Nine Lives of a Black Panther Page 17

  A puzzled look washed over Bruce’s face. “Does that mean we’re supposed to go down if a pig stops us while we’re packing?” he asked. I could tell he was frustrated. We all were, for that matter.

  Touré stood up. “That means it’s them or us.”

  Looking back now, I realize that our conversation that warm summer night in Watts foreshadowed the brutal months, soon to follow, of what some of us later called “blood and guts in Southern California.” Beginning that summer of 1969, things started heating up everywhere, on both sides. First, the Party was continuing to grow rapidly. New members joined and became involved in our community programs. We were working on opening a revolutionary liberation school intended for elementary and middle-school children. Our goal was to create a new black consciousness to counter the oppressive ideologies of white racial supremacy and economic oppression being reinforced in mainstream schools. Schools were already being opened across the country, from San Francisco to Queens.

  At the same time, David Hilliard, Emory Douglas, and Masai had recently joined Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria. In Chicago, Bobby Seale was being gagged and literally chained to his chair in court for trying to challenge his arrest for inciting a riot at the Democratic National Convention. And, of course, we were still reeling from the death of Sylvester Bell on August 15 and then the police shooting into Panther homes, both in San Diego. In Southern California, in fact, we were entering a period that was more dangerous than ever before. And in Los Angeles specifically, our worst fears were beginning to turn into reality.

  It was the end of the first week in September, and Al Armour called the Watts crew into the office. I noticed right away that Lux wasn’t there, and we were missing a few other brothers too. Al was leaning against the wall as we all settled into our chairs. He had a distressed look on his face; we knew what he was about to tell us was serious. I sat quietly off to the side, watching him closely. His body language did not bode well.

  Al called us all to attention. “Norma gave me some news that I did not want to ever hear,” he began. “She told me last night that Chip, Lux, and Caveman got into a shoot-out with the highway patrol,” he finished somberly.

  Norma was Al’s wife, and she worked out of Central. We all respected her ability to get intel.

  “There was some bloodshed,” Al continued. “We don’t know where they are or how they’re doing.”

  “Where were they when it went down?” I asked dismally.

  “Gardena,” Al responded. “The police stopped them and there was a shoot-out. One officer was shot and Chip was hurt, but that’s all I know. Everybody must be on high alert, because the brothers might contact you for some help. Make yourselves available in whatever way you can. We’ve got to pull together and find a way to help rescue them.”

  Damn! I thought to myself. The Gardena and Torrance areas were where the real redneck pigs worked. If one could imagine any pig worse than the ones in South Central, it would be those in redneck country. We were glad our comrades defended themselves and escaped without being killed, but we were worried about Chip, who we found out later had been shot in the head. We were receiving reports that Chip had made it to some members in the leadership, and G and Elaine helped to hide him for a while. But his head wound required medical attention and he had to be taken to the hospital, where he was labeled a fugitive and arrested.

  Eventually, Lux and Caveman were captured and charged with assault and kidnapping. In the end, they were both tried and convicted by an all-white jury in Torrance and ended up doing major time, at least ten to fifteen years. Chip was also charged with assault on a highway patrolman, but he was additionally charged with murdering a security guard. He was convicted of all charges and sentenced to death. In 1972, though, when California overturned the death penalty, Chip’s sentence was reduced to life in prison.

  It’s hard to describe how I felt about losing Lux to the pen. I became very emotional about it: he was one of my closest comrades, and he played a large part in my growth and development as a Panther. I felt his absence immediately. Al took Lux’s conviction really hard too; he and Lux had joined together and led the Watts office. As for Caveman, I had known him since high school—we grew up together. Losing him to prison was like losing part of my history. Chip had recently joined, so we didn’t share a lot of history, but I respected his talent and zeal, and I knew that we had lost a committed soldier. Out of the group that came from Tracy together, I knew his imprisonment would last longer than the others—the conviction of murdering a security guard meant that he would grow old and possibly die in jail.

