The Savage City

by T. J. English

  IN MARCH 1970, Dhoruba caught a break. After eleven months of incarceration, and just weeks before opening statements were scheduled to begin in the trial of the Panther Twenty-one, the New York State Supreme Court ruled that some of the defendants could be released on bail. The defendants selected for bail were Afeni Shakur, Joan Bird, Cetewayo, and Dhoruba. According to attorney Gerald Lefcourt, lead counsel for the Panther Twenty-one, Dhoruba was chosen “because he was brilliant; he was very articulate and could help raise money for the cause by giving speeches.”

  Over the next few months, Dhoruba undertook what was his most active period as a member of the BPP. He gave speeches all around New York City and traveled to Los Angeles, Dayton, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Buffalo, and North Carolina to talk at political forums and rallies about the case of the Panther Twenty-one. He hosted visiting “dignitaries” who wanted to meet with leaders of the now internationally famous Black Panther Party. Dhoruba met with representatives from the African National Congress, the Irish Republican Army, the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), and other self-proclaimed revolutionary groups who felt a kinship with the Black Panthers. He even escorted the French author and existentialist Jean Genet from New York to San Francisco via plane to meet with David Hilliard, Donald Cox, and other Panther leaders.

  Almost every weekend, Dhoruba flew on a commercial airliner to Oakland to meet with the Central Committee, taping updates on the Panther Twenty-one trial on a portable cassette recorder for Huey Newton to listen to in prison. In return, Newton sometimes recorded thoughts and observations of his own, returning the tapes to Dhoruba through his attorney, Charles Garry. Dhoruba found the process frustrating, but with Hilliard blocking him from direct access to Newton, it was his only lifeline to the leader.

  Dhoruba was also grappling with a serious philosophical conundrum. From Algeria, Eldridge Cleaver had been sending out proclamations calling for the Black Panther Party to become the “vanguard organization” in a worldwide black socialist revolution, with underground cadres in Palestine, Korea, North Vietnam, and all over Africa. Cleaver was promoting armed insurrection as the natural goal of this shared struggle. Huey Newton, on the other hand, was publishing a series of articles in the Black Panther advocating what he called “intercommunalism,” a form of community-based political organizing. Newton ridiculed cultural separatism, calling it “pork chop nationalism,” and seemed to be retrenching from any kind of armed confrontation.

  These differences troubled Dhoruba, and soon they threatened to disrupt the tectonic plates undergirding the Panther universe.

  In the wake of the Panther Twenty-one arrests, amid mounting fears that the East Coast Panthers were riddled with informants, the party’s Central Committee decided that the entire operation needed to be monitored by Oakland. In Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx, overseers arrived from California with the authority to call the shots. One of the first edicts passed by the West Coast overlords was that Black Panthers were no longer to wear dashikis, gelees, or other African-style garb. This rule was a dagger aimed at the heart of New York’s black nationalist identity, and it didn’t sit well with the party’s foot soldiers. “Can you imagine?” said Cleo Silvers, for whom learning to wrap her hair in a gelee had been a rite of passage into the Panthers. “This showed that there were people in leadership positions in the organization who didn’t know the first thing about our culture.”

  Like most New Yorkers, Dhoruba was not happy with the situation. He referred to Thomas Jolly, Robert Bey, and the other Central Committee envoys as “knuckleheads” and “fools.” But he remained loyal to the concept of the Black Panther Party. For Dhoruba, Huey Newton was an icon; his personal sense of courage was beyond reproach. Which is why, on August 5, 1970, Dhoruba and the rest of the Panther universe was ecstatic when the word circulated that Minister Huey was free.

  After more than two years in prison, Newton saw his conviction for voluntary manslaughter overturned on a technicality. Although prosecutors in California were already planning to retry Newton, he was released on bail, free to travel within the United States, giving speeches and raising money on behalf of the Black Panther Party.

