The Savage City (29 page)

According to newspaper accounts, Newton and another Panther member were driving in West Oakland when they were pulled over by a police officer. Realizing that he'd just pulled over the head of the Black Panther Party, the cop called for backup. Another cop arrived. Newton was told to get out of the car. He did, and a scuffle between Newton and the first cop ensued. Newton shot the cop dead, then turned and fired—and hit—the other cop. The policeman was able to return fire, hitting Newton in the lower back. Newton and his partner then fled the scene. Bleeding profusely, Newton was rushed to a hospital, where he was treated and arrested.

Papers all over the country carried an Associated Press wire service photo of Newton on a hospital gurney, bleeding and barely conscious, handcuffed to the side of the gurney with an Oakland cop standing over him. Given that the Black Panther Party leader was proclaiming his innocence, it was a loaded image that sent shock waves through the black liberation movement.

Recovering from his wounds, Newton was transferred to Alameda County jail, where he was held without bail. Almost immediately, a “Free Huey” movement was born. It would become a huge publicity boon for the Panthers throughout the United States. The Black Panther Party was now the most famous and—among policemen—the most despised black liberation organization in the country.

For Dhoruba, the Free Huey movement was like the voice of Malcolm X himself, calling out to enlist his support in the worldwide struggle for black liberation.

 

BY THE EARLY
months of 1968, the Whitmore case had become a lonely chorus in a loud symphony of rebellion and dissent. Riots, assassinations, and the looming specter of the Black Panther Party dominated the discussion. Stories of black kids framed by a prejudiced criminal justice system had become so common that George's story didn't even seem like news anymore. Given George's past association with the Wylie-Hoffert murders, the name Whitmore was still good for a few column inches in the back pages of the metro section, but that was it. In the racial hurricane of the late 1960s, Whitmore's travails had become a drop in the bucket.

 

BY THE TIME
an attorney named Myron Beldock became involved in the Whitmore case, the kid's chances didn't look too good. Beldock, just thirty-five, was a skilled litigator with expertise in appellate law. The appeals process was an aspect of jurisprudence that sometimes required a talent for prestidigitation: a successful appellate lawyer was expected to create something out of nothing, or at least to zero in on a specific legal detail, using it to change the entire outlook of a case.

The Whitmore appeal was going to require that kind of magic. The accused had been convicted on charges of assault and attempted rape at three separate trials. Most recently, he'd been given the maximum sentence and remanded once again to the psych ward at Kings County Hospital, and then upriver to Sing Sing. By now Arthur Miller, Whitmore's most devoted legal advocate, seemed to be burned out on the case. Miller had asked Beldock for help, though he couldn't promise much financial remuneration in return. As Beldock remembered years later, “I'm sure Arthur used the word ‘injustice' and described it as a wrongful conviction. The fact that an injustice had occurred, the strong feeling that there was a wrong that needed to be made right, was something Arthur and I would have shared in common. He knew that I would be open to the case even though, purely as a legal matter, it promised to be an uphill battle.”

In many ways, Beldock was a child of the system. His father had been an appellate judge in Brooklyn for close to thirty years, and along with his years of experience in the appellate division, Beldock had served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York from 1958 to 1960. Beldock knew the system's strengths and weaknesses; he understood that justice within it was based all too often on power and influence rather than fairness.

Despite its prominence a few years earlier, Beldock was only marginally aware of the Whitmore case; like most lawyers, he tended to focus only on whatever case was in front of him at the time. But he recognized that the Whitmore case had become something of a judicial sinkhole, with its layers of bias, appellate reversals, and allegations of racial injustice—a classic example of what civil rights leaders and legal scholars had begun to refer to as “institutional racism.”

The charges against Whitmore had been tried before three separate judges. Most legal matters relating to the case had been reviewed ad nauseam. Beldock had to find something—anything—to use as grounds for a new appeal. He started by reading Whitmore's sixty-one-page false confession, then worked his way through the various trial transcripts. He also read a recent book about the Whitmore case:
Justice in the Back Room,
by Selwyn Raab, the
World Telegram
reporter who'd covered the saga almost from the beginning, and whose article for
Harper's
had been squelched by the dictatorial Manhattan D.A. Frank Hogan.

Beldock was astounded by what he read. In his nine years as an attorney, he rarely used the word
racism
in describing the criminal justice system. Yet the details of the Whitmore case rang true to him: as someone who'd grown up around judges and lawyers and officers of the court, he'd often heard racial epithets dropped in conversation. “There was a basic prejudice to the system,” recalled Beldock. “I heard a lawyer or two refer to black people as ‘animals'—that includes defense lawyers and certainly prosecutors. Generally speaking, if you were black or Hispanic and had no particular sophistication, cops were able to get you to admit to things that were not true. I tended to not look at individual cases involving black and Hispanic defendants as racial matters because, in a sense, it was
all
a racial matter. There was prejudice across the board.”

