Mixed Times

The 1960s and 1970s were confused times. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement were contemporary to Malcolm X and the nation of Islam, also contemporary with the rising black militancy that led to Black Nationalism and the Black Panther Party. Add to the crazy mix, the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, and J. Edgar Hoover and a Gestapo FBI regime. Then of course, there were black gangsters like Frank Lucas and the Italian Mafia. All of these human forces were contemporaries, stirred together in the same pot, during the same era.

It was a time when many officers in law enforcement were compromised through shakedown bribes, gifts and grafts, or blackmailed through sex. The mob captured many officers on candid camera and showed it back to them at the police station. That was how the mob married the law. While in the meantime, J. Edgar Hoover used his FBI forces to play the largest human chess game in the world.

Maybe this side-story of David Duke will add a piece to the puzzle.

In the mid-1960s, there were rumors of drugs being smuggled back into US black communities via CIA cargo planes (Air America) from Southeast Asia. At the time, David Duke worked for Air America in Laos during the Vietnam War.

Duke was the All-American boy who went on to become the leader of the Ku Klux Klan and eventually elected to the Louisiana state legislature. Looking at his resume, it would have been impossible for this future Klan leader and the CIA not to know about the Ike Atkinson – Frank Lucas drug shipment pipeline. As the movie “American Gangster” clearly points out, there were high up military officers on the drug trafficking payroll.

Not to suggest that Mr. Duke was one of those on the take, but it has always been known that the Ku Klux Klan advocated black self-destruction and Nazi doctors were in search of the “magic bullet” to destroy the race of dark-skinned people. These two hate groups would have condoned widespread drug use among blacks.

Black Panther think tanks charged the US government with foreknowledge of the drug epidemic. In fact, we had planned to charge the United States once again with Genocide. We had planned to resurrect and revise the original charge “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People” submitted to the United Nation in 1951 by actor Paul Robeson, except this time it would included the charge of complicity in the drug trade to destroy black people.

We knew for a fact that the CIA was involved and, through them came undercover FBI agents working both sides of the fence. They were not supposed to kill, but they murdered like gangsters, or witnessed the hits go down. One such agent infiltrated the KKK and had to witness a lynching, not being able to do anything about it. The excuse for Hoover not intervening to protect southern blacks was this: “The investigation is ongoing”, as it is today, in too many cases.

Also, two FBI agents were at the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965. They were there only to nab the shooters, but not to protect Malcolm.

FOOTNOTES: From 1898 through to 1910, Bayer (the aspirin company) openly marketed heroin as a painkiller, knowing its addictive powers. Needless to say, the story of drugs is too long, winding, and more complex than to two black drug kingpins.

The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted Dec. 9, 1948, flowed from the determination of the world community that never again would fascism be allowed to plunge humanity into holocaust and world war….The U.S. did not ratify the Genocide Convention until Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wisc.) finally pushed it through the U.S. Senate in 1987.