Peter Levy:Who Killed Ralph Featherstone?
Channel: GIRES-Global Research Institute
Date: 2021-08-09

FULL TITLE:Who Killed Ralph Featherstone? A Case Study in the Repression of the Long Black Freedom Struggle

Dr. Peter B. Levy is Full Professor in the Department of History and Political Science at York College of Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses on Recent America, the Civil Rights Movement, and Race and Justice. He is the author of over a dozen books, including: "The Great Uprising: Race Riots in Urban America during the 1960s\" (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and "The Seedtime, The Work, and The Harvest: New Perspectives on the Black Freedom Struggle In America," as well as numerous articles and essays, most notably: “The Media and H. Rap Brown: Friend or Foe of Jim Crow” in "The Strange Careers of Jim Crow," (NYU Press, 2019) and “Gloria Richardson and the Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland,” in "Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America," (NYU Press, 2005). He has been the recipient of a number of awards including the York College Professional Service and Leadership Award (2012) and has participated in three NEH Summer Seminars.

ABSTRACT
A bit over a half-century ago, just before midnight on March 9, 1970, a bomb demolished a car carrying two young men approximately 20 miles north of Baltimore and two miles south of the courthouse in Bel Air, Maryland, where civil rights activist H. Rap Brown was set to go on trial the following day. The explosion was so severe that authorities could not identify the remains of one of the car’s passengers. At first, many speculated that Brown, who was being tried for inciting a riot in Cambridge in 1967, had been in the car. It was quickly announced that Ralph Featherstone, a veteran Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activist, had been killed by the blast. Based on a small sampling of skin fragments, medical examiners subsequently identified William “Che” Payne, another SNCC veteran, as the second victim. Almost immediately, two opposing explanations for their deaths emerged. Framing the incident as part and parcel of a wave of terrorist acts, authorities, the national media, and most local news outlets cast Featherstone as a “bitter revolutionary” and uniformly concluded that Featherstone and Payne had inadvertently blown themselves up with a device that they intended to use to disrupt Brown’s trial. In contrast, virtually everyone who knew them, from family members to movement colleagues, as well as the Black press, insisted that Featherstone and Payne had been assassinated, most probably by those who sought to kill Brown. Making use of heretofore classified government material, especially Featherstone’s FBI files, this paper will suggest that Featherstone’s death, alongside the better-known assassination of Black Panther Fred Hampton by Chicago police and the broader COINTELPRO policies of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the national media’s coverage of it, offers a cautionary tale, reminding us of the dangers of unchecked state power and the risk of relying on the national press to ferret out the truth about the repression of Black dissidents--a lesson we dare not forget as a new wave of protest for racial equality sweeps the streets. More broadly, this paper will describe how “the long repression of the Black freedom struggle” generated segregated public memories of the past, which in turn shaped how contemporaries interpreted Featherstone\'s death. Put somewhat differently, while direct evidence suggests that Featherstone did not blow himself up, indirect evidence of centuries of repression of Black dissenters lends even further credence to the contemporary claim that Featherstone\'s death was part and parcel of broader efforts to cripple the modern civil rights movement.
A bit over a half-century ago, just before midnight on March 9, 1970, a bomb demolished a car carrying two young men approximately 20 miles north of Baltimore and two miles south of the courthouse in Bel Air, Maryland, where civil rights activist H. Rap Brown was set to go on trial the following day. The explosion was so severe that authorities could not identify the remains of one of the car’s passengers. At first, many speculated that Brown, who was being tried for inciting a riot in Cambridge in 1967, had been in the car. It was quickly announced that Ralph Featherstone, a veteran Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activist, had been killed by the blast. Based on a small sampling of skin fragments, medical examiners subsequently identified William “Che” Payne, another SNCC veteran, as the second victim.

CONFERENCE INFORMATION
“Racial Violence: The American (hi)story
Organizer: GIRES-Global Institute for Research Education & Scholarship  
Date: 24-25 July 2021
Place: Amsterdam (Virtual)
https://www.gires.org/activities/conferences/racial-violence-the-american-history/