Panther Baby

by Jamal Joseph

  Beef number three: A number of New York Panthers, including the wives and relatives of the Panther 21, had been disciplined or even suspended from the party by California Panthers who had been transferred to New York to assume leadership positions. There was some truth to this complaint. The bailed-out members of the 21 had spent a lot of time battling bad decisions and the prevailing belief that New York and every other chapter should be run exactly like Oakland. At first these jailhouse meetings would end on a positive note. We would leave with strategies and proposals for making things in the party better. But as time went on, a rift between Panther 21 members on the inside and those outside the prison developed. Not many of the suggestions made by 21 members on the inside were implemented. There was also frustration that Panther 21 members on the outside were too busy with national issues to give their full attention to helping the lawyers and the imprisoned members prepare for the upcoming trial.

  None of the Panthers still “inside” were content to sit in their prison cells waiting for visits, letters from the outside, or trips to the enclosed prison roof to play basketball. They were organizers, agitators, and revolutionaries to the nth degree. Whoever they encountered was transformed. Fellow prisoners were passed books and newspapers and given on-the-spot political education classes. Social workers, chaplains, and guards all caught an earful about the contradiction in the legal system that was designed to protect the rich and persecute the poor.

  Dr. King, Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Malcolm X had left a legacy that taught us to organize people around their common needs and interest. In Montgomery, Alabama, it was a bus boycott around the issue of transportation. In Mississippi it was schools and the right to vote. In Oakland, California, it was Panthers with shotguns and law books organizing to challenge police brutality. In New York, Philly, Chicago, and other Panther chapters it was housing, poverty, and poor children going to school hungry that fired the engine. In Branch Queens, Lumumba and the other Panther prisoners would organize the prisoners around the issue of a fair trial and reasonable bail.

  After weeks of teaching and organizing in small groups, the Branch Queens Panthers led a swift and explosive takeover of the prison. Riot doesn’t describe what happened, because the Panthers and prisoners took control of the building so quickly the guards never knew what hit them. They used the prison telephones to call lawyers and the press, and within hours a vigil was set up outside the prison where hundreds of people stayed to ensure that there would be no brutality or reprisals. A stage was erected in front of the prison. Afeni, Dhoruba, and I spoke to the crowd, who demanded the release of all prisoners. Gerry Lefcourt, Bob Bloom, and the other lawyers helped the Panthers negotiate with the prison and the courts. They demanded and received bail hearings for every prisoner. Judges came to Branch Queens and other prisons and held hearings to review bad bail decisions. As a result, hundreds of prisoners were released.

  The Panthers managed to break out the bars in their unit so they had a clear view of the street. The final triumphant part of the negotiation was that a cherry picker lowered them from their windows into prison vans, which then safely transported them without fear of reprisal to another prison. The fact that the rebellion was used to point out class and racial inequities in the system was a first in the history of U.S. prison rebellions. The usual demands were for better food and living conditions, but the imprisoned members of the Panther 21 knew that this was a bigger moment and that their case and celebrity could be used to make an immediate as well as long-term impact. The sight of Panther 21 members riding down in those cherry pickers with clenched fists was the equivalent of watching Hannibal entering Rome.

  The day after the Panther 21 descended victoriously in the cherry picker, I went home to the Bronx to see Noonie. I felt like a young soldier on leave after a long military campaign. I had tried to remember to call her at least once a week but often failed to do this. Now seemed like the right time to visit. Her home-cooked meal of stewed chicken and rice was the best food I’d had in months. She sat across from me at the kitchen table and watched me eat with a smile. When I was younger I used to cut off her loving looks with a “What?” or “Noonie, don’t stare. You’re the one who told me that’s not nice.” But this time I pretended not to notice. I knew she missed her Eddie terribly and that my absence, albeit for the cause, was lonely and painful for her.

  After dinner I went downstairs and hung out on the stoop with my childhood best friends, John Danavall, Roy Campbell, and Darryl Tookes. We talked about girls and guys from the neighborhood, basketball, and college. College was a distant and foreign thought to me. I was home from the revolutionary battlefield, and the best I could do in this conversation was to urge them to be radical students, wherever they wound up. I was surprised how much the fellas knew about the Panthers and the Panther 21 case. They had news clippings about me I hadn’t seen. They were proud of me but also worried. I shrugged it off with a couple of revolutionary quotes about “the people’s victory over oppression.” Walking around the neighborhood with them was a trip. The old folks would greet me with “Are you saying out of trouble, boy?” or “You know we’re praying for you.” The girls we used to mess with would either come over and flirt, asking about Panther meetings, or they would cross the street, saying, “I’m not gonna mess with you, Eddie Joseph. You are crazy!”

  We wound up at Roy’s house, listening to him playing trumpet alongside his father’s jazz records. Darryl started playing chords on the piano and scatting. I had no idea then that within a few years Roy and Darryl would become accomplished and world-famous musicians. Roy would be a sideman to many jazz greats and would become a respected band leader and composer in his own right. Darryl would sing, play, and arrange for everyone from Roberta Flack to Michael Jackson and become a well-known pop, rock, jazz, and funk icon. John would spend time in Africa, working in music promotion and distribution, and return to America to work as a counselor and educator.

