowing the attorneys to see the evidence on informers would lead "to unnecessary rummaging in government files."

Webster and Van Graafeiland warned that allowing anyone to see the informer files "is likely to compromise the fundamental public policy underlying the [informer] privilege."

"Informer privilege" is the legal doctrine which the FBI uses to cover up its informers 'crimes. According to this "privilege" informers have the right to complete secrecy -- no matter what they do.

Now that Webster, as FBI chief, will be a defendant in the socialists' lawsuit instead of its appeals judge, he will probably be even more concerned about keeping the records secret.

Add to his appreciation of informers Webster's ruling in a controversial police case in St. Louis. When he excused the cops of wrongdoing, Webster explained that it was "unrealistic" to think police work can be error free.

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Two Charges Dropped Against Indicted Agent: New York F.B.I. Cited For Illegal Acts- No Prosecutions

(New York, N.Y.) -The head of New York's FBI office and 26 agents have been named as unindicted co-conspirators in a case involving mail tampering and illegal wiretapping in searching for radical fugitives.

According to a Justice Department "bill of particulars" filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan last week, J. Wallace LaPrade and his agents conspired with John Kearney, the former FBI supervisor in New York who is the only defendant in the case, to spy on the Weathermen in the early 1970's. (The Weathermen group is a spin-off of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which came into prominence as one of the leaders of the anti-war movement during the late 1960's.)

At the same time, U.S. District Court Judge Kevin T. Duffy threw out two of five counts charging Kearney with mail tampering in the conspiracy.

Kearney is the first FBI agent ever indicted. He was charged last April in connection with his command of Squad 47, a "Red Squad" unit assigned to "neutralize" the Weathermen.

Judge Duffy ruled in favor of a motion by Kearney's lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, that the two counts should be dismissed because of a technical error in the grand jury indictment.

Duffy dismissed two counts charging numerous illegal mail openings based on a minor technicality: that each count charged more than one offense, violating a rule that requires a separate count for each offense charged. Duffy also ruled that one count charging a number of illegal wiretaps might be narrowed down to specify a single offense, but remarked that "there is some doubt" that the government prosecutors could succeed in doing this.

A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Robert Fisk said it was unlikely the government would appeal Duffy's ruling. He said the prosecution could seek to reindict Kearney on the mail charges in a way that would conform to the ruling, or proceed

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to trial with the remaining counts.

Kearney's lawyer is expected to challenge the two other counts in the indictment on other grounds. Those two counts charge a conspiracy to open mail and a conspiracy to tap telephones.

Last December, the five lawyers who had been conducting the Justice Department probe quit in protest over the government's refusal to seek indictments against other FBI agents involved in the illegal activities against the Weathermen.

Attorney General Griffin Bell has previously said that he is waiting for the Kearney case to go to trial before the government seeks indictments against other agents or members of the Bureau hierarchy in connection with the illegal FBI wiretaps. mail tampering and burglaries.

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Cointelpro Plots Against Republic Of New Africa Revealed

(Jackson, Miss.) -- More disclosures of FBI "dirty tricks" against the Provisional Government, Republic of New Africa (RNA), in Detroit and Mississippi came to light here this week as RNA investigators pored over 1,000 pages of recently released files.

Among the startling discoveries was a document showing that the FBI fingerprint lab was not prepared to support its claim that a palm print found on a supposed murder rifle really belonged to RNA Vice President Hekima Ana.

This FBI deception changed defense strategy and played a major role in a jury verdict of guilty to first degree murder for Hekima and two other men. They were convicted on state charges for the death of a Jackson police lieutenant who was among 40 policemen and FBI agents who besieged the RNA residence during the early hours of August 18, 1971. The police and agents claim they had come to serve a fugitive warrant. The wanted man was not at the house.

The newly released pages also reveal a frantic effort in the days after the shoot-out, on the part of the FBI and federal prosecutors, to find some charge which would stick against RNA President Imari Obadele. Obadele and three others had been arrested at the RNA office, several blocks away, where no shooting occurred.

At one point FBI Director Hoover is advised that the state of Mississippi had lodged charges of "waging war against the state treason charges, "in order to hold" Obadele and the three others arrested at the office with him. In another memo, the Jackson FBI complains to Washington headquarters of the "magnitude of the problem faced by local and federal officials in convicting Henry (Obadele's former name)."

In another previously-suppressed memo Justice Department attorneys beseech the Washington field office for any "statements (of Obadele) which could be construed as initiating the conspiracy. "The Washington field office could produce nothing adequate, but Obadele was later charged, along with eight others, with conspiracy to assault federal officers and sentenced to 12 years. He is currently at Atlanta Penitentiary. A federal habeas corpus appeal for him is expected to be argued this spring in Philadelphia.

As the federal trial approached,

-- 8 --
the newly released documents show the FBI in Mississippi became outraged at the Justice Department in Washington. The Justice Department apparently considered its case too weak to go to court even in Mississippi.

As a result the Jackson FBI called upon Senators Eastland and Stennis to intervene. Not long afterwards Elliott Richardson, then attorney general, talked with the FBI head in Mississippi for "clarity." He then personally gave the go ahead for prosecution.

The Jackson FBI warned: "if this case is not vigorously pursued and charges are dropped, publicity in this matter will be spread to all extermist organizations throughout the United States by the RNA. (Obadele's) previous public statements can leave little doubt that he would utilize such action to increase his own stature."

The federal prosecution lied in denying that President Obadele and the RNA were COINTELPRO targets or that such a program existed. RNA targeting was not admitted until March, 1977, months after President Obadele and the two other RNA defendants on bail had returned to jail.

Finally, the FBI takes credit for producing stories in the Detroit News in 1969 by reporters Don Ball and Michael Maharry, promoting a so-called "split" between President Obadele and his brother, attorney Milton R. Henry, both then RNA officers.

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People's Perspective

South Carolina Kills E.R.A.

(Columbia, S.C.) -- The South Carolina Senate, after four hours of debate, voted 25 to 2 to kill a resolution to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution. ERA has been ratified by 35 states but must be approved by three more states by March 22, 1979, in order to amend the Constitution. Three states who ratified ERA have withdrawn their approval, although the legality of these withdrawals is under investigation. Recently the Alabama state senate rejected ERA by a 24 to 8 vote.

