Vol. 73/No. 44      November 16, 2009

On October 29, Housing Authority officials called in cops to help them evict Bumpurs. Six cops broke through Bumpurs’ apartment door. The cops claimed Bumpurs attacked them with a kitchen butcher knife. “When they busted the door open,” explained [her] daughter, “of course she got terrified and picked up a butcher knife. What would any old woman have done?”

[A cop] pumped two shotgun blasts into Bumpurs, and the cops evicted her—dead.

November 16, 1959
On Nov. 5 the grand jury in Pearl River County, Mississippi, adjourned without even bothering to hear evidence or call witnesses in the lynching of Mack Charles Parker last April. This official endorsement of the lynching and contemptuous flaunting of national and international opinion moved the U.S. Department of Justice to announce that it would seek indictments against the lynchers.

This federal announcement, however, is no more than a hypocritical and empty gesture. It is designed not to put any of Parker’s lynchers in jail, for all and one agree that now no Mississippi jury will even indict them, let alone convict.

Its sole aim is to cover up the complicity of the federal government in allowing the lynchers to get off scot free and in heading off a demand for the passage of a federal anti-lynch law.

November 17, 1934
After 18 long years the Supreme Court, cloaked in the mantle of “impartial” justice, has finally discovered the “Mooney Case.” The whole world quivered with indignation over the brazen frame-up. The international working class marched in the streets shouting its protest. Every scrap of evidence used to send Mooney to life-long incarceration was proved perjured, trumped-up or deliberately false. Witnesses against Mooney confessed that they had sold their testimony for a few filthy dollars.

Having finally bestirred itself, the Supreme Court is not granting Mooney a new trial. The sum total of its munificent decision is a summons to Warden Holahan of San Quentin to show cause why Mooney should be denied a writ of habeas corpus.

The Supreme Court and every other court respond to one thing only when class war prisoners are involved. Action, protest, and strike by the working class!  
 
 
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