  With his insinuating Louisiana drawl and quick wit, Newton had charisma to spare. When he first walked out of the courthouse where he was held in a cell pending release from prison, the light-skinned Newton tore off his shirt and stood atop a parked Volkswagen with his buff prison physique, as if to proclaim “Look, Ma, top of the world!” It seemed as though a new Panther era was under way.

  The enthusiasm didn’t last long. Dhoruba recalled:

  When Huey and them founded the party, it was a community organization in Oakland with maybe two dozen members. When Huey came out of prison he had a national organization with forty-something chapters that had spawned dynamic leaders like Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, Fred Hampton in Chicago, George Jackson, Geronimo Pratt, Angela Davis, and others all over the country. That freaked Huey out. He became concerned about maintaining control. To get to Huey, you had to go through David [Hilliard]. And David was intimidated by New York. All them country boys from Oakland were intimidated by New York. We used to take Huey and them up to Harlem; they were never comfortable in concentrated urban areas. Huey used to look at the buildings and say, “Wow, man, you’re all stacked up on top of one another. How many people you got in this one box?” They used to adopt our style, ’cause we wore all the New York–style shit. We used to wear wide-brimmed gangster hats and soft, full-length leathers. We weren’t wearing waist-length jackets like Huey and them wore. We were wearing the Heaven’s Gate shit, full-length leather dusters, with wraparound shades. We were on some shit. So when they came here, Huey used to say, “Set us up with some of them hats, Dye-ruba.”

  The differences were more than just stylistic.

  These motherfuckers had no sense of history. One of the things that corrupted the California Panthers and made Huey so corruptible was because they had no nationalist culture. They had no culture. They came from a people who had migrated there from the South only recently, less than a generation before. They had come to Oakland to work in the navy yards building the ships. That’s when they built the housing projects. And the racist cops, people who became cops were crackers from Louisiana and Texarkana. This was the dynamic they knew; they were transplanted country boys. And therefore, when they came in touch with real urban ghettos in Chicago, Philly, Baltimore, they were confronted with a whole different thing. And in New York the differences were significant, because Harlem was the geopolitical center of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism. The Panthers from Oakland never really could grasp that there was this vast international black culture.

  Dhoruba had hoped that Newton would bond with the New York Panthers, but it was not to be. On trips to New York, Huey did not stay with “the people” in Harlem or Brooklyn; he stayed downtown in lofts owned by wealthy radical benefactors, or in the Upper East Side apartment of actress Jane Fonda, a vocal Panther supporter who was often out of town filming a movie or participating in some antiwar activity. Newton kept his distance from the New York leadership. Though he oozed a brash confidence in public, when it came to interacting with the New York Panthers Newton seemed to have an inferiority complex.

  One of the first indications that the divisions were personal in nature came with the staging of a major event—the People’s Revolutionary Constitutional Convention, which would include speeches by Panther representatives at large-scale gatherings in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Newton had been out of prison barely a month, but he had been a constant presence in the imagination of Panthers on the East Coast, many of whom still had the iconic poster of Newton in his wicker chair on their walls. The Constitutional Convention was the first time many would see and hear the man they had worshipped for the last three years.

  Before Newton took the stage at Philadelphia’s Temple University, the large crowd was addressed by Cetewayo, representing the Panthe
r Twenty-one. As he had with his basso profundo rendering of the Panther Twenty-one Manifesto, Cetewayo used his impressive vocal instrument to deliver a rousing, militant speech.

  In contrast, Newton was a disappointment. His high-pitched nasal twang paled after Cetewayo’s delivery, and his didactic lecture on intercommunalism was condescending and esoteric. Having come to salute their newly released revolutionary hero, the audience grew restless after discovering he was only a man. Some even booed.

  After a forty-five-minute speech that seemed to go on forever, Newton left the stage in a rage. He had been reluctant to take part in the convention in the first place, since it had been initiated by Cleaver from Algeria. Now Huey had been humiliated on the East Coast, which he was beginning to view as hostile territory. He headed back to California convinced that the New York Panthers had set him up to look like a fool.

