Animated crowd demands ‘Free the San Francisco 8’

Francisco Torres

An energetic, standing-room-only audience of hundreds participated in an uplifting event in New York City Nov. 30 to celebrate the legacy of the Black Panther Party and to demand that the charges against the San Francisco 8—Herman Bell, Ray Boudreaux, Richard Brown, Henry W. (Hank) Jones, Jalil Muntaqim (Anthony Bottom), Richard O’Neal, Harold Taylor and Francisco Torres—be dropped. The meeting took place at the Martin Luther King Jr. Labor Center in Manhattan.

Hank Jones

These former Black Panthers were arrested Jan. 23 on charges related to the 1971 killing of a San Francisco police officer. Similar charges were thrown out in 1975 after it was revealed that police had used torture to extract confessions from some of the eight in 1973.

Harold Taylor

Boudreax, Jones, Torres and Taylor, accompanied by their partners and Soffiyah Elijah of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, presented a moving history of their survival of the COINTELPRO torture, frame-up and renewed case against them.

Ray Boudreaux WW photos: G. Dunkel

The program was emceed by Kamau Franklin of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and featured stunning performances by youth from the IMPACT! Repertory Theatre (impactreptheatre.org); a welcome from Bruce Richard, vice president of SEIU 1199; Gil Noble, veteran producer and host of WABC’s “Like It Is”; and more. The event brought out the largest attendance to date of this national tour for the eight.

For more information on the case, visit freethesf8.org.

—LeiLani Dowell