Al Qaeda Plays the Malcolm Card

By Salim Muwakkil
For "In These Times"
December 25, 2008


Many Islamist groups fear the election of a black American president with explicit African roots will lessen anti-American fervor among their recruits. When media reports emerged that al Qaeda’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, disparaged President-elect Barack Hussein Obama as a “house negro,” it angered many in the black community. However, it also struck a chord.

The Egyptian physician — who is reportedly Osama bin Laden’s confidant — actually used the phrase “house slave,” but it was later translated as “house negro.”

Al-Zawahiri said, “You [Obama] represent the direct opposite of honorable black Americans like Malik al-Shabazz or Malcolm X,” who “condemned the crimes of the Crusader West against the weak and oppressed, and he declared his support for peoples resisting American occupation.”

The al Qaeda leader said Obama, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice “confirmed” Malcolm X’s definition of a “house slave.” He was referring to Malcolm X’s distinction between slave-era “house Negroes,” who lived comfortably in the big house abetting white supremacy, and “field negroes,” who toiled in the fields under the whip, plotting resistance.

But his metaphor was wrong about Obama: If anything, he would now be the housemaster, not the slave.

What’s more, Al Qaeda is deploying this particular metaphor to offset Obama’s global popularity, particularly in East Africa. Many of these Islamist groups fear the election of a black American president with explicit African roots and symbolic Islamic connections will lessen the anti-American fervor among their recruitment targets.

Although al-Zawahiri overplayed his hand with such a transparent racial ploy, he did manage to draw attention to what could be a troublesome issue for many progressive activists, particular for those who are African-American.

Many advocates of progressive international policies see the United States as “imperialism central.” And for good reason. Stephen Kinzer’s 2006 book, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, makes clear this nation’s ignoble history in subverting and deposing foreign governments. Kinzer concludes, “No nation in modern history has done this so often, in so many places so far from its own shores.”

The response to al-Zawahiri’s comments also revealed African-American Muslims have little love for radicalized Islamists. At a news conference in New York City at the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial, Educational and Cultural Center, a gathering of African-American Muslim leaders denounced al-Zawahiri’s remarks as “insulting.” The group added, “As Muslims and as Americans, we will never let terrorist groups or terror leaders falsely claim to represent us or our faith.”

The statement also noted that radicalized Islamists have, “historically been disconnected from the African-American community generally, and Muslim African-Americans in particular.”

This was a veiled shot at Arabs’ historic role in the slave trade and the racism still blemishing some Arab nations, such as in Sudan.

Minister Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam — which is generally separate from other African-American Islamic groups — has been effusive in his praise for Obama. And Farrakhan has made clear his disdain for groups that employ terrorism.

Despite Farrakhan’s aversion to al Qaeda’s tactics, his foreign policy prescriptions probably would please al-Zawahiri and “condemn the crimes of the Crusader West against the weak and oppressed.” With their man Obama now leading the “Crusader West,” where will the Nation of Islam stand when the crusade inevitably continues?

More generally, where will black progressives stand?

No doubt, there will be strong black critics of the Obama administration who will keep the first black president’s feet to the fire.

Others may find more to love about America. If the Obama administration decides to bomb Pakistan’s tribal territories, for example, these supporters, who once may have questioned the wisdom of unilateral bombing, now will urge critics to “understand the bigger picture.”

In October 2002, actor and activist Harry Belafonte called Powell and Rice “house negroes” for their subservience to the Bush administration. He was condemned in the media, but the black community had his back. If Belafonte said the same about Obama today, he would have to take a banana boat back to Jamaica.

Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of In These Times, where he has worked since 1983. He is currently a Crime and Communities Media Fellow of the Open Society Institute, examining the impact of ex-inmates and gang leaders in leadership positions in the black community.

More information about Salim Muwakkil at http://www.inthesetimes.com/community/profile/13/

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Chief Sealth and the Independent Living Movement

Chief Sealth and the Independent Living Movement

By Karen Cole
Word Count: 2,500


OUR Center Park of the City of Seattle, named after local Native American leader Chief Sealth, was founded by “Our Lady” Ida May Daly. This wheelchair using soul had a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, or MS.

While dying of a devastating illness, Ida Daly procured enough public and private donations to buy a large square city block of land. It was located in an undervalued black and Catholic neighborhood five miles south of downtown metropolitan Seattle. She then had a huge seven story brick and concrete apartment building, including a generous parking garage, erected onsite, which at the time was incredibly cheap land.

She carefully built it to be completely wheelchair accessible, so that disabled people, especially those in wheelchairs, would have a place to actually thrive and live, instead of one in which to slowly die. She didn’t like what institutionalized living does to people, and how most institutions preach about an afterlife, mainly involving how you have to die to achieve it. She wanted disabled people to live longer lives.

