The Savage City (25 page)

Two days after the article appeared, D.A. Koota announced that his office would not retry Whitmore for the Minnie Edmonds murder. The charges were being thrown out.

Whitmore's attorneys were caught off guard by Koota's sudden announcement. They quickly put together legal papers to argue in court that—now that all three murder charges against Whitmore had been dismissed—the defendant should be allowed to go free on bail pending appeal of his conviction in the Borrero matter.

In appeals court, Whitmore's attorneys made their argument. The presiding judge, Hyman Barshay, ordered yet another psychiatric evaluation for Whitmore, saying he wanted to know beyond a reasonable doubt that Whitmore was no danger to society before making any decision on bail. This time he was examined by an independent psychiatrist outside the system, a psychiatric professor at the State University of New York. The doctor declared that, although “somewhat preoccupied with his experiences” with the courts, Whitmore was “well adapted, without any evidence of mental disease.” The professor added that if there was anything strange about Whitmore, it was his total lack of any rancor for his ordeal.

When Whitmore was brought from the Queens House of Detention to Justice Barshay's courtroom in Brooklyn Criminal Court for the bail hearing, he was uncertain what all the excitement was about. He knew his attorneys were working on something, but he didn't know the details. A representative of the NAACP appeared before the judge and vouched for the fact that a job awaited Whitmore in his hometown of Wildwood. Parker Johnson, who was now the first Negro police captain on the Wildwood police force, submitted a letter in which he promised to keep George under “close supervision.” The cost of the bail—five thousand
dollars—was guaranteed by R. Peter Straus, the progressive-minded president of radio station WMCA, who had a history of supporting and donating money to civil rights causes. He put up the collateral, the NAACP paid the bail bond premium, and on July 13—two years, two months, two weeks, and five days after he walked into the Seventy-third Precinct station house in Brownsville—George Whitmore was released on his own recognizance.

Wearing a wool suit provided by his mother and carrying his possessions in a paper bag, Whitmore squinted in the afternoon sun. Newspaper and TV reporters were on the scene.

“Did you ever think this day would come?” George was asked.

“No, I didn't,” he said.

“Any bitterness?”

George thought about that. “I am hurt, yes. It would be abnormal for any person to come out and say he is not hurt when he is.”

Whitmore's mother and attorney Arthur Miller led him toward a car.

“Would you like to see the police officers brought to justice?” shouted yet another reporter.

“It's not my place to say,” said George.

With one hundred dollars in his pocket—the last of the money raised for him by the NAACP in Brooklyn—Whitmore got into the car and was driven away. He was taken to the same junkyard shack in Wildwood where he'd been living with his father before his troubles began. Once again, this would be his home.

As the car pulled up, Whitmore's father came out of the shack and peered in the backseat.

“Hi, Pops,” said George. “It's me.”

His father replied, “It's you. It's you. Thank God, it's you…. Boy, I am so glad to see you I don't know what to say.”

The exuberance of freedom lasted for a while. But then Whitmore realized he was right back where it all began: the junkyard. Each morning, he looked around at his surroundings—the same rusted husks of old cars, piles of scrap metal and garbage, junkyard dogs rummaging for food. Then there was Pops, still bellicose and drunk most of the time, telling George what he should and shouldn't do. This was the same set of circumstances that had compelled George to flee to Brooklyn in the first place. Nothing had changed. He was still George Whitmore, Negro suspect.

 

NOVEMBER 2, 1966,
was Election Day. Finally, the citizens of New York would decide the fate of the CCRB, Mayor Lindsay's campaign proposal. It had been a long and vituperative referendum debate. In some ways, the fight over the board was a metaphor for race relations in the city: there were loud voices on all sides, and the tone set by civic and community leaders was seized upon by race hustlers and professional agitators.

In the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York, a group of angry white teenagers calling themselves SPONGE—the “Society for the Prevention of Niggers Getting Everything”—banded together to protest the idea. Some (especially black folks) suspected that SPONGE was a kind of youth division of the PBA, partly financed by the police advocacy group. Mostly, the organization became an excuse for impoverished white youths to loiter outside the entrance to the subway and harass black people. “Go back to Africa, niggers!” they shouted at people coming home from school or work. “Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate” was another chant. SPONGE had fewer than a hundred members, but they represented a certain segment of the population: aggrieved white people who felt besieged. East New York was a stark example of the city's wrenching demographic trends: as the state census showed, in the course of merely five years, the neighborhood had gone from being 80 percent white (mostly Jewish, Italian, and Irish) to 80 percent black and Puerto Rican. This massive shift created layers of resentment, and it raised the prospect of violence.

