Former Black Panther Now Chicago Area Congressman Weighs in on the Zimmerman Verdict

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Here is a quote about Bobby Rush:

After co-founding the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers in 1968, he served as its "defense minister". After witnessing fellow Black Panther Fred Hampton being killed in a police raid, Rush made statements saying "We needed to arm ourselves" and referring to the police as "pigs". Earlier that same year Rush stated the philosophy behind his membership in the Black Panthers saying, "Black people have been on the defensive for all these years. The trend now is not to wait to be attacked. We advocate offensive violence against the power structure." Despite the group's engagement in violence, Rush nonetheless worked on several non-violent projects that built support for the Black Panthers in African-American communities, such as coordinating a medical clinic which offered sickle-cell anemia testing on an unprecedented scale. Rush's own apartment was raided in December 1969, where police discovered an unregistered pistol, rifle, shotgun, pistol ammunition, training manuals on explosives, booby traps, an assortment of communist literature, and a small amount of marijuana. Rush was imprisoned for six months in 1972 on a weapons charge, after carrying a pistol into a police station.