I used to be sad about how Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had to keep up a “preachy” attitude of going somewhere else when he died, probably meaning the grave, perhaps only to get rid of the fallacy of Hell for complex “sinners” - such as his politically active self. He would speak of “The Promised Land,” which most of the disabled I’ve met seem to think is somewhere up in Canada. I wouldn’t know myself, though.

Center Park, while not “The Promised Land,” is a dual winged red brick and white mortar concrete building containing some two hundred separate one and two bedroom apartment units. Made mostly of cinderblocks, it’s well insulated, cool in the summer and warm in the winter. The residents have few complaints, except for those about Christians with overly religious attitudes who think they can get wheelchair people to “get up and walk.”

Via a strange coincidence of circumstances, Center Park is located in what in the eighties was still an African-American neighborhood that used to be white and mostly Catholic. There still are some people from those times who live there, as I have attended their major church once or twice, but the racial frictions are probably mostly gone by now. In the eighties I lived and worked there, and wondered deeply about life, the universe and everything. I was a trained professional writer and artist working a day job helping physically challenged people do their personal care and transfers.

Some of these people and their attendants were white and also partly descendants of local Native Americans, such as John Tyler, the man I started out working for, and his aide Virginia Jarvis. I happen to be part Cherokee Indian, of the “Trail of Tears” tribes. Chief Sealth was the Native American dignitary our Emerald City was named after, and he resides currently in a grave near an aboriginal people’s reservation. He was the leader of a tribe hereabouts, possibly the Duwamish. He gave a wonderful “final” speech where he handed over his tribal lands, the Duwamish were involved, and he asserted in a noble and peaceful way that “we” white people might be able to handle the wonderful privileges of living here.

But who is the true Chief of Seattle; is it the Mayor, or someone else? Many communities exist in our lovely area, led by many an interested tribe, party or person. But what makes a person such a being of involvement? Is it his or her heart, or brains, or beaucoup bucks, or the fact there must be someone important - for greatness to be thrust upon him or her?

Everyone needs to be a Somebody, like Jesse Jackson put it, saying that you really should become that somebody. To my memory that will always be John Tyler, who presided over one floor of Center Park as a disabled radical, fighting for the rights and freedoms of able-disabled Americans. He was a major force for getting the wheelchair lifts put on the city buses.

He was ably assisted by a Jewish Republican-cum-Democrat named Ronald Gary Schwarz, who “did a 180 degree left turn” politically when he entered a wheelchair, going from a ruthless Republican background into a bleeding heart liberal one. When he became disabled from MS, he finally found his life’s purpose, helping those who needed it by also being one of the people responsible for getting the lifts put on the buses. He lived down the hall on the same floor as John, and I worked live-in for both of them.

Life, however, has changed surely from what I saw at Center Park. It was the first apartment building built in the entire country for disabled people in wheelchairs. It got flooded by every other type of handicapped people who could find a way into it. The “laundry list” - meaning the applications, made out of paper in those times - was one thousand or more names long to get in. It looped ten times around the block, which mind you was more like a downtown office city block than a neighborhood one.

The office was run by ABs, in other words able-bodieds, and it was thought that if you did anything wrong when you reported problems to the office “lesbians” who ruled the building, you would be kicked out or sent to a mental ward. These women were overworked, overweight and underpaid, with no sense of humor, but who nonetheless smiled abysmally evil grimaces all the livelong day - and looked for excuses to kick you out or send you to another form of “The Poor House,” as they used to put it in the Dickensian days of author Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” and “A Christmas Carol.” Whichever place least suited; there you would most surely be stuck, if you didn’t mind your p’s and q’s.

As power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, those ladies ruled Center Park with an iron fist in a velvet glove. Mark Twain, alias Samuel Langhorne Clemens, had warned readers like me about the existence of such seeming Christian and God fearing ladies. He went on at great length about how merciless they were, when it comes to putting you in “your place;” I was finally forced to believe him. The office at Center Park of the Doldrums was sufficiently depressing in and of itself, as I said, back in the Precambrian Times.

This “precious pretty palace” for the handicapped back then - in spite of good intentions and its excellent reputation - was thought of as the hospital - or Death’s Door - by many. God’s verdant Land of Oz, an ode to our Emerald City, was however fully accessible outside, in a marvelous garden that led around half the perimeter of Center Park. It had a wide flat pathway twined around it, and it was as lush as the Garden of Eden, the temporary home of Adam and Eve. At the thought of sex, unavoidable by all of the disabled, you couldn’t go here to “get some.” But you could check into a nearby motel, which many disabled people there often did. They told me of their misadventures, which usually involved trying to talk someone able bodied of the opposite sex into a motel tryst, and then being left flat on one’s back on a motel room bed, unable to get up.

