Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  When I heard that Huey Newton had been involved in a shootout with two pigs and one had died, I thought I’d check this brother out, as he seemed to be a sure enough leader. And when the Panthers came to New York, I checked them out, and found the ten-point program unquestionable, and the fact that it was community-based a good thing. Digging that the cadre believed that political power stems from the barrel of a gun made me feel instant kinship. So I joined, and extended my energies and skills to the black community and mankind through the Party.51

  Drawn to the Black Panthers’ militancy, Afeni Shakur joined the Party as soon as it came to New York in the spring of 1968 and married Lumumba.52 She was sick of turning the other cheek and believed that the Panthers offered a real alternative. Shakur had been impressed by the way in which the Panthers responded when a policeman tried to take one of their guns in Sacramento. The Panther holding the gun had asked the policeman, “Am I under arrest?” When the policeman responded that he was not, the Panther told the policeman, “Then take your hands off my motherfucking gun. I have a constitutional right to have this gun.” “In 1967 that in itself was enough to blow anybody’s mind,” Shakur later recalled.53

  From that time on, Shakur waited eagerly for the Party to spread to New York so that she could join: “All I did then was wait for the Black Panther Party to come to New York. Somebody told me they were coming; you know, I knew they just had to come, they just couldn’t stay on the Coast. . . . Nothing that strong could stay in one area. I just knew from the beginning that it would branch out into something beautiful—it had to. I just knew there were niggers all over the place that felt like I did. The Party got here around April.”54

  Others joined the Party for similar reasons. David Parker, a seventeen-year-old rank-and-file New York Panther explained the appeal to the New York Times in 1968: “Why am I a Black Panther? Well, I’ve been listening to Brother Malcolm’s records for a long time. I know what he said and I’ve just been waiting for the Panthers to come here.” Paraphrasing Malcolm X, he argued that the Panthers offered change: “Change, change by any means necessary.” Bill Hampton, a twenty-seven-year-old New York Panther, married father of three, and former executive in training with the Olin Mathieson chemical company, told the Times, “We’re revolutionaries and we’re fighting a war” for the survival of black people. “People have to realize that ‘the man’ is not just moving on us Panthers, but he is moving on all black people. . . . They see us as a threat and realizing this the man has to put it down. That’s why the police run around here now trying to get something started.” Hampton described police as “Gestapo forces that occupy the black community” and asserted, “They have got to be forced out of our community . . . their power is on their hips. Take those guns away from those pigs and they are nobodies. The only way to counteract this power is with a gun in your hand.”55

  Abayama Katara, still a student at Franklin High School when he joined the Panthers, recalled one of the experiences that convinced him the police were an occupying force:

  One night my family was sitting in the living room and I heard what sounded like firecrackers. I looked out the window and saw a black man running down the street with what looked to be an army of cops running after him. (I found out later he had tried to hold up a store and a rookie cop had fired on him.) There were people all over the street, but the cops didn’t even tell them to get down, they just kept on firing. When the brother got to 135th Street he stopped on the corner and held his hands up, but the cops just kept coming and shooting. People were shouting out of the windows at the cops telling them to stop, couldn’t they see the brother was trying to give up, and so the cops started pointing their guns at the windows, telling everybody to keep inside and mind their own business. And about then a bullet chipped a piece of brick between the window I was hanging out of and the apartment next to ours. We never did figure out whether that bullet ricocheted or whether one of those cops just wanted to see a lot of black blood, but it was sure hard to see where it could have ricocheted from. They finally caught up with the brother in the schoolyard, and you could hear him screaming all the way down the street as they dragged him to a patrol car.56

  When Katara heard that the Panthers were taking on the issue of police abuse, he went to a Party meeting. There, he found a way of thinking about the police that transformed his perspective and in turn changed his life. Panthers kept talking about “pigs,” and Katara did not know what they meant. After the meeting, he asked one of the Panthers if he knew what a pig was. “Man, he looked at me as if I asked him what earth was. After he finished running it down, I was souped up for a motherfucker. I left the house saying ‘pig’ over and over again. I got on a bus and everybody must have thought I was bugged out, because all the way home I just kept on saying ‘pig,’ because the way the brother ran it down, it fit perfectly.”57 More than an insult, calling the police (and other authorities) pigs rejected their legitimacy, denounced their Gestapo-like behavior as inhuman, and asserted the moral superiority of the oppressed. Katara felt liberated.

