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FREE THE NY 21 AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS
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PREMIERE SHOWINGS IN AMERICA
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THE STORY OF A POLITICAL ASSASSINATION
The film "Z" is based on a true incident in Greece. For the usual,
obvious reasons, the film was shot elsewhere (Algeria) and the country is superficially
un-identifiable.
The subject, briefly, is the story of a certain Lambrakis, played by Yves Montand) an "agitater" against the installation of capitalistic military bases in his country who, with the complicity of the power structure, is assassinated. The one man, the Prosecuting Attorney, who seeks the truth, is menaced and constantly threatened, but by his own teeth and hair, survives.
The film was done by: Costa Gavrras, a Greek refugee whose parents have been persecuted since the Second World War for their leftist activities. He lives in France, is married to Michele Reye, the journalist who did the Ramparts story on Guevara's death and was captured (????) by the Viet Cong.
The actors include Irene Papas, Greece's greatest actress, who has voluntarily exiled herself. Also, Yves Montand (always politically affiliated as well as his wife Simons Signoret).
The script, based on a novel, is by Jorge Semprun and Gavras. Semprun is a Spanish refugee who also wrote "La Guerre est Fini" which Resnais did.
The cinematographer is Raoul Coutard, himself a celebrity due above all to Godard. The music is by MIKOS THEODORAKIS, who did "Zorba the Greek" and is still imprisoned on a Greek island as a subversive. One can be prosecuted today in Greece for merely playing his records.
The story -- a denunciation of the industrial-military complex and its fascist police tactics -- is in color and 35mm. It has been a great success in Paris due to the "politisation" following the events of May of last year. It was also at present the official French entry at the Cannes Film Festival and won best actor.
The producer -- an actor in the film, Jacques Perrin, and Gavras have agreed to lend the film to the Peace and Freedom and Panther coalition between June 5 and 10. The film could not come earlier, as the Cannes Film Festival requirement is that all films be exhibited only in their initial country before the Festival.
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THE CIA AS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER
President Nixon has made a surprising alliance with certain forces of black
militancy. This may seem audacious, even dangerous, like playing with the fires
of a revolutionary black consciousness. But it is actually a time -- tested
technique.
(I. BLACK POWER COMES TO WASHINGTON)
Black Power has come a long way since that night in 1966 when Stokely Carmichael made it the battle cry of the Mississippi March Against Fear. For a time it was a slogan that struck dread into the heart of white America -- an indication that the ante of the black man's demands had been raised to a point where the whole society would have to be reoriented if they were to be met. But Black Power hardly seems a revolutionary slogan today. It has been refined and domesticated, awarded a prominent niche in the American Dream. And Carmichael's statement of a few years ago, that the President of the United States might say "We shall overcome" over national television but would never call for Black Power, has also been disproven -- by Richard Nixon, seemingly the most unlikely of men. The country needs "more black ownership," Nixon said during his campaign, "for from this can flow the rest: black pride, black jobs, and, yes, Black Power."
It is obvious that the Nixon Administration has made some crucial decisions concerning the possibilities of Black Power during its short time in office. With great fanfare it unveiled an elaborate program of black capitalism. And while it failed to lure Whiteny Young, Roy Wilkins or others in the moderate civil rights establishment into cabinet posts, it did find a man with even better credentials as a militant -- James Farmer, former national director of CORE. The President has indicated since assuming office that he sees nothing dangerous in the upsurge of a black militancy, provided that it seeks a traditional kind of economic mobility as its end, even if it wears Afro costumes and preaches a fiery race pride while it sets up businesses and replaces white capitalists as our society's most visible contact with the ghetto. Of course, other black militants, the thrust of whose political programs cannot be absorbed by black capitalism or by a mere cultural renaissance, who do not look to the ruling powers of society for assistance in their revolution, will continue to be denounced, imprisoned, hunted and destroyed. For them there is the method of the stick. But in other cases the use of the carrot is preferred as more potent -- and less predictable, as Mr. Nixon has well demonstrated.
He has made a surprising alliance with certain forces of black militancy. This may seem audacious, even dangerous, like playing with the fires of a revolutionary black consciouness. But it is actually a time-tested technique. The Nixon Administration's encouragement of cultural nationalism and its paternal interest in black capitalism are little more than an updating and transposition into a domestic setting of pattern established years ago by U.S. power abroad. Although the State Department, the U.S. Information Agency, the Ford Foundation and hosts of other organizations were involved, it was primarily the Central Intelligence Agency which discovered the way of deal with militant blackness. It found that the U.S. could maintain a foothold in the newly independent African states by creating and subsidizing an American elite of Afro-oriented black leaders (James Farmer himself was only one of many) whose positions in the civil rights movement were an invaluable, if often unconscious, cover for the Agency's primary aim -- to emasculate black radicalism in Africa, and eventaually at home.
[II. AMSAC'S AFROS]
IT WAS THE SPRING OF 1963, and at first glance it looked like a revolutionary round table in Havana. The list of participants in the conference read like a Who's Who of the Southern African independence movement: Oliver Tambo, acting president of the African National Congress of South Africa; Eduardo Mondlane (recently assassinated), leader of the Mozambique Liberation Front; Jariretundu Kozonguisi, president of the Southwest African National Union; leaders from virtually every other political faction of these countries as well as Zimbabwe, Angola, and Zambia. They were all wanted men at home, engaged in directing armed struggles against hated colonial regimes. But the meeting hadn't been convened by Fidel Castro. In fact, it took place at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
The architects of a Southern Africa liberation movement had agreed to come to Washington because the convening organization was a black group meeting at the nation's leading black university. The American Society for African Culture (AMSAC), composed of important black American scholars, writers, artists and professionals, was the most prestigious and articulate of all black groups interested in advancing African culture and building bonds between U.S. blacks and their African brothers. This conference was AMSAC's fourth international meeting in as many years. It looked like the beginnings of a black revolutionary's dream-come-true, the linking up of African and Afro-American freedom struggles. But what most participants didn't know was that the whole affair had been sponsored by the CIA.
The Howard University meeting provided an ideal opportunity for the CIA to look over the top American revolutionaries while providing an illusion of U.S. concern for their cause. AMSAC itself had begun as a way of keeping an eye on the resurgent African independence movement. It was organized in the aftermath of the first International Conference of Negro Writers and Artists, held in Paris in late 1955. This conference had been convened by a group of African exiles and European intellectuals organized into the Société Africaine de Culture (SAC), which published the journal Présence Africaine, featuring men like Camus, Sartre, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire. But giving impetus to an organization like AMSAC was by no means on SAC's agenda.
SAC had asked the late Richard Wright, the black American writer self-exiled in Paris, to invite some American Negroes to the international gathering. Wright did so, although many whom he invited were unable to afford the trip. Thsoe who did show up were among the most influential of America's black bourgeoisie, and many later became influential in AMSAC. Headed by Dr. Horace Mann Bond, a leading black educator and father of Georgia legislator Julian Bond, the American delegation included Mercer Cook, who later received the ambassadorship to Niger during the Johnson Administration; John A. Davis, later to become head of AMSAC; James Ivy, editor of the NAACP magazine, Crisis, and eventully AMSAC treasures; Thurgood Marshall, and Duke Ellinton. These were AMSAC'S founding fathers.
At the outset of its career, AMSAC shared its New York offices with the Council on Race and Caste in World Affairs, a largely paper organization founded some years earlier by the CIA, specializing in information about and analysis of racial problems affecting international relations. The council merged formally with AMSAC in 1957, and acted as the major financial conduit to the new group, which was not officially incorporated until February 1960. The CIA conduits reporting contributions to AMSAC over the years included the Pappas Charitable Trust ($65,000), and these foundations: Marshall ($25,000); Benjamin Rosenthal ($26,000); J. Frederick Brown ($103,000); Colt ($47,000); C. H. Dodge ($28,000); Rabb ($40,000), and Ronthelym ($20,000). AMSAC's statement of purpose declared an intention "to study the effects of African culture on American life; to examine the cultural contributions of African people to their societies; to appraise the conditions affecting the development of ethnic national and universal culture; to coopeate with international organizations with a view to … exchange of information on African culture.…"
"I joined AMSAC because I thought it would be really pursuing the ideas advocated by the Société Africaine de Culture," Harold Cruse, author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, told us, "but I was quickly turned off when they began to move in another political direction. It was composed of a combination of careerists, slick articulate operators with little conviction, and leaders of the integrationist Negro intellectual establishment. They were liberals without a base whose legitimacy came entirely from their association with established groups like AMSAC. I even doubt they were capable of thinking this kind of operation up themselves."
It will never be clear to what exent the "AMSAC Afros," as Cruse calls them, did think up the organization for themselves; but even if they did, they certainly didn't pay for it. That was taken care of by the CIA, which realized that AMSAC's brand of non-radical cultural nationalism could be useful abroad and perhaps eventually at home. The organization's 1962 conference report declared, "American Negroes do not hold important posts in the great corporations doing business in Africa. Nor can it be said that they seek to make or have been given the opportunity of making money in Africa. Mainly they bring service and love to the complex of Afro-American relations." This they indeed did, but often without knowing what and whose ends they were serving.
AMSAC's cultural and educational programs -- the frosting on the political cake the CIA was serving up to emerging Africa -- involved some of America's most prominent black artists: Odetta, Randy Weston, Nina Simone, Lionel Hampton and Langston Hughes. The organization also sponsored visits to Africa by American Negro scholars, writers, lawyers and intellectuals. AMSAC's representatives included scholar Saunders Redding, the man whom Harold Cruse describes as the chief of intellectual spokesmen for the American Negro establishment; artists Jacob Lawrence and Elton Fax, and former NAACP counsel Robert Carter. Men like these provided the cultural camouflage which not only disguised the political nature of AMSAC's work, but deepened its impact on Africans as well. But the careers of others, far less celebrated, tell more about the real AMSAC enterprise.
[III. BLACK CIA AGENT]
ONE OF THE MOST INTERESTING case studies of AMSAC's use of its Afros centers on the man who was the organization's assistant executive director from its early days through 1961 -- a tall, frequently goateed, black CIA agent named James T. ("Ted") Harris.
Born in Philadelphia in 1924, Harris won a DAR medal for good scholarship at La Salle College. After service during the war, he returned to La Salle where he built a reputation as a concerned and outspoken liberal. Visible, articualte black collegians were a rarity in those days, and Harris' reputation grew nationally when he became involved in student politics. In 1948, when the newly formed National Student Association elected him president, he quickly won admission to the inner circle, the CIA's "old boy network" which came to dominate NSA activities for almost 20 years.
Early in the '50s, Harris moved to Geneva, where he served as assistant secretary-general for the CIA-supported World University Service. From that post he returned to the U.S. for more training. After receiving a master's degree at Princeton's Public Affairs Institute, where he studied on a CIA Whitney scholarship, he was off to Cairo for field experience, this time on a Ford Foundation Research Fellowship. He returned to the NSA after his stint in Egypt, to run the important CIA-funded Foreign Student Leadership Program to "assist active student leaders in the Third World." Through this job, Harris came to know and befriend many African students in the U.S. His next assignment followed naturally. He moved on to AMSAC.
Harris was active in AMSAC through 1961. In that year, while the U.S. was desperately trying to stabilize a friendly national government in the Congo, Harris went back to the Ford Foundation, which made him secretary-general of a Ford-funded National School for Law and Administration in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). Harris spent two years there, shaping an educational program which, as he was later to tell AMSAC's Howard University conference on Southern Africa, provided a way to instruct the Congolese in Western administrative techniques. Congolese sources strongly suspected that the school also served as a conduit for CIA money which was pumped into the pockets of selected Congolese politicians. As soon as a dependable Congolese was groomed to take over the school. Harris returned to New York to help the Ford Foundation shape its overseas development programs for Africa and the Middle East. In 1964, he left Ford to direct education and training for the Corning Glass Works in New York, working under Amory Houghton, the man who had headed the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs (FYSA), the CIA's principal agency for funding its international student programs. In 1966, while remaining a consultant to Houghton, Harris moved on to join yet another CIA creation, the African-American Institute. At the AAI, he directed field programs, traveling frequently to Africa.
