Gale Encyclopedia Of American Law 3Rd Edition Volume 2 P7 ppt

secession, urging the president to maintain a strong Unionist stance. In a shuffle of cabinet offices in December 1860, Black served for a short time as SECRETARY OF STATE . During his brief tenure, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union, and Black was a key adviser to Buchanan in handling the crisis. In January 1861, with only a few weeks left in his own term as president, Buchanan named Black to a seat on the U.S. Supre me Court that had been vacant for eight months. Republican senators, anxious to give the incoming president, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, his first appointment to the Court, opposed Black. Furthermore, although Black was a strong supporter of the Union, he was not an abolitionist. As a result, his nomina- tion was harshly criticized by the Northern antislavery press and by Democrat STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS, who had just lost the election to Lincoln. Also, Southern senators who might have supported Blac k were resigning from the Senate to join the Confederacy. Had Buchanan acted earlier to fill the seat, Black could have been easily confirmed. Instead, he was rejected 26–25. Deeply disappointed at his narrow defeat, Black returned to his home in York, Pennsylva- nia. He then suffered a number of personal setbacks, including the loss of his life savings, which he had entrusted to a relative for investment, and a rapid decline in health. In late 1861 Black’s health gradually started to improve and he resumed practicing law. In December of that year, he was appointed reporter of decisions for the U.S. Supreme Court, a position created by Congress in 1816. As reporter, Black was primarily responsible for editing, publishing, and distributing the Court’s opinions. The reporter was paid a modest yearly salary and usually earned additional income selling copies of the bound volume in which an important case appeared or printing and selling a significant opinion separately in a pamphlet. In those days, the volumes produced by a particular reporter usually bore the reporter’s name on the spine. Black served as reporter for three years and produced Black’sReports,two volumes of opinions that earned him high praise. In 1864 Black left the Court and returned to private practice in Pennsylvania. He handled several important cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, includ ing EX PARTE Milligan, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 2, 18 L. Ed. 281 (1866). In Milligan, the Court held that the president lacked the power to authorize military tribunals to try civilians when they could be tried in civil courts. Black also remained involved in the continuing litigation over California land titles, and earned high fees for his services. Jeremiah Sullivan Black. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. Jeremiah Sullivan Black 1810–1883 ❖ ❖ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ 1810 Born, Stony Creek, Pa. 1830 Admitted to the Pennsylvania bar 1844 Appointed president judge of the Court of Common Pleas 1851 Appointed to Supreme Court of Pennsylvania 1857 Appointed U.S. attorney general under President Buchanan 1861–64 Served as court reporter for U.S. Supreme Court 1861–65 Civil War ◆ 1868 Impeachment trial against President Johnson 1873 Helped revise Pennsylvania Constitution 1876 Served as counsel to Samuel Tilden in contested 1876 presidential election 1883 Died, York, Pa. ▼▼ ▼▼ 18001800 18501850 18751875 19001900 18251825 ◆ GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION 48 BLACK, JEREMIAH SULLIVAN Black was a close friend of President ANDREW JOHNSON , who assumed the presidency after Lincoln was assassinated. Black was initially engaged to represent Johnson in his impeach- ment trial but withdr ew after disagreements with Johnson’s other lawyers arose. He also served as counsel to SAMUEL J. TILDEN,an unsuccessful Demo cratic presidentia l candidate, in an investigation of the disputed results of the 1876 presidential election. Black continued to practice law and remain active in civic affairs until 1883, when he died at the age of seventy-three. FURTHER READINGS Black, Jeremiah S. Essays and Speeches of Jeremiah S. Black (1885). Reprint, 2009. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Library. Congressional Quarterly. 2004. Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court. 4th ed. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly. Elliott, Stephen P., ed. 1986. A Reference Guide to the United States Supreme Court. New York: Facts on File. BLACK LETTER LAW A term used to describe basic principles of law that are accepted by a majority of judg es in most states. The term probably derives from the practice of publishers of encyclopedias and legal treatises to highlight principles of law by printing them in boldface type. BLACK MONDAY See STOCK MARKET. BLACK PANTHER PARTY No group better dramatized the anger that fueled the 1960s BLACK POWER MOVEMENT than the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP). For five tumultuous years, the Panthers brought a fierce cry for justice and equality to the streets of the largest U.S. cities. Its members flashed across TV screens in black berets and leather coats, shotguns and law books in hand, confronting the police or storming the Califor- nia Legislature. Political demands issued from the party’s newspaper; loudspeakers boomed at rallies for jailed Panther leaders. Behind the scenes, the FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (FBI) spent millions of dollars in a secret counterin- telligence program aimed at destroying the group. By the time a 1976 congressional report revealed the extent of the FBI’s efforts, it was too late. Shoot-outs with police officers, con- flicts with other groups, MURDER, prison sen- tences, and internal dissent had destroyed the Black Panthers. The details surrounding the 1969 shooting deaths of two party leaders by Chicago police remain unclear. The other party leaders split in 1972 and one of them, Bobby Seale, ran for mayor of Oakland in 1973, losing in a runoff. By 1975, the last of the group, a splinter faction under ELDRIDGE CLEAVER, had disappeared. Before the advent of the Panthers, the mid- 1960s saw gradual progress in the struggle for CIVIL RIGHTS. This progress was too slow for many African Americans. Traditional civil rights groups such as MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.’s SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE (SCLC) were focusing their efforts on ending segregation in the South, but conditions in urban areas were reaching a boiling point. Younger activists increasingly turned away from these older groups and toward leaders such as STOKELY CARMICHAEL, whose STUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMIT- TEE (SNCC) demanded not merely integration but economic and social liberation for African Americans. Black power was Carmichael’smes- sage, and in Mississippi he had organized an all- black political party that took as its symbol a snarling black panther. The ethos of black power spread quickly to urban areas in the North, East, and West, where integration alone had not soothed the problems of racism, poverty, and violence. Police violence against African Americans was a common complaint in impoverished Oakland, California. By 1966 two young men had had enough. One was HUEY P. NEWTON, age 23, a first-year law student. With his friend Bobby Seale, age 30, Newton founded the BPP, with the intent of monitoring police officers when they made arrests . This bold tactic— already being employed in Minne apolis by the nascent AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT (AIM)—was entirely legal. Also legal under California state law was the practice of carrying a loaded weapon, as long as it was visible. But legal or not, the sight of Newton and Seale bearing shotguns as they rushed to the scene of an arrest had enormous shock value. To police officers and citizens alike, this represented a huge change from the previo usly nonviolent demon- strations of civil rights activists. Although they did not use the guns and maintained the legally required eight to ten feet from officers, the GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION BLACK PANTHER PARTY 49 Panthers inspired fear. They also quickly won respect from neighbors who saw them as standing up to the predominantly white police force. The law books they carried—and from which they read criminal suspects their rights— appeared to many in the community to give the Panthers a kind of legitimacy. Attracting new members through their high visibility, the Panthers sprang to national attention in 1967. Antagonism toward the party by law enforcement officials had prompted California lawmakers to consider GUN CONTROL. In May 1967 legislators met in Sacramento, the state capital, to discuss a bill that would criminalize the carrying of loaded weapons within city limits. To Seale and Newton, chairman and minister of defense of the BPP, respectively, the proposed law was unjust. Governor RONALD REAGAN was on the lawn of the state legislature as 30 armed Black Panthers arrived and entered the building. TV cameras followed the group’s progress to the legislative chambers, where they were stopped by police officers, Seale shouting, “Is this the way the racist government works—[you] won’tleta man exercise his constitutional rights?” He then read a prepared statement: The Black Panther Party calls upon American people in general and black people in particular to take full note of the racist California legis- lature which is now considering legislation aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless, at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of black people. The Panthers kept their guns, le ft the building, and wer e s ubs equently disarmed by the pol ice. No sooner had the demonstration ended than the national media denounced the Panthers as antiwhite radicals. For many white U.S. citizens, the Panthers symbolized terror. The party denied being antiwhite, but a new political focus now superseded its original goal of SELF-DEFENSE. In a ten-point program, the Panthers called for full employment, better On May 2, 1967, armed members of the Black Panther Party enter the California state capital to protest a bill restricting the carrying of arms in public. AP IMAGES GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3 RD E DITION 50 BLACK PANTHER PARTY housing and education, and juries composed of African Americans. It denounced the war in Vietnam and the military draft. Some of its demands went further. Point 3 said the group wanted an end to the robbing of the black community by the whites. Another point called for the release of all African American men from prison. The group’s major political objective was self-determination. It demanded United Nations – supervised elections in the black community, which it dubbed the bla ck colony, for blacks only, so that “black colonials” could determine