Panther Baby

by Jamal Joseph

  Put faces on those junkies, lives in those watery, desperate eyes. Black men who in another place and time could have been soldiers, could have been warriors, scholars, architects. Black women who could be, should be, teachers, doctors, lawyers. Teenagers who should be dancing, dating, sporting with eyes that are red from studying late, as opposed to eyes that are dying from chasing a heroin date. The crumbling buildings abandoned by slumlords had stories: babies, in diapers, running from apartment to apartment into the loving arms of extended families, and rent parties where fried fish and greens were served for a dollar a plate, and soul music played while Grandma or Auntie laughed and stacked enough dollars to stave off eviction for one more month. Staircases where first kisses were shared and dreams of the future, perhaps away from the ghetto, blossomed. Those were the ghosts of the not-so-distant past and the demons of the present that we underground Panthers saw as we walked those crumbling streets among the living dead.

  Dhoruba and I stood on the corner of 116th Street and Eighth Avenue where fifty, maybe a hundred, junkies flitted about buying drugs and running into the shooting galleries in full view of the community, with cops avoiding the area or ignoring it as they rode by in squad cars with payoffs in the glove compartment. “The police are an occupying army,” I said in street-corner speeches not far from this junkie gathering spot. “They are not here to protect us but to protect the interest of the capitalist suppressors. That’s why when a grandmother calls the cops to say someone is breaking into her house, the cops take an hour to come, if they show up at all. And that’s why when a white store owner on 125th Street calls and says there’s a black man outside who looks like he’s thinking about robbing the store, the cops are on the scene before the store owner can hang up the phone.”

  A grandmother told us about this corner. She had raised her kids, her grandkids, and a dozen of the neighborhood kids on this block. Now she couldn’t walk down it because of the drug traffic. The whole scene made us mad. Seeing the teenage girl who had probably sold her body to score the fix that she was buying confirmed our mission. We no longer called ourselves Panthers. The split between the East Coast “New York Panthers” and the West Coast “California Panthers” made the whole thing too confusing and, in my mind, irrelevant. Rather than argue with black people about which faction of the Black Panther Party to follow, we needed to be talking about the path to revolution. We considered ourselves Black Liberation Army soldiers who needed to continue to fight for freedom. As Panthers, we helped organize community marches and protests at known drug locations. The idea was to shame and intimidate drug dealers by the power of community action. The targeted drug spots would always close and change locations within a day or two. There were also more than a few beat-downs and guns drawn as Panthers made it clear to drug dealers that no poison would be sold on corners near Panther offices or churches and community centers that had Panther support.

  As fugitives, we could not stand in the street with a bullhorn flanked by grandmothers and children denouncing drug dealers. Instead we chose to engage in “armed propaganda”—close the drug dens by force, and put fear in the drug dealers as they wondered which one of their drug spots would be hit next.

  Drug den number one: Four of us in a car sitting across the street from a semi-abandoned tenement. It’s early afternoon. Late spring. Some people on the street, but not too many. We pull the car around the corner, just out of sight of the drug den. We check our weapons—pistols, a sawed-off shotgun, an M-1 carbine with a collapsible stop. We leave the car. Guns concealed under our three-quarter army fatigue and leather jackets. We enter the building. Falling plaster and gaping holes in the floor.

  Brother Brick knocks on the door of the first-floor apartment. The rest of us press ourselves against the wall on either side of the door. He’d sniffed some black pepper while we were in the car so his nose would be running and his eyes would be red—like a junkie, sick with flulike symptoms and stomach cramps, in need of a fix. “Give me two,” Brother Brick says, holding out a crumpled bunch of singles when the dealer cracks the door. That’s all the space we need to kick the door in and throw the dealer to the ground. “Oh shit,” a black woman junkie says as we spread out through the tiny apartment in military formation.

