A HOPEFULLY HISTORICALLY AND EDUCATIONAL INSIGHT INTO FASCISM HERE IN THE UK, ON DISPLAY HERE AT THE JAIL .
British Fascist and Leader of the BUF Movement ( British Union of Fascist Movement ) , Oswald Mosley in his prime during the 1930’s
Above & Below: Original oil paintings of British Union of Fascists founder & leader Oswald Mosley, by Gloucestershire artist Paul Bridgman on display at The Crime Through Time Collection, Littledean jail , UK .
PLEASE DO BE AWARE THAT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL HAS NO AFFILIATION , CONNECTION OR INVOLVEMENT WITH ANY EXTREMIST , POLITICALLY MOTIVATED OR OTHERWISE MOVEMENTS WHATSOEVER …… WE SIMPLY EXHIBIT AND TOUCH UPON A GREAT MANY POLITICALLY INCORRECT AND TABOO SUBJECT MATTERS THAT NO OTHER VISITOR ATTRACTIONS DARE COVER IN THE WAY WE CHOOSE TO DO HERE. …. “IT’S ALL HISTORY FOR GOODNESS SAKE”
POLITICALLY INCORRECT IT MAY BE… SO WHAT…… IT HAPPENED HERE IN BRITAIN
BELOW: A BRIEF INSIGHT INTO A FEW OF OUR RARE PRIVATE COLLECTION OF BRITISH FASCIST MOVEMENT MEMORABILIA, HERE ON DISPLAY AT THE JAIL
BELOW IS A VERY BRIEF PICTORIAL SLIDESHOW INSIGHT INTO JUST A FEW OF THE EXHIBIT ITEMS HERE ON DISPLAY IN OUR FASCISM IN BRITAIN EXHIBITION.TOUCHING UPON A TABOO SUBJECT MATTER THAT OUR UK GOVERNMENTS HAVE LONG SINCE WISHED TO BRUSH UNDER THE CARPETS AS NOT BEING WORTH REFLECTING UPON IN OUR BRITISH HISTORY SCHOOL AND COLLEGE CURRICULUM’S
Above and below: Rare images of Oswald Mosley’s BUF Movement parading with the original BUF Standards/Banners…. one of which is here on display at Littledean Jail in and amongst the Fascism in Britain Exhibition .
Below: A rare original Oswald Mosley British Union Standard/Rally Banner being one of the so say 60 number of them that were carried and used by the movement during the 1930’s, along with other BUF related memorabilia
ASIN: B07L467C1X
Above and below: Oswald Mosley seen at various British Union rallies during the 1930’s …
SURELY IT IS A PART OF HISTORY THAT WE SHOULD ALL REFLECT UPON IN EDUCATIONAL TERMS AS TO OUR PAST CONFLICTS ?
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PLEASE DO TAKE THE TIME IF INTERESTED IN OUR FASCISM IN BRITAIN HISTORY DURING THE 1930’S-1940’S TO LOOK AT THE INTERACTIVE DOCUMENTARY FOOTAGE BELOW
Above : An exceptionally rare Arnold Leese (1878-1956) “Imperial Fascist League” banner which controversially depicted the Nazi Swastika emblem within the centre of the Untider Kingdom’s Union Jack Flag.
Mosley was the eldest of three sons of Sir Oswald Mosley, 5th Baronet, of Ancoats (29 December 1873 – 21 September 1928), and wife Katharine Maud Edwards-Heathcote (1874–1950), the second child of Captain Justinian Edwards-Heathcote of Market Drayton, Shropshire. Mosley’s family were Anglo-Irish. His branch were prosperous landowners in Staffordshire. Through the intermarriage common among the British upper classes, the 5th Baronet was the third cousin of the Earl of Strathmore, which would eventually make Oswald Mosley, the 6th baronet, fourth cousin to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, who was the Earl of Strathmore’s daughter, and fourth cousin once removed to Queen Elizabeth II.
Mosley was born at Rolleston Hall, near Burton-on-Trent on November 16, 1896. When his parents separated he was brought up by his mother, who initially went to live at Betton Hall near Market Drayton, and his paternal grandfather, Sir Oswald Mosley, 4th Baronet. Within the family and among intimate friends, he was always called “Tom”. He lived for many years at Apedale Hall near Newcastle-under-Lyme.
Lord Curzon had to be persuaded that Mosley was a suitable husband, as he suspected Mosley was largely motivated by social advancement in Conservative Party politics and her inheritance. The 1920 wedding took place in the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace in London. It was the social event of the year. The hundreds of guests included European royalty, including King George V and Queen Mary; and Leopold III and Astrid of Sweden, King and Queen of Belgium.[2]
He had three children by Cynthia: Vivien Elizabeth Mosley (25 February 1921 – 26 August 2002), who married on 15 January 1949 Desmond Francis Forbes Adam (27 January 1926 – 3 January 1958), educated at Eton College,Eton, Berkshire, and at King’s College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, by whom she had two daughters and one son; Nicholas Mosley, 3rd Baron Ravensdale (born 25 June 1923), a successful novelist who wrote a biography of his father and edited his memoirs for publication; and Michael Mosley (born 25 April 1932), unmarried and without issue.
By Diana Mitford, he had two sons: Oswald Alexander Mosley (born 26 November 1938), married on 10 May 1975 to Charlotte Diana Marten (born 1952) and father of Louis Mosley (born 1983); and Max Rufus Mosley (born 13 April 1940), who was president of theFédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) for 16 years.
Mosley spent large amounts of his private fortune on the British Union of Fascists (BUF) and tried to establish it on a firm financial footing by negotiating, through Diana, with Adolf Hitler for permission to broadcast commercial radio to Britain from Germany.
By the end of World War I Mosley decided to go into politics as a ConservativeMember of Parliament (MP), although he was only 21 years old and had not fully developed his politics. He was driven by a passionate conviction to avoid any future war and this motivated his career. Largely because of his family background, he was considered by several constituencies; a vacancy near the family estates seemed to be the best prospect.
Unexpectedly, he was selected for Harrow first. In the general election of 1918 he faced no serious opposition and was elected easily. He was the youngest member of the House of Commons to take his seat (Joseph Sweeney, an abstentionistSinn Féin MP was younger). He soon distinguished himself as an orator and political player, one marked by extreme self-confidence. He made a point of speaking in the House of Commons without notes.[citation needed]
Mosley was at this time falling out with the Conservatives over Irish policy, objecting to the use of the Black and Tans to suppress the Irish population. Eventually he ‘crossed the floor‘ and sat as an Independent MP on the opposition side of the House of Commons. Having built up a following in his constituency, he retained it against a Conservative challenge in the 1922 and 1923 general elections.
The liberal Westminster Gazette wrote that he was “the most polished literary speaker in the Commons, words flow from him in graceful epigrammatic phrases that have a sting in them for the government and the conservatives. To listen to him is an education in the English language, also in the art of delicate but deadly repartee. He has human sympathies, courage and brains.”[5] By 1924 he was growing increasingly attracted to the Labour Party, which had just formed a government, and in March he joined. He immediately joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) as well and allied himself with the left.
When the government fell in October, Mosley had to choose a new seat as he believed that Harrow would not re-elect him as a Labour candidate. He therefore decided to oppose Neville Chamberlain in Birmingham Ladywood. An energetic campaign led to a knife-edge result but Mosley was defeated by 77 votes. His period outside Parliament was used to develop a new economic policy for the ILP, which eventually became known as the Birmingham Proposals; they continued to form the basis of Mosley’s economics until the end of his political career.
In 1926, the Labour-held seat of Smethwick fell vacant and Mosley returned to Parliament after winning the resulting by-election on 21 December. Mosley felt the campaign was dominated by Conservative attacks on him for being too rich and claims he was covering up his wealth.[6]
Mosley and his wife Cynthia were ardent Fabians in the 1920s and 1930s. Mosley appears in a list of names of Fabians from Fabian News and Fabian Society Annual Report 1929–31. He wasKingsway Hall lecturer in 1924 and Livingstone Hall lecturer in 1931.
Mosley was always impatient and eventually put forward a whole scheme in the ‘Mosley Memorandum’ to find it rejected by the Cabinet; he then resigned in May 1930. At the time, the weekly liberal paper The Nation described his move: “The resignation of Sir Oswald Mosley is an event of capital importance in domestic politics… We feel that Sir Oswald has acted rightly—as he has certainly acted courageously—in declining to share any longer in the responsibility for inertia.”[5] He attempted to persuade the Labour Party Conference in October, but was defeated again.
The memorandum called for high tariffs to protect British industries from international finance, for state nationalisation of industry and a programme of public works to solve unemployment. Thirty years later, in 1961, R. H. S. Crossman described the memorandum: “… this brilliant memorandum was a whole generation ahead of Labour thinking.”[5]
Determined that the Labour Party was no longer suitable, Mosley quickly founded the New Party. Its early parliamentary contests, in the 1931 Ashton-under-Lyne by-election and subsequent by-elections, were successful only in splitting the vote and allowing the Conservative candidate to win. Despite this, the organisation gained support among many Labour and Conservative MPs, who agreed with his corporatist economic policy—among those who agreed were Aneurin Bevan and Harold Macmillan. It also gained the endorsement of the Daily Mail newspaper, headed at the time byAlfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe.[citation needed]
The New Party increasingly inclined to fascist policies, but Mosley was denied the opportunity to get his party established when the 1931 election was suddenly called. All its candidates, including Mosley, lost their seats. As the New Party gradually became more radical and authoritarian, many previous supporters defected from it. Shortly after the election, he was described by the Manchester Guardian:
When Sir Oswald Mosley sat down after his Free Trade Hall speech in Manchester and the audience, stirred as an audience rarely is, rose and swept a storm of applause towards the platform—who could doubt that here was one of those root-and-branch men who have been thrown up from time to time in the religious, political and business story of England. First that gripping audience is arrested, then stirred and finally, as we have said, swept off its feet by a tornado of peroration yelled at the defiant high pitch of a tremendous voice.[5]
After his failure in 1931 Mosley went on a study tour of the ‘new movements’ of Italy’s Benito Mussolini and other fascists, and returned convinced that it was the way forward for him and for Britain. He determined to unite the existing fascist movements and created the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932. The BUF was anti-communist and protectionist. It claimed membership as high as 50,000, and had the Daily Mail[7] and Daily Mirror[8] among its earliest (if, in the case of theMail, short-lived) supporters.[9]
Mosley had found problems with disruption of New Party meetings, and instituted a corps of black-uniformed paramilitary stewards, nicknamed blackshirts. The party was frequently involved in violent confrontations, particularly with Communist and Jewish groups and especially in London.[10] At a large Mosley rally at Olympia on 7 June 1934 mass brawling broke out when hecklers were removed by blackshirts, resulting in bad publicity. This and the Night of the Long Knives in Germany led to the loss of most of the BUF’s mass support. The party was unable to fight the 1935 general election.
In October 1936 Mosley and the BUF attempted to march through an area with a high proportion of Jewish residents, and violence resulted between local and nationally organised protesters trying to block the march and police trying to force it through, since called the Battle of Cable Street. At length Sir Philip Gamethe Police Commissioner disallowed the march from going ahead and the BUF abandoned it.
Mosley continued to organise marches policed by the blackshirts, and the government was sufficiently concerned to pass the Public Order Act 1936, which, amongst other things, banned political uniforms and quasi-military style organisations and came into effect on 1 January 1937.
In the London County Council elections in 1937 the BUF stood in three of its East London strongholds, polling up to a quarter of the vote. Mosley then made most of the employees redundant, some of whom then defected from the party with William Joyce. As the European situation moved towards war, the BUF began nominating Parliamentary candidates and launched campaigns on the theme of Mind Britain’s Business. After the outbreak of war he led the campaign for a negotiated peace. He was at first received well but, after the invasion of Norway, public opinion of him gave way to hostility and Mosley was nearly assaulted. [11]
On 23 May 1940 Mosley, who had continued his peace campaign, was interned under Defence Regulation 18B, along with most active fascists in Britain, and the BUF was later proscribed. His wife Diana Mitford was also interned,[12] shortly after the birth of their son Max; they lived together for most of the war in a house in the grounds of Holloway prison.
Mosley used the time to read extensively on classical civilisations. Mosley refused visits from most BUF members, but on 18 March 1943 Dudley and Norah Elam (who had been released by then) accompanied Unity Mitford to see her sister Diana. Mosley agreed to be present because he mistakenly believed Diana and Unity’s mother Lady Redesdale was accompanying Unity.[13]
The Mosleys were released in November 1943, when Mosley was suffering with phlebitis, and spent the rest of the war under house arrest. On his release from prison he stayed with his sister-in-lawPamela Mitford, followed shortly by a stay at the Shaven Crown Hotel in Shipton-under-Wychwood. He then purchased Crux Easton, near Newbury, with Diana. He and his wife were the subject of much media attention.[14] The war ended what remained of his political reputation.
After the war Mosley was contacted by his former supporters and persuaded to rejoin active politics. He formed the Union Movement, calling for a single nation-state covering the continent of Europe (known as Europe a Nation), and later attempted to launch a National Party of Europe to this end. The Union Movement’s meetings were often physically disrupted, as Mosley’s meetings had been before the war, and largely by the same opponents.
This led to Mosley’s decision, in 1951, to leave Britain and live in Ireland. He later moved to Paris. Of his decision to leave, he said, “You don’t clear up a dungheap from underneath it.”[citation needed]
Mosley briefly returned to Britain in order to fight the 1959 general election at Kensington North, shortly after the 1958 Notting Hill race riots. Concerns over immigration were beginning to come into the spotlight for the first time and Mosley led his campaign on this issue. When Mosley’s final share of the vote was less than he expected, he launched a legal challenge to the election on the basis that the result had been rigged. The result was upheld.
Mosley died of natural causes on 3 December 1980 in his Orsay home, aged 84. He was cremated in Paris and his ashes were scattered on the pond at Orsay. His papers are housed at the University of Birmingham Special Collections.
This “In popular culture” section may contain minor or trivial references. Please reorganize this content to explain the subject’s impact on popular culture rather than simply listing appearances, and remove trivial references. (October 2011)
Mosley’s rising influence before the Second World War provoked alarm and reaction against would-be populist dictators by major cultural figures of the time:
A character in the novel The Holy Terror (1939) by H. G. Wells is a bombastic British fascist with an aristocratic background, strikingly similar to Mosley.
“Sir Roderick Spode” in P.G. Wodehouse‘s novels parodies Mosley. Spode, a blustering bully who is described as an “amateur dictator”, heads a British fascist “Black Shorts” organization.
Mosley’s attempts to promote his views after the war resulted in continued critical reaction:
In the 1986 film version of Colin MacInnes‘s book Absolute Beginners, Steven Berkoff appears as a Mosley-esque character billed as “The Fanatic”, who delivers a (rhyming) hate speech at a fascist election rally; it is generally assumed this is meant to be Mosley during his brief resurgence in 1958.
A semi-fictionalized depiction of Mosley, the BUF, and Battle of Cable Street appears in the 2010 BBC Wales revival of Upstairs, Downstairs, which is set in 1936.
The original version of the Elvis Costello song “Less Than Zero” is an attack on Mosley and his politics, but US listeners assumed that the “Mr Oswald” referred to was Lee Harvey Oswald and Costello obligingly wrote an alternative lyric in which it was.[18]:74,84
In the popular BBC science fiction sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart, 1990s time travellerGary Sparrow attempts to educate 1940s East EndbarmaidPhoebe Bamford on the subject of racism, only to have Phoebe rebut him by saying: “You can be a right twit sometimes Gary. Me and dad were down Cable Street in ’36 standing up to Mosley and his Blackshirts. I know all about Fascists, thank you very much!” (Series 3, Episode 25, “The Yanks are Coming“).
In the film It Happened Here, Mosley is implied to be the puppet leader of German-occupied Britain.
In Guy Walters‘s alternative history novel The Leader, Mosley has taken power as “The Leader” of Great Britain in 1937. King Edward VIII is still on the throne, Winston Churchill is a prisoner on theIsle of Man, and Prime Minister Mosley is conspiring with Adolf Hitler about the fate of Britain’s Jewish population.
In Philip Roth‘s alternative history novel The Plot Against America, a secret pact between President Charles Lindbergh and Hitler is said to include an agreement to impose Mosley as the ruler of a German-occupied Britain with America’s blessing after a sham attempt by Lindbergh to convince Churchill to negotiate peace with Hitler would fail.
In Kim Newman‘s alternative history novel The Bloody Red Baron, Mosley is shot down and killed in 1918 by Erich von Stalhein (from the Biggles series by W. E. Johns), with a character later commenting that “a career has been ended before it was begun.”
WHAT GOES ON BEHIND THESE WALLS …. STAYS BEHIND THESE WALLS .!!!!!!!!!!
THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL
PLEASE DO BE AWARE THAT WE HAVE NO LINKS OR AFFILIATION TO ANY EXTREMIST ORGANISATIONS OF ANY KIND WHATSOEVER ….. WE ARE SIMPLY A FREE SPEECH, POLITICALLY INCORRECT VISITOR ATTRACTION THAT FEATURE A GREAT MANY HISTORICALLY SENSITIVE AND TABOO SUBJECT MATTERS THAT NO OTHER VISITOR ATTRACTION DARES TO COVER .
AS WE ALWAYS SAY …. IF EASILY OFFENDED , DISTURBED OR OF A SENSITIVE NATURE THEN PLEASE DO AVOID A VISIT TO LITTLEDEAN JAIL
ABOVE : ORIGINAL OIL PAINTING BY PAUL BRIDGMAN AND COMMISIONED BY THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION ON DISPLAY HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL, DEPICTING NATHAN BEDFORD FORREST.
ABOVE : ORIGINAL OIL PAINTING BY PAUL BRIDGMAN AND COMMISIONED BY THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION ON DISPLAY HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL, DEPICTING WILLIAM JOSEPH SIMMONS.
Above is an intriguing video showing Mo Asumang, daughter of a black Ghanaian father and a white German mother, talks to BBC News about her experiences making her new documentary, The Aryans, in which she confronts racists, both in Germany and among the Ku Klux Klan in America.
THE KU KLUX KLAN & BLACK PANTHER PARTY EXHIBITION AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL …. Deemed by many to be politically incorrect.. though in our view and indeed by a great many black people, an historically significant and educational insight .
Above : US President Donald Trump allegedly pictured here with members of the infamous and notorious Ku Klux klan .
THE KU KLUX KLAN AND BLACK PANTHER PARTY EXHIBITION AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL ……A PART OF BLACK AMERICAN HISTORY THAT SHOULD NOT BE HIDDEN UNDER THE CARPET .
Below is an interesting video news item relating to an insight into the new KKK
PLEASE DO BE AWARE THAT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , IT’S OWNER , OR ANY OF IT’S STAFF HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL HAVE NO AFFILIATION , CONNECTION OR INVOLVEMENT WITH ANY EXTREMIST , POLITICALLY MOTIVATED OR OTHERWISE MOVEMENTS WHATSOEVER …… WE SIMPLY EXHIBIT AND TOUCH UPON A GREAT MANY POLITICALLY INCORRECT AND TABOO SUBJECT MATTERS THAT NO OTHER VISITOR ATTRACTIONS DARE COVER IN THE WAY WE CHOOSE TO DO HERE. …. “IT’S ALL HISTORY FOR GOODNESS SAKE”….EVEN IF ON OCCASIONS, SENSITIVE , THOUGHT PROVOKING SUBJECT MATTERS THAT INCITE STRONG DEBATE
BELOW IS A VERY BRIEF PICTORIAL INSIGHT INTO SOME OF THE KU KLUX KLAN EXHIBITION ITEMS ON DISPLAY HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL
1The 3rd Klan is decentralized, with approx. 179 chapters.
Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right[4][5][6][7] organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically expressed through terrorism.[8][9] Since the mid-20th century, the KKK has also been anti-communist.[8] The current manifestation is splintered into several chapters and is classified as a hate group.[10]
The first Klan flourished in the South in the 1860s, then died out by the early 1870s. Members adopted white costumes: robes, masks, and conical hats, designed to be outlandish and terrifying, and to hide their identities.[11] The second KKK flourished nationwide in the early and mid 1920s, and adopted the same costumes and code words as the first Klan, while introducing cross burnings.[12] The third KKK emerged after World War II and was associated with opposing the Civil Rights Movement and progress among minorities. The second and third incarnations of the Ku Klux Klan made frequent reference to the USA’s “Anglo-Saxon” and “Celtic” blood, harking back to 19th-century nativism and claiming descent from the original 18th-century British colonial revolutionaries.[13] The first and third incarnations of the Klan have well-established records of engaging in terrorism and political violence, though historians debate whether or not the tactic was supported by the second KKK.
First KKKThree Klans
The first Klan was founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a charitable organization to help widows and orphans.[14] by veterans of the Confederate Army.[15] They named it after the Greek wordkuklos, which means circle. The name means “Circle of Brothers.”[16]
Although there was no organizational structure above the local level, similar groups arose across the South, adopting the name and methods.[17] Klan groups spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement during the Reconstruction era in the United States. As a secret vigilante group, the Klan targeted freedmen and their allies; it sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including murder, against black and white Republicans. In 1870 and 1871, the federal government passed the Force Acts, which were used to prosecute Klan crimes.[18] Prosecution of Klan crimes and enforcement of the Force Acts suppressed Klan activity. In 1874 and later, however, newly organized and openly active paramilitary organizations, such as the White League and the Red Shirts, started a fresh round of violence aimed at suppressing blacks’ voting and running Republicans out of office. These contributed to segregationist white Democrats regaining political power in all the Southern states by 1877.
