OUT WITH A BANG
20
THE FAMILY
The Pan-Radical Alliance, 1977 to 1979
By 1977 the age of the urban guerrilla appeared all but over. The SLA was a dim memory, Patty Hearst now languishing in prison. The Weather Underground was no more. Only the FALN, the NWLF, and the little-noticed bombing groups in New England and Washington state soldiered on, not that anyone in Middle America much cared about the odd midnight explosion in Seattle or Boston or especially New York City. This was 1977. New York was a ruin. Things were always blowing up in New York.
What America wanted was to forget that all of this had ever happened—the sixties, the demonstrations, the riots, Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate, Hoover, the bombings, every bit of it. What Americans wanted most was to dance to the throbbing new beat of disco and, if so inclined, snort the occasional line of cocaine and have a good time. For ten years the news had all been very, very bad. A new president, Jimmy Carter, had taken office. A new day, a new America, was dawning.
How significant underground groups remained in this new America was the topic of a rare if brief debate prompted by Mark Rudd’s surrender that September. The author of the definitive SDS history, Kirkpatrick Sale, citing the FALN and the NWLF, asserted in a New York Times op-ed that the “armed struggle” movement was not only still vital but constituted “every bit as dedicated an underground as existed” in 1970. Sale estimated there were “several hundred” people still underground. “Not that they are exactly a dominant force,” he argued, “but they are clearly the significant factors in creating social change in the 1970s and seem to be getting stronger every year.”1 This was a reach and drew scoffs from the Times critic Walter Goodman. Noting Sale’s assertion that the “bulk” of Weatherman remained underground, he asked, “How many makes a bulk? Four? Seven? . . . Are there really hundreds of terrorists now operating in America or do they bulk only in Mr. Sale’s wishful imagination?”
The truth, it turned out, was somewhere between the two estimates. Because despite it all, despite the Townhouse and the BLA’s defeat and the SLA’s immolation and the fact that no one anywhere in America seemed the slightest bit inclined to follow them into bloody revolution, there remained a ragged core of armed radicals who refused to surrender their dreams. Some had been with Weather, a few on the margins of the BLA. By 1977 the most committed had begun gathering in New York, deep amid the ruins of a bombed-out neighborhood in the South Bronx, at perhaps the most unlikely revolutionary incubator one could imagine: an acupuncture clinic. It was called Lincoln Detox.
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The Bronx had been the middle-class “Jewish borough” of New York for decades until the 1950s, when its factories began closing and Jewish families fled en masse before a rushing tide of Puerto Ricans and African Americans. The population of the South Bronx, which slumps along the Harlem River across from the northern reaches of Manhattan, went from two-thirds white in 1950 to two-thirds black and Hispanic in 1960. Property values plummeted through the 1960s; landlords often couldn’t find buyers, when they tried to sell, or even renters, forcing them toward bankruptcy. Scores resorted to stripping and then burning their properties for the insurance money. By the early 1970s arson had risen to epidemic proportions; by decade’s end more than 40 percent of all the structures in the South Bronx had burned. Out-of-control fires blazed every night for years, creating a perpetual haze over much of the borough. Firefighters couldn’t keep up. Entire blocks went up in smoke. Watching flames spread near Yankee Stadium during the 1977 World Series, Howard Cosell famously quipped, “The Bronx is burning.”
Into the ruins of the South Bronx crept predators of every stripe. Drugs were epidemic; gangs ruled the streets. Those who remained endured unimaginable poverty and anger. “Rage,” the Times noted in a 1973 series, “permeates all facts of life in [the] South Bronx.” In 1970, when the worst was still to come, much of that rage was directed at the area’s only public hospital, Lincoln Hospital, on Concord Avenue at East 141st Street. Built in 1898, Lincoln had been condemned in 1949, but plans for its replacement had bogged down over legal challenges from owners of a factory on the proposed new site who refused to relocate. By 1970 Lincoln was a filthy, squalid place, dangerous to doctors and patients alike. The quality of its care was so notoriously poor that locals called it “the butcher shop.” Beyond its walls, venereal disease and infant mortality were rampant.
