Posted on 11/04/2008 9:08:58 AM PST by markedmannerf
Edited on 11/04/2008 12:16:09 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
On Fox now...
youtube video, taken by a Univ. of PA student of the black panther goons with nightsticks from PA today.
Address of polling place: 1221 Fairmount (?) in Philadelphia
"When I'm finished with them, I'll make Attila the Hun look like a fag."
Obama is not a uniter he is a racist divider that is not going to take us forward, but return us to the 60's.
I used to live in N Cali...Beautiful, but very scary and very liberal...
These Americans’ absolute refusal to knuckle-under had been hardened by service in World War II. Having fought to free other countries from murderous regimes, they rejected vicious abuse by their county government. These Americans had a choice. Their state's Constitution - Article 1, Section 26 - recorded their right to keep and bear arms for the common defense. Few “gun control” laws had been enacted.
II. The Setting
These Americans were Tennesseeans of McMinn County, located between Chattanooga and Knoxville, in Eastern Tennessee. The two main towns were Athens and Etowah.
McMinn Countians had long been independent political thinkers. They also had long:
accepted bribe-taking by politicians and/or the Sheriff to overlook illicit whiskey-making and gambling;
financed the sheriff's department from fines - usually for speeding or public drunkenness - which promoted false arrests;
put up with voting fraud by both Democrats and Republicans.
Tennessee State law barred voting fraud:
ballot boxes had to be shown to be empty before voting;
poll-watchers had to be allowed;
armed law enforcement officers were barred from polling places;
ballots had to be counted where any voter could watch.
III. The Circumstances
The Great Depression had ravaged McMinn County. Drought broke many farmers; workforces shrank. The wealthy Cantrell family, of Etowah, backed Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1932 election, hoping New Deal programs would revive the local economy and help Democrats to replace Republicans in the county government. So it proved.
Paul Cantrell was elected Sheriff in the 1936, 1938, and 1940 elections, but by slim margins. The Sheriff was the key County official. Cantrell was elected to the State Senate in 1942 and 1944; his chief deputy, Pat Mansfield, was elected sheriff. In 1946, Paul Cantrell again sought the Sheriff's office.
IV. World War II Ends; Paul Cantrell's Troubles Begin
At end-1945, some 3,000 battle-hardened veterans returned to McMinn County. Sheriff Mansfield's deputies had brutalized many in McMinn County; the GIs held Cantrell politically responsible for Mansfield's doings. Early in 1946, some newly-returned ex-GIs decided:
to challenge Cantrell politically;
to offer an all ex-GI, non-partisan ticket;
to promise a fraud-free election.
In ads and speeches the GI candidates promised:
an honest ballot count;
reform of county government.
At a rally, a GI speaker said, “’The principals that we fought for in this past war do not exist in McMinn County. We fought for democracy because we believe in democracy but not the form we live under in this county.’” (Daily Post-Athenian, 17 June 1946, p. 1).
At end-July 1946, 159 McMinn County GIs petitioned the FBI to send election monitors. There was no response. The Department of Justice had not responded to McMinn Countians’ complaints of election fraud in 1940, 1942, and 1944.
V. From Ballots to Bullets
The election was held on 1 August. To intimidate voters, Mansfield brought in some 200 armed “deputies”. GI poll-watchers were beaten almost at once. At about 3 p.m., Tom Gillespie, an African-American voter, was told by a Sheriff's deputy, “’Nigger, you can't vote here today!!’”. Despite being beaten, Gillespie persisted; the enraged deputy shot him. The gunshot drew a crowd. Rumors spread that Gillespie had been “shot in the back”; he later recovered. (C. Stephen Byrum, The Battle of Athens; Paidia Productions, Chattanooga TN, 1987; pp. 155-57).
