THE NEW BLACK PANTHER PARTY
THE GREATER NEW YORK-NEW JERSEY CHAPTERS
NEWARK, NEW JERSEY 07101
973-776-3901, EXT. 2966
January 15, 2002
STATEMENT CONDEMNING TROOPERS SLAP ON THE WRIST
The New Black Panther Party roundly condemns the pathetically lenient treatment just given to two violently dangerous and racist state troopers.
We find it obscenely offensive that Troopers James Kenna and John Hogan were not even given probation after nearly killing several young Black and Latino men on the NJ Turnpike who were armed with nothing but basketballs and bibles!
It is extremely instructive that this charade of justice is staged on the birth anniversary of the immortal Martin Luther King Jr. They timed this staged charade hoping they would affect sympathy in public opinion for these racist badge wearing thugs and for the State Police. They also did it a way that makes it plain to Black people. Martin Luther King and our Civil Rights legacy notwithstanding, the Black man still has no rights that the white man is bound to respect.
Also infuriating were the comments made by Judge Charles Delehey’s saying that “they (meaning these wilding police) are not only victims of their own conduct, but victims of the system that employed them.”
“They are the victims”!
Well if they are victims, then what the hell are Keyshawn Moore, Danny Reyes, LeRoy Grant and Rayshawn Brown, who are lucky to be alive after that madness?!
In our eyes, for a Judge who has the power to actually do something about that “system” when he had two lying, racist, violent perpetrators right in front of him, but who then does nothing but condemn them to fines of less than $300 each, he is not only giving us a clear example of New World Order doublespeak, he is victimizing the real victims of this shooting again all over again!
Martin Luther King taught all lovers of justice that racism is “a contempt for life.” This charade is in fact a bold, callous expression of “contempt for Black life” clearly rooted in the most obscene butchering of our ancestors’ families on the auction block in slavery! This judge let these two lying racist and dangerously wolfen men to walk for what it could have cost their ancestors to buy and sell our ancestors not too many decades ago!
This is why the New Black Panther Party called for the Malcolm X International Human Rights Strategy, a united front against racial profiling and police brutality in May, and for that united front to participate in the recent United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, raising their united voice against the vicious scourge of this homegrown upsouth racism, and uniting with the rest of the black nation in an uncompromising call for reparations.
By the way, the international community spoke out loud in a united voice at the World Conference and declared that the Transatlantic Slave Trade was indeed a “crime against humanity” and that the survivors of its victims are entitled to reparations on account of that mammoth inhumanity and all their residual encounters with the virulent persistence of racism.
Nearly as pathetic as this cynical, phony plea and court decision was the response of two leading New Jersey civil rights organizations at the May Statewide march against profiling. Instead of at least entertaining a discussion on the Malcolm X strategy and doing as Martin Luther King did, that is, taking nonviolent direct action to bum rush and shutdown the institutional perpetrators of injustice, which in this case would have been the Statehouse; They lobbied to keep us from participating in the statewide march on the bogus premise that we are violent!
We have never been involved in any violence. We have not shot anybody! We have not killed anybody! We have not wounded anybody! We have not strip searched anybody! We have not beaten or maimed anybody! We have not planted false evidence on anybody or framed anybody! The police has and still nobody is paying the price for that!
The fact that our people face so much and that our lives are taken so cheaply, it is a miracle that their hasn’t been more responses of a self-defense kind! The profilers, their judicial and legislative protectors and the compromisers who use nonviolence to hide their own cowardice and who won’t use nonviolent direct action to raise hell, they all ought to be grateful for that.
We will continue to expose our real enemies on behalf of their real victims, our people, and we will continue to raise hell onto the National March On Washington for Reparations on August 17th.
Finally, if the State of New Jersey wants to address the system that produced this ordeal for these brothers, then it should make the practice of racial profiling a crime that includes mandatory jail time for anyone who practices it and anyone who covers it up! It should make an example of two sitting judges Peter Verniero and Deborah Poritz by kicking both of their racist behinds the hell off the bench! It should purge their ranks of anyone associated with white supremacist gangs or organizations as many are. It should call for the reopening of the case of Assata Shakur and Sundiata Acoli!
Only the people can police the police!
Power to the people!
In whose streets?
Our streets!
Hands off Assata!
Free Sundiata!
Arm Yourself!
Or Harm Yourself!
Black Power!
Zayid Muhammad,
Eastern Regional Chief of Staff
-30-
’Bro. Zayid’ Kazi Angaza Kikongo Muhammad
01.31.2004