My People Are Rising

by Aaron Dixon

  “Aaron, have you seen or talked to Elaine?” It was Ericka Huggins. I felt guilty, because I was supposed to know where Elaine was at all times.

  “No. She said she was going to take little Ericka to get some ice cream,” I answered, sheepishly. I hoped my answer sufficed. Ericka sounded very concerned, which worried me.

  The next day, Tex and I went to the San Francisco Airport to retrieve the red Mercedes that Bill Elder and I had driven Elaine around in for the past four years. She was gone. Huey had felt threatened by Elaine’s consolidation of power and her influence in Northern California politics. When she refused to give him access to the millions of dollars under her control through the Oakland Council for Economic Development, he threatened her unless she turned over control of the funds. Elaine had dedicated the last four years to building up the party’s respectability, forging alliances that Huey, Bobby, and David Hilliard had been unable to forge. She had become one of the most powerful individuals in California. As much as Elaine loved Huey, in the end, he treated her just as he had treated the others that were run off from the party.

  The day after her disappearance, Elaine took out a full-page ad in the Oakland Tribune to explain her departure to the people of Oakland. She did not reveal the truth—that Huey had fallen back into his old patterns. She instead cited her fatigue and expressed a desire to pursue her musical interests; Elaine was a very talented singer. The fact that she felt compelled to take out this ad demonstrated her importance to the people and the city of Oakland.

  The following morning, keeping with the usual routine, I picked up Janice to go Elaine’s penthouse, a place she had recently moved to on Lake Merritt. Once we were inside the apartment, I told Janice that Elaine had left the party. It was a weird moment, because we didn’t know whether to cry or laugh. As a matter of fact, we both yelled out in jubilation. Our reaction surprised us, but considering how difficult Elaine was to work for, maybe our joy should have been expected. I think we also realized that with Elaine gone, the party would fall. We both knew our own exit was imminent.

  I had fallen in love with a young woman, a medical student at UC Berkeley, who worked at the clinic. Her name was Mildred, and she was a young woman of Black, Japanese, and Mexican ancestry from San Diego. She was attractive, intelligent, down-to-earth, and most of all, she was always happy and optimistic. I think we fell in love the first time we laid eyes on one another. With us there were no ulterior motives, no forced or hidden emotional reasons. We had a genuine attraction to one another. I felt as if she were in essence the girl of my dreams, as if she were my soulmate. My relationship with Lola was one of conscience; not that I did not love Lola, but I had been drawn to her out of my own weakness. I wanted to help her, to save her from unhappiness, and was looking to fulfill my own need for a sense of worth. I did not know what would become of this situation. I knew I loved Lola, but I knew also that Mildred and I had something special. With things in the party growing tense and uncertain, Mildred asked me if I would leave the party and go with her to San Diego. As much as I loved that woman, as much I sensed an opportunity for true happiness, I was not ready to cut my ties to the party.

  I struggled to explain my inability to leave. Even though the writing was on the wall, I felt unable to make my escape. But events beyond my control would push me closer to the edge.

  34

  The Richmond Incident

  Just a song before I go A lesson to be learned Traveling twice the speed of sound It’s easy to get burned

  —Crosby, Stills & Nash, “Just a Song Before I Go,” 1977

  About a week after Elaine’s disappearance, I was out in the field collecting donations for the sickle cell anemia program. It was the end of the workday, so I stopped at the Hofbrau on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley to get my favorite dish, the turkey dinner. While I ate, I contemplated the future of the Black Panther Party. After my meal, I called Central Headquarters to let them know I would be coming in shortly to turn in the donation money.

  Flores got on the phone. “Aaron,” he said in his calm manner, “when you come in from the field, I want you to go home and get your shoes and meet me at the office by six. We have some work to do.”

  When I arrived at the office with my .45, House Man told me that Flores had already left, so I went back home to relax and spend time with Lola and the kids. The next morning I awoke feeling very strange, anxious, and extremely fearful. I sensed that something had gone wrong, something had happened.

