Nine Lives of a Black Panther Page 5

  I was glad to be going back to my predominately black school. I felt comfortable and more relaxed now that I wouldn’t have to feel like a target of white racism all the time. If I got into trouble, at least I could explain how and why.

  That Saturday I went to the park to see some friends. I made sure I was dressed well so that my boys from the neighborhood would know I hadn’t changed. Nana had always told me to “look the best you can look,” so over the years I had honed my sense of fashion. I guess my style was a combination of Mr. Morgan and Uncle Edwin. Sometimes I wore suits, and other times I would sport my black leather jacket.

  Harold Taylor was at the park, and he walked up to me with a grin. “Woo-ooo, check this brother out!”

  Then Tyrone saw us both. He walked over. “Wayne, what are you doing with a suit on in Watts?”

  I laughed. “Do you know how tough you have to be to wear a suit every day in Watts?”

  We laughed again and then walked over to the corner store, which gave me an opportunity to show my homeboys the benefits of being well dressed. We checked out the girls along the way, and they checked us out too. I was back in my old neighborhood. I was feeling good and ready for anything that came my way.

  On the first day of school, I met a guy named Leroy and we got to be tight. He came up to me, smiling. “Check me out!” he said. Leroy had been to New York for the summer and his hair was rounded and fluffed out. He patted his head with both hands. “It’s called a natural.” Up to this point, brothers were wearing conks, processes, fronts, or pompadours, with plenty of grease and hair pomade—Murray’s or Royal Crown. Leroy explained to me, “All the brothers on the East Coast are wearin’ it.”

  I thought the natural was cool. I was wearing my hair front and pompadour style. Soon though, I started growing it out into a natural too because it showed race pride and it was natural to black people.

  Leroy was also into boxing, one of my favorite sports because it kept me in shape and prepared in case I needed to win a fight. I thought Leroy was a cool cat, so we began to hang out on the weekends, going to the skating rink and practicing boxing.

  We also spent a lot of time talking about politics. It was 1964 and the Civil Rights Act had just passed, which black folks were real glad about. But Leroy was more into Malcolm X. I was already familiar with Malcolm since the local Nation of Islam would occasionally come on the radio, but Leroy had actually seen Malcolm speak live when he was in New York. He even attended some of the classes the Nation of Islam taught at their mosque in New York and in Los Angeles after he returned.

  Leroy and I would listen to some of Malcolm’s recordings. “Do you want to integrate with a cracker?” Malcolm X asked.

  When I heard that I thought, Right on!

  “With an old white cracker so you and this cracker can sit on a toilet together? This is what you want to integrate for, right? For you and this cracker to sit on the same toilet? This old white cracker?” Malcolm asked.

  My experiences integrating at Henry Clay came rushing back.

  I began to make my own analysis of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. I saw King as part of the “old guard,” a southern black preacher who advocated integration and nonviolence. I thought King had a good message and was the type of leader the older generation could relate to. But Malcolm X was from Detroit, and he spoke more to the urban, young people. He talked about nationhood and Black Nationalism. He said that black people should control the businesses, jobs, schools, and police in our neighborhoods. As far as I could see, Malcolm X was right, because integration wasn’t really working for us anyway. I mean, look what I had just been through in middle school.

  One of the most memorable conversations I had with Leroy occurred when we were walking one day, talking about self-defense. “Wayne, I just can’t understand King’s position that black people should lie down and let themselves be brutalized to make America better,” he argued.

  “I think King is really about protecting us,” I agreed, “but I believe that all people should have the right to defend themselves. If my uncle Edwin and uncle Bill Pharr saw me walking away from a white boy who tried to jump me, they would both kick my ass.”

  Later that night, I lay in bed thinking about that conversation. I decided I agreed with Malcolm X when he said we should not be nonviolent with people who were violent with us. Under my breath I said amen.

