[Ppnews] Persecuting Panthers
Political Prisoner News
ppnews at freedomarchives.org
Mon Apr 23 08:53:19 EDT 2007
<http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/04/21/18403248.php>http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/04/21/18403248.php
<http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/04/21//police>Police State
Persecuting Panthers
by Kiilu Nyasha ( <mailto:Kiilu2 at sbcglobal.net>Kiilu2 [at] sbcglobal.net )
Saturday Apr 21st, 2007 11:59 PM
Last year, the Black Panther Party celebrated its
40th anniversary, garnering incredible media
coverage of its history and the positive impact
it had on communities here and around the world.
Three months after the 40th anniversary
celebration, on Jan. 23, 2007, the police in New
York, Florida and California arrested Francisco
Torres, Harold Taylor, Richard Brown, Richard
O’Neal, Ray Boudreaux and Henry Watson Jones on
charges related to the 1971 killing of a San
Francisco police officer – and also charged two
political prisoners, Herman Bell and Jalil
Muntaqim (Anthony Bottom). They’re both parole
eligible after over 30 years in prison.
Persecuting Panthers
The San Francisco 8 and the ongoing war against the Black Panther Party
by Kiilu Nyasha
Last year, the
<http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com>Black Panther
Party celebrated its 40th anniversary, garnering
incredible media coverage of its history and the
positive impact it had on communities here and
around the world. Numerous activities across the
country preceded a very successful Oakland
reunion that drew Panthers from as far away as
Tanzania. One of the most notable events was “The
Black Panther Rank and File” exhibit and series
of forums at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center
for the Arts. It ran from March 17 to July 2,
2006, and turned out to be the best attended
exhibit at the Center since its opening.
Little did we know that the same forces that
attacked and destroyed the Party were busy
planning still more attacks on its former
members. (Note: The BPP no longer exists, but in
keeping with our slogan, “once a Panther, always
a Panther,” I’ll not be referring to our brothers as “ex-Panthers.”)
Three months after the 40th anniversary
celebration, on Jan. 23, 2007, the police in New
York, Florida and California arrested Francisco
Torres, Harold Taylor, Richard Brown, Richard
O’Neal, Ray Boudreaux and Henry Watson Jones on
charges related to the 1971 killing of a San
Francisco police officer – and also charged two
political prisoners,
<http://www.prisonactivist.org/pps+pows/bell.html>Herman
Bell and <http://www.freejalil.com/>Jalil
Muntaqim (Anthony Bottom). They’re both parole
eligible after over 30 years in prison.
Ten brothers would have been arrested had it
not been for the fact that one, Ronald Stanley
Bridgeforth, has not been seen or heard from in
over 30 years and is still being sought. And John
Bowman, known as JB, one of the five Grand Jury Resisters, is deceased.
JB died last Dec. 23 of terminal cancer that
went undiagnosed by this medical system until in
its advanced stage. The FBI literally hounded him
to his death and beyond; they sought to open his
casket – there wasn’t one; he was cremated – they
interrogated family members and the funeral
director and they even visited the crematorium
voicing suspicions that he had escaped. Unbelievable!
We must be clear that this witch hunt, part of
the war on terror, is really a war on resistance
to an increasingly fascist, imperialist
government. It’s a war on the best of our kind,
heroes and sheroes who resist racist repression
and fight for the survival and liberation of our people.
One such hero was JB, who joined the Party in
1967 in San Francisco, where he grew up. I met
him in ‘69 or ‘70 in New Haven and grew to
respect and love him dearly. Warm and caring, he
was truly dedicated to serving and uplifting
Black people and did so for 40 years. A founder
of <http://www.allofusornone.org/>All of Us or
None and the
<http://www.cdhrsupport.org>Committee to Defend
Human Rights (CDHR), he was a community organizer
in Oklahoma City until his death.
The four other Grand Jury Resisters – Brown,
O’Neal, Taylor and Boudreaux – were subpoenaed in
2003 to testify before a San Francisco grand jury
in what was the opening salvo of this bogus case.
