Thanks for the links and since I posted the original I will now post the Full text for those who don't like to click on links.
<<Claim: Hillary Clinton played a significant role in defending Black Panthers accused of torturing and murdering Alex Rackley.
Status: False.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1999]
Scream, America, When You've Had Enough
Back in 1969 a group of Black Panthers decided that a Black man named Alex Rackley needed to die. Rackley was a fellow Panther suspected of disloyalty.
Rackley was first tied to a chair. Safely immobilized his "friends" tortured him for hours by, among other things, pouring boiling water on him.
When they got tired of torturing Rackley Black Panther member Warren Kimbro took Mr. Rackley's outside and put a bullet in his head. Rackley's body was found floating in a river about 25 miles north of New Haven, Conn.
Maybe at this point you're curious as to what happened to these Black Panthers. Well, in 1977, that's only eight years later, only one of the killers was still in jail. The shooter, Warren Kimbro, managed to get a scholarship to Harvard. He later became an assistant dean at Eastern Connecticut State College.
Isn't that something? As a 60's radical you can pump a bullet into someone's head, and years later, in the same State, you can be an assistant college dean! Only in America!
Ericka Huggins was the lady who served the Panthers by boiling the water for Mr. Rackley's torture. Some years later Ms. Huggins was elected to a California school board.
How in the world do you think that these killers got off so easy? Well, maybe it was in some part due to the efforts of two people who came to the defense of the Panthers. These two people actually went so far as to shut down Yale University with demonstrations in defense of the accused Black Panthers during their trial. One of those people was none other than Bill Lan Lee. Mr. Lee, or Mr. Lan Lee as the case may be, isn't a college dean. He isn't a member of a California school board. He is the head of the U.S. Justice Departments Civil Rights Division. Lee is serving in that capacity, illegally, by the way, but that's another story -- another part of the Clinton saga of ignoring the rule of law.
O.K., so who was the other Panther defender? Is this other notable Panther defender now a school board member? Is this other Panther apologist now an assistant college dean?
Nope, neither. The other Panther defender was, like Lee, a radical law student at Yale University at that time. She is now known as The Smartest Woman in the World. She is none other than the unofficial Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from the State of New York -- our lovely First Lady, the incredible Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Origins: It's difficult for those who weren't around to experience the 1960s first-hand to fully understand the controversy that swirled around "radical" parties such as the Black Panthers. Certainly to many Americans they represented the very worst of that era's political movements: a group of hate-filled militants who felt their disaffection with the existing social and political systems justified anything required to achieve their aim of "revolution by any means necessary" (such as smuggling guns into a Marin County courtroom in an attempt to free Panther George Jackson, resulting in a shoot-out that killed a judge, two inmates, and Jackson's brother). To others, however, they were the only political group that truly represented a downtrodden and marginalized group of people who had been enslaved, discriminated against, and denied civil rights protections for hundreds of years; that sought to improve the condition of the poor by operating schools, opening medical clinics, and providing free breakfasts for ghetto children; and that had the courage to stand up to the brutality visited upon them by law enforcement acting in the service of a government and a society that sought to "keep them in their place."
In May of 1969, Black Panther founder and national chairman Bobby Seale (who had already been indicted for his alleged participation in demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968) made a trip from Oakland to New Haven, Connecticut, to speak at Yale University. The Black Panthers were by then nationally known, a focus of media attention, and under the active surveillance of the FBI. (J. Edgar Hoover had publicly declared several months earlier that he considered the Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.") Rumors of police informants and government spies having infiltrated the party were rampant, and a man named Alex Rackley, a member of the Panthers' New York chapter, fell under suspicion. Rackley was taken to the home of Warren Kimbro (a "community organizer and aspiring Panther") where he was held captive for 24 hours, beaten, and scalded with boiling water in an effort to force him to confess. Rackley was then taken to a marsh in Middlefield by Kimbro, George Sams (Panther field marshall and, according to some, himself a police informant), and Lonnie McLucas (a Panther member from Bridgeport), where Sams ordered Kimbro and McLucas to kill the suspected informant. (Who did the actual killing has always been disputed; McLucas reportedly fired the first shot, but Kimbro admittedly delivered the bullet to the head that killed Rackley.) Rackley's body was discovered the next day by fishermen, and fourteen Black Panthers were arrested and charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy.
That several Black Panthers directly took part in the torture and murder of Alex Rackey is beyond dispute, and to those of us who believe that torture and murder are always wrong, no matter what the cause, their actions were morally reprehensible. But this piece isn't really about outrage over what the Black Panthers did thirty years ago; it's a political tract whose purpose is to discredit the Clintons by associating them with the Black Panthers. Of the hundreds of people who played part in the Black Panthers' New Haven trial three decades ago, the only ones named here are Hillary Clinton (currently our First Lady and a candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in New York), and Bill Lann Lee (acting head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, whose appointment by President Clinton remains controversial because of Lee's support for affirmative action programs).
So, exactly what connection do Ms. Clinton and Mr. Lee have to the Black Panthers? The piece quoted above claims:
How in the world do you think that these killers got off so easy? Well, maybe it was in some part due to the efforts of two people who came to the defense of the Panthers. These two people actually went so far as to shut down Yale University with demonstrations in defense of the accused Black Panthers during their trial.
We'll begin with the last part, and it's simply ludicrous. Yale University was not "shut down" during the trial. Classes were made optional when 12,000 Panther supporters swarmed the campus in protest, and the president of Yale University himself, Kingman Brewster Jr., announced: "I personally want to say that I'm appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass that I am skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the U.S." To lay the entire responsibility for this massive, widespread protest on the shoulders of two Yale students is just silly, all the more so because nobody has offered evidence that either one of them led, or even participated in, any student demonstrations or protests in support of the Black Panthers. Nevertheless, even if they didn't actually lead or take part in any demonstrations they're still guilty by association, we're told, because they "defended" the Black Panthers.
