The Savage City (10 page)

In retrospect, the incident that landed Dhoruba in prison seems almost inevitable, given the level of gang tension in the early '60s. The Disciples were at war with many gangs, especially the Fordham Baldies. Dhoruba rarely went anywhere without a .32-caliber pistol.

One spring night in May 1962, he ventured into rival territory in the northern Bronx with a homeboy who was going to see his girlfriend. Dhoruba and his friend were walking through a housing project in the Soundview neighborhood when they were set upon by a group of jitter-buggers who had a beef with Dhoruba's friend. Dhoruba pulled out his pistol and opened fire, with everyone scattering for cover in the courtyard of the projects. No one was hit, and Dhoruba ditched his gun and went home. At 2:00
A.M.
the police came knocking at his door. They had witnesses to the shooting, and somehow they had recovered his pistol. Dhoruba was arrested and charged with felonious assault with a deadly weapon.

Dhoruba already had one strike on his record, an attempted burglary conviction from earlier that year. After consulting with a court-appointed lawyer, he pled guilty to the felony assault charge and was given a sentence of five years.

On the eve of his nineteenth birthday, Dhoruba became an inmate
of the New York State correctional system—first at Elmira, a facility for youth offenders, and later at Cocksackie, a prison full of gangbangers. By the time he was transferred to Comstock in 1964, Dhoruba had begun to see prison life as a microcosm of life on the outside. The inmates were mostly black and Latino, the guards and prison authorities exclusively white. Institutional racism was deeply entrenched:

Dhoruba clashed with guards, often landing in what was called the Box. “The first time I got sent to the Box was because a guard told me to do something, and I said no.” The Box varied from facility to facility, but the concept was the same: maximum separation.

Inmates sent to the Box first spent seven days in a screening cell. On a ground floor tier known as the Flats, screening cells were stripped-down cells with only a toilet and a bed frame without a mattress. A worn, soiled mattress was delivered to the cell each night at 9:30
P.M.
and picked up at 6:00
A.M.
Beyond the bars of the cell, the catwalk was fenced in by a wire-mesh screen.

After a week in the screening cell, a phalanx of guards arrived in the middle of the night. In Dhoruba's case, three white guards pulled him out of bed at 2:00
A.M.
for transport to the Box, which was separated from general population. Dhoruba was shackled and dragged to a freight elevator—a place where beatings routinely occurred, beyond the sight of eyewitnesses. Dhoruba was clubbed, kicked, and punched, as was routine. Inmates usually arrived at the Box with cuts, abrasions, even broken bones, their files annotated to read “inmate injured while resist
ing transport.” Their heads were shaved bald. The Box housed everything from killers and reprobates to political prisoners; it was a true Brotherhood of the Damned, a prison within a prison.

It was during his time in the Box that Dhoruba first came into contact with a breed of militant Negro he'd never known before. On the streets of the Bronx, Dhoruba had been a mindless gangbanger with no real consciousness or sense of history. In prison, he began to see things in a new way.

A Muslim inmate by the name of Mjuba took young Dhoruba under his wing and began giving him books and pamphlets to read. Among the first of these materials were two pamphlet-sized books from the 1920s called
Ten Black Presidents
and
Sex and Race
by J. A. Rogers, a Jamaican-born historian and ethnographer who wrote from an African American perspective. For blacks whose only education had been in the U.S. public school system, Rogers's writings were mind-blowing, both for the historical information they contained and for their point of view, which did not exist in the mainstream culture. Rogers's writings were so prized in prisons that inmates painstakingly copied his pamphlets by hand so that more inmates could have access to them.

Rogers wasn't the only writer Dhoruba discovered in prison. For the first time, he read the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, and Harriet Tubman. Most significantly, it was during his time in prison that Dhoruba came under the influence of Malcolm X.

Before his incarceration, Dhoruba had heard of the fiery activist who was shaking up Harlem and the rest of New York with his pointed condemnations of white supremacy and racial trickery. But Dhoruba had been an adolescent, mostly without racial consciousness, a particle of matter bouncing randomly through space without focus or direction. The activities and exhortations of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and others were a distant echo to Torch, the gangbanger primed to shoot first and ask questions later. Now that he was behind bars, however, Dhoruba began to reckon with a world he had not known existed—a world of theory, logic, and righteous ness that, when combined with action, had the power to ignite a revolution.

“We declare our right on this earth,” said Malcolm X, “to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”

Dhoruba fell under the spell of Minister Malcolm's words, many of them contained in speeches reprinted verbatim in the newspaper
Muhammad Speaks,
smuggled by inmates into the prison. Though they were merely words printed on a page, without the power of his piercing verbal presentation, Malcolm's message stoked embers within Dhoruba's soul. Through Mjuba and other Muslim inmates locked away inside the Box, the kid from the Bronx began a process of historical reclamation and indoctrination—one that mirrored the rising tide of an entire generation.

As he sat in the prison library reading newspaper accounts of this kid named Whitmore—a young black male like himself, born in the same month of the same year, trying to exist as a human being in the white man's world—Dhoruba felt a connection. He absorbed such stories, of young black men caught in the grip of what he increasingly recognized as a racist criminal justice system, and filed them away in his mind, where they would inform and inspire his growing political consciousness.

