Nine Lives of a Black Panther Read online

  I was standing a couple of feet from the front door when suddenly—boom!—it blew open. I immediately jumped into a bunker we had built on the right side of the room as a uniformed blur of police officers stormed past me. Just then, Cotton opened with the machine gun, moving forward in the direction of the front door. Bam! Bam! Bam! I heard in rapid succession. My heart began to beat faster as the adrenaline raced through my body. The cops were stopped in their tracks; then they bunched up in the hallway trying to get back to the front door. As they moved back past my position, I let loose with the shotgun, catching the police in the side and front. Good thing for them they had on bulletproof vests. But now they had no choice but to withdraw. “They’re shooting back!” a couple of officers yelled as they retreated, running and limping back out the front door.

  I knew at least one had gotten shot; a trail of blood ran the length of the hallway. I was still in the bunker when Paul Redd jumped in next to me, shotgun in hand. Bernard fired his shotgun directly over our heads, out toward the front. The sound was like a thunderclap directly on top of me. “What the hell are you doing? Go upstairs and find a window to shoot out of!” I yelled at him.

  The smell of gunpowder began to fill up the front of the building. It was dark, but there was no way we were going to turn on any lights. Robert Bryan came running from the back and took up a position behind the sandbags in the front office. Paul ran over to the left side of the building and hopped into a bunker over there. Cotton had been moving toward the front and got in the right bunker as I checked to make sure the rear of the building was secure. There was a ton of dirt piled up against the back door; this was where we had been digging a tunnel to the sewers below. Much of the dirt had also been used to fill the sandbags throughout headquarters and to fill the walls just in case the cops fired on us.

  We were pretty secure downstairs. The dirt piled against the rear door made it immoveable. Outside, the downstairs door that led to our second-floor office had been reinforced and was also secure. In the upstairs office we had gun slats in the walls; the only problem was that once they were opened, the light would give away our positions. But the upstairs was still protected. There was a skylight in the center of the room, and because the pigs were on the roof, they had to walk over the skylight. We hugged the walls so they couldn’t see us. The police had taken serious fire, so they hadn’t tried to come up the steps. We had shot the cops out of our headquarters through the front door, their point of attack. To our credit, we had repelled the first assault by the police and secured the building.

  Knowing the LAPD would need time to regroup, I went to the gun room and got the ammunition we needed to defend ourselves. Paul, who had a shotgun and a .30 caliber carbine, was reloading his weapons in the left bunker. When I returned to the front, I reloaded my M-14. Cotton reloaded his .45 caliber in the right bunker. I also passed out pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails, which we used to keep the police from sneaking up on us. As soon as we would hear movement outside, we’d signal for the bombs. This cleared the sides of the building so the cops couldn’t rush through the front door again. A few of the pipe bombs landed on a car parked in front of the building, igniting it. The smoke from the fire, as well as kerosene and gasoline fumes, began to waft inside.

  Soon, the police began throwing tear gas at the building. We had chicken wire around the upper windows, which blocked most of the incoming canisters, but the fumes still found their way inside, mixing with the cordite and gunpowder. My eyes began to tear up, but I didn’t dare wipe them; we knew that the way to deal with tear gas was to keep our hands away from our faces so that we wouldn’t accidentally rub the tear gas in our eyes and pores, where it would become more effective.

  “Redd! You got some cigarettes?” I shouted. I was digging in my pockets looking for my pack of Kools, but they were nowhere to be found. Paul had taken some Lucky Strikes from his pocket and snapped off the filtered end, sticking them up his nose to keep the tear gas fumes out. He tossed me the pack; I did the same. I knew my other comrades would follow suit—our training required us to understand the dangers of tear gas.

  Peaches and Tommye had been downstairs but needed to get to the communications room upstairs so they could notify other comrades, our families, and the community that the pigs had “vamped” on us. We knew the building like the backs of our hands. Every one of us was able to get through in the dark, but the pigs on the roof would be watching for movement of any kind. I escorted them both, covering them with the shotgun aimed at the ceiling, to the communications room where they manned the phones and called the local press and wire services. Though it seemed like an eternity, all of this activity had transpired thirty minutes after our initial contact with the police.