So what exactly is the place of each person, so physically challenged, you might wonder, given the fact disabled life before the Internet involved mostly only television zombie status - or wandering around for a stroll in your wheelchair outside, waiting for a life you could lead? Perhaps if you weren’t too disabled, you could find a small “job of work.” In those days, before Section 504 of the Washington State Code was put through, it was spectacularly hard for a disabled person to get work. Once that law was put through, it made it easier for a soul in a wheelchair or with any other disability or handicap to find work, given they were to be judged on the same basis as an able-bodied person.

It was kind of an affirmative action program, the sort of thing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was dreaming of in the sixties. But John Tyler, the radical I spoke of before, most seemed to know about his place in the scheme of things being similar to Dr. King’s, albeit he didn’t always get along with black people. He also had a succinctly short death sentence of polio and sleep apnea hanging over his head while he did his level best to get rights for the disabled going. It was what he thought of as his place, along with a handful of other disabled, both men and women, who knew it was.

Do you think if you knew your life was short, you would bother to help others? At the most, your place would not be here - ere long. The place known as Center Park had a laundry room, was made out of heat retentive cinder blocks, which kept it warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and was fairly easygoing to live in, if you could avoid the office “mavens.” But during the eighties, before the days of the Internet, there was virtually nothing to do there but watch television and overeat. A lot of disabled people at Center Park gave up to smoking, drinking and drug doing, which was readily supplied by downtown Seattle denizens.

That’s one of the reasons people there were suicidal, but most were unable to complete the act. They had a few places to dally, such as a common room, partial to elderly lady gossips and no one else, and an arts and crafts center, much the same as at your basic under funded mental institution, but when the excrement hit the fan, there was nothing much doing but watching TV and shooting the breeze downstairs with your friends. I would hope for your understanding about the mental institution reference; there was usually a long line downstairs, called “the medications line,” and many of the disabled people at Center Park were on mental health medications.

Seattle and its neighboring town of Bremerton have been called the most livable cities in the world, but to some extent, there have been disabled people forced to only die there, pretty much out of sickness combined with utter boredom. Before Section 504 was put through, there wasn’t much in the way of jobs available to pass the time, so people got pretty bored, as their SSI (Social Security Income) didn’t afford much money for a good time out on the town. There was a small chess club going when I was there, but not much else, except for minor sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.

While it was unknown whether he’d truly existed, the Legend of Center Park was the unknown savant in a manual wheelchair who managed to hump up one of the stairwells the entire seven stories, pick the roof’s lock by using a bobby pin, and push himself over the edge to his death on the street below. He purportedly did this solely out of sheer unadulterated boredom. Now Center Park has a nice monthly newsletter, run by “the Bushman,” Jim Bush, a friend of John Tyler’s - and the Internet. It may keep people in there out of nursing homes - for awhile at least.

Nobody in Center Park wants to live in “a rest home,’ because they kill people in there. Actually, they do, because they put them on psychiatric medications, and those eventually kill you. They’re horrible, and they even can make you high, which can make them hideously attractive. I see the pill line in my mind; there it is at Center Park when you give up trying. Pills are not a good thing to try to keep alive on. I would avoid them if I were you.

There’s still the most beautiful Adam and Eve garden you ever saw outside on the grounds of Center Park, which was really there. But they probably won’t let you smoke except for outside. Smoking was “not allowed” there back in the eighties. But the wondrous fairytale garden, a minor paradise of sorts, was looped around the building, and it but now lurks in my mind’s eye – it’s where two attendants of the disabled trysted, namely, me and my husband, Reggie Peralta. He and I were both personal care attendants, me in the home, and he in the hospital system. He and I dumped Center Park to get married and have children. We successfully had one daughter.

Anyway, the way of the world is that even disabled people must suffer from losing one attendant at a time, and have to retrain the new ones. There is a job involving Movement politics, the Independent Living Movement at least, awaiting you - if you care for caring for other people. In short, many of the disabled and handicapped people need attendants, and this article is yet another attempt to advertise for this job. You can find it in newspapers and on the Internet under “home health care aide” - and other such titles.

You don’t have to think of it as politics so much anymore because of the Internet. Also, it’s a nursing oriented job that can lead to wonderful factionalism among the compadres who gather and create new things that make this entire “Brave New World” (a spurious reference to a famous book by Aldus Huxley) into a wonderful place. Meanwhile, I know this is true, because I am now disabled physically where I wasn’t before. It’s due to some nasty medication for depression, which I do not ever recommend, and it was going to happen anyway. Nonetheless, I am still a professional book author, ghost writer, copy editor, proof reader, manuscript rewriter, coauthor, graphics and CAD artist, publishing helper, and website developer, with my own international services corporation.

