Armmond was in New York visiting his mother and father to say good-bye — expecting he might never return home — when he read the newspaper headlines about the armed militant blacks who showed up at the California Capitol talking of revolution and carrying guns. Soon he and his friends decided against heading to China. “We didn’t want to miss the revolution in the U. S.” He expected it to happen soon and then the borders might be clamped down, preventing their return if they went to China. So Armmond headed to work in Mississippi instead, and the revolution never came. Neither Armmond nor fellow revolutionaries he plotted with expected the Oakland Panthers to be the vanguard of their revolution. Huey’s brother Melvin thought Huey actually had a view similar to Armmond’s. Huey envisioned the Panthers’ role as symbolic leaders: “He saw the guns as something that was spectacular and something to draw attention and to draw people in. He didn’t see it as something that would be used to take on the United States.” Eldridge Cleaver had different ideas.
Not surprisingly, the Panthers’ opposition to gun control only strengthened support for Assembly member Mulford’s “Panther” bill. Until it passed, California gun laws had been extremely permissive. Rifles and shotguns could be obtained by anyone. The only people not allowed to buy handguns were convicted felons, drug addicts, minors and people not yet citizens. But the NRA’s then moderate leadership envisioned no curtailment of hunters’ rights in Mulford’s bill and gave Governor Reagan their blessing to sign it into law in June of 1967 as emergency legislation. To this day, the Mulford Act remains one of the nation’s most restrictive gun laws.
The widespread publicity garnered Newton his first paid speaking engagement at San Francisco State College. With the $500 speaking fee, Newton and his close childhood friend David Hilliard then bought a pound of marijuana, which they broke up for sale on the street to raise bail money for those arrested in Sacramento. Newton had not yet recruited Hilliard to become a Black Panther. Hilliard had a family and a good job as a longshoreman. But they considered themselves practically family since they had lived around the corner from each other in sixth grade. As they drove through Oakland with matchboxes of weed in their car, Hilliard spotted policemen on patrol and asked: “Hey, Huey, what are we supposed to do if the police stop us?” Newton laughed and responded, “We shoot them. You know, we fight” — a response that remained etched in Hilliard’s memory less than six months later when Newton had his near fatal encounter with two Oakland police officers.22 Fortunately, in May the police car drove on by.
Shortly afterward, Seale and Newton had words with policemen on a street corner outside Panther headquarters. The confrontation resulted in several minor charges against Newton: brandishing a weapon, possessing an illegal knife and disturbing the peace, including using profanity in public. In 1967, just wearing a “Fuck the Draft” jacket on the street was considered sufficient grounds for an arrest. It was why Newton thought it wise to call police pigs and got the Panthers to use the phrase “off the pigs” — words that did not amount to profanity.
When Janice Garrett dropped out of college and joined the Panthers that June she did not tell her parents in the Midwest. She knew that television coverage of the Panthers’ Sacramento debut scared them. Janice joined the Panthers together with her boyfriend, which was the most common way for women to become involved in the Party. All of her roommates joined also. Women were expected not to have boyfriends outside the Party; the men could sleep with whomever they chose. In the early days, women had key roles, although its culture was decidedly macho. Garrett acted for a short time as Bobby Seale’s secretary. Judy Juanita helped Emory Douglas with the paper. Over time, as more recruits came on board, the founders realized the women faced harassment and the organization would spin out of control if they did not establish strict rules of behavior. Some new Panther men also undermined the Party’s mission by getting drunk or high on drugs while wielding guns or by committing crimes against people in the black community. This was not surprising, given Newton’s aggressive recruitment efforts in pool halls and taverns.
The Panthers adopted rules inspired by those of Black Muslims which they then enforced by threats of expulsion. The rules included exclusive allegiance to the Party as a military force, following orders, and learning the 10-point program and rules by heart. Members were not to possess any drugs while on Party business or engage in unnecessary use of a firearm. That must have relieved Beverly Axelrod, whose teen-aged sons had often witnessed Panthers waving guns in her living room as points of emphasis. The rules banned commission of crimes against blacks (no mention of barring crimes against whites). They also prohibited possession of a weapon while under the influence of narcotics, “weed” or alcohol. Members were officially urged to speak politely, “not to take liberties with women and not to hit or swear at people.”23
Bobby Seale was then serving a short sentence for the charges lodged against him in Sacramento. Represented by the Treuhaft firm, Seale and several other Panthers who had no prior police record had pled guilty to disturbing the peace so others who already had records would not have to serve any jail time. Earl Anthony felt Seale’s absence more than he had expected. Seale provided leadership talents that were sorely needed. Newton liked to play hard when not devoted to Panther business. At night, he often partied with more than one woman, took speed pills and smoked a lot of marijuana between bar-hopping to down Cuba Libres while chatting with friends. At Newton and Cleaver’s request, Anthony traveled to other cities to recruit new members. Not much seemed to be happening in Oakland or San Francisco, with their small ranks decimated by those jailed after the Sacramento excursion. Cleaver told Anthony not to worry: “The Party is going to take over California in 1968.”24 That was not COINTELPRO’s view. Oakland had been quiet while other cities rioted that summer; J. Edgar Hoover considered the Black Panthers a local problem that would quickly fade away.
Maddeningly to the Oakland police, over the summer of 1967 the Panthers’ aggressive watchdog behavior quickly turned Newton and Seale into neighborhood celebrities. Word spread about what Huey told the San Francisco policeman who pulled a gun on him, “If you shoot, I’m shooting back and you’ll die just like I do.” David Hilliard was among those impressed: “For the first time the playing field was level.”25 Not exactly. Two policemen guarding public housing in San Francisco got killed that August. Earl Anthony had been traveling at the time. He had dropped out of law school and his draft board in Van Nuys, California called him up. Once there, the new Panther boldly told the board to draft him at their peril — if he got sent to Vietnam he would likely shoot his white superiors. The practice known as fragging was then growing increasingly common in Vietnam — unhappy black GIs who began tossing hand grenades at detested white sergeants or other superiors.
The week after Anthony appeared before the Van Nuys draft board, someone bombed it. Shortly afterward, Anthony had another visit from the two ex-Marine, Vietnam War veterans who had approached him earlier that spring. This time, FBI agents Kizenski and O’Connor beat him unconscious. When he came to, they told him he would face prosecution for the Van Nuys bombing and as a co-conspirator to murder in San Francisco unless he turned informant. Anthony disclaimed knowledge of the bombing; as far as he knew, the Panthers also had nothing to do with the San Francisco cop killings. But that was irrelevant. Hoover had proof of Anthony’s radical connections and had no compunction about securing false evidence to convict those he considered subversives — that was how he ensured that Ethel Rosenberg got the electric chair for treason at the height of the McCarthy Era.
Anthony knew that if the murder charge stuck he would face the death penalty. He agreed to weekly predawn meetings at a designated isolated location South of San Francisco. Anthony would later fear for his life from both sides. In his 1990 tell-all, Spitting in the Wind: The True Story Behind the Violent Legacy of the Black Panther Party, he revealed that, starting in August of 1967, FBI agents Kizenski and O’Connor, elite members of COINTELPRO, “had me by the balls and they squeezed hard and long.”26 Among other useful information Anthony could tell them about was Eldridge Cleaver’s new black girl friend, Kathleen Neal from SNCC in Atlanta, who came