AMERICAN JUSTICE ON TRIAL. Lise Pearlman

American Justice on Trial revisits in light of current events People of California v. Huey P. Newton — the internationally-watched 1968 murder case that put a black militant on trial for his life for the death of a white policeman accused of abuse. The trial put our nation’s justice system to the test and created the model for diversifying juries “of one’s peers” that many of us now take for granted as a constitutional guarantee. In the process, protesters orchestrated by the defense generated a media frenzy that launched the Black Panther Party as an international phenomenon. Using this trial as their platform, the Panthers took aim at entrenched racism in a democracy founded on the principle of equality. They put their sights on toppling white male monopoly power, and they convinced many followers to pay it forward. They also prompted an extraordinary backlash from those in power. The ramifications of this decades-old conflict continue to unfold today.

The year 2016 marks a half century since Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded, in Oakland, California, a small militant group that they named the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Like Black Lives Matter, Black Youth Project and other civil rights activist groups today, Panther members were predominantly in their late teens or early 20s when they took to the streets, challenging the nation’s criminal justice system and making bold accusations of abusive policing. Today almost everyone recognizes the image of Black Panthers in iconic black leather jackets and berets, their fists raised in defiant salutes. In 1967, that fledgling organization would likely have disappeared quickly if not for one riveting murder trial. Now — a half century later — is an especially good time to take a fresh look back, to reexamine what may very well be the most pivotal criminal trial of the 20th century and ponder what it tells us about the importance of diversity, if we want to improve some of the most glaring shortcomings in our beleaguered American justice system.

2016 began with intense populist attacks on the federal government from both the Left and the Right. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump promoted a nationalist agenda that promised to “take America back” to an idealized earlier conservative era of white Christian domination, while disenchanted youth rallied in response to a call for political revolution against economic inequality by Bernie Sanders, a Democratic Socialist who came of age in the turbulent 1960s.

2016 also began with an armed takeover of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon by a small contingent of militant white ranchers who sought to instigate a broader revolt against the United States government. The response of the FBI says a great deal about race relations today. Back in 1993, federal agents engaged in a deadly gun battle with white religious cult members in Waco, Texas, when the agents were denied access to a private compound to search for a stockpile of illegal weapons. A 51-day siege ended in the fiery deaths of 76 more people, including women and children inside the Branch Davidian compound, amid widespread public criticism of the Department of Justice’s handling of the confrontation.

On the second anniversary of the Waco siege, white army veteran Timothy McVeigh and co-conspirators took revenge through the devastating bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building — the deadliest act of domestic terrorism our nation has ever experienced. The explosion killed 168 people, injured many more and caused extensive damage to hundreds of nearby structures. The unprecedented bombing at first sparked fears across the country that it was the act of Arab terrorists. The FBI embarked on a nationwide manhunt, and after collecting tons of documentary evidence and conducting 28,000 interviews, found the death and destruction to be the work of homegrown bombers. They arrested McVeigh and Terry McNichols, another member of the same rightwing survivalist group; a third man turned state’s evidence for a reduced sentence. University of Missouri constitutional law professor Douglas Linder maintains a website dedicated to famous American trials. He is among experts who assert that the closure of the Oklahoma Bombing case left many questions unanswered, including why the government failed to prosecute anyone else “despite considerable evidence linking various militant white supremacists to the tragedy.”¹ Indeed, white supremacists celebrate McVeigh as a martyr to the cause of a rightwing overthrow of the federal government.²

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) tracks domestic terrorism. It has noted a sharp rise in terrorist incidents since Barack Obama became President. In 2009, the heads of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security told Congress they considered homegrown terrorists as much of a threat as foreign terrorists. By the end of 2015, the monitoring of hate-mongering internet networks by the SPLC revealed a significant uptick — its annual Spring Intelligence Report characterized 2015 as “a year awash in deadly extremist violence and hateful rhetoric from mainstream politicians.”³

In January 2016, federal agents took a careful and measured approach to the Oregon armed takeover of public land. Unlike the siege at Waco, the Oregon siege ended after 41 days with only one death and the surrender of the other white militants, who then faced criminal charges. What repercussions would there have been if the Oregon takeover of public lands had instead been perpetrated by a small band of Arab jihadists or by black militants? Journalists immediately speculated that racism played a major role in political reaction to the Oregon standoff.⁴ Many Americans would never have expected, or tolerated, a similar restrained FBI response if the militants were not white.⁵ Reaching back half a century to compare the illegal armed seizure of public lands in Oregon to an infamous Black Panther protest in Sacramento in 1967, one commentator wrote:

[Unlike] what’s happening in Oregon right now, [the Black Panthers] entered the state Capitol lawfully, lodged their complaints against a piece of racially motivated legislation and then left without incident. But for those who see racial double standards at play in Oregon, the scope and severity of the 1967 response — the way the Panthers’ demonstration brought about panicked headlines, a prolonged FBI sabotage effort and support for gun control from the NRA, of all groups — will serve as confirmation that race shapes the way the country reacts to protest.⁶

Young

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