Dennis Bernstein - Mumia Library

In the history of every oppressed people, there was one figure who earned the hatred and enmity of that community. This was always the Snitch.

Throughout the long, tortured centuries of oppression against Blacks in America, a special contempt was reserved for those who dared snitch against the endangered slave community, people who made their "livings" by selling out their own people, sending information to dreaded slave-catchers in the South, who used the infamous Fugitive Slave Act to track and re-enslave those who dared escape their fiendish clutches.

In 1800, a slave named Gabriel Prosser, his wife, and his brothers, organized a far-reaching rebellion that gathered some 1,000 rebels who were bent on waging an armed assault on Richmond, Virginia. The plot was betrayed by two snitches, Tom and Pharoah, and the resultant revolt ended in failure. At least 35 rebels were hanged.

The brilliant Denmark Vesey's Revolt in Charleston, South Carolina was spoiled by one snitch. One hundred and thirty-one conspirators were arrested, and 37 of them, including Vesey, were hanged.

In the summer of 1740, another major conspiracy was wiped out around the city of Charles Town, South Carolina. A slave traitor told all that he knew to the slaveholders a full day in advance of the revolt, and when nearly 200 rebellious slaves gathered "together in Defiance" they were beaten and recaptured. Half escaped. At least fifty of the Africans were caught and hanged, in batches of ten a day, the better "to intimidate the other negroes" [Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943/1993), p. 189]. The Snitch, Peter, was rewarded with "a suit of Cloaths, hat, shoes & stockings & ?20 in cash" [Aptheker, p. 77].

In our own era, the late 1960s and 1970s saw members of the Black Panther Party, like the revered Fred Hampton and Capt. Mark Clark, slain in their apartment building in Chicago by killer cops who were helped by an "informer" (snitch): William O'Neal, who provided floorplans, sleeping places, and security details of the home. He was well-placed for that dastardly mission, as he was security lt. for the chapter. He served Fred and other key Panthers soft drinks reportedly laced with secobarbital, making them unable to respond to the deadly raid in the night. He duly received a bonus, of perhaps $300--today's equivalent of thirty pieces of silver, it seems.

In popular culture (at least in the version projected on the idiot box) snitching has been portrayed as hip, as "in", as an OK thing to do. From the pimp-dressing Huggy Bear of Starsky and Hutch infame; to the latest personification, they have made snitching virtually acceptable. Young generations of African- Americans, unmindful of their legacy of resistance against the slavery system, don't understand that snitching is not cool.

In Jewish law (halakha), there were few crimes one could commit against their community that was worse than snitching. Scholar Adin Steinsaltz noted that "Anyone bearing tales against others to the alien authorities...places himself outside of the law by his action, and members of the community are permitted and even encouraged to kill him" [The Essential Talmud].