Like many of those who marched in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, I have been thrilled to see a new generation of prosecutors reopen some of the long unsolved crimes of that era, especially the series of attempts to solve murders of African-Americans and their white supporters in the South during that violent era.
Unlike many others, I have also been pleased to see the purported leftists from groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), and their fellow travelers held accountable for some of their heinous crimes.
But there is a next step that must be taken, and that, at this writing, remains undone. I was reminded today once again of the unfairness of one particularly unnecessary and brutal killing -- that of Betty Van Patter, in December 1974.
The reminder came in the form of an excellent article in the Los Angeles Times, LAT story, written by David J. Garrow, a senior fellow at Cambridge University, author of "Bearing the Cross," a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
He lauded the recent Congressional vote to approve the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which would authorize up to $13.5 million a year in new federal spending for investigations into "cold case" killings like that of Till, a black teenager who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 after supposedly whistling at a white woman.
Garrow writes, "These better-late-than-never prosecutions are certainly laudable; such horrendous crimes should not go unpunished. But there is a problem. Entirely overlooked in Congress' consideration of the present bill is the way it unthinkingly adopts two of the most widespread but nonetheless false myths about the civil rights movement: that it took place only in the South and that it ended in the late 1960s."
He further notes that "those (Black) Panther apparatchiks who were responsible for the December 1974 disappearance of party bookkeeper Betty Van Patter, an idealistic white leftist who had discovered Panther financial shenanigans and whose battered body was found in San Francisco Bay" remain unpunished.
Thank you, Mr, Garrow, for properly setting the context of Ms. Van Patter's death. She, too, was a civil rights hero, though one very few have yet come to recognize. Bringing those responsible for her death to justice would finally help to heal the untreated wounds of an era when those purportedly working to make things better exploited naive supporters and then arbitrarily eliminated them when they tried to point out that the ends do not always justify the means.
Shame on you, book author still getting lecture invitations on the east coast, and living your hypocritical PC life in New York City. Shame on you, author and former leader of the party living around Atlanta, still breathing fire. One of you ordered Betty's killing and the other of you did the deed.
Our world can never be put right until the two of you are held just as responsible for your murderous deeds as those hateful old white Klansmen who, one by one, are finally being prosecuted in the South.
There are only two options -- justice and injustice. I want to see the day the two of you are dragged in from your comfortable perches and face the consequences of what you did that night when you snuffed out the life of an idealist, a mother, a person who would later have known the joy of being a grandmother.
You are the true racists.
And that is the saddest legacy of the work we all did in the '60s. The people that Betty was trying to help became the very monsters we all wished to defeat. Nothing justifies murder.
Shame on both you, and you know exactly who you are, EB and FF. May you both rot in hell! Or, better yet, in prison for killing Betty Van Patter.
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