The Savage City

by T. J. English

  In September 1968, he and Iris moved to Harlem. It was a manifestation of his journey back to his roots, back to Africa, in the sense that Harlem was a symbol of Africa in America. Dhoruba and Iris took an apartment on West 137th Street, across from Harlem Hospital. Dhoruba gave up his weed-peddling party life among the hippies in the East Village to become, as he saw it, a warrior in the fight for liberation and justice.

  The fall of ’68 was full of promise but also dread. Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction,” released in 1966, was still riding the charts almost two years later; with its vision of coming apocalypse, it was a song that spoke across racial lines. The diverse strains of dissent at play in the country were beginning to cohere.

  And that fall Eldridge Cleaver finally made his New York City debut, after which the Black Panther Party in New York would never be quite the same.

  After the shoot-out in Oakland the previous May, Cleaver had been incarcerated for a month and then paroled, pending criminal charges. In the meantime, he announced that he was a candidate for president of the United States on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. Having the Black Panther Party’s minister of information running for president was a stimulating national sideshow, especially among the country’s burgeoning radical left. In New York State, Cleaver’s age—thirty-three, two years shy of the age of eligibility—got him banned from the ballot. It didn’t matter. As Cleaver said, he didn’t “dream at night about living in the White House.” He was running not to win, but to use the national platform his candidacy provided.

  In New York, Dhoruba Bin Wahad was put in charge of Cleaver’s security detail. He was finally coming face-to-face with the man whose writings in Ramparts had attracted him to the Black Panther Party in the first place. “Certain people,” remembered Dhoruba, “had an aura about them. Eldridge was like that. Soul on Ice was on the best-seller list. His reputation was large, and he carried himself like a star. He was probably the most potent recruiting tool the party had at the time; he had credibility with the lumpen and the ex-cons, and he was attractive to white radicals, the New Left—even the media thought Eldridge was cool.”

  In an October 11 press conference at the Algonquin Hotel in midtown Manhattan to kick off a four-day speaking tour, Cleaver announced that “the purpose of my campaign is to organize people, to break some ground for a revolutionary movement, to lay the base for a revolutionary movement that will unite black radicals and white radicals.” Dressed in the unofficial Panther uniform of black leather jacket and blue turtleneck sweater, he parried with the New York press like a skilled middle-weight contender. When asked if his New York–based running mate, Judith Mage, had received funds from a city antipoverty program, he said, “I hope she can take all of it, take every penny she can get not only from the poverty program, but I wish that we could rip off Fort Knox. And all these hocus-pocus questions about where our money comes from—I hope that Mao Tse-tung sends me a boxcar full of money today ’cause I need it. Ho Chi Minh, send me some money. Fidel Castro, send me some money. Your momma, tell your momma send me some money ’cause we need it.” He added that if Mage was getting antipoverty funds she “would be functioning in the spirit of Robin Hood.”

  With Dhoruba and his four-man security crew at his side, Cleaver also spoke at New York University’s Washington Square campus before an audience of two thousand students. He spoke to a smaller group of Panther cadre at the auditorium of P.S. 201, many of whom were electrified. “He was spitting fire,” said one Panther. His speeches were profane, sometimes angry, and often witty; people came away feeling they had witnessed an authentic cultural phenomenon.

  Eldridge Cleaver giving speeches was one thing, but the Panthers were also a reality that played out in the streets on a daily basis. Both the New York police and members of the party used the word war to describe what was happening. As with most wars, it would sweep up many bystanders—people who weren’t necessarily combatants but who were close enough to the action to become casualties.

  One of these was Joseph “Jazz” Hayden. Born and raised in Harlem, Hayden became entangled in the era of the Panthers, though he was not a member of the Black Panther Party. He was known to the police as a local criminal—and he was a black male, which itself made him a suspicious character in the eyes of the law.

  The incident that proved his undoing occurred in late September. Earlier that month, in California, Huey P. Newton was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter in the shooting death of the Oakland police officer the previous year. The conviction sent shock waves through the national Panther network. On September 27, Defense Minister Newton was sentenced to a term of two to fifteen years in prison. In New York, some among the armed wing of the Panthers felt it was necessary to retaliate by seeking payback against the system. It was part of a new strategy among some of the more militant element of the party—though never officially sanctioned by its hierarchy—to strike back after perceived acts of injustice on the part of “the power structure.” In this case, the decision was made to respond to the sentencing of Newton in California by shooting some “pigs” in Harlem.

  On the night of September 28, two uniformed police officers were sitting in a squad car at a taxi stand at 114th Street and Lenox Avenue. A black male wearing what was later described as an orange-lined black cape approached with a .30-caliber rifle and opened fire from fifteen feet away. Both officers were hit; one of them was able to return fire, emptying his revolver at the rifleman and a getaway driver. The attackers sped away in a black Cadillac. The cops believed they might have hit the fleeing gunman. The assailants were described by a police spokesperson as Negroes with mustaches, both of them tall and thin, with the driver dressed in “African garb.”

  The officers were wounded but in fair condition. A citywide alarm went out for the assailants. According to police, it was the fourth such attack on officers in the previous two months.

