Black Against Empire
Page 28
At the time, Panther leaders had no direct knowledge of the FBI’s role in fomenting the killing, but they had a strong grasp of the political dynamic at hand. The Panthers were correct in surmising that the killings were not part of the normal course of conflict between the Party and a rival black nationalist organization. Evidence would emerge later showing that the state had a hand in stirring up the conflict that contributed to the killings of John Huggins and Bunchy Carter. Yet the Panthers did not know at that time, and we still do not know today, to what extent US members were working directly with the FBI or police and whether the killings were planned and implemented under direction of the government. Police issued warrants for the arrest of the Stiner brothers, George and Larry, rank-and-file members of US, who had been present at the time of the killing. The Stiner brothers turned themselves in to police and received life sentences for conspiracy to commit murder. But US members Claude Hubert-Gaidi, whom witnesses said was the actual shooter, and Harold Jones-Tawala, who played a central role in the violent conflict that day, both disappeared and never stood trial.12
In the months that followed, the Panthers rallied around their martyrs, drawing on the outpouring of allied support to advance their revolutionary program. L.A. Panther Gwen Goodloe attended the Los Angeles Conference of Baptist Ministers and received an endorsement for the free breakfast program, which the Panthers hoped would help them obtain use of church space to prepare and serve breakfast. The Seventh-Day Adventist Church on Santa Barbara Avenue (now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard) near South Budlong Avenue in South Central Los Angeles provided free facilities for the program. Donald Freed helped form Friends of the Panthers, which started holding public meetings on March 8, to help organize an L.A. breakfast program and to raise funds. UCLA agreed to provide leftover cafeteria food for the program. The Panthers named the first Free Breakfast for Children Program in L.A. after John Huggins and began serving daily breakfasts on April 29.13
Hollywood stars like Jean Seberg donated thousands of dollars to support Panther operations in L.A.14 At the end of October, the L.A. Panthers opened the Walter “Toure” Pope Community Center, named after a young Panther killed in a shoot-out with L.A. police earlier that month. The Panthers started another free breakfast program at the community center, where they also organized political education classes and held larger community events. One Saturday in November, about 150 adults, including 45 soldiers from Camp Pendleton, visited to express solidarity, eat breakfast with the children, and denounce the actions of the U.S. military—comparing the injustice of the war in Vietnam to the war the Panthers were fighting at home.15 With help from the Panthers, their Chicano allies Los Siete de la Raza also opened a free breakfast program in Los Angeles at the Ramona Gardens housing project in October.16 By November, plans were in the works to open a Bunchy Carter Free Health Clinic, and several doctors and nurses had volunteered their time to organize the launch and operation of the facility.17
As the Southern California Panther chapter grew and became more involved in the black community, repression increased. Police regularly pulled over known Panthers, often arresting them only to drop the charges later. On May 1, police raided the Adams Boulevard office of the Black Panther Party, arresting eleven Panthers and seizing three guns. Police booked two of the Panthers on charges that included “suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon” and released the rest. The Black Panther reported that in a single month that spring, L.A. police performed fifty-six arrests involving forty-two Panthers. The bail for these fifty-six arrests totaled more than $100,000, but with legal support from Panther allies, bails were reduced, and most of the charges were dropped.18
Despite growing community support for the Panthers, the FBI was apparently pleased with the effects of the US-Panther conflict they had helped create and continued to foment tensions between the two organizations through covert counterintelligence actions, such as distributing incendiary cartoons ridiculing the Panthers and attributing them to US.19 On Friday, August 15, 1969, San Diego Black Panther leader Sylvester Bell was shot and killed by members of US as he sold copies of the Black Panther in the parking lot of a shopping center in southeast San Diego.20 The FBI special agent in charge in San Diego wrote to FBI Director Hoover to celebrate the development and propose further FBI activities to escalate the US-Panther conflict:
Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues [sic] to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego. Although no specific counterintelligence action can be credited with contributing to this over-all situation, it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this program. . . . In view of the recent killing of [Black Panther Party] member SYLVESTER BELL, a new cartoon is being considered in the hopes that it will assist in the continuance of the rift between [the Panthers] and US. This cartoon, or series of cartoons, will be similar in nature to those formerly approved by the Bureau and will be forwarded to the Bureau for evaluation and approval immediately upon their completion.21
The Panthers were at war, and the Panther National Central Committee placed Geronimo Pratt in charge of the Southern California chapter. Pratt proceeded to fortify the L.A. offices. He assigned Panthers to dig tunnels in the basement and use the dirt to fill sandbags. Pratt recalled, “We stuffed sandbags in the panels behind our walls, below our ceilings, up under our roof. We put up tons of dirt. It was all defensive structure. No bullet was gonna penetrate three-foot walls.”22
At 5:30 P.M. on Wednesday November 12, seventy-five police officers surrounded the L.A. Panther headquarters on Central Avenue near 41st Street, where a meeting was under way. They positioned sharpshooters on roofs and paddy wagons at the corners. The Panthers called the media, and soon reporters and many local residents gathered outside. The police left.23
Almost four weeks later, at 5:00 A.M. on December 8, police simultaneously raided three Panther buildings in Los Angeles—the home of Geronimo Pratt, the Toure Community Center, and the chapter headquarters on Central Avenue. At Pratt’s home, the police knocked down the door, shot up the house, and arrested everyone inside, including Pratt; his wife, Saundra; Long John and Kathy Kimbro; and Evon Carter—Bunchy Carter’s widow—and the two Carter children, Michelle, eight, and Osceola, eight months. At the same time, another police party raided the community center, shooting up the building and arresting Panthers Al Armour, Sharon Williams, Craig Williams, and Ike Houston.
At 41st and Central, it was war. The initial raid by seventy-five police officers on L.A. Panther headquarters met fortified resistance. Police and Panthers exchanged fire. Hundreds of police reinforcements arrived, as did hundreds of observers and the news media. The Panther sandbags absorbed most of the police rounds. Metal grilles the Panthers had installed over the windows prevented police from launching tear gas and smoke canisters into the building. Panthers tore filters from cigarettes and stuck them in their noses as makeshift gas masks against the tear gas that did seep in.
Pioneering the first-ever Special Weapons Assault Team (SWAT), the raiding officers came dressed for war. The SWAT officers wore black jumpsuits with black boots, head coverings, and flak jackets. They wore gas masks, carried M16 rifles, and carried bandoliers of ammunition over their shoulders. From behind the relative safety of armored cars and vehicles borrowed from the National Guard, police fired five thousand rounds of ammunition into the Panther headquarters. Panthers returned fire with rifles and submachine guns and lobbed homemade Molotov cocktails at the police. Police attempted to penetrate the roof with a dynamite charge dropped from a helicopter, but the roof held.
The fighting went in waves. Police tried to gain position but could not penetrate the Panther fortress. With intensive exchanges, the sky would fill with thick smog. Then, with a pause in the shooting, a breeze would clear the air. The battle raged almost five hours. Police requested use of a grenade launcher from the army and were granted permission from the Pentagon. Then, at 9:45 A.M., Panthers waved a white flag from a
window and the shooting stopped.
Renee “Peaches” Moore, nineteen, wearing a torn and bloodied yellow dress, emerged carrying the flag. She told reporters, “We gave up because it’s not the right time. We’ll fight again when the odds are more in our favor.” Panthers Bernard Smith, Gil Parker, Wayne Pharr, Will Safford, Tommie Williams, Paul Redd, Jackie Johnson, Robert Bryan, Melvin “Cotton” Smith, Roland Freeman, and Lloyd Mims followed, and all were arrested. All but four of the Panthers were teenagers; three were in their early twenties, and Melvin “Cotton” Smith was forty-one. Three Panthers and three police were injured in the confrontation.24 Robert Bryan later recalled that what had kept the Panthers fighting were the lines from Bunchy Carter’s poem “Black Mother”:
A slave of natural death who dies,
Can’t balance out two dead flies.
