The Savage City

by T. J. English

  As he had after Malcolm X’s assassination, George made a few dollars painting portraits of King and selling them to inmates. Sometimes, as he sketched out the contours of King’s face and then painted in the details, George felt like he wanted to cry.

  AS WITH MOST cops, the first thing Bill Phillips wondered after the King assassination was, When would the rioting start? In New York City, the hours and days immediately after the assassination were tense. There were sporadic disturbances around the city, with some looting, broken windows, and candlelight vigils that occasionally turned unruly. The threat became much worse on the night of April 6, as news came of full-fledged rioting in more than one hundred cities. The National Guard was sent in to restore peace in Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. Before the riots were over, thirty-seven to forty-six people were killed, with thousands of injuries and property damage of more than $50 million.

  In New York, Mayor Lindsay took to the streets in an attempt to quell the growing, restless anger. There would ultimately be rioting in New York, some of it destructive and costly, but nothing like what Phillips and the NYPD had experienced the previous summer, when police cars were shot at, torched, and showered with brick-filled garbage cans from tenement rooftops. Still, the toll from rioting in New York after the King assassination was one dead, seventy police and civilian injuries, and 428 arrests. Property damage was estimated at $5 million.

  One week after King was buried in a nationally televised ceremony, Phillips was cruising in a squad car with his latest partner, Eddie Lawrence. Lawrence was what was known in the department as a “hair bag,” a veteran cop with close to twenty years on the job, slow, cautious, with one eye on his retirement date and dreams of suburbia.

  At Park Avenue and West 122nd Street, in the shadow of the elevated tracks of the New York Central railroad, a Latina in her midtwenties came fleeing out of a building and flagged down Phillips and Lawrence.

  “I’ve been robbed, I’ve been robbed!”

  “When did it happen?” Phillips asked the woman.

  “It’s happening right now. He’s still up there in the apartment.”

  Phillips thought about that: How likely was it that a robber was waiting up there for cops to arrive? “He’s not up there,” said Phillips.

  The woman was taken aback. “Yes he is. He’s still there.”

  Phillips sighed and got out of the car, followed ten steps behind by his partner. He opened the front door of the building, a run-down four-story tenement at 1743 Park Avenue. In the narrow hallway, Phillips saw a man carrying shopping bags in each hand. The man was short but well-built, black, midthirties, wearing jeans and a loose cotton shirt.

  “That’s him,” said the woman. “Look, he’s still got my things in the bag. That’s my radio.”

  Phillips stepped forward and said to the man, “Okay, you fuck, drop the loot and get against the wall.”

  The man’s name was Calvin McCoy. He had an extensive police record, twenty-five arrests on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to possession of narcotics to burglary. He was a junkie, likely robbing the woman’s apartment for items to pawn so that he could buy smack. He had the skittish mannerisms of a junkie but looked like an athlete.

  McCoy’s eyes darted here and there, looking around the hallway; he had nowhere to run. He put down the bags and faced the wall. When Phillips stepped forward to frisk the suspect, McCoy elbowed him square in the solar plexus and knocked him off balance. McCoy bolted down the hallway and out the front door.

  Standing outside the building, Officer Lawrence looked up to see a black dude come running frantically out the front door, with Phillips close behind.

  “Grab him, Eddie!” shouted Phillips.

  Lawrence tried to stop the robber but was knocked flat on his ass. He did, however, slow McCoy down enough that Phillips managed to catch up and grab him. Phillips and McCoy tussled on the street. The fabric of McCoy’s shirt ripped and the shirt was torn completely off. McCoy pulled out a switchblade, and Phillips froze. The robber lunged at Phillips. The cop raised his left hand to block the attack, and the blade sliced the meaty part of his palm, sending blood spurting everywhere. Phillips jerked back his hand, pulling away. McCoy bolted down Park Avenue underneath the elevated railway tracks, a shirtless black man on the run. Phillips took off after him, his hand dripping blood. He recalled:

  This guy is going like a raped ape. Zip! He’s running like a deer under the el. He’s got some body on him, looked like a weight lifter. I’m chasing him and he’s gaining on me every step. I hear Eddie yell, shoot him, shoot him. Good fucking idea, right? He’s now about fifteen, twenty yards away. I whip out my gun and fire two shots up in the air under the el…. On the corner there’s a traffic stanchion. I rest my hand on it, cock the gun and fire one shot. Get him right through the back. He doesn’t fall down, but he stops running. When I get to him he’s bleeding from the nose and mouth. The bullet severed the lung artery. I says, holy shit, this guy’s going to die. Jesus Christ almighty, I killed this fucking guy.

