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NewsMax.com Monday March 27, 2000; 8:43 PM EST Before Sharpton, Hillary Hobnobbed with Crips, Bloods and Panthers Hillary's riot? That's what some are saying about the violence that erupted in Brooklyn over a case that has become the focus of the first lady's United States Senate campaign against New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Mrs. Clinton, it turns out, is no stranger to some of the more militant players in America's cauldron of racial politics. In fact, before she hooked up with a triad of reverends now busily polarizing New York on her behalf, she entertained former Crips and Bloods gang members at the White House and championed the cause of the Black Panthers. Since New York police fatally shot the unarmed Patrick Dorismond, the Revs. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Calvin Butts have become Mrs. Clinton's most effective campaigners, whipping up so much resentment in New York's black community, it's surprising more people weren't injured in the recent rock and bottle throwing melee. While Hillary confines herself to milder forms of racial demagoguery, making statements like "We all know New York has a problem; all of us except, it seems, Mayor Giuliani," her three reverends have been less circumspect. "You want to maintain the status quo and you want a few Negroes to help you do it. Go to hell, white man," shouted Rev. Butts from his pulpit at the Abyssinian Baptist Church a few weeks ago. The white man Butts had in mind was, of course, Giuliani -- who days earlier had trumpeted the acquittal verdict in another police shooting case as vindication for his own wait-and-see approach. Showing typical Republican timidity, neither Giuliani nor New York's GOP governor George Pataki has called Butts on his racist diatribe, despite the fact that this member of Hillary's triad just happens to be president of the taxpayer-funded State University of New York at Old Westbury. Not to be outdone by Butts, Jackson came to town to pronounce the first lady's Senate opponent "mentally disturbed." For his part, Sharpton argued that Brooklyn's mini-riot was actually the mayor's fault, claiming that the presence of so many police clad in riot gear had provoked the crowd. (In fact, observers agree, cops in riot gear didn't appear till after the rock and bottle throwing began.) The racial demagoguery is working, with the latest Zogby poll putting Hillary three points ahead of Giuliani, a whopping ten-point improvement for her in the last three weeks. None of this is new to Hillary. One of the more bizarre, though little noted, features of the Clintons' arrival in Washington was their invitation to two former Los Angeles gang members to help celebrate their triumph. "Man, it was beautiful," one-time Crip Charles Rachal told the Los Angeles Times in January 1993 about his meeting with the president. "He talked to us individually and all together -- just like it was a family thing. People were getting up, going to this table, going to that table, giving hugs and taking pictures. Man, it was heartwarming." Rachal and former Blood gang member Leon Gullett had ringside seats for Clinton's swearing-in ceremony and were even invited to one of the gala inaugural balls, reported the Times. Gang members might not be everybody's idea of A-list party guests. But for Hillary, hobnobbing with murderous militants was old hat. Twenty years earlier, while a grad student at Yale, a young Hillary Rodham's brand of radical politics led her to the doorstep of the Black Panthers. Several Panthers, including the notorious Bobby Seale, were then on trial in New Haven for the torture death of one of their own members, Alex Rackley. The Panthers suspected Rackley was an informant for police, better known to Hillary's crowd at the time as "the pigs." For his perceived sins, Rackley's Panther brethren clubbed him, burned him with cigarettes, scalded him with boiling water, stabbed him with an ice pick and finally shot him twice. Police found Rackley's mutilated body floating in the Coginchaug River, twenty-five miles north of New Haven. In her stinging biography of the first lady, Hell to Pay, Barbara Olson reports, "Hillary formed a close association with [Panther lawyer Charles] Garry and manifested no misgivings about the violent rhetoric of his clients, who called for police assassinations and said, 'If Bobby dies, Yale fries.'" "Hillary attended the Black Panther trials and put her considerable leadership and organizational skills to work in organizing shifts of fellow students to monitor the trial and report alleged civil rights abuses," Olson wrote. As the trial's controversy swirled over Yale's campus, the rallying cry from student radicals became "Shut it down or burn it down!" Even after Yale's faculty voted to suspend normal operations and open the campus to outside protestors, several unexplained fires erupted in Yale buildings, reports Joyce Milton in her Hillary bio, The First Partner. Hillary Clinton cut her activist teeth on the politics of race. After rubbing shoulders with the Crips, the Bloods and the Panthers, it's no surprise she's counting on her new friends, Sharpton, Jackson and Butts, to help make her New York's next U.S. Senator. News Topics | Home | Research | History | Blood Gangs | Crip Gangs | People| Life in a Gang | Gallery | Iraqi Cards | Memorial | Migration | Graffiti | Resume| Injunctions Homicides | Maps | California Prisons | Contact

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