Читать книгу AMERICAN JUSTICE ON TRIAL - Lise Pearlman - Страница 15

Some people say we’ve got a lot of malice Some say it’s a lot of nerve But I say we won’t quit moving until we get what we deserve We have been bucked and we have been scorned We have been treated bad, talked about as just bones But just as it takes two eyes to make a pair, ha Brother we can’t quit until we get our share.

— JAMES BROWN, “SAY IT LOUD”

Newton and Seale’s new revolutionary party started out slowly. At the invitation of their friend Richard Aoki, the two fund-raised in the fall of 1966 by hawking copies of the quotations of Chairman Mao for $1 apiece at anti-war demonstrations on the U. C. Berkeley campus. They figured, correctly, that inner city blacks would do brisk business with white radicals when they offered them Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book, with sayings like “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” At seventy-cents’ profit per copy, the proceeds mounted quickly. They used them to purchase guns as an inducement to enroll new Panther Party members.

Aoki had started wearing the same black leather jacket and tilted beret as the Panther leaders, his eyes shielded by dark glasses. With his moustache, practiced grimace and sunglasses, he exuded a fierce image despite his slight stature. Seale and Newton gave the 29-year-old Japanese-American the title Field Marshal, the only non-black who would ever achieve any rank in the party. Newton had told him “The struggle for freedom, justice and equality transcends racial and ethnic barriers. As far as I’m concerned, you black.”¹ After all, Aoki’s entire family had endured worse violation of his civil rights than almost anyone else Newton knew — Aoki spent years as a child prisoner of war in a Utah internment camp with no indoor plumbing or heat, his parents scorned as enemies despite the fact they were both born and raised in America. Aoki had quit the army because he did not want to kill Vietnamese civilians. The ex-GI still bore the psychological scars of his family’s mistreatment. Before their relocation, his grandfather ran a successful Oakland noodle company. Internment split up his parents. On their return, they found the family home vandalized; his father became a hardened criminal. As a teen in West Oakland, it was easy for Aoki to identify with disaffected black hustlers on the street.

Aoki earned his title of Field Marshal by supplying Seale and Newton with their first weapons; he also gave Newton and new recruits like young Bobby Hutton firearms training. Unbeknownst to either Seale or Newton or anyone else in their circle, since 1961 Aoki had been a government informant helping the FBI track Communists and other dissidents.² Aoki told the FBI he did not support the Soviet Union and would help them unmask Communists; he became a key informant on the Free Speech Movement at Cal. The shocking revelation of Aoki’s duplicity would not occur until almost five decades later as the accidental byproduct of Freedom of Information Act requests by investigative reporter Seth Rosenfeld, author of the 2012 best-seller Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power. When the news went public, Bobby Seale refused to believe it was true. A lifelong friend of Aoki’s from the days when they were both young radicals found it just as astonishing, but realized that Aoki had long led a compartmentalized life.

The FBI was focused on Communists when the bureau originally recruited Aoki. When he started taking classes at Oakland City College, it was the FBI that suggested he open a chapter of the Trotskyite Student Socialist Alliance. Over the next fifteen years, Aoki secretly reported to the FBI on various leftist groups, including the Panthers. But when Aoki first joined Seale and Newton in 1966 to help write their party platform, the FBI did not have any interest yet in either Seale or Newton. No evidence would ever emerge that the FBI used one of its standard provocateur tactics to put Aoki up to offering the Panthers weapons and weapons training in 1966 to lure them into confrontations with the police. Aoki may have provided the weapons out of genuine desire to abet their new venture; he had witnessed the brutality of police in West Oakland firsthand.

Aoki graduated from Cal in 1968 with a sociology degree and, after obtaining a master’s degree in 1970 in the same field, went on to a 25-year career as a teacher and administrator at Merritt College (formerly Oakland City College). When Rosenfeld interviewed Aoki in 2007 for his book about the Free Speech Movement, Rosenfeld stunned Aoki with news that an FBI agent had identified him as a long-term informant listed in their records as T-2. The ex-GI at first retreated into silence; then he offered a denial with a cryptic explanation: “It is complex. Layer upon layer.”³ Three years later — before Rosenfeld’s discovery went public — Aoki committed suicide at his home. On the bed near where he shot himself he had carefully laid out his Panther regalia and his freshly ironed Army uniform.⁴

Many informants led two lives. At Cal in 1966, Aoki become one of the most active Asian students lobbying for ethnic studies. He invited his good friends Seale and Newton to campus and provided Seale with a speaking opportunity. John Burris was an undergraduate that fall and became an early fan of Seale’s oratory. But Burris disagreed with the Panthers’ overall strategy: “There was a call for all black men to be armed. . . . My sense is if you have guns then you might be placed in a position to use them. . . . I was not a person who believed in violence and so I would not put myself in a position to harm anyone or to have anyone harm me . . . and I would not own a gun, and carry a gun, promote . . . any activities of that kind. . . . I didn’t think that was realistic. . . . I had a real sense of the power of the U.S. Government . . . and that you could be wiped out, a whole mass of people could be wiped out.”

Burris was not alone in his squeamishness about packing a gun. Most of the Cal students who gravitated towards the Panthers likely had a similar reaction. Newton headed off campus to recruit more streetwise acquaintances. The promise of guns quickly lured neighborhood toughs and high school truants to Newton’s lectures about his new party’s philosophy. The Panthers’ first recruit, sixteen-year-old Bobby Hutton, had been one of Seale’s charges at the Anti-Poverty Program in Oakland. Newton routinely carried a pump-action shotgun, Hutton carried an M3 carbine, and Seale a .45 automatic in a holster. As they gained off-campus supporters, the Panthers started to become an intimidating force.

By 1966, the whole atmosphere at Oakland City College had already become racially polarized. Many black students became campus bullies. Unofficial taboos kept most whites from using a particular water fountain the black students favored, maybe in retaliation for Southern “whites only” drinking fountains. Whites began to feel extremely uncomfortable if they congregated with black students in the hallway outside of classrooms; blacks also monopolized the snack room. White students who made eye contact with black males while walking around campus often generated icy stares; whites who were not radicals faced derision as “honkies.” Graffiti on campus included death threats against honkies. When members of the new Black Panther Party brought rifles on campus, the open display of weapons intimidated and frightened many students while inspiring and empowering others.

