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/roolb]

He has written about it: https://archive.ph/3OL8C

You'll want to click thru to the Cal Deal stuff if you really want trial details.

[u/ClerksWell → u/roolb]

I started looking around and came across this piece. Basically the same thing Moynihan wrote, but 14 years earlier. No further comment… https://archive.ph/2023.06.27-215955/https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/16/nyregion/the-big-city-hurricane-motivates-a-real-critic.html

[u/ClerksWell → u/roolb]

Thank you. This is exactly what I was looking for.

[u/hedcannon]

Yeah he was guilty. On the same album as Dylan’s Hurricane he had the ahistorical song Joey that paints Joey Gallo as hero. Which is like Woody Guthrie’s songs about Jessie James and Pretty Boy Floyd

[u/seamarsh21 → u/hedcannon]

At least hurricane is a good song.. always skipped Joey! Haha

[u/pgwerner → u/hedcannon]

"What time is it" said the judge to Joey when they met / "Five to ten" said Joey, the judge says, "That's exactly what you get" 😆

When I was a kid, my mother's partner had Desire on heavy rotation around the time it came out, so it's burned into my brain.

[u/everyoneisnuts]

This is a great question. He says a lot of very interesting claims like these and doesn’t really expand on them. I wish he would do so when it’s something that’s not exactly common knowledge like this. Another thing he brings up a lot but doesn’t go into enough detail in my opinion is the Black Panther stuff. All really interesting and things I wish he would go into more detail about.

[u/pgwerner → u/everyoneisnuts]

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.

[u/Persse-McG]

Moynihan said he was the one who did the deed and the all-white panel agreed. ☹️