Within a few weeks I was running out of money when I heard about a guy running a book uptown in a grocery store. It was November, still football season; I bet on a game, putting $100 on a 10-to-1 bet. The team I picked won. The next day I went to the store to collect my winnings and the butcher who worked there said I had to go upstairs to get my money. Stupidly, I followed him. Once we got in the apartment he and the owner jumped me from behind and beat me damn near to death. Then they called the police and said I tried to rob them. When the police came my eyes were swollen shut and I was floating into and out of consciousness but I could hear the butcher telling the cops I held them up at gunpoint. I tried to speak, to say he was lying, but I couldn’t move my jaw. The police weren’t interested in my story anyway. They took me to the hospital. Later, when they asked me my name I gave them the name of one of my oldest childhood friends, Charles Harris.
Right after I was released from the hospital I was taken to a judge for arraignment. A bail hearing was set and a public defender was assigned. That kind of speed was unheard of in Louisiana, where you could be arrested on a charge and lie in jail for weeks before you were arraigned.
From court they took me to the Manhattan House of Detention, known as the Tombs, a high-rise building. It was a shock to see. Angola was a farm. Standing outside the Tombs you wouldn’t know it was a city jail. I was taken in an elevator to a cellblock on the eighth floor. The Tombs was integrated. For me, being from the South, it was strange at first to have a white cellmate. He didn’t protest having a black cellmate. I didn’t protest either. Other than that it wasn’t much different from Angola. Prison is prison. First you figure out the routine, which doesn’t take long because every day is the same. Then you learn the culture and how to play between the lines. The faster you do that the quicker you adjust. At any prison there is always a pecking order. The strong rule over the weak, the smart over the strong. All the threats, games, manipulations, stories, and bullying were the same in the Tombs, overseen with the same kind of cruelty and indifference by the prison administration.
Conditions were horrible—filthy, overcrowded, and run-down. There weren’t enough beds in the Tombs, so prisoners were forced to sleep on the floor in cells and in the day room. The toilets would back up and it could take days for maintenance crews to come around and fix the plumbing. Trustees were supposed to mop up but seldom did. The food was the worst I’d ever had; the same thing every day, boiled and with no seasoning. There were bedbug and lice epidemics. Security would come in and spray the floors, walls, sheets, and mattresses with poison. Every few months prisoners were stripped naked and sprayed for bedbugs and lice.
Soon after I arrived a prisoner on the tier tried to intimidate me. It started in the shower. He made comments about my body. I kept on showering. I dried off, put my clothes on, and went into the day room. He was sitting at a table playing cards. I grabbed a mop bucket, walked up to him, and split his head open with it. He was taken to the hospital, where he was treated, and he was returned to the same floor and cellblock where I was. Now he knew not to fuck with me and so did everyone else. I expected to be put in the dungeon for that but I never got busted for it. The prisoner told officials he was hit from behind and didn’t know who did it. It was violent in the Tombs but nowhere near as violent as at Angola. At Angola men would stab each other over a game of dominoes. In the Tombs if there was a fight there was usually more of a reason.
Since I lied about my identity I couldn’t write to or call my mom. She was the only one I knew who would send me money. I started a little laundry business to get by. I used to wash dudes’ underwear, T-shirts, socks. They paid me with commissary items. There was a lot of cash money floating around in the Tombs too. For cash, I gave haircuts with a razor and comb. When I had enough saved up I played loan shark, loaning prisoners money. They paid me back with interest. As usual I lay low, but I didn’t tolerate any threat or any bullshit. One month passed into the next, 1969 rolled into 1970. I continued to maintain that I was Charles Harris. I knew eventually they would find out my true identity, but you never know what might happen, I told myself. There is always hope.
1970s
Understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will die or live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution. . . . Join us, give up your life for the people.
—George Jackson
Chapter 10
Meeting the Black Panther Party
In April 1970, the New York Times reported on a questionnaire taken by 907 prisoners awaiting trial in the Tombs. “More than four out of ten prisoners said they had seen a guard assault an inmate,” the newspaper reported. “Fewer than one out of ten said they had a mattress and blanket their first few days in the Tombs. About half said they obtained a mattress and blanket a week or more after entering, often from another prisoner who was leaving the jail. Nine out of ten prisoners who had blankets said they were filthy. About half the inmates said a total of three men were assigned to their cells designed for one; a large proportion of the respondents complained about the presence of rats, roaches and body lice and a severe shortage of soap.”
That spring, three new prisoners were placed on the eighth-floor tier of the Tombs. They introduced themselves as members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Unfortunately, I only remember the name of one of the men—Alfred Kane. But I’ve never forgotten the men themselves. They taught me my first steps. I noticed they had the same pride and confidence that I had seen in the Panthers on the streets of Harlem. The same fearlessness, but there was also kindness. When they talked to someone, they asked him his name. “What do you need?” they asked. Within a few days they ran the tier, not by force but by sharing their food. They treated all of us as if we were equal to them, as if we were intelligent. They asked us questions. “Does everyone know how to read?” they asked. “We will teach you.” They set up meetings and invited all of us to come. I was skeptical but curious, so I went. The concepts they talked about went over my head: economics, revolution, racism, and the oppression of the poor around the world. I didn’t understand any of it. But I kept attending the meetings.