By January 1969, when Harris left AAI and international work, he had compiled an impressive record. He had traveled to all of Western Europe and to the Middle East, to India, Pakistan and 23 countries in northern, eastern, western and central Africa (as well as 49 states of the U.S.) often on speaking tours. His languages included Arabic, French, Italian and Spanish. He was a member of the powerful and prestigious Council on Foreign Relations and the NAACP, and a director of an offshoot of CORE, the Scholarship, Education and Defense Fund for Racial Equality.
The CIA backed AMSAC and supported people like Harris because its strategists has a sophisticated understanding of how a certain brand of African cultural nationalism could be dangerous to America's international objectives. They realized that cultural radicalism often stimulated political radicalism and that cultural issues, especially in the emerging African states, were often latent with explosive political implications. Maintaining an effective political presence in resurgent Africa thus required an active cultural dimension, and the CIA took an early interest in attempting to control the emerging cultural-political elites and, as much as possible, making sure that their concerns stayed at arm's length from revolution. The Agency saw cultural nationalism and new notions of "negritude" as alternatives to the type of revolutionary culture called for by such radicals as Frantz Fanon, who once said, "It is around the people's struggles that African Negro culture takes on substance and not around songs, poems, and folklore."
The architects of the CIA's covertly-backed cultural program selectively encouraged those black writers most friendly to the West. Through its program of enlightened patronage, these writers found a ready outlet for their work in a whole series of cultural magazines in and about Africa, funded by CIA-backed foundations: Africa Report (African-American Institute); Transition and The New African (Congress of Cultural Freedom); Classic (Farfield Foundation); and others. And finally, AMSAC had its own magazine, African Forum. The writers favored by these publications were not agents, but simply men whose politics were acceptable to the American culture brokers. And what Fanon later called "a charmed circle of mutual admiration at the summit" quickly emerged. Patronage
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and promotion won international recognition for the CIA's
cultural elite while providing a cultural framework important to the directed
development of African consciousness.
The CIA did not become the leading international impresario of black culture for the aesthetic pleasure of the experience. The great question during the heyday of AMSAC and similar organizations was what formal African independence would actually mean once it became a reality. And at some point, the CIA decided that the development of a safe cultural nationalism was critically important to U.S. interests in Africa. It was essential not only as a way of keeping cultural energies in line, but primarily (though the two are intertwined) to channel the explosive force of nationalism itself in directions suitable to the U.S. The tide of decolonization rolling over the continent could open the way for a new American Empire to break the old imperial monopoly of the European order that had controlled Africa. Or it could produce the kind of radical nationalism which would guard the new Open Door with inhospitable vigilance, and might even make accommodations with the communist powers. Thus the CIA made every effort to promote a kind of cultural nationalism in Africa which would be satisfied with the removal of the most obvious forms of foreign domination; one in which concern for cultural integrity did not reinforce, but rather replaced, demands for basic economic and political autonomy.
This was the scope of the enterprise in which American blacks became indispensably involved, through AMSAC and other vehicles. But to appreciate the effect of this misalliance on African development and to see what the alternative of cultural nationalism meant in its social and political context in Africa (and could mean in the United States, if the Nixon Administration is successful), one must also view the operation from the receiving end. A particularly vivid example of America's ideological manipulation of African society in transition is seen in the role played by the CIA in shaping the nationalist movement in Kenya.
[IV. A CIA JET SET]
THE NIGHTMARE OF PRIMAL BLACK SAVAGERY that pervades white fantasies about Africa has been evoked most vividly by Kenya, seene of the bloodlust and carnage of the Mau Mau. This myth of the Mau Mau (as the Kenya Peace and Land Army was known in the West) is the inverse of the reality. Throughout the entire Mau Mau "Emergency," fewer than 100 whites were killed -- including 57 counterinsurgency police; among Africans the toll was greater than 11,000. Colonial security forces, like the American "scalphunters," hunted men for bounty. Tens of thousands of Africans were herded into British detention camps. In one roundup, 35,000 were arrested in a single day.
The Mau Mau myth and similar racist inventions still hold firm in the popular mind, but responsible agencies of the U.S. government cannot afford to hamper their own effectiveness with such unsophisticated views. Thus, in the decade preceding Kenyan independence and since that time, the CIA has provided carefully selective support to elements of the same independence movement which most Americans could think of only with revulsion and horror.
The United States may seem in any case to be an unlikely supporter of national liberation struggles in the Third World. Both the fact is that U.S. policy has never stopped at sponsoring black militancy, whether of the Mau Mau or of CORE, when it served the right purpose. As Vice President, Nixon reported to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee following his 1957 African tour; "American interests in the future are so great as to justify us in not hesitating even to assist the departure of the colonial powers from Africa. If we can win native opinion in this process the future of America in Africa will be assured." The trouble with old style colonialism in Africa, Nixon perceived, was that it was so un-American.
The CIA's program in Kenya could be summed up as one of selective liberation. The chief beneficary was Tom Mboya, who in 1953 became general secretary of the Kenya Federation of Labor. During the "Emergency," when all other African political organizations were banned, the KFL was the leading vehicle for the independence movement. It was harassed, its offices were ransacked, and many of its leaders were detained. But it survived and Mboya became a hero. Both a credible nationalist and an economic conservative, Mboya was ideal for the CIA's purposes -- the main nationalist hero and eventual chief of state, Jorno Kenyatta, not being considered sufficiently safe. Mboya even propounded a brand of African socialism which favored "free" (i.e. anticommunist) trade unions and encouraged foreign investment, foreign banking and foreign land ownership. African socialism, he said, meant "those proven codes of conduct in the African societies which have over the ages conferred dignity on our people and afforded them security regardless of their station in life. I refer to universal charity, which characterizes our societies, and I refer to the African thought processes and cosmological ideas, which regard men not as a social means, but as an end and entity in society."
Like America's black capitalism today, this prescription hardly struck the strategists of white America as a threat. Mboya's cultural socialism was seen as something which could inocuiate against the actual disease of revolution; it clearly deserved support. Mboya soon joined the CIA jet set, traveling the world from Oxford to Calcutta on funds from such conduits as the Africa Bureau and from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. (ICFTU, which played a key role in Kenya, is an aggregation of international trade union secretariats set up in 1949 to counter an upsurge of left-wing trade unionism outside the communist bloc. Its extensive international operations in Africa and elsewhere were funded and manipulated by the CIA through various of its U.S. based affiliated secretariats. Recently, however, there has been a split with U.S. labor organizations.)
Mboya later became ICFTU representative in the region. His articles were published by other CIA recipients, including the International Union of Socialist Youth, the International Student Conference, and the World Assembly of Youth. Meanwhile the American press was touting him as a future leader of East Africa. Even the Wall Street Journal's article on Mboya was headed: "Businessmen Favorably Impressed."
The ICFTU also supported Mboya and his African socialism through his KFL, a model "free trade union"-- aid which reached £1000 a month in outright grants during the early '60s. In addition, the CIA-supported Fund for International Social and Economic Education contributed more than $25,000 to the Federation's coffers. One of the directors of this Fund, George Cabot Lodge (Henry's son), explained the importance of this aid in Spearheads of Democracy, a book which grew out of a Council on Foreign Relations study group which brought labor experts together with Cord Meyer Jr., the chief of the CIA's covert funding program. Speaking for the group, Lodge wrote: "The obscure trade unionist of today may well be the president or prime minister of tomorrow. In many countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, trade unions are almost the only organized force in direct contact with the peopel and they are frequently among the most important influences on the people." Aid to Mboya, he added, "has not only strengthened [ICFTU] but the whole cause of freedom and democracy in Africa."
The British were uncomfortably aware of what their "special ally" was doing in Kenya. In a British Cabinet Annexe marked for "UK EYES ONLY," dated December 21, 1959, they complained: "The aim seems to be to take advantage of the difficult situation in which the United Kingdom and other European powers find themselves and to replace their influence and interests by direct U.S. machinery of the ICFTU and American contacts that have been built up with American leaders for this purpose." The document concluded that "Americans are not interested in the creation of genuine African trade unions as we know them. America has no Labour Party. … As a result, the American trade union leaders such as Meany, Reuther, and Dubinsky can afford directly and openly to execute governmental and particularly State Department and CIA policy."
The ICFTU often works through the mainly U.S.-based international union secretariats. In Africa, where unionization has been concentrated in government employment, the most important secretariat -- and accordingly the main CIA instrument -- has been the Public Services International (which was also instrumental in the overthrow of the Cheddi Jagan government in British Guiana). W. C. Lawrence, a PSI representative in East Africa, laconically expressed the organization's role in a February 15, 1962 letter to his superior, Paul Tofahrn: "It seems to me that it is up to us to see that they (East African unionists) know what is right."
In 1963, just after Mboya left his post with the Kenya Federation of Labor, it looked as if the Federation might be losing sight of "what is right." Strikes threatened throughout the economy, and PSI feared some kind of class polarization of the society during the critical transition to independence, perhaps leading to the wrong kind of independence entirely. PSI records reveal how it stepped in. General Secretary Tofahrn sent a "Dear Tom" letter to Mboya on January 29, 1963, reading in part: "Perhaps the Goverment can do nothing else but say 'no' to their claims, but then the question arises how to say 'no' in a manner so convincing that the people concerned accept 'no' for an anser." He added that he was sending a special representative, T. Nynan, to Nairobi "to seek to avoid a strike," and he concluded with the comment that "this letter is written in order to urge you to drop hints in the appropriate quarter."
Mboya's hints were right on target, and on February 13, Nynan was able to report that the situation was in hand. "I was very lucky," he wrote, "getting the support of Brother Tom Mboya in my tries to avoid the strike."
[V. PEACE WITH FREEDOM]
UNDERWRITING MBOYA AND HIS Labor Federation was a natural strategy for the U.S. in Kenya during the '50s and early '60s. It advanced responsible nationalism; and it was painless, because the employers faced with higher wage demands were British, not American. By 1964, however, American investments, which would reach $100 million by 1967, were becoming significant, and some of the Kenyan union demands began to lose their charm. But even more important, 1964 also brought dangers of "political instability" serious enough to make radio communications with the Nairobi Embassy eighth highest on the State Department roster for the year. Zanzibar revolted and Tanzania's Nyerere was nearly overthrown. Rebellion was spreading through the Northeast Congo, and Kenya lay astride the natural supply route. The CIA decided that a new approach was in order.
Mboya had long been supported as a force to the right of Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta, but an accommodation with Kenyatta was now seen as necessary, particularly to insure that he did not support the Congolese rebels, and more generally to get him to close ranks against the agitating Kenyan left. It was a strategy which has since become familiar enough: utilize the credibility of the appropriate flexible militants to crusth the rest.
In June 1964, U.S. Ambassador to Kenya William Attwood met with Kenyatta and agreed that Western labor groups would stop subsidizing Mboya and the KFL; for balance, Kenyatta assured him that Russian and Chinese aid to the leftist leader, Vice President Odinga, would also end. Simultaneously, the CIA was making appropriate shifts in its operations, throwing its resources into a new kind of vehicle which would embrace the whole Kenyan political mainstream, while isolating the left and setting it up for destruction by Kenyatta. To this end the CIA shifted its emphasis to an organization by the name of "Peace With Freedom."
Continued Next Issue
FREE
ALL
POLITICAL
PRISONERS
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DEPUTY CHAIRMAN FRED HAMPTON TAKEN POLITICAL PRISONER
Once again the decadent power structure, has acted to destroy another who worked
to see that power be placed in the hands of the people. It has tried to destroy
Huey, Eldridge, and now Illinois Chapter Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton, On Monday,
May 26, Fred was sentenced to 2-5 years in Statesville Penitentiary by pig judge
Sidney Jones for alleged robbery of a Good Humour ice cream truck. He was convicted
on April 7 for stealing 710 ice cream bars last summer. Bond was denied to Fred
because as pig Jones said, "He advocates armed revolution."