  As a Black Panther, Katara soon became president of the Afro-American history club at Franklin High School. His club tried to educate classmates, displaying posters in the hallway of three phases of the Black Liberation Struggle. The first phase was illustrated by the image of a black woman being beaten by Bull Connor’s police and dogs; the second, by pictures of members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee taking nonviolent action; and the third, by pictures of the Black Panther Party in action, including a photo of Kathleen Cleaver with a shotgun. The principal ordered them to remove the violent photos, but the students argued that there were far more violent scenes in their history books. Soon the posters became a point of contention in the ongoing struggle between black community activists and school officials for control of the school district, a struggle in which the New York Black Panther Party played an active part in late 1968.58

  While the New York Panthers became heavily involved in issues of housing, schools, and welfare, as well as their program of political education, their conflicts with police were the activities that garnered the most media attention and mobilized allied support. On August 1, twenty-year-old Gordon Cooke and seventeen-year-old Darrell Baines, both Party members, were working in the Panther office at 780 Nostrand Avenue in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. A little before 2:30 P.M., they went out onto the sidewalk in front of the office and sought to rally neighbors to protest police abuse. Cooke shouted into the bullhorn, calling the police “racist,” “pigs,” and “crackers.” He soon attracted a crowd of about fifty people. Someone called the police. Two officers arrived on the scene, waited nearby, and then walked into the store next to the Panther office and called for backup. One officer asked Cooke if he had a permit to use the bullhorn. Another asked Baines who was in charge, and Baines said he was. The officer called Baines over to the patrol car, but Baines refused, and the officer tried to grab him. Police later claimed that Baines kicked an officer in the groin. According to Cooke, he saw the police roughing up Baines and tried to intervene. The policeman started to beat Cooke over the head with his nightstick. Soon other police cars arrived, and several policemen blocked off the other Panthers while six of their fellow officers beat Cooke with nightsticks. Even after Cooke was handcuffed and on the ground, they continued to beat him on the pretense that he was resisting arrest. Cooke was taken to Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, where he was treated for head lacerations, and then arrested for resisting arrest and interfering with an officer. Baines was arrested for assault, harassment, and resisting arrest.59

  Later that afternoon, 350 Panthers turned out for the arraignment of Darrell Baines and Gordon Cooke at the Brooklyn Criminal Court. Judge John Furey, who had served for ten years in the New York Criminal Court, placed the two defendants on parole. The judge explained later that Baines and Cooke had no previous records, and “under the circumstances, with the group that was there and the charges that were brought, i
t seemed foolish to needlessly put them on bail.”60

  Early the next morning, two policemen came to the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn on a domestic dispute call. As they got out of the police car, they were hit and wounded by birdshot fired from a shotgun by one or two people hiding in the bushes thirty feet away. The shooters ran and escaped. The New York Times reported a rumor, which the police denied, that a Black Panther button was found at the scene near two shotgun shells.61 Panther captain Joudon Ford denied any Panther involvement in the shooting.62

