The Savage City (26 page)

The black panther was a powerful image, one whose appeal reached far and wide. In Oakland, California, a number of young black activists heard Stokely Carmichael's speech at Berkeley and were suitably inspired. Two young men who were members of a local chapter of RAM, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, branched out and founded a group they called the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. On May 2, 1967—the same day that Dhoruba Bin Wahad was released from Green Haven prison—the Black Panther Party for Self Defense staged a public demonstration that galvanized the attention of an entire generation of young activists. Armed with rifles—which were legal to carry in the state of California—they marched on the state capital in Sacramento to declare their right to bear arms and use them if necessary when attacked by white supremacists or the police. The sight of a dozen young black men, armed and marching in formation into the halls of the state capital building, was a powerful display of street theater beamed around the world on television news programs and commented upon with great alarm by white pundits and commentators.

The activities of the Black Panther Party in California captured the imagination of black activists in New York. In early 1967, Eddie Ellis
was part of a contingent that welcomed Huey Newton to the city. In an apartment in the East Village, Ellis and a group of activists that included members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, commonly pronounced “snick”) met secretly with Newton. SNCC had been cofounded by and was closely identified with Stokely Carmichael, who was unable to attend the meeting because he was on a speaking tour in Europe and Africa. Also at this meeting was Maxwell Stanford, cofounder and leader of RAM. The SNCC and RAM members discussed with Newton the best way to go about combining their efforts and establishing a New York chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.

According to Eddie Ellis, the meeting went well. There were philosophical differences between SNCC and Huey Newton's burgeoning Black Panther Party, but those issues were mostly ignored. Newton headed back to Oakland and announced at a press conference that Stokely Carmichael was being named Honorary Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party.

For a new generation of young black militants, it was an exciting alliance. The fact that Martin Luther King Jr., the movement's apostle of nonviolence, had expressed public misgivings about the concept of Black Power seemed only to embolden the new generation. This was not your grandfather's black liberation movement. Blacks were now going to defend themselves, and the implication was that they were going to take what was legally and morally theirs—by force, if necessary. If the police tried to beat them down, they would fight back. To young activists like Eddie Ellis, it was the dawn of a new era: “We were ready to stand and fight. There was a feeling that Malcolm's agenda had been cut short when he was killed. It was now our responsibility to carry on the legacy.”

This new approach, and the role the Black Panther Party would play as a symbol and motivator for much of what followed, was made apparent in an “Open Letter to the Harlem Community” signed by Ellis and others who had attended the meeting in the East Village. The letter was circulated in the street, at political gatherings, and on bulletin boards in Laundromats, diners, and elsewhere. “The Black Panther Party has arrived in Harlem,” the letter stated, noting that this was not to be a political party in the traditional sense but rather “a social MOVEMENT of BLACK people addressing itself specifically to the
problems faced by black people living in the midst of white America.” The letter urged all residents to take part in OPERATION SHUT DOWN, an organized effort to shut down and take over local public schools. “Our children are the future, so we should be careful what they learn and who teaches them…. They will mature either to become instruments of the white power structure used to keep our people politically unaware and vulnerable,
or
to become proud black men and women with love and concern for their own kind.”

The letter also proclaimed that “armed self defense against the police” was one of its central tenets, adding with a sense of urgency that “TIME IS RUNNING OUT!” The letter was signed, “Yours for unity, power and self-determination.”

If you were young, black, and filled with righteous indignation, it was an exciting initiative, with the promise of payback for decades of abuse and injustice at the hands of the Powers That Be. If you were a New York cop who saw the new militancy as a threat to the social order, it looked more like the mau-mauing of the American Republic.

 

GEORGE WHITMORE HAD
never heard of Stokely Carmichael or Huey P. Newton or the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. In fact, since the day when George sat in an empty catering hall at the Ivy Hotel in Wildwood watching Martin Luther King give his “I have a dream” speech, he had completely lost track of the civil rights movement. They didn't have many civil rights in prison. George was caught up in his own ongoing legal struggles; he didn't have much time to ponder the rising of his people, despite the fact that his own case was one of the sparks that seemed to ignite the budding revolution.

