America's wealthy rulers are congratulating themselves. They got away with it. They killed the first one. And now they plan to hang, shoot, gas, and electrocute hundreds more.

There are no rich people on death row. It is Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Native Americans, and the poor who face execution. These are the people that Gilmore's killing is meant to terrorize.

Those responsible for this barbarous and vindictive act are the real criminals. They are the real mass murderers. Their hands are stained with the blood of the Vietnamese, the Chilean workers, South African Blacks, and countless others.

Gilmore was white. That helps mask the racist injustice of capital punishment, which has always been used mainly against Blacks and other minorities.

Gilmore admitted killing two people. That helps cover up the notorious use of police frame-ups to send innocent people to their deaths--from the Haymarket martyrs of 1886, Joe Hill, and the Rosenbergs, to people like Gary Tyler and Delbert Tibbs whose lives are in jeopardy today.

The new president, like the old one, stands foursquare for executions. As governor of Georgia, Carter signed that state's current death penalty law in 1973.

January 28, 1952
Meeting in defiance of a giant Ku Klux Klan rally of robed racial terrorists in nearby Tallahassee, over 150 delegates representing approximately 10,000 members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 15 Southern states held an emergency conference in Jacksonville, Florida, Jan. 19 and 20. Declaring they would not be intimidated and while the Klan rally hurled curses and threats at them, the conference delegates honored the memory of murdered NAACP leader Harry T. Moore and resolve to carry on the work for which he gave his life.

Plans were mapped at the conference to combat the wave of racist terror and to carry on the fight for equal rights.

The emergency conference culminated in a mass meeting attended by 1,200 people. Roy Wilkins, administrator of the NAACP, told the audience that Moore was killed because he fought the doctrine of white supremacy. A message from Walter White, NAACP secretary, declared that "the bomb has replaced the lyncher's rope" and that violence in the South was no longer directed primarily against the Negro but that now "Jews, Catholics, trade unionists" and others were targets of the bigots. Wilkins also answered a radio broadcast of that afternoon by the Florida Peace Officers Association which had smeared the NAACP as a "racial hate organization."  
 
 
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