The Black Panthers and Angela Davis

Few organizations in American political life have been as flamboyant as the Black Panthers. Few political trials have been so filled with drama as the Panther trials in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The Black Panther Party Platform and Program, What We Want, What We Believe, stated their position in its first article: “We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community. We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.” The tenth and final article stated that the “major political objective” of the party is a “United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.”⁸² It is this quest for national destiny that links the Panthers to other nationalists.

A notable characteristic of the Panther trials, in contrast to the Irish nationalists’ trials, is how few convictions resulted. The Panthers’ reputation was fearsome. Yet, in spite of sensational trials where Panthers were charged with the most serious crimes, only a handful of Panthers were convicted. Most were either found guilty on substantially reduced charges, which amounted to near-acquittals, were set free after a deadlocked jury produced a mistrial, or were found not guilty.

One of the Panther co-founders, Huey Newton, was charged with the murder of an Oakland Patrolman, John Frey, but he was convicted in 1968 of voluntary manslaughter. After serving nearly two years of his sentence, Newton was freed by the California Supreme Court on the ground that the jury had not been properly instructed. He was retried twice, both times in 1971, for the Frey killing. Both the second and third trials ended with a deadlocked jury and a mistrial. After the third trial the charges against Newton were dropped.⁸³

The New York Panther Twenty-One (actually thirteen were tried) were indicted for conspiracy to attack a police station, murder policemen, and bomb five department stores. They were found not guilty. In another trial three Panthers had been arrested while passengers in a car driven by a fourth, who was an undercover policeman. The three, Alfred Cain, Ricardo DeLeon, and Jerome West, faced their driver in court where he provided all the evidence against them, just as earlier he had provided the car and a map drawn for a hotel robbery. One trial ended in a hung jury, and the second acquitted the three of conspiracy to commit robbery, although it convicted them of unlawful possession of weapons.⁸⁴

Another of the Panther co-founders, Bobby Seale, was tried in New Haven for the murder of Alex Rackley. Earlier Lonnie McLucas had been found guilty of conspiring to murder Rackley, although acquitted on even more serious kidnapping charges. George Sams and Warren Kimbo, who pleaded guilty and testified for the prosecution, were given life sentences for the murder. But the trial of Seale and Erika Huggins for the same crime resulted in a dismissal of the charges after the jury deadlocked.⁸⁵

Panthers in Los Angeles, Detroit, and New Orleans were acquitted in 1971 on charges of murder in attacks on policemen, although convicted of possession of illegal weapons or of assault in two trials while found not guilty in the third.⁸⁶

In two trials related to the Panthers, verdicts of not guilty were returned: the Soledad Brothers’ trial for the murder of a prison guard and Angela Davis’s trial for supplying weapons in a Marin County kidnapping which resulted in the death of a judge and three others.

Murray Kempton, in titling his book about the 1971 New York Panther Twenty-One trial The Briar Patch, put his finger on a characteristic of many nationalist political trials. Each side wants to throw the other into the briar patch, yet each gets ensnared in a genuine briar patch in the trial. The New York Panthers were charged with plotting a series of terrorist events: bombing police stations, department stores, railroads, and the Bronx Botanical Gardens, and the murder of police. If all these guerrilla activities had taken place, and not merely been talked about, New York would have been thrown into chaos. But they did not happen. Was an immense plot nipped in the bud? Or was the Panthers’ bluff called? Perhaps some of both? The seeds of actual terrorist activities had been planted, but whether they grew faster and larger in the imagination of the police or the Panthers is unclear. The bombing of the 24th and the 44th Precinct Police Stations was a genuine terrorist plot which was put into operation. But because of skillful undercover police work, such as replacing dynamite with an oatmeal-clay mixture, the Panthers’ raid on these two police stations was a dud. The trial, which might have concluded with a conviction of those involved in this conspiracy, instead trapped the prosecution. Yet, if the purpose of the prosecution was to break and finish off the Panthers as an organization, perhaps the trial did contribute to this end even though those put on trial were acquitted.

