Word: panther
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BOBBY SEALE and Hucy Newton started the Black Panther Party on the streets of Oakland, following the cops around with M-Frifles and watching as they patrolled the black ghetto there. The Panther community patrol was an outstanding success: Oakland's police force, known as one of the worst in the West, was tamed temporarily by the sight of angry, armed blacks observing them with the expressed intention of preventing murder, beatings, and illegal harassment of black people...
...Panther defenders often excuse their rantings as merely militant rhetoric. Obviously it cannot be dismissed that way. The use of language carries responsibility, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed out in his famous remark about crying "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Rhetoric has a significance and catalytic effect of its own. In the tense U.S. of 1970, Hilliard's public cries of "Kill Nixon" could be a dangerous incitement to psychotic action on the part of others...
Admissible Tapes. Seale and his co-defendants reject the murder charge. Panthers claim that Rackley was a Panther in good standing, and say that his death was engineered by Sams, who they contend was working with the police. They also claim that Sams is mentally incompetent, and have succeeded in obtaining a court-ordered psychiatric examination...
...even if the court finds Sams to be mentally unstable, the police still believe they have a case against the New Haven Eight. The court has ruled that the tape describing Rackley's torture and trial is admissible as evidence. The police themselves have a pistol seized at Panther headquarters in New Haven. Ballistics experts assert that it was the same weapon that killed Rackley...
That the U.S. "end its systematic oppression of political dissidents, and release all political prisoners," including Bobby Seale and other members of the Black Panther party...