Refusing to testify, they were all jailed for the jury’s duration.
Upon release, in view of the Abu Ghraib
torture scandal and the ongoing violation of
their constitutional and human rights, they felt
compelled to alert the public to the similarity
of tortures perpetrated behind walls in the U.S.
So they founded CDHR and began touring the States
to educate people about
<http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/COINTELPRO/cointelpro-methods.html>COINTELPRO,
the
<http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html>Patriot
Act, and this latest witch hunt.
Earlier witch hunts of Panthers included the
capture and framing of
<http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/hougland_geronimo.htm>geronimo
ji Jaga (Pratt) who suffered 27 years in
California prisons until exonerated in 1996,
winning a subsequent lawsuit;
<http://www.semiotexte.com/authors/wahad.html>Dhoruba
bin Wahad (Richard Moore), who did 19 years
before exoneration and a million-dollar
settlement in 2000; the NY 21, who were all found
“not guilty!”;
<http://www.thejerichomovement.com/jamil.html>Jamil
Al-Amin ( H. Rap Brown), now a Muslim imam, doing
life in a Georgia state prison while appealing
his wrongful conviction;
<http://www.thejerichomovement.com/sadiki.html>Kamau
Sadiki (Freddie Hilton), sentenced to life in
2003 after refusing to cooperate in the pursuit
of <http://www.assatashakur.org>Assata Shakur,
now living in Cuba, the exiled mother of his
daughter. In 2005, New Jersey’s governor
increased the bounty on Assata to $1 million!
Nor can we forget the state’s plot to execute
<http://www.freemumia.org>Mumia Abu Jamal who has
been locked on Pennsylvania’s death row for 25
years for a murder he clearly didn’t commit. He
would be dead – death warrants have been signed
twice already – were it not for the power of the
people. Not to mention countless other Panthers imprisoned for up to 40 years.
The original investigation of the Ingleside
murder of Sgt. John Young began with the arrest
in New Orleans, in 1973, of JB, Taylor and Ruben
Scott. Two San Francisco detectives interrogated
and supervised their torture by New Orleans police for several days.
The brothers were isolated from one another,
stripped naked and handcuffed to a chair, covered
with boiling hot blankets and plastic bags tied
over their heads threatening suffocation. Cattle
prods were used to inflict electric shocks to
their genitals and anus, and they were brutally
beaten with blackjacks and other objects. Taylor
described being kicked in the back of the neck
unconscious, then kicked back awake four or five times in an hour.
All tolled, the prolonged tortures left the
brothers with permanent injuries, including
damaged ear drums, chronic pain, knee problems,
arthritis and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
symptoms such as trouble sleeping and nightmares.
At that time, they all made torture-induced
confessions, but such “evidence” is neither
credible nor legal. So in 1975, a San Francisco
judge dismissed the case. It’s outrageous that
these same charges are again being brought
against eight elders ranging in age from 55 to
71, all of whom face conspiracy charges on the
Ingleside incident and numerous other activities between 1968 and 1973.
It was during this very period that 41 FBI
field offices were advised by a memo from the FBI
director to “be alert to have them arrested” on
virtually any charges they could trump up
the
same period when Panthers were struggling to meet
people’s basic needs through free breakfast
programs, clothing drives, health clinics, sickle
cell testing, alternative schools, organizing
against rent hikes and substandard housing, and
advocating for community control of local police
to stop them from murdering and brutalizing our people.
This resurrected case must be understood
through the historical lens of the FBI’s
<http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/COINTELPRO/cointelpro.html>Cointelpro
(counterintelligence program) working in concert
with local police departments. These forces, led
by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, targeted the
Panthers for neutralization (incarceration,
assassination or isolation) with an official
reign of terror encompassing 1968-1973, or until
the
<http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6808>Weather
Underground raided FBI files and exposed its illegal operations.
