Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (15 page)

Huey's death allowed Peter and me to write his story and to describe the Panther reality I had uncovered. (We called it "Baddest" and published it as a new chapter in the paperback edition of our book
Destructive Generation
.) By now, we had become identified with the political Right (although "libertarian irregulars" might better describe our second thoughts). What we wrote about the Panthers' crimes, therefore, was either dismissed or simply ignored by an intellectual culture that was still dominated by the political Left. Even though Huey's final days had tainted the Panthers' legacy, their glories were still fondly recalled in all the Sixties nostalgia that continued to appear on public television, in the historical monographs of politically correct academics and even in the pages of the popular press. The Panther crime wave was of no importance to anyone outside the small circle of their abandoned victims.

Then, in an irony of fate, Elaine Brown emerged from obscurity early this year to reopen the vexed questions of the Panther legacy. She had been living in a kind of semi-retirement with a wealthy French industrialist in Paris. Now she was back in America seeking to capitalize on the collective failure of memory with a self-promoting autobiography,
A Taste of Power
, published by a major New York publisher, with all the fanfare of a major New York offermg.

With her usual adroitness, Elaine had managed to sugarcoat her career as a political gangster by presenting herself as a feminist heroine and victim. "What Elaine Brown writes is so astonishing," croons novelist Alice Walker from the dust jacket of the book, "at times it is even dfficult to believe she survived it. And yet she did, bringing us that amazing light of the black woman's magical resilience, in the gloominess of our bitter despair." "A stunning picture of a black woman's coming of age in America," concurred
Kirkus Reviews
. "Put it on the shelf beside
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
." To the
Los Angeles Times'
Carolyn See, it is "beautiful, touching, astonishing. . . . Movie makers, where are you?" (In fact, Suzanne DePasse, producer of Lonesome Dove, who appears to have been the guiding spirit behind the book is planning a major motion picture of Elaine's life.)
Time's
review invoked Che Guevara's claim that "the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love," and commented: "In the end, Brown discovers, love is the most demanding political act of all."

A
New York Times Magazine
profile of Elaine Brown, "A Black Panther's Long Journey", treated her as a new feminist heroine and prompted View and Style sections of newspapers in major cities across the nation to follow suit. Elaine, who reportedly received a 450,000 dollar advance from Pantheon Books, has been on the book circuit, doing radio and television shows from coast to coast, including a segment of the
MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour
, where she appeared on a panel chaired by Charlayne Hunter Gault as an authority on black America. ("I hate this country," she later told the Los Angeles Times. "There's a point at which you're black in this country, poor, a woman, and you realize how powerless you are." In contrast, Elaine once told me privately: "The poorest black in Oakland is richer than 90 percent of the world's population.") At Cody's Books in Berkeley, two hundred radical nostalgists came to hear her, flanked by her "bodyguard," Huey's old gunman, Flores Forbes.

I read the book and, jaded though I was, still was amazed by this reception. The only accurate review seemed to come from the Bloods and Crips who flocked as fans to her Los Angeles appearance.
A Taste of Power
is, in its bloody prose, and despite the falsehoods designed to protect the guilty, the self-revelation of a sociopath, of the Elaine I knew.

"I felt justified in trying to slap the life out of her," — this is the way Elaine introduces an incident in which she attempted to retrieve some poems from a radical lawyer named Elaine Wenders.

The poems had been written by Johnny Spain, a Panther who participated in George Jackson's bloody attempt to escape from San Quentin. Elaine describes how she entered Wenders's office, flanked by Joan Kelley and another female lieutenant, slapped Wenders's face and proceeded to tear the room apart, emptying desk-drawers and files onto the floor, slapping the terrified and now weeping lawyer again, and finally issuing an ultimatum: "I gave her twenty-four hours to deliver the poems to me, lest her office be blown off the map."

Because Wenders worked in the office of Charles Garry, Huey's personal attorney, Elaine's thuggery produced some mild repercussions. She was called to the penthouse for a "reprimand" by Huey, who laughingly told her she was a "terrorist." The reprimand apparently still stings and Elaine even now feels compelled to justify the violence that others considered impolitic: "It is impossible to summarize the biological response to an act of will in a life of submission. It would be to capture the deliciousness of chocolate, the arousing aroma of a man or a perfume, the feel of water to the dry throat. What I had begun to experience was the sensation of personal freedom, like the tremor before orgasm. The Black Panther Party had awakened that thirst in me. And it had given me the power to satisfy it."

