Days of Rage (27 page)

Six blocks south, at 106th Street, Binetti managed to pull alongside the speeding Maverick. At that moment the driver, one of two or three black men inside, crouched in his seat. From the passenger side the ugly nose of a .45-caliber submachine gun appeared. In a split second a geyser of bullets blasted the patrol car. The windshield exploded. Officer Binetti was struck eight times, in the neck, stomach, and arms. Officer Curry was hit in the face, neck, and chest; one bullet severed his optic nerve. The patrol car veered to its left and smashed into a stone staircase beneath a statue of the Civil War general Franz Sigel. The Maverick roared away, vanishing into the gloom.

A few moments later, after briefly losing consciousness, Officer Binetti came to. Glancing to his right, he saw his partner lying outside the car, his uniform stained with blood. Before passing out once more, Binetti managed to palm the car radio. “Twenty-six Boy Charlie, 26 Boy Charlie,” he murmured. “We’ve been shot. We’ve been shot.”
¹

 • • • 

Three miles north of the shooting, the eight grimy towers of the Colonial Park Houses stood on the west side of the Harlem River, beside the site of the old Polo Grounds, the hallowed baseball stadium where Bobby Thomson hit the “shot heard ’round the world” for the New York Giants that defeated the Brooklyn Dodgers in a 1951 pennant playoff game. The Colonial Park buildings, fourteen stories tall, were home to hundreds of poor black families, who on sultry summer nights could gaze out their kitchen windows south across the tenements of Harlem toward the glittering office towers of Midtown. Colonial Park was a rough place, the kind of project cops from the nearby 32nd Precinct—the “Three Two”—entered with care.

Two nights after the shootings on Riverside Drive, two officers from the Three Two, Waverly Jones, thirty-three, and Joseph Piagentini, twenty-eight, stepped from their squad car and walked into Colonial Park to answer a call about a woman hurt in a knife fight. When the woman refused their help, the two ambled back to their car. As they did they passed two young black men lounging against the fender of a parked car. The men fell in behind them. A moment later the men drew pistols and opened fire.

Officer Jones, who was black, was struck three times, first in the back of the head, then twice in the spine. He died instantly. The second gunman fired repeatedly into Officer Piagentini, who fell to the sidewalk but, as the gunman cursed him, refused to die. The first gunman then reached down and removed Officer Jones’s .38, hefting it in his hand, feeling its weight, as if he were taking a souvenir. The second gunman wrenched Piagentini’s weapon from its holster even as the dying officer flailed at him. Once he had it, he fired every bullet in its chamber into the fallen cop.

Still Piagentini wouldn’t die. The first gunman stepped to his prone body, pointed his own .45 downward, and fired a single shot. Then both shooters turned and walked away. Behind them, Officer Piagentini, in his last moments of life, began crawling toward the safety of a green hedge, a trail of blood in his wake. The next morning the coroner would count twenty-two bullet holes in his body.

A few hundred feet away, a passerby named Richard Hill heard the shots. Running to the scene, he glimpsed what he thought to be a clump of bloody clothes on the sidewalk. Then the clump moved. Hill sprinted toward the two fallen men, snatched up a walkie-talkie from the pavement, and yelled, “Mayday! Mayday! Two cops shot!”

That same evening, two packages were delivered, one to the
New York Times
, a second to WLIB, a Harlem radio station. Each carried a license plate, the same plates seen on the Maverick whose occupants shot Officers Curry and Binetti. The
Times
package also contained a .45-caliber cartridge and a typewritten message. It read:

May 19th 1971

All power to the people.

Here are the license plates sort [
sic
] after by the fascist state pig police. We send them in order to exhibit the potential power of oppressed peoples to acquire revolutionary justice.

The armed goons of this racist government will again meet the guns of oppressed Third World People as long as they occupy our community and murder our brothers and sisters in the name of American law and order; just as the fascist Marines and Army occupy Vietnam in the name of democracy and murder Vietnamese people in the name of American imperialism are confronted with the guns of the Vietnamese Liberation Army, the domestic armed forces of raciscm [sic] and oppression will be confronted with the guns of the Black Liberation Army, who will mete out in the tradition of Malcolm and all true revolutionaries real justice. We are revolutionary justice. All power to the people.