Meanwhile, Seale and Newton had begun to tap into simmering black community outrage at chronic police abuse, a well-documented and long-standing problem. Back in 1949, the local branch of the left-wing Civil Rights Congress had investigated charges of Oakland officers regularly beating up black residents. Oakland-based civil rights lawyer Bob Treuhaft and his wife, Decca Mitford, had searing memories of that eye-opening experience. Decca spent long hours assisting in that research: “[Our investigation disclosed] monstrous beastliness, authority cloaked in nightmare garb . . . On Fridays . . . police would regularly lie in wait outside the West Oakland bars that served as banks for the cashing of pay checks, arrest those emerging on charges of drunkenness, and in the privacy of the prowl cars beat them and rob them of their week’s pay en route to the West Oakland police station.”⁵

The scathing report led to a legislative inquiry into police brutality in Oakland, one of the first official inquiries ever undertaken of any major police department for alleged abusive treatment of minorities. These days, such findings would be national news and would provoke mass demonstrations, but in those years before the Civil Rights Era, the report drew little media coverage and no meaningful state action. The continuing racial divide between the black community and the OPD greatly exacerbated the situation.

The first noticeable progress occurred in 1951 when Treuhaft and his law partner Edises amazingly obtained the reversal of a death penalty conviction in a highly publicized murder case involving a local black shoe-shine boy, Jerry Newson. (From 1930 to 1960 half of those executed in California were black.) Newson had been accused of murdering a white pharmacist and his assistant. In his defense, Newson testified that the police pressured him into making a false confession under threat of facing “the hard boys” of the department who would otherwise beat a confession out of him.⁶ On remand from the California Supreme Court, the case was tried twice more, but both trials ending in hung juries. Newson eventually went to jail for an unrelated robbery. As a small boy growing up in Oakland, Newton had heard all about the Newson case. Huey considered Bob Treuhaft and Bert Edises two of his childhood heroes. They offered the black community a glimmer of hope that police misconduct might sometimes be redressed.

For more than two decades after the war, the black community believed the OPD deliberately cultivated a racist police force, mostly from the South. Black policemen were rare in the 1940s. A few more were hired in the 1950s, maybe 15 in all. By the late 1960s, when blacks were the largest minority group in the city, of 658 sworn police personnel in the OPD, only 27 were nonwhites — and only 16 of those were black. With the exception of one of 95 sergeants and one of 11 captains, the leadership was entirely white. Curtis Baker, who ran the West Oakland Help Center, became a strong advocate of creating a civilian police review board. He testified before the California Civil Rights Commission in June of 1966 at a hearing on police community relations: “Oakland must stop hiring Ku Klux Klansmen and Mississippi hillbillies to do their killing. “We (Negroes in Oakland) are living in a cage.”⁷

Seale’s and Newton’s revolutionary friend Louis Armmond, who introduced them to the writings of Dr. Fanon, agreed with that stark assessment. When the Panthers were first launched, “We found that community monitoring of the police and . . . methods of self-defense in Oakland, were just as necessary as . . . armed self-defense in . . . Mississippi and Louisiana in the ’60s during the civil rights movement. But we knew that in Mississippi, the Klan and the police and the sheriff were the same. In Oakland, there were more or less formal separations, but the official police actually carried out the same methods in many ways as the Klan would do unofficially in the South.”

A decade later, a black elected official in the East Bay described local law enforcement in the 1960s the same way — just as brutal as “the most rabid, cracker police force in a small Mississippi town.”⁸ That was quite an indictment. Mississippi and Alabama provided such horrific evidence of racist policing in the early ’60s that they became the major catalyst for passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Louisiana and rural Florida police employed similarly bigoted tactics, but Alabama took center stage in 1963 when national television showed shocking footage of police under Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor siccing attack dogs on freedom marchers and using fire hoses on children as well as adults. On “Bloody Sunday” — March 7, 1965 — people across the country again saw with their own eyes vicious beatings by police in Selma, Alabama, clubbing peaceful marchers unconscious for joining a freedom walk to Montgomery led by Reverend Martin Luther King. Future Georgia Congressman John Lewis was among the hospitalized victims.

Oakland’s Police Chief strongly objected to this odious comparison; he vigorously disputed that his recruiters discriminated against minority applicants or actively sought Southern racists. Actually, the OPD conducted a nationwide recruitment effort during the years after World War II, focused on a combination of military veterans and graduates of four police academies, including one at Berkeley. These efforts to find top applicants netted dedicated criminology majors like George Hart at Cal, who would rise through the ranks to become chief in 1973. And yet that did not entirely refute charges of racist police recruitment.

Two of the four academies that OPD hired from were located in the Deep South — one in Florida and one in Louisiana. Those recruitment efforts, as well as newspaper ads in hubs like Atlanta, attracted many white applicants to the OPD from communities that routinely turned a blind eye to mistreatment of blacks and to “unsolved” lynchings in which off-duty police were themselves often complicit. Throughout the South in the Civil Rights Era, the FBI fed slander to daily newspapers many of whose publishers gladly labeled Reverend King an “unspeakable extremist agitator,” who associated with Communists. The press likewise derided Northern voting rights volunteers as “miserable street rabble.”⁹ Growing up in communities with such little regard for the rights of blacks who lived across the tracks, it was no wonder that many Southern recruits to the OPD drew fierce criticism from West Oaklanders for the way they handled their jobs in the similarly segregated city of Oakland. (Under pressure from the black community, the OPD later abandoned its national recruitment efforts and focused on hiring more locals.)

