Two nights after the shootings on Riverside Drive, two officers from the Three Two, Waverly Jones, thirty-three, and Joseph Piagentini, twenty-eight, stepped from their squad car and walked into Colonial Park to answer a call about a woman hurt in a knife fight. When the woman refused their help, the two ambled back to their car. As they did they passed two young black men lounging against the fender of a parked car. The men fell in behind them. A moment later the men drew pistols and opened fire.
Officer Jones, who was black, was struck three times, first in the back of the head, then twice in the spine. He died instantly. The second gunman fired repeatedly into Officer Piagentini, who fell to the sidewalk but, as the gunman cursed him, refused to die. The first gunman then reached down and removed Officer Jones’s .38, hefting it in his hand, feeling its weight, as if he were taking a souvenir. The second gunman wrenched Piagentini’s weapon from its holster even as the dying officer flailed at him. Once he had it, he fired every bullet in its chamber into the fallen cop.
Still Piagentini wouldn’t die. The first gunman stepped to his prone body, pointed his own .45 downward, and fired a single shot. Then both shooters turned and walked away. Behind them, Officer Piagentini, in his last moments of life, began crawling toward the safety of a green hedge, a trail of blood in his wake. The next morning the coroner would count twenty-two bullet holes in his body.
A few hundred feet away, a passerby named Richard Hill heard the shots. Running to the scene, he glimpsed what he thought to be a clump of bloody clothes on the sidewalk. Then the clump moved. Hill sprinted toward the two fallen men, snatched up a walkie-talkie from the pavement, and yelled, “Mayday! Mayday! Two cops shot!”
That same evening, two packages were delivered, one to the New York Times, a second to WLIB, a Harlem radio station. Each carried a license plate, the same plates seen on the Maverick whose occupants shot Officers Curry and Binetti. The Times package also contained a .45-caliber cartridge and a typewritten message. It read:
May 19th 1971
All power to the people.
Here are the license plates sort [sic] after by the fascist state pig police. We send them in order to exhibit the potential power of oppressed peoples to acquire revolutionary justice.
The armed goons of this racist government will again meet the guns of oppressed Third World People as long as they occupy our community and murder our brothers and sisters in the name of American law and order; just as the fascist Marines and Army occupy Vietnam in the name of democracy and murder Vietnamese people in the name of American imperialism are confronted with the guns of the Vietnamese Liberation Army, the domestic armed forces of raciscm [sic] and oppression will be confronted with the guns of the Black Liberation Army, who will mete out in the tradition of Malcolm and all true revolutionaries real justice. We are revolutionary justice. All power to the people.
Three nights later, a second pair of packages arrived at WLIB. This time the typewritten letter read:
Revolutionary justice has been meted out again by righteous brothers of the Black Liberation Army with the death of two Gestapo pigs gunned down as so many of our brothers have been gunned down in the past. But this time no racist class jury will acquite [sic] them. Revolutionary justice is ours!
Every policeman, lackey or running dog of the ruling class must make his or her choice now. Either side with the people: poor and oppressed, or die for the oppressor. Trying to stop what is going down is like trying to stop history, for as long as there are those who will dare live for freedom there are men and women who dare to unhorse the emperor.
All power to the people.
Up at the Three Two, where detectives confirmed that both letters came from the same typewriter, and at the FBI offices on Sixty-ninth Street, white men read the two notes, turned to one another, and asked:
What the hell was the Black Liberation Army?
• • •
More than forty years later, a handful of historians are still asking the same question—“handful” being a generous characterization of the few obscure academic papers and police procedurals that constitute all known publications on the Black Liberation Army, known as the BLA. The paucity of literature is a reflection of the deep confusion and ambivalence the BLA engendered in its heyday. Many policemen, along with BLA members themselves, considered the group a murderous black counterpart to the Weathermen. Mainstream politicians, afraid of alienating black voters, played down this talk entirely. Following suit, most of the white-dominated press dismissed the BLA as a ragtag collection of street thugs. To the press, at least, poorly educated, self-proclaimed black guerrillas who murdered policemen were not credible revolutionaries. But self-proclaimed white guerrillas from good schools who bombed vacant buildings were.