You too can do terrific things with your life, such as writing for pay; all you need to do is apply with our company. We have years of experience and the entire world and much of the known universe at our disposal, thanks to the Internet and the World Wide Web. Who needs to be a suicidal “legend” – when you can live your life fully instead - in spite of major or minor physical and/or mental challenges? There’s writing to be done. . .

Isn’t life great?


THE END


Executive Director and President of Rainbow Writing, Inc., Karen Cole writes. RWI at http://www.rainbowriting.com is an affordable online professional freelance writing agency working for everyone from low end to celebrity clients, and specializing in the ghost writing, editing, promotions and marketing of books and screenplays.

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The Disciples of Hatred, in Their Own Words and Images

By BRENT STAPLES
Published: December 22, 2008


Nazi hunters have made an art of exposing war criminals through photographs taken in the death camp era. This strategy would have worked well against Southern lynch-mob killers who posed for the camera while murdering African-Americans in a campaign of terror that persisted into the mid-20th century.

Black American lives were viewed as expendable in the pre-civil rights South. The murderers who hanged, dismembered or burned black victims alive — before crowds of cheering onlookers — knew well that the law would not act against them. These savage rituals were meant to keep the black community on its knees.

The white men and women who flocked to these carnivals of death sometimes brought along young children, who were photographed no more than an arm’s length away from a mutilated corpse. These photos were often turned into grisly postcards that continued to circulate even after Congress made it illegal to mail them.

A particularly vivid lynching postcard depicts the charred and partially dismembered corpse of Jesse Washington, who was burned before a crowd of thousands in Waco, Tex., in 1916.

The card, which appears to have been written by a white spectator to his parents, is signed “your son Joe.” He refers to the horrific murder — in which the victim’s ears, fingers and sexual organs were severed — as the “barbecue we had last night.” He identifies himself in the crowd by placing a mark in ink about his head.

By permitting images like this one to move through the mail at all, the government tacitly endorsed lynching, along with the presumption that African-Americans were less than human. The mailings also aided a propaganda campaign that was intended to terrorize the black population in the nation as a whole, not just in the South.

Joe from Waco is no doubt long dead. But many of the people who attended lynchings as children in the 1930’s and 40’s must be still alive and walking the streets of the principal states of the lynching belt. They include Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas, all of which voted against the first black president.

The nearness of the past was fully evident not long ago in Atlanta, when the collectors James Allen and John Littlefield were trying to mount an exhibition of lynching images that had drawn a huge audience and international attention when shown at the New-York Historical Society’s “Without Sanctuary” exhibition of 2000.

Influential Atlantans equivocated. As a person familiar with the issue told me recently: “There were concerns that people in crowds were still alive. And of course, family members and relatives of those people might come in and have to say, ‘That’s my dad’ or ‘That’s my mom.’ ”

“Without Sanctuary” was shown in Atlanta in 2002 at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site and drew more than 175,000 people, three times as many as viewed it in New York. But the tension surrounding the exhibition made it seem unlikely that the images and the accompanying documents would find a permanent home in Georgia or any other lynching belt state.

So it came as a surprise earlier this year when the collection was acquired by Atlanta’s Center for Civil and Human Rights, an ambitious cultural and historical institution that has yet to break ground for its building and plans to open in 2011. The center aspires to emulate the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in method, linking the civil rights movement to national and international issues of the day.

The notion of housing the lynching material in the same institution as, say, Martin Luther King’s sermons and speeches strikes some as jarring. But this is just as it should be. The civil rights movement can only be properly understood in the context of the reign of terror that gripped black Southerners.

The victims of those public hangings and burnings were sometimes accused of crimes. But they were often guilty of nothing more than seeking the right to vote, speaking truth to white power. Black business owners who challenged white supremacy in the marketplace were favorite targets.

The victims were sometimes killed after they had been marched through the black section of town — with a stop at the school for the colored — and fully exploited as a testament to black powerlessness. Lynching, in other words, was a method of social control.

When visitors to the Center for Civil and Human Rights confront these realities, they will know what the civil rights pioneers faced — and what they feared — when they took those first, perilous steps along the path to freedom.

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JACK THE RIPPER - Fourth Chapter

By Marilyn Bardsley

Dark Annie


Because the people of Whitechapel firmly believed that the deaths of Martha Tabram, Emma Smith and Polly Nichols were connected, there was a great deal of pressure upon the police to bring the criminal(s) to justice. Three theories were entertained: (1) a gang of thieves was responsible, such as the men who robbed and assaulted Emma Smith,; (2) a gang extorting money from prostitutes penalized the three women for failing to pay; (3) a maniac was on the loose.

