All Articles Tagged "black panthers"
Say It Loud: 8 Celebrities Whose Parents Were Activists
(Photo Courtesy of starpulse.com)
Arguably the best hip-hop lyricist of all time, the late and legendary Tupac Shakur was born to Afeni Shakur and Billy Garland, who were both active members of the Black Panther Party in its prime. Afeni was charged with multiple felonies during the late ‘60s for allegedly conspiring to bomb public places in New York. All of the charges were later dropped.
No Misconduct Found in DOJ Panther Case
(AP) — In a case that has drawn strong criticism from Republican conservatives, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility has found no evidence that politics played a role when department attorneys dismissed three defendants from a voting rights lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party. OPR, which investigates allegations of attorney misconduct, concluded that the government lawyers’ work on the lawsuit in 2009 was based on a good-faith assessment of the law and the facts and had a reasonable basis. ”We found no evidence of improper political interference or influence from within or outside the department” and the government attorneys acted appropriately in the exercise of their supervisory duties, OPR said in a letter Tuesday to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas.
No Misconduct Found in DOJ Panther Case
(AP) — In a case that has drawn strong criticism from Republican conservatives, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility has found no evidence that politics played a role when department attorneys dismissed three defendants from a voting rights lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party. OPR, which investigates allegations of attorney misconduct, concluded that the government lawyers’ work on the lawsuit in 2009 was based on a good-faith assessment of the law and the facts and had a reasonable basis. ”We found no evidence of improper political interference or influence from within or outside the department” and the government attorneys acted appropriately in the exercise of their supervisory duties, OPR said in a letter Tuesday to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas.
Psst. Conservatives? Eric Holder Was Right about Black Panther Nonsense
(Washington Post) — The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, who has done a great deal to frame the conservative narrative on the New Black Panther story, isirate that Attorney General Eric Holder recently dismissed the right’s charges about the Panther voter intimidation case as “simply not supported by the facts.” Rubin writes:
Does he actually believe this to be the case, having been sheltered from testimony, news reports, and a report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights? Or, does he imagine that he can simply bluster his way through the next two years without addressing the mound of evidence against his department? After all, his own Justice Department is conducting two internal investigations — one by the Office of Professional Responsibility and one by the Inspector General. If there is nothing here, then certainly Holder’s own employees would have long ago closed the books on their inquiries.
Revisiting The Injustice of The Justice System: The Case of Mumia
On December 9, 1981, in Philadelphia, near the intersection of 13th and Locust Streets, police officer Daniel Faulkner was shot and murdered and Mumia Abu-Jamal was shot and injured.
Albert Magilton, a pedestrian, said he didn’t see the murder but witnessed Faulker pull over Mumia Abu-Jamal’s brother, William Cook, who reportedly told police at the crime scene “ I ain’t got nothing to do with this.”
A drunken cab driver who said he’d been parked behind the officer’s vehicle fingered Mumia Abu Jamal as the shooter, begging the question; how many cab drivers with D.U.I.s voluntary roll up on the police?
A garden variety prostitute testified that a man (presumably Jamal) emerged from a parking lot and shot Faulker.
But wait, it was later discovered that the prostitute’s eyewitness descriptions of the crime scene were found to be inconsistent. Apparently, her descriptions of the crime scene described a scene in which Abu-Jamal’s car was both present and absent (I guess it’s hard out there for both the pimp and prostitute).
Vietnam veteran William Singletary said he witnessed the shooting and Abu-Jamal was not the shooter but police forced him to hightail it out of town before the trial began. In the end, journalist and Black Panther Mumia Abu Jamal was convicted of murder via unanimous verdict. The “voice of the voiceless” was silenced, sentenced to the death.
I don’t know who’s on second, who’s on third, or who shot Officer Faulker on that night in Philly. But the fact that I don’t know and worse, have no idea, speaks to the fact that Mumia Abu Jamal deserves a new trial.
Before you pummel me with stones, let me say that I am not mocking the complexities of this case, or Mumia Abu-Jamal’s life behind bars. To the contrary, I am highlighting the inefficacy of a judicial system unable to make the most logical choice available when faced with an accumulation of new evidence and the weakened veracity of old evidence.
