Dear Friends and Family of Political Prisoners –

Chip Fitzgerald, one of the longest-held Black Panther political prisoners, will have a parole hearing in the upcoming months. Chip has been in prison for 47 years – since he was 19 years old.  As former political prisoners and allies, we have joined together to support Chip and other comrades still remaining inside. We are asking for your support in raising money for an attorney to represent Chip at his parole hearing.

Chip Fitzgerald in 1996
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Chip has a good chance of release because of changes in California parole law. Currently, people over the age of 65 who have served 25 years or more are prioritized for release. The seriousness of the original offense is no longer enough to deny parole – “some evidence” of current dangerousness is required. And Chip’s age at the time of his arrest – just 19 – is a factor to be considered at his hearing. Chip has also suffered from a stroke, and has had no incident reports since 2008 (when he was attacked by 2 young men and responded in self-defense).

Please join us in supporting this campaign to FREE Chip Fitzgerald, now 66 years old. Like all our political prisoners, he has continued to fight for justice from behind bars, and has had a positive influence on scores of young men in prison with him. We need him back in the community and with his family and comrades.

To support Chip at his parole hearing, please contribute here:

http://www.plumfund.com/community-crowdfunding/aid-chip-fitzgerald 

We appreciate your support for Chip and all U.S. political prisoners and prisoners-of-war – Free Them All!!!

In solidarity, (partial list)

Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald was born and raised in Compton, California. Upon his release from the Youth Authority in early 1969, he joined the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party.

Bruce Richard, a former member of the Party’s Southern California Chapter with Chip, now a union executive, recalls:

 

In September 1969, Chip was wounded and arrested in connection with a police shoot-out. He was tried for assault on police and other, related charges, including the murder of a security guard. He was convicted and sentenced to death. He was 19 years old.

 “The Greatest Threat”

This was immediately following the early 1969 announcement by infamous FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that “The Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” As documented by Huey P. Newton in his widely-acclaimed Ph.D. dissertation War Against the Panthers, A Study of Repression in America, Hoover then pledged to use a special counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black nationalists,” and, specifically targeted the Black Panther Party. Newton and other scholars document that, of the actions employed by the COINTELPRO program to carry out its agenda, 79% were “specifically directed toward destruction of the Party.”

In 1972, the California Supreme Court, in California v. Anderson, declared the death penalty unconstitutional, as a violation of the Eighth Amendment protection against “cruel or unusual punishments” and of the State’s constitutional ban against both. Along with nearly 100 other men on death row at the time, Chip found his death sentence commuted to life, with the possibility of parole. Today, however, unlike 98% of those on death row in 1972 who have been released, Chip languishes in prison still, incarcerated for 47 years now. In spite of his long and brutal incarceration, Chip’s dedication to the cause of the liberation of black and all oppressed people has not wavered.

Although Hoover identified the Party as a “threat to the internal security of the country,” he boldly stated that it was the Party’s Free Breakfast for Children program, not its weapons of self-defense, that made the Party so “dangerous.” Begun in the Party’s base in Oakland, California, the Free Breakfast Program grew across the nation with the rise of Party chapters during 1969, in over 40 states. Hoover charged that the Program was spreading revolutionary propaganda to all the hundreds of thousands of black families whose children participated in it, a dangerous development. Newton stated: “Since its inception, the Party [was] subject to a variety of actions by agencies and officers of the federal government intended to destroy it …precisely because of the Party’s political ideology and potential for organizing a sizable group of the country’s population that has been historically denied equal opportunity in employment, education, housing, and other recognized basic needs.”

It is well-documented that, at the end of 1969, under the direction of the FBI, Chicago police assassinated the Party’s Illinois chapter chairman Fred Hampton and leading member Mark Clark and Los Angeles police created its SWAT Team and raided the offices of the Party there, at one-location in a five-hour gun battle. This was the Party to which Chip belonged. He is a casualty of this war. 

Chip’s incarceration cannot be viewed apart from this history of the FBI’s war against the Panthers. Chip is the definition of a political prisoner, and is the longest-held Black Panther Party political prisoner. Indeed, at his last parole hearing, in July 2008, he was vigorously challenged by a Board member about his political views, past and present, and summarily denied.

Just as Chip’s long incarceration is rooted in the political agenda of the State, his freedom is dependent upon political action. JOIN US to support Chip at his 2016 parole hearing.