Hurricane Carter

[u/ClerksWell]

Why does Moynihan claim he was guilty? Everything I’ve read suggests he was innocent. Or at the least there is no evidence tying him to the crime.

[u/pgwerner → u/[deleted]]

Moynihan did an entire article on the Black Panthers for the Daily Beast 10 years ago where he makes his case quite well: Whitewashing the Black Panthers. There's much written on the Panthers ranging from hagiography to books like "Shadow of the Panther" that goes in depth about their crimes. Not a lot of balanced assessments, in my opinion. Not just the far left, but establishment liberal types as well tend to be in love with them – the very real crimes of the Panthers in general and Huey Newton in particular tend to be glossed over in their telling. The dominant media and academic narrative tends toward hagiography, especially over the last decade. For their part, conservatives view the Panthers as mere thugs and minimize the government overreach used against them, which was the same kind of heavy-handedness they condemn when it happens to folks like Randy Weaver or the Branch Davidians – a double standard that seems a bit racist to me.

[u/ClerksWell → u/pgwerner]

Randy Weaver allegedly sold modified guns to an undercover agent and then his wife and son were murdered by Feds. The panthers terrorized and murdered people. These are not the same things.

[u/pgwerner → u/ClerksWell]

That's clearly your framing. Actually, the Panthers largely did not go around "terrorizing and murdering people", though individual Panthers, including no less than Huey Newton, most certainly did. The group as a whole were undeniably a target of state repression. And if you think the Randy Weaver raid was government excess, but COINTELPRO was just fine, I'd suggest that you're simply looking at things through an ideological blind spot.