In addition to highlighting the struggles and achievements of the influential groups, the series commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Young Lords’ founding and murder of Chicago Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton at the hands of the FBI and Chicago police. The program culminates on the 12th with an entire day of performances, screenings, and parties held at several Harlem and El Barrio institutions. For the entire schedule, go here.

40th anniversary of Fred Hampton’s death

The Illinois Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark were ambushed in a raid by Chicago Police 40 years ago today.

In Hampton’s West Side apartment in the 2300 block of West Monroe Street on Dec. 4, 1969, police entered the home and fired at least 99 shots, versus one shot fired by the opposing side. He was 21 years old at the time of his death. That location has been dubbed “Ground Zero” by Hampton’s son, Fred Hampton Jr.

A few years after his death a scholarship was named in his honor, The Fred Hampton Memorial Legal Assistance Scholarship Fund. Hampton desired to become an attorney to help others in his community. His family established the fund to encourage the study of law within the Black community.

In 2006, his son, with the support of former 2nd Ward Ald. Madeline Haithcock made a failed attempt to get an honorary street named after Hampton. However, what didn’t pass in the city did in west suburban Maywood.

The slain Panther was honored in September 2007 with an honorary street name and statue in his honor in Maywood, where he grew up. The former Oak Street is now known as Fred Hampton Way and the statue sits in front of the Fred Hampton Family Aquatic Center.

-Kathy Chaney

poster from The Black Panther newspaper, 1969

Who: Emory Douglas, Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party
Where: Ferguson Auditorium, Columbia College. 600 S. Michigan Ave, 1st Floor.
When: 6:30-7:30

Description from Columbia’s website:

After working in a prison printshop while incarcerated as a teenager and more formally studying commercial art at San Francisco City College, Emory Douglas took on the role of Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, creating the group’s visual style and iconic representations of the Black Power Movement. Through the party’s newspaper The Black Panther, Douglas’s graphic work helped motivate the disenfranchised to action throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Colette Gaiter has describer him as the “Norman Rockwell of the ghetto” portraying the strength and dignity found among even the most harshly oppressed. This lecture is presented as part of the Scraping the Surface Lecture Series. Presented by Anchor Graphics, in conjunction with Critical Encounters: Fact & Faith.

To see more of his work, check out this online exhibit at the MOCA Pacific Design Center

It’s a week filled with fabulous sights, sounds and yes – even special little lovelies that can only be enjoyed in this, the coziest season of the year. So strap on your skates – or skis… or snowshoes – and head out into the best city in the world for loads and loads of free fun!

Monday, November 30

Start off the work week right… with a little metal on ice! The Chicago Park District’s nine ice skating rinks have opened their doors for a bit of wintery, slippery fun. Skate rental is $6 and admission is free. Most rinks are open from 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Mondays.

Tuesday, December 1

For something a little out of the holiday box, expand your mind by attending a public lecture given by Emory Douglas. As the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, Mr. Douglas created the group’s visual style of the Black Power Movement. Called the “Norman Rockwell of the ghetto,” his images portray strength and dignity amidst poverty and oppression. The lecture begins at 6:30 p.m. at Columbia College.

Wednesday, December 2

Chicago is a hustling, bustling city, one filled with happy noise all day long. Experience the city’s music in a whole new way at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. More than 20 producers created short audio pieces that portray Chicago through sound, story and imagination. Be sure to attend this event at the Chicago Cultural Center and RSVP in advance to info@thirdcoastfestival.org.

Thursday, December 3

One of the best parts of the holiday season are the movies and the Chicago Film Archives wants to Tinsel the Town with some fabulous cinematic treats. They’ll be showing eight short, vintage holiday-themed films at the Chicago Cultural Center, each sure to be better than the last! Films start at 7 p.m., but you’d better arrive early to nab a seat.

Friday, December 4

Forget the egg nog and head straight for the espresso. Once you’ve caffeinated yourself into the stratosphere, take your art-loving friends to 410 S. Michigan for A Night at the Fine Arts Building. From 6 p.m. until midnight, there will be open artists studios, galleries, live music, spoken word and theater performances.

Saturday, December 5

Still digesting Thanksgiving dinner? Burn off those holiday pounds with a little cross country skiing and snowshoeing at Northerly Island. It’s free whether you have your own gear or not, a delightful way to celebrate the season, and the scenery! Oh the scenery! There must be three inches of snow on the ground, so start begging ole man winter now.