Record Tax Breaks

(Washington, D.C.) - A new Treasury Department study reveals that 1.4 per cent of U.S. taxpayers, those with incomes of $50,000 a year or more, reaped 31 per cent of all" authorized" tax breaks for individuals. These benefits mean $84 billion lost in tax revenues, in addition to $28 billion lost due to special benefits for corporations. Very few of the tax benefits are focused on those making $20,000 a year or less yet they account for 62 million of the 88 million individuals who filed 1977 tax returns.

Jobs Decrease

(Washington, D.C.) - A study prepared by the Public Interest Research Group reports that every time the U.S. defense budget increases by one billion dollars, some 11,600 jobs are lost. The jobs are lost due to the fact that military spending produces fewer jobs than investing in other areas would, and thus the current $107 billion military budget is costing a minimum of 1,240,000 jobs.

Nix Racist Union

(Newport News, Va.) - After years of repeated attempts, a victory was scored by the United Steel Workers Union at the Tenneco shipyard in Newport News, Virginia. Led by Black workers, the 20,000 workers at the shipyard voted out the company union which had been entrenched since 1939. Tenneco is Virginia's largest private employer and has a long history of racist practices and wage and benefit cutbacks.

Burke To Run

(San Francisco, Calif.) -- U.S. Representative Yvonne Braith-waite Burke, a Congressional Black Caucus member, announced her candidacy for state attorney general last week. Burke, who has worked closely with the federal courts, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and the California Assembly Criminal Justice Committee, will be opposing Los Angeles City Attorney Burt Pines for the democratic nomination.

Charges Dropped against Hawaiians

(Honolulu, Hawaii) - A federal judge has dismissed charges against 22 Hawaiians charged with "trespassing" on Hawaiian land under U.S. Navy control. This is the second time in two months that the U.S. military failed in its attempt to block civilians from returning to Kahoolawe Island, which the Navy has used for bombing practice since 1941.

Although a 1953 Presidential order gave the Navy control of the island, the decree also stipulates that the island be returned to civilians when no longer needed by the military. The Ohana movement has vowed to struggle until the Navy stops its needless daily bombing runs and the island is returned to the Hawaiian people as an historical and cultural sanctuary.

Children's Commercials Hit

(San Francisco, Calif.) - The locally-based Committee on Children's Television and Consumers Union filed a petition with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week to end all television commercials which exploit trusting pre-schoolers and young children. The petition states that "children are highly vulnerable to the claims and influence of commercial advertisers and don't understand that the presentations are designed only to sell."

Special Admissions Threatened

(San Francisco, Calif.) - A proposal by the University of San Francisco Law School dean which would reduce the special admissions program from 50 to 10 students faces widespread student and community opposition. A demonstration and rally were held recently when the proposal was presented to the faculty for their vote, the outcome of which has yet to be announced.

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C.I.A. Director Addresses Secret Group Of Corporate Presidents

(San Francisco, Calif.) - CIA Director Stansfield Turner was here last week to address a mysterious, secret organization of 550 corporate presidents who are strangely paranoid over media coverage.

The organization, the Young Presidents Organization (YPO), is composed of the elite of the corporate world. The 550 delegates who were meeting in San Francisco's Fairmont and Stanford Court hotels described their secret group as an "international education association of 3,500 corporate presidents."

To qualify for membership in the YPO, one has to have become the chief executive of his company before the age of 40, provided that the company has annual sales of roughly $2 million.

Although on the surface the YPO convention appeared to be no different than other business conventions, nearly all of the delegates displayed a cloak-and-dagger attitude.

When asked to explain why their group was so secretive, YPO delegate Ben Gilgore explained very sharply, "Most businessmen prefer not to speak to newspaper people period, whether or not they're part of this organization."

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To Fight Other Charges: A.I.M. Leader Leonard Peltier Acquitted

(Milwaukee, Wisc.) - American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Leonard Peltier recently won a major court victory when he was acquitted on trumped-up charges of attempting to murder two off-duty Milwaukee cops.

After the jury composed of six Blacks and six Whites, delivered the not guilty verdict, Peltier's supporters wept, embraced and cheered in the corridors of the courtroom which they had packed throughout the nine-day trial.

The attempted frame-up of the AIM activist was the focus of nationwide attention, with Peltier's supporters staging numerous mass rallies in Milwaukee before and during the trial.

The courtroom proceedings were attended by Native American spiritual leader Leonard Crow Dog, AIM activist Clyde Bellecourt and AIM National Chairman John Trudell.

Peltier was one of AIM's most capable organizers, leading the Wisconsin contingent to Washington, D.C., in 1972 in the "Trail of Broken Treaties" protest. Peltier's supporters charge that the AIM leader's participation in the Washington, D.C., protest, only two weeks before the Milwaukee incident, was the real motive for the attempted frame-up.

With the victory in Milwaukee, Peltier's supporters gained new impetus in the battle to win the AIM leader's release from Marion federal prison in Illinois, where he is serving two life terms for "aiding and abetting" in the deaths of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1975. A new appeal hearing has tentatively been scheduled for March 2 in St. Louis.

In the Milwaukee trial, detailed testimony by two Native American women who witnessed the 1972 incident could not be refuted by the prosecution.

TEXAS RESTAURANT

Verla and Loretta Ford both testified that when they entered the Texas Restaurant on November 22, 1972, two men were laughing and gesturing and pointing at a table where Peltier and two companions were eating. They said that when Peltier and his companions went to pay their bill, the two men followed them.

A minute later, the Ford sisters testified, the door burst open as one of the men wrestled Peltier back inside the restaurant. The other man came in a moment later waving a gun around. It was only at this point that the men identified themselves as off-duty police officers.

Both women testified that the officers beat and kicked Peltier. The sisters said they and their companions followed as the cops led Peltier out of the restaurant and watched in horror as the

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took turns beating Peltier while his hands were cuffed behind him.

Loretta Ford testified that after Peltier was placed in the back of a paddy wagon, "it looked like it was going to tip over… It was rocking from side to side. We could hear them scuffling… We just were all yelling or crying… I never saw anything like that before."

Peltier was charged with two counts of attempted murder in the incident. Ronald Hlavinka and James Eccel, the two off-duty officers (both of whom have quit the police force), claimed Peltier drew a gun and pulled the trigger after they had left the restaurant but it didn't fire.

The Ford sisters said that the only gun they saw was in the hands of one of the officers.

Under cross-examination, both Eccel and Hlavinka said that they had had "several" drinks before going to the restaurant. Hlavinka's hands were so swollen from beating Peltier that he missed three days of work because of it.

