The Savage City

by T. J. English

  A few days after the riots in Detroit and East Harlem, Dhoruba was on the subway, on his way to visit his aunt in his old neighborhood of Morrisania. He noticed that the police presence throughout the city had been stepped up, with cops in riot gear at nearly every station. He got off the train at the Jackson Avenue station in the Bronx—and walked into the middle of a police dragnet.

  I came down the stairs and the police had cordoned off the entire area underneath the train station. They had created sort of a funnel, and everybody that came into the area was detained. A group of about fifteen to twenty kids were walking together by the train station when I came down. A bunch of police came out of nowhere. With their guns out, they jumped the kids. Somehow I wound up in the middle of this. I didn’t know none of these kids. But they put us all up against the wall together. They cuffed us and locked us all up, said we had burglarized or burned a school or something. It was just a way for them to sweep a bunch of youths off the street and hold them in detention for twenty-four hours.

  Dhoruba was held overnight in jail and released at arraignment the next day. For the next six months he would have to make repeated court appearances to deal with the false charges before they were eventually dismissed. Not everyone was so lucky: many of the youths rounded up in the dragnets accepted plea bargains. Dhoruba saw the raid as one more indication of how the system was geared to criminalize black youths—even if they were just walking down the street or riding the subway.

  Since his release from Green Haven Bin Wahad had become hyperattuned to the possibilities of life. One aspect of his spiritual and physical rebirth involved pursuing something he’d been denied in prison: female companionship. While living with his grandfather in Queens, he met a young sister with the right combination of sass and self-possession. When Iris Bull walked into Dhoruba’s life on a street in South Jamaica, it was lust at first sight. She was twenty-one years old, shapely and lean, with a smooth café au lait complexion and proud “natural” hairstyle; they consummated their physical relationship in the basement of Dhoruba’s grandfather’s house, but it quickly blossomed into something more: a true manifestation of the Summer of Love.

  Dhoruba and Iris fell hard for each other and decided to get an apartment in the East Village, Manhattan’s bohemian quarter. Along with being the location for the secret meeting that launched the Black Panther Party in New York City, the East Village was ground zero for many of the cultural strains that were blossoming and commingling to form what would become known as the “psychedelic sixties.” Dhoruba and Iris moved into a street-level loft at 237 East Third Street, down the block from Slugs, a popular jazz club. The rent was cheap. Iris worked at a novelty shop on St. Mark’s Place selling papier-mâché flowers and black-light posters. And Dhoruba found his own source of income: pooling his resources with a couple of friends, he bought marijuana by the pound, which he stored in a vacant apartment in the building where he lived and sold by the dime bag.

  In an era of black pride and black-is-beautiful, Dhoruba and Iris were a power couple. They were strikingly handsome both individually and together, with dynamic personalities and a mutual admiration that lit up a room. The semiregular parties they held at their loft on East Third Street—complete with tabs of acid and a huge bowl filled with joints on the coffee table—became a central gathering place for a diverse collective of black militants, white hippies, artists, and activists. Fueled by hallucinogens and booze, their parties sometimes lasted an entire weekend.

  Dhoruba found himself torn between two powerful drives: a hunger to exercise his newfound freedom in the hedonistic frenzy of the times, versus his intellectual drive to continue pursuing his process of political enlightenment, with all the discipline and self-sacrifice that entailed. He still played his Malcolm X records and devoured the news accounts he found in the Liberator, the Amsterdam News, the East Village Other, and other papers he trusted. He read Stokely Carmichael’s manifesto, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, and also Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama by Julius Lester, two influential books published that year. He was flirting with the prospect of becoming a full-fledged member of the Black Power movement—and his feelings only intensified when he read an article in the leftist magazine Ramparts by a cat named Eldridge Cleaver.