their own natio nal destiny. To advance its cause, the party published the Black Panther newspaper. Its articles, cartoons, and imagery reflected a hardening stance. The police were caricatured as pigs—introducing a term of condemnation that would enter the national vernacular—and a recurring image was that of a Black Panther holding a gun to the head ofapiginapoliceuniform.Howeverextreme such rhetoric may sound in the early 2000s, it galvanized young African Americans coming of age in the Vietnam era. BPP chapters sprang up nationwide, and by 1968 as many as 5,000 members worked from BPP offices in 25 major U.S. cities. Prominent activists, including Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver, joinedthe party. Cleaver had achieved national prominence for his 1967 essay collection Soul on Ice. As the BPP’s minister of information, he had a voice that struck exactly the tone the Panthers wanted, a blend of determination, outrage, and threat. “These racist Gestapo pigs,” Cleaver told reporters, “have to stop brutalizing our community or we are going to take up arms and we are going to drive them out.” On another front, the Panthers proceeded with charitable services to African American communities, called Serve the People programs. They organized health clinics and schools. Holding food drives, they rounded up groceries and distributed them for free. Morning break- fast programs for African American children served food and spirituals, as kids sang “Black Is Beautiful.” White liberals supported the Panthers, writing supportive articles in intellec- tual journals such as the New York Review of Books; writing books that showed admiration for their style, like Norman Mailer’s The White Negro; and inviting them to fashionable Elridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party’s (BPP) minister of information, outside of BPP headquarters in Oakland in September 1968 after two of the city’s police officers fired shots into the building. AP IMAGES GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3 RD E DITION BLACK PANTHER PARTY 51 fund-raising parties, as did composer and con- ductor Leonard Bernstein. But this support was far from unanimous; the author Thomas C. Wolfe coined the phrase radical chic to satirize it. The successes achieved by the Panthers in Oakland and beyond were soon overshadowed by violence as tense confrontations between the police and Panther members erupted in gunfire. In October 1967, after a gun battle left one officer wounded and another dead, Newton was arrested. “Free Huey!” became a cry at protests across the United States while Newton remained in jail. From his cell, he told national TV audiences that the plight of African Amer- icans was similar to that of the Vietnamese. “The police occupy our community,” he said, “as a foreign troop occupies territory.” Con- victed of murder, he remained in prison until August 1970. An appeals court later threw out the conviction. The violence continued, as the police began raiding BPP offices. In 1968 a confrontation in West Oakland left three officers and two Panther members wounded. A 17-year-old Panther was killed. Seale announced on televi- sion that black people should organize so that they could retaliat e against racist police brutality and attacks. In 1969 Seale too was in court. The police had arrested him at an antiwar demonstration outside the 1968 Democratic National Con- vention in Chicago. He was charged with rioting. During the trial of Seale and other demonstrators—dubbed the Chicago Eight— federal district court judge Julius J. Hoffman ordered the vociferous Seale handcuffed to a chair and gagged, a move that inspired such public revulsion that a mistrial was declared. However, in 1970 Seale and several other Panthers were back in court, in New Haven, Connecticut. The charge was the 1969 alleged murder of suspected Panther police informant Alex Rackley. Seale and fellow Panther Erica Huggins were ultimately acquitted, but two other Panthers, including Warren Kimbro (who plea-bargained), were sentenced to prison. Seale’s controversial trial inspired a “May Day” riot at Yale University in New Haven, prompting the federal government to send in 2,500 NATIONAL GUARD members after a substan- tial amount of mercury (a bomb-making ingredient) was taken from a Yale chemistr y lab and several rifles were discovered missing. The Panthers affected the highest circles of federal law enforcement. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, considered them a black nationalist hate group. In November 1968 he ordered FBI field agents to begin destabilizing the group by exploiting dissension within its ranks. This end was to be achieved through the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTEL- PRO), a surveillance and mis i nformation pro- gram widely used in the late 1960s against civil rights, black power , and various leftist groups. The FBI infiltrated the Panther membership with informants, wiretapped telephones, mailed fake letters to leaders, and spread innuendo both inside and outside the party. Documenta- tion of the counterintelligence campaign would emerge in a report issued in 1976 by the U.S . Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations, titled The FBI’s Covert Program to Destroy the Black Panther Party. The report revealed that the FBI had gone to great lengths, some of them illegal, to pit the Panthers against themselves and other groups. The destabilization worked. The FBI man- aged to exacerbate a bloody feud between the Panthers and another California-based group, United Slaves (US). It poured resources into making leaders suspicious of each other, no tably aggravating a rift between Newton and Cleaver. Perhaps its most egregious involvement came during a 1969 operation against Fred Hampton, the Chicago-based chairman of the Illinois BPP. In late 1967 the FBI launched a disinformation campaign against the 19-year-old, and his file in the FBI’s Racial Matters Squad soon swelled to more than 4,000 pages. When Hampton fell under suspicion in the murder of two Chicago police officers, an FBI informant provided authorities with a detailed floor plan of his apartment. On December 4, 1969, police officers raided the apartment. Hampton and another Panther member were killed; four others were wounded. The Panthers alleged that the incident was an ASSASSINATION. Several official and private inquiries were conducted, including one led by ROY WILKINS, executive director of the NAACP, and Ramsey Clark, former U.S. attorney general. Lawsuits brought against the FBI by the victims’ survivors dragged through the courts until 1983, when the federal government agreed to pay them a $1.85 million settlement. U.S. district court judge John F. Grady imposed sanctions on the FBI for having covered up facts GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION 52 BLACK PANTHER PARTY in the case. For the Illinois Panther chapter, however, the raid in 1969 had signaled the beginning of the end. In disarray in 1972, the Panthers soon collapsed. Its leadership feuded, police and FBI harassment took a heavy toll, and the black power movem ent had nearly expired. Charged with murder, Cleaver had fled to Cuba and Algeria, where he continued to urge African Americans on to revolution. Cleaver maintained his Black Panther faction in exile until 1975. Seale and Newton preferred nonviolent solutions. After the Panthers disbanded, Seale ran for mayor of Oakland in 1973, winning a third of the vote. He later became a public speaker and a community liaison on behalf of Temple University’s African American studies program. Newton earned a doctor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz, but his legal problems continued. In March 1987 he was convicted for being a felon in possession of a firearm—despite the overturning of his original murder conviction—and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. In 1989 he was again in prison, serving time for a parole violation for possessing cocaine. He died in August 1989, after being shot during a drug deal in the neighborhood where he began the Panthers. Conversely, fellow Panther Kimbro was accepted into a graduate program at Harvard while still in prison, and was released after serving little more than four years of his sentence. He became an assistant dean at a local university and later served as director of Project More, a halfway house and prison- alternative program in New Haven. He was quoted in a 2000 issue of the Christian Science Monitor as wanting to be known as “a guy who made some mistakes, turned his life around, and learned to help other people. ” The legacy of Newton and Seale’s party is debatable. Its alliance with international revolu- tionary leaders—Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh, to name a few—cost it credibility in the eyes of mainstream U.S. citizens. An organization devoted originally to the aim of self-defense for beleaguered urban African Americans, it nose-dived into violence and terror. For this reason, the BPP is customarily dismissed as an extremist, self-destructive exponent of the black power movement. But this transformation owed something to the harassment of the Panthers by law enforcement agencies. In turn, the calculated federal and local campaigns against the Panthers i nitiated the group’s most tangible effect on U.S. law: highlighting FBI counterintelligence against U.S. citizens was a noteworthy gain. In the years following the death of FBI director Hoover, pressure for reforms dismantled the apparatus he single-handedly used against his political enemies. Drawing attention to the issue of urban police brutality was another major Panther contribu- tion, one that grew as a concern in subsequent years. In addition, the group’s focus on the questionable number of African American men fighting the U.S. war in Vietnam inspired black intellectuals to criticize the role of race in the U.S. military. Moreover, in the party’s passionate ten- point program were the seeds of ideas that eventually took root in the U.S. legal system: By the 1990s, juries increasingly reflected the racial composition of the communities in which defendants lived. As the history of the CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT demonstrates, such change came slowly, begrudgingly, and often at great personal cost to the men and women who fought for it. The original Black Panther Party for Self- Defense is not to be confused with an entity that emerged in the late 1990s, calling itself the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and adopt- ing the original STALKING panther logo. The newer group allegedly violated a 1997 Texas state court order prohibiting them from “referring to themselves by any name containing the words Panther, Black Panthers, or Black Panther Party.” In 2003, lawyers representing some of the original Panthers, e.g., The Black Panther Party, Inc. (which brought the Texas action) and the Huey P. Newton Foundation, contemplated filing a federal trademark infringement suit after an August 2002 cease and desist letter apparently went unheeded. FURTHER READINGS Alexandri, Maya. 2003. “Stalking the New Panthers.” IP Law & Business (January). Available online at http://www.law. com/jsp/law/LawArticleFriendly.jsp?id=1045793329369; website home page: http://www.law.com (accessed July 7, 2009). Baker, Naima. 