The role of the FBI in this case has come out in the courtroom. Contrary to standard procedure, the FBI, and not the Milwaukee police, interrogated witnesses in January, 1976, including Hlavinka and Eccel. Hlavinka said that the FBI never talked to him around the time of the incident, but a defense witness who was once engaged to Hlavinka challenged his story.

In a recent letter from prison Peltier said, "The U.S. thinks it can stop our movement by locking us in cells, but they're wrong." Despite six years of legal persecution, Peltier said in a recent interview, "I have made a commitment…to keep fighting until we win self-determination and sovereignty."

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Rights Violations In Murder Of Chicano: Federal Jury Convicts Ex-Houston Cops

(Houston, Tex.) - Three former Houston cops were convicted here last week for violating the rights of a Mexican-American prisoner. Jose Campos Torres, by beating him and throwing him into a downtown bayou where he drowned last May.

The three officers, Terry Denson, Stephen Orlando, and Joseph Janiste, were convicted on two counts of violating the civil rights of Torres, whose body was found floating in the Buffalo Bayou on May 8 of last year.

One of the counts, involving a violation of federal civil rights which results in death, is a felony, carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Federal prosecutors admit that this verdict was a compromise in that the defendants were not found guilty of additional charges that they had conspired to withhold information about the gruesome incident from a federal prosecutor.

Before reaching a verdict, an all-White jury had deliberated for over seven hours in what was an obvious case of gross police abuse.

The officers had already been convicted of negligent homicide,

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a misdemeanor, by an all-White Huntsville, Texas, jury and had received suspended sentences and $2,000 fines. The Chicano community became so infuriated by this that they threatened massive civil disobedience unless the federal government intervened.

Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe and other political leaders in the state were then forced to pressure the U.S. Department of Justice to seek indictments against the police officers -- not for murder, but for violating Torres civil rights.

Torres was arrested on May 5 of last year in a Houston tavern on charges of disturbing the peace. The 23-year-old Chicano was viciously beaten by the five officers (while handcuffed) before being taken to the police station for booking.

POLICE STATION

When he was finally taken to the police station the sergeant on duty ordered that Torres be taken to a hospital for treatment. Instead of being taken to a hospital. Torres was taken to Buffalo Bayou, where he had been beaten by the five cops previously.

According to sworn testimony, the officers spreadeagled Torres against a police car and after some discussion by the cops. Denson suggested. "Let's see if this wetback swim." Then Torres, who was drunk and wearing heavy clothing and Army combat boots. was thrown over a 16-foot concrete embankment. His body was found two days later.

A 20-year-old rookie police officer who had witnessed the incident Carless Elliott, reported the incident to his superiors after he learned of Torres' death. Elliott later became a key prosecution witness at both trials.

Mrs. Margaret Torres, the mother of the slain man, commented on the verdict saying that it "will not bring my son back, but it may keep some other sons from being hurt."

Following the first trial, when the officers literally walked away scot free, the Chicano woman was stunned with disbelief over the fact that the judicial system condoned the murder of her son.

However, the matter is not yet resolved since one of the lawyers for Officer Terry Denson boldly proclaimed that any time in the penitentiary "would be unacceptable" for the officers and that he would seek an appeal

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Black Activist Seeks Support For Kentucky Strike: Miners' Council Rejects Coal Pact

(Washington, D.C.) - The bargaining of the United Mine Workers (UMW) last week overwhelmingly rejected a proposed settlement of the nationwide coal strike in the face of widespread opposition by rank-and-file miners to provisions aimed at ending wildcat strikes.

The action occurred on the 69th day of the longest coal strike in the nation's history, one day after the Carter administration had ordered that plans be drawn up for emergency movement of coal to areas running critically short of fuel needed to produce electric power.

The contract was rejected by a 30-6 vote, with three members of the 39-member UMW council absent.

FEARED FOR LIFE

Claiming that he feared for his life, UMW President Arnold Miller delayed defending the contract at an earlier session of the council.

"I'm not going to present this contract to the council under conditions of mob rule," Miller said after telephoning the Associated Press from his home.

The "mob rule" Miller spoke of consisted of a demonstration by about 200 rank-and-file union members demanding rejection of the contract. They filled thee lobby and stairway of the union headquarters but left the building when asked to.

A straw vote later in the day by the bargaining council produced a 33-3 rejection of the proposed pact.

Miller has been under attack in the coal fields for agreeing to an industry proposal that would fine miners as much as $22 a day for engaging in wildcat work stoppages over safety and other local grievances.

UMW Vice President Sam Church said wage provisions of the contract appeared to be "generally acceptable" to the miners but they objected to provisions dealing with disciplinary procedures and the health and retirement funds.

The Carter administration met February 11 to draw up plans aimed at ensuring continued coal supplies for Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana and Pennsylvania, the four states hardest hit by the strike.

Department of Energy spokesman Frank Kelly said coal stockpiles at some utilities in the four states were as low as a 21-day supply.

Meanwhile, Black labor activist Bill Worthington, a leader of United Mine Workers in eastern Kentucky, was in the Bay Area recently in an attempt to gain support for the 17-month-old coal miners strike in Stearns, Kentucky, which has turned into a pitched, armed battle.

Bill Worthington takes stairs slowly. "It's not may age," he says. It's black lung, pneumoconiosis, A miner's chance of getting it after more than 20 years underground are 90 per cent. Worthington has been a miner for 33 years.

The Black miner recently toured northern California on behalf of the Stearns strikers. The miners have been out 17 months in an effort to win a union contract. The Blue Diamond Coal Company owns the mine and refused to negotiate with the 200 miners. No coal in moving and a strike leader says they'll stay out "until hell freezes over, thaws and freezes over again."

The media and the Bituminous Coal Operators Association

-- 20 --
(BCOA) have branded strikes over safety "wildcatting." Worthington and other miners call it the "right to withdraw."

The difference he says is not semantic, but political. "Miners who work at the face are able to see a lot of danger before anyone is killed. The liberty to withdraw would save a lot of lives."

Worthington says that in the coal fields, such actions are a "political thing. The coal operators control the local courts. They control the whole ball of yarn on a state level and that influences the federal level.

"On a federal level," he explained, "we have the right to withdraw, but local courts don't recognize that. It's always a local guy who decides whether or not it's a 'wildcat' and the way he holds his job is to go along with the political system."

In the spring of 1977 there was a series of job actions all over the coal fields. These drained the union's strike fund and many miners charged they were deliberately provoked in order to weaken the UMW in the face of the then upcoming negotiations.

