By February 2, 1970, when the pre-trial hearings commenced, most of the Panthers had been in jail for 10 months. In response to this blatant use of the courts for political purposes, the Panthers engaged in their own political counter-tactic: relentless disruption of court decorum. Through unceasing verbal tirades, they accused their jailers, the prosecution, the judiciary, and the media of engaging in political warfare. At one point, a melee emerged between several Panthers and the police, resulting in injuries on both sides. By month’s end, in response to both these court disorders and to the firebombing of his house by members of the Weather Underground, Judge John M. Murtagh declared an indefinite recess of the proceedings. He promised to resume the trial only after each defendant had submitted a written and signed statement providing their “assurance that the defendants are now prepared to participate in a trial conducted under the American system of justice.”
The Panther 21 maintained a revolutionary disposition, approaching the courtroom as a site of political struggle rather than an arbiter of justice. In lieu of said statement, they submitted an “Open Letter to Judge Murtagh,” a historical critique of what they reframed the “Amerikkkan system of justice.” Collectively authored by the Panther 21, the open letter was transmitted to Murtagh and the public in the form of a written document and tape recording read by Cetewayo Tabor. The Panthers denounced the vaunted liberal principle of equality before the law as hypocrisy and argued that white culture was stricken with a deep-seated “cultural racist phobia” of Black people in general, and particularly of those who resist oppression.
They argued that throughout its historical development, U.S. law has operated as an instrument of ruling class domination and racial criminalization. As evidence, they cited the unbroken chain of racist law: the tacit authorization of racial slavery in the founding documents of the United States; fugitive slave laws that curtailed Black freedom in non-slave holding states; the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case; the “Black Codes,” which effectively criminalized Blackness after the Civil War; Ku Klux Klan terror, which persisted through the complicity of the police and courts; and Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 case that legalized racial segregation. They further argued that while the Civil Rights Act of 1964 overturned legal segregation, it did so without upending the white supremacist organization of American society. They argued that a narrative of American political development from a Black perspective exposed “[the court’s] remarkable and ingenious talent for interpreting the law according to the needs and interests of the dominant white ruling class.”
The political significance of the 21’s open hostility toward the authority of established law attains deeper political significance when interpreted in relation to the fledgling efforts of Black revolutionary organizations to institute and legitimize new bodies of law. In 1968, citizens of the newly formed Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika, which sought to secede from the United States, signed the Declaration of Independence of the Black nation. In the spring of the following year some BPP chapters began organizing Peoples’ Tribunals, makeshift court proceedings in which community members adjudicated conflicts, determined the guilt or innocence of the accused, and handed down penalties on their own authority. The party organ described these tribunals as “the only legitimate and just recourse that Black people have to redress their grievances.” At the same time, the party was in the early stages of organizing a Revolutionary Peoples’ Constitutional Convention where they planned to convene representatives from various radical left organizations on the campus of Howard University in Washington, D.C. in order to author and ratify a new constitution that reimagined the United States as a democratic and anti-imperialist formation. These efforts to delegitimize established law while simultaneously establishing the legitimacy of new law is the sine qua non of revolutionary politics.