AMERICAN JUSTICE ON TRIAL. Lise Pearlman

extremely vulnerable. An IV dangled from his arm; a tube remained in his nose. Under sedation since his arrival, Newton had lost a lot of blood, and appeared to be in great pain. Without asking any questions Garry felt right away that “this man was totally and completely innocent.” Beverly Axelrod’s presence was important. As Huey Newton’s trusted confidante, she introduced Charles Garry to him as someone he could also completely rely on. Knowing that his brother Melvin had vetted Garry, Newton was even more at ease. He painted a grim picture of his ordeal to the two white lawyers, recounting different police guards’ taunts: “Nigger, you are going to pay for this.” One officer threatened to cut off the tube “so you will choke to death, so that the state won’t have to bother trying you or gassing you.”¹⁶ Newton said he awoke once to see a shotgun pointed at his face and heard a policeman joke that they should get a razor to kill him with and say it was suicide.

      Newton’s complaints alarmed Axelrod. She called a close friend from the Lawyers Guild, Alex Hoffmann, in Berkeley. Hoffmann, a slightly-built, Viennese-born lawyer, was four years Axelrod’s junior, with a brilliant legal mind and the same unbridled enthusiasm for radical causes as Axelrod. He looked like the product of the ’50s Beat Era that he was, a chain-smoking intellectual fond of jazz, his dark hair already receding. With Hoffmann in tow, Axelrod immediately set off to find Oakland Police Chief Charles Gain and demand that Newton be allowed nursing aides round-the-clock at his defense team’s expense. She and Garry had no doubt that the threats had occurred — the hatred the Oakland police felt for Newton was palpable. For the better part of a year, armed Panthers had been tailing officers around black neighborhoods, calling them “pigs” and challenging their authority.

      The Panthers had first set foot on the world stage in May, less than six months earlier. Over twenty armed men (plus several unarmed friends along for support) marched into the State Assembly in Sacramento to assert their Second Amendment rights in opposition to pending gun control legislation. They also used that media platform to read a confrontational statement about their party’s opposition to the Vietnam War and racism in America. Shocked by the gun-toting visitors, the Assembly members passed a new “Panther Rider,” which specifically prohibited most civilians from openly carrying loaded weapons in any public place or street. That law made California the most restrictive state on gun control; it remains in effect today, in sharp contrast to permissive gun carry laws in many states where “Stand Your Ground” and “Open Carry” laws prevail.

      During the next six months, Oakland police often invoked this new gun restriction when stopping Black Panthers with or without cause. The early morning shootout on October 28, 1967, marked the first exchange of gunfire. Now they had Newton in their custody facing potential execution for killing one of their own — the first Oakland officer shot in the line of duty in over twenty years. The police not only wanted revenge, they wanted to put an end to the growing popularity of the Panther Party platform. It addressed racial exploitation in fighting wars, in housing, education and employment. But the Panthers were best known for their angry and sometimes violent pushback against perceived police misconduct and racism in the criminal justice system. Impatient for results, the Panthers prepared an aggressive set of demands:

      WHAT WE WANT NOW! . . .

      7.WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END TO POLICE BRUTALITY AND MURDER OF BLACK PEOPLE.

      8.WE WANT FREEDOM FOR ALL BLACK MEN HELD IN FEDERAL, STATE, COUNTY, AND CITY PRISONS AND JAILS.

      9.WE WANT ALL BLACK PEOPLE WHEN BROUGHT TO TRIAL TO BE TRIED IN COURT BY A JURY OF THEIR PEER GROUP OF PEOPLE FROM THEIR BLACK COMMUNITIES.

      WHAT WE BELIEVE . . .

      7.WE BELIEVE WE CAN END POLICE BRUTALITY IN OUR BLACK COMMUNITY BY ORGANIZING BLACK SELF DEFENSE GROUPS THAT ARE DEDICATED TO DEFENDING OUR BLACK COMMUNITY FROM RACIST POLICE OPPRESSION AND BRUTALITY.¹⁷

      The police resented being viewed as a “white army of occupation”¹⁸ that the black community needed the Panthers to protect themselves against. Unbeknownst to the Oakland police at the time Frey confronted Newton, the Panthers numbered only about a dozen members, in and out of jail. Newton’s arrest and prosecution sparked what would become a dynamic expansion of the Panther Party. In November of 1967, a white hippie commune loaned Hilliard a psychedelic double-decker bus so the Panthers could drum up support in local neighborhoods to “Free Huey!” With a bullhorn, they repeatedly blasted the question: “Can a black man get a fair trial in America . . . defending his life against a white policeman?”¹⁹

      Within a few months’ time, a new Panther chapter opened in Los Angeles. Even then, the two branches totaled about 75 people who identified themselves as Party members. The Oakland police would have been far more incensed had they seen what was coming; galvanized by the campaign challenging Newton’s imprisonment over the next year and a half, the Panther Party would burgeon to over 40 chapters, nearly 5,000 members, numerous community programs and a nationwide newspaper with a six-figure circulation. This rise was fast and precipitous. A year and a half after the Panthers’ spectacular Sacramento debut in the spring of 1967, J. Edgar Hoover listed the Party as the highest internal threat to national security of all black nationalist “hate groups.”

      By the time they formed the Black Panther Party, Newton and Seale had developed a strong friendship based on a shared belief — the time had come for aggressive political action against entrenched racism. In his introduction to Rage, Professor Ekwueme Thelwell — then a recent advisor to the acclaimed civil rights TV series Eyes on the Prize — described Newton and Seale as combining the spiritual values of their hard-working, rural Southern parents in “uneasy tension with another incompatible current: the in-yo-face, up-against-the-wall-motherfuckah, quasi-criminality and macho violence of the urban street-gang culture.”²⁰ The deliberately calculated “in-yo-face” strategy of young armed blacks looking “boldly into the eyes of white authority” took the breath away from observers on both sides of the racial divide. Newton and Seale were determined to lead by example “above ground,” ostentatiously waging “ideological and material battle in plain view.”²¹ They quickly became known as “the baddest niggas on the scene,”²² a reputation that new recruits found irresistible.

      Reprinted courtesy of The San Francisco Sun Reporter.

      Front page of the San Francisco Sun Reporter, October 1, 1966 featuring the riots that followed the killing of unarmed sixteen-year-old Matthew Johnson in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco by a local policeman on September 27, 1966. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland within weeks of this incendiary incident.

      2. OAKLAND — THE MAKINGS OF A RACIAL TINDERBOX

       “The Negro’s sounds of NOW! are not irrational demands or threats; they are a cry of desperation.”

      — AUGUST 1965, EUGENE FOLEY, ASST. SEC’Y OF

      COMMERCE IN CHARGE OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT¹

      What made Oakland in 1966 the next likely Watts? Alameda County, the seventh largest in California, occupies 821 square miles to the immediate east of the San Francisco Bay. Since 1873, Oakland has been its county seat. In 1852, when Oakland was incorporated with fewer than 1,500 people, most settled by the waterfront. After 1869, when Oakland became the terminus for the transcontinental railroad, the population began to expand exponentially, with large numbers of immigrants from Europe, most of them from Portugal and Ireland. The new arrivals also included a small percentage of Italians and Germans, African-American and Chinese railroad workers, Mexicans and Japanese immigrants. After the calamitous 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, West Oakland experienced another major growth spurt with thousands displaced from their homes across the Bay, including famed author and social activist Jack London, who had lived in Oakland as a child. Jack London Square on the waterfront now bears his name.

      For entertainment, starting in the late nineteenth century, Oaklanders frequented a theme park in vice-ridden Emeryville