The Savage City (31 page)

By the summer of 1968, what remained of Eddie Ellis's early efforts to launch the Panthers in New York had been absorbed into a new and improved version. A chapter officially associated with the Oakland Panthers (now known as “the Central Committee” or “national leadership”) was founded in Bed-Stuy. Fred Richardson, owner of the party's bookstore headquarters at 780 Nostrand Avenue, was named the local minister of information.

On a hot day in early August, Dhoruba hopped on the Interborough
subway and headed out to the office on Nostrand. That morning, he had argued with Iris about his involvement with the party. Iris was not a member. Though she was just as Afrocentric as Dhoruba, she had begun to view her husband's involvement with the movement as an extension of his former life as a gangbanger. It meant dealing with guns and hanging with the same kinds of Bronx street thugs—some of whom still occasionally visited Dhoruba, especially whenever they needed a place to hide from the law. Dhoruba's disagreements with his wife over the party would eventually undermine their marriage.

Dhoruba was caught up in the historical moment. That summer, in the wake of King's murder, Panther chapters and branches were sprouting up all over the country—not just in major cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore, and Detroit, but even in midsized cities like Seattle and Toledo and Roxbury, Massachusetts. It was a grassroots phenomenon, attracting countless young men and women attracted by the swash-buckling image of Newton, Cleaver, and the rest, and angered by the behavior of repressive local police against political activity in the black community. That summer saw violent clashes between police and nearly any group who dared to call themselves Black Panthers. Of the many lethal confrontations, the worst occurred in Cleveland, where eleven people—Panthers and police—were killed during a shoot-out.

In New York, the police were on alert. In many ways, the Panthers were the realization of everything the NYPD had feared since Malcolm X first arrived on the scene. The Panthers' distaste for the police was brazen; it was spelled out in their Ten-Point Program, expounded upon by speakers at Panther rallies, and delineated in the
Black Panther,
the party's house newspaper, published weekly. Edited by Intercommunal News Service, the
Black Panther
emerged in the summer of '68 as a powerful promotional and fund-raising tool for the Panthers around the country. The paper sold for twenty-five cents at Panther offices, at rallies, and at corner newsstands—that is, those that weren't being harassed by police, who often confiscated and destroyed whatever copies they could get their hands on.

The average policeman would have found much to hate about the
Black Panther
. Its pages were filled with “anti-American” editorial diatribes against the war in Vietnam, in terms that supported the communist enemy; its writers repeatedly attacked the criminal justice system as inherently racist; its editors lionized Panther members on trial for
shooting or killing police as revolutionary heroes. Perhaps most viscerally offensive, the
Black Panther
promoted the image of the P-I-G.

The use of the word
pig
to describe police—first circulated by Huey Newton—had caught on throughout the radical left, including among white college kids, in a way that unsettled the average policeman. The very first issue of the
Black Panther
defined a pig as “an ill-natured beast who has no respect for law and order, a fool traducer who's usually found masquerading as a victim of an unprovoked attack.” This definition played off longtime police attitudes toward black people and sought to upend the notion that law and order was the sole province of the men in blue. The term was further crystallized through the artwork of Emory Douglas, the Panthers' minister of culture, whose lavish drawings and cartoons of cops as pigs appeared frequently in the
Black Panther
and galvanized the opposition. LeRoi Jones (who would soon change his name to Amiri Baraka) described Emory's pig as “a nasty scrawny filthy creature with a projected sensibility that was mostly slime lover and animal slacker, if you will. The bravura touch was the flies that always circled the creature's nasty self. Whatever one thought of the Panther philosophy as a whole, I did not meet anyone among any sector of the Movement that did not dig that pig, just looking at it would crack you up in a mixture of merriment and contempt!”

The entire posture of the Panthers, and their newspaper, involved a level of irreverence, disrespect, and hatred of the criminal justice system that mystified, if not shocked, most cops. For sheer, sustained hostility toward civic authority, there was no precedent for it in the history of American law enforcement.

Emerging as two warring tribes in a theater of battle not yet clearly defined, the Panthers and the police drew lines in the sand. Hostilities were mounting on the sweltering August afternoon when Dhoruba arrived at the party headquarters on Nostrand Avenue. There was a carnival atmosphere outside the store, with people gathering in the street. A Panther spokesperson stood on a soapbox rapping through a bullhorn, explaining the party platform and Ten-Point Program, and excoriating the cops as they drove by in squad cars to monitor the scene.