  As we waited for the next round of attacks, we also waited for the cops to identify themselves as police and state that they had a search warrant or that we were under arrest. None of that happened—the pigs had just busted through our door. Basically, the police had launched a planned, unprovoked attack against us with the clear intention to kill. Again, we were able to survive because of our diligence and training. We had settled in to fight, and everybody handled their business. We fought back. No one thought of giving up.

  Two hours passed. We were getting hit at various positions, and while the tear gas was having minimal success, the smoke was still drifting throughout the building. That’s when the police decided to blow the roof off our headquarters.

  It seemed like everything around us exploded, literally and figuratively. I looked up through the hole where part of our roof used to be and saw, with a note of irony, that the orange and red violence of dawn had swept the early morning sky, while the Panther headquarters had been covered with violent smoke from some serious munitions of the LAPD. The explosive charges they planted made a deafening noise, practically destroying Paul’s eardrums. The hole in the roof was large, but the pigs didn’t get the effect they had hoped for; the gaping hole allowed the tear gas that had collected inside to escape. Meanwhile, wood, composition tar paper, and all manner of debris rained down on us.

  “I’m hit, I’m hit!” I heard Roland yell.

  Tommye and Peaches came running downstairs, sweat and soot dripping from their faces. Roland had been wounded earlier when the pigs first came in, and he got hurt again when the roof blew. He came downstairs bleeding from his side, but the first thing he said was that he needed a gun; he didn’t want the police running up on him with nothing in his hand. I went to the gun room to retrieve a .45 automatic pistol and gave it to him.

  Snipers then became the central strategy of the police attack. The Panthers who remained upstairs were taking tremendous fire. “Duck, Wayne!” Pee Wee yelled out. “The bullets are as thick as donuts up here!”

  He was right. I could hear the bullets whizzing by, hitting everything except my comrades. But even through the barrage of bullets, those still upstairs were able to hold on to one room for a good while.

  During this time, I was holding fire with a sniper when he locked on my position. I could actually see the bullet coming at me in a straight line. I rolled out of the way, and it hit the concrete floor. Tommye, who was lying directly behind me, was hit twice, once in each thigh. Her blood squirted onto my ankle as the bullets tore into her flesh. My arm and chest suddenly felt as if they were burning, and that’s when I realized that some of the bullet fragments had hit me in my left arm. I also took some shotgun pellets in my chest. Then I felt something warm and wet trickle down the side of my face; I don’t know exactly when, but at some point a bullet had grazed my forehead.

  Making matters worse, we had run out of .30 caliber ammo and shotgun shells. This was a serious blow because that’s what most of our weapons needed. But we still had the Thompson .45, which Cotton was holding, and Robert and I had the two M-14s.

  The pigs finally cleared us out of the upstairs space, so now everyone was downstairs. We could hear them talking from outside the building. We surmised that their next step in fo
rcing us out would be to use a tank or armored vehicle. Based on this assumption, we finally began to talk about surrendering.

  “I been shooting at the police for four or five hours, and I ain’t about to go outside,” I said defiantly. Some of the other brothers were in agreement, especially Paul Redd, who was adamant about not giving up. But as we were discussing the options, Peaches spoke up.

  “I’ll go out,” she reasoned. We all got quiet. Peaches repeated herself. We finally agreed.

  We had to cover Peaches as she went out. Cotton was in one bunker, Paul was in the other, and I had the M-14. Shortly before she left, I went back upstairs with the aim of starting a fire in our information room. But then I thought better of it once I got up there, because to do that, pulling down file cabinets and all, I would expose myself to police fire. Peaches went out waving a white rag.

  Shortly after her, we all walked out, one at a time, in silence.

