Days of Rage Read online

  This, at least, was a conservative white interpretation of the black riots that had begun convulsing U.S. cities in 1964. Los Angeles’s Watts neighborhood had burned in 1965, followed in 1966 by riots in twenty cities, including San Francisco, Oakland, Cleveland, and Omaha. The idea that these riots represented something other than the spontaneous frustrations of impoverished urban blacks—that these could be the first shots of an armed black revolution—came into sharp focus in 1967. The catalyst was a pair of nasty summer riots in Newark and Detroit, in which crowds of enraged blacks ransacked entire city blocks and engaged in street battles with police and hundreds of National Guardsmen. In the flames of Newark, the activist Tom Hayden, like many others in the Movement, saw a black rebellion. “The actions of white America are showing black people, especially the young, that they must prepare to fight back,” he wrote. “The conditions slowly are being created for an American form of guerrilla warfare based in the slums. The riot represents a sign of this fundamental change.”

  No one could prove that black riots were a product of Black Power sloganeering, but they certainly pushed violent rhetoric toward new extremes. When Carmichael, seeking release from his administrative responsibilities, resigned the chairmanship of SNCC in May 1967 to embark on a speaking tour of Europe and Africa, he was replaced as Black Power’s national spokesman by his successor, a fiery twenty-three-year-old militant named H. Rap Brown. While white radicals like Hayden swapped position papers as Detroit and Newark burned, Brown not only foresaw the spread of violence; he demanded it. During a July riot in the town of Cambridge on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he mounted the hood of a car and, in a rambling forty-five-minute speech, used the most explicit language yet in calling for the overthrow of White America.

  “This ain’t no riot, brother!” Brown declared. “This is a rebellion, and we got 400 years of reasons to tear this town apart! You don’t have to be a big group to do it, brothers. In a town this size, three men can burn it down. That’s what they call guerrilla warfare!” Brown’s remarks, scribbled down by a New York Times reporter, went beyond calls for burning “the white man’s” stores. “Don’t love him to death! Shoot him to death!” Brown told the wildly cheering crowd. “You better get yourself some guns! . . . I know who my enemy is, and I know how to kill him. . . . When I get mad, I’m going out and look for a honky and I’m going to take out 400 years’ worth of dues on him.”

  The incident thrust Rap Brown into the national spotlight. All that summer, in speeches from New Jersey to Texas, he escalated his calls for blacks “to wage guerrilla war on the honky white man,” as he put it to an audience in Jersey City. “Violence is necessary; it is as American as cherry pie,” he told a boisterous crowd outside a Washington, D.C., church on July 27. “Black people have been looting. I say there should be more shooting than looting, so if you loot, loot a gun store.” In a speech in Queens, New York, on August 6, Brown called the Detroit and Newark riots “a dress rehearsal for revolution” and warned President Lyndon Johnson—whom he termed “the greatest outlaw in history”—that “if you play Nazis with us, we ain’t gonna play Jews.”

  This kind of talk, by the leader of a nationally recognized group like SNCC, was unprecedented, a step beyond anything Carmichael or even Malcolm had dared put into words. It provoked widespread denunciations, congressional investigations, and something approaching horror among black leaders as well as white. For the moment, however, White America could do little to halt the spread of Black Power. As Rap Brown whipped black crowds into a frenzy, Stokely Carmichael took the angry word farther afield, introducing Black Power to adoring audiences in Copenhagen, London, Paris, several African capitals, and, significantly, Havana. As he had with Robert Williams, and would do to scores of white and black radicals in the years to come, Fidel Castro greeted Carmichael with open arms. Carmichael, in turn, met with guerrilla leaders from across the Third World and, placing Black Power’s struggle in an international context, pledged solidarity with revolutionary movements from Uruguay to South Africa. When he returned to New York’s Kennedy Airport on December 11, he received a hero’s welcome. A crowd raised clenched fists and chanted, “Ungawa! Black Power!”