Second KKK
In 1915, the second Klan was founded in Georgia. Starting in 1921, it adopted a modern business system of recruiting (which paid most of the initiation fee and costume charges to the organizers) and grew rapidly nationwide at a time of prosperity. Reflecting the social tensions of urban industrialization and vastly increased immigration, its membership grew most rapidly in cities, and spread to theMidwest and West out of the South. The second KKK preached “One Hundred Percent Americanism” demanded the purification of politics, calling for strict morality and better enforcement ofprohibition. Its official rhetoric focused on the threat of the Catholic Church, using anti-Catholicism and nativism.[19] Its appeal was directed exclusively at white Protestants.[20] Some local groups took part in attacks on private houses and carried out other violent activities. The violent episodes were generally in the South.[21]
The second Klan was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and state structure. At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization claimed to include about 15% of the nation’s eligible population, approximately 4–5 million men. Internal divisions, criminal behavior by leaders, and external opposition brought about a collapse in membership, which had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930. It finally faded away in the 1940s.[22] Klan organizers also operated in Canada, especially in Saskatchewan in 1926-28, where it attacked immigrants from Eastern Europe.[23]
Third KKK
The “Ku Klux Klan” name was used by many independent local groups opposing the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, they often forged alliances with Southern police departments, as in Birmingham, Alabama; or with governor’s offices, as with George Wallace of Alabama.[24] Several members of KKK groups were convicted of murder in the deaths of civil rights workers and children in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Today, researchers estimate that there may be approximately 150 Klan chapters with upwards of 5,000 members nationwide.[25]
Today, a large majority of sources consider the Klan to be a “subversive or terrorist organization”.[25][26][27][28] In 1999, the city council of Charleston, South Carolina passed a resolution declaring the Klan to be a terrorist organization.[29] A similar effort was made in 2004 when a professor at the University of Louisville began a campaign to have the Klan declared a terrorist organization so it could be banned from campus.[30] In April 1997, FBI agents arrested four members of the True Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Dallas for conspiracy to commit robbery and to blow up a natural gas processing plant.[31]
Six well-educated Confederate veterans from Pulaski, Tennessee, created the original Ku Klux Klan on December 24, 1865, during Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War.[32][33] The name was formed by combining the Greek kyklos (κύκλος, circle) with clan.[34] The group was known for a short time as the “Kuklux Clan.” The Ku Klux Klan was one among a number of secret, oath-bound organizations using violence, including the Southern Cross in New Orleans (1865) and the Knights of the White Camelia (1867) in Louisiana.[35]
Historians generally see the KKK as part of the post Civil War insurgent violence related not only to the high number of veterans in the population, but also to their effort to control the dramatically changed social situation by using extrajudicial means to restore white supremacy. In 1866, MississippiGovernor William L. Sharkey reported that disorder, lack of control and lawlessness were widespread; in some states armed bands of Confederate soldiers roamed at will. The Klan used public violence against blacks as intimidation. They burned houses, and attacked and killed blacks, leaving their bodies on the roads.[36]
A political cartoon depicting the KKK and the Democratic Party as continuations of the Confederacy
In an 1867 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, Klan members gathered to try to create a hierarchical organization with local chapters eventually reporting up to a national headquarters. Since most of the Klan’s members were veterans, they were used to the hierarchical structure of the organization, but the Klan never operated under this centralized structure. Local chapters and bands were highly independent.
Former Confederate Brigadier General George Gordon developed the Prescript, or Klan dogma. The Prescript suggested elements of white supremacist belief. For instance, an applicant should be asked if he was in favor of “a white man’s government”, “the reenfranchisement and emancipation of the white men of the South, and the restitution of the Southern people to all their rights.”[37] The latter is a reference to the Ironclad Oath, which stripped the vote from white persons who refused to swear that they had not borne arms against the Union. Gordon was said to have told former slave trader and Confederate GeneralNathan Bedford Forrest about the Klan. Forrest allegedly responded, “That’s a good thing; that’s a damn good thing. We can use that to keep the niggers in their place.”[38] Forrest went on to become Grand Wizard, the Klan’s national leader.[15][39][40]
In an 1868 newspaper interview, Forrest stated that the Klan’s primary opposition was to the Loyal Leagues, Republicanstate governments, people like Tennessee governor Brownlow and other carpetbaggers and scalawags. He argued that many southerners believed that blacks were voting for the Republican Party because they were being hoodwinked by the Loyal Leagues.[41] One Alabama newspaper editor declared “The League is nothing more than a nigger Ku Klux Klan.”[42]
Despite Gordon’s and Forrest’s work, local Klan units never accepted the Prescript and continued to operate autonomously. There were never hierarchical levels or state headquarters. Klan members used violence to settle old feuds and local grudges, as they worked to restore white dominance in the disrupted postwar society. The historian Elaine Frantz Parsons describes the membership:
Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of antiblack vigilante groups, disgruntled poor white farmers, wartimeguerrilla bands, displaced Democratic politicians, illegal whiskeydistillers, coercive moral reformers, sadists, rapists, white workmen fearful of black competition, employers trying to enforce labor discipline, common thieves, neighbors with decades-old grudges, and even a few freedmen and white Republicans who allied with Democratic whites or had criminal agendas of their own. Indeed, all they had in common, besides being overwhelmingly white, southern, and Democratic, was that they called themselves, or were called, Klansmen.[43]
In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy. Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern society. It aimed to reverse the interlocking changes sweeping over the South during Reconstruction: to destroy the Republican party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life.[44]
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
To that end they worked to curb the education, economic advancement, voting rights, and right to keep and bear arms of blacks.[44] The Ku Klux Klan soon spread into nearly every southern state, launching a “reign of terror against Republican leaders both black and white. Those political leaders assassinated during the campaign included Arkansas Congressman James M. Hinds, three members of the South Carolina legislature, and several men who served in constitutional conventions.”[45]
Activities
Three Ku Klux Klan members arrested in Tishomingo County, Mississippi, September 1871, for the attempted murder of an entire family.
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Klan members adopted masks and robes that hid their identities and added to the drama of their night rides, their chosen time for attacks. Many of them operated in small towns and rural areas where people otherwise knew each other’s faces, and sometimes still recognized the attackers. “The kind of thing that men are afraid or ashamed to do openly, and by day, they accomplish secretly, masked, and at night.” With this method both the high and the low could be attacked.[46] The Ku Klux Klan night riders “sometimes claimed to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers so, as they claimed, to frighten superstitious blacks. Few freedmen took such nonsense seriously.”[47]
The Klan attacked black members of the Loyal Leagues and intimidated southern Republicans and Freedmen’s Bureau workers. When they killed black political leaders, they also took heads of families, along with the leaders of churches and community groups, because these people had many roles in society. Agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau reported weekly assaults and murders of blacks. “Armed guerrilla warfare killed thousands of Negroes; political riots were staged; their causes or occasions were always obscure, their results always certain: ten to one hundred times as many Negroes were killed as whites.” Masked men shot into houses and burned them, sometimes with the occupants still inside. They drove successful black farmers off their land. “Generally, it can be reported that in North and South Carolina, in 18 months ending in June 1867, there were 197 murders and 548 cases of aggravated assault.”[48]
Klan violence worked to suppress black voting. More than 2,000 persons were killed, wounded and otherwise injured in Louisiana within a few weeks prior to the Presidential election of November 1868. Although St. Landry Parish had a registered Republican majority of 1,071, after the murders, no Republicans voted in the fall elections. White Democrats cast the full vote of the parish for Grant’s opponent. The KKK killed and wounded more than 200 black Republicans, hunting and chasing them through the woods. Thirteen captives were taken from jail and shot; a half-buried pile of 25 bodies was found in the woods. The KKK made people vote Democratic and gave them certificates of the fact.[49]
Klansmen killed more than 150 African Americans in a county in Florida, and hundreds more in other counties. Freedmen’s Bureau records provided a detailed recounting of Klansmen’s beatings and murders of freedmen and their white allies.[51]
Milder encounters also occurred. In Mississippi, according to the Congressional inquiry:[52]
One of these teachers (Miss Allen of Illinois), whose school was at Cotton Gin Port in Monroe County, was visited … between one and two o’clock in the morning on March 1871, by about fifty men mounted and disguised. Each man wore a long white robe and his face was covered by a loose mask with scarlet stripes. She was ordered to get up and dress which she did at once and then admitted to her room the captain and lieutenant who in addition to the usual disguise had long horns on their heads and a sort of device in front. The lieutenant had a pistolin his hand and he and the captain sat down while eight or ten men stood inside the door and the porch was full. They treated her “gentlemanly and quietly” but complained of the heavy school-tax, said she must stop teaching and go away and warned her that they never gave a second notice. She heeded the warning and left the county.
By 1868, two years after the Klan’s creation, its activity was beginning to decrease.[53] Members were hiding behind Klan masks and robes as a way to avoid prosecution for freelance violence. Many influential southern Democrats feared that Klan lawlessness provided an excuse for the federal government to retain its power over the South, and they began to turn against it.[54] There were outlandish claims made, such as Georgian B. H. Hill stating “that some of these outrages were actually perpetrated by the political friends of the parties slain.”[53]
Resistance
Union Army veterans in mountainous Blount County, Alabama, organized “the anti-Ku Klux”. They put an end to violence by threatening Klansmen with reprisals unless they stopped whipping Unionists and burning black churches and schools. Armed blacks formed their own defense in Bennettsville, South Carolina and patrolled the streets to protect their homes.[55]
National sentiment gathered to crack down on the Klan, even though some Democrats at the national level questioned whether the Klan really existed or believed that it was just a creation of nervous Southern Republican governors.[56] Many southern states began to pass anti-Klan legislation.
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
In January 1871, Pennsylvania Republican Senator John Scott convened a Congressional committee which took testimony from 52 witnesses about Klan atrocities. They accumulated 12 volumes of horrifying testimony. In February, former Union General and Congressman Benjamin Franklin Butler ofMassachusetts introduced the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (Ku Klux Klan Act). This added to the enmity that southern white Democrats bore toward him.[57]While the bill was being considered, further violence in the South swung support for its passage. The Governor of South Carolina appealed for federal troops to assist his efforts in keeping control of the state. A riot and massacre in a Meridian, Mississippi, courthouse were reported, from which a black state representative escaped only by taking to the woods.[58] The 1871 Civil Rights Act allowed President Ulysses S. Grant to suspend Habeas Corpus.[59]
In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant signed Butler’s legislation. The Ku Klux Klan Act was used by the Federal government together with the 1870 Force Act, another act that President Grant signed, to enforce the civil rights provisions for individuals under the constitution. Under the 1871 Klan Act, after the Klan refused to voluntarily dissolve, President Grant issued a suspension of Habeas Corpus, and sent Federal troops into 9 South Carolina counties. The Klansmen were arrested and prosecuted in Federal court. More African Americans served on juries in Federal court than were selected for local or state juries, so they had a chance to participate in the process.[59][60] In the crackdown, hundreds of Klan members were fined or imprisoned.
The Klan declines and is superseded by other groups
Although Forrest boasted that the Klan was a nationwide organization of 550,000 men and that he could muster 40,000 Klansmen within five days’ notice, as a secret or “invisible” group, it had no membership rosters, no chapters, and no local officers. It was difficult for observers to judge its actual membership. It had created a sensation by the dramatic nature of its masked forays and because of its many murders.
In 1870 a federal grand jury determined that the Klan was a “terrorist organization”.[61] It issued hundreds of indictments for crimes of violence and terrorism. Klan members were prosecuted, and many fled from areas that were under federal government jurisdiction, particularly in South Carolina.[62] Many people not formally inducted into the Klan had used the Klan’s costume for anonymity, to hide their identities when carrying out acts of violence. Forrest ordered the Klan to disband in 1869, stating that it was “being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to the public peace”.[63] HistorianStanley Horn writes “generally speaking, the Klan’s end was more in the form of spotty, slow, and gradual disintegration than a formal and decisive disbandment”.[64]A reporter in Georgia wrote in January 1870, “A true statement of the case is not that the Ku Klux are an organized band of licensed criminals, but that men who commit crimes call themselves Ku Klux”.[65]
While people used the Klan as a mask for nonpolitical crimes, state and local governments seldom acted against them. African Americans were kept off juries. In lynching cases, all-white juries almost never indicted Ku Klux Klan members. When there was a rare indictment, juries were unlikely to vote for a conviction. In part, jury members feared reprisals from local Klansmen.
Others may have agreed with lynching as a way of keeping dominance over black men. In many states, officials were reluctant to use black militia against the Klan out of fear that racial tensions would be raised.[60] When Republican Governor of North CarolinaWilliam Woods Holden called out the militia against the Klan in 1870, it added to his unpopularity. Combined with violence and fraud at the polls, the Republicans lost their majority in the state legislature. Disaffection with Holden’s actions led to white Democratic legislators’ impeaching Holden and removing him from office, but their reasons were numerous.[66]
The Klan was destroyed in South Carolina[67] and decimated throughout the rest of the South, where it had already been in decline. Attorney General Amos Tappan Ackerman led the prosecutions.[68]
In some areas, other local paramilitary organizations such as the White League, Red Shirts, saber clubs, and rifle clubs continued to intimidate and murder black voters.[69]
In 1874, organized white paramilitary groups were formed in the Deep South to replace the faltering Klan: the White League in Louisiana and the Red Shirts inMississippi, North and South Carolina. They campaigned openly to turn Republicans out of office, intimidated and killed black voters, tried to disrupt organizing and suppressed black voting. They were out in force during the campaigns and elections of 1874 and 1876, contributing to the conservative Democrats regaining power in 1876, against a background of electoral violence.
Shortly after, in United States v. Cruikshank (1875), the Supreme Court ruled that the Force Act of 1870 did not give the Federal government power to regulate private actions, but only those by state governments. The result was that as the century went on, African Americans were at the mercy of hostile state governments that refused to intervene against private violence and paramilitary groups.
Whereas the number of indictments across the South was large, the number of cases leading to prosecution and sentencing was relatively small. The overloaded federal courts were not able to meet the demands of trying such a tremendous number of cases, a situation that led to selective pardoning. By late 1873 and 1874, most of the charges against Klansmen were dropped although new cases continued to be prosecuted for several more years. Most of those sentenced had either served their terms or had been pardoned by 1875. The Supreme Court of the United States eviscerated the Ku Klux Act in 1876 by ruling that the federal government could no longer prosecute individuals although states would be forced to comply with federal civil rights provisions. Republicans passed a second civil rights act (the Civil Rights Act of 1875) to grant equal access to public facilities and other housing accommodations regardless of race. Ironically, the Klan during this period served to further Northern reconstruction efforts, as Ku Klux violence provided the political climate needed to pass civil rights protections for blacks. Although the Ku Klux Act of 1871 dismantled the first Klan, Southern whites formed other, similar groups that kept blacks away from the polls through intimidation and physical violence. Reconstruction ended with the election of President Rutherford B. Hayes, who suspended the federal military occupation of the South; yet blacks still found themselves without the basic civil liberties that Congressional Republicans had sought to secure.[70]
Klan costumes, also called “regalia“, disappeared by the early 1870s (Wade 1987, p. 109). The fact that the Klan did not exist for decades was shown when Simmons’s 1915 recreation of the Klan attracted only two aging “former Reconstruction Klansmen.” All other members were new.[72] By 1872, the Klan was broken as an organization.[73] Nonetheless, the goals that the Klan had failed to achieve itself, such as suppressing suffrage for Southern blacks and driving a wedge between poor whites and blacks, were largely accomplished by the 1890s by militant Southern whites. Lynchings of African Americans, far from being ended by the Klan’s disintegration, instead peaked in 1892 with 161 deaths.[74]
The second Klan: 1915–1944
Refounding in 1915
Three events in 1915 acted as catalysts to the revival of the Klan:
The film The Birth of a Nation was released, mythologizing and glorifying the first Klan.
Jewish businessman Leo Frank was lynched near Atlanta after the Georgia governor commuted his death sentence to life in prison. Frank had been convicted in 1913 and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young white factory worker named Mary Phagan, in a trial marked by intimidation of the jury and media frenzy. His legal appeals had been exhausted.
The second Ku Klux Klan was founded by William J. Simmons at Stone Mountain, outside Atlanta. It added to the original anti-black ideology with a new anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, prohibitionistand antisemitic agenda. Most of the founders were from an Atlanta-area organization calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan, which had organized around Leo Frank’s trial. The new organization emulated the fictionalized version of the Klan presented in The Birth of a Nation.
The Birth of a Nation
An illustration from The Clansman: “Take dat f’um yo equal—”
Movie poster for The Birth of a Nation. It has been widely noted for reviving the Ku Klux Klan.
Director D. W. Griffith‘s The Birth of a Nation glorified the original Klan. His film was based on the book and play The Clansman and the book The Leopard’s Spots, both by Thomas Dixon, Jr. Dixon said his purpose was “to revolutionize northern sentiment by a presentation of history that would transform every man in my audience into a good Democrat!” The film created a nationwide Klan craze. At the official premier in Atlanta, members of the Klan rode up and down the street in front of the theater.[75]
Much of the modern Klan’s iconography, including the standardized white costume and the lighted cross, are derived from the film. Its imagery was based on Dixon’s romanticized concept of old England and Scotland, as portrayed in the novels and poetry of Sir Walter Scott. The film’s influence and popularity were enhanced by a widely reported endorsement by historian and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.
The Birth of a Nation included extensive quotations from Woodrow Wilson’s History of the American People, as if to give it a stronger basis. After seeing the film in a special White House screening, Wilson allegedly said, “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”[76] Wilson’s remarks immediately became controversial. Wilson tried to remain aloof, but finally, on April 30, he issued a non-denial denial.[77] Wilson’s aide, Joseph Tumulty said, “the President was entirely unaware of the nature of the play before it was presented and at no time has expressed his approbation of it.”[78]
The new Klan was inaugurated in 1915 at a meeting led by William J. Simmons on top of Stone Mountain. A few aging members of the original Klan attended, along with members of the self-named Knights of Mary Phagan.
Simmons stated that he had been inspired by the original Klan’s Prescripts, written in 1867 by Confederate veteran George Gordon in an attempt to create a national organization. These were never adopted by the Klan, however.[79] The Prescript stated the Klan’s purposes in idealistic terms, hiding the fact that its members committed acts of vigilante violence and murder from behind masks.
The Second Klan saw threats from every direction. A religious tone was apparent in all of its activities; indeed, “two-thirds of the national Klan lecturers were Protestant ministers,” says historian Brian R. Farmer.[80] Much of the Klan’s energy went to guarding the home, in its view, says historian Kathleen Blee, to protect “the interests of white womanhood.”[81]
The second Klan arose during the nadir of American race relations, in response to urbanization and industrialization. Massive immigration of Catholics and Jews from eastern and southern Europe led to fears among Protestants. The Great Migration of African Americans to the North stoked racism by whites in Northern industrial cities; thus the second Klan would achieve its greatest political power not in any Southern state, but in Indiana. The migration of African Americans and whites from rural areas to Southern cities further increased tensions. The Klan grew most rapidly in urbanizing cities which had high growth rates between 1910 and 1930, such as Detroit, Memphis, Dayton, Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston. InMichigan, more than half of the members lived in Detroit and were concerned about urban issues: limited housing, rapid social change, competition for jobs.[82]Stanley Horn, a Southern historian sympathetic to the first Klan, was careful in an oral interview to distinguish it from the later “spurious Ku Klux organization which was in ill-repute—and, of course, had no connection whatsoever with the Klan of Reconstruction days”.[83]
In an era without Social Security or widely available life insurance, it was common for men to join fraternal organizations such as the Elks or the Woodmen of the World to provide for their families in case they died or were unable to work. The founder of the new Klan, William J. Simmons, was a member of twelve different fraternal organizations. He recruited for the Klan with his chest covered with fraternal badges, and consciously modeled the Klan after those organizations.[84]
Klan organizers, called “Kleagles“, signed up hundreds of new members, who paid initiation fees and bought KKK costumes. The organizer kept half the money and sent the rest to state or national officials. When the organizer was done with an area, he organized a huge rally, often with burning crosses and perhaps presented a Bible to a local Protestant minister. He then left town with the money. The local units operated like many fraternal organizations and occasionally brought in speakers.
The Klan’s growth was also affected by mobilization for World War I and postwar tensions, especially in the cities where strangers came up against each other more often. Southern whites resented the arming of black soldiers. Black veterans did not want to go back to second-class status in the United States. Some were lynched, still in uniform, upon returning from overseas service.[85]
Activities
Simmons initially met with little success in either recruiting members or in raising money, and the Klan remained a small operation in the Atlanta area until 1920, when he handed its day-to-day activities over to two professional publicists, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke.[86] The Klan now expanded exponentially, reaching a mass national base by 1925. The remodeled Klan downplayed the old issues left over from Reconstruction, and focused on anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-Communist and anti-immigrant appeals. It now sold itself as a nativist and strenuously patriotic organization, and it emphasized its support for vigorous enforcement of prohibition laws. Most of its members lived in the North and West.