  Paul, Cotton, and I were the last ones to leave the building. Cops were everywhere—on rooftops, the sides of the building, everywhere. That’s when I clearly saw that most of these guys weren’t regular beat cops; they were the paramilitary Special Weapons and Tactics team, aka SWAT—the LAPD’s newest weapon. The eleven of us were staring at about three hundred of them, face-to-face. They were dressed in all black from head to toe—black jumpsuits and baseball caps. The LAPD had thrown their best at us, yet none of us had died.

  They herded us around the corner, where they got us down on the ground and tied us up with rope—no handcuffs. We knew they were purposely treating us like animals.

  Roland, who was wounded, was lying on the ground when a paramedic came up and put a blanket on his head. He started wiggling and hollering, “I’m not dead!” This made the blanket fall off so that everyone could see his condition. Despite the violent and difficult circumstances we found ourselves in, we all found humor in Roland’s actions.

  The police put us all in squad cars to take us off to jail. Then my friend Erwin Washington, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, broke through the police line. “Wayne! Do you have a statement?” he yelled.

  “Tell Moms I love her and tell my Sharon I love her too,” I said. I didn’t think I would ever see the light of day again.

  The cops put me in a squad car and rolled all the windows down because I was saturated with tear gas fumes. One of the officers asked me how we could take all that gas, and I told him about the cigarette butts. He looked at me incredulously; then he told me that their next move, had we not surrendered, was to bring in a tank and blow us out. As we headed out, one of the cops noticed I was bleeding from my forehead and my chest, so they took me to a hospital. It was the same hospital Roland had been taken to.

  They put me in a bed near Roland. The cops had his bed surrounded and were gawking at his wounds when one of them noticed an old gunshot wound in his foot. When Bunchy Carter had been killed, Roland had been on a mission with a shotgun stuck in his pant leg. The gun had gone off and struck him in the foot.

  “He probably shot himself in the foot,” one of the cops quipped, just to make him mad.

  Roland got pissed. It made me mad too. But there was nothing much I could do to come to the defense of my comrade. “Leave him alone!” I hollered in frustration.

  That made the pigs turn and look at me. They came over to my hospital bed and grabbed my glucose bottles, rattling them to shut me up.

  Later that night I was transfered to county jail. A nurse at the hospital, who was sympathetic to us, got word to my family that I was alive. I was only nineteen years old.

  2

  BACK HOME

  I hadn’t intended to disobey my mother.

  “Wayne, go wash your hands and get ready for dinner,” my mom called.

  “Yes, ma’am!” I hollered back as I walked out of my room into the living room on my way to our bathroom, where I could run warm water and soap over my hands as I’d been taught to do. But on the way I stopped to flip on the TV and caught a glimpse of The Cisco Kid, one of my favorite shows. Instead of washing my hands, I sat down to watch.

  A commercial came on, and I eyed the Jet magazine lying on our wooden coffee table. Enticed by the hope of catching a glimpse of the racy swimsuit model in the centerfold, I swiped the magazine. I glanced toward the kitchen, hoping that my mom wouldn’t walk into the room, and then peeled back the cover. I looked down and saw the unexpected. The violence of the images hit me square in the chest; my heart started pounding and I couldn’t breathe. I was looking at the gruesome pictures of Emmett Till. He was horribly disfigured. His face was all bloated, with the left side of it crushed in, all the way to the bone. It was a lot to take in, especially for a five-year-old kid.

  I closed the Jet magazine and sat on the sofa, frozen. My mother called again, asking me if I had washed my hands. I told her yes and joined her at the kitchen table. I didn’t ask about the photo. I kept my silence, never forgetting the image. Even though the boy in the magazine was much older, I knew he was a black kid, just like me. What happened to him? I wondered.

  Later I heard that Emmett Till was killed on August 28, 1955, at the age of fourteen, because he was flirting with a white woman. I couldn’t stop rolling the idea around and around in my head. What kind of people would do that to a kid?

