New Haven Black Panther Trials - Aftermath

Aftermath

Both the Panthers and the FBI suffered damage to their reputations, after the public exposure of their most unsavory activities.

In 1971, a group of left-wing radicals calling themselves the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI burglarized an FBI field office in Media, PA. Among the materials stolen in this break-in were documents revealing the nature of the COINTELPRO program. Within the year, Director Hoover declared that the centralized COINTELPRO was over.

For the Panthers, the Seale trial may have been the height of their national exposure and their popularity among the broader left-wing movement. A string of violent confrontations with law-enforcement, along with the trials and convictions of national party leaders that followed, left the movement spent and adrift, and by the mid-1970s it was largely inactive.

The trial surfaced again in the news in 2000, when former first lady Hillary Clinton ran for U.S. Senate in the state of New York. Anti-Clinton activists discovered that during the trials, Clinton (then a Yale law student named Hillary Rodham) volunteered to monitor the trial for violations of civil rights, for the American Civil Liberties Union. Widely circulated mass e-mails erroneously ascribed to Clinton responsibility for "getting the defendants off," and also blamed the future head of the Clinton U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, Bill Lann Lee, who was a Yale undergraduate at the time. Although both were much too junior to have had any role in the actual legal defense, according to John Elvin of Insight on the News, "Insight reviewed biographies of Hillary Clinton by Milton, Brock and Roger Morris for this story and lengthy selections from such other biographies as Barbara Olson’s Hell to Pay. Together, relying on primary and other firsthand sources, they unquestionably back David Horowitz’s contention that Hillary was a campus leader during the Panther protests"; Lee apparently played no prominent role in any protests.

Detective Nick Pastore, who arrested Seale and brought him to New Haven to stand trial, went on to become New Haven's Chief of Police, widely renowned for his successful policy of community policing, and now heads a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington, DC named Criminal Justice Policy. Thirty one years later, when Seale returned to New Haven to speak at the Yale Repertory Theatre, Pastore decided to attend and even presented Seale with a pink porcelain pig and a hug, congratulating him for continuing "the struggle".