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.
Amid the chaos of those early March days, the only constant was the rumor of imminent warfare between the East and West Coast Panthers. Zayd Shakur repeatedly told reporters that Newton had dispatched as many as seventy-five “robots” to wipe out the New York leadership
. Overnight, the Panther offices in Harlem and the Bronx were transformed into fortresses. Guns were stockpiled. Windows were boarded. At any minute, Shakur warned, Newton’s assassins would strike.
Then, on the afternoon of Monday, March 8, came the spark. Robert Webb was a charismatic twenty-two-year-old Panther field marshal from the Bay Area who had come to Harlem the previous spring with two other Panthers in an effort to reassert Oakland’s control. Webb, however, warmed to the New Yorkers; when his companions were unceremoniously sent back to California, he stayed behind, emerging as a popular leader known as Coffee Man. “Coffee Man saw how we worked, and he hooked up with us,” a onetime Panther named Cyril Innis recalls. “He became one of us, and that made the powers that be very, very nervous.”
That Monday afternoon, in front of a Chock Full o’ Nuts restaurant at the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, Webb confronted a rival Panther selling newspapers. Exactly what happened has never been explained, but Webb, who was carrying his customary .357 Magnum, ended up dead on the sidewalk, a single bullet hole in the back of his head. The Harlem Panthers would later claim he had been killed by a Newtonite assassin, but no arrest was ever made. In an FBI memo written to J. Edgar Hoover a month later, an agent in New York credited COINTELPRO “activities” with causing Webb’s murder. Webb’s death electrified the New York Panthers, who were convinced that the long-awaited war had begun.
“Right then, that’s when the BLA started,” Cyril Innis recalls. “Certain people were told to go underground. Who made the decisions? I wish I knew. To this day, I don’t really know.”
• • •
The full story of the Black Liberation Army’s origins will probably never be told. Too many people have died, then and since; too many who lived still worry about being prosecuted for the killings that began that chaotic spring. One man who will talk, however, was perhaps the BLA’s most important organizer. His name in 1971 was Richard “Dhoruba” Moore. Forty years later, after a legal odyssey as strange as any in U.S. history, he is known as Dhoruba bin-Wahad.
Dhoruba Moore, as he will be called, was twenty-six that spring. He was an unlikely underground commander, a rangy, motormouthed peacock and curbside intellectual whose rambling soliloquies on every conceivable topic tended to draw snickers from Panthers and reporters alike. Like Sekou Odinga and other Panthers, he was a onetime gang member who had been radicalized in prison. A talented recruiter, Dhoruba had been arrested and become one of the more notorious of the Panther 21, thanks to his penchant for outrageous courtroom outbursts.
That March, as tensions escalated between West and East Coast Panthers, Dhoruba and another 21 defendant, Michael “Cetawayo” Tabor, made bail and were released from custody. When the party split and open warfare appeared imminent, both men decided to join Cleaver in Algiers. With two others, they jumped bail and made their way to Montreal, where flights had been arranged. At the last moment, however, Dhoruba was informed that his papers weren’t ready; he couldn’t go. When Tabor boarded a plane to Algiers, Dhoruba was left behind. At that point, he had to make a choice. If he returned to New York, where he imagined Newton’s assassins were combing the streets in search of him, he was going back to fight—fight the West Coast Panthers and the New York police and anyone else who threatened them. “What else would we do? Join the Salvation Army?” Dhoruba recalls. “This was war.”
War meant one thing: mobilizing the underground, the nascent Black Liberation Army. “It was our plan when we came back to build an underground, to use the infrastructure we had in place, that would attack the police who had killed our people,” Dhoruba recalls. “We would strike back, and that’s what we did, or what we tried to do.”
Returning to New York, Dhoruba began gathering his people, many of whom had been put on alert that winter. By and large, those first BLA recruits were men, and a few women, with arms or medical training, whom Dhoruba felt he could trust. They came mostly from three neighborhoods, including the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where Dhoruba had worked as a Panther recruiter, and South Jamaica, the home of many of the “heaviest” Panthers, including the Shakur brothers and Sekou Odinga. A third source of recruits was the Washington Heights chapter of the National Committee to Combat Fascism, a Panther-affiliated group many would-be Panthers had joined when the party’s ranks were closed to new members in 1969. “Jamaica, Brownsville, and Washington Heights—that’s where almost all the initial BLA cadres came from,” Dhoruba recalls. “Andrew Jackson, Frank Fields, Assata Shakur—they all came from the Washington Heights chapter. I’d had Washington Heights on the down low for months. They were half expecting this.”