  By then, however, Carmichael’s power, if not his visibility, was waning. Riven by internal disputes, SNCC was crumbling. The Movement was surging beyond civil rights toward something darker and more confrontational. Yet still no one had answered the basic question: What was Black Power? What did it mean on the streets? An answer was on the way, it turned out, and it came clad in sleek black leather jackets, black berets, and cocked shotguns. Within days of his return from abroad, Carmichael met in Washington with members of a new group who would translate the bold words of Black Power into organization and action, transforming the nascent revolutionary movement and setting the stage for the underground groups to come. They called themselves Black Panthers.

  • • •

  Stokely Carmichael’s work in Lowndes County had actually spawned a dozen or more tiny Black Power groups who called themselves Black Panthers, in New York, St. Louis, San Francisco, and other Northern cities. But only one of these would become the Black Panthers. This was the one that formed around a pair of Oakland college students, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who founded their Black Panther Party for Self-Defense four months after Carmichael’s Greenwood speech, in October 1966. Like many they would attract in 1967 and 1968, Newton and Seale were working-class Southern transplants: The seventh child of a minister and a housewife, Newton had come from Louisiana as a boy, and Seale had come from Dallas. Newton—silkily handsome, thin-skinned, intellectual, a tortured soul—was the thinker, the visionary. Seale, six years older, served as the governor on Newton’s fiery engine.

  They became friends at Oakland’s Merritt College, where Newton paid his tuition in part by burglarizing homes. Seale, following a dishonorable discharge from the air force, had joined the Robert Williams−inspired Revolutionary Action Movement; he met Newton at Merritt’s Afro-American Association. Both were smitten by the entire canon of revolutionary literature circa 1966, especially Negroes with Guns, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and anything written by Che Guevara. They read everything Mao wrote. But their idol was Malcolm, whose every word they treated as scripture; Newton later called the Panthers “a living testament to [Malcolm’s] life work.” As the thrill of Black Power swept black colleges and ghettos in the fall of 1966, the two decided to form a local group to protest police brutality and mount armed patrols to monitor police in black neighborhoods, as a group in Watts was doing. They pitched the idea to Merritt’s Soul Student Advisory Council, which rejected it as impractical. When Seale took it to his RAM friends, they were even more emphatic: They called him suicidal.

  And so, that fall, Newton and Seale sat down in the offices of the North Oakland Service Center and, engulfed by books and pamphlets issued by RAM, the Nation of Islam, and a half-dozen other militant groups, devised a program of their own. Newton dictated; Seale transcribed. The result was the Panthers’ famous “ten-point program.” Some of these points were practical, some not. They demanded full employment, good housing and education, an end to police brutality, and “freedom,” but also the exemption of blacks from military service and the release of all blacks in every jail and prison. Before they had a single recruit, Newton named himself the party’s leader—its “minister of defense”—while Seale became the chairman, the No. 2.

  Few protest groups in U.S. history have risen to national prominence as quickly as the Panthers: They went from an idea in Huey Newton’s head to the front pages of major newspapers in a scant seven months. Part of this was luck, part the enormous appeal to beleaguered urban blacks of the Panthers’ message to police: Kill a black man, they warned, and retribution will follow. But the crucial factor in the Panthers’ meteoric rise was Newton’s genius for media and street theatrics, as demonstrated from their first confrontations with authority to the costumes they donned,
black leather jackets, powder-blue shirts and turtlenecks, and especially the black berets they wore in honor of Che Guevara. Unlike other black-militant groups springing up that year, the Panthers not only sounded badass; they looked it.