Prohibition
Historians agree that the Klan’s resurgence in the 1920s was aided by the national debate over prohibition.[87] Thus Prendergast contends that the KKK’s “support for Prohibition represented the single most important bond between Klansmen throughout the nation”.[88] The Klan opposed bootleggers, sometimes with violence. In 1922, two hundred Klan members set fire to saloons in Union County, Arkansas. The national Klan office was finally established in Dallas,Texas, but Little Rock, Arkansas was the home of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan. The first head of this auxiliary was a former president of the ArkansasWCTU.[89][verification needed] Membership in the Klan and in other prohibition groups overlapped, and they often coordinated activities.[90]
Labor and anti-unionism
In southern cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, Klan members kept control of access to the better-paying industrial jobs but opposed unions. During the 1930s and 1940s, Klan leaders urged members to disrupt the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which advocated industrial unions and was open to African-American members. With access to dynamite and using the skills from their jobs in mining and steel, in the late 1940s some Klan members in Birmingham began to perpetrate bombings in order to intimidate upwardly mobile blacks who moved into middle-class neighborhoods. “By mid-1949, there were so many charred house carcasses that the area [College Hills] was informally named Dynamite Hill.”[91] Independent Klan groups remained active in Birmingham and were deeply engaged in violent opposition to the Civil Rights Movement.[91]
Urbanization
Stone Mountain, site of the founding of the second Klan in 1915
A significant characteristic of the second Klan was that it was an organization based in urban areas, reflecting the major shifts of population to cities in both the North and the South. In Michigan, for instance, 40,000 members lived in Detroit, where they made up more than half of the state’s membership. Most Klansmen were lower- to middle-class whites who were trying to protect their jobs and housing from the waves of newcomers to the industrial cities: immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, who tended to be Catholic and Jewish in numbers higher than earlier groups of immigrants; and black and white migrants from the South. As new populations poured into cities, rapidly changing neighborhoods created social tensions. Because of the rapid pace of population growth in industrializing cities such as Detroit and Chicago, the Klan grew rapidly in the U.S. Midwest. The Klan also grew in booming Southern cities such as Dallas and Houston.[92]
In the medium-size industrial city of Worcester, Massachusetts in the 1920s, the Klan ascended to power quickly but diminished as a result of opposition from the Catholic Church. There was no violence and the local newspaper ridiculed Klansmen as “night-shirt knights”. Half of the members were Swedish American, including some first-generation immigrants. The ethnic and religious conflicts between Worcester residents is discussed. Swedish Protestants fought against Irish Catholics for political and ideological control of the city.[93]
For some states, historians have obtained membership rosters of some local units and matched the names against city directory and local records to create statistical profiles of the membership. Big city newspapers were often hostile and ridiculed Klansmen as ignorant farmers. Detailed analysis from Indianashowed the rural stereotype was false for that state:
Indiana’s Klansmen represented a wide cross section of society: they were not disproportionately urban or rural, nor were they significantly more or less likely than other members of society to be from the working class, middle class, or professional ranks. Klansmen were Protestants, of course, but they cannot be described exclusively or even predominantly as fundamentalists. In reality, their religious affiliations mirrored the whole of white Protestant society, including those who did not belong to any church.[94]
The Klan attracted people but most of them did not remain in the organization for long. Membership in the Klan turned over rapidly as people found out that it was not the group they wanted. Millions joined, and at its peak in the 1920s, the organization included about 15% of the nation’s eligible population. The lessening of social tensions contributed to the Klan’s decline.
The second Klan adopted a burning Latin cross as its symbol. No such crosses had been used by the first Klan, but the burning cross was used as a symbol of intimidation by the second Klan.[95] The burning of the cross was also used by the second Klan as a symbol of Christian fellowship, and its lighting during meetings was steeped in Christian prayer, the singing of hymns, and other overtly religious symbolism.[12]
The practice of cross burning had been loosely based on ancient Scottish clans’ burning a St. Andrew’s cross (an X-shaped cross) as a beacon to muster forces for war. In The Clansman (see above), Dixon had falsely claimed that the first Klan had used fiery crosses when rallying to fight against Reconstruction. Griffith brought this image to the screen in The Birth of a Nation; he portrayed the burning cross as an upright Latin cross rather than the St. Andrew’s cross. Simmons adopted the symbol wholesale from the movie, prominently displaying it at the 1915 Stone Mountain meeting. The symbol has been associated with the Klan ever since.[96]
Education
In 1921, in an attempt to gain a foothold in education, the Klan bought Lanier University, a struggling Baptist university in Atlanta. Nathan Bedford Forrest, grandson of the confederate general by the same name, was appointed business manager, and the school would teach “pure, 100 percent Americanism”. Enrollment was dismal and the school closed after its first year of Klan ownership.[97]
The Klan had numerous members in every part of the U.S. At its peak, claimed Klan membership exceeded four million and comprised 20% of the adult white male population in many broad geographic regions, and 40% in some areas.[98] The Klan also moved north into Canada, especially Saskatchewan, where it opposed Catholics.[99]
The Klan issue played a significant role at the bitterly divisive 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City. The leading candidates were Protestant William Gibbs McAdoo, with a base in areas where the Klan was strong, and Catholic New York Governor Al Smith, with a base in the large cities. After weeks of stalemate, both candidates withdrew in favor of a compromise. Anti-Klan delegates proposed a resolution indirectly attacking the Klan; it was narrowly defeated.[100][101]
In some states, such as Alabama and California, the KKK worked for political reform. In 1924, the Klan became active in local politics in Anaheim, California. The city had been controlled by an entrenched commercial-civic elite that was mostlyGerman American. The elite gave little support to the prohibition laws—the mayor, for example, had been a saloon keeper. The Klan, led by the minister of the First Christian Church, represented a rising group of politically oriented non-German citizens who had been shut out of influence and who denounced the elite as corrupt, undemocratic and self-serving. Cocoltchos says the Klansmen sought to create a model orderly community. There were about 1200 Klan members in orange County, and Cocoltchos tracked them through local records, comparing them to 300 prominent anti-Klan activists. The economic and occupational profile of the pro and anti-Klan groups shows the two were similar and about equally prosperous. Cocoltchos finds no evidence of status anxiety. The Klansmen were all Protestants, as were most of the antis, but the antis also enlisted many Catholic Germans. The Klansmen had a much higher rate of voting and joining nonpartisan civic groups (such as the Chamber of Commerce) than the othersbefore they joined the Klan, suggesting to Cocoltchos it was a high sense of civic activism that led to joining the KKK in the first place. The Klan easily won the hotly contested local election in Anaheim in April 1924. They systematically fired Catholic city employees and replaced them with Klansmen. The new city council tried to strictly enforce prohibition, and the Klan held large rallies and initiation ceremonies over the summer. The opposition organized, bribed a Klansman for the secret membership list, exposed the Klansmen running in the primaries and defeated most of them. The antis stepped up the campaign in 1925 and succeeded in a hotly contested election in voting to recall the Klansmen who had been elected in April 1924. The Klan in Anaheim quickly collapsed, its newspaper closed after losing a libel suit, and the minister who led the local Klavern moved to Kansas.[102]
In Alabama the Klansmen were among the foremost advocates of better public schools, effective prohibition enforcement, expanded road construction, and other political measures which benefited lower-class white people. By 1925, the Klan was a political force in the state, as leaders such as J. Thomas Heflin, David Bibb Graves, and Hugo Black manipulated the KKK membership to try to build political power against the Black Belt planters, who had long dominated the state.[103] Black was elected US senator in 1926; President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Black to the Supreme Court not knowing he had been active in the Klan in the 1920s. In 1926, with Klan support, Bibb Graves won the Alabama governor’s office. He was a former Klan chapter head. He pushed for increased education funding, better public health, new highway construction, and pro-labor legislation. Because the Alabama state legislature refused to redistrict until 1972, however, even the Klan was unable to break the planters’ and rural areas’ hold on legislative power.
Its predecessor had been an exclusively partisan Democratic organization in the South. The second Klan grew in the Midwest, where for a time, its members were courted by both Republicans and Democrats. The KKK state organizations endorsed candidates from either party that supported its goals; Prohibition in particular helped the Klan and some Republicans to make common cause in the Midwest. In the South, however, the southern Klan remained Democratic, closely allied with Democratic police, sheriffs, and other functionaries of local government. With continuing disfranchisement of most African Americans and many poor whites, the only political activity took place within the Democratic Party.
Resistance and decline
The Ku Klux Klan rose to prominence in Indiana politics and society after World War I. It was made up of American-born, white Protestants of many income and social levels. Nationally, in the 1920s, Indiana had the most powerful Ku Klux Klan. Though it counted a high number of members statewide (over 30% of its white male citizens[104]), its importance peaked with the 1924 election of Edward Jackson for governor. A short time later, the scandal surrounding the murder trial of D.C. Stephenson destroyed the image of the Ku Klux Klan as upholders of law and order. By 1926 the Ku Klux Klan was “crippled and discredited.”[105]
D. C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan. His conviction for murdering a young white schoolteacher in 1925 devastated the Indiana Klan.
D. C. Stephenson was the Grand Dragon of Indiana and 22 northern states. He led the states under his control to separate from the national KKK organization in 1923. In his 1925 trial, he was convicted for second degree murder for his part in the rape and subsequent death[106] of Madge Oberholtzer. After Stephenson’s conviction in a sensational trial, the Klan declined dramatically in Indiana. Historian Leonard Moore concluded that a failure in leadership caused the Klan’s collapse:
Stephenson and the other salesmen and office seekers who maneuvered for control of Indiana’s Invisible Empire lacked both the ability and the desire to use the political system to carry out the Klan’s stated goals. They were uninterested in, or perhaps even unaware of, grass roots concerns within the movement. For them, the Klan had been nothing more than a means for gaining wealth and power. These marginal men had risen to the top of the hooded order because, until it became a political force, the Klan had never required strong, dedicated leadership. More established and experienced politicians who endorsed the Klan, or who pursued some of the interests of their Klan constituents, also accomplished little. Factionalism created one barrier, but many politicians had supported the Klan simply out of expedience. When charges of crime and corruption began to taint the movement, those concerned about their political futures had even less reason to work on the Klan’s behalf.[107]
Many groups and leaders, including prominent Protestant ministers such as Reinhold Niebuhr in Detroit, spoke out against the Klan. In response to blunt attacks against Jewish Americans and the Klan’s campaign to outlaw private schools, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League was formed after the lynching of Leo Frank. When one civic group began to publish Klan membership lists, the number of members quickly declined. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoplecarried on public education campaigns in order to inform people about Klan activities and lobbied against Klan abuses in Congress. After its peak in 1925, Klan membership in most areas of the Midwest began to decline rapidly.[92]
In Alabama, KKK vigilantes, thinking that they had governmental protection, launched a wave of physical terror in 1927. They targeted both blacks and whites for violation of racial norms and for perceived moral lapses.[108] This led however to a large backlash beginning in the media. Grover C. Hall, Sr., editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, began publishing a series of editorials and articles that attacked the Klan for its “racial and religious intolerance”. Hall won a Pulitzer Prize for his crusade.[109] Other newspapers kept up a steady, loud attack on the Klan, referring to the organization as violent and “un-American”. Sheriffs cracked down. In the 1928 presidential election, the state voted for the Democratic candidate Al Smith, although he was Catholic.
Klan membership in Alabama dropped to less than 6,000 by 1930. Small independent units continued to be active in Birmingham, where in the late 1940s, members launched a reign of terror by bombing the homes of upwardly mobile African Americans. Activism by such independent KKK groups increased as a reaction against the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Imperial WizardHiram Wesley Evans sold the organization in 1939 to James Colescott, an Indiana veterinarian, and Samuel Green, an Atlanta obstetrician. They were unable to staunch the declining membership. In 1944, the IRS filed a lien for $685,000 in back taxes against the Klan, and Colescott was forced to dissolve the organization in 1944. Local Klan groups closed over the following years.[110]
Ku Klux Klan members march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. in 1928
Due in part to the Klan terror directed at them, five million blacks left the South for northern, midwestern and western cities from 1940 to 1970.
After World War II, folklorist and author Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the Klan and provided information to media and law enforcement agencies. He also provided secret code words to the writers of the Superman radio program, resulting in episodes in which Superman took on the KKK. Kennedy’s intention to strip away the Klan’s mystique and trivialize the Klan’s rituals and code words may have contributed to the decline in Klan recruiting and membership.[111] In the 1950s, Kennedy wrote a bestselling book about his experiences, which further damaged the Klan.[112]
The following table shows the change in the Klan’s estimated membership over time.[113] (The years given in the table represent approximate time periods.)
Soviet propaganda poster (Freedom, American style, 1950, by Nikolay Dolgorukov and Boris Efimov), showing the KKK’s lynchings of blacks.
The name “Ku Klux Klan” began to be used by several independent groups. Beginning in the 1950s, for instance, individual Klan groups in Birmingham, Alabama, began to resist social change and blacks’ improving their lives by bombing houses in transitional neighborhoods. There were so many bombings in Birmingham of blacks’ homes by Klan groups in the 1950s that the city’s nickname was “Bombingham”.[24]
During the tenure of Bull Connor as police commissioner in the city, Klan groups were closely allied with the police and operated with impunity. When the Freedom Riders arrived in Birmingham, Connor gave Klan members fifteen minutes to attack the riders before sending in the police to quell the attack.[24] When local and state authorities failed to protect the Freedom Riders and activists, the federal government established effective intervention.
In states such as Alabama and Mississippi, Klan members forged alliances with governors’ administrations.[24] In Birmingham and elsewhere, the KKK groups bombed the houses of civil rights activists. In some cases they used physical violence, intimidation and assassination directly against individuals. Many murders went unreported and were not prosecuted by local and state authorities. Continuing disfranchisement of blacks across the South meant that most could not serve on juries, which were all white.
According to a report from the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, the homes of 40 black Southern families were bombed during 1951 and 1952. Some of the bombing victims were social activists whose work exposed them to danger, but most were either people who refused to bow to racist convention or were innocent bystanders, unsuspecting victims of random violence.[115]
The 1964 murder of two black teenagers, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore in Mississippi. In August 2007, based on the confession of Klansman Charles Marcus Edwards, James Ford Seale, a reputed Ku Klux Klansman, was convicted. Seale was sentenced to serve three life sentences. Seale was a former Mississippi policeman and sheriff’s deputy.[119]
The 1965 Alabama murder of Viola Liuzzo. She was a Southern-raised Detroit mother of five who was visiting the state in order to attend a civil rights march. At the time of her murder Liuzzo was transporting Civil Rights Marchers.
The 1966 firebombing death of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer Sr., 58, in Mississippi. In 1998 former Ku Klux Klan wizard Sam Bowers was convicted of his murder and sentenced to life. Two other Klan members were indicted with Bowers, but one died before trial, and the other’s indictment was dismissed.
There was also resistance to the Klan. In 1953, newspaper publisher W. Horace Carter received a Pulitzer prize for reporting on the activities of the Klan. In a 1958 North Carolina incident, the Klan burned crosses at the homes of two Lumbee Native Americans who had associated with white people, and they threatened to return with more men. When the KKK held a nighttime rally nearby, they were quickly surrounded by hundreds of armed Lumbees. Gunfire was exchanged, and the Klan was routed at what became known as the Battle of Hayes Pond.[120]
While the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had paid informants in the Klan, for instance in Birmingham in the early 1960s, its relations with local law enforcement agencies and the Klan were often ambiguous. The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, appeared more concerned about Communist links to civil rights activists than about controlling Klan excesses against citizens. In 1964, the FBI’sCOINTELPRO program began attempts to infiltrate and disrupt civil rights groups.[24]
As 20th-century Supreme Court rulings extended federal enforcement of citizens’ civil rights, the government revived the Force Act and Klan Act from Reconstruction days. Federal prosecutors used these laws as the basis for investigations and indictments in the 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner;[121] and the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo.[122] They were also the basis for prosecution in 1991 in Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic.
Jerry Thompson, a newspaper reporter who infiltrated the KKK in 1979, reported that the FBI’s COINTELPRO efforts were highly successful. Rival KKK factions accused each other’s leaders of being FBI informants. Bill Wilkinson of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was revealed to have been working for the FBI.[125]
Thompson, the journalist who claimed he had infiltrated the Klan, related that KKK leaders who appeared indifferent to the threat of arrest showed great concern about a series of civil lawsuits filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center for damages of millions of dollars. These were filed after KKK members shot into a group of African Americans. Klansmen curtailed activities to conserve money for defense against the lawsuits. The KKK also used lawsuits as tools; they filed a libel suit to prevent publication of a paperback edition of Thompson’s book.
Tennessee shooting
In 1980, three KKK members shot four elderly black women (Viola Ellison, Lela Evans, Opal Jackson and Katherine Johnson) in Chattanooga, Tennessee, following a KKK initiation rally. A fifth woman, Fannie Crumsey, was injured by flying glass in the incident. Attempted murder charges were filed against the three KKK members, two of whom—Bill Church and Larry Payne—were acquitted by an all-white jury, and the other of whom—Marshall Thrash—was sentenced by the same jury to nine months on lesser charges. He was released after three months.[126][127][128] In 1982, a jury awarded the five women $535,000 in a civil rights trial.[129]
Michael Donald lynching
After Michael Donald was lynched in 1981 in Alabama, the FBI investigated his death and two local KKK members were convicted of having a role, including Henry Francis Hays, who was sentenced to death. With the support of attorneys Morris Dees and Joseph J. Levin of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Donald’s mother, Beulah Mae Donald, sued the KKK in civil court in Alabama. Her lawsuit against the United Klans of America was tried in February 1987. The all-white jury found the Klan responsible for the lynching of Donald and ordered the Klan to pay US$7 million. To pay the judgment, the KKK turned over all of its assets, including its national headquarters building in Tuscaloosa.[130] After exhausting the appeals process, Hays was executed for Donald’s death in Alabama on June 6, 1997. It was the first time since 1913 that a white man had been executed in Alabama for a crime against an African American.[131]
The modern KKK is not one organization; rather it is composed of small independent chapters across the U.S.[137] The formation of independent chapters has made KKK groups more difficult to infiltrate, and researchers find it hard to estimate their numbers. Estimates are that about two-thirds of KKK members are concentrated in the Southern United States, with another third situated primarily in the lower Midwest.[138][139][140] KKK members have stepped up recruitment in recent years, but the organization grows slowly, with membership estimated at 5,000–8,000 across 179 chapters. These recent membership campaigns have been based on issues such as people’s anxieties about illegal immigration, urban crime and same-sex marriage.[141] Many KKK groups have formed strong alliances with other white supremacist groups, such as neo-Nazis. Some KKK groups have become increasingly “Nazified”, adopting the look and emblems of white power skinheads.[142]
On November 14, 2008, an all-white jury of seven men and seven women awarded $1.5 million in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages to plaintiff Jordan Gruver, represented by theSouthern Poverty Law Center against the Imperial Klans of America.[143] The ruling found that five IKA members had savagely beaten Gruver, then 16 years old, at a Kentucky county fair in July 2006.[144]
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has provided legal support to various factions of the KKK in defense of their First Amendment rights to hold public rallies, parades, and marches, as well as their right to field political candidates.[145]
Current Klan splinter divisions have grown substantially since the 2008 election of U.S. President Barack Obama, the first African-American to hold the office;[146][147] the Klan has expanded its recruitment efforts to white supremacists at the international level.[148] Current membership estimates by the ADL hold at a national estimate of five thousand.[140]
Ex-Grand Wizard David Duke has claimed that thousands of Tea Party movement activists have urged him to run for president in 2012[149] and he is seriously considering entering the Republican Party primaries.[150] Duke has also released a video detailing his platform.[151] In the video, he pledges that as president he would stop all immigration to the U.S., including legal immigration, and says that he “will not let Israel or any nation dictate our foreign policy.”[152] He has also claimed that he would be “willing to risk life and limb, endure the barbs of the media” to mount “the most honest campaign for president since the time of our Founding Fathers.”[153] However, Duke is legally disqualified from running for public office as part of his 2002 guilty plea for tax evasion.[154]
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, headed by national director and self-claimed pastor Thom Robb, and based in Zinc, Arkansas.[158] It claims to be the biggest Klan organization in America today.
Other countries
Aside from Canada, there have been various attempts to organise KKK chapters outside of the United States. In Australia in the late 1990s, former One Nation founding member Peter Coleman established branches throughout the country,[159][160] and in recent years the KKK has attempted to infiltrate other political parties such as Australia First.[161] Recruitment activity has also been reported in Britain.[162][163]
Vocabulary
Membership in the Klan is secret. Like many fraternal organizations, the Klan has signs which members can use to recognize one another. A member may use the acronym AYAK (Are you a Klansman?) in conversation to surreptitiously identify himself to another potential member. The response AKIA (A Klansman I am) completes the greeting.[164]
Throughout its varied history, the Klan has coined many words[165] beginning with “Kl” including:
All of the above terminology was created by William Simmons, as part of his 1915 revival of the Klan.[166] The Reconstruction-era Klan used different titles; the only titles to carry over were “Wizard” for the overall leader of the Klan and “Night Hawk” for the official in charge of security.
The Imperial Kludd was the chaplain of the Imperial Klonvokation and he performed “such other duties as may be required by the Imperial Wizard.” The Imperial Kaliff was the second highest position after the Imperial Wizard.[167]
HERE AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL WE FEATURE THE BRITISH SECRET AGENT – VIOLETTE SZABO, ALONG WITH OTHER SOE HERO’S AND HEROINES, SAS (SPECIAL AIR SERVICE) AND OTHER UK SPECIAL FORCES.