  Worst of all, the assault on the Party was still raining down on us in a fury. On the same day we found out about Chip, Lux, and Caveman, the cops raided the breakfast program again. It was September 8; I’ll never forget that gloomy day, with all its bad news. Hasawa, Touré, Bruce, and a few others were there working and serving the children. The police came in armed, engaging in their usual despicable behavior, throwing the kids’ food all over the floor, pushing and threatening. They were ordering the children around too, terrorizing them, shouting at them, and telling them to call their parents to pick them up. That shit is hard for a soldier to sit back and do nothing about. And there’s such an irony in it all: yeah, we know terrorism very well. They’ve been terrorizing our people in America for hundreds of years. And now Hoover wants to label us the terrorists. We were just trying to fight back, fire with fire.

  Then, four days after the attack on the breakfast program, we lost Nathaniel Clark; he was killed in a domestic dispute with his wife. I was at Central Headquarters when I heard about it. She said he was high at the time, and she shot him to death. He was only nineteen when he died. Clark was part of the original group who started the L.A. Party with Bunchy. It was a devastating loss for the organization but particularly for the Watts office.

  And a few days after losing Clark, the Metro cops came to the Watts office, demanding entry. I was standing at the front entrance when they came. I quickly closed the door and then grabbed a pump shotgun, refusing them entry without a search warrant. “Haven’t we been through this before?” I snarled through the locked door. “No warrant, no admission. You’re not welcome here.”

  Fortunately, it ended without incident that day. The mini-standoff went on for what seemed like forever, but it probably lasted about thirty minutes. We’d done this drill before: the pigs trying to threaten and scare us, yelling insults and obscenities, and then one of us hurling it right back at them, before they packed up and left. This had happened too many times for some of the comrades, and I knew they were itching to get back at the police. Things could have gone down entirely differently that day, but it still served to heighten the stress and agitation everyone felt.

  September finally ended, and the beginning of October was a little quieter, so we had some time to catch our breath. Until, that is, October 18. It was a Saturday, clear and cool out. That was the day that Touré and Bruce decided to take offensive action against the pigs. I’m not sure what triggered the event—it could have been the latest trashing of the Free Breakfast for Children Program, or maybe it was the imprisonment of Chip, Lux, and Caveman. But obviously, the two of them finally made the decision not to wait anymore for the police to become reasonable human beings, human beings who would allow us to work in our community freely and defend ourselves, like free men should. They decided to no longer wait for the police to act like the “officers of the peace” they were supposed to be, who were sworn “to protect and to serve,” as the LAPD’s motto advertised in the official maxim they adopted in 1963.

  I wasn’t aware of what had gone down until the next day. I had been arrested; I was in custody at the Seventy-Seventh Precinct, on some trumped-up charge designed to keep me off the street. I was sitting on a bench in a jail cell when a Metro officer walked by. He saw me and kind of jumped back, a look of surprise washing over his face. “I thought we got you tonight,” he said cryptically. “But I guess it was the oth
er W.P.”

  I glowered at him, not saying a word, not moving a muscle.

  “Yeah, we got on the ground and shot your boy in the head,” he finished, emphasizing the word “head” with special relish, a perverse grin deforming his face.

  What the fuck is he talking about? I thought to myself. The other W.P.? Question after question was racing through my mind. Is he messing with me? Is he telling the truth? Could it be Touré he’s talking about—Walter Pope? Is Touré in custody too? Or worse? I shuddered.

  I was in custody all night. The night dragged. It was torturous, wondering what had gone down and having no way of finding out. I was trying to stay positive, but worst-case scenarios were playing themselves out in my head. I couldn’t sleep at all, couldn’t even close my eyes and try to rest a little. By the next morning, I was exhausted, but they finally released me. I went straight to the Watts office, and it was there that I heard Touré and Bruce had been ambushed by an undercover Metro Squad car at Manchester and Stanford, sitting outside of a Jack in the Box hamburger stand. It was Craig who gave me the news.

  I studied him. “So where are they?” I asked steadily. “In jail?”

