Black panthers to march at Duke Univeristy

DURHAM - The national chairman of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense says his group intends to march at Duke University on Monday to "deal directly" with lacrosse players about charges of rape of an escort service dancer at a team party.

Duke's campus police are coordinating with the Durham Police Department to prepare for the black-separatist group, which has a reputation for coming to its protests armed.

Malik Zulu Shabazz, a Washington lawyer who is the leader of the New Panthers, said he will be in Durham to rally with local black leaders and monitor progress of the criminal case against Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann, the two students charged with raping and kidnapping the dancer.

"We are conducting an independent investigation, and we intend to enter the campus and interview lacrosse players," Shabazz said Thursday. "We seek to ensure an adequate, strong and vigorous prosecution."

Duke is a private institution, and its campus is private property. Shabazz said he has not sought permission to enter but that his group has "received no word that we are not welcome."

John Burness, Duke's vice president for public affairs and community relations, said Thursday that the university will allow a controlled march on campus, as long as the New Black Panthers follow specific rules.

"As an institution we support free speech, and we will treat them like any other group," Burness said. "But we do not permit weapons. We will take necessary steps to keep the campus safe."

One of the key tenets of the New Black Panthers is owning firearms and knowing how to use them, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a national Jewish group that has monitored Shabazz and his followers for years.

"They are a racist and anti-Semitic group," said Myrna Shinbaum, a spokesperson for the New York-based league. "These guys come armed. They carry shotguns to demonstrations. The authorities down there should know this."

Asked whether his followers will be armed when they come to Duke, Shabazz chuckled and said, "I don't know if I can comment on that."

A flier distributed by the group this week displays photos of Finnerty and Seligmann and calls for those who have "had enough of disrespect and racism from Duke" to assemble at the front gates of the university's West Campus at 10 a.m.

"We as black men cannot sit idly by and allow white men to rape black women, regardless of what our sister (who by nature is a queen and a divine black woman) was doing," Shabazz is quoted as saying in a media release announcing the event.

In a telephone interview Thursday, Shabazz said he and several local black leaders will meet with Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong about the case Monday. Nifong did not return a message late Thursday seeking to confirm that a meeting is planned.

A "town hall" meeting is also planned at 6 p.m. Monday at St. Joseph's African Methodist Episcopal Church on Fayetteville Street. Shabazz is set to be the keynote speaker. The Rev. Philip R. Cousin Jr., the minister of the church and a Durham County commissioner, did not return calls about the event. Representatives of the NAACP and the Nation of Islam are also expected to attend.

The New Black Panthers is listed as a racist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization more often cited for its efforts to monitor the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists. The Panthers is also disavowed by the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, named for the activist who helped found the original Black Panther Party in 1966.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, the New Panthers are a black separatist militia founded in 1990 by Khallid Muhammad, who was removed from a top leadership post at the Nation of Islam after Louis Farrakhan reportedly found his statements against Jews, Catholics and homosexuals too radical.

Shabazz became the group's leader in 2001, after Muhammad's death. He has drawn media headlines in recent years for claiming that Jews were evacuated from the World Trade Center before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and voicing support for Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker" who was found eligible for the death penalty this month for his role in the Sept. 11 plot.

Shabazz, who said the group's current membership numbers in the "low thousands," backed away from claims published in a Durham newspaper Thursday that the New Black Panthers are providing security for the dancer and her family after she received death threats.

The accuser's mother told The News & Observer on Thursday that Panthers came by the family's house Wednesday and offered their protection, but the family decline

A very well-considered and thoughtout analysis of the 1979 event. Few snips:

Sunday, April 2, 2006
Second thoughts about Nov. 3, 1979

...
I took Ballance's criticisms to heart. I looked deeper into my own thinking and realized that I had selectively picked comments that supported my preconceived view of police malfeasance in the killings. I had filtered Ballance's comments through a lens far too narrow. His letter helped me see that I had become so absorbed in the survivors' narrative that I had failed to listen clearly to his words and the critical words of many others.