I’d rather be without shame,
A bullet lodged within my brain.
If I were not to reach our goal,
Let bleeding cancer torment my soul.25
Mainstream allies rallied in support of the Black Panthers in the days following the December 8 police raid. Black state senator Mervin Dymally, in whose district the shoot-out took place, told reporters, “We need to raise some national voice against what is happening to the Panthers. I think it’s a national plan for police repression. One must conclude that this is not an isolated incident.”26 Moderate black leaders feared that if the Panthers could be so violently repressed, other blacks could as well.27 John W. Mack, executive director of the L.A. Urban League, said that police action against the Panthers had “the potential for spreading to other blacks.” Earl E. Raines, executive secretary of the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP told the press, “The black community is affected. . . . Next time it may be you.” A coalition of major black organizations in Los Angeles, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Operation Breadbasket, and the Conference of Black Elected Officials called for a massive rally at city hall on December 11 to protest the police raid of the Panther offices. Other allies mobilized as well. The Socialist Workers Party held a press conference in support of the Panthers. High school students organized a picket of the Hollywood police station. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) volunteered to help with the Panthers’ case. ACLU attorney Fred Okrand protested the high bail set for the Panthers arrested in the raids.28
On Thursday December 11, at the rally endorsed by mainstream black leadership, about four thousand protestors rallied at Los Angeles City Hall to protest the police raid of Panther headquarters on Central Avenue. Most of the protestors were young and black. Participants held signs with slogans such as “Stop Mass Murder,” “Stop Panther Killing,” “Pigs Will Be Pigs,” “End Political Repression,” and “Free All Political Prisoners.” Sharing a stage with NAACP and other mainstream black supporters, Elaine Brown told the crowd, “These young warriors . . . established a lesson that should never be forgotten—the power really does belong to the people.” Angela Davis said, “This is fascism; there’s no doubt about it.” The crowd moved from city hall and took over the Hall of Justice, where one young protestor addressed the crowd from the steps: “We have done what we have done today to show that the City Hall, this building, or any other building belongs to the people. The glorious warriors arrested Monday are on the top three floors of this building . . . We are here to show them we will get them out . . . to show them that eventually we will take power and we will destroy this goddamn place.”29
In 1969, the state’s repressive actions did not crush the Los Angeles Panthers. We need only compare the nascent Los Angeles chapter in January 1969 to the larger, better resourced, and highly militarized organization that police encountered when they tried to raid the Panthers’ offices and were held at bay in the miniature one-day urban war of December 1969. Rather than weakening the Panthers, the intensive campaign of state repression during the year drove more members, funding, and allied support to the Party. In cities across the country, the pattern was similar. Repressive state actions in 1969 fueled growth of the Party.
