New Haven Black Panther trials
Encyclopedia
In 1970 there were a series of criminal prosecutions in New Haven, Connecticut
against various members of the Black Panther Party
. The charges ranged from criminal conspiracy to felony murder. All indictments stemmed from the murder of nineteen-year-old Alex Rackley in the early hours of May 21, 1969. The trials became a rallying-point for the American Left
.
kidnapped fellow Panther Alex Rackley
, who had fallen under suspicion of informing for the FBI. He was held captive at the New Haven Panther headquarters on Orchard Street, and tortured for two days until he confessed. During that time, national party chairman Bobby Seale
visited New Haven and spoke on the campus of Yale University
. After his speech, Seale briefly stopped by the headquarters where Rackley was being held captive, though it was never proven that he went inside or knew about Rackley's treatment.
Early the next day, three Panthers - Warren Kimbro
, Lonnie McLucas
, and national Panther "Field Marshal" George Sams, Jr. - drove Rackley to the nearby town of Middlefield, Connecticut
. Kimbro shot Rackley once in the head and McLucas shot him once in the chest. They dumped his corpse in the Coginchaug River
, where it was discovered the next day.
Police raided the Panther headquarters, eventually arresting nine New Haven area Black Panthers (in addition to two juveniles). McLucas and Sams were captured later.
Sams and Kimbro confessed to the murder, and agreed to testify against McLucas in exchange for a reduction in sentence. Sams also implicated Seale in the killing, telling his interrogators that while visiting the Panther headquarters on the night of his speech, Seale had directly ordered him to murder Rackley. In all, nine defendants were indicted on charges related to the case. In the heated political rhetoric of the day, these defendants were referred to as the "New Haven Nine", a deliberate allusion to other cause-celebre defendants like the "Chicago Seven
".
Jury selection began in May 1970. The case and trial were already a national cause celebre among critics of the Nixon administration, and especially among those hostile to the actions of the FBI. Under the Bureau's then-secret "Counter-Intelligence Program" (COINTELPRO
), FBI director J. Edgar Hoover
had ordered his agents to disrupt, discredit, or otherwise neutralize radical groups like the Panthers. Hostility between groups organizing political dissent and the Bureau was, by the time of the trials, at a fever pitch. Hostility from the left was also directed at the two Panthers cooperating with the prosecutors. Sams in particular, never widely popular in the movement, was accused of being an informant, and lying to implicate Seale to hide his own complicity with the FBI.
Beginning with the pretrial proceedings, tens of thousands of supporters of the Panthers arrived in New Haven individually and in organized groups. They were housed and fed by community organizations and by sympathetic Yale students in their dormitory rooms. The Yale college dining halls provided basic meals for everyone. Protesters met daily en masse on the New Haven Green
across the street from the Courthouse (and one hundred yards from Yale's main gate) to hear protest speakers. Among the speakers were Jean Genet
, Benjamin Spock
, Abbie Hoffman
, Jerry Rubin
, and John Froines
(an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon). Teach-ins and other events were also held in the colleges themselves.
Yale chaplain, William Sloane Coffin
, stated, "All of us conspired to bring on this tragedy by law enforcement agencies by their illegal acts against the Panthers, and the rest of us by our immoral silence in front of these acts," while Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr. issued the statement, "I personally want to say that I'm appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass that I am skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the U.S." Brewster's generally sympathetic tone enraged many of the University's older, more conservative alumni, heightening tensions within the school community.
As tensions mounted, Yale officials sought to avoid deeper unrest and to deflect the real possibility of riots or violent student demonstrations. Sam Chauncey
has been credited with winning tactical management on behalf of the administration to quell anxiety among law enforcement and New Haven's citizens, while Kurt Schmoke
, a future Rhodes Scholar, mayor of Baltimore, MD and Dean of Howard University
School of Law, has received kudos as undergraduate spokesman to the faculty during some of the protest's tensest moments. Ralph Dawson, a classmate of Schmoke's, figured prominently as moderator of the Black Student Alliance at Yale (BSAY).
