The Savage City

by T. J. English

  Dhoruba moved his African wife and child back to the United States, where he settled in New Jersey. For a time, he resumed his role as a speaker at political forums and rallies. But increasingly Dhoruba’s politics and uncompromising point of view seemed to reflect battles from another era. He routinely attacked ostensibly progressive activists and political figures whom he considered insufficiently radical. Dhoruba was still a revolutionary, but the revolution he advocated had been put to rest long ago.

  In November 2008, at the age of sixty-three, Dhoruba became a father for the fourth time. His new child caused him to reflect back on the years of his youth, when he and others of his generation had thrown themselves into the whirlwind.

  I don’t know if I ever thought what the endgame of joining the Panthers would be. Maybe I thought the endgame would be a victory march down Madison Avenue with black, red, and green flags. You woulda had [police commissioner] Murphy and Lindsay and all of them in the hoosegow under charges of corruption…. I thought that maybe we would succeed in getting the type of respect that would allow us to basically build our own lives and maybe our own future. Because almost everybody I grew up with was either in jail or dead….

  My major motive was to make these motherfuckers respect us. Because I came from an environment where respect from [the police] didn’t come because they admired your intellect or creativity. They thought you were a whole different level of human being, if you were a human being at all. I really believed that there could be no true reconciliation unless there was pain on both sides. People only reconcile when they’re tired of the pain and tired of what’s happening.

  I think our mission was to show that you couldn’t employ violence, intimidation, and fear on black people without a consequence. That was the whole thing: a political consequence. If you do [something], there is a consequence.

  Bin Wahad, the former gangbanger from the South Bronx, had over the years embraced a Pan-Africanist perspective. The more he became immersed in the struggle for civil rights in the United States, the more acutely aware he became that he and his fellow revolutionaries were merely displaced Africans living out the legacy of slavery. His forays in Africa sometimes took him to his sharpest levels of reflection.

  I used to drive through Africa and see devastated villages and kids running across the roads, and you realize war doesn’t bring anybody anything. It destroys shit on a really deep, profound level. And war usually comes from those who have power, the people who have other people willing to kill you, willing to brutalize you, willing to murder you. These are the people who have the upper hand. So, at what point does a man have a right to fight, to use violence, at what point? Because if there’s no forces or organization or movement exacting a consequence on those who wield power over you, what can you do? I’m not saying everything is reducible to violence and that’s the only way. But if people feel free to exercise power over you, there’s nothing you can do about it. They’re gonna exercise power over you in their own interest, and they don’t really care what you have to say about it.

  Dhoruba’s opinions were far from flippant; they were hard-earned. You could disagree with his views and actions, but it was hard to question his bona fides. His philosophy was tempered in the streets and during twenty-four years behind bars, nineteen of those for a crime he maintains he did not commit.

  By early 2010, the former Panther had put together the pieces of a new business venture that involved ibogaine, a highly touted though controversial drug used as a treatment for narcotics addiction. Ibogaine is derived from iboga, a hallucinogenic plant of West African origin. Together with partners in Ghana, Dhoruba was looking to build a narcotics rehabilitation clinic somewhere in Saudi Arabia. Often, after negotiating some detail of the plan from his cell phone driving around New York and New Jersey, he would hang up the phone and say to himself, “I gotta get back to Africa.”

  George Whitmore

  Life wasn’t easy for Whitmore, a man whose existence was changed forever by a chance encounter with a policeman on a Brooklyn street. Upon his release in 1973, George moved back to the same area of New Jersey where he had lived most of his life. He tried to live an anonymous life, but his story as a wronged man was still fresh, and people asked him about it constantly. Remembered George, “I got tired of everybody saying, ‘Hey, aren’t you Whitmore?’ and reciting all these things I was trying to forget. I was polite and nice about it and everything, but I said, Well, it’s time for me to move. I lived in Whitesboro, Wildwood, Denisville, Woodbine. Everywhere I went, people knew my case.”