Thus, a clear indication that Fred has been jailed, not for some "illegal act" (which he did not even commit), but because of his political beliefs. In court, the state and pig Jones working jointly, resorted to every kind of piggish tactic to see that Fred be taken off the streets as soon as possible. A hearing was held -- aggravation and mitigation -- where the state tried to show that Fred should be given 5-10 years in jail and the defense counsel tried to show that he be given the minimum sentence. Defense Attorney Fred Cohen asked pig Jones to stay the execution and give Fred bail pending appeal of the entire case. This was denied. Pig Jones' sentence varied only slightly from the one requested by the state. Cloaked in the black robe that surely smells of the mire that he lives in, pig Jones-Black puppet manipulated by the pig power puppeteers of Chicago -- has carried out this system's policy of "legal and sanctioned persecution. (Fascism) The state attorney's every effort was not to show that Fred was a thief (which is what they called him), but it was to show that Fred's political ideas are in direct opposition to his and all others who embrace injustice.
And what are Fred's political ideas and actions? What has he done that has made a "criminal"? If it is criminal to help initiate a Breakfast for Children Program, then Fred is a criminal. If it is criminal to help open a free health clinic, provide heat in the winter for families who don't have it, and remove power from slumlords, then Fred is a criminal. If it is criminal to teach people verbally and through example how to rid themselves of the oppression which stifles them, then Fred is a criminal. Yes, he's a criminal, the kind of criminal that Malcolm, Huey, and Eldridge are -- the kind that says (as only he can say), "No matter what anybody says, I am a revolutionary." And every since he has made that statement, he has been harassed, arrested, beaten, shot at and now framed by pigs, proving that the only crime that Fred has committed has been his love for the people and his acts for their liberation. His political views have resulted in him being placed into a kind of hell that the pigs have tried to make into a permanent home for all who have moved to destroy this treacherous system. Fred is a political prisoner.
The next step that the defense counsel will take will be to challenge pig Jones' decision to hold Fred without bond. That step is only one small step, for we will exhaust all legal means and all other means to see that Fred be released.
To the pig justices, the demagogic politicians, and all who are responsible for Fred being incarcerated into a "sanctioned hell", you will suffer the consequences for your vile acts. You may think that it is a hope, a wish, a dream, but we the people say that it will be a reality: Fred again will walk the streets with the people; he again will educate the people, Fred will help the people. Fred will be with us because he belongs with us. Deputy Chairman Fred has said: "You can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail revolution." We, the people, are saying: "Pigs, we refuse to let you jail either."
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE IN THEIR STRUGGLE AGAINST FACISM.
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THE AMERICAN WAY OF JUSTICE???
On Friday, May 16th at 10:30 a.m., members and friends of the Jersey City Chapter
of the Black Panther Party appeared in Newark Municipal Court before the Hitler-fascist
Judge James Del Mauro.
While awaiting to hear the verdict and ransom to be imposed upon Bro. Ralph (Buddha) Cobb, we had the opportunity to watch PIG JUSTICE in operation. The entire court as usual was filled with poor oppressed Black, Brown, and White people, with the Blacks being in the majority and receiving the harshest sentences and highest ransoms. Of all the cases we sat and watched appear before pig judge Del Mauro only 3 received suspended sentences, two victims were white and the other a black youth accused of taking $1.90 worth of merchandise. All others felt the whip! In many cases even those who sat in the courtroom let out sighs of surprise as they watched the many innocent victims being railroaded through 'due process (PIG INJUSTICE) of the law'.
At about 12:20 p.m., Bro. Ralph (Buddha) Cobb appeared before the dishonorable racist judge Del Mauro, (Bro. Cobb was still wearing the same clothing that the pigs had kidnapped him in, because each time his family attempted to bring him clothes he had been moved to a different jail). The Star Liar took the stand and oath of hypocrisy.. during the entire questioning his eyes were held down. All Party members and friends were shocked when we first saw the accuser. He appeared to be a cross-breed of "Stepping Fletcher", "Uncle Remus" and "Rochester"… Yes he was a negro, of the house nigger breed…He was a plain ordinary janitor, who appeared underpaid as most working class people are… yet…this fool sat there and pointed the finger at an innocent man.
As he was questioned the contradictions in this buffoon' stales were extremely high. (1) the incident occurred Friday morning, May 9th, he went to the pig pen the same day and filed a complaint, yet he did not make a statement until Monday morning May 12th; (2) during the entire time he rode the 2 men around, the one who sat in the front seat with a shot gun and the lying nigger identified as Bro, Cobb, he only looked at approximately 2 times. (3) the 2 men identified themselves as belonging to the black Brothers and/or Black Panthers, and (4) the only thing the 2 men wanted who he said kidnapped him, was the telephone number and address of the rabbi, which anyone with an ounce of sense knows you should look for in the telephone book. Dishonorable judge Del Mauro sat and listened to all this bulls -- t and imposed ransom on Bro. Cobb at $5,000.
All of us present in pig court noticed while watching this racist corrupt appendage of injustice in session was (1) pig judge Del Mauro's total disregard for the rights of the oppressed people who appeared for the most part without lawyers. Their right to an attorney was not explained to them and (2) the hog prosecutor's attempt to deny Bro. Cobb's attorney the right to see and challenge the statement of the crazy, funky nigger accuser, by some stupid statement about he the prosecutor would agree to allow Bro. Cobb's attorney to see the statement only if he could see any statement that Brother Cobb's attorney might have…By their own actions once more the pigs within the racist, capitalist judicial system have shown that this is a "GOVERNMENT OF THE PIGS, BY THE PIGS, AND FOR THE PIGS.'
The Jersey City and Newark pig departments, know that Ralph Cobb is innocent; especially the 2 Bobsie Twins, who have been our constant undersirable shadows for the past 3 or 4 months. Their reason for vamping on him is (1) to suppress members of the Black Panther Party and to destroy the Party, and (2) racist exploiter 'Tom Whelan' had to insure his receiving a victory at the polls, so as usual he used racist tactics and fear to manipulate the people. But this failed because "the will of the People is stronger than the pigs technology" …so no first ballot victory.
The Jersey City press as usual only exposed one side of the story and it was misguided…so on Wednesday, May 14th, a press conference was to be held at the Black Panther Office, the press invited and only one reporter showed, a representative of the "Newark News". Neither the Jersey Journal or Hudson Dispatch felt the people were entitled to hear both sides of the story and from their own opinion as to who was telling the truth.
We call upon the people of the community to come out in support of Bro. Cobb. All those who saw Bro. Cobb anytime Friday morning May 9th, come or call the Black Panther office. Acknowledge this to a member of the Party and prove that the will of the people is greater than the pigs tricknology.
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE
Jersey City Chapter
Black Panther Party
-- 7 --
THE CHICAGO ICE CREAM FRAMEUP
The masses of working people are being repressed through an unjust war. The
pig (racist) monopoly class are trying to lure an unarmed people into counter-revolutionary
war they are waging against them. They realize a class struggle, the armed struggle
will destroy their resistance; and their fear of the socialist revolution is
mounting everyday.
The counter-revolutionary war being waged by these reactionaries is being opposed by the people's army, the Black Panther Party. The Black Panther Party is setting down by example the strategic means for resisting his counter revolutionary war. We have taken up the tremendous task to educate the masses. We have put our faith in the masses, we rely on them, they in turn, rely on us. We serve them wholeheartedly, satisfy their needs; as a result they put their faith in the Party.
The masses are beginning to see the contradictions between their interests and the monoply capitalists. They are beginning to realize that an attack on the peoples' army is an attack on them. The "Nixon-Daley clique is waging an undeclared war against the people's army. They are murdering, jailing, framing, and robbing the peoples' army. They are murdering, jailing, and framing the only friends the masses have. We have put our faith in the masses and they will respond to our call.
Deputy Chairman, Fred Hampton, of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party was sentenced 2 to 5 years in prison. The Black Panther Party sees this as another attempt to destroy the people's army. He was tried for robbery in Maywood, Ill., July 10, 1969. The "pig" state attorney oinked that he robbed '710' ice cream bars from an ice cream truck.
The state had no evidence that Chairman Fred committed the crime or that he was even on the scene. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced for his political views. He was sentenced because he was Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman of the Black Panther Party for Illinois. Is this the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Chairman Fred has always put his faith in the masses. He came off the mountain top, down to the valley where the masses were in order to educate them and help them in their struggle against violent repression.
He was amongst the masses everyday, trying to make them understand politics and political power. The masses said they were hungry, Chairman Fred answered with the only solution, Food! There is a need for medical help, so Chairman Fred began to initiate a free medical clinic, why? If you asked him why, he would respond, because "I am a revolutionary."
Chairman Fred helped the masses to find who were their real friends. He told them, in order to determine who our friends are, we must make a class analysis. He said, the same analysis could be used to determine who are our real enemies. The Chairman's interests were the same as the people's interests. He saw to it that the people were not led astray by their enemies.
"The people must be made to understand that without a people's army, the people have nothing," Chairman Fred often exclaimed.
The Black Panther Party is laying down the foundation for a socialist government, a peoples' government, Chairman Fred was working night and day to help. He gave all his energies to destroy the pigs whose only "name to fame" was oppression of the people.
Fred Hampton is in jail but the Black Panther Party will continue his work and progressive programs. The Black Panther Party will drum into these pigs heads that, "You can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail a revolution". We will be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount this attempt to stop the people's army and strive to forge close links with the masses.
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS
SUPPORT THE PARTY, STOP THE PIGS
Eugene Charles, Illinois Chapter
-- 7 --
DENVER PANTHERS DETERMINED: COMMUNITY CONTROL OF SCHOOLS
The Black Panther Party is not shocked, dismayed or set back by the outcome
of the racist school board elections which served to reveal the true attitude
and racism that is rampant in every federal and state institution in the U.
S. The Black Panther Party will go forth with its program to de-centralize the
school system and to institute community control in our area. We will wrest
the power from the hands of the school board and the racist administration,
and return it to the hands of the people. We are a party of the people, by the
people, and for the people. What the people feel, we feel. What hurts the people,
hurts us. We are intelligent enough to realize what Black people want is freedom
and the power to determine their own destiny. And black people can never realize
this freedom and power by attempting to integrate themselves into a decadent
capitalistic and racist system. Since the start of the school integration plans
and cross bussing, black students at every age level have been subjected to
every kind of inhuman treatment by racist teachers, principals and school administrators.
They've been dragged off illegally and against the will of the people. We will
educate the people to the fact that as long as the black community leaves the
education of their children in the hands of a varicious capitalistic businessmen,
that they will be reduced to the same subhuman standards as presently exist
in the white communities and the nation. Further they would continue to be taught
self-hatred which causes them to be active participants in their own extermination
and the extermination of all black people that is presently in practice by this
racist capitalistic government and its allies.
We intend to survive America by any means necessary and we intend to educate black children to survive by the same means. We will defend our community and our children and put into practice an educational system based upon political, economical and social survival.
The B.S.U. program of the Black Panther Party is designed to meet the basic needs of black students everywhere and must be implemented in all schools in our community.
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE
BLACK POWER TO BLACK
PEOPLE
PANTHER POWER TO THE VANGUARD
Denver Chapter Black Panther Party
-- 8 --
FASCIST FEDERAL, STATE & LOCAL PIGS CONSPIRE TO DESTROY NEW HAVEN LEADERSHIP
The New Haven Pig Force combined with state, F.B.I. and County Pigs, illegally
vamped on the Black Panther Office at 1:05 Thursday morning.
Wearing bulletproof vests carrying riot shotguns and using gestapo tactics, they broke the front window to the office to gain entry to the upstairs apartment where women and children were asleep. The pig department totally ransacked the downstairs office and the above apartment, confiscating money that was to be used for the childrens free breakfast, posters, papers, rifles, furniture, clothing, food and office equipment.