  There are two dealers inside and several junkies nodding or shooting up. “Everybody down,” we command, helping people into prone positions with firm shoves. A dealer starts to reach for a gun on a table. I swing a sawed-off shotgun around. “You want to die for this poison today, brother?” I ask with the barrel inches away from his face. His eyes grow big, complimenting the size of the steely black pipe that has a 12-gauge round waiting on the other side. He shakes his head no. I shove him to the floor and help to scoop the bags of heroin laid out on a coffee table with a cracked mirror top. “Drugs are genocide,” we yell to the junkies and dealers. “Stop dealing this poison or face the wrath of the people.” Moments later we are on the street ripping open the dope bags and dumping the contents into the sewer.

  A small crowd had gathered: a few grandmothers, kids, folks from the community. “We’re shutting this drug den down,” we announced. “The community needs to form a people’s army to stand vigilant against drugs, police brutality, and all forms of oppression. Power to the people.” The kids were wide-eyed. The grandmothers and parents applauded as we walked around the corner, jumped into our car, and sped away.

  “What are the guns about?” my childhood pastor, Reverend Lloyd, asked me a few months earlier when I visited Trinity Baptist Church in an attempt to start a free breakfast program. “The guns are not about killing people,” I answered. “It’s about trying to inflict a political consequence. Sixteen million armed black people means that racism will be bad for business, because those sixteen million will also be politically armed and understand that white people are not the enemy but that the institutions of oppression are. That’s how we’ll fight. Disrupt the capitalist system. Storm the banks and shut down the corporations. Make it bad for business to be a racist oppressor.”

  Reverend Lloyd didn’t allow me to start the breakfast program at his church. I probably should have said the guns were just for self-defense, and then only in the most extreme cases. But the Black Panther Party’s courageous—some say “crazy”—stance against the police brought issues of police brutality into the national spotlight. Even if people didn’t agree with the way the Panthers used guns, ideology, and in-your-face revolutionary rhetoric to confront the police, they questioned the way the armed state responded to the Panthers, and this created protests, inquiries, and a larger conversation about human rights and political oppression in general.

  As underground soldiers, we worked to make drug dealing, which we saw as a form of “ill legitimate capitalism,” bad for business. We hit drug dealers in the Bronx and Harlem, flushing the drugs down toilets and sewers, taking the money we found and giving it to grassroots community programs as well as to grandmothers and activists in the neighborhood who were helping to raise the village. A bounty was put on our heads—fifty thousand to a hundred thousand dollars, according to friends who were part of the hustling night life. The drug dealers were tired of these black militants who were fucking up business. So now there were drug dealers, cops, and some former Panther comrades who were hunting for us, all of whom definitely would prefer us dead rather than alive.

  When you woke up in the morning as a Panther you had the thought that this might be the day that you went to prison or got killed. When you woke up in the morning as a soldier of the Black Liberation Army you had the thought that this was definitely the day that you would die. You were moving too fast, always armed, always in danger of instant confrontation that could wind up with bullets flying.

  More opportunities came up for me to get away. I could have gone down south and lived on somebody’s farm, slipped back across the border to Canada for another try at Europe and Africa, or made my way to Cuba. I turned all these offers down, justifying my decision by saying
that someone had to stay to help build the underground resistance movement. It was the only way to make up for my mistakes and personal failures: not spotting Yedwa as a pig, not getting more of the Panther 21 out on bail, letting Afeni and Joan walk back into prison, going into hiding and abandoning all the young Harlem and Bronx Panthers who looked to me for leadership. No, I was going to build the resistance or die trying. When the Panther 21 was convicted I would lead the charge of the resistance in storming the prisons to free them.

