Johnny Hazard : Tanks Versus Teachers in Mexico City

Striking teachers at Zócalo plaza in Mexico City, Friday, September 13, 2013. Photo by Eduardo Verdugo / AP.

Tanks vs. teachers:
Federal police drive striking teachers
from Mexico's Zócalo plaza

By Johnny Hazard / The Rag Blog / September 19, 2013

"In addition to promoting just causes and altering business as usual for awhile (and hoping that such alterations will be permanent), marches, rallies, highway blockages, and the collective taking of public spaces, but especially encampments and occupations, re-establish community and the liberating collective creativity that has been lost amid urban chaos." -- Armando Bartra, Mexican left intellectual

"Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexican president, doesn't know how his first wife died, can't name three books that have shaped his life, and can't name the capital city of the state of Veracruz, yet he's ready to evaluate teachers!" -- Sign on a tent at the teachers' encampment

MEXICO CITY -- 3,500 federal police, with their tanks and water cannons and joined by hundreds of the “progressive” police of Mexico City, expelled thousands of teachers, members of the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (dissident caucus but, today, the de facto teachers' union in Mexico) from the central plaza, the Zócalo, on Friday, September 13.

Violence, according to government and mainstream media, was limited, but images of 12 police attacking one woman have been widely distributed. In other times or other places, or with other actors, this may have been the end of the story: another social movement smothered.

But the teachers have not gone far. Many are in the plaza of the Monumento de la Revolución, about a mile away. And the level of public support for the teachers is much greater since the police action. Students at most of the campuses of all the public universities in the city, including technical schools and teachers' colleges, have voted in assemblies to shut down campuses and join in actions to support the teachers.

Police drive teachers from the plaza Monday. Photo by Eduardo Verdugo / AP.

They are staffing the kitchens at the encampment and arrived on short notice for a candlelight march on Saturday night and for a much bigger march on Sunday night that culminated in an alternative Independence Day celebration.

The federal police attack on teachers had, perhaps, two main objectives:

1. To support the governments's bogus education reform that stems from the premise that teachers are to blame for whatever is wrong with education and with youth. (A movie called Panzazo, styled after Waiting for Superman, was funded by the corporate elite and served as the first shot by the other side in this battle.)


2. To open up the plaza for Independence Day celebrations tonight and tomorrow. It's a strange ritual in which hundreds of thousands of apolitical, mostly drunk people fill the square, shoot fireworks at other people, spray foam on people who don't want it, and listen to the president shout "Viva México" at a time when Mexico's lack of independence in the face of U.S., Canadian, and Spanish corporations has never been more severe. Television coverage of the event appears more stately, emphasizing pomp and circumstance inside the presidential palace (which faces the Zócalo), and muting the noise of the crowd.

This year was Peña Nieto's first Independence Day in office and images abound of his promenading with his new wife, a soap opera star. His relationship with her became public very soon after the mysterious death of his first wife. When he was still a state governor, he had a multi-million-dollar publicity contract with Televisa, the largest television network. It's common here for politicians to literally buy the media with taxpayer funds, but Peña Nieto has taken the concept to a new level.

The teachers and their supporters are now organizing -- gathering food, tarps, tents, and clothes -- to withstand extreme rains. (Normally in this season, it rains for a while every day in the late afternoon, but, since Friday, it's been raining most of the time as very severe tropical storms have hit both coasts. Guerrero, home to some of the most hell-raising teachers, is especially hard-hit, with damage exacerbated by systemic negligence. In Acapulco and Chilpancingo, and more in smaller communities, there is no running water, telephone, transportation, or Internet service.)

This week has seen marches every day and most of the local universities remain in active shutdown till Friday. Much of the coverage of the strike in the U.S. media, it should be noted, has been inaccurate or misleading, or often virtually nonexistent.

[A former Minneapolis teacher, Johnny Hazard now lives in Mexico City where he is a professor at the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México and author of Con estos estudiantes: La vivencia en la UACM, a book about that alternative university.]

See earlier Rag Blog coverage of the continuing Mexican teachers' protests by Johnny Hazard and Shirley Youxjeste.

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Shirley Youxjeste : Mexican Feds Crack Down on Teachers Protesting Educational 'Reform'

Mexican federal police confront protesting teachers in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, on April 4, 2013. Photo by  EFE / STR. Image from La Prensa (San Antonio).

Mexican teachers take the streets
against standardized tests

Teachers in Guerrero, tired of the hostility of the business class, shut down two department stores in Chilpancingo for eight hours, using shopping carts as barricades.

By Shirley Youxjeste / The Rag Blog / April 18, 2013

GUERRERO, Mexico -- The image had an impact in and out of Mexico: an older man with the appearance of a campesino, surrounded and subdued by five federal police officers who employed fists, boots, and three fire extinguishers. The man’s crime was to attend a demonstration in support of his children’s teachers in Chilpancingo, capital of the state of Guerrero.

Guerrero is home to tourist centers like Acapulco and Zihatanejo/Ixtapa, but the rest of the state is among the poorest places in the Western Hemisphere. It is here where resistance to the attempt to convert teachers into test preparers is strongest.

In December, Enrique Peña Nieto was inaugurated president after controversial elections led to the return of the traditional ruling party, the PRI (Partido de la Revolución Institucional) after 12 years out of office. Within days, Peña Nieto had rammed an educational “reform” package with the assent of all registered political parties.

The new law forces even more standardized testing for teachers and students and facilitates the firing of teachers whose students don’t “perform” as expected.

The march of April 5 in which the above-described incident took place was the first of many attempts to occupy the Autopista del Sol, the freeway that runs from Mexico City to Acapulco during the final days of school vacations, when traffic tie-ups were sure to be more severe.

About 3,000 teachers and supporters kept it blocked for a few hours until police moved in and used violent tactics to subdue demonstrators. This spot on the freeway, incidentally, is where state police killed two protesting education students in a similar blockade in December 2011.

Most news media reported the April 5 protest as a gathering of “lazy and violent” teachers; the more violent police actions have been publicized mainly through social networks. Teachers responded with  more marches the following Wednesday, with an estimated 100,000 marching in Chilpancingo (whose total population is not much more than that), and teachers in the neighboring states of Oaxaca, Morelos, and Michoacán also demonstrated.

Among the marchers in Chilpancingo and other cities in Guerrero, in addition to teachers, parents, students, and members of other unions, were members of various Policía Comunitaria organizations, grassroots defense groups that have more in common with the Black Panthers than with the real police.


Shopping cart barricades

On Saturday, April 13, teachers in Guerrero, tired of the hostility of the business class, shut down two department stores in Chilpancingo, Wal Mart and Liverpool, for eight hours, using shopping carts as barricades to prevent people from entering.

On April 25-27, the CNTE (Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación), the dissident caucus within the dominant teachers’ union, will hold a national conference on alternative education in Mexico City.

Business organizations have reacted with extreme hostility toward the teachers, with executives and business owners offering themselves as scabs so classes can take place. Other business groups (apparently more local) and, of course, groups of parents have expressed support for the teachers.