At the height of its infamy, many questioned whether the BLA even existed, the theory being that every time a black militant shot a policeman, he announced himself as a member of the BLA. The group itself was maddeningly difficult to pin down. It had no leadership or structure the press could point to, no Bernardine Dohrn, no Bill Ayers, not even a Mark Rudd to rely on for public statements. Other than the odd bare-bones communiqué, BLA members were utterly mute, a policy its adherents have clung to for decades; before now, onetime BLA fighters had yet to issue a meaningful word about the group’s internal dynamics, much less its crimes. Now as then, the BLA is viewed as semimythic, but to rank-and-file policemen who hunted its members across the country, there was nothing imaginary about the BLA. The machine guns its “soldiers” fired, the grenades they threw, the policemen they killed, the banks they robbed—it was all very real. Between tokes and giggles the Weathermen may have mused about “offing the pigs,” but after the Townhouse they just talked the talk. To men in uniform, it was only the BLA who walked the walk.
In fact, the Black Liberation Army was a credible group of violent urban guerrillas, the first and only black underground of its kind in U.S. history. In one sense the BLA was a cluster of deadly acorns that rolled free when the mighty oak of the Black Panther Party fell and shattered; it was a splinter group of the Panthers, much as Weatherman split off from SDS. In another sense, it was the logical culmination of the Black Power movement: After years of black “revolutionaries” calling for armed attacks against the police and federal government, one group, the BLA, finally followed through.
How it happened is a complex story. As FBI records make clear, the Black Liberation Army was an idea long before it was a reality. Any number of ’60s-era militant groups had taken some form of the name. A group of three who plotted to blow up the Statue of Liberty in 1965 called itself the Black Liberation Front. A group of eight who engaged in sniper attacks on Detroit police in 1970 called itself the Black Liberation Army Strike Force. The actual BLA was a concept of the Black Panthers; the idea of a Panther underground had existed as long as the party itself. Talk of a black underground was a staple of Huey Newton’s early speeches, and by 1968 the party’s rules anticipated its establishment, stating that “no party member can join any other army force other than the Black Liberation Army.” Many Panther chapters offered weapons training, and several claimed to be training paramilitary units. But even at the height of the party’s influence, the BLA existed only in the minds of the most militant Panthers, as an urban guerrilla force that might form in some dimly imagined future.
The actual BLA emerged during the Black Panther Party’s implosion in the spring of 1971, a traumatic process that prompted several chapters, most notably New York, to secede from the party. In fact, the story of the BLA is in large part the story of the New York Panthers. Hundreds of black men and women, from Harlem to Bedford-Stuyvesant, joined the New York chapter, but for the sake of this narrative, two boyhood friends mattered most. Their names at birth were Nathaniel Burns and Anthony Coston. Born in 1944, Burns was a lean, charismatic thug nicknamed Beany in the neighborhood gangs where he fought as a teen; years later, after changing his name
to Sekou Odinga, he would emerge as the most admired revolutionary of his age, a savvy urban guerrilla who traveled the globe, robbed banks, and engineered prison breakouts during an underground career spanning twelve years. Coston, a squat, muscled gangbanger known in his youth as Shotgun, would become Lumumba Shakur. His career would prove far shorter.
Like a surprising number of people who ascended to leadership positions in the BLA, the two were the children of Southern migrants who grew up in the South Jamaica section of Queens, a historically white neighborhood that during the 1950s became a favored destination for hundreds of middle-income black families streaming into New York from the Deep South. Odinga and Shakur, as they will be called, met at Edgar D. Shimer Junior High, where Odinga recalls meeting Shakur in the assistant principal’s office. Both boys were troublemakers. Odinga’s father, Albert Burns, a laborer with a fourth-grade education, had come north from Mississippi in the 1930s and saved enough money to buy a two-story home, where Sekou was the fourth of seven children. Like his friends, the teenaged Odinga joined a gang, the Sinners, whose members busied themselves with muggings and fistfights with rival gangs like the Bishops and the Chaplains. In 1961, when he was sixteen, he was arrested for a mugging and sent to the state prison in Comstock, New York.