  I was hiding out in a tiny studio apartment in Washington Heights when the news of the Panther 21 verdict came over the small kitchen radio. It was now May 1971. I had been hiding out for two months. Summation and closing arguments in the Panther 21 trial had been going on for the last several weeks. In his instructional charge to the jury, Judge John Murtagh dismissed all of the gun charges. During the long trial there had been much talk about guns, self-defense, and the constitutional right to bear arms. Judge Murtagh said that he wanted to clear away the gun rhetoric so that the jury could focus on the main conspiracy charges. Judge Murtagh’s instructions alone took two days. The trial had lasted eight months. To everyone’s surprise the jury returned with a verdict in three hours. Deliberations in such big cases usually took days or weeks, so not much deliberation probably meant the jurors’ minds had already been made up. I imagined that Afeni, Joan, and the Panthers tried to stand as erect and strong as possible as they were brought into court from their holding cells. The nooses had been fitted tightly around their necks, and the legal lynching was about to be complete.

  Clarence Fox, the black jury foreman, read the verdict with a slight West Indian lilt to his voice. It made his pronouncements seem even more surreal and poetic. “Not guilty,” he answered when asked about the first count of the indictment. “Not guilty,” he repeated dozens of times, as the jury acquitted the Panthers on every single count of the indictment. Gasps of disbelief mingled with tears of joy and cheers of freedom as the two-and-a-half-year nightmare came to an end. Afeni, Lumumba, Joan, Shaba, and the rest of the Panther 21 walked free.

  The prosecutors and our lawyers rushed to the jury. The lawyers shook the jurors’ hands and thanked them; the prosecutors wanted to know what happened. Mr. Fox and the other jurors explained to the lawyers and the press that they had been convinced that the Panther 21 had been arrested because of their political beliefs, and while they may have been engaged in some illegal activities, there was no proof of a conspiracy to launch guerrilla warfare in New York City. Mr. Fox went on to explain that once the judge dismissed the illegal gun charges, there was nothing to establish a conviction of the Panther 21. So the Panthers did receive justice. Not from the judges and the police system that indicted us, but from twelve people who listened to the arguments and the soul-felt speeches given by the lawyers along with Cet and Afeni.

  An eight-months pregnant Afeni had given her summation to the jury, convinced that her son, Tupac Shakur, would be born in prison. “Forgive me if I stray from legal jargon, for I am not a lawyer. I have chosen to defend myself against the advice of cocounsel, the court, friends, and as a matter of fact, against my own intellect. I do it now, as I have in the past, because I know better than any lawyer in America that Afeni Shakur is not guilty of the charges before you. Here I am, scared, shaking, nervous, but full of the knowledge that I cannot beg you for pity. There is no need for that. I am tired. I am sick of this. He [the prosecutor] has not proven any of the charges against me. Why hasn’t he proven them? Because he just couldn’t. Because there was nothing to prove. So then why are we here? Why are any of us here? I don’t know. But I would appreciate it if you would end this nightmare, because I am tired of it. There is no logical reason for us to have gone through the last two years as we have. To be threatened with imprisonment because somebody somewhere is watching and waiting to justify his being a spy. So do what you have to do. Let history record you as a jury who would not kneel to the outrageous bidding of the state. All we ask of you is that you judge us fairly. Please judge us according to the way you want to be judged. That’s all I have to say.”

  “This is the people’s victory,” I declared as I joyfully danced around the little kitchen in that safe house in the Bronx. I pumped my fists and threw karate kicks in the air when I heard the news, knowing that the credit for this outcome went to the jurors. I imagined the joy the members of the 21 felt walking from the courthouse with their freedom. I wished I could go downtown to join them, but I was still a fugitive. My case had been severed from theirs, so their not guilty verdict didn’t apply to me. Plus I had missed a court appearance date and the judge issued a bail-jumping warrant for my arrest. Dhoruba was acquitted in absentia. Later we talked about surrendering ourselves for the bail-jumping charges, which carried five years, but felt we would be set up and murdered by the guards in prison, so we decided we wanted to remain underground.

  14

  Rite of Passage

  A few months earlier, before I went underground, I was walking alone near Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. I had just given a talk to an organization known as the Committee of Returned Volunteers. These were men and women who had served in the Peace Corps and still met to discuss and be involved in various social causes. The issue of reasonable bail and fair trials for the Panthers was something that they felt they could support.