Other deputies detained ex-GI poll-watchers in a polling place, as that made the ballot count “public”. A crowd gathered. Sheriff Mansfield told his deputies to disperse the crowd. When the two ex-GIs smashed a big window and escaped, the crowd surged forward. “The deputies, with guns drawn, formed a tight half-circle around the front of the polling place. One deputy, “his gun raised high ...shouted: ‘You sons-of-bitches cross this street and I'll kill you!’” (Byrum, p. 165).
Mansfield took the ballot boxes to the jail for counting. The deputies seemed to fear immediate attack, by the “people who had just liberated Europe and the South Pacific from two of the most powerful war machines in human history.” (Byrum, pp. 168-69).
Short of firearms and ammunition, the GIs scoured the county to find them. By borrowing keys to the National Guard and State Guard Armories, they got three M-1 rifles, five .45 semi-automatic pistols, and 24 British Enfield rifles. The armories were nearly empty after the war's end.
By eight p.m., a group of GIs and “local boys” headed for the jail to get the ballot boxes. They occupied high ground facing the jail but left the back door unguarded to give the jail's defenders an easy way out.
VI. The Battle of Athens
Three GIs - alerting passersby to danger - were fired on from the jail. Two GIs were wounded. Other GIs returned fire. Those inside the jail mainly used pistols; they also had a “tommy gun” (a .45 caliber Thompson sub-machine gun).
Firing subsided after 30 minutes: ammunition ran low and night had fallen. Thick brick walls shielded those inside the jail. Absent radios, the GIs’ rifle fire was un-coordinated. “From the hillside, fire rose and fell in disorganized cascades. More than anything else, people were simply ‘shooting at the jail’.” (Byrum, p. 189).
Several who ventured into “no man's land”, the street in front of the jail, were wounded. One man inside the jail was badly hurt; he recovered. Most sheriff's deputies wanted to hunker down and await rescue. Governor McCord mobilized the State Guard, perhaps to scare the GIs into withdrawing. The State Guard never went to Athens. McCord may have feared that Guard units filled with ex-GIs might not fire on other ex-GIs.
At about 2 a.m. on 2 August, the GIs forced the issue. Men from Meigs county threw dynamite sticks and damaged the jail's porch. The panicked deputies surrendered. GIs quickly secured the building. Paul Cantrell faded into the night, almost having been shot by a GI who knew him, but whose .45 pistol had jammed. Mansfield's deputies were kept overnight in jail for their own safety. Calm soon returned: the GIs posted guards. The rifles borrowed from the armory were cleaned and returned before sun-up.
VII. The Aftermath: Restoring Democracy in McMinn County
In five precincts free of vote fraud, the GI candidate for Sheriff, Knox Henry, won 1,168 votes to Cantrell's 789. Other GI candidates won by similar margins.
The GIs did not hate Cantrell. They only wanted honest government. On 2 August, a town meeting set up a three-man governing committee. The regular police having fled, six men were chosen to police Athens; a dozen GIs were sent to police Etowah. In addition, “Individual citizens were called upon to form patrols or guard groups, often led by a GI. ...To their credit, however, there is not a single mention of an abuse of power on their behalf.” (Byrum, p. 220).
Once the GI candidates’ victory had been certified, they cleaned-up county government:
the jail was fixed;
newly-elected officials accepted a $5,000 pay limit;
Mansfield supporters who resigned, were replaced.
The general election on 5 November passed quietly. McMinn Countians, having restored the Rule of Law, returned to their daily lives. Pat Mansfield moved back to Georgia. Paul Cantrell set up an auto dealership in Etowah. “Almost everyone who knew Cantrell in the years after the ‘Battle’ agree that he was not bitter about what had happened.” (Byrum, pp. 232-33; see also New York Times, 9 August 1946, p. 8).
VIII. The Outsiders’ Response
The Battle of Athens made national headlines. Most outsiders’ reports had the errors usual in coverage of large-scale, night-time events. A New York Times editorialist on 3 August savaged the GIs, who:
“...quite obviously - though we hope erroneously - felt that there was no city, county, or State agency to whom they could turn for justice.
