A Black Dyke Reflects on the Panthers

[It's Pride, at least here in NYC. In honor of that fact, I am posting here an article that Comrade Google suggests is not otherwise available on the Internet. It appeared as one of a stunning roundup of pieces by Black LGBTQ writers in The Advocate in one issue in the 1990s, under the irresistible title "Black Out."

By me, they should all be online, but I am posting this one for obvious reasons. It is by Alycee Lane, then a grad student at UCLA. In it she discusses what the Black Panther Party had meant to her—as an elementary school "baby dyke" in Buffalo and then later as she learned about Huey Newton's famous speech in which he welcomed the women's and gay liberation movements and called on the BPP to work with them. That was in 1970 when the modern queer movement was first erupting in all its Stonewall-fueled glory—and when many other self-styled revolutionary and socialist organizations shied away from it, or adopted appallingly homophobic stances. 

There's a lot about our history to be learned from this short piece, and there's always a chance that it won't be up at Fire on the Mountain forever, so if you agree with me on its importance, I encourage you to save it and to make sure others have access.]

The Black Panther Party And Gay Liberation

By Alycee Lane

I really wanted to be a member of the Black Panther Party when I was younger. I imagined myself one day galvanizing the other kids in my neighborhood in Buffalo, N.Y., and conducting a righteous raid on that one house I passed on the way to my integrated school—that horrifying white house that donned, hatefully, a sprawling banner stained with the curse WHITE POWER. Yeah, I was going to conduct a righteous raid. I figured this was the Panther thing to do, especially since I had seen the brothers walking proudly with their guns, policing the police, who were, in my young opinion, somehow connected to the curse.

In spite of their guns and "baaad black man" attitudes, it never occurred to me to feel intimidated by or afraid of the Panthers. For they never failed to greet me with love—"Good morning, little sister" and "How are you doing in school? Making those grades? Learning about your history?" I simply wanted to be with and be like them. I didn't know about the Panther

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Black NJ: People's Organization for Progress on the FBI & NJ State Police attack on Assata Shakur

FBI/NJ State police put up a new billboard advertising their call for an extrajudicial hit against our sister Assata Shakur

This past week, many movement activists were shocked when our sister, Assata Shakur, was suddenly placed atop an until then unknown FBI "terrorist" list. In response, at noon on Friday May 10 People's Organization For Progress, the New Black Panther Party and a host of allied organizations and individuals held a press conference in at the Rodino Federal Building in Newark, NJ. The statement that follows was read by Lawrence Hamm, NJ state chairman for POP:

Take Assata Shakur off the Terrorist List

The People's Organization For Progress (POP) calls upon the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to remove Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard) from its Most Wanted Terrorists List.  She does not belong on the list because Ms. Shakur was never charged nor convicted of an act of domestic or international terrorism.

To place her on such a list is fundamentally unjust. It is a perversion of justice and involves the ex post facto application of terrorist laws and definitions of terrorism that were not in existence or applied to her case at the time of her arrest and conviction.

Furthermore, she did not commit the crime she was accused of.   She was placed on the list because her conviction connected her to the murder of a police officer. However, evidence in her case shows that she could not have shot and killed that officer.  She became a fugitive because given the circumstances of her case, the atmosphere of repression, and the racism of the criminal justice system she could not get justice in this country and to remain here may have cost her life.

The move to place her on the list and the doubling of her bounty to $2 million has little to do with justice and everything to do with politics. It is an opportunistic attempt to use the criminal justice system to score political points in this highly charged post Boston bombing environment.

Placing Assata Shakur on the terrorists list when she was not convicted of a "terrorist act" is in essence falsely accusing her of a crime that she did not commit. It is the abandonment of the law in the name of enforcing the law.

Like the war in Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, preemptive strikes, and the abandonment of international law, it is the establishment of a false premise as a rationale for violent action, which has no legal basis but for which political support may be imagined or conjured up.  Placing Assata Shakur on the terrorists list sets a dangerous precedent.