2000. “May Day, May Day.” 211 Park St. Newsletter. Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale (October). Colhoun, Alexander. “Ex-Black Panther Warren Kimbro.” Christian Science Monitor (September 7, 2000). “A Panther Generation Gap.” Editorial. Chicago Tribune (October 30, 2002). GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION BLACK PANTHER PARTY 53 Yale Univ. Library Manuscripts and Archives, Record Unit 16, 1996. Guide to the Inventory of May Day Records, 1970–1972, 1976. New Haven: Yale Univ. Library. CROSS REFERENCES Black Power Movement; Civil Rights Movement; Vietnam War. BLACK POWER MOVEMENT The Black Power movement grew out of the CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT that had steadily gained momentum through the 1950s and 1960s. Although not a formal movement, the Black Power movement marked a turning point in black-white relations in the United States and also in how blacks saw themselves. The movement was hailed by some as a positive and proactive force aimed at helping blacks achieve full equality with whites, but it was reviled by others as a militant, sometimes violent faction whose primary goal was to drive a wedge between whites and blacks. In truth, the Black Power movement was a complex event that took place at a time when society and culture was being transformed throughout the United States, and its legacy reflects that complexity. In the 1950s and early 1960s, groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) and the SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE (SCLC) worked with blacks and whites to create a desegregated society and eliminate racial discrimination. Their efforts generated positive responses from a broad spectrum of people across the country. Rev. MARTIN LUTHER KING Jr., who headed the SCLC, made significant headway with his adherence to nonviolent tactics. In 1964 Pre- sident LYNDON B. JOHNSON signed the CIVIL RIGHTS Act and a year later he signed the Voting Rights Act. Civil rights legislation was an earnest and effective step toward eliminating inequality between blacks and whites. Even with the obvious progress, however, the reality was that prejudice could not be legislated away. Blacks still faced lower wages than whites, higher crime rates in their neighborhoods, and unspoken but palpable racial discrimination . Young blacks in particular saw the civil rights movement as too mainstream to generate real social change. What they wanted was something that would acceler- ate the process and give blacks the same opportunities as whites, not just socially but also economically and politically. Perhaps more important, they felt that the civil rights movement was based more on white percep- tions of civil rights than black percept ions. Not all blacks had been equally impressed with the civil rights movement. Malcolm X and the NATION OF ISLAM, for example, felt that racial self-determination was a critical and neglected element of true equality. By the mid-1960s, dissatisfaction with the pace of change was growing among blacks. The term “black power” had been around since the 1950s, but it was STOKELY CARMICHAEL, head of the STUDENT NON- VIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE (SNCC), who popularized the term in 1966. Carmichael led a push to transform SNCC from a multiracial community activist organi- zation into an all-black social change organiza- tion. Late in 1966 two young men, HUEY NEWTON and Bobby Seale, formed the BLACK PANTHER PARTY for SELF-DEFENSE (BPP), initially as a group to track inciden ts of police violence. Within a short time groups such as SNCC and BPP gained momentum, and by the late 1960s the Black Power movement had made a definite mark on American culture and soci ety. The Black Power movement instilled a sense of racial pride and self-esteem in blacks. Blacks were told that it was up to them to improve their lives. Black Power advocates encouraged blacks to form or join all-black political parties that could provide a formidable power base and offer a foundation for real socioeco nomic progress. For years, the movement’s leaders said, blacks had been trying to aspire to white ideals of what they should be. Now it was time for blacks to set their own agenda, putting their needs and aspirations first. An early step, in fact, was the replacement of the word “Negro” (a word associated with the years of SLAVERY) with “black.” The movement generated a number of positive developments. Probably the most noteworthy of these was its influence on black culture. For the first time, blacks in the United States were encouraged to acknowledge their African heritage. COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES established black studies programs and black studies departments. Blacks who had grown up believing that they were descended from a backwards people now found out that African culture was as rich and diverse as any other, and they were encouraged to take pride in that GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION 54 BLACK POWER MOVEMENT heritage. The Black Arts movement, seen by some as connected to the Black Power move- ment flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. Young black poets, authors, and visual