One of the elements often employed in political screeds such as this one is the ambiguity of the word "defend." It can be used in the sense of providing legal aid to a person accused of a crime, or in the sense of supplying moral justification for a person's actions. Sometimes these two concepts go hand in hand; but often they don't. We often find it necessary, in order to preserve and protect our rights, to defend (in a legal sense) those whose actions we consider morally wrong, and to defend (in a moral sense) those who actions we find legally wrong. We sometimes let criminals go free because constitutional safeguards were violated in the process of bringing them to justice. That doesn't mean we condone their crimes; it means we're willing to "defend" their rights in order to preserve a higher moral principle (i.e., the rights that protect all of us).
What has been overlooked (or deliberately ignored) in the piece quoted here is that even though fourteen Black Panthers were arrested and charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy in connection with the murder of Alex Rackley, only two of them were put on trial (the others plead to lesser charges, or the charges against them were dropped): Bobby Seale and Erika Huggins. Why only these two? Seale wasn't present at either the torture or murder of Alex Rackley; he maintained that he knew nothing about any plans to kill Rackley and wasn't even aware that Rackley was suspected of being a police informant. (Panther George Sams did claim he had told Seale about suspicions Rackley was an informant, however.) Erika Huggins wasn't present when Rackley was killed, either. She was accused of having taken part in the "interrogation" of Rackley, boiling the water used to scald him and kicking him while he was tied to a chair. Certainly her actions were both criminally wrong and morally reprehensible, but several other Panthers took a far more active hand in the torture and murder of Rackley (such as those who actually poured the boiling water onto him, beat him, and shot him in the head). Why were only these two people put on trial while the other Panthers were allowed to plead out or weren't even prosecuted at all?
Many people genuinely believed, at the time, that the government was deliberately prosecuting for murder people whom it knew full well were not guilty of murder in order to discredit a group it perceived as a threat, and that perhaps the government had deliberately sacrificed Rackley by planting him in the Panthers' midst and then leaking his cover in order to provoke a showdown. (The fact that neither of the accused was ever convicted is taken by some as proof of the correctness of this theory; others dismiss it as irrelevant and maintain that the case was far too politically controversial to allow for a fair verdict.) If Bobby Seale, the head of the Black Panther party, could be convicted and sent to prison for murder, the Black Panthers would lose a great deal of public support and credibility and be disarmed as a threat to the government. This, it was widely held, was the government's real motivation for prosecuting only Seale and Huggins while other Panthers who were more directly involved in Rackley's murder went free or were allowed to plead to lesser charges (in exchange for turning state's evidence against Seale and Huggins).
The key point here is not whether this notion was ultimately right or wrong. The key point is that many people believed it to be true at the time, and they therefore "supported" the Black Panthers during the subsequent trial (in a legal sense) -- not necessarily because they condoned the (alleged) actions of the two people on trial (or the Black Panthers in general), but because they felt it was morally wrong for the government to prosecute murder charges against only two people, neither of whom was directly involved in the murder of Alex Rackley, all for political purposes. So, one cannot simply tar everyone who "defended" the Panthers with the same brush of moral outrage; many found the Panthers and their actions odious but still "defended" them because they honestly believed the government's attempts to prosecute only a select two of questionable guilt (while letting confessed torturers and murderers off with a comparative slap on the wrist) to be the far greater injustice.
So, what exactly did Mr. Lee and Ms. Clinton do to "defend" the Panthers in a legal sense? In Mr. Lee's case, he did absolutely nothing. He wasn't a lawyer, or even a law student; he was simply another Yale undergraduate who had nothing to do with the Black Panthers' trial. Ms. Clinton wasn't a lawyer then, either; she was a Yale law student. The sum total of her involvement in the trial was that she assisted the American Civil Liberties Union in monitoring the trial for civil rights violations. That a law student's tangential participation in one of the most controversial, politically and racially charged trials of her time (one that took place right on her doorstep) to help ensure it remained free of civil rights abuses is now offered as "proof" of her moral reprehensibility demonstrates that McCarthyism is alive and well -- some of us apparently believe in rights but don't believe everyone has the right to have rights.
Of course, neither Mr. Lee nor Ms. Clinton had anything to do with "defending" the other twelve Panthers, who never even stood trial because the government declined to prosecute them or allowed them to turn state's evidence. The flimsy "evidence" typically mustered as "proof" of their "support" for the Black Panthers is that Hillary Clinton was co-editor of the Yale Review when it printed a derogatory cartoon depicting police as decapitated pigs, even though no one has demonstrated that she approved (or even knew) of it, and that in order to join a student group, Bill Lee once "acquiesced when pressed to write a statement expressing solidarity with the Panthers who were on trial." (If Mr. Lee was such a wholehearted supporter of the Panthers, one has to wonder why he had to be "pressed" into making such a statement.)
Stripped of all the invective and blatant political ranting, the case here against Mr. Lee and Ms. Clinton comes down to nothing more than "We don't like their politics" and "They were there," so they must be as morally guilty as the Panthers themselves. As a junior senator from Wisconsin once demonstrated, if you can't defeat your political opponents at the ballot box, and you can't point to anything specific they've done wrong, simply declare them guilty for once having been associated (no matter how tenuous the association) with a group now reviled. "Vilification by association" tactics that worked for McCarthyites in the 1950s apparently still have their adherents today.>>
JD |