SPONGE served as a peanut gallery to a summer of hate that spread throughout the city but was especially heated in Brooklyn. There were organized protests, racial skirmishes, shootings, and ambushes on a near-nightly basis. The hostilities cut both ways. In July, when a group of white student government interns arrived in Bedford-Stuyvesant to study ghetto conditions, they were met by Sonny Carson, the head of Brooklyn CORE, who told them:

Even Mayor Lindsay was not immune to the onslaught of racial invective. When he walked the streets in a mostly Italian American section of East New York in an effort to lessen tensions, he was told, “Go back to Africa, Lindsay, and take your niggers with you!” The Jewish owner of a butcher shop that had been looted during one of the summer's mini-uprisings said of the mayor, “I got him in hell—and I never cursed anyone before.”

Then it happened: on the night of July 21, 1966, at the corner of Dumont Avenue and Ashford Street, a ten-year-old Negro boy named Eric Dean was shot dead. As usual, accounts of what happened varied; the shooting took place during a street disturbance, with cops and agitators present. Amid the chaos and uncertainty, police arrested Ernest Gallashaw, a seventeen-year-old Negro. The Brooklyn D.A.'s office alleged not only that Gallashaw had shot Dean with a zip gun, but that he'd actually been attempting to shoot a police officer. The D.A. claimed to have three eyewitnesses. Another witness, however, claimed he saw a white youth identified only as “Little Joe” shoot the black kid.

Ernest Gallashaw had no criminal record; he lived with his mother and extended family in a city housing project. Now, he was a teenager indicted for homicide.

The three witnesses who gave their story to the grand jury were hidden away by the D.A.'s office, but journalist Sidney Zion tracked them down and interviewed them for the
New York Times
. The witnesses, boys eleven, twelve, and fourteen years of age, all had histories of mental instability. To Zion, they recanted much of what they had told the grand jury. Yet the case proceeded anyway, with denials and counterdenials and explosive revelations in the press.

The Gallashaw case was a good example of how treacherous the city's racial dynamic had become. An innocent young boy had been killed
during a riot. A black kid had been arrested, though some witnesses said they'd seen a white perpetrator. Dubious eyewitnesses were assembled. The witnesses told one story, then recanted, then re-recanted. It became impossible to know whom to trust, or how to get a clear picture of what had happened. The criminal justice system—the police and the D.A.'s office—was so thoroughly discredited in the eyes of minority communities that it seemed the truth could never be known.

Outside a Brooklyn courthouse during a pretrial hearing in the Gallashaw case, a group of thirty demonstrators carried picket signs and marched in a circle. “No more Whitmores,” they chanted. A hand-bill distributed by workers from CORE cited the Whitmore case as the kind of travesty they hoped to avoid. Under the headline “One More Whitmore,” the flyer read:
The eyewitnesses who saw the white racist kill Eric Dean are being harassed and intimidated by the police. Radio station WBAI played a tape-recorded interview with people in East New York who said they saw the fatal shot fired from a passing car with four white men. The D.A. said this information was irrelevant because of the nature of the speakers. They were black.

Given the incendiary nature of the Gallashaw case, the trial was put on a fast track. On October 13, just a few weeks before the citizenry was to vote on the CCRB referendum, Ernest Gallashaw was found not guilty of murder.

There were winners and losers in the city's unfolding racial drama. Blacks were united in their belief that the Gallashaw verdict was correct. Whites didn't know what to believe.

Around that time, the
New York Times
polled white New Yorkers for their views on race. They found that 54 percent felt the civil rights movement was moving “too fast.” “While denying any deep-seated prejudice against Negroes, a large number of those questioned used the same terms to express their feelings,” the
Times
observed. “They spoke of Negroes receiving ‘everything on a silver platter' and of ‘reverse discrimination' against whites.” Social commentators began to talk of a “white backlash” against the civil rights movement.

 

CONSIDERING ALL THE
attention the CCRB ballot measure had received, voter turnout was low. On November 2, when the votes were counted, the result came down more than two to one—67 percent to 32 percent—
in favor of the PBA referendum. There would be no newly constituted civilian review board composed of citizens not aligned with the NYPD. It was a resounding victory for the PBA, the Conservative Party, and the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick.

The people had spoken—at least those who voted. The police had maintained their exclusive right to police themselves.

But at what cost?

DHORUBA BIN WAHAD
never got the chance to say good-bye to his father. On May 2, 1967, he was released directly from the Box at Green Haven prison into civilian life, leaving his old man behind. Dhoruba had spent his last fourteen months in isolation. Having served the full five years of his term, Dhoruba would not be required to report to a parole officer or a bail bondsman; he would no longer be beholden to the system in any way. He was free and clear.

The Bureau of Prisons gave Dhoruba ten dollars' meal money and a one-way ticket to New York City. No one met him at the gate upon release. He took a bus from Poughkeepsie to the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan, then hopped a subway to the Bronx.

While he was away Dhoruba's mother had remarried. She now lived with her new husband, Louis, in a two-bedroom apartment on the seventeenth floor of the St. Mary's Housing Project, a huge new complex at 159th Street and Third Avenue in the South Bronx. When her prodigal son arrived home, she wept.