[Shirley Youxjeste is a retired Wisconsin teacher now living in southern Mexico.]

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Ron Jacobs : Cops and Contradictions

Demonstrators form a "human oil spill" in Burlington, VT, July 30, 2012. Photo by Sarah Harris / North Country Public Radio. Inset image below: Riot police used rubber bullets, sting ball pellets, and pepper spray against Burlington demonstraters. Image from Occupy Wall Street / Facebook.
In Asheville and Burlington:
Cops and contradictions

Contradictions between the powerful and everyone else are heightened in places like North Carolina, especially when contrasted to liberal enclaves like Vermont... However, the difference between the right wing state and the liberal one is often much smaller than one might think.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / August 27, 2012

BURLINGTON, Vermont -- Leaving Asheville, North Carolina, the place I called home from summer 2005 through summer 2012, always provides me with a mixture of regret and relief. I love the beer, music, scenery and my friends there, but the fact that it is in the U.S. South -- with its generally reactionary politics -- always leaves a bitter taste.

Asheville itself is a city whose relationship to its home state is much like the relationship Austin has to Texas. It is a liberal to progressive enclave in a wasteland of Bible Belt intolerance and anti-worker policies designed to keep the workforce in a state of perpetual desperation. Low wages, no unions and bosses who can fire folks almost at will seem to be the order of the day in states like North Carolina.

The high unemployment rates in the state keep the marginally employed and those just a paycheck away from that status in a situation not much different from the slavery once commonplace there.

A friend of mine plays in a number of symphony orchestras in the region. Every summer she performs in a few pops concerts that serve as fundraisers for these ensembles. The most recent one was in a town about 50 miles east of Asheville. She described the scene to me over beer and pizza.

I pulled into the parking lot after getting lost on the back roads. The lot was filled with BMWs, Mercedes SUVs, Lexuses, and Escalades. Standing around in small groups underneath tents covered in corporate logos and set up to keep the sun away were groups of mostly older people.

The women wore light clothing that they probably paid too much for. The men, almost to a T, were dressed in white polo shirts, deck shoes, and pink Bermuda shorts. Many of the automobiles sported Romney bumper stickers and, as I walked toward the performers’ entrance to the stage area, I couldn’t help noticing the number of audience members sporting Romney campaign buttons.

The show was your standard fare: Sousa and other patriotic nonsense, show tunes and a couple edited versions of popular classical tunes. The patriotic tunes received the most applause, of course. When I got back to my car there was a Romney campaign leaflet stuck under the windshield wiper.

Contradictions between the powerful and everyone else are heightened in places like North Carolina, especially when contrasted to liberal enclaves like Vermont (where I currently reside), and the hope of progressive change seems minimal. However, the difference between the right wing state and the liberal one is often much smaller than one might think.

After I bought my airline tickets to Asheville I found out that the Northeast Governors Association (and Eastern Canadian PMs) would be holding their conference in downtown Burlington the same weekend. Like its larger parent, the U.S. Governor’s Association Conference, the northeastern conference is a weekend of political backslapping, conspiring and feasting with lots of corporate sponsorship.

The context of this year’s conference is the ongoing campaign by the energy corporation HydroQuebec to dam up Quebec’s rivers, destroy the pristine wilderness they flow through, and displace the people and wildlife living there. Another part of the context is the desire of the oil industry to ship oil from the tar sand fields in Canada through the New England states.

To top off their arrogance, Quebec Premier Charest, whose refusal to back off of tuition hikes and other changes to Quebec’s higher education system have sparked a strike and massive protest, was feted.
So, protests were planned.

Since I could not afford to change my travel dates I wished my comrades well. Imagine my surprise upon returning to Burlington and finding out that Burlington police had attacked protesters with rubber and other “non-lethal” weapons for attempting to block roads around the conference site.

Of course, in the wake of the police attack, politicians and police administrators were quick to blame the protesters for their “aggressive” tactics. Response from some segments of the community was swift. University of Vermont literature professor Nancy Welch wrote in a Facebook post regarding the police attack:

What Burlington Police Chief Michael Schirling leaves out of his defense of the police assault on protestors outside the Northeast Governors Conference is that the “confrontation” and “conflict” the protestors engaged in was nonviolent.

Just as the men and women who sat in at Greensboro lunch counters and marched on Montgomery in the Civil Rights era had a conflict with Jim Crow and sought to confront it, so do the people who marched Sunday have a conflict with heads of state who push such environmentally and socially devastating projects as Tar Sands and the F-35 bombers while defunding family planning clinics, public services, and state universities.

The protestors’ confrontation took the classic Civil Rights-era forms: lying down in front of the hotel the governors were huddled up in; standing in front of the bus that was to whisk the governors away to dinner. It is sobering that police chose to respond in Bull Connor fashion by unleashing violence. Even more sobering is that our Democratic mayor and governor are championing them.

The fallout continues. The newly elected Democratic mayor of Burlington is now calling for a conversation between the city, the police and citizens. At the same time, some kind of investigation is supposedly being arranged. The likelihood is that little will change and the police will be able to do what they please when situations like that which occurred the weekend of July 29th happen again.

Earlier in this piece I wrote that political environments like that found in North Carolina tend to heighten the contradictions between the rulers and the ruled. So do actions like those undertaken by Burlington police outside the Northeast Governor’s Conference. One can only anticipate with trepidation what contradictions law enforcement in Charlotte, N.C. and Tampa, Florida will heighten when the U.S. Republicans and Democrats hold their conventions in the coming days.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Ron Jacobs : Creeping Fascism? Ask the Cop on the Corner

Police state shown busily creeping. Image from The End of the World.
Ask the cop on the corner:
Creeping fascism

The infant U.S. police state is no longer learning to crawl; it has learned to walk and will soon be stomping its boots in a neighborhood near you.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / February 22, 2012

The list contines to grow. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The essentially unprovoked police attacks on protesters, bystanders, and journalists at Occupy protests around the nation. The continuing murder of (mostly young and black) men by police departments around the nation with few or no legal repercussions to the murderers.

The growing surveillance state and the denial of basic freedoms via emergency legislation in cities facing political protest usually from the left. The permanence of that legislation even after the protests have ended. The continuing pursuit of “material support” charges against antiwar and solidarity activists involved in work against U.S. and Israeli policies.

The infant U.S. police state is no longer learning to crawl; it has learned to walk and will soon be stomping its boots in a neighborhood near you.


Anyone following the Occupy protests since last fall is well aware of the response of the authorities. It can best be characterized as brutal and with little regard for civil liberties. This is the case even though many of the protesters were/are white-skinned and from middle class backgrounds.

It is fair to say that this demographic fact gave the protesters more press coverage while it also prevented the police from carrying out even more brutal attacks. Young black and Latino men going about their daily lives generally have more to fear from the police than the Occupy protesters. That being said, it is useful to take a look at some recent comments regarding Occupy Oakland, the police attacks on the group, and the response of officials and others.