  Craig looked at me solemnly. “Touré is dead, man,” he answered, as tears filled his eyes. “We heard Bruce got hit too,” he went on, “but he escaped. He’s in good hands though, getting help from the leadership.”

  The impact of his words pushed me back a couple steps, like I had just gotten walloped in the chest. I felt overwhelmed, distraught, and destroyed. I found a chair nearby and fell down into it. I sat in silence for a long time; this time I didn’t even want to know what happened. I was trying to wrap my head around the loss of Touré. I broke down.

  Later that day, Long John came to the Watts office. He clarified what really went down. His purpose in telling us, he explained, was to warn us against taking the offensive. He wanted to keep us alive.

  “Comrades,” he said firmly, “I know this has been a devastating time for you in Watts. The police are not letting up. But you got to hear me when I say that you cannot go on these suicide ventures against the police. It’s too dangerous.”

  “What exactly are you saying, comrade?” someone asked.

  “I know you heard there was an ambush yesterday, but I’m here to tell you the truth.” Long John looked hard at each of us.

  “So what really happened, Captain?” I pressed.

  “Without telling anyone, Touré and Bruce had planned a surprise attack on the pigs,” he replied straightforwardly.

  My mind was racing. As he spoke, I flashed back to my ambush attempt against Fisher and Hole. I winced.

  The attack had occurred, Long John expounded, at the Jack in the Box restaurant that had been robbed several times, so all of us knew undercover cops were staking out the place. Touré and Bruce spotted the police and parked out of view, then walked up to the back of the squad car and let loose. Touré had a .30 caliber M-1 carbine and Bruce had a double-barrel shotgun. Both of them got shots off. They wounded one of the officers, but then Touré’s gun jammed, which gave the pigs an opportunity to return fire. Bruce had taken some bullets in the abdomen and was wounded badly, and Touré was killed. Based on what the police said to me earlier, they shot Touré when he was on the ground. I also heard later, through other sources, that they stomped him on his head too.

  Somehow Bruce was able to get back to the Volkswagen they had driven in. He ended up at the apartment of Gwen, Elaine, and some of the other women. Long John and G came to help, and eventually they found a movement doctor who told them that Bruce had sustained life-threatening wounds and needed to go to the hospital. Bruce was arrested at the hospital, but his life was saved. He eventually did about seven years in prison.

  The death of Touré devastated the Party in several major ways. Most of all, in losing him, we lost one of the most enthusiastic and committed future leaders of the Party. But for me personally, I had lost another friend. Glenda Josephs, who worked the breakfast program, was Touré’s girlfriend. At the time he was killed, she was pregnant. At least I was glad to know his legacy would live on in his child.

  Touré’s death not only brought on more warnings from leadership about the rank and file taking independent action against the pigs, but it also created controversy throughout the chapter. Touré’s gun had jammed, and it was a gun that Cotton Smith had worked on. By this time, everybody was looking at everybody else with suspicion. Comrades were on edge. Fingers were pointing to Cotton, because some thought he deliberately gave Touré a defective gun for the ambush. I completely disagreed with this, because I understood weapons and knew that the M-1 has a tendency to jam. They were good weapons, but I thought they should be used for defense as opposed to offensive assault precisely for that reason.

  I didn’t care about the controversy with Cotton or the critique of Bruce and Touré taking action as they had. I loved Touré like a brother, and I knew that I would miss him for the rest of my life. I was part of the honor guard at his funeral, and it was truly an honor. But it was also an overwhelmingly sad day for me. What was happening to the Party? What about the future? I came home from the services that day and sat down on my bed, my hand still clutching the wadded-up memorial card that someone had made up for him. I sat there for a long time. I needed a lift; I needed a reminder of why we were doing this. I wished more than anything in that moment that I could speak with my comrade just one more time. I opened the program still wrinkled up in my hand, smoothing out its pages, numbly reading and rereading the words inside. Then I reached over to my bedside table and grabbed the pen lying next to my gun. Inside it, I wrote Touré a little note, five simple words, a reminder.

  ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE.