With the false premise established what will be next?  Will Cuba be given the ultimatum to give up Shakur like the Afghanistan government was told to give up Osama Bin Laden before the US invasion of that country?  Will there be a drone strike of Shakur's supposed residence in Cuba?  Will Navy Seal Team "7" be sent on a covert mission to assassinate Assata Shakur who is an American citizen?

Zayid Muhammad of the New Black Panthers introduces Newark elder Amiri Baraka, who also spoke eloquently at the press conferenc 

By identifying Shakur as a terrorist the FBI is taking the terrorists list and making it a "political enemies" list, which is an instrument of state terror. And why not?  This fits in perfectly with unjust and illegal trillion dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, extraordinary renditions, black site secret prisons in foreign lands, torture, assassination of US citizens, military courts, secret trials, Guantanamo, elimination of habeas corpus, indefinite detention, government domestic spying, arbitrary arrests, police brutality, racial profiling, stop and frisk, mass incarceration, school to prison pipeline, suppression of dissent, COINTELPRO type operations, ignoring the Constitution, trashing the Bill of rights, and trampling upon our civil liberties.  

And let's look at her accusers. Who is calling her a terrorist?  The FBI who spied on Dr. Martin Luther King. The FBI whose Director J. Edgar Hoover made it his mission to destroy Dr. King. The FBI who engaged in acts of state terror that included assassination against people and organizations in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements.

And the New Jersey State Police who shot up Newark and killed innocent people during the rebellion. The New Jersey State Police who for years engaged in the worst forms of racial profiling.  The New Jersey State Police, a department so rife with racism that the federal government had to put it under a "master" to force it to reform its racist ways.

With this precedent the rights of all Americans are placed in greater jeopardy. Now, anyone can be deemed a terrorist, not because this was proven in a court of law but by fiat, proclamation or declaration by the President, US Attorney General, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, or some other agency of the federal government.

And this can be done not just for transgressions of the present. It can be done retroactively for sins of the past, ten, twenty, thirty, and forty years ago. If the government doesn't like someone just put them on the terrorist list.

Of course, this exercise of twenty-first century US democracy would not be complete unless accompanied by the economic incentive that American capitalism can provide. In this age of robber billionaires a $1 million dollar bounty on the head of Assata Shakur was not enough. It has been doubled to $2 million.

Who are the $2 million pieces of silver for? Are they for enterprising US citizens? No. Assata Shakur has been given political asylum in Cuba. This pot of gold is to entice elements within Cuban Society to violate the laws and policies of the Cuban government.

The FBI and company hope that in Cuba there are corrupt persons within the police, or criminal elements, or people opposed to the government who will take the bait and do this bit of subcontracting work and keep some of the heat off the bosses in the US.

They hope that there are Hamid Kharzais in Cuba who would like to have bags of money delivered to them on a monthly basis. "Bring Assata Shakur to us and you to can be a millionaire." Dead or alive has not been specified.

The placing of Assata Shakur on the terrorist list while portrayed as a noble act in the attempt to get justice for a slain police officer is in fact a shameful act of revenge, opportunism, political manipulation, and authoritarianism.  It is part and parcel of a corrosive trend eating away at the democratic processes and institutions in our country for half a century and which has accelerated since 9/11.

Assata Shakur should not be on the terrorist list. She should be removed from that list just as Nelson Mandela was removed from that list several years ago. When the threat of terrorism and the terrorist label is misused in this manner the victims of real acts of terror are dishonored.

(Fire on the Mountain thanks POP Corresponding-Secretary Ingrid Hill for her photographs from the press conference/picket at the Rodino Office Building)

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"Breathing the spirit of rebellion into our youth…"

"We must breath the spirit of rebellion into our youth," Lawrence Hamm said, reflecting on the importance of this past Saturday's commemoration of the 179th anniversary of August 21, 1831 South Hampton County Virginia slave revolt with these words. In fact, Newark, NJ may be the only place in the US where there is a park honoring Nat Turner, the leader of this rebellion.