NOT FORGETTING OF COURSE OUR WW2 NAZI HOLOCAUST EXHIBITION FOR WHICH WE FEATURE AND INCLUDE MANY OF THE ABOVE WHO HAD BEEN CAPTURED, TORTURED AND SUBSEQUENTLY EXECUTED BY THE NAZI’S DURING THIS HORRIFIC PERIOD.
WE ALSO HAVE A NUMBER OF PERSONALLY SIGNED EXHIBIT ITEMS KINDLY DONATED TO THE MUSEUM AND ON DISPLAY FROM VIOLETTE SZABO’S DAUGHTER – TANIA WHO HAS CARRIED ON THE LEGACY OF HER MOTHER SINCE HER DEATH IN 1945 .
ABOVE & BELOW …. Original oil paintings by our in-house Gloucestershire artist Paul Bridgman here on display at The Crime Through Time Collection, Littledean Jail .
SOE HEROINE VIOLETTE SZABO
VIOLETTE’S DAUGHTER TANIA
ORIGINAL FILM POSTER FROM THE EPIC FILM BASED ON VIOLETTE SZABO
TANIA SZABO PROUDLY SHOWING HER MOTHER’S MEDALS SHE RECEIVED POSTHUMOUSLY TO ANDY JONES OF THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL
BELOW ARE A FEW PICTURES TAKEN AT A RECENT GET-TOGETHER AND CATCH-UP WITH TANIA , DAUGHTER OF WW2 S.O.E. ( SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE ) HEROINE – VIOLETTE SZABO … PARTICULARLY SPECIAL WHEREBY SHE KINDLY BROUGHT ALONG AS A SURPRISE , HER MOTHERS GEORGE MEDAL , CROIX DE GUERRE AND THE MEDAILLE DE LA RESISTANCE FOR WHICH TANIA HAD RECEIVED POSTHUMOUSLY AS A YOUNG CHILD. A GREAT PRIVILEGE TO HAVE SEEN AND HELD SUCH A HISTORICALLY IMPORTANT PIECE OF HISTORY .
BELOW: ANDY JONES OF LITTLEDEAN JAIL WITH ACTRESS VIRGINIA McKENNA STAR OF THE FILM ” CARVE HER NAME WITH PRIDE” AT A RECENT GARDEN PARTY FUNDRAISING EVENT AT THE LITTLE STONE SHED ‘VIOLETTE SZABO MUSEUM ‘ IN WORMELOW, HEREFORDSHIRE.
BELOW: ANDY JONES OF LITTLEDEAN JAIL WITH VIOLETTE SZABO’S DAUGHTER TANIA AT A RECENT GARDEN PARTY FUNDRAISING EVENT AT THE LITTLE STONE SHED ‘VIOLETTE SZABO MUSEUM ‘ IN WORMELOW, HEREFORDSHIRE.
Below is a signed image of Tania Szabo wearing the medals she received posthumously for and behalf of her mother Violette now on display at the Crime Through Time Collection
VIOLETTE WITH DAUGHTER TANIA
TANIA SZABO WEARING HER MOTHERS MEDALS
SOE HEROINE VIOLETTE SZABO
TANIA SZABO
TANIA SZABO
TANIA SZABO WEARING HER MOTHERS MEDALS
SOE HEROINE VIOLETTE SZABO
SOE HEROINE VIOLETTE SZABO
SOE HEROINE VIOLETTE SZABO
SOE HEROINE VIOLETTE SZABO
VIRGINIA McKENNA SIGNED FILM STILL
ACTRESS VIRGINIA McKENNA WITH TANIA SZABO
SOE HEROINE VIOLETTE SZABO
VIRGINIA McKENNA SIGNED FILM STILL
SOE HEROINE VIOLETTE SZABO
CARVE HER NAME WITH PRIDE FILM POSTER
TANIA SZABO VISITS LITTLEDEAN JAIL
SOE HEROINE VIOLETTE SZABO
CARVE HER NAME WITH PRIDE FILM POSTER
VIRGINIA McKENNA SIGNED FILM STILL
CARVE HER NAME WITH PRIDE FILM POSTER
1ST DAY COVER SIGNED BY WW2 SOE HEROINE NANCY WAKE
VIRGINIA McKENNA SIGNED FILM STILLS
ANDY JONES WITH TANIA SZABO AT A RECENT VIOLETTE SZABO MEMORIAL EVENT AT THE VIOLETTE SZABO MUSEUM , WORMELOW IN 2014
ANDY JONES WITH VIRGINIA McKENNA AT A RECENT VIOLETTE SZABO MEMORIAL EVENT AT THE VIOLETTE SZABO MUSEUM , WORMELOW IN 2014
TANIA SZABO AT THE UNVEILING OF THE PLAQUE COMMEMORATING HER MOTHER AND OTHER SOE MEMBERS IN 2013
TANIA SZABO’S BOOK ON HER MOTHER
1ST DAY COVER SIGNED BY WW2 SOE HEROINE ODETTE HALLOWES ALONG WITH TANIA SZABO
HERE AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , LITTLEDEAN JAIL, FOREST OF DEAN, GLOUCESTERSHIRE, UK ….. WE FEATURE MANY OF THE UK’S SPECIAL FORCES INCLUDING PERSONAL TESTAMENTS TO MANY OF OUR HEROINES INCLUDING SOE VIOLETTE SZABO WHO WAS CAPTURED , TORTURED AND MURDERED BY THE NAZI’S AT RAVENSBRUCK CONCENTRATION CAMP IN 1945 (AGED 23)
Violette Szabo was born Violette Reine Elizabeth Bushell in Paris, on 26 June 1921, the second child of a French mother and an English taxi-driver father, who had met during World War I. The family moved to London, and she attended school in Brixton until the age of 14. At the start of World War II, she was working at the perfume counter of Le Bon Marché, a department store in Brixton.
Violette met Étienne Szabo, a French officer of Hungarian descent, at the Bastille Day parade in London in 1940. They married on 21 August 1940 after a whirlwind 42-day romance. Violette was 19, Étienne was 31. Shortly after the birth of their only child, Tania, Étienne died from chest wounds at the Battle of El Alamein in October 1942. He had never seen his daughter. It was Étienne’s death that made Violette, having already joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service in 1941, decide to offer her services to the British Special Operations Executive (SOE).
Below shows Violette with her husband Etienne
After an assessment for fluency in French and a series of interviews, she was inducted into SOE. She received intensive training in night and daylight navigation; escape and evasion, both Allied and German weapons, unarmed combat, demolitions, explosives, communications and cryptography. In his book “Das Reich” Max Hastings comments that Szabo was adored by the men and women of SOE both for her courage and endless infectious cockney laughter. An ankle injury during parachute training delayed her deployment until 5 April 1944, when she parachuted into German-occupied France, near Cherbourg.
Under the code name “Louise”, which also happened to be her nickname, she and SOE colleague Philippe Liewer reorganised a Resistance network that had been broken up by the Germans. She led the new group in sabotaging road and railway bridges. Her wireless reports to SOE headquarters on the local factories producing war materials for the Germans were important in establishing Allied bombing targets. She returned to England by Lysander on 30 April 1944, landing at RAF Tempsford, after an intense but successful first mission.
Second mission
She flew to the outskirts of Limoges, France on 7 June 1944 (immediately following D-Day) from RAF Tempsford. Immediately on arrival, she coordinated the activities of the local Maquis (led by Jacques Dufour) in sabotaging communication lines during German attempts to stem the Normandy landings.
She was a passenger in a car that raised the suspicions of German troops at an unexpected roadblock that had been set up to find SturmbannführerHelmut Kämpfe of the Das Reich Division, who had been captured by the local resistance.
A brief gun battle ensued. Her Maquis minders escaped unscathed in the confusion. However, Szabo was captured when she ran out of ammunition, around midday on 10 June 1944, near Salon-la-Tour. Her captors were most likely from the 1st Battalion of 3rd SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment Deutschland (Das Reich Division). In R.J. Minney’s biography she is described as putting up fierce resistance with her Sten gun, although German documents of the incident record no German injuries or casualties. A recent biography of Vera Atkins, the intelligence officer for the French section of SOE, notes that that there was a great deal of confusion about what happened to Szabo—the story was revised four times—and states that the Sten gun incident “was probably a fabrication.”
Interrogation, torture and execution
She was transferred to the custody of the Sicherheitsdienst(SD) (SS Security Service) in Limoges, where she was interrogated for four days. From there, she was moved to Fresnes Prison in Paris and brought to Gestapo headquarters at 84 Avenue Foch for interrogation and torture. In August 1944, she was moved to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where over 92,000 women died. Although she endured hard labour and malnutrition, she managed to help save the life of Belgian resistance courier Hortense Clews.
Violette Szabo was executed, aged 23, by SS firing squad on or about 5 February 1945. Her body was cremated in the camp’s crematorium.
Three other women members of the SOE were also executed at Ravensbrück: Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort, and Lilian Rolfe. Of the SOE’s 55 female agents, thirteen were killed in action or died in Nazi concentration camps
BELOW ARE SOME BRIEF IMAGES OF AN ORIGINAL WW2 “F.A.N.Y” (FIRST AID NURSING YEOMANRY ) – WTS (WOMENS TRANSPORT SERVICES ) UNIFORM COMPLETE WITH ITS ORIGINAL WW2 ISSUE GAS MASK … AS WOULD HAVE ALSO BEEN WORN BY VIOLETTE SZABO DURING HER DUTIES PRIOR TO HAVING BEEN SECONDED TO THE SOE (SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE ) AS A BRITISH SECRET AGENT .
A VERY SCARCE AND HIGHLY SOUGHT AFTER HISTORIC ITEM IN ITS OWN RIGHT DISPLAYED HERE TOO IN AND AMONGST OTHER WW2 F.A.N.Y , ATS, WTS ETC ETC WOMEN IN WARTIME MOVEMENTS
BELOW AND ABOVE
World War 2 FANY ( First Aid Nursing Yeomany) uniform on mannequin displayed along with an original WW2 anti aircraft binocular gunsight on tripod now on display to the public here at the Crime Through Time Collection at Littledean jail, Gloucestershire
below… Film poster advertising “CARVE HER NAME WITH PRIDE” based on the heroine -Violette Szabo… starring Virginia McKenna and Paul Scofield
ORIGINAL 1958 CINEMA RELEASE POSTER
George Cross posthumously awarded to Violette Szabo’s daughter Tania
Croix de Guerre posthumously awarded to Violette Szabo’s daughter Tania
Tania Szabó is Violette’s daughter, although, as she says, she is of an age to be her mother’s grandmother by now. On her ninth birthday, in June 1951, she sailed forAustralia with her grandparents, Charles and Reine Bushell, on the £10 ticket. After college in Armidale, NSW and a stint as a psychiatric nurse in Sydney, she returned to England in the New Year of 1963. It was so very cold.
After working as a secretary, croupier, office administrator in various companies, completing a course in computing in the late 60s (cards with holes and no electronics) and spending a year in Beverley Hills studying Spanish while continuing her studies in the humanities, she returned to England and finally moved to Jersey in April 1976 where she opened her Language Studio with the help of Paul Emile Francis Holley, a friend of Violette’s. He also trained her in the recognition of German armaments and uniforms as he was a British Intelligence Officer during WWII.
Tania is an author as well as a professional multilingual translator and private tutor. The author, Avv. Mario Zacchi of Florence and author of Il Mastino Napoletano – the Italian Mastiff, the Standard and History of this amazing dog commissioned Tania to translate it. It is now lodged with the British Library. Zacchi’s writing in his native Italian immediately draws you into the mystery, fierce loyalty and funny antics of this Cerebus of dogs and it was a sheer delight for Tania to translate into English bringing his love and erudition of this remarkable breed to an anglophone readership.
On 29 April 2009, Paul Holley, the Intelligence officer, who had trained Violette in German armaments and uniforms, and was Tania’s friend and mentor, died one month into his 90th year. She continues to miss his friendship and invaluable support. She has closed her Language Studio and now retired could no longer afford to live in Jersey and now lives in a lovely 17th century cottage just outside Builth Wells in Wales. She is still sorting out all the books and archives before completing her paperback version of Young Brave and Beautiful and getting back down to writing Etienne’s amazing life’s story.
Violette’s only daughter Tania Szabo pictured at her home in Jersey i 2007
Here is a brief look at some of the privately owned items from former punk rocker from late 1976 through to the early 80’s , Andy Jones of The Crime Through Time Collection , Littledean Jail .
ORIGINAL CLASH TOUR POSTER
Andy was also bass player in former Gloucester punk band – Demob and then later in the 1980’s Goth Rock Band “Kiss The Blade” see the video below …. (I am the then slim bass playing geezer in sunglasses and blond hair … still a punk rocker in 1986 )
All the punk clothing items were either worn , or personally acquired by him during this period, as was all the other punk memorabilia now featured here on display .
Andy says …. “Yes both the Quadrophenia and punk rock exhibitions here on display at Littledean Jail are of a very selfish interest… In youth culture terms it was in many ways a controversial, ” sex , drugs and rock and roll” fuelled era . Whilst I never took drugs …. it was a brilliant period … AND I LOVED IT. Loads of great multi-cultural music , fashion , beautiful ladies and I travelled each and every highway from 1976 (when I was mere 14 ) through to the early eighties, jumping trains to travel to watch an endless array of punk rock bands, then having missed the last trains back to Gloucester … sleeping in cardboard boxes with tramps at London Paddington Station on endless occasions (no cardboard boxes or tramps on the platforms nowadays ) . My personal favourite punk bands were… The Sex Pistols, The Clash , UK Subs , The Damned , Siouxsie and The Banshees, 999 to name but a few. I was also a regular at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s “Seditionaries” and their rival cloth shop “Boy” … as well as Camden Market etc . The plain truth is that I WAS THERE …
So for anybody who may well wish to criticize or rubbish these personal collections, I would wish to make it clear that I was never interested in acquiring such items for monetary or investment gains and neither am I a dealer to sell items on …
As is very apparent if and when you visit Littledean Jail …I am simply an obsessive hoarder and so glad I saved these and a great many other items of interest …. hopefully for other peoples enjoyment too. LONG LIVE PUNK ” .
THE FIRST SEX PISTOLS T SHIRT ( SO SAY ????) ….
A VERY RARE AND AT THE TIME A VERY CONTROVERSIAL ….1976 MALCOLM MCLAREN DESIGNED “SMOKING BOYS” T SHIRT WHICH FEATURES AN IMAGE TAKEN BY MCLAREN FROM A PAEDOPHILE MAGAZINE ALSO THIS T SHIRT IS COMPLETE WITH IT’S UNTOUCHED ,INNER ORIGINAL SEX SHOP LABEL
WHILST NOT 100% SURE , AND I MAY BE WRONG ???? (PLEASE DO CORRECT ME IF I AM WRONG ???) AS FAR AS I AM AWARE , THIS IS BELIEVED TO BE ONE OF MALCOM MCLAEN’S FIRST 50 SCREEN PRINTED RUNS OF HIS FIRST SEX PISTOLS T SHIRT IN 1976 KNOWN AS THE SMOKING BOYS T SHIRT . SEEN HERE WITH IT’S ORIGINAL SEX LABEL (SEE BELOW) . PRINTED BY THEN SEX PISTOLS BASSIST GLEN MATLOCK USING THE COLLEGE PRINTING EQUIPMENT WHILST HE WAS STUDYING AT CENTRAL ST MARTINS ART SCHOOL IN LONDON .
IF I AM WRONG IT WAS MANUFACTURED DURING THE NEXT PRINT RUN IN THE SAME YEAR SHORTLY AFTER THE FIRST PRINT RUN …1976
CLOSE-UP OF WELL WORN AND NOW WRINKLED SEX ORIGINAL INNER LABEL
BELOW: ORIGINAL 1977 … AT THE TIME (AND STILL IS ) VERY CONTROVERSIAL SEDITIONARIES T-SHIRT . ALSO SEEN HERE WORN BY ADAM ANT ( SEEN HERE WITH SIOUXSIE BACK IN 1977) AND ALSO AMERICAN PUNK ROCK SINGER JOAN JETT .
BELOW ….. CAN’T REMEMBER DATE OF PURCHASE OF THIS ORIGINAL DESTROY MUSLIN SHIRT FROM MALCOM MCLAREN AND VIVIENNE WESTWOOD’S SHOP “SEDITIONARIES” … SOMEWHERE BETWEEN 1977 AND 1979 ?? BUT DEFINATELY AN ORIGINAL ONE .
HERE BELOW IS ANOTHER VERSION OF AN ORIGINAL 1980 DESTROY MUSLIN SHIRT FOR WHICH I BELIEVE WAS AT THE TIME UNDER A SEPERATE LICENCE WITH BOY CLOTHING AS WAS AGREED WITH VIVIENNE WESTWOOD WHILST MALCOM MCLAREN WAS AWAY IN THE USA ?? … PURCHASED FROM BOY CLOTHING SHOP WITH THE UNDERGARMENT AS CAN ALSO BE SEEN HERE … ALONG WITH THE BOY CLOTHING LABEL ON THE COLLAR .
BELOW IS AN ARRAY OF VARIOUS LATE 1970’S TO EARLY 1980’S ORIGINAL PUNK ROCK SHIRTS FROM BOTH MALCOM MCLAREN & VIVIENNE WESTWOOD’S SEDITIONARIES AND THEIR THEN RIVALS BOY CLOTHING BOUTIQUE SHOPS BOTH ON THE KINGS ROAD , CHELSEA. NOW ON DISPLAY AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION, LITTLEDEAN JAIL , ALONG WITH A GALLERY OF VARIOUS OTHER PUNK ROCK MEMORABILIA INCLUDING ORIGINAL POSTERS , SIGNED MEMORABILIA…. ETC ETC ALL ON DISPLAY HERE AT THE JAIL
ALL IN ALL A GREAT YOUTH CULTURE PERIOD FOR WHICH ANDY WAS GLAD TO HAVE BEEN A PART OF ….. HENCE THIS SELFISH COLLECTION BEING HERE ON DISPLAY FROM WHAT WAS AT THE TIME A BIT OF A CONTROVERSIAL PERIOD IN IT’S OWN RIGHT TOO .
Rear view of parachute harness on original Malcom McLaren and Vivienne Westwood black labelled Punk Rock “Parachute” shirt circa 1977
Close up of button on original Malcom McLaren and Vivienne Westwood black labelled Punk Rock “Parachute” shirt circa 1977
Original Malcom McLaren and Vivienne Westwood black labelled Punk Rock “Parachute” shirt circa 1977
Original Malcom McLaren and Vivienne Westwood black labelled Punk Rock “Parachute” shirt circa 1977
Original Seditionaries product label on Malcom McLaren and Vivienne Westwood black labelled Punk Rock “Parachute” shirt circa 1977
Face on view of parachute harness on original Malcom McLaren and Vivienne Westwood black labelled Punk Rock “Parachute” shirt circa 1977
HERE BELOW IS AGAIN ONLY A BRIEF SLIDESHOW GALLERY OF A FEW OF THE PUNK ROCK MEMORABILIA ITEMS HERE ON DISPLAY AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , LITTLEDEAN JAIL . TO INCLUDE ORIGINAL POSTERS OF ALL SIZES , FLYERS , SIGNED ALBUMS AND PHOTO’S ETC, SID VICIOUS’S WELL WORN BOOTS AND WRIST CHAIN ETC, ETC
PLEASE NOTE … DUE TO SIZE AND QUANTITY OF IMAGES IN THE SLIDESHOW , THERE MAY BE A SLIGHT DELAY IN LOADING THEM … SO PLEASE BE PATIENT
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Original UK Subs “Warhead” single poster
BELOW…. A SEEMINGLY ORIGINAL AND WELL AGED VINTAGE SEX PISTOLS POSTER SIZED 25.5 INCHES HEIGHT X 14 INCHES WIDTH?? … NOT REALLY SURE OF IT’S ORIGINS. WAS THIS A ONE-OFF BESPOKE POSTER, OR WAS IT A LATER DESIGN TO POSSIBLY INCORPERATE THE LATER USED JAMIE REID SWASTIKA SYMBOL DESIGN ON THE PISTOLS MEMORABILIA ?? I HONESTLY DO NOT KNOW BUT IT’S STILL AN INTERESTING POSTER DESIGN . ????
A BIT CONFUSING FOR ME TOO … AS THE SWASTIKA SYMBOL TO THE BEST OF MY KNOWLEDGE WAS NOT PART OF THE EARLY SEX PISTOLS SYMBOLISM AT THE TIME OF THE RELEASE OF ANARCHY IN THE UK …. CAN’T SEE ANY PURPOSE OF ANYONE WISHING TO FAKE OR DEFACE THIS POSTER EITHER … SO ALL IN ALL A BIT OF AN ODDITY ???.
IF ANYBODY CAN SHED ANY LIGHT ON THE ORIGINS OF THIS POSTER PLEASE DO CONTACT US AT THE JAIL BY PRIVATE MESSAGE
Original CRASS poster
Original signed single by Gene October frontman of great early days punk rock band CHELSEA
ABOVE: FRONT COVER LINDA’S SOON TO BE RELEASED NEW BOOK, PUBLISHED AND RELEASED BY MIRROR BOOKS ON THURSDAY 11 JULY. AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER THROUGH AMAZON & WILL BE AVAILABLE THROUGH ALL GOOD BOOKSHOPS THEREAFTER .
ABOVE AND BELOW : Here’s a couple of pics of Linda Calvey during one of her private visits to view her exhibition here on display at Littledean Jail .
