On this day, 2 April 1969, multiple members of the socialist Black Panther Party were arrested in predawn raids across New York City. 21 members were subsequently charged, and 13 eventually tried for 156 offences ranging from conspiring to bomb department stores to conspiring to murder policemen.
After an eight-month trial, the longest and most expensive in the state’s history, on May 13, 1970 it took the chair of the jury 20 minutes to read out 156 consecutive “not guilty” verdicts, after jurors unanimously acquitted the defendants of all charges. The courtroom erupted with applause and cheers of “power to the people!” And “right on!”.
The prosecution case centred on the testimony of three undercover agents who testified that the Panthers were plotting to bomb railway and subway stations, police stations, shops and even the Bronx Botanical Garden. Afeni Shakur, later mother of rapper Tupac Shakur, defended herself, essentially arguing that the undercover agents were lying. Outside the courts there was a mass campaign in support of those charged, two of whom fled to Algeria, and were expelled from the party as a result. After the verdicts, several of the defendants left the courtroom with their fists raised.
The prosecution was part of an often-violent and criminal state campaign to try to destroy the Black Panther Party.
This book includes the collective autobiographies of the defendants, along with essays tying their legacy to struggles today: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/books/products/look-for-me-in-the-whirlwind-from-the-panther-21-to-21st-century-revolutionshttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1685798468271963/?type=3
During the last ice age, when hunters and gatherers crossed the ancient Bering Land Bridge that connected Asia with North America, they carried something special with them in their genetic code: pieces of ancestral Australian DNA, a new study finds.
Over the generations, these people and their descendants trekked southward, making their way to South America. Even now, more than 15,000 years after these people crossed the Bering Land Bridge, their descendants — who still carry ancestral Australian genetic signatures — can be found in parts of the South American Pacific coast and in the Amazon, the researchers found.
“Much of this history has unfortunately been erased by the colonization process, but genetics is an ally to unravel unrecorded histories and populations,” study senior researcher and professor Tábita Hünemeier and study co-lead researcher and doctoral student Marcos Araújo Castro e Silva, both of whom are in the Department of Genetics and Evolutionary Biology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, told Live Science in an email. Read more.
Just from a quick glance around, gradual expansion from various populations living on and traveling to-and-from ice sheet islands seems more plausible for North America than Bering Land Bridge.
I can’t stand elon musk’s simp army like okay maybe they could idk pay for a concerted clean up effort with those billions of dollars they have? You can’t just destroy this planet to get to other ones lol. source