... “There is a warning for all of us in the occurrence...and above all a warning for the veterans of McMinn County, who also violated a fundamental principle of democracy when they arrogated to themselves the right of law enforcement for which they had no election mandate. Corruption, when and where it exists, demands reform, and even in the most corrupt and boss-ridden communities there are peaceful means by which reform can be achieved. But there is no substitute, in a democracy, for orderly process.” (NYT, 3 Aug 1946, p. 14.)
The editorialist did not see:
McMinn Countians’ many appeals for outside help;
some ruthless people only respect force;
that it was wrong to equate use of force by evil-doers (Cantrell and Mansfield) with the righteous (the GIs).
The New York Times:
never saw that Cantrell and Mansfield's wholesale election fraud, enforced at gun-point, trampled the Rule of Law;
feared citizens’ restoring the Rule of Law by armed force.
Other outsiders, e.g., Time and Newsweek, agreed. (See Time, 12 August 1946, p. 20; Newsweek, 12 Aug 1946, p. 31 and 9 September 1946, p. 38).
The 79th Congress adjourned on 2 August 1946, when the Battle of Athens ended. However, Representative John Jennings, Jr., from Tennessee decried:
McMinn County's sorry situation under Cantrell and Mansfield;
the Justice Department's repeated failures to help the McMinn Countians.
Jennings was delighted that “...at long last decency and honesty, liberty and law have returned to the fine county of McMinn...”. (Congressional Record, House; U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1946; Appendix, Volume 92, Part 13, p. A4870.)
IX. The Lessons of Athens
Those who took up arms in Athens, Tennessee:
wanted honest elections, a cornerstone of our Constitutional order;
had repeatedly tried to get Federal or State election monitors;
used armed force so as to minimize harm to the law-breakers;
showed little malice to the defeated law-breakers;
restored lawful government.
The Battle of Athens clearly shows:
how Americans can and should lawfully use armed force;
why the Rule of Law requires unrestricted access to firearms;
how civilians with military-type firearms can beat the forces of “law and order”.
Dictators believe that public order is more important than the Rule of Law. However, Americans reject this idea. Criminals can exploit for selfish ends, the use armed force to restore the Rule of Law. But brutal political repression - as practiced by Cantrell and Mansfield - is lethal to many. An individual criminal can harm a handful of people. Governments alone can brutalize thousands, or millions.
Since 1915, officials of seven governments “gone bad” have committed genocide, murdering at least 56 million persons, including millions of children. “Gun control” clears the way for genocide by giving governments “gone bad” far greater freedom to commit mass murder.
Law-abiding McMinn Countians won the Battle of Athens because they were not hamstrung by “gun control”. McMinn Countians showed us when citizens can and should use armed force to support the Rule of Law. We are all in their debt.
This is a bare bones summary of a major report in JPFO’s Firearms Sentinel (January 1995). To learn how the gutsy people of Athens, Tennessee did the Framers of the Constitution proud, send $3 to JPFO, 2872 South Wentworth Avenue; Milwaukee, WI 53207; and request the January 1995 Firearms Sentinel. This document is from: chiliast@ideasign.com (A.K. Pritchard)
Nightsticks are now standard issue for precinct workers? Now that’s cool.
