Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  The early morning of October 28 was cool, dark, and slightly misty. Officer John Frey of the Oakland police force sat alone in his patrol car on Willow Avenue at the corner of Seventh Street. Officer Frey (pronounced “fry”) had just turned twenty-three. Married, though separated, Frey was a large man, over six feet tall and more than two hundred pounds. In his year and a half on the force, Frey had already developed quite a reputation. A ten-year veteran of the Oakland Police Department told a reporter from Ramparts, “Frey is not what I would categorize as a good cop.” Frey had been implicated in numerous incidents of racism. H. Bruce Byson, an English teacher who invited Frey to speak about police work to his class at Clayton Valley High School, reported that Frey told the class that “niggers” in the neighborhood he patrolled were “a lot of bad types.” In the trial eventually held to adjudicate the events of that early morning, Elford Dunning, an accountant for Prudential Life Insurance, testified that Frey had racially harassed him during a traffic accident, and when Dunning complained that Frey was acting like the Gestapo, Frey loosened his holster, put his hand on his gun, and said “I am the Gestapo” and ordered Dunning into the police car. Earlier on the evening that Huey Newton and Gene McKinney drove to get soul food on Seventh Street, Frey had intervened in a dispute between a black grocery clerk named Daniel King and a white man without pants on who claimed King had stolen his pants. According to King, Frey called him a nigger and held his arms so the white man could beat him.2

  Several hours after Frey had released King, Newton and McKinney drove by his parked patrol car. Sitting on the dashboard in front of Frey was a list of twenty cars that the Oakland police had identified as Black Panther vehicles. Second to last on the list was “Volkswagen, 1958, sedan, tan, AZM489.” Frey called for backup and pulled out after the Volkswagen. When Newton saw the red beacon lights in his rear-view mirror, he pulled over near the corner of Seventh and Campbell.

  HUEY MUST BE SET FREE!

  When physician Mary Jane Aguilar saw an Oakland Tribune photograph of Huey Newton taken hours after he was pulled over by Frey, she wrote a letter to the Black Panther Party:

  I can remember nothing in my medical training which suggested that, in the care of an acute abdominal injury, severe pain and hemorrhage are best treated by manacling the patient to the examining table in such a way that the back is arched and belly tensed. Yet this is precisely the picture of current emergency room procedure which appeared on the front page of a local newspaper last week-end. Looming large in the foreground of the same picture, so large as to suggest a caricature, was a police officer. Could it have been he who distracted the doctor in charge of the case to position the patient in this curious way?3

  There are conflicting accounts of what happened near the corner of Seventh and Campbell Streets in Oakland that morning. In the murder trial that followed the incident, the jury was not able to put together a clear and compelling account from the evidence and testimony presented in the courtroom. But at some point during the early hours of the day, Newton and Gene McKinney arrived at David Hilliard’s house. Newton had a gunshot wound in his abdomen, so David and his brother June Hilliard rushed Newton to the Kaiser Hospital emergency room. Soon the story was all over the news: Officer Frey was dead, and Huey P. Newton, minister of defense for the Black Panther Party, had been arrested as the prime suspect in his murder.4

  Well before the news stories hit the press, the Black Panther Party sprang into action. Over the preceding months, a small but growing number of people had come to view Newton as the leader of the vanguard of black revolution. In the months following the Panthers’ action in Sacramento, the Party had increased its capacity, not only by growing its membership and improving its ability to organize people but also by strengthening its political analysis, its newspaper, and its relationships with other political organizations. Now that Newton would face capital charges for a confrontation with the Oakland police and could be sent to the gas chamber, his release became the central cause of the Party.

  Beverly Axelrod introduced Newton to her mentor Charles Garry, who she felt would be the ideal lawyer for such a high-profile, politically charged case. Garry, the son of Armenian immigrants, was known as a passionate trial lawyer. His raw eloquence and brilliant maneuvers elicited revealing responses from witnesses under cross-examination. A former president of the San Francisco chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and an avowed Marxist with a strong commitment to social justice, Garry had defended more than thirty capital cases, and not one of his clients had been executed. Garry offered to represent Newton, and Newton accepted.5

  From the start, Newton and the Black Panther Party viewed the trial as a political contest rather than merely a legal proceeding. The Party put out the sixth issue of its newspaper with the picture of Huey in his wicker throne on the front page and the bold headline, “Huey Must Be Set Free!” After explaining that Huey had been shot and arrested and that Officer Frey had been shot and killed, the editorial discussed the case in terms of racial politics:

  The shooting occurred in the heart of Oakland’s black ghetto. Huey is a black man, a resident of Oakland’s black ghetto, and the two cops were white and lived in the white suburbs. On the night that the shooting occurred, there were 400 years of oppression of black people by white people manifested in the incident. We are at that crossroads in history where black people are determined to bring down the final curtain on the drama of their struggle to free themselves from the boot of the white man that is on their collective neck. . . . Through murder, brutality, and the terror of their image, the police of America have kept black people intimidated, locked in a mortal fear, and paralyzed in their bid for freedom. . . . They are brutal beasts who have been gunning down black people and getting away with it. . . . Huey Newton’s case is the showdown case. . . . We say that we have had enough of black men and women being shot down like dogs in the street. We say that black people in America have the right to self defense. Huey Newton has laid his life on the line so that 20,000,000 black people can find out just where they are at and so that we can find out just where America is at.6

  The Panthers argued that Newton was resisting the long-perpetrated oppression of blacks by police when he was shot and imprisoned. The Party turned the state’s accusations against Newton around, using the case to mobilize support and put America on trial.

