Vol.64/No.15 April 17, 2000
25 and 50 years ago
April 18, 1975
PORTLAND, Ore--This city's first public inquest into a police murder of a Black youth turned into a whitewash of the death of Rickie Johnson, a seventeen-year-old high school student.
On March 14, Portland cop Kenneth Sanford shot Johnson in the back of the head in an unoccupied house in North Portland. Sanford had entered the house disguised as a cab driver, holding his gun in a brown box supposed to contain Chinese food ordered at the house. Sanford hoped to entrap anyone within into attempting a robbery. Two days earlier a cab driver was allegedly robbed delivering a food order to the same address.
Sanford was ordered to shoot to kill if an armed robbery attempt was made. After entering the house, Sanford shot twice, hitting Johnson in the back of the head. He claimed that Johnson held a gun.
In addition to the murder of Johnson, there have been three other police killings of Blacks in the city in the last six months.
Under the pressure of a demonstration at police headquarters and demands from organizations such as the Portland State Black Student Union, the NAACP, the Albina Ministerial Alliance, and the Urban League, an inquest was finally scheduled for April 2.
About 400 people, mostly Blacks, attended the hearing. The size of the crowd was a strong indication of the support for the demand that Sanford be dismissed from the force and brought to trial for murder.
April 17, 1950
NEW YORK, April 14--Two of the Trotskyist leaders in the Soviet-controlled zone of Berlin, Oskar Hippe and Walter Haas, have been seized by Stalin's secret police and face execution, Farrell Dobbs, national chairman of the Socialist Workers Party, announced today. Dobbs appealed to all labor and liberal organizations in the country to protest the arrest of these working class leaders and demand their release from the prison camps in the Soviet Union where they are held by the MVD.From information just received from their friends in Berlin, Hippe and Haas were arrested late in 1948 by the Russian occupation forces and thrown into concentration camps. Both were well-known among Berlin workers for their decades of activity as revolutionary socialists in the German labor movement and their unimpeachable records of struggle against the Nazis.
The action of Stalin's secret police against these working class militants is all the more atrocious because both men suffered terribly from the Nazi terror. Oskar Hippe was three times arrested and tortured by the Nazis and imprisoned for two years in the internment camp at Luckau. Walter Haas was condemned for high treason by the Nazis for his role as a leader in the underground Trotskyist organization at Berlin. He spent three years in prison.
Front page (for this issue) |
Home |
Text-version home