Lee Co-Hosts Forum Featuring Cop-Killers & Former Black Panthers

On May 10, 2021, Lee and two fellow Democratic members of the House of Representatives – Steve Cohen and Bobby Rush – hosted a forum about COINTELPRO, the FBI program that tracked the activities of radical leftist organizations in the 1960s and ’70s. Speakers at the forum heaped praise upon several convicted and incarcerated cop-killers – including Mumia Abu-Jamal, Mutulu Shakur, and H. Rap Brown (a.k.a. Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) – describing them as “political prisoners.” Lee, who had worked closely with the Black Panther Party (BPP) in the 1970s, introduced former Panther leader Ericka Huggins at the forum and described her as a “former colleague and comrade.” Huggins and another forum speaker, BPP co-founder Bobby Seale, had been charged in 1970 with the May 1969 torture and murder of 19-year-old BPP member Alex Rackley, who was suspected of providing information about the BPP to police. Though the charges against Huggins and Seale were eventually dropped after a jury was unable to reach a verdict, a tape recording that was introduced as evidence at their trial proved conclusively that Huggins had indeed been present while Rackley was being tortured. Moreover, in a 1977 retrospective of the case, The Washington Post reported that Huggins had admitted to: (a) boiling water that was subsequently poured onto Rackley as part of the torture, and (b) kicking Rackley and verbally abusing him while he sat tied to a chair.