"In union mines," Worthington explained, "we have a safety committee which must check dangers and then consult with management." The committee then requests repairs. In most cases, this spring, Worthington and the UMW say, the operators refused to make even minimal repairs. This left miners little choice.

"In regards to living or dying the men rightfully choose living and refused to go to work."

The dangers included loose rocks, faulty machinery, buildups of gases and little or no air. Federal regulations require 9,000 cubic feet of air at each face. When the level drops below that, miners can't breathe and dust builds up.

The mines in this country are the most dangerous place a man or women can work. In 1976, there were 141 deaths and 14,000 injuries officially recorded in the mines. In the entire world, there is only one other country with a worse safety record, South Africa. Worthington pointed out that in many cases the same corporations own controlling interests in South Africa and the U.S. The giant oil companies, he said, "control 40 per cent of the coal mines."

Turning to the black lung fight, one he's been in since the miners finally forced Congress to pass the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act in 1969, Worthington said that despite tremendous effort, "as yet, there's not a mine that's come into compliance with the mine health and safety act."

The 1969 statute for the first time mandated that any miner who'd spent 10 years or more in underground mines and had a respiratory disease, got it in the mines and should be compensated. It was legal, federal recognition of how deadly the nation's mines were.

The statute was only passed after massive demonstrations by disabled, crippled and retired miners and the Farmington, West Virginia, mine disaster where 78 miners died in a mine explosion.

-- 11 --

“Mill Workers Need Protection”: Threads Of Discontent; Trouble In Textile Industry

(New York, N.Y.) - Otis Edwards is Black, 67, retired and has brown lung, a respiratory disease. He spent 44 years working in cotton mills in North Carolina, first outside shovelling coal, then inside loading dye kettles, and finally, the last 23 years before he retired, cleaning cotton and lint dust off the carding machines for the J.P. Stevens Company in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina.

He saw World War II come, White male workers drafted into the armed forces, and White women drafted into the mills to fill the labor gap. If there were any jobs left, and there usually were in the cleaning and maintenance category, Black workers got them.

Edwards was at work in the mill in July of 1965 when the Civil Rights act of 1964 went into effect. The impact was immediate. Says Edwards, "They closed down all the departments and held a meeting. They said… all would use the same bathroom."

In the South it meant allowing Black workers to help White workers load dye kettles, or allowing Blacks to work in the same area as Whites. Segregation died hard.

It also meant a small increase in pay. At the Stevens mill, Edwards' annual salary went from $4,000 to $5,000 between 1971 and 1973. The Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) had a lot to do with the changes.

When the ACTWU made the J.P. Stevens Roanoke Rapids mills the first target of its efforts to unionize Southern textile workers in 1963, Black workers were ready to listen, and responded in far greater numbers than Whites:

"Mill workers need protection," says Edwards. "They need a union, especially Blacks. In fact, if it wasn't for Black workers

-- 25 --
in the mills there wouldn't be any union movement. The companies would only hire us to do the dirty work."

The J.P. Stevens Company is the nation's second largest textile firm. It has 85 plants in North and South Carolina, seven of them in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. In 1974, 3,500 workers (18 percent of them Black) in the seven plants voted for union representation.

Almost four years later, there is still no union. Stevens has doggedly and illegally evaded the collective bargaining process.

In North Carolina, which has "right to work" laws, there is no such thing as "no contract, no work." Should workers go out on strike, Stevens could, lawfully, hire an entire new work force to keep the mills running.

The union, instead of staging a walkout, has chosen to institute an international boycott of Steven's products (mainly towels, sheets and table linen, but also textile products in unfinished form).

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) recently moved to seek a national injunction against Stevens to prevent it from further interfering with the rights of workers to form a union. The federal courts have held the company in contempt on two occasions.

Many observers believe that if J.P. Stevens loses its case in this labor dispute, the New South will lose its advantage as a mecca for cheap labor.

-- 13 --

Oui Magazine Interview With Black Panther Party President: A Conversation With Huey P. Newton

Below, THE BLACK PANTHER reprints an in-depth interview conducted by Oui magazine with Black Panther Party President, Founder and chief theoretician Huey P. Newton, who will celebrate his 36th birthday on February 17.

QUESTION: What pressures prompted you to flee the U.S. in 1974?

HUEY: Well, first of all I was informed that there was a ten-thousand dollar contract out on my life. And the source of the information was a strange one -- the police chief of Oakland, Charles Gain. He said it in a statement to my attorney.

Q: Why did he tell you this?

HUEY: You'd have to ask him. Who knows what tangle of motives he could have had? The source of the contract, apparently, was the narcotics dealers of Oakland. They were very upset by the Panthers' campaign against heroin. This is what friends in the community told me. We got very little information out of Gain -- only the promise that he would investigate further.

WORST PROBLEM

But the worst problem, in some ways, wasn't the contract. I had been tailed for most of my adult life, and the effect was both exhausting and terrifying. People think you're being paranoid when you describe these situations to them. FBI agents would tail me everywhere -- into a grocery store or doughnut shop. When they followed me in a car, it was always bumper-to-bumper. This wasn't just local. This was everywhere. Their blatant lack of discretion would be difficult to exaggerate. When I arrived in Cuba, one of the difficulties of adjustment was that virtually for the first time in my life I wasn't being followed. It took a while for me to relax and drop my continual vigilance.

Q: You didn't meet Castro while you were in Cuba. Why not?

HUEY: I didn't ask to meet him and I guess he didn't ask to meet me, which is just fine. I think it's very impolite to go into someone's country and ask to meet their head of state. The question never came up really, but I think that after Robert Williams, Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver all denounced Cuba, the government was somewhat apprehensive about giving too much exposure to the so-called North American revolutionaries.

Q: Did you feel welcome in Cuba?

HUEY: Yes. When I first got there, they gave me a grand tour of the provinces, showed me all the schools and universities, construction sites, clinics, dams, and coffee and sugar production. They offered me a job as a university teacher, but I preferred to work in a cement factory.

Q: Why?

HUEY: Primarily to enhance my own understanding of the people. It was essentially a very good experience. Hard labor in Cuba is a very different thing from hard labor in the United States. In Cuba, a job is not only a job; it also becomes the very center of communication. We ended up spending weekends at the beach with our co-workers, who were like an extended family. When our toilet broke down, for example, I immediately went into a panic. I asked my wife, "Who do we call' Where is the central agency What do we do?" When we explained our problem to the people who shared our apartment building, they told us to report the problem to our fellow workers. I did, and some of the workers who knew about plumbing came out and repaired the toilet. I asked if I should pay. They said, "No, but, when something breaks down in our home we would like you to help us." I had undergone the collective experience.