  STOP THE DRAFT WEEK

  In the weeks leading up to Newton’s arrest, the Bay Area antiwar movement had experienced its own conflict with the Oakland police. As resistance to the Vietnam War intensified, white antiwar activists began getting a taste of police repression—and this experience was to deepen their alliances with the Panthers. By October, the draft resistance movement was gathering steam.7 No longer were the students and the antiwar activists simply Americans expressing their view within established channels. Inspired by Black Power, emboldened by the ghetto rebellions, many draft resisters saw themselves as subjects of empire who sought self-determination, much like the Vietnamese. They rejected the legitimacy of the war, the draft, and the government more generally, seeking to resist by any means.

  “This week,” a demonstrator wrote from Oakland at the end of Stop the Draft Week in mid-October, “the first crack appeared in the egg that will hatch white revolution in America.” Demonstrators sought to emulate the radical tactics of the ghetto rebellions of July. According to Frank Bardacke, an antiwar activist who would face the heaviest charges from the Stop the Draft Week protests in Oakland, the draft card burning was the defining act that set the tone for active resistance to authority: “Young men burning their draft cards on Sproul Hall steps changed the political mood of the campus. This example and that of hundreds who turned in their draft cards gave the rest of us courage.”8 “We too are the Vietcong,” Hal Jacobs of the Students for a Democratic Society told a Resistance rally in preparation for Stop the Draft Week at UC Berkeley.9

  Day one, Monday October 16, was relatively calm. Some 300 resisters turned in t
heir draft cards at the Federal Building in San Francisco, and another 120 were arrested for a nonviolent sit-in at the Oakland Induction Center. But the next day, confrontations with police intensified. While Monday had been reserved for the more pacifist groups, Tuesday’s event was organized by those ready to take the resistance to a new level, including SDS, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Independent Socialist Club, which instructed “those in the militant action” to “wear a hat and thick clothes, carry a handker-chief and change, and arrange for someone to have bail ready.” One of the speakers was George Ware, the SNCC field secretary who had recently traveled to Cuba with Stokely Carmichael.

  Emboldened by the Black Power movement and what one organizer called “vicarious intoxication by the summer riots,” resisters attempted to shut down the induction center in Oakland and met brutal repression. Under the front page headline “Cops Beat Pickets,” the San Francisco Chronicle described the police action: “Police swinging clubs like scythes cut a bloody path through 2500 antiwar demonstrators who had closed down the Oakland Armed Forces Examining Station yesterday . . . their hard wooden sticks mechanically flailing up and down, like peasants mowing down wheat.” More than twenty people were injured, and twenty-five were arrested. In the next two days, ninety-seven more were arrested during peaceful pickets.

  At 6:00 A.M. on Friday, ten thousand demonstrators surrounded the Oakland induction center. Many were dressed for conflict with the police, wearing helmets and shields. They painted the streets and built barricades using benches, large potted trees, parking meters, garbage cans, cars, and trucks. Some of these vehicles had been stolen and then positioned in the intersections with the air let out of the tires. In this way, the resisters shut down many of the intersections surrounding the induction center and prevented buses from reaching it. The confrontation grew into a violent melee that soon spread over a twenty-block area of downtown Oakland.10

  The Panthers had claimed to be fighting an anticolonial war all along. Now antiwar activists increasingly saw their struggle too as a fight against imperialism, and the “Free Huey!” campaign became a lightning rod for the anti-imperial Left. “Free Huey!” bumper stickers appeared all over the Bay Area. White as well as black support for Huey’s immediate release from prison boomed. As Ramparts writer Gene Marine explained, this outpouring of support had little to do with whether Newton’s shooting and jailing were unjust. Instead, the groundswell of support reflected the increasingly widespread belief that “justice was impossible.” “Once the white radical could accept the idea that white America is the mother country and black America the colony,” wrote Marine, “his problem with the cry of ‘Free Huey!’ disappeared; he was in the position of a Frenchman opposed to his nation’s colonial adventure in Algeria.”11

  Both Black Power organizations and New Left groups rallied in support of Huey. The day of the shooting, SNCC headquarters sent a telegram to Huey at Kaiser Hospital:

  Violent cop attack against you is part of White America’s plan to destroy all revolutionary Black men. Brothers and sisters in SNCC support you all the way. We praise and welcome your fine example of armed self-defense. Your action is inspiration for black men everywhere. SNCC stands united with you and ready to help in any way possible.12

  Telegrams and articles supporting Huey and demanding his release poured in from New Left allies such as the Progressive Labor Party and Bob Avakian of the Community for New Politics.13