These were the days when just about any community dispute in the streets of New York drew protesters, many of them angry radicals, and outrage over Lincoln Hospital attracted more than its share. Eighty percent of Lincoln’s patients were Puerto Rican, and it was an upstart Puerto Rican version of the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, that led demands for change at the hospital. The Lords, a onetime youth gang whose signature action involved burning trash to protest the lack of garbage trucks serving the area, announced their intervention in Lincoln’s affairs in July 1970, when dozens of its purple-bereted members burst into the hospital at dawn, barricaded themselves inside the old nursing building, and unfurled a Puerto Rican flag atop it. They presented a list of demands to the hospital’s administrators: resumption of house calls (doctors were too frightened to go out alone), a day-care center, a twenty-four-hour “grievance table” manned by community volunteers, takeover of the hospital by a coalition of local leaders and hospital staffers, and completion of the new facility.
When hospital leaders announced that many of the proposals were “valid,” the Young Lords left peacefully—for the moment. In following days, however, its members were a constant and angry presence in hospital corridors. White doctors and nurses had long avoided Lincoln, and the Lords’ main targets were the foreign-born staff members who had taken their place, many of them Korean and Filipino, who now found themselves being cursed as they scurried to tend patients. The Lords demanded more Puerto Rican staff members. In response, doctors and nurses resigned in droves. A series of sit-ins and demonstrations stretched on for weeks. The hospital descended into bedlam.
Near the height of chaos that November, the Young Lords returned in force, this time with a crowd of twenty-five or so drug addicts and others. They took over a sixth-floor auditorium and demanded that administrators let them establish a drug-treatment center. Lincoln operated its own small methadone clinic, one of the few in the area, but it was a garden hose spraying the forest fire of Bronx drug addiction. Once again the weary administration gave in, admitting the need. “We should be treating thousands of addicts,” its administrator, Antero Lacot, told reporters, “but we are only treating a hundred. Every day we have to turn away 15 to 20 addicts who come here seeking help.” The Lords simply remained in place, opening a makeshift clinic in the auditorium. Later they gained office space and nearly $1 million in state and city funding. Thus was born what soon became the South Bronx’s largest drug-treatment center. Everyone called it Lincoln Detox.
From the beginning it was like no other clinic in New York. Run by radicals who established a socialist collective to administer it, Lincoln Detox drew many of its volunteers and paid staffers from the ranks of New York’s militant leftists. They adorned its walls with photos of Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and, in time, Joanne Chesimard. Its volunteers included Michael “Cetawayo” Tabor and Afeni Shakur of the Panther 21, Brian Flanagan from Weather, as well as Bernardine Dohrn’s sister, Jennifer, who fell for a Young Lords leader, Mickey Melendez, with whom she had three children. Practically overnight Lincoln Detox became a kind of clubhouse for New York’s radical elite. According to Dhoruba Moore, when the Black Liberation Army needed medical supplies in 1971, the radicals at Lincoln turned them over by the truckload.
But it was the treatment Lincoln Detox offered that was truly radical, in every sense of the word. It was an article of faith among many militants that the plague of drugs was a scheme concocted by a white government to oppress blacks. This theory had been popularized by Malcolm X, who preached that dru
g addiction could be cured by freeing blacks of the self-hatred indoctrinated by whites. At Lincoln this meant augmenting methadone with a regimen of political education classes that included Marxist literature and lectures, all paid for with city funding. Every addict was given an eighty-six-page pamphlet called “The Opium Trail: Heroin and Imperialism,” which claimed, among other eye-opening assertions, that a commitment to armed revolution could cure heroin addiction better than methadone alone. “By providing an alternative explanation and another focus for anger,” its authors wrote, “as well as collective support and some sense of direction, the movement can be the best form of therapy.”
The directors of traditional clinics rolled their eyes. “They got the biggest hunk of garbage put together that a million dollars could buy,” one scoffed.2 Still, Lincoln administrators, many of whom appeared intimidated by Detox staffers, tolerated most of it, only occasionally attempting to rein in the radicals, as when one acting director, new to the job, switched off the power when a group of 150 staffers and junkies commandeered the chapel to screen a documentary about a Mozambican revolutionary group. When the Detox crowd refused to leave, police and security guards were called, leading to the predictable melee. Twenty-three people were arrested.