Two weeks later I read Elizabeth Wheaton's comprehensive and balanced book on Nov. 3, "Codename GREENKIL," which places blame on all the participants: the Klan/Nazis; police; and the Communist Workers Party, the organizer of the Nov. 3 march.

...
The history of Nov. 3 is complicated. Many have allowed the immense pain of the survivors to keep them from scrutinizing the role of the CWP. This allows them to support the survivors' narrative, which, it seems to me, is as follows:

Peaceful labor organizers, who were on the verge of developing multiracial textile unions, were gunned down on Nov. 3 by Klan/Nazi assassins. The assassination plot was conceived by textile factory owners because the owners greatly feared the emerging union. The textile barons had the cooperation of the police, FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and these law enforcement agencies were assigned the task of organizing and allowing the assassinations to take place. The city of Greensboro, the local media, the powerful white community leadership, the state of North Carolina and the U.S. attorney's office conspired and covered up the plot and used the court system to ensure a continuation of the cover-up and the acquittal of the assassins.

The one exception to the cover-up, according to the survivors' narrative, was the 1985 civil suit. A jury awarded almost $400,000 for the wrongful death of Michael Nathan and the wounding of two other marchers. The jury also found Greensboro Police officers Paul Spoon and Jerry Cooper, FBI informant Eddie Dawson and five Klan/Nazi members liable. But the jury found no conspiracy, collusion or cover-up after hearing the arguments from the survivors' attorneys over several months. The judge who presided over this civil case was considered to be fair and trustworthy. This jury was also considered by most to be fair and reasonable.

The Klan, police malfeasance, seedy informants and the climate of racism are fertile ground and great theater for packaging this sinister story. Most in the progressive community have accepted some parts of the CWP narrative because we know that similar events have happened.

But the record shows many important facts that cannot be ignored:

• The Communist Workers Party members were not peaceful labor organizers but Maoist extremists seeking militant and violent conflict on Nov. 3. Founder and general secretary of the CWP, Jerry Tung, said, "Yes, in the final analysis, the practice of our party's correct and militant line, and indeed the party itself, can only be forged by blood -- by sacrificing the most sacred of all things -- our lives."

• The primary goal of the CWP was to recruit membership for the party, not to create effective textile unions. Jim Waller, one of those killed on Nov. 3, said: "We will struggle against any tendency to raise building this union as the principal goal, to elevate it above building the party to prepare for revolution."

• The precursor to the CWP, the Workers' Viewpoint Organization, found little success in recruiting textile workers in the late '70s. The WRL, a far left group, said about the CWP and the WVO: "Anti-communist sentiment runs deep, even and especially among the working class, and the CWP's Maoist inspired rhetoric was evident and never won them many allies in the community. Relationships between the WVO people and the rest of the left political community were little better. The CWP's stance of calling for armed struggle ... rendered them untenable in coalition building."

• The extremist ideology of the CWP required complete sacrifice and commitment. Tung said "There will be a lot of sacrifices. Sacrifices like you have never done before. Tightness, discipline in a way you have never done before. Because the extent to which we can do that is the extent to which we can seize state power with a minimum of bloodshed."

• The CWP was an authoritarian organization. Survivor Sally Bermanzohn has said: "We all studied democratic centralism in a book called 'A Basic Understanding of the Communist Party of China.' ... What democratic centralism comes down to is: Don't cross the leadership."

• Jerry Tung directed CWP members in North Carolina to sponsor militant, aggressive, anti-Klan events. The local CWP made a militant challenge to the Klan via flyers, posters and letters.

• Tung considered the CWP's violent and militant confrontation with the Klan/Nazis in China Grove in the summer of 1979 to be a good format for future party-building activities. Bermanzohn was very concerned about the level of violence that developed at China Grove. She tried to convince Tung that such events were too dangerous. "Rather than address the issues of danger, Jerry said that the China Grove confrontation was a 'shining example' of struggles that WVO (CWP) should be taking up" she says in the book, "Through Survivors' Eyes."