At Comstock Odinga renewed his friendship with Shakur, who had spent his childhood ricocheting among the homes of relatives in Virginia, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and eventually Queens. Both were in the process of discovering the teachings of Malcolm X. Both, however, were startled to find Shakur’s father way ahead of them. As Shakur wrote:
In the summer of 1962, my father came to see me. He was telling me about the family, but he seemed reluctant about something. Then my father dropped it on me and it blew my mind, because I was thinking about how I was going to say the same thing to him. He asked me my opinion of Brother Malcolm X. I told my father that, “Malcolm X is a very beautiful brother and all the brothers in prison love Brother Malcolm X.” I also told my father that I was a black nationalist and a Muslim but I could not relate to praying. I never before saw anything that affected my father like what I just said. His facial expression became one of complete satisfaction. . . . We must have talked for about four hours.2
From that day on, the elder Coston, now known as Aba Shakur, acted as a spiritual guide for his son and his friends, a role he continued for many in the Black Panthers and the BLA. Shortly after, his son adopted the name Lumumba Shakur. His older brother James, an elfin intellectual who would also take leadership positions in the Panthers and BLA, took the name Zayd Shakur. The Shakurs, in turn, introduced Odinga to Malcolm X’s teachings. “Aba was very, very influential; you could almost say he was the father of our little movement,” Odinga recalls. “People like me, Lumumba, Zayd, lots of others later on, everybody was exposed to Aba. He sent Malcolm’s writings to us at Comstock. When Lumumba finished reading, he gave it to me. Those were the first books I had ever read. It was Aba and those years in Comstock that made me the man I became later.”
Odinga was the first to be released, in December 1963. “I went in angry and foolish, and I came out the same way, but looking for direction,” he remembers. “I went in search of Malcolm and saw him preaching on a street corner. He was mesmerizing.” Odinga was drifting from job to job, smoking weed and gambling, when he finally glimpsed a way to follow the vague new path he sensed lay before him. While he was visiting the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, New York, a group of “beautiful black sisters” at the African Pavilion asked him to model a series of dashikis and other colorful African garb. Odinga was entranced. He befriended the girls, began wearing dashikis, and soon learned to make his own, which he sold to friends. A year later he shed his identity as Nathaniel Burns and, inspired by the Guinean nationalist Sékou Touré, legally changed his name to Sekou Odinga. When Shakur emerged from prison, he joined Odinga’s circle. The two took an apartment in Harlem, where they turned heads as some of the first to wear dashikis in the street.
Their hopes of joining Malcolm X’s entourage evaporated with Malcolm’s assassination in February 1965. In the wake of his death, scores of black nationalist groups sprang up. Odinga and Shakur joined the Panthers, proudly donning the black berets and standing guard outside the group’s New York headquarters on Seventh Avenue in Harlem. From the beginning, the Panther leadership in California was ill at ease with its New York recruits. Many of the New Yorkers, steeped in Malcolm’s teachings, had risen from gangs and served in prison; they were far more streetwise, confrontational, and Afrocentric than the Californians. “We had studied black history and African history,” Odinga recalls. “They were more into the politics of communities in California. We were more African. They were more American.” One of the first open disagreements between the two groups, in fact, came when headquarters attempted to ban the wearing of dashikis and the taking of African names. When the New Yorkers objected, a Panther delegation headed by Eldridge Cleaver was sent east to enforce the order.
“Lumumba and I met with them,” Odinga recalls. “It got ugly for a minute or two. They said, ‘We are the party. If you are part of the party, you will follow orders.’ We said, ‘We will follow your leadership, but not blindly.’ Arguments stretched on for weeks. Most of the rank and file was on our side. Finally we compromised. We agreed to wear black leather to BPP functions. The rest of the time, dashikis.”
Oakland’s wariness was reflected in the leadership it chose in New York, a group of SNCC veterans based in Brooklyn. Shakur was made section leader in Harlem, Odinga in the Bronx. Odinga was also named minister of education and took responsibility for the political-education classes all new Panthers were obliged to attend. Both took part in the full array of Panther activities, the free breakfasts, the lectures, appearances at myriad demonstrations. But from the beginning, Odinga and Shakur had a second, secret agenda, the same one later pursued by the Black Liberation Army: They wanted to kill cops.