In short, the response to the Oakland protesters' commitment to defend themselves against police attacks has caused some potential rifts in the Occupy movement. Those rifts have been covered well across the media universe. It is not my intent to continue those discussions here.

Instead, I would like to paste a quote from a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice that goes a long way towards explaining law enforcement’s perception of the Occupy movements tactics. This quote first appeared in a San Francisco Chronicle article on February 11, 2012, discussing the police tactic of kettling.

For those unfamiliar with the tactic, it essentially involves surrounding a group of protesters in an area where they have no escape, then arresting them all. Sometimes the arrests are preceded by a series of gas attacks and various physical attacks by the police.

The professor quoted is named Maria Haberfeld. Ms. Haberfeld’s career path is not one that suggests a strong belief that police should protect protesters’ civil rights and liberties. She was born in Poland and immigrated to Israel as a teenager.

According to her profile on the John Jay website, Haberfeld served in a special counter-terrorist unit of the IDF that was created to prevent terrorist attacks in Israel. After that, she served in the Israel National Police and then the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. None of these agencies are known for their commitment to civil liberties. Indeed, most of their work is undertaken in what can be best termed as a murky legal and moral environment.

When asked to comment on the recent police tactics against Occupy protesters intent on squatting an abandoned building in Oakland -- tactics that provoked a melee between well-armed police and unarmed protesters -- Haberfeld was quoted when describing the protesters’ intent: “It almost falls into the description of a terrorist threat.”

Suffice it to say that, with a perception of protesters as terrorists, the police would certainly feel free to prevent such a protest from succeeding. In fact, there are probably some in law enforcement that feel they should be able to use live ammunition in such cases.

Funeral of Ramarley Graham at Crawford Memorial United Methodist Church in the Bronx, Saturday, Feb. 18, 2012. Photo by Anthony DelMundo / New York Daily News.

Recently, a young African-American man was shot and killed by the police in the bathroom of his apartment in the Bronx. The young man, Ramarley Graham, was 18 years old. The police involved in the incident explained their actions by claiming Graham had a gun and that he ran from the police because he was selling marijuana.

The NYPD’s own investigators did not find a gun and video footage of Graham walking into his apartment building show an 18-year-old kid walking calmly up the sidewalk and to the building’s entrance. Then, a group of police with guns drawn are shown kicking down the door and entering the building. Within minutes, Graham was killed while his grandmother was in another room in the same apartment.

Graham’s murder was the third fatal shooting of a black man in New York City in a week. A week!

New York is not alone in this epidemic of murder. Police shot over 40 people in Chicago in 2011, with at least 16 fatalities among the shooting victims. This evidence, while anecdotal, is representative of the role police play in the police state. The fact that most of the killings are considered justifiable lends further evidence to the argument that the police state is growing.

If there were not a campaign directed from the highest political offices in Manhattan against marijuana smokers and providers in New York City, the likelihood of Graham’s death diminishes greatly. As it has for decades, the “war on drugs” continues to provide authorities with an excuse to surveil, arrest, imprison, and sometimes kill poor and working-class residents of the United States.

Chicago is also the site of a number of police state exercises. Foremost among them is the continuing investigation of antiwar and solidarity activists by the U.S. Department of Justice. For those who might not remember, on September 24, 2010, the FBI raided several houses and a couple offices in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Chicago, and North Carolina under the guise of looking for proof that the people living in those houses were involved with organizations that “lent material support to terrorists.”

On February 1, 2012, Northern Illinois Assistant U.S. Attorney Barry Jonas told the press that the “investigation is continuing” into the case. The assignment of Jonas to the case is telling, primarily because of his earlier role in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation defendants.

This prosecution focused on five officials of what was once the largest Muslim charity in the U.S. The foundation’s mission was to provide humanitarian aid to the people of Palestine and other countries. In 2001 its offices were raided and five people associated with the charity were indicted in 2004.

The first trial ended with a hung jury. The second trial ended with convictions and the defendants were sentenced up to 65 years in prison. One of the individuals who is being investigated, Jess Sundin, told the press: “That Barry Jonas is now involved in our case is an ominous development. He is famous for one of the most appalling attacks on civil and democratic rights in the past decade -- the prosecution of the Holy Land Five.”

According to Mick Kelly of FightBack News, the Holy Land Five prosecution “included secret witnesses -- the defense never got to find out who the witnesses were -- the use of hearsay evidence, and the introduction of evidence that had nothing to do with the defendants in the case, such as showing a video from Palestine of protesters burning an American flag, as a means to prejudice the jury.”

One assumes that this is permissible in the post-911 Patriot Act world we now live in. The fear of terrorism trumps all and the State is not afraid to stoke that fear in order to maintain its power.

Cops at Chicago Occupy protest, Nov. 17, 2011. Photo by misterbuckwheattree / Flickr / Chicagoist.

The other instance of the police state assault on civil rights and liberties can also be found in Chicago. This May, the city is hosting the NATO/G8 summit meetings. This meeting of the capitalist rulers of the world and their biggest armed force will make Chicago the site of what will hopefully be some of the largest protests against the imperial intentions of Washington since earlier in this century.

The stated intention of organizers to protest is being met with a concerted attack on the protesters and their motives from the establishment media and politicians, while the city of Chicago is changing its laws to prevent the protests from attracting the thousands they can potentially draw. Like Charlotte, N.C., and Tampa, FL -- the sites of the 2012 major U.S. party political conventions -- the city of Chicago has put a series of ordinances into place that will make it easier for the police and other law enforcement agencies to attack the protests and limit their effectiveness.

Furthermore, these ordinances will not disappear after the so-called “state of emergency” brought on by the events in these cities is over. Instead, they will become permanent, essentially restricting the right to protest forever.

Having politically come of age in the Nixon era, I naturally compare the current situation with the assault on civil rights and liberties in the United States that occurred then.

An incomplete list from that time includes the indictment of dozens of organizers on conspiracy (most notably the Chicago 8, Panther 21, and Harrisburg 7) and other charges; the brutal attacks on protesters in demonstrations large and small; the assassinations of Black Panthers, Latinos, and American Indian Movement members; the murders by law enforcement at People’s Park, Kent and Jackson State, Attica, and in African-American and Latino urban areas across the nation; the prosecution of Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, and Ericka Huggins; etc.

You get the point. The repression was clear and it was everywhere. Yet, it was not always successful. Why? Primarily because there was a mass movement that fought it. The highlights of this movement were its successes: the acquittals of Angela Davis, Bobby and Ericka, and the Panther 21, and the failure of the prosecution in the case of the Harrisburg 7.

The failures of the moment against repression were unfortunately too frequent, but those successes remain important, both for the very fact of their success and as examples of the potential of a mass movement against repression.

Repression can be fought and defeated. The place to begin lies in front of us.

[Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. This article was also published at CounterPunch. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog. ]

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Jordan Flaherty : Challenging Louisiana's 'Crime Against Nature' Law

Harassment of New Orleans sex workers. Photo from ColorLines.
Justice Dept. calls law discriminatory:
Victims fight Louisiana's repressive
'Crime Against Nature' statute

Legal action comes with increased scrutiny from the federal government over the conduct of the New Orleans Police Department.

