- With Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff
-
- For the story behind the story...
-
- Monday March 27, 2000; 8:43 PM EST
-
- Before Sharpton, Hillary Hobnobbed with Crips, Bloods and Panthers
- Hillary's riot?
-
- That's what some are saying about the violence that erupted Saturday in
- Brooklyn over a case that has become the focus of the first lady's US
- Senate campaign against New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
-
- Mrs. Clinton, it turns out, is no stranger to some of the more militant
- players in America's cauldron of racial politics. In fact, before she
- hooked up with a triad of reverends now busily polarizing New York on
- her behalf, she entertained former Crips and Bloods gang members at the
- White House and championed the cause of the Black Panthers.
-
- Since New York police fatally shot the unarmed Patrick Dorismond nearly
- two weeks ago, the Revs. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Calvin Butts
- have become Mrs. Clinton's most effective campaigners, whipping up so
- much resentment in New York's black community, it's surprising more
- people weren't injured in Saturday's rock and bottle throwing melee.
-
- While Hillary confines herself to milder forms of racial demagoguery,
- making statements like "We all know New York has a problem; all of us
- except, it seems, Mayor Giuliani," her three reverends have been less
- circumspect.
-
- "You want to maintain the status quo and you want a few Negroes to help
- you do it. Go to hell, white man," shouted Rev. Butts from his pulpit
- at the Abyssinian Baptist Church a few weeks ago. The white man Butts
- had in mind was, of course, Giuliani -- who days earlier had trumpeted
- the acquittal verdict in another police shooting case as vindication for
- his own wait-and-see approach.
-
- Showing typical Republican timidity, neither Giuliani nor New York's GOP
- governor George Pataki has called Butts on his racist diatribe, despite
- the fact that this member of Hillary's triad just happens to be
- president of the taxpayer funded State University of New York at Old
- Westbury.
-
- Not to be outdone by Butts, Jackson came to town last week to pronounce
- the first lady's Senate opponent "mentally disturbed."
-
- For his part, Sharpton argued Sunday that Brooklyn's mini-riot was
- actually the mayor's fault, claiming that the presence of so many police
- clad in riot gear had provoked the crowd. (In fact, observers agree,
- cops in riot gear didn't appear till after the rock and bottle throwing
- began.)
-
- The racial demagoguery is working, with the latest Zogby poll putting
- Hillary three points ahead of Giuliani, a whopping ten-point improvement
- for her in the last three weeks.
-
- None of this is new to Hillary.
-
- One of the more bizarre though little noted features of the Clintons'
- arrival in Washington was their invitation to two former Los Angeles
- gang members to help celebrate their triumph.
-
- "Man, it was beautiful," one-time Crip Charles Rachal told the Los
- Angeles Times in January 1993 about his meeting with the president. "He
- talked to us individually and all together -- just like it was a family
- thing. People were getting up, going to this table, going to that
- table, giving hugs and taking pictures. Man, it was heartwarming."
-
- Rachal and former Blood gang member Leon Gullett had ringside seats for
- Clinton's swearing-in ceremony and were even invited to one of the gala
- inaugural balls, reported the Times.
-
- Gang members might not be everybody's idea of A-list party guests. But
- for Hillary, hobnobbing with murderous militants was old hat.
-
- Twenty years earlier, while a grad student at Yale, a young Hillary
- Rodham's brand of radical politics led her to the doorstep of the Black
- Panthers. Several Panthers, including the notorious Bobby Seale, were
- then on trial in New Haven for the torture death of one of their own
- members, Alex Rackley.
-
- The Panthers suspected Rackley was an informant for police, better known
- to Hillary's crowd at the time as "the pigs." For his perceived sins,
- Rackley's Panther brethren clubbed him, burned him with cigarettes,
- scalded him with boiling water, stabbed him with an ice pick and finally
- shot him twice. Police found Rackley's mutilated body floating in the
- Coginchaug River, twenty-five miles north of New Haven.
-
- In her stinging biography of the first lady, Hell to Pay, Barbara Olson
- reports, "Hillary formed a close association with [Panther lawyer
- Charles] Garry and manifested no misgivings about the violent rhetoric
- of his clients, who called for police assassinations and said, 'If Bobby
- dies, Yale fries.'"
-
- "Hillary attended the Black Panther trials and put her considerable
- leadership and organizational skills to work in organizing shifts of
- fellow students to monitor the trial and report alleged civil rights
- abuses," Olson wrote.
-
- As the trial's controversy swirled over Yale's campus, the rallying cry
- from student radicals became "Shut it down or burn it down!" Even after
- Yale's faculty voted to suspend normal operations and open the campus to
- outside protestors, several unexplained fires erupted in Yale buildings,
- reports Joyce Milton in her Hillary bio, The First Partner.
-
- Hillary Clinton cut her activist teeth on the politics of race.
- After rubbing shoulders with the Crips, the Bloods and the Panthers,
- it's no surprise she's counting on her new friends, Sharpton, Jackson
- and Butts, to help make her New York's next US Senator.
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