B. Kwaku Duren (born April 14, 1943, alias, Robert Donaldson Duren and Bob D. Duren ) is a lawyer, educator, writer, editor, a controversial African American lawyer. , Black Panther, old social, political and community activist; and former inmates who now live and practice law in South Central Los Angeles. He has run for the United States Congress three times and once for the Vice President of the United States. As a young man, he spent almost five years in a California jail for armed robbery. He began to read extensively and take college classes while in prison and after his parole in the fall of 1970, he founded and led the National Poor Congress. Several years later, he and his younger sister, Betty Scott, along with Mary Blackburn and other community activists, set up an alternative school - the Institute of Interfaith Youth (1972-1975) - in Long Beach, California.
Behind the death of his sister's shooting by a California Highway Patrol officer during a routine traffic stop, Duren helped find and co-chaired the Coalition against the Police (CAPA) from 1975-77. From 1976 to 1981 he became Coordinator of the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party (SCC/BPP). From 1979 to 1991 he worked for the Los Angeles Legal Aid Foundation, beginning as a Community Outreach Worker; then, as paralegals and lawyers; he was one of the founding members and first president of the Los Angeles Legal Services Union (AFL-CIO/UAW).
Duren studied at law school at Peoples College of Law in Los Angeles. He graduated in the fall of 1989 and was accepted at the California State Bar on August 8, 1990. He has worked as a lawyer and "people" community activist in South Central Los Angeles ever since.
A founding member of Unlimited Community Services, Inc., he was Executive Director from 1977-2008. As Chairman of the New Panther Vanguard Movement - since 1994 Duren is co-editor-in-chief, with his ex-wife Neelam Sharma of The Black Panther International News Service, a quarterly newspaper published in Los Angeles from 1995 to 2001.
Video B. Kwaku Duren
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B. Kwaku Duren was born in Beckley, West Virginia, his father's hometown, William Preston "Brack" Duren, and his mother, Willie Wade Bennett. Duren is the only son in a family of four. His father worked as a miner, fighter, and steel mill worker.
During the Second World War, when Duren was a baby, his parents moved to Cleveland, Ohio. They live in various places around Cleveland to settle in some new "housing projects". Her mother was a housewife for many years but also worked as a housekeeper and tailor. When Duren's "Brack" his hand was badly injured in an industrial accident at Midland Steel (he lost two-and-a-half fingers of his right hand), and the company fired him with a small settlement, Willie Duren was forced to seek work cleaning white houses to help support his family.
In 1959, Duren's mother moved from Cleveland to Long Beach, California. Her husband followed her family to Long Beach shortly after. In 1960, Brack Duren was arrested in a house attack by the FBI and accused of armed robbery of illegal gambling in Cleveland, which he had done after being injured and unable to find work. He was extradited to Ohio where he served many years at Chillicothe Prison before becoming a prison attorney, conducting research on his own case (with the help of his eldest daughter, Joyce), withdrawing, and ultimately winning his technical release. He rejoins and remarries with his wife after being released from prison and living the rest of his life in Long Beach.
At the age of 17, Kwaku Duren was arrested for breaking and entering a television store. He served six months at the L.A. county prison facility. before being placed on probation. After her release, she worked in a swimming pool in Long Beach, selling drugs, and, with a colleague, conducted a series of store help for several years. In the spring of 1966, he was arrested for pulling a taxi driver, convicted, and sentenced to five years for life. He spent four and a half years in Chino and Soledad jails. (In a bit of irony, he works as a taxi driver while placing himself in law school.)
For three and a half years at Soledad, a black adviser introduced Duren to the writings of African American historian and sociologist, W.E.B. Du Bois - especially World and Africa . Even before slipping into crime, Duren has become a greedy reader. He then began an intensive study of African-American history while in prison, reading books such as The Autobiography of Malcolm, X. He also devoured works by writers such as JA Rogers, Erich Fromm, Friedrich Engels , Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin. He ordered these books through the State Library of California and UNESCO's UNESCO library. One of the special areas that he dedicates to himself is the history of slavery and its influence on, and echo in, contemporary life. In addition to pursuing autodakes, Duren enrolled and completed economics, sociology, and psychology classes, as well as astronomy, at San Francisco State University. He was released in September 1970 at the age of 27.
Maps B. Kwaku Duren
The Intercommunal Youth Institute
Duren, his younger sister, Betty Scott (aka Betty Scott-Smith), and other community activists founded the Non-Profit Interagency Youth Institution (IYI) in Long Beach during the summer of 1973. This alternative school, a project of Experimental Institute, Inc. , hosted by Duren and modeled after the highly successful Black Panther Party community school in Oakland, California. Duren is the Director of the Institute and teaches the history of the world. Betty Scott is a business manager. IYI received certification from the state education board and also received Title I fund [federal]. IYI's motto, "The World is a Classroom," captures the school's methodology. As well as giving instruction in "three R's", IYI strives to teach students a self-awareness strategy to avoid gangs, drugs, and criminal life.