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / March 21, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- Eve is a transgender woman living in rural southern Louisiana. She was molested as a child and left home as a teenager. Homeless and alone, she was forced to trade sex for survival. While still a teenager, she was arrested and charged with a Crime Against Nature, an archaic Louisiana law originally designed to penalize sex acts associated with gays and lesbians.

Now Eve is one of nine plaintiffs fighting the law in a federal civil rights complaint that advocates hope will finally put this official discrimination to an end.

This legal action comes in the context of increased scrutiny from the federal government over the conduct of the New Orleans Police Department. A U.S. Justice Department investigation of the NOPD, released last week, found "reasonable cause to believe that patterns and practices of unconstitutional conduct and/or violations of federal law occurred in several areas," including "racial and ethnic profiling and lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgender (LGBT) discrimination."

The report specifically mentioned Louisiana's Crime Against Nature law, calling it "a statute whose history reflects anti-LGBT sentiment." The report also concluded that investigators "found reasonable cause to believe that NOPD practices lead to discriminatory treatment of LGBT individuals."


Punishing women

Eve, who asked that her real name and age remain confidential, spent two years in prison. During her time behind bars she was raped and contracted HIV. Upon release, she was forced to register in the state’s sex offender database. The words “sex offender” now appear on her driver’s license.

“I have tried desperately to change my life,” she says, but her status on the database stands in the way of housing and other programs. “When I present my ID for anything,” she says, “the assumption is that you’re a child molester or a rapist. The discrimination is just ongoing and ongoing.”

Eve was penalized under Louisiana’s 205-year-old Crime Against Nature statute, a blatantly discriminatory law that legislators have maneuvered to keep on the state’s books for the purpose of turning sex workers into felons.

As enforced, the law specifically singles out oral and anal sex for greater punishment for those arrested for prostitution, including requiring those convicted to register as sex offenders in a public database. Advocates say the law has further isolated and targeted poor women of color, transgender women, and especially those who are forced to trade sex for food or a place to sleep at night.

In 2003, the Supreme Court outlawed sodomy laws with its decision in Lawrence v. Texas. That ruling should have invalidated Louisiana’s law entirely. Instead, the state has chosen to only enforce the portion of the law that concerns “solicitation” of a crime against nature. The decision on whether to charge accused sex workers with a felony instead of Louisiana’s misdemeanor prostitution law is left entirely in the hands of police and prosecutors.

“This leaves the door wide open to discriminatory enforcement targeting poor black women, transgender women, and gay men for a charge that carries much harsher penalties,” says police misconduct attorney and organizer Andrea J. Ritchie, a co-counsel in a new federal lawsuit challenging the statute.

A media-fueled national panic about child molesters has brought sex offender registries to every state. But advocates warn that, across the U.S., these registries have been used disproportionately against African Americans and other communities of color, and are often used for purposes outside of their original intent.

Louisiana, however, is the only state in the U.S. that requires people who have been convicted of crimes that do not involve minors or sexual violence to register as sex offenders.

In 1994, Congress passed Megan’s Law, also known as the Wetterling Act, which mandated that states create systems for registering sex offenders. The act was amended in 1996 to require public disclosure of the names on the registries and again in 2006 to require that sex offenders stay in the public registry for at least 15 years.

Megan’s Law was clearly not targeted at prostitution. However, Louisiana lawmakers opted to apply the registry to the crimes against nature statute as well, and at that moment started down the path to a new level of punishment for sex work. “This archaic law is being used to mark people with a modern day scarlet letter,” says attorney Alexis Agathocleus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, another party to the lawsuit.

People convicted under the Louisiana law must carry a state ID with the words “sex offender” printed below their name. If they have to evacuate because of a hurricane, they must stay in a special shelter for sex offenders that has no separate facilities for men and women.

They have to pay a $60 annual registration fee, in addition to $250 to $750 to print and mail postcards to their neighbors every time they move. The postcards must show their names and addresses, and often they are required to include a photo. Failing to register and pay the fees, a separate crime, can carry penalties of up to 10 years in prison.

Women and men on the registry will also find their names, addresses, and convictions printed in the newspaper and published in an online sex offender database. The same information is also displayed at public sites like schools and community centers. Women -- including one mother of three -- have complained that because of their appearance on the registry, they have had men come to their homes demanding sex. A plaintiff in the suit had rocks thrown at her by neighbors. “This has forced me to live in poverty, be on food stamps and welfare,” explains a man who was on the list. “I’ve never done that before.”

In Orleans Parish, 292 people are on the registry for selling sex, versus 85 people convicted of forcible rape and 78 convicted of “indecent behavior with juveniles.” Almost 40 percent of those registered in Orleans Parish are there solely because they were accused of offering anal or oral sex for money.

Seventy-five percent of those on the database for Crime Against Nature are women, and 80 percent are African American. Evidence gathered by advocates suggests a majority are poor or indigent.

Legal advocates credit on-the-ground organizing and the advocacy of the group Women With A Vision (WWAV) for making them aware of this discriminatory law. WWAV, a 20-year-old New Orleans-based organization, provides health care and other services to women involved in survival sex work.

“Many of these women are survivors of rape and domestic violence themselves,” says WWAV executive director Deon Haywood. “Yet they are being treated as predators.”

Advocates and attorneys announce lawsuit against New Orleans' "Crime Against Nature" ordinance. Photo from Louisian Justice Institute.

Plaintiffs tell their stories

Ian, another plaintiff in the legal challenge to the Crime Against Nature statute, was homeless from the age of 13, and began trading sex for survival. When an undercover officer approached him and asked him for sex, Ian asked for money. “All I said was $50,” he says, “And they put me away for four years.”

In prison, Ian was raped by a correction officer and by other prisoners, and like Eve, he contracted HIV. Now, he says, potential employers see the words “sex offender” written on his ID and no one will hire him. “Do I deserve to be punished any more than I’ve already been punished?” he asks. “I was 13 years old. That’s the only way I knew how to survive.”

Hiroke, a New Orleans resident and another plaintiff in the suit, spoke on a call set up by advocates. “I had just graduated from high school and was just coming out as transgender,” she says. Hiroke was arrested and convicted while still a teenager.

As she began to describe her experience, Hiroke’s voice began to shake. “I was being held with men in jail at the time...” she began. Then there was silence on the line. Holding back tears, she then apologized for being unable to continue.

The Louisiana legislature recently passed a reform of the Crime Against Nature statute, but for the vast majority of those affected, the change makes little to no difference. Although the new law takes away the registration component for a first conviction, a second conviction requires 15 years on the registry, and up to five years imprisonment. A third conviction mandates a lifetime on the registry.

More than 538 men and women remain on the registry because they were convicted of offering anal or oral sex, with more added almost every day.

The legal challenge to the Crime Against Nature law, called Doe v. Jindal, has been filed in Louisiana’s U.S. District Court Eastern District on behalf of nine anonymous plaintiffs. It was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, attorney Andrea J. Ritchie, and the Law Clinic at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law.

