
Collins will face an additional charge under the federal Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Federal authorities must determine whether Mr. South Carolina has no hate crime statute, so the Federal Bureau of Investigation was called in. A broken piece of rope was still tied to his truck, the police said. The man charged with his slaying, Gregory Collins, was smoked out of his mobile home with tear gas and arrested within hours of the body’s discovery.

Indeed, the Hill case does not cry out as an example of racism or incompetence on the part of law enforcement officials. Malik Zulu Shabazz, president of the New Black Panther Party, called for the death of Mr. Many exhorted the audience to become more involved in community activities and their children’s lives. Instead, they talked about the need for better housing and programs for youth, the problem of gang violence and what they said was racial profiling by the police. Hill, reparations for slavery and “self-improvement in the black community.”īut several people, asked why they had come, did not bring up the killing. The march and demonstration attracted several hundred of Newberry’s black residents, who pumped their fists in the air and agreed to support the group’s seven demands, including justice for Mr. “It’s really interesting that there’s a hate group taking a position on calling something a hate crime,” said Rebecca Smith, a white retired auctioneer who sat with her husband on the sidewalk in front of their house, watching the march go by. Here in Newberry, a town better known for its college and its opera house in what was once the egg-and-dairy capital of South Carolina, the sight of beret-topped men with walkie-talkies and “black power” placards attracted curious spectators. Even Bobby Seale, a leader of the original Black Panther Party of the 1960s, has called it “a black racist hate group” that is usurping the original Panther name. And the New Black Panther Party is itself a hate group, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. In recent days, the New Black Panthers have been at the center of an unrelated furor over what conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin say is reverse racism in the Obama administration. “It’s like that old saying, ‘You shed more heat than light.’ ” Glisson, the director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation in Oxford, Miss.

“We keep finding these surrogates and calling them a racial dialogue, but instead it’s just drama without a substantive discussion,” said Susan M. But on close examination, this story unfolds like origami in reverse, saying less about racism in the South than about the fraught posturing of the summer’s raging national conversation on race. On Saturday, black-clad members of the national New Black Panther Party marched to the courthouse steps to demand that the case be classified as a hate crime.Īll that seems fairly straightforward, even par for the course.
Newberry opera house james gregory Patch#
Then, he tied his body to the back of a truck and dragged it for nearly 11 miles before the rope broke, leaving the mangled corpse of the victim, Anthony Hill, on a bloody patch of road. Before dawn on June 2, law enforcement officials here say, a white man shot and killed a black co-worker at close range.
