Less than three months after the profile of Huey Newton ran in The New York Times came headlines of an early morning shootout in West Oakland in which patrolman John Frey died and Newton and another police officer were severely wounded. Frey was the first officer killed by gunfire in Oakland in two decades. Were the Panthers signaling to inner city blacks across the country that the time had come for armed revolt? Sensing a great propaganda opportunity, the American Communist Party quickly offered to raise funds for Newton’s defense. A public relations battle soon followed, with the establishment press on one side and the underground press on the other, over who was the victim and who the aggressor, while the Panthers exploited the publicity to gain support for their revolutionary agenda.
Pioneering black media professionals like San Francisco TV reporter Belva Davis and print journalist Gilbert Moore, who covered the trial for LIFE magazine, found themselves caught uncomfortably in the middle. The Panthers’ 10-point program resonated with them even though they both disagreed with the Panthers’ extremism and glorification of violence. The Panthers soon began to attract wealthy leftist celebrities like Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda and Leonard Bernstein — among the elite later ridiculed by author Tom Wolfe as indulging in “radical chic” by embracing the Panthers’ cause. The implication was that these celebrities were naïve and silly, considering it trendy to dabble with extremists they knew little about. On the other side of the political spectrum, 1968 presidential candidate Richard Nixon focused on black militants as the target of his “Law and Order” campaign, vying with Independent segregationist George Wallace for the support of fearful white voters. The 1968 “Law and Order” campaign marked the start of the Republican Party’s famous “Southern Strategy” which has been the GOP’s electoral mainstay ever since.
Tension surrounding the upcoming Newton trial escalated after Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in the first week of April 1968 prompted riots in cities across the country. President Johnson called out 60,000 National Guardsmen; the evening news reported that Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago ordered police to shoot to kill black rioters. A Wall Street Journal headline proclaimed that the nation was at a crossroads, with King’s death threatening a “Lasting Rift in American Society.” Its front page story noted that nonviolent efforts to bridge the racial gap were imperiled and asked: “Can America avoid two societies — one black, the other white, separated by a chasm of hate?”23
Just two days after King’s death, a group of Panthers led by ex-felon Eldridge Cleaver ambushed two Oakland policemen. The armed confrontation ended with Cleaver and his young companion Bobby Hutton attempting to surrender unarmed. Hutton died in a barrage of gunfire that also caused extensive property damage in the neighborhood. The police said they mistakenly believed Hutton still held a weapon; the Panthers claimed the police murdered the young Panther in revenge for Officer Frey’s death. The black community reacted with outrage at the police and City Hall; the press backed the angry mayor’s call for stronger police action, polarizing black and white Oaklanders even more.
Could Huey Newton get a fair trial for the death of Officer Frey under these circumstances? With a traditional white male “jury of one’s peers,” Panther supporters assumed the answer was: “Hell, no!” Nearly everyone believed Newton was headed for the gas chamber. The trial judge rescheduled his death penalty trial for mid-June of 1968. Then, the week before the trial was set to begin, the nation again reeled with news of Senator Robert Kennedy’s assassination while campaigning for President in Los Angeles. The judge postponed the Newton trial once again to July. All the while, growing opposition to the Vietnam War helped turn Newton into an anti-war icon and the Newton trial into a cause célèbre for radical groups and anti-war activists. What followed was a media frenzy amid high security never before seen at the Alameda County courthouse.
Reporter Belva Davis likened the Newton trial to a Hollywood film with perfectly cast top-notch lawyers. Each day one could expect a packed courtroom, many hundreds of demonstrators, and media from across the continent and beyond clamoring for press passes. Bay Area television and radio stations broadcast the highlights daily. National media and international papers followed the proceedings closely. LIFE magazine reporter Gilbert Moore experienced an epiphany while watching the prosecution and defense paint starkly different pictures of the confrontation that resulted in Officer Frey’s death: “Conditioned by history, both sides blinded by myth and images, moved by rage and fear . . . each in their own blind way incapable of seeing each other as human beings . . . was a tragedy in the making.”24
Hollywood could hardly have invented a more compelling movie script. A deeply politicized death penalty case with countercharges of racism against the police and prosecution witnesses makes for terrific theater, promising great division among spectators. Throw in the counsel on both sides receiving death threats and extraordinary precautions taken to safeguard the courtroom and the deliberating jury. Envision COINTELPRO wiretapping key Panthers and infiltrating their ranks with informers the whole time. Assume that hordes of police and National Guardsmen must be put on alert to quell anticipated riots. Picture the defendant as an emerging folk hero capturing the imagination not only of downtrodden members of his own race but athletes, singers and songwriters, liberal professionals, college students and antiwar activists, who have adopted him as a leftist icon. The 1968 trial of twenty-six-year-old Huey Newton was just such a screenwriter’s dream.
In the extraordinarily volatile year of 1968 the message of black militant leaders — decrying police brutality and linking it to racism in general and the quagmire of the Vietnam War — resonated the most with those outside the establishment who got their news from the underground press. Here were the Panthers bragging that they were the vanguard of the revolution. The hordes of counterculture reporters who converged in Oakland to cover the trial served an audience of impoverished urban blacks, the Old and New Left, college students, and a growing coalition of war opponents. These were “the people” Newton was talking about when he proclaimed, “I have the people behind me, and the people are my strength.”25
In mid-July 1968, when the proceedings began, one underground newspaper ran a blaring headline proclaiming “Nation’s Life at Stake.” The article explained:
History has its pivotal points. This trial is one of them. America on Monday placed itself on trial [by prosecuting Huey Newton]. . . . The Black Panthers are the most militant black organization in this nation. They are growing rapidly. They are not playing games. And they are but the visible part of a vast, black iceberg. The issue is not the alleged killing of an Oakland cop. The issue is racism. Racism can destroy America in swift flames. Oppression. Revolt. Suppression. Revolution. Determined black and brown and white men are watching what happens to Huey Newton. What they do depends on what the white man’s courts do to Huey. Most who watch with the keenest interest are already convinced that he cannot get a fair trial.26
Nationally renowned trial lawyer James Brosnahan was then a local federal prosecutor: “This trial occurred at a time when Oakland was deeply divided and entrenched, and the white community controlled almost everything, certainly controlled the press, certainly controlled all of the facilities; the courts and all of that . . . It was reasonable to believe that he couldn’t possibly get a fair trial. . . . Friction between the police department and the Black Panthers . . . had burst out in a number of different ways. All that created an atmosphere, a sort of cauldron of bias against Huey Newton.” What happened when that sea of bias was roiled by a tidal wave of American youths already alienated by the ongoing Vietnam War?
Innocence Project Co-Director Barry Scheck was a freshman at Yale in 1967–68 who then counted himself among the fast-growing hordes of Panther fans. Scheck had been campaigning hard for Robert Kennedy for President that spring: “We thought we were going to change the world.” Like millions of other Americans, Scheck found himself reeling from the twin shocks of Dr. King’s assassination and Kennedy’s just two months later. Looking back, Scheck asks: “How much more destabilizing do you want a political situation to become? . . . Many of us who had been involved in the presidential campaigns of McCarthy and Kennedy began to feel like . . . we have to take direct action. We have to go to the streets. We have to organize.” By the summer of 1968:
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