In addition to brother Hamm, Roger Smith and Elizabeth McGrady spoke representing the Friends of Nat Turner Park, the Central Ward community group that reached out to the Trust for Public Land, the Newark Public School, the Springfield/Belmont Super Neighborhood Council and other public advocacy groups to bring this, the largest city-owned park into Newark, into existence. Smith, a former member of the original Black Panther Party has been active in the city his entire life and was able to shed light on exactly how this unique park came into existence over the last four decades.


"Street Doctor" Earl Best reflected on the many ways the Central Ward needs this new park, while Larry Adams, POP's co-chair, shared Nat Turner's story and the history of the 1831 slave revolt he led. POP chairman Hamm decribed Adams presentation as a "deep and thoroughly materialist" history. POP elder and movement griot, Aminifu Williams expanded on brother Adams' masterful history lessons, melding in his own seven-decades of experience in the people's struggles, while POP historian Wade McIver shared little-known facts about Turner's revolt. Revolutionary poet Carlos Dufflar shared brand new verse devoted to Turner's life and legacy.

Zayid Muhammad, National Minister of Culture of the New Black Panther Party, roused the nearly 100 participants in attendance, speaking about the political and cultural implications of Nat Turner's revolutionary ideals and their implications for a new generation of revolutionaries. "We need to wonder," brother Muhammad asked, "how this revolutionary people's park got the approval of the reactionary Booker administration?"

The answer to this question is that the very existence of Nat Turner Park is the legacy of an earlier generation of activism. As Roger Smith pointed out, the 1967 Newark Rebellion energized the Committee for a Unified Newark, which in turn led to the election of Kenneth Gibson, Newark's first African-American mayor in 1970. The mood, attitude and community culture of the times that attempted to build the Kawaida Tower low-income housing, succeeded in getting the land set aside and  designated for Nat Turner Park. It took more than 30 years to build, but it is certainly a people's victory… 

[This Fire on the Mountain blog entry is dedicated to the memory of our brother Ron "Slim" Washington, an African-American labor and community leader who passed Sunday, August 22. In the words of his friends, he devoted the entirety of his intellect, passion and energy to the cause of Black Liberation. Slim would most certainly have been with POP at  the Commemoration of Nat Turner's 1831 slave revolt, just as he played a leading role in the many struggles of the past four decades that helped bring this park into existence. Ronald "Slim" Washington, Ashé! Ronald "Slim" Washington, Presenté!]


Thanks once again to POP photographer Jon Levine for sharing the photos used in this blog. For more pictures from Newark's 1st Annual Commemoration of Nat Turner's Rebellion click on this link.

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May ‘70: 3. May Day & Bobby Seale

Me, I don’t have much memory of Nixon’s April 30, 1970 speech announcing the invasion of Cambodia. It could have been because nothing the bastard did would have surprised me by that point, but more likely it’s just that I was already on my way to New Haven to see about Bobby.

That would be Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party, who was facing trial in the case of some Connecticut Panthers accused of murdering a member they thought was a police informant. A national call had gone out for a May Day demonstration to defend Bobby, and thousands of young radicals from around the country and especially the Northeast were en route. We had a couple of dozen from NYU’s Uptown campus with us.

Lemme step back here to set a little context. NYU today is a bigtime, self-promoting academic powerhouse whose relentless pursuit of lower Manhattan real estate for expansion has earned them the hatred of all clear-thinking New Yorkers. Back then, NYU was a bit cheesier, with a campus in Greenwich Village and a satellite one in the Bronx. (The Uptown campus was abandoned by the racist NYU administration later in the 1970s when it found the West Bronx was becoming, let’s say, too colorful, and is now the home of Bronx Community College).

We had a pretty good SDS chapter at NYU Uptown and saw no reason to change anything just because the national organization had imploded the previous summer. (In fact, at one point we decided the chapter head, Lon E. Thud, must be National Secretary of SDS—nobody else was doing it, after all). NYU had given me a “compulsory leave of absence for academic reasons” at the endof the previous school year, a tactical mistake on their part. I was still a registered student and, as such, could not be excluded from the campus.