Dhoruba made his way through the crowd and headed into the store to talk to Richardson, the minister of information, about distribution for the
Black Panther
. In the two months since Dhoruba joined the party, he'd already distinguished himself as a cut above the usual inductee. His
political consciousness as a black nationalist was fully formed, and with it came leadership skills he'd learned on the street. Although he hadn't yet been given a title, local Panthers and visiting leaders from the Central Committee in Oakland were already pegging Dhoruba as one to watch. He'd been assigned to handle receipt of newspaper shipments from the West Coast and distribution in the East. Given that the paper had become the Panthers' most lucrative fund-raising source, it was an important task.

As Dhoruba talked with other members, a young Panther burst in. “The pigs is vamping on the brothers outside!”

The scene outside was chaotic. Dhoruba later described it in an unpublished memoir, “The Future Past: The Biostory of a Black Revolutionary in Cold War America”:

At the station house, Dhoruba was part of a four-man delegation that entered and negotiated with the precinct commander. The police had arrested one person for illegal use of a bullhorn to incite a riot and two others for assault on police officers, including one who allegedly kicked a cop in the groin. It was agreed that the arrested Panthers would be transferred immediately from the precinct to arraignment court on Schermerhorn Street in downtown Brooklyn.

A contingent of more than two hundred supporters from the neighborhood—all black—immediately made their way to the courthouse, where they staged a loud demonstration on the front steps. Inside, the
courtroom was packed with both supporters and off-duty cops who'd heard about the confrontation and showed up to support their fellow officers. An assistant D.A. and lawyers for the arrested men gave conflicting accounts of what took place on Nostrand Avenue. The three Panthers were charged and given an appearance date by Judge John F. Furey. Since they had no criminal records, Judge Furey allowed the men to be released on their own recognizance without having to post bail—a move that angered the off-duty cops.

Outside, Panther supporters and cops milled about in the afternoon heat. The crowd had now doubled in size to about four hundred. Television reporters and cameras were on the scene for what appeared to be the first major showdown between cops and the infamous Black Panther Party in New York.

Dhoruba was on the outskirts of the crowd when he was bum-rushed by a TV reporter and a cameraman. “Here's one of these Panthers,” said the cameraman. The reporter hurried over. “You witnessed what happened. What do you think about the charges?”

Dhoruba recalled his reaction: “A microphone was shoved in my face, and I went off: ‘This was an unprovoked attack by the police. The brothers had a First Amendment right to be out on the street. This is typical fascist pig behavior. All power to the people.'”

When Dhoruba got home that night, Iris said, “So now you're a spokesman for the Black Panther Party?”

“What are you talking about?” said Dhoruba.

“You were on the six o'clock news identified as a Black Panther spokesman.”

“For real?”

Dhoruba watched the report repeated at eleven that night, and there it was: in the blink of an eye, he had gone from being a neophyte member to being the new face of the Black Panther Party in New York City.

 

RESENTMENT OVER THE
incident in Brooklyn hung heavy in the humid air that night. A group of Panthers and cops lingered outside the courthouse on Schermerhorn Street. When they finally left, one of the brothers allegedly yelled at the cops, “You'll see some Panther Power tonight!”

Around midnight, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, a call went out over the police radio: a domestic dispute at
1054 Eastern Parkway. Two patrolmen headed over to the address, but before they reached the front door a pair of shotgun blasts knocked both the cops down.

The patrolmen weren't dead, just wounded by the buckshot from the gun. A backup team of cops arrived and rushed them to the hospital.

Combing the scene of the shooting for clues, investigators came across two empty shotgun shells in a back alley—and a white button bearing the insignia of a black panther.

The war was on.

GEORGE WHITMORE WALKED
out of prison on June 15, 1968, but his problems with the law were not over. Although he had been released on $5,000 bail (once again paid for out of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), he still stood convicted of assault and attempted rape. The remainder of his five-to-ten-year sentence was still hanging over his head. His most recent attorney, Myron Beldock, told him that his appeal had been put in abeyance—there would be a hearing at a future date. Until then, he would remain beyond the walls of prison but not yet free.

Upon his release, Whitmore rejoined Aida and met his daughter, less than a year old, for the first time. Aida and the baby stayed in East New York with Aida's family, but George went back to New Jersey, where there was supposed to be work during the summers in Wildwood. But no one would hire a convicted sex offender out on bail.