—[[All media should be showing this live time not doing a 2 min report and then talk about obama voting this morning
If this was two men dressed as KKK then all the media would be reporting this but because it is blacks cheating and doing this then the media ignore it
fox needs to get in there and see their cheating
this is B/S]]—
PRECISELY, and FNC is just as to blame as the mainstream media for ignoring this issue. They SHOULD be reporting on this all day long and pointing out that some on the left are tryign to suppress votes by intimidation. BUT because it is black people intimidating white voters, it gets barely a mention- a LOT of what Obama is connected with barely gets a metnion- but by golly, let’s spend millions of dollars investigating whether Sarah Palin had a trooper fired, or whther Scooter Libbey lied or not. Cripes- the MaINstream media is so stinking two faced it isn’t funny, and lately, FNC has been falling into that category as well- though not quite as bad as the MSM, they are beginning to really tuck their tails between their legs for fear of ‘upsetting’ the radical left
—[[All media should be showing this live time not doing a 2 min report and then talk about obama voting this morning
If this was two men dressed as KKK then all the media would be reporting this but because it is blacks cheating and doing this then the media ignore it
fox needs to get in there and see their cheating
this is B/S]]—
PRECISELY, and FNC is just as to blame as the mainstream media for ignoring this issue. They SHOULD be reporting on this all day long and pointing out that some on the left are tryign to suppress votes by intimidation. BUT because it is black people intimidating white voters, it gets barely a mention- a LOT of what Obama is connected with barely gets a metnion- but by golly, let’s spend millions of dollars investigating whether Sarah Palin had a trooper fired, or whther Scooter Libbey lied or not. Cripes- the MaINstream media is so stinking two faced it isn’t funny, and lately, FNC has been falling into that category as well- though not quite as bad as the MSM, they are beginning to really tuck their tails between their legs for fear of ‘upsetting’ the radical left- Pissed? You betcha I am- sorry fer the rant
Nightsticks are now standard issue for precinct workers? Now that’s cool.
No doubt they’re concealing too.
We are a civilized country. We do not need paramilitary people with no lawful authority of any race standing outside voting places. The City of Philadelphia must do something about this. If they don’t, than higher authorities should.
Ayers' wikipedia is quite revealing as are reviewer comments for his book with wifey Dorhn: The Fugitive Days at www.amazon.com.
Anyone googling, they are The New Black Panthers. (The communists have a website with Obama stuff for sale. I bet the New Black Panthers have a website too).
Violent revolutionary organization of the 1960s and 1970s
Its members engaged in drug dealing, pimping, rape, extortion, assault, and murder.
Aimed to harass the police, to protest against “police brutality” and America’s allegedly racist power structure, and ultimately to ignite a violent race war in the United States
In 1966 Huey Newton turned his Oakland, California street gang into the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, a group whose raison d’etre was to harass the police under mask of a “political” program. Because of its obsession with guns and “self defense,” the organization caught the political fancy of Sixties radicals who considered themselves to be at war with the United States. The Panthers were termed “America’s Vietcong” by Tom Hayden. As onetime Panther Eldridge Cleaver would acknowledge in a 1998 Sixty Minutes interview: “If people had listened to Huey Newton and me in the 1960s, there would have been a holocaust in this country.” In 1967 the group shortened its name to the Black Panther Party (BPP).
BPP leaders studied the works of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong for guidance on how to establish revolutionary socialism in the U.S. through mass organizing and community-based programs. But no tract influenced the Panthers more profoundly than did Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1965), which condemned colonialism’s legacy and advocated a peasant-led revolution of “absolute violence” as a means of liberating African people. Hailed by the New Left as “the vanguard of the revolution,” BPP’s six original members included Huey Newton (Defense Minister), Bobby Seale (Chairman), “Little Bobby” Hutton (Treasurer), Elbert “Big Man” Howard, Sherman Forte, and Reggie Forte.
To define his organization’s mission, Newton wrote a ten-point program which stated, among other things, that “the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income”; that “this racist government has robbed us [blacks], and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules”; that “if the White Landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people”; that education should “expos[e] the true nature of this decadent American society”; that “Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us”; that “all Black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial”; and that “all Black people should arm themselves for self-defense.”