Q: Do you think that the reason this could not work here is because of our form of government, or because Americans have a history of isolating themselves from each other?

HUEY: Both interreact to the point of being inseparable. If you create an environment where people are taught that they must supersede others in order to be happy, that will naturally breed mutual alienation. If you create an environment where people depend on each other, an environment where you promote cooperation rather than competition, then people will behave in a different way.

Q: But there are managers or "bosses" in Cuba, too.

HUEY: Yes, but the chief function of these managers is to do the administrative works. If changes are made on the job, it's done only with the consent of the workers.

Q: Is there a disparity in income between manager and worker?

HUEY: There is a difference in pay scales, but the difference isn't great: the lowest pay is 120 pesos a month, the highest is 400. Fidel gets 400. The average is roughly 250. I earned about 220.

Q: Are those who earn 150 a month envious of those who earn 250?

HUEY: Well, each job provides a school; the worker can go to school for two hours, three days a week, and promote himself in his job area. There is some competition, obviously, but it's not like it is here. The framework of the competition is friendlier. First of all, everyone is able to get his basic food. For a family of four you spend about 27 pesos a month. Rationing limits the extent of competition. I liked Cuba. You don't have the developed sense of community here. It's hard to communicate the reasons why the Cuban people can feel so much joy in long hours of work with so little pay.

Q: Why did you choose to live in Cuba rather than China?

HUEY: The Chinese culture is too different. I didn't feel at home when I visited China, although I appreciated what they share together. I appreciated the socialist state.

Q: Why didn't you get to meet with Mao?

HUEY: I had gone to China about six months before Richard Nixon. I had about four visits planned with Mao, but they kept on being cancelled because Western reporters would say that my planned talks with Mao would interfere with the planned Nixon visit. The Chinese would ask me why. I think that the U.S. is every bit as weird to them as China is to the U.S. At any rate, they decided to schedule a visit with Chou En-lai instead. He was a very intelligent, witty old man and was very curious as to how I had managed to survive in America. He complimented me for being courageous.

Q: Did you miss the Panther community while you were in Cuba?

HUEY: Yes, but I have developed "interior resources," and my comrades are always with me. It's the simple reality of having shared difficult experiences with people. Share them and you find the exchange continues.

Q: Did you think about returning to America all the time you were there?

-- 14 --

HUEY: Absolutely. Cuba was a good experience, but it was also difficult being in exile. This is my home.

Q: Didn't you arrive in Cuba on a rubber raft?

HUEY: Yes, but I don't want to talk about that experience. I'm saving it for my book.

Q: Do you think that the United States has changed enough in the last three years to provide you with a fair trial?

HUEY: I don't think a fair trial is in the realm of possibility after having an eighty-thousand-dollar bail inflicted on me. But, yes, I do hope to be acquitted. I think that the United States has changed enough that people are at least somewhat aware that the police can commit crimes, that the FBI and CIA can spy on private individuals, that the Armed Forces are an bastion of crazy people.

Watergate and Vietnam have altered America's awareness. Unfortunately, however, Americans feel helpless when they're stripped of their idealism. They have grown so accustomed to thinking everything is OK that when they find out it isn't, they give up.

Q: What difficulties do you face with the upcoming trial?

HUEY: I keep finding out more all the time. It's shocking, actually. There are the letters that different agencies put into circulation to discredit me. I've also discovered that a group of retired policemen from Berkeley and Oakland have banded together to get me. I found this out when I first got here. A friend -- a very conservative woman whose family has police affiliations -- told me about it. This is one example of how the U.S. has changed. A few years ago, she would have kept this to herself. But awareness of what has been afoot in America has definitely changed her consciousness. I also heard that the FBI was trying to use this police cellgroup.

Q: Why this "cell-group" of policemen, as you call it?

HUEY: You have to remember that there are bitter wounds from the Sixties that still haven't healed. Just a week ago the chief of police of Oakland [George Hart] was on television explaining that he understood that there was a cell of the Klan in the Oakland Police Department that had become active again. They were passing leaflets around in the locker room. I also think that there is a squad of retired police officers who are dedicated to tracking me and assassinating me. They hold me responsible for the whole free-speech movement in the Sixties, and of course I'm a chief target because [my case decision] was reversed and eventually dismissed on the accusation of killing a White police officer.

Q: Do you think the same forces are responsible for what happened in Richmond, California, where a person linked to you was shot while attempting to break into a house next door to a witness who was scheduled to testify against you?

HUEY: That's possible. A lot of things could have happened. It might have been a group of people who left the party a few weeks ago. Some of them opposed my coming back, and they couldn't stand another drain. Eighty thousand dollars in bail is a real financial drain on the party, on our whole standing in the community. Some people left because they were tired, just fatigued after sacrificing so much of their personal lives.

Q: Do you think they were trying to protect you in some sick way? Or were there agents who were putting them up to this?

HUEY: It could have been anything. My posture in the party while I was in prison was to eliminate the line of armed combat, and as a result many people left the party. Now I think that the conditions require that we take a different posture. Some people in the party disagree with my coming back and going through the judicial process. So it could have been people who disagree with my actions, or it could have been police involvement. It could have been people trying to make may case look bad, I don't know. I have never helped the authorities to do their job. We haven't had institutions that can give justice, so it's hard for me to even speculate about it. Let them bring charges against someone and let them try to solve that.

Q: Do you think this signifies that the authorities' attitude about you has returned to normal?

HUEY: Yes. They won't rest until I'm dead or in prison.

Q: So, are you again fearful for your life? Did you anticipate this when you came back from Cuba?

HUEY: Yes, But it's not a matter of fear. I'm conscious enough to know that nobody gets out of life alive, and that I won't and nobody else will. I always try to laugh at the funny things that happen on the way to the grave. I'm not afraid, because I'm cautious. I want to hang on to this form of existence as long as I can, but I'm aware that there's danger, so I watch what they're doing.

Q: Are you being followed now?

HUEY: No, not that I can tell, and that's sort of odd. Maybe it's because their technology has gotten so advanced that they're using satellites or something. I've come to the point where my joke is, "I want my tail back -- at least then I can see what's following me."

Q: Is there any possibility that you would jump bail?

HUEY: No. I think it would be ridiculous for me to return only to split again. There's no way, no possibility that I would leave the U.S.