In doing research for his 1999 book, Blue v. Black: Let’s End the Conflict Between Cops and Minorities, civil rights lawyer John Burris concluded: “The culture of the department in Oakland was such that, even if an officer came with good intentions, he could be co-opted by the department itself, by the culture of the department. And good officers in fact, even if they didn’t turn into bad officers and turn to brutality, will nevertheless not speak up about it.” Guy Saperstein, author of Civil Warrior: Memoirs of a Civil Rights Attorney, noticed that other local officials were complicit as well. When he worked with young black kids in an Oakland playground in the 1960s before he became a lawyer, he reported to his superiors that he had seen policemen repeatedly drive onto the playground just to harass the children. The only upshot was that Saperstein was considered a troublemaker and transferred to a different location.

An experience like Saperstein’s at that time was unfortunately par for the course. If accused of any misconduct, the police department could then always count on the strong backing of both an irate City Council and the Oakland Tribune. When the Poverty Council sought civilian oversight of the police in 1966, the City Council defended the department’s professionalism and the majority rejected out-of-hand either creation of an advisory police review board or Mayor Reading’s suggestion of an ombudsman to investigate citizens’ complaints.

The City Council pointed to an official report detailing an incident in East Oakland that could have erupted into a riot but was defused by local police. “Police officials met behind the scenes with Negro teenage leaders to discuss rumors of police brutality and rumors of plans for further violence, and felt that these talks helped to improve the atmosphere.”¹⁰ But citing one instance of the police seeking to reduce potential conflict in East Oakland did not address the misery still experienced by the black community of West Oakland. The mainstream press compounded black communities’ sense of oppression. Oakland and San Francisco reporters for major papers maintained their longstanding color code for news stories, leaving ghetto murders and beatings largely unexamined and unreported.¹¹

In this toxic environment, most black Oaklanders felt helpless and resentful — not Newton and Seale, who seized the opportunity for direct action. They looked for an easy-to-find storefront, where they could boldly advertise their name for all passersby. On January 1, 1967, using paychecks Seale, Newton and Hutton received from the anti-poverty program, the Panthers opened their first office in North Oakland near the Berkeley border. A large sign in their window at the corner of Fifty-sixth and Grove streets proclaimed, “Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.” (Grove Street is now Martin Luther King, Jr. Way.)

Today, most Americas recognize Miranda warnings from crime stories on television and in the movies. Police routinely tell suspects before interrogating them that they have a right to remain silent and a right to an attorney. These constitutional rights stem from the Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate oneself and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel in criminal proceedings. But such warnings were not required in California or other states when Huey Newton had his first brushes with the law. They were the controversial product of the Warren Court in the mid-1960s. When Newton took law classes, he learned about these new protections. In 1964, in a five-to-four decision in a case arising out of Illinois, the United States Supreme Court invalidated a confession obtained after the suspect asked to speak to an attorney and was denied that opportunity. The decision in Escobedo v. Illinois (1964) 378 U.S. 478 generated a lot of confusion about exactly when a suspect should be told he has a right to remain silent under the Fifth Amendment guarantee that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” It also left unresolved whether a suspect first had to ask for an attorney in order to benefit from the Sixth Amendment right to “have the assistance of counsel for his defence” before answering questions from the police.

The California Supreme Court addressed the Sixth Amendment question the following year, reviewing a death penalty case from San Quenten to decide if an inmate’s confession should be thrown out even though he had not first asked for a lawyer. In People v. Dorado (1965) 62 Cal. 3d 338 the California court divided four to three in reversing the inmate’s conviction based on Escobedo. Then, in June 1956, came the decision of the United State’s Supreme Court itself on when suspects must be told of their right to remain silent and their right to council. The high court had before it several criminal convictions from various jurisdictions and made its famous ruling in all of them under the name of the lead case, Miranda v. Arizona (1966) 384 U.S. 436.

Miranda was another highly controversial five-to-four ruling. The majority recognized the inherently intimidating nature of a police stop and how that severely impacted a suspect’s free choice. It also considered the question of whether those unschooled in the law should be required to first ask for an attorney in order to receive the protection of that Sixth Amendment right. The high court took notice that the FBI already had a practice of giving warnings to suspects at the outset of a criminal interrogation that they had the right to remain silent and the right to consult an attorney. The majority saw no good reason why such warnings should not be required of state and local police as well, where the vast majority of criminal prosecutions took place. The burden was minimal and outweighed by the benefit to individuals entitled to constitutional guarantees. The Miranda ruling was issued just a few months before the Panthers formed. The Oakland Police Department regularly monitored court decisions affecting its practices and quickly implemented mandated changes by special order and department training bulletins. Huey Newton saw this major new requirement as a perfect teaching tool to educate West Oakland arrestees on what their rights were and to put abusive cops who might not be following the new mandates on the defensive.

Starting in January 1967, the handful of members of the newly-formed Black Panther Party for Self-Defense began tailing Oakland police, pulling their cars over to observe firsthand when the police stopped to arrest someone in the neighborhood. Aoki went with them on their “shotgun patrols.” “We had cameras and tape recorders to chronicle what was going on.”¹²

The Panthers knew this was a major provocation. The basic idea of keeping tabs on police behavior toward ghetto blacks was not new — a Community Alert Patrol had been established with federal funding in Watts following the historic 1965 riots in that largely black Los Angeles district. But in Watts they just used tape recorders and notebooks. A clandestine, armed group of black war veterans had formed in Louisiana in 1964 to defend their neighborhoods from the Ku Klux Klan. But brandishing loaded weapons in public gave the Black Panthers a distinctive, more threatening aspect.

Amid the buzz created by their boldness, Newton began holding weekly meetings at the Panther office for walk-ins who learned they would get weapons training if they could sit still long enough through lectures in political theory. Armed Panthers continued to monitor black neighborhoods in Oakland, following testy police around on their patrols. To establish a unique identity, besides carrying weapons, the Panthers adopted uniforms for themselves: black pants, a powder blue shirt, a black leather jacket (which most of them already owned), black shoes and socks and a black beret like that worn by Mark Comfort, Curtis Baker and others modeling themselves after Che Guevara and the French Resistance. Jean Genet later proclaimed that the Panthers “attacked first by sight.”¹³ At the time, Thelton Henderson was running a legal aid office in East Palo Alto. The Panthers came to town recruiting and spreading their message. He recalls the first time he saw members representing the Party: “It was a very impressive show of . . . military-style discipline. When they left, they had a lot of people that said, ‘Hey. This is good. This is the kind of thing that East Palo Alto could benefit from.’”