  That evening I was back home by eleven, respecting Noonie’s curfew. I climbed into bed and slept for fifteen straight hours. The comfort of home let my body relax in a way that was impossible on old beat-up mattresses in a Panther pad or a sleeping bag on the floor of the Panther office. I was in a dreamlike daze when I stepped outside the next day. I hadn’t rested like that in months. The feeling of a good night’s sleep was so foreign to my body that the experience was like being high. I sat on the stoop watching children coming home from school, playing tag and catch, and jumping rope on this safe, quiet black working-class block in the Bronx. Harlem and the Panther office were just a forty-minute subway ride away, but these worlds couldn’t have been more different.

  I wondered what it would be like if I just stayed. If I called the Panther office and said, “I’m not coming back.” Or just didn’t show up. Noonie and my friends still loved me. My bed was still warm. The home-cooked meals were still good.

  Then I thought about the slums, the hungry kids, the racist cops, and I started to feel like I was sitting in a bubble. Most black folks didn’t live like this. I got anxious. I knew it was time to go. I went upstairs, hugged Noonie, and jumped on the subway headed back to 125th Street.

  12

  A Moment of Doubt

  Summer 1970. I had been out of prison for four months. It felt like a year. Constantly in motion. Doing public speaking; conducting political education classes and leadership meetings; taking part in community patrols; cooking breakfast for kids; hitting rats with a shovel while trying to clean garbage out of an alley; sitting in the hospital with brothers who had their skulls cracked by the police; watching people die in the gutter from drugs, bullets, and stab wounds; watching sick babies cry in their mothers’ arms.

  All this was intensified by the summer’s blazing heat, the smell of sweaty bodies on the street, the stench of rotting garbage mingled with incense from street vendors, and music everywhere. Record shops with blaring speakers, African drummers playing on stops and park benches, jazz and R&B
clubs with doors flung wide open. And every so often there was the sound of sirens—the through line to the sound track of revolution. I would stand on the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue and take it all in.

  That’s where I was when I got the news. The Panthers from the office ran up to me shouting that Huey P. Newton was free. We hugged, pumped our fists, and practically danced up and down 125th Street, handing out flyers and spreading the word. Later we gathered in the Panther office to watch the news on television. Huey stepped out of prison and climbed on top of a car to greet hundreds of supporters who had gathered. He ripped off his prison shirt and threw his arms up in victory. Huey had a body builder’s physique, and with his outstretched arms he looked like an Olympic champion, a conquering warrior, a Panther Adonis ready to lead the oppressed masses to victory and freedom.

  We were energized beyond measure by Huey’s release. It was lightning in our veins, rockets on our feet. Panthers always had a certain swagger when they walked—part cat, part sexual god, three parts bad motherfucker. Man, did we get our swagger on in the community and in the face of the police, just thinking about how the movement would grow now that Huey was free.

  At his first press conference, Huey promised to send a regiment of Black Panthers to Vietnam to fight alongside the North Vietnamese people. I pictured myself in the jungle, wearing sandals and black ninjalike pajamas, carrying an AK47 rifle. Then he talked about meeting with revolutionary leaders from Cuba, North Korea, and China to organize a revolutionary tribunal that would try President Nixon and the U.S. government for war crimes. I pictured myself in a Mao-style jacket, accompanying Huey as part of the Panther Diplomatic Delegation. Whatever the assignment from Huey, I was ready to serve.

  A few weeks later Huey came to Harlem. He had said that Harlem was the black capital of the world and that he was moving the national headquarters of the Black Panther Party there, and to that end the Panthers had purchased a large brownstone on 127th Street. It needed a lot of improvement, and we took turns working shifts on the renovation. The building was also to serve as Huey’s residence in New York. Huey came to the office with David Hilliard and other Panther leaders. He shook our hands, embraced us, and talked to us about the work we had to do to free Bobby Seale, the Panther 21, and all political prisoners.

  Then we walked through Harlem. A crowd gathered and followed us everywhere. There was Huey on 125th Street. That corner where all the great leaders stood. My corner. The day ended at a nice large apartment downtown where Huey was a guest. I sat on the floor of the living room filled with the radical-chic leftist intellectuals and Panther elite and listened to Huey speak about his new theories, and discourse on the lumpen proletariat revolution, and “Intercommunicalism”— an evolved form of Marxism.

  I came back to the Panther pad in the wee hours of the morning excited about Harlem’s future with our leader in residence, but Huey never returned. Work on the house on 127th Street was never completed, and within a year COINTELPRO, the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program, would create a deep divide and bitter split between the East Coast and West Coast chapters of the Black Panther Party.