In the summer of 1975, the Venceremos Brigade elected him to lead a youth delegation to an international summer youth camp in Cuba to meet and discuss youth issues with other students, and to learn about the Cuban Revolution. After Duren returns to the US, the FBI and the INS detain him. He was released after a lengthy interrogation of his intention to visit Cuba.
Death of Betty Scott
On September 20, 1975, while on his way to the Monterey Jazz Festival, Betty Scott and his partner, George Smith, were withdrawn at 4 am in Pleasanton, California, near Oakland, reportedly due to a speeding offense. Ms. Scott was driving. During the dismissal, two California Highway Patrol officers, Curtis Engberson and Gordon Robbins, approached the car. Engberson was young, a recent recruit to CHP. She approached Ms. Scott on the driver's side of the vehicle; Robbins takes the passenger side. There are conflicting claims about whether the officers have their weapons withdrawn, which will not be routine in stopping traffic. Other details of the subsequent events are also disputed. What was recorded was that Scott was shot once in the neck by Engberson, fell into Smith's lap, and died almost instantly. The shooting was probably devoid of malicious intentions - though Engberson and Robbins could still be held responsible - and happened in reaction to a young officer nervous about Robbins's shout, "He's got a gun!" Smith kept a gun in the drawer, and Ms. Scott had reached into the compartment to produce a car registration in response to Engberson's order to do so. However, the powder burns on the victim's neck, the bullet trajectory, other physical evidence, and Smith's report strongly suggests that police testimony, in important details, be made after the facts to reduce errors. Grand Jury Alameda County does not condone the officers (returns a justifiable verdict of murder), thereby agreeing with a police report that Ms. Scott had pointed the gun at the clerk and yet this pistol somehow managed to fall back into the drawer after the officer shot him.
Smith, who was in the front seat next to Scott, was charged with attempted murder of a police officer, even though he did not have a gun in his possession and was shocked by Scott's shooting. The charges against him were then dropped after a series of demonstrations organized by Scott-Smith's Defense Committee. Off-the-record testimony by another CHP officer to a Duren family member states that the officer who killed Scott later experienced an emotional trauma as a result of his actions.
Duren and his family, including Duren's first wife, Virginia Harris, and Mary Blackburn formed the Scott-Smith Justice Committee to investigate the incident and then demanded CHP for three million dollars in the wrong suit. The lawsuit did not work. After Scott's death, IYI was dissolved.
In February 1976, Duren helped create - along with former Black Panthers members Michael Zinzun and Anthony Thigpenn - the Coalition Against Police (CAPA). Duren became chairman together. The coalition, renowned for its broad-based alliance between black and Mexican communities in L.A., has the aim of preventing, exposing, and refusing harassment and offenses by police, and to seek legal remedies for such misuse. Duren has been involved in police abuses and brutality issues since the formation of The Scott-Smith's Committee for Justice and CAPA.
Citizens Against Police Abuse
In 1981, Kwaku was a founding member and co-chair of the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA), a multi-racial community-based organization with activists in East and Southcentral Los Angeles. He later became the main plaintiff in the ACLU domestic spy suit against Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates who sought to eliminate LAPD's Public Disorder and Intelligence Division (PDID). CAPA, et al. vs. Gates, et al., Settled for $ 1.3 million and the dissolution of Public Disorder and Intelligence Division (PDID) and the establishment of the LAPD Anti-Terrorist Division (ATD).
Black Panther
In the summer of 1976, Duren first enrolled at the Peoples College of Law in Los Angeles. At the same time, he and several other black activists formed political study groups. He and these activists went to Oakland and met Elaine Brown, Chairman of the Black Panther Party, to discuss Party reform at L.A.
In October, almost a year after the murder of his sister, and after meeting with members of the Party Central Committee, Duren officially joined the Black Panther Party. In January 1977, while the LAPD helicopter spun overhead, Duren inaugurated the new office of the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party (SCC/BPP) on Central Avenue in South Central. He believes that the Party has the potential to raise awareness of black and other youth in a continuing struggle for "people's power." In the summer of the same year, Huey Newton, who co-founded the Party in 1966 with Bobby Seale, returned from political exile in Cuba. Late in 1977 Elaine Brown quit the BPP as a result of the conflict with Newton, whose behavior became increasingly uncertain, possibly due to a power struggle exacerbated by the use of Newton's cocaine.
Nevertheless, Duren continues to work with the Party, reorganize the Southern California Chapters, grow its membership, and carry out its community engagement agenda. However, his strong attitude toward the use and trafficking of cocaine by Party members seems to make it at odds with Newton and other members of the BPP leadership.