BELOW: ORIGINAL OIL PAINTING BY GLOUCESTERSHIRE ARTIST PAUL BRIDGMAN DEPICTICING INFAMOUS “GODMOTHER OF BRITISH CRIME ” aka THE BLACK WIDOW, LINDA CALVEY , ALONG WITH HER FORMER HUSBANDS MICKEY CALVEY AND DANNY REECE, ALSO FORMER LOVER RONNIE COOK . THIS PAINTING IS ON DISPLAY IN AND AMONGST THE DARK TOURIST ART GALLERY HERE AT THE JAIL.
BELOW: SIGNED COLLAGE PRINT OF LINDA CALVEY, BLACK WIDOW, PERSONALLY SIGNED BY HER. THIS BEING A PRINT OF THE ORIGINAL PAINTING BY PAUL BRIDGMAN , GLOUCESTERSHIRE ARTIST WHICH IS HERE ON DISPLAY AT THE JAIL .
ABOVE: ORIGINAL PERSONALLY SIGNED OIL PAINTING ENTITLED ‘TRANQUILITY’ BY LINDA CALVEY. THIS WAS PAINTED FOR LINDA’S MOTHER WHILST INCARCERATED IN HIGHPOINT PRISON, SUFFOLK IN NOVEMBER 2002 AS CAN BE SEEN ABOVE.
Above : “DEADLY WOMEN” … Here is an intriguing short American produced documentary based on the UK’s infamous Linda Calvey- “The Black Widow”
ABOVE: A PERSONALISED HANDWRITTED AND SIGNED DOODLE SKETCH FROM LINDA INCLUDING HER PRISON NUMBER, HERE ON DISPLAY AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL.
Linda Calvey is a Londoner with stunning good looks and an attraction to gangsters . Her first husband, gangster Mickey Calvey, died in a Police shoot out after a botched armed robbery, and her second husband, Ronnie Cook, received a 16-year prison sentence for armed robbery in 1981.
While Ronnie is incarcerated, Linda fritters away his stash. Fearing her lover’s reaction on his release, she pays a hitman £10,000 to take care of Cook, but “allegedly ” ends up firing the fatal shot herself ???
Linda Calvey has always vehemently denied this claim !!!!!
ABOVE: A RATHER STRIKINGLY PERSONALLY HAND SIGNED SEXY IMAGE OF LINDA CALVEY. PICTURED HERE IN HER PRIME AGED 22 AND PRIOR TO HER ARREST . WOW WHAT A STUNNER !!!(AND STILL A REAL STUNNER TODAY )
ABOVE & BELOW … LINDA CALVEY -THE BLACK WIDOW LEAVES COURT IN A HIGH SECURITY POLICE VEHICLE DURING HER TRIAL AT THE OLD BAILEY , LONDON IN NOVEMBER 1991 . SHE SERVED 18 YEARS IN VARIOUS WOMEN’S HIGH SECURITY PRISONS FOR A MURDER THAT SHE HAS CONSISTENTLY DENIED COMMITTING
SHE WAS OFFERED A LESSER PRISON SENTENCE BY THE HOME OFFICE IF SHE CONFESSED TO THE MURDER AFTER BEING GIVEN A LIFE SENTENCE. .SHE SUBSEQUENTLY REFUSED THIS OFFER OUTRIGHT AS SHE HAS ALWAYS MAINTAINED HER INNOCENCE AND THAT SHE HAD BEEN SET-UP ….. HENCE AS A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE SERVED THE FULL 18 YEAR PRISON TERM .
Original painting by Gloucestershire Artist Paul Bridgman for and on display here at Littledean Jail
ABOVE: LINDA’S WEDDING DAY WORN BASQUE, WHICH SHE WORE WHEN MARRYING CO-ACCUSED MURDERER – DANNY REECE. THE WEDDING TOOK PLACE AT HMP DURHAM, AS CONFIRMED WITH HER HANDWRITTEN LETTER ABOVE, WHICH IS ON DISPLAY HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL
BELOW: TABLOID SENSATIONALISM…. THE SUNDAY PEOPLE IN DECEMBER 2006 AIM TO RIDICULE LINDA CALVEY WHILST SHE IS STILL IN PRISON .
BELOW : LINDA CALVEY (THE BLACK WIDOW) …BRITAIN’S NOTORIOUS FORMER FEMALE ARMED ROBBER, GANGSTER AND ALLEGED MURDERESS….WHO SERVED OVER 20 YEARS IN PRISON (18 YEARS OF THESE FOR A MURDER SHE STILL VEHEMENTLY CLAIMS TO THIS DAY SHE DID NOT COMMIT ) ….. SEEN FILMED HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL HAVING A HEAD AND HANDS CAST FOR DISPLAY ( FOR THE LINDA CALVEY – BLACK WIDOW EXHIBITION ) NOW ON PERMANENT DISPLAY AS PART OF THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION .
THESE CASTS HAVING BEEN MADE BY NICK REYNOLDS , SON OF THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY MASTERMIND – BRUCE REYNOLDS
BELOW: LINDA CALVEY WITH ANDY JONES OF THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION PRESENTING A HANDMADE CUSHION ACQUIRED FROM NOTORIOUS BRITISH SERIAL KILLER ROSE WEST WHILST IMPRISONED TOGETHER AT HMP DURHAM IN 1994 …. NOW ON DISPLAY AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL ALONG WITH VARIOUS OTHER MEMORABILIA ITEMS KINDLY DONATED FOR HISTORICAL DISPLAY AT THE JAIL .
ABOVE & BELOW : IMAGES OF BOTH SIDES OF THIS CARD AS PERSONALLY DISCRIBED BY LINDA HERSELF IN THE HANDWRITEN AND SIGNED PIECE BELOW
ABOVE AND BELOW : A CHRISTMAS CARD FROM MYRA HINDLEY TO LINDA CALVEY WHILST THEY WERE BOTH IN PRISON, ALONG WITH A HANDWRITTEN AND SIGNED LETTER FROM LINDA CONFIRMING THE ABOVE.
BELOW: A FEW IMAGES TAKEN IN FEBRUARY 2018, OF A RECENT CATCH UP WITH LINDA CALVEY AND ANDY JONES OF THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION DURING A PRIVATE VISIT TO HER HOME. WHEREUPON SHE ALSO KINDLY ADDED SOME PERSONALLY HAND SIGNED ANNOTATIONS TO VARIOUS EXHIBIT FEATURES FOR DISPLAY IN HER EXHIBITION AREA HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL .
NEWSPAPER FEATURE ON LINDA CALVEY’S MARRIAGE TO GEORGE CEASAR IN 2009 .
SHE VEHEMENTLY DENIES KILLING HER FORMER LOVER RON COOK WHO WAS SHOT AT POINT BLANK RANGE WITH A SHOTGUN AT THE HOME OF LINDA CALVEY, THE CRIME FOR WHICH SHE SERVED A TOTAL OF 18 YEARS IN PRISON .
SHE CLAIMS SHE WAS AFFORDED THE OPPORTUNITY BY THE HOME OFFICE AUTHORITIES TO SERVE A LESSER SENTENCE OF 7 YEARS IF SHE CONFESSED TO THIS CRIME .
SHE REFUSED THIS OFFER CLAIMING THAT…. WHY SHOULD SHE CONFESS TO A CRIME SHE NEVER COMMITTED?
INSTEAD THE HOME OFFICE INCREASED THE TARIFF ON TWO OCCASIONS TO A TOTAL 18 YEAR LIFE SENTENCE WHICH SHE SERVED IN FULL AS A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE .
COME VISIT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION AND SEE FOR YOURSELVES WHAT LINDA CALVEY HAS TO SAY IN HER OWN WORDS …
Linda Calvey
Linda Calvey is a female murderer and armed robber jailed for killing her lover Ronnie Cook in 1990. She was known as the “Black Widow” because all of her lovers ended up either dead or in prison.[1]
Previous criminal career
Calvey began her criminal career as a lookout, later becoming a getaway driver and eventually wielding guns herself during robberies.[2]
Murder of Cook
She paid a hitmanDaniel Reece £10,000 to kill Cook. However he lost his nerve at the last minute and Calvey picked up the gun herself shooting the victim at point blank range whilst he kneeled in front of her.[3]
At the time of her release Calvey was Britain‘s longest serving female prisoner. She spent 18 and a half years in prison for the murder of Cook and had also previously served three and a half years for an earlier robbery.[4]
In 2002 a book by Kate Kray detailing Calvey’s life and crimes was published
BELOW ARE A NUMBER OF IMAGES OF SOME OF THE PERSONAL EXHIBIT ITEMS BELONGING TO LINDA CALVEY ON DISPLAY HERE AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , IMAGES OF LINDA PICTURED HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL AND AT VARIOUS EVENTS ETC ETC
Black Widow in freedom bid
ABOVE: Linda Calvey pictured here during a private visit to The Crime Through Time Collection at Littledean Jail in the Forest of Dean , Gloucestershire.
A woman known as the Black Widow who was jailed for life for shooting dead her lover at point-blank range launched a new High Court bid for freedom today.
Lawyers for Linda Calvey asked a judge for permission to challenge Home Secretary David Blunkett’s failure to refer her case to the Parole Board.
Her counsel Alan Newman QC accused Mr Blunkett of acting unlawfully and in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Calvey, 53, who was in court to hear her case argued, has served 12 years of her life sentence and is currently held at Highpoint Prison, Suffolk.
She was convicted in November 1991 of the murder of Ronald Cook.
At her Old Bailey trial the jury was told that Calvey originally hired a hit man, Daniel Reece, for £10,000 to carry out the murder in November 1990.
But he had lost his nerve at the last minute, and she forced Cook to kneel in front of her before carrying out the killing.
Both Calvey and Reece, who was also jailed for life, denied murdering Cook at Calvey’s home in Plaistow, east London, in November 1990.
The trial jury was told Calvey was nicknamed the Black Widow because of her habit of dressing in black after her husband Mickey was shot dead by police in 1978 as he was carrying out an armed robbery.
Today Mr Newman told the court that the trial judge set the minimum period she must serve for retribution and deterrence at seven years – but the then Home Secretary more than doubled the tariff to 15 years in 1993. The tariff was reviewed and reset in 1998.
In November last year, the House of Lords ruled in the case of Anderson that it was incompatible with human rights laws for the Home Secretary to set tariffs for mandatory lifers.
Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights required minimum periods in custody to be set by “an independent and impartial tribunal”.
Following that ruling Ms Calvey asked the Home Office to refer her case to the Parole Board as a matter of urgency, but her request was turned down.
Mr Newman told Mr Justice Jackson, sitting in London, that the Home Secretary’s failure to do so was unreasonable and breached Article 5 of the convention, which guaranteed a prisoner’s right to have their case reassessed if the basis for his or her detention changed.
He said it was “irrelevant” that the Lord Chief Justice had also concluded that the tariff should be 15 years.
Mr Blunkett had taken the view that Ms Calvey would have to wait until she could take advantage of new legislation passing through Parliament dealing with the position of lifers’ tariffs.
But by then she would probably have served the full 15-year tariff, and this would amount to a “cruel punishment” contrary to the 1688 Bill of Rights, said Mr Newman.
He told the judge that the case could affect many other murderers serving life sentences.
Seeking leave to apply for judicial review, he said: “The present application raises important and difficult points of law. Whatever may be the eventual outcome, even if at the end of the day the Secretary of State’s view prevails, this case clearly should be allowed to proceed to a full hearing.”
Would you marry the black widow? Ex-gangster Linda Calvey finds a new fiance
She’s a notorious gangster’s moll and every man who’s fallen for her has ended up dead or in jail. Now she’s finished a 28-year stretch for murder – and found a rich fiance. Has he got more money than sense?
Potentially lethal things, cars. Linda Calvey had a close call with an exploding spark
plug the other day. It left her a little shaken.
‘Afterwards, the guy in the garage told me that I was very lucky the engine did not go up, because I’d have been a gonner,’ she explains, breezy as you like.
Taking a chance: Linda Calvey and husband-to-be George Ceasar, who trusts her implicitly
‘I was telling my friend and she said: “Oh goodness, Linda. It could have been even worse. What if George had been driving and he’d been blown to pieces? You’d have been back inside in no time.” She was right, too. I can see the headlines now: The Black Widow Strikes Again.’
For some reason she seems to find this funny. Even more curiously, George, the man she will marry next year, is rocking with laughter too, tears collecting in his eyes.
Why the hilarity? Surely no sane person — or, at the very least, no lawabiding person — would regard it as funny to be so closely associated with Linda Calvey, behind the wheel or not.
Linda is the stuff of legends
For Linda is the stuff of legends — East End gangster legends, mostly.
In notoriety terms, she is up there with the Krays (indeed, Reggie Kray once proposed to her, which kind of says it all). So did ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser. In glamour terms, she is in a league of her own.
For most of her adult life she has gone by the name of the Black Widow, dubbed so ever since one police officer with whom she’d had dealings pondered the fact that ‘every man she has ever been involved with is either in prison or dead’.
When Myra Hindley died a few years back, Linda — her prison hairdresser, oddly enough — assumed the title of the longest-serving female prisoner in the country.
That 18-year stint was for blasting a former lover to death with a shotgun. Another lover was her co-defendant in the case, and was sent down, too.
They later married behind bars, although — as is so often the way with Linda — it didn’t last.
Her first husband Micky (the one who taught her to be a career criminal — armed robbery to be precise) met a violent end, too, although this was at the hands of the police, who confronted him mid hold-up. That is quite some history to be trailing up the aisle with poor George, who seems like ever such a nice man.
George’s past is squeaky clean
They will marry in the spring with seven — count them! — bridesmaids in tow. Isn’t that a tad excessive for a 60-year-old grandmother getting hitched for the third time? Perhaps.
But then nothing about Linda Calvey was ever understated.
Four months ago, she was released from prison and into the arms of her new love, whom she met while she was on day release.
George Ceasar is a businessman and a part-time ski instructor, and ‘the farthest thing in the world from a gangster’, according to his future wife, who seems almost surprised by this. He drives a red Rolls-Royce (‘bought rather than nicked,’ she grins). His past is squeaky clean, literally. He used to run a successful bleach factory.
‘We were the first people to put bleach in bottles,’ he tells me, proudly.
He should really be the sort of man who would run a mile from Linda Calvey and the criminal underworld she epitomises.
So why, then, is he gazing adoringly at her and bemoaning the peculiarities of the British parole system, in the way that most men of his background would tut-tut at how you can never find a Post Office when you need one.
Gangster Reggie Kray and “Mad” Frankie Fraser both proposed to Linda Calvey
‘Can’t you poison someone in daylight hours?’
George simply cannot believe that his bride-to-be is still subject to ‘barmy’ parole conditions, which mean she cannot spend the night at his — or their, as it is now — home.
‘They have this mad idea that I am in some danger because of her,’ he says, appalled.
‘The prison officers took me aside when I went to visit her, saying: “Be careful.”
‘They implied she might try to kill me, which is nonsense. Even if it were true, do the authorities really think that they are protecting me by allowing her to be here with me only during the day. Can’t you poison someone in daylight hours?
‘It’s just ludicrous, from all angles. Does she seem dangerous to you?’
Erm, well, no. But then, didn’t Harold Shipman’s patients think he was a darling? I pitch up at George’s sprawling 13-room period house in the Kent countryside, hoping to talk to Britain’s most notorious female gangster, and am taken aback by what I find.
Her demeanour — warm, sparky, surprisingly vulnerable, endlessly entertaining — sets the tone for what will be a truly surreal interview.
‘It is the first time I’ve had a Christmas tree in 18 years. Every year I had Christmas
inside, all I could think of was: “I want my own tree.” George wanted to get an artificial one. I said: “No, George — it has to be real. That’s what I’ve dreamed of.” He said: “Well, whatever you want, my dear, you will have.”’
George was smitten from the start
While I try to get the interview under way — remember that the subject matter is murder, armed robbery and organised crime — they bicker about who will make the tea and whether they are going to see Barry Manilow that evening. She wants to go, but he doesn’t.
I feel as though I have stepped into a rather uneasy cross between a Guy Ritchie film and an Ealing comedy. So, how clever is the woman who has been billed as Britain’s most notorious female gangster? On this evidence, extremely. The other inmates called her Ma in prison, and you can see why.
She is attractive. A little brassy, yes — the lead character in Lynda La Plante’s Widows was apparently based on her — but not overly so. She is tactile, engaging and endearing.
George was smitten from the very start. They met in a Medway town when she was on day release from prison two years ago.
‘I was in a restaurant and it was very busy, so she and her friend shared the table with me. We got chatting, and I thought to myself: “Well, this is a lovely lady here”,’ says George.
‘She said she was on a day out. I said: “Oh, an outing?”
‘She said: “No, a day out from prison.”
‘I said: “Blimey. What did you do? It obviously wasn’t something that bad if you’re in an
open prison.”
‘She said: “The thing I went down for was bad, but the point is I didn’t do it. I am innocent.”’
‘She said she didn’t do it, and I believe her’
George — in his mid-Seventies — has had troubles of his own. He tells me that he, too, has been married twice and that his second wife ‘robbed him blind’.
‘You don’t have to be murdered by a woman to be done over by her,’ he says at one
point. He has grown-up children who he never sees. It sounds as though he was lonely when this captivating creature came into his life. Despite the horrific charge list, he brushes over the gangster stuff — even the bits Linda has admitted to.
‘Yes, she was a naughty girl, but haven’t you done anything wrong?’ he asks disingenuously.
He also claims she is the kindest person he has ever met. They decide between themselves that she’s a much nicer person than he is on the grounds that she once gave a cold stranger her own gloves, while such a thing would never occur to George.
Linda was the longest serving female prisoner in the country
It almost seems churlish to bring up more bloody matters and he sighs when I do so.
‘We’ve talked about it all,’ says George. ‘She’s told me what she did do and what she didn’t do. Yes, she did make mistakes, but she told me that on the big one — killing Ron — she didn’t do it, and I believe her. She was stitched up.
‘She has been completely honest with me. After we’d been out on our first date, I sat her down in the living room and said: “I want the truth. I don’t care whether you did
it or not, but I want to know the truth.” She swore she didn’t, and I believe her.’
Linda has always maintained that she did not kill Ronald Cook. She points out that had she professed some guilt she would have been out of jail years ago.
‘They kept me in because I refused to say I did it. But I’ve always held my hands up to what I’ve done. Armed robbery, yes. I’ve done terrible things, things so bad I can hardly believe it myself. But I did not kill Ron, and I will go to my grave saying it.’
‘Men close to me end up dead or in prison… it’s not my fault’
However, in November 1991, a jury decided that she did, and the evidence presented in court was as chilling as Linda’s current set-up is cosy.
Ron had been her lover for several years, but when he went to prison, she turned to several of his friends — also gangsters — for comfort.
Things got complicated, in the sexual and financial sense.
The court heard that, on Ron’s release, Linda was terrified that he would discover she had been unfaithful and had spent the heist money he had stashed away. She allegedly asked another lover, Daniel Reece, to kill him.
An agreement was put in place. Linda collected Ron from prison and drove him to the home they shared. Reece was waiting, but lost his nerve at the crucial moment, leaving Linda to take the shotgun off him and finish the task herself.
Surreally enough, we find ourselves in George’s kitchen when this horrific chapter is broached.
Both are standing as Linda tells her version, effectively re-enacting aspects of that day as she describes how she cowered in a corner as a gunman — the real killer, she says — fired at pointblank range.
The pair of them talk, quite matter-of-factly, about it as Linda puts the kettle on, saying that the Black Widow tag is quite unfair.
‘OK, men close to me came a cropper, but that’s because I associated with gangsters. They end up dead or in prison. That’s life. It’s not my fault.’
‘I liked the lifestyle’
What she fails to do, however, is convey any real sense of remorse — even for the fact that a man she professed to love died in such a manner. Cold-blooded? Barking mad? Or has she just been removed from law-abiding society for so long that she finds such complete moral detachment easy?
What’s interesting is that the only man she talks about with genuine affection is her first husband, Micky — shot dead by armed officers in a botched robbery.
‘I was from a respectable family, no hint of trouble there,’ she says of their meeting.
‘Micky was trouble, but oh so charming with it. Even my mother said: “I can see why you have fallen for him.” He worshipped me, my Micky. He gave me the world. I
didn’t know — honest I didn’t — that most of it was nicked.’
Micky robbed at gunpoint. His team’s jobs were mostly planned in their kitchen, with her making tea and sandwiches, listening in. Learning. She maintains that she got involved in the hard stuff only when Micky died.
‘I kind of just slid in. I started doing some of the driving, then getting more involved. I had children to feed. I liked the lifestyle. Yes. I wasn’t evil, though. I wasn’t.’
She even insists, after a moment’s hesitation, that the guns she carried weren’t even loaded.
Linda Calvey poses for a photo at a Holloway prison party
Tougher than the rest
She clearly hates the police and blames The Establishment, whatever that is, for the death of Micky. But she isn’t nearly as bitter as you might expect about her time in prison.
Again she talks dispassionately about how she survived: it seems to have boiled down to being tougher than all the rest, but never appearing to be tough. Black humour stalks every sentence.
‘When I went to Durham, I said I wouldn’t talk to anyone who had killed a child. The wardens said: “Well, you’ll not be talking to many people here then. They are all
murderers.” ’
She struck up a bizarre relationship with Myra Hindley. She says they weren’t friends, but they were close enough that Linda dyed Hindley’s hair regularly. She clearly
doesn’t put herself in the same criminal, morally deficient class, though.
