Nation: Police And Panthers: Growing Paranoia

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To most whites, violence is not justifiable; to an increasing number of blacks, it is. While there is no evidence of a police conspiracy to annihilate the Panthers, more and more blacks believe it to be so. Says Los Angeles' Lou Smith: "They're going to make every one of us Panthers." Even middle-class blacks are rallying. Edward Boyd, a New York marketing executive with a son at Yale and two younger boys at Collegiate, a fashionable Manhattan private school, admits: "I'm changing my mind and they will have my support." The growing paranoia of many police feeds on that of the Panthers. For the American white majority, the risk of an all-out police attack on the Panthers is that it will bring about precisely what it is presumably intended to forestall: creation of a large, militant force of armed, angry blacks dedicated to achieving justice at whatever cost in violence to white society—and to themselves.