  In its first hundred days, the party consisted only of Newton, Seale, and a dozen or so of their friends. With little fanfare, they secured their first guns, learned how to use and clean them, opened a storefront office at Fifty-sixth and Grove in Oakland, and began their patrols, cruising the streets until they found a black citizen being questioned by police, typically at a traffic stop. The Panthers would step from their car, guns drawn, and remind the citizen of his rights; when a shaken patrolman asked what the hell they were doing, Newton, who had taken law school classes, told him of their right to bear arms. The Panthers generated curiosity and then, after a tense confrontation outside their office in early February 1967, respect.

  An Oakland policeman stopped Newton’s car; Seale and others were with him. At first Newton politely showed his driver’s license and answered the officer’s questions; he had his M1 rifle in clear view, Seale his 9mm. In short order three more patrol cars arrived. A crowd began to form. Up and down the street, people poked their heads from apartment windows. When an officer asked to see the guns, Newton refused. “Get away from the car,” Newton said. “We don’t want you around the car, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “Who in the hell do you think you are?” the officer demanded.

  “Who in the hell do you think you are,” Newton replied.

  At that point, Newton emerged from the car and loudly chambered a round in his rifle. When police tried to shoo away the growing crowd, Newton shouted for everyone to stay put, that they were within their rights to observe what was happening on a public street.

  “What are you going to do with that gun?” an officer asked.

  “What are you going to do with your gun?” Newton replied. “Because if you shoot at me or if you try to take this gun, I’m going to shoot back at you, swine.”

  The byplay continued like this for several long minutes. Each time Newton challenged the police, onlookers would clap and yell, “You know where it’s at” or “Dig it!” Newton, it was clear, was acting out the fantasy of every black youth on the street. And, amazingly, he got away with it. The police retired without making any arrests.

  Within days, word of these brazen new Panthers spread from Oakland across the Bay Area. The turning point came on February 21, 1967. Another of the new Panther groups, this one based in San Francisco, had invited Malcolm’s widow, Betty Shabazz, to announce the formation of a Bay Area chapter of Malcolm’s OAAU on the anniversary of his death; because the San Francisco Panthers disdained weaponry, they invited the Oakland Panthers to provide security. Newton, Seale, and their new recruits, all armed, escorted Shabazz from the airport to offices of the radical magazine Ramparts, where she gave an interview. They emerged afterward into a phalanx of newspapermen, television cameras—and police.

  Shabazz had asked that her picture not be taken. When one photographer refused to lower his camera, Newton punched him. Several policemen raised their guns. When a few Panthers turned their back to watch Shabazz emerge from the building, Newton snapped, “Don’t turn your back on these back-shooting motherfuckers!” He chambered a round into his shotgun. A crowd formed. Both Ramparts editors and policemen raised their hands and told everyone to “cool it,” but when one officer refused, Newton barked, “Don’t point that gun at me!” When the officer still refused, he shouted, “Okay, you big fat racist pig, draw your gun! Draw it, you cowardly dog! I’m waiting.” The officer lowered his weapon, defusing the situation, but the incident was caught on television cameras and made a powerful impact when it aired.

  This was something entirely new to California and soon to the rest of the country: strong, proud black men with guns facing down startled white policemen. This, it appeared, was what Black Power would mean in the streets. Word of Huey Newton and these fearless new Black Panthers spread like a windswept fog. In the next few weeks the party attracted hundreds of new recruits, some of them gang members and ex-convicts; Newton made clear that the Panthers wanted the toughest, most badass street fighters he could find, and he got them.

  None were more important than a tall, languid ex-con who studied Newton’s bit of theater on the sidewalk that day outside the Ramparts office, where he worked. His name was Eldridge Cleaver, and his destiny would be to become Huey Newton’s single most valuable partner and, later, his worst nightmare. Cleaver’s legacy would be the destruction of the Black Panther Party, but he was even more pivotal to what came after, to the underground movement of the 1970s. He became Black Power’s fourth great voice, the oratorical bridge between open defiance of American authority and urban guerrilla warfare. Not only would he emerge as the guiding force behind the Black Liberation Army, but, having forged alliances between black convicts and white Bay Area radicals, he created the intellectual framework for what became the Symbionese Liberation Army.