  Through his attorney, Whitmore filed a lawsuit against the City of New York for improper arrest and malicious prosecution. It took five years to get a ruling. In 1979, a judge dismissed Whitmore’s suit, saying that parts of it had been filed too late. The judge also declared that there was “no proof of actual malice” by the Brooklyn D.A.’s office in trying Whitmore three times on the same false accusation.

  In a rare display of discord, George was quoted in the Times saying, “They wrecked my life and they still won’t admit they did anything wrong. If justice prevails, let it prevail for me.” And, eventually, it did: the judge’s decision was overturned on appeal, and in 1982 Whitmore received $560,000 in a settlement with the city.

  As often happens with people from humble beginnings who come into a large sum of money, the influx of cash was a mixed blessing for Whitmore. Relatives, friends, acquaintances, and would-be business partners came out of the woodwork. George gave some of the money away to family members in need. He invested half of the money in a cattle business, but his partner, a former schoolmate, fleeced Whitmore of nearly $100,000. The crooked business partner went to jail, but Whitmore was unable to recoup his losses.

  In Denisville, a pleasant, mostly white suburb on the other side of the tracks from Wildwood, Whitmore bought a beautiful, spacious home (“a mansion,” he called it) on a tree-lined street. He got a good deal: the asking price was $100,000, but since the previous occupant had killed his wife and himself in the house, George was able to buy the house for $75,000.

  George moved in with a lady friend and three kids—two of his and one of hers. He knew about the killings that had taken place in the house, but what he didn’t know was that the place was haunted. “One morning I woke up and all the silverware had been pulled out of the drawers and thrown on the floor. That was only the beginning; there were ghosts in that house.” George bought sheets of plywood and boarded up part of the house to keep the ghosts away.

  There was another problem. One day, George came home and someone had painted the words Nigger Get Out on the side of his garage. Whitmore contacted the local police, but they seemed uninterested in what George called his “KKK problem.” When the racial harassment continued, George decided he wasn’t wanted in the lily-white suburb of Denisville. He sold the property at a loss and moved back to Wildwood.

  It was the mid-1980s, and Whitmore’s money was running out. He took what he had left, bought a scallop boat, and started his own fishing business. George had always loved the water, ever since his days of sticking a homemade fishing pole out his bedroom window when he was a child. With a crew of four or five men, George went out to sea and stayed there through the fishing season. “Out on the ocean seemed to be the only place where I could get peace of mind,” he recalled. “Nobody knew me or bothered me. I wasn’t no famous man who went through hell. I was anonymous.”

  One day, out on his fishing boat, George was hit in the face by a steel cable and broke his nose. He bled all over the boat, but he stayed at sea until he and the crew met their scallop quota. By the time he returned to land and went to the hospital, it was too late to reset his broken nose. Forever after, George would have a noticeably crooked nose.

  Eventually, like many things in Whitmore’s life, his fishing business took a bad turn. His boat was repossessed for lack of payment. By the 1990s, the money from his settlement with the City of New York was long gone. He lived off welfare and disab
ility payments from the State of New Jersey. His drinking problem, which had begun in prison, grew worse, and when George drank he sometimes got ornery. His girlfriend took out a restraining order against him, which George routinely violated. Thus began a series of arrests for things like criminal trespassing, violating a protection order, simple assault, contempt of court, defaulting on bail, and driving while intoxicated. Between 1990 and 2005, Whitmore was arrested twenty-four times. He became a well-known figure at Middle Township Municipal Court and other courts and jail-houses in and around the Wildwood area.

  Into the new century, now in his sixties, George stopped getting into trouble with the law, but his life of hardship did not let up. He had three separate heart attacks and was once declared legally dead. He broke more bones than he could count. Whitmore had developed a knack for disaster. He was like a tumbleweed blowing in the wind, freewheeling, trying to stay a few steps ahead of the next catastrophe. Nearly every day he self-medicated with vodka, beer, and cigarettes.