The thirst for violence is a prominent feature of this self-portrait: "It is a sensuous thing to know that at one's will an enemy can be struck down," Elaine continues. In another passage she gives one of many instances of the pleasure. Here, it is a revenge exacted, after she becomes head of the party, on a former Panther lover named Steve, who had beaten her years before.

Steve is lured to a meeting where he finds himself looking down the barrel of a shotgun. While Elaine's enforcer, Larry Henson, holds Steve at gunpoint, Elaine unleashes four members of the Squad, including the four hundred-pound Robert Heard, on her victim: "Four men were upon him now . . . Steve struggled for survival under the many feet stomping him. . . . Their punishment became unmerciful. When he tried to protect his body by taking the fetal position, his head became the object of their feet. The floor was rumbling, as though a platoon of pneumatic drills were breaking through its foundation. Blood was everywhere. Steve's face disappeared."

The taste for violence is as pervasive in Elaine's account as is the appetite to justify it in the name of the revolutionary cause. She describes the scene in Huey's apartment just after he had pistol-whipped the middle-aged black tailor Preston Callins with a .357 Magnum. (Callins required brain surgery to repair the damage): "Callins's blood now stained the penthouse ceilings and carpets and walls and plants, and [Huey's wife's] clothes, even the fluffy blue-and-white towels in the bathroom." This is Elaine's reaction to the scene: "While I noted Huey's irreverent attitude about the whole affair, it occurred to me how little I, too, actually cared about Callins. He was neither a man nor a victim to me. I had come to believe everything would balance out in the revolutionary end. I also knew that being concerned about Callins was too costly, particularly in terms of my position in the party. Yes, I thought, Callins."

Elaine deals with Betty's murder in these pages, too. "I had fired Betty Van Patter shortly after hiring her. She had come to work for the party at the behest of David Horowitz, who had been editor of
Ramparts
magazine and a onetime close friend of Eldridge Cleaver. He was also nominally on the board of our school. . . . She was having trouble finding work because of her arrest record." This is false on every significant count. Betty had no arrest record that Elaine or I knew about. I was one of three legal incorporators of the Learning Center and, as I have already described, the head of its Planning Committee. Finally, I had met Eldridge Cleaver only once, in my capacity as a fledgling editor at
Ramparts
. (Elaine's purpose in establishing this particular falsehood is clearly to link Betty to a possible plot: "I began wondering where Betty Van Patter might have really come from. . . . I began re-evaluating Horowitz and his old Eldridge alliance.") Elaine continues:

Immediately Betty began asking Norma, and every other Panther with whom she had contact, about the sources of our cash, or the exact nature of this or that expenditure. Her job was to order and balance our books and records, not to investigate them. I ordered her to cease her interrogations. She continued. I knew that I had made a mistake in hiring her. . . . Moreover, I had learned after hiring her that Betty's arrest record was a prison record — on charges related to drug trafficking. Her prison record would weaken our position in any appearance we might have to make before a government body inquiring into our finances. Given her actions and her record, she was not, to say the least, an asset. I fired Betty without notice.
Betty had no prison record for drug trafficking or anything else. "While it was true that I had come to dislike Betty Van Patter," Elaine concludes, "I had fired her, not killed her."

Yet, the very structure of Elaine's defense is self-incriminating. The accurate recollections that Betty, who was indeed scrupulous, had made normal bookkeeping inquiries that Elaine found suspicious and dangerous, provides a plausible motive to silence her. The assertions that Betty was a criminal, possibly involved in a Cleaver plot, are false and can only be intended to indict the victim. Why deflect guilt to the victim or anyone else, unless one is guilty oneself?

Violence was not restricted to the Panthers's dealings with their enemies, but was an integral part of the party's internal life as well.

In what must be one of the sickest aspects of the entire Panther story, this party of liberators enforced discipline on the black "brothers and sisters" inside the organization with bull-whips, the very symbol of the slave past. In a scene that combines both the absurdity and pathology of the party's daily routine, Elaine describes her own punishment under the Panther lash. She is ordered to strip to the waist by Chairman Bobby Seale and then subjected to ten strokes because she had missed an editorial deadline on the Black Panther newspaper.