  Within minutes, Tex’s girlfriend Naomi called. “Aaron, have you seen Tex?”

  Her voice had a deep sound of concern, as if she suspected the answer. Since Tex and I were best friends and almost always together, she thought I surely would know his whereabouts. My stomach began to churn. I started to feel nauseated. Tex and I had been assigned together as a team after Deacon’s death. He and I were inseparable buddies. For a while he had moved in with Lola, me, and the kids. We often hung out together. On occasion we skipped going out into the field, and instead went back to the pad and put on some Ronnie Laws or Gary Bartz, firing up a joint or two. As a young child, Tex had witnessed his mother stab his father to death, and that vision was always with him. We had both proclaimed that if something had to be done, we wanted to be together. If one of us were assigned to go out without the other, we always called, but I had not heard anything from Tex, not a word. That was not like him.

  I opened the front door to be confronted with an ugly, overcast day. A light rain was beginning to fall. I picked up the Sunday paper and broke the rubber band. It opened onto a staggering headline, almost knocking me to the ground: PANTHER FOUND SHOT DEAD ON RICHMOND STREET. I frantically scanned the article, looking for a clue, any clue that could tell me something, anything that would ease my fears. The dead Panther was identified as Louis “Tex” Johnson.

  Outside my apartment, I gathered with Rollins Reid, House Man, and others in the soft rain as we tried to make sense of this disaster. We took long swigs of Johnnie Walker Red, trying to deaden the pain. Not only was Tex dead, but also Flores was wounded; he had gone into hiding. At that moment, I only wanted to kill the pain. I had already been numb for almost ten years, ever since the death of Welton Armstead, the first Panther killed in Seattle. For me, that was ten funerals ago. I just wanted to get fucked up, but it was no use. I couldn’t forget Tex’s smiling face.

  I learned later that Huey had overridden Flores’s assignment and replaced me with another comrade, who, in a panic, accidentally fired the fatal round that killed Tex. Tex was wearing a blue jumpsuit, which we often wore on missions of this sort. Also, several M-16s were found at the scene. The party attempted to distance itself from the debacle, later revealed to have been an attempt to silence a witness in Huey’s upcoming trial. Tex’s body went unclaimed. He lay alone on the streets of Richmond, California.

  The following days and months would see the party sliding into a pit of no return. As a result of Tex’s death and the aborted hit, a congressional investigation began to probe the internal activities of the Black Panther Party. In response, Huey sent several comrades from the security squad underground, including Bethune. The horror of what had happened unfolded slowly. The night of the attempted hit, Nelson Malloy, a comrade from Winston-Salem who worked in the medical clinic, had been asked to take the wounded Flores to the emergency room. At the hospital, the nurse called the police. Flores and Nelson fled the hospital and caught a flight to Las Vegas, where we had just opened a branch community center. Huey sent a hit team to Las Vegas. They found Nelson and drove him into the desert, where he was shot several times and buried in a shallow grave, only to be discovered alive by passersby. Nelson was taken to the hospital and then went straight back to North Carolina. Tragically, he was paralyzed for life.

  One evening, while I was sitting in the school cafeteria in what was to be my last political education class, Big Bob appeared in the doorway and motioned for me to come over.

  “A. D., the servant wants you to g
o pick up all of the weapons and dump them in the bay. Here’s some money for the U-Haul truck,” he said, handing me a two-page list of addresses. “Get the biggest truck you can,” he added, as I was heading out the door. Big Bob always seemed the same, no matter what was transpiring—no emotion, no digression, just straight ahead.

