My People Are Rising (26 page)

Dr. John Green and a patient at the Sidney Miller People's Free Medical Clinic, Seattle, 1969.

With Lola's daughter, little Natalie Wilson, 1976.

Poppy and I in our Seattle home, 1972.

Me, Vanetta Molson, and Big Malcolm at the LampPost, 1974.

Leslie Seale (left) and Valentine Hobbs (right) at the LampPost, 1973.

Lola Wilson at the LampPost, 1975.

Cointelpro
Is Unleashed

Jake Fidler (left) and Nafasi Halley (right) carrying posters of Chairman Bobby Seale after his kidnapping by the FBI, Seattle, August 1969.

18

COINTELPRO Is Unleashed

The President, he's got his war Folks don't know just what it's for Nobody gives us rhyme or reason Have one doubt, they call it treason

—Les McCann, “Compared to What?,” 1969

In June 1969
President Richard Nixon, flanked by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell, held a press conference. They announced that the Black Panther Party was “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” COINTELPRO, the FBI counterintelligence program created in 1956 at the height of anticommunist hysteria, now geared up to focus almost solely on destroying the Black Panther Party and other radical groups. Although we didn't think the governmental repression could possibly get worse, it did.

Black Panther Party offices were raided from coast to coast. In Denver, Captain Landon Williams and Rory Hithe, two of the party's most important organizers, were wounded and arrested. In Nebraska, two Panther leaders were arrested, their office blown up, and the two leaders imprisoned for life. In New York, twenty-one of the leading members of the New York chapter were arrested and imprisoned on a variety of trumped-up charges. They became known as the “New York 21,” and it took two years for them to be acquitted of the charges.

In mid-April 1969, the Frisco chapter had been organizing for a May Day “Free Huey” rally at the San Francisco federal courthouse. For weeks the comrades had been out in the community, passing out flyers, talking to people, and driving through the Fillmore, Hunters Point, Pattero Hill, Sunnydale, and Mission neighborhoods in a truck mounted with a loudspeaker, advertising the upcoming rally. The San Francisco pigs had been harassing the comrades for weeks, stopping the truck for petty reasons. Days before the rally, the pigs surrounded the truck in front of the Panther office on Fillmore and pulled their guns, sending the Panther comrades running into the office. They then fired tear gas through the office windows. Although the comrades were able to get out through a hole in the back wall, they were confronted there by armed pigs. When one sister began to collapse from the tear gas, Field Marshal Don Cox (“D. C.”) ran to her aid. A pig known as Big Red yelled at D. C., “Didn't I tell you to put your hands up?” D. C. answered, “She's fainting!” Big Red responded by firing two rounds at D. C. The bullets passed through D. C.'s big Afro, just barely missing the head of the field marshal. All the comrades were arrested and released, except for D. C., who remained in custody, a marked man. And this was only the beginning of the repression.

The movement had expanded in many communities across the nation: the Brown Berets in Southern California; La Raza Unida Party (RUP) in the Southwest; the Red Guards and Los Siete de la Raza in Northern California; the American Indian Movement in the Midwest and on the West Coast; and white groups such as the Chicago-based Young Patriots and the Weatherman. Looking to the Black Panther Party as the vanguard of the movement, these organizations were determined to fight injustice in this country and US imperialism abroad, and in turn we all became targets of the US government. The antiwar movement also had spread to every college campus in the country. The government was determined to crush these radical leftist groups.

The party led the formation of a coalition with many of these groups, kicked off with the three-day National Conference for a United Front Against Fascism, held in Oakland in March 1969. I took a squad of Seattle Panthers down to help with security. People from all over the world were in attendance. There were speeches and rallies and an exclusive screening of
Z
, a film by Costa-Gavras about state control and a Greek assassination conspiracy. I was assigned to a security detachment of about eight people. We were given weapons and orders to mingle with the crowds, traveling in a van from event to event.

With us was a sixteen-year-old sister named Marsha Turner. Marsha was one of those rare persons with amazing beauty and the kind of enthusiasm and dedication that came along only every once in a while. She had a light, peach-colored complexion, a black, mid-high Afro, and high cheekbones. She had graduated from Berkeley High School at the top of her class and joined the party at age fifteen. In that short time she had risen to become national coordinator of the party's recently launched Free Breakfast for School Children Program. She could also outshoot most men in the party, which is why, at the conference, she was disguised as a prostitute, roaming the crowds with a big, snub-nosed .357 Magnum stuffed in her purse, keenly observing the crowd while Chairman Bobby and other well-known leaders spoke. And Basheer, a comrade from New York, led a goon squad on members of the Progressive Labor Party, who were foolishly attempting to disrupt the conference.

Out of this three-day conference came the establishment of an umbrella organization, the United Front Against Fascism, which opened community centers in white neighborhoods, led by white radicals, as well as new community centers in Black neighborhoods, led by the party. The Central Committee decided after the conference that there would be no more new Black Panther Party chapters; new offices would be identified as Communities to Combat Fascism centers. Existing chapters would remain as they were, with some exceptions.

A short while earlier, the party had launched the Free Breakfast for School Children Program, designed to provide a nutritious breakfast to hungry elementary schoolkids. Conceived by longtime Oakland Panther Glen Stafford, this program would also give party members something tangible and relevant to contribute to the community beside the focus on guns and self-defense. A number of brothers felt that such an activity was not revolutionary in nature and thus refused to participate. Most of those dissenters joined the ranks of the purged.