‘Myra never regretted what she had done. I was often shocked by her. I remember when I was working in the prison library she came in and asked to order a book, but she wanted me to put it in the name of another girl, who never came into the library. I asked what book. It was The Devil And His Works. She got it, too.
George looks on — fascinated rather than horrified — as she chats away about somehow finding herself in the same prison wing as one of the most notorious female killers of our time.
‘I missed seeing my grandchildren grow up’
Is there remorse on her part? Yes, undoubtedly so — although mostly for herself and her loved ones.
‘I did not kill Ron and should not have done that sentence, but I know full well that it was my lifestyle that put me in prison for that murder, and that is a terrible thing to live with.
‘All my grandchildren were born when I was inside. I haven’t seen any of them grow up, and they never had a granny.
‘One day, one of them had to write in school about what they did at the weekend. My granddaughter wrote: “We went to see Granny and I got tickled by the policeman and
then we went swimming.” She meant she’d been frisked coming to the prison to see me. That floors you, you know.’
‘Mate, she saw you coming’
She seems close to tears. George pats her arm and talks about how they could put another Christmas tree in the hallway, if she wants.
I wonder if her realizes that most people will look at him and conclude that George, with his red Rolls-Royce, his big empty house and his ability to see the best in people and conclude: ‘Mate, she saw you coming.’
Have they considered a prenuptial agreement?
‘I’ve said I would sign one,’ Linda says sharply, but George shakes his head in distaste.
‘You can’t go into a marriage thinking like that. You have to trust people. Life’s a gamble, but if you lose trust, what have you got? So, she might kill me. Well, hell, I’ll
take the chance.’
Next spring — “If I last that long,” quips George — those wedding bells will ring. Linda is already thinking about flowers and cakes.
As I leave, she skips off to fetch me some of the cake decorations she learned to make in prison.
They are truly remarkable: tiny flowers, berries and leaves, made out of icing, but impossible to tell from the real thing, even up close.
The woman has a rare, impressive — and deeply disturbing — talent for leaving you wondering what is real and what is fake.
DAILY MAIL NEWS REPORT 6 SEPTEMBER 2016 ….
Has the curse of the Black Widow struck again? Notorious gangster’s moll Linda Calvey is single once more after third husband, 84, dies in Spanish hospital
George Ceasar passed away over the weekend, leaving Calvey a widow
Policeman once mused all Calvey’s husbands end up dead or behind bars
But Ceasar was confident his younger wife was not going to ‘bump him off’
Friend says Calvey is concerned people may not think she is a gold-digger
A killer known as the Black Widow is single again following the death of her third husband – but a close friend has insisted it has nothing to do with her infamous track record for losing spouses.
Linda Calvey – who was given her nickname after after one police officer mused ‘every man she has ever been involved with is either in prison or dead’ – is mourning the passing of Goerge Ceasar, 84, in a Spanish hospital this weekend.
The couple had been married five years and, despite Ceasar’s advanced age and ill-health, Calvey is said to be bracing herself for an adverse reaction from critics
PICTURED HERE ABOVE IS LINDA’S FIRST HUSBAND MICKY WHO WAS SHOT DEAD BY A POLICE MARKSMAN
The friend said: ‘She dreads imagining the wrong conclusions people will now leap to, especially as cynics warned when she married him it was for his money, which wasn’t true.
‘The reality is that despite being a tough old boy, George simply passed away from a combination of illness and old age. Linda had nothing to do with his death.
‘It’s sad but that’s life.’
Calvey’s first husband was shot dead by police marksman, and the second, who she divorced, is serving life for murder, see below
Above: Second husband : marrying Danny Reece in Durham’s prison chapel in 1995 . He is still serving a life sentence
She served 18-and-a-half years in jail – the longest time behind bars by any woman in Britain – after shooting a former lover dead.
But Ceasar, who was 17 years her senior, seemed unworried by her reputation.
At his and Calvey’s lavish white wedding five years ago, the law abiding tycoon joked of his willingness to take a chance on ‘Linda not bumping me off’.
However, it is said he recently told friends that ‘marrying Linda was the worst mistake of my life’ – while Calvey hinted at a possible divorce.
‘Unlike George she wasn’t prepared to sit around at home in God’s waiting room day in day out. She spent a third of her life locked-up and when she was released she needed to be out and about,’ said the friend.
Ceasar, who left the UK to live in Spain for health reasons last winter, had spent a month in hospital near Benidorm, Costa Blanca, surrounded by Calvey’s family and friends.
The former ski instructor – who was given the last rites by a priest last week – left instructions for his ashes to be scattered on his favourite mountainside in Switzerland.
But Calvey was not at his side when he passed away as she is still subject to parole orders including travel restrictions, lives in Basildon, Essex.
Calvey, who rejected marriage proposals from villains Reggie Kray and ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser between husbands, was immortalised in the hit TV series, apltly named ‘Widows,’ by Lynda La Plante but she scoffed at claims she had made £1million from her crimes.
Her first husband Micky was shot dead by the Flying Squad in a bungled raid on a London supermarket in 1978.
She later wed hitman Danny Reece, who helped her kill her then boyfriend, Ronnie Cook in 1990.
Then, while Reece was still in jail for the murder, she asked him for a divorce to wed George.
They had first met by chance in a crowded pub in Canterbury, Kent, close to the prison where she was being prepared for release.
Ceaser asked her if she was enjoying a shopping trip in town, to which she replied: ‘Yes, but I’m from the jail down the road.’
Above: Linda with her boyfriend Ronnie Cook who she was alleged to have shot dead in cold blood .
As their friendship blossomed, he regularly visited her at HMP East Sutton Park and she confessed to him hat while she had ‘done many bad things in life’ she was not a murderer – despite the Old Bailey’s damning verdict.
Calvey has always maintained she was innocent, but jurors heard how she snatched the shotgun from Reece after he had bungled Cook’s killing, and finished him off herself.
On jail visit before her release in 2008, a concerned prison officer took besotted George aside and warned him: ‘Beware, she kills her men, you know..’
But the friend said this week: ‘Okay, the men close to Linda always came croppers but that’s because she associates with gangsters. Yes, they end up dead or in jail but it isn’t her fault.’
The friend said that she was braced for a backlash over George’s death from doubters who claimed she had only wed him for his bank balance.
Calvey had spent so long in jail that when she left her cell, her State pension amounted to only 11p a week.
‘Despite their differences, Linda greatly respected George, who was the kindest man she had ever known. She will miss him but she was never a gold digger.
ABOVE: SID VICIOUS WITH HIS GIRLFRIEND NANCY SPUNGEN
BELOW IS THE POLICE MUGSHOT OF SID VICIOUS AT THE TIME OF ONE OF HIS MANY ARRESTS , BACK IN 1979, IN NEW YORK , USA.
BELOW … IMAGE OF SID VICIOUS WEARING THESE BIKER BOOTS WHILST PRANCING ABOUT IN PARIS WHILST FILMING A TV DOCUMENTARY .
ABOVE AND BELOW …SID VICIOUS PERFORMING SOLO WEARING THESE LEATHER BOOTS ON WHAT WAS HIS LAST LIVE PERFORMANCE AT MAX’S KANSAS CITY , NEW YORK ON SEPTEMBER 29 1978 … LATER TO BE REPORTED IN THE NME DATED 14 OCTOBER 1978
SID VICIOUS PERFORMING SOLO WEARING THESE LEATHER BOOTS ON WHAT WAS HIS LAST LIVE PERFORMANCES AT MAX’S KANSAS CITY , NEW YORK ON SEPTEMBER 29 1978 … LATER TO BE REPORTED IN THE NME DATED 14 OCTOBER 1978
SID VICIOUS PERFORMING SOLO WEARING THESE LEATHER BOOTS ON WHAT WAS HIS LAST LIVE PERFORMANCES AT MAX’S KANSAS CITY , NEW YORK ON SEPTEMBER 29 1978 … LATER TO BE REPORTED IN THE NME DATED 14 OCTOBER 1978
NME CUTTING DATED 14 OCTOBER 1978 OF SID VICIOUS WEARING THESE BOOTS DURING HIS SOLO GIG AT MAX’S KANSAS CITY GIG … A GREAT RARE CLOSE-UP OF SID’S BOOTS AS WAS LAST WORN BY SID SHORTLY BEFORE HIS ARREST FOR THE MURDER OF HIS GIRLFRIEND NANCY SPUNGEN ON 12 OCTOBER 1978
PURCHASE RECEIPT FOR THE BOOTS … BOUGHT BY ANDY JONES FOR THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION AT FRASERS AUCTION HOUSE , LONDON, BACK IN 2000
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CLOSE UP IMAGE OF SID VICIOUS BOOTS
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Above are several images of Sid Vicious most treasured leather biker boots , which he can also be seen wearing in this video of him prancing about in Paris , France . in his alleged suicide note ( many believe that this was actually written by his mother Anne Beverley ) he had requested that he be buried with his leather jacket and these leather biker boots … This was never the case as he was cremated and his ashes were secretly thrown over Nancy’s grave . His mother had subsequently kept his personal clothing last worn by him and later these boots were auctioned off in the year 2000 by Alan Parker through Frasers Auctions , London . Bought by Andy Jones of the Crime Through Time Collection and now on permanent display at Littledean Jail , Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, UK .
Original painting by Gloucestershire artist Paul Bridgman of Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen on display in and amongst our Punk Rock Collection here at Littledean Jail.
ABOVE IS SID’S ( NOW WELL AGED ) BIKE CHAIN BRACELET ALONG WITH IMAGE OF HIM WEARING THIS . ALSO HERE ON DISPLAY AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , LITTLEDEAN JAIL .
Sid Vicious, born John Simon Ritchie, later named John Beverley (10 May 1957 – 2 February 1979), was an English bass guitarist, drummer and vocalist, most famous as a member of the influential punk rock band the Sex Pistols, and notorious for his arrest for the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.
Vicious joined the Sex Pistols in early 1977, to replace Glen Matlock, who had fallen out of favour with the rest of the group. Due to intravenous drug use, Vicious was hospitalized with hepatitis during the recording of the band’s only studio album Never Mind the Bollocks. Accordingly, his bass is only partially featured on one song from the album. Vicious would later appear as a lead vocalist, performing three cover songs, on the soundtrack to The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, a largely fictionalized documentary about the Sex Pistols, produced by the group’s former manager Malcolm McLaren and directed by Julien Temple.
During the brief and chaotic ascendancy of the Sex Pistols, Vicious met eventual girlfriend and manager Nancy Spungen. Spungen and Vicious entered a destructive codependent relationship based on drug use. This culminated in Spungen’s death from an apparent stab wound while staying in New York City‘s Hotel Chelsea with Vicious. Under suspicion of having committed Spungen’s murder, Vicious was released on bail; he was later arrested again for assaulting Todd Smith, brother of Patti Smith, at a night club, and underwent drug rehabilitation on Rikers Island. In celebration of Vicious’ release from prison, his mother hosted a party for him at his girlfriend’s residence in Greenwich Village, which was attended notably by the Misfits bassist Jerry Only.
Vicious’ mother had been supplying him with drugs and paraphernalia since he was young, and assisted him in procuring heroin late that night. Vicious died in his sleep, having overdosed on the heroin his mother had procured.
Less than four weeks after Vicious’ death, the soundtrack album of The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle was released. Later that year, on 15 December, a compilation of live material recorded during his brief solo career was packaged and released as Sid Sings.
ABOVE IS AN EXCEPTIONALLY SCARCE AND RARE SIGNED BY BOTH PHOTOGRAPH OF SID AND NANCY TOGETHER .
BELOW IS THE ICONIC AND CONTROVERSIAL ALBUM COVER OF THE SEX PISTOLS …” NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS HERE’S THE SEX PISTOLS ” THIS BEING A FULLY SIGNED BY THE ORIGINAL PISTOLS LINE UP ON A RARE RUSSIAN VERSION OF THE ALBUM .
Nancy Spungen death and Sid Vicious arrest
Sid Vicious mugshot 9 December 1978
On the morning of 12 October 1978, Vicious claimed to have awoken from a drugged stupor to find Nancy Spungen dead on the bathroom floor of their room in the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan, New York. She had suffered a single stab wound to her abdomen and appeared to have bled to death. The knife used had been bought by Vicious on 42nd Street and was identical to a “007” flip-knife given to punk rock vocalist Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys by Dee Dee Ramone. According to Dee Dee’s wife at the time, Vera King Ramone, Vicious had bought the knife after seeing Stiv’s. Vicious was arrested and charged with her murder.[He said they had fought that night but gave conflicting versions of what happened next, saying, “I stabbed her, but I never meant to kill her”, then saying that he did not remember and at one point during the argument Spungen had fallen onto the knife
On 22 October, ten days after Spungen’s death, Vicious attempted suicide by slitting his wrist with a smashed light bulb and was subsequently hospitalized at Bellevue Hospital where he also tried killing himself by jumping from a window as well as shouting “I want to be with my Nancy” or other similar words, but was pulled back by hospital staff. In an interview he gave in November 1978, he said that Nancy’s death was “meant to happen” and that “Nancy always said she’d die before she was 21.” Near the end of the interview, he was asked if he was having fun. In reply, he asked the interviewer if he was kidding, adding that he would like to be “under the ground.” It was also at Bellevue that he met his lawyer James Merberg, who did everything he could to keep Vicious out of jail.
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SID VICIOUS SUICIDE BY OVERDOSE
On the evening of February 1, 1979, a small gathering to celebrate Vicious having made bail was held at the 63 Bank Street, New York apartment of his new girlfriend, Michelle Robinson. Sid and Michelle had started dating in November after Sid was released from Bellevue Hospital the previous October. Vicious was clean, having been on a detoxification methadone program during his time at Rikers Island. At the dinner gathering, however, Sid had some heroin delivered by his friend, English photographer Peter Kodick, against the wishes of Sid’s girlfriend and some other people at the party. It was also during this party that Sid had apparently spent the hours looking towards the future; he had plans for an album he was going to record to get his life and career on track should he be off the hook. Vicious overdosed at midnight, but everyone who was there that night worked together to get him up and walking around in order to revive him. At 3:00 am, Vicious and Michelle Robinson went to bed together. Vicious died in the night and was discovered dead by Anne and Michelle early the next morning.
In his first interview, appearing in the Daily Mirror‘s June 11, 1977 issue, Vicious said “I’ll probably die by the time I reach 25. But I’ll have lived the way I wanted to.”
A few days after Vicious’ cremation, his mother allegedly found a suicide note in the pocket of his jacket:
We had a death pact, and I have to keep my half of the bargain. Please bury me next to my baby. Bury me in my leather jacket, jeans and motorcycle boots Goodbye.
Since Spungen was Jewish, she was buried in a Jewish cemetery. As Vicious was not Jewish, he could not be buried with her. According to the book Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Jerry Only of the Misfits drove Anne and her sister, and two of Sid’s friends to the cemetery where Nancy was buried and Anne scattered Sid’s ashes over Nancy Spungen’s grave. In the same book, it is alleged that the cemetery didn’t want to be associated with Vicious and his inherent negative reputation, and it is speculated that this was of greater importance to them than the above stated reason he and Nancy weren’t able to be buried together.
TRUE CRIME, MURDERABILIA, MAIMERABILIA AND DISMALABILIA ….IT’S ALL HERE AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , LITTLEDEAN JAIL
HERE’S A BRIEF INSIGHT INTO THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF INFAMOUS 1966 COP KILLER HARRY ROBERTS . THE EXHIBITION INCLUDES PERSONAL HANDWRITTEN AND SIGNED CORRESPONDENCE FROM HIM , PERSONAL BELONGINGS AND PRISON WORN CLOTHING ….ALL OF WHICH CAN NOW BE SEEN ON PUBLIC DISPLAY AT THE JAIL IN AND AMONGST ALL THE TABLOID STORIES FROM OVER THE YEARS
ABOVE: Original painting of Harry Roberts by local Gloucestershire artist Paul Bridgman
SUNDAY PEOPLE STORY 24 APRIL 2016 ……NOT TOO SURE WHO TOOK THIS PHOTOGRAPH OR WHERE IT WAS TAKEN OF HARRY ROBERTS SIGNING PHOTOGRAPHS, OR WHO SOLD THE STORY TO THE PRESS ?? (CERTAINLY NOT US) . FOR THE RECORD , WHILST HARRY HAS PRIVATELY VISITED THE JAIL. THIS PHOTOGRAPH WAS DEFINITELY NOT TAKEN HERE , NEITHER DID HE ASK OR RECEIVE ANY PAYMENTS FOR THE PERSONAL ITEMS HE DONATED FOR PUBLIC DISPLAY ALL OF WHICH ARE FEATURED IN AND AMONGST THE TABLOID STORIES ABOUT HIM AND THE CRIMES HE COMMITTED .
ONE OF THE MANY AND CONTINUALLY UPDATED COLLAGE DISPLAYS FEATURING HARRY ROBERTS WHICH INCLUDES SENSATIONALISED TABLOID FEATURES …. ON DISPLAY HERE AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL
PLEASE NOTE THAT WE ARE A CRIME MUSEUM AND IN NO SHAPE OR FORM DO WE GLORIFY OR GLAMOURISE ALL THOSE THAT WE FEATURE HERE ON DISPLAY AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL.
FOR THE RECORD, NEITHER DO ANY OF THE ALLEGED OR CONVICTED PERSONS WHO HAVE PERSONALLY CONTRIBUTED DISPLAY ITEMS HERE ( NO MONIES OR PAYMENTS HAVE BEEN MADE BY US TO ANY OF THOSE WHO HAVE CONTRIBUTED MEMORABILIA FOR DISPLAY )
ALL CRIMES, SLEAZE, SCANDALS AND TRAGEDIES THAT WE FEATURE HERE ARE IN THE MAIN UNPLEASANT SUBJECT MATTERS TO COVER …. AND AS SUCH ARE NOT PRESENTED IN A PLEASANT WAY EITHER …
ABOVE : HANDWRITTEN AND SIGNED BY COP KILLER HARRY ROBERTS
AUTHENTIC HAND SIGNED BY HARRY ROBERTS
VICTIMS FROM LEFT PS CHRISTOPHER HEAD , DC DAVID WOMBWELL AND PC GEOFFREY FOX
Harry Maurice Roberts (born 21 July 1936) is an English career criminal who in 1966 instigated the Shepherd’s Bush murders , in which three police officers were shot dead. The killings happened after the plain-clothes officers approached the van in which Roberts and two other men were sitting in Braybrook Street, near Wormwood Scrubs prison in London. Roberts opened fire on the officers when he feared they would discover the firearms his gang were planning to use in an armed robbery. He shot dead two of the officers, while one of his accomplices fatally shot the third.
After Roberts had spent nearly 48 years in jail, in 2014 the Parole Board for England and Wales approved his release, at the age of 78. Having exceeded by far his minimum term of 30 years imprisonment, Roberts was one of the United Kingdom’s longest-serving prisoners, remaining in custody from 1966 until his 2014 release
PLEASE DO BE AWARE THAT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL DOES NOT IN ANY SHAPE OR FORM CONDONE THE HEINOUS MURDERS COMMITTED BY HARRY ROBERTS OR HIS ACCOMPLICES …..
WE ARE SIMPLY A CRIME MUSEUM AND AS SUCH TOUCH UPON AND FEATURE A VAST ARRAY OF HISTORIC AND PRESENT DAY TRUE CRIMES AND EVENTS THAT HAVE SHOOK THE WORLD IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER ….. HENCE PROVIDING A SAD , DISTURBING AND INSIGHT INTO THESE EVIL CRIMES .
ALL IN ALL FORMING A HOPEFULLY HISTORICAL ARCHIVE FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES TOO .
SO PLEASE , PLEASE , PLEASE … IF EASILY OFFENDED , DISTURBED OR OF A SENSITIVE NATURE, DO AVOID VISITING LITTLEDEAN JAIL .
BELOW IS A GALLERY OF VARIOUS PERSONALLY SIGNED PIECES AND PRISON WORN CLOTHING FROM HARRY ROBERTS ….
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CULTURAL IMPACT
Roberts’ name has been used for many years to antagonise the police, with chants like “Harry Roberts is our friend, is our friend, is our friend. Harry Roberts is our friend, he kills coppers. Let him out to kill some more, kill some more, kill some more, let him out to kill some more, Harry Roberts” as well as “He shot three down in Shepherd’s Bush, Shepherd’s Bush, Shepherd’s Bush. He shot three down in Shepherd’s Bush, our mate Harry” (to the tune of “London Bridge Is Falling Down“) which originated with groups of young people outside Shepherd’s Bush police station after Roberts had been arrested
There have been artistic representations of Roberts. The character of Billy Porter in the 2001 novel He Kills Coppers by Jake Arnott, and the 2008 TV adaptation, is based on Harry Roberts.
BELOW: SCENE OF THE TRIPLE COP KILLING
BELOW: HARRY ROBERTS INSPIRED TV SERIES AND BOOK … “HE KILLS COPPERS”
HARRY ROBERTS , POLICE KILLER RELEASED FROM PRISON ARTICLE IN DAILY MAIL ON 11 NOVEMBER 2014, ALSO SOME VIDEO ARCHIVE FOOTAGE … SEE HERE
HERE AT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , LITTLEDEAN JAIL WE TOUCH UPON AND FEATURE A NUMBER OF CONTROVERSIAL AND HISTORIC ASSASSINATIONS OF SOME OF THE ICONIC FIGUREHEADS THROUGHOUT TIME INCLUDING MARTIN LUTHER KING JR FEATURED HERE BELOW .