  Jazz Hayden had nothing to do with the shooting. In fact, he had deliberately steered clear of the Panthers. He was a small-time hustler looking to score off the underground economy—the numbers racket, marijuana trade, dice, craps, and card games. He admired what the Panthers were doing, but it wasn’t for him. “For one thing,” he recalled years later, “what the Panthers was doing wasn’t gonna help me pay no bills.”

  Hayden had been working the streets in Harlem since childhood. His father was a merchant marine who separated from his mother, leaving Jazz to fend for himself. As a kid, he’d collected pennies by selling peanuts and scrounging for empty bottles outside the Polo Grounds, where the New York Giants played ball. He ran errands for a local barbershop, dusted off coats, and shined shoes for loose change.

  By the time he was a teenager, he was a different kind of hustler. Hayden described a typical day:

  You come outside in the morning and your pockets are empty. You cash in some bottles, get you a couple dollars. Then you try to get into a nickel-and-dime crap game and work your way up to a big crap game. Then you get a set of craps and a milk crate and you start your own crap game. If you made a profit from that, you take that profit and you put it into a couple bags of smoke, roll up some joints, sell them. So you start out with nothing at the beginning of the day and end up with something at the end of the day. And you start out the next day hustling and keep going until you build up some collateral.

  The corner crap game was the lifeblood of Harlem’s underground economy:

  You could start a nickel-and-dime crap game in the park. Then you had crap games where there was a hundred thousand dollars. Guys would be pulling up in cars and coming out with shopping bags in the trunk full of cash. Right there in the street; right under a lamppost. Guys dropping two or three or five thousand dollars. If the cops came, they would close it down for a minute. Cops would pull over to the curb, and whoever was cuttin’ the game would go up and pay off the cops, and—boom—they was gone. And the game was back on. And so you had all the numbers players, all the short con players, anybody who had a bank w
as in that crap game. This is what I saw when I grew up and this is what I became a part of.

  Jazz advanced thanks in part to his uncle, who was an established numbers man.

  My uncle used to take me around to all the bars in Harlem. He used to run a numbers business. He’d sit me on a barstool while he went in the back to talk to all the guys who were the moneymakers and the shot callers. They would be in the dark in the back. I might be standing there watching the door, everybody that came in. These were places of business. People met who they wanted to meet, had their conversations or whatever. My uncle introduced me as his nephew. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was probably being socialized to be one of those guys in the back of the bar. And so I started out as a kid with my uncle taking me to spots, and then I looked up one day and I was the guy in the back of the bar.

  In the late 1950s, Hayden got busted with eleven bags of heroin in his pocket. The bags sold for two dollars each. He was both a seller and a part-time user, but this was his first offense. There was no such thing as narcotics rehab back then; he was sentenced to Comstock prison for three years. He was sixteen years old. “The first night they locked me in a cell, I was rehabilitated. I’d never been away from home, never been in this kind of situation, this cement and steel. I cried.”

  It was in prison that Hayden learned for the first time that he was a black man living in a white man’s world.

  Growing up in Harlem, I didn’t know nothin’ about racism ’cause it was all black people. In my community I could walk from 155th Street to 125th Street every Sunday to go to the movies, and every block I pass they waving, and everybody dressed up going to church. And now here I am caught up in this black/white dichotomy. The guards were all white, country boys; they had tobacco juice dripping down their shirts. Clubs big as baseball bats. They ran everything. All the good jobs in prison went to the white guys. They had all the positions of power. Whites had their handball courts and the others had theirs. If your ball went on to one of their courts and you went to get it, you’d get a beating. It was crazy. I came out of there after three years, and I was politicized. I was bitter, angry, and dangerous. It literally turned me into an animal.

  As an ex-con back in the hood, Hayden could not find gainful employment. “I had no skills; I had nothing.” One thing he did have was an instinct for the streets. Narcotics had supplanted gambling as the vice of choice, so he sold weed and heroin to get by.

  By 1968, Hayden was well aware of the Panther phenomenon.

  I observed them in the neighborhood and I’m saying, “Yeah.” Bunch of kids out there with black jackets and tams on, starting these lunch programs and the rest of this stuff. And then they started stepping up their program and taking on the police, that’s when they became targets. But then—what’s the saying?—“It ain’t no fun when the rabbit got the gun.” Suddenly the hunted turned the tables. It was a whole new ball game. Of course I felt pride in that. But at the same time—survival. The economic circumstances are critical. I stayed away from the Panthers because I had business to take care of.

  Jazz Hayden wasn’t aware of Huey Newton’s sentencing, or the ambush of two cops in Harlem, when he went strolling along Lenox Avenue with a friend on a crisp evening in October. He was carrying a bag of groceries. As they approached the intersection near Hayden’s apartment building, they noticed a lot of police gathered at the corner. “It was not unusual to see police activity on the street, but as we got closer, we noticed a van with police pouring out. It looked like they was raiding a building or something. My friend said, ‘Oh shit, they must be after somebody out here.’” As Jazz and his friend got closer, they noticed local residents ducking into doorways, as if they were getting out of the line of fire. When the cops saw Jazz and his friend, they swung into action. A handful of police popped up from behind, and a cop yelled, “Hold it!” That’s when Jazz and his friend realized they were the ones the cops were after.

