Geronimo Pratt

[rich]

been reading up on this case and has much within for some tangential
background to IV.


After returning from his second tour in Vietnam and enrolling as a
student at UCLA in 1967, Geronimo Pratt became interested in the
rights and welfare of black citizens, volunteering to help community
efforts that provided breakfast programs for children, conducted
clothing giveaways and furnished transportation for students.

     At the same time, he became increasingly aware of prejudicial
treatment and harassment of blacks at the hands of some law
enforcement officers and certain sectors of government. Roughly a year
later, after a pivotal incident—the shooting of a small black child
who had allegedly stolen a candy bar—he joined the Black Panther
Party.

     Although he didn’t know it at the time, he had entered something
even more dangerous than a burning helicopter: the quagmire of lies,
betrayals, secret informants, dirty tricks, arson and murder that was
COINTELPRO—the domestic counter-intelligence program laid out under
the direction of then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

     As described in a series of Freedom articles, evidence—including
FBI records and eyewitness accounts—showed that Pratt had been framed
for a December 1968 murder on a Santa Monica, California, tennis court
while he was some 400 miles to the north, meeting with other black
leaders. Pratt was fingered for the crime in 1970, after he became the
leader of the Los Angeles chapter of the Panthers.

     “There is no question whatsoever that Pratt was framed for the
murder,” the author of FBI Secrets, M. Wesley Swearingen, a 25-year
FBI agent, said. “Pratt was in Oakland when it happened. He was set
up.” Swearingen stated that the FBI knew three wiretaps existed which
placed Pratt in Northern California before, during and after the
so-called tennis court murder, but the bureau withheld this and other
vital information from the court and the jury which would have
absolved Pratt.

more on the case
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2008/12/geronimo-pratt.html