Newton commuted to San Francisco Law School to take another course in criminal law and spent many hours studying in the law library above the Poverty Center. He kept a copy of California Criminal Laws in his car, prepared to read policemen chapter and verse about the constitutional right to bear arms, as well as the rights of arrested citizens. This was all part of the two-pronged approach: radical action on the one hand, and savviness about “the system” on the other. Newton sometimes brought a gun to work at the federal jobs program and put it on his desk. He liked to explain how California gun law allowed the carrying of loaded weapons. His friend Paul Cobb from elementary school who worked with Newton in the jobs program had no interest in picking up a gun. When Lionel Wilson discovered that both Seale and Newton brought guns to work, they were fired. Newton sometimes got too cocky — to his detriment.

In January of 1967 Newton and Seale found an opportunity to proselytize at a black power rally in Golden Gate Park where more than 30 speakers were invited. They brought along copies of the Little Red Book to sell. Eldridge Cleaver had just gotten out of prison the month before and attracted a large crowd to hear the famous author, now publishing his essays in Ramparts. Afterward, Newton and Seale tracked Cleaver down at a radio interview and introduced themselves. Cleaver then invited the pair to a meeting at a rented Victorian in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco. The new cultural center Cleaver co-founded with other local black authors was called Black House. Parties were held there every Saturday for literary and political gatherings of black radicals. Cleaver told Newton and Seale planning sessions would start soon at Black House for a memorial celebration for the second anniversary of Malcolm X’s death. The Panthers’ 10-point program was just the unifying agenda he was looking for. Cleaver’s aim at the time was to unite all black militants under one umbrella.

Seale and Newton showed up at the first planning session with several new recruits, all in uniform and all armed. They stood at attention together on one side of the room as Cleaver urged the other attendees to adopt the Panthers’ 10-point program. Law student Earl Anthony, who had been to many meetings of black nationals before, had never seen anything like the Panthers. Anthony himself led the Independent Action Movement that had recently launched a highly successful public housing rent strike in San Francisco. The attendees that night surprised Cleaver by adopting the 10-point program without discussion or dissent. Many remained wary, especially the Black Panthers of Northern California, whom Seale had broken with in the fall. The Black Muslims Cleaver invited had little interest in anything Cleaver might orchestrate; they mistrusted him for having a white girlfriend affiliated with Communists. Like Stokely Carmichael, the Black Muslims no longer wanted anything to do with white radicals.

The Malcolm X event would last for several days in late February with his widow Betty Shabazz a star attraction. The other focal point would be a memorial service for Matthew Johnson, the unarmed teenager killed by police in San Francisco in September 1966. Cleaver tapped both the San Francisco Panthers and the newer Oakland Panther Party for Self-Defense to meet Betty Shabazz at the airport and escort her into the city. Seale and Newton and their new recruits shocked observers by showing up at San Francisco airport on February 21, 1967, carrying carbines, shotguns and pistols. The Black Panthers of Northern California showed up, too, without loaded weapons. Police had also arrived in large numbers, apparently alerted ahead of time to the reception awaiting Betty Shabazz’s arrival. The combined entourage of Black Panthers then escorted her to an interview with Eldridge Cleaver at Ramparts headquarters in North Beach, with the police following them.

On the street outside the Ramparts offices, about a hundred policemen confronted the black militants before they entered the building. Eldridge Cleaver enjoyed the tableau from inside his office. Newton accused one of the policemen of having an itchy finger and dared him to draw. Seale immediately realized how close Newton had then come to a shootout: “If just one of them had gone for his gun, he would blast him, because Huey had his gun at a 45-degree angle to the ground and he was ready. He had the barrel of the gun in his left hand. His finger was on the trigger, he had knocked the safety off, and had jacked a round into the chamber.”¹⁴

The police backed off, but they recognized that this was an ugly sign of more local armed confrontations to come. Incidents were occurring with greater frequency across the country. In June, a group of whites in Prattville, Alabama, would empty their rifles into homes in a black neighborhood, prompting SNCC leader, H. Rap Brown, to call for “full retaliation.” Brown characterized Alabama as the “starting battleground for America’s race war.”¹⁵ Brown also encouraged violent confrontations elsewhere, repeating before various audiences his strong support for armed self-defense: “If America chooses to play Nazis, black folks ain’t going to play Jews.”¹⁶

In April 1967 came another catalyst. In nearby Richmond, California, Mark Comfort saw an opportunity for action — the recent killing by a sheriff’s deputy of unarmed 22-year-old Denzil Dowell. Comfort alerted Seale and Newton, who attracted hundreds of angry residents to a protest rally. Large numbers of police stood safely at the crowd’s edges. The deputy had insisted he was justified in shooting Dowell for fleeing arrest for attempted burglary. The family cast doubt on the deputy’s story: by their tally, three times as many shots had been fired as officially reported and two patches of blood on the ground indicated that Dowell’s body had been dragged to where it lay when found. The attending doctor told them that the angle of the wounds indicated that Dowell’s arms were raised when he was shot. The family got nowhere with their complaints to authorities so armed Panthers in uniform marched in to speak first with the district attorney and then the sheriff. They got nowhere either except to escalate the already tense stand-off between the Richmond police and the local black community.

Before forming the Panthers, Seale had already been working for a few years at community-building in North Richmond, which, even more dramatically than Oakland, had become a breeding ground for deep resentment toward local police. At the beginning of World War II, fewer than 300 blacks lived in the city. Richmond’s black population increased over 5,000 percent in seven years as Southern transplants were lured into overcrowded neighborhoods to work on defense contracts and in shipyards.