  I was at home alone, watching TV, when I heard that Malcolm X had been assassinated. It was February 21, 1965. I was devastated that we had lost such a strong leader. But I was even more pissed off that black people had shot him—seven bullets at point-blank range—when he was speaking and trying to maintain peace. My first thought was that whoever did it was stupid as hell and really didn’t give a damn about our people. This only made me more determined to promote Malcolm X’s ideas and teachings. And his influence in my life would never die.

  That same year I graduated from Edison. In June, I started summer school at Washington High, where I became friends with Mark and Tony, whom I met in auto-shop class. Both guys were in the eleventh grade, so they were older than I was. I was impressed with them. Not only did they have cars, but they were into low-riding. Soon, we were hanging out regularly. But I was still reading Malcolm X, so my race consciousness was being elevated at a rapid pace.

  Interestingly enough, it was my low-riding friends who informed me that Watts was on fire. It was August 11, the first day of the rebellion, when Mark excitedly ran into the class. “The shit’s on!”

  I asked, “What’s on?”

  “Didn’t you hear? They fightin’ the police in Watts!”

  “No shit?”

  Mark went over to the window, pointing. “Look east,” he said. We got up and went to the window and saw black smoke rising into the sky, coming out of Watts. As we were standing at the window, an announcement came on the intercom system that school would be ending early that day.

  “Man! Let’s go check it out!” Tony said. So we jumped into Mark’s car and drove three miles, going down side streets into Watts, avoiding police along the way.

  The word out on the streets was that in the afternoon a twenty-one-year-old black male named Marquette Frye had been pulled over by a white California Highway Patrolman. The cop radioed for Frye’s car to be impounded, claiming that Frye had been drinking. Frye, who lived not far from where he was stopped, was riding with his brother Ronald, who went home to get their mother. When she came back, the story goes, she was angry that Marquette had been placed under arrest and went off. That caused the cops to manhandle her; seeing their mom being treated like that, Marquette and Ronald went off too. At this point, Marquette was handcuffed, so the cops claimed he was resisting arrest. It was a mess. The folks in the neighborhood saw this whole family getting jacked by the police and decided that they had had enough. They were yelling at the cops; then somebody—or some bodies—started throwing bottles and rocks, attacking the police and trying to drive them out. People had gotten fed up with police harassment, which is why many of us adopted an outlaw mentality—because the law was not intended to work for us. The crowd got bigger, more police came, more stuff was thrown.

  Once we got to Avalon and Imperial, streets on the outskirts of the uprising, it was complete madness. We couldn’t believe our eyes. “Man, look!” I said. A guy was running down Central Avenue carrying a TV set.

  “Hey, look at that guy throwing a firebomb at the cops!” yelled Tony in disbelief.

  “Where’d all the other cops go?” Mark asked.

  “Man, I bet they ain’t going over there,” I hollered. “Right on! Right on!”

  The police had pulled back and the crowd was enraged, going crazy, breaking windows, throwing bricks, and starting fires. It was as if all the anger and the pent-up frustrations of African Americans from four hundred years of oppression and the civil rights struggle all came to a head in one big explosion of violence and fury. It seemed like the whole community was in
support of the riots. We went farther into Watts, and I realized that the people were in control of the streets.

  We stayed out there for about an hour. Mark and Tony had to leave, so they dropped me off near my house; I’d moved back with my mom for high school. She was living in a new home that she had purchased on Eighty-Seventh and Broadway, a two-bedroom with a wooden frame. She was renting our old house on Normandie. There was a little shopping center near our new home with a cleaners, a liquor store, and a Thrifty’s that was vandalized during the riots. The glass windows were busted out of the storefronts and there was glass everywhere.

  As far as I could see, the police protected the power structure. I had no illusions about their role in society. Even though the national headlines were filled with the sadistic actions of policemen in the South like Bull Connor of Alabama, Los Angeles police chief Bill Parker was no better. Parker believed that his job was to keep black people in their places. He had specifically recruited white racist bullies from the South to serve on his police force. One of the popular sayings in the streets was that “the LAPD killed a nigga every day,” and we waited to hear about who it would be that day.

