Panther Baby (10 page)

Bashir and I would go out together to seek donations for the Panther breakfast program. His size would give my smile the advantage we needed as we asked local merchants to donate milk, eggs, and cereal to the program. We were careful not to make threats or ask for money. A few storekeepers had been shaken down by fake Panthers in uniform demanding cash to protect their stores. A couple of these fakers were caught and given a real Panther ass-whipping. Bashir and I would invite the store owners to see the breakfast program in action before they gave. We wanted them to be assured that their donations were going straight to the community. Most of the store owners would donate once they saw the program. Some would give us additional canned goods, rice, and vegetables that made it possible to have food giveaway programs.

A lot of white high school and college kids would come to the Panther office to buy papers, books, and buttons and to attend the Wednesday night community PE classes. I became friends with a high school kid named Neal from New Jersey. On Saturdays he would bring his Volkswagen van and help us pick up boxes of food donated by merchants in the community for the breakfast program. An older Jewish man, who ran a nearby dry cleaner, also became a supporter. He would give us unclaimed clothes and would clean donated clothes for free, which we would set out on racks for the community. Dozens of people got free bags of food and free clothing from the Panther office each week.

Teenage activists from around the city came to the Harlem office to train and work as Panthers. Among them was Nile Rodgers, who later started the band Chic and became a famed musician, composer, and producer of hundreds of songs, including “We Are Family”; Joseph Harris, who became a physician and part of the Nobel Prize–honored “Doctors without Borders”; and Charles Barron, who is now a New York City councilman.

With so many of the Panther men being arrested and killed, women took on key leadership roles in the Panthers, running many of the programs and offices around country. Sisters Wonda, Safiyah, and Claudia kept the Harlem office going against all odds. Malika held the fort in Brooklyn, and Sister Audrey led the fight in Boston.

A Panther sister named Olewa, who was a trained nurse, organized a free storefront health clinic in Brooklyn, which was open on Saturdays and several afternoons a week to give free care to community folks who might otherwise not have been able to see a doctor. It was also the place where Panthers from Harlem, the Bronx, and Queens could go for health care.

It’s amazing how sick we all were. A number of young Panthers, including me, had ulcers, directly related to stress and poor diets. Many of the young women suffered gynecological problems, also related to stress. High blood pressure and migraines were common. We would drink the chalky antacids, dry swallow the aspirins, and say, “Fuck it, we’ll be dead in battle soon anyway.”

I did a lot of speaking engagements on behalf of the Panther 21, both alone and with Afeni. I was giving at least one speech a day, sometimes more—at schools, community centers, and churches; on college campuses; even at the Apollo
Th
eater.
Th
e biggest trip was speaking at cocktail-party fund-raisers in the homes of the rich and the elite.
Th
e Panther 21 Defense Committee was organized soon after our arrest, and many members were young white activists.
Th
e Panthers and the committee separated the issues of civil liberties from the belief in Panther ideology and created a way for people from diverse backgrounds to join the conversation.

Composer Leonard Bernstein and other prominent Manhattanites opened their homes for cocktail fund-raisers, a “sixties happening” that author Tom Wolfe called “radical chic.”
Th
e Panthers called it fund-raising and consciousness raising. From the days of the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement, white people of conscience have committed time, money, sweat, and sometimes blood to the cause of social justice.

Not long after the Panther 21 arrest, a group of young white radical students were taken into custody for planting a bomb at a government building.
Th
ey were released on low bail. Members of the Minutemen, a white separatist group, were arrested with bombs and guns, and they were also released on low bail.
Th
e exorbitant bail levied in the Panther 21 case was a key organizing point used by our supporters. Why are there two standards—one black, one white—for justice in America?
Th
e next logical question raised at these events was whether the Panthers or any person of color could receive a fair trial.

I would often find myself in an elegant town house or penthouse talking about these issues and raising money for the Panther Bail Fund. An hour or two later I would be back in Harlem trying to grab three hours of sleep in a rat- and roach-infested tenement.