In light of Denzil Dowell’s death, Cleaver suggested they start a newsletter with the Richmond killing as the lead story of its first issue. It ought to prove as much of a lightning rod as Matthew Johnson’s death had been in San Francisco’s black community. Beverly Axelrod helped them craft two mimeographed pages in her living room while Bob Dylan’s 1964 album The Times They Are A-Changin’ blared on the phonograph. The Panthers took to playing Dylan’s 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited every time they gathered to put out the paper. Newton particularly enjoyed the anti-establishment lyrics to “Ballad of a Thin Man,” which included the line “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”¹⁷ Having the Black Panthers congregate in her home to launch their new party’s messages of defiance against police brutality exhilarated Axelrod. She was deeply in love with Eldridge. Her circle of leftists had just celebrated the pair’s engagement at a publication party for his book Soul On Ice. This was the revolutionary relationship she had always coveted.

The first issue of the paper was fairly basic and crude-looking, with a simple layout. Everything about the issue suggested amateurs at work, much like the first issue of the underground Berkeley Barb, which would soon achieve the highest national circulation for any newspaper of its kind. What mattered is that they got the word out from the outraged community’s perspective. Twenty-three-year-old San Franciscan Emory Douglas had joined the Panthers in mid-January of 1967. As a teenager he had worked in a printing shop while serving a sentence in a juvenile detention facility in Southern California. He later studied graphic design at San Francisco City College where he was active in the Black Student Union. When Douglas saw Bobby Seale working on the primitive first issue of the Panther newspaper, Douglas told Seale he could improve on the graphics. Douglas took over production of later issues with the title “revolutionary artist” and later Minister of Culture.

By the second issue in mid-May, they launched a far more professional-looking Black Panther newspaper, published biweekly in a print shop under Douglas’s guiding hand. As he began to help Douglas with the paper, Anthony came to understand that the Communist Party was financing the paper for mass distribution. All the Panther members distributed papers to tell their story and promote their 10-point program. Sales soon regularly exceeded 100,000 per issue; proceeds from the sales of the newsletters became the Panthers’ primary source of income. They raised the price first to fifteen cents, then a quarter apiece. Each edition included blistering criticisms of racist policing and plenty of pictures and cartoons to communicate their message through imagery. Huey Newton had asked Douglas to be aware that “basically, the African-American community wasn’t a reading community. They learned through observation and participation.”

The Panthers were the first to popularize the term “pigs” for police, based on a postcard cartoon Beverly Axelrod had passed on to them. The first images Emory Douglas did were pig drawings, meant to be a symbol of police oppression — a “low-natured beast that bites the hand that feeds it.” Douglas put a badge on the pig and sometimes gave it a number — that of Oakland Officer John Frey, who had a reputation in the community for mistreating blacks on his West Oakland beat well before his fateful encounter with Huey Newton on October 28, 1967.

Douglas, Newton and Seale had a new assistant in their all-night efforts to get out the Black Panther newspaper every couple of weeks: Earl Anthony. Anthony became the eighth official member of the Black Panther Party. To show force in San Francisco and Richmond earlier in the year, the Panthers had bolstered their numbers by inviting along armed friends who just dressed for the occasion without being members of the Party. Cleaver had been suspicious at first of Anthony because of his ties to Maulana Ron Karenga, founder of the black nationalist group “US” in Los Angeles and Anthony’s association with Black Muslims in San Francisco. But Anthony was a “renegade” Black Muslim, the label applied to Black Muslims who took drugs and womanized, a subgroup Cleaver could identify with. He had been a Black Muslim himself in prison. Anthony broke with his own rent-strike organization to join the Panthers after seeing them in action in San Francisco.

Other black militants Anthony knew were now shunning white alliances. SNCC had recently purged whites from its Atlanta headquarters. The Black Muslims in San Francisco suspected that Axelrod funneled money from the Communist Party to pay for Black House; that was not who Black Nationalists wanted interfering with their own agenda. What Anthony did not tell anyone is that two FBI agents whom he used to know from his old school sports teams had recently contacted him. Anthony came from a middle class family. In college at the University of Southern California, he had been a young Republican. The two fair-haired, white ex-Marines who showed up at his San Francisco apartment out of the blue warned Anthony that Eldridge Cleaver was associating with Communists and asked him to keep a look out. At the time, Anthony took it as a friendly warning.

When the pair of FBI agents later asked Anthony what he knew about the sudden disappearance from the Bay Area of the San Francisco Panthers that spring, he told them that Cleaver had scared them off. Maybe he had pistol-whipped a few first; Anthony would not always tell the FBI men all he knew. Meanwhile, the Panthers were becoming a subcultural force that increasing numbers of blacks admired. Anthony had driven Huey Newton to the Richmond gathering in honor of Denzil Dowell. Anthony had been involved in both the Watts riots in 1965 and the San Francisco riots in 1966, but had never witnessed anyone take charge of a crowd like Seale and Newton did that day. Watching the police look on in apprehension from the sidelines demolished their previous aura of invincibility.

For many black students at San Francisco State it took slightly longer than it took Anthony to embrace the Panthers’ militarism. When Janice Garrett first saw the Panthers on campus, the sight of them marching in uniform was intimidating. But like her friends, Garrett now wore her hair in an Afro, part of the statement they were making as they became active in establishing a pioneering Black Studies department. When Bobby Seale came to the campus to speak, Garrett and her friends in the Black Student Union invited Seale, Cleaver and Newton to conduct political education classes in the large flat Garrett shared with several other students. Among her roommates was Judy Juanita who would later write the novel Virgin Soul, fictionalizing their entry into the Panther Party. The first Panthers they saw were all male. Beverly Axelrod’s role in the Party was unofficial. The first female recruit to the Black Panthers was Tarika Lewis, a 17-year-old Oakland high school student. Janice Garret and her friends would soon quit school to join, too.