After his crash course in the case, Beldock met Whitmore at Sing Sing, where the prisoner had recently been declared legally “sane” after yet another psychiatric evaluation. In a visitors' cubicle, George seemed
distracted, chain-smoking through their meeting. Beldock was the sixth lawyer he had met, the latest in a parade of advocates who had come into his life with great fanfare and then—all except for Arthur Miller—disappeared in a cloud of smoke.

After talking with Whitmore, Beldock came away with the same impression as pretty much everyone who met him. “He was sweet tempered and pretty simple. An ordinary young man. He wasn't a very well educated person. He had some learning disabilities, bad eyesight and I believe he was dyslexic. Anyone who met George would know that he was the type of person who was not very able to stand up to pressure. He would have wanted out of that police precinct and would have said and done whatever his masters told him to do. If the police had told him ‘it is all going to be over, all you have to do is sign a confession to the Lincoln assassination,' he would have signed it.”

Beldock told Whitmore, “What has been done here is a grave injustice, George. Myself and Arthur Miller will do everything we can to get the conviction overturned.”

George was impressed by Beldock; he seemed sincere and compassionate. But Whitmore was burned out himself; he was losing the ability to focus on the details of his case. His parting words to Beldock were, “Next time you visit, could you bring a carton of cigarettes?”

“Sure,” said Beldock. He returned to New York City and went to work.

Before long, Beldock zeroed in on one pertinent and unresolved issue: Elba Borrero's identification of Whitmore as her assailant at the Seventy-third Precinct station house.

Amid all the issues surrounding the Whitmore case, somehow the legality of the Borrero ID had never been sufficiently challenged by George's many attorneys. Almost everything about the identification violated the police department's own policies regarding witness identifications. According to the cops, the prosecutors, and Borrero herself, she had never been shown a photo spread of potential suspects. She was told that Whitmore had been brought into the precinct on another criminal matter, possibly predisposing Borrero to believe he was a criminal. Whitmore was not placed in a lineup; rather, she had peered at Whitmore through a peephole as he recited lines (“I'm going to rape you, I'm going to kill you”) fed to him by the detectives. After initially expressing uncertainty, Borrero positively identified George despite the
fact that his height, weight, and physical characteristics differed from the original description she'd given at the scene—except for the fact that he was a “Negro male.”

Beldock allowed himself to be optimistic; he felt there were good grounds for an appeal on the notion that Whitmore's identification by Borrero had been illegal, unconstitutional, and a violation of his civil rights. At the very least, the attorney would file appeal papers, while submitting an application for bail on the grounds that Whitmore's conviction for assault and attempted rape was “tainted and improper.” They would try to get George out of prison pending his appeal.

As for Whitmore himself, he remained behind the walls at Sing Sing, indulging his talent for making homemade wine. In March 1968, he received a letter from Aida with some good news: she had given birth to a healthy baby girl. They named her Aida Jr.

George sat in his cell.
I'll be damned,
he thought.
I'm a father.

EDDIE ELLIS AND
others in the black liberation movement had been trying to establish a beachhead for the Black Panther Party in New York, but their efforts hadn't gone according to plan. The arrests of sixteen members of RAM on charges of “conspiracy to commit anarchy” had effectively wiped out what was supposed to be the military wing of the party in New York—a devastating blow to what was supposed to be a revolutionary militant organization. Young people in the community who were frustrated and impatient with the predictable patterns of nonviolent protests had expected the Panthers to put some weight behind their demand for Black Power; for them, this was a major step backward.

Ellis had wanted to build an organization that had both a militant underground section and an aboveground political wing, like the Irish Republican Army (IRA). RAM had been central to this plan. They had developed an underground guerrilla strategy based on liberation struggles in Algeria, Cuba, Ireland, and South Africa. Max Stanford and other RAM leaders were to be the Panthers' legitimate link to the practice of armed self-defense. Now that the cadre from RAM had been taken off the street, the New York Panthers weren't much different from other reform-oriented activist groups like CORE or the NAACP.