Arrested for a trumped up charge of murder and conspiracy to commit murder were Warren and Sylvia Kimbro, Erica Huggins, George Edwards, Rose Smith. Jeannie Wilson, Maude Francis, Francis Catter and Peggy Hudgins. Sylvia Kimbro was later released on a one hundred dollar bond and her charges were reduced to breach of peace because she was not a member of the party. From what Sylvia told me from the questions they asked her, they are trying to connect this with the alleged conspiracy of the twenty one Black Panthers in New York and that they are trying to connect Chairmen Bobby Seale in with this alleged lie on the New Haven Black Panthers.
The enclosed news clippings will give you further information and I'll send in reports as news develops.
All The Power To The People
Black Power To Black People
Panther Power To The Vanguard
Theodore Spurlock
29 Dickerman St.
New Haven, Conn. 06511
FREE THE CONN. EIGHT
-- 9 --
FREE THE NEW YORK PANTHER 21
The arrest of 21 members of the New York Chapter of the Black Panther Party
for "conspiracy" signals a growing government repression of the movement
in this country. All of us in all segments of the movement must recognize the
consequent necessity of working together and supporting one another. The more
the left is fragmented, the more easily these fragments can be isolated and
destroyed.
On April 3rd, the 21 Panther members were arrested and charged with conspiring to blow up a number of department stores, 15,000 tulips in the Bronx Botanical Gardens, and a police station, as well as possession of dangerous weapons and explosives. The arrests were conducted in the early morning hours by squads of armed policemen. The emotional stress of the arrests caused the premature birth of the child of Curtis and Lena Powell (Powell was one of the 21 arrested). The child lived three days. This event was not considered news fit to print by the media.
The absurd nature of the charges against the 21 clearly indicate the intent of the arrests: to destroy the Panther Party and create a lynch-mob atmosphere in order to discredit the Panthers in the community. By their efforts to create a revolutionary movement in the black community and to turn the black struggle into a struggle against capitalism as well as racism, the Panthers represent a significant danger to the establishment. To charge the Panthers with conspiracy to blow up department sotres -- an act which would only hurt working people, not the power structure -- can only be seen as an attempt to destroy the Panthers; as D.A. Hogan said, "we have made significant dents in the Panther leadership".
These latest arrests are an escalation of a continuous pattern of arrests and harassment of the Black Panther Party. In the past ten months 60 criminal charges have been brought against New York Panthers, but NO CONVICTIONS HAVE BEEN OBTAINED. The pattern followed in each case has been the setting of exhorbitantly high bail followed by a number of prosecutions requested postponements (which served to keep the accused in jail and away from the people) and eventual dismissal of charges.
The 21 are being held in $100,000 bail each; a grand total of 2.1 million dollars. The movement has not yet been able to raise this sum, and petitions to reduce bail have been denied. The 21 are still in detention and are being held in various Houses of Detention in all five boroughs of New York City. Thus it is extremely difficult for their attorneys to confer with them and of course impossible to confer with them all at one time. The high bail-ransom coupled with the obstacles being placed in the way of defense attorneys William Kunstler and Jerry Lefcourt in effect deny the 21 any due process and exercise preventative detention. It must be borne in mind that the Panthers are in prison and thus in danger. DISTORTIONS IN THE PRESS.
The morning edition of the New York Daily News following the bust carried the headline SMASH PANTHER BOMB PLOT. Subsequent articles in New York linked the Panthers to funds from Cuba and China; PFP staff members found that the only information interesting the Times was whether PFP financed the Panthers. On April 7th a bomb exploded in Goldblatt Brothers Department store in Chicago. A New York Times story prominently headlined the bombing a possible Panther work and compared the explosives to those supposedly found by the police arresting the 21, A week later, a 40 year old white marine veteran surrendered to police after a shootout in which two policemen were killed and confessed to the Goldblatt bombing. This admission was given nowhere near the prominent coverage the original accusations against the Panthers for this incident had received.
During the course of various court hearings Defense Attorney Kunstler has made a number of statements critically important to movement activists. His statements have either gone unreported by the non movement media or been distorted or reported out of context. Attorney Kunstler has compared the frame-up of his clients to the Reichstag fire frame-ups perpetrated by the Nazis in the late thirties, and has refused to delete from affidavits statements made by the 21 that they are victims of a police conspiracy. For the statements he has made and his refusal to delete his clients' statements. Kunstler has been threatened with contempt of court charges by trial judge Marks.
Liberation News Service has accused the media of careful and conscious deception regarding the politics and program of the Black Panther Party. "There are no reports through the bourgeois press that the Panthers have said, 'we want land, bread, housing, education, justice, and peace', that the Panthers have a ten point political program; that they are working for implementation of that program; that they are establishing free breakfast programs for school children…that they do this so that people may see a concrete act of socialism." Media ignoring and distortion of news denies people the information needed to understand the events occuring around them; understanding vital to the furtherance of movement goals. THE MOVEMENT RESPONSE
All radical groups realize the necessity of showing solidarity with the Panthers, Demonstrations took place outside of the Criminal Courts Building during arraignment and bail hearings for the Panthers. These street actions did point out the anger felt by the radical movement at this latest act of repression, but they also illustrated some of the more crucial differences between white and black movements. To go into the streets, marching in a circle behind police barricades, separated from (and protected from?) the people watching, chanting "Free the Panther 21" and "Off the Pigs" and conducting a rally consisting mostly of cathartic slogan shouting is to go into the Man's streets in the Man's terms. Had they wanted to, the police whom we so bravely called "pig" could have exterminated us.
Street actions do have a purpose and are at various points necessary and worthwile. The purpose of street action in this case was to demonstrate solidarity and to educate people. True -- we showed our support for the Panthers, but we also pointed out the sort of demonstrations the City of New York will allow: those conducted behind barricades and under police surveillance. We must also ask ourselves how we appeared in the eyes of our Panther brothers shouting "Off the Pigs" from the relative safety of our white skins, middle class status and protecting police barricades and lines.
Far more important than appearance, though, is effectiveness. At this point Peace and Freedom and the white radical movement in general can assist the Panthers in two concrete ways: raising ransom and mounting our own propaganda campaign against the deceptions and distortions of the media. The Panthers are currently attempting to raise bail for the 21. As long as they are in prison their very lives as well as their freedom are threatened. The movement is not in a position at this time to free them by any means other than posting ransom -- we must raise that ransom and also be willing to accept the possibility of forfeiting that bail money.
In a propaganda campaign we must expose the true nature of the law as an instrument of repression, counter the distortion and deception of the media, and prepare others for the coming of further repression. Rather than hold cathartic rallies after each demonstration at the Criminal Courts Building, emphasis should be placed on leafleting and on speeches telling the people what was going on in the Criminal Courts Building. Movement people demonstration, police on the line and passersby should have heard something more than shouts of "Fuck the Pigs".
Fred Heinze, NYC PFP
BAIL MONEY NEEDED FOR THE
PANTHER 21: send to
Black Panther Party
Box 1224
Brooklyn, N. Y. 11202
-- 10 --
LETTERS FROM JAIL
I am writing this note in hopes that it will inspire at least one of those paper
Panthers to get out into the community and do the work of the people.
During my incarceration, I have found that there is a great need for the sisters and brothers to know the true meaning of "Power To The People". Very few of our young brothers and sisters have ever read the ten point program. They are unfamiliar with the Party's purpose. We are looked upon as an all black gang dedicated to destruction. When the brothers in Oakland sat down and put the ten points together that is not what they had in mind. We must educate the community to the correct purpose of the Black Panther Party.
The Party is dedicated to seeing that the needs of the people are met. We will do whatever the people deem necessary to attain these basic needs. We will go to jail, we will be murdered, we will be prosecuted and most of all we will live for the people. We are responsible always to the people. Every action must be understood by the masses. I no longer have any wants, for my desires are my people's. I have no time, because my time belongs to the people. You see, everything belongs to the people. If you find it hard to put into practice, then you have no place in the Vanguard. Everyone is not expected to be able to carry the load (for it is without a doubt a heavy load -- but then the rewards are great). The load must be carried whether you do it or not. You must review the three choices you have!
I love my people and because of this love the seventy years that I am facing seems a small price to pay. Land, bread, education, housing, clothing, justice and peace these are my goals.
Solidarity in the Struggle, Afeni O. Shakur
-- 11 --
FASCIST PIGS MURDER MAN FRAME CONNECTICUT PANTHERS
On April 2, 1969, 21 members of the Black Panther Party were vamped on by all
the "law enforcement" agencies of the racist U.S. Government and indicted
for "conspiracy" to blow up department stores, railroad tracks and
the Botanical Gardens. Law enforcement lunatics representing the CIA, FBI and
state and local pigs staged coordinated assaults on the homes of more than 30
Panthers in the New York City Area. We do not blow up facilities where our own
people and other oppressed people work, for we are here to serve the needs and
demands of the people.
On May 7, 1969, Riverside Church received a phone call stating that if the demands of the "Black Manifesto" were not delivered, the church would be blown up and that the anonymous caller was from the Black Panther Party. This is even more ridiculous than our blowing up department stores and the Botanical Gardens. We do not blow up churches, we feed FREE BREAKFAST TO CHILDREN in churches and community centers all across the country.
The Black Panther Party is not conspiring against the people. The capitalistic lunatics of the pig power structure, who exploit and murder oppressed people everyday all over this planet, are the real conspirators. Tricky Dick Nixon, arch imperialist Rockefeller, slick Lindsay and the rest of the pig power structure are engaged in a conspiracy to annihilate the Black Panther Party in particular and black people in general. The imperialist U. S. Government is making blatant attacks on the Party all across the nation. Our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton was denied bail pending his appeal. Chairman Bobby Seale was indicted along with the "Chicago 8" for conspiracy to incite to riot (the riot had been going on two days before he came to town) during the Democratic Convention. Pigs shot up our San Francisco Headquarters with M-16's and other automatic weapons. The same mad dogs are responsible for the bombing of the Panther Headquarters in Des Moines. The fascist government and all their pig lackeys are bent on destroying the leadership and organization of the Black Panther Party. The mutilated body of Brother Alix Rackley was found in Middlefield, Connecticut and 8 Panthers from our New Haven Office were indicted for "conspiracy to commit murder" and are being held without bail, which is a direct violation of their constitutional rights. Among those arrested was Erika Huggins, the wife of Jong Huggins, who was murdered along with Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter by bald headed zombies from Ron Karenga's US organization (The Karengatangs).
The racist news media, dictating the official party line of the fascist pig power structure stated, "that Rackley was no longer a trusted member of the organization". This is a naked lie. Brother Alix was a member in good standing in the Harlem Branch of the Black Panther Party and all Panthers know that compulsion and force are permissible when dealing with the enemy, but absolutely impermissible in dealing with comrades or friends. (Page 151 Red Book) Brother Alix was murdered by the pigs and now 8 Panthers have been framed on trumped up charges and are being held captive without bail in New Haven, Connecticut. The murder of Brother Alix and the bust of the "Connecticut 8" is the latest of a series of vicious attacks against the Party by the pig power structure that has escalated in the last six months. The racist news media continued to oink the official line of their superiors stating that "there is a direct link between the murder and the arrest of the Panther 21". Of course there is! The same pigs that murdered Brother Alix, are the same pigs that conspired to frame the Panther 21 and are still conspiring to annihilate the Black Panther Party throughout the nation. The pig is putting more crap into his "conspiracy game" and is trying to deceive the masses of the people.
The truth of the matter is that one of our brothers has been murdered by pigs and 8 Panthers have been framed for murdering one of their comrades. Aside from all the bulls -- t and lies that are printed in the news media, 13 Panthers are still being held in jail with bail of $100,000 each and the oppressive fascist courts have refused to lower the ransom (bail). When our Chief of Staff, David Hilliard, came east to post bond for one of the incarcerated brothers, not one bondsman in New York City would touch the case because the avaricious bondsmen were ordered by pig D.A. Hogan not to write a bond for any of the busted Panthers, on the threat of loosing their licenses.
