Days of Rage (9 page)

After the confrontation outside
Ramparts,
Cleaver signed on as the Panthers’ “information minister,” editor of the party’s new weekly newspaper,
the Black Panther
, and—in the public’s mind, at least—Newton’s intellectual equal. But while the Newton-Cleaver marriage gave the Panthers instant legitimacy in radical circles, it introduced an ideological rift that would eventually split the party. Newton and Seale were using “armed self-defense” as a recruiting tool, a way to lure members to man the education, welfare, and free-breakfast programs the Panthers were putting into place; for all their tough talk, they had no intention of actually hunting policemen. Cleaver did. He wanted the bloody fight Malcolm and Rap Brown foresaw: a genuine revolution, Vietnam-style guerrilla warfare in America. Many found this hard to take seriously, but Cleaver was serious. Once, when asked what he
meant when he talked of an army, Cleaver responded, “A black liberation army! An army of angry niggas!”
²

With Cleaver on board, the Panthers’ profile rose quickly. After a sheriff’s deputy killed an unarmed car thief named Denzil Dowell that April, the Panthers announced their own investigation. This outraged a group of state legislators, one of whom swore to “get” the Panthers by introducing a bill to ban the public display of loaded weapons. Newton’s dramatic response would make the Panthers a household name. On May 2, 1967, Bobby Seale led a team of two dozen armed Panthers, clad in black leather and berets, to the California State Capitol building in Sacramento. A news crew, on hand for a talk Governor Ronald Reagan was giving to a group of schoolchildren on a nearby lawn, began filming.

Seale, wearing a .45 on his hip, was stopped by security guards at the top of the capitol steps. To his left stood a Panther holding a .347 Magnum; to his right was the party’s first recruit, a teenager named Bobby Hutton, massaging a 12-gauge shotgun. One of the guards asked another, “Who in the hell are all these niggers with guns?”

“Where in the hell is the assembly?” Seale shouted. “Anybody here know where you go in and observe the assembly making these laws?”

When someone yelled that it was upstairs, Seale’s group pushed past the guards, ascended a broad staircase, and marched into the packed assembly chamber. Pandemonium ensued. As guards began pushing the Panthers back toward the door, a guard snatched Hutton’s shotgun. “Am I under arrest?” Hutton yelled. “What the hell you got my gun for? If I’m not under arrest, you give me my gun back!”

The Panthers went peacefully. Outside, as reporters crowded around, Seale read a statement, denouncing the proposed gun law and launching into a tirade against “racist police agencies throughout the country intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of black people.” This was the Panthers at their most theatrical, and it caused a sensation. Overnight, footage of armed black men boldly roaming the capitol steps stunned the nation.

All that summer, as Newton led the Panthers in demonstrations across the Bay Area, the party was inundated by calls from new recruits. Then came the moment that altered the course of Panther history. Early on the morning of October 28, 1967, Newton—who by his own estimate had already been stopped by police fifty or more times—was flagged down by an Oakland patrol car. A gunfight ensued. Newton walked away with at least one bullet hole in his abdomen. Two officers were badly wounded; one died. When Newton limped into an emergency room, he was arrested. He would not go free for three years.

The prosecution of Huey Newton would be one of the decade’s centerpiece events, providing a rallying cry—“Free Huey!”—for a generation of Black Power advocates, drawing hundreds of recruits to the party and mobilizing thousands more to protests. But the impact on the Panthers was ultimately devastating. The absence of both Newton and Bobby Seale—who was serving a six-month sentence for his role in the confrontation on the capitol steps—created a leadership vacuum that was filled by Eldridge Cleaver. It was under Cleaver that the Panthers would drastically escalate their language of violence and insurrection to levels never before heard in America.

