Blast of echoes - SF8's Hank Jones talks about America's racist past

http://www.pasadenaweekly.com/cms/story/detail/blast_of_echoes/5693/


Blast of echoes



SF8's Hank Jones talks about America's racist past but steers clear
of discussing the 37-year-old murder he's accused of committing

By
http://www.pasadenaweekly.com/cms/story/detail/blast_of_echoes/5693//cms/story/author/andre_coleman/227

Andre Coleman 02/21/2008

Henry Jones was in the Marines in 1955 and stationed in Japan at the
height of America's Jim Crow era. But even there he still faced
discrimination and segregation, his resentment of it only fueled by
what was done that year to Emmett Till.
The 14-year-old Till was dragged from a relative's home in
Mississippi, severely beaten, tortured and then lynched after a white
woman claimed Till had whistled at her.

"His mother wisely left his casket open so that people could see how
they mutilated her son beyond recognition, and we got the pictures,"
Jones said of his time overseas. "That was a turning point in my
life. From that point on, I became an activist. We began by
desegregating the towns around the base. Before that, there were four
or five locations we could go. Everything else was off limits to
blacks, so we began to integrate. We felt if we weren't welcome
there, then nobody is going to be welcome there."

More than 50 years later, the 72-year-old Altadena resident is once
again speaking out against injustice and battling the government,
only now he is also fighting for his life after being accused of the
1971 murder of San Francisco police Officer John V. Young, gunned
down after eight members of the Black Liberation Army allegedly
stormed a police station, shooting Young and wounding a civilian clerk.

Police arrested Jones and fellow Altadena resident Ray Boudreaux on
Jan. 24, 2007.

Richard Brown, Richard O'Neal, Francisco Torres and Harold Taylor
were also arrested in different parts of the country that day and
later charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder in relation
to Young's death.

Two other men, Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim, have been serving life
terms in New York State prisons since 1973 for murders committed in that state.

Jones and Boudreaux posted bail in September and earlier this month
the conspiracy charges were dropped after a judge ruled that the
statute of limitations had expired. The men are due back in San
Francisco in April for a preliminary hearing.

Boudreaux declined to be interviewed for this story. And Jones
refused to discuss specifics of the case. However, he is traveling
the country speaking at colleges and events about the current
post-Sept. 11 atmosphere. He also recently attended the Pan African
Film Festival in Los Angeles for the premiere of the documentary
"Legacy of Torture," which details his ongoing legal battles.

Jones will neither admit nor deny connections to the Black Panther
Party or the Black Liberation Army, which authorities believe were
responsible for Officer Young's death. Rather, Jones said he is
simply an activist and organizer who is now being targeted by an
overzealous post-Sept. 11 federal government that has "tagged" him
and groups ranging from animal activists to artists as terrorists.

"The country has changed," Jones observed during an interview this
week at his home. "The climate now appears to be much like it was in
the '60s and '70s as far as progressive organizations are concerned.
Anyone that dissents or protests is suspect and investigated and put
on a list and monitored. Civil liberties are under assault."

San Francisco prosecutor Maggie Krell denies that the government is
attacking the San Francisco 8 for past political leanings and affiliations.

"There has been a long, thorough, methodical investigation involving
the San Francisco police, Department of Justice investigators and the
FBI,"' Krell said during a press conference last year. "We didn't
feel we had enough evidence until now. The investigation stretches
across different counties, different states."

There is no statue of limitation on murder charges, she continued.
So, "it's never too late to do the right thing. That's what we're
doing by bringing these men to justice."

Born in New Albany, Miss., during the days of racial segregation -
when black people had to go through back doors, couldn't try on
clothes in department stores and had to step off the sidewalk when
approaching white people - Jones later moved to San Francisco.

"Watching the protests on TV every day and watching the vicious
assaults by the racist Southern police and the Klan, it made you want
to get involved - I was from Mississippi and had experienced that
stuff. I wanted to do something, but I could not run off and leave my
family, so I got involved in the community in San Francisco
organizing around the issues."

It wasn't long before the Panthers were deemed the greatest threat to
the country's internal security by J. Edgar Hoover, who had just
started COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program), which used
infiltration and torture methods.

Frank McCoy and Ed Erdelatz were lead San Francisco police detectives
on the Young case and almost immediately, according to Jones, began
investigating activist groups, including the Panthers, the BLA and
the Weathermen.

In 1973, Taylor, along with John Bowman and Ruben Scott, was arrested
in New Orleans on an unrelated burglary complaint. While in custody,
McCoy and Erdelatz showed up and allegedly questioned Taylor, who was
later beaten with blackjacks and shocked with cattle prods until he
confessed to Young's murder.

Two years later, a San Francisco judge dropped the charges against
Taylor, ruling the confession was obtained illegally.

Twenty-eight years later, soon after Sept. 11, McCoy and Erdelatz
were assigned to Homeland Security. That's when Jones was accused of
being part of a terror organization, a charge dropped by prosecutors in 2003.

"They initially stated they were investigating white people," Jones
said. "They asked me if I knew any white people and radical members
like the Weathermen, the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society], and
quickly it switched to the murder of the police officer in San
Francisco and if I had any knowledge of that. It's been ongoing ever since."

In 2005, six of the men appeared in court but refused to cooperate
and spent six weeks in jail until the grand jury adjourned. The group
then started the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, which
they hope to use to raise funds for their defense.

"What we are trying to do now is educate the youth and get these
activists back out there confronting the wrongs in the system," Jones
said. "You look around and you see the erosion of constitutional and
legal rights and ... before you know it, you will be in a fascist
state like Nazi Germany. You have to resist that, and it's
everybody's responsibility to do that."





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