  I was born in Berkeley, California, on August 25, 1950, to William and Evelyn Pharr. My father was from Gipson, Louisiana, and my mother’s folks were the Prescotts from Bunkie, Louisiana. My parents moved to California during the 1940s, like a large number of African Americans who wanted to escape the racism and oppression of the South and build a better future. I was the only child of my father and mother. Dad had one other child, my half brother, who lived back in New Orleans.

  Our family first settled in the Northern California areas of Vallejo, Oakland, and Berkeley. Wartime shipyards and factories beckoned newcomers, and the work was plentiful. While many of the men in my family had jobs in the factories, my father served as a merchant seaman in the navy. Dad was not physically imposing, but he was smart, especially when it came to generating income. Before joining the navy, he owned several small businesses, specializing in janitorial and plumbing work.

  The women in my family did domestic work for wealthy white families. My grandmother’s sister Nanny, an outstanding cook, was so respected among white folks that her referrals for domestic help could easily land someone a job. She was the lightest color in the family, with sparkling blue eyes. Actually, it was she who sent for my mother and persuaded her to leave Louisiana and finish high school in California. She hooked my mom up with a job while she went to school, working as a domestic, of course.

  My mother was street-smart like my dad, but she was book smart too. She had earned the honor of class valedictorian at Vallejo High School, but it didn’t mean much beyond the school grounds—she remained a domestic after graduation. But my mother was not going to let life’s limitations stop her. She was hardworking and ambitious, and she created opportunities for herself. My mom and I favor each other physically—same caramel brown skin, same piercing eyes, and same distinctive nose.

  My great uncle Edwin, one of my favorite relatives, introduced my parents to each other. Uncle Edwin was the color of shiny cocoa, with curly black hair and a big barrel chest. He was always nattily dressed in slacks and a shirt. He was also fond of leather coats. Edwin was a good hustler—I always admired that. He owned an after-hours nightspot in Oakland and a car wash too. As a kid, I was in awe of Uncle Edwin. He was flashy—he drove around in a Cadillac, and he even had a car phone back in the 1950s! It was a big, heavy, boxy thing, but who else had a car phone in those days?

  My great-aunt Nanny (left) and my mother, Evelyn Dotson, sit together in the mid-1940s. Nanny brought my mother to California from Bunkie, Louisiana, to finish high school and to rescue her from the racism of the South. WAYNE PHARR COLLECTION

  Felix Prescott was my great grandfather on my mother’s side and the fearless patriarch of our family. H
e was born in Louisiana in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended. I admired him for refusing to let white folks bully our family. WAYNE PHARR COLLECTION

  People saw Uncle Edwin as a renegade, notorious even, because he ignored societal norms about what was right or wrong. Nanny told me that Uncle Edwin got his personality from his father, who was my great grandpa Felix. Tales about Felix have been passed down through the generations in our family. He was considered a “bad nigga” who stood up to white folks. It might have been because he was half white himself, or, as my aunt Nanny put it, he was half crazy.

  Being too much like Felix was the reason Uncle Edwin had to leave the South when he was young. I’m not sure what my uncle did, but Felix had to rescue him from a local white man who wanted to beat him. Felix told the family, “I ain’t lettin’ them white folks take Edwin!” When the white man came, Felix pulled him off his horse. After that, Uncle Edwin was put on a train and sent to live with Aunt Dovey in Oakland. Growing up, my cousins and I all wanted to be like Felix. My mother told me that my great grandpa picked me up and sat me on his horse when I was just a baby. He died in 1951.

  Uncle Edwin played an important role in my life. He would give me bits of information on how to conduct myself so I could also be successful. “A man works for his money; it don’t come to you. You go out and you get it,” he turned and said to me one day.

  I looked up at him and nodded, mesmerized by the baritone voice that boomed at me.

  “You take care of yourself and you take care of your family. That’s what a man does. You gonna be a man one day, so you gotta learn about the importance of family now, you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, and I meant it.

  “You got to keep yourself up; you can’t go ’round looking like no hobo,” he finished. I just smiled and thought to myself, I will make this a part of my life.