More than two years of proceedings in the New York Panther Twenty-One case, including an eight-month trial which involved six weeks of jury selection and six months of presenting evidence to the jury, all boiled down to less than three hours of jury deliberation (perhaps, after time for lunch and the jury’s housekeeping details are subtracted, twenty minutes of deliberation) and a verdict of not guilty repeated 156 times, a parallel with the speed of the O.J.

The decisive not guilty verdict was not an instance of jury nullification. The jury had not balked at applying the law. Nor did the jury reject the evidence presented to them. Rather, the prosecution in the Panther Twenty-One trial overplayed its hand and drew out the jury’s trump.

As Peter Zimroth demonstrates, and as the prosecutor apparently failed to do, the Panther Twenty-One trial involved real crimes with real intended victims. Several of the defendants had planned a coordinated bombing and long-range rifle attack on the 44th Precinct Police Station in the Bronx, the 24th Precinct Police Station in Manhattan, and the Queens Board of Education office, all at 9 P.M. on Friday, January 17, 1969. Dynamite had been placed in the three locations. However, the sticks at the 44th Precinct Station had been switched with phonies so that only a blasting cap exploded. At the 24th Precinct Station the fuse on the phony sticks had been improperly lit. At the Queens school the real dynamite (from a source other than the undercover police) blew a hole in the side of the building. Near the 44th Precinct Station, after some shooting, one Panther (nineteen-year old Joan Bird) was arrested while two men escaped. They left behind a long-range rifle with which they had planned to shoot at the police as they rushed out of the burning building after the explosion.⁸⁹ These are crimes, and the Panthers had been caught in the act. That no one had been injured and that property damage had been small is due to clever police work, hardly to a lack of intention or effort on the part of the Panthers. Yet the verdict was clearly not guilty.

What went wrong for the prosecution, to put it briefly, was that the Panther Twenty-One trial backfired. As Zimroth, who observed the trial and had come from a background which made him sympathetic with the prosecution, concluded:

And so, after more than two years of fighting, the prosecutor lost the propaganda war he started. He wanted to convince the jurors, and beyond them the public, that the Black Panther Party was dangerous; that it believed “the only good pig is a dead pig”; that its members shot at cops and blew up buildings; that they “iced” suspected police informants like Alex Rackley; that the Party strove to overthrow the “establishment” as the Algerian rebels had done; that it led the urban guerrilla warfare being waged all over the country; that it symbolized the chaos of radical dissent. He wanted the jurors to see the events charged in the indictment as part of a broader history of violence on the Left.

Instead, by the end of the trial, the prosecutor had convinced most of the jurors not that the defendants were dangerous, but that the District Attorney and Judge were.…

These jurors saw the prosecution as part of the history of government repression; and they did not want to be part of that history.⁹⁰

This is hardly to suggest that the defense in the Panther Twenty-One trial was passive. The proceedings before the trial began were notable for disruptions and are used as one of several prime examples in a major study of courtroom disorder. Some of the flavor of these hearings is provided in the following exchange:

The Court: Do the defendants want to enter pleas?

A Defendant: You can take the indictment, you can take the entire Nixon Administration and stick it up your ass. We’re not willing to.…

Another Defendant: You think we got contempt for your court? You’re absolutely right. It’s nothing but a joke. It’s a class institution that upholds your class. You going to put me in jail? I’ve been in jail almost a year.

The Court: Be seated.

A Defendant: You white-haired racist pig.

Another Defendant: This is toilet paper.

The Court: And you will be seated, too.

Another Defendant: Why don’t you shut up?⁹¹

Finally, after three weeks of such pretrial hearings and outbursts, Judge Murtagh ordered the defendants out of the courtroom and indefinitely recessed the proceedings, leaving the defendants facing an indefinite stay in jail. The impasse broke when the Supreme Court in Illinois v. Allen permitted judges to remove defendants who misbehaved. This decision gave Judge Murtagh the authority to continue the hearings in the absence of the defendants if they had to be removed for disorderly conduct. It worked; the thirteen Panthers agreed to behave in court, and the hearings then progressed toward the trial.⁹²

