Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) delivered the following speech at Clark Atlanta University, February 9.  Her remarks were part of the university’s W.E.B. DuBois Lecture Series.

I'd like to thank Representative Dr. Bob Holmes for inviting me to share this afternoon with you.

I'd like to begin with two items that could directly affect everyone in this room right now.

An interesting item passed in the news yesterday and there was almost no discussion about it in the mainstream corporate press:  for the first time "in decades" according to the Associated Press, a university was ordered by a federal judge to turn over records relating to an event held on an American college campus.

Drake University hosted a forum entitled, "Stop the Occupation!  Bring the Iowa Guard Home!"  The event was sponsored by the National Lawyers Guild, a legal activist organization headquartered in New York City.  Four activists who attended the forum were subpoenaed and ordered to appear before a grand jury.  Those served subpoenas include the leader of the Catholic Peace Ministry, the former coordinator of the Iowa Peace Network, a member of the Catholic Worker House, and an anti-war activist who visited Iraq in 2002.

The University subpoena asks for "all documents or recordings which would identify persons that actually attended the meeting."  A representative of the American Association of University Professors says that he has not heard of a similar case, of a U.S. university being subpoenaed for such records.

The second item is a piece of legislation that passed last year entitled the International Studies in Higher Education Act.  Inside seemingly innocuous legislation reauthorizing international educational programs, is buried the creation of an "advisory board" through which the United States Congress can extend its purview onto every college campus that offers an international curriculum or area studies.  Nineteen educational organizations signed a letter objecting to the provisions in the legislation pertaining to the advisory board.  This particular provision of the legislation emerged as Dr. Stanley Kurtz charged at a Congressional hearing that most international programs reflect an "anti-American bias, discourage students from working for the US government, and were dominated by the writings of Dr. Edward Said," a noted Palestinian writer, recently deceased.  In addition, The American Conservative Magazine heralded the new day in university academic freedom when it announced "Congress threatens to cut off funding to collegiate Mideast Studies departments that refuse to toe the neocon line."  The magazine describes the bill as legislation "all about failure to tolerate disagreement."  The magazine further describes the real targets of the bill as the 11 Middle East studies departments around the country that receive special federal funding. Daniel Pipes, recently appointed by President Bush to the Board of Directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace, founded Campus Watch, an organization that monitors institutions, faculty, and campus activities and reports instances of what it considers to be "extremism, " "analytical failure," and "apologetics" on its website.  According to the American Conservative Magazine, "it has encouraged students to inform on professors that express the wrong views and briefly maintained online 'dossiers' on outspoken scholars."

At the same time that this is going on in higher education – that a university can get into legal woes because it recognizes free speech for others and that that same university could lose its funding because it exercises academic freedom of thought – more and more black men are being murdered by rogue police officers and tonight, death penalty vigils will be held for death row inmate Kevin Cooper, a black man scheduled to be executed tomorrow.  Cooper's defenders rely on the fact that six members of the jury that convicted him now raise concerns about possible police misconduct and evidence tampering and support delaying the execution.

Briefly, the facts of the case are these:

On the night of June 4, 1983 the Ryen family and a houseguest were murdered in their San Bernardino, California home.  Eight year old Josh Ryen survived to tell police that three white or Hispanic men killed his family and attacked him.  Blonde hair was found clutched in one of the victim's hands.  Yet, Kevin Cooper, a black man with hair like mine, sits on death row and is about to be executed for the murder of the Ryen family and their houseguest.  Why?  Because the jury were never shown the evidence of the blonde hair.  Moreover, a pair of bloody overalls was delivered to the police by a woman who claimed that her boyfriend might have been involved in the murder.  The police disposed of the overalls in a dumpster and never tested them and the woman was never called to testify.  A prison inmate confessed to the crime, providing his cellmate with details that could only be known by someone at the crime scene.  However, the prosecutor's investigator refused to admit this confession and didn't even investigate it.

Now what do these two events have to do with the topic for today which is "The USA Patriot Act and It's Implications for Civil Liberties and African Americans"?  Plenty.  Because the environment created by the Patriot Act exacerbates the already-existent problem of injustice and a lack of civil liberties for black America.  The situation before the Patriot Act was bad for black America.  The Patriot Act and its sister, the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY2004, only expand the opportunities for bad things to happen.  However, before the Patriot Act legalized many aspects of what we call COINTELPRO, such activity, although against the law decades ago, was routinely used against black America.  In fact, that activity included "regime change" on our leaders in order to deny our community the right to authentic leadership.

Briefly, the USA Patriot Act allows the government to label you a terrorist if you belong to an activist group, search your home and not even tell you, collect information about what books you read, what you study, your purchases, your medical history, and your personal finances.  It allows the government to take your property away without a hearing (it can use this provision to bankrupt organizations, too) and it allows your e-mails and internet activity to be monitored as well as allowing you to be wiretapped even if your name isn't on a warrant.  Finally, it allows spying on innocent Americans and it permits indefinite incarceration of immigrants and non-citizens.  In addition, it directly threatens six Amendments to the Constitution:  the First (freedom of religion, speech, assembly, press); Fourth (freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures); Fifth (due process); Sixth (right to a speedy trial); Eighth (no excessive bail or cruel and unusual punishment); and the Fourteenth (equal protection under the law, including non-citizens).