We began the school year with an orientation week packet and program we had put a lot of time into prepping and followed up with extensive dorm canvassing, picking up some fine new members. One of our fall activities was selling the Black Panther, the BPP’s weekly paper, to build support for the revolutionary group—a dynamic model of revolutionary organization, hugely popular in the Black community and under concerted and deadly attack by local police forces and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

In the early months, we could barely sell a dozen papers. The problem wasn’t their militant program or their guns. We were meeting particular resistance on a disproportionately Jewish campus. “Aren’t they anti-Semitic?” folks would ask, citing the BPP’s early support of the Palestinian struggle and Fatah.

But patient education and organizing would combine with the increasing radicalization of the times to create a more favorable climate. By mid-winter SDS took a contingent of over 100 from the Uptown campus to join a march from Manhattan to the Queens House of Detention in support of the Panther 21 (more political prisoners, victims of frame-up charges, whose long court case and trial, the most expensive in NY history, eventually resulted in complete exoneration).

When the call came to rally on May Day in New Haven to Free Bobby! (a slogan which had somehow mysteriously appeared writ large across various Uptown campus buildings), a couple dozen of the most active radicals at the school headed up there, to join 15,000 other protesters crashing in Yale dorms and rallying on the New Haven Green.

Friday, May 1 was a very tense day, which foreshadowed the month to come in its combination of repression and concession. The governor had persuaded Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, to airlift 4,000 Army paratroops and Marines from Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune for deployment in New Haven! Meanwhile, Connecticut National Guard troops in APCs and tanks were stationed around the city.

At the same time Yale University head Kingman Brewster, facing a substantial groundswell of support for Seale within his elite student body, famously set himself against the establishment, declaring at a mass faculty meeting, to the horror of many alumni:

“I personally want to say that I am appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass in this country that I am skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States."

Significantly, that faculty meeting was dealing with the threat of a student strike at Yale, endorsed at a 1500 student rally where a Panther spokesman declared “That Panther and that Bulldog gonna move together!" In a pre-emptive strike, the profs voted to suspend business as usual. Faculty members didn’t have to hold classes, and no students would be penalized academically for not attending.

Finally, Brewster had decided to open the campus to the protestors, so as to avoid making Yale an easy target for us. Meanwhile, he negotiated with established organizers and leaders from New Haven’s Black community and the upstart Panther chapter there to ensure that dangerous violence wouldn’t break out. Even New Haven’s police chief fought for authority over the military contingent, and they were kept out of sight for the most part.

It was still a close thing on May Day. The afternoon rally was, as rallies tend to be, peaceful and long and boring, even with the occasional whiff of tear gas. In the evening, there were running skirmishes in the campus area, some clearly the work of provocateurs, and tear gas aplenty. We were ready to rumble, but the tactical and political leadership, headed by the Panthers, directed us to keep things cool. New Haven didn’t blow.

Nothing I’ve read mentions the most important thing to come out of the rally. We voted to respond to Nixon’s Cambodia invasion with a national student strike (which, though we didn’t yet grasp it, was already underway). And we laid out three main demands for the strike:

US Out Of Southeast Asia

End Campus Complicity With The War Machine

Free Bobby Seale & All Political Prisoners

With no widely-recognized national student organization to provide direction to the forces already set in motion, this call did a lot to lay down the political terms on which the events of May ’70 would take place. Campus after campus took the three demands up. Indeed, they were just what the doctor ordered—very broad, revolutionary in fact, but still specific, and representing mass sentiment among a whole layer in every part of the country and every section of the people, millions who had been thrown into motion by the ferment of the ‘60s.

Click here to read this series from the beginning.

Click here to read the next installment.