- Shannon Sankstone

Click here to read more posts from Shannon.

Racism, Repression, and Resistance:
COINTELPRO Then and Now:
40 years since the FBI and Chicago police assassinated Fred Hampton
December 3, 2009

The Community Church of New York
40 East 35th Street Between Park Avenue and Madison Avenue
New York, NY, 10016-3870

Commemorating the 40th anniversary of the murder of Fred Hampton and the release of The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther by Jeffrey Haas. Panel discussion will explore the ongoing repression of political dissent in the U.S., from the COINTELPRO program that targeted the Black Panther Party to the current surveillance and disruption of political movements in the name of national security.

Time: 6:30 PM

Panelists Include:
Jeffrey Haas: attorney and author
Rachel Meeropol: staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights
Malik Rahim: founder of Common Ground Relief in New Orleans
Francisco Torres: member of the San Francisco 8
Laura Whitehorn: activist and former political prisoner

Discussion and book signing will follow the presentation.

This event is free and open to the public.

For more information email info@CCRjustice.org
Sponsored by the Center for Constitutional Rights
Co-sponsors include: Coalition to Abolish the AETA, National Lawyers Guild, New York City Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, War Resisters League, Witness Against Torture
War Resisters League
339 Lafayette St.New York, NY 10012
www.warresisters.org
(212) 228-0450

dossier sur l’affaire Mumia Abu-Jamal

dossier sur l’Histoire du Black Panther Party

L’affaire Mumia Abu-Jamal + L’histoire du Black Panther Party en PDF

The hip-hop heavyweight is on a college tour, though audiences should expect to hear more weighty rhetoric than witty rhymes.

Cross-post by Delaney Rohan, Campus Progress

Laying his rap talents aside for an evening, critically-acclaimed hip-hop artist Lupe Fiasco gave George Washington University students a lesson in history this week. But unlike what’s taught in closed-door college classrooms, this lesson belonged to anyone who would listen.

Facing a darkened auditorium of over 100 students, Fiasco, drenched in a spotlight, began the evening by reading a now exalted speech Muhammad Ali once made in protest of the Vietnam War.

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over.

Nearly 40 years later—with America still mired in Iraq, the Obama Administration contemplating sending 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, and nearly 50 million people lacking access to health care –Ali’s message remained emotionally relevant.

Making the rounds to eight universities, Fiasco is seeking to promote the new film The People Speak, a documentary featuring actors like Matt Damon, Danny Glover, and Viggo Mortensen performing some of American history’s most important, yet little-known, speeches and writings. Inspired by historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, the film highlights underexposed works from non-traditional American heroes, from Ali to abolitionist John Brown to Shay’s Rebellion participant Plough Jogger. A History Channel special of the same name will air Dec. 13.

After Fiasco’s recitation, he responded to questions, during which he described how his life was guided by his father’s involvement in the Black Panther Party and his mother’s intellectual encouragement. A product of activism himself, Fiasco believes participating in the Speak film fits well with his persona.

“This is what I stand for personally and professionally,” he said. “These are the types of projects and things I’m just drawn to naturally.” He added that doing the tour has opened his eyes to a mother country he’d never known: “Before, I had one view of America—the regular textbook history of America, which is based on imperialism and capitalism and injustice … [the people’s history] was never put to the forefront.”

While acknowledging how far Americans have come, Fiasco says he hopes The People Speak will encourage young people to continue to struggle.

“The biggest budget [in the United States] is the death budget, not the life budget,” Fiasco noted, referring to U.S. defense spending.

Asked what young people should protest now, Fiasco replied, “Everything. There’s so much injustice out there. There’s commercial injustice, industrial injustice, corporate injustice, political injustice, social injustice, religious injustice.” Later, flouting the stereotype that all rap musicians are homophobes, Fiasco equated the struggle for civil rights to that of gay rights. “They’re going against the same machinery, the same abuses, and the same kind of prejudices,” he said.

Speak’s producer, Chris Moore, who sat beside Fiasco throughout the event, said his dream for the film is wide accessibility. “Our hope is to get it out there as far as we can, and we’ve been benefited by the fact that we actually have a serious marketing distribution machine working with us in the A&E television networks.”

The tour’s next stop is at Northwestern University on Nov. 11.