  Police cars with sirens wailing flocked to the scene as local residents gathered on the street. Also among the first responders were representatives of a special Urban Task Force that Mayor Lindsay’s office had established after King’s assassination for exactly this purpose—to arrive at the scene of potentially explosive incidents and try to maintain the peace. As people milled about, uncertain what to do, a few angry comments were shouted at the cops.

  Phillips was taken to the same hospital as the robber. While his hand was being stitched up, he was informed that Calvin McCoy had died.

  “What did you have to shoot the guy for?” one of the mayor’s task force members asked Phillips. “Can you account for this shooting? You may be in a lot of trouble.”

  Phillips wasn’t in any trouble. The investigation of the shooting, treated as a routine inquiry by the NYPD, found that the suspect was killed in the line of duty. Phillips was given a special commendation for valor, but he wasn’t especially proud of the shooting.

  A police officer is supposed to understand that any time he shoots at a guy he intends to kill him. But I think, most of us think, that most of these guys that get shot don’t die. As a matter of fact, them guys are hard to kill. Shoot these people in the fucking head and they live, I swear to Christ. So when I’m shooting at the guy, I figured the guy isn’t going to die for chrissakes…. I didn’t think, I’m going to kill him. I didn’t aim at his head. I just aimed at his general body. It’s really hard to hit a guy with a handgun at that distance.

  Several weeks later, a man came into the Twenty-fifth Precinct station house in Harlem and said, “I want to report a murder.”

  He was sent up to the second floor to see a detective. He walked into the squad room and repeated his refrain, “I want to report a murder.”

  “Yeah?” said a detective. “Who was murdered?”

  “My brother was murdered. By Patrolman William Phillips.”

  The detective glared at the guy and said, “Get the fuck out of here.”

  There was no rioting after the shooting of Calvin McCoy. His long criminal record, and the fact that his death took place while he was in the midst of committing a crime, seemed to mitigate whatever reaction the community might have felt. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. McCoy’s death raised all kinds of theoretical issues: Does a burglar caught in the act deserve to die? Was shooting a fleeing perp in the back an act of “valor,” as the department would proclaim? But this was the sort of encounter that took place regularly in the ghetto, where a cop had to make a hair-trigger decision about the use of deadly force, and the residents were left to decide if the results were outrageous enough to justify burning down their neighborhood.

  A few months after the shooting of Calvin McCoy—after Phillips had been presented with his medal of valor by the NYPD—the officer was at a grand jury hearing about the shooting. In the hallway of the courthouse, he happened to walk by the mother of the man he shot. Weary be
yond her years, in tremendous emotional distress, the woman looked at the cop and said, “You killed my son.”

  The normally loquacious Phillips had no comeback.

  SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER the King assassination, on May 15, 1968, Dhoruba and his wife, Iris, attended a star-studded benefit for the Black Panther Party. It was held at Fillmore East, impresario Bill Graham’s famous nightclub in the East Village, where many of the major acts of the era would perform and a generation perfected the practice of tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. On this night, there would be no acid or other hallucinogens; it was an event devoted to speeches, the staging of three short theater pieces, and fund-raising. Roughly twenty-six hundred people, black and white, witnessed an evening filled with what the New York Times later described as “rhetoric composed of racial paranoia, political jargon, Utopian idealism, unprintable threats, gutty ‘soul’ talk and shrewd humor.”