  As for me, I didn’t have any real contact with the police. I avoided situations that might lead to any police confrontations. Once I got caught by a teacher smoking cigarettes at school and the police were notified. I didn’t get arrested; they just tried to scare me. However, I knew several people who had suffered under the blunt ends of their racist batons. My cousin Al Prescott was a case in point. Al was a Vietnam War vet who was wounded during the war. He lost an eye and had to have an iron plate put in his head because of his injuries. Despite his disabilities, he secured a job at Lockheed after he was discharged. One day I ran into Al at my great aunt’s house. He was swollen, beat up, puffed up, and bruised up. I didn’t even recognize him at first. According to Al, the police had pulled him over the night before. They yanked him out of his car for no reason, jumped him, and beat him almost to death. He begged them not to hit him in the one good eye he had left. What kind of assholes would beat a disabled man?

  The violence in Watts continued for days. My mother could not get off of work during the riots, and since she didn’t want me staying at home alone, she sent me to my aunt’s house, which was farther west, around Manchester and Normandie. There were still some whites living in that particular neighborhood, and they were traveling in packs. As I was walking down the street to my aunt’s house, a carload of white boys pulled up. “There goes one of them right there!” I heard, as the car screeched toward the curb. Before they had a chance to come after me, I pulled out my zip gun. It had a .22 caliber bullet in it, and though I didn’t know if it would even fire, I pulled it out anyway. I was lucky I had it with me. When the white boys saw my gun they jumped back in their car and drove away.

  For the most part, my family stayed out of the uprising. They weren’t out in the streets protesting, nor did they attend any of the community meetings. They were happy to have the little jobs, businesses, and homes that they had, so they kept out of the fray. But they understood that as black people we were still oppressed. They remembered having to work under white folks in the South, so it wasn’t hard for them to understand anger at the oppressor. It was the topic of the hour in my family.

  “Nanny,” I asked, “what do you think?”

  Instead of giving me her opinion, she told me a story. When she was a maid, she worked for this one white man who owned a farm. “Lawd, he sure did treat us black folks bad,” she told me. “But the good Lord was watchin’ out for us. One day he took his family up in the airplane, and the whole thing came crashing down. We never saw any of them again.”

  5

  BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL

  After the city quieted down, Tony and I decided to survey the scene. It was surreal. There was blood splattered in the streets, shattered glass, broken furniture, and trash everywhere. Some people were milling around seemingly in a daze; others were sitting out on their front porches.

  “Damn!” Tony said, with a look of disbelief on his face. “Is this for real?”

  I just looked at him and shook my head. I was so overwhelmed. “Will Watts ever be the same?” I asked.

  The collective exhaustion was so heavy it hung in the air. And then there was the charred debris from the fires. We could smell the smoke and destruction. Thirty-four people had lost their lives during the six days of anger and protest—how many of them to police brutality we would never really know.

  By the end of the uprising more than fourteen thousand guardsmen, sheriffs, and police had descended on Watts. It was obvious the government, from the local to the federal levels, felt a pressing need to respond. The response locally was to bring in more law enforcement; nationally, the response was to conduct a study on the causes of the uprising. In the end, the studies stated that people were angry about police brutality and the lack of jobs. Unbelievable! They spent all that money to tell us what we already knew.

  Another government solution was to establish programs designed to address the economic and social problems in South Central Los Angeles. The Teen Post was one such program. It was set up to keep the angry, urban youth off the streets. One of my aunts, Caffie Greene, a longtime activist, was a director. She called my house to tell me about the program. “Wayne,” she began, “I want you to come down and see me in my office.”

  “What’s up, Auntie?” I asked.

  “There is a new program called the Teen Post that I am running. It’s set up to give teenagers work experience, and I think it would be great for you.”

  “What about school?” I asked.

