Karl Nemmersdorf's article on Fay Stender, radical attorney who spearheaded prison rights movement in the 70s, is relevant to the current madness. Stender was seriously wounded by a former inmate. "A few radicals began to suspect the truth about convicts.
theoccidentalobserver.net/2019/11/05/the…
Fay's shooting highlighted the hypocrisy in the radical community. Almost all of them now supported the police and district attorney and wanted the shooter prosecuted, even though they had “spent their professional lives denouncing the criminal justice system as an instrument
of racial and class oppression and defending accused criminals as social victims.” The hypocrisy reached a greater poignancy when a former colleague of Fay’s, a member of the Prison Law Project, appeared on the shooter’s defense team, stating later, “I was just seething at the
way the White Left reacted to Brooks’ arrest. It was racist. They had never taken this attitude . . . in the past. . . . And yet, when one of their own was shot, they immediately cooperated with the cops.”
After Stender's suicide, David Horowitz, former editor of Ramparts,he was struck by how few Blacks attended the funeral. Another radical in attendance observed, “no matter what you do, if you are White, it doesn’t matter if you spent your whole life working for Blacks.”
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