  There was no black voice, before or since, quite like Cleaver’s. Born in rural Arkansas in 1935, he moved with his family to Phoenix and then to Watts, where as a teenager he fell into a life of drugs and petty theft. He spent much of the 1950s shuttling between reform schools and California prisons, eventually, in 1957, graduating to rape. Years later, in a series of essays that paved the way for the white-radical deification of hardened black prison inmates, he described his rape of white women as his first revolutionary act.

  He wrote:

  To refine my technique, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto—in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of the day—and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically. . . . Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women—and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.

  Sentenced to prison for rape, first at San Quentin and later at Folsom, Cleaver (like Malcolm) read voraciously, joined the Nation of Islam, and became a leader in the state’s burgeoning prison movement, pushing for books and classes in African history. In 1965 he wrote a radical Bay Area attorney named Beverly Axelrod, who took up his case. She gave some of Cleaver’s letters to editors at Ramparts, who enjoyed them so much that they promised to hire him, as they did, when Axelrod managed to secure Cleaver’s release, in December 1966. Cleaver, who became Axelrod’s lover, said years later that he had been romantically “gaming” her in a cynical bid to gain his freedom.

  At Ramparts, Cleaver became an instant celebrity, by far the most prominent black radical in the Bay Area. Angry, sometimes funny, and frequently sexual, his letters and articles portrayed Cleaver as a kind of cross between Malcolm and Barry White, an angry, charismatic lover man with his own revolutionary spin on hoary black stereotypes. Cleaver viewed blacks as sexual supermen, envied by whites and too often rejected by uppity black women. And, like Huey Newton, he argued that the most genuine “revolutionaries” were those who were most oppressed: black prison inmates and gangbangers—an idea that appealed strongly to white radicals yearning for a taste of black authenticity. Unlike Stokely Carmichael, Cleaver embraced white radicals, who adored him. They flocked to Black House, a kind of Black Power salon Cleaver co-founded, where he held court with every Movement figure who visited San Francisco. Cleaver’s rise would be capped in 1968, when his letters and Ramparts articles were packaged into a memoir, Soul on Ice, an international bestseller that sold more than two million copies in just two years. Critics hailed Cleaver as a powerful new literary talent, a symbol of black polit
ical and sexual repression. The New York Times named Soul on Ice one of the ten best books of 1968.

  After the confrontation outside Ramparts, Cleaver signed on as the Panthers’ “information minister,” editor of the party’s new weekly newspaper, the Black Panther, and—in the public’s mind, at least—Newton’s intellectual equal. But while the Newton-Cleaver marriage gave the Panthers instant legitimacy in radical circles, it introduced an ideological rift that would eventually split the party. Newton and Seale were using “armed self-defense” as a recruiting tool, a way to lure members to man the education, welfare, and free-breakfast programs the Panthers were putting into place; for all their tough talk, they had no intention of actually hunting policemen. Cleaver did. He wanted the bloody fight Malcolm and Rap Brown foresaw: a genuine revolution, Vietnam-style guerrilla warfare in America. Many found this hard to take seriously, but Cleaver was serious. Once, when asked what he meant when he talked of an army, Cleaver responded, “A black liberation army! An army of angry niggas!”2

  With Cleaver on board, the Panthers’ profile rose quickly. After a sheriff’s deputy killed an unarmed car thief named Denzil Dowell that April, the Panthers announced their own investigation. This outraged a group of state legislators, one of whom swore to “get” the Panthers by introducing a bill to ban the public display of loaded weapons. Newton’s dramatic response would make the Panthers a household name. On May 2, 1967, Bobby Seale led a team of two dozen armed Panthers, clad in black leather and berets, to the California State Capitol building in Sacramento. A news crew, on hand for a talk Governor Ronald Reagan was giving to a group of schoolchildren on a nearby lawn, began filming.