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear arguments Tuesday over jury instructions given during Abu-Jamal’s 1982 trial. Jury instructions? Our judicial system sometimes sweats the small stuff; jury instructions, jury sequestering, sentencing guidelines and the like. But where the over-arching questions of guilt and innocence are concerned, our system is overwhelmingly inept.
If Abu-Jamal is guilty, no one cares about the jury’s instructions, or whether he gets life or the death penalty? The people who are spending every ounce of energy defending him are doing so because they believe him innocent. This is the central question that must be asked and answered. Everything else is just playing with inconsequential moving parts, putting in miles on the gerbil wheel.
Abu-Jamal has modeled himself as the mythical American revolutionary. A young, bright, enigmatic rebel wrongfully convicted while poised on the precipice of a movement. It is time to separate mythology from history. Time for a once and for all verdict on Abu-Jamal’s guilt or innocence. Everything else is just vacuous posturing.
Yvette Carnell is a former Capitol Hill Staffer turned political blogger. She currently publishes two blogs, Spatterblog.com and GoGirlGuide.com.
Who and What is The New Black Panther Party?
It is safe to state that America has become an empire that is crumbling day by day and is becoming inundated with widespread hate and fear and maladjustment to suffering and injustices. Right and left-wing cable chatter has galvanized a multitude of individuals to act in a way that is contrary to the ideal of loving thy neighbor. Congruent with this notion is the fact that the United States Department of Justice (USDOJ) has recently reported a rise in criminal and extremist groups and associated hate crimes.
In a majority of the cases, most of these clandestine organizations have been associated with right-wing extremism. There have been some leftist groups over the years that have caused minor alarm, but one left-wing organization that is currently capturing the attention of conservatives with a certain sense of urgency is the New Black Panther Party (NBPP). Talk show hosts such as Bill O’Reilly, Megyn Kelly and Sean Hannity continue to ask, “Who and what is the NBPP?”
To understand the “who” of the “new” party, it is logical for one to become acquainted with the “who” of the “old.” As commonly understood, the original Black Panther Party (BPP), was an organization of young African-Americans, mostly under the age of 25, that operated within the context of neo-Marxist principles to primarily “protect” African-American neighborhoods from rampant racist practices.
These young “militants” were secular, persuasive and articulate communicators and were comprised almost entirely of citizens from the poor and working classes. Although the United States government had promulgated public policies (i.e., Civil Rights Act of 64’ and Voting Rights Act of 65’) that would yield voting, education and civil liberties for minorities, many of these young “revolutionaries” did not believe that the government had done anything to help transform the age-old racist and xenophobic mindsets among Caucasians. Relative to the “what” of the BPP, they believed through their Ten-Point program that a self-determinative and revolutionary approach was needed to replace the fundamentally corrupt American institutional, corporate, financial and military systems, which would ultimately result in breaking the chains of oppression from the poor and working classes.
Many commentators, then and now, would stereotypically state that the BPP was strictly a hateful, violent and racist group that was out to kill white people. There were likely some members who held these sentiments. But based on robust analysis of factual, unbiased and documented evidence, I do not believe that this was the underlying platform of the organization, at least as the BPP matured. To be sure, their initial black nationalistic thought processes were racist in context, but the BPP later denounced this racism and became more socialistic while excluding race. This was evidenced as they ultimately enjoined hands with Native Americans, Asians, women and individuals of other ethnicities from around the world.
New Black Panthers Case Causes Deep Divisions
(Washington Post) — On Election Day 2008, Maruse Heath, the leader of Philadelphia’s New Black Panther Party, stood in front of a neighborhood polling place, dressed in a paramilitary uniform. Within hours, an amateur video showing Heath, slapping a black nightstick and exchanging words with the videographer, had aired on TV and ricocheted across the nation. Among those who saw the footage was J. Christian Adams, who was in his office in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in Washington. “I thought, ‘This is wrong, this is not supposed to happen in this country,’ ” Adams said. “There are armed men in front of a polling place, and I need to find out if they violated the law, because in my mind there’s a good chance that they did.” The clash between the black nationalist and the white lawyer has mushroomed into a fierce debate over the government’s enforcement of civil rights laws, a dispute that will be aired next week when the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights unveils findings from a year-long investigation.