  Among the performers was LeRoi Jones, poet and provocateur, who had barely survived the Newark riot of the previous summer. A Newark native, Jones had been beaten by police; a photo of the aftermath, with blood streaming from his skull, appeared in papers around the country, making him an instant hero and symbol of the movement. Jones also coined a phrase that had become something of a motto for black liberation: “We are a John Coltrane people living in a Lawrence Welk world.”

  At Fillmore East, Jones read a long, incendiary poem entitled “Home on the Range.” He was followed onstage by Kathleen Cleaver, wife of Eldridge, who’d been slated to headline the event until he was waylaid by an incident that, like the incarceration of Huey Newton, had rocked the Panther universe.

  Three days after King’s murder, Cleaver and a handful of Panthers got into a brutal, ninety-minute gun battle with local police in Oakland, California. Seventeen-year-old Bobby Hutton, one of the Panthers’ founding members, was shot dead by cops that day; three other people were wounded, and Cleaver and five other Panthers were arrested. Authorities were unable to establish whether Cleaver had fired on police, but he was held on the grounds that he had violated the terms of his parole from prison. Cleaver’s bail was set at $200,000, and the Fillmore East benefit organizers resolved to donate part of the money they raised to Cleaver’s bail.

  For Dhoruba Bin Wahad, the event was a coming out of sorts. He was still a probationary member of the Black Panther Party, spending his free time memorizing the Panthers’ platform and Ten-Point Program, which was headed “What We Want, What We Believe.” He read Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, the bible for Panthers with an anticolonial and Pan-African bent, and watched the movie The Battle of Algiers, required viewing for would-be Panthers. There were additional classes on everything from Marxist economic theory to history classes on slavery, the Nat Turner slave rebellion, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. The reading and discussion classes were rigorous; prospective members who missed a class or came unprepared were disciplined or even denied membership.

  Dhoruba excelled at the PE classes, which extended the education he’d begun in prison.

  Because of my studies in the joint I already had the historical overview. I was more advanced than some of the younger brothers and sisters. Having been incarcerated gave me perspective and credibility. Plus, I had been the vice president of one of the largest gangs in the city [the Sportsmen Disciples]. I knew about organizing people who maybe didn’t have a college or even high school education. I knew about fostering self-pride and group morale and how to enforce internal discipline in a way that conveys the right message without alienating the rank and file. I knew about organizing activities that had the potential of bringing us into conflict with the po po. On top of all that, I had the military training; I knew about guns.

  Dhoruba not only knew about weapons, he wasn’t afraid to put them to use—if and when the time arrived.

  Some people joined the party to feed children through the breakfast program. Some were primarily political activists looking to change the system. All that’s cool. But me, I joined the party to fight the pigs. That’s why I joined. Because my experience with the police was always negative. I saw the way they ran roughshod over us, abused us, framed us, all my life. And we didn’t have no say. Well, what Huey and Eldridge were advocating was self-defense, the idea that we weren’t going to sit back and take that shit anymore, that we had the right to defend ourselves. And now we were going to exercise that right. Of course, this terrified the police, which was just fine by us. Nothing terrifies the police more than the image of a black person with an Afro holding a gun.

  By the summer of 1968, what remained of Eddie Ellis’s early efforts to launch the Panthers in New York had been absorbed into a new and improved version. A chapter officially associated with the Oakland Panthers (now known as “the Central Committee” or “national leadership”) was founded in Bed-Stuy. Fred Richardson, owner of the party’s bookstore headquarters at 780 Nostrand Avenue, was named the local minister of information.

  On a hot day in early August, Dhoruba hopped on the Interborough subway and headed out to the office on Nostrand. That morning, he had argued with Iris about his involvement with the party. Iris was not a member. Though she was just as Afrocentric as Dhoruba, she had begun to view her husband’s involvement with the movement as an extension of his former life as a gangbanger. It meant dealing with guns and hanging with the same kinds of Bronx street thugs—some of whom still occasionally visited Dhoruba, especially whenever they needed a place to hide from the law. Dhoruba’s disagreements with his wife over the party would eventually undermine their marriage.