Q: Was part of the reason you returned to the United States the hundred-million dollar lawsuit against the FBI and CIA?

HUEY: To some degree. But the main thing is that people are more conscious. Before, no matter how loudly we screamed, there was a sort of deafness. I don't even depend on the documentation that exists to extricate me. I believe that, based on the evidence and admissions of the last ten years, the American people are capable of understanding what the police can and will do. America may know for the first time how the police are capable of murder. If I can help prove it -- good.

Q: Do you think that without the intervention of the FBI and CIA the split with Cleaver might not have happened?

HUEY: I don't know. There was definitely all sorts of government activity in that direction. The FBI has never ceased to amaze me with their audacity. I found that there was a directive to open large bank accounts, withdraw funds and send check stubs around to my supporters to show I was living high on the hog. The FBI also sent letters to party members and friends, just after I got out of jail in 1970, saying that I had been released for the purposes of being an

-- 15 --
informer. The very fact that I, a Black man, was being released from jail -- especially with the charges against me -- made me look very suspicious. I have never read an account in history where a Black man in the North or South was accused of killing a White policeman and set free.

DOUBTS

So you have to understand that the doubts people had about me were very real. I think they were based much more on fear than rivalry. I did feel hurt by Eldridge, though. If I had received a letter accusing him of acting against the interests of the party, I would have gone to him about it. That is what friendship is all about. I was aware that people were talking about a split, so I arranged to go on TV with a hookup of Eldridge in Algeria to squelch the rumor the government was circulating. But there was Eldridge, denouncing me. Maybe he never was my friend.

Q: What happened with Bobby Seale? He left the party under mysterious circumstances a couple of years ago, and no one knows why.

HUEY: It's as much of a mystery to me, actually. He didn't talk to me about it beforehand -- I guess the pressure was such that he didn't feel he could, and that was very sad to me. I wished we could have talked about it, but he felt otherwise. It's one of a number of things that have made me sad over the years -- I guess I'm a very sad person, all in all.

Q: Did these incidents change how you felt about other fellow party members?

HUEY: Of course there was a very heavy emotional reaction. Trust is hard to achieve. But if you stop having faith in the people you work with, you're just cutting yourself off. There's a very delicate balance between self-reliance and mutual dependence that you have to learn to maintain. And when you are betrayed, you see that the betrayer has lost a very human connection. You feel a little sorry for them. Their betrayal has deprived them of the job of being able to trust.

Q: You appear a great deal less angry than you were ten years ago.

HUEY: I'm much more aware of the contradictions, the conflicts of interests, the contradictions inside myself and the contradictions in other people. It's taught me to be less harsh with others, to not regard them as lesser than myself. I find their difficulties inside myself, too. I understand now that people don't consciously work against their own interests. Many times, people work against their interests unconsciously. The primary problem is to lift consciousness. This doesn't necessarily preclude violence, but we try very hard to resolve problems in a different way. And when we have to hurt somebody, it's an act of tremendous sadness -- you are damaging yourself, your extended self, a part of your own organism.

Q: Is this change in attitude reflected in the party's policies?

HUEY: I wouldn't call it a change in attitude as much as a shift in emphasis. And I would qualify this further by going back to the very beginning, when we were patrolling the police force of Oakland in the mid-Sixties. We had guns, but they were registered. And we had books -- legal books -- that were just as much a part of our neighbourhood protective policies as the guns. Many news reports said that the Black Panther Party wanted to kill the police. That was nonsense. Our intentions were to keep the police from misusing their tremendous power over the neighbourhoods. Along with the defence programs, as we called them, we had the breakfast program, the drive to eliminate sickle-cell anemia -- where we tested over a half-million people -- and all of these things were overlooked. They had little dramatic value. Yet, if you read the FBI files, you see that Hoover's statement is that the Panthers' Breakfast for Children program was the most threatening single element about us -- more than our guns -- because it was so effective in the community. In Hoover's eyes, it was a form of infiltration.

Q: Why do you think you were his main target?

HUEY: I don't think it was me. I think it was the party.

Q: But doesn't the FBI perceive a party or movement in terms of leadership? Their strategy has been to force a group to disperse by destroying its leadership.

HUEY: That's one of our main problems to this day. I've always wondered why it was directed with such intensity at me. It's not logical.

Q: When you started roaming the streets of Oakland for your defense program, did you forsee that they were going to jack you up, put you in jail, try to kill you?

HUEY: I thought it might happen.

Q: Did your family get harassed by the FBI?

HUEY: They received some threats but, fortunately, did not receive the treatment I feared they might. It wasn't a long, grinding form of harassment that some people's families have undergone.

Q: Did your family eventually reconcile themselves to your stance?

HUEY: After I was arrested they unbent somewhat. My mother and father told other people that they supported my act, and it got back to me. Eventually they told me themselves. But it was difficult for them. I was moving in direct violation of their plans. They wanted me to go to music school, to go through law school, and I never fell in line. They had interpreted it as ingratitude when I railed against their plans.

Q: What struck you as wrong in these plans of your parents?

HUEY: They really didn't take into account a fundamental racism in our society that changes very slowly. We were poor. Those at the bottom strive to get out of the degradation and pain, but America has yet to develop a place for them to go. There is a sort of stairstep, mobile system for Whites to make the transition from one class to another. Nothing like it exists for Black Americans. Those few Blacks who get ahead are never really assimilated. They forget the old ways to learn the new, but in reality aren't accepted anywhere. Even though they get ahead, a line is eventually drawn somewhere, beyond which they cannot pass. Education becomes a form of alienation. An ambitious project or an adequate income cease being tools and become just another form of loneliness.

Q: But you went to college.

HUEY: Yes, but I did it on my own time. But I never forget how estranging academia can be, how absurd it often is.

Q: How did jail affect your thinking?

HUEY: I think I'm still finding that out; I'll be finding that out for the rest of my life. Certainly, spending three years in solitary confinement taught me the value of meditation.

Q: Was this the point where you were introduced to Zen Buddhism?

HUEY: I'm not sure I have ever been introduced to Zen Buddhism. I don't know if I understand Zen. After I got out of jail. I met Roshi Dick Baker and Baba Ram Dass, and we had a furious debate by correspondence. It started when Dick Baker kept pointing out to me that my way of putting things was essentially Christian. Ram Dass said, 'No, he isn't Christian; he's just alienated.' Of course, this worried me. No one wants to be alienated.

