The Savage City (28 page)

To Officer Phillips, the most frustrating aspect of the riot was the response of the police brass:

The city of New York considered itself lucky. The damage from the East Harlem riot was minimal compared to Newark and Detroit. The Lindsay administration claimed credit for managing the disturbance, keeping it from exploding into an urban street version of the End of Days.

Their sense of relief was misplaced. What was happening in New York was more like a slow-motion riot—a schism buried deep within the contours of city life that would rumble and spew for much of the next decade.

 

DHORUBA BIN WAHAD
had been out of prison for two and a half months when the riots took place. Images of Molotov cocktails, National Guard troops, and rampaging Negroes brought back memories of his jitterbugging days—but this was on a much larger scale. In prison, he had seen black people herded, regimented, and controlled on a daily basis; now it seemed as though freedom was synonymous with rebellion and dissent. Watching footage of the riots on television, Dhoruba had the same thought as many leaders of the Black Power movement: if only the outrage and anger could be harnessed and directed in a more productive way, then the revolution could be transformed from a dream to a reality.

A few days after the riots in Detroit and East Harlem, Dhoruba was on the subway, on his way to visit his aunt in his old neighborhood of Morrisania. He noticed that the police presence throughout the city had been stepped up, with cops in riot gear at nearly every station. He got off the train at the Jackson Avenue station in the Bronx—and walked into the middle of a police dragnet.

Dhoruba was held overnight in jail and released at arraignment the next day. For the next six months he would have to make repeated court appearances to deal with the false charges before they were eventually dismissed. Not everyone was so lucky: many of the youths rounded up in the dragnets accepted plea bargains. Dhoruba saw the raid as one more indication of how the system was geared to criminalize black youths—even if they were just walking down the street or riding the subway.

Since his release from Green Haven Bin Wahad had become hyper
attuned to the possibilities of life. One aspect of his spiritual and physical rebirth involved pursuing something he'd been denied in prison: female companionship. While living with his grandfather in Queens, he met a young sister with the right combination of sass and self-possession. When Iris Bull walked into Dhoruba's life on a street in South Jamaica, it was lust at first sight. She was twenty-one years old, shapely and lean, with a smooth café au lait complexion and proud “natural” hairstyle; they consummated their physical relationship in the basement of Dhoruba's grandfather's house, but it quickly blossomed into something more: a true manifestation of the Summer of Love.

Dhoruba and Iris fell hard for each other and decided to get an apartment in the East Village, Manhattan's bohemian quarter. Along with being the location for the secret meeting that launched the Black Panther Party in New York City, the East Village was ground zero for many of the cultural strains that were blossoming and commingling to form what would become known as the “psychedelic sixties.” Dhoruba and Iris moved into a street-level loft at 237 East Third Street, down the block from Slugs, a popular jazz club. The rent was cheap. Iris worked at a novelty shop on St. Mark's Place selling papier-mâché flowers and black-light posters. And Dhoruba found his own source of income: pooling his resources with a couple of friends, he bought marijuana by the pound, which he stored in a vacant apartment in the building where he lived and sold by the dime bag.

In an era of black pride and black-is-beautiful, Dhoruba and Iris were a power couple. They were strikingly handsome both individually and together, with dynamic personalities and a mutual admiration that lit up a room. The semiregular parties they held at their loft on East Third Street—complete with tabs of acid and a huge bowl filled with joints on the coffee table—became a central gathering place for a diverse collective of black militants, white hippies, artists, and activists. Fueled by hallucinogens and booze, their parties sometimes lasted an entire weekend.

Dhoruba found himself torn between two powerful drives: a hunger to exercise his newfound freedom in the hedonistic frenzy of the times, versus his intellectual drive to continue pursuing his process of political enlightenment, with all the discipline and self-sacrifice that entailed. He still played his Malcolm X records and devoured the news accounts he found in the
Liberator,
the
Amsterdam News,
the
East Village Other,
and other papers he trusted. He read Stokely Carmichael's manifesto,
Black
Power: The Politics of Liberation in America,
and also
Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama
by Julius Lester, two influential books published that year. He was flirting with the prospect of becoming a full-fledged member of the Black Power movement—and his feelings only intensified when he read an article in the leftist magazine
Ramparts
by a cat named Eldridge Cleaver.

Cleaver, like Dhoruba himself, was an ex-con who had recently been released from prison—in Cleaver's case California's notorious Folsom Prison. Even before he'd been released in December 1966, Cleaver was something of a celebrity: his prison writings had been published in
Ramparts,
which enjoyed a devoted readership in the Bay Area and also in New York City. Upon his release,
Ramparts
hired him as a correspondent-at-large.