Under the leadership of the late Sen. Frank
Church, hearings were held resulting in passage
of the Freedom of Information Act of 1973,
allowing individuals to obtain copies of their
secret files. This prompted lawsuits against the
government and others. For example, I was one of
numerous plaintiffs in a wiretap lawsuit settled
out of court in New Haven against the City, the
FBI, the Chief of Police and the phone company.
Today, that wouldn’t be possible, because
wiretapping is legal under the
<http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html>PATRIOT Act.
By 1969, 28 Panthers had been murdered by
police and by 1973, at least 32 Panthers,
including Field Marshall
<http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/rodneyjackson.html>George
Jackson, had been killed by so-called law
enforcement. The most blatant was the
premeditated assassination of
<http://www.blackcommentator.com/67/67_hampton.html>Fred
Hampton and
<http://www.markclarklegacy.com/home.htm>Mark
Clark in Chicago. A million-dollar civil lawsuit
was won, thanks to Attorney Dennis Cunningham,
but not one policeman who participated in the
predawn deadly assault on the Panthers was ever even indicted.
Fast forward to 1985, when Philadelphia police
bombed <http://www.onamove.com>MOVE’s home,
killing six adults and five children of the
Africa family. A lawsuit settlement but no
indictments. To 1999, when New York police murder
innocent, unarmed
<http://www.amadoudiallofoundation.org/lifehistory.html>Amadou
Diallo with 41 shots. Not one conviction! To
2007, when three unarmed Black men were shot,
Sean Bell fatally, in a hail of 50 police
bullets. Manslaughter charges. And we could go on
and on documenting police murders of innocent
Black folks, often with complete impunity, only
paid suspensions (vacations) for the murderers
and payoffs to grieving families.
Cointelpro under Nixon has regrouped under
Bush with Attorney General John Ashcroft’s new,
legal counterintelligence program, the
<http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html>PATRIOT
Act, to begin anew the persecution of Panthers.
In fact, before leaving office, Ashcroft sought
to reopen all cases of police killings dating back to the ‘60s.
Who are the SF 8?
Collectively, the San Francisco 8 are a group
of Black community activists who served the
people in the BPP activities mentioned above.
They are fathers, grandfathers and even great grandfathers.
Richard Brown, 65, has worked for decades
right here in San Francisco’s Fillmore District.
“He was at community meetings at night, on
boards, in the neighborhood, working for
affordable housing. His job was never 9 to 5.”
said the Rev. Arnold Townsend, who has known
Brown for 40 years. Employed for 20 years as a
program coordinator at the Ella Hill Hutch
Community Center, he’s also a founding member of
the African American Police Community Relations
Board and several other neighborhood
organizations. “He has a fantastic rapport with
the young people,” Jim Queen, a commissioner with
the city’s Juvenile Probation Department, told
the San Francisco Chronicle. “He grew up there
and had a special way with the kids, a stern
tough-love way. He demanded high standards and
made sure he was always available to them.”
Likewise, the Chronicle noted that Richard
O’Neal, 57, “who has two grown sons ... has
worked for the past few years at the Southeast
Community Center. ... People who work there said
they were stunned by his arrest, recalling him as
a kind and gentle man who always had a smile on
his face and would at times stay late to fix
lights or other things.” Veronica Hunnicutt, the
dean of the Southeast college campus, exclaimed,
“Oh, my God, we’re just utterly stunned. It’s
taken us all aback because he is such a nice man.
He is a trusted employee who would do anything to
help us. I hope they look at all of the
information, because this man has been wonderful
out here. He would take the shirt off his back to
try to help you.” O’Neal has only been charged with “conspiracy.”
Ray Boudreaux, 64, a Vietnam veteran who
resided in Altadena, Calif., was employed for the
past 25 years as an electrician for the County of
Los Angeles and did community work until his
arrest. “People come to me sometimes as a
peacemaker. And all of that has to do with all of my experience.”