Delaney Rohan is an editorial intern at Campus Progress. He graduated from the University of Florida this spring and is pursuing a master’s degree at American University.

With their guns, uniforms and talent for political theatre, the Black Panthers topped the FBI’s list of ‘threats to national security’ in the 60s. In 1968, Howard Bingham spent six months trailing and photographing them

Source: Life with the Black Panthers, Howard Bingham via the Guardian

More at source.

(once again, a Facebook post–I apologize for the brevity).

(from the BPP’s Ten-Points) “We want an immediate end to police brutality and the murder of Black people”. 
BPP activist Fred Hampton was killed in a police raid while sleeping alongside his pregnant girlfriend in 1969. He was unarmed and after being wounded in the shoulder the policeman responded to his injuries by shooting him pointblank in the head and then responding “He’s good and dead now”. 
Google “Oscar Grant” and “Alonzo Heyward”, police brutality is still a problem–race is still relevant. 

History is now, folks. 
This month is Black History Month (UK).

Elaine Brown's music is the Civil Rights era's underappreciated Molotov cocktail

PREVIEW: DOWNLOAD Elaine Brown’s  “Seize the Time” MP3

“Yet, I see they’ve taken liberties / With your souls and your lives.” Elaine Brown led the Black Panther Party from 1974 to 1977, while party leader Huey P. Newton was in Cuba on the run. These lines from the title track of her 1969 album Seize the Time effectively map out Brown’s party, life and activism.

Brown’s music is explicitly African American. In “The Panther” she describes her “hero” clearly: “His name is man / His face is black.” On her second full-length release, 1973’s Until We’re Free, she sings love ballads to dedicated revolutionaries (criminals in the American political structure) George Jackson and his brother Jonathan.

Brown’s soulful voice and the stirring musicianship throughout the record hammer her message home, and forty years later, much of it is still as relevant as anything released today. Racism is still very much a driving force in American culture and politics. If we really had overcome all of the stereotypes and prejudices present forty years ago, electing a black president would have yielded yawns, not media mayhem.

However, in 2002 she derided nearly every major African American political figure in her book The Condemnation of Little B, including Henry Louis Gates Jr, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice and even Chris Rock, among others. Brown’s dedication to her cause, both in 1969 and today, shatters perceptions of how far the (according to her) “defunct” Civil Rights Movement really got and how far it has yet to go.

Whatever your opinions of her politics are, don’t deny that the horns in between the verses of “Seize the Time” enthrall as much or more than anything Kanye West has produced.

– Eric Vilas-Boas, Production Editor

One of the first stops on the Black Panther tour was the intersection where the Black Panthers first organized to get a stoplight in the 1960s. Photo by Juana Gonzalez.

OMG… The part of our college tour that I looked forward to most has finally happened. I was completely blown away. Forgive me in advance if I offend, but visiting the colleges and universities are great. They are an enlightening experience, however I appreciate the opportunity, no doubt, but the most memorial and empowering experience in my opinion is the Black Panther tour. I witnessed living history. I stood in the presence of men that actually lived to tell their tales. I swear I stood in awe listening to them speak while looking at their facial expressions as they relived every moment. I will never forget any of this historical experience.

You may have to excuse me because I can go on and on about this experience and just the Black Panther party in general. No matter what or how the media tried to portray them they’ll always be heroes in my eyes. Both the law and society were against them. Without fear, they moved a nation; the world in fact.

David Hilliard, original Black Panther gives South Central youth a lesson in social justice and activism. Photo by Jesus Garcia.

At the beginning of the tour, I didn’t know what to expect. Though I anticipated every moment. I shouted with excitement as I watched additional former Panthers cross the street toward us. I asked if that was them, although I was pretty sure it was. We greeted the legendary David Hilliard and two of his comrades, as they walked onto our tour bus. I couldn’t believe it, I, little ole me, was in the presence of such great people…Revolutionaries. As they began to speak, I visualized everything. I imagined I was there…fighting oppression by any means necessary right along with them.

SCYEA youth revisit Black Panther sites. Photo by Juana Gonzalez.