Considering how poor the victims were, the first two theories were not very plausible, so the final theory became popular. The East London Observer commented on the Tabram and Nichols murders:

The two murders which have so startled London within the last month are singular for the reason that the victims have been of the poorest of the poor, and no adequate motive in the shape of plunder can be traced. The excess of effort that has been apparent in each murder suggests the idea that both crimes are the work of a demented being, as the extraordinary violence used is the peculiar feature in each instance.

A request was made of the Home Secretary for a reward to be offered for the discovery of the criminal. Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary, had no idea at this point what he was dealing with, and declined to offer a reward, laying responsibility at the feet of the Metropolitan Police.

Today, even with all the techniques of modern forensic science and psychology, a serial killer is a major challenge for a metropolitan police force. Some serial killers will never be caught, regardless of the sophistication and skill of the authorities in that jurisdiction. London's Metropolitan Police, in Victorian times, was operating almost completely in a knowledge vacuum, with no modern forensic tools available to them. Fingerprinting, blood typing and other staples of forensic technique were not yet developed for police use. Even photography of victims was not a usual practice. There was no crime laboratory at Scotland Yard until the 1930's.

Police today have developed elaborate profiling techniques to identify serial killers, and have amassed a database of information with which forensic psychologists and psychiatrists can determine the kind of individual perpetrating the crime. In 1888, the police were ignorant of sexual psychopaths. They had seen nothing like the Ripper crimes in England in their experience.

While police were searching for the killer of Polly Nichols, a story surfaced about a bizarre character named "Leather Apron." This man required prostitutes to pay him money or he would beat them. The Star claimed the man was a Jewish slipper maker of the following description:

From all accounts he is five feet four or five inches in height and wears a dark, close-fitting cap. He is thickset and has an unusually thick neck. His hair is black, and closely clipped, his age being about 38 or 40. He has a small, black moustache. The distinguishing feature of his costume is a leather apron, which he always wears...His expression is sinister, and seems to be full of terror for the women who describe it. His eyes are small and glittering. His lips are usually parted in a grin which is not only not reassuring, but excessively repellent.

With all this publicity, including the fear of mob violence, "Leather Apron" went into hiding.

Annie Chapman
Annie Chapman, known to her friends as "Dark Annie," was a pathetic woman. She was essentially homeless, living at common lodging houses when she had the money for a night's lodging, otherwise roaming the streets in search of clients to earn a little money for drink, shelter and food.

She was 47 when she died, a homeless prostitute. But her life had been much different in 1869, when she was married to John Chapman, a coachman. Of the three children they had, one died of meningitis and another was crippled. The stress of illness and the heavy drinking of both husband and wife caused the breakup of their marriage. Things became much worse for Annie when John died and she lost the small financial security his allowance had provided her. The emotional shock of his death was just as bad as the financial loss and she never recovered from either.

Suffering from depression and alcoholism, she did crochet work and sold flowers. Eventually she turned to prostitution, despite her plain features, missing teeth, and plump figure. For the most part, she was very easy going. However, a week before her death, she got into a fight with a woman over a piece of soap and Annie was struck on the left eye and on her chest.

On Friday, September 7, 1888, Annie was told her friend that she was feeling sick. Unknown to her, she was suffering from tuberculosis. "I must pull myself together and get some money or I shall have no lodgings," she told her friend Amelia.

Place where Annie Chapman was found.

Just before two in the morning on Saturday, September 8, a slightly drunken Annie was turned out of her lodging house to earn money for her bed. Later that morning, she was found several hundred yards away in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields.

29 Hanbury Street was just across from the Spitalfields market. Seventeen people made the building their home, five of which had rooms overlooking the site of the murder. Of those five or so with rooms overlooking the crime scene, some had their windows open that night.

Hanbury Street looking East, circa 1918-20
Spitalfields Market opened at 5 a.m., so there were many other people gathered that morning, people who had businesses in the building at 29 Hanbury, preparing for the opening of the market. Residents were leaving for work as early as 3:50 a.m. The streets around the market were filled with the commercial vehicles delivering to the marketplace. John Davis, an elderly carman who lived with his wife and three sons at 29 Hanbury, found Annie's body just after 6 a.m. He noticed that her skirts had been raised up to her pelvis. He went immediately to get help and returned with two workmen. By the time a constable was called, everybody in the house had been awakened.

Yet, amazingly enough, even though the sun rose at 5:23 that morning, and so much traffic was present at that early hour, no one heard any suspicious disturbance or cry, nor was anyone seen with bloody clothing or weapon. There was clean tap water in the backyard where Annie was found, but the murderer did not use the water to wash the blood from his hands or knife. Also amazing was the risk that the murderer took in this daylight crime.