ABOVE AND BELOW : ORIGINAL OIL PAINTINGS BY OUR IN-HOUSE GLOUCESTERSHIRE ARTIST PAUL BRIDGMAN HERE ON DISPLAY AT THE JAIL …
THIS ALONG WITH A MASS OF TRUE CRIME , MURDERABILIA, AND OTHER ASSOCIATED MEMORABILIA IS ALL HERE ON DISPLAY AS PART OF A HOPEFULLY EDUCATIONAL INSIGHT DURING ONE’S VISIT TO THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION HERE AT THE JAIL
MARTIN LUTHER KING ASSASSINATED ON THE BALCONY OUTSIDE HIS ROOM AT THE LORRAINE MOTEL , MEMPHIS USA
MARTIN LUTHER KING IN HIS COFFIN SHORTLY BEFORE FUNERAL
MARTIN LUTHER KING POLICE MUGSHOT AT TIME OF A PREVIOUS ARREST
MARTIN LUTHER KING IN HIS COFFIN SHORTLY BEFORE FUNERAL
Born
Michael King, Jr.
January 15, 1929 Atlanta, Georgia, United States
Martin Luther King is probably the most famous person associated with the civil rights movement. King was active from the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 to 1956 until his murder in April 1968. To many Martin Luther King epitomised what the civil rights campaign was all about and he brought massive international cover to the movement.
Martin Luther King was born in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15th, 1929. The church was very much a part of his life as both his father and grandfather had been Baptist preachers. They themselves were involved in the civil rights movement. By the standards of the time, King came from a reasonably comfortable background and after graduating from college in 1948 he was not sure about which profession to join. He considered a career in medicine and law but rejected both and joined the Baptist Church. He studied at the Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. It was while studying here, that King learned about the non-violent methods used by Mahatma Gandhi against the British in India. King became convinced that such methods would be of great value to the civil rights movement.
After leaving Crozer, King got married to Coretta Scott. He became a Baptist pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was in Montgomery at the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He was appointed the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association which was created during the boycott and he became a prominent leader of the boycott – even driving some of the black community to work as the buses had been boycotted. King was arrested for starting a boycott (an arrestable offence as a result of an obscure law that was very rarely used) and fined $500 with $500 costs. His house was fire-bombed and others involved with MIA were also intimidated – but by the end of 1956, segregation had been lifted in Montgomery and bus integration had been introduced.
Another result of the boycott was the establishment of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). This organisation was committed to the use of non-violence and its motto was “Not one hair of one head of one person should be harmed.” Martin Luther King was elected its president. The importance of the SCLC’s involvement was simply because the churches that represented the black population in the South were potent organisations. Now that they had combined their power and influence, this power was multiplied.
Not long after the conclusion of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King wrote ‘Stride Towards Freedom’. This was read by some students at Greensboro, North Carolina and they started the student sit-in of the Woolworth’s lunch counter which had a policy of not serving African-Americans. Though the students were frequently abused and assaulted, they never fought back. The same tactic – a non-violent response to violence – was also used by the Freedom Riders in their campaign to desegregate transport.
Buoyed by this response, King toured the country making speeches and urging more and more people to get involved in the civil rights movement. King had also noted the economic power that the black community had – as was seen in Montgomery. He tried to get communities to use companies/individual shop keepers etc. who were sympathetic to the civil rights campaign but also to boycott those who were not.
King also placed great faith in the power of the vote. Many black Americans in the South still faced enormous problems doing something as basic as registering to vote such was the intimidation they faced. In Mississippi, 42% of the state’s population was black but only 2% registered to vote in the 1960 election. However, more and more did register throughout the South and in 1960, their support (70%) helped to give the Democrat J F Kennedy the narrowest of victories over Richard Nixon.
In 1963, Kennedy proposed his civil rights bill. To persuade Congress to support this bill, King, with other civil rights leaders, organised the legendary March on Washington. Baynard Rustin was given overall control of the march.
The march – officially the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom – was a major success. Held on August 28th, 1963, it attracted between 250,000 and 400,000 people. The final speaker was Martin Luther King and it was here that he made his legendary ‘I have a Dream’ speech which was heard throughout the world and did a huge amount to publicise the civil rights movement in America across the world. Congress did accept Kennedy’s civil rights bill and it became the 1964 Civil Rights Act – a far reaching act that many saw as a fitting tribute to the assassinated Kennedy.
King then moved on to a bill that would guarantee the voting rights of the black community in America. This led to the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
From this time on, King became more and more concerned with the poverty of those in America – both black and white. For whatever reason, King became more radical – or so it seemed to those who distrusted him. He used the word “revolution” in some of his speeches and he voiced his opposition to the Vietnam War. King also became involved in trade union issues.
King had clearly made enemies in his rise to fame. At the most basic level, the KKK did what they could to tarnish his name in the South. However, it was the work done by the FBI under the leadership of J Edgar Hoover that did most damage. Rooms where King stayed during his travels were bugged and recordings of his alleged sexual improprieties were made. The FBI released such details to the press.
On April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King was shot dead by an assassin. His death sparked off riots in many cities and 46 people were killed during these. In March 1969, James Earl Ray was found guilty of King’s murder and sentenced to 99 years in prison. Many years after starting his sentence, Ray claimed that he was innocent and that he could not have killed King.
THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY
The Black Panther Party, originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was a political organization founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, California.
ABOVE AND BELOW : ORIGINAL OIL PAINTINGS BY OUR IN-HOUSE GLOUCESTERSHIRE ARTIST PAUL BRIDGMAN HERE ON DISPLAY AT THE JAIL …
HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL AND THROUGH OUR BUSINESS FACEBOOK WE TRY AND PROVIDE A BALANCED AND HOPEFULLY HISTORICALLY EDUCATIONAL INTERACTIVE INSIGHT INTO WHAT MANY DEEM TO BE TABOO SUBJECT MATTERS .
PLEASE DO BE AWARE THAT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , IT’S OWNER , OR ANY OF IT’S STAFF HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL HAVE NO AFFILIATION, CONNECTION OR INVOLVEMENT WITH ANY EXTREMIST , POLITICALLY MOTIVATED OR ANY OTHER MOVEMENTS WHATSOEVER …… WE SIMPLY EXHIBIT AND TOUCH UPON A GREAT MANY POLITICALLY INCORRECT AND TABOO SUBJECT MATTERS THAT NO OTHER VISITOR ATTRACTIONS DARE COVER IN THE WAY WE CHOOSE TO DO HERE. …. “IT’S ALL HISTORY FOR GOODNESS SAKE”….EVEN IF ON OCCASIONS, SENSITIVE , THOUGHT PROVOKING SUBJECT MATTERS THAT INCITE STRONG DEBATE .
WIDELY REGARDED TO BE BLACK RACIST MOVIES MANY OF THESE NOW BANNED KU KLUX KLAN MOVIE POSTERS WERE DEEMED TO BE A GLORIFICATION TOOL AND USED FOR RECRUITMENT OF NEW MEMBERS INTO THIS WHITE EXTREMIST HOODED ROBE MOVEMENT
HERE BELOW IS A BRIEF PICTORIAL INSIGHT INTO SOME OF THE KKK MEMORBILIA ITEMS HERE ON DISPLAY AT THE JAIL
Movies about the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)
Ever since the release of legendary director D.W. Griffith’s controversial epic The Birth of the Nation (1915), based on Thomas F. Dixon Jr.’s (play and) novel titled The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan and featuring silent star Lillian Gish and future Oscar winner Donald Crisp (among others), classic Hollywood seems to have avoided taking on the KKK to expose its wicked acts or its members’ ignorant beliefs in any substantive way. Though there are several dramas which incorporate it – or at least Klan-like organizations – peripherally, classic films that feature any real detail about its beginnings, longevity, charters, or even insight into its leaders and/or their motivations etc. are surprisingly absent. Maybe the studios felt that real evil and its practitioners were being adequately portrayed in their gangster and war pictures, or perhaps there were fears that a movie about the Klan wouldn’t make good at the box office (particularly in the South)?
The Warner Bros.’s Storm Warning (1951) wasn’t very specific about the KKK’s prejudices, though much of the film’s dialogue (from prosecutor Ronald Reagan and the miscast Ginger Rogers character) does deliver the requisite indictment of the organization and its members: too scared to act without the courage of numbers or show their faces (hence the hoods). But the twist is that the Grand Dragon’s real motivation for leading the clandestine group is financial – there’s real money for him in the dues and the paraphernalia he sells to its members – such that he comes off as a corrupt union boss, or worse a capitalist;-) In the end, the leader’s true self centered (versus “all for one”) nature is revealed and the enraged and disillusioned group wises up and runs for cover from the law. Warner’s Black Legion (1937), starring Humphrey Bogart and featuring a plot plausible enough to earn Robert Lord his second Best Writing-Original Story AA nom, did a better job of exploring the roots of hatred and xenophobia that can seduce one to join such an organization. Since I wrote about MGM’s Stars in My Crown (1950) in my earlier Films about Faith essay, I’ll not include any more text about it here other than to mention that actor Ed Begley (Sr.) seemed to have excelled in portraying angry racist characters. The WB’s (and producer-director Mervyn LeRoy’s) overlong drama The FBI Story (1959), a veritable paean to the organization’s squeaky clean agents and the stout leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, warrants barely a mention except that one of its storylines includes the infiltration of the KKK by the film’s principal character, played by James Stewart.
Which brings me to The Mating Call (1928), produced by Howard Hughes and including titles written by future Oscar winner Herman J. Mankiewicz. The Klan-like organization in this one is named “The Order” and its purpose is to enforce a morality code within its community: black hooded individuals tie a wife beater to a cross and whip him for abusing his spouse. But the primary sin herein is adultery. Upon returning home a hero after serving his country during World War I, Leslie Hatton (Thomas Meighan) finds that his wartime marriage to Rose (Evelyn Brent, playing a sexually aggressive man-eater) was annulled by her parents. But even though he’s (somehow) not interested in having an affair with his former bride, Hatton’s accused of fooling around with Rose by her current husband Lon, a hypocrite that’s having extramarital relations of his own (with a judge’s daughter, no less). Lon uses The Order to threaten the war hero to leave his wife alone. Hatton’s solution to avoid future visits and further scrutiny from these local self-appointed moral authorities includes his going to Ellis Island and marrying a French girl (Renee Adoree, The Big Parade (1925)) whose parents want to immigrate to the United States. However, a subsequent scandal affecting the aforementioned characters (and others) leads The Order to become involved in Hatton’s life again.
Some other dramas that feature the KKK or like-minded groups are: Legion of Terror (1936), The Burning Cross (1947), Another Part of the Forest (1948), The Klansman (1974), Places in the Heart (1984), which earned writer (director) Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)) his third Oscar, and Mississippi Burning (1988); plus, it’s hard to forget the hilarious scene in Mel Brooks’ western spoof Blazing Saddles (1974) in which Cleavon Little (accompanied by Gene Wilder) dons a white rob and hood
ABOVE: AN ORIGINAL OIL PAINTING BY OUR IN-HOUSE ARTIST DEPICTING HUEY P NEWTON , FOUNDER MEMBER OF THE INFAMOUS & NOTORIOUS BLACK PANTHER MOVEMENT IN 1966 , OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, USA .
ABOVE: AN ORIGINAL OIL PAINTING BY OUR IN-HOUSE ARTIST, OF BOBBY SEALE, CO-FOUNDER MEMBER OF THE INFAMOUS & NOTORIOUS BLACK PANTHER MOVEMENT IN 1966 , OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, USA .
ABOVE: A SHORT VIDEO ON THE HISTORY OF THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY
PLEASE NOTE THAT THE CRIME THROUGH TIME COLLECTION , IT’S OWNER , OR ANY OF IT’S STAFF HERE AT LITTLEDEAN JAIL HAVE NO AFFILIATION , CONNECTION OR INVOLVEMENT WITH ANY EXTREMIST , POLITICALLY MOTIVATED OR OTHERWISE MOVEMENTS WHATSOEVER …… WE SIMPLY EXHIBIT AND TOUCH UPON A GREAT MANY POLITICALLY INCORRECT AND TABOO SUBJECT MATTERS THAT NO OTHER VISITOR ATTRACTIONS DARE COVER IN THE WAY WE CHOOSE TO DO SO HERE. …. “IT’S ALL HISTORY FOR GOODNESS SAKE”….EVEN IF ON OCCASIONS, SENSITIVE , THOUGHT PROVOKING SUBJECT MATTERS THAT INCITE STRONG DEBATE .
WE WOULD RESPECTFULLY HOPE THAT OUR OWN EXHIBITION INSIGHT IS DEEMED TO BE HISTORICALLY EDUCATIONAL AS WE DO HERE .
PLEASE DO NOTE OUR POLITE WARNINGS IN THAT THIS DARK TOURIST ATTRACTION IS NOT FAMILY FRIENDLY. IT IS NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN, THOSE EASILY OFFENDED, DISTURBED OR OF A SENSITIVE NATURE
THERE IS A MASS OF GRAPHIC, EXPLICIT, NUDITY AND DISTURBING CONTENT THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE OF THE COLLECTIONS HERE ON DISPLAY ….
Above: Original oil painting of Kathleen Cleaver by Gloucestershire Artist Paul Bridgman on display at the jail
MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE, WASHINGTON DC, USA
Above: Original oil painting by Gloucestershire Artist Paul Bridgman of Angela Davis here on display at Littledean Jail.
MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE, WASHINGTON DC, USA
Above: An original Tommie Smith hand signed photograph of the iconic ‘ Black Power Salute’ at the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games … here on display at the jail.
MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE, WASHINGTON DC, USA
Original oil painting of Malcolm X (aka Malcolm Little) by Gloucestershire Artist Paul Bridgman on display here at the jail
Above : Original oil painting of Malcolm X (aka Malcolm Little) by Gloucestershire Artist Paul Bridgman on display here at the jail
MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAM HISTORY AND CULTURE, WASHINGTON DC, USA
Above: Original oil painting of Rev, Dr Martha Luther King Jr by Gloucestershire Artist Paul Bridgman on display here at the jail
MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAM HISTORY AND CULTURE, WASHINGTON DC, USA
Above: Original oil painting of Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr by Gloucestershire Artist Paul Bridgman on display here at the jail
MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAM HISTORY AND CULTURE, WASHINGTON DC, USA
MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAM HISTORY AND CULTURE, WASHINGTON DC, USA
MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAM HISTORY AND CULTURE, WASHINGTON DC, USA
MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAM HISTORY AND CULTURE, WASHINGTON DC, USA
MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAM HISTORY AND CULTURE, WASHINGTON DC, USA
MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAM HISTORY AND CULTURE, WASHINGTON DC, USA
MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAM HISTORY AND CULTURE, WASHINGTON DC, USA
MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAM HISTORY AND CULTURE, WASHINGTON DC, USA
The Black Panthers were formed in California in 1966 and they played a short but important part in the civil rights movement. The Black Panthers believed that the non-violent campaign of Martin Luther King had failed and any promised changes to their lifestyle via the ‘traditional’ civil rights movement, would take too long to be implemented or simply not introduced.
The language of the Black Panthers was violent as was their public stance. The two founders of the Black Panther Party were Huey Percy Newton and Bobby Seale. They preached for a “revolutionary war” but though they considered themselves an African-American party, they were willing to speak out for all those who were oppressed from whatever minority group. They were willing to use violence to get what they wanted.
The Black Panther Party (BPP) had four desires : equality in education, housing, employment and civil rights.
It had a 10 Point Plan to get its desired goals.
The ten points of the party platform were:
1) “Freedom; the power to determine the destiny of the Black and oppressed communities.
2) Full Employment; give every person employment or guaranteed income.
3) End to robbery of Black communities; the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules as promised to ex-slaves during the reconstruction period following the emancipation of slavery.
4) Decent housing fit for the shelter of human beings; the land should be made into cooperatives so that the people can build.
5) Education for the people; that teaches the true history of Blacks and their role in present day society.
6) Free health care; health facilities which will develop preventive medical programs.
7) End to police brutality and murder of Black people and other people of color and oppressed people.
8) End to all wars of aggression; the various conflicts which exist stem directly from the United States ruling circle.
9) Freedom for all political prisoners; trials by juries that represent our peers.
10) Land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and community control of modern industry.”
The call for a revolutionary war against authority at the time of the Vietnam War, alerted the FBI to the Black Panther’s activities. Whatever happened, the FBI was successful in destroying the Black Panther’s movement.
Those who supported the BPP claim that the FBI used dirty tactics such as forging letters to provoke conflict between the BPP’s leaders; organising the murders of BPP leaders such as John Huggins; initiating a “Black Propaganda” campaign to convince the public that the BPP was a threat to national security; using infiltrators to commit crimes that could be blamed on the BPP so that leaders could be arrested and writing threatening letters to jurors during trials so that the BPP would be blamed for attempting to pervert the course of justice. Supporters of the BPP claimed that this last tactic was used with success at the trial of the “Chicago Eight” whereby the jury, apparently angered at being intimidated by the BPP, found the eight members of the BPP guilty. None of the above tactics have ever been proved or admitted to by the FBI.
In California, the party leader of Oakland, David Hilliard, claimed that the BPP was at the top of the FBI’s most wanted list. Hilliard also claimed that the then governor of California, Ronald Reagan, constantly vilified the BPP.
“This caused a stigma to beplaced upon the Black Panther Party as Pied Pipers of cultural and social revolution characterising us as the essence of violence, chaos and evil.”
The head of the FBI, Edgar J Hoover, called the BPP “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” Hoover ordered field operatives of the FBI to introduce measures that would cripple the BPP. Using infiltrators (one of these, William O’Neal, became Chief of Security for the BPP), the FBI knew of all the movements etc of BPP leaders. FBI raids in BPP heartlands – Chicago and Los Angeles – that led to the arrest of regional leaders, resulted in the collapse of the movement.
To view the BPP as a purely revolutionary and violent movement is wrong. In areas of support the BPP created a Free Food Program to feed those who could not afford to do so for themselves; Free Medical Research Health Clinics to provide basic health care for those who could not afford it and an Intercommunal Youth Band to give community pride to the movement. In a book of his essays called “To Die for the People”, Huey Newton wrote that these were exactly what the African-American community wanted and that the BPP was providing its own people with something the government was not. Such community projects have survived in other guises, but after the demise of the BPP their lost their drive for a number of years.
Was there much support for the BPP? Were they ‘Public Enemy Number One’ as Hoover claimed? In 1966, a survey carried out in America showed that less than 5% of African-Americans approved of groups such as the BPP. 60% were positively hostile to such groups. But were these survey results slanted in such a manner as to tarnish the name of the Black Panthers at an early stage in its existence especially as the head of the FBI, Hoover, was known to be very against the movement? In areas such as Oakland and parts of San Francisco and South San Francisco where the BPP claimed to feed nearly 200,000 people, support would have been a lot higher.
The Black Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) was an African-American revolutionary leftist organization active in the United States from 1966 until 1982. The Black Panther Party achieved national and international notoriety through its involvement in the Black Powermovement and U.S. politics of the 1960s and 1970s. The group’s “provocative rhetoric, militant posture, and cultural and political flourishes permanently altered the contours of American Identity.”[1]
Founded in Oakland, California by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale on October 15, 1966, the organization initially set forth a doctrine calling primarily for the protection of African American neighborhoods from police brutality.[2] The organization’s leaders espoused socialist and communist (largely Maoist) doctrines; however, the Party’s early black nationalist reputation attracted a diverse membership.[3] The Black Panther Party’s objectives and philosophy expanded and evolved rapidly during the party’s existence, making ideological consensus within the party difficult to achieve, and causing some prominent members to openly disagree with the views of the leaders.