We visited many historical landmarks of the Black Panther Party. Everything from their first office, to the location where they pressured city official to put up a traffic light to protect the safety of small children trying to cross the street. We even saw where Huey P. Newton was shot by the racist cop. Mr. Hilliard had a personal story for every place we visited. It was all touching. I can honestly say I’ve never in my entire life been so moved, so humbled by the stories and lessons. As I listened, I really began to realize how amazing and wonderful their lives were. Mr. Hilliard told of his life story as a panther and how he continues to contribute to the community by sharing his life experiences everyday. I love the rise and fall of his life and how he continues the struggle. I must admit that words aren’t enough to express such an experience at least not for me. I am so inspired by the Black Panther Party, their trials and mission. We’re all mere humans, as Mr. Hilliard acknowledged today, so we’re bound to make mistakes. Though its how we overcome that becomes our legacy.

Written by Tylo White on Saturday, Sept. 5, 2009

Named “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States,” by FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense stood at the vanguard of the most powerful movement for social change in America before being systemically destroyed by the United States government.

The Black Panther Party (BPP) used existing laws to challenge the power structure that subjugated an entire race of people in a country that decried freedom and equality as one of its basic tenets. Co-founded by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in Oakland, California in 1966 in the wake of the assassination of Malcolm X, following the uprising in Watts, and at the height of the civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Black Panthers were armed with a revolutionary agenda while availing themselves of the Second Amendment to ensure their own protection.

Employing their Ten Point Program, which called for “Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice, and Peace,” as well as freedom, full employment, free healthy care, and an end to oppression, police brutality, all wars of aggression, hate crimes, and false imprisonment, the BPP organized community-based service programs including free breakfasts for school children, free busing for senior citizens, preventative medical health care, co-operative housing, people’s free-food programs, and mass voter registration drives in forty-eight states. The BPP organized to put members on the ballot during local elections around the nation, notably Eldridge Cleaver’s run for president in 1968 and Seale’s run for mayor of Oakland in 1974.

With the 1967 incarceration of Newton for killing a white police officer came the rallying cry: “Free Huey!” Widespread support was first evidenced by the fist salute at the 1968 Summer Olympics by two medalists during the playing of the American national anthem (the athletes were later banned for life by the Olympic Committee). By 1969, the BPP was the primary target of COINTELPRO, who employed a campaign of disinformation, infiltration, and assassination. Much of what is known about the government’s activities at that time has come to light through the Freedom of Information Act. It is with these revelations that we may better understand the lengths to which the government went to destroy a revolutionary movement seeking to better the living and working conditions for the people of the United States.

Seale, who led the BPP for eight years as its chairman, is the author of Seize the Time: The Story of The Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton, which he tape recorded and wrote as a political prisoner in the San Francisco County Jail in 1969 and 1970. With the publication of Stephen Shames’ book The Black Panthers (some 36 years after Vice President Spiro T. Agnew crushed it’s first plans for release), Seale agreed to speak with me for That 70s Show, powerHouse Magazine issue 2, about the Black Panther Party.

Bobby Seale on the Black Panther Party, as told to Miss Rosen:

Everyone has a level by which they’re going to deal for self. But in dealing for self you can or cannot be considerate of your fellow human being next to you or near you or around you or in your neighborhood. It was the 60s protest movement that captured the imagination of a lot of young people, including myself. For me to go and hear Martin Luther King speak in 1962 when I was first introduced to, beginning to understand, what that 60s protest movement was about, I was a young college man, I was an engineering/design major, and at night I worked a full time job in an engineering department. I was working on the Gemini Missile project, a government-financed framework putting the satellites up around the earth. I placed myself in the high tech world I loved. So that’s where I was; but I became sensitive, was made sensitive by people like Martin Luther King, by the plight of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. They made me understand, made me take the time to research and know the history—not only the colonization of Africa but the history of African Americans in this country. And I had already identified with the history of peoples—when I was 16, before I knew any African American history, I knew Native American history and their plight. It was easy, I guess, that the civil rights protest movement should get to me and cause me to be concerned a young man—not married, to get involved in the protest movement, to the point of literally quitting my engineering job to go to work in the grassroots community and not even make the kind of money I was making.

Now the Constitution of the United States of America and the First Amendment that Huey Newton had pointed out before we started the Black Panther Party gave the people the right to peacefully assemble and peacefully address their grievances. That’s important to understand—morally, correctly so—but more importantly from a legal standpoint. The people had a right to peacefully redress their grievances and peacefully protest. Before the Black Panther Party came along, peaceful protesters were getting murdered shot, killed, brutalized. Peaceful protesters who declared that they were holding peaceful protests. It happened to a lot of protest efforts around the country because they gained momentum, because they were saying, “Let’s make a change.” Violence was getting heaped upon peaceful protesters.