If the U.S. monopoly capitalist groups (Tricky Dick Nixon, Filthy rich Rockefeller, Standard Oil, Dupont, etc.) persist in pushing their policies of agression and war (exploiting and murdering third world people everyday all over this planet) the day is bound to come when they will be hung by the whole world. The same fate awaits the accomplices (black capitalist, cultural nationalist and all the other buffoons who perpetrate this dying system, etc.) of the United States. (Page 79 Red Book). People of the world unite and defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs!
Acting Deputy Minister of Information
Zayd-Malik Shakur
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE
BLACK POWER TO BLACK
PEOPLE
PANTHER POWER TO THE VANGUARD
New York State Chapter
Black Panther Party
-- 11 --
LETTERS FROM JAIL
May 15, 1969
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE
To The Cadre
Sitting here in the clutches of our People's enemies, my mind is constantly seeking to offer some guidance to the brothers and sisters who are waging the struggle against these exploitive racist dogs.
The racist manipulation of this system of exploitation and computerized Slavery have cast all semblance of racist justice aside and are attacking us madly. We must learn from this, and defend, our people and ourselves. We must educate all the people to the why's of these attacks, and how they are programmed into their own exploitation and misery. We can only do this if we work unceasingly with a correct attitude with the people. The pigs are off into exterminating the people in the black and white communities who are willing to stand up, and stop their exploitation. We must make them pay the price of hyprocrisy and racism, by organizing the people not by words alone but with our actions.
These punks here have us uptight, but you have the people, who are like reforged steel, needing only to be molded into a sword of their own liberation. Therefore each Brother and Sister must make themselves into blacksmiths and not vacillate and hesitate for our very liberation depends on how well you do the job.
Well I haven't much else to say except be cool -- that goes for everybody, and all of you looked good in Court (especially the Sisters). Give my regards to the Brother Roogie, and long live the People's struggle!
With that I'll sign off, write sometime and let me know what's going down.
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE
BLACK POWER TO BLACK
PEOPLE
PANTHER POWER TO THE VANGUARD
Richard Moore
Dharuba
P.S. Read Page 131 Red Book (bottom
of page)
P.P.S. OFF THE PIG!
-- [12] --
THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY COMES FORTH TO COMBAT THE RAGING TIDE OF FASCISM
Incipient American fascism is endeavoring to direct the disillusionment and
discontent of these masses into reactionary fascist channels. It is a peculiarity
of the development of American fascism that at the present stage it appears
principally in the guise of an opposition to fascism, which it accuses of being
an "un-American" tendency imported from abroad. In contradistinction
to German fascism, which acts under anti-constitutional slogans, American fascism
tries to portray itself as the custodian of the constitution and "American
democracy." It does not yet represent a directly, menacing force. But if
it succeeds in penetrating to the broad masses who have become disillusioned
with the old bourgeois parties, it may become a serious menace in the very near
future.
And what would the success of fascism in the United States entail? For the tolling masses it would, of course, entail the unrestrained strengthening of the regime of exploitation and the destruction of the working class movement.
Under these circumstances, can the American proletariat content itself with the organization of only its class conscious vanguard, which is prepared to follow the revolutionary path? No.
It is perfectly obvious that the interests of the American proletariat demand that all its forces dissociate themselves from the capitalist parties without delay. It must at the proper time find ways and suitable forms of preventing fascism from winning over the broad ciscontented masses of the toilers. And here it must be said that under American conditions the creation of a mass party of toilers, a "Workers' and Farmers' Party," might serve as such a suitable form. Such a party would be a specific form of the mass people's front in America that should be set up in opposition to the parties of the trusts and the banks, and likewise to growing fascism. Such a party, of course, will be neither Socialist nor Communist. But it MUST be an anti-fascist party and must NOT be an anti-Communist party. The program of this party must be directed against the banks, trusts and monopolies, against the principal enemies of the people who are gambling on its misfortunes. Such a party will be equal so its task only if it defends the urgent demands of the working class, only if it fights for LAND for the white and black sharecroppers and for their liberationg from the burden of debt; only if it works for the cancellation of the farmers' indebtedness; only if it fights for the equal status of the Negroes; only if it fights for the demands of the war veterans, and for the interests of the members of the liberal professions, the small businessmen, the artisans. And so on.
It goes without saying that such a party will fight for the election on it candidates to local offices, to the state legislatures, to the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Our comrades in the United States acted rightly in taking the initiative for the creation of such a party. But they still have to take effective measures in order to make the creation of such a party the cause of the masses themselves. The question of forming a "Workers' and Farmers' Party," and its program, should be discussed at mass meetings of the people. We should develop the most widespread movement for the creation of such a party, and take the lead in it. In no case must the initiative of organizing the party be allowed to pass to elements desirous of utilizing the discontent of the masses which have become disillusioned in both the bourgeois parties, Democratic and Republican, in order to create a "third party" in the United States, as an anti-Communist party, a party directed against the revolutionary movement.
(Excerpt from speech delivered at the seventh world congress of the Communist International July 25th, August 20th, 1935 -- by Georgi Dimitroff).
It is one the first time that we raise our voice in defense of Socialist leaders who have fallen victims to fascist reaction. To remain silent in face of this bloody orgy of fascism means in fact to encourage the executioners of the working class. "Now, for every man of sound and honest mind it is clear that what is meted out today to the Revolutionary Organizations and workers movements, will be done to the liberal-democrats, student protestors and street people of all ethnic groups in the guise of law and order. In the struggle against this fascist plague which menaces the working class, the lumpen proletariat, the whole of mankind, those active in the labor movement cannot but address the question to all honest people considering themselves to be supporters of liberty, justice, and peace as to where they stand.
(Excerpts taken from "United Front Against Fascism" by Georgi Dimitroff)
-- 14 --
NATIONAL REVOLUTIONARY CONFERENCE FOR A UNITED FRONT AGAINST FASCISM
OAKLAND CALIFORNIA
JULY 18, 19, 20, and 21 st.
FASCISM THE POWER OF FINANCE CAPITAL ITSELF
THIS REVOLUTIONARY CONFERENCE FOR A UNITED FRONT AGAINST FASCISM IS CALLED BY THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY.
THE FREEDOM OF ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS AND POLITICAL FREEDOM FOR ALL PROLETARIAN TYPE ORGANIZATIONS, THE FREEDOM AND POLITICAL WORK OF ALL STUDENTS, FARMER PEASANTS, WORKERS, AND THE LUMPEN MUST BE DEVELOPED INTO A NATIONAL FORCE; A FRONT WHICH HAS A COMMON REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY AND POLITICAL PROGRAM WHICH ANSWERS THE BASIC DESIRES AND NEEDS OF ALL PEOPLE IN FASCIST, CAPITALISTIC, RACIST AMERICA. PRIMARY OBJECTIVE WILL BE COMMUNITY CONTROL OF POLICE TO END FASCISM.
IN OAKLAND CALIFORNIA, JULY 18, 19, 20 & 21st REPRESENTATIVES FROM AROUND THE COUNTIES OF ALL ORGANIZATIONS REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE, SOME 5,000 OR MORE REPRESENTATIVES WILL DEVELOP A UNITED FRONT AGAINST FASCISM. HEADQUARTERS BLACK PANTHER PARTY OFFICE, 3106 SHATTUCK AVE., BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, 845-0103 OR 845-0104.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
PANTHER POWER TO THE VANGUARD
-- 15 --
PIGS BUST NINE YOUNG PATRIOTS
May 21 -- Nine members of the Lincoln Park Young Patriots were arrested yesterday
after they had attempted to convince the bartender at the Harvest Moon Lounge
2519 N. Lincoln, to stop hassling customers and young people in the neighborhood.
When the Patriots arrived, the barkeep immediately called upon the protection
of the state. One cop car arrived which tried to mediate the dispute, but it
was forced to limp away with a flat tire. Receiving no satisfaction inside,
the Patriots went out to the sidewalk, and the tavern owner locked the door
behind them.
Appropriately a sign appeared on the tavern's window: "Temporarily Closed by Order of the Young Patriots". Suddenly a lot of cop cars arrived. "You can't close a tavern", they said. "We didn't lock the door", the Patriots replied. The cops then ordered the Patriots to clear a path in the side walk. They did. The cops then ordered them to disperse, and they stepped into a nearby doorway. They were then told they were under arrest: "You didn't move fast enough". The charge was disorderly conduct, although three juveniles were later released. One woman Patriot who had just been released from the hospital began hemorrhaging. She was refused medical attention and taken to women's lock-up at 11th and State.
-- 15 --
PIG DALEY TO DESTROY BLACK SO CALLED GANGS
Daley declared open war on our Black brothers and sisters who are forced to
live in the city's ghettoes. This pig called his racist hatchet men and Black
Bootlickers together to draw up a plan of action against the people's interest
in the "People's City Hall!"
The SS who attended the meeting were Hammerhead Hanrahan, Judge Johnny MacBrown Boyle, Jesse James Conlisk, School Board President, Frank Uames Whiston, Ray 'Simple' Simon, Slave Holding Thomas Jefferson E. Keane, Gym Shoe Wearing-toe jam Athlete 'House Nigger' Ralphie 'Boy' Metcalfe and Dr. 'Yes Man' Hankerchief Head Dense Brain Brooks.
These mad dog capitalist conspirators are plotting to murder potential revolutionary brothers and sisters who are to be the true representatives of the oppressed communities. These brothers and sisters are poor just like you and I. They are poor and sometimes confused not because they choose to be; but because the so-called representatives in Washington, D.C., the so-called representatives in Springfield, Illinois, the so-called representatives in the city hall sit around all day on their fat asses and talk about the conditions and never do a damn thing about them: Who in hell is guilty? The Pigs: (RIGHT ON!) Furthermore, these are our brothers and sisters and we will not allow the pigs in the power structure to murder them.
The real gang in this city that creates violence is pig Daley's gang! The real gang in the city that sends Black Bootlickers to destroy 'organizations before they become revolutionary organizations. The Black Panther Party is a revolutionary organization. We look at ourselves as "Oxen to be ridden by the people". We feed hundreds and thousands of little hungry brothers and sisters all over the country.
We had heat put in ice cold houses and stopped many money hungry landlords from evicting the people. In June, we will open the first free medical center in the black community. These are some of the things Revolutionary Organizations do for the oppressed class. These are the things the Black Panther Party is involved in. This is the danger point because the pigs can't let free programs be operated in the Black Community -- in fact no community! Why? Simply because this is taking the people down the trail of social revolution (Total Equality of Land and Wealth).
We are recognized all over the world as the Vanguard of the Oppressed Class Liberation Front.
It was Huey P. Newton who put the Revolutionary theory and practice in motion in this decadent country. I ask to support us in the name of Huey P. Newton, Little Bobby Hutton, Eldridge Cleaver, 'Bunchy' and John Huggins, Ted Boston, Fred Hampton, Mickey White, and the man who inspired the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X!
We say:
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE
PANTHER POWER TO THE VANGUARD
Deputy Minister of Information
Illinois Chapter
Black Panther Party
-- 15 --
EUGENE OREGON DEPUTY MINISTER OF INFORMATION BUSTED
On May 22, 1969 at 9:15, the F.B.I. proceeded to 1250 Ferry St. to arrest the
Deputy Minister of Information of the Eugene Chapter of the Black Panther Party.
The Deputy Minister of Inform- was asleep so the F.B.I. proceeded to the landlord
of his apartment house and had him open the private apartment. After the door
was opened, they seized Julius Hurst, the Deputy Minister of Information and
a 12 gauge pump shotgun. They handcuffed him and took him to Portland to the
Federal Courthouse where he was arraigned for draft evasion and is presently
being held on $10,000 bail.
We contacted a city councilman and several attorneys. They contacted a federal commissioner and are demanding that Julius Hurst be let out on his own recognizance and be able to return to the community.
We have a lawyer. He agreed to defend the Deputy Minister of Information. He is unable to appear at the designated time which is Friday, May 23 at 10:00 a.m. He stated that he would contact Julius Hurst and tell him to ask for a court appointed lawyer for his bail hearing.