  Paranoia had always played a part in Newton’s temperament. But now, as he realized the Panthers had grown beyond his control, his insecurities kicked into overdrive. He was being courted by famous intellectuals and Manhattan celebrities at parties, plied with high-priced cognac and the new social drug: cocaine. Giving Newton cocaine, noted Dhoruba, “was like pouring gasoline on a brush fire” his ego flared in a million different directions. Newton came to believe that people were out to get him—and his fears played right into the hands of the FBI’s rejuvenated COINTELPRO initiative.

  Ever since Newton’s release from prison, the bureau had stepped up its counterintelligence program, aiming to exploit the growing rift between the Cleaver and Newton factions of the Black Panther Party. As one confidential memo confirmed, the purpose of COINTELPRO was to “attack, ridicule and to foment mistrust and suspicion amongst the current and past membership [of the Party].” The operation forged letters purporting to be from a Panther member to various party leaders, alleging that a particular member was sleeping with another member’s wife, or that a certain Panther was a police informant, or that another was stealing money from the organization. The cumulative effect of this full-scale disinformation campaign was devastating to the party, with each success noted in an FBI memorandum:

  To create friction between Black Panther Party (BPP) leader Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers and BPP Headquarters, a spurious letter concerning an internal dispute was sent Cleaver, who accepted it as genuine. As a result, the International Staff of the BPP was neutralized when Cleaver fired most of its members. Bureau personnel received incentive awards from the Director for this operation.

  J. Edgar Hoover took a hands-on approach to COINTELPRO, often pushing his agents to go further in their counterintelligence efforts. In an Airtel sent by Hoover to all forty-two field divisions participating in the program, the director castigated a particular division for objecting to one proposal because it involved the spreading of untrue information. Wrote Hoover:

  Purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt BPP and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge. If facts are present, it aids in the success of the proposal but the Bureau feels that the skimming of money is such a sensitive issue that disruption can be accomplished without facts to back it up.

  In another instance, an FBI division questioned a proposal to send Newton a letter, supposedly from a specific Panther member, claiming that his chief of staff, David Hilliard, was looking to have him murdered. The division expressed a concern that the letter “could place the Bureau in the position of aiding or initiating a murder by the BPP.” When Hoover responded, his only concern was that the forged letter shouldn’t be tied to a specific Panther member.

  Should reword this letter to convey the same thought without directly indicating that it is from a specific member of a rival group. The letter could imply that the writer would soon get in touch with Hilliard to see what he would pay to have Newton eliminated.

  Hoover expressed no objection that his agents’ activities could lead to murder—as long as it couldn’t be traced back to the bureau.

  Black Panthers eliminating other Black Panthers—that was the unspoken goal of COINTELPRO. And by late 1970, the program had begun to bear fruit. In the California desert, Fred Bennett, a Panther known to be sympathetic to the Cleaver faction, was tortured, doused with gasoline, set on fire, and shot to death. His body was then cut up and buried in the desert. It was believed that the murder had been ordered by Newton. In a confidential Airtel memo, Hoover could hardly contain his glee:

  Increasing evidence points to rising dissention within BPP causing serious morale problems and strained relationship among Panther hierarchy. Primary cause for these internal problems appears to be the dictatorial, irrational and capricious conduct of Huey P. Newton. His extreme sensitivity to any criticism, jealousness of other leaders and belief he is some form of deity are causing severe problems within the group…. He has recently expelled or disciplined several dedicated Panthers including…the “New York 21” who were a leading cause celebre of Pantherism…. This dissention coupled with financial difficulties offers an exceptional opportunity to further disrupt, aggravate and possibly neutralize this organization through counterintelligence. In light of above developments this program has been intensified by selected offices and should be further expanded to increase measurably the pressure on the BPP and its leaders.