It’s important to understand what we said in our Ten Point Program, when we called for full employment, decent housing, an end to exploitation and robbery of our communities, free preventative medial care for our communities—these were basic civil rights issues that peaceful protesters were about across the board. But politicians would order their police, order their National Guard, order their state police to literally beat the heads of and brutalize the peaceful protesters. So by the time we came along, Huey and I, creating the Black Panther Party, we took the position that if anyone attacks the people of the United States, if any racist or others attack the people of the United States, it’s wrong. Because we would take arrest, that was always our policy: if the police say we’re under arrest, we take the arrest. We were never afraid of the courtroom, but if they come in shooting and not recognizing our human right to live, as a means to try to terrorize us, we will defend ourselves—and that’s what we did. By 1969 every Black Panther Party office across the United States of America was attacked and half of those attacks resulted in shootouts—because the police came in shooting. They didn’t come in saying you were under arrest, they just came in shooting and we defended ourselves. And in that heavy period of 1969, twenty-eight of my Black Panther Party members ended up dead, a couple of them killed by provocateur agents working for the FBI inside our organization. And then they attempted to blame party members for doing it. Now this is why I was heating up, but we defended ourselves. And we had many a rally that was basically peaceful; we had many a gathering that was basically peaceful; we had many a free breakfast for children in churches or in other halls that were basically peaceful efforts. The point is they heaped the violence upon the United States and we defended ourselves from it.

Now people forget how and why all those attacks and all those shootouts—shootouts with the police were largely the police attacking the United States—now why did those police and those attacks stop? People have to remember that by 1970, going into 1971, the United States Senate, Senator Ted Kennedy and Senator Church headed up an investigation hearing on the FBI because they found out the FBI was going to police departments and setting up and laying plans months in advance to attack the Black Panther Party offices. Now with this hearing the FBI was in the hot seat and the United States Senate asked—it was right on live television—“Why are you running around here attacking these Black Panther Party members?” Now if you take note of history, those investigations were caused by the last two attacks in December 1969. December 4 in Chicago, a predawn raid where the police busted into a house and came in shooting, shot up everybody, and killed and murdered Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. We later proved and showed, and as the Freedom of Information Act documents, that in fact the FBI had an infiltrator who got the plans for the layout of the house. Those plans were given to the State Attorney’s Special Police Force. Six to eight years later, a suit was filed and the families of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark eventually won millions from the FBI and the State Attorney.

Two days after that shootout they attacked the Los Angeles office, and a month or two after that they laid out plans to attack the national headquarters, the central headquarters of the Black Panther Party here in Berkeley California. I was in jail at the time, but a young white policeman in the Berkeley Police Department had overheard the plans. This young white police officer, hearing them laugh and carry on about how “We’ll kill 10 or 20 of these Black Panther Party when we come in shooting from the downstairs up to the second story through the ceilings,” all this kind of crap—this young white policeman stole the plans and gave them to our lawyer and we called a press conference and put them in the press.

I am trying to show you that there’s smoking gun evidence of how the politicians and others had agreed that they needed to wipe out and terrorize the Black Panther Party. Further, the mayor of Seattle, Washington, a young white liberal mayor, got on television after he discovered the FBI had planned attacks on the Seattle chapters. He said, “We want the FBI out of our department. We will not have the FBI try to spearhead and cause an attack on the Black Panther Party here in Seattle.” Now notice something: after the investigations there were never any more shootouts between the Black Panther Party members and the police in the United States again—ever. That’s the evidence.

This is what people forget or don’t know or don’t understand about our position. The difference is between taking the right of self-defense and at the same time having all kinds of programs around the country. Party members went to do breakfast programs without guns. It’s what we did when we started that Free Breakfast for Children program—it’s one thing to say the racist pig power structure is brutal, it’s murderous; it’s another thing to articulate and specify all the hysterical particulars of how racist discrimination has affected the United States; but it’s another thing to say we’re not only observing the police, we’re going to organize political, electoral campaigns and we’re going to run for political office and we’re going to try to win some of these localized seats where we have these large African American groups.