Another celebrity who supported us was the actress Jane Fonda. I first met her when she came by the Harlem office one afternoon to pick up some papers and pamphlets about political prisoners. Her hair was cut short and straight, and she wore no makeup and had on jeans, so I didn’t recognize her. I guess I was expecting Barbarella, who had titillated my fourteen-year-old eyeballs a few months before I joined the Panthers. “Hi, I’m Jane,” she said, extending her hand. She was relaxed and down-to-earth. She played with the children in the office and asked questions about the community programs and the Panther 21 case.
Th
ere were no bodyguards or escorts, just a waiting taxi to take her back to the set of her current movie,
Klute.

She invited me to stop by USA/Filmways, where the film was being shot, which I gladly did. I had no idea that Harlem was the home to a major film studio. USA/Filmways took up most of the block between Second and
Th
ird Avenues on 127th Street.
Th
e Godfather
,
Taking of the Pelham 123,
Th
e Cotton Club,
and
New Jack City
were some of the movies shot there. It was my first time on a film set. Watching Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland act in the midst of the mass of lights, cameras, equipment, and people was a mind blower. Jane would talk to me between takes and explain how the different camera angles and shots would be cut together to create a scene in the film. When I left the studio a couple of hours later it was still light outside, although the scene inside had been a night bedroom scene. Wow! I thought. Film is powerful! No wonder the Panther leadership encouraged young progressive filmmakers to interview and to document us.

Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, the “first couple” of black theater, Broadway and Hollywood, came to the Panther office to show support and to film fund-raising appeals for the Panther 21. Harry Belafonte, Henry Fonda, Leonard Bernstein, and the great French playwright and philosopher Jean Genet were among other celebrities who visited the Harlem Panther office.

I learned to love jazz by sitting in the front row of clubs and concerts given in support of the Panther 21. Carmen McRae, Freddie Hubbard, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Max Roach turned me on with amazing vocals and intense playing. After the shows we would hang with the jazz greats and listen to their war stories about the racism and struggles they encountered traveling around the country. A couple of the musicians told me they kept guns in their music cases and considered themselves Panthers long before there was a Black Panther Party. White musicians also performed benefit concerts.
Th
e Grateful Dead did a few concerts on the West Coast.
Th
e Young Rascals rocked the Apollo
Th
eater with “Groovin,’ ” “Good Lovin’,” and other hits to help us raise money in New York.

We did a lot of small-group fund-raising events for Manhattan’s “upper crust.”
Th
ese talks were designed to connect human faces to the Panther movement and to educate people about the Panther 21.
Th
e media had portrayed us as hate-filled terrorists; Afeni and I would talk about our community programs and the lives of our fellow Panther 21 members.
Th
ere were other groups and organizations that also came forward in support of the civil liberties of the Panthers.
Th
e Committee of Returned Volunteers, founded by former Peace Corps volunteers, held fund raisers for the Panther Bail Fund. Reverend Moore opened his church in Harlem for fund-raising concerts and dinners.
Th
e NAACP Legal Defense Fund sent lawyers to help the Panther 21 fight in court for a reasonable bail. We worked together as a community.

Th
e bigger events like the outdoor rallies, rock concerts, and student takeovers were designed to fire up the masses. “Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here today because the time for revolution has come and because the fascist pigs of the power structure have got to go,” I yelled through a bullhorn microphone to a crowd of several thousand students at Columbia University.
Th
ey had once again taken over the campus, protesting the war in Vietnam.
Th
e steps of Low Library, the stately domed building that governs the center of the campus, was the stage for the rally.
Th
e large bronze statue of Alma Mater that sits in front of Low Library had been blindfolded with the North Vietnamese flag.