  My friend who was with me, he didn’t hesitate. He ran. He disappeared into a tenement building. And as he was going through the doorway, all I could hear was POW POW POW POW-POW! I mean, the police tore that doorway up with gunfire. And I’m standing there with these groceries in my hands. I look around and see that the cops pretty much have me surrounded. My friend who went through the doorway, he’s gone. And I’m standing there looking. The cops yell, “Freeze!” I did have a gun on me. Part of me said freeze, too, but another part of me said, “Man, fuck this.” I just threw the groceries with the milk and everything up in the air, and broke straight for the police. I saw an opening and was turning back towards Lenox Avenue. A few of the cops drop to one knee and start firing—POW POW POW POW! I’m running, I’m high stepping, and I don’t know, the bullets must have been going between my legs or something. I got past them. But one of the detectives was running after me. He almost had me, but he tripped and fell at the corner as I hit Lenox Avenue. I ran straight towards the mosque on 116th Street; there’s a subway entrance there. I figure with all the people around, I’m safe, the detectives can’t shoot with all those people coming out of the subway. It’s too dangerous. But they didn’t stop, they kept firing. They wanted me dead or alive.

  Hayden was able to escape down an alley and up to a rooftop. From the roof, he looked down on the dozens of police scouring the neighborhood. “I stayed on the roof and wound up sleeping there that night. I woke up in the morning, looked out, and the coast was clear. I got out of there.”

  The next day Hayden tracked down his friend to trade notes on what happened. “We didn’t have any idea what the cops wanted. Were they after both of us? Were they after me? Him? We didn’t know.”

  That afternoon, he and the friend were walking on Park Avenue when a car full of detectives pulled up, guns drawn. “Once again, my friend, he broke. He ran one way, I ran another. Only this time, the cops followed me. The shooting commenced. I used the same tactics to get away, running into crowds. I ended up shaking them, but now I realized that I was the target. They had let my friend go and come after me. I was the one they wanted.”

  Hayden went into hiding. He called a black detective he knew in the local precinct and asked, “What the hell is going on?” The detective said, “Listen. The only thing that’s keeping you alive is me. All them white cops, if it was up to them, you’d be dead. What you need to do is come into the station so we can talk.”

  Jazz smelled a rat. “I had no intention of goin’ in. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. I had no clue. I didn’t know why they was shooting at me. Come in and talk about what?

  “They hunted me throughout Harlem, and they hunted me in the Bronx. Every time I’d be somewhere, I’d leave just before they got there. Somebody was giving them information.”

  Hayden didn’t read the newspapers much. If he had, he might have seen an article in the New York Times dated October 26, with the headline: “Suspect, 26, Seized in Harlem Shooting of Two Patrolmen.” The article explained that a man named Stanley Stewart had initially been arrested for the shooting of a fellow drug dealer but was also being charged with the shooting of the cops. Stewart was a sometime hustling partner of Jazz Hayden. Stewart insisted he hadn’t done the shooting. Fine, said the detectives, you tell us who did and we’ll let you slide. Stewart fingered his partner, Jazz Hayden.

  At the time, Hayden knew none of this. He was a man on the run, and he had no idea why. “They put out a ten-thousand-dollar reward on me. So all the numbers places, after-hours joints, they closed down everything. They said nobody is going to be able to hustle till we find this guy.”

  It all came to an end after a month, in the Bronx. Hayden recalled:

  I was hiding out with my girl. We was coming out of the apartment one day, and I seen all these flashing lights outside. The police were coming to the door. I left my girl and ran up to the roof. I looked out over the roof. Man, the streets were flooded, there must have been a whole precinct out there. They had just missed me in the apartment. So, once again, I’m on the roo
f. I got nowhere to go. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t go down the stairs. I couldn’t jump. I was stuck. But they didn’t come up. Once again, I slept on the roof till the morning, when I noticed snow was coming down.

  Hayden hid out a few days more, but they finally tracked him down at his girlfriend’s place, lying on a sofa with his gun out on a pillow for ready use. “I was half asleep. My girl was coming up the stairs. She was saying, ‘Jazz, Jazz!’ Then I saw the detectives behind her. She comes through the door, and they’re right behind her. They got the shotguns out. One of them said, ‘Watch it! He’s got a gun!’

  “I don’t know how I survived that. That was a license to kill for them. They rushed over to the sofa. They grabbed the gun. They grabbed me. The first thing they do is start examining me.” Jazz thought they were probably looking for bullet wounds—they’d shot at him so many times while he was running away that he must have been nicked somewhere.

  Only after he was taken into custody did Hayden learn why the police had been hunting him. He told his public defender, “This is insane. I had nothin’ to do with that shooting. It was a Panther shooting. I ain’t no Panther.” The lawyer reassured him that the case against him was weak: eyewitness descriptions of the shooter said he was six feet four; Hayden was a little guy, five feet five and a half. The lawyer told Jazz that even the cops probably didn’t think he was the shooter, but he was still charged with attempted murder and held without bail.