artists found their voices and shared those voices with others. Unlike earlier black arts movements such as the Harlem Renaissance, the new movement pri- marily sought out a black audience. The same spirit of racial unity and pride that made the Black Power movement so dynamic also made it problematic—and to some, dangerous. Many whites, and a number of blacks, saw the movement as a black separatist organization bent on segregating blacks and whites and undoing the important work of the civil rights movement. There is no question that Black Power advocates had valid and pressing concerns. Blacks were still victims of racism, whether they were being charged a higher rate for a mortgage, getting paid less than a white co-worker doing the same work, or facing violence at the hands of white racists. But the solutions that some Black Power leaders advocated seemed only to create new problems. Some, for example, suggested that blacks receive paramilitary training and carry guns to protect themselves. Though these individuals insisted this device was solely a means of self-defense and not a call to violence, it was still unnerving to think of armed civilians walking the streets. Also, because the Black Power movement was never a formally organized movement, it had no central leadership, w hich meant that different organizations with divergent agendas often could not agree on the best course of action. The more radical groups accused the more mainstream groups of capitulating to whites, and the more mainstream accused the more radical of becoming too ready to use violence. By the 1970s most of the formal organizations that had come into prominence with the Black Power movement, such as the SNCC and the Black Panthers, had all but disappeared. The Black Power movement did not succeed in getting blacks to break away from white society and create a separate society. N or did it help end discrimination or racism. It did, however, help provide some of the elements that were ultimately necessary for blacks and whites to gain a fuller understanding of each other. FURTHER READINGS Carmichael, Stokely, Charles V. Hamilton, and Kwame Ture. 1992. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Vintage. Cross, Theorore. 1984. The Black Power Imperative: Racial Inequality and the Politics of Nonviolence. New York: Faulkner. Van Deburg, William L. 1992. New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. CROSS REFERENCES Black Panther Party; Carmichael, Stokely; Civil Rights Acts; Malcolm X; Nation of Islam; NAACP; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Voting Rights Act of 1965. BLACKACRE A fictitious designation that legal writers use to describe a piece of land. The term Blackacre is often used in comparison with Whiteacre in order to distin- guish one parcel of land from another. v BLACKFORD, ISAAC NEWTON Isaac Newton Blackford achieved prominence as a jurist. He was born November 6, 1786, in Isaac Newton Blackford 1786–1859 ❖ ❖ 1786 Born, Bound Brook, N.J. ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ 1806 Graduated from Princeton 1817–53 Served on Indiana Supreme Court 1811 Moved to Indiana territory 1813 Became clerk and recorder of Washington County, Indiana 1816 Indiana became a state; Blackford became speaker of Indiana legislature 1832 Served as president elector of the Clay ticket 1855 Appointed U.S. Court of Claims judge 1859 Died, Washington, D.C. 1861–65 U.S. Civil War ▼▼ ▼▼ 1800 1825 1850 1875 1775 ◆ GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION BLACKFORD, ISAAC NEWTON 55 Bound Brook, New Jersey. A graduate of the Col- lege of New Jersey (later Princeton University), Blackford served as clerk and recorder of Washington County, Indiana, in 1813. The fol- lowing year he became a territorial court judge. Blackford served as a member of the Indiana state house of representatives from 1816–1817. He was also a candidate for Presidential Elector for Indiana in 1824. The following year he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate seat for Indiana. Blackford participated in state politics as a county delegate to the Indiana legislature, serving as speaker of the state’s house of representatives in 1816. In 1817 Blackford returned to the judiciary and sat as a justice of the Indiana Supreme Court until 1853. He subsequently served as a U.S. COURT OF CLAIMS judge from 1855 to 1859. Blackford died on December 31, 1859, in Washington, D.C., and was buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis. BLACKLIST A list of individuals or organizations designated for special discrimination or boycott; also to put a person or organization on such a list. Blacklists have been used for centuries as a means to identify and discriminate against undesirable individuals or organizations. A blacklist might consist, for example, of a list of names developed by a company that refuses to hire individuals who have been identified as union organizers; a country that seeks to boycott trade with other countries for political reasons; a LABOR UNION that identifies firms with which it will not work; or a government that wishes to specify who will not be allowed entry into the country. Many types of blacklists are legal. For example, a store may maintain a list of individuals who have not paid their bills and deny them credit privileges. Similarly, credit reports can effectively function as blacklists by identifying individuals who are poor credit risks. Because the purpose of blacklists is to exclude and discriminate, they can also result in unfair and