January 11, 1974
It took a federal jury less than an hour to find three
Indians innocent of government charges stemming from the
November 1972 occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)
in Washington, D.C.
Keever Locklear, Dock Locklear, and William Sergeant were acquitted Dec. 19 on a series of charges, including possession of stolen BIA documents and threatening FBI agents.
The documents - containing secret information on how the government oppresses Indians - were taken during the occupation in order to bring the truth about the BIA's role to the public.
The trial itself was one more example of the thousands of broken promises made by the government to Indians.
At the end of the BIA take-over, federal officials made an agreement with the protesters that no one would be prosecuted for the action. Judge Arthur Stanley - a one-time sergeant in the Seventh Cavalry - wouldn't even allow this evidence in court, but the case fell through anyway.
January 10, 1949
Despite a pouring rain, members of the Socialist Workers
Party picketed the Dutch Consulate here tonight in protest
against the Dutch government's ruthless attack on the
Indonesian Republic. The call for the demonstration was issued
by the American Labor Party in conjunction with two other
Stalinist-front organizations. The New York Local of the SWP
came to the demonstration in good faith, believing that the
addition of its forces would increase the impact of the action.
The SWP members had barely joined the picket line when
Stalinist leaders demanded their withdrawal and got the captain
in charge of a police detachment to eject them from the line.
The SWP then formed its own line adjacent to the Stalinists and continued demonstrating. Before the action was finished, the SWP line was twice as large as the Stalinists'.
The SWP distributed a leaflet denouncing Dutch imperialism and exposing Washington's role in the rape of Indonesia. It hailed the Indonesian Trotskyists in their "revolutionary struggle for complete and unconditional independence of Indonesia."