  One day in January 2010, George was at the Western Union counter at a check-cashing store in Rio Grande, New Jersey, picking up money sent to him by a friend in Manhattan. Standing nearby, George noticed a man wearing a surgeon’s mask over his face, but he didn’t think too much about it: There was lots of talk on the news about the swine flu, and sometimes people wore masks. Whitmore picked up his money, $250 in cash. Then, before he had a chance to put it in his pocket, the man with the mask snatched the money out of his hand and dashed out the door.

  Whitmore ran after the thief, heading out into the street, when—BAM!—he was hit by a car. The vehicle dragged him twenty feet. Whitmore was unconscious when paramedics arrived on the scene and determined that the victim needed to be transferred to a hospital in Atlantic City. The fastest way to get there was by helicopter.

  When Whitmore awoke, he was high in the sky—the first time he’d been in a helicopter since the day in 1973 when he was flown to New York City for the court hearing that would eventually lead to his freedom.

  Whitmore suffered numerous broken bones and a concussion in the accident, but he escaped life-threatening injury. Soon he returned to his home at a motel off Route 9 in the town of Cape May Court House, where he convalesced. Said George, “I’ve had three heart attacks, been declared dead, got a stent in my heart, been harassed by ghosts, the KKK, broke my nose—you name it. But I’m still here. I ain’t going nowhere. I’m a survivor.”

  IN THE CITY of New York, the wheels of progress continue to turn. The forces that shaped the lives of Whitmore, Phillips, Dhoruba, and others seemed to linger for decades—and things got worse before they got better. In the 1980s, the explosion of crack cocaine in the ghetto would lead to levels of violence and mayhem that far surpassed the heroin years of the 1950s and 1960s. The result was a staggering rate of incarceration for black males in their teens and twenties. The number of homicides in the city doubled from its total of one thousand in 1970 to more than two thousand in 1990. The city’s crime rate continued to climb until, coincidentally, New York elected its first African American mayor, David Dinkins, in 1990.

  The 1990s, when former federal prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani became mayor after Dinkins, saw a continuation in the decline of violent crime, but it was also a period characterized by instances of police brutality that far outstripped anything that had happened to George Whitmore. A Haitian immigrant was tortured and sodomized in the back room of a Brooklyn station house; an African immigrant was riddled with forty-one bullets by a team of cops while he reached for his identification in front of his home in the Bronx. Protesters marched on police headquarters and City Hall. Eventually, Giuliani, like John Lindsay, headed to Florida to run for president. In the Republican Party primary of 2008, he somehow managed to do even worse than Lindsay, garnering a total of zero delegates before dropping out of the race.

  Since the infamous 9/11 terror attacks of 2001 the crime rate has remained low. In 2009 there were 496 murders in New York, the lowest total since the NYPD began keeping detailed crime statistics in 1963. The Savage City is now the Safest Big City in America. But many of the fissures remain. Within the criminal justice system, assumptions based on race and class are still the norm. Out on the street, police stop and frisk African American and Latino youths at a rate nine times higher than whites. The city’s jails are disproportionately filled with young black men. More cops than ever live in the suburbs, outside the city they police. When it comes to poor and minority neighborhoods in places like Brooklyn and the Bronx, they are strangers in a strange land.

  Crime may be down, but the system is still based on fear. Mayors and police commissioners come and go; they tout new programs and produce statistics to show they’re doing their job, but the institutional roots are largely the same. A criminal justice system that was designed to separate the races, and to enforce a racial caste system, does not change overnight. In fact, it doesn’t change at all unless the general populace, and those who enforce the system, are willing to recognize the problem.

  The Savage City may have drifted from memory; the names and events of a tumultuous era have been paved over and buried away. But the scars, emotions, and underlying causes are still present. They remain embedded below the surface of the city like a dormant but smoldering volcano, one that could rumble to life at any time.

  Today, the city projects an image of security. But the fault lines remain. Lift up the rock and you will see.

  NOTES

  The narrative of this book is based on primary sources: interviews with participants, archival documents, and unpublished manuscripts, as well as many of the books, newspaper and magazine articles, reports, transcripts, and law enforcement files listed throughout this section.