In the meantime, the Field Lt. Security Lt. and myself are proceeding to Portland for the hearing tomorrow and then to transport him back to Eugene, Oregon. We will also meet with Captain Dixon in assisting in organizing and staging a Black Panther Party in Portland, Oregon.
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE
PANTHER POWER TO THE VANGUARD
Howard Andes
Eugene Chapter
Black Panther Party
-- 15 --
FASCIST JUDGE REFUSES TO ISSUE WARRANT FOR THE MURDERER OF MANUEL RAMOS
May 19 -- After Judge Cerda continued until July 2 the case of the 4 Young Lords
busted at the time Manuel Ramos was murdered, defense attorney Don Stang presented
him with a complaint against off-duty pig James Lam signed by Manuel's father,
mother sister and wife, asking that a warrant for the arrest of Officer Lam
be issued. Judge Cerda said he didn't have the authority to do that -- that
the incident had been investigated and he would need more evidence.
-- 15 --
FASCIST PIGS SHOT IN SEATTLE
Seattle, Wn.
Three fascist pigs were shot and nine others wounded when they vamped on some black brothers in allyways, the deal went down in the black community. The pigs sprayed tear gas and nightsticks. They busted 35 people all in the name of law and order.
Members of the Black Students Union at Seattle Community College, protesting the refusal of the board of trustees to appoint a negro to the board marched (peacefully) from the central area, causing the pigs to go mad.
-- 15 --
PIG SHOOTS SISTER IN TEXAS
Denton, Texas
A black sister was critically wounded when a rookie piglet pulled his gun and it went off. This angered the people and they took it to the streets.
FREE HUEY
FREE THE NEW YORK 21
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS
-- 16 --
30-Year Pot Sentence: Justified or Political?
BY BOB TUTT
Chronicle Reporter
A Houston group is seeking nation-wide support to free black militant Lee Otis Johnson from the 30-year sentence he got for giving a marijuana cigaret to a police undercover agent.
They contend Johnson is "a black political prisoner" prosecuted for challenging the white establishment, then given an unreasonable punishment.
Dr. Clark Read, chairman of the Houston chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and professor of biology at Rice University, said. "The circumstances surrounding this case leave little doubt that a charge was sought to put Lee Otis Johnson out of the way so that he couldn't speak further on the condition of black people in this community."
Appeals Sentence
Johnson, 29. a former field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, was convicted and sentenced last August. He is appealing.
The interracial group working in his behalf calls itself the Lee Otis Johnson Defense Committee. It was formed about four months ago, and roughly 100 people have participated in its meetings.
In response to its efforts, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has referred Johnson's case to the Justice Department for "investigation and appropriate action."
Publicity Sought
The committee has asked publications all over the country to publicize what they regard as the injustice in Johnson's case.
For one, the Village Voice, a weekly published at Greenwich Village in New York City, reported:
"Apparently (Johnson's) political actions were too radical and too loud for dusty Texas. After an incredible series of harassments, he ended up in jail on an unbelievable 30-year pot sentence."
Amnesty International, a human rights organization headquartered at Dusseldorf, Germany, has written the committee to inquire about Johnson's case.
Dist. Atty. Carol Vance disputes that Johnson, an ex-convict, was treated unfairly in any way.
"After hearing all the evidence and considering his past criminal record, one could reasonably argue that Lee Otis Johnson received less than he deserved," said Vance.
"The record of his trial will bear out that the only evidence presented to the jury concerned his distribution of marijuana," he said.
Vance and Lt. M. L. Singleton, head of the Houston police intelligence unit, also dispute the committee's claims that Johnson was subjected to continual harassment after his SNCC activities at Texas Southern University in the spring of 1967.
"I don't regard Lee Otis Johnson as a political prisoner. I regard him as a criminal," said Singleton, whose unit watches the activities of militant groups.
"He doesn't tell you that he and his friends were smoking marijuana, drinking Robitussin (a cough medicine containing codeine) and stealing food, that they were trying to get dynamite to blow up major overpasses, power stations, telephone facilities and public buildings," asserted Singleton.
"I should damn well think that this was a public menace," be added.
Assails Police
Defense attorney Will Gray, who represented Johnson at his trial and who is working on his appeal, lambasted the police intelligence unit as "a miniature gestapo" out to souelch dissent.
"They consider anything in opposition to the establishment to be criminal. They want to place someone in any group that takes a position they don't like and get incriminating evidence against its leaders." Gray said.
"That's exactly what I would expect Will Gray to say," responded Singleton. "We don't care what anyone says or does as long as he doesn't break the law."
It was Singleton who ordered rookie officer Billy M. Williams, a Negro, to infiltrate Johnson's SNCC group in March, 1968, and report on their activities.
Johnson allegedly gave Williams a marijuana cigaret on March 8 of that year. No charge was filed at that time, however. Six weeks later Johnson was indicted for possession and sale of marijuana.
Texas law defines such a gift as a sale.
Suspicious of Delay
The defense committee contends that there is something suspicious about the delay in charging Johnson. They note that he was indicted two days after he spoke at a memorial meeting for Martin Luther King and strongly criticized the mayor and the police chief.
Singleton said the charge was not immediately filed to protect Williams' cover. "We couldn't have got the rest of them. Williams helped us file 16 cases on four of them," he said.
Last August an all-white jury in Dist. Judge Wendell A. Odom's court convicted Johnson for the sale of marijuana, then imposed the 30-year sentence. The jury foreman denied there was any bias against Johnson.
The committee contends that a change of venue sought by Gray should have been granted. Publicity about Johnson's activities had been so widespread no impartial jury could have been picked here, they say.
They say the fact Dist. Atty. Vance personally prosecuted the case indicated the importance of a conviction to the state.
Vance countered: "In view of the overall facts and the defendant's background, I felt the case deserved my personal attention, and if in the future, we have another white, yellow, red, green or black person who has promoted violence and destruction in this city and he gets caught selling marijuana. I may well choose to try that case."
Claims Frame-up
Johnson, now a prisoner at the Harris County Rehabilitation Center, maintains that he has never touched marijuana and that he was framed.
"The question of his guilt or innocence is immaterial," said Abbie Lipschutz, a diamond wholesaler who is a leader of the committee.
"He was prosecuted, not for the alleged marijuana offense, but because he was a thorn in the sides of Houston politicians. They found a convenient way of getting him out of the way with a charge that may or may not be true." he said.
Lipschutz also stressed that few members of the committee share Johnson's revolutionary views. "I had known Lee Otis as a political wild man, and I didn't agree with him," he said. "I believe that revolutionary attempts only bring on harsh responses that can lead to an American fascism."
Lipschutz charged that much of the mail Johnson is posting from jail and much that is sent him is disappearing. He said this is more evidence that Johnson is a political prisoner. He has asked a Harris County grand jury to investigate this.
Sheriff's Capt. M. F. Patton, in charge of the rehabilitation center, said that all incoming and outgoing mail is censored, but he denied any of Johnson's mail has been stopped.
'Feel Better Now'
Johnson, interviewed recently in jail, said. "When I first came in here, I was very bitter and fense. There was fire in my heart. All I was thinking about was how to get even. I've lost weight, and I think I've got a stomach ulcer.
"But I feel better now. I feel this time (sentence) I have is unwarranted. I know it's not going to stick."
To date, about 100 persons who live in other states have sent money for Johnson's defense. About $1250 has been collected through contributions and sale of "Free Lee Otis" buttons and bumper stickers, Lipschutz said.
He said he is confident some appellate court will see the unfairness of Johnson's punishment and free him, even though it may take two years or more.
Vance said he is confident that "unless there is a radical departure from the law, there is no way this conviction can be reversed due the punishment assessed."
-- 16 --
PIG THREATS
On May 19th at approximately 3 p.m., the Bobsie Twins (Pigs William Hamilton
and Kevin Moran, N.J. license plate JVY-107), stopped Brother Benjamin Oritiz,
who at the time was trying to stop some young brothers from fighting. The pigs
who were parked at the corner of Pacific Ave. and Maple Street, called Brother
Oritiz to the car, which was no shock to us because we realize that this has
been their constant thing for sometime. The Bobsie Twins told Brother Oritiz
that from now on: 1) any of the brothers in the Party who didn't have draft
cards would be thrown in the pig pen, 2) that they knew various Panther members
spent time at Sister Clara's house and planned to bust it, 3) if he was not
out of town by Friday, they were going to lock him up. One of the sick pigs
said "Remember M ---- f ---- we can always frame you if we want too",
then showed brother Oritiz 3 bags of marijuana. They got tired of using petty
threats so they said they were going to start shooting members of the Panther
Party, and last but not least came out of a Baby Face Nelson bag of "we're
going to get our gang to blow up the damn place"…referring to the
Black Panther Office.
This is not the first time that these crazy pigs have threatened us and it won't be the last. We are letting you the people know what's happening in this racist town. The same way the have framed us before (Isaiah, Charles, Victor, and Buddha) is the same way they been framing your sons, daughters and you for 400 years, Point No. 7 of the 10-point Platform and Program of the Black Panther Party says: "We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people. We believe we can end police brutality in our community by organizing self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The second amendment of the constitution of the United States gives the right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self-defense.
To the pigs of the power structure quoting Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party we say "Our organization has received serious threats from certain racist elements of White America, including the Jersey City Pig Department. Threats to take our lives, to exterminate us. We cannot determine when any of these elements, or a combination of them, may move to implement these threats. We must be alert to the danger at all times. Therefore, those who approach our doors in the manner of outlaws, who seek to enter our homes illegally, unlawfully and in a rowdy fashion, those who kick our doors down with no authority and seek to ransack our homes in violation of our human rights, will henceforth be treated as outlaws, as gangsters, as evildoers. We have no way of determining that a man in a uniform involved in a forced outlaw entry into our home is in fact a guardian of the law. He is acting like a lawbreaker and we must make an appropriate response. We draw the line at the threshold of our doors……………….
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE
-- 16 --
SEATTLE PANTHERS RENAME PARK AFTER COMRADE
It is deemed necessary by the Central Committee of the Washington State Chapter
of the Black Panther Party, that Garfield Park, located in the heart of the
black community, be renamed Welton Armstead Memorial Park. There was a rally
held on Saturday, June 1, 1969 for that purpose.
On October 5, 1968, at 12:30 a.m. brother Welton "Butch" Armstead was shot in the back and killed. Butch was a heavy brother who knew the ideology of the Party and the need to strategically resist the power structure. He was working underground for the Party and was a beautiful, dedicated and courageous brother.
He was murdered by Earl Buttadahl, a racist pig from Georgia, who of course got off on justifiable homicide. It was the nature of the dogmatic, racist to try and destroy those who would most oppose the oppressive pig power structure that exists in this country.
Yes Butchy was murdered, murdered in the same tradition of Bobby Hutton. Sidney Miller, Malxolm X, and other warriors who were strongly opposed to the racist pig establishment, those who picked up the gun to put an end to the funky, racist, traditional American way.
But people must realize that rocks won't finish what Butchy was doing, it's going to take guns and force, two's and three's not 20's and 30's. You can't fight a 300 lb, armed to the teeth, pig with rocks and bottles. You fight them with 38's, 357 magnums, 41 and 44 magnums, shotguns, carbines and other equipment that'll T.C.B. You got to match and over power the pigs' technical equipment. We know with or without his piece the pig still ain't nothing. You don't make the pig mad with some rocks and bottles, you make the mother dead with technical equipment -- guns.
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE
LONG LIVE HUEY P. NEWTON
OFF THE PIG!
Washington State Chapter
Black Panther Party
-- 17 --
INTERVIEW WITH CHA CHA JIMENEZ CHAIRMAN -- YOUNG LORDS ORGANIZATION
BM: Cha Cha, how did the Young Lords come into existence and become an organization?