Journalist Fred Shapiro, who first laid eyes on Whitmore at the Seventy-third Precinct station house back in April 1964—when George was paraded before the media as the Wylie-Hoffert perpetrator—met briefly with Whitmore to interview him for a book he was writing on the case. George said to Shapiro, “I can't seem to get nothin' going with my case hanging over my head. Don't seem worthwhile to go lookin' for [a permanent job] when I know they may be sending me back to jail after all.” George was especially concerned about his wife and his daughter, he told the reporter. Then he hit him up for twenty dollars.

Finally, Whitmore got some good news. His longtime lawyer, Arthur Miller, called to say they'd found him a part-time job through a federal jobs program.

“That's beautiful,” said George. “What's the job?”

“You ever hear of the Nation of Islam?” Miller said.

George thought about that. “You mean the Black Muslims?”

“Yes.”

“Sure, I heard of them.”

“Well, you can get a federally funded job working for them. It pays minimum wage, but it's better than nothing.”

Damn, thought George. The Black Muslims. Elijah Muhammad. He wasn't sure how he felt about that. “Mister Miller,” he said, “you sure this might not have a negative effect on my case, me workin' with an organization like that?”

“Well, George, I spoke with them about that. I warned them they could not use the fact that you would be employed there as any kind of publicity stunt in any way. They said that was not their intention. They want you to meet with the leader there—Minister Louis Farrakhan.”

“Okay.”

“I'll go with you. We'll meet with Farrakhan and express our concerns and see how it goes.”

On a warm summer morning, Whitmore took a bus into Manhattan, where he was met by his lawyer. He and Miller took a taxi to Mosque Number Seven, located in Harlem on West 116th Street and Lenox Avenue.

The original Mosque Number Seven had been burned down after Malcolm X's assassination back in 1965. The new version opened at the same location, the refurbished building topped with a dome and a revolving star and crescent. The mosque was in the process of expanding to include not just a religious temple but also a school, a performance space, a restaurant, and numerous shops. Whitmore and Miller met with Louis Farrakhan, a Bronx-born former calypso singer, in his thirties, who was now the national spokesman for the Nation of Islam as well as minister of its largest and most influential mosque.

Over lunch at a restaurant attached to the building, Miller explained to the minister that they did not want Whitmore's employment there to be used as political agitprop by the Nation, which they felt could poison the waters and endanger his chances of getting his conviction over-
turned. Farrakhan assured Miller and Whitmore that he understood their concerns. “Our goal is simply to help a brother in need, nothing more,” he said.

George had a positive impression of Farrakhan, who was soft-spoken and seemed sincere. After lunch, Farrakhan introduced Whitmore to a group of fifty or so Muslims at the mosque, explaining that while Whitmore was struggling to find justice in the courts, he would be working for the Nation of Islam in a part-time capacity. “Here, you are one of us, you are a brother,” Farrakhan told George in front of the group.

Whatever his reaction to Farrakhan in the moment, George had lingering reservations about the Black Muslims. His impressions of the organization came mostly from prison, where the Nation was a visible presence. They were rigidly disciplined, overtly religious, and seemed to interact almost exclusively with their own kind. George was the type of person who had always mixed easily with whites, Latinos, and anyone else who treated him like a human being. To be restricted to any one group went against his nature.

Nonetheless, he needed the work. And so Whitmore began reporting on a semiregular basis to a printing plant and office in East New York—the distribution center for
Muhammad Speaks,
the official newspaper for the Nation of Islam. The location was convenient. George moved in with his wife and daughter in a backroom apartment that belonged to Aida's mother, within walking distance of the job. Although they gave him his own desk, the job was mostly that of a glorified errand runner.

There were problems from the start: Whitmore smoked cigarettes, liked the occasional drink of vodka, ate pork, and was known to curse, all of which were forbidden or frowned upon by Muslims. Members of the Nation projected a conservative personal demeanor, with the men wearing a quasi uniform of gray suit, starched white shirt, and bow tie. While working for the Muslims, George wore the same outfit, which made him feel constricted. The most serious problem was his smoking. Whitmore had smoked since he was twelve years old; he was a pack-a-day man. There were no ashtrays anywhere on the premises. Eventually, they bought George an ashtray—a huge one, the size of a skillet. Whitmore was halfway insulted by the gesture, convinced they were implying that he should go ahead and smoke himself to death. In fact, he never felt completely comfortable with the men and women of the Nation of Islam, and after working at the office for a couple of weeks,
he stopped showing up for work. It was the closest Whitmore would ever come to being directly associated with any aspect of the black liberation movement.