The Panthers had already attracted attention from the local mainstream press for their rally in Richmond and armed escort of Malcolm X’s widow into the city from the airport earlier in the year. The Sunday San Francisco paper on April 30, 1967, ran a blaring headline — “Oakland’s Black Panthers Wear Guns; Talk Revolution” — accompanied by photos of the two armed Party leaders.¹⁸ San Francisco State was only one of many new platforms the Panthers sought to broadcast their views. The Black Panthers took over Black House from the Black Nationalists that spring as well. In April of 1967, after the Richmond rally, a local radio station invited Newton to speak on a call-in talk show. When he read the 10-point program on the air, an irate Assemblyman from Piedmont named Don Mulford phoned in to announce to the radio audience his sponsorship of a new bill in Sacramento to ban carrying loaded guns in public and to prohibit unapproved instructors from teaching the use of firearms. Newton came up with a bold and immediate response to this threat. Looking for volunteers, Seale shared Newton’s plan with Garrett and her roommates. Seale would lead an armed group of Panthers and members of the Dowell family on an eighty-mile drive to the State Capitol in early May to oppose the bill and introduce the Panther Party and its 10-point program to the world.

Emory Douglas joined Seale in that historic trip as did Mark Comfort. They packed loaded guns in the trunks of their cars, planning to display them on arrival. Cleaver went along with no gun, on official assignment to cover the event for Ramparts magazine. Newton wisely accepted the recommendation that he stay home — he remained on probation, and they anticipated trouble. On May 2, 1967, 24 men and 6 women — most dressed all in black — emerged from six cars driven in a caravan to Sacramento. Many of them wielded rifles, 12-gauge pump-action shotguns and Magnum .357s. Seale also sported a .45 caliber pistol on his hip. Some had slung on bandoliers of ammunition. Following Newton’s strict instructions, they kept the weapons pointed straight up or down at the ground as they marched toward the Capitol building. Like Newton, those on parole could not carry hand guns, nor could Hutton, who was still under age. At the time, carrying loaded weapons in plain sight and not directed at anyone was legal. Still, Newton counseled Seale that, if fired upon, he should shoot back.

As the attention-getting entourage approached their destination, Governor Ronald Reagan happened to be standing on the lawn with a group of visiting school children. Members of the press corps were already on hand to cover events at the Capitol. At the startling sight of an armed squadron of black militants, Reagan broke into a trot in the opposite direction. Stunned cameramen and reporters followed the unknown group of black militants as they made their way into the Capitol building.

Caught off guard, the security detail let the expanded entourage of Panthers and media head upstairs to the Assembly much like any other visitors. All the while TV cameras were rolling and photos were snapped. The guards stopped a few of the Panthers in the building and took away their guns, but afterward gave the weapons back and let them go. On prior occasions when white NRA members had worn guns into the building the guards had not relieved them of their weapons. Reportedly, a few Second Amendment hardliners had already shown up that day in the visitors’ gallery wearing holstered hand guns. But a squadron of armed blacks boldly exercising their right of protest alarmed legislators as white gun owners had never done. Cameramen kept filming as the proceedings abruptly came to a standstill at the intrusion. Then, to the immense relief of the Assemblymen, Capitol police quickly ushered out their unexpected visitors without any violence. One of the surprised freshman was San Francisco Assemblyman Willie Brown, at the start of his long political career. He would soon become a Panther lawyer and ally.

On both the way in and out of the Capitol building, Seale stood on the Capitol steps to read to the media Newton’s “Executive Mandate Number One,” which attracted immediate television coverage. It accused the California legislature of seeking to keep the black community “disarmed and powerless” while police repression increased throughout the country. The statement echoed the new bellicose direction of SNCC since the spring of 1966 in asserting the American black power movement as part of an international struggle against imperialism, linking U. S. domestic policy to the “racist war of genocide in Vietnam.”¹⁹

Safely observing television coverage of the breaking news out of Sacramento from his parents’ home in Oakland, Newton reacted with glee at the success of what he called ‘shock-a-buku’ — sudden moves that keep the enemy off balance.”²⁰ The story hit the next front page of all major newspapers in the state with headlines like “Armed Men Invade Assembly,” “Guns in Capitol” and “Armed Foray in Assembly Stirs Wrath.”²¹ It made Melvin nervous: “It got a lot of press, which was Huey’s object. He wanted . . . a colossal event, and the colossal event really was a recruitment effort. . . . [But] to go to Sacramento with the guns [was] a two-edged thing. . . . [I]t got the publicity and the attention of the youth that wanted to be Panthers. . . . The other side of it was that it . . . drove some people in the opposite direction. . . . I would not have done it, but it was done. . . . I’d never thought the guns served a good purpose.”

As the Panthers drove out of Sacramento, they were arrested on a variety of minor charges and taken to the city jail. During the next few days, the media deluged the Panthers with inquiries as the London Times and other international papers featured their spectacular political confrontation. To Barry Scheck, as a politically aware high school senior in New York, the Panthers suddenly sprung “out of nowhere . . . into the news . . . going to Sacramento, carrying guns, with the black berets and the black leather . . . This was a very powerful message . . . These were people that were not going to get beaten and . . . hosed by police in the streets” like the nonviolent civil rights marchers following Dr. King’s approach.

The governor’s office immediately demanded tighter security at the Capitol. As chief of staff, Ed Meese already had open channels to the FBI from his days as chief prosecutor of protesters in the Free Speech Movement. He could easily find out what Hoover knew about this revolutionary group calling itself the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Shocked newsmen raced to report the incident as an armed invasion, though the Panthers had never actually threatened anyone and were surrounded the whole time they were in the Capitol building by reporters, camera crews and school kids with tales to tell of their most unusual civics lesson.

At first, no one in the media could concentrate on anything other than the guns, but as coverage continued, TV reporter Belva Davis proposed a new angle. As the first African-American woman hired by KPIX-TV in San Francisco, she had a different perspective than her white colleagues. She suggested that they look at the Panthers’ motivation for the stunt. She told her boss they aimed to get publicity for their 10-point program to change society for the better. The Panthers wanted to improve education for kids in black communities; they dreamed of starting school breakfast and lunch programs and their own school. With persistence, Belva Davis got the background story on the air — one she believed would otherwise never have been broadcast.