10
Hampton and Clark
Fred Hampton was a natural leader. He dressed casually and was not flashy, but he had a strong, bold presence. People trusted him. He had been raised in a loving and close-knit family and attended church and Bible study throughout his childhood. He was a top athlete in high school, and an A student. He never used drugs or drank. Even as a young man, when he spoke, the words flowed sharp and lyrical in the best of the black church tradition. People opened their eyes and listened. And he was fearless.1 Born August 30, 1948, the youngest of three children in a strong family from Louisiana, Hampton grew up in Maywood, Illinois, a working-class suburb of Chicago. In September 1967, he became the president of the youth council for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People branch there. In that capacity, he helped organize a student boycott of his high school, Proviso East High, when black girls were excluded from the home-coming queen’s retinue. When black students protested, white students responded with violence, beating black students with bats and black-jacks. Hampton organized groups of black students to fight back. In response to the interracial violence, Maywood police imposed martial law and set up checkpoints in the city’s black neighborhoods. Hampton brought in representatives from the national NAACP and led the boycott of Proviso East High, demanding retraction of the martial law.2
Bobby Rush was a more scholarly type activist—a sharp thinker and a good administrator but not much of a public speaker. He had grown up in the Chicago Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; by 1968, he was codirecting the small SNCC chapter there, and he had an ongoing relationship with Stokely Carmichael. As tensions heightened between Stokely and other SNCC leaders in the spring of 1968, and following King’s assassination, Stokely encouraged Rush to start a Black Panther chapter in Chicago. According to Rush, “The problem with SNCC was that it didn’t have any specific activities.”3 Stokely arranged for Rush to travel to California to meet Donald Cox, and through Cox, to meet David Hilliard and Bobby Seale. The Panthers’ approach impressed Rush, and he began seeking partners to build a Panther chapter in Chicago. When Rush heard Hampton speak at a black leadership conference at the headquarters of the Chicago gang Black P. Stone Nation, he knew Hampton was his key to success; Rush recruited him to join the Panthers. Rush and Hampton, along with Bob Brown—Rush’s SNCC codirector—organized what would soon become the Party’s major hub in the Midwest.4
ATTEMPTED PROVOCATION
In Chicago in the late 1960s, gangs were an important political force in black neighborhoods—none more so than the Blackstone Rangers. From their start in the early 1960s, the Rangers had focused on community building as an adjunct to their illegal activities, which included drug trafficking and extortion. As a result, they constituted a sort of parallel government on the South Side, protecting members of their neighborhood from other gangs and the police and providing some community services. By the late 1960s, they had swallowed up most of the smaller gangs in the area as part of the “P. Stone Nation” and had more than thirty-five hundred dedicated members, possibly as many as eight thousand. The gang organized cultural activities, such as a play coordinated by singer/songwriter/jazz pianist Oscar Brown Jr., and developed a loose affiliation with Black Power politics. Just before the big Chicago rebellions in the summer of 1967, a large block of federal money was channeled to Chicago, including a $957,000 grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity earmarked for at-risk youth. The Rangers and their main gang rivals, the Disciples, received the grant to help run a job-training program for unemployed black youth on Chicago’s South Side. The Rangers also developed a wide range of other community and entrepreneurial activities, including a youth center and a restaurant.5
In December 1968, having quickly built a powerful Panther base in Chicago, Fred Hampton entered discu
ssions with Jeff Fort, leader of the Rangers, about merging the Panthers and the Rangers. The merger promised to boost the Panthers’ membership and street presence. The FBI saw the potential merger as a political threat and sought to foster conflict between the two groups. The Chicago FBI field office suggested, in a memo to FBI headquarters on December 16, that spreading false rumors that the Black Panther Party leadership was disparaging Fort “might result in Fort having active steps taken to exact some form of retribution towards the leadership of the [Black Panther Party].” Hampton and a small entourage of Panthers went to the Rangers’ headquarters on December 18 around 10:30 P.M. to discuss the potential merger. Hampton suggested to Fort that by joining forces, they could take over all the other Chicago street gangs. According to an FBI informant, Hampton told Fort that “they couldn’t let the man keep the two groups apart.” Fort was interested in a merger, the informant reported in an FBI memo, but he wanted the Panthers to join the Rangers, not the other way around, and he put on a show of strength: Fort “gave orders, via walkie-talkie, whereupon two men marched through the door carrying pump shotguns. Another order and two men appeared carrying sawed off carbines then eight more, each carrying a .45 caliber machine gun, clip type, operated from the shoulder or hip, then others came with over and under type weapons. . . . After this procession Fort had all Rangers present, approximately 100, display their side arms and about one half had .45 caliber revolvers . . . all the above weapons appeared to be new.”6 Fort told Hampton that he supported the Panthers but that the Rangers were not to be considered members of the Party, and he gave Hampton a new .45 caliber machine gun to “try out.”