The Savage City (39 page)

Later, in sessions with their lawyers—when the defendants were able to meet with one another in a holding pen adjacent to Manhattan criminal court—Dhoruba discussed the situation with Lumumba Shakur, Cetewayo, and others. Some of the New York Panthers were livid when they heard that the national leadership had been ready to sell them down the river. Lumumba suggested that they break away from the Black Panther Party and form a splinter group.

Dhoruba argued for patience. “Look,” he said, “if we could just get through to Minister Huey P. Newton, and explain our vision for a national party based in New York City, I know he would agree. The problem is Hilliard. He controls access to Huey while he's in the joint. If we could just get to Huey, he'd realize that now is not the time to bail out on the party in New York. On the contrary, this trial could be the basis for a whole new initiative—national, even international.”

The others were impressed. Dhoruba was taking leadership; he was stepping into the breach.

In a matter of months, Dhoruba Bin Wahad would get his wish, meeting face-to-face with Huey P. Newton. But the man Dhoruba met wasn't the same man who had spawned the Black Panther Party for Self Defense a few years earlier, before he went off to prison for the killing of an Oakland police officer. And the BPP that Newton envisioned back in 1966—small, localized, and politically parochial—had grown unmanageable while he was away. Growing pains, internal conflicts, and the
persistent counterintelligence efforts of the FBI had begun to eat away at the foundation of the black liberation movement in New York City.

 

IN MARCH 1970,
Dhoruba caught a break. After eleven months of incarceration, and just weeks before opening statements were scheduled to begin in the trial of the Panther Twenty-one, the New York State Supreme Court ruled that some of the defendants could be released on bail. The defendants selected for bail were Afeni Shakur, Joan Bird, Cetewayo, and Dhoruba. According to attorney Gerald Lefcourt, lead counsel for the Panther Twenty-one, Dhoruba was chosen “because he was brilliant; he was very articulate and could help raise money for the cause by giving speeches.”

Over the next few months, Dhoruba undertook what was his most active period as a member of the BPP. He gave speeches all around New York City and traveled to Los Angeles, Dayton, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Buffalo, and North Carolina to talk at political forums and rallies about the case of the Panther Twenty-one. He hosted visiting “dignitaries” who wanted to meet with leaders of the now internationally famous Black Panther Party. Dhoruba met with representatives from the African National Congress, the Irish Republican Army, the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO), and other self-proclaimed revolutionary groups who felt a kinship with the Black Panthers. He even escorted the French author and existentialist Jean Genet from New York to San Francisco via plane to meet with David Hilliard, Donald Cox, and other Panther leaders.

Almost every weekend, Dhoruba flew on a commercial airliner to Oakland to meet with the Central Committee, taping updates on the Panther Twenty-one trial on a portable cassette recorder for Huey Newton to listen to in prison. In return, Newton sometimes recorded thoughts and observations of his own, returning the tapes to Dhoruba through his attorney, Charles Garry. Dhoruba found the process frustrating, but with Hilliard blocking him from direct access to Newton, it was his only lifeline to the leader.

Dhoruba was also grappling with a serious philosophical conundrum. From Algeria, Eldridge Cleaver had been sending out proclamations calling for the Black Panther Party to become the “vanguard organization” in a worldwide black socialist revolution, with underground cad
res in Palestine, Korea, North Vietnam, and all over Africa. Cleaver was promoting armed insurrection as the natural goal of this shared struggle. Huey Newton, on the other hand, was publishing a series of articles in the
Black Panther
advocating what he called “intercommunalism,” a form of community-based political organizing. Newton ridiculed cultural separatism, calling it “pork chop nationalism,” and seemed to be retrenching from any kind of armed confrontation.

These differences troubled Dhoruba, and soon they threatened to disrupt the tectonic plates undergirding the Panther universe.

In the wake of the Panther Twenty-one arrests, amid mounting fears that the East Coast Panthers were riddled with informants, the party's Central Committee decided that the entire operation needed to be monitored by Oakland. In Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx, overseers arrived from California with the authority to call the shots. One of the first edicts passed by the West Coast overlords was that Black Panthers were no longer to wear dashikis, gelees, or other African-style garb. This rule was a dagger aimed at the heart of New York's black nationalist identity, and it didn't sit well with the party's foot soldiers. “Can you imagine?” said Cleo Silvers, for whom learning to wrap her hair in a gelee had been a rite of passage into the Panthers. “This showed that there were people in leadership positions in the organization who didn't know the first thing about our culture.”