  I looked at the long list of the locations of the weapons. I left immediately, taking James Aaron with me to carry out our final mission. For the next seven hours we crawled in attics, beneath houses, beneath porches, and in other odd, hard-to-reach places, gathering the entire armament of the Black Panther Party, with the exception of shotguns and hand weapons. At 3 a.m. we made our way to the middle of the San Mateo Bridge in a drizzling rain. We parked. James Aaron and I had said very little during our gathering mission. We both knew the end was near. We also knew that if we got caught with this illegal cargo we would both go away for a long time.

  We occasionally puffed on a joint, trying to deaden our senses. So much had happened in such a short time. A California Highway Patrol car lazily drove by. After it was out of sight, we jumped into action, opening up the back of the long truck. We began to pull and toss crates, trunks, suitcases, AK-47s, M-16s, 9mm submachine guns, a .50-caliber machine gun, a long antiaircraft weapon, and endless trunks of ammo. We watched the party’s armaments fall into the dark, cold waters of the San Francisco Bay. I came across my .30-caliber assault carbine, the twin of Elmer’s, which we had purchased together. For a moment I stood and reflected on how we had spray-painted the carbines black, carving “All Power to the People” in the wooden stock, with our initials. I looked at the “A. D.” one last time before I reluctantly tossed it in with the rest of the weaponry that had helped us to be the most feared and powerful political organization in American history.

  Unloading the truck seemed to take us forever. The next night I was back at the bridge alone, discarding the remainder of the weapons. I made it home safely, exhausted, falling onto the bed, relieved to be done. Suddenly, something caught my eye in the closet. There were four beautiful, black M-16s with several clips and boxes of ammo, looking very seductive. Big Bob must have dropped them off. For a second I thought maybe I would keep these for myself, but I remembered the Panther oath we had all taken when we joined the party: Obey all your orders in all your actions. I knew this would be a dangerous time not to obey the orders given me. I jumped up and grabbed the weapons and ammo, drove down to the Oakland-Alameda Estuary, and tossed the sleek black weapons into the night, listening as they splashed into the water.

  35

  The End of the Line

  Soul searching Looking inside . . . Soul searching Digging a little bit deeper

  Gotta keep on . . . Tryin’!

  —Average White Band, “Digging Deeper,” 1976

  Tex’s death had a heavy impact on all of us. His happy-go-lucky, comical ways had put everyone at ease, yet he could be serious and fearless when needed. He and Naomi had just started seeing each other. Both of them had been moving from relationship to relationship until they discovered their love for one another. Now, Naomi was walking around like a zombie. For Lola, who was already unstable, his death was the defining event that pushed her over the brink, from which she would never recover. For her young mind, it was one too many losses, one too many contradictions. Something inside of her snapped. She slowly began to transform from the person she was into someone she wasn’t. Before Tex’s death she did not drink or smoke weed. She was always home with the kids in the evening. She had always been conscientious and close to our little family.

  We were all trying to dull our senses, trying to deny what was happening, that our revolutionary family was coming to an end and we would all have to make a decision when to leave our slowly disintegrating army. When to step outside the tent and face life on our own. Those of us who were left were just barely holding on, functioning day to day, minute to minute.

  Flores’s absence was also felt. He had joined the Southern California chapter at seventeen. Flores was as smooth and calm as a clear morning sky. He was the only one in the security squad who never seemed to cross the line—he never got drunk, never overindulged; he followed the party line, yet was still flexible enough to allow others to bend the rules and policies. He had always treated me with the utmost respect.

  We knew we were the last of the warriors, the last of a dying breed. We had become a strong force, feeling invincible at times. We had considered ourselves as eternal soldiers, always thinking we would fight the enemy to victory or to death. What we had failed to realize was that the enemy, at times, was us.

  The once formidable Panther military might was now in ruins. For twelve years, people like Landon and Randy Williams, Field Marshal Don Cox, Orleander Harrison, Robert Bay, Geronimo, Valentine, and many others had maintained the military power and expertise of the party. All these comrades were now either imprisoned, dead, on the run, or disillusioned. The weapons themselves were at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay.