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Revolutionary Recipes: Bean Pie for the Panther 21

Panther 21 demo, NYC

I first learned of the theological importance of bean pies at NYU in late 1968, Jerry 10X, a basketball player and a leader of Katara, the Black student organization at NYU’s then-Uptown Campus in the Bronx, had recently converted to the Nation of Islam but was still willing hang with the SDS crew as we had supported Katara in a building seizure earlier in the semester. Jerry instructed me as to the central role that the bean pie (sort of a Platonic ideal of a bean pie) played in keeping the cosmos balanced. I wish I could remember the details--it was a doozy of a piece of religious reasoning.

No mention of bean pies occurs in NOI patriarch Elijah Muhammed’s How To Eat To Live, but the book passionately advocates for small navy beans as an ideal food for NOI members (and strenuously warns against the large white beans). By the 1950s bean pies were being made and sold by members of the faith in cities across the country, and became a kind of signifier of Black nationalism, even among non-Muslims.

This recipe though is dedicated to the New York-based Panther 21. The Black Panther Party formed a New York section in the summer of 68 and grew rapidly. An early recruit was Lumumba Shakur, a follower of Islam and Malcolm X, and the son of a Muslim family. In a whirlwind of activity frantic even for those revolutionary times, Lumumba headed and built the Harlem branch, coordinated with the heads of other NYC branches, oversaw mass campaigns demanding community control of hospitals, spoke publicly for the new organization public, recruited, trained and drilled new members—and met, proposed to and married a young woman named Alice Faye Williams, who became Afeni Shakur.

Afeni recalls, "Lumumba introduced me to hot bean pie. We would buy them on the corner of One Twenty-sixth and Lenox. Bring them home. Heat them in the oven. Slice them up and eat the whole thing. Delicious. Sweet. We’d eat the whole thing…Just happy…"

Less than a year later in April, 1969 the NYC police rounded up Lumumba, Afeni and a dozen and a half other members of the BPP on various conspiracy charges, signaling the start of an all-out nation-wide assault on the growing and influential revolutionary organization.

The Panther 21 faced two years of grueling court battles before all those still facing charges were exonerated by juries of their peers. Meanwhile, splits between the East and West Coast Panthers and divisions within the ranks of the 21 defendants themselves sent Lumumba and Afeni and the others spinning on very different trajectories, to more struggle, to burnout, to death, to life in prison, to crime, to addiction, to a quiet everyday life…to Afeni’s loss of her son Tupac Shakur in the hip-hop wars of the ‘90s.

But this recipe is for those days when the Panthers were playing a vanguard role in this country, the struggle was ripping, the people’s movements were erupting and every day held the possibility of "Just happy"…and more.

Damn Good Bean Pie

This recipe is for the filling, enough for two pies. Use your own personal favorite piecrust recipe—one of the best bean pies I ever et had a Graham cracker crust. Or in a pinch, a good commercial piecrust, the kind you unfold or unroll into your own pan, like Pillsbury, will do fine.

2 cups dry small Navy beans
Check ‘em over for stones, rinse ‘em well in a colander and let ‘em soak in 5 cups of water overnight. Drain and rinse, add fresh water to cover by 1.5" and bring to a boil. Then just simmer for about 90 minutes, skimming and adding water if necessary.

Preheat oven to 350.

Beat into beans for about 3 minutes:

1 stick butter

2 tbsp flour

4 eggs

1 tsp nutmeg

1 tsp cinnamon

1 standard can evaporated milk (not condensed!)

Finally mix in:

2 cups sugar

2 tbsp real vanilla

Now pour the glop into your crust and pop it in the oven for an hour. It should be golden brown on top and smell fabulous.

(I like to add a half tsp mace, but if you don’t have any, it’s completely optional.)

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Black NJ: P.O.P. Celebrates Kuumba (creativity) on 6th Day of Kwanzaa

New Years Eve 2009, was the People's Organization for Progress' evening this past year to host one of Newark's Kwanzaa celebrations. For years, each night's observance has been sponsored by a different local organization and because POP's weekly General Assembly is Thursday, this year our turn corresponded to Kuumba, the celebration of creativity.