In the end, compromises between the administration and the students defused the worst of the friction. While Yale (and many other colleges) went "on strike" from May Day until the end of the term, like most schools it was not actually "shut down". Classes were made "voluntarily optional" for the time and students were graded "Pass/Fail" for the work done up to then.
s installed at the courtroom doors; jury selection took six weeks, a Connecticut record, and the jury deliberated for six days, another Connecticut record. Despite impassioned accusations from protesters that McLucas was being railroaded into the electric chair by a "racist jury," the jurors (ten white, two black) acquitted him on the most severe charges, convicting him instead on the sole charge of conspiracy to commit murder. His defense attorney declared, "The judge was fair, the jury was fair, and, in this case, a black revolutionary was given a fair trial." McLucas was sentenced to twelve to fifteen years in prison. His two collaborators in the murder, who had pleaded to second degree murder, were released after four years.
In October, 1970, Bobby Seale
went on trial alongside Ericka Huggins, a New Haven Panther who had been present in the apartment during Rackley's captivity and, according to testimony, boiled water to torture him with. This trial was an even larger undertaking, involving a full four months of jury selection. The defense emphasized that it was only Sams' testimony that tied Seale and Huggins to Rackley's murder. The jury was unable to reach a verdict, deadlocked 11 to 1 for Seale's acquittal and 10 to 2 for Huggin's acquittal. On May 25, 1971 Judge Harold Mulvey stunned courtroom spectators by dismissing the charges against Huggins and Seale saying: " I find it impossible to believe that an unbiased jury could be selected without superhuman efforts- efforts which this court, the state and these defendants should not be called upon to either to make or to endure".
In 1971, a group of left-wing radicals calling themselves the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI
burglarized an FBI field office in Media, PA. Among the materials stolen in this break-in were documents revealing the nature of the COINTELPRO program. Within the year, Director Hoover
declared that the centralized COINTELPRO was over.
For the Panthers, the Seale trial may have been the height of their national exposure and their popularity among the broader left-wing movement. A string of violent confrontations with law-enforcement, along with the trials and convictions of national party leaders that followed, left the movement spent and adrift, and by the mid-1970s it was largely inactive.
The trial surfaced again in the news in 2000, when former first lady Hillary Clinton ran for U.S. Senate in the state of New York. Anti-Clinton activists discovered that during the trials, Clinton (then a Yale law student named Hillary Rodham) volunteered to monitor the trial for violations of civil rights, for the American Civil Liberties Union
. Widely circulated mass e-mails erroneously ascribed to Clinton responsibility for "getting the defendants off," and also blamed the future head of the Clinton
U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, Bill Lann Lee
, who was a Yale undergraduate at the time. Although both were much too junior to have had any role in the actual legal defense, according to John Elvin of Insight on the News, "Insight reviewed biographies of Hillary Clinton by Milton, [David] Brock
and Roger Morris
for this story and lengthy selections from such other biographies as Barbara Olson
’s Hell to Pay. Together, relying on primary and other firsthand sources, they unquestionably back David Horowitz’s contention that Hillary was a campus leader during the Panther protests"; Lee apparently played no prominent role in any protests.
Detective Nick Pastore
, who arrested Seale and brought him to New Haven to stand trial, went on to become New Haven's Chief of Police, widely renowned for his successful policy of community policing, and now heads a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington, DC named Criminal Justice Policy. Thirty one years later, when Seale returned to New Haven to speak at the Yale Repertory Theatre
, he presented Pastore with a pink porcelain pig and a hug.
New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven is the second-largest city in Connecticut and the sixth-largest in New England. According to the 2010 Census, New Haven's population increased by 5.0% between 2000 and 2010, a rate higher than that of the State of Connecticut, and higher than that of the state's five largest cities, and...
against various members of the Black Panther Party
Black Panther Party
The Black Panther Party wasan African-American revolutionary leftist organization. It was active in the United States from 1966 until 1982....
. The charges ranged from criminal conspiracy to felony murder. All indictments stemmed from the murder of nineteen-year-old Alex Rackley in the early hours of May 21, 1969. The trials became a rallying-point for the American Left
American Left
The American Left consists of individuals and groups, including socialists, communists and anarchists, that have sought fundamental change in the economic, political and cultural institutions of the United States. Although left-wing ideologies came to the United States in the 19th century, there...
.