• The CWP did not provide important information on Nov. 3 about security for the march in spite of attempts by Greensboro Police to speak with people gathering for the march at Windsor Community Center. The officers were treated with hostility and weren't told that Windsor was a secondary gathering location. The plan for a low-profile police presence on Nov. 3 was flawed, but the field officers near the scene might have modified these plans if they had had proper information.

• TV news footage shows that only about 20 adult marchers were gathered at Morningside Homes at the time of the shooting, although the CWP claims there were about 100. The Klan/Nazis have been accused of targeting specific demonstrators, but Klan gunfire struck 15 of the 20 demonstrators.

• Some members of the CWP on Nov. 3 were armed with pistols and a shotgun, and more weapons were in a nearby demonstrator's car.

• According to the court testimony of FBI audio witness Bruce Koenig, 39 shots were fired on Nov. 3; 23-25 of them were likely fired by the Klan, and 14 to 16 shots were probably fired by the CWP. Koenig's testimony was confusing at times and the method he was using was just being developed by the FBI, but his testimony is the best evidence available about the number of shots fired after the initial stick fighting between the two groups.

• The CWP placed the residents of Morningside Homes at great risk by having its march in a residential community.

Will the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission take the time to scrutinize and understand the CWP? Many think that the commission's final report, which is due in May, will be tilted toward the survivors because they have suffered greatly and because they have been the key presence behind the creation of the truth and reconciliation process.

The commission's founding documents declare it supports a complete truth-seeking process. It is also assumed that, based upon the truth, community reconciliation can gradually emerge.

***

And now, entering the stage in dejavu-ness but named this time "Malik Shabazz and the New Black Panthers".... in a recruiting drive while militantly asserting they are at Duke to "protect The Black Woman" from "white rapists" at Duke University. Whom, of course, Malik Shabazz "claims" he intends to interview and conduct his own investigation of.

Video: Media's Perception Of Duke, Durham Not Reality, Students Say

Media's Perception Of Duke, Durham Not Reality, Students Say

POSTED: 2:27 pm EDT April 30, 2006 UPDATED: 2:41 pm EDT April 30, 2006

DURHAM, N.C. -- Some students at Duke University and North Carolina Central University say an ongoing investigation into allegations of rape involving three white Duke lacrosse players and a black exotic dancer won't tear the Durham community apart.

Students from both schools, as well as Durham Technical Community College, put some sweat equity behind that investment Saturday and volunteered with Habitat for Humanity, working to build a house in Durham's West End community.

Durham's Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance scheduled the student workday with Habitat because it draws people of all backgrounds -- race, socio-economic and faith, organizers said.

The rape investigation, which has made headlines across the nation, has -- at least -- created the impression of heightened racial tensions in Durham, but students volunteering Saturday said they did not see it that way.

"No, we don't hate each other," said Barron Brown, a student at N.C. Central, where the alleged victim is enrolled. "We don't hate each other at all."

Students at both universities also said the perception in the media is not the reality they know.

"I feel like Duke and Durham are a microcosm of America," said Duke student Thomas Stratton. "I don't think the problems are anymore severe than the nation at-large."

The semester, no doubt, has been tough for students at both schools. Since the rape allegations surfaced in March, both campuses, as well as Durham, have received large amounts of media coverage -- some of which has portrayed Duke as an elite white university in a poor black city.

City leaders and the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau have been battling that perception, distributing promotional material about the city which gives the facts on Durham's racial makeup and financial status.

The city's population is 45.5 percent white and 43.8 percent black, while the median household income is $41,160, or just under the national average.

And yes, Stratton said there are relationships to repair and rebuild, but when it comes down to it, students from both campuses have a good foundation.

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