  Cleaver, like Dhoruba himself, was an ex-con who had recently been released from prison—in Cleaver’s case California’s notorious Folsom Prison. Even before he’d been released in December 1966, Cleaver was something of a celebrity: his prison writings had been published in Ramparts, which enjoyed a devoted readership in the Bay Area and also in New York City. Upon his release, Ramparts hired him as a correspondent-at-large.

  Dhoruba had read some of Cleaver’s writings in the magazine, but the article that really caught his attention was one he wrote about a visit by Betty Shabazz, wife of the late Malcolm X, to speak at a political function in San Francisco. The Black Panther Party in Oakland had been assigned as Sister Shabazz’s security detail in the Bay Area. “I fell in love with the Black Panther Party immediately upon my first encounter with it,” Cleaver wrote. Cleaver described being seated in an auditorium awaiting the arrival of Sister Shabazz: “I spun around in my seat and saw the most beautiful sight I had ever seen: four black men wearing black berets, powder blue shirts, black leather jackets, black trousers, shiny black shoes—and each with a gun! In front was Huey P. Newton with a riot pump shotgun in his right hand, barrel pointed down to the floor. Beside him was Bobby Seale, the handle of a .45 caliber automatic showing from its holster on his right hip, just below the hem of his jacket…. Where was my mind at? Blown!”

  After this initial introduction to the Panthers, Cleaver was honored to hear that Shabazz, who’d read an article of his about the legacy of Malcolm X in Ramparts, wanted to meet him. She was escorted to the magazine’s editorial office by the Panthers, who were confronted by a group of San Francisco police officers alarmed by reports of a group of Negroes dressed in all black carrying rifles and handguns. In Ramparts, Cleaver described the encounter that followed:

  At that moment, a big, beefy cop stepped forward. He undid the little strap holding his pistol in his holster and started shouting at Huey, “Don’t point that gun at me! Stop pointing that gun at me!” He kept making gestures as if he was going for his gun.

  This was the most tense of moments. Huey stopped in his tracks and stared at the cop.

  “Let’s split, Huey! Let’s split!” Bobby Seale was saying.

  Ignoring him, Huey walked within a few feet of the cop and said, “What’s the matter, you got an itchy finger?”

  The cop made no reply.

  “You want to draw your gun?” Huey asked him.

  The other cops were calling out for this cop to cool it, to take it easy, but he didn’t seem to be able to hear them. He was staring into Huey’s eyes, measuring him.

  “O.K.,” Huey said. “You big fat racist pig, draw your gun!”

  The cop made no move.

  “Draw it, you cowardly dog!” Huey pumped a round into the chamber of the shotgun. “I’m waiting,” he said, and stood there waiting for the cop to draw.

  All the other cops moved back out of the line of fire. I moved back, too, onto the top steps of Ramparts. I was thinking, staring at Huey surrounded by all those cops and daring one of them to draw, “Goddam, that nigger is c-r-a-z-y!”

  Then the cop facing Huey gave it up. He heaved a heavy sigh and lowered his head. Huey literally laughed in his face and then went off up the street at a jaunty pace, disappearing in a blaze of dazzling sunlight.

  Immediately afterward, Cleaver joined the Black Panthers, becoming their minister of information.

  Just as Cleaver was impressed by the antics of Huey Newton, Dhoruba was equally enthralled by Cleaver’s account of the action. The Black Panthers, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver—it all left Dhoruba’s head spinning in amazement. He vowed to learn more about this righteous new group, which echoed so many of th
e sentiments roiling in his own mind.

  Politics was in the air. In October, at one of Dhoruba and Iris’s regular parties on East Third Street, someone pulled out a flyer promoting a huge protest march the next day in Washington, D.C. Billed as “The Rise on the Pentagon,” it promised to be unlike anything ever staged before: a march on the Pentagon in which virtually every radical protest group and some mainstream political groups promised to attend. Anyone who was against the war in Vietnam was urged to make the trek to D.C.

  “Hey,” said someone at the party, “why don’t we all go?” There were cars, minivans, and buses leaving for the march from Tompkins Square Park, just a few blocks away.

