by Ann Williams
The reason for the attack was to route out the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia, who the Israelis believed had avoided evacuation from Beirut by hiding among the refugees. They believed that there were possibly as many as 200 armed men in the camps with a generous stock of ammunition.
As soon as the scale of this massacre was published in the world press, with photographs of the refugee’s bodies having been brutally murdered, Israeli was held directly responsible. The Israeli public were appalled and a huge demonstration of around 300,000 people took place on September 25, 1982. They demanded for the immediate resignation of Prime Minister Menaheim Begin and Ariel Sharon and insisted on an immediate investigation of the tragedy.
In his autobiography, Ariel Sharon wrote that, although he deeply regretted the civilian casualties at Qibya,
. . . it was now clear that Israeli forces were again capable of finding and hitting targets far behind enemy lines.
Although Unit 101 was disbanded, it did, however, continue to take part in retaliatory action on military targets, but this time under the name of the 202nd Paratroop Brigade.
Even at the end of his career Ariel Sharon was still commanding ‘death squads’, and he has never been indicted for any of his crimes. Prime Minister Sharon suffered a brain haemorrhage on January 4, 2006, and Ehud Olmert took over as Acting Prime Minister.
Bombing Of 16Th Street Baptist Church
We had been trying to win the hearts of white Southerners, and that was a mistake, a misjudgement. We realized that you have to hit them in the pocket.
Wyatt Tee Walker
Birmingham, Alabama, was one of the most segregated cities in the United States in the 1960s, and it was also the place where a violent branch of the Ku Klux Klan lived. Since the end of World War II, the city had seen a lot of prejudice against its black community. An event that took place on Sunday, September 16, 1963, proved to be a turning point in the civil rights movement at that time, and it put an end to segregation in the south.
The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was a three-storey building and the largest black church in Birmingham. Due to its prime position in the town it was often used to hold meetings and a rallying point for many civil rights activists. So it wasn’t by accident that the Ku Klux Klan made this church their target. The church itself was built in a Byzantine-style with two domed towers and a large basement, which served as the meeting place for influential activists, even attracting names such as Martin Luther King.
Two members of the Ku Klux Klan, Bobby Frank Cherry and Robert Edward Chambliss (also known as ‘Dynamite Bob’) moved stealthily towards the 16th Street Baptist Church in the early hours of Sunday morning. Underneath a set of steps at the side of the church, the two men planted 19 sticks of dynamite and then left as quickly as they had come.
At approximately 10.15 a.m., 80 children were starting to assemble in the basement of the church to hear prayers on the church’s Youth Day. Suddenly there was a tremendous explosion, which blew a hole in the wall at the back of the church, destroyed the steps and destroyed all the stained glass windows – with the exception of one, which depicted Jesus Christ leading young children. Five cars that were parked behind the church were also badly damaged or destroyed, and the windows in a building opposite were completely blown out.
The callous attack on innocent victims took the lives of four young girls – Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair – and a further 22 victims were badly injured.
One 14-year-old girl who survived the blast described what happened when the bomb went off as follows:
I heard something that sounded, at first, a little like thunder and then just this terrific noise and the windows came crashing in. And then a lot of screaming, just a lot of screaming and I heard someone say, ‘Hit the floor’. And I remember being on the floor . . . and it was real quiet.
The nation was stunned and outraged by the attack, which sparked a spate of violence in Birmingham city, with two more young African-American children dead by nightfall. Johnnie Robinson, who was 16, was shot by police when he threw stones at a car carrying white people, and 13-year-old Virgil Ware was killed by two white people riding on a motorcycle.
The governor of Alabama, George Wallace, was accused by local civil rights activists of arranging the killings. The former Birmingham police commissioner, Eugene Connor, made matters even worse by saying to a large crowd of people at a citizen’s meeting, that if they wanted to blame anyone they should blame the Supreme Court. He also put forward that it could possibly be the African- Americans themselves who could have detonated the bomb intentionally to bring attention to their cause.
However, a witness eventually came forward and said he could identify Robert Chambliss, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as the man who had placed the bomb under the steps of the church. Chambliss was arrested and charged with murder and possession of explosives. Following a trial on October 8, 1963, he was found not guilty of murder and charged with six month’s imprisonment and a fine for the possession of the dynamite.
It was more than a decade before the file on the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was reopened. Bill Baxley, the attorney general of Alabama, asked to see the original FBI files on the case and soon found that they had indeed accumulated a large amount of evidence that had not been brought to light in the first trial. Chambliss was tried once again in November 1977, and with the new evidence, he was found guilty of murder and given a life sentence. He died in Alabama prison on October 29, 1985, having never publicly admitted that he had taken any part in the bombing.