For the time being, Whitmore's own legal predicament was on hold. As he awaited a ruling on his lawyer's motion to appeal his attempted-rape-and-assault conviction, he tried to make a life for himself back in Wildwood. His father and mother had separated, and his brothers and sister were living in Brooklyn, so George was living alone with his father. “He still got drunk most every day,” George remembered. “Sometimes, in my weak moments, I thought I'd be better off back in prison.”

There was one positive note for George: somehow, in the midst of his travails, he had managed to fall in love.

Aida de Jesus was a seventeen-year-old Puerto Rican girl whom
George had first met in 1963 during one of his seasonal visits to Brooklyn, before all his troubles began. Back then she was living with her family in Brownsville, and George with his cousins, the Dantzlers. One afternoon, he came upon Aida sitting on the stoop in front of her apartment building. He told her she was pretty and made her laugh. Their friendship blossomed into a romance when Aida came to visit George at the Brooklyn House of Detention. Sometimes, Aida would stand in the street outside the jail alongside wives and girlfriends of the inmates. The only window in the facility looked down on the street. Inmates would arrange, via phone, for their sweethearts to appear on the street at a designated time. The women would arrive, preferably dressed as sexy as possible, and the incarcerated men would try to catch a glimpse of them from the window.

Now that he was out and back home in New Jersey, George tried to stay in contact with Aida, but it was difficult with her in Brownsville. For this reason—and also because it was hard to find work in Wildwood during the winter—in January 1967 George decided to go live with his mother in Brooklyn. He was returning to the lion's den—Brownsville—at a time when the borough was seething with racial tension.

George and Aida moved in together in a small room at his mother's apartment. He almost landed a job as a security guard at a factory in East New York, but the job involved carrying a gun, so the employer was required to do a background check. It was a common problem for Whitmore. Prospective employers liked George, he was well mannered and seemingly capable—but then they would run a background check and find out he was
that
George Whitmore. “Come back after you win your case,” they would tell him.

George did eventually find a part-time job as a security guard at a store in Brownsville, one that didn't require carrying a gun or a background check. He worked the night shift. One night, walking home from work, he found himself on Bristol Street, the very same block where Elba Borrero had been accosted years earlier. Suddenly, from behind, he was jumped by someone who pressed something sharp—a knife or a screwdriver—against the small of his back.

“Gimme money or I fuck you up,” said the person.

George couldn't see the guy behind him, but he thought he recognized it as the voice of a local Puerto Rican gang member he knew. The guy told George to take off his shoes and hold them under his armpits.
He then reached into Whitmore's pockets, took whatever cash George had on him, then said, “Stay away from the Puerto Rican girl. Go with your own kind, nigger.” Then he clubbed George on the back of the head and ran away down Bristol Street.

Whitmore had heard there were hostilities between black and Puerto Rican gangs in Brooklyn. When he walked around the neighborhood with Aida, he heard the occasional derogatory remark. It wasn't surprising: after all, he had been convicted of assaulting and attempting to rape a Puerto Rican woman in this very neighborhood. Whitmore's notoriety preceded him. George had never thought about needing protection before, but he was beginning to feel like an easy target in Brooklyn.

His brother Gerald had hooked up with a Brownsville gang—the Suicide Frenchmen, the teenage wing of the Frenchmen, a Brooklyn gang that had been around since the late 1940s. It was an all-black gang, based in Brownsville, Bed-Stuy, Bushwick, and East New York, that sometimes rumbled with white and Puerto Rican gangs—especially the Dragons, the largest Latino gang in the city. George joined the Suicide Frenchmen because belonging to the group gave him a feeling of strength in numbers. There was no initiation ceremony; all that was needed was that George be introduced to the gang by a current member, in this case his brother Gerald.

Late on the night of February 27, George was hanging out with his brother and other members of the Suicide Frenchmen at a pool hall in Brownsville. When George and Gerald went next door to a grocery store that was connected to the pool hall, they ran into members of a rival Puerto Rican gang. One of them was the guy George believed had mugged him on Bristol Street a few nights earlier. When he told Gerald, his brother and the rest of the gang decided to stand up for George. Out came the knives, bike chains, and pool cues, and a full-fledged gang rumble ensued.