There was a second problem, even more deeply rooted in the shifting landscape of the black liberation movement: Ellis had populated his Black Panther Party with former members of SNCC and CORE—exactly the
kinds of middle-class organizations, full of college kids, churchgoers, and conventional political activists, to which the Panthers were supposed to be an alternative. The whole idea behind the party as put forth by Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and later Eldridge Cleaver was that revolutions were inspired and waged from the bottom up—by the “lumpen proletariat.” To Newton, the Panthers should be an organization of “brothers off the block.” As cofounder Bobby Seale put it: “Huey wanted…brothers who had been out there robbing banks, brothers who had been pimping, brothers who had been peddling dope, brothers who ain't gonna take no shit, brothers who had been fighting the pigs…. Huey P. Newton knew that once you organize the brothers that he ran with, he fought with, he fought against, who he fought harder than they fought him…you get revolutionaries.”

The philosophical differences between the West Coast Panthers and groups like SNCC and CORE seemed irreconcilable. SNCC and the Black Panther Party made a public announcement that they were merging their efforts and forming a coalition, but behind the scenes, their differences were already undermining the standing of the older organizations, who were increasingly viewed as out of touch.

The impossibility of a merger was made clear in the summer of 1968, when a contingent of West Coast Panther leaders arrived in New York for a series of Free Huey rallies and a press conference at the United Nations. At the offices of SNCC on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the Panthers met with James Forman, veteran organizer, former Freedom Rider, and an eloquent debater and speaker who was considered one of the civil rights movement's “big four” leaders, along with Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, and Whitney M. Young.

The goal of the meeting was supposed to be finding a way for the Panthers and Forman to combine their efforts. Among the attendees were Melvin Newton, Huey's brother, and David Hilliard, a boyhood friend of Newton's who'd been named chairman of the Black Panther Party while Huey was in prison. But the meeting was derailed by a dispute between Forman and the Panther camp. Accounts would differ, as usual; the
New York Times
reported that “Members of the Black Panther Party walked into James Forman's office at [SNCC] on Fifth Avenue in late July, according to federal authorities. One of them produced a pistol and put it into Mr. Forman's mouth. He squeezed the trigger three times. It went click, click, click. It was unloaded.”

This story may have been apocryphal; it grew to include claims that the Panthers “tortured” Forman in the Manhattan office and forced him into a game of Russian roulette. Forman denied there was any torture or gunplay, but he did eventually disassociate himself from any Panther alliance. “I had never worked in an organization where I felt my personal security and safety were threatened by internal elements,” he wrote in his memoir, “and I did not intend to start doing it then.”

To those who were hoping the Panthers would offer a new, more militant posture, rumors of the incident with Forman only added to the group's take-no-prisoners reputation. As Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver later put it, “You're either part of the solution or part of the problem.” The Panthers, it seemed, were declaring the old-guard leaders to be part of the problem.

And yet a third issue, bubbling below the surface, was causing a rift among black leaders, one that none of them—not the Panther leadership, James Forman, or anyone else—fully recognized at the time.

The account of the gun incident between the Panthers and Forman that appeared in the
Times
had been supplied by the FBI—the “federal authorities” cited in the piece. Unbeknownst to the black leaders, a number of undercover federal agents and paid informants had infiltrated SNCC, and the information they gleaned about the organization's internal plans and strategies was then being leaked to selected media outlets. It was all part of a secret Justice Department program that grew out of the cold war, a policy of spying on and seeking to undermine or even destroy people and organizations that were considered “un-American” through the use of subterfuge and the spreading of disinformation.

For more than a decade, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had been conducting a confidential investigation into the activities of civil rights leaders, under a counterintelligence program, or COINTELPRO, code-named “Racial Matters.” Although the program had been in existence since the late 1950s, it had kicked into overdrive after the August 1963 March on Washington. Shortly after King's speech that day, the chief of the COINTELPRO program sent Hoover an eleven-page confidential memo. “We must mark [King] now, if we have not before, as the most dangerous Negro in the future of this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security…. It may be unrealistic to limit [our actions against King] to legalistic proofs that would stand up in court or before Congressional Committees.”

If the FBI believed that Martin Luther King Jr. was “the most dangerous Negro” in America, one whose activities justified extralegal measures, imagine how Hoover and his people must have felt about the emerging Black Panther Party.

The philosophical differences and eventual split between the Panthers and the old-guard civil rights organizations was real, but it was also the beginning of an era when federal law enforcement would step up its lines of attack and subterfuge. Some of the efforts on the part of local police and federal law enforcement would be transparent, others covert and ultimately unconstitutional. From this point on, nearly anyone who stuck his neck out on behalf of equality and advancement for black people—especially anyone who assumed a leadership role in the Black Power movement—was designated an enemy of the state, added to what was called the Black Agitator Index, a list of names of bad Negroes whose political beliefs qualified them to be spied on, monitored, and held up to special scrutiny by the state.