Dhoruba had read some of Cleaver's writings in the magazine, but the article that really caught his attention was one he wrote about a visit by Betty Shabazz, wife of the late Malcolm X, to speak at a political function in San Francisco. The Black Panther Party in Oakland had been assigned as Sister Shabazz's security detail in the Bay Area. “I fell in love with the Black Panther Party immediately upon my first encounter with it,” Cleaver wrote. Cleaver described being seated in an auditorium awaiting the arrival of Sister Shabazz: “I spun around in my seat and saw the most beautiful sight I had ever seen: four black men wearing black berets, powder blue shirts, black leather jackets, black trousers, shiny black shoes—and each with a gun! In front was Huey P. Newton with a riot pump shotgun in his right hand, barrel pointed down to the floor. Beside him was Bobby Seale, the handle of a .45 caliber automatic showing from its holster on his right hip, just below the hem of his jacket…. Where was my mind at? Blown!”

After this initial introduction to the Panthers, Cleaver was honored to hear that Shabazz, who'd read an article of his about the legacy of Malcolm X in
Ramparts,
wanted to meet him. She was escorted to the magazine's editorial office by the Panthers, who were confronted by a group of San Francisco police officers alarmed by reports of a group of Negroes dressed in all black carrying rifles and handguns. In
Ramparts,
Cleaver described the encounter that followed:

Immediately afterward, Cleaver joined the Black Panthers, becoming their minister of information.

Just as Cleaver was impressed by the antics of Huey Newton, Dhoruba was equally enthralled by Cleaver's account of the action. The Black Panthers, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver—it all left Dhoruba's head spinning in amazement. He vowed to learn more about this righteous new group, which echoed so many of the sentiments roiling in his own mind.

Politics was in the air. In October, at one of Dhoruba and Iris's regular parties on East Third Street, someone pulled out a flyer promoting a huge protest march the next day in Washington, D.C. Billed as “The
Rise on the Pentagon,” it promised to be unlike anything ever staged before: a march on the Pentagon in which virtually every radical protest group and some mainstream political groups promised to attend. Anyone who was against the war in Vietnam was urged to make the trek to D.C.

“Hey,” said someone at the party, “why don't we all go?” There were cars, minivans, and buses leaving for the march from Tompkins Square Park, just a few blocks away.

It sounded crazy—most everyone at the party was already high on grass, acid, and booze. But they walked over to Tompkins Square, where thousands were gathered: hippies, college students, and people from church groups and political organizations. Dhoruba and a handful of his friends climbed into a Volkswagen minibus and were off.

“When we got to the Washington, D.C., area—
damn
,” said Dhoruba. “There were people walking on the highway towards the march; thousands of people walking on the shoulder of the road. I'd never seen so many white kids at one time since I got out of prison.”

The march on the Pentagon would turn out to be a seminal event, an occasion for speeches, singing, chanting, getting high, and cursing at and scuffling with armed troopers. Eight hours later, Dhoruba and his crew were back on the minibus heading back to New York.

Traveling with Dhoruba was a group of black college students who had hitched a ride back to the city. Remembered Dhoruba, “One of the college students was talking about how marginalized they were on campus, how they were unable to get any respect from the institutional authorities. With all the reading I'd been doing, all the political analysis I'd been exploring, I jumped right into the discussion. One of the students said to me, ‘You sound just like one of those Black Panthers from the West Coast.' I said, ‘Well, if there was an organization like that in New York, I would probably join them.'”

Back in the city, Dhoruba was hurtling himself down the road toward political engagement. He read all he could find on the Panthers, and eventually visited the Panther office, a modest basement in Harlem at Seventh Avenue and West 141st Street. The group that seemed to be running the office struck Dhoruba as college kids, possibly former SNCC members who were following the community-outreach model of the traditional civil rights movement—initiating a free breakfast program for children and establishing what they called “liberation schools” to educate kids in Harlem. But Dhoruba was still half a thug, a for
mer gangbanger whose thoughts ran more toward armed self-defense than toward organizing social survival programs. He kept his eye on the Panthers, but hoped to see them follow the example of leaders like Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, cats who had a prison pedigree and sense of audacity that resonated with him.

In October, Dhoruba and Iris decided to get married. They donned matching African clothing, piled into a friend's pickup truck, and drove down to the Municipal Building in lower Manhattan for the ten-minute ceremony. The couple shared a sense of possibility; they felt ready to seize their moment in history.

Much as most New Yorkers picked up one of the city's many daily papers to read the latest about the weather or their favorite sports teams, Dhoruba always scanned the news for the latest about the Black Panther Party. On the morning of October 20, just a week after his marriage, the Panthers hit the front page: the party's chairman, Huey Newton, was in the hospital—and under arrest for shooting and killing a cop.