After the case was opened several more times, it wasn’t until May 17, 2000, that the FBI eventually announced that the bombing had been the work of the Ku Klux Klan splinter group known as the Cahaba Boys. They claimed the bombing had been the work of four men, Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry. Cash was already dead, but Blanton and Cherry were arrested and tried. So it was 38 years after the bombing of the church that Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry were found guilty of the deaths of the four girls and given a life sentence. Bobby Cherry, who right up until his death in November 2004, always denied that he had had any part in terror attack on the Baptist church.
A song entitled Birmingham Sunday was composed by Richard Farina and recorded by Joan Baez to commemorate the aftermath of the tragedy, and in 1997 a documentary called 4 Little Girls, which was directed by Spike Lee, was nominated for an Academy Award.
BIRMINGHAM SUNDAY
Come round by my side and I’ll sing you a song
I’ll sing it so softly, it’ll do no one wrong
On Birmingham Sunday, the blood ran like wine
And the choir kept singing of freedom
That cold autumn morning no eyes saw the sun
And Addie Mae Collins, her number was one
At an old Baptist church, there was no need to run
And the choir kept singing of freedom
The clouds they were gray and the autumn winds blew
And Denise McNair brought the number to two
The falcon of Death was a creature they knew
And the choir kept singing of freedom
The church it was crowded but no one could see
That Cynthia Wesley’s dark number was three
Her prayers and her feelings would shame you and me
And the choir kept singing of freedom
Young Carol Robertson entered the door
And the number her killers had given was four
She asked for a blessing, but asked for no more
And the choir kept singing of freedom
On Birmingham Sunday the noise shook the ground
And people all over the earth turned around
For no one recalled a more cowardly sounds
And the choir kept singing of freedom
The men in the forest, they asked it of me
How many blackberries grew in the blue sea
And I asked them right with
a tear in my eye
How many dark ships in the forest
The Sunday has come and the Sunday has gone
And I can’t do much more than to sing you this song
I’ll sing it so softly, it’ll do no one wrong
And the choirs keep singing of freedom
The church itself was repaired and is still functional today, remaining a central landmark in the Birmingham Civil Rights District. In 1980, the 16th Street Baptist Church was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and in 2006 it was designated as a National Historic Landmark.
The Black Panthers
They came down on us because we had a grass-roots, real people’s revolution, complete with the programmes, complete with the unity, complete with the working coalitions, we were crossing racial lines.
Bobby Seale, 1996
After the death in 1965 of the Civil Rights activist Malcolm X, two men, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, decided they wanted to form a party that would continue to fight for the rights of the African-American. In October 1966, in Oakland, California, together they founded the Black Panther Party, which was originally called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defence.
The initial aim of the organization was to promote armed resistance against society’s oppression towards the African-American. However, as the party grew in size the views of some of its members became more extreme and started to clash with those of the original leaders. Although the initial aims of the party had been more focused on socialism and trying to alleviate poverty and hardship among their communities, the group’s political goals were eventually overshadowed by their conflicting and often military-style tactics.
The Black Panthers were one of the first parties in the United States to use force to try to free the ethnic minority. They based their laws on those set out by the late Malcolm X, although his views on winning equality for the oppressed minorities were taken to new heights by the Black Panthers. They also turned to the works of Marx, Lenin and Mao for guidance on how to run their organization.
TEN POINT PLATFORM
The Party adopted a Ten Point Platform and Programme, which laid out the fundamental needs of the black majority in the United States, and addressed the longstanding grievances they had that alienated them from the rest of society. It was a manifesto that demanded that their needs be met and that oppression against the blacks be ended immediately, stressing that blacks had a constitutional right to bear arms and to use self-defence where deemed necessary.
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black and oppressed communities.
2. We want full employment for our people.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our black and oppressed communities.
4. We want decent housing, fit for the shelter of human beings.
5. We want decent 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.
6. We want completely free health care for all black and oppressed people.
7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people, other people of colour, all oppressed people in the United States.
8. We want an immediate end to all wars of aggression.
9. We want freedom for all black and oppressed people now held in the United States Federal, State, County, City and Military prisons and jails. We want trials by jury of peers for all persons charged with so-called crimes under the laws of this country.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people’s community control of modern technology.
The first party’s newsletter, The Black Panther, went into distribution on April 25, 1967, followed by a march to the California state capital. The marchers were all fully armed, and their protest was against the state that was trying to abolish the carrying of loaded weapons in public. One of the party’s leaders, Bobby Seale, read out their statement of protest, but instead of being sympathetic to their cause the police responded by arresting him and his 30 armed followers. It was this act by the authorities that activated the new resistance movement within the United States, causing other minority black workers to obtain arms and set up offshoots of the Black Panther Party.