  My mind in a daze, I felt no more enthusiasm, no more hope that we could continue to move the party forward. And, after all, that is what we lived for. Without the hope of a future, there seemed to be no more reason to live, no reason to exist. We had come so close to achieving something unprecedented in American history: the nonviolent capture of an American city by progressive revolutionary forces.

  In late March ’78, I was sometimes the driver for Huey, occasionally driving him down to UC Santa Cruz, where he was still pursuing a PhD in philosophy. During those drives our eyes would meet in the rearview mirror. He was distant, rarely speaking. I knew him more deeply than he suspected, especially the good in him and the complexity of his character.

  He once asked me, “Aaron, how do you keep that inner tube from growing around your stomach? Mine is getting big.”

  “I stopped eating red meat,” I answered, wondering if he would engage in conversation. He didn’t. I wondered what was on his mind. What was he thinking about? I thought back to the time I first laid eyes on that baby face. He was behind steel-blue bars in the Alameda County Jail in April 1968. Those were better days for him. Now it seemed nothing he did made any sense.

  I wondered what had happened to him between our first meeting and his release from prison in 1974. In prison he had been brilliant in his leadership of the party, inspiring us to move forward against all odds. Many of us had thought that upon his release, Huey would set about correcting the mistakes others had made in handling the party while he was incarcerated, that he would set everything right. But something had happened to him. Huey used to joke, “A funny thing happened on the way to the forum. . . .” In the case of Huey P. Newton, whatever happened was deadly serious. Most of us will never know the truth.

  There would be speculation that the government used some form of mind control or psychological experimentation on Huey while he was locked up in the California penal system. Maybe he never meant for the Black Panther Party to grow into a national and international organization. Maybe the party would have developed differently if the government attacks on us had not been so fierce that they led to the elimination of key leaders like Fred Hampton and Bunchy Carter, and the exile of important figures like Don Cox and Pete O’Neal. Maybe things would have been different if Bobby Seale had not been locked up in Connecticut upon Huey’s release. According to many memos between J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, the government’s goal was to eliminate the Black Panther Party by 1969. It was due to the ferocity and determination of the party and its members that we survived as long as we did.

  It was a cloudy day when a knock came at my door, and there stood Randy Williams, broad-shouldered, muscle-bound from nine-and-a-half years in Soledad Prison. He had done his time as if it had been a stroll in the park, and at the conclusion of his sentence, he came straight back to the party, as if the revolution were still occurring. Poison had recently done the same.

  “Hey, Aaron. Huey told me to come by to pick up the keys to the car and
your .45.”

  I was not surprised or particularly concerned, for I knew this would push me closer to leaving. I handed him the keys. I picked up my Colt Combat Commander, the weapon that had been my constant companion the past four years. It was like giving up a part of me, something familiar and close. Reluctantly, I handed the gun to Randy.

  “Oh, yeah,” Randy added. “You are to report to the school for maintenance.”

  We barely looked at each other as he left.

  The door had been opened, but it took one more incident to push me over the threshold. One evening soon after, I was part of a truckload of comrades dropped off in San Francisco’s Broadway District, a popular destination for tourists and monied hipsters. We were passing out flyers for an event in support of Huey’s upcoming trial. I went into a popular spot called Enrico’s and began handing out flyers to the customers. I approached a table where a white couple and a Black gentleman were sitting.

  The Black gentleman took one look at the flyer and jumped up and began a tirade. “Huey Newton is nothing but a two-bit gangster,” he angrily yelled. “He’s a murderer and a two-bit thug!”

  I looked more closely at the man as I prepared to respond, and recognized the face of someone I had once admired. It was Bill Cosby. I had spent my late nights as a young teenager watching Bill Cosby and Robert Culp as tennis-playing spies on the TV show I Spy, a groundbreaking series for its time. There were very few if any Black actors in leading television roles, so it was a complete joy to watch this cool and funny Black cat on TV.