-- 16 --
So we started corresponding, Ram Dass and I. Somewhere along the line he decided that I wasn't alienated, because I started getting messages back from people who attended his lecture tours, saying that Ram Dass was saying positive things about me. But I don't know about Zen.

Q: Didn't Dick Baker say that you had achieved meditative states after he read your book Revolutionary Sucide?

HUEY: Yes, but I had to achieve some insight into myself or get crushed by the experience of solitary confinement. It was an either/or situation. But these ideas about meditation strike me as rather luxurious. It seemed to me that Dick Baker was trying to interpret my necessities according to his lights. I don't know if it was meditation or not. Baker kept on saying that I could not have achieved my insights without meditation. I kept on saying that I didn't use meditation. Then Baker would say that only saints don't need to meditate, and asked if I thought that I was a saint. This really bugged me. I never meditated but I'm not a saint. But Dick Baker and I understand each other pretty well, given the difference in vocabulary. And he does have a personal serenity that strikes me as an achievement.

Q: How would you describe your own religious perceptions?

HUEY: Well, I haven't developed a personal serenity. There have been times that I felt an absolute freedom, but -- it's funny -- each time I've experienced this, I thought it was absolute and permanent, and the whole sense would then vanish or last only a day or two at best. Then I'd start asking questions again. And as a matter of fact, I was in a greater state of anxiety after each one of these experiences than I was before I had them. I'm told that it's hard for an activist to understand the absurdity of activity. Baker said that I was hung up on action. I think nonaction is perfectly valid -- if you're in solitary confinement. What I learned in solitary confinement I use as I use all of my experience -- as a piece of equipment in battle.

Q: In short, you see meditation itself as a means to an end, where Baker sees it as an end itself.

HUEY: Well, that simplifies things. I'll put it this way: All the samurai were Buddhist but not all Buddhists were samurai. The way my exposure to Zen helped me was that it showed me that you don't move in anger, that you don't destroy for the sake of destruction. The universal understanding of oneness that Buddhists talk about is not much different from the Marxist definition of the universe as something dialectically interconnected. Both Buddhism and Marxism have accounts of the struggle of opposites based on the eternal contradiction of emotion and matter. Both imply that the individual ego is something that can become cancerous and destructive.

Q: Do you then consider yourself a fundamentally nonviolent person?

HUEY: Existence is violent; I exist; I'm violent in that way. The thing we are going to have to learn is how to turn work into creativity, play, entertainment. We must learn to entertain ourselves -- entertainment is redirected violence. It comes from violence, from the vital, directed forces, but it isn't a diminishment. The thing to do is to create a situation that enlarges rather than diminishes. But it's hypocritical, too, to pretend that existence is not violent. It's hypocritical -- the way vegetarians are hypocritical. They think they aren't harming anything, but a carrot screams too.

Q: How do you account for the disparity between public image and private man? When you were first released from jail in 1970 you were a hero -- "Free Huey" had been the battle cry for two years. You then went on a college lecture tour, and you lectured on Hegel and Immanuel Kant. You were expected to be a flaming rhetorician and here you were giving an introductory philosophy course.

HUEY: I really don't know. I'm not really an outgoing person. I'm not very charismatic. I'm not a good speaker and I'm a rather shy individual. I never did anything very herolike. I just worked on community programs.

Q: C'mon, you were the hero to millions when you got out of jail in 1970…

HUEY: Yeah, they freed Huey and then they wanted Huey to free them. But all the time, I wanted them to know that they freed Huey -- to know their own power -- so that they could free themselves. I would have been put in the gas chamber if they hadn't freed me. This was the power of the people; I never claimed any power in the whole thing. When I was lecturing, it was a real letdown. I was trying to teach -- which means giving what you have and letting others draw their own conclusions from it -- and this is very hard to do with a big crowd of people. The campus lecture tour was the worst experience I have had in my life. I lost fifty pounds during that time.

Q: Five or ten years ago it would have been impossible to imagine the chairperson of the BPP running for mayor of Oakland, or Elaine Brown becoming one of Governor Jerry Brown's delegates at the 1976 Democratic Convention. What's behind this shift?

HUEY: It's certainly not because of a fundamental shift in our political goals, which are socialist. Nor have we become a part of the Democratic Party's machinery. If there has been a shift, it's in the fact that we have one of the best organized local parties in the U.S. We have had to make some changes in tactics, but our goal has always been simply one of people gaining control over their community, and we're trying to do that now. The kind of unemployment we have now in the Black communities -- it's really a form of fascism, and that's a term we don't throw around lightly these days.

Q: Do you think that the school has much to do with the Panthers' gaining respectability?

HUEY: It may. A large corporation in Oakland gave us three thousand dollars and said we had the best private school in the area.

Q: Do you plan to extend it to a high school?

HUEY: Well, the kids who graduate at the age of twelve have finished high school; the school program is a tough, accelerated one. The next step is to create a university.

Q: What's next for you and the party in terms of programs?

HUEY: We think socialism is necessary. At this time we demand full employment, and people believe that they can be fully employed under capitalism so we push for that, as a way of proving that the system can't possibly accommodate full employment. And we push for it in the belief that the changes we envision will become tangible.

Q: Do you feel you've been typecast as a revolutionary?

HUEY: Yes. I think that since October of 1966, when the party formed, it's been very difficult for me to do the things that I would like, because people accepted the image that they made and they could never accept me doing many of the things that I think are important. They're afraid. Politicians are afraid to communicate and civic leaders are afraid to socialize, so they put me in a box. Since I've come back, I've really become aware for the first time that I'll never get out of that box. But it doesn't cause me too many problems any more.

-- 17 --

Intercommunal News: Tirivafi Kangai At Bay Area Zimbabwe Fundraiser: Z.A.N.U. Rep.--“We Will Crush The Rhodesian Government”

(San Francisco, Calif.) - Declaring that "we have the enemy on the run." Tirivafi Kangai, Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) chief representative in the United States, told a cheering crowd here last week that "total political power in Zimbabwe must be surrendered to the Patriotic Front."

Kangai's remarks came in a keynote speech at a benefit held at Everett Junior High School on Friday, February 10, and sponsored by the Zimbabwe Medical Drive Coalition (ZMDC). The ZMDC is a broadbased organization of Bay Area Black community and other progressive groups and individuals which is seeking to raise $50,000 to purchase badly needed medical supplies for the Zimbabwean people and the armed forces of the Patriotic Front.