 

THE MOVEMENT WAS
under way, whether Whitmore was on board or not. He was still at the mercy of the system—“plodding darkly on in resignation,” as DuBois had put it, “steadily, half hopelessly, [watching] the streak of blue above.” He steered clear of politics as if it were a wolf in sheep's clothing, unable or unwilling to man the barricades.

Others were there to pick up the slack.

The Black Panther Party was the latest and most vocal manifestation of an evolving process. On West 122nd Street and Seventh Avenue, a new and reinvigorated version of the Panthers put down stakes, a Harlem chapter that was separate from the Brooklyn operation. The location they chose at 2026 Seventh Avenue was under the control of HARYOU-ACT, a federal program that allowed poverty administrators to lease and rent commercial space in the ghetto (giving rise to the term “poverty pimps”). Dhoruba and Lumumba Shakur—whom Dhoruba first met while living with his grandfather in South Jamaica, Queens—were among the group that decided to appropriate the storefront office “on behalf of the people.”

WE SERVE THE PEOPLE
, read the greeting above the front door of the Panthers' Harlem office. Soon the modest storefront, with its postered windows and hand-painted
BLACK PANTHER PARTY
sign, was a hub of activity. The Harlem chapter also started a branch in the South Bronx, and new members started signing up at a rate of three and four a day—which mirrored the national trend. By the end of the summer the Panthers would have chapters in twenty-five American cities, and tens of thousands of members.

The growth of the Panthers was so fast and sudden that the national leadership in Oakland were overwhelmed. They tried to send emissaries to all local chapters, including New York, to ensure that any group using the Black Panther name was promoting the Panther credo—the Ten-Point Program, the mission statement, executive mandates from Newton, and so on. They could distribute and sell the
Black Panther,
but ten cents out of every twenty-five from sales of the paper was supposed to go to the Central Committee on the West Coast.

Ron Penniwell was sent to live in New York and serve as a liaison with the central headquarters in California. Penniwell would oversee the development of the Harlem office, which quickly became a showcase for curiosity seekers and media outlets fascinated by the Panthers. Political education classes were sometimes held on the sidewalk outside the office, with members dressed in the Panther uniform of black beret, black leather jacket, and combat boots. Marching exercises were performed in the street, with the young Panthers calling out in cadence:

Most of the Panthers' new recruits were in their teens and early twenties. Some were attracted by the Panthers' militant image, but social and political activists of all stripes were drawn to the party.

Cleo Silvers was a social worker, originally from Philadelphia, who had come to New York City as a VISTA volunteer in late 1966. She was typical of a new breed of activist who was attracted to the action-oriented approach of the Panthers. Since arriving in New York she'd been working in the Sixteenth Congressional District in the South Bronx, an area that had the dubious distinction of having the lowest income per capita,
and highest rate of heroin addiction, of any district in the United States. Cleo had been assigned to work with the Catholic Church and the New York Housing Authority as an organizer and volunteer. Remembered Silvers: “We organized rent strikes, because the housing conditions were horrible. We did the clean-up campaign with the churches, cleaning up the streets. Mostly, we dealt with addicts, trying to get them into detox.”

Silvers first came into contact with the Panthers when she was involved in an attempt by health-care workers at Lincoln Hospital to take over the facility.

Silvers was so impressed with the Panthers that she headed to the Harlem office to sign up. It was there that she met Afeni Shakur. Afeni was the same age as Cleo—twenty-one—but she was already a movement veteran, having worked for Malcolm X's organization when she was barely seventeen. Silvers remembered:

Silvers gave up her job with the hospital to work full-time with the party.

Silvers spent much of her free time reading in preparation for her political education class at 9:00
P.M.
Her teacher was Dhoruba Bin Wahad. “To me, the PE classes were slow, because there were people in the party who didn't know how to read. But Dhoruba was brilliant. He devoted himself to taking some complex political concepts and theories and breaking it down in a way that everybody could understand. He was firm. If he asked you a question about the PE material and you didn't know the answer, he made you run laps around the block.”

Silvers also took physical defense classes, which were held next door to the office.