<http://www.prisonactivist.org/pps+pows/bell.html>Herman
Bell, 59, of Mississippi, and
<http://www.freejalil.com/>Jalil Muntaqim
(Anthony Bottom), 55, of San Francisco, joined
the Party in the Bay Area, where they began their
long service to the people. Captured in the early
1970s, along with
<http://prisonactivist.org/pps+pows/nuh-washington>Albert
Nuh Washington and Gabriel and Francisco Torres,
they were framed for the killing of two policemen
in New York City in May 1971. I saw Jalil and Nuh
in the San Francisco court when they were
arraigned in 1971. In 2007, it’s déjà vu!
Originally the NY 5, their first trial ended
in a hung jury. In a second trial, the Torres
brothers’ charges were dismissed, but perjured
and coerced testimony – including that of Ruben
Scott, tortured in New Orleans – resulted in
convictions of the remaining brothers, who got 25
to life and became known as the
<http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/profiles/ny3.html>NY
3. The trial judge had refused to hear any
testimony about Cointelpro and its campaign to
secure convictions by any means, including
breaking laws. In April of 2000, after 29 years
of incarceration, Nuh Washington passed away, ending a long battle with cancer.
Herman and Jalil have maintained close ties to
their families here in the Bay. In 2000, Jalil
was featured in an Essence magazine article on
father-daughter relationships. Both continued to
grow and contribute to society despite being locked up all these decades.
They earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees,
tutored and counseled prisoners, and worked with
community activists outside to organize the
<http://www.prisonactivist.org/pps+pows/vg_update.html>Victory
Gardens Project, the urban-rural connection to
plant, harvest and distribute free food to
various ‘hoods along the East Coast. This
life-giving project enjoyed eight successful
seasons. Jalil is also the founder of the
<http://www.thejerichomovement.com>Jericho
Movement to free political prisoners.
Harold Taylor, 58, was living in Panama City,
Fla., where he remained committed to his
principles and community. He had joined the Black
Panther Party in Los Angeles. In a 2006 interview
with Harold and JB on <http://www.kpfa.org>KPFA,
Harold described how the FBI “used a lot of
informants, agents and provocateurs to entrap
people.” In fact, the FBI had infiltrated 67
agents into the BPP and deployed 700 informants
nationwide. “In 2003 the detectives that were
responsible for my torture [in New Orleans] came
to my house to try and question me. I have not
been the same since,” said Taylor.
Henry W. (Hank) Jones, 71, of Altadena, a
responsible family and community elder, was
employed as a real estate appraiser before his
arrest. “I [have lived] under the constant threat
of another ... incarceration. In essence I have
been robbed of peace of mind, life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness,” said Jones when in
2003 he was subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury and resisted.
Francisco Torres, 58, was born in Puerto Rico
and raised in New York City. A Vietnam veteran,
he’s been an activist since his discharge from
the military in 1969 in veterans’ and community
affairs and has worked with troubled youth right
up until his recent arrest and extradition to San Francisco from Queens, N.Y.
Six of these brothers are being kept in jail
needlessly on bails of $3 million each – reduced
from $5 million for equity! Where are all the
wealthy Black entertainers and sports figures who
claim to want to give back to their communities?
Well here’s a golden opportunity for you to give
back to our community activists! They present no
risk of flight, they’re highly respected members
of their communities and they should be returned
to their families as soon as possible. Equity in
property can be used to secure release on bail
without any permanent sacrifice of personal or community resources.
Hearings will be held in the next weeks to
request a lowering of bail for these brothers,
making it more realistic to secure their release
during these lengthy “conspiracy” hearings. The
next hearing is Friday, April 27, 1:30 p.m., at
850 Bryant St., San Francisco. A noon rally will precede the hearing. Join us!
For more information on the SF 8 and how you
can help, please go to <http://www.CDHRsupport.org>http://www.CDHRsupport.org.
Free the SF 8, Mumia Abu-Jamal and all political prisoners
<http://www.cdhrsupport.org>http://www.cdhrsupport.org
The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org
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