  “It’s an after-school program,” she replied. “It won’t pay much, but it will put some money in your pocket.”

  That got me interested. “OK,” I agreed. “I’ll come by on Monday.”

  The Teen Post locations were set up in various neighborhoods, and most of us did menial work like cleaning lots. I worked out of the Eighty-Fourth and Broadway office. Even though I made minimum wage, I was working. The first paycheck I ever got was from my job at the Teen Post.

  Each Teen Post became a hangout spot, but a lot of consciousness-raising occurred there too. The most passionate political conversations I’d ever had in my young life took place at the Teen Post—conversations about why blacks suffered as we did and why we seemed to have so little compared to whites.

  One day, Tyrone Hutchinson and Paul Redd were standing in a corner, going back and forth in a heated discussion about Bill Cosby’s role in I Spy. “It’s about time we got a black man starring on an evening show,” Paul said.

  “But Bill Cosby is not playing the lead. You know they ain’t gonna let a black man be the star of the show,” Tyrone argued back.

  I was sweeping when I overheard the conversation. I walked over and interjected, “Yeah, Bill Cosby is still not in charge. He is just like Tonto was to the Lone Ranger. But still, it is cool to see a black man on TV.”

  “Yeah, man, at least he’s not playing a clown,” said Paul.

  Conversations like that could go on for hours until we had to get back to work.

  Teen Post offered some benefits to our community, but the program was not without its issues. One of the problems with government programs like Teen Post was that they were based on an assumption that all black youth were involved in criminal activity or gang violence, not that we needed more industry and business opportunities. That couldn’t have been further from the truth.

  One year after the rebellion, the first Watts Summer Festival showcased the emergence of black pride. It was a beautiful experience. The weeklong celebration was a great coming together of people. All of Watts had come alive. It was rather amazing to see the community spring back with such resiliency when just a year ago it had looked like a war zone. The center of the festival was at Will Rogers Park, which was abuzz with music, talent shows, parades, giveaways, and lots of vendors selling food, T-shirts, and other items expressing black pride. We
partied in the streets to James Brown and recited the lyrics to songs like “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” as it blasted through the speakers:

  He’s doing the jerk, he’s doing the fly

  Don’t play him cheap ‘cause you know he ain’t shy

  He’s doing the monkey, the mashed potatoes,

  Jump back Jack, see you later alligator.

  The mantra of the day was “black is beautiful!” Just saying those words was empowering. The brothers and sisters were young and strong, wearing their hair natural. It was the time of creative expression. We wore bell-bottoms and platform shoes. The girls wore hot pants and halter tops. We smiled and greeted one another with “Brother!” “Sister!” “Right on!” and “Black power!” It was the beginning of the Watts Writers Workshop and the Watts Happening Coffee House. We had entered the age of the Black Arts movement on the West Coast.

  At the same time, gangs did exist. However, they weren’t like the gangs of today: the drug phenomenon hadn’t come into play yet, nor were the gangs as money-driven and intense. Most of them had originally started off as self-defense groups to fight off white gangs like the Spook Hunters. Others began as social clubs and then became territorial. Ironically, after the Watts Rebellion, gang activity was on the decline.

  Some of the gangs back then were the Business Men, Gladiators, Rebel Rousers, Swamp Boys, Orientals, Huns, and of course the Slausons, which was the largest gang. The Slausons’ territory covered a five-mile radius, from Manchester Boulevard north to Slauson Avenue and from Figueroa Avenue to Compton Boulevard east. They had many subsets or smaller groups with names like the Flips, Saints, Warlords, Baby Slausons, and Renegade Slausons. My set was Broadway, but we were all Slausons. At first, to officially join the gang, a person had to be jumped, which meant the initiates had to go through the gauntlet and fight their way through it. But things changed, and people started to become identified with the gang in their neighborhood. I wasn’t jumped into the Slausons, but I lived in the neighborhood, so I eventually took on the persona of a Slauson and identified with the organization.