Aug. 5, 1964 - William Epton, the chairman of the Progressive Labor Movement in Harlem, an extreme left-wing organization, was arrested today on charges of advocating criminal anarchy.
This was the first such indictment voted in New York County since 1919, when three men associated with a Communist newspaper, Revolutionary Age, were convicted.
Epton, 23 years old, describes himself as an electrical tester and lives at 1420 Amsterdam Avenue. He says he is a disciple of the Chinese Communists.
Epton was accused of advocating overthrow of the organized government of the State of New York by force and violence and of calling for the killing of police officers and judges.
The defendant was arraigned before Supreme Court Justice Gerald Culkin, who fixed bail at $10,000.
District Attorney Frank Hogan said part of the evidence supporting the indictment was a speech Epton delivered last July 18 at 115th St. and Lenox Ave. in Harlem.
The prosecutor declined to say whether Epton’s speech had been linked directly to the recent Harlem riots touched off July 16 by the killing of a 15-year-old youth by an off-duty police lieutenant.
Each of the two counts in the indictment against Epton is a felony punishable by a prison term up to 10 years and a $5,000 fine.
The indictment charged that in his Harlem speech, Epton said:
“We’re going to have a demonstration, and we don’t say it is going to be peaceful because the cops have declared war on the people of Harlem, and no country or peoples in the world that have had war declared on them have not declared war on their enemy… Every time they kill one of us, damn it, we’ll kill one of them, and we should start thinking that way right now, preaching violence, because we had better stop talking about violence as a dirty word.
“If we’re going to be free, we will not be fully free until we smash this state completely and totally. Destroy and set up a new state of our own choosing and our own liking.”
In another part of the speech, according to the indictment, Epton said:
“And in that process of smashing this state, we’re going to have to kill a lot of these cops, a lot of these judges, and we’ll have to go up against their army… All people in this world who are free got their freedom through struggle and through revolution. That’s the only way to gain freedom.”
The statute Epton is accused of violating, Section 161 of the Penal Law, was written in its present form in 1902 after the assassination of President William McKinley.
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