spokesperson for the multiracial coalition named Susan Graham, president of a group called Project Race, welcomed this “victory” but insisted that her troops would continue to pursue the multiracial category: “As it is, my children cannot be multiracial children. My children can be ‘check-all-that-apply’ children and I do not consider that fair.”
It’s not really about fairness, Susan. It’s about a racial/ethnic spoils system, which is the sorry mess that civil rights advocacy has become in America since the death of Martin Luther King. The stakes here, of course, are not rights but entitlements: the set-asides, grants, voting district lines and other government (and now private) handouts that serve as payoffs to the racial/ethnic grievance-mongers. Otherwise, who could be against a multiracial census category, which if adopted would embody the celebrated American mosaic?
Actually, I would be against it. I say this not only as a veteran of the once venerable civil rights struggle, but as the grandfather of three beautiful granddaughters who would qualify for the box that will not appear on your next national census and thus would not qualify for the affirmative action perks, the special even-if-you-don’t-really-need-them scholarships, and the minority even-if-you-have-to-subcontract-them-to-someone-who-is-actually-qualified-t o-do-the-job contracts.
Of course, my granddaughters will be able to fill a preferred racial box anyway and qualify for all these perks if they just tick off the category which includes that part of their racial/ethnic chromosomes (in their case, black) that make the Clinton liberals and other social engineers of the new American apartheid feel good about themselves. I use the word “apartheid” advisedly, because apartheid in its origins was nothing more than an affirmative action program for the Boer minority, who were oppressed by the English.
The current multiracial census fiasco ought to set off alarm bells to the nation, that we are headed down a terribly wrong path. We have already become a race-conscious society in a way that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago, when the phrase “without regard to race, color or creed” was still invoked whenever anyone wanted to describe American pluralism. Will the present path lead us down the road to deeper and more bitter racial divisions, ugly struggles over diminishing racial spoils, increasing civil conflict and eventually a South African future? Or perhaps just further into the realm of the ridiculous and the just plain stupid? I have no idea. But you can check one of the above.
August 3, 1997, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24395; http://www.salon.com/1997/07/18/horowitz970718/.
I first heard the name Geronimo Pratt in the early 1970s during a late night conversation with Huey Newton, the “Minister of Defense” of the Black Panther Party, now deceased. Pratt was the leader of the Los Angeles branch of the Party and had been convicted of a robbery-murder that occurred on December 18, 1968. A young elementary school teacher named Caroline Olsen and her husband, Kenneth, were accosted by two gunmen on a Santa Monica tennis court, and were ordered to lie down and give up their cash and jewelry, which they did. But as the predators left the scene, one of the gunmen emptied his .45 caliber weapon into their prone bodies, wounding Kenneth Olsen and killing Caroline. Nearly two years later, Geronimo Pratt was charged with the murder and subsequently convicted despite the efforts of a young attorney on the make named Johnnie Cochran.
It was not just the murder conviction that made Pratt a figure of interest, since other Panthers had gone to jail for criminal offenses as well. Pratt was special because Newton and the Party had hung him out to dry. Even though he was “Deputy Minister of Defense,” and ran the Los Angeles Party, there were no “Free Geronimo” rallies organized on his behalf, as there had been for Huey and other Panthers like Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale. In fact, Huey and the other Panther leaders—Seale, David Hilliard and Elaine Brown—flatly denied Pratt’s alibi that he was at a Panther meeting in Oakland at the time of the murder. It was this denial that sealed Pratt’s fate.
There were reasons why Huey would do this. He had expelled Pratt from the Panthers shortly after the murder of Caroline Olsen because of his support for an anti-Newton Black Panther faction led by Eldridge Cleaver. This more violent wing of the Party had accused Newton of selling out the “armed struggle.” To show their authenticity, Cleaver’s followers had formed the “Black Liberation Army,” which had already launched a “guerilla war” in America’s cities, conducting a string of armed robberies and several murders in the process. A Vietnam War veteran, Pratt had been the Party’s “military expert.” As head of the Los Angeles chapter, he had fortified its headquarters for a shootout with police, deploying machine guns and other automatic weapons in a firefight in which three officers and three Panthers were wounded. At the beginning of August 1970, when Pratt was kicked out of the Party, another member of his violent faction, Jonathan Jackson, marched into a Marin County courthouse with loaded shotguns and took hostages in an episode that cost the lives of a federal judge, Jackson, and two of his cohorts. Pratt had supported Jackson and his plan to use the hostages to liberate his brother from San Quentin, where he was waiting trial for murder.
The evening Huey and I talked about Geronimo, he explained to me that Pratt, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was also psychotic (the word he used); he had not only committed the Santa Monica murder but actually enjoyed violence for its own sake. Huey attributed Pratt’s aberrant behavior to his war experience, although he had not known Pratt prior to his military discharge. And that was the way it remained for me for twenty-five years, as I was discovering that Huey himself was a cold-blooded killer and the Panthers a political gang that had committed many robberies, arsons and murders. By the time Johnnie Cochran brought Pratt’s case before the general public, I was almost ready myself to give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps some other Panther had killed Caroline Olsen and used Pratt’s car to commit the crime, as his supporters maintained. Perhaps the murder weapon, a distinctive .45 caliber model used in the military and identified by several witnesses as belonging to Pratt, had actually belonged to someone else, as he maintained.
But there was a detail from that conversation with Huey that I could never forget and yet never quite believe either. Pratt was so crazy, Huey told me, that “he couldn’t get an erection unless he was holding a knife in his hand.” This detail would surface in the aftermath of Pratt’s release last June by Orange County Superior Court Judge Everett Dickey. Dickey had agreed with Cochran that the prosecution had wrongfully concealed from the original jury the information that their key witness, a former Panther named Julius Butler, had acted as a police and FBI informant. It was Butler who had identified the .45 as Geronimo’s weapon and—even more damning—had claimed that Pratt boasted to him that he had killed Caroline Olsen. It was Butler—and the adroit use Cochran made of him—that led Pratt to be granted a new trial and be hailed by Cochran and a compliant press as a hero and a victim of injustice.
In the tapestry of Johnnie Cochran’s political career, the case of Geronimo Pratt forms a central thread. A young Johnnie Cochran, just setting out on his law career, had been Pratt’s counsel in the original trial. By his own account, it was the Pratt case that radicalized him, persuading him that America’s criminal justice system was unfair to black men. It showed him, too, that his failure to play the race card had led to the conviction of his client. He resolved never to make this mistake again. When decades later Cochran took on the legal battle that made him famous, he told O.J. Simpson, “I’m not going to let happen to you what happened to Geronimo Pratt.” After getting Simpson off, he recalled the solemn promise he had made to the imprisoned Pratt: that he
