Days of Rage (28 page)

Their hopes of joining Malcolm X’s entourage evaporated with Malcolm’s assassination in February 1965. In the wake of his death, scores of black nationalist groups sprang up. Odinga and Shakur joined the Panthers, proudly donning the black berets and standing guard outside the group’s New York headquarters on Seventh Avenue in Harlem. From the beginning, the Panther leadership in California was ill at ease with its New York recruits. Many of the New Yorkers, steeped in Malcolm’s teachings, had risen from gangs and served in prison; they were far more streetwise, confrontational, and Afrocentric than the Californians. “We had studied black history and African history,” Odinga recalls. “They were more into the politics of communities in California. We were more African. They were more American.” One of the first open disagreements between the two groups, in fact, came when headquarters attempted to ban the wearing of dashikis and the taking of African names. When the New Yorkers objected, a Panther delegation headed by Eldridge Cleaver was sent east to enforce the order.

“Lumumba and I met with them,” Odinga recalls. “It got ugly for a minute or two. They said, ‘We are the party. If you are part of the party, you will follow orders.’ We said, ‘We will follow your leadership, but not blindly.’ Arguments stretched on for weeks. Most of the rank and file was on our side. Finally we compromised. We agreed to wear black leather to BPP functions. The rest of the time, dashikis.”

Oakland’s wariness was reflected in the leadership it chose in New York, a group of SNCC veterans based in Brooklyn. Shakur was made section leader in Harlem, Odinga in the Bronx. Odinga was also named minister of education and took responsibility for the political-education classes all new Panthers were obliged to attend. Both took part in the full array of Panther activities, the free breakfasts, the lectures, appearances at myriad demonstrations. But from the beginning, Odinga and Shakur had a second, secret agenda, the same one later pursued by the Black Liberation Army: They wanted to kill cops.

And they tried. Along with twenty other Panthers, they concocted an ambitious plan to attack a series of policemen and precincts. Bombs were built, sniper positions set. But two of the Panthers turned out to be police detectives, and before the plan could be set into motion, the NYPD swooped in and arrested almost everyone, including Shakur. Of those involved in the Panther plot, only one avoided arrest: Sekou Odinga. He was hiding in an upper-floor apartment near Brooklyn’s Prospect Park when a squad of officers crept up the stairs to arrest him. Asleep at the time, Odinga woke when he heard a noise. Pressing his ear to the door, he sensed what was happening. He heard footsteps on the roof. He was surrounded. He stepped into the bathroom, glanced around, and saw what he would have to do. Struggling into his clothes, he grabbed a carbine by his bedside and yelled, “Who’s there?”

“The police! Open the door!”

“Gimme a minute. I’m putting my clothes on.”

Once he had the speaker’s attention, Odinga stepped to the front door and loudly clicked a round into the gun’s chamber.

“He’s got a gun!” came the shout. “He’s got a gun!”

As the police scattered for cover, Odinga raced into the bathroom, where a tiny window, no more than twelve inches wide, opened. Outside was a four-story drop to an alley below. Leaving his rifle behind, he squeezed through the window and slid one hand onto a concrete drainpipe that ran down the building. Leaving the safety of the window, he clasped the drainpipe with both hands and both feet and began shimmying down. He managed to descend about ten feet when a voice cried out from below: “There he is! There he is!”

Odinga sprang from the wall and jumped, landing nearly thirty feet below on the roof of a one-story garage. As he landed, his knee struck his chin and nearly knocked him unconscious. He stood, woozy, and heard the cries of policemen all around. Stepping to the edge of the roof, he leaped into a tree, only to have the branches break, dropping him to the pavement below. He limped to a nearby brownstone, tried its door, found it locked, then tried another, and another and another, until he found an unlocked basement door. Inside, he curled himself into a ball and hid behind an oil tank.

Police cordoned off the block and began a house-to-house search. For hours Odinga listened as they tromped about. His luck held. No one came into the basement. When darkness fell, he uncoiled his aching body, stepped from the basement, hailed a gypsy cab, and vanished.