  For whatever reason, I was rolling alone that night. Usually I was escorted by one or two young Panthers from the Harlem office. That evening I sat on a park bench and watched the gay, straight, and lesbian lovers; the hippies, activists, and dog walkers; the children on roller skates, musicians, magicians, and holy people. I felt the same way I did when I was sitting on Noonie’s steps looking at the kids play in my old neighborhood. What if I just stayed here? I thought. Became a blippy (black hippie) who smoked weed, played bongos, lived between Washington Square Park and a commune in Vermont. After an hour or so I left the park and passed a church on Washington Square. The glass-cased announcement board outside the church listed the times for Sunday school and Sunday service. Beneath that was a sign: 36 BLACK PANTHERS–12 POLICE OFFICERS KILLED. This blew my mind. That church members were keeping track of how many Panthers and how many police had died in various battles. That they would care, that they had a perspective that included life lost on both sides amazed me. There was no judgment here, just a tally of human life lost in a battle for change.

  A few weeks later I was walking through Harlem with Cet, who had just gotten out of prison on bail and was still awaiting trial. It was nighttime and we were on the corner near the housing projects where Cet grew up. He was known in the neighborhood as Mike Tabor, the All-City basketball star. Cet pointed out a basketball court where some of the greatest games in Harlem had been played and a store that he robbed when he was a heroin addict feeding a hundred-dollar-a-day habit. A childhood friend of Cet’s, David, walked up to us. David and Cet crushed each other with a bear hug and grinned from ear to ear. “Mike, everybody in the neighborhood is pulling for you, man. We’ve all followed the Panther 21 case. It’s some bullshit the way they’ve been trying to frame you brothas and sistas up.”

  Then the corner became theater as they laughed, mimed, and reenacted adventures from their youth. Cet was catching his breath from a hard laugh when he asked David what he was up to now. David looked at the ground and gave a embarrassed shrug. “I’m a pig,” he said. “I joined the force two years ago.”

  I braced myself in preparation for the verbal, if not physical, ass whipping about to befall David. Cet was one of our most eloquent and powerful spokesmen, and I had seen him tear apart cops, capitalists, and politicians with biting, pointed lines. Instead Cet asked David what his job on the force was.

  “Traffic, mainly. Sometimes community patrol. The other guys on the job actually get mad at me because I spend so much time talking to these kids out here about staying out of trouble.”

  “Then you’re a police officer, not a pig,” Cet replied. “As
long as you remember that you’re out here to protect the people as opposed to these capitalist swine, you’ll be all right.”

  In that moment I realized that we had to speak to everyone’s humanity. People could choose to be progressive and human, no matter what their job was. A cop wasn’t automatically a pig just because he wore a badge. And a Panther wasn’t automatically a revolutionary and a servant of the people because he put on a beret. But there was no time to check for humanity as we moved about the city as fugitives. On that day we still had arrest warrants and bounties on our heads, and we had no intention of returning to prison. Like so many before us, from all sides of the political spectrum, victory or death was the mantra.

  In early June 1971 a group of us led a raid on an after-hours club in the Bronx, housed in an old two-story warehouse on a dark street. Brother Brick (who had participated in previous drug-den raids), Dhoruba, a stickup artist named Gus, and I left our car and approached the club carrying pistols and automatic weapons. We overpowered the guard at the door and took the long staircase that led from the entrance to the second floor.

  Gus had told us there was a side room where dealers shot dice and exchanged large amounts of money and drugs. About thirty people were partying in the main area of the club. We fired a machine-gun burst into the ceiling when one of the club security guards tried to reach for a gun. We herded everyone into a corner and scooped up the drugs and money. Brother Brick, who was the point man, checked the streets from a window as we were about to leave. “There are a million pigs outside,” he reported.