Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a noted author of nine books about the African American experience in America. His numerous published articles appear in newspapers and magazines across the country as well as some of the most popular web sites on the Internet. He is a radio host and TV commentator. He  has received several awards for his writings.

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Snatching at King's Legacy
January 9, 2006

The scramble to snatch and grab a piece of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy has not diminished one bit in the twenty years since the first King national holiday was celebrated. Ironically, Ronald Reagan was the first to grab at it. Reagan fought tooth and nail against passage of the King holiday bill. After insinuating that King was a Communist, Reagan signed it only after Congress passed it overwhelmingly, and virtually insured that the bill was veto proof. But then Reagan reversed gears and apologized to a deeply hurt Coretta Scott King, King’s widow, and effusively praised King as a champion of freedom and democracy. Reagan said that King’s struggle for equality was his struggle too.

During the furious battles that raged over affirmative action in the 1990s, conservatives snatched a flowery line from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and boasted that he would have opposed racial quotas, preferences, and by extension affirmative action if he had lived. It was a wild stretch. King almost certainly would have been a vigorous supporter of affirmative action if he had lived. But in his speeches and writings, he also stressed personal responsibility, self- help, strong families, and religious values as goals that blacks should strive to attain.

In the late 1960s when King denounced the Vietnam war, embraced militant union struggles, and barnstormed around the country blasting wealth and class privilege, the red-baiters and professional King haters branded him a Communist. The Lyndon Johnson White House turned hostile. Corporate and foundation supporters slowly turned off the money spigot. The NAACP, Urban League, black Democrats, and some in King’s own organization turned their backs on him. During his last days, King spent much of his time fund raising and defending his policies against the critics within and without his organization. The back biting, carping of and backpedaling from King not by his enemies, but by some of his one-time friends and supporters got worse when he railed against the penchant for lavish personal spending, luxury apartments and fancy homes by some of his group’s staffers.

In his last installment on King, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68, Taylor Branch tells how King stormed out of a planning meeting on his Poor Peoples March in fury at the attacks at him by some of his top aides who wanted to scrap the March. The issue of uniting masses of poor people for economic uplift, smacked of class war, and was just too risky and dangerous. The fear was that it would hopelessly alienate their Democratic Party boosters. King was unfazed by their criticism and hurled another broadside at them for their personal egoism, selfishness, and opportunism. King’s civil rights friends weren’t the only ones that took shots at him.

Many black ministers joined in the King bash. At the National Baptist Convention in 1961, then and now the largest black religious group in America, King and a band of dissidents challenged the Convention’s leaders to give more active support to the civil rights battles. They wanted none of that. They flung un-Christian like threats and insults at King and the civil rights advocate-ministers, engaged in fisticuffs with them, and slandered King as a “hoodlum and crook.”

When the dust settled, King was summarily booted out of the organization, and set up a rival ministers group. Even after King’s death, and he took his place among America’s heroes, many black ministers still remained stone silent on the assault on civil liberties protections, the gutting of job and social programs, and U.S. militarism. These were all issues that King relentlessly and loudly spoke out against when he was alive. In an even more insulting twist, many black ministers, and that included one of King’s daughters, shamelessly and unapologetically evoked King’s name to pound gay rights and same sex marriage. There’s not a shred of evidence that King would have been a gay rights opponent. Coretta even demanded that one group of ministers cease using his name to back an anti-gay referendum in Miami a few years ago. Yet they still snatch at his legacy and hail King as one of their own on the King holiday.

Then there’s the King holiday. Though many corporations and government agencies plaster full- page ads in black newspapers that extol King on his holiday, and tout how much he’s done for them, the King holiday is still rock bottom among the national holidays that business and government agencies observe. An annual survey by BNA Inc., a Washington based business news publisher, revealed that about one-quarter of businesses give their workers a day off with pay. That number pales even in comparison to the next least celebrated holiday, Presidents Day.

King is no different than other towering historical figures, especially those that had the bad fortune to fall to an assassin’s bullet. The hypocrisy, mythmaking, embellishments, and outright distortions, quickly kicks in about them. Everyone wants a piece of the fallen legend to puff up their importance and whatever social and political ax they seek to grind. Fortunately, King’s legacy is still big and wide enough to snatch chunks of.