Three nights later, a second pair of packages arrived at WLIB. This time the typewritten letter read:

Revolutionary justice has been meted out again by righteous brothers of the Black Liberation Army with the death of two Gestapo pigs gunned down as so many of our brothers have been gunned down in the past. But this time no racist class jury will acquite [
sic
] them. Revolutionary justice is ours!

Every policeman, lackey or running dog of the ruling class must make his or her choice now. Either side with the people: poor and oppressed, or die for the oppressor. Trying to stop what is going down is like trying to stop history, for as long as there are those who will dare live for freedom there are men and women who dare to unhorse the emperor.

All power to the people.

Up at the Three Two, where detectives confirmed that both letters came from the same typewriter, and at the FBI offices on Sixty-ninth Street, white men read the two notes, turned to one another, and asked:

What the hell was the Black Liberation Army?

 • • • 

More than forty years later, a handful of historians are still asking the same question—“handful” being a generous characterization of the few obscure academic papers and police procedurals that constitute all known publications on the Black Liberation Army, known as the BLA. The paucity of literature is a reflection of the deep confusion and ambivalence the BLA engendered in its heyday. Many policemen, along with BLA members themselves, considered the group a murderous black counterpart to the Weathermen. Mainstream politicians, afraid of alienating black voters, played down this talk entirely. Following suit, most of the white-dominated press dismissed the BLA as a ragtag collection of street thugs. To the press, at least, poorly educated, self-proclaimed black guerrillas who murdered policemen were not credible revolutionaries. But self-proclaimed white guerrillas from good schools who bombed vacant buildings were.

At the height of its infamy, many questioned whether the BLA even existed, the theory being that every time a black militant shot a policeman, he announced himself as a member of the BLA. The group itself was maddeningly difficult to pin down. It had no leadership or structure the press could point to, no Bernardine Dohrn, no Bill Ayers, not even a Mark Rudd to rely on for public statements. Other than the odd bare-bones communiqué, BLA members were utterly mute, a policy its adherents have clung to for decades;
before now, onetime BLA fighters had yet to issue a meaningful word about the group’s internal dynamics, much less its crimes. Now as then, the BLA is viewed as semimythic, but to rank-and-file policemen who hunted its members across the country, there was nothing imaginary about the BLA. The machine guns its “soldiers” fired, the grenades they threw, the policemen they killed, the banks they robbed—it was all very real. Between tokes and giggles the Weathermen may have mused about “offing the pigs,” but after the Townhouse they just talked the talk. To men in uniform, it was only the BLA who walked the walk.

In fact, the Black Liberation Army was a credible group of violent urban guerrillas, the first and only black underground of its kind in U.S. history. In one sense the BLA was a cluster of deadly acorns that rolled free when the mighty oak of the Black Panther Party fell and shattered; it was a splinter group of the Panthers, much as Weatherman split off from SDS. In another sense, it was the logical culmination of the Black Power movement: After years of black “revolutionaries” calling for armed attacks against the police and federal government, one group, the BLA, finally followed through.

How it happened is a complex story. As FBI records make clear, the Black Liberation Army was an idea long before it was a reality. Any number of ’60s-era militant groups had taken some form of the name. A group of three who plotted to blow up the Statue of Liberty in 1965 called itself the Black Liberation Front. A group of eight who engaged in sniper attacks on Detroit police in 1970 called itself the Black Liberation Army Strike Force. The actual BLA was a concept of the Black Panthers; the idea of a Panther underground had existed as long as the party itself. Talk of a black underground was a staple of Huey Newton’s early speeches, and by 1968 the party’s rules anticipated its establishment, stating that “no party member can join any other army force other than the Black Liberation Army.” Many Panther chapters offered weapons training, and several claimed to be training paramilitary units. But even at the height of the party’s influence, the BLA existed only in the minds of the most militant Panthers, as an urban guerrilla force that might form in some dimly imagined future.