 • • • 

The legal odyssey of Lumumba Shakur and the rest of Panther 21 falls outside the narrative of this book. All told, their mass trial lasted more than eight months, from September 1970 to May 1971; at the time, it was the longest and most expensive trial in New York history. “The 21” became a cause célèbre for the city’s white radicals, as well as many wealthy liberals. The legendary Park Avenue party thrown by the composer Leonard Bernstein—which inspired writer Tom Wolfe to coin the term “radical chic”—was a fund-raiser for the 21; the most prominent Panther in attendance (and the centerpiece of Wolfe’s article) was Field Marshal Don Cox, who, while little remembered today, would go on to become a guiding force behind the BLA. Celebrities adored the New York Panthers; when Shakur’s slender, intellectual brother, Zayd, was arrested, his bail was posted by none other than Jane Fonda. Zayd Shakur, so slight his peers jokingly called him the “field mouse” rather than field marshal, would go on to become an influential member of the BLA.

The BLA was ultimately a by-product of tensions between the smooth, cliquish Panthers of the West Coast and the angry, Afrocentric, dashiki-wearing Panthers of New York—tensions that rose during the Panther 21 trial. Throughout the proceedings, the New York Panthers clamored for money—for lawyers, bail, and expenses—that Oakland was unable to supply. Relations worsened when headquarters insisted on dispatching a stream of California Panthers to New York to fill the leadership vacuum left by the 21’s incarceration. The California Panthers, especially a field marshal named Thomas Jolly, smirked at the dashikis, openly courted female Panthers, and seemed to freely spend what remained of the chapter’s cash. “Panthers on the street, we felt put upon, abused, distrusted,” recalls Thomas “Blood” McCreary, then a Brooklyn Panther. “You don’t trust our new leaders? They treated us like a bunch of idiots, fucking our women and stealing our money. These motherfuckers, they were running amok.”

Tensions rose further still when Huey Newton, his murder conviction reversed on appeal, emerged from prison and reassumed leadership of the Panthers in August 1970. The party Newton now oversaw, however, was nothing like the one he had known. It had grown from a handful of chapters to more than fifty, with thousands of new members Newton had never met. He had few skills to lead such an organization, much less one hounded on every front by the FBI and riven with dissent. Even as Newton began making his first tentative speeches as a free man, rumors flew that he was in fact a shell of his former self, holed up in an Oakland penthouse snorting mounds of cocaine.

Maybe the most contentious issue Newton faced was the question of armed struggle, the question of whether the Panthers really should, as their rhetoric promised, go to war against American police. A few Panthers, notably Eldridge Cleaver, had always called for armed revolution, and right away. Some rank-and-file Panthers, especially in New York, agreed. Once Cleaver disappeared, however, few in the national leadership were prepared actually to build and arm the guerrilla force he envisioned, even on a standby basis. The one leader who argued for doing so was a twenty-three-year-old Panther named Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt. A Green Beret in Vietnam, Pratt had been the Southern California chapter’s “minister of defense.” When Newton went to prison, Pratt took it upon himself to organize underground cadres within several Panther chapters. The leadership grudgingly consented.

Once a chastened Newton emerged from prison, however, he wanted little to do with talk of revolution, which he dismissed as fantasy. This kind of talk prompted grumbling from, of all places, the North African country of Algeria, where Cleaver, after months trying to find a safe haven, had remade himself as head of the Panthers’ new “international section.” The story of Cleaver’s time in Algiers is a key untold chapter of the Black Liberation Army story. After fleeing a court date in November 1968, Cleaver had gone to Cuba, where he’d hoped to set up camps to train revolutionaries he believed would start a guerrilla war in the United States. In fact, Fidel Castro refused to allow him to even give interviews, much less set up camps. Incensed, Cleaver demanded to leave. Castro resisted—that is, until a reporter spotted Cleaver and broke the news that he was in Cuba. In June 1969, after Cleaver had cooled his heels in Havana for six months, a Cuban diplomat walked him onto an Aeroflot flight and escorted him to Algiers, where he was reunited with his wife, Kathleen.

Algiers in the summer of 1969 was perhaps the perfect place, and the perfect moment, for Eldridge Cleaver. Since winning its bloody war for independence from France in 1962, the government had forged close relations with the Soviet Union and allowed scores of revolutionary groups, from Angola to Palestine, to maintain offices in its diplomatic community. A London paper termed Algiers in 1969 the “headquarters of world revolution.” Cleaver, figuring he could demand an embassy too, invited any number of other Panther fugitives to join him. A half dozen followed suit, including a trio of California skyjackers; Donald Cox of “radical chic” fame, a Panther field marshal fleeing a murder indictment in Baltimore, who arrived in May 1970; and Sekou Odinga, who with two other Panthers reached Algiers via Havana three months later. Cox became Cleaver’s aide-de-camp, Odinga his unofficial No. 3 man.