The crime
On May 19, 1969, members of the Black Panther PartyBlack Panther Party
The Black Panther Party wasan African-American revolutionary leftist organization. It was active in the United States from 1966 until 1982....
kidnapped fellow Panther Alex Rackley
Alex Rackley
Alex Rackley was a member of the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s. In May 1969, Rackley was suspected by other Panthers of being a police informant...
, who had fallen under suspicion of informing for the FBI. He was held captive at the New Haven Panther headquarters on Orchard Street, and tortured for two days until he confessed. During that time, national party chairman Bobby Seale
Bobby Seale
Robert George "Bobby" Seale , is an activist. He is known for co-founding the Black Panther Party with Huey Newton.-Early life:...
visited New Haven and spoke on the campus of Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
. After his speech, Seale briefly stopped by the headquarters where Rackley was being held captive, though it was never proven that he went inside or knew about Rackley's treatment.
Early the next day, three Panthers - Warren Kimbro
Warren Kimbro
Warren Aloysious Kimbro was a Black Panther Party member in New Haven, Connecticut who was found guilty of the May 21, 1969, murder of New York Panther Alex Rackley, in the first of the New Haven Black Panther trials in 1970...
, Lonnie McLucas
Lonnie McLucas
Lonnie McLucas was a Black Panther Party member in Bridgeport, Connecticut who was found guilty of the May 21, 1969 murder of New York Panther Alex Rackley, in the first of the New Haven Black Panther trials in 1970. Rackley had been held and tortured at New Haven, Connecticut Panther headquarters...
, and national Panther "Field Marshal" George Sams, Jr. - drove Rackley to the nearby town of Middlefield, Connecticut
Middlefield, Connecticut
Middlefield is a town in Middlesex County, Connecticut, United States. The population was 4,203 at the 2000 census. The town includes the village of Rockfall-History:...
. Kimbro shot Rackley once in the head and McLucas shot him once in the chest. They dumped his corpse in the Coginchaug River
Coginchaug River
The Coginchaug River in Connecticut, with a watershed of including forests, pastures, farmland, industrial, and commercial areas, is the predominant tributary of the Mattabesset River...
, where it was discovered the next day.
Police raided the Panther headquarters, eventually arresting nine New Haven area Black Panthers (in addition to two juveniles). McLucas and Sams were captured later.
Sams and Kimbro confessed to the murder, and agreed to testify against McLucas in exchange for a reduction in sentence. Sams also implicated Seale in the killing, telling his interrogators that while visiting the Panther headquarters on the night of his speech, Seale had directly ordered him to murder Rackley. In all, nine defendants were indicted on charges related to the case. In the heated political rhetoric of the day, these defendants were referred to as the "New Haven Nine", a deliberate allusion to other cause-celebre defendants like the "Chicago Seven
Chicago Seven
The Chicago Seven were seven defendants—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Lee Weiner—charged with conspiracy, inciting to riot, and other charges related to protests that took place in Chicago, Illinois on the occasion of the 1968...
".
Protest and unrest
The first trial was that of Lonnie McLucas, the only person who physically took part in the killings but refused to plead guilty. In fact, McLucas had confessed to shooting Rackley, but since some of the charges brought against him made him eligible for the death penalty, a not-guilty plea was the only logical trial strategy.Jury selection began in May 1970. The case and trial were already a national cause celebre among critics of the Nixon administration, and especially among those hostile to the actions of the FBI. Under the Bureau's then-secret "Counter-Intelligence Program" (COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations.COINTELPRO tactics included discrediting targets through psychological...
), FBI director J. Edgar Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover
John Edgar Hoover was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972...
had ordered his agents to disrupt, discredit, or otherwise neutralize radical groups like the Panthers. Hostility between groups organizing political dissent and the Bureau was, by the time of the trials, at a fever pitch. Hostility from the left was also directed at the two Panthers cooperating with the prosecutors. Sams in particular, never widely popular in the movement, was accused of being an informant, and lying to implicate Seale to hide his own complicity with the FBI.
Beginning with the pretrial proceedings, tens of thousands of supporters of the Panthers arrived in New Haven individually and in organized groups. They were housed and fed by community organizations and by sympathetic Yale students in their dormitory rooms. The Yale college dining halls provided basic meals for everyone. Protesters met daily en masse on the New Haven Green
New Haven Green
The New Haven Green is a privately owned park and recreation area located in the downtown district of the city of New Haven, Connecticut. It comprises the central square of the nine-square settlement plan of the original Puritan colonists in New Haven, and was designed and surveyed by colonist...
across the street from the Courthouse (and one hundred yards from Yale's main gate) to hear protest speakers. Among the speakers were Jean Genet
Jean Genet
Jean Genet was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing...