And they tried. Along with twenty other Panthers, they concocted an ambitious plan to attack a series of policemen and precincts. Bombs were built, sniper positions set. But two of the Panthers turned out to be police detectives, and before the plan could be set into motion, the NYPD swooped in and arrested almost everyone, including Shakur. Of those involved in the Panther plot, only one avoided arrest: Sekou Odinga. He was hiding in an upper-floor apartment near Brooklyn’s Prospect Park when a squad of officers crept up the stairs to arrest him. Asleep at the time, Odinga woke when he heard a noise. Pressing his ear to the door, he sensed what was happening. He heard footsteps on the roof. He was surrounded. He stepped into the bathroom, glanced around, and saw what he would have to do. Struggling into his clothes, he grabbed a carbine by his bedside and yelled, “Who’s there?”
“The police! Open the door!”
“Gimme a minute. I’m putting my clothes on.”
Once he had the speaker’s attention, Odinga stepped to the front door and loudly clicked a round into the gun’s chamber.
“He’s got a gun!” came the shout. “He’s got a gun!”
As the police scattered for cover, Odinga raced into the bathroom, where a tiny window, no more than twelve inches wide, opened. Outside was a four-story drop to an alley below. Leaving his rifle behind, he squeezed through the window and slid one hand onto a concrete drainpipe that ran down the building. Leaving the safety of the window, he clasped the drainpipe with both hands and both feet and began shimmying down. He managed to descend about ten feet when a voice cried out from below: “There he is! There he is!”
Odinga sprang from the wall and jumped, landing nearly thirty feet below on the roof of a one-story garage. As he landed, his knee struck his chin and nearly knocked him unconscious. He stood, woozy, and heard the cries of policemen all around. Stepping to the edge of the roof, he leaped into a tree, only to have the branches break, dropping him to the pavement below. He limped to a nearby brownstone, tried its door, found it locked, t
hen tried another, and another and another, until he found an unlocked basement door. Inside, he curled himself into a ball and hid behind an oil tank.
Police cordoned off the block and began a house-to-house search. For hours Odinga listened as they tromped about. His luck held. No one came into the basement. When darkness fell, he uncoiled his aching body, stepped from the basement, hailed a gypsy cab, and vanished.
• • •
The legal odyssey of Lumumba Shakur and the rest of Panther 21 falls outside the narrative of this book. All told, their mass trial lasted more than eight months, from September 1970 to May 1971; at the time, it was the longest and most expensive trial in New York history. “The 21” became a cause célèbre for the city’s white radicals, as well as many wealthy liberals. The legendary Park Avenue party thrown by the composer Leonard Bernstein—which inspired writer Tom Wolfe to coin the term “radical chic”—was a fund-raiser for the 21; the most prominent Panther in attendance (and the centerpiece of Wolfe’s article) was Field Marshal Don Cox, who, while little remembered today, would go on to become a guiding force behind the BLA. Celebrities adored the New York Panthers; when Shakur’s slender, intellectual brother, Zayd, was arrested, his bail was posted by none other than Jane Fonda. Zayd Shakur, so slight his peers jokingly called him the “field mouse” rather than field marshal, would go on to become an influential member of the BLA.
The BLA was ultimately a by-product of tensions between the smooth, cliquish Panthers of the West Coast and the angry, Afrocentric, dashiki-wearing Panthers of New York—tensions that rose during the Panther 21 trial. Throughout the proceedings, the New York Panthers clamored for money—for lawyers, bail, and expenses—that Oakland was unable to supply. Relations worsened when headquarters insisted on dispatching a stream of California Panthers to New York to fill the leadership vacuum left by the 21’s incarceration. The California Panthers, especially a field marshal named Thomas Jolly, smirked at the dashikis, openly courted female Panthers, and seemed to freely spend what remained of the chapter’s cash. “Panthers on the street, we felt put upon, abused, distrusted,” recalls Thomas “Blood” McCreary, then a Brooklyn Panther. “You don’t trust our new leaders? They treated us like a bunch of idiots, fucking our women and stealing our money. These motherfuckers, they were running amok.”
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