Remember Cochran For More Than O.J. Simpson
March 30, 2005

The defining moment for me in the O.J. Simpson trial was not Simpson’s acquittal and the firestorm that it ignited nationally. It was a note I got from an associate in Johnnie Cochran’s law firm. He said that Johnnie wanted me to know that he admired my comments in the case. I was one of the legion of talking head analysts during the trial, and like many of the other analysts, I was skeptical, even critical, of some of Cochran’s legal maneuvers.
 
I thought he badly overplayed the race card in the case, and deliberately played to the anti-police sentiments of some of the black jurors. But Cochran still went out of his way to pay me the compliment. I then paid even closer attention to Cochran’s arguments and presentation in the trial. By the end of the trial Cochran convinced me that there was more than enough reasonable doubt to acquit Simpson. Most legal experts that worked with him and battled against him in major criminal and civil cases in the more than four decades of his legal career, agreed that Cochran was more than a flamboyant, race conscious, courtroom showman. He was a consummate legal professional that sought to use his prodigious legal talent to defend the rights of the poor and the dispossessed.
Cochran set a lofty standard for advocacy law that influenced a generation of criminal and public advocacy attorneys.

He was deeply influenced by the monumental legal battles that civil rights legend Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall fought against segregation and police violence. Cochran publicly credited them for inspiring him to champion civil rights causes in the courtroom Cochran stamped his biggest imprint on the volatile issue of police abuse. In 1965, Cochran defended Leonard Deadwyler, an unarmed black motorist shot by an LAPD officer while he was taking his pregnant wife to the hospital. The LAPD had long been recognized by many as America’s poster police department for brutal treatment of blacks. Deadwyler was the latest in the legion of blacks that had been shot by the police under dubious circumstances. During the coroner’s inquest into the Deadwyler killing that was televised, Cochran riveted public attention on the LAPD’s policies and practices. The officer was exonerated, but Cochran’s skill at fingering police abuse heightened public awareness of racism, police violence, and the need for major reforms in police practices.
Over the years, Cochran’s fame and reputation grew, and he got richer in the process. Yet, he still continued to battle police abuse. He waged a quarter century fight to free Black Panther Elmer Geronimo Pratt who was falsely convicted of the murder of a white woman in 1972. Cochran exposed how the government used paid agents to frame black militants and disrupt black organizations.

Pratt was released in 1997. Cochran repeatedly said the Pratt case and victory was the defining moment of his career. But the case was an extension of his relentless fight for justice in the courts.

The Simpson case was yet another example to Cochran of how a black defendant, even a rich black celebrity defendant such as Simpson, could be victimized by the criminal justice. The issues again were racism, and police misconduct.

Cochran did not, as I mistakenly believed, play on race to manipulate the jurors and get Simpson off. He meticulously picked apart the flaws, contradictions and inconsistencies in the prosecutions case. The case was won on the evidence or lack thereof, and not race, and Cochran paid a steep price for his skill.

Much of the public enraged at the verdict, blamed him for letting a murder skip away free. Cochran would spend the next decade in the case, in speeches, two autobiographies, and several articles explaining his action in the case.

In those years I would occasionally see Cochran at different functions, and each time he did not duck the thorny issues in the Pratt, Simpson and the other police abuse cases that he was involved in during his career. The audiences always sat in rapt attention, and when he finished they would leap to their feet in sustained applause to show their deep appreciation and admiration for his work.

In his final years, Cochran railed at the Bush administration for trampling on civil rights in the war on terrorism. In one of his last major speeches at the mostly white, upper crust Commonwealth Club in Los Angeles in 2002, Cochran blasted then Attorney general John Ashcroft for eroding civil rights and warned, “They’re not going to say later, hey, you know, we’re just taking those for a little while until we work this little problem out.” Cochran understood that civil rights were not a “little problem” but were precious commodities that had to be safeguarded at all costs, and that the Bush administration imperiled those rights. That’s why Johnnie Cochran should be remembered for much more than O.J.
 