Both sides in the New York Panther Twenty-One (or thirteen) trial played by a political agenda in the case. As Murray Kempton put it, “counsel on all sides would begin with the same misconception: Mr. Phillips thought he was prosecuting the armed revolution and his opponents thought they were defending it. Mr. Phillips thought these were the worst and Mr. Lefcourt, the best, of revolutionaries.”⁹³

The jurors soon saw that the indictment was inflated beyond the facts, that the government put out what appeared to be hysterical publicity, that the defendants were held on unusually high bail, that the police and their undercover agents had gathered evidence with considerable, perhaps excessive, zeal, and that the prosecutor and judge appeared to be working together. “After hearing all the evidence and everything,” a juror said later, “I came to the conclusion myself that the whole thing was a conspiracy to eliminate the Panthers as a whole.”⁹⁴ Given that perception, which was shared by the other jurors, the defense would have wide latitude to operate from their political agenda. The defense had the tactical advantage, as Murray Kempton put it, “that belongs to the lawyer who had learned that he is not defending the Viet Cong and is opposed by judge and prosecution who go on assuming that they are trying the Viet Cong. The most difficult task in any argument is to convince by hyperbole.”⁹⁵

An irony in the Panther Twenty-One trial is that, while the overblown indictment portrayed the defendants as major conspirators in the assault on the white capitalist establishment, a picture which Panther rhetoric encouraged, the facts supported little of it. As their collective autobiography illustrates, they envisioned themselves as the vanguard of the “worldwide people’s struggle against the worldwide racist, fascist, capitalistic, greed-filled pigs.” Yet they had done next to nothing to initiate the revolutionary upheaval. This was a source of embarrassment. As Murray Kempton speculated, for their pride it would have been better “if the defendants would all confess to having done what they had not done rather than let everyone see that they had done so little and, then, their reputation for badness restored, try to persuade the jury that it was a fine thing for them to have done what they had not done.”⁹⁶

The prosecution, for all of its effort (rather because of it), lost the jury and the trial. But the Panthers, because of the time, money, and energy diverted from their organizational and political activities into the defense effort at the trial, lost the war and were virtually eliminated. Because the two founders, Newton and Seale, were also on trial and their trials were deemed more important than the New York trial, the national Panthers Party did not assist the New York Panther Twenty-One. This contributed to the split between the Newton-Seale and the Cleaver factions, as well as to the murders of Robert Webb, who was loyal to Cleaver, and Samuel Napier, loyal to Newton, by the opposite sides. In the end both factions and all others involved had been caught in a briar patch.

The 1972 trial of Angela Davis parallels the Panther Twenty-One trial. There was, to begin with, a serious crime. In 1970 Jonathan Jackson entered a Marin County courtroom and at gunpoint took hostages, including Judge Haley. In the shootout which followed, Jackson, two San Quentin convicts, and the judge were killed. Angela Davis—a friend of George Jackson, one of the Soledad Brothers and Jonathan’s older brother—was arrested and charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. The link was that the guns Jonathan used were Angela Davis’s. The prosecution attempted to convince the jury that Davis had engineered the plot as a means of freeing the Soledad Brothers. “Passionate love” was the motive suggested by the prosecution. Davis’s political views, radical in all directions, were not far below the surface in the trial. She was an active Communist, a black revolutionary, and a militant feminist. At the time of the shootout she was the center of California attention when Governor Ronald Reagan attacked her for being a Communist and got her fired from a teaching position in the Philosophy Department at UCLA, an action which earned UCLA the censure of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The regents refused to reappoint her because her speeches were “so extreme, so antithetical to the protection of academic freedom and so obviously, deliberately false in several respects as to be inconsistent with the qualifications for appointment to the faculty of the University of California.”⁹⁷

If the purpose of the prosecution at her 1972 trial was to prove to the world that Angela Davis was a dangerous person who masterminded the 1970 courthouse shootout, they failed to convince the all-white jury which heard the evidence. They found her not guilty. When she was asked after the trial whether her opinion of the American system of justice had changed, she replied: “No, my opinion is not changed.… The very fact that I was acquitted shows not that I had a fair trial, but that I shouldn’t have been tried at all.”⁹⁸