, Benjamin Spock
Benjamin Spock
Benjamin McLane Spock was an American pediatrician whose book Baby and Child Care, published in 1946, is one of the biggest best-sellers of all time. Its message to mothers is that "you know more than you think you do."Spock was the first pediatrician to study psychoanalysis to try to understand...
, Abbie Hoffman
Abbie Hoffman
Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was a political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ....
, Jerry Rubin
Jerry Rubin
Jerry Rubin was an American social activist during the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1980s, he became a successful businessman.-Early life:...
, and John Froines
John Froines
John R. Froines is a chemist and anti-war activist.He is noted as a member of the Chicago Seven, a group charged with involvement with the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Froines, who holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Yale, was charged with interstate travel for purposes of...
(an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon). Teach-ins and other events were also held in the colleges themselves.
Yale chaplain, William Sloane Coffin
William Sloane Coffin
William Sloane Coffin, Jr. was an American liberal Christian clergyman and long-time peace activist. He was ordained in the Presbyterian church and later received ministerial standing in the United Church of Christ....
, stated, "All of us conspired to bring on this tragedy by law enforcement agencies by their illegal acts against the Panthers, and the rest of us by our immoral silence in front of these acts," while Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr. issued the statement, "I personally want to say that I'm appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass that I am skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the U.S." Brewster's generally sympathetic tone enraged many of the University's older, more conservative alumni, heightening tensions within the school community.
As tensions mounted, Yale officials sought to avoid deeper unrest and to deflect the real possibility of riots or violent student demonstrations. Sam Chauncey
Sam Chauncey
Henry "Sam" Chauncey, Jr. was a longtime administrator at Yale University. He has been credited in part with management of the volatile atmosphere on campus and in New Haven, Connecticut associated with the New Haven Black Panther trials....
has been credited with winning tactical management on behalf of the administration to quell anxiety among law enforcement and New Haven's citizens, while Kurt Schmoke
Kurt Schmoke
Kurt Lidell Schmoke is the Dean of the Howard University School of Law and a former mayor of Baltimore, Maryland. The son of Murray and Irene B. Reid , he attended the public schools of Baltimore...
, a future Rhodes Scholar, mayor of Baltimore, MD and Dean of Howard University
Howard University
Howard University is a federally chartered, non-profit, private, coeducational, nonsectarian, historically black university located in Washington, D.C., United States...
School of Law, has received kudos as undergraduate spokesman to the faculty during some of the protest's tensest moments. Ralph Dawson, a classmate of Schmoke's, figured prominently as moderator of the Black Student Alliance at Yale (BSAY).
In the end, compromises between the administration and the students defused the worst of the friction. While Yale (and many other colleges) went "on strike" from May Day until the end of the term, like most schools it was not actually "shut down". Classes were made "voluntarily optional" for the time and students were graded "Pass/Fail" for the work done up to then.
Trials
McLucas's trial set new records for the scale of judicial proceedings in Connecticut. It was the first in Connecticut to have metal detectorMetal detector
A metal detector is a device which responds to metal that may not be readily apparent.The simplest form of a metal detector consists of an oscillator producing an alternating current that passes through a coil producing an alternating magnetic field...
s installed at the courtroom doors; jury selection took six weeks, a Connecticut record, and the jury deliberated for six days, another Connecticut record. Despite impassioned accusations from protesters that McLucas was being railroaded into the electric chair by a "racist jury," the jurors (ten white, two black) acquitted him on the most severe charges, convicting him instead on the sole charge of conspiracy to commit murder. His defense attorney declared, "The judge was fair, the jury was fair, and, in this case, a black revolutionary was given a fair trial." McLucas was sentenced to twelve to fifteen years in prison. His two collaborators in the murder, who had pleaded to second degree murder, were released after four years.