The SCC re-established under the status of the Duren Coordinator is always small in the number of members. Duren kept it this way because he felt that many would-be applicants were attracted to the Party more for his public and symbolic role than for the serious political agenda announced by BPP. However, this chapter has managed to set the "survival program." These include martial arts training for youth and adults, Tutorial/School of Liberation for Youth, and Environmentally Scary Awareness (AMAN) escort program.
David Bryant, an African American, who was a LAPD officer under the orders of the then Chief of Police, Daryl Gates, illegally infiltrated the SCC. This "domestic spy case" became part of a larger civil rights lawsuit, entitled CAPA vs Gates at LAPD, and was finalized in 1983. In early 1982, the head of the Oakland BBP decided to dissolve the BPP, and the leadership of the SCC reorganization, collectively, decided to stop the operation. CAPA vs, Gates, et al. lawsuit. from
Lawyers People
Duren began taking a law class at the Peoples College of Law (PCL) in August 1976. He came out about six months into the program and devoted himself to organizing around police abuse/infringement issues, resulting in the formation of CAPA, as mentioned above, and the opening returned to SCC/BPP in 1977. In late 1979, he was employed as a Community Outreach Worker by Linda Ferguson, Director of the Watts Legal Aid Office (located in Manchester and Broadway in South Central). When the Legal Assistant's opening became available about a year later, he was transferred to that position; simultaneously, he took a paralegal class at the University of Southern California Paralegal Program and received a Certificate of Completion.
Around 1981, Duren began an independent law study program with Linda Ferguson. However, his involvement with CAPA v. Gates separated his focus, so he withdrew from the course.
He returned to formal legal studies by re-enrolling at PCL in 1985. He graduated in June 1989, received his JD title, and took the bar for the first time in October 1989. He received confirmation that he had graduated in November. 1989. The California Bar Checking Committee delayed its acceptance to the state bar because the Subcommittee on Moral Fitness postponed the filing of its lawyer. Duren wrote the State Administration Council and threatened to sue. He was later accepted and continued to work for legal assistance, but as a staff attorney. Duren was sworn by Judge Richard Paez - at that time a high court judge who had served as ex-executive director of Legal Aid - in the Paez courtroom in 1990. Paez was later appointed as a federal judge.
Duren left Legal Aid for private practice in 1991 because of political pressure from the National Legal Services Corporation in the form of increased oversight of several campaigns for his political office (including running for Congress in 1982 and 1986). At that time, and still exist, the prohibition of lawyers Congress who worked with Legal Aid to run political office (a law that prohibits lawyer Lawyers for political office sponsored by Republican senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch). In 1993, Duren was certified for legal practice in the Federal Court and in 1998 was certified to practice in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal. He was appointed to the Court of Arbitration/Mediation of the High Court in 1997 and to the Panel of Federal Court Resolutions Officials and the Pilot Pilot Prisoner Program in 2000.
B. KWAKU DUREN [# 147789], 70, from Compton suspended for two years, resided, and placed on a two-year probation with an actual 30-day suspension and ordered to take MPRE and pay compensation. Orders will enter into force May 10, 2013. (http://members.calbar.ca.gov/fal/Member/Detail/147789)
Duren stipulates that he failed to perform competent legal services by not appearing in court causing his client's seizure case to be dismissed. Duren also did not notify the client of significant developments in his case, failing to immediately refund $ 10,000 in unbilled fees and failing to give him the proper calculation when he requested a refund. He then, late, returns $ 2,000 of the fee. In mitigation, Duren has more than 20 years of discipline-free practice before the offense, has been involved in various pro bono activities and cooperates with the State Bar by entering the provisions before the trial. As part of the provisions, Duren was ordered to pay $ 8,000, plus interest, to previous clients.
On March 12, 2017, the California Supreme Court dismissed Duren after he failed to participate in the Bar State Court process related to three counts of offense involving a client issue, which caused the Bar District Court to enter a default. The error means that the court is considered to recognize the factual accusation against Duren.
References
Bibliography
- DeSantis, John. The New Untouchable . Chicago: The Noble Press, Inc. 1994.
- Donner, Frank. Patron of Privileges: Red Team and Police Repression in Urban America . Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.
- Duren, Joyce. My mates with Lupus . Duren Enterprises, 1985.
- Duren, Joyce. Black Profile . New York: CORE Publications, 1976.
- Escobar, Edward. "The Dialectics of Repression," in The Journal of American History, March 1993.
- Hunt, Raymond G., and Magenau, John M. Powers and Chiefs of Police . Newbury Park, California; SAGE Publications, 1993.
- Jerger, Burr. "CHP Shoots Black Activist." Los Angeles Free Press . 3 - 9 October 1975, page 9.
- Oakland Tribune . "Woman Shot: Pulled Gun on CHP." September 21, 1975, p. 1.
- Sharma, Neelam, and Duren, Kwaku, eds. Black Panther International News Service . Vols. 4, 5, 6, and 7.
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