Revisiting The Malcolm X Assassination
February 23, 2005

Forty years after the assassination of Black Nationalist leader Malcolm X the question still dangles: Why was Malcolm X murdered? The easy answer is that his murder was a revenge killing for the bitter and contentious attacks he made on his former mentor and father figure, Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. Louis Farrakhan, then known as Louis X, candidly admitted years later, “There was not a Muslim who loved the Honorable Elijah Muhammad that did not want to kill Malcolm.” Farrakhan at the time repeatedly lambasted Malcolm as a betrayer of the faith. Years later, though, Farrakhan attempted a public reconciliation with Betty Shabazz, Malcolm’s widow and other family members.

The three men convicted of the killing were all fanatic followers of Muhammad. But did they kill Malcolm out of robotic blind hatred? Were there others involved? And who stood to benefit the most from Malcolm’s death? Those are the tougher questions that beg answers, but remain shrouded in mystery.

The men almost certainly hated Malcolm and believed they were being good Muslims by killing him. However, the FBI and the New York police department’s super secret elite undercover unit, the Bureau of Special Services (BOSS) also hated Malcolm. They waged a fierce illegal, shadowy campaign to undermine Malcolm and the Muslims. They riddled the Nation of Islam and Malcolm’s group, the OAAU, with informants, and police agents. They dogged his tail on his travels in Africa, and the Middle East. FBI and BOSS agents reported on every word of his speeches and press conferences.

FBI officials were well aware of the threats made on Malcolm’s life by Muslims, and they knew that some in the organization were more than willing to carry out his murder. Months before the killing, FBI informants supplied verbatim accounts to FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover of death threats made against Malcolm at Black Muslim meetings. During a European jaunt, Malcolm was not allowed to leave the airport in London and Paris. Reportedly, British and French intelligence agencies feared there would be an assassination attempt against him in their countries.

Malcolm knew that he was a marked man, and that the FBI and local police had taken a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil attitude toward the threats against him. He fired off an angry letter to then secretary of State Dean Rusk charging that, “the government had no intention to help or protect my life.” He often told friends and reporters that there were forces bigger then the Muslims who wanted to kill him.
 
The FBI’s interest in Malcolm’s murder didn’t stop with the conviction of his killers. FBI agents closely monitored the trial proceedings. In memos to top FBI officials, their prime concern was to protect their informants and undercover agents planted in Malcolm’s organization from public exposure. At one point during the trial, one of the hit men, Talmadge Hayer, claimed that he was promised several thousand dollars for the murder by a non-Muslim. The prosecutor and defense attorneys did not press him to name names. The judge sternly warned the jury to consider only that part of Hayer’s testimony that was directly pertinent to the case and disregard the rest of his statements. Hayer’s statement may have simply been hyperbole to get press attention, or inflate his importance, but it was another loose end that deliberately was not tied up.

Those loose ends still tantalize and intrigue four decades later. Malcolm had become a major national and international figure who shortly before his death had worked out a constructive program for domestic social and economic change. Asian and African leaders increasingly viewed him as an able, respected, and visionary spokesman against apartheid, colonialism, the Vietnam War, and for world peace. Malcolm had evolved from the race-baiting, demagogue of his early Nation of Islam days to become one of America’s leading social critics.

There is no evidence that the FBI, intelligence agencies, or the New York police had a direct hand in Malcolm’s murder, and the contour of any conspiracy by anyone other than the Black Muslims to get Malcolm remains hazy, problematic, or non-existent. But Malcolm’s murder can’t be totally separated from the well-documented savage war that the FBI waged against Martin Luther King, Jr., black organizations, and black leaders during the 1960s. In an infamous memo from those years, FBI officials flatly warned of the necessity to prevent “the rise of a “black messiah” among blacks. The FBI was more than willing and able to do whatever it could to make sure that that didn’t happen. Malcolm undoubtedly was an unwitting casualty of Hoover and the FBI’s obsession to decapitate black leadership. FBI officials undoubtedly shed few tears over his murder.

The whitewash of the issues and even mystery that often surround the murder of a popular, but controversial leader always raises questions and doubts, no matter how many years pass. Forty years later, those questions and doubts are still there in Malcolm X’s murder.
 

Earl Ofari Hutchinson has a weekly on-line news and information service,
The Hutchinson Report