Over time I learned they were part of the Panther 21, arrested the year before with 18 other members of the Black Panther Party in New York City. Thirteen of them were on trial, indicted on a total of more than 100 charges, including conspiracies to kill police and bomb department stores, police stations, and the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. Bail for each of them was set at $100,000, astronomical in those days. They told us they were innocent. The charges and high bail were manufactured to get them off the street so they couldn’t do the work of the party in their neighborhoods. That work included breakfast programs for children before they went to school, forming alliances with local business to support the breakfast program and other community projects, distributing the Black Panther Party newspaper, and having meetings in black neighborhoods to recruit more members. When I heard about the false arrest, trumped-up charges, and excessive bail I was surprised they weren’t angry. They acted like they weren’t even in prison. They told us about great black people from history and great achievements made by African Americans. They spoke of providing health care to black people in their communities. They said this country had been treating blacks horribly and that change was coming. I didn’t understand anything about how change could happen. I didn’t think one person could make a difference. Then a prisoner on the tier gave me a book called A Different Drummer, by William Melvin Kelley. It opened my mind.
I read the entire book in two days. Then I reread it. The story takes place in a fictional Southern state and features a main character, Tucker Caliban, who is descended from a great and powerful African. That African, brought over in the hull of a slave trader’s ship, was so strong it took the ship’s entire crew to contain him. After being dragged from the ship in chains he bro
ke free; gathering his chains in his hands he ran away from the slave traders, eventually leading a band of escaped slaves who freed other slaves, until he was shot and killed. His baby son was taken into captivity. The generations between the son of the African and Tucker’s grandparents had been born into slavery. As the story opens the time of chattel slavery has passed but Tucker isn’t free. He works for the descendants of the family who had owned his ancestors. He lives in a small, Southern, racist town.
He tries to find peace buying former plantation land, but it gnaws on him that he is only allowed to buy what a member of the family allows him to buy. He builds a house and plants crops he owns, but it feels wrong to work the land where his ancestors were enslaved. It feels wrong that his life is still connected to the family who owned his people. He wants a life that is not dictated by white people. He wants to control his own destiny but he also knows he can’t be someone different and live his old life at the same time. Tucker covers his land in salt so nothing will grow there again. He kills his livestock. He sets his house on fire and it burns to the ground. He and his wife and child move north. “Tucker was feeling his African blood,” a white character says. His actions are a revelation to other black people in the town who had felt just as trapped. Word spreads and a mass migration of blacks eventually leave the state.
I knew how Tucker felt. Like him, I wanted to burn my past to the ground. At one time my greatest dream was to go to Angola prison. Maybe that’s all I’d been allowed to dream. To survive Angola, I had become a man who acted against his true nature. Now I wanted to go as far as my humanity would allow me to go. After reading A Different Drummer I started to believe, for the first time in my life, that one man could make a difference.
The words the Panthers spoke started to make more sense to me. The Panthers explained to us that institutionalized racism was the foundation for all-white police departments, all-white juries, all-white banks, all-white universities, and other all-white institutions in America. It was purposeful and deliberate, they told us, and it wasn’t just blacks who were marginalized. It was poor people all over the world. On the tier, in the dining hall, on the yard I started to see the black men around me as if for the first time. I thought of my neighborhood where three out of every four kids were petty thieves. We were all so poor. I was so used to it being that way. It was illegal for us to go to places where white people went. Racism was the law. The Voting Rights Act wasn’t passed until I was 17. Although blacks were allowed to vote before that, we were usually intimidated and told by powerful white men who and what to vote for. We had no knowledge of the history of African people and their contributions to civilization. We didn’t know anything about African American scientists, statesmen, historians, writers. Without knowing black history, we knew nothing about ourselves.
I thought of my mom, living under the dehumanizing Jim Crow laws in a world of white supremacy that didn’t care about her. All the textbooks in a black child’s classroom in the South were already used—passed down by white schools under Jim Crow laws. Out of date and worn out, many of them had cruel and racist remarks about black people handwritten in the margins. My mom used to tell us she missed a lot of school because she only went when she had shoes. I had judged her harshly for not being able to read.
I thought of the most violent and depraved prisoners I’d encountered at Angola and in New York. I couldn’t bring myself to hate them. Uneducated, they were surrounded by racism and corruption in prison, threatened by, and often the victims of, violence and beatings because of their race, forced to live in filth, worked to death, and barely fed. Treated like animals they became subhuman. They became animals. All the principles I was being taught by the Black Panther Party I now started to understand. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community. We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our black and oppressed communities . . . decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings . . . land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace. I not only got it with my mind, I felt it with my heart, my soul, my body. It was as if a light went on in a room inside me that I hadn’t known existed.
Chapter 11
What Is the Party?
[If] any white man in the world says “Give me liberty, or give me death,” the entire world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one.