The audacity of this rhetoric, even from a vantage point of forty-five years, is shocking. It was the Panther newspaper,
the Black Panther
, that coined the phrase “Off the Pig”; under Cleaver, the
Panther
openly called for the murder of policemen, supplying tips on ambush tactics and ways to build bombs. “The only good pig,” quipped Michael “Cetawayo” Tabor, a New York Panther, “is a dead pig.” The Panther chief of staff, David Hilliard, was arrested after telling a crowd in San Francisco, “We will kill Richard Nixon.” When Cleaver ran for president in 1968, he said of the White House, “We will burn the motherfucker down.” Another Panther was quoted as saying, “We need black FBI agents to assassinate J. Edgar Hoover . . . and nigger CIA agents should kidnap the Rockefellers and the Kennedys.”
³

Panther rhetoric, in turn, inspired a host of black voices toward new extremes. A young poet, Nikki Giovanni, was among the mainstream black writers attracted to revolutionary themes. She wrote in a 1968 poem:

Nigger

Can you kill

Can you kill

Can a nigger kill

Can a nigger kill a honkie . . .

Can you splatter their brains in the street

Can you kill them . . .

Learn to kill niggers

Learn to be Black men.
⁴

Much of this, the author Curtis J. Austin has observed, could be dismissed as “ghetto rhetoric.” But the FBI, and especially urban police commissioners, could not ignore it, and with good reason. The escalation in Black Power rhetoric paralleled a rise in attacks on police. Between 1964 and 1969, assaults on Los Angeles patrolmen quintupled. Between 1967 and 1969, attacks on officers in New Jersey leaped by 41 percent. In Detroit they rose 70 percent in 1969 alone. In congressional testimony and press interviews, police officials in cities across the country blamed the rise in violence squarely on the Panthers and their ultraviolent rhetoric.

The Panthers drew the FBI’s attention early on. In late 1967 agents began bugging party headquarters in Oakland, the first step in an anti-Panther drive that, as shown elsewhere in this book, would grow into an elaborate and illegal campaign of dirty tricks against Black Power groups, all of it designed to prevent the rise of what J. Edgar Hoover called “a black messiah”: a single black leader who could unite the disparate voices of Black Power. Until that messiah rose, Hoover told a Senate committee in 1969, he considered the Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

In early 1968, the rise in Panther rhetoric led to heightened tensions with Bay Area police, especially in Oakland. The police launched scores of raids on Panther homes, briefly arresting Cleaver and Seale, and rumors flew that police were plotting to “wipe out” the Panthers. Then, on April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. In Washington, D.C., Stokely Carmichael, now aligned with the Panthers, announced that White America had declared war on blacks. Riots broke out in more than 120 cities. In Oakland, two days later, Cleaver and a group of Panthers jumped into three cars and went looking for police to kill. They stopped at an intersection in West Oakland, Cleaver recalled years later, because he “needed to take a piss real badly.” An Oakland patrolman pulled up behind. “Everybody all day was talking about taking some action,” Cleaver recalled. “So we put together a little series of events to take place the next night, where we basically went out to ambush the cops. But it was an aborted ambush because the cops showed up too soon.” When the patrol car pulled up, Cleaver said, the Panthers “got out and started shooting. That’s what happened. People scattered and ran every which a-way.”

Cleaver and young Bobby Hutton took refuge in the basement of a nearby home, where they engaged police in a ninety-minute gunfight. When the police used tear gas, Cleaver emerged shirtless—to show he was unarmed—alongside Hutton. Officers began shoving and kicking Hutton; when he stumbled, shots rang out. Hutton, hit at least six times, was killed. He became a martyr. Cleaver, granted bail, became a hero.

It was King’s death and the image of brave Panthers seeking to avenge it that cemented the party’s national reputation. For the first time many blacks who had resisted the martial calls of Black Power began to believe that white violence must be met with black violence. Emissaries arrived in Oakland from New York and dozens of other cities, all clamoring to start their own Panther chapters. In a matter of months, party membership went from hundreds to thousands; by late 1968 there would be Panther chapters in almost every major urban area. From a managerial point of view, it was chaos. A Central Committee was supposed to impose some kind of structure, but for the moment, Panther headquarters exercised little sway over these new affiliates.

