The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has given U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder an April 12 deadline to state whether the Justice Department will stop stonewalling an investigation of alleged voter intimidation involving three members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia.

By: David A. Patten at Newsmax.com

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has given U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder an April 12 deadline to state whether the Justice Department will stop stonewalling an investigation of alleged voter intimidation involving three members of the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Philadelphia.

A letter from Commission chairman Gerald A. Reynolds to Holder declares that the organization’s efforts to obtain information from the Justice Department are at an “impasse.”

The Commission wants to know why the Department dismissed a complaint filed against several New Black Panther defendants who were videotaped confronting a cameraman and brandishing a nightstick outside a polling place.

Editor’s Note: See video of the New Black Panthers voting rights controversy below

According to the Commission, the men blocked access to the polls, harassed voters and poll workers, and hurled racial epithets. Police were called to the scene and the two men were ordered to leave.

Videos of the incident have been posted on YouTube.

Bartle Bull, an author and civil rights veteran who ran RFK’s 1968 presidential campaign, was observing the Fairmont Street polling station in Philadelphia when the incident occurred. Bull filed an affidavit that stated he overheard one of the men tell a white poll observer, “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker.”

Bull, a former publisher of the Village Voice, was awarded the 2003 civil rights medal by the late liberal lion Sen. Ted Kennedy for his voting-rights work in Mississippi. He was monitoring polling activities on Election Day 2008 in his role as chairman of New York’s Democrats for McCain organization.

In his affidavit, Bull called the incident “the most blatant form of voter intimidation I have encountered in my life in political campaigns in many states, even going back to the work I did in Mississippi in the 1960s.”

FULL STORY

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