  It sounded crazy—most everyone at the party was already high on grass, acid, and booze. But they walked over to Tompkins Square, where thousands were gathered: hippies, college students, and people from church groups and political organizations. Dhoruba and a handful of his friends climbed into a Volkswagen minibus and were off.

  “When we got to the Washington, D.C., area—damn,” said Dhoruba. “There were people walking on the highway towards the march; thousands of people walking on the shoulder of the road. I’d never seen so many white kids at one time since I got out of prison.”

  The march on the Pentagon would turn out to be a seminal event, an occasion for speeches, singing, chanting, getting high, and cursing at and scuffling with armed troopers. Eight hours later, Dhoruba and his crew were back on the minibus heading back to New York.

  Traveling with Dhoruba was a group of black college students who had hitched a ride back to the city. Remembered Dhoruba, “One of the college students was talking about how marginalized they were on campus, how they were unable to get any respect from the institutional authorities. With all the reading I’d been doing, all the political analysis I’d been exploring, I jumped right into the discussion. One of the students said to me, ‘You sound just like one of those Black Panthers from the West Coast.’ I said, ‘Well, if there was an organization like that in New York, I would probably join them.’”

  Back in the city, Dhoruba was hurtling himself down the road toward political engagement. He read all he could find on the Panthers, and eventually visited the Panther office, a modest basement in Harlem at Seventh Avenue and West 141st Street. The group that seemed to be running the office struck Dhoruba as college kids, possibly former SNCC members who were following the community-outreach model of the traditional civil rights movement—initiating a free breakfast program for children and establishing what they called “liberation schools” to educate kids in Harlem. But Dhoruba was still half a thug, a former gangbanger whose thoughts ran more toward armed self-defense than toward organizing social survival programs. He kept his eye on the Panthers, but hoped to see them follow the example of leaders like Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, cats who had a prison pedigree and sense of audacity that resonated with him.

  In October, Dhoruba and Iris decided to get married. They donned matching African clothing, piled into a friend’s pickup truck, and drove down to the Municipal Building in lower Manhattan for the ten-minute ceremony. The couple shared a sense of possibility; they felt ready to seize their moment in history.

  Much as most New Yorkers picked up one of the city’s many daily papers to read the latest about the weather or their favorite sports teams, Dhoruba always scanned the news for the latest about the Black Panther Party. On the morning of October 20, just a week after his marriage, the Panthers hit the front page: the party’s chairman, Huey Newton, was in the hospital—and under arrest for shooting and killing a cop.

  According to newspaper accounts, Newton and another Panther member were driving in West Oakland when they were pulled over by a police officer. Realizing that he’d just pulled over the head of the Black Panther Party, the cop called for backup. Another cop arrived. Newton was told to get out of the car. He did, and a scuffle between Newton and the first cop ensued. Newton shot the cop dead, then turned and fired—and hit—the other cop. The policeman was able to return fire, hitting Newton in the lower back. Newton and his partner then fled the scene. Bleeding profusely, Newton was rushed to a hospital, where he was treated and arrested.

  Papers all over the country carried an Associated Press wire service photo of Newton on a hospital gurney, bleeding and barely conscious, handcuffed to the side of the gurney with an Oakland cop standing over him. Given that the Black Panther Party leader was proclaiming his innocence, it was a loaded image that sent shock waves through the black liberation movement.

  Recovering from his wounds, Newton was transferred to Alameda County jail, where he was held without bail. Almost immediately, a “Free Huey” movement was born. It would become a huge publicity boon for the Panthers throughout the United States. The Black Panther Party was now the most famous and—among policemen—the most despised black liberation organization in the country.

  For Dhoruba, the Free Huey movement was like the voice of Malcolm X himself, calling out to enlist his support in the worldwide struggle for black liberation.