The “self defense” part of the Program involved appearing in public places heavily armed. While the anti-police (“pig”) rhetoric captured the attention of radicals who were beginning to flirt with “revolutionary violence,” the reality was that BPP (which patrolled the streets in armed squads) was engaging in warfare against the police rather than “defending the people” against them. As Eldridge Cleaver told Reason magazine in 1986: “We [Panthers] would go out and ambush cops, but if we got caught we would blame it on them and claim innocence.”
Exemplifying the temper of the times, the Panthers became a national phenomenon by the late 1960s, displacing Martin Luther King (“Uncle Martin”) and other traditional civil rights leaders. But while they were radical icons by day, by night the Panthers grew into a criminal organization that engaged in drug dealing, pimping, extortion, assault, and murder. They committed more than 300 violent felonies in a single year (1969), as Edward J. Epstein has documented. During BPP’s years as an active entity, its members and former members would kill at least 15 law-enforcement officers and would injure dozens more.
Among his fellow Panthers, Newton enforced obedience to his will by means of beatings and torture. One of his many female lovers in the Party, Elaine Brown, would later reveal that one of Newton’s preferred methods of punishing errant members was stomping: “The floor was rumbling, as though a platoon of pneumatic drills were breaking through its foundation. Blood was everywhere. [The victim’s] face disappeared.”
On February 21, 1967, BPP provided an armed escort for Betty Shabazz, widow of Malcolm X, at a Bay Area speaking engagement. When newsmen tried to get closer to Shabazz than the Panthers wished to allow, police tried to enforce order with their nightsticks. In response, the Panthers loaded shells into their shotguns. After a tense standoff of several minutes, both sides backed off. Newton, however, gloated that the Panthers had “won” as a result of their “superior firepower.”
Adopting Mao’s phrase that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” some thirty Party members with rifles and shotguns marched into the California State Assembly at Sacramento to protest a proposed arms-control law on May 2, 1967. This incident propelled the organization to national prominence.
In August 1967, the Federal Bureau of Investigation instructed its counter-intelligence program, COINTELPRO, to “neutralize” such “Black Nationalist Hate Groups” as BPP. The FBI had only five agents available to monitor BPP activities in the entire Bay Area where the Panthers were based. In these circumstances, the Bureau accused some Panthers of being informers and planted letters containing insults purportedly written by one Panther leader to another. The purpose was to divide the group and decrease the level of violence its members could commit against others. But when one Panther’s life was threatened for being an informer, the FBI sent a memo instructing its agents to cease the practice.
In October 1967 Huey Newton shot and killed Oakland police officer John Frey. The facts of the case were beyond dispute. But Newton’s attorney, Charles Garry, alleged that because the American justice system, from the police through the courts, was thoroughly infested with racism, it would be impossible for a young black like Newton to get a fair trial anywhere in the country. “The system,” Garry claimed, was responsible for putting so many innocent black males in jeopardy.
During his trial for Frey’s killing, Newton became a national hero to New Leftists like Tom Hayden, who, as noted earlier, celebrated the Panthers as “America’s Vietcong,” proudly likening them to the Communist guerrillas who were killing U.S. forces in Southeast Asia. The Panthers’ contention that blacks constituted an “internal colony” in America and could only be liberated by armed revolution, became standard rhetoric for the Left.
In December 1967 BPP formed a coalition with the Peace and Freedom Party, which was composed mostly of young whites who opposed the Vietnam War. Out of this coalition, the “Free Huey” movement was created by leftists sympathetic to Newton’s effort to fight back against a satanic United States.
In late 1967 and early 1968, the Party sold Mao’s Red Book to university students in order to raise funds for the purchase of shotguns. By early 1968, BPP had made the book required reading for all its members.
Stokely Carmichael, the former Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a nationally known Black Power proponent, was recruited into BPP and became its Prime Minister in February 1968. Carmichael adamantly opposed permitting whites to join the “black liberation” movement, a position that ran counter to the Panther view.
In the aftermath of the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., BPP, which rejected King’s belief in nonviolent protest, began to provide its members with military training.
