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 ost
ensibly 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.
To begin to understand all this, one needs to understand the protest movements of the ’60s, and to understand that turmoil, one must at least glance at the decade that produced all those angry young activists: the 1950s. For much of white America, the ’50s was a time of suffocating conformity, when parents born during the Depression and empowered by winning a “good war” taught their children that America represented everything that was right and true in the world. These were the “happy days,” when a booming economy sent wealth soaring and children, born by the millions, grew up in homes where every family seemed to have two cars in the driveway, a stereo cabinet, and, in fifty million homes by 1960, a television. How happy were Americans? When a 1957 Gallup poll asked people whether they were “very happy, fairly happy, or not too happy,” an astounding 96 percent answered very or fairly happy. “The employers will love this generation,” University of California president Clark Kerr said in 1959. “They are not going to press many grievances . . . they are going to be easy to handle. There aren’t going to be riots.”
And then, as if overnight, things changed. More than anything else, it was the pictures young Americans began seeing on those new televisions in 1960—of stoic Southern blacks dragged away from all-white lunch counters, of black protesters being beaten bloody by red-faced Southern deputies—that laid the groundwork for the white protest movement. The violence and injustice itself was shameful enough, but it was what those pictures said about America, about what an entire generation of young people had been taught, that felt like a betrayal. America wasn’t a land of equality. It wasn’t a land of the good and the just and the righteous. It was all a lie.
Those were feelings, at least, that consumed many of the idealistic white students who joined the civil rights movement after those first sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. There were only a trickle at first, but when pictures of Southern thugs beating the first Freedom Riders in 1961 were broadcast, the numbers grew. A host of white groups sprang up to work with SNCC in those first years, but by far the most influential was SDS, at the time an obscure youth branch of an even more obscure socialist education organization called the League for Industrial Democracy, which traced its origins to 1905.
SDS’s emergence was spearheaded by a Freedom Rider named Tom Hayden, a onetime University of Michigan student who served as SDS’s president in 1962 and 1963. It was Hayden who, at a conference of barely sixty SDSers and allies on the coast of Lake Huron, drafted the protest manifesto that became known as “The Port Huron Statement.” Grandly billed as “an agenda for the generation,” the fifty-page document by itself did not electrify or even mobilize campus activists across the country. But it did establish an agenda for SDS—broadly antiwar, antipoverty, and pro−civil rights—that over time would attract hundreds and then thousands of mostly white students across the nation. That the massive baby boom generation would produce a politically liberal or even radical voice had long been anticipated; the sociologist C. Wright Mills had actually written an open “Letter to the New Left” in 1960, asking what was taking so long. SDS and its intellectual allies, wanting to distance themselves from the communist “Old Left” that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had destroyed, took the “New Left” mantle as their own. SDS thus became the core of the ’60s New Left, much as the New Left became the core of the broader protest movement, “the Movement.”
The Movement grew all through 1963 and 1964, propelled both by social shocks, such as the assassinations of President Kennedy and of three civil rights workers in Mississippi, and by the first whiffs of true campus unrest, especially the emergence of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California in Berkeley. Much of white activism was still drawn to the struggle for Southern civil rights, at least until 1966, when Stokely Carmichael’s call for Black Power served as a warning that white protesters were no longer wanted, much less needed. It was then, when the white protest movement badly needed something new to protest, that the new war in Vietnam, accelerating in 1965, caught its attention.
SDS crouched unsteadily at the center of the gathering storm. Somewhat like a social fraternity, it existed as a string of campus chapters linked by a national office that attempted—through conve
ntions, newsletters, and traveling emissaries—to direct the individual chapters, with mixed degrees of success. In practice, the chapters largely went their own way. But the highest echelon of SDS, its national leadership, did tend to draw the liveliest minds in the Movement, and their utterances were widely followed. All through 1965 and 1966 SDS members peopled myriad civil rights and antiwar demonstrations, hundreds of them, but a kind of malaise soon set in. Every month brought more and larger protests. Yet there seemed to be little improvement in black civil rights, and more American soldiers poured into Southeast Asia every day. Clearly, if SDS and the broader Movement were to bring about the fundamental changes they so badly wanted, a new set of tactics would be needed.
The first stirrings of something greater than mere protest, something momentous, could be heard in SDS leadership circles by the end of 1966. The first to voice them was the organization’s national secretary that season, Greg Calvert, a twenty-nine-year-old history teacher from Iowa State who would be gone from SDS by the time others began going underground. It was Calvert who, in the face of widespread frustration at the speed of change, first began using Malcolm’s word, “revolution,” to characterize the level of struggle the Movement needed to bring to America. In a report to membership in November 1966 he wrote, “Let’s quit playing games and stop the self-indulgent pretense of confusion. . . . I am finally convinced that a truly revolutionary movement must be built out of the deepest revolutionary demands and out of the strongest revolutionary hopes—the demand for and the hope of freedom.”
This was still a long way from planning actual violence, but an intellectual foundation was being laid. Calvert’s call struck a chord, as did the slogan he coined that swept the Movement that winter of 1966−67: “From protest to resistance.” At least initially, no one was entirely sure what “resistance” meant. But out on college campuses, students quickly provided the answers. All through the first half of 1967, protesters who once silently carried signs began confronting authority. When a district attorney tried to confiscate copies of a student literary magazine at Cornell, a crowd of angry students sold it in brazen defiance; when six were arrested, others surrounded the police car and freed them. At Penn State student protesters occupied the president’s office until he provided information about the university’s practice of releasing student-organization lists to Congress.
Days of Rage Page 7