  Outraged that Judge Furey had treated the Panthers “lightly,” ten patrolmen from Brooklyn’s Grand Avenue station organized a petition charging Furey with allowing Panthers to wear hats and curse in his courtroom and calling for his resignation. The petition demanded that the police union—the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA)—call for Furey’s resignation and threatened that the signatories would resign and withhold dues from the PBA if the group did not take this action.63 A Brooklyn Bar Association subcommittee responded by asking the police commissioner to investigate the charges that Furey had allowed Panthers to act disrespectfully in his courtroom. The PBA launched its own investigation.64 Spurred by the petition, a group of officers began a new organization called the Law Enforcement Group (LEG). The group claimed that officers were not receiving the support they needed generally and called for widespread changes, beginning with a grand jury investigation of alleged “coddling of accused criminals by the Criminal Courts” and including the “abolition of the Police Department’s Civilian Complaint Review Board,” prevention of “another Warren Court,” and “removal of civilians from clerical duties in police stations.”65 Sensing a challenge to their customary policing practices, these officers sought to beat back what they saw as a serious move to undermine their authority.

  Civil liberties groups responded, calling the coddling charge “an absurdity.” These groups identified LEG as a “frightening power play to take over the judiciary” and an “undisguised declaration of war against the black militant communities.” Ira Glasser, the spokesman for the New York Civil Liberties Union said, “If the program they wanted was instituted we would wind up with an open police state.”66

  Several weeks later, on August 21, as public attention faded, a group of young blacks that included several Brooklyn Panthers ignited a pile of trash heaped in the street on Nostrand Avenue near the Panther office. When firemen and police responded to the rubbish fire, rebels attacked them with bottles, bricks, cans, and stones and then began smashing storefront windows and looting stores along a twelve-block commercial stretch of Nostrand Avenue. Police quickly quashed the rebellion and arrested seven participants: George Correa, Darrell Baines, John Martinez, Morris Holman, Ricky Fletcher, Patricia Riley, and Fremont Dunn. Some one hundred police officers packed into the Brooklyn Criminal Court for a hearing on the rebels’ case later that day, and the district attorney asked the court to set an extrahigh bail: “We have reason to believe that these defendants are members of the ultramilitant Black Panther Party. We feel there is a danger that they may not reappear in court unless high bail is set. Their actions show clearly a lack of respect for authority.” The judge proceeded to set an unusually high bail of $50,000 each for twenty-two-year-old Correa and seventeen-year-old Baines and $11,500 for seventeen-year-old Martinez, each charged with resisting arrest and possessing stolen property. More standard bail of $1,500 each was set for the remaining four defendants.67 Rather than stifle protest, the punitive bails ignited further resistance.

  While street rebellions were common among urban black youths in the late 1960s, these rebels were different, claiming common cause with the anti-imperialist struggles in Vietnam and the domestic draft resisters. In addition to twenty Panthers who rallied for the rebels and turned out for further court hearings the following week, the white Left saw the Panthers as allies in their own anti-imperialist struggle and responded to the police repression with resistance. William Kunstler, a renowned left-wing lawyer took the Brooklyn Panthers’ case and argued that the bail was “unconstitutionally excessive,” part of the “police vendetta against the Black Panthers in New York.” Members of the predominantly white Peace and Freedom Party and also the Columbia Strike Committee organized demonstrations outside the courthouse protesting the unusually high bail. The protestors carried signs saying “Hands Off Black Panthers,” “White Radicals Defend Black Panthers,” and “Stop Cop Harassment of the Black Panther Party.” The court reduced bail to $20,000 for Correa, $10,000 for Baines, and $2,500 for Martinez.68