Dr. George Bagster
PhillipsDr. George Bagster Phillips, veteran police surgeon, was called to the spot and described what he saw for the inquest:

I found the body of the deceased lying in the yard on her back...The left arm was across the left breast, and the legs were drawn up, the feet resting on the ground, and the knees turned outwards. The face was swollen and turned on the right side, and the tongue protruded between the front teeth, but not beyond the lips; it was much swollen. The small intestines and other portions were lying on the right side of the body on the ground above the right shoulder, but attached. There was a large quantity of blood, with a part of the stomach above the left shoulder...The body was cold, except that there was a certain remaining heat, under the intestines, in the body. Stiffness of the limbs was not marked, but it was commencing. The throat was dissevered deeply. I noticed that the incision of the skin was jagged, and reached right round the neck.

Dr. Phillips estimated that Annie Chapman had been dead approximately two hours. The absence of any cry heard by the residents of 29 Hanbury could be explained by the evidence that she was strangled into unconsciousness and immediately thereafter had her throat slashed.

Dr. Phillips examined the body of Annie
Chapman at the scene
She had been murdered where she was found. While there was no sign that Annie had fought off her attacker, there was a strange occurrence that Dr. Phillips noted near the feet of the corpse. Annie had apparently kept in her pocket a small piece of cloth, a pocket comb and a small-tooth comb, all of which had appeared to be purposely arranged in some order.

An envelope containing two pills was found near her head. On the back of the envelope were the words Sussex Regiment. The letter M and lower down Sp were handwritten on the other side. There was a postmark that said London, Aug. 23, 1888. Also, a leather apron was found, along with some other trash around the yard.

The testimony that Dr. Phillips gave at the inquest gave a more detailed view of the ferocity of the murder. The murderer had grabbed Annie by the chin and slashed her throat deeply from left to right, with the possible failed attempt to decapitate her. This was the cause of death. The abdominal mutilations, described in the September 29 edition of the Lancet, were post mortem:

The abdomen had been entirely laid open; that the intestines, severed from their mesenteric attachments, had been lifted out of the body, and placed by the shoulder of the corpse; whilst from the pelvis the uterus and its appendages, with the upper portion of the vagina and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder, had been entirely removed. No trace of these parts could be found, and the incisions were cleanly cut, avoiding the rectum, and dividing the vagina low enough to avoid injury to the cervix uteri. Obviously the work was that of an expert - of one, at least, who had such knowledge of anatomical or pathological examinations as to be enabled to secure the pelvic organs with one sweep of the knife.

At the inquest, Phillips said, "The whole inference seems to me that the operation was performed to enable the perpetrator to obtain possession of these parts of the body." This police surgeon with 23 years of experience was very surprised that the mutilations had been done so skillfully and in what must have been a short period of time, saying that he could have not done such work in less than fifteen minutes and more likely an hour.

Coroner Baxter
Coroner Wynne E. Baxter agreed in his summation:

The body has not been dissected, but the injuries have been made by someone who had considerable anatomical skill and knowledge. There are no meaningless cuts (like in the Tabram murder). It was done by one who knew where to find what he wanted, what difficulties he would have to contend against, and how he should use his knife, so as to abstract the organ without injury to it. No unskilled person could have known where to find it, or have recognized it when it was found. For instance, no mere slaughterer of animals could have carried out these operations. It must have been someone accustomed to the post-mortem room.

Phillips conjectured that the murder instrument was not a bayonet or the type of knife used by leather workers, but rather a narrow, thin knife with a blade between 6 and 8 inches long. The kind of knife used by slaughtermen and surgeons for amputations could have been such an instrument.

Abrasions on Annie's hands indicated that her rings had been forced off her. Later, from conversations with Annie's friends, police were able to determine that Annie wore cheap brass rings, which may have been mistaken for gold.

Inspector Abberline, who was in charge of the Polly Nichols murder, was instructed to help with the Chapman murder, which was in Spitalfields, a different police jurisdiction. However, the lead inspector was Joseph Chandler of the Metropolitan Police's H Division. There seemed common agreement among the inspectors that the same man who killed Polly Nichols also killed Annie Chapman.

The Chapman investigation was just as frustrating as the Nichols investigation. The physical evidence - the leather apron, a nailbox and a piece of steel - were owned by Mrs. Richardson, one of the residents, and her son. The envelope with Sussex Regiment seal on it was widely sold to the public at a local post office. Furthermore, a man at Annie's lodging house saw her pick up the envelope from the kitchen floor to put her pills in when her pillbox broke.