  At one “Free Huey!” rally outside the trial at the Alameda County courthouse, Bobby Seale climbed on top of a car to speak to the crowd. The police ordered him down, and he complied. When a young protestor challenged him for following police orders, he explained his actions: “What do you want me to do, just jump up and off some cop? That [would] do Huey a lot of good, wouldn’t it—a big shootout in front of the trial?”14

  Building on the political strategy they had developed in facing legal challenges after the Sacramento action, Newton and the Panthers insisted on a political approach to the trial. They would follow the law to the letter and strive to exonerate Huey through legal channels, to “exhaust all legal means,” but the principle behind the case would be political.15 They would use Huey’s trial as a forum to put America on trial, to expose its inherent racism and injustice. If confronted with a strategic choice about whether to advance the political project or Newton’s personal interests, the Panthers would give priority to the poli tical path. This decision reflected their belief that the political system was inherently unjust and that Huey would be put to death. They designed their legal approach to call attention to state repression and to advance the Panthers’ cause. Further, the Panthers believed that only a powerful mass political campaign could save Huey’s life.

  KATHLEEN

  One of the first recruits to join the “Free Huey!” campaign was Kathleen Neal, who would go on to become a key player in the Panther leadership.16 Neal had grown up in Tuskegee, Alabama, and other college towns where her father Ernest Neal worked as a professor. When Dr. Neal joined the U.S. Foreign Service, Kathleen lived for stints in New Delhi, the Philippines, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Always an honor student in American schools abroad, she later attended boarding school in the United States, went to Oberlin College, and completed a government internship in Washington, D.C.17

  Neal’s experiences as a young black woman growing up in the South in the 1950s made her want to challenge injustice. Seeing powerful women leaders of SNCC in action made her wonder how she too might advance a revolution for black liberation. This search led her first to SNCC and then to the Black Panther Party. “I saw Gloria Richardson standing face to face with National Guard soldiers, bayonets sticking from the guns they pointed at the demonstrators she led in Cambridge, Maryland,” Neal later wrote. “I saw Diane Nash speaking at Fisk University, leading black and white Freedom Riders onto Greyhound buses that got set on fire when they reached Alabama. I saw Ruby Doris Robinson holding a walkie-talkie, dispatching the fleet of cars that transported civil rights workers across the state of Mississippi during the 1964 Freedom Summer. These women were unfurling a social revolution in the Deep South. Gloria Richardson, Diane Nash, and Ruby Doris Robinson all worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. . . . That’s where I was determined to go.”18

  In 1966, Neal went to work in SNCC’s New York office, then to Atlanta as the secretary of SNCC’s Campus Program.19 There, she helped organize a black student conference in March 1967 at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she first met Eldridge Cleaver.20 She later recalled their first encounter:

  What startled me most about him—a brilliant writer, and eloquently lucid speaker, as well as a tremendously handsome and magnetic person—was that he referred to himself as a “convict.” Seeing him at the conference as he moved about with supreme confidence, an ease that approached elegance and a dignified reserve that all combined to give him an air that could best be described as stately, it seemed hard to conceive of this powerful man as a “convict.” He exuded strength, power, force in his very physical being. To think of such a man caged up and designated for the dungheap of history was impossible.21

  On the plane back to Washington from the conference, Kathleen wrote a passionate love poem to Eldridge, titling it “My King, I Greet You,” in answer to “My Queen, I Greet You,” the open love poem he had written to all black women (from all black men).22 Three weeks after Huey Newton’s arrest, Kathleen moved to San Francisco to join the Black Panther Party. Another month and a half later, just after Christmas 1967, Kathleen and Eldridge were married. Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, who had served time with Eldridge in Soledad Prison, was the witness.23

  Kathleen—now Kathleen Cleaver—threw herself fully into the campaign to free Huey. She helped organize demonstrations, wrote leaflets, held press conferences, attended court hearings, designed posters, spoke at rallies, and appeared on television programs.24 She had more formal education than most Panthers and soon was a
ppointed to sit on the Central Committee as communications secretary of the Black Panther Party.

  The work of Kathleen Cleaver in the Party was important in the ongoing and at times challenging process of integrating black women into an organization that had begun as a male formation. The male chauvinism that women like Cleaver all too often confronted within and outside the Party made women’s participation all the more challenging. Over time, as issues of gender and sexuality became increasingly important to the Party’s development, women like Cleaver modeled strikingly influential and vital roles for black women in the Black Panther Party in particular and in black nationalist organizations in general. The tradition of radical black women activists such as the strong black women leaders in SNCC shaped the activism of Panther women like Cleaver. However, most Panther women ultimately improvised their revolutionary roles precisely because there was no guide-book, no single model. As Cleaver acknowledged in a 1970 interview, “Of all the things I had wanted to be when I was a little girl, a revolutionary certainly wasn’t one of them. And now it was the only thing I wanted to do. Everything else was secondary. It occurred to me that even though I wanted to become a revolutionary more than anything else in the world, I still didn’t have the slightest idea what I would have to do to become one.”25