Jeffrey Blankfort was one of the propagandists for the Panther gang. As a
photographer he took many of the pictures that created the heroic images of a bunch
of street thugs. Apparently he has no regrets for the damage he did. His comments
here are typical fantasies. The Panthers never had support in the black community,
which was well aware of the Panthers' criminal activities. The Panthers were
strictly the heroes of the white readers of magazines like Ramparts which ran
Blankfort's heroic images. The Panthers' criminality, as Newton and Bobby Seale
write in their autobiographies, was there from the outset. They recruited gangsters
quite consciously. The Party was launched nationally when Newton murdered a 26
policeman. As I pointed out in a previous post, 348 Panthers were arrested in 1969
for strictly criminal activities, while Newton was in jail (and the Party according
to Blankfort was free of his bad influence). The charges against them ranged from
wife-beating to armed robbery and murder. The personal smears directed at Hugh
Pearson and myself (Rockefeller life style -- yeah -- and "government-serving
propaganda pieces") are typical and traditional Stalinist tactics: everybody who
disagrees with the party line is a sell-out or a government agent. Discrediting
witnesses is how leftists were able to kill so many people in the 20th Century and
keep the support of "progressives" like Blankfort.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jun 14 2000 - 17:28:23 CUT