 

IN THE SPRING
of 1968, Dhoruba bin Wahad took a part-time job at a small printing plant in lower Manhattan. He was still selling weed on the side, throwing occasional parties at his loft on East Third Street, and educating himself on the symbiosis between black liberation and anticolonial struggles around the world. Among the books he devoured was
Soul on Ice,
a collection of essays on race, revolution, and criminal justice by Eldridge Cleaver. With Huey Newton locked up in prison, Cleaver was coming into his own as the most famous and visible leader of the Black Panther Party. On TV to promote his book and at rallies, Cleaver was articulate and attractive. With his neatly trimmed goatee, tinted sunglasses, and fierce street patter (
can you dig it?
), Cleaver appeared to Dhoruba and a whole generation of young black men as a kind of street prince, the epitome of Panther chic. More than a hustler, he brought a level of philosophical insight to his politics that was exciting to like-minded, would-be revolutionaries.

In
Soul on Ice,
Cleaver identified the revolution as a conflict between personal liberation and the repressive forces of “the white mother country.” Just as Malcolm X had noted that the relationship between the police and people in the ghetto was at the core of the struggle, Cleaver framed the issue of police repression in an international context:

Dhoruba was hooked. Not since Malcolm had someone expressed the “truth” so vibrantly, in terms immediately recognizable to “a brother from the block.” Dhoruba's social consciousness, long since hot-wired in prison, had just been waiting for an incident that would push him over the edge into action. That incident occurred on April 4, 1968.

He spent most of that morning making deliveries for the printing plant. He'd just returned to the plant when a fellow worker asked, “Hey, did you hear the news?”

“What news,” said Dhoruba.

“Martin Luther King was assassinated.”

Dhoruba took the news like a kick to the groin. He left the building, walked across the street, and sat down in a small park. Someone nearby had a transistor radio, and as he listened he learned more about King's shooting in Memphis. Police believed the assailant was a white man named James Earl Ray, who was still at large (Ray would be captured two months later). The killer had shot King while he was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel; the civil rights leader was dead before he reached the hospital. He was thirty-nine years old.

The fact that Dhoruba had mixed feelings about King's campaign of nonviolent protest only added to the shock. For many young men of Dhoruba's generation, King had become a kind of symbol of appeasement. To allow black protesters to be hosed down and beaten by cops, to be spat upon while they engaged in peaceful sit-ins at some lunch counter in Alabama or Mississippi, was anathema to Dhoruba and almost everyone else he knew growing up in the Bronx. To black men like Dhoruba, nonviolent protest meant getting beaten by your oppressors and just standing there and taking it; at the most fundamental level, it was an affront to their manhood. As the Black Power movement increasingly dominated the headlines, King was receding from the front lines of the civil rights struggle. The idea that he, not one of them, had been violently gunned down was almost beyond belief.

They killed that dude?
Dhoruba thought to himself.
He wasn't even a threat. And they killed the man.

When Dhoruba returned to work, he was met with a surprising development: the white workers at the plant all started apologizing to him.
Why do they feel the need to apologize on behalf of that cracker who pulled the trigger?
he wondered.
Did they feel complicit in the act?
The apologies only depressed him further.

That day, he quit his job at the printing plant. Within forty-eight hours of hearing about the assassination, he headed out to Brooklyn, to what he heard was the new headquarters for the Black Panther Party in New York, an Afrocentric bookstore at 780 Nostrand Avenue in Bed-Stuy. In the window was a poster, soon to be iconic, of Huey P. Newton sitting in a wicker chair, a modern-day African warrior with a spear in one hand and a rifle in the other. Dhoruba entered the store.

“Where do I sign up for the Black Panther Party?”

The young brothers and sisters in the store, Dhoruba remembered, were sporting black berets, goatees, and Afros. One brother identified himself as the officer of the day. “Well, my brother, it ain't like that,” he said. “You can't just join. We have to educate you first. You have to know the party's ten-point program and platform by heart. Also, you have to attend PE classes.”

“PE classes,” said Dhoruba. “What's that?”

“Political education—learning history from a black perspective. All the things they don't teach us in school, you dig?”

Dhoruba nodded. “Where do I take the classes?”

“They're held twice weekly at Long Island University in Brooklyn.” The Panther officer handed Dhoruba a couple of pamphlets and an application form. “Fill this out. You have to report for class every week in Brooklyn till you're accepted into the party.”

Dhoruba looked at the list of Panther reading material in a pamphlet: Frederick Douglass, Du Bois, Baldwin,
Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
by Harold Cruse. “I've read some of these books already,” he said.

“Yeah?” said the officer. “That puts you ahead of the game. Where did you attend college?”