It took a full year of on-and-off negotiations, however, for the Algerian government to approve official recognition of the “international section” of the Black Panther Party. While waiting, Cleaver embarked on a series of trips, leading Panther delegations to the Soviet Union, China, North Vietnam, and his personal favorite, North Korea, where he spent two months. In Algiers, Cleaver rented a spacious apartment in the Pointe Pescade section, where he gave frequent interviews. Finally, in June 1970, Cleaver received the Algerian government’s formal recognition, which came with a monthly stipend, identification cards, the right to obtain visas, and, best of all, the Panthers’ own embassy, a white two-story villa in the suburb of El Biar previously used by the North Vietnamese. Cleaver held a press conference to announce it all, telling reporters the “Nixon clique had begun to group the black people in concentration camps, escalating repression to the level of overt fascist terror against those who dare resist the oppression of the diabolical system under which the blacks of the United States are suffering. We reject the temple of slavery, which is the United States of America, and we intend to transform it into a social system of liberty and peace.”

Huey Newton emerged from prison just as Cleaver established himself in his new Panther embassy. Their rivalry was intense and very personal. It was stoked by the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO program: Agents forged dozens of letters between various Panthers passing on spurious allegations that Newton was plotting to kill Cleaver and vice versa. The two clashed almost immediately over Cleaver’s call to raise a guerrilla army to fight the U.S. government. All this, as it happened, coincided with a trip Geronimo Pratt was making through Southern chapters in his ongoing attempts to organize just such a clandestine force. After Pratt was arrested in Dallas that December, Newton expelled him from the party. When several militant New York Panthers protested, Newton announced he was expelling them, too.

From Algiers, Cleaver called loudly for Geronimo Pratt and the New York Panthers to be reinstated. Newton refused. By late January 1971 rumors of an impending split in the party were approaching a fever pitch, especially in New York, where stories sprouted daily that Newtonite assassins were arriving at any moment to wipe out the East Coast leadership. Newton realized it was time for a public display of unity. But with Cleaver marooned in Algeria, the best he could do was a transatlantic phone call between the two, which was to air, live, on Jim Dunbar’s
A.M. San Francisco
television talk show on February 26. Cleaver reluctantly agreed, but he suspected he was walking into a trap. All manner of wild rumors were flying from Algiers to Oakland: that Cleaver had ordered several Panthers murdered; that he was preparing a violent overthrow of the party; that he was secretly dealing drugs and guns; that he was insane. Even their doctrinal differences could be embarrassing if aired on live television.

Both men went ahead. It was a disaster. As Newton sat in a Bay Area television studio, Cleaver opened the conversation by insisting that the New York Panthers be reinstated. Newton again refused, saying those purged had plunged “into counterproductive avenues of violence and adventurism.” Cleaver was just getting started. Terming the Central Committee “inept,” he demanded their resignation. When Newton again refused, the two men simply talked past each other. The high point came when Cleaver denounced Newton personally, called for immediate guerrilla warfare against the U.S. government, and said that he would now direct the “real” Black Panther party from Algiers. Afterward Newton expelled Cleaver. Cleaver then expelled Newton.

For days, confusion reigned. Chapter leaders across the country telephoned Oakland for guidance and held meetings among themselves. Nothing as formal as a nationwide vote ensued, but had there been, the results would have been clear within a week: The vast majority of Panther chapters remained loyal to Oakland, to Newton. Party histories inevitably call this period the Split; in fact, it was less a split than a single-city secession. Only New York—many of its members, anyway—wanted to side with Cleaver. One account tells of a tense meeting in Harlem between several East Coast leaders, including some from as far afield as Rhode Island and Baltimore. Only the Harlem, Brooklyn, Queens, and Bronx branches pledged allegiance to Cleaver. Afterward, New York’s intellectual leader, Zayd Shakur, who remained in regular contact with Cleaver in Algeria, told other members they would establish the new East Coast Black Panther Party by taking over the old Panther headquarters, the Harlem storefront on Seventh Avenue. A new newspaper,
Right On!
, would be published to spread the word.