—James Baldwin
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was started in October 1966 by two college students in Oakland, California—Huey Newton and Bobby Seale—who wanted to stop police brutality in their neighborhoods. In the sixties, police were regularly raiding black neighborhoods while armed with guns, dogs, and cattle prods. Black people were harassed, intimidated, chased, beaten, shot, and killed by police in their neighborhoods on a daily basis. Newton and Seale created a program they called “copwatching” to monitor police activity in their neighborhoods. They started carrying legally acquired firearms to police incidents in black neighborhoods, for self-defense they said, to protect the people in the neighborhood if necessary. Newton carried law books in his car. “Sometimes,” he wrote in his autobiography, “when a policeman was harassing a citizen, I would stand off a little and read the relevant portions of the penal code in a loud voice to all within hearing distance. In doing this, we were helping to educate those who gathered to observe these incidents. If the policeman arrested the citizen and took him to the station, we would follow and immediately post bail. Many community people could not believe at first that we had only their interest at heart,” he wrote. “Nobody had ever given them any support or assistance when the police harassed them, but here we were, proud Black men, armed with guns and a knowledge of the law. Many citizens came right out of jail and into the Party, and the statistics of murder and brutality by policemen in our communities fell sharply.” The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense grew from that.
It’s a common myth that the Black Panther Party was a racist organization. Racial hatred was never taught in the party. In the late sixties, Illinois Black Panthers Bob Lee and Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the party, formed an alliance with a group of white youth from Chicago’s poverty-stricken North Side whose roots stretched back to Appalachia. The white group called themselves the Young Patriots Organization and wore Confederate flags on their jackets. Like the Black Panther Party, the Young Patriots Organization was formed to combat police brutality in impoverished neighborhoods. The Panthers reached out to the Young Patriots because they shared common goals: equal opportunities as well as the end of white supremacy, the end of racism, the end of housing discrimination, and the end of police brutality. The Young Patriots started wearing BLACK POWER buttons on their jackets. Lee and Hampton created other multiracial alliances—with the Young Lords and the Native American Housing Committee, among others. Hampton called this fledgling movement the Rainbow Coalition. Who knows what could have been? Fred Hampton, at the age of 21, was assassinated in his bed by police in a 1969 predawn raid at his Chicago home. His pregnant fiancée, who was lying next to him, was shot too. Jesse Jackson used Hampton’s phrase when he created the National Rainbow Coalition for his 1984 presidential run.
The Black Panther Party wasn’t a violent organization. If you check the history you will see that whatever violence Panthers were involved in was a response to being attacked first. Bobby Seale said, “Our position was: If you don’t attack us, there won’t be any violence; if you bring violence to us, we will defend ourselves.” One of the rules laid out by party leaders was, “No party member will use, point, or fire a weapon of any kind unnecessarily or accidentally at anyone.”
“The nature of a panther is that he never attacks,” said Huey Newton. “But if anyone attacks him or backs him into a corner, the panther comes up to wipe that aggressor or that attacker out.” Yet the mainstream media painted the Panthers as a violent militia. The sight of black men legally carrying guns was so terrifying
to the establishment that even the National Rifle Association (NRA) supported a measure to repeal the California gun law that allowed the public to openly carry loaded firearms. In 1967, a Republican assemblyman from Oakland introduced the bill that became the Mulford Act. To protest the bill, which party members knew was created to stop them from being legally allowed to patrol their own neighborhoods, 30 Black Panthers in leather jackets and berets gathered on the steps of the California state capitol in Sacramento, legally carrying their guns. Some party members made their way into the assembly chamber and were arrested. Outside the capitol, Bobby Seale read a statement against repealing the gun law. In part, he said, “The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon the American people in general and the black people in particular to take careful note of the racist California Legislature which is considering legislation aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder, and repression of black people.” Two months later, Governor Ronald Reagan, a longtime member of the NRA and supporter of gun owner rights, signed the Mulford Act into law.
Much of the violence attributed to the Black Panther Party was caused by infiltrators on the FBI’s payroll. Only one year after Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the party and released its 10-Point Program, in 1967, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover expanded the bureau’s covert “dirty tricks” operation known as COINTELPRO—which stands for Counterintelligence Program—created in 1956 to fight communism, in order to focus on and attack the Black Panther Party. The FBI spent millions of dollars to infiltrate the Black Panther Party, create divisiveness and mistrust among its members, murder and incarcerate its leaders, hamper fund-raising for community programs and lawyers, and leak false information to the press and law enforcement authorities, all to destroy the party. (It was an FBI informant, acting as 21-year-old Fred Hampton’s bodyguard, who reportedly set up Hampton’s murder by Chicago police.) The FBI constantly surveilled Panthers and harassed their family members and anyone who supported the party. COINTELPRO-like tactics were used by local police and DA offices across the country to persecute party members: to charge them with crimes they didn’t commit and to keep Panthers in jail, separating them from the party and disrupting chains of leadership and communication within the organization. Arresting Panthers tarnished their reputations and called into question the motives of the Black Panther Party to the public at large. The arrests distracted party members on the street by forcing them to raise funds—which would normally go to the community—to use for bail and to hire attorneys for Panthers being persecuted by police, DAs, and the judicial system. (In the end the FBI won; the party wouldn’t officially end until 1982, but it was decimated from inside out by the early seventies.)
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