illegal discrimination. In some cases, blacklists have done great damage to people’s lives, locking them out of employment in their chosen careers or denying them access to influential organizations. For example, if a labor union makes a blacklist of workers who refuse to become members or conform to its rules, it has committed an UNFAIR LABOR PRACTICE in violation of federal laws. Blacklists may also necessitate disclosure laws. State and federal fair credit reportin g acts, for example, require that access to information in a credit report must be given, upon request, to the person to whom the information applies. The most famous instance of blacklisting in U.S. history occurred in the entertainment industry during the 1940s and 1950s. Motion picture companies, radio and television broad- casters, and other firms in that industry developed blacklists of individuals accused of being Communist sympathizers. Those firms then denied employment to those who were named on the blacklists. Blacklisting in Hollywood came about largely through the work of the House Un- American Activities Committee (HUAC), which was formed to investigate the activities of Communist, fascist, or other supposedly sub- versive and “un-American” political groups. Though the committee purported to be con- cerned with all types of potential subversion, after WORLD WAR II ended in 1945 and relations with the Soviet Union subsequently deteriorated, it focused largely on COMMUNISM as a threat to the internal stability of the United States. In highly publicized hearings in 1947, 1951–52, and 1953–55 the committee sought to ferret out Communist sympathizers, conspiracies, and propaganda in the entertainment industry. The HUAC hearings produced lists of individuals who either had been identified by witnesses as Communists or had refused to answer questions in appearances before the committee on the grounds of the FIRST AMEND- MENT , which protects f ree speech and free association, or the FIFTH AMENDMENT, which protects against SELF-INCRIMINATION. Entertain- ment industry companies, fearing that they would be perceived by the public as pro- Communist if they employed people named in the hearings, then used these lists as blacklists. They refused to hire hundreds of actors, writers, and other entertainment professionals named in the HUAC hearings. Many promising careers were thus ended and much potentially edifying art was lost. Some of the first victims of Hollywood blacklisting were known as the Hollywood Ten. GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION 56 BLACKLIST In the October 1947 HUAC Hearings Regarding Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, ten Hollywood screenwriters and directors—Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo— appeared under SUBPOENA, or court order, before the committee. Each of them refused to answ er questions regarding affiliation with the Com- munist party on the grounds that such ques- tions violated their First Amendment right to privacy, or a right to remain silent, regarding their political beliefs or affiliations. The courts rejected this argument, found the Hollywood Ten guilty of contempt of Congress, and gave them prison sentences lasting from six months to one year. Nine of the ten were blacklisted in the film industry. (Ironically, the man conducting the 1947 HUAC hearings, Representative J. Parnell Thomas [R-N.J.], joined Lardner in federal prison in 1950 after Thomas was convicted of stealing government funds.) Subpoenaed witnesses in these hearings faced a dilemma: On the one hand, they could invoke constitutional protection such as the Fifth Amendment, thereby implying current or former membership in the Communist party, putting themselves on the blacklist, and ending their chances of ever working in the entertain- ment industry again; on the other hand, they could “name names,” or identify their friends as Communists, thereby betraying those close to them. In many cases, people were blacklisted for past political affiliations that they had aban- doned. During the anti-Communist hysteria that gripped the nation in the 1950s, Congress’s investigations into the Hollywood film industry went unchecked and the resulting blacklists destroyed numerous promising careers. FURTHER READINGS Bernstein, Walter. 2000. Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist. New York: Da Capo. Buhle, Paul, and Dave Wagner. 2004. Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950– 2002. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Vaughn, Robert. 1972. Only Lies: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting. New York: Putnam. The Hollywood Ten were photographed in January 1948, before their arraignment on charges of contempt of Congress. Nine of the ten were later blacklisted from the film industry. AP IMAGES GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION BLACKLIST 57 . Pa. ▼▼ ▼▼ 18001800 18501850 18751875 19001900 1 825 1 825 ◆ GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION 48 BLACK, JEREMIAH SULLIVAN Black was a close friend of President ANDREW JOHNSON , who assumed. minister of information, outside of BPP headquarters in Oakland in September 1968 after two of the city’s police officers fired shots into the building. AP IMAGES GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, . Kimbro.” Christian Science Monitor (September 7, 20 00). “A Panther Generation Gap.” Editorial. Chicago Tribune (October 30, 20 02) . GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION BLACK PANTHER PARTY 53 Yale