SPARKS FLY
The kindling fires of the Black Panthers were sparked into full flame when their Defence Minister, Huey Newton, was arrested in October 1967 for killing a white Oakland policeman. Already disillusioned by the horrors of the Vietnam War, young whites joined their fellow, urban blacks and raised their voices in unison to set Huey free. The Party soon expanded from being a once small urban set up into a fully fledged national organization. Support groups sprang up everywhere – Japan, China, France, England, Germany, Sweden, Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uruguay and Israel – and even a group of senior citizens formed a party that became known as the Grey Panthers.
Back at the original party headquarters, the Panther movement formed a series of social programmes to provide services for the black and poor in their community. These were to become known as the Survival Programmes, of which there were 35 in total.
The first one to be set up was the Free Breakfast for Children Programme, which started in one catholic school in San Francisco and then spread to every major city in the United States. The programme meant that thousands of undernourished children in the country would receive a free breakfast every day. This shed such a poor light on the government that it shamed them into setting up a similar programme for public schools, although the FBI said it was just a form of propaganda on the part of the Panthers. Even worse, the FBI described the Panthers as a group of communist troublemakers who were out to overthrow the government of the United States.
The Black Panther Party used funds from the sale of Mao’s Red Book to buy arms, and realizing what valuable information was in the book, they decided to make it required reading for all their members. Meanwhile, fuelled by the information supplied to him by his men in the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover set out to try to eliminate the Black Panther Party. He called upon local police and authorities to help him eradicate them for good. By the end of the year, virtually every member of the Black Panthers had been aggressively beaten by members of the police or the FBI or had their property destroyed.
Seventeen-year-old Bobby Hutton was shot dead by Oakland police on April 6, 1968, in a 90-minute gun battle. Hutton himself was unarmed and after his house was set on fire he was forced to flee into a barrage of bullets. In August of the same year another 17-year-old member of the party was murdered, Tommy Lewis, together with Robert Lawrence and Steve Bartholomew. The FBI, with the co-operation of the police did everything in their power to intimidate and break the spirit of the Black Panther Party, resorting to many underhanded tactics, including the use of informants and agents provocateur. They destroyed Party property and tried their hardest to quell the programmes that had been set up to help the impoverished community.
One of the most remembered attacks by the FBI and the police was a raid on the home of the Panther organizer, Fred Hampton, in December 1969. The occupants of the house had been drugged by an informant working for the FBI and were asleep at the time of the raid. Hampton was killed along with his bodyguard, Mark Clark. The other people in the house were dragged out onto the street, beaten and subsequently charged with assault. These charges, however, did not hold up in court and they were later dropped.
Despite all the odds being stacked against them, the Black Panthers survived, strengthened and added to their Survival Programmes. They started to provide free medical clinics, gave groceries to the needy, distributed free clothes and shoes, provided education and transport and generally supported the community in any way they could.
UNDERHAND TACTICS
Realizing that their efforts to destroy the Black Panthers were not working, the FBI decided to employ even further underhanded tactics. In Marc
h 1970 they started to sew seeds of dissension among the members of the Black Panthers by sending forged letters to prominent members. One of their targets was a man named Eldridge Cleaver, who at the time was living in exile in Algiers. The letters contained false information about the party informing him that they were taking steps to remove Huey Newton from his position of power. Cleaver received many letters, asking for his assistance in getting rid of Newton so that he could take over control.
There was general unrest throughout the Black Panthers and the start of its downfall came when Cleaver was asked to do a television interview in which he expressed his complete contempt at what had happened to the party and its original standards. He criticised their Programmes as being reformist and demanded the immediate removal of their chief of staff, David Hilliard.
Following the derisory interview, Cleaver was forced to leave the party, and he set up his own Black Liberation Army. Bobby Seale ran for the post of mayor of Oakland in 1973, but having received only 40 per cent of the votes he was defeated.
Having struggled for years with factions and internal hatred, Huey Newton started to become more disillusioned and the party was starting to fall apart. By the start of the 1980s the party crumbled and many of the remaining members were either hunted down and killed, imprisoned on trumped-up charges, or forced to flee the United States.
On August 22, 1989, Huey Newton was shot dead on the streets of Oakland in a shoot-out over drugs, something to which he had become heavily dependent on over the years.
Cleaver came out of exile as a born-again Christian and in the later years of his life he adopted an attitude similar to his hero, Martin Luther King Jr, and became involved in different business ventures. He too became reliant on cocaine. Before his death he gave one last interview in which he said: