The Savage City (30 page)

“Oh, various penal institutions upstate,” he replied. “That was my college.”

The officer of the day reached out and shook Dhoruba's hand. “All power to the people, my brother. You've come to the right place.”

 

GEORGE WHITMORE WAS
in the second-floor rec room at Sing Sing when the news came that King had been gunned down in Memphis. Like everyone else, he was stunned. When the network news showed footage of King giving his speech before the National Mall, George choked up. He remembered sitting in the empty catering hall at the Ivy Hotel in Wildwood that day—August 28, 1963—watching the March on Washington play out on television. If it hadn't been for the magnitude of that day and King's speech, Whitmore's coworkers might not have remembered that he'd been there watching TV at just the moment when detectives claimed he was in Manhattan raping and eviscerating Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert.

King's speech had become Whitmore's alibi. Martin Luther King Jr. had literally saved his life.

That night, the penitentiary was put on lockdown. Worried about riots or acts of revenge by black convicts against white convicts, authorities kept the inmates in their cells twenty-three hours a day for five straight days. Mealtime was doled out in shifts, to ensure only minimal interaction between prisoners. An eerie quiet descended upon Sing Sing in those days, and it lingered until the guards lifted the lockdown and allowed prisoners to circulate in general population.

As he had after Malcolm X's assassination, George made a few dol
lars painting portraits of King and selling them to inmates. Sometimes, as he sketched out the contours of King's face and then painted in the details, George felt like he wanted to cry.

 

AS WITH MOST
cops, the first thing Bill Phillips wondered after the King assassination was, When would the rioting start? In New York City, the hours and days immediately after the assassination were tense. There were sporadic disturbances around the city, with some looting, broken windows, and candlelight vigils that occasionally turned unruly. The threat became much worse on the night of April 6, as news came of full-fledged rioting in more than one hundred cities. The National Guard was sent in to restore peace in Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. Before the riots were over, thirty-seven to forty-six people were killed, with thousands of injuries and property damage of more than $50 million.

In New York, Mayor Lindsay took to the streets in an attempt to quell the growing, restless anger. There would ultimately be rioting in New York, some of it destructive and costly, but nothing like what Phillips and the NYPD had experienced the previous summer, when police cars were shot at, torched, and showered with brick-filled garbage cans from tenement rooftops. Still, the toll from rioting in New York after the King assassination was one dead, seventy police and civilian injuries, and 428 arrests. Property damage was estimated at $5 million.

One week after King was buried in a nationally televised ceremony, Phillips was cruising in a squad car with his latest partner, Eddie Lawrence. Lawrence was what was known in the department as a “hair bag,” a veteran cop with close to twenty years on the job, slow, cautious, with one eye on his retirement date and dreams of suburbia.

At Park Avenue and West 122nd Street, in the shadow of the elevated tracks of the New York Central railroad, a Latina in her midtwenties came fleeing out of a building and flagged down Phillips and Lawrence.

“I've been robbed, I've been robbed!”

“When did it happen?” Phillips asked the woman.

“It's happening right now. He's still up there in the apartment.”

Phillips thought about that: How likely was it that a robber was waiting up there for cops to arrive? “He's not up there,” said Phillips.

The woman was taken aback. “Yes he is. He's still there.”

Phillips sighed and got out of the car, followed ten steps behind by his partner. He opened the front door of the building, a run-down four-story tenement at 1743 Park Avenue. In the narrow hallway, Phillips saw a man carrying shopping bags in each hand. The man was short but well-built, black, midthirties, wearing jeans and a loose cotton shirt.

“That's him,” said the woman. “Look, he's still got my things in the bag. That's my radio.”

Phillips stepped forward and said to the man, “Okay, you fuck, drop the loot and get against the wall.”

The man's name was Calvin McCoy. He had an extensive police record, twenty-five arrests on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to possession of narcotics to burglary. He was a junkie, likely robbing the woman's apartment for items to pawn so that he could buy smack. He had the skittish mannerisms of a junkie but looked like an athlete.

McCoy's eyes darted here and there, looking around the hallway; he had nowhere to run. He put down the bags and faced the wall. When Phillips stepped forward to frisk the suspect, McCoy elbowed him square in the solar plexus and knocked him off balance. McCoy bolted down the hallway and out the front door.

Standing outside the building, Officer Lawrence looked up to see a black dude come running frantically out the front door, with Phillips close behind.

“Grab him, Eddie!” shouted Phillips.

Lawrence tried to stop the robber but was knocked flat on his ass. He did, however, slow McCoy down enough that Phillips managed to catch up and grab him. Phillips and McCoy tussled on the street. The fabric of McCoy's shirt ripped and the shirt was torn completely off. McCoy pulled out a switchblade, and Phillips froze. The robber lunged at Phillips. The cop raised his left hand to block the attack, and the blade sliced the meaty part of his palm, sending blood spurting everywhere. Phillips jerked back his hand, pulling away. McCoy bolted down Park Avenue underneath the elevated railway tracks, a shirtless black man on the run. Phillips took off after him, his hand dripping blood. He recalled:

Police cars with sirens wailing flocked to the scene as local residents gathered on the street. Also among the first responders were representatives of a special Urban Task Force that Mayor Lindsay's office had established after King's assassination for exactly this purpose—to arrive at the scene of potentially explosive incidents and try to maintain the peace. As people milled about, uncertain what to do, a few angry comments were shouted at the cops.

Phillips was taken to the same hospital as the robber. While his hand was being stitched up, he was informed that Calvin McCoy had died.

“What did you have to shoot the guy for?” one of the mayor's task force members asked Phillips. “Can you account for this shooting? You may be in a lot of trouble.”

Phillips wasn't in any trouble. The investigation of the shooting, treated as a routine inquiry by the NYPD, found that the suspect was killed in the line of duty. Phillips was given a special commendation for valor, but he wasn't especially proud of the shooting.

Several weeks later, a man came into the Twenty-fifth Precinct station house in Harlem and said, “I want to report a murder.”

He was sent up to the second floor to see a detective. He walked into the squad room and repeated his refrain, “I want to report a murder.”

“Yeah?” said a detective. “Who was murdered?”

“My brother was murdered. By Patrolman William Phillips.”

The detective glared at the guy and said, “Get the fuck out of here.”

There was no rioting after the shooting of Calvin McCoy. His long criminal record, and the fact that his death took place while he was in the midst of committing a crime, seemed to mitigate whatever reaction the community might have felt. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. McCoy's death raised all kinds of theoretical issues: Does a burglar caught in the act deserve to die? Was shooting a fleeing perp in the back an act of “valor,” as the department would proclaim? But this was the sort of encounter that took place regularly in the ghetto, where a cop had to make a hair-trigger decision about the use of deadly force, and the residents were left to decide if the results were outrageous enough to justify burning down their neighborhood.

A few months after the shooting of Calvin McCoy—after Phillips had been presented with his medal of valor by the NYPD—the officer was at a grand jury hearing about the shooting. In the hallway of the courthouse, he happened to walk by the mother of the man he shot. Weary beyond her years, in tremendous emotional distress, the woman looked at the cop and said, “You killed my son.”

The normally loquacious Phillips had no comeback.

 

SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER
the King assassination, on May 15, 1968, Dhoruba and his wife, Iris, attended a star-studded benefit for the Black Panther Party. It was held at Fillmore East, impresario Bill Graham's famous nightclub in the East Village, where many of the major acts of the era would perform and a generation perfected the practice of tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. On this night, there would be no acid or other hallucinogens; it was an event devoted to speeches, the staging of three short theater pieces, and fund-raising. Roughly twenty-six hundred people, black and white, witnessed an evening filled with what the
New York Times
later described as “rhetoric composed of racial paranoia, political jargon, Utopian idealism, unprintable threats, gutty ‘soul' talk and shrewd humor.”

Among the performers was LeRoi Jones, poet and provocateur, who had barely survived the Newark riot of the previous summer. A Newark native, Jones had been beaten by police; a photo of the aftermath, with blood streaming from his skull, appeared in papers around the country, making him an instant hero and symbol of the movement. Jones also coined a phrase that had become something of a motto for black liberation: “We are a John Coltrane people living in a Lawrence Welk world.”

At Fillmore East, Jones read a long, incendiary poem entitled “Home on the Range.” He was followed onstage by Kathleen Cleaver, wife of Eldridge, who'd been slated to headline the event until he was waylaid by an incident that, like the incarceration of Huey Newton, had rocked the Panther universe.

Three days after King's murder, Cleaver and a handful of Panthers got into a brutal, ninety-minute gun battle with local police in Oakland, California. Seventeen-year-old Bobby Hutton, one of the Panthers' founding members, was shot dead by cops that day; three other people were wounded, and Cleaver and five other Panthers were arrested. Authorities were unable to establish whether Cleaver had fired on police, but he was held on the grounds that he had violated the terms of his parole from prison. Cleaver's bail was set at $200,000, and the Fillmore East benefit organizers resolved to donate part of the money they raised to Cleaver's bail.

For Dhoruba Bin Wahad, the event was a coming out of sorts. He was still a probationary member of the Black Panther Party, spending his free time memorizing the Panthers' platform and Ten-Point Program, which was headed “What We Want, What We Believe.” He read
Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon, the bible for Panthers with an anticolonial and Pan-African bent, and watched the movie
The Battle of Algiers,
required viewing for would-be Panthers. There were additional classes on everything from Marxist economic theory to history classes on slavery, the Nat Turner slave rebellion, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. The reading and discussion classes were rigorous; prospective members who missed a class or came unprepared were disciplined or even denied membership.

Dhoruba excelled at the PE classes, which extended the education he'd begun in prison.

Dhoruba not only knew about weapons, he wasn't afraid to put them to use—if and when the time arrived.