John White Must Go Free!

Convicted for Defending Family Against Racist Attack

In a trial recalling Southern Jim Crow “justice,” John White, a black 54-year-old construction foreman, was convicted of manslaughter in Suffolk County, New York, for defending his home and family from a mob of five white youth spewing racist epithets and threatening to kill his son. He was also convicted of possessing an unlicensed gun. John White faces up to 15 years in prison after the December 23 verdict, a travesty that tramples on the elementary right of self-defense.

White thought he had found his dream home in the mainly white town of Miller Place in suburban Long Island. But Suffolk County is notorious for its segregation and racist violence, including by the Klan, against black people and immigrants. On 9 August 2006, White’s 19-year-old son Aaron was driven out of a party after a white girl spread a story, which she admitted at trial was an Internet hoax, that he had threatened to rape her. Seizing on the claim of rape, which has always been a rallying cry for racist lynch-mob terror, 17-year-old Daniel Cicciaro Jr. and his drunken crew drove up to White’s home in two cars, revving their engines and shining their headlights.

With Cicciaro threatening him on his cellphone, the terrified Aaron woke his father, putting the phone on speaker as Cicciaro howled, “Come out of your house you n----r. I’m going to kill you.” John White grabbed his pistol and ran out of the house. The five thugs, one of them with a baseball bat, surrounded him on the driveway and threatened his family. One said, “We can take that skinny n----r motherf---er.” When White turned back to his house, Cicciaro lunged for the gun. White’s gun went off accidentally, killing Cicciaro.

At the trial, White explained that his actions in defense of his family came from experience. His pistol had been given to him by his grandfather, Napoleon White, who fled Alabama after the Ku Klux Klan torched his store in the 1920s. He also described how other members of his family had been lynched. He testified of his reaction when he saw the headlights of the mob’s car in his driveway: “In my family history, that’s how the Klan comes. They pull up. They blind you with their lights. They burn your house down. They threaten your family. That’s how they come.” After moving to Long Island in 1988, White said he had decided to keep his grandfather’s gun for protection after hearing of another black family’s house being burned down. Not only most blacks but also many whites feel sympathy for this man who defended his family and home.

The jury that convicted White was composed of eleven whites and one black man. After four days of deliberation, they told Judge Barbara Kahn that they were deadlocked. But the judge ordered the jury to continue meeting on Saturday, indicating that she would order them to meet again on Sunday, two days before Christmas. Following the trial, Francois Larché, one of two jurors who favored acquittal but were bullied by the others, pointed to the pressure applied by the judge, stating that Kahn told the jury that a mistrial would only cause more pain and suffering and burden another jury. The two jurors caved in. White’s lawyers have announced that they will appeal.

As Marxists, we have always stood for the right of armed self-defense and in opposition to gun control schemes, which are most often promoted by Democratic Party liberals and black politicians. The right to bear arms, a product of the Revolutionary War against British colonial rule, and other democratic rights were won and defended through social struggle. In going after White, the prosecution argued that he introduced a gun into “a volatile situation”—in essence, blaming the victim for the racist attack he endured. The logic of White’s conviction is to deny black people the most fundamental right of self-defense. It recalls the Jim Crow courts and lynch-rope mobs that targeted blacks who dared to defend themselves against race-terror.

Gun control kills, and it kills blacks in particular. It is a means to enforce a monopoly of violence in the hands of the capitalist state. As we wrote in “Clinton’s Racist ‘Law and Order’—Defend the Right to Bear Arms! No to Gun Control!” (WV No. 593, 4 February 1994): “Gun control leaves guns in the hands of cops, criminals and Klansmen while making the country’s black, poor and working people defenseless in the face of racist terror and armed strikebreakers.”

In capitalist America, black self-defense against racist terror has historically been met with frenzied state repression. The earliest 20th-century gun control laws were passed in states like South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi as a way to disarm blacks in the face of the KKK. In 1965, the New York City Council passed a bill especially to keep black militant Malcolm X from carrying a carbine for protection. In 1967, the California legislature banned the carrying of a loaded gun after legally armed Black Panthers began patrolling ghettos where police terror was rampant. The California ban was followed by nationwide gun control laws—especially after the ghetto upheavals that broke out following Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968—pushed by then-attorney general Ramsey Clark (a current favorite of the reformist Workers World Party and its International Action Center).

In response to John White’s conviction, Al Sharpton’s National Action Network has called for a “March for Justice” on January 5. White has also received support from the Nation of Islam. The conviction of John White must be protested. But the program of Al Sharpton and other black Democrats such as Jesse Jackson has always meant support for gun control laws in the name of fighting crime and violence. For their part, the Nation of Islam black nationalists, while not supporting gun control, have echoed the bourgeois rulers’ racist diatribes about “black-on-black crime” and grotesquely put themselves forward to help police the ghettos—for example, as security guards in housing projects—for the racist killer cops. It is in the name of the “war on crime” and “war on drugs”—long supported by Sharpton and Jackson—that America’s prisons have swelled to more than two million people, over half of them black and Latino.

The role of the liberal black misleaders is to contain social unrest within bounds safe for the racist capitalist rulers. On September 20, as more than 50,000 overwhelmingly black people came out to demonstrate in defense of the Jena Six in Louisiana, Sharpton and Jackson preached reliance on the same “justice” system that from the county sheriff on up is a machine of racial and class oppression, pushing the deadly illusion that racist injustice is an aberration that can be set right by appeals to the government.

Had White not defended his family that night and had his son been killed, the liberals would have doubtless wrung their hands and shed their tears, all the while intoning about “tolerance” and calling for more “hate crime” laws. In other words, they would have done everything to strip blacks of the right to defend themselves while pushing the lie that the capitalist courts of injustice can redress the oppression of black people, which has always been the cornerstone of American capitalism.

We stand in counterposition to the liberals and black nationalists, whose opposition to integrated class struggle serves to reinforce the capitalist status quo, which is based on oppression and exploitation. We fight for the independent mobilization of the multiracial working class against racist terror and in defense of the rights of black people, immigrants and all the oppressed. When Michael Griffith, a black man, was lynched in New York’s Howard Beach in December 1986, we raised the call for the formation of integrated armed workers defense guards drawn from responsible union men and women to patrol the streets where he was murdered. In particular, we pointed to the Transport Workers Union, the powerhouse of New York City labor. The New York Labor Black League, which is fraternally allied with the Spartacist League, was founded in July 1986 after a successful campaign to defend black transit worker James Grimes. Grimes was being railroaded by the courts and his bosses for using his gun while on the job to defend himself against robbers who threatened to kill him.

Key to mobilizing the power of labor in defense of all the oppressed is a political struggle against the pro-capitalist union tops who tie the working class to the class enemy, especially through support to the Democrats, the other party of American capitalism. Our purpose is to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party that fights to sweep away the barbaric system of capitalism and establish working-class rule—the only path to black liberation. Overturn the conviction of John White!

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The Partisan Defense Committee has contributed to a fund set up for John White’s legal defense. We encourage our readers to do the same. Send contributions to: John White Legal Defense Fund, Ideal Tax Consultants, 762 Belmont Ave., Babylon, NY 11704.