Students held signs and banners:
STOP THE WAR
and
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
. “Brothers and sisters,” I continued, “what the pigs fear most is what we have here today. Solidarity! Black, white, red, brown, and yellow standing together. Students and community folks standing together. Children of the bourgeois and children of the lumpen proletariat standing together demanding complete and total liberation.
Th
at’s why the pig police and the swine National Guard have been brutally attacking college campuses. When the pigs murdered students at Jackson State University in Mississippi they made it clear that they will kill any nigger who stands up, and when the pigs fired on white students at Kent State University in Ohio they made it clear that anybody who stands up is a nigger.”
Th
e crowd of students and activists cheered.

I looked around and saw the riot-geared police standing on the fringes of campus. “So, brothers and sisters, if Columbia University doesn’t recognize that the war in Vietnam is a war of capitalist exploitation being waged against oppressed people of color, and if it doesn’t recognize that the United States pig military is occupying Vietnam the way the New York City pig department occupies Harlem, then you must do more than take over this campus today. You need to burn this motherfucker down.”
Th
e students went crazy. I pumped my fist and left the makeshift stage with the crowd shouting, “Power to the people!” and “Free the Panther 21!”

I would usually be escorted to these events by one or two young Panthers, Mark Holder and his younger brother Kim, partly for security and partly to help sell the Panther papers, buttons, and posters that we brought along to the events.
Th
ese were good community organizers and dedicated “people’s soldiers” who had the skills to do battle if and when it came to that.

Th
ere were many young Panthers, the rank and file, who literally worked day and night to keep the New York chapter going, who didn’t get the headlines or the media soundbites but who gave blood, sweat, tears, and in some cases their lives to the movement.

Th
e Panther party I came home to from prison was different from the organization I left. When I joined in 1968, being a Panther was a part-time proposition. You were expected to represent Panther ideology and organize wherever you went.
Th
e requirements for being a full-fledged Panther meant coming to a couple of political education classes a week and occasional branch meetings.
Th
e barrage of raids, shootouts, and arrests now made things different. Panthers were expected to make a full-time commitment. It was no longer an after-work or after-school thing.

Panthers around the country lived communally in houses or apartments.
Th
e days began before dawn and ended late at night. After serving children at one of the free breakfast program locations, selling papers, organizing, attending meetings, and patrolling the community, you would stumble into the Panther pad exhausted. It didn’t matter how sleep-deprived a Panther was at the end of the day, you were still expected to take your turn sitting at the window of a Panther house or office, on lookout for the police.
Th
ere was a real expectation that the cops would raid our homes or offices with guns blazing. Fred Hampton was murdered in his bed as he slept next to his pregnant wife. Seventeen-year-old Bobby Hutton was shot eleven times in the back after Oakland cops told him to run down an alley. In Des Moines, Iowa, Philadelphia, Newark, Denver, and L.A. cops shot up, bombed, and raided Panther offices.
Th
irty-six Panthers had been killed and hundreds were in prison.

Of course, we didn’t think one or two teenagers with guns could hold off a police assault force by themselves.
Th
e job of the Panthers on sentry duty was to sound the alert so that the children could be taken to the safest area of the Panther pad, and then calls could be made to attorneys, the press, and community supporters. In cities where Panthers were able to sound the alert on police raids, the death toll and the brutality were held to a minimum. Cops were reluctant to kill Panthers when a crowd of community folk, lawyers, and reporters were watching.

Still the raids continued, and many more Panthers would die. Every day we received phone calls and letters that promised death to Panthers. We knew that the police were trying to intimidate us and to scare us, to make us quit, close the Panther offices, and go home. Instead, the threats and intimidation strengthened our resolve to fight, and to die if necessary.
Th
at, of course, was exactly the reaction that the FBI and the government wanted, as witnessed by FBI Director Hoover’s counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, through which operatives infiltrated the Panthers and planted false information and evidence designed to create anger, distrust, and paranoia. At the same time, the FBI went to local police departments with “evidence” that the Panthers were gearing up for an attack.