Salon.com > Black Panthers

How long can Eric Holder hang on?

Thu, 16 May 2013 13:45:00 +0000

When Attorney General Eric Holder walked into a hearing room in the Rayburn House office building yesterday, he must have expected that lawmakers would rake him over the coals for his department’s snooping on AP reporters, but he didn’t seem nervous. After all, this pageant of scandal and Congressional grilling has become routine for Holder, who has been a lightning rod since the first days of the Obama Administration.

After almost four and half years on the job, he’s been the first attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress, been called “rabidly un-American,” and even reportedly tried to resign. A LexisNexis search for “Eric Holder” “grilled” and “Congress” returns 534 articles. Attorneys general don’t often last two presidential terms.

Could the AP phone records controversy could be a tipping point for the embattled AG, whom even Democrats have been wary to support?

The NRA’s flip flop on African Americans

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 18:30:00 +0000

When the gun control debate focused around black militants taking up arms, the fulcrums were very different. Indeed, both the NRA and President Ronald Reagan spoke against armed citizens when African American men patrolled neighborhoods brandishing firearms in response to racial violence. The Panthers were not the "well-regulated militia" that the white, conservative stalwarts of Second Amendment advocacy had in mind.

Hence the hypocrisy now of the gun group appealing to African Americans -- invoking the Civil Rights movement -- to lobby support against gun regulation. The NRA hired Internet star and gun advocate Colion Noir to feature in a video, posted on YouTube Friday, to appeal to the black community. In the video, Noir says:

The same government who at one point hosed us down with water, attacked us with dogs, wouldn’t allow us to eat at their restaurants and told us we couldn’t own guns. [...] The only person responsible for your safety is you. Cops can’t always be there. Obama definitely can’t be there. Guy telling me to get rid of my guns when I need them the most, isn’t my friend, isn’t looking out for my best interests and doesn’t speak for me or the community that I’m part of.

Angola 3 prisoner ordered free for third time

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 21:27:00 +0000

Former Black Panther Albert Woodfox, one of the "Angola 3," has been in solitary confinement in Angola Prison for the murder of a guard, despite the fact that evidence strongly suggests his innocence. Although a federal judge this week overturned his conviction, Louisiana are likely to keep Woodfox locked up. He has been ordered free by a judge twice before, after all.

Earlier this week the same federal judge that ordered Woodfox’s release in 2008 again ruled Woodfox should be set free on the basis of racial discrimination in his retrial.

As Amy Goodman explained for the Guardian:

This is the third time his conviction has been overturned. Nevertheless, Woodfox remains imprisoned. Those close to the case expect the state of Louisiana, under the direction of Attorney General James "Buddy" Caldwell, to appeal again – as the state has successfully done in the past – seeking to keep Woodfox in solitary confinement, in conditions that Amnesty International says "can only be described as cruel, inhuman and degrading".

... Woodfox and fellow inmate Herman Wallace were in Angola for lesser crimes when implicated in the prison murder of a guard in 1972. Woodfox and Wallace founded the Angola chapter of the Black Panther party in 1971, and were engaged in organizing against segregation, inhumane working conditions and the systemic rape and sexual slavery inflicted on many imprisoned in Louisiana's Angola.

Cain: Panther pressured whites

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 14:36:00 +0000

On election day, Fox News and Drudge Report were up in arms over the presence of one member of the New Black Panther Party outside of a Philadelphia polling place. Herman Cain was equally outraged, saying on Fox News last night that it was part of the bigger picture of Democrats who "push race warfare to the limit."

“My thoughts are, this whole thing about civility, the Democrats have demonstrated they can find new lows to be incivil [sic] about the language,” Cain told Sean Hannity.

"This is nothing more than another way to get around the voter intimidation charge and to basically cause white voters to think twice about going to vote,” he said. “That’s what that was all about.”

“I’ve never been more hopeful”

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 01:56:00 +0000

What are you seeing and hearing in your state and at the polling place? Send information and photos to readermail@salon.com.

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Black Power: American as apple pie

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 16:28:00 +0000

“WHAT HAPPENS TO A DREAM deferred? Does it dry up, like a raisin in the sun?” Langston Hughes asked in 1951, “Or does it explode?” An answer came when the Black Power Movement burst upon the American political and cultural landscape of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Movement took on significant dimensions in many realms — politics, public policy, education — but nowhere was its impact more tangible than in the culture, especially music. Movement activists utilized more than speeches, proclamations and marches to motivate their followers: rhythmic, expressive, improvisational music also propelled the struggle. Unlike the gospel-fueled Civil Rights Movement, Black Power had fewer ties to the church than to the street. Its rhetorical models included the self-aggrandizing rhymes of Muhammad Ali and the militant sloganeering of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, while its urgent resilience found a danceable counterpart in the soul music of James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, and hundreds of others.