And because Thursday was New Years Eve, the usual meeting location, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, was completely committed Watch-Night activities and unavailable to POP. But since one of our senior members, Mr. Aminifu Williams is also associated with REFAL we were fortunate enough to get access to their Kommuniversity location. POP Elder Aminifu was also associated with Dr. Maulana Karenga's US Organization in Los Angeles back at the time Kwanzaa in the U.S. originated in the middle-1960s, so POP's Griot, Aminifu, was also able to provide historic background on Kwanzaa's origins that many other celebrations of the holiday lack.

Bringing our celebration back to issues in the community:
Because this was the People's Organization for Progress celebration, we didn't simply follow the order of the activities designated by the Nguzo Saba (the Seven Principles of Kwanzaa). As a community-based festival Kwanzaa demands that we link each of the Seven Principals, Umoja (Unity); Kujichagulia (Self-Determination); Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility); Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics); Nia (Purpose); Kuumba (Creativity); and Imani (Faith) back to our ongoing activism. This year's Kwanzaa had two themes, as well as the principle of creativity that we recognized.

Because Sundiata Acoli (Black Panther Party member and a political prisoner incarcerated for 36 years) is scheduled for a parole hearing scheduled for February, New Black Panther Party Minister of Culture Zayid Muhammad presented a letter-writing campaign aimed at winning Acoli's parole (see link for more information about this campaign). Sundiata (who is 73 years old) is a former NASA mathematician who was arrested and imprisoned for alleged involvement in the shooting death of NJ State Trooper Werner Foerster. Acoli was convicted in 1972 and sentence to Life plus 30 years. This is the same shooting incident that our sister Assata Shakur was framed for after being shot twice.

The second theme for this year's POP Kwanzaa was Youth. Some of the People's Organization for Progress' most successful and inspiring campaign this past year have been thanks to the involvement of our Youth Committee (see The Community Fights for Water Rights & Wins for one electrifying example). Andrea Jones, C0-Chair of the POP Youth Committee, reviewed the past year and presented the committee's plans for 2010.

Lawrence Hamm, POP's chairman, introduced and closed the program explaining the need for self-esteem in the context of the historic experiences of African Americans. Kwanzaa was developed as a component of this assertion of dignity and achievement. The holiday is based on the historic harvest celebrations of many African civilizations. It takes its name from the Swahili phrase "matunda ya kwanza" which means "first fruits."

K'Sakhem Wé, Chairman of REFAL People's Organization for Progress Chairman Larry Hamm

To view more photos from this event, go to People's Organization for Progress Kwanzaa 2009. Thanks to POP photographers Ingrid Hill, chair of POP's Reparations Committee, Labor Committee chair Jon Levine.

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Before There Was Hip Hop...

My brother Steve recently laid a copy of a book on me that I hadn't seen in almost 40 years, A Panther Is A Black Cat by Reginald Majors. Thumbing through it, I found a description of a "Free Huey" rally where Baby D read a poem by Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter (gunned down by members of the US organization in L.A., January 17, 1969). Struck by the excerpt Majors included, I dug up the whole thing here, as printed in the Black Panther newspaper, January 3, 1970.

NIGGER TOWN

In Nigger Town
In Nigger Town
The streets are made of mud
Infested with rats and bats and bugs

In Nigger Town
In Nigger Town
The streets are made of brick
Ask any swinging dick that happens past
Why won't he get off his big, fat, black, funky ass

A grumbling snitch
A shot of shit for a dope fiend bitch
Hid behind the cemetery in the fog
A leg, a hog, a short dog of Elderberry
Misery spreads and brothers dead
Cause Charlie's runnin' in the reds

In Nigger Town one day
Four little children kneeled to pray
in Jesus name
Boom!
Four little children gone
And Jesus never came

Now you say, you're tired of all this shit
You suck-a-pawed son-of-a-bitch
If you was, you'd ball you mitt
DO SOMETHING nigger! if you only spit

Tell the truth snaggle-tooth
I know you're scared you mother goose
With niggers in Nigger Town
I'm fed up to my neck
About a drunk, a thief, a punk
I wouldn't give a husky heck
In Nigger Town.

