Inequality of Justice Quotes
One problem the Attorney General and the President faced was with the FBI. Director J. Edgar Hoover. He was a racist himself and he detested Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights demonstrators. He didn’t want his agents protecting the demonstrators who he regarded as Communists and rabble rousers . Further, his agents in the South were in tight with the local law enforcement officers who were allowing the white crowds to beat the demonstrators, and they didn’t want to upset their “colleagues” by arresting people who the local authorities didn’t want arrested. Only when one of them attacked an FBI agent observing the demonstration did the FBI make an arrest. That produced the dilemma the Attorney General described.
There were a number of anarchist organizations across the country and in New York that advocated anarchism. As Moss testified, one of the reasons that the anarchists found sympathizers and followers was the incompetence, corruption, and injustice of the courts. After the Page Commission report New York Courts began a reform and triggered similar court reform efforts throughout the country. Even today we have problems with overzealous or corrupt police or prosecutors who falsify or hide evidence, but the frequency is very small compared with what it was in the early 1900s.
The dilemma at the time was that the death penalty had bee used far more frequently against the poor and against monorities than for the exact same crimes when committed by majority whites.
Althought most of Seale’s “solutions” were counterproductive and/or ineffectual, and the Black Panthers were regarded as public enemies, Seale was right about some of his complaints including this one. In most of the South the changes forced by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts where just beginning to have significant effect. So there were proportionately very few Blacks on Southern Juries. Even in the North, Blacks did not register to vote in proportion to their numbers so since jury pools were then usually drawn from voter registration lists, Blacks were statistically underrepresented. When a few Blacks were put on a jury panel, the prosecutor had the right of preemptory challenge as did the defense. But there were enough challenges so that the prosecutor could disqualify all the African Americans on the Jury. Even today, this is legal in many jurisdictions and although better than in 1970, then a Black defendant would rarely have African Americans on the jury of “his peers.”