In September 1968 Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for the Frey killing and was sentenced to a prison term of fifteen years.
That same month, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described BPP as the single “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”
By the summer of 1969, the alliance between the Panthers and SNCC began to unravel, in large measure because of the dispute over the inclusion of whites in the movement.
In May 1970 the California Appellate Court reversed Newton’s conviction and ordered a new trial, on grounds that the judge had erred by not giving jurors the option of convicting Newton of involuntary manslaughter. After two more trials that ended with hung juries, the State of California dropped its case against Newton.
As of 1970, BPP consisted of approximately 2,000 members spread across the United States. The following year, Newton ordered all BPP chapters nationwide to close their offices and consolidate their efforts by relocating to Oakland. He revamped the organization, saying it was time to “put away the gun” and, quoting Mao, “serve the people.”
The Panthers thereafter initiated a “free breakfasts for children” program which they claimed was responsible for serving a thousand meals each day to students in San Francisco schools. When one journalist checked the veracity of this figure, however, he found that the actual number of meals served was no more than fifty. Moreover, the food was usually extorted from local businessmen. It should be noted further that the Panthers’ “free breakfasts” were political, not charitable, endeavors. The serving of meals was accompanied by question-and-answer recitation drills for the young recipients, drills that characterized the police as “pigs,” and described “the capitalists” as “the pigs who control the country” and “steal from the poor.”
During this period, a young Yale law student named Hillary Rodham (who would eventually become Hillary Clinton) was introduced by one of her professors, Thomas Emerson (known as “Tommy the Commie”) to Panther defense attorney Charles Garry. Garry helped Miss Rodham get personally involved in the legal defense of several Black Panthers, who were then being tried for the May 1969 torture, murder, and mutilation of one of their own members, Alex Rackley, who they had suspected of being a police informant.
In August 1974 Newton had a violent falling out with Bobby Seale. Newton expelled Seale from the Party in a most brutal manner, whipping him mercilessly and then sodomizing him with such force that Seale had to have his anus surgically repaired. As a Party member would later recall, “You have to understand, it had nothing to do with sex. It was about power.”
On August 6, 1974, Newton shot and killed a 17-year-old Bay Area prostitute named Kathleen Smith. Soon afterward, he pistol whipped his tailor, Preston Callins, during a dispute, inflicting four skull fractures on the victim.
Pimps throughout the Bay Area, angry at Newton for having killed one of their breadwinners, put a bounty on Newton’s head, prompting him to disappear from public sight. When Newton failed to show up for his arraignment for the Smith murder charges, he was placed on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list. It was later learned that Newton was in Cuba, where he would remain for approximately three years. During that period, young Elaine Brown, who Newton had groomed (by means of instruction and violent beatings) to be one of his closest lieutenants, assumed control of BPP’s day-to-day activities. It was Newton, however, who maintained ultimate authority from his base in Cuba, relaying his orders to Brown via daily telephone calls.
In 1974 a 42-year-old white woman named Betty Van Patter, who had recently been hired to keep the financial books of an Oakland-based Panther “Learning Center,” found something wrong with the Panthers’ record books and informed Brown. Van Patter was unaware that the Panthers were in fact using the Center as a vehicle by which to embezzle millions of dollars in California education funds. Nor did she know that the Center also served as the pretext for a Panther shakedown operation of “after hours” clubs whose owners were required to “donate” weekly sums, on pain of death if they refused. On Newton’s orders, Brown oversaw the Panthers’ kidnap (on December 13, 1974), rape, and murder of Mrs. Van Patter. On January 13, 1975, the victim’s corpse, with the head caved in, would be found floating in San Francisco Bay.
With Newton in exile, BPP’s social and political significance swiftly declined and ended.
"The result you can see -- most of the people who graduated in the 60's, dropouts or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, and educational systems. You are stuck with them. You can't get rid of to them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You can not change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information."--Yuri Bezmenov, KGB Defector
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