The actual BLA emerged during the Black Panther Party’s implosion in the spring of 1971, a traumatic process that prompted several chapters, most notably New York, to secede from the party. In fact, the story of the BLA is in large part the story of the New York Panthers. Hundreds of black men and women, from Harlem to Bedford-Stuyvesant, joined the New York chapter, but for the sake of this narrative, two boyhood friends mattered most. Their names at birth were Nathaniel Burns and Anthony Coston. Born in 1944, Burns was a lean, charismatic thug nicknamed Beany in the neighborhood gangs where he fought as a teen; years later, after changing his name to Sekou Odinga, he would emerge as the most admired revolutionary of his age, a savvy urban guerrilla who traveled the globe, robbed banks, and engineered prison breakouts during an underground career spanning twelve years. Coston, a squat, muscled gangbanger known in his youth as Shotgun, would become Lumumba Shakur. His career would prove far shorter.

Like a surprising number of people who ascended to leadership positions in the BLA, the two were the children of Southern migrants who grew up in the South Jamaica section of Queens, a historically white neighborhood that during the 1950s became a favored destination for hundreds of middle-income black families streaming into New York from the Deep South. Odinga and Shakur, as they will be called, met at Edgar D. Shimer Junior High, where Odinga recalls meeting Shakur in the assistant principal’s office. Both boys were troublemakers. Odinga’s father, Albert Burns, a laborer with a fourth-grade education, had come north from Mississippi in the 1930s and saved enough money to buy a two-story home, where Sekou was the fourth of seven children. Like his friends, the teenaged Odinga joined a gang, the Sinners, whose members busied themselves with muggings and fistfights with rival gangs like the Bishops and the Chaplains. In 1961, when he was sixteen, he was arrested for a mugging and sent to the state prison in Comstock, New York.

At Comstock Odinga renewed his friendship with Shakur, who had spent his childhood ricocheting among the homes of relatives in Virginia, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and eventually Queens. Both were in the process of discovering the teachings of Malcolm X. Both, however, were startled to find Shakur’s father way ahead of them. As Shakur wrote:

In the summer of 1962, my father came to see me. He was telling me about the family, but he seemed reluctant about something. Then my father dropped it on me and it blew my mind, because I was thinking about how I was going to say the same thing to him. He asked me my opinion of Brother Malcolm X. I told my father that, “Malcolm X is a very beautiful brother and all the brothers in prison love Brother Malcolm X.” I also told my father that I was a black nationalist and a Muslim but I could not relate to praying. I never before saw anything that affected my father like what I just said. His facial expression became one of complete satisfaction. . . . We must have talked for about four hours.
²

From that day on, the elder Coston, now known as Aba Shakur, acted as a spiritual guide for his son and his friends, a role he continued for many in the Black Panthers and the BLA. Shortly after, his son adopted the name Lumumba Shakur. His older brother James, an elfin intellectual who would also take leadership positions in the Panthers and BLA, took the name Zayd Shakur. The Shakurs, in turn, introduced Odinga to Malcolm X’s teachings. “Aba was very, very influential; you could almost say he was the father of our little movement,” Odinga recalls. “People like me, Lumumba, Zayd, lots of others later on, everybody was exposed to Aba. He sent Malcolm’s writings to us at Comstock. When Lumumba finished reading, he gave it to me. Those were the first books I had ever read. It was Aba and those years in Comstock that made me the man I became later.”

Odinga was the first to be released, in December 1963. “I went in angry and foolish, and I came out the same way, but looking for direction,” he remembers. “I went in search of Malcolm and saw him preaching on a street corner. He was mesmerizing.” Odinga was drifting from job to job, smoking weed and gambling, when he finally glimpsed a way to follow the vague new path he sensed lay before him. While he was visiting the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, New York, a group of “beautiful black sisters” at the African Pavilion asked him to model a series of dashikis and other colorful African garb. Odinga was entranced. He befriended the girls, began wearing dashikis, and soon learned to make his own, which he sold to friends. A year later he shed his identity as Nathaniel Burns and, inspired by the Guinean nationalist Sékou Touré, legally changed his name to Sekou Odinga. When Shakur emerged from prison, he joined Odinga’s circle. The two took an apartment in Harlem, where they turned heads as some of the first to wear dashikis in the street.