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Like Tarzan. Two black militants were killed when their car was blasted to bits while they were riding on a highway south of Bel Air, Md. The dead were Ralph Featherstone, 30, and William ("Che") Payne, 26. Featherstone, a former speech therapist, was well known as a civil rights field organizer and, more recently, as manager of the Afro-American bookstore, the Drum & Spear, in Washington. Both were friends of H. Rap Brown, whose trial on charges of arson and incitement to riot was scheduled to begin last week in Bel Air. Reconstruction of the car's speedometer indicates it was traveling about 55 miles an hour when it blew up.
Police believed that Payne had been carrying a dynamite bomb on the floor between his legs and that it accidentally exploded. A preliminary FBI investigation supported that theory. Friends of the dead men contended that white extremists had either ambushed the pair or booby-trapped their car, perhaps trying to kill Brown. But police pointed out that Featherstone and Payne had driven in from Washington without notice, cruised around Bel Air briefly and seemed to be headed back. That assassins could plot and move so quickly defies belief.
Although Featherstone had not been known as an extremist, friends said that he had grown markedly more bitter in the past year. Police cited a crudely spelled typewritten statement found on his body: "To Amerika:* I'm playing heads-up murder. When the deal goes down I'm gon be standing on your chest screaming like Tarzan. Dynamite is my response to your justice." Brown, meanwhile, was nowhere to be found.
The night after the Bel Air incident, a blast ripped a 30-ft. hole in the side of the Dorchester County courthouse in Cambridge, where Brown allegedly incited the 1967 riot and where his trial was originally scheduled. No one was hurt in the blast, which occurred just 100 miles from Bel Air. Police were seeking a young white woman seen at the courthouse before the blast.
Haymarket Again. Last week's violence was only the latest in a frightening trend. Though the upswing in bombing is far from nationwide, it has occurred in widely separated parts of the country. New York and San Francisco, both areas of left-wing extremist activity, have been particularly hard hit, but so have less electric cities, including Seattle, Denver and Madison, Wis.
In New York, there were 93 bomb explosions in 1969, police say, and another 19 bombs did not explode. Half the 93 are classed as political, a category that was virtually nonexistent ten years ago, when there were no more than 20 bombings a year. New York authorities have accused 21 Black Panthers of a conspiracy to blow up stores and railroad tracks and, during a hearing on those charges, five bombs were set off around the city in one night, three at the home of the judge. Last July through November, a series of bombs exploded in government and corporate offices in the city; three left-wing white radicals were arrested and one is still sought. The San Francisco Bay Area had an estimated 62 bombings in the past year, Seattle 33. The FBI says that there were 61 bombing and arson cases on U.S. college campuses in 1969.