Among the eager volunteers attracted to Lincoln Detox in those early days was a sharp young black radical named Jeral Williams, who would later gain infamy under his adopted Muslim name, Mutulu Shakur. Born in Baltimore to a housepainter father and a devout Christian mother—she was also blind—Shakur as a teenager had joined one of the edgiest of early black-power movements, the Republic of New Afrika (RNA). In 1968, the year Shakur signed up, the RNA held a convention in Detroit and proposed carving out a new black homeland from the states of Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina; the group even elected a provisional government that included Malcolm X’s widow. A weaker cousin to the larger and more significant Black Panthers, the RNA eventually crumbled under the onslaught of gunfights and FBI raids.
Shakur, only twenty the year Lincoln Detox opened, found a new home at the clinic; starting as a volunteer, he proved so energetic that he earned a $9,000-a-year job as an assistant drug counselor. Staffers remembered him as self-assured, cocky, and arrogant, a streetwise general in search of troops to follow his lead. He seemed to know everyone in radical circles, from Silvia Baraldini to Bernardine Dohrn. He steadily gained status at Lincoln, especially after marrying one of the Panther 21, Afeni Shakur, making him stepfather to her son, the future rapper Tupac Shakur. Mutulu Shakur rose further when he became an early convert to a new treatment that debuted at the clinic in 1974: acupuncture.
The problem, not that anyone at Detox cared to admit it, was that revolutionary politics as a cure for heroin addiction didn’t actually work very well. Methadone was still used, but it too had its limits, and after four years many in the clinic were searching for new remedies. Acupuncture was introduced by a young doctor named Richard Taft, a stringy-haired graduate of the Baylor University Medical School in Houston, whose uncle, Robert A. Taft, Jr., was a Republican senator from Ohio; his great uncle was the twenty-seventh president, William Howard Taft. Dr. Taft taught the ancient Chinese art to Shakur and others until, as luck would have it, his dead body was found in a clinic closet in October 1974. No one at Detox publicly acknowledged the ironic fact that the founder of its newest heroin-treatment program had died of a heroin overdose himself, a syringe jammed into his arm. Counselors told patients Taft had been killed by the CIA.3
Still, acupuncture caught on. A practitioner named Mario Wexu arrived to train the staff after Taft’s death, demonstrating how acupuncture could be used alongside traditional Western medicine, of which Shakur, for one, was contemptuous. Shakur and three other counselors began taking courses under Wexu through the Acupuncture Association of Quebec, and after a yearlong review and a month of clinical training, they earned doctor of acupuncture degrees. Shakur came to believe in the full range of acupuncture treatments, arguing that in his hands precisely placed needles could cure everything from hay fever to diarrhea. Wexu even took him to China to observe the work of traditional acupuncturists. By 1977, when Shakur assumed leadership of Lincoln Detox’s acupuncture programs, his sway within the clinic had risen to the point where many staffers referred to him as its deputy director, though he wasn’t.
Exactly why twenty-six-year-old Mutulu Shakur, budding doctor of acupuncture, turned to armed robbery would never be precisely explained. But he and his wife had a child on the way, and a $9,000 salary didn’t buy much in New York, even in 1977. Though years removed from his teenaged sojourn in the Republic of New Afrika, Shakur still saw himself as an ardent black nationalist and revolutionary, and revolutionary ideas filled much of the conversation each day at Lincoln Detox. In 1976, when he began discussing the possibility of some kind of armed action with potential partners in crime, he said he wanted to raise money to give back to the poor blacks of the Bronx. What he didn’t say, because this wasn’t an effective way to recruit a revolutionary army, was that one reason he wanted more money was to fuel his growing appetite for the drug whose popularity was sweeping the nation: cocaine. The drug counselor was developing a taste for drugs, and $9,000 a year didn’t buy much cocaine, then or ever.
Whatever his motivation, Shakur’s transformation coincided with the arrival in his life of a true revolutionary, a cool, stoic figure all but worshiped by would-be white and black revolutionaries alike. It was time for Sekou Odinga to come in from the cold.
