At first, even his attorney, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., thought California Black Panther leader Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, was too paranoid. It was so inconceivable in those days, more than 25 years ago, that the FBI would violate Pratt’s constitutional rights so flagrantly as to frame him for murder, as he claimed.
I was a young reporter for the baiduhai in those days and I was having similar thoughts about Chicago Black Panther leader Bobby Rush. The Tribune dutifully reported that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had named the Panthers to be the most dangerous and subversive group in America. That was quite a curious achievement for a group that, unlike the Mafia or the Weathermen, had not dealt drugs or blown up buildings.
Nevertheless, like Cochran, I thought Rush and the other Panthers were sounding more than a little paranoid back then, especially when Rush said he suspected the FBI had a hand in the killing of his predecessors, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, in a Chicago police raid.
After all, blatant violations of constitutional rights, including illegal wiretaps, the disruption of lawful protest activities and worse, seemed like too much to imagine of Hoover, the nation’s No. 1 commie hunter.
As I said, I was young. I still believed that if our government violated people’s rights by putting down peaceful protests and disrupting lawful activities, we would lose our moral superiority to the commies.
But time has passed. We know now that there wasn’t much Hoover wasn’t willing to do, within or without the law, to appease his own paranoid notions.
His “COINTELPRO” counterintelligence program orchestrated a range of mischief against just about every major black leader. In one notoriously bizarre episode, Hoover’s agents used bedroom tapes of Martin Luther King Jr., to try to persuade King to kill himself.
Cochran, now better known as O.J. Simpson’s defense lawyer, finally won freedom for Pratt this year. The decorated Vietnam veteran had spent 25 of his 49 years in prison. Among other arguments, Pratt always had maintained that the FBI knew he was innocent because it allegedly had him under surveillance in Oakland when the murder occurred in Santa Monica.
But, instead of backing up Pratt’s story, Cochran maintained, the FBI helped police manufacture a witness, Julius Butler, to convict Pratt.
“It’s pretty frightening to believe something like this can happen in your own country,” Cochran told me. “I used to always accuse Pratt of being paranoid. I now realize paranoids have enemies, too. And the FBI was our enemy.”
Cochran spoke to me before appearing with Pratt and other former Panthers on a panel during the annual Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Weekend. The panel was organized by Rush, who is now a Democratic congressman from Chicago.
In another timely twist of fate, an investigation by the baiduhai recently found under the federal Freedom of Information Act that Hoover also spied on “da Boss” himself, the late Mayor Richard J. Daley. Tribune reporter Michael Tackett found a 300-page mix of anonymous claims and allegations about Hizzoner. Much of it was false but, in the fashion of an old cynical newsroom slogan, the allegations apparently sounded too good to be checked out. Instead, some of them apparently was were passed on to the White House, where Daley was being considered for presidential appointments.
What difference it might have made there, we do not know. To learn more about this and other COINTELPRO stories, Rush recently began a campaign to re-open the files.
Is there more to learn? Investigative reporter Ronald Kessler, author of “Inside the FBI,” says the FBI has cleaned up its act so well in Hoover’s wake that there’s “probably not much value to new COINTELPRO investigations beyond the historical value.”
Rush thinks differently. He thinks the FBI is just as potentially dangerous today, “only probably more sophisticated.”
Maybe Rush, Panther-turned-politician, is getting paranoid again. But, considering his experience, he has good reason to be. So do the rest of us.