The anonymous plaintiffs include a grandmother, a mother of four, three transgender women, and a man, all of whom have been required to register as sex offenders from 15 years to life as a result of their convictions for the solicitation of oral sex for money.

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times, Mother Jones, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. This article was also posted at The Louisiana Justice Institute version of this article originally appeared at ColorLines.com.]

• Also see "Culture of Abuse: Police Harassment of New Orleans Transgenders" by Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / April 20, 2011.

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David Holmes Morris : Violent Repression in the Dominican Republic

Policemen stand guard in Capotillo, the Dominican Republic. Photo from Reuters.
Dominican National Police:
A tradition of violent repression

By David Holmes Morris / The Rag Blog / October 21, 2010

Despite national and international outcry, the Dominican National Police is continuing its tradition of violent repression of dissidents at a time when protests are becoming more common across the country. Some recent incidents in El Cibao, the agricultural and mining region in the north, have resulted in the arrests of many demonstrators, a number of injuries by tear gas and gunshot, and one death.

A delegation from Amnesty International had met with the Distrito Nacional prosecuting attorney as recently as early October seeking information on the large number of deaths of citizens at the hands of the National Police throughout the country and in the capital in particular. At least 226 unlawful killings by the police occurred in the country between January and August of 2009. Thirty percent of the homicides in the Distrito Nacional during the same period were reportedly committed by the police.

In the most dramatic recent incident in El Cibao, a university student taking part in protests on October 12 against government neglect of poor neighborhoods in the area of Santiago de los Caballeros, the country’s second largest city, was shot to death when police fired into the crowd of demonstrators, and at least four others were injured. The demonstrators were demanding that roads be paved and reliable water and electrical power be provided.

Residents of the communities point out that major roads are impassable and that for many years promises of repairs made during election campaigns are quickly forgotten after the elections. Electrical power is available only sporadically in many areas.

A similar incident occurred on July 16 when police shot and killed 13-year-old Miguel Ángel Encarnación during a demonstration by residents of the Capotillo neighborhood of Santo Domingo over the same problems of unpaved roads, intermittent power and water supplies and poor infrastructure in general.

The government has in the meantime promoted the construction of hotels and other businesses catering to tourists and has invested in infrastructure in areas favored by them.

Demonstraters and policeman in Capotillo, Dominican Republic. Image from Panorama Diario.

Barrick Gold

In nearby Cotui, the national police on October 13 used tear gas and birdshot against miners demonstrating for union recognition at the Pueblo Viejo gold mine, of which Barrick Gold of Canada is the majority owner. At least six miners were injured..

Barrick has consistently resisted the miners’ efforts to organize. Labor Minister Max Puig warned the company in August that the government would enforce provisions of the labor code protecting the miners’ rights, although labor federation president Rafael Abreu had presented evidence in June to the International Labor Organization in Geneva documenting Puig’s interference in workers’ rights to form unions at Barrick Gold and other companies.

A renegotiation of the contract between Barrick and the government resulting from rising gold prices had drastically reduced the government’s share of profits from the mine, possibly providing motivation for government support of the workers.

In 2006, Barrick had acquired a 60 percent interest in the mine, one of the oldest European gold mining operation in the Americas, sparking continuing protests by the some 2,000 Dominican and Peruvian miners employed there and by environmentalists and farmers of the area, which is in the heart of the country’s most fertile agricultural region.

Dominican student protesters block streets in Puerto Plata on September 10, 2010. Image from Dominican Central.

Santiago de los Caballeros

The death of the student in Santiago had occurred during demonstrations in a number of communities in the area, all of which, organizers say, were peaceful before the police intervened. “We weren’t even burning tires,” according to Víctor Bretón of the Frente Amplio de Lucha Popular, FALPO, the Broad Front for Popular Struggle, “because the protest was peaceful, when a police contingent arrived and one of them, without saying a word, fired indiscriminately against us, killing our comrade and injuring four others.” The student who was killed, Alfredo Gómez Núñez, was also a member of FALPO.

The National Police were back the next day at the funeral for the slain demonstrator. The mourners reacted angrily to the police presence by blocking roads, burning tires, and shouting slogans against the police and the police responded by again firing into the crowd. Four protesters, including two minors, and one police officer, were injured.

Police authorities claimed the officer was shot by the demonstrators, a claim Bretón denied, saying “unarmed and grieving” people would not open fire on a heavily armed police force.

Police then occupied the streets in communities throughout the area and protests continued, with the burning of tires and the blocking of a major highway, Carretera Duarte. Residents of Los Tejados, who had been without power for a week, blocked another highway then evaded arrest by fleeing before police arrived.

On the same day, high school students in San Francisco de Macorís, another city in El Cibao, protested the killing, with university students following suit with their own vigorous protest, forcing the cancellation of classes at the Centro Universitario Regional del Nordeste in San Francisco for the rest of the day. The campus of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Santo Domingo, in the capital, was also closed down for the day because of demonstrations there. University rector Franklin García Fermín attributed the protests to violent, hooded vandals.

Police authorities in Santiago meanwhile announced the formation of a commission to investigate police behavior during the events. “We object to that commission,” said FALPO activist Raúl Monegro, “due to the fact that you cannot be an aggressor and at the same time investigate yourself.”


Amnesty International

Amnesty International has also investigated the case of Juan Almonte Herrera, of the NGO Dominican Committee on Human Rights, who was abducted on his way to work in Santo Domingo on September 28, 2009, by men witnesses have identified as officers of the National Police. One of two charred bodies found in a burned car the next month was identified by his sister as Almonte, although police denied the identification. Family members and lawyers pursuing the case report being under surveillance and receiving death threats.


History

The National Police traces its origins to the Dominican Constabulary Guard, which was created by the U.S. marines during the military occupation of 1916 to 1924. It was renamed the National Police the year the marines left. One of its early members was Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, who joined the force in 1919 as a second lieutenant and rose through the ranks to become commander of the force by 1930. He became president that year and ruled the country, either directly or through puppets like Joaquín Balaguer, until he was assassinated in 1961. He was one of the most brutal dictators in the history of Latin America.

Sources: Amnesty International, El Caribe, Diario Libre, Dominican Today, Hoy Digital, Listin Diario, Nuevo Diario.

[San Antonio native David Holmes Morris is an army veteran, a language major, a retired printer, a sometime journalist, and a gay liberationist. This article was also posted to Upside Down World.]

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Environmental Warrior : Remembering Judi Bari

Judi Bari celebrates March 3, 1995, outside the Oakland Federal Courthouse after winning a round in her civil rights lawsuit against the FBI and Oakland Police. Photo by Xiang Xing Zhou / San Francisco Daily Journal.
Earth First! and the FBI:
The bombing of Judi Bari

By Penelope Rosemont / The Rag Blog / May 17, 2010

Twenty years ago -- on the 24th of May, 1990 -- sensationalist headlines across the country announced the arrest of two leading environmentalists, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. Their car had been bombed -- but it was they who were arrested, charged with their own bombing! The environmental activist movement and Earth First! in particular were branded as terrorist organizations.

This incident fell just after the very successful Earth First! campaign to save the old growth Redwoods, labeled "Redwood Summer," that brought in young people from all over the country. They sang, they sat down in the roads, and they filled the jails like the old time Wobbly organizers, like Civil Rights activists, like the Peace Movement. It looked like the timber industry was in for big trouble.

But then the car bombing. What followed was an interesting and frightening revelation of political intrigue, collusion among the police, the FBI, and the timber companies.

This remarkable history is being observed with a series of "Revolutionary Ecology" activities and an historical exhibit in Berkeley on May 23, 2010, and with an anniversary observance in Oakland on May 24.

Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney filed a civil rights lawsuit against four FBI agents and three Oakland police officers, and in a landmark decision on June 11, 2002, a federal jury found unanimously against six of the seven defendants, saying they had attempted to frame the defendants in an effort to stop their political activities. The jury awarded $4.4 million in damages.

In an editorial on June 13, 2002, the San Francisco Chronicle said that the verdict "reminds law enforcement advocates that Americans are not panicked by the threat of terrorism into abandoning their civil rights... The overzealous pursuit of [Bari and Cherney] was unacceptable -- and unconstitutional -- regardless of what one thinks of the activists' politics."

Attorney Dennis Cunningham of the People's Law Office in Chicago was interviewed by Michael James on "Live from the Heartland," at Chicago's Heartland Cafe, June 6, 2004.

James asks Cunningham about the outcome of the Judi Bari case, and for "background on who she was and what the case was about?"

Dennis Cunningham replies,

Judi Bari was an environmentalist organizer with Earth First!. She and Darryl Cherney, another EF! Organizer, were bombed in their car in Oakland. A pipe bomb was put under the driver's seat and rigged with a motion device that would ignite on the motion of the car. When the bomb went off the cops came -- the FBI came right away -- and they told the cops 'we know these people, they are terrorist suspects, we've been investigating them, and we believe this was their own bomb and they were on their way to plant it someplace -- you should bust them.' Oakland cops say 'okay boss' and did.

They arrested them and charged them with possession and transportation of an illegal explosive device -- it made headlines all over the country -- the front page of The New York Times, and everywhere else -- it was the top of the news around the country. They were vilified as terrorists by virtue of those headlines and by connecting them to the bomb, which in fact had been used to try to kill them or kill her. Judi Bari was a leading voice and an amazingly skilled, experienced, and persuasive organizer and public speaker -- those who planted the bomb were out to shut her up.

The bombed car. Photo from Judi Bari Web Photo Gallery.

Michael James asked Cunningham why he thought Earth First! was the main environmental organization getting headlines at that time, and added that he heard they "had been chaining themselves to trees to trying to stop the cutting of the redwoods."

Cunningham replied,

True, true. They were organizing for a summer project. They called it Redwood Summer. They modeled it after the 1960s Civil Rights Project, Mississippi Summer -- they were trying to bring people, students, and activists from all over the country to the redwood region to do direct action in the summer of 1990. They wanted to try to slow down the timber harvest and protect the old-growth redwoods.

A big local timber company in Humboldt County had been bought up by corporate raiders with junk bonds, to pay off the junk bonds, they tripled the timber harvest. There was an initiative put on the ballot for November that would have limited the clear cutting and the kind of destructive logging that they do now, which fills up the streams with silt and kills the fish, and kills the fishing industry, and leaves the hillsides unstable and prone to mud slides -- a disaster. After the bombing, the timber companies hired a Washington public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton, to fight the ballot initiative.

Cunningham continued,

And then as soon as the bombing had taken place Timber Companies labeled the bill 'the bomber initiative... terrorists want to pass this thing, it's too radical. Earth First! shouldn't be allowed to dictate public policy.' The Initiative ultimately lost by a point and a half.

A researcher concluded that there was more than three billion dollars in timber revenues that the companies had been able to realize in the 12 years since the bombing, that they wouldn't have got if the initiative had passed. So there was a big motivation to shut Judi up, besides that she and EF! were reaching out to the timber workers.

Judi was trying to make common cause between the environmentalists and the workers, saying, 'where you gonna work when the trees are gone?' The timber industry is clear cutting as fast as they can. In Mendocino County at that time 95% of big trees were already gone, and they closed mills.

Judi led an Earth First! contingent and with a group of workers went to a county board meeting right after the big timber company in Mendocino announced it was closing the mills. They got up at the county board meeting and said that the board should take over the mill, preserve the jobs, keep the economy stable. For the timber companies that was pretty much the last straw. But they didn't want to make a martyr out of her.

They hoped to shut her up for good. They thought they did, but she didn't die in the bombing. It was a miracle she didn't die. But then they had her accused of the bombing. Within three hours and five minutes of the explosion, they were under arrest.

James asked Cunningham when he got involved with the case. He replied that "Bill Simpich, a lawyer in San Francisco and Oakland, had started a suit against the FBI and the Oakland Police for false arrest, but that after he joined the group of defense attorneys they were able to reverse the charges so, in fact, they were able to accuse the Oakland police and the FBI of arresting Bari and Cherney on purpose in order to discredit them in a COINTELPRO type operation.

Cunningham explained that "COINTELPRO stands for Counter Intelligence Program -- a J. Edgar Hoover undercover dirty operation that the cops used and that the FBI used against the Black Panthers, against the anti-war movement, against the Communist Party, against who knows..."

James commented that it was often used against anyone who challenged them.

Cunningham added,

Yes, everyone who seemed to present a popular threat against the status quo, they did what they could to mess up their work; and they didn't have any boundaries of legality on what they allowed themselves to do. So there were frame-ups... the murder of Fred Hampton arose out of COINTELPRO operations...

We had a lawsuit that lasted 10 years and went to trial in 2002, in trial for about six weeks, and we were waiting for the jury for another three weeks. The jury came back with a 4.4 million total award for the two of them. It was half punitive damages and half what they call compensatory damages.

About 80% of the total of the money was assigned to the First Amendment cause -- meaning that the claim that it had been done on purpose to mess up their political work was the thing that most appealed to that jury, and they gave the most damages for that. It was going to be appealed, and then we started talking about settling and getting it over with since by then it was 12 years of litigation.

James pointed out that Judi had since died of cancer, and never got to see this victory.

Cunningham added that she had endured incredible suffering,

Judi died in 1997 from breast cancer. She had been horribly injured in the bombing. She was crippled, and she had a lot of pain. She kept right on doing her political work and got deeply involved in the case because she felt it was really important to fight back against the FBI attack on the environmental movement.

The FBI were so intent on creating the effect they wanted -- headlines of the arrest of the victims as the perpetrators -- that they really didn't bother to cover their tracks very well...

Michael James' interview with James Cunningham will be excerpted in a book now under development by Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company.

Today it seems everybody is an "environmentalist" -- but it doesn’t seem to mean anything except that they want a car with better mileage, and may have a recycle bin. That’s it, they fill up the world with more and more junk and the oceans with plastic bottles. Even capitalism has adopted "green" as the new thing since the financial and real estate crash, trying to exploit what minimal interest people have in preserving the planet.