 

FROM WITHIN HIS
tiny room at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in Manhattan, George Whitmore felt his world crumbling around him. He'd been charged with two major felonies in Brooklyn and a double murder in Manhattan. He was notorious. During his brief stay at the Brooklyn House of Detention after his arrest, he'd been ridiculed by inmates:
Hey George, how was that white pussy? Damn, Whitmore, how you let those detectives play you like that?
But all the trash talk was background noise; his real concern was the words he read in newspaper accounts of his arrest: “facing two life sentences” “if convicted, likely to receive the death penalty.”

Death. It was a strange prospect for a relatively healthy nineteen-year-old boy to consider. George pondered the options: lethal injection, gas, the electric chair.

By the time he was transferred to Bellevue, George was overcome by depression. To preserve his sanity, he began scratching out thoughts in a daily diary:

George's attorney, Jerome Leftow, visited him a number of times, first at the House of Detention and later at Bellevue. By most standards, Leftow was in over his head with the Whitmore case. Though he'd been a criminal defense attorney for seven years, he'd never tried a homicide case. Though he was anxious about taking on such a high-profile case, he was heartened by the fact that Whitmore's mother, whom he met at his office after George was incarcerated, liked him and wanted him to stay on the case.

Leftow was idealistic, and he was sympathetic with Whitmore's predicament. As he got to know George, he could see how easily he might have buckled under police questioning. “I asked Whitmore, ‘Were you beaten?'” he recalled years later. “He said, ‘I was pushed around.' That was the most difficult thing to understand. At first I didn't understand what George was trying to tell me. I was still thinking about police brutality in the usual sense where the prisoner is tied to a radiator and beaten up. It took me a while to realize that George was the kind of kid that, if a detective used a harsh voice, it was the same as being struck.”

A psychiatrist who evaluated Whitmore's handwriting, in his Bellevue diary, agreed with Leftow's assessment. Wrote the doctor: “He is without guile, somewhat repressed emotionally, and therefore likely to be infantile in some areas. Essentially optimistic, he tries most of the time to look on the bright side of life, often having fantasies of being accepted in a world which is foreign to him wherein he dreams of himself as being admired, wanted, loved.”

Whitmore was supposed to have been transferred from Bellevue after two months of evaluation, but when late June rolled around he was still buried deep within the hospital bureaucracy.

While visiting George, Leftow was stunned when a female doctor mentioned offhand that Whitmore was receiving injections of sodium amytal, commonly known as a “truth serum.” Leftow was furious. “It broke every rule against self-incrimination. No written approval was ever gotten. I was never asked. His parents were never asked. This was a terribly wrong thing. I had a discussion with the doctor. He told me they had given him truth serum. The results were inconclusive. The doctor said they were studying people accused of sex crimes and they thought George would be a perfect person to test. I'm sure the district attorney's office knew. I am absolutely sure about that. But of course they never told me. It was just an accident that I found out.”

Leftow tried to make an issue of these extralegal injections as a violation of Whitmore's rights, but his efforts were quickly squelched by a judge—one of many objections that would be shot down by prosecutors and judges as they tried to expedite prosecution of the Career Girls Murders case.

Far beyond the boundaries of Bellevue Hospital—where Whitmore would spend his twentieth birthday in a drug-induced haze—the struggle continued. In Washington, D.C., dignitaries gathered to inaugurate a historic occasion. On the morning of July 2, President Lyndon Johnson was joined by Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders at the White House as he signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This legislation was seen as a direct consequence of the March on Washington—and as a tribute to the late President Kennedy, who had put the bill before Congress just weeks before his assassination.

To King and others who had been marching, protesting, getting arrested, hosed down, and beaten as advocates for civil rights, it was a momentous occasion. But out on the streets of America's big cities, it was dismissed by many as pie in the sky.

In New York City, frustration over the glacial pace of progress over civil rights was matched by mounting anger over images of black people being clubbed and attacked by police dogs and murdered by white supremacists in the South, often with official support. This seething resentment was made worse by the daily reality of poverty and hopelessness in places closer to home, such as Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.
Writer James Baldwin, Harlem born and raised, sounded alarm bells with his 1963 book
The Fire Next Time:

For those who'd been paying attention, the city seemed a powder keg ready to blow. And that's exactly what happened, over a tumultuous six nights in July 1964.

The Harlem riots of 1964 weren't triggered exclusively by outrage over George Whitmore's coerced confession, but his story undoubtedly played a role. The arrest of a suspect in the case brought sighs of relief among white folks and the mainstream press, but the Negro community saw things differently. In the
Amsterdam News,
the city's preeminent black newspaper, the headline read: “Negro Youth Claims False Confession
.”
The article focused not on the NYPD's success in finding the killer, but on the doubts that had been raised about his confession. The clear implication of the
Amsterdam News
's coverage was that Whitmore was being framed. It was one more grievance to be added to James Baldwin's searing catalog of atrocities past and present.