In October, 1970, Bobby Seale
Bobby Seale
Robert George "Bobby" Seale , is an activist. He is known for co-founding the Black Panther Party with Huey Newton.-Early life:...
went on trial alongside Ericka Huggins, a New Haven Panther who had been present in the apartment during Rackley's captivity and, according to testimony, boiled water to torture him with. This trial was an even larger undertaking, involving a full four months of jury selection. The defense emphasized that it was only Sams' testimony that tied Seale and Huggins to Rackley's murder. The jury was unable to reach a verdict, deadlocked 11 to 1 for Seale's acquittal and 10 to 2 for Huggin's acquittal. On May 25, 1971 Judge Harold Mulvey stunned courtroom spectators by dismissing the charges against Huggins and Seale saying: " I find it impossible to believe that an unbiased jury could be selected without superhuman efforts- efforts which this court, the state and these defendants should not be called upon to either to make or to endure".
Aftermath
Both the Panthers and the FBI suffered damage to their reputations, after the public exposure of their most unsavory activities.In 1971, a group of left-wing radicals calling themselves the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI
Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI
The Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI was a leftist activist group operational during the early 1970s. Their only known action was breaking into a two-man Media, Pennsylvania FBI office, and stealing over 1000 classified documents. They then mailed these documents anonymously to several...
burglarized an FBI field office in Media, PA. Among the materials stolen in this break-in were documents revealing the nature of the COINTELPRO program. Within the year, Director Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover
John Edgar Hoover was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972...
declared that the centralized COINTELPRO was over.
For the Panthers, the Seale trial may have been the height of their national exposure and their popularity among the broader left-wing movement. A string of violent confrontations with law-enforcement, along with the trials and convictions of national party leaders that followed, left the movement spent and adrift, and by the mid-1970s it was largely inactive.
The trial surfaced again in the news in 2000, when former first lady Hillary Clinton ran for U.S. Senate in the state of New York. Anti-Clinton activists discovered that during the trials, Clinton (then a Yale law student named Hillary Rodham) volunteered to monitor the trial for violations of civil rights, for the American Civil Liberties Union
American Civil Liberties Union
The American Civil Liberties Union is a U.S. non-profit organization whose stated mission is "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States." It works through litigation, legislation, and...
. Widely circulated mass e-mails erroneously ascribed to Clinton responsibility for "getting the defendants off," and also blamed the future head of the Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, Bill Lann Lee
Bill Lann Lee
Bill Lann Lee is a Chinese American civil rights lawyer who served as Assistant Attorney General for the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division under President Bill Clinton....
, who was a Yale undergraduate at the time. Although both were much too junior to have had any role in the actual legal defense, according to John Elvin of Insight on the News, "Insight reviewed biographies of Hillary Clinton by Milton, [David] Brock
David Brock
David Brock is an American journalist and author, the founder of the media watchdog group, Media Matters for America, and a Democratic political operative...
and Roger Morris
Roger Morris
Roger Morris may refer to:*Roger Morris , 2000s novelist*Roger Morris *Roger Morris *Robert Morris , signer to the United States Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the United States Constitution*Roger Morris , British architect*Roger Morris , historian and author of...
for this story and lengthy selections from such other biographies as Barbara Olson
Barbara Olson
Barbara Olson was a lawyer and conservative American television commentator who worked for CNN, Fox News Channel, and several other outlets...
’s Hell to Pay. Together, relying on primary and other firsthand sources, they unquestionably back David Horowitz’s contention that Hillary was a campus leader during the Panther protests"; Lee apparently played no prominent role in any protests.
Detective Nick Pastore
Nick Pastore
Nick Pastore served as chief of the New Haven, Connecticut police department from 1990 through 1997, during which period he gained national attention due to his successfully implemented policy of community policing, a contrast to the quasi-militaristic approach for which the department had...
, who arrested Seale and brought him to New Haven to stand trial, went on to become New Haven's Chief of Police, widely renowned for his successful policy of community policing, and now heads a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington, DC named Criminal Justice Policy. Thirty one years later, when Seale returned to New Haven to speak at the Yale Repertory Theatre
Yale Repertory Theatre
The Yale Repertory Theatre at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut was founded by Robert Brustein, dean of the Yale School of Drama in 1966, with the goal of facilitating a meaningful collaboration between theatre professionals and talented students. In the process it has become one of the...
, he presented Pastore with a pink porcelain pig and a hug.