Extensive conversations with the associates of Annie Chapman yielded neither good suspects nor any reasonable motive for the crime. Nor was there any suspicious person found escaping the scene of the crime.

John Richardson
However, the investigation was not entirely fruitless and three important witnesses were found, one of which almost certainly caught a glimpse of the murderer. The first witness, John Richardson, was Mrs. Amelia Richardson's son. Between 4:45 and 4:50 on the morning of the murder, he visited 29 Hanbury to check the locks on the cellar in which Mrs. Richardson kept her tools and goods for her packing case enterprise.

He opened the yard door and sat down on the step to cut a piece of leather from his boot that had been hurting his foot. As it was beginning to get light outside, he could see that the cellar locks had not been tampered with while he sat fixing his boot. He could also see that at that time, there was no body of Annie Chapman in the backyard. "I could not have failed to notice the deceased had she been lying there then," he said at the inquest.

Another witness, Albert Cadosch, living next door to 29 Hanbury Street, testified that he heard voices coming from the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street just after 5:20 a.m. The only word he overheard was No. A few minutes later, around 5:30 a.m., he heard the sound of something falling against the fence.


Baxter conducts the inquest
The most important witness was Mrs. Elizabeth Long, who was coming to the Spitalfields market and passed through Hanbury Street when she heard the Black Eagle Brewery clock strike 5:30. She saw a man and a woman talking "close against the shutters of No. 29." Mrs. Long identified Annie Chapman in the mortuary as the woman who had been facing her as she passed down Hanbury Street. Unfortunately, the man Annie was conversing with, who was almost certainly her killer, had his back to Mrs. Long. She did her best to describe him in her testimony to Coroner Wynne E. Baxter:

George Akin Lusk
Some of the merchants in the area were quick to sense the growing anti-Semitic fever and took action to contain it. They formed the Mile End Vigilance Committee, which was primarily composed of Jewish businessmen. George Lusk, a building contractor and vestryman in his local church, was elected to head this committee of 16 prominent local citizens. This committee, far from being the vigilante group that some had claimed, was closer to an organized "neighborhood watch." Samuel Montagu, who was the Jewish Member of Parliament for the Whitechapel area, offered a reward for the capture of the Whitechapel killer, an action sanctioned by the Mile End committee.

In a week or so, the bawdy nightlife of Whitechapel surged back to its normal pitch. There were just too many people whose daily subsistence depended upon prostitution and other forms of evening entertainment to let the pace lapse for long.

While Whitechapel was unsatisfied with the lack of results of the police investigation, it was hard to fault the police for the quantity of work that was produced. On Tuesday, September 11, a few days after the death of Annie Chapman, John Pizer, the famous "Leather Apron," was arrested.

Despite attempts by his family to portray Pizer as a victim of malicious rumors, there was sufficient evidence to show Pizer was an unpleasant character with at least one documented case of stabbing, for which he served six months at hard labor. The allegations of bullying and extorting money from prostitutes were never proven. The East London Observer described in a not altogether unbiased view, Pizer's testimony to Coroner Baxter:

He was a man of about five feet four inches, with a dark-hued face, which was not altogether pleasant to look upon by reason of the grizzly black strips of hair, nearly an inch in length, which almost covered the face. The thin lips, too, had a cruel, sardonic kind of look, which was increased, if anything, by the drooping dark moustache and side whiskers. His hair was short, smooth, and dark, intermingled with grey, and his head was slightly bald on the top. The head was large, and was fixed to the body by a thick heavy-looking neck. Pizer work a dark overcoat, brown trousers, and a brown and very much battered hat, and appeared somewhat splay-footed.

When Baxter asked Pizer why he went into hiding after the deaths of Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman, Pizer said that his brother had advised him to do so.

"I was the subject of a false suspicion," he said emphatically.

"It was not the best advice that could be given to you," Baxter returned.

Pizer shot back immediately. "I will tell you why. I should have been torn to pieces!"

The fact that Pizer was an unpleasant character did not make him the Whitechapel murderer. First of all, he had alibis for the times at which Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman were murdered. When Polly was killed, Pizer was at a lodging house, which was corroborated by the proprietor. When Annie was killed, he was afraid to be seen and was staying with relatives, a story which was corroborated by several people. Secondly, he lacked the skill to carve up Annie Chapman and remove her uterus.

Pizer was released, but a number of others were picked up and questioned. Some were just eccentric and drunken characters that shot off their mouths about the murders; others were insane. Few were worthy of prolonged investigation, either because they lacked the medical skills or because they had alibis for the time the women were murdered. Often the alibis consisted of confinement in asylums or jails.