"Bunchy"


Check the language, the attitude, the rhymes. If this ain't hip hop, I'm Barry Manilow.

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State Repression: The Good News...

[This report came in yesterday from organizers for the National Jericho Movement. The wheels may be coming off of the ugly revanchist effort to railroad 8 former members of the Black Panther Party into jail on charges of killing a San Francisco police officer--in 1971. One clear motive of the state in pursuing this case is to counteract the reversal of verdicts in frame-up cases that had kept former Panthers jailed for decades, like Geronimo ji-Jaga. They may have picked up a rock only to drop it on their own feet, however, because the previous trial of one of the 8, Harold Taylor, was thrown out of court because he had been savagely tortured. Bringing the case back up now proves once again that torture is not reserved for Iraqis swept into Abu Ghraib, but is practiced by the police right here at home as a matter of course.]

Important Victory in San Francisco 8 Case!

Prosecutors in the San Francisco 8 case announced that they are filing an amended complaint, in effect dropping the conspiracy count against 5 of the brothers, because the statute of limitations (of 3 years on conspiracy) has expired. This is a result of defense motions filed recently that challenged the complaint on the basis of expired statute of limitations.

Ray Boudreaux, Richard Brown, Hank Jones and Harold Taylor now only face one count, the alleged murder of a San Francisco police officer in 1971. The case against Richard O'Neal must now be dismissed, since he was originally charged only in the second count.

The prosecutors will argue that the statute of limitations did not expire against Herman Bell, Jalil Muntaqim and Francisco Torres as they were not residents in California during the last 35 years. "This is a ridiculous argument," according to defense attorney Stuart Hanlon, "as these men were forcefully removed from the state against their will by being imprisoned. Following his acquittal on charges in New York State, Cisco Torres was living in New York City. All 3 were consistently available to California State prosecutors." This legal point will be argued in the upcoming San Francisco hearing on January 10th, and their lawyers will ask that the conspiracy count be dropped against the other 3 men.

This is a major victory in this case which rests on statements coerced under torture. "This is the first step in the government's case falling apart," Hanlon said.

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SomeThoughts on Repression

On December 4, 1969, Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were gunned down in their sleep in a massive military-style raid executed by Chicago cops. I only heard about it a couple of days later, as I had just arrived in Cuba with the first Venceremos Brigade. Some of us talked regretfully about being stuck in the Caribbean for the next two months when stuff was starting to break loose back in the belly of the beast. Hey, we were young.

Every December 4, thousands of us of a certain age think of Brother Fred and of how the pigs murdered him because he was a dynamic leader of the oppressed.

I’ve been thinking about him today with Oaxaca in mind. Last night I heard filmmaker Tami Gold and some very recently returned global justice activists report. The situation is dire. 17 activists and bystanders have been killed and more than 150 arrested or disappeared in the last 10 days. Teachers union leaders, back at work, are being grabbed in the classroom and carted off. Bloody reaction is gaining the upper hand.

While it is true that the Mexican government would rather not suffer international attention or even anger, there are alternatives that the Mexican ruling class finds far less acceptable. I’ve spent the last few months being irked as hell at some here in the US who celebrated the popular uprising led by APPO as an invincible revolutionary upsurge. Wake up—they are in one city and armed, as the showdown with the Federal Preventive Police and PAN vigilantes unfolded, with slings, molotovs and some cheap handguns! I fear many more may die as Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz and the Federales crack down and take revenge, and the movement begins the difficult task of adjusting and consolidating under conditions of “normalcy” and fearsome repression.

And if they think their interests demand it, the rich and powerful here will gun down as many as they need to—and jail more. The BPP lost many more cadre to the criminal “justice” system than police bullets. Some are still in jail. Today, with far less attention from liberals or the left, dozens of young activists in the ecology movement and the animal rights movement are facing—and serving!--fearsome sentences. Check out the Day in Support of the Green Scare Indictees slated for December 7. There’s probably an event happening near you.

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