Word: epton
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...will not be fully free until we smash the state completely and totally," cried William Epton in a street-corner harangue on the first night of the 1964 Harlem riots. Later that evening he added: "In that process, we're going to have to kill a lot of these cops, a lot of these judges, and we'll have to go up against their army." A onetime Communist who thought that the Party was too restrained and resigned to help organize the Peking-oriented Progressive Labor Movement, Epton was arrested and eventually convicted in a New York court...
...case as a chance for the court to tell more about how far agitators can go in potential riot situations before the First Amendment free-speech guarantee fades into the shouting-fire-in-a-crowded-theater category. But the court ducked the chance, choosing instead to dismiss Epton's appeal in an unsigned order. The order might be interpreted as meaning that such haranguing can very easily become criminal and that the Rap Browns can be prosecuted without constitutional objection. But it might not. For in cases involving concurrent sentences, the court has traditionally allowed all the convictions...
...Epton order did not lend itself to sure interpretation, court watchers last week were as certain as they ever get that in another case the court had clearly tipped its hand on the issue of draft-card burning. David O'Brien burned his card on the steps of the South Boston courthouse in 1966. His subsequent card-burning conviction was overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit, which declared that the anti-card-burning law was an unconstitutional suppression of "symbolic speech." The Supreme Court agreed to take the case, and last week the justices heard oral...
...Epton was no ordinary agitator. He joined the Communist Party in 1958, dropped out four years later because, in his words, it was "no longer a revolutionary party." With other frustrated militants he organized the Peking-oriented Progressive Labor Movement, became its Harlem chairman and ran for the city council in 1963 and the state senate this year on the party's ticket...
Long before the riots, according to a Negro detective who infiltrated the group, Epton was concocting plans for a "bloody revolution." Though he had no hand in starting the violence, the state charged that Epton sought to keep the disorders "going and going." Police, who had made a tape recording of his July 18 speech, arrested him a week later for trying to organize a march in defiance of a city ban. His attorney argued that Epton was only trying to "do something both locally and nationally for the poor and oppressed." But the poor and oppressed of Harlem apparently...