  BY THE EARLY months of 1968, the Whitmore case had become a lonely chorus in a loud symphony of rebellion and dissent. Riots, assassinations, and the looming specter of the Black Panther Party dominated the discussion. Stories of black kids framed by a prejudiced criminal justice system had become so common that George’s story didn’t even seem like news anymore. Given George’s past association with the Wylie-Hoffert murders, the name Whitmore was still good for a few column inches in the back pages of the metro section, but that was it. In the racial hurricane of the late 1960s, Whitmore’s travails had become a drop in the bucket.

  BY THE TIME an attorney named Myron Beldock became involved in the Whitmore case, the kid’s chances didn’t look too good. Beldock, just thirty-five, was a skilled litigator with expertise in appellate law. The appeals process was an aspect of jurisprudence that sometimes required a talent for prestidigitation: a successful appellate lawyer was expected to create something out of nothing, or at least to zero in on a specific legal detail, using it to change the entire outlook of a case.

  The Whitmore appeal was going to require that kind of magic. The accused had been convicted on charges of assault and attempted rape at three separate trials. Most recently, he’d been given the maximum sentence and remanded once again to the psych ward at Kings County Hospital, and then upriver to Sing Sing. By now Arthur Miller, Whitmore’s most devoted legal advocate, seemed to be burned out on the case. Miller had asked Beldock for help, though he couldn’t promise much financial remuneration in return. As Beldock remembered years later, “I’m sure Arthur used the word ‘injustice’ and described it as a wrongful conviction. The fact that an injustice had occurred, the strong feeling that there was a wrong that needed to be made right, was something Arthur and I would have shared in common. He knew that I would be open to the case even though, purely as a legal matter, it promised to be an uphill battle.”

  In many ways, Beldock was a child of the system. His father had been an appellate judge in Brooklyn for close to thirty years, and along with his years of experience in the appellate division, Beldock had served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York from 1958 to 1960. Beldock knew the system’s strengths and weaknesses; he understood that justice within it was based all too often on power and influence rather than fairness.

  Despite its prominence a few years earlier, Beldock was only marginally aware of the Whitmore case; like most lawyers, he tended to focus only on whatever case was in front of him at the time. But he recognized that the Whitmore case had become something of a judicial sinkhole, with its layers of bias, appellate reversals, and allegations of racial injustice—a classic example of what civil rights leaders and legal scholars had begun to refer to as “institutional racism.”

  The charges against Whitmore had been tried before three separate judges. Most legal matters relating to the case had been reviewed ad nauseam. Beldock had to find something—anything—to use a
s grounds for a new appeal. He started by reading Whitmore’s sixty-one-page false confession, then worked his way through the various trial transcripts. He also read a recent book about the Whitmore case: Justice in the Back Room, by Selwyn Raab, the World Telegram reporter who’d covered the saga almost from the beginning, and whose article for Harper’s had been squelched by the dictatorial Manhattan D.A. Frank Hogan.

  Beldock was astounded by what he read. In his nine years as an attorney, he rarely used the word racism in describing the criminal justice system. Yet the details of the Whitmore case rang true to him: as someone who’d grown up around judges and lawyers and officers of the court, he’d often heard racial epithets dropped in conversation. “There was a basic prejudice to the system,” recalled Beldock. “I heard a lawyer or two refer to black people as ‘animals’—that includes defense lawyers and certainly prosecutors. Generally speaking, if you were black or Hispanic and had no particular sophistication, cops were able to get you to admit to things that were not true. I tended to not look at individual cases involving black and Hispanic defendants as racial matters because, in a sense, it was all a racial matter. There was prejudice across the board.”

  After his crash course in the case, Beldock met Whitmore at Sing Sing, where the prisoner had recently been declared legally “sane” after yet another psychiatric evaluation. In a visitors’ cubicle, George seemed distracted, chain-smoking through their meeting. Beldock was the sixth lawyer he had met, the latest in a parade of advocates who had come into his life with great fanfare and then—all except for Arthur Miller—disappeared in a cloud of smoke.