It was Kangai's first time back in the Bay Area since his appointment last June as ZANU chief representative in the U.S. Prior to his new position, which necessitated a move to New York City, the popular young ZANU Central Committee member served ably as ZANU's Bay Area representative.

The theme of the evening's program was a "Night of Solidarity with the People of Zimbabwe." Messages of solidarity were delivered by Cecilia Guido, representing Non-Intervention in Nicaragua; Steven Guerra, national coordinator of the National Committee Against Grand Jury Repression; and Paul Smith, well known Bay Area activist in the American Indian Movement (AIM).

The Liberation Support Movement (LSM) presented an educational slide show detailing the current situation in Rhodesia, focusing on the numerous vicious attacks staged on Zimbabwean refugee camps in Mozambique by the Ian Smith regime.

Receiving a cheering, standing ovation, Kangai began by thanking the ZMDC for initiating the Medical Drive. Emphasizing the need for the Drive the ZANU chief U.S. representative explained:

"The people in our refugee camps in Mozambique are children, and old and defenseless people who ran away from Zimbabwe because their homes were destroyed by the rebel, minority, fascist Ian Smith regime.

"I call upon the Hispanic community, the Asian community, the White community and the Black community in the Bay Area to become more involved in this great Bay Area Medical Drive," he urged.

Kangai provided an informative analysis on the current status of the armed liberation struggle being waged by the Patriotic Front, which is composed of ZANU and the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU).

RALLY THE PEOPLE

"Our liberation movement has been able to rally all the people of Zimbabwe around armed struggle. We are now operating all across Zimbabwe and have semi-liberated 40 per cent of the countryside." Kangai said, noting that by "semi-liberated" he meant that the freedom fighters are constantly under attack.

The ZANU official then elaborated at length on the latest Anglo-American proposals for bringing Black majority rule to Rhodesia.

Attacking the proposals because of the provision giving control of the transitional government to Great Britain, Kangai emphasized. "The liberation movement in Zimbabwe has been fighting for 15 years. We have not been fighting so that Britain can be recognized. We have been fighting so that power can be surrendered to the people of Zimbabwe."

On the issue of United Nations peacekeeping forces in Rhodesia, Kangai said that in the past the world body has "failed dismally" when it sent such forces to

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troubled areas of the world. He cited such examples as the Belgian Congo (now Zaire). Cyprus, Korea and the Middle East.

"The people of Zimbabwe have been fighting to liberate our country, and we should be our own peacekeepers," Kangai declared.

He also criticized the Zimbabwe Development Fund, a scheme concocted by the Western powers to ensure continued economic power of the White minority in Rhodesia after the onset of Black majority rule.

"We see the Zimbabwe Development Fund as interference by the Western powers in the development of our country. We should develop Zimbabwe according to our own plan, "Kangai said.

He then went on to denounce the well-publicized talks being held in Rhodesia between Smith and Black puppet leaders Bishop Abel Muzorewa, Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole and Chief Jeremy Chirau.

Blasting the three men as "sellouts, Uncle Toms and traitors to the motherland," Kangai explained that the trio has agreed to the creation of a National assembly which would be composed of 72 Africans and 28 Whites. A 78 per cent majority would be needed to pass any law.

"But you won't even get that majority with Chirau, Muzorewa and Sithole," Kangai said, pointing out that there is no unity among the three men.

"I am taking time to explain these things," he continued, "because tomorrow we might be caught in a situation where these three stooges may say they have formed an African government and that the armed struggle should be stopped.

"They cannot call a ceasefire. The only people who can call a ceasefire are ZANU and ZAPU -- the Patriotic Front," the ZANU representative insisted, adding, "We are not fighting in Zimbabwe to be co-opted by the Rhodesian government."

Nearing the end of his rousing speech, Kangai pinpointed the basis for the 15-year-old armed liberation struggle against the Smith regime.

"We have always emphasized that the war in Zimbabwe is not a racial struggle. We are free people, regardless of the color of our skin, who are an exploited majority.

"Right now the exploiters happen to be Rhodesian Europeans, but tomorrow they may be the Sitholes. Tomorrow they may be the Muzorewas. Tomorrow they may be the Chiraus.

"We are fighting for our independence and dignity. We are gong to crush the enemy".

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Actros Seek Asylum: Winnie Mandela Given Suspended Sentences

(Bloemfontein, South Africa) -- Black South African activist Winnie Mandela last week received two suspended six-month prison sentences for visiting with her relatives and holding a conversation with her neighbors during which they discussed the price of a chicken.

Following the sentence, Mrs. Mandela, who has been banned to Brandfort, a small predominantly Afrikaans town near here since last May, marched defiantly through town surrounded by cheering, chanting supporters, Eight of them were arrested as they passed a police station singing and making Black power salutes.

The wife of imprisoned African National Congress (ANC) President Nelson Mandela, Mrs. Mandela, 43, was convicted for violating restrictions on her social life imposed by the South African government. Under the seven-year banning order enacted against

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her last May, she is not allowed to talk with more than one person at a time.

Nelson Mandela has served 14 years of a life sentence in the maximum security prison on Robben Island, 10 miles off Cape Town, and for the past 16 years his wife has lived under various restriction orders. The home to which Mrs. Mandela is now confined has no running water or electricity.

Commenting on the severity of the charges against Mrs. Mandela, her attorney told the court: "If the accused is imprisoned for discussing the price and size of a chicken, there must be something wrong with our justice and administrations."

Meanwhile, in Toronto, Canada, eight Black South African actors last week sought political asylum, declaring that it would be dangerous for them to return home because of their role in a play critical of South Africa's racial policies.

The five men and three women members of the South African Jabula players presented themselves to Canadian immigration authorities and filed applications for refugee status.

Sources with the acting troupe said they feared reprisals from the White minority government because a commentary in their production at Toronto's O'Keefe Center last month was critical of the apartheid system and contained references to murdered Black Consciousness Movement founder Steve Biko.

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New Markets For Multinationals: Police Attack Protesters In Tokyo Airport Seige

(Narita, Japan) - After a day-long battle, police last week moved in with fire hoses and tear gas and forced a group of students and farmers from a fortress-like structure erected to protest Tokyo's new international airport.

Thirty-six people, most of them students, were arrested.

The airport, located 50 miles from Tokyo in the town of Narita, is scheduled to open late next month. It has been a frequent target of bitter armed protest by farmers, who object to having their land confiscated for runways, and left-wing students who have supported the farmers' plight.

Protests by farmers and students have delayed the opening of the airport by several years. The Jap