The organization’s official newspaper, The Black Panther, was first circulated in 1967. Also that year, the Black Panther Party marched on the California State Capitol in Sacramento in protest of a selective ban on weapons. By 1968, the party had expanded into many cities throughout the United States, among them, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Newark, New Orleans, New York City, Omaha,Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.. Peak membership was near 10,000 by 1969, and their newspaper, under the editorial leadership of Eldridge Cleaver, had a circulation of 250,000.[4] The group created a Ten-Point Program, a document that called for “Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice and Peace”, as well as exemption from conscription for African-American men, among other demands.[5] With the Ten-Point program, “What We Want, What We Believe”, the Black Panther Party expressed its economic and political grievances.[6]
Gaining national prominence, the Black Panther Party became an icon of the counterculture of the 1960s.[7] Ultimately, the Panthers condemned black nationalism as “black racism” and became more focused on socialism without racial exclusivity.[8] They instituted a variety of community social programs designed to alleviate poverty, improve health among inner city black communities, and soften the Party’s public image.[9] The Black Panther Party’s most widely known programs were its armed citizens’ patrols to evaluate behavior of police officers and its Free Breakfast for Children program. However, the group’s political goals were often overshadowed by their confrontational, militant, and violent tactics against police.[10]
Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover called the party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,”[11] and he supervised an extensive program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance, infiltration, perjury, police harassment, assassination, and many other tactics designed to undermine Panther leadership, incriminate party members and drain the organization of resources and manpower. Through these tactics, Hoover hoped to diminish the Party’s threat to the general power structure of the U.S., or even maintain its influence as a strong undercurrent.[12]Angela Davis, Ward Churchill, and others have alleged that federal, state and local law enforcement officials went to great lengths to discredit and destroy the organization, including assassination.[13][14][15] Black Panther Party membership reached a peak of 10,000 by early 1969, then suffered a series of contractions due to legal troubles, incarcerations, internal splits, expulsions and defections. Popular support for the Party declined further after reports appeared detailing the group’s involvement in activities such as drug dealing and extortion schemes directed against Oakland merchants[16] By 1972 most Panther activity centered around the national headquarters and a school in Oakland, where the party continued to influence local politics. Party contractions continued throughout the 1970s; by 1980 the Black Panther Party comprised just 27 members.[17]
They worked at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center, where they also served on the advisory board. To combat police brutality, the advisory board obtained 5,000 signatures in support of the City Council’s setting up a police review board to review complaints. Newton was also taking classes at the City College and at San Francisco Law School. Both institutions were active in the North Oakland Center. Thus the pair had numerous connections with whom they talked about a new organization. Inspired by the success of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and Stokely Carmichael‘s calls for separate black political organizations,[19] they wrote their initial platform statement, the Ten-Point Program. With the help of Huey’s brother Melvin, they decided on a uniform of blue shirts, black pants, black leather jackets, black berets, and openly displayed loaded shotguns. (In his studies, Newton had discovered a California law that allowed carrying a loaded rifle or shotgun in public, as long as it was publicly displayed and pointed at no one.)[20]
What became standard Black Panther discourse emerged from a long history of urban activism, social criticism and political struggle by African Americans. There is considerable debate about the impact that the Black Panther Party had on the greater society, or even their local environment. Author Jama Lazerow writes “As inheritors of the discipline, pride, and calm self-assurance preached by Malcolm X, the Panthers became national heroes in African American communities by infusing abstract nationalism with street toughness—by joining the rhythms of black working-class youth culture to the interracial élan and effervescence of Bay Area New Left politics…In 1966, the Panthers defined Oakland’s ghetto as a territory, the police as interlopers, and the Panther mission as the defense of community. The Panthers’ famous “policing the police” drew attention to the spatial remove that White Americans enjoyed from the state violence that had come to characterize life in black urban communities.”[12] In his book Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America journalist Hugh Pearson takes a more jaundiced view, linking Panther criminality and violence to worsening conditions in America’s black ghettos as their influence spread nationwide.[21]
Awareness of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense grew rapidly after their May 2, 1967 protest at the California State Assembly.
In May 1967, the Panthers invaded the State Assembly Chamber in Sacramento, guns in hand, in what appears to have been a publicity stunt. Still, they scared a lot of important people that day. At the time, the Panthers had almost no following. Now, (a year later) however, their leaders speak on invitation almost anywhere radicals gather, and many whites wear “Honkeys for Huey” buttons, supporting the fight to free Newton, who has been in jail since last Oct. 28 (1967) on the charge that he killed a policeman…”[22]
In October 1967, Huey Newton was arrested for the murder of Oakland Police Officer John Frey, a murder he later admitted and pointed to with pride.[23] At the time, Newton claimed that he had been falsely accused, leading to the “Free Huey” campaign. On February 17, 1968, at the “Free Huey” birthday rally in the Oakland Auditorium, several Black Panther Party leaders spoke. H. Rap Brown, Black Panther Party Minister of Justice, declared:
Huey Newton is our only living revolutionary in this country today…He has paid his dues. He has paid his dues. How many white folks did you kill today?[9]
The mostly black crowd erupted in applause. James Forman, Black Panther Party Minister of Foreign Affairs, followed with:
We must serve notice on our oppressors that we as a people are not going to be frightened by the attempted assassination of our leaders. For my assassination—and I’m the low man on the totem pole—I want 30 police stations blown up, one southern governor, two mayors, and 500 cops, dead. If they assassinate Brother Carmichael, Brother Brown…Brother Seale, this price is tripled. And if Huey is not set free and dies, the sky is the limit![24]
Referring to the 1967–68 period, black historian Curtis Austin states: “During this period of development, black nationalism became part of the party’s philosophy.”[25] During the months following the “Free Huey” birthday rallies, one in Oakland and another in Los Angeles, the Party’s violent, anti-white rhetoric attracted a huge following and Black Panther Party membership exploded.
Two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., on April 6, 1968, seventeen-year-old Bobby Hutton joined Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther Party Minister of Information, in what Cleaver later admitted was “an ambush” of the Oakland police.[26] Two officers were wounded, and Bobby Hutton became another martyr when officers opened fire, killing Hutton and wounding Cleaver.[27]
After Hutton’s death, Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale and Kathleen Cleaver (Eldridge’s wife) held a rally in New York City at the Fillmore East in support of Hutton and Cleaver. PlaywrightLeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) joined them on stage before a mixed crowd of 2,000:
We want to become masters of our own destiny…we want to build a black nation to benefit black people…The white people who killed Bobby Hutton are the same white people sitting here.[28]
The crowd, including many whites, gave LeRoi Jones a standing ovation.
In 1968, the group shortened its name to the Black Panther Party and sought to focus directly on political action. Members were encouraged to carry guns and to defend themselves against violence. An influx of college students joined the group, which had consisted chiefly of “brothers off the block.” This created some tension in the group. Some members were more interested in supporting the Panthers social programs, while others wanted to maintain their “street mentality”. For many Panthers, the group was little more than a type of gang.[29]
Curtis Austin states that by late 1968, Black Panther Party ideology had evolved to the point where they began to reject black nationalism and became more a “revolutionary internationalist movement”:
(The Party) dropped its wholesale attacks against whites and began to emphasize more of a class analysis of society. Its emphasis on Marxist-Leninist doctrine and its repeated espousal of Maoist statements signaled the group’s transition from a revolutionary nationalist to a revolutionary internationalist movement. Every Party member had to study Mao Tse-tung’s “Little Red Book” to advance his or her knowledge of peoples’ struggle and the revolutionary process.[30]
Panther slogans and iconography spread. At the 1968 Summer Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, two American medalists, gave the black power salute during the playing of the American national anthem. The International Olympic Committee banned them from the Olympic Games for life. Hollywood celebrity Jane Fonda publicly supported Huey Newton and the Black Panthers during the early 1970s. She and other Hollywood celebrities became involved in the Panthers’ leftist programs. The Panthers attracted a wide variety of left-wing revolutionaries and political activists, including writer Jean Genet, former Ramparts magazine editor David Horowitz (who later became a major critic of what he describes as Panther criminality)[31] and left-wing lawyer Charles R. Garry, who acted as counsel in the Panthers’ many legal battles.
Survival committees and coalitions were organized with several groups across the United States. Chief among these was the Rainbow Coalition formed by Fred Hampton and the Chicago Black Panthers. The Rainbow Coalition included the Young Lords, a Latino youth gang turned political under the leadership of Jose Cha Cha Jimenez.[32] It also included the Young Patriots, which was organized to support young, white migrants from the Appalachia region.[33]
The Black Panther Party had a list of 26 rules that dictated their daily party work. They regulated their participant’s use of drugs, alcohol, and their actions while they were working. Almost all of the rules had to do with only the actions of members while they were in an event or a meeting of the Black Panthers. The rules also said that members had to follow the Ten Point Program, and had to know it by heart. The final section of rules had to do with more of the leader’s responsibilities, such as providing a first aid center for members of the Black Panthers.[34][35][36]
The original “Ten Point Program” from October, 1966 was as follows [37][38]:
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.
We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
2. We want full employment for our people.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.
We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.
We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.
We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.
8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the black community.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
1970 BPP pamphlet combining an anti-drug message with revolutionary politics
“This country is a nation of thieves. It stole everything it has, beginning with black people. The U.S. cannot justify its existence as the policeman of the world any longer. I do not want to be a part of the American pie. The American pie means raping South Africa, beating Vietnam, beating South America, raping the Philippines, raping every country you’ve been in. I don’t want any of your blood money. I don’t want to be part of that system. We must question whether or not we want this country to continue being the wealthiest country in the world at the price of raping everybody else.”
Inspired by Mao Zedong‘s advice to revolutionaries in The Little Red Book, Newton called on the Panthers to “serve the people” and to make “survival programs” a priority within its branches. The most famous of their programs was the Free Breakfast for Children Program, initially run out of an Oaklandchurch.
The BPP also founded the “Intercommunal Youth Institute” in January 1971,[41] with the intent of demonstrating how black youth ought to be educated. Ericka Huggins was the director of the school and Regina Davis was an administrator.[42] The school was unique in that it didn’t have grade levels but instead had different skill levels so an 11 year old could be in second-level English and fifth-level science.[42] Elaine Brown taught reading and writing to a group of 10 to 11 year olds deemed “uneducable” by the system.[43] As the school children were given free busing; breakfast, lunch, and dinner; books and school supplies; children were taken to have medical checkups; and many children were given free clothes.[44]
The Party briefly merged with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, headed by Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture). In 1967, the party organized a march on the California state capitol to protest the state’s attempt to outlaw carrying loaded weapons in public after the Panthers had begun exercising that right. Participants in the march carried rifles. In 1968, BPP Minister of InformationEldridge Cleaver ran for Presidential office on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. They were a big influence on the White Panther Party, that was tied to the Detroit/Ann Arbor band MC5 and their manager John Sinclair, author of the book Guitar Army that also promulgated a ten-point program.
Black Panther Party members standing in the street, armed with a Colt .45 and a shotgun
One of the central aims of the BPP was to stop abuse by local police departments. When the party was founded in 1966, only 16 of Oakland’s 661 police officers were African American.[45] Accordingly, many members questioned the Department’s objectivity and impartiality. This situation was not unique to Oakland, as most police departments in major cities did not have proportional membership by African Americans. Throughout the 1960s, race riots and civil unrest broke out in impoverished African-American communities subject to policing by disproportionately white police departments. The work and writings ofRobert F. Williams, Monroe, North CarolinaNAACP chapter president and author of Negroes with Guns, also influenced the BPP’s tactics.
The BPP sought to oppose police brutality through neighborhood patrols (an approach since adopted by groups such as Copwatch). Police officers were often followed by armed Black Panthers who sought at times to aid African-Americans who were victims of police brutality and racial prejudice. Both Panthers and police died as a result of violent confrontations. By 1970, 34 Panthers had died as a result of police raids, shoot-outs and internal conflict.[46] Various police organizations claim the Black Panthers were responsible for the deaths of at least 15 law enforcement officers and the injuries of dozens more. During those years, juries found several BPP members guilty of violent crimes.[47]
On October 17, 1967, Oakland police officer John Frey was shot to death in an altercation with Huey P. Newton during a traffic stop. In the stop, Newton and backup officer Herbert Heanes also suffered gunshot wounds. Newton was arrested and charged with murder, which sparked a “free Huey” campaign, organized by Eldridge Cleaver to help Newton’s legal defense. Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, though after three years in prison he was released when his conviction was reversed on appeal. During later years Newton would boast to friend and sociobiologist Robert Trivers (one of the few whites who became a Party member during its waning years) that he had in fact murdered officer John Frey and never regretted it.[23]
In April 1968, the party was involved in a gun battle, in which Panther Bobby Hutton was killed. Cleaver, who was wounded, later said that he had led the Panther group on a deliberate ambush of the police officers, thus provoking the shoot-out.[26] In Chicago, on 4 Dec 1969, two Panthers were killed when the Chicago Police raided the home of Panther leader Fred Hampton. The raid had been orchestrated by the police in conjunction with the FBI; during this era the FBI was complicit in many local police actions. Hampton was shot and killed, as was Panther guard Mark Clark. Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan, his assistant and eight Chicago police officers were indicted by a federal grand jury over the raid, but the charges were later dismissed.[48][4]
Prominent Black Panther member H. Rap Brown is serving life imprisonment for the 2000 murder of Ricky Leon Kinchen, a Fulton County, Georgia sheriff’s deputy, and the wounding of another officer in a gunbattle. Both officers were black.[49]
From 1966 to 1972, when the party was most active, several departments hired significantly more African-American police officers. During this time period, many African American police officers started to form organizations of their own to become more protective of the African American citizenry and to increase black representation on police forces.[50]
COINTELPRO document outlining the FBI’s plans to ‘neutralize’ Jean Seberg for her support for the Black Panther Party, by attempting to publicly “cause her embarassment” and “tarnish her image”
In August 1967, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) instructed its program “COINTELPRO” to “neutralize” what the FBI called “black nationalist hate groups” and other dissident groups. In September 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described the Black Panthers as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”[51] By 1969, the Black Panthers and their allies had become primary COINTELPRO targets, singled out in 233 of the 295 authorized “Black Nationalist” COINTELPRO actions. The goals of the program were to prevent the unification of militant black nationalist groups and to weaken the power of their leaders, as well as to discredit the groups to reduce their support and growth. The initial targets included the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Revolutionary Action Movement and the Nation of Islam. Leaders who were targeted included the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Maxwell Stanford and Elijah Muhammad.
Part of the FBI COINTELPRO actions were directed at creating and exploiting existing rivalries between black nationalist factions. One such attempt was to “intensify the degree of animosity” between the Black Panthers and the Blackstone Rangers, a Chicago street gang. They sent an anonymous letter to the Ranger’s gang leader claiming that the Panthers were threatening his life, a letter whose intent was to induce “reprisals” against Panther leadership. InSouthern California similar actions were taken to exacerbate a “gang war” between the Black Panther Party and a group called the US Organization. Violent conflict between these two groups, including shootings and beatings, led to the deaths of at least four Black Panther Party members. FBI agents claimed credit for instigating some of the violence between the two groups.[52]
On January 17, 1969, Los Angeles Panther Captain Bunchy Carter and Deputy Minister John Huggins were killed in Campbell Hall on the UCLA campus, in a gun battle with members of US Organization stemming from a dispute over who would control UCLA’s black studies program. Another shootout between the two groups on March 17 led to further injuries. It was alleged that the FBI had sent a provocative letter to US Organization in an attempt to create antagonism between US and the Panthers.[53]
From the beginning the Black Panther Party’s focus on militancy came with a reputation for violence. They employed a California law which permitted carrying a loaded rifle or shotgun as long as it was publicly displayed and pointed at no one.[54] Carrying weapons openly and making threats against police officers, for example, chants like “The Revolution has co-ome, it’s time to pick up the gu-un. Off the pigs!”,[55] helped create the Panthers’ reputation as a violent organization.
On May 2, 1967, the California State Assembly Committee on Criminal Procedure was scheduled to convene to discuss what was known as the “Mulford Act“, which would ban public displays of loaded firearms. Cleaver and Newton put together a plan to send a group of about 30 Panthers led by Seale from Oakland to Sacramento to protest the bill. The group entered the assembly carrying their weapons, an incident which was widely publicized, and which prompted police to arrest Seale and five others. The group pled guilty to misdemeanor charges of disrupting a legislative session.[56]
On October 17, 1967, Oakland police officer John Frey was shot to death in an altercation with Huey P. Newton during a traffic stop. In the stop, Newton and backup officer Herbert Heanes also suffered gunshot wounds. Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter at trial. This incident gained the party even wider recognition by the radical American left, and a “Free Huey” campaign ensued.[57]Newton was released after three years, when his conviction was reversed on appeal. During later years Newton would boast to sociobiologist Robert Trivers (one of the few whites who became a Party member during its waning years) that he had in fact murdered officer John Frey.[23]
On April 7, 1968, Panther Bobby Hutton was killed, and Cleaver was wounded in a shootout with the Oakland police. Two police officers were also shot. Although at the time Cleaver claimed that the police had ambushed them, Cleaver later admitted that he had led the Panther group on a deliberate ambush of the police officers, thus provoking the shoot-out.[26][27]
From the fall of 1967 through the end of 1970, nine police officers were killed and 56 were wounded, and ten Panther deaths and an unknown number of injuries resulted from confrontations. In 1969 alone, 348 Panthers were arrested for a variety of crimes.[58] On February 18, 1970 Albert Wayne Williams was shot by the Portland Police Bureau outside the Black Panther party headquarters inPortland, Oregon. Though his wounds put him in a critical condition, he made a full recovery.[59]
In May 1969, Black Panther Party members tortured and murdered Alex Rackley, a 19-year-old member of the New York chapter, because they suspected him of being a police informant. Three party officers — Warren Kimbro, George Sams, Jr., and Lonnie McLucas — later admitted taking part. Sams, who gave the order to shoot Rackley at the murder scene, turned state’s evidence and testified that he had received orders personally from Bobby Seale to carry out the execution. After this betrayal, party supporters alleged that Sams was himself the informant and an agent provocateuremployed by the FBI.[60] The case resulted in the New Haven, Connecticut Black Panther trials of 1970, memorialized in the courtroom sketches of Robert Templeton. The trial ended with a hung jury, and the prosecution chose not to seek another trial.
Black Panther bookkeeper Betty van Patter was murdered in 1974, and although this crime was never solved, the Panthers, according to the magazine Mother Jones, were “almost universally believed to be responsible”.[61]David Horowitz became certain that Black Panther members were responsible and denounced the Panthers. When Huey Newton was shot dead 15 years later, Horowitz characterized Newton as a killer.[62] When Art Goldberg, a former colleague at Ramparts, alleged that Horowitz himself was responsible for the death of van Patter by recommending her for the position of Black Panther accountant, Horowitz counter-alleged that “the Panthers had killed more than a dozen people in the course of conducting extortion, prostitution and drug rackets in the Oaklandghetto.” He said further that the organization was committed “to doctrines that are false and to causes that are demonstrably wrongheaded and even evil.”[63] Former chairperson Elaine Brown also questioned Horowitz’s motives in recommending van Patter to the Panthers; she suspected espionage.[64] Horowitz later became known for his conservative viewpoints and opposition to leftistthought.[65]
While part of the organization was already participating in local government and social services, another group was in constant conflict with the police. For some of the Party’s supporters, the separation between political action, criminal activity, social services, access to power, and grass-roots identity became confusing and contradictory as the Panthers’ political momentum was bogged down in thecriminal justice system. Disagreements among the Party’s leaders over how to confront these challenges led to a significant split in the Party. Some Panther leaders, such as Huey Newton and David Hilliard, favored a focus on community service coupled with self-defense; others, such as Eldridge Cleaver, embraced a more confrontational strategy. Eldridge Cleaver deepened the schism in the party when he publicly criticized the Party for adopting a “reformist” rather than “revolutionary” agenda and called for Hilliard’s removal. Cleaver was expelled from the Central Committee but went on to lead a splinter group, the Black Liberation Army, which had previously existed as an underground paramilitary wing of the Party.[66]
The Party eventually fell apart due to rising legal costs and internal disputes. In 1974, Huey Newton appointed Elaine Brown as the first Chairwoman of the Party. Under Brown’s leadership, the Party became involved in organizing for more radical electoral campaigns, including Brown’s 1975 unsuccessful run for Oakland City Council and Lionel Wilson‘s successful election as the first black mayor of Oakland.[67]
In addition to changing the Party’s direction towards more involvement in the electoral arena, Brown also increased the influence of women Panthers by placing them in more visible roles within the male-dominated organization. Brown claims this attempt to battle previously pervasive sexism within the Party was very stressful for her and led to her dependence on Thorazine as a way to escape the pressures of leading the Party.[68]
In 1977, after Newton returned from Cuba and ordered the beating of a female Panther who organized many of the Party’s social programs, Brown left the Party.[69]
Although many scholars and activists date the Party’s downfall to the period before Brown became the leader, an increasingly smaller cadre of Panthers continued to exist through the 1970s. By 1980, Panther membership had dwindled to 27, and the Panther-sponsored school finally closed in 1982 after it had become known that Newton was embezzling funds from the school to pay for his drug addiction.[67][70]
Some critics have written that the Panthers’ “romance with the gun” and their promotion of “gang mentality” was likely associated with the enormous increase in both black-on-black and black-on-white crime observed during later decades.[21][71] This increase occurred in the Panthers’ home town, Oakland California, and in cities nationwide.[72][73][74][75][76] Interviewed after he left the Black Panther Party, former Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver lamented that the legacy of the Panthers was at least partly one of disrespect for the law and indiscriminate violence. He acknowledged that, had his promotion of violent black militantism prevailed, it would have resulted in “a total bloodbath.” Cleaver also lamented the abandonment of poor blacks by the black bourgeoisie and felt that black youth had been left without appropriate role models who could teach them to properly channel their militant spirit and their desire for justice.[77][78][79][80][81]
In October 2006, the Black Panther Party held a 40-year reunion in Oakland.[82]
In January 2007, a joint California state and Federal task force charged eight men with the August 29, 1971 murder of California police officer Sgt. John Young.[83] The defendants have been identified as former members of the Black Liberation Army. Two have been linked to the Black Panthers.[84] In 1975 a similar case was dismissed when a judge ruled that police gathered evidence through the use of torture.[85] On June 29, 2009 Herman Bell pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the death of Sgt. Young. In July 2009, charges were dropped against four of the accused: Ray Boudreaux, Henry W. Jones, Richard Brown and Harold Taylor. Also that month Jalil Muntaquim pleaded no contest to conspiracy to commit voluntary manslaughter becoming the second person to be convicted in this case.[86]
Since the 1990s, former Panther chief of staff David Hilliard has offered tours of sites in Oakland historically significant to the Black Panther Party.[87]
The Anti-Defamation League and The Southern Poverty Law Center consider the New Black Panthers as a hate group.[88] Members of the original Black Panther Party have insisted that this New Black Panther Party is illegitimate and have strongly objected that there “is no new Black Panther Party”.[89]
The National Alliance of Black Panthers was formed on July 31, 2004. It was inspired by the grassroots activism of the original organization but not otherwise related. Its chairwoman is Shazza Nzingha.[90]