  “Arm Yourselves.” Graffiti expressing the mood of the city in 1970. WAYNE PHARR COLLECTION

  14

  GETTIN’ READY

  From G to Long John and all the others, during the PE classes the message was the same, urgent and clear: The FBI has a mandate to destroy the party! The head FBI pig, J. Edgar Hoover, has declared war on us. You all know that he said we, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, are the most dangerous threat to national security.

  And it was true: every chapter of the Party was under siege in one way or another.

  “We are at war, and we have lost many comrades over the last year,” Peaches declared as we sat in PE class one balmy October afternoon in Watts. All around the room, heads were nodding in agreement.

  “It’s not only us,” she continued, “but our friends and family; all of our people are catching hell and having their lives turned upside down.”

  “Chairman Bobby Seale is on trial in Chicago,” someone behind me muttered angrily, “and the New York 21 Panthers are facing big time for bullshit charges, like conspiracy to blow up the New York Botanical Gardens.”

  “They even claimed that the New York Panthers were gonna kill Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, and a bunch of old civil rights activists!” a pretty sister next to me added irritably.

  “Panthers don’t have time to think about tryin’ to kill them ol’ Negroes!” responded someone else.

  The room filled with murmurs of agreement, in a unanimous acknowledgment of our new urgency. The frustration in the meeting room was now palpable.

  By the fall of 1969, every chapter and every person dedicated to the Party was being persecuted for his or her political beliefs. Chairman Bobby Seale had been kidnapped by police in Northern California and taken to Chicago for his trial for inciting a riot at the Democratic National Convention a year earlier. During the trial, he was chained to a chair and gagged to prevent him from demanding his lawyer of choice. The Philadelphia office was raided, and the home of a Panther was shot up in San Diego. In Los Angeles, we had just lost several comrades from the Watts office—including Walter “Touré” Pope, Bruce Richards, Luxey Irving, Nathaniel Clark, Robert “Caveman” Williams, and Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald—to death or imprisonment. Others in Los Angeles, like Ronal
d Freeman and Blue, were fighting murder cases, so they were locked up too.

  In Watts, Al, Craig, James, and I led the office, but we also relied more and more on the few who were left of the crew that came from Tracy—Chris Means, Kibo, and Hasawa. I was pleased that the community was still with us, even though the mandate to destroy the Party was obvious and put a strain on the community too. Despite the attacks, we were able to recruit about twenty new members during that time, including Robert Bryan, a Vietnam vet and cousin of Craig Williams. Robert was hard to miss in a crowd: he liked to wear those great big Jackson Five hats, and he had a thick mustache. He was a little older than most of us, in his midtwenties, and I was happy that he came to us with military experience. Because we were under siege, having new blood like Robert was significant.

  Although he wasn’t new on the scene, Jimmy Johnson seemed to me to be trying too hard to prove himself. By late 1969, Jimmy was hanging around the Party on a regular basis. He was a pimp, but there was no comparison between him and Superfly. Frankly, I thought he was real low level. I met Jimmy at an apartment on Eighty-Fourth and Main where Panthers hung out. One of the first things I noticed about him, besides his wannabe pimp persona, was a long fingernail (which I believed was for snorting coke). After being accepted as a member of the Party, Jimmy operated out of the Broadway office. It was there that he worked himself up to captain, handling security. I never felt comfortable with Jimmy, though, because he didn’t exhibit the same political commitment as others. When Jimmy, Ronald Freeman, and a few others went to San Diego to restore order after the Us killings, Jimmy got into an argument with one of the brothers and got shot in the mouth. I don’t know exactly what went down that day, but he still stayed in the Party after that, to my surprise.

  The high number of casualties we had suffered weighed heavily on our minds. Uncertainty was thick in the air. We never knew who would be available to lead our programs because the pigs took us off the streets so frequently. In fact, the police had spun us into a vicious cycle of repeat arrests, charging us with an endless list of made-up crimes and then dropping the charges when they couldn’t make them stick. This meant we had to keep raising bail money, and keep going to court to defend ourselves, so that we could get back to our business in our community. The worst part was that we never knew what would happen to us from day to day.