  At a September 4 preliminary hearing for Correa, Baines, and Martinez, 150 whites, many of them off-duty policemen associated with LEG, packed the courtroom. The cops positioned themselves behind the Panthers in the courtroom, poking them in the back with their nightsticks, cursing, and saying, “White tigers eat black panthers.” When the small group of Panthers left the courtroom and made their way to the elevator, the police beat them up and attacked a few white members of Columbia University’s Students for a Democratic Society who had come to support the Panthers. The New York Times reported, “About 150 white men, many of whom were off-duty and out-of-uniform policemen, attacked a small number of Black Panther party members and white sympathizers yesterday on the sixth floor of the Brooklyn Criminal Court.” Many of the off-duty police wore “Wallace for President” buttons, referring to George Wallace, the white supremacist former governor of Alabama who was running for president of the United States. The off-duty policemen beat the Panthers and their white supporters with blackjacks. LEG officers called the Panthers “niggers” and “motherfuckers” while beating them. Uniformed police pretended to try to stop the beating but actually dropped their billy clubs so the off-duty officers could use them to beat the Panthers. According to the Times, two of the Panthers had blood gushing from their heads after the beating. New York Panther chairman David Brothers, the Peace and Freedom Party nominee for the 12th Congressional District at the time, was kicked and stomped in the back more than twenty times. Panther section leader Tom McCreary suffered a fractured skull.69

  Katara, one of the Panthers in the delegation that day, recalled fleeing from the off-duty police who were beating them, with nowhere to turn. The Panthers finally got into an elevator and tried to go down, but the elevator went up. Everywhere they went, the off-duty police were waiting for them. They exited the elevator, and Joudon Ford called the mayor’s office but could not get through. They went to the offices of the Human Rights Commission and City Council but found no one there. They fled into another courtroom and asked the judge there for help. He finally called a court guard to escort the Panthers downstairs. When they went outside, the police were waiting for them, and the Panthers split up and ran. The police chased them. Katara made it into the subway and took off his beret and black shirt so that the off-duty police would not recognize him and was able to ride home safely.70

  The next day, Mayor John Lindsay and Police Commissioner Leary verified that off-duty policemen had participated in the attack, and they promised swift action, “including criminal prosecution if that is warranted by the facts.”71 The day after the courtroom beating, a group of Panthers and their attorneys Kunstler and Gerald Lefcourt met with representatives of Mayor Lindsay’s office and answered questions about the attack.72

  In the following days, the Panthers and their allies turned up the political and legal pressure. On September 7, the New York state NAACP called upon the district attorney to conduct a grand jury investigation into the beating.73 Two weeks later, Acting District Attorney Elliott Golden ordered a “thorough grand jury investigation” into the September 4 attack on Black Panthers in the Brooklyn Criminal Court.74 On September 10, the Black Panther Party filed a suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, charging the New York City Police Department with systematic “violence, intimidation and humiliation,” asking for community control of the police, and seeking injunctions forbidding the police from har
assing Black Panthers. The National Lawyers Guild, the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, and the Law Center for Constitutional Rights all sponsored the suit.75 The Panthers’ web of support was widening.

  A couple days later, at 2:05 on the morning of September 12, another ambush of police occurred in Brooklyn. Two officers were patrolling on Schenectady Avenue only a few feet from where the other two officers had been ambushed on August 2. Signs nearby announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the gunman who had shot the other officers. Two blasts from a .308 rifle burst through the front windshield of the patrol car, injuring both officers and shattering the windows on the right side of the car. The officers were admitted to Kings County Hospital.76

  FROM COAST TO COAST

  At the time of the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Hutton in early April of 1968, the Black Panther Party was essentially a local organization based in Oakland, with a satellite chapter beginning to organize in Los Angeles. Although the Black Power ferment was brewing in most major U.S. cities, the Party had not yet achieved national influence. This quickly changed in 1968. As Kathleen Cleaver later recalled, “The murder of King changed the whole dynamic of the country. That is probably the single most significant event in terms of how the Panthers were perceived by the black community.”77 Seeking effective ways to advance their communities’ interests, young blacks flocked to the Black Panther Party and its politics of armed self-defense. The Party did little recruiting. Instead, young activists from around the country contacted the Party asking how they could join, and the Party responded by opening new Black Panther offices in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and at least seventeen other cities by the end of the year, including Albany, Bakersfield, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Des Moines, Detroit, Fresno, Indianapolis, Long Beach, Newark, Omaha, Peekskill, Philadelphia, Richmond, Sacramento, and San Diego.78