Cha-Cha: In 1959 the Young Lords was a gang, a street gang on the near North Side of Chicago in the area of Oldtown. It got together as probably being more or less for protection because it was primarily a white area and the Young Lords were Puerto Rican. Later on more and more Puerto Bicans came into the area as more and more of the racist whites moved out into another community which was closer to Oldtown. After a while they became a social club, they had parties for the benefit of raising money for sweaters and T-shirts. They had picnics, they had dinners for the families and slowly but surely they were changing organizationally into helping the people in the community. After a period of time of giving money to the people in the community, and giving donations of food and clothing, the Young Lords tried to sit down to cope with the needs of their environment. So they got together to find out what was the real problem, how could they help their people best. This was the main reason why the Young Lords Organization turned politically, because they found out that just giving gifts wasn't going to help their people, they had to deal with the system that was messing over them.
BM: Cha-Cha I see that more and more in different medias that you are associated with different political groups such as the Black Panthers, which is a very political organization and they have a political line and a political platform and program which they follow. What inspired you to align yourselves with the Black Panther Party?
Cha-Cha: Well you see, we're still looking for that way in which we can help our people. Now we're starting to realize who our people really are, who our friends are and who our enemies are. And as we read and studied other organizations that are appearing now in the United States, we see and we recognize the Black Panther Party as a vanguard party, a vanguard revolutionary party. And we feel that as revolutionaries we should follow the vanguard party, this is why we follow them.
BM: Cha-Cha, I've seen in the news and it's been in different medias where you lost a member of your organization, he was shot down by some of the Chicago police. And in working in a political way as the Black Panthers do and knowing Mayor Daley and the officials or the power structure of Chicago to be, as they've demonstrated in the past, are you prepared and willing to deal with that situation or whatever for existence as a political organization?
Cha-Cha: As a political organization, I think we're well prepared to deal with it. I think we've dealt with it already, I think we've showed Chicago our following by coming out in 24 hours bringing 3,000 people to the streets which is something that isn't done very often. Manual Ramos was a regular guy from the Ghettoes of Chicago. He was just like most of us are right now. Like we said before earlier, we're still searching for a way to help our people, we're still helping search for a way towards perfection. Manual Ramos was a regular member in the organization since the beginning. We feel that he was a true revolutionary for changing along with it, because most of us don't really understand all the basic issues. Most of us are new in the movement but we can see everyday, this is a common experience for us, you know, this is a common experience for people in the ghetto. Daley just this past week had a press conference four days out of five days, showing the people of Chicago that he is planning this repression against gangs. Fred Hampton, the Deputy Chairman of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party is in jail right now serving a two to five sentence, the head of the CobraStones is in jail doing three to twenty. I have myself been arrested on a fake charge of aggravated kidnapping, the kidnapping of my own child they claimed, but I was released right away when they found out. The reason I say gangs, Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and myself is because this is what he means when he talks about getting rid of the gangs, at least most gangs, are changing and are turning politically.
BM: Have you been confronted with or had to deal with any situations dealing with agent provocateurs trying to get into the organization or coming into the organization or creating situations that might have charges brought against you by the F.B.I., the C.I.A. etc?
Cha-Cha: Just the other day we had a march on the pig station because of the brother Manual, we demanded the arrest of pig James Lam and a group calling themselves the CobraStones came and threw stones at the deomonstrators and we passed through Cabriddy housing project which is mostly a black populated area and we felt that the blacks were our brothers and we wanted them to come in.
We thought that they would join us, and they did. They joined us, except for these provocateurs. I wouldn't say that they were C.I. A., or F.B.I., but I do say what they told me after the demonstration. They told me that the pigs were saying that we wanted to provoke a fight with them, that we were trying to take over their turf, you know, treating us more like a gang style and we talked to them. A couple of days later we took over McCormick Theological Seminary and there we had a meeting and we found out that the pigs were trying to pay them to attack us.
BM: Cha-Cha since you've been moving in a political fashion as a political organization how many people have been arrested?
Cha-Cha: How many people, I say it's hard to count. About five a week (an average) get arrested. This is including all the Lords. Some of the charges that come on us are like mob action, assault and battery on the pigs whether we touch them or not. Just the other day a brother was searched down, because they have this stop and frisk law in Illinois where they just search you anytime they want to, he was searched down and all of a sudden he came out with a bag of marijuana which he never knew he had in his pocket, he couldn't believe it. This is some of the charges that we get charged with. We get stopped for leafleting and and they say something about littering the streets, you know ridiculous charges, you know, like kidnapping or anything, or just basically disorderly conduct or resisting arrest. Basically disorderly conduct is usually a $25 bail, resisting arrest is $25 bail. Most of these bails are $25 or there are some up to $50. This is the basic bond for most people who do get arrested. Now when a Young Lord gets arrested it's a special case, sometimes the bails come up to $1,000, $10,000 and $25,000 and even higher than that, a $100,000. Excessive bails are given to the Black Panthers and the Young Lords and the Young Patriots, the coalition that we have formed.
BM: Since the Young Lords have become a political organization rather than a street gang how is it accepted in the community? Do the people relate to and support you; how do they feel about the Young Lords; about this transition; Do you get more support?
Cha Cha: In the beginning when we were just a regular oganization, a gifting organization, giving gifts out to the people we didn't get too much support, but we did feel happier when we gave gifts. But now that we've started organizing people, getting them together and starting them to work politically, we've gotten much support in the community. We have given much aid to the Latin community especially in the school committee or any committee where no Latins or even Blacks could be found, but now these places are filled with Latins and blacks and poor whites. So the people in the community are for us and everyday we get new members.
BM: So then would you say that the people are beginning to recognize or they do recognize that the movement is one of a class struggle rather than a race struggle?
Cha-Cha: I think our organization just by the people, just by the content, just by being Puerto Rican, you just have to understand it's a class struggle, because we have light skinned people like myself, I'm very light, we have dark skinned people, we have red, we have yellow, we have all kinds of people, a rainbow of people. And this is why we can easily understand it is common sense to us that this is a class struggle. I can't relate to black people hating white people and white people hating black people and Puerto Ricans getting hated by anybody, you know, and people can't relate to that, you know, we look to see which is our enemy, which is our commonest enemy and we just see that the pigs are the body guards of the capitalist pigs that are oppressing and exploiting our people. We look to see that this octopus, the United States has been sucking all the resources from Puerto Rico and we see who our enemy is. We see that the United States is our enemy. And we look out for allies, you know, we look at Cuba, we look at Mao, we look at all these other countries that have liberated themselves from the monsters.
-- 17 --
CHA CHA JIMENEZ ACCUSED OF KIDNAPPING OWN CHILD
May 22-Last Thursday the straight press and electronic media played up the arrest
of Cha Cha Jimenez, Chairman of the Young Lords Organization, for kidnapping
without mentioning that the person he was charged with kidnapping was his own
14 month old daughter, Jacqueline. Fred and the Belmont Booster are now the
only two media to carry the true story of this unusual case of movement harassment.
On Monday night, May 19, Mrs. Mary Porrata walked into the 13th District Police Station to report that her daughter Mary Lou had stolen her granddaughter, of whom she claimed to be the legal guardian. The cops paid little attention until it came out that Jacqueline's father (Mary Lou's husband) was Cha Cha Jimenez. Upon hearing that magical name, the cops proceded to collaborate in framing Cha Cha, and that night a warrant was issued for his arrest on kidnapping charges. They didn't find him until 4:50 Thursday morning, when he walked into the 13th district station and inquired if anyone wanted him. Someone did, bail was set at $25,000 ($2,500 cash bond) and a trial was arranged before Judge Saul Epton.
At the trial, it was brought out that: (1) Cha Cha hadn't kidnapped his daughter, since it was his wife, Mary Lou, who had gone to her mother's apartment to take her own child. At the time, Cha Cha was at the Young Lords Office. (2) Mrs. Porrata could produce no papers proving her to be the child's legal guardian. (3) Cha Cha was ready to offer $2,500 cash bond -- in cash Judge Epton threw the case out of court after what witnesses called a five-minute lecture to the state's attorney on building a proper case. Jacqueline is back with her parents, who are expecting twins sometime in August. And the capitalist press has yet to retract their lies.
-- 18 --
INTERVIEW WITH BOB RUSH
Deputy Minister of Information of the Black Panther Party doing an interview
for the Black Community News Service for the Black Panther Party. This interview
is conducted with the Deputy Minister of Defense for the Chicago Chapter. Bobby
Rush. BIGMAN: Recently we've seen that the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther
Party has had quite extensive problems with the power structure of Illinois
in particular the power structure in Chicago, Mayor Daley's regime and one of
the main forces or main spokesman of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther
Party, Fred Hampton has been convicted on some charges in the past, he's been
generally harrassed. Give us a general rundown on that.
BOBBY: It started out not, with exceptions of the party in Chicago, it started out when Fred was organizing Maywood. It was antagonistic contradictions between him and the power structure in the little suburban town of Maywood, Illinois, right outside of Chicago. They've always harrassed Fred. They've come by his house late at night and taken him out of bed and threatened to kill him because he's a very articulate spokesman and he can move people just by rapping to them. He can move them and make them do things that the power structure felt would be a threat to them.
BIGMAN: Recently we've seen where Fred has been convicted of stealing some ice cream or something to that effect. Would you give us a rundown on that.
BOBBY: Well this all originated out of some of those conditions in Maywood. What happened was in 1967 some brothers on the block were out playing basketball one day, and a Good Humor ice cream truck came by and they didn't have the bread so they plotted and said they were going to rip off the ice cream man. And they ripped the ice cream man off and beat him up and he had two black eyes and when the pigs came on the scene Fred had driven up right after the incident, they automatically took the ice cream man over to where Fred was and asked the ice cream man was Fred the one that did it, and he said yes so they arrested him on robber charges. Now when it came to court it was up before this nigger judge named Sidney Jones and Jones was the same judge that had been under pressure about two weeks ago for letting this mafia restaurant owner off for murdering a fifteen year old boy he ran over. He had had his license revoked three times pervious to that and he was (Sidney Jones) was under attack by State's attorney's office for this. So evidently they made a deal. Sidney Jones made a deal with the State's attorney saying that if he convicted Fred for the ice cream robbery and sent Fred away then Sidney Jones would be back in good standing with the pig power structure. In the court room they made a mockery out of so called justice, the State's attorney completely used guerilla tactics and gestapo tactics, zeroing in on Fred, making certain witnesses appear against him in court and as a result, negated their whole testimony for Fred; these were some of thetactics they used. They sentenced him to two to five years without an appeal bond because they know Fred is a threat to the existing establishment and he will mobilize more of the people in Illinois more than any one man could, so they sent him away because they knew that he was a true lover of the people and a peoples' warrior.
BIGMAN: So what you're saying is Fred Hampton is in essence a political prisoner in the same fashion as Huey P. Newton. Are there any chances of an appeal, bail or any legal maneuvers lawyers could make to possibly free this brother?
BOBBY: Well, the lawyers now are engaged in trying to get a writ of habeus corpus to make the government show a reason why Fred shouldn't have an appeal bond. In the event that don't work then we'll just have to say fuck it and we'll just have to take the case to the people and let the people decide it.
BIGMAN: In the recent course of events that went down in the courts and whatever, the Black Panther News Service hasn't had a chance to talk with Fred. Have you talked to him or could you just give us some general statement on anything that Fred might have related to the people or any message at all?
BOBBY: Well, Fred during his speeches he used to always say that you could murder a revolutionary but you can't murder revolution, that you can run a freedom fighter out of the country but you can't run freedom fighting out of the country, and that you can jail a liberator but you can't jail a liberation; and I think these are the things that he has instilled in our minds and our hearts and these are the words that the people respect him for.
BIGMAN: Bobby you yourself have had to travel to California on two occasions because of some investigation by the federal grand jury and the federal government into the Black Panther Party, will you tell us something about that?