The great tragedy of the Gulf Oil Spill has not yet been felt. The spill is still going on! Why aren’t BP officials being arrested and charged with reckless homicide? The ocean is being killed, so why aren't the army, the navy, young unemployed kids, being mobilized to do some good for a change and try to clean this thing up. Oil, like water and air, should belong to the people, it should be used wisely, not wasted.

Such actions would honor the legacy of Judi Bari.

Here is more about the upcoming activities in the Bay Area:

On Sunday, May 23, an event dubbed "Revolutionary Ecology" (the title of one of Judi's best essay collections) will take place at La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley, with a panel of speakers, music, film and an exciting historical exhibit.

On Monday, May 24, the actual anniversary, people from near and far will gather at the site where a motion-triggered bomb exploded under Judi's car seat, nearly killing her and forever changing the Earth First! movement. The location is on Park Blvd. in Oakland just south of the MacArthur Freeway.

[Penelope Rosemont is a writer, editor, publisher, radical activist, and surrealist artist. She is the author of Dreams and Everyday Life: André Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker, SDS and the Seven Cities of Cibola, and the editor of Surrealist Women : An International Anthology.]

Go to:

• Remembering Judi Bari on the Earth First Journal
• www.judibari.org

Judi Bari always livened up rallies with her fiddle. Photo from Judi Bari Web Photo Gallery.
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Paul Krassner : Kent State Anniversary Blues

Reaction from students at New York University after the Kent State massacre. Photo from NYU Archives Photograph Collection.
Four dead in Ohio:
Kent State Anniversary Blues

By Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2010

See gallery of photos, Below.

In my book, Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs: From Toad Slime to Ecstasy, Freddy Berthoff described his mescaline trip at a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert in the summer of 1970 when he was 15. “Earlier that spring,” he wrote, “the helmeted, rifle-toting National Guard came up over the rise during a peace-in-Vietnam rally at Kent State University. And opened fire on the crowd. I always suspected it was a contrived event, as if someone deep in the executive branch had said, ‘We’ve got to teach those commie punks a lesson.’”

Actually, President Nixon had called antiwar protesters “bums” two days before the shootings. While Freddy was peaking on mescaline, CSNY sang a new song about the massacre:

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in O-hi-o...

Plus nine wounded. Sixty-seven shots -- dum-dum bullets that exploded upon impact -- had been fired in 13 seconds. This incident on May 4, 1970 resulted in the first general student strike in U.S. history, encompassing over 400 campuses.

Arthur Krause, father of one of the dead students, Allison, got a call from John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, who said, “There will be a complete investigation.” Krause responded, “Are you sure about that?” And the reply: “Mr. Krause, I promise you, there will be no whitewash.”

But NBC News correspondent James Polk discovered a memo marked “Eyes Only” from Ehrlichman to Attorney General John Mitchell ordering that there be no federal grand jury investigation of the killings, because Nixon adamantly opposed such action.

Polk reported that, “In 1973, under a new Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, the Justice Department reversed itself and did send the Kent State case to a federal grand jury. When that was announced, Richardson said to an aide he got a call from the White House. He was told that Richard Nixon was so upset, they had to scrape the president off the walls with a spatula.”

Last year, Allison Krause’s younger sister, Laurel, was relaxing on the front deck of her home in California when she saw the County Sheriff’s Deputy coming toward her, followed by nearly two dozen men. “Then, before my eyes,” she recalls, “the officers morphed into a platoon of Ohio National Guardsmen marching onto my land. They were here because I was cultivating medical marijuana. I realized the persecution I was living through was similar to what many Americans and global citizens experience daily. This harassment even had parallels to Allison’s experience before she was murdered.”

What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

Now, 40 years later, Laurel, her mother and other Kent State activists have been organizing the 2010 Kent State Truth Tribunal, scheduled for May 1-4 on the campus where the slaughter of unarmed demonstrators originally occurred. The invitation to participate in sharing their personal narratives has been extended to 1970 protesters, witnesses, National Guardsmen, Ohio and federal government officials, university administrators and educators, local residents, families of the victims. The purpose is to uncover the truth.

Laurel Krause.
Laurel was 0nly 15 when the Kent State shootings took place. “Like any 15-year-old, my coping mechanisms were undeveloped at best. Every evening, I remember spending hours in my bedroom practicing calligraphy to Neil Young’s ‘After the Goldrush,’ artistically copying phrases of his music, smoking marijuana to calm and numb my pain.”

When she was arrested for legally growing marijuana, “They cuffed me and read my rights as I sobbed hysterically. This was the first time I flashed back and revisited the utter shock, raw devastation and feeling of total loss since Allison died. I believed they were going to shoot and kill me, just like Allison. How ironic, I thought. The medicine that kept me safe from experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder now led me to relive that horrible experience as the cops marched onto my property.”

She began to see the interconnectedness of those events. The dehumanization of Allison was the logical, ultimate extension of the dehumanization of Laurel. Legally, two felonies were reduced to misdemeanors, and she was sentenced to 25 hours of community service. But a therapist, one of Allison’s friends from Kent State, suggested to Laurel that the best way to deal with the pain of PTSD was to make something good come out of the remembrance, the suffering and the pain.

“That’s when I decided to transform the arrest into something good for me,” she says, “good for all. It was my only choice, the only solution to cure this memorable, generational, personal angst. My mantra became, ‘This is the best thing that ever happened to me.’ And it has been.” That’s why she’s fighting so hard for the truth to burst through cement like blades of grass.

[Paul Krassner’s latest book is an expanded edition of his 1993 autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut, available at paulkrassner.com. This piece was also published in High Times magazine.]


Mary Ann Vecchio kneels over the body of Jeffrey Miller after the Kent State shootings, May 4, 1970. Pulitzer prize winning photo by John Paul Filo / Valley News-Dispatch. Filo was a journalism student at Kent State at the time.
The Guard takes aim. Photo by Howard Ruffner / Picasa.
Four dead in Ohio: Allison Krause, William Shroeder, Jeffrey Miller, Sandy Scheur.

Allison Krause. Image from Mendo Coast Current.
Photo by Mr. Baggins / Democratic Underground.
Kent State Protest Poster, 1970. NYU Archives Collection.
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Jonah Raskin : 40 Years Later: The Assassination of Fred Hampton

Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in 1969. Photo by Paul Sequeira.
I will never forget...
The assassination of Fred Hampton

I protested in New York with hundreds of other people, all of us outraged... I was arrested and beaten on 51st Street opposite St. Patrick’s Cathedral by plainclothes police officers, and, along with dozens of other demonstrators, locked up in jail.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / November 29, 2009

See photos from the murder scene, Below.

I have a special relationship to Fred Hampton, the charismatic leader of the Black Panther Party who electrified crowds in Chicago in the late 1960s with fiery comments such as “You can jail the revolutionary but you can’t jail the revolution.”

