A “Malcolm X Day” celebration was held in the school auditorium, which I attended. One after another, Bobby Seale, Elaine Brown, and other Panthers mounted the podium to proclaim the Party as “the only true continuator of the legacy of Malcolm.” Looking around at the familiar faces of the Panthers in the hall, I felt depressed and even betrayed. Huey had assured me that the Center would not become the power base for a sect, and had even excluded Bobby and Elaine from its operation to make me a believer. And yet now I could see that’s all that it was.
At the next Planning Committee meeting in Huey’s apartment, I braced myself and launched into a passionate complaint. On a day that all black Oakland should have been at the Center, I said, the occasion had been turned into a sectarian promotion for the Black Panther Party. My outburst was met by a tense silence from the others at the table. But Huey seemed unfazed and even to lend some support to what I had said. This duplicitous impression of yielding was almost a performance art with him.
Elaine had a similar talent for seduction when it fitted her agenda. In our first encounter at Mills, she had strategically brought the Malcolm X incident into our conversation. In her most disarming manner, she related how, after the meeting, Ericka Huggins had reported to her and other members of the Party that, “David Horowitz said that the Malcolm X Day celebration was too black.”
It was a shrewd gambit, reminding me of my precarious position in the Panther environment, while at the same time making her appear as a friend and potential protector. She had her reasons to ingratiate herself with me then, because she knew that somehow I had Huey’s ear, and she wanted desperately to end her exile. A month later, Huey kicked Bobby out of the Party and her wish was granted. She became the new Party chairman. A month after that, Huey was gone to Cuba.
When Huey left, all the Panthers whom Huey had assigned to work with me—all the members of the Planning Committee except Ericka—fled too. They left, suddenly, without warning, in the middle of the night. A week earlier, which was the last time I saw them, they had worried about Elaine’s new ascendance. When I asked why they were afraid of Elaine, they said, “She’s crazy.” Now they had disappeared, and I had no way of contacting them to question them further.
Although I had been warned about Elaine’s dark side, at this point I had only seen benign aspects myself. Now, as she took charge of the Party, she revealed another dimension of her personality that was even more attractive.
Where Huey had pretty much ignored the Learning Center after its creation, Elaine threw herself into its every detail, from curriculum to hygiene. She ordered it scrubbed from top to bottom, got proper supplies for the children, and made the Center’s needs a visible priority. Soon, the first real community event was held on its premises. It was a teen dance attended by 500 youths from the neighborhood. I could not have asked for a more concrete sign that things were going to be different. And these efforts were ongoing. Eventually Elaine would recruit Oakland dignitaries to the board of the Center, like Mayor Lionel Wilson and Robert Shetterly the president and chairman of the Oakland Council for Economic Development. How could I not support her efforts in behalf of a project that had seemed so worthy and to which I had dedicated so much effort?
There were other seductive aspects to her leadership as well. The Black Panther Party—the most male dominated organization of the Left—was suddenly being led by an articulate, take-charge woman. And not just one woman. Elaine’s right and left hands in the Party organization—Joan Kelley and Phyllis Jackson—were also female, as was its treasurer Gwen Goodloe.22 With Huey gone under a dark cloud, Elaine and the Center were facing formidable obstacles. My social and racial privilege always afforded me a way out of these difficulties (as my leftist conscience was constantly reproving me). How could I face myself, if I abandoned their ship now?
Many years later Gwen Goodloe contacted me. She was then working as an executive in the finance department of Hughes Aircraft, a defense contractor. How did you get your clearance, I asked her? “I told them the truth,” she said.
So I stayed. And when the Party’s treasurer, Gwen Goodloe, fled a week later, and Elaine became desperate over who would manage its finances, I suggested a solution. Betty Van Patter, who was already doing the books for the Learning Center, might be of help in handling the general accounts. This was to be my last act of assistance to the Party. The crises of the fall had piled on one another in such swift succession, that I was unable to assess the toll they were taking. But in November, an event occurred that pushed me over the edge.
There had been a second teen dance, and this time there was a shooting. A Panther named Deacon was dead. His assailant, a black youth of 16, was in the county hospital. When I phoned Elaine to ask what had happened, she exploded in the kind of violent outpouring I was now becoming used to, blaming the disaster on “the police and the CIA.” This stock paranoia was really all I needed to hear to tell me things were not what they had seemed and were terribly wrong. (Years later, I learned from Panthers who had fled and were now in contact with me that the shooting had been over drugs, which the Party was dealing from the school.)
When I walked into the school auditorium where Deacon lay in state (there is really no other term for the scene in front of me), I suddenly saw the real Party to which I had closed my eyes to for so long. Of course, the children were there, as were their parents and teachers, but dominating them and everything else physically and symbolically was the honor guard of Panther soldiers in black berets, shotguns alarmingly on display. Added to this spectacle, mingling with the mourners, there were the unmistakable gangster types, whose presence had suddenly become apparent to me after Elaine took over the Party: “Big Bob,” Perkins, Aaron, Ricardo, Larry. They were fitted in shades and Bogarts and pinstripe suits, as though waiting for action on the set of a B crime movie. In their menacing faces there was no reflection of political complexity such as Huey was so adept at projecting, or of the benevolent community efforts like the breakfast for children programs that the Center provided.
Underneath all the political rhetoric and social uplift, I suddenly realized was the stark reality of the gang. I remember a voice silently beating my head, as I sat there during the service, tears streaming down my face: “What are you doing here, David?” it screamed at me. It was my turn to flee.
Betty did not attend the funeral, and if she had would not have been able to see what I saw. Moreover, she and I had never had the kind of relationship that inspired confidences between us. As my employee, she never really approved of the way Peter and I ran Ramparts. For whatever reasons—perhaps a streak of feminist militancy—she didn’t trust me.
Just as a precaution, I had warned Betty even before Deacon’s funeral not to get involved in any part of the Party or its functioning that she didn’t feel comfortable with. But Betty kept her own counsel. In one of our few phone conversations, I mentioned the shooting at the dance. She did not take my remark further.
Later it became obvious that I hadn’t really known Betty. I had counted to some extent on her middle class scruples to keep her from any danger zones she encountered in Panther territory. But this too was an illusion. She had passions that prompted her to want a deeper involvement in what she also perceived as their struggle against oppression.
There was another reason I did not express my growing fears to Betty. The more fear I had the more I realized that it would not be okay for me to voice such criticism, having been so close to the operation. To badmouth the Party would be tantamount to treason. I had a wife and four children, who lived in neighboring Berkeley, and I would not be able to protect them or myself from Elaine’s wrath.
There were other considerations in my silence, too. What I had seen at the funeral, what I knew from hearsay and from the press were only blips on a radar screen that was highly personal, dependent on my own experience to read. I had begun to know the Panther reality, at least enough to have a healthy fear of Elaine. But how could I convey this knowledge to someone who had not been privy to the same things I had? How could I do it in such a way that they would believe me and not endanger me? Before