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When Eldridge Cleaver was thrown out of Algeria in 1972, the Panthers with him scattered. Like Cleaver, Donald Cox found refuge in France. Michael Tabor ended up in Zambia. Only Sekou Odinga, the one Panther whose reputation actually grew despite the Algerian debacle, wanted to continue the struggle where it had begun, in the United States. Tall, quiet, and dark-skinned, with a pistol usually jammed into his belt in his role as Cleaver’s principal bodyguard, “Sekou,” one visitor to Algiers was quoted years later as saying, “is the most amazing of all the Panthers.” Odinga drew comparisons to “Shaft” and other blaxploitation heroes of the day. The word used most often was “badass.”
Odinga had long talks with the others before leaving Algiers; they knew what he wanted to do. He was still a wanted fugitive, indicted in the Panther 21 case; they thought returning to the States was suicidal. But Odinga remained dedicated to Malcolm’s words. He still believed in the revolution. He left Algiers in the fall of 1972, drifting through Lebanon, Tanzania, and other African countries. Eventually, in the spring of 1973, he returned to the United States. “I flew back,” he recalls. “It was easy. Security wasn’t like it is now. You could use any small airport, go through Mexico or Canada.”
As luck would have it, he reached New York just a few weeks before the May 1973 shootout in which Assata Shakur, still known as Joanne Chesimard, was captured on the New Jersey Turnpike. He had met with her just weeks before. “Everybody was having a tough time,” he recalls. “But we were underground in a tough time. We were up against the strongest military power in the world; they were hell-bent on destroying us. Assata and them, they were being hunted. [She] and Zayd [Shakur], they were not expropriators. They had been pushed into doing things they didn’t know how to do. At the time we worked up some plans to do things together. It was very rough. But it was still doable.”
In fact, it wasn’t. From the moment Odinga returned to the United States, it seemed another group of BLA soldiers was killed or captured every month. When the final BLA member, Twymon Meyers, was killed, in November 1973, Odinga realized he was on his own. “I had organized my immediate future with them in mind, but Zayd and them got killed before we were able to do much,” he recalls. “That really stopped a lot of stuff.”
Years later the FBI would allege that Odinga and Mutulu Shakur carried out a series of armed robberies during the late 1970s. What they never learned, Odinga says, was that his revo
lutionary expropriations actually began much earlier, after the BLA’s collapse, in 1974. Odinga worked with his old friend Larry Mack and another black radical he declines to identify. “I couldn’t even tell you how many there were,” he says of the banks this group robbed. “At least ten before 1976. Connecticut, New Jersey, mostly New York. I remember ‘expros’ in Midtown [Manhattan], Long Island, Queens. I went back in twice to one in Queens. When the guard looked up and saw me for a second time, he just made this face and went, ‘Oh no, not again.’”
This group “fell apart” in 1976, Odinga says, after his main partner decided to retire. It was then that he renewed his acquaintance with Mutulu Shakur. Odinga, several years older, had known him since Shakur was “thirteen or fourteen,” Odinga says. “He would always come around. He liked my weed.” When Shakur approached him about forming an underground group in 1976, Odinga had all but retired from robbing banks. He had apartments in Pittsburgh and New York and had opened a legitimate business, selling African jewelry with Zayd and Lumumba Shakur’s father, who purchased their goods on trips to Africa. Odinga and Aba Shakur would drive south from New York, selling to shopkeepers, until reaching New Orleans, where they unfolded card tables on a street corner and sold what remained to tourists.
At first, Odinga recalls, he was skeptical about helping Mutulu Shakur rob anything. “Mutulu is a very good speaker, a good organizer,” he recalls, “and I think that was what he was cut out to do. The military stuff, that wouldn’t work out.” So Odinga sat out Shakur’s first robbery attempt, in late 1976. The target was in Pittsburgh, and while Odinga agreed to let Shakur use his apartment there as a staging area, he declined to take part. Instead Shakur recruited two friends from the Lincoln Detox crowd, Raymond Oliver and Chui Ferguson, an army veteran who had volunteered at Lincoln and now helped run a drug-rehabilitation clinic in Brooklyn. Ferguson, who suffered from back spasms, also happened to be one of Shakur’s acupuncture patients.
Days of Rage Page 52