  Like many prominent New York Panthers, Dhoruba was in the thick of the FBI’s disinformation campaign. He was identified in COINTELPRO files as a “field secretary” and also “street leader” of the Panthers. According to one confidential memo “Diruba [sic] is angry over leadership decisions” made by party headquarters, and, according to a confidential informant, “has plans to take over the entire New York chapter.”

  Dhoruba’s dissatisfaction was no secret. At a party central staff meeting held at a community center on Northern Boulevard in Corona, Queens, Dhoruba spoke up on behalf of the Panther Twenty-one. All the party’s national leaders were in attendance—Newton, Hilliard, Elbert “Big Man” Howard, Bobby Rush from Chicago, and seventeen others. At the meeting, Dhoruba complained that “there has not been proper accounting of funds raised by the Defense Committee.”

  Dhoruba was raising a touchy subject. In recent months, COINTELPRO agents had begun leaking information to reporters that Huey Newton was living a lavish lifestyle high in a penthouse apartment in Oakland. The accusations happened to be true: funds raised by the Committee to Defend the Panther Twenty-one in New York were being diverted to the Central Committee, and Newton was using some of the funds to finance his burgeoning cocaine habit.

  At the staff meeting in Queens, Newton rose to defend himself. Instead of addressing the issue directly, he rambled for nearly two hours, talking mostly about political developments in China and Cuba, the need for oppressed people to unite in the struggle against imperialism, the need for greater sales of the party newspaper—everything except the Panther Twenty-one case. Clearly, Newton, Hilliard, and others from party headquarters in Oakland would not hesitate to use funds from the Panther Twenty-one Defense Committee to suit their needs, but they weren’t interested in discussing a strategy to support the defendants.

  Dhoruba was caught in between. Monday through Friday, he arrived in the courtroom in lower Manhattan, often exhausted from traveling on weekends, giving speeches, and organizing activities on behalf of his fellow defendants. Still, some of those who were still in jail resented the fact that Dhoruba was free. As the primary liaison between the defendants and the Panther hierarchy, he received the brunt of their complaints about the party leadership. They also had major philosophical problems with what they saw as Newton’s efforts to lead the party away from its militant agenda toward the less radical realm of social and political reform.

  Locked away in prison, with no end in sight to their legal travails, the frustrations of the Panther Twenty-one and their defenders had been building for months. In early January 1971, it exploded when eleven of the defendants decided to publish an open letter that criticized the leadership of Huey
P. Newton and demanded the expulsion of David Hilliard as chief of staff.

  The letter, published in the underground weekly the East Village Other, was presented as an open letter to the Weather Underground, a radical organization that had begun a bombing campaign against “symbols of U.S. oppression.” Among other bombings, the Underground had set off an incendiary device in front of Judge Murtagh’s home in upper Manhattan, garnering some press coverage but creating no injuries and little property damage.

  In their open letter to the mostly white radical group, the Panther Twenty-one stated that as far as they were concerned the Weather Underground—not the Black Panther Party—was now the preeminent revolutionary vanguard organization in the United States.

  Dhoruba consulted with the Panther Twenty-one about the letter.

  I told them not to publish it. It wasn’t that I didn’t agree with them—I did. But I knew [the letter] would be viewed as a provocative act. Lumumba and them said, “Man, you soft, you out there letting them do what they wanna do. Maybe we should have your ass back in jail.” So now my [fellow defendants] are plotting to riot in the courtroom so my bail will get revoked at the next hearing.

  As Dhoruba had predicted, Huey Newton saw the letter as a threat to his leadership. In an interview on a national radio program, Newton referred to the Panther Twenty-one as “traitors and jackanapes.” All eleven Panthers who had signed the letter were immediately expunged from the party by Newton, and it was declared that the party would no longer support the Panther Twenty-one. Dhoruba had not signed the letter, but he was guilty by association: though he was not purged, he was immediately suspended by executive order, along with Cetewayo, Joan Bird, and Afeni Shakur.