By the time of the Panthers’ startling May debut, Soulbook magazine contributor Louis Armmond had already left for the East Coast fully committed to armed revolt. He had seen hundreds of thousands of protesters marching in the streets in the past couple of years. Armmond and a number of militant colleagues “thought at that time that there was going to be a general insurrection in the United States.” While he kept his plans secret, Armmond and some of his radical associates were then determined to head to China for training in guerrilla warfare to be better prepared for the coming uprising of American college students. “We had studied in detail guerilla warfare movements in Vietnam and Philippines and all over. So I wanted to go — many of us wanted to go — to get . . . further training.”

Armmond was in New York visiting his mother and father to say good-bye — expecting he might never return home — when he read the newspaper headlines about the armed militant blacks who showed up at the California Capitol talking of revolution and carrying guns. Soon he and his friends decided against heading to China. “We didn’t want to miss the revolution in the U. S.” He expected it to happen soon and then the borders might be clamped down, preventing their return if they went to China. So Armmond headed to work in Mississippi instead, and the revolution never came. Neither Armmond nor fellow revolutionaries he plotted with expected the Oakland Panthers to be the vanguard of their revolution. Huey’s brother Melvin thought Huey actually had a view similar to Armmond’s. Huey envisioned the Panthers’ role as symbolic leaders: “He saw the guns as something that was spectacular and something to draw attention and to draw people in. He didn’t see it as something that would be used to take on the United States.” Eldridge Cleaver had different ideas.

Not surprisingly, the Panthers’ opposition to gun control only strengthened support for Assembly member Mulford’s “Panther” bill. Until it passed, California gun laws had been extremely permissive. Rifles and shotguns could be obtained by anyone. The only people not allowed to buy handguns were convicted felons, drug addicts, minors and people not yet citizens. But the NRA’s then moderate leadership envisioned no curtailment of hunters’ rights in Mulford’s bill and gave Governor Reagan their blessing to sign it into law in June of 1967 as emergency legislation. To this day, the Mulford Act remains one of the nation’s most restrictive gun laws.

The widespread publicity garnered Newton his first paid speaking engagement at San Francisco State College. With the $500 speaking fee, Newton and his close childhood friend David Hilliard then bought a pound of marijuana, which they broke up for sale on the street to raise bail money for those arrested in Sacramento. Newton had not yet recruited Hilliard to become a Black Panther. Hilliard had a family and a good job as a longshoreman. But they considered themselves practically family since they had lived around the corner from each other in sixth grade. As they drove through Oakland with matchboxes of weed in their car, Hilliard spotted policemen on patrol and asked: “Hey, Huey, what are we supposed to do if the police stop us?” Newton laughed and responded, “We shoot them. You know, we fight” — a response that remained etched in Hilliard’s memory less than six months later when Newton had his near fatal encounter with two Oakland police officers.²² Fortunately, in May the police car drove on by.

Shortly afterward, Seale and Newton had words with policemen on a street corner outside Panther headquarters. The confrontation resulted in several minor charges against Newton: brandishing a weapon, possessing an illegal knife and disturbing the peace, including using profanity in public. In 1967, just wearing a “Fuck the Draft” jacket on the street was considered sufficient grounds for an arrest. It was why Newton thought it wise to call police pigs and got the Panthers to use the phrase “off the pigs” — words that did not amount to profanity.

When Janice Garrett dropped out of college and joined the Panthers that June she did not tell her parents in the Midwest. She knew that television coverage of the Panthers’ Sacramento debut scared them. Janice joined the Panthers together with her boyfriend, which was the most common way for women to become involved in the Party. All of her roommates joined also. Women were expected not to have boyfriends outside the Party; the men could sleep with whomever they chose. In the early days, women had key roles, although its culture was decidedly macho. Garrett acted for a short time as Bobby Seale’s secretary. Judy Juanita helped Emory Douglas with the paper. Over time, as more recruits came on board, the founders realized the women faced harassment and the organization would spin out of control if they did not establish strict rules of behavior. Some new Panther men also undermined the Party’s mission by getting drunk or high on drugs while wielding guns or by committing crimes against people in the black community. This was not surprising, given Newton’s aggressive recruitment efforts in pool halls and taverns.

The Panthers adopted rules inspired by those of Black Muslims which they then enforced by threats of expulsion. The rules included exclusive allegiance to the Party as a military force, following orders, and learning the 10-point program and rules by heart. Members were not to possess any drugs while on Party business or engage in unnecessary use of a firearm. That must have relieved Beverly Axelrod, whose teen-aged sons had often witnessed Panthers waving guns in her living room as points of emphasis. The rules banned commission of crimes against blacks (no mention of barring crimes against whites). They also prohibited possession of a weapon while under the influence of narcotics, “weed” or alcohol. Members were officially urged to speak politely, “not to take liberties with women and not to hit or swear at people.”²³

Bobby Seale was then serving a short sentence for the charges lodged against him in Sacramento. Represented by the Treuhaft firm, Seale and several other Panthers who had no prior police record had pled guilty to disturbing the peace so others who already had records would not have to serve any jail time. Earl Anthony felt Seale’s absence more than he had expected. Seale provided leadership talents that were sorely needed. Newton liked to play hard when not devoted to Panther business. At night, he often partied with more than one woman, took speed pills and smoked a lot of marijuana between bar-hopping to down Cuba Libres while chatting with friends. At Newton and Cleaver’s request, Anthony traveled to other cities to recruit new members. Not much seemed to be happening in Oakland or San Francisco, with their small ranks decimated by those jailed after the Sacramento excursion. Cleaver told Anthony not to worry: “The Party is going to take over California in 1968.”²⁴ That was not COINTELPRO’s view. Oakland had been quiet while other cities rioted that summer; J. Edgar Hoover considered the Black Panthers a local problem that would quickly fade away.