BOBBY: To analyze this correctly it would mean that we are clearly on the road to social revolution we're on the road to victory, because the enemy has begun to react blindly and foolishly as far as trying to eradicate and trying to wipe out the leadership of the Black Panther Party across the nation. This shows a trend in history where any imperialistic power is on their last leg, they just act like mad dogs and just strike out without any type of plan or just strike out blindly trying to wipe out the enemy. But we understand that the people have become mobilized, the people, as the masses, have become educated and the days of capitalistic monopoly classes are over.
-- 19 --
NEW YORK PIGS ATTACK PEOPLE OVER STOPLIGHT
Today in Corona Queens, N. Y., about 150 people (and Panthers not in uniform)
of the Community, were about to protest for a stoplight at 102nd Street and
Northern Blvd. Three Black people have already lost their lives at this spot,
two people in one week.
The protest began at 12:00 p.m. the people and Panthers began to line up in the street, some with signs. Ten pig cars came up with four to five pigs in each car. The running dogs, coward ass pigs ran from behind a parked truck and cars and started beating the people with nightsticks, without asking the people to move. The cowards drew their guns. What were the people going to protect themselves with? Posters. Some of the people ran into the Malcolm X community center, the coward pigs (about 50) forced their way in with guns drawn. Brother Carlton who works in the center, was standing at the door and asked the pigs for a warrant, which they did not have. Brother Carlton called the pigs racists for harassing the people inside the center. Brother Carlton was arrested on charges of felonious assault, and taken to the pig pen (Brother Carlton is a Panther), at this time Brother Jacob who was beaten by a nigger pig was taken out the back door of the center, so the pigs could not get him.
A nigger community relations pig named Matthews and his nigger partner from the 110th precinct was there, they did not a thing to stop their nigger pig friends from beating the brothers and sisters. Matthew's nigger pig partner ran, because he knows this was some wrong crap going down. We won't have any more of Matthew's bull, he has drawn the line between the people and his running dog ass.
There were two people beaten by a nigger pig. Brother Jacob, sister Fintz, both members of the Party, this dirty fat mouthed nigger piglet, brutally beat two black people. Then the pig said to the people "I did not know it was a woman". What was wrong with the nigger piglet? Is he blind, or was he trying to make his pig boss, proud of him? He is a Nigger, a nigger a big fat mouth, lying, boot-licking, nigger pig.
It was also related to me that the Captain of the 110th precinct is a racist pig who was imported from Jackson, Mississippi, and that there is only a few negro cops left in the precinct because of the racist attitudes of the white pigs.
All of this could have been avoided if the local government would have fulfilled its duty, by putting a light on the corner.
The order to attack the people was given by a dog face Lt. pig about 150 people witnessed the attack on the people. This kind of unnecessary attack on the people and Panthers must stop now…the pig is a Coward, Mad Dog, that is about to fall.
Point No. 7 of the 10-point Platform
and Program of the Black
Panther Party reads:
"WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END
TO POLICE BRUTALITY AND
MURDER OF BLACK PEOPLE.
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE
BLACK POWER TO BLACK
PEOPLE
PANTHER POWER TO THE VANGUARD
-- 19 --
FASCIST NEW YORK PIGS BREAK INTO HOMES OF STUDENTS
On May 13, 1969, between 4:00 and 4:30 a.m., in the morning, the police carrying
shotguns and wearing bullet-proof vests, broke into the homes of:
1. Orlando Pile
2. Leroy Davis
3. Bruce LaRoche
4. Ray Aviles
5. David Powell
6. Frank Fernandez
7. Eddie Bradley
8. Bennett Cooke
9. Sherman Fogg
10. Cynthia Gumbs
11. Casandra Chisolm
12. Linda McCummings
13. Clyde Johnson
14. Cy McClean
15. Larry Murphy
16. John Leish
17. Ronald Outlaw
Their homes were ransacked and their families harassed and molested. Before being arraigned on 23 counts of arson, conspiracy, inciting to riot, vandalism, etc., they were not allowed their constitutional right of making a phone call to a lawyer or family. $15,000 ransome was set for each person.
We the students of Brooklyn College contend the so-called charges against our brothers and sisters are LIES.
WHY?
The brothers and sisters had 18 relevant demands for Black and Puerto Rican educational survival on campus.
People this is a very serious matter when our brothers and sisters can be arrested for presenting demands. It is time for all of us to rise up in arms because Black people have a program for change.
-- 19 --
FASCIST FBI ESCALATES ON OREGON PANTHERS
To All Black Panther Chapters:
We cannot claim victory in the Pacific Northwest while sounding retreat in the South. And yet it is absurd to geographically label a cancerous society as North and South. Isn't it so true and painful that the South is the Canadian border onward.
The arrest of Bill Green, Julius Hurst and Artie Cox by the F.B.I. and the Eugene Police Department is clearly and obviously another attempt to suppress Black people.
The F.B.I. and their puppet support wing of the local police department have tried every illegal means at their disposal to try to eliminate the Black Panther Party of Eugene and the nation. Bill Green is from Washington, D.C., and Julius Hurst is from Portland. Was it coincidence that the warmongering draft boards in the district of Columbia and in Portland simultaneously swore out warrants to arrest these brothers? No. It was not. The order of the day nationally is to intimidate, suppress, arrest and murder all people who are aware, concerned, and reacting to the digital oppression that this tyrannical society continues to hammer upon the people.
The F.B.I. is supposed to be a super home grown spy organization. Their mission is to protect and guard the people's rights, often at the expense of maiming and incarcerating the people. Who is going to protect the people from the F.B.I.? Mr Hoover, the 74-year-old federal chief, still lives with his mother. He apparently needs some fetish form of protection. His national mandate to his cadre is to continue supporting all forms of supporession.
The federal government kicked its way into Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, the Congo, Berkeley, and Julius Hurst and Bill Green's homes. Apparently, they have the consent of their president. We don't think draft warrants justify kicking in doors and loaded weapons.
We think the F.B.I. and the local cop and robber band represents clear and present danger. It is past the emergency state. It is now necessary for the people of this state and all other states to arm themselves to apprehend the midnight desperados who ride around in unmarked cars with loaded pistols and riot guns, kicking in doors. Bill Green and Julius Hurst are being held in Portland in the federal jail mainly because they are Black Panthers and are politically aware of the heineous attitudes of the harassers of the people. The unusually high bails are in vogue. The are repressive. The dogmatic disposition of that old, decreped, bald headed. Bob Hope, joke-telling federal bandit Kill the People Kenny, with his conputerized solid state transistorized pigs Lezack and Toma Hawk refused to let Julius Hurst out on his own recognazance and refused to lower his bail because he wrote an article in the March 20, 1969, issue of the Black Panther newspaper and for these reasons the people of the United States feel that he is a danger to the community. What people? These repressive measures are responding to 17th century logic. This is their action in government. We would like to congratulate chief pig Ellsworth of Eugene and his storm troopers and that lying punk hiding behind his cheap tin badge, that dead or alive advocate, chicken, baby pig sheriff Marlowe and his green minstrel suit, poot-butted, cow faced deputies, for their outrageous roles played during the dead and lateness of the night. We don't know if the chief or that cow, tea-drinking miserable excuse for a human being, sheriff Marlowe lives with his mom, but all indications point to some apron-string obsession of anti people, anti-logic, and pro-murder.
Artie Cox was said to have threatened the life of a postman. According to Deputy District Attorney John Moore, the pig department's Minister of Reason and doubt, Artie Cox threatened a postman who was a juror at a local trial of a black man. According to Judge Rodman, this is the same juror who told the balliff during a recess period at that trial that Artie Cox was "a liar" when he said that he lived at an address that showed only Dennis White. Judge Rodman conferred with the postman, the prosecuter, the defense attorney and the defendant for the purpose of declaring a possible mistrial. It was proven that Artie Cox was not lying, but rather that the United States postman, who apparently memorized his beat, was outraged at the fact that more than one black man lived at the same address. We are sure that Judge Rodman will testify when the postman is sued for defamation of the character of Artie Cox.
As far as threatening a person's life, Nikita S. Krushchev said that he was going to "bury" this country with his bombs and missiles, and yet the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the entire pig forces of this country had him in their midst and failed to apprehend and charge him for threatening the lives of an entire nation. And who is going to arrest the United States Congress for failing to legislate appropriate laws to eliminate poverty, hunger, and disease?
Then there is a third force in this blitz-krieg attack on the people; The University of Oregon which pays $47,000 a year for protection and other war games to the local pig department -- the same pig department that protects only itself.
We are not anti-law, anti-institution. We are opposed to those people who are by law and statutes responsible for carrying out the laws presently on the books. The basis for that opposition is that if all those laws were enforced, the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and their local pawnbrokers would all be in jail -- and to us there are too many law- abiding, rightous representatives of the people in jail. No. We don't need that. The new philosophy and practice is peace to the people at home and abroad.
High bails, unlawful searches and seizures, war and murder cannot stop the will of the people. Our struggle is a class struggle, against war, fear, ignorance and a police state. This cancerous society is not yet fit for people.
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE
PANTHER POWER TO THE VANGUARD
Defense Captain Howard Anderson
Ray Eaglin
Oregon Chapter
Black Panther Party
FREE HUEY
FREE THE N.Y. 21
FREE CONN. 8
FREE JERSEY 3
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS
-- 19 --
LETTER FROM A BLACK GI
May 27, 1969
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
This letter is coming to you from Ft. Gordon, an army post, in Georgia. I have just seen sister Kathleen whip it on the bigoted, Barbara Walters, of the "Today" show. I say this in reflection, and growing motivation, which had me write, finally, to you. Up until now, I have been professing myself to this pig army that I was a "supporter" of the Black Panther Party. I have been receiving your newspaper through my mother, in L.A. But due to her ignorant distaste of the Black Liberation Movement she has discontinued forwarding them to me. One of the purposes of this letter is to send you my address and have them sent directly to me. But through the support of hearing sister Kathleen denounce this pig society, I have been motivated to appeal to you for a direct association with the Black Panther Party. I appeal to you for my enlistment. I have no aspirations to take part in this pig system army, or anything it offers. The only army I can dig is the Black Liberation Army, an army for the people. I have constant conflicts, major and minor, with the white and black pig lifers here. I believe my hassels with the black pig or negro pigs is because I am somewhat part of their hidden conscious. I. through my professments, make them realize they are some sorry a -- s -- tless pigs. Therefore, they retaliate most obviously by harassment. No sweat. I hope you take these words into consideration and grant me enlistment. Whether yes or no, I will continue to relate with you.
Continue on brothers.
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE
FREE HUEY
-- 20 --
HARLEM FREE BREAKFAST PROGRAM
On May 19, the birthdate of Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, Friendship Baptist
Church, 144 W. 131st St., and the Harlem Community opened the first Free Breakfast
for School Children in New York.
In the current issue of the Black Panther Party newspaper, an editorial statement by Bigman states: "It is the wisdom, the strength, and the love of humanity that was Malcolm, that was the motivating force in the founding of the Black Panther Party." It is out of this wisdom, this strength and this love of humanity personified in Huey P. Newton, our Minister of Defense, that the idea of a Free Breakfast for School Children came. Every morning, in churches and community centers across the country, a full, hot breakfast is being served to school children absolutely free of charge. Food and money are being supplied in donations from local small businessmen, large distributors and private citizens. Also, many members of the Harlem community have offered their services in preparing and serving the food. Friendship Baptist Church is only the first of many churches whose facilities will be used to feed the hungry children of Harlem.
The Black Panther Party is here to serve the people by putting this socialistic program into practice. The Harlem community has many hungry children in its midst. Pig Nixon and the racist government refused to feed the hungry people of this nation. The avaricious businessman takes profits out of the community each day, while the people of the community starve. Malcolm says: "You can't operate a capitalistic system unless you are vulturistic, you have to have someone else's blood to suck to be a capitalist. You show me a capitalist, I'll show you a bloodsucker. He cannot be anything but a bloodsucker if he's going to be a capitalist." Pig Rockefeller, Lindsay and the Board of Education are not interested in feeding the hungry children of our community. Consequently, the community and the Black Panther Party have instituted the Free Breakfast for School Children Program every weekday morning.
In th