  In instances where individuals were interviewed numerous times, they are usually listed by date of the first interview.

  Abbreviations are used to designate the following institutions and agencies:

  Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP Papers)

  New York City Municipal Archives (NYCMA)

  New York Public Library (NYPL)

  Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture (SCRBC)

  Paley Center for Media (PCM)

  Vanderbilt University Television News Archives (Vanderbilt TVNA)

  NYPD Bureau of Special Services (BOSS)

  Organization of African American Unity (OAAU)

  Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM)

  Black Panther Party (BPP)

  Federal Bureau of Investigation Counterintelligence Program (FBI COINTELPRO)

  INTRODUCTION

  Safest Big City in America: Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City began using this phrase in 2006 to characterize the city’s declining crime rate. The term caught on primarily as a marketing tool to promote tourism.

  Crime rates in NYC, 1963 to 1973: Greenwood, Peter W., Analysis of the Apprehension Activities of the New York City Police Department.

  Mechanical cotton picker: Lemann, Nicholas, The Promised Land, pp. 3–6.

  Sharecropping system: Ibid., pp. 5–6, 11–25; Blackmon, Douglas A., Slavery by Another Name, pp. 90–91, 120–121.

  The black migration: Lemann, The Promised Land, pp. 6–7; Biondi, Martha, To Stand and Fight, pp. 5–11, 28–31.

  My Father’s Gun: McDonald, Brian, My Father’s Gun, pp. 14–27; interview with Brian McDonald (February 4, 2010).

  The Lyons Law: McDonald, My Father’s Gun, p. 19.

  McDonald’s father: Interview with Brian McDonald (February 4, 2010).

  Police brutality in NYC: Biondi, To Stand and Fight, pp. 70–74.

  Forty-six unarmed African Americans killed by police: Ibid., p. 60.

  “Lynching, Northern style”: Ibid.

  Harlem riot of 1943: Ibid.; Jackson, Kenneth T. (ed.), Encyclopedia of New York, p. 124.

  Hinton Johnson incident: Goldman, Peter Louis, The Death and Life of Malcolm X, pp. 56–49.

  “A boiler that is a
llowed”: Cannato, Vincent J., The Ungovernable City, p. 166.

  NYC crime statistics: New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, statistical analysis of seven major crime groups, 1963–1973.

  1. BLOOD OF THE LAMB

  Martin Luther King Jr. stabbing incident: “Dr. King, Negro Leader, Stabbed by Woman in a Store in Harlem,” New York Times, September 21, 1958; “Martin Luther King Stabbed,” New York Daily News, September 21, 1958; Branch, Taylor, Parting the Waters, pp. 243–245.

  New Yorkers depart for March on Washington, D.C.: “Cars, Buses, Trains, and Planes Taking New Yorkers to Capital,” New York Times, August 28, 1963; Petersen, Anna, “80,000 Lunches Made Here by Volunteers for Washington Marchers,” New York Times, August 28, 1963; Hansen, Drew D., The Dream, pp. 25–27.

  The March on Washington: “Gentle Army Occupies Capital; Politeness Is Order of the Day,” New York Times, August 29, 1963; “Wagner Hails March; Cites Whites’ Turnout,” New York Times, August 29, 1963; Jones, Theodore, “Tired New Yorkers Head Home Full of Praise for Capital Rally,” New York Times, August 29, 1963; “Rights Marchers Tell of Feelings,” New York Times, September 2, 1963; Eyes on the Prize, PBS documentary; Hansen, The Dream, pp. 1–64; Branch, Parting the Waters, pp. 833–864.

  “I have a dream” speech: Eyes on the Prize, PBS documentary; Hansen, The Dream, entire book; Branch, Parting the Waters, pp. 846–887. Speech was broadcast in its entirety on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 19, 2010 (text version transcribed directly from audio by the author).

  The speech on television: Adams, Val, “TV: Coverage of March,” New York Times, August 29, 1963.