The President recently signed additional FBI powers into law. Contained in the Intelligence Authorization Act, the government now has unprecedented power to obtain records from financial institutions – without permission from a judge. Worse, the law expands the definition of "financial institution" to include insurance companies, travel agencies, real estate agents, stockbrokers, the US Postal Service, and even jewelry stores, casinos, and car dealerships.

We have moved into a new era in the United States.  But blacks in America have always been under the watchful eye of a skeptical US government. 

Government documents reveal that our leaders have been targeted as far back as Marcus Garvey.  In a Justice Department memo dated October 11, 1919, J. Edgar Hoover writes that Marcus Garvey is "an exceptionally fine orator, creating much excitement among the negroes" and at another point in the same document Hoover writes, "Unfortunately, however, he has not as yet violated any federal law whereby he could be proceeded against on the grounds of being an undesirable alien, from the point of view of deportation." The Justice Department then paid a black man, a Mr. James Wormley Jones, to work his way into a position of trust at UNIA.  The resultant "mail fraud" charges were all that could be fraudulently cooked up against Garvey, but were enough to land him in the Atlanta federal prison and then deported as an undesirable alien.

On December 4, we commemorated the life and the murder of Fred Hampton, Chair of the Chicago Chapter of the Black Panther Party.  We commemorate Fred Hampton's life because he was young, articulate, charismatic – he could have been a Congressman from Chicago.  And should have been.  Except that he was black and so, instead of a promising political career, Fred Hampton was executed by Chicago police with two point-blank shots fired into his head.  His pregnant fiancée was lying in the bed next to him.

And of course, we know Dr. King was murdered in 1968, but we know almost nothing of the facts surrounding the case because even the rifle prominently displayed in Memphis as the murder weapon, in reality is not. What we do know is that Operation Lantern Spike in just two months of targeting of Dr. King logged 16,900 man hours of military intelligence by 240 military personnel tracking his every move in March and April of 1968.  But they make the claim that on the fateful day of April 4, they don't know what happened to Dr. King at the time of his murder.

Sadly, by the time of Hampton's murder the following year in 1969, the FBI had already articulated its policy that there would be no other Martin Luther King Jr.-type black leader who had not been pre-selected by them.  Fred Hampton was not pre-selected by them.  Fred Hampton was no sellout.  What happened to Fred Hampton, and Black America at that point, constitutes regime change and is no different than what we see being played out in Iraq today.  In addition, I believe Ward Connerly, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice represent that same type of regime change on our community.  In 1965, the CIA wrote that somewhere at the top there must be a "clean Negro" who could step into the vacuum and chaos if Martin Luther King Jr. were either exposed or assassinated. 

Interestingly, in both Fred Hampton's and Martin Luther King's cases, there were black men planted beside them who were doing the bidding of the political elites – for a buck.  In the case of Fred Hampton, the black man who assisted the FBI in Hampton's murder was Fred's own bodyguard, William O'Neal, who after Hampton's murder was given a "bonus" by the FBI for his work.  As for Dr. King, it is now documented that his own SCLC accountant, Mr. James Harrison, was a paid informant for the FBI.  And of course there were others.

Now in each of these cases, someone close to the targeted person was secretly working for the other side.  And seemingly, all it took to earn a "bullseye" from our own government were fine oratory skills, charisma, a plan, and action on behalf of black people.

I'd like to add a final word about the power of the corporate media and why we don't need to believe much of what we read, see, or hear from them.  They serve a master that is not the truth.  Nor is their master the public good.  And their power can be discerned by their failure to tell the truth even about my last election and the fact that 40,000 Republicans voted in the Democratic Primary and changed the outcome of the election.  In the same way that they continue to shape public opinion locally about that election, so too have they done with the candidacy of Howard Dean who the corporate media consolidated against and wiped out his front-runner status, not in the polls, but in the delegate count – where it really matters.

The corporate media were used by the levers of power to discredit and neutralize black leadership (their words, not mine) and white sympathizers.  COINTELPRO could not have been successful against black America without the cooperation of the corporate media.  And regime change against black leadership could not have been successful without the assistance of the media.  Our local media here in Atlanta admit to having been used to denigrate the leadership of Ralph David Abernathy after the murder of Dr. King.  Now, if they admit to that, just imagine what they did back then and what they continue to do now that they don't admit to.  Coverage of me and the Howard Dean debacle are but two examples of what we can see before our very eyes today, right now.  While millions of protesters in this country took to the streets against the war in Iraq, the corporate media cooperated with the Pentagon in its embedding scheme to portray its version of war to the gullible American public.  As Black Commentator remarks:  "media companies act in effective unison on matters of importance to the corporate class" and have narrowed the scope of "tolerable dissent" in this country.  At this time, Bob Marley's lyric, "none but ourselves can free our mind" could not be more true.  In order to liberate ourselves from the tyranny that now occupies the White House and every branch of our government, including leadership positions within our own community, we must free our minds from the control of the corporate media in addition to protecting the precious rights that our community fought for.  However, in an age when the average American can be targeted for what they express in a classroom, borrow at the library, or buy at the drug store, black America is most certainly in double jeopardy. 

With all this having been said, I still believe that it is possible to change our circumstances and those of America.  But it will take unity, concerted activism, and exercise of black ballot power to do it.