I first heard about Hampton -- “Chairman Fred” as he was affectionately called -- in the summer of 1969 when I was working in the national office of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Chicago, where Hampton was born in 1948, and where he joined the Black Panther Party at the age of 20 in 1968.

That summer I wrote a pamphlet about him and about the attacks on the Panthers that were mounted by state and federal law enforcement. Six months later -- on December 4, 1969 -- Hampton and fellow Black Panther Mark Clark were murdered by the Chicago police in an apartment at 2337 West Monroe. Five days after those murders, on December 9, I protested in New York with hundreds of other people, all of us outraged.

At about 7 p.m., I was arrested and beaten on 51st Street opposite St. Patrick’s Cathedral by plainclothes police officers, and, along with dozens of other demonstrators, locked up in jail. All that night and into the wee hours of the next morning I was beaten by at least a dozen police officers in several precincts in Manhattan. My hands were handcuffed behind my back. I was punched, pushed, kicked, clobbered, and struck with a variety of blunt and sharp instruments, including truncheons. At the time it felt like torture.

My lawyer, Paul Chevigny of the American Civil Liberties Union, who specialized in cases of police brutality, said then that the beating that I received was the worst beating he had ever seen at the hands of the New York police. To document the case that he hoped to bring against the police on charges of brutality he took dozens of color photos of me that showed every cut, laceration and bruise -- I was black and blue and swollen from head to toe -- but someone broke into his law office and stole the photos.

When I appeared before a judge that December I was charged with attempted murder of a police officer, though I thought the police had been trying to murder me, or at least to make me feel that my life was in danger. “If you want war, we’ll give you war,” one of the New York City police officers who beat me said. He was a veteran of the War in Vietnam who believed in the war, and he carried out his own personal war against anyone and everyone who was opposed to that war.

In fact, it was a time of war and not only in Vietnam. America itself seemed to be on the brink of civil war in those violent days at the very end of the 1960s and on the cusp of the 1970s, and as President Nixon, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell launched a program to combat the tide of rebellion in every possible way.

The murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, and the attacks on the Black Panther Party all around the country, added up to a war with real guns and real bullets. It was accompanied by a public relations campaign that the forces of law and order in the Nixon administration aimed at black militants and at their white supporters: a rag-tail army of rebels, resisters, rioters, anarchists and saboteurs who did everything in their power to disrupt the orderly, day in and day out operations of the American Empire.

The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther, by Jeffrey Haas. Lawrence Hill Books; $26.95.

Recently, I had the opportunity to revisit those turbulent times, and to rethink the murder of Hampton. Forty years is a long time, but my memories of that era are crystal clear. I was also aided and abetted by The Assassination of Fred Hampton, a new and engaging book by long-time radical lawyer Jeff Haas who spent more than a decade aiming to uncover the government conspiracy against the Panthers and to see justice done.

Haas brought a civil suit against the real criminals in the case such as Edward Hanrahan, the Illinois State Attorney and a Harvard Law School graduate, who dispatched 14 heavily armed Chicago police officers to 2337 West Monroe on December 4, 1969, at 4 a.m.. “Heavily armed” is no exaggeration. In addition to shotguns and handguns, the officers had a Thompson machine gun, wielded by officer Joe Gorman.

One can only imagine what Gorman and his fellow police officers thought they were doing, but it seems possible that they saw themselves as actors in a movie about a Chicago gangland massacre in which they played the part of gangsters with police badges.

The seven Panthers who survived the raid on West Monroe were indicted by an Illinois grand jury on charges of attempted murder and aggravated battery, but the indictments were dismissed. And that was only the beginning of a series of legal battles that went on and on and on, into the 1980s.

In The Assassination of Fred Hampton Haas shows that an undercover police agent infiltrated the Illinois Panthers, that he became Hampton’s bodyguard, and furnished to law enforcement officials vital information about Hampton, Clark and their comrades. The Chicago police had a floor plan of Hampton’s apartment, and knew exactly where he would be sleeping. Someone, perhaps the undercover agent, drugged Hampton so that he would be asleep and unable to fire a shot.

Haas also shows that the police had a green light from FBI Director Hoover who created the FBI Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), and who sent a directive to Marlin Johnson, the head of the Chicago FBI office, in which he ordered operatives to “disrupt, expose, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the Panthers, and “prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement.”

It didn’t matter that Hampton wasn’t a black nationalist. He was messiah-like and he was young. He was a Panther, and the Panthers, who carried guns, used the rhetoric of urban guerrillas, urged members to “Off the Pig” in the parlance of that era. In fact, on November 13, 1969, two Chicago police officers were ambushed and murdered. The FBI pointed an accusing finger at the Panthers, and the local police carried out their directive. One Panther would testify that on December 4, while inside the apartment at 2337 West Monroe, he heard a police officer say, “If Black Panthers kill police, police will kill Black Panthers.”

The Assassination of Fred Hampton has plenty of drama both in and out of the courtroom, and at times it reads like a suspenseful Perry Mason case, though it was, of course, far more political than any case Perry Mason ever handled and with more far-reaching implications. Hanrahan was never able to run successfully for public office in Chicago after Hampton’s murder, and Panthers as well as the African American community at large found solace in his failure. But there was no real justice, and no happy ending of the sort Mason always enjoyed at the end of a case.

The surviving occupants of the Panther apartment filed for damages against 28 state and federal law enforcement officials. Haas was their lawyer. The complaints alleged violations of constitutional rights. The jury trial lasted 18 months, generating a 37,000-page transcript. At the close of the case, a District Court granted verdicts in favor of the federal and most of the state defendants. Neither the judge nor the jury wanted to believe that the government had actually conspired to murder two men.

After I was beaten by New York City police officers some of my friends assumed that I was to blame, and that I deserved the harsh treatment I received. After all, they said, I had rioted in the streets. I had damaged property and I was violent. That the police who beat me were no less violent many friends could not and did not see or understand. The police had cracked my skull -- I required dozens of stitches -- and had beaten me to a bloody pulp, but in the eyes of many citizens the police were simply doing their job and enforcing law and order.

Forty years later, I am not sorry that I rioted in the streets of New York. I am, of course, happy to be able to say that the charges of attempted murder against me were dropped when I agreed to drop the case against the police for brutality.

When police officers murder men in their sleep one can’t simply go on living as though nothing has happened. Indeed, something very terrible happened in America when Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated. I have not forgotten them, and I have not forgotten what happened to me on December 9, 1969. The stain is still there on the national conscience. That is how I feel now, 40 years later.

Perhaps if you read Haas’s relentlessly honest book, and also see reproduced here the photos of the Panther apartment with bullet holes in the walls, and the bloody mattress of the bed in which Hampton lay asleep, you will not forget either.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of The Mythology of Imperialism: Revolutionary Critique of British Literature and Society in the Modern Age (Monthly Review Press), and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation (University of California Press.]

Fred Hampton murder scene. Photos, from top, by Paul Segueira, from the Chicago Police Department, and from AP / World Wide Photos.

• Find The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther, by Jeffrey Haas, at Amazon.com

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