The summer of 1974 was disastrous for Newton. Reports had appeared in the press placing him at the scene of a drive-by shooting at an “after hours” club. He was indicted for pistol-whipping a middle-aged black tailor named Preston Callins with a .357 magnum, for brawling with two police officers in an Oakland bar, and for murdering a 17-year-old prostitute named Kathleen Smith. When the day arrived for his arraignment in this last matter, Huey failed to show. Assisted by the Panthers’ Hollywood patrons, he had fled to Cuba.
With Huey gone, Elaine took the reins of the Party. I was already shaken by Huey’s flight and by the dark ambiguities that preceded it. As a “politically conscious” radical, however, I understood the racist character of the media and the repressive forces that wanted to see the Panthers destroyed. I did not believe, therefore, all the charges against Huey. Although disturbed by them, I was unable to draw the obvious conclusion and leave.
My involvement with the Black Panther Party had begun in early 1973. I had gone to Los Angeles with Peter Collier to raise money for Ramparts, the flagship magazine of the New Left, which he and I co-edited. One of our marks was Bert Schneider, the producer of Easy Rider, the breakthrough film of the Sixties, which had brought the counter-cultural rebellion into the American mainstream. Schneider gave Ramparts $5,000, and then turned around and asked us to meet his friend Huey Newton.
At the time, Newton was engaged in a life and death feud with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Cleaver had fled to Algiers after a shoot-out with Bay Area police. (Eldridge has since admitted that he ambushed them). Schneider wanted us to take Eldridge’s name off the Ramparts masthead where he was still listed as “International Editor.”
Huey’s attraction to the Left had always been his persona as “Minister of Defense” of the Black Panther Party, his challenge to revolutionary wannabees to live up to their rhetoric and “pick up the gun.” Huey had done just that in his own celebrated confrontation with the law that had left Officer John Frey dead with a bullet wound in his back. Everybody in the Left seemed to believe that Huey had killed Frey, but we wanted to believe as well that Huey—as a victim of racism—was also innocent. Peter’s and my engagement with the Panthers was more social than political, since Ramparts had helped the Party become a national franchise. I was put off by their military style, but now a change in the times prompted the two of us, and especially me, to be interested in the meeting.
By the early 70s, it was clear that the Movement had flamed out. As soon as Nixon signaled the end of the military draft, the anti-war demonstrations stopped and the protestors disappeared, marooning hardcore activists like myself. I felt a need to do something to fill the vacancy. Huey Newton was really alone among Movement figures in recognizing the change in the zeitgeist and making the most of it. In a dramatic announcement, he declared the time had come to “put away the gun” and, instead, to “serve the people,” which seemed sensible enough to me.
Our meeting took place in Huey’s penthouse eyrie, 25 floors above Lake Oakland. In its intra-party polemics, the Eldridge faction had condemned Huey for “selling out the armed struggle,” and made much of Huey’s lavish lifestyle. But the apartment itself was sparely furnished and I was ready to accept Schneider’s explanation that it was necessary for “security.” (A TV screen allowed Huey to view entrants to the building, 25 floors below). Not only J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous agents but also the disgruntled Cleaver elements might very well want to see Huey dead. There had been several killings already. One of Huey’s East Coast loyalists, Sam Napier, had been shot and doused with gasoline, and set on fire.
Somehow, because of Huey’s sober pronouncements and his apparent victory in the intra-party struggle I regarded this reality as part of the past, and no longer threatening. Unlike Elaine, Huey was able to keep his street passions in check in the presence of white intellectuals he intended to make use of. In all the time I worked with him, I never saw him abuse another individual, verbally or otherwise. I never saw him angry or heard him utter a threat. I never saw a gun drawn. When I opposed him on important political issues, as I did at our very first meeting, I found him respectful of my differences, a seduction I could not resist. (My partner, Peter, was more cautious and politically aloof and, as events were to prove, wiser than I.)
After the meeting, I offered to help Huey with the Party’s community projects and to raise money for the Panther school. Huey wanted to buy a Baptist church facility in the East Oakland ghetto with an auditorium, cafeteria and 35 classrooms. In the next months, I raised more than $100,000 to purchase the buildings on 61st Avenue and East 14th Street. The $63,000 down payment was the largest check I had ever seen, let alone signed. The new Oakland Community Learning Center was administered by a Planning Committee, which was composed of Panthers whom Huey had specially selected to work with me. Neither Bobby Seale, nor Elaine Brown, nor any other Panther leaders were among them.
The Learning Center began with more than 100 Panther children. Its instruction was enriched by educationalists like Herbert Kohl whom I brought in to help. I took Kohl to see Huey in the penthouse eyrie, but the meeting went badly. Within days, Huey’s spies had reported that Kohl (who was street smart in ways I was not) was telling people that Huey was using cocaine. When I confronted Herb, he said: “He’s sniffing. He was sniffing when we were up there.”
I had not been part of the Sixties drug culture and was so unfamiliar with cocaine at that time, that I had no idea whether Kohl was right. Huey’s runny nose, his ability to stay alert despite the fifth of Courvoisier he daily consumed, the sleepless nights at Schneider’s Beverly Hills home where once Bert and his girlfriend Candice Bergen had gone to bed Huey talked endlessly to me about politics and the millions of dollars the Party had squandered on bail—all these were tell-tale signs I could not read. I assumed the innocent possibility that Huey was “sniffing” because he had a cold, which is what I told Kohl, who probably thought I was shining him on. After the incident, Huey banished Kohl from the penthouse, but let him continue to help on the Learning Center.
The Center was operated by a front I had created called the Educational Opportunities Corporation, a California tax-exempt 501(c)(3). It was imperative—or so I thought—to keep the books of the school in order and to file appropriate tax reports so that hostile authorities would not be given a pretext to shut us down. This proved to be only another aspect of my politically induced innocence. Long after I had gone, too, I watched the Center operate illegally, without filing proper tax reports, while Huey and Elaine were diverting large sums of money (received as government grants) to themselves and their gunmen to keep them in fancy cars and clothes and, when necessary, out of jail. Unable to conceive such a possibility for a Party all leftists knew was targeted for destruction by J. Edgar Hoover, I engaged the services of our bookkeeper at Ramparts, Betty Van Patter, to keep the Learning Center accounts.
Virtually my entire relationship with Huey and the Party was through the activities of the school. In the months following the purchase of the building on East 14th, it became apparent to me that things were not proceeding as planned. In particular, it was still exclusively a Party operation. I had never been enthusiastic about the Party as such, which seemed to me merely an ideological sect whose time had passed. I had conveyed these views to Huey at the outset of our relationship and he had pretended to agree. He had even promised that if we purchased the facility and built an educational center, it would gradually be turned over to the East Oakland community and not become just another Party institution.
Six months had gone by, however, and there were only Panthers in attendance. The impoverished black community around the school remained aloof, as did the black intellectuals like Berkeley sociology professor Troy Duster, whom I periodically approached to help out with the operation, and who would come up to the penthouse to see Huey, but afterwards never follow through or come back. Adding to my dismay was the fact that the school head, Brenda Bay, had been replaced by Ericka Huggins, a prominent Party figure and in my view an individual who