Insanity and medical qualifications became the key factors in sorting out suspects. Another factor was foreign origin, recalling Mrs. Long's testimony in the Annie Chapman murder. The focus on medical knowledge led the police well beyond the reaches of Whitechapel, into the middle and upper classes of London, as the eccentric and violent behavior of some surgeons and other physicians came into question.

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Martin Luther King's murder no mystery to Louis Stokes

By Robert L. Smith
April 03, 2008


Louis Stokes knew Martin Luther King Jr. as a friend and confidant before he made it his duty to find out who killed him.

King organized voter registration drives that helped Stokes' younger brother, Carl, become the first black mayor of a major American city in November 1967. Then he stood beside Louis Stokes at campaign headquarters in Cleveland, discussing the meaning of the moment, as volunteers celebrated in the street.

Less than a decade later, Congressman Louis Stokes led the inquiry into King's murder as chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

His love and admiration for the man he still calls Martin stoked his emotions but did not cloud his judgment, Stokes insists. At the 40th anniversary of King's death, he remains convinced that his committee got it right.

About 6 p.m. April 4, 1968, King was shot with a high-powered rifle as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. James Earl Ray alone pulled the trigger, maybe for money. The government and the police had nothing to do with it.

Those conclusion have inspired decades of second-guessing, grand conspiracies, speculative books and movies.

Even in Cleveland, where Stokes' reputation is sterling, doubts linger.

"I never have thought that they got to the bottom of it," said Stanley Tolliver, a Cleveland lawyer who represented King during his civil rights work in Cleveland in the late 1960s.

Tolliver said he thinks that Ray, an escaped convict, pleaded guilty to a crime someone else masterminded.

"I was never satisfied that he was the one who did it. I don't think he was smart enough," Tolliver said. "I think somebody put him up to it and he copped to it to avoid the death penalty."

Stokes is not surprised to hear Tolliver's theory. He has heard hundreds. During a 29-year career in Congress, his expertise in leading sensitive investigations led to a familiarity with conspiracy theories.

"People are fascinated by assassinations," said Stokes, who practices law between Cleveland and Washington, D.C., with Squire Sanders & Dempsey. "Just look at the Lincoln assassination. People are still speculating, writing books about it."

Stokes said he stands by his committee's conclusions, in part, because they have stood the test of time.

"What I look at now is that no one has been able to refute our findings," he said. "Nobody -- with all the investigations going on all over the country -- nobody has been able to refute our findings."

His committee's report was less than complete, he concedes. But then, it faced unusual challenges.

King's murder was eight years old and President John F. Kennedy had been dead 13 years when a task force was assembled to investigate both assassinations. The rumors of government complicity and cover-ups had never ceased. The nation needed to hear the truth.

Speaker of the House Thomas "Tip" O'Neill turned to Stokes.

"What we encountered was evidence that had been destroyed, important witnesses who were deceased," Stokes said.

Still, he was determined to run down every rumor and accusation, he said. His committee dismissed most allegations and confirmed a few.

It concluded that Ray was likely part of a conspiracy, a plot to kill King. Ray was aware of a bounty offered by a St. Louis lawyer and he had stalked King across the country, Stokes said. Ray needed help to escape to Mexico and to England, where he was captured.

"We think his brothers, who were also notorious criminals, helped finance his trips," Stokes said.

But the committee knocked down the most explosive allegations. Law enforcement authorities were not involved in King's death, it concluded, and there was no government cover-up.

Over the years, many have questioned Ray's role as assassin, including members of the King family, who supported Ray's call for a new trial before he died in prison in 1998.

Skepticism crescendoed in 1992 after the release of "JFK," Oliver Stone's movie about the assassination of President Kennedy.

"That was the weirdest, wildest, most senseless movie I've ever seen," Stokes said. He still marvels at its premise: "Our government killed our president and then we had a congressional committee cover it up."

The closing credits listed Stokes' Washington address and he was deluged with accusatory letters and phone calls. Soon after, Stokes took action to begin to publicize evidence collected for the Kennedy investigation.

Records from the King investigation remain sealed and likely will be for another 20 years, following Stokes' instructions in 1978.

That secrecy bothers John Judge, a co-founder of the Washington-based Coalition on Political Assassinations.

"We don't think the committee did everything wrong," Judge said. "We don't think they went far enough. We don't think they were exhaustive."

Judge's group argues the sealed records could shed new light on an unsolved crime.

Stokes said the release of interview transcripts and other papers could embarrass and malign innocent people.

Confident that he got his man, Stokes finds himself thinking instead about who was lost.

When he first heard over the radio that King had been shot, he sat in his car and cried.

"There was a greatness about him that you don't feel with ordinary people," Stokes said. "It's impossible to measure what our nation lost. He changed us all."

King was, he noted, 39 years old.

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