Years later, Whitmore remembered: “I washed my hands of the whole thing. I didn't want to have nothin' to do with it. The last thing I needed was trouble. But trouble seemed to come my way.”

The familiar sound of police sirens pierced through the streets of Brooklyn. Half a dozen NYPD squad cars screeched to a halt outside the pool hall and grocery store; more than a dozen cops wielding nightsticks flooded out of the cars and into the street to break up the rumble. In the gutter lay a twenty-seven-year-old Puerto Rican male, unconscious,
who had been stabbed or beaten to a bloody pulp. He was rushed to the hospital.

The cops rounded up everybody at the scene. The various gang members were asked for identification, and the cops tried to elicit statements about what had taken place.

“Tell me what did you see,” one of the cops asked Whitmore.

George had learned his lesson. “I wanna talk to my lawyer,” he responded.

The cop looked at Whitmore's identification, and his eyes opened wide. He called for a sergeant, who also looked at the ID. “Are you
the
George Whitmore?” the sergeant asked.

“I wanna talk to my lawyer,” said George.

This
was
the infamous George Whitmore, the cops realized—a political hot potato.

The other gang members were hauled into the Seventy-third Precinct. Rather than taking George to the site of his infamous confession three years earlier, detectives took him to a neighboring precinct and called his attorney, Arthur Miller.

The police had nothing to hold George on, so he was released into the custody of his lawyer. “You should have seen the cops,” Miller said afterward. “They were so polite they were calling George ‘Mister Whitmore.'”

Gerald Whitmore was not so lucky. He fled the scene of the rumble but was arrested at the building where he lived on Amboy Street. After someone identified him as wielding a pool cue that may have been used on the kid found bleeding in the gutter, Gerald was cuffed, hauled into the precinct station house, and booked. One of the detectives said, “You know what you're being charged with?”

Gerald said, “Yeah. Simple assault.”

“Nope,” said the cop. “Murder.” The Puerto Rican kid had died at the hospital.

Upon hearing that he was being charged with murder, Gerald remembered years later, “Well, that wiped the smile off my face.”

Within days, medical tests showed that the pool cue was not the murder weapon. After being held in jail for a week, Gerald was released, though at his arraignment in downtown Brooklyn an assistant D.A. could not resist a parting shot. “This does not mean that Gerald Whitmore is not responsible for the death,” said D.A. Aaron Koota's chief assistant,
“but merely that there is insufficient evidence at this time to warrant further prosecution.”

Those closest to George and Gerald felt they'd dodged a bullet. R. Peter Straus, the radio executive who had put up the collateral for George Whitmore's bail bond, was upset to learn that George was even back in Brooklyn at all, much less in the same neighborhood where his troubles began. Arthur Miller was concerned that Whitmore's bail might be revoked. George's presence in the neighborhood was stirring up tensions between black and Puerto Rican gangs. Whitmore's mother had twice reported to local cops instances of Spanish-speaking hoodlums looking for George at her tenement building.

Whitmore knew he had to get out of town, but now a new pressing matter was keeping him in Brooklyn: his girlfriend, Aida, was pregnant. The two of them decided to get married. Given Whitmore's uncertain legal situation (he could have his bail revoked or lose his appeal and be shipped back to prison at any time), a wedding date was hastily set.

On March 9, at the interdenominational Holy House of Prayer Church in Brownsville, George and Aida were married. A few newspaper reporters and photographers attended, as did two plainclothes detectives, who were assigned to guard Whitmore and his new bride. After the ceremony, attorney Miller arranged for George to make a statement to the press. Dressed in a suit and tie, wearing his now customary black-rimmed glasses, George was poised and only a bit nervous as he told the gathering of newshounds, “What happened, happened, and can't nobody change it. As for being a news figure, it don't make me proud. I assume everything will die down eventually. There may be people who will think of me as guilty, but let's just say this is something I have to live with, and not let it stop me from carrying out plans to better my condition.”