We were ready to write legislation that deleted the racist discrimination, policies, and institutionalized racism. Because the city council is nothing but a local legislative body—just as a county seat is a local legislative body, as states are local legislative bodies, as the federal government is a local legislative body—it can make laws and policies that make human sense. This is what our revolution was about. Not only had the Black Panther Party spread out in 49 chapters with branches in cities across the United States of America but we had working coalitions with all ethnic groups, including our white, left radical friends, so we had another ten thousand working in our framework called the United Front Against Fascism: The National Committee to Combat Fascism. So to the power structure we were on the proper move to make a change.

What people have to take time to understand was that we, as young college students, injected something into the movement that was relevant, and that legacy is about uniting people and creating greater political electoral empowerment. You have to remember we ran for political office with our names on the ballot: a critique of and opposition to institutionalized racism in the United States. Trying to unite people with electoral and community empowerment and to change legislative bodies as a means to fight against institutionalized racism here in the United States of America: that is what we were about, that is what I stood for, that is what I organized.

Emory Douglas, the American artist who was part of the Black Panther Party, is currently the international artist in residence at Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts. The former Minister of Culture and Revolutionary Artist was part of the Black Panther Party from 1967 until the early 1980’s. Before that, Douglas majored in commercial art at the City College of San Francisco, which would see him hone the skills that would eventually lead him to design works for The Black Panther newspaper.

Right now, Emory Douglas has an exhibition at the Gus Fisher gallery in Auckland that runs until October 3, 2009. It’s something that really shouldn’t be missed. You can check the viewing times here.

For those of you not residing in Auckland, Douglas will also be talking at Wellington’s Te Papa on Saturday September 19. For more information visit the Te Papa website.

And if you’re not familiar with the Black Panther Party we strongly suggest you get up on it right here.

Holder’s Black Panther Stonewall

Why did the Justice Department dismiss such a clear case of voter intimidation?

August 20, 2009

By JOHN FUND

President Obama’s Justice Department continues to stonewall inquiries about why it dropped a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party.

The episode—which Bartle Bull, a former civil rights lawyer and publisher of the left-wing Village Voice, calls “the most blatant form of voter intimidation I’ve ever seen”—began on Election Day 2008. Mr. Bull and others witnessed two Black Panthers in paramilitary garb at a polling place near downtown Philadelphia. (Some of this behavior is on YouTube.)

One of them, they say, brandished a nightstick at the entrance and pointed it at voters and both made racial threats. Mr. Bull says he heard one yell “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!”

In the first week of January, the Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party and three of its members, saying they violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by scaring voters with the weapon, uniforms and racial slurs. In March, Mr. Bull submitted an affidavit at Justice’s request to support its lawsuit.

via John Fund: Black Panther Voter Intimidation Case Dropped – WSJ.com.

Last November members of the Black Panthers were videotaped intimidating voters in Philadelphia.  The Justice Department sought and obtained civil judgments against them.  Then, last May, DOJ brass dropped all the charges.

Now we know who did it.  From the Washington Times, EXCLUSIVE: No. 3 at Justice OK’d Panther reversal

Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli, the No. 3 official in the Obama Justice Department, was consulted and ultimately approved a decision in May to reverse course and drop a civil complaint accusing three members of the New Black Panther Party of intimidating voters in Philadelphia during November’s election, according to interviews.

Why drop the case?  No answer in the article.

Some people are not letting it go.  Lawmakers want answers, seek refiling in Panther case

Congressional Republicans on Thursday escalated their criticism of the Justice Department for dismissing a controversial voter-intimidation case, demanding that civil charges against the New Black Panther Party be restored. They also renewed their request to interview career attorneys who disagreed with the administration’s decision to dismiss the charge.

EXCLUSIVE: No. 3 at Justice OK’d Panther reversal

Case involved polling place in Philadelphia

By Jerry Seper (Contact) | Thursday, July 30, 2009

EXCLUSIVE:

Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli, the No. 3 official in the Obama Justice Department, was consulted and ultimately approved a decision in May to reverse course and drop a civil complaint accusing three members of the New Black Panther Party of intimidating voters in Philadelphia during November’s election, according to interviews.

The department’s career lawyers in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division who pursued the complaint for five months had recommended that Justice seek sanctions against the party and three of its members after the government had already won a default judgment in federal court against the men.

via EXCLUSIVE: No. 3 at Justice OK’d Panther reversal – Washington Times.