A Taste of Power
inadvertently provides another service by describing how the Panthers originally grew out of criminal street gangs and how the gang mentality remained the core of the party's sense of itself even during the heyday of its political glory. Elaine writes with authority, having come into the party through the Slausons, a forerunner of the Bloods and the Crips. The Slausons were enrolled en masse in the party in 1967 by their leader, gangster Al "Bunchy" Carter, the "Mayor of Watts." Carter's enforcer, Frank Diggs, is one of Elaine's first party heroes: "Frank Diggs, Captain Franco, was reputedly leader of the Panther underground. He had spent twelve years in Sing Sing Prison in New York on robbery and murder charges." Captain Franco describes to Elaine and Ericka Huggins his revolutionary philosophy: "Other than making love to a Sister, downing a pig is the greatest feeling in the world. Have you ever seen a pig shot with a .45 automatic, Sister Elaine? . . . Well, it's a magnificent sight." To the newly initiated Panther, this is revolutionary truth: "In time, I began to see the dark reality of the revolution according to Franco, the revolution that was not some mystical battle of glory in some distant land of time. At the deepest level, there was blood, nothing but blood, unsanitized by political polemic. That was where Franco worked, in the vanguard of the vanguard."

The Panthers were — just as the police and other Panther detractors said at the time — a criminal army at war with society and with its thin blue line of civic protectors. When Elaine took over the party, even she was "stunned by the magnitude of the party's weaponry. . . . There were literally thousands of weapons. There were large numbers of AR-18 short automatic rifles, .308 scoped rifles, 30-30 Winchesters, .375 magnum and other big-game rifles, .30 caliber Garands, M-15s and M-16s and other assorted automatic and semi-automatic rifles, Thompson submachine gunss, M-59 Santa Fe Troopers, Boys .55 caliber anti-tank guns, M-60 fully automatic machine guns, innumerable shotguns, and M-79 grenade launchers. . . . There were caches of crossbows and arrows, grenades and miscellaneous explosive materials and devices."

I remember vividly an episode in the mid-1970s, when one of the Panther arms caches, a house on 29th Street in East Oakland, was raided by the police and one thousand weapons, including machine guns, grenade launchers, and anti-tank guns were uncovered. Party attorney Charles Garry held a press conference at which he claimed that the weapons were planted by the police and that the 29th Street house was a dormitory for teachers at the Panther school (which it also, in fact, was). Then Garry denounced the police raid as just one more repressive act in the ongoing government conspiracy to discredit the Panthers and destroy militant black leadership. Of course, all right thinking progressives rallied to the Panthers' support.

And right thinking progressives are still rallying. How to explain the spectacle attending the reception of Elaine's book? After all, this is not pre-glasnost Russia, where crimes were made to disappear into a politically controlled void. The story of the Panthers' crimes is not unknown. But it is either uninteresting or unbelievable to a progressive culture that still regards white racism as the primary cause of all ills in black America, and militant thugs like the Panthers as mere victims of politically inspired repression.

The existence of a Murder Incorporated in the heart of the American Left is something the Left really doesn't want to know or think about. Such knowledge would refute its most cherished self-understandings and beliefs. It would undermine the sense of righteous indignation that is the crucial starting point of a progressive attitude. It would explode the myths on which the attitude depends.

In the last two decades, for example, a vast literature has been produced on the "repression of the Panthers" by the FBI. The "Cointelpro" program to destabilize militant organizations and J. Edgar Hoover's infamous memo about the dangers of a "black messiah" are more familiar to today's college students probably than the operations of the KGB or the text of the Magna Carta. In
A Taste of Power
, Elaine Brown constantly invokes the vai specter (as she did while leader of the party) to justify Panther outrages and make them "understandable" as the hyper-reflexes of a necessary paranoia, produced by the pervasive government threat. A variation of this myth is the basic underpinning of the radical mind-set. Like Oliver Stone's fantasies of military-industrial conspiracy, it justifies the radical's limitless rage against America itself. On the other hand, even in authoritative accounts, like William O'Reilly's
Racial Matters
, the actual "Cointelpro" program never amounted to much more than a series of inept attempts to discredit and divide the Panthers by writing forged letters in their leaders' names. (According to O'Reilly's documents, vai agents even suspended their campaign when they realized how murderous the Panthers actually were, and that their own intelligence pranks might cause real deaths.) Familiarity with the Panthers' reality, suggests a far different question from the only one that progressives have asked — Why so much surveillance of the Panthers? — namely: Why so little? Why had the FBI failed to apprehend the guilty not only in Betty's murder but in more than a dozen others? Why were the Panthers able to operate for so long as a criminal gang with a military arsenal, endangering the citizens of major American cities? How could they commit so many crimes — including extortion, arson and murder — without being brought to the bar of justice?