The cell that coalesced around Dhoruba Moore was only one of several that formed that spring in the chaos after Robert Webb’s death—an estimated fifty to eighty Panthers were in some stage of going underground—but it was the first to act. Several safe-house apartments were already in place, an archipelago of dingy flats scattered through Harlem and the Bronx. What amounted to the group’s headquarters was a shambling three-story townhouse at 757 Beck Street in the Bronx, where Dhoruba stored the group’s weapons, including several hand grenades and a machine gun. Bunking off and on there were a dozen or so Panthers, all in their twenties, several of whom were destined for prominence within the BLA; these included Frank “Heavy” Fields, a chunky New York University dropout; Andrew Jackson, a suave, smooth-skinned Queens Panther; and sixteen-year-old Mark Holder, who had been at Robert Webb’s side when he was murdered. The townhouse doubled as their hospital. Friends at a radical-run clinic in the Bronx had stolen a closetful of medical supplies for them. The group’s medical expert—she knew first aid, at least—was Joanne Chesimard, later known as Assata Shakur, a smart, attractive City College student who would eventually become the BLA’s most infamous member.
The Beck Street cell’s first priority was money for food and rent. To get it, Dhoruba says, they began robbing heroin dealers, which brought the additional benefit of fighting the drug trade, a longtime Panther priority. “I knew all these major drug dudes, Nicky Barnes, Tito Johnson, Albie Simmons, from the Bronx and from prison,” Dhoruba recalls. “It was the natural place to get money. So when we first went underground, we started taking down heroin dealers. We were really rolling these motherfuckers. And they gave us information. When we rolled Tito, he says, ‘There’s a lot of pressure, we can’t work, the cops are all over us wanting information on you.’ That’s how we found the police were trying to use the dealers against us. We bashed down a lot of doors, man. We were like black cops.”
After several weeks, when neither the police nor a Panther assassination squad had found them, the talk at 757 Beck turned to revenge for Robert Webb’s murder. Their target was obvious: the East Coast office of the Newton-controlled Black Panther newspaper, on Northern Boulevard in Queens. The office was run by a popular thirty-two-year-old Panther named Sam Napier. They watched it for days. As police later pieced together events, seven members of the Beck Street underground, led more or less by Dhoruba, piled into a U-Haul truck and drove to Queens on the afternoon of April 17. Shooing away a number of women and children in the office, the group bound Napier with a venetian blind cord, tortured him, shot him four times, then set his body on fire.
To those white radicals who had rallied to the Panther 21’s defense, the sudden outbreak of violence was deeply unsettling. One of those caught in the political cross-currents was a twenty-three-year-old volunteer on the 21’s defense committee named Silvia Baraldini. She was an expatriate Italian businessman’s daughter who had grown up in Washington, D.C., and radicalized at the University of Wisconsin; in the next dozen years Baraldini would go on to one of the more colorful careers of any underground figure. “Suddenly, you know, all these Panthers we knew were killing each other,” she remembers. “None of us, the whites I mean, had any clue what was really going on.”
One might expect Napier’s gruesome murder to have intensified West Coast�
�East Coast violence. Instead, it ended it. The BLA never again targeted a Panther for death. Instead, barely a month later, its members would ambush four police officers, killing two. Contemporary accounts portrayed the May shootings of Officers Curry and Binetti and the murders of Officers Jones and Piagentini as attacks that erupted out of nowhere, with no warning. In fact, the BLA’s abrupt change in focus arose from a little-noticed incident in Harlem a full month earlier, on April 19, just two days after Sam Napier’s death.
That afternoon two patrolmen, Arthur Plate and Howard Steward, were cruising on West 121st Street when a pedestrian flagged them down and, motioning toward a trio of black men, said he had overheard them discussing plans for a robbery. The officers emerged from the car, approached the three men and ordered them into the foyer at 215 West 121st to be searched. Two complied. The third drew a pistol and opened fire. A wild gunfight ensued inside the vestibule. Officer Plate was struck in the face and fell to the floor, critically wounded. Officer Steward, struck in the thigh, ducked, drew his gun, and fired all six shots in his service revolver. His bullets killed one of the men, twenty-year-old Harold Russell, and injured a twenty-three-year-old named Anthony “Kimu” White. A third man, wounded in the shoulder, charged out the door and made his escape. Police identified him as Robert Vickers.
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