  The trial of the Panther 21, who now numbered thirteen, began on September 8, 1970. Because of my age, my trial had been severed, and I would be tried separately. Before opening arguments could be made, a jury had to be selected. Our defense strategy was to point out the contradictions in the American justice system by fighting for a jury that truly represented the Panthers’ peer group. The Panthers’ preference would have been to hold the trial in Harlem, perhaps at the Apollo, with nooses on the stage and a jury of brothers and sisters off the block who could see the case for the attempt at legal lynching it really was. The next best thing would be to have that Harlem jury downtown, a jury that would comprise artists, ex-convicts, recovering drug addicts, veterans, teachers, transit workers, community organizers, students, young women, a computer engineer, and one African American man with a PhD in biology—a jury that truly reflected the lives and occupations of the Panther 21.

  The Manhattan jury pool comprised mainly white male registered voters. The jury-selection process disqualified or eliminated most of the black, poor, and disenfranchised candidates who could be considered true peers of the majority of black defendants who went to trial in New York. Many black men in prison were sitting there because of white judges and white juries. The Panther 21 decided to use the jury-selection process to point out the contradictions in the system. Judge John Murtagh and Assistant District Attorney Joseph Phillips would have loved to seat the jury in one day so that the justice railroad train could leave the station immediately, but the Panthers and our attorneys were not having it.

  Jury selection is a chess game. Both sides get to question prospective jurors. If either the prosecution or the defense does not like a juror, it tries to get the judge to dismiss that person for “cause.” A paralegal who worked for civil rights causes would be challenged by the prosecution. A woman whose son was a police officer would be challenged by the defense. Other challenges based on political or religious beliefs or perceived prejudices were harder to argue. If one side could not get a juror dismissed for cause, then it could use one of its twelve preemptory challenges. The selection process in the Panther 21 trial continued for weeks, with lots of questions coming from our side about the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the black-power struggle. There were heated fights with the judge, and when challenges were exhausted we finally had a jury of twelve, including four African Americans, four women, and a black jury foreman, Clarence Fox.

  The prosecution’s opening arguments talked about bomb plots, hatred, and seized weapons that were intended for use in an all-out guerrilla war against the police and the government. The defense’s opening argument was about the history of slavery, dehumanization, the civil rights movement, and black people’s constitutional right to bear arms as self-defense against racist members of society who in the past had beaten, lynched, burned, bombed, and murdered people of color.

  The typical relationship between a poor person on trial and his attorney is that of the common versus the elite. The lawyer is a sorcerer who understands the wizardry that is the law. The defendant is the commoner, unfortunate enough to be in the clutches of the empire but lucky to have a sorcerer willing to donate a bit of precious time to his case. No need for the commoner to ask questions about the process, because it’s too complex for him to understand. And how dare the commoner question the strategy or the actions of the wizard. If the commoner had a grasp of how the law worked, he wouldn’t be in this miserable situation to begin with.

  The relationship between the Panthers and their attorneys was quite different. The energy was that of comrades struggling together in a battle that might be lost, but one that would be remembered for the ages. The lawyers respected the intelligence, commitment, and perspective of the Panthers. They saw us not as victims but as targets, people who were being persecuted and prosecuted because they had a well-developed ideology and a clear sense of direction. Advice was given, debates were had, but the lawyers always deferred to the Panthers as to what the courtroom strategy would be.

  A few days into the trial the judge ordered a morning recess. When court resumed an hour later, court officers blocked my way and informed me that the judge had banned me from the courtroom. I, of course, made a scene, talking about my constitutional rights to witness a public hearing and trying to push my way past the guards. The lawyers went to talk to Judge Murtagh who confirmed that he granted the prosecution’s request that I not be allowed in the court. Since I was still a defendant I should not be allowed to observe witnesses and evidence that would be used against me. It was a ridiculous decision, but the judge held his fascist ground. Later I learned that the prosecutor didn’t want the baby-faced Panther in the second row influencing the jury as I made eye contact and exchanged smiles and clenched fists with the Panthers on trial.

  I felt angry and helpless, further severed from the batt
les and fate of my Panther 21 comrades. I would see Afeni, Dhoruba, Cet, and Joan each day as they dragged into the Panther office after court, mad, weary, and tense, like fighters in the seventh round of a brutal fifteen-round match. We would debrief on the run, each of us headed to a meeting, a fund-raiser, a building in crisis, or a corner where the police were shoving people. There was no time for them really to unwind.

  Besides the battle in court with the prosecution, there was the battle with the Panthers in prison. Harsh words and cold feelings were the communication between those on the inside and those out on bail. These were the same issues that had been in place for months: frustration over the lack of success in bailing all the Panthers out, concern that Panthers were spending more time selling papers and less time in community programs, and a national leadership that was perceived as being insensitive to the needs and suggestions of rank-and-file members. One morning, Judge Murtagh threw Cet in jail because he was an hour late for court. He had the flu and a bronchitis attack, but no matter to Murtagh. He did the same to Afeni one morning because she was a few minutes late. The lawyers objected strenuously, and Afeni and Cet’s bail were restored by the end of the day. Judge Murtagh saw he had leverage over all of the Panthers when it came to bail. He threatened to take away everyone’s bail if there were any more outbursts or contempt of court behavior by the Panthers or their attorneys.

  One night, near the Bronx Panther office, Afeni pulled me to the side and told me she was pregnant. Her husband, Lumumba, had been in prison for sixteen months.