It was, in some respects, the apex of the party’s influence; looking back, there is no denying that the Panthers’ “heroic” age was already passing. In September, after a two-month trial marked by rancorous demonstrations, Huey Newton was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to two to fifteen years. Bobby Seale was indicted for taking part in demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention that August, becoming one of the “Chicago Eight.” Eldridge Cleaver, released on bond after the April shootout, spent the rest of 1968 “campaigning” for president and promoting
Soul on Ice
. After refusing to appear for a court date on November 27, he vanished; some said he had fled to Canada, others to Cuba. The next month a weary Stokely
Carmichael boarded a freighter for a self-imposed exile in Guinea. “The revolution is not about dying,” he observed. “It’s about living.”

In the absence of its best-known leaders, the party was ostensibly run by Newton’s childhood friend and chief of staff, David Hilliard. But Hilliard was a weak leader, crass and profane, and by early 1969 the chapters were growing increasingly autonomous, straining ties between Oakland and the larger East Coast outposts, especially the ultramilitant New York chapter. Beset by police informers, Hilliard initiated a nationwide purge of suspect members, forbidding new initiates and further alienating not only his subordinates but the Panthers’ radical white allies. The new Nixon administration’s all-out war on the party led to mass arrests of Panthers in New York in April and May 1969 and in New Haven that May. By the summer of 1969 the party was spiraling toward anarchy.

Which is exactly when a crucial group of the Panthers’ white allies mounted a kind of rescue operation. These were not just any allies. They were the crème de la crème, the national leadership of the dominant white Movement organization, Students for a Democratic Society, known as SDS. They called themselves Weatherman.

Part One

WEATHERMAN

03

“YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION”

The Movement and the Emergence of Weatherman

He’s a real Weatherman

Ripping up the mother land

Making all his Weatherplans

For everyone

Knows just what he’s fighting for

Victory for people’s war

Trashes, bombs, kills pigs and more.

The Weatherman

—Weatherman song, to the tune of the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man”

Pig Amerika beware: There’s an army growing right in your guts, and it’s going to bring you down.

—Weatherman editorial, December 1969

Weatherman, or the Weather Underground Organization, as it was eventually known, was the first and by far the largest group of people to launch a nationwide campaign of underground violence on American soil. A faction of the leading ’60s-era protest group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), it boasted a membership that stood in sharp contrast to those of later underground groups, whose members tended to be fringe militants. Weatherman was composed of the cream of the protest movement, including some
of its most visible activists; they may have been the country’s first Ivy League revolutionaries. Much has been written about Weatherman, especially its “aboveground” origins and its early months in 1969, which were marked by all manner of bizarre behavior, not least its members’ penchant for engaging in sexual orgies. Much less has been written about Weatherman’s actual underground operations, which have remained cloaked in secrecy for more than four decades.

Partly as a result, Weatherman’s multiyear bombing campaign has been misunderstood in fundamental ways. To cite just one canard, for much of its life, Weatherman’s attacks were the work not of a hundred or more underground radicals, as was widely assumed, but of a core group of barely a dozen people; almost all its bombs, in fact, were built by the same capable young man: its bomb “guru.” Nor, contrary to myth, did Weatherman’s leaders, especially its best-known alumni, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, operate from grinding poverty or ghetto anonymity: For much of their time underground, Dohrn and Ayers lived in a cozy California beach bungalow, while the group’s East Coast leaders lived in a comfortable vacation rental in New York’s Catskill Mountains. Of far greater significance is widespread confusion over what Weatherman set out to do. Its alumni have crafted an image of the group as benign urban guerrillas who never intended to hurt a soul, their only goal to damage symbols of American power: empty courthouses and university buildings, a Pentagon bathroom, the U.S. Capitol. This is what Weatherman eventually became. But it began as something else, something murderous, and was obliged to soften its tactics only after they proved unsustainable.