  Dhoruba was caught up in the historical moment. That summer, in the wake of King’s murder, Panther chapters and branches were sprouting up all over the country—not just in major cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore, and Detroit, but even in midsized cities like Seattle and Toledo and Roxbury, Massachusetts. It was a grassroots phenomenon, attracting countless young men and women attracted by the swash-buckling image of Newton, Cleaver, and the rest, and angered by the behavior of repressive local police against political activity in the black community. That summer saw violent clashes between police and nearly any group who dared to call themselves Black Panthers. Of the many lethal confrontations, the worst occurred in Cleveland, where eleven people—Panthers and police—were killed during a shoot-out.

  In New York, the police were on alert. In many ways, the Panthers were the realization of everything the NYPD had feared since Malcolm X first arrived on the scene. The Panthers’ distaste for the police was brazen; it was spelled out in their Ten-Point Program, expounded upon by speakers at Panther rallies, and delineated in the Black Panther, the party’s house newspaper, published weekly. Edited by Intercommunal News Service, the Black Panther emerged in the summer of ’68 as a powerful promotional and fund-raising tool for the Panthers around the country. The paper sold for twenty-five cents at Panther offices, at rallies, and at corner newsstands—that is, those that weren’t being harassed by police, who often confiscated and destroyed whatever copies they could get their hands on.

  The average policeman would have found much to hate about the Black Panther. Its pages were filled with “anti-American” editorial diatribes against the war in Vietnam, in terms that supported the communist enemy; its writers repeatedly attacked the criminal justice system as inherently racist; its editors lionized Panther members on trial for shooting or killing police as revolutionary heroes. Perhaps most viscerally offensive, the Black Panther promoted the image of the P-I-G.

  The use of the word pig to describe police—first circulated by Huey Newton—had caught on throughout the radical left, including among white college kids, in a way that unsettled the average policeman. The very first issue of the Black Panther defined a pig as “an ill-natured beast who has no respect for law and order, a fool traducer who’s usually found masquerading as a victim of an unprovoked attack.” This definition played off longtime police attitudes toward black people and sought to upend the notion that law and order wa
s the sole province of the men in blue. The term was further crystallized through the artwork of Emory Douglas, the Panthers’ minister of culture, whose lavish drawings and cartoons of cops as pigs appeared frequently in the Black Panther and galvanized the opposition. LeRoi Jones (who would soon change his name to Amiri Baraka) described Emory’s pig as “a nasty scrawny filthy creature with a projected sensibility that was mostly slime lover and animal slacker, if you will. The bravura touch was the flies that always circled the creature’s nasty self. Whatever one thought of the Panther philosophy as a whole, I did not meet anyone among any sector of the Movement that did not dig that pig, just looking at it would crack you up in a mixture of merriment and contempt!”

  The entire posture of the Panthers, and their newspaper, involved a level of irreverence, disrespect, and hatred of the criminal justice system that mystified, if not shocked, most cops. For sheer, sustained hostility toward civic authority, there was no precedent for it in the history of American law enforcement.

  Emerging as two warring tribes in a theater of battle not yet clearly defined, the Panthers and the police drew lines in the sand. Hostilities were mounting on the sweltering August afternoon when Dhoruba arrived at the party headquarters on Nostrand Avenue. There was a carnival atmosphere outside the store, with people gathering in the street. A Panther spokesperson stood on a soapbox rapping through a bullhorn, explaining the party platform and Ten-Point Program, and excoriating the cops as they drove by in squad cars to monitor the scene.

  Dhoruba made his way through the crowd and headed into the store to talk to Richardson, the minister of information, about distribution for the Black Panther. In the two months since Dhoruba joined the party, he’d already distinguished himself as a cut above the usual inductee. His political consciousness as a black nationalist was fully formed, and with it came leadership skills he’d learned on the street. Although he hadn’t yet been given a title, local Panthers and visiting leaders from the Central Committee in Oakland were already pegging Dhoruba as one to watch. He’d been assigned to handle receipt of newspaper shipments from the West Coast and distribution in the East. Given that the paper had become the Panthers’ most lucrative fund-raising source, it was an important task.