Maddeningly to the Oakland police, over the summer of 1967 the Panthers’ aggressive watchdog behavior quickly turned Newton and Seale into neighborhood celebrities. Word spread about what Huey told the San Francisco policeman who pulled a gun on him, “If you shoot, I’m shooting back and you’ll die just like I do.” David Hilliard was among those impressed: “For the first time the playing field was level.”²⁵ Not exactly. Two policemen guarding public housing in San Francisco got killed that August. Earl Anthony had been traveling at the time. He had dropped out of law school and his draft board in Van Nuys, California called him up. Once there, the new Panther boldly told the board to draft him at their peril — if he got sent to Vietnam he would likely shoot his white superiors. The practice known as fragging was then growing increasingly common in Vietnam — unhappy black GIs who began tossing hand grenades at detested white sergeants or other superiors.

The week after Anthony appeared before the Van Nuys draft board, someone bombed it. Shortly afterward, Anthony had another visit from the two ex-Marine, Vietnam War veterans who had approached him earlier that spring. This time, FBI agents Kizenski and O’Connor beat him unconscious. When he came to, they told him he would face prosecution for the Van Nuys bombing and as a co-conspirator to murder in San Francisco unless he turned informant. Anthony disclaimed knowledge of the bombing; as far as he knew, the Panthers also had nothing to do with the San Francisco cop killings. But that was irrelevant. Hoover had proof of Anthony’s radical connections and had no compunction about securing false evidence to convict those he considered subversives — that was how he ensured that Ethel Rosenberg got the electric chair for treason at the height of the McCarthy Era.

Anthony knew that if the murder charge stuck he would face the death penalty. He agreed to weekly predawn meetings at a designated isolated location South of San Francisco. Anthony would later fear for his life from both sides. In his 1990 tell-all, Spitting in the Wind: The True Story Behind the Violent Legacy of the Black Panther Party, he revealed that, starting in August of 1967, FBI agents Kizenski and O’Connor, elite members of COINTELPRO, “had me by the balls and they squeezed hard and long.”²⁶ Among other useful information Anthony could tell them about was Eldridge Cleaver’s new black girl friend, Kathleen Neal from SNCC in Atlanta, who came out to visit Cleaver in July. The agents figured it was only a matter of time before Cleaver would split from Beverly Axelrod, lose Communist backing, and the Black Panther Party would die for lack of funding. They urged Anthony to egg Cleaver on to turf wars with black nationalists.

J. Edgar Hoover did not let most FBI agents or local police know COINTELPRO even existed. At first, Kizenski and O’Connor were based in Washington; they soon relocated to the West Coast. As the FBI kept a closer eye on the Panthers, local leftists started to take notice of the Panthers, too. Muckraker Decca Mitford counted herself among their earliest fans. She later observed, “I admired the idea of the BPP since its origin. I felt such an organization was badly needed in Oakland, based upon my experiences and observations . . . during the 1950s and 1960s.”²⁷

Melvin Newton recalls, “it was not unusual for a black person [even for a low level] misdemeanor arrest [to] receive a good beating before making it into the jail.” As a rare black clerk in the OPD, Morrie Turner came to the same conclusion — something needed to be done about police abuse. If you were a trigger-happy officer “you could shoot . . . prisoners or suspects, and the department would back you up, they were on your side.” But that was before Chief of Police Charles Gain took office in 1967 and implemented what changes he could to the culture he had inherited.

Chief Gain grew up in a working class neighborhood in Oakland in the 1930s and made strong friendships in the black community, including among local leaders of the NAACP. Gain empathized with their frustration. John Sutter, who served on the Oakland City Council in the early 1970s when Gain was chief, notes: “When Charles Gain became the chief of police in the late ’60s . . . he [had a] much more liberal inclination than most police chiefs and more so actually than our mayor and city manager. So he ran into conflict with his bosses. But he was . . . more concerned about community response to what the police [department] was doing. And, of course, that meant that . . . some people . . . thought that he was too soft on crime and others who were very supportive of him. . . .”

Among his first acts as chief, Gain issued an order making it punishable for officers to use racial slurs. His predecessor had prohibited use of derogatory language, but to little avail. Gain created a specific list of banished words so there would be no doubt as to what he meant. Gain also began to address the problem of racism in training and in policy statements. Turner considered Chief Gain a man ahead of his time who could not alter the culture singlehandedly. As Burris observed: “Those same officers were still there. Chief Gain was in the process of trying to control the department, but it already was steeped in a certain kind of culture . . . he could not change. . . .”

Morrie Turner, then in his mid-forties, lived two blocks from Panther headquarters and would frequently stop to talk with Bobby Seale to learn more about the Party. Seale won Turner over as a supporter sooner than many of his generation, though Turner totally opposed the use of guns. A veteran of World War II, Turner had almost lost his hand when a soldier accidentally discharged his weapon in the barracks. The bullet whizzed within inches of Turner and barely avoided crippling Turner’s chances for a future livelihood as a syndicated cartoonist.

Aside from carefully managing their confrontations with police and engineering media events, the Panthers built community support by lobbying for traffic signals at dangerous intersections and acting as crossing guards. The black middle class may have not wanted to associate publicly with the Panthers, but neither did they completely back away, in part because the Panthers were providing a free and desperately needed community service. As Belva Davis observed, “Better education, food for the kids that go to school and . . . not to have to go to school hungry. I mean, they were just fundamental rights and to deny that the things that they were asking for were needed would have been hypocritical.” Other black community leaders began taking a look at the Panthers’ 10-point program and came to a similar conclusion: the Panthers’ demands largely echoed their own wish list for fair treatment.

By August, the Panthers became sufficiently mainstream in the local black community to be asked to patrol a Juneteenth Day celebration in West Oakland’s DeFremery Park commemorating freedom from slavery. DeFremery was the largest park around, a favorite gathering place for the locals. Oakland police were officially asked not to monitor the August 1967 festival. Entertainers and speakers were all African-American, including San Francisco Assemblyman Willie Brown (later Speaker of the State Assembly and then Mayor of San Francisco) and State Senator Mervin Dymally (later Lieutenant Governor of California) as well as Berkeley’s new anti-war Council Member Ron Dellums, who would go on to a long career in Congress capped by serving as Mayor of Oakland. The police were affronted that the Panthers were the chosen event security, but acquiesced. It turned a new page in local police-community relations.