Like most New Yorkers, Dhoruba was not happy with the situation. He referred to Thomas Jolly, Robert Bey, and the other Central Committee envoys as “knuckleheads” and “fools.” But he remained loyal to the concept of the Black Panther Party. For Dhoruba, Huey Newton was an icon; his personal sense of courage was beyond reproach. Which is why, on August 5, 1970, Dhoruba and the rest of the Panther universe was ecstatic when the word circulated that Minister Huey was free.

After more than two years in prison, Newton saw his conviction for voluntary manslaughter overturned on a technicality. Although prosecutors in California were already planning to retry Newton, he was released on bail, free to travel within the United States, giving speeches and raising money on behalf of the Black Panther Party.

With his insinuating Louisiana drawl and quick wit, Newton had charisma to spare. When he first walked out of the courthouse where he was held in a cell pending release from prison, the light-skinned Newton tore off his shirt and stood atop a parked Volkswagen with his buff prison
physique, as if to proclaim “Look, Ma, top of the world!” It seemed as though a new Panther era was under way.

The enthusiasm didn't last long. Dhoruba recalled:

The differences were more than just stylistic.

Dhoruba had hoped that Newton would bond with the New York Panthers, but it was not to be. On trips to New York, Huey did not stay with “the people” in Harlem or Brooklyn; he stayed downtown in lofts owned by wealthy radical benefactors, or in the Upper East Side apartment of actress Jane Fonda, a vocal Panther supporter who was often out of town filming a movie or participating in some antiwar activity. Newton kept his distance from the New York leadership. Though he oozed a brash confidence in public, when it came to interacting with the New York Panthers Newton seemed to have an inferiority complex.

One of the first indications that the divisions were personal in nature came with the staging of a major event—the People's Revolutionary Constitutional Convention, which would include speeches by Panther representatives at large-scale gatherings in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Newton had been out of prison barely a month, but he had been a constant presence in the imagination of Panthers on the East Coast, many of whom still had the iconic poster of Newton in his wicker chair on their walls. The Constitutional Convention was the first time many would see and hear the man they had worshipped for the last three years.

Before Newton took the stage at Philadelphia's Temple University, the large crowd was addressed by Cetewayo, representing the Panther Twenty-one. As he had with his basso profundo rendering of the Panther Twenty-one Manifesto, Cetewayo used his impressive vocal instrument to deliver a rousing, militant speech.

In contrast, Newton was a disappointment. His high-pitched nasal twang paled after Cetewayo's delivery, and his didactic lecture on intercommunalism was condescending and esoteric. Having come to salute their newly released revolutionary hero, the audience grew restless after discovering he was only a man. Some even booed.

After a forty-five-minute speech that seemed to go on forever,
Newton left the stage in a rage. He had been reluctant to take part in the convention in the first place, since it had been initiated by Cleaver from Algeria. Now Huey had been humiliated on the East Coast, which he was beginning to view as hostile territory. He headed back to California convinced that the New York Panthers had set him up to look like a fool.

Paranoia had always played a part in Newton's temperament. But now, as he realized the Panthers had grown beyond his control, his insecurities kicked into overdrive. He was being courted by famous intellectuals and Manhattan celebrities at parties, plied with high-priced cognac and the new social drug: cocaine. Giving Newton cocaine, noted Dhoruba, “was like pouring gasoline on a brush fire” his ego flared in a million different directions. Newton came to believe that people were out to get him—and his fears played right into the hands of the FBI's rejuvenated COINTELPRO initiative.

Ever since Newton's release from prison, the bureau had stepped up its counterintelligence program, aiming to exploit the growing rift between the Cleaver and Newton factions of the Black Panther Party. As one confidential memo confirmed, the purpose of COINTELPRO was to “attack, ridicule and to foment mistrust and suspicion amongst the current and past membership [of the Party].” The operation forged letters purporting to be from a Panther member to various party leaders, alleging that a particular member was sleeping with another member's wife, or that a certain Panther was a police informant, or that another was stealing money from the organization. The cumulative effect of this full-scale disinformation campaign was devastating to the party, with each success noted in an FBI memorandum:

J. Edgar Hoover took a hands-on approach to COINTELPRO, often pushing his agents to go further in their counterintelligence efforts. In an Airtel sent by Hoover to all forty-two field divisions par
ticipating in the program, the director castigated a particular division for objecting to one proposal because it involved the spreading of untrue information. Wrote Hoover:

In another instance, an FBI division questioned a proposal to send Newton a letter, supposedly from a specific Panther member, claiming that his chief of staff, David Hilliard, was looking to have him murdered. The division expressed a concern that the letter “could place the Bureau in the position of aiding or initiating a murder by the BPP.” When Hoover responded, his only concern was that the forged letter shouldn't be tied to a specific Panther member.

Hoover expressed no objection that his agents' activities could lead to murder—as long as it couldn't be traced back to the bureau.