So much had changed. On that first day back, Dhoruba walked the streets of Morrisania, trying to take in the new topography. While he was away, the Third Avenue elevated subway line had been completely demolished; the area was now dominated by two massive new housing projects, St. Mary's and the Grant housing projects.

The streets were teeming with people, more Puerto Ricans than
Dhoruba remembered, and a new generation of young Negroes—teenagers and older—who seemed ready to seize the day with a kind of restless energy, all of it set to the music of James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, and other soul and R&B singers whose music would become the sound track of a rising consciousness.

That night, Dhoruba met his stepfather; the two eyed each other warily over the first home-cooked meal Dhoruba had had in five years. Later, after everyone else had gone to bed, he sat alone in his mother's apartment in the St. Mary's projects and pondered the past and the future.

He may have been a new person, but Dhoruba was back in the old neighborhood. “Hey, did you hear? Torch is back,” cried his old gang-banging homies in the Sportsmen Disciples. It wasn't long before he was back running with the gang.

One of those who accompanied Dhoruba on this would-be robbery was a neighborhood kid named Augustus Qualls, who would play a major role in one of Dhoruba's later entanglements in the criminal justice system.

It was the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday. The after-hours club
they targeted was known for selling liquor illegally on Sunday. Dhoruba and three others entered the club and pulled out weapons. “Nobody move!” somebody shouted. One of the gang members fired a shot into the ceiling; that caught everyone's attention. Dhoruba and the others loaded up a pillowcase with cash from behind the bar, then fled out into the street.

Someone in the neighborhood must have heard the gunshot and called the cops, because a police cruiser drove up almost as soon as Dhoruba and the others hit the street. “[The cops] didn't even say halt,” remembered Dhoruba. “They just started shooting at us.” He and his fellow robbers fled across the street into a vacant lot; the police car drove in reverse, with one of the cops leaning out the window firing off rounds.

Dhoruba and the others disappeared into the projects. For days afterward, Dhoruba hid out at an old girlfriend's apartment. Since none of the robbers had worn disguises during the stickup, many people knew that Dhoruba was involved, and that the cops were after him. Anxious that someone might snitch to the cops, Dhoruba had to get out of the neighborhood.

On a Saturday morning, he pulled his hooded sweatshirt tight around his head and took to the streets for the first time in days. He hopped on the subway and headed for his grandfather's house in Queens. To Dhoruba, Queens was like another country; he figured the cops would never find him there.

On the subway, he pondered his predicament. He was disappointed to find himself on the run after being out of prison only a few weeks. The gangbanger Torch might have thought it was cool, but his new self did not. He'd already lost five crucial years to the penitentiary; he didn't want to go back. His prison studies had convinced him there was more out there for him than robbing after-hours joints and counting cadence with the gang. He vowed to lie low for a while and stay out of trouble.

He holed up in his grandfather's basement in the neighborhood of South Jamaica, in the outer reaches of Queens. To Dhoruba, South Jamaica was the suburbs, but in fact it was a ghetto—a Queens version of the South Bronx. As with many neighborhoods in the outer boroughs and in Harlem, South Jamaica was struggling to deal with a huge influx of poor blacks from the South. And, just as in these other neighborhoods, a true race consciousness was beginning to take shape among its black residents.

Within days of his arrival in Queens, Dhoruba came across a modest Pan-African cultural center run by the Shakur brothers, Lumumba, Mutulu, and Zyad. Dhoruba had learned about black nationalism in prison, but the Shakur brothers were intense; they were members of Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), a group dedicated to armed insurrection and to securing land for people of African descent in the United States so that they could establish their own state.

Having only recently been let out of prison, Dhoruba was more interested in his newfound freedom—with its promises of sex, drugs, and sweet soul music—than he was in enlisting in the Republic of New Afrika. Yes, he had changed his name, learned some Swahili, and begun a process of racial self-actualization, but Dhoruba wasn't yet nearly as radicalized as the Shakur brothers. He did, however, pick up some vinyl 45 rpm recordings of Malcolm X's speeches at the Uhuru Cultural Center, along with the book
Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements,
with its cover photo of Malcolm in midspeech, finger raised, virtually spitting fire.

Down in his grandfather's basement, Dhoruba listened to “The Bullet or the Ballot” and “The Black Revolution,” seminal speeches he had read in prison but was hearing in Malcolm's own voice for the first time. Dhoruba was mesmerized by Malcolm's crisp articulation and his ability to think on his feet. The speeches dealt with history, but they also addressed the contemporary situation: Martin Luther King Jr., LBJ, integration, the escalating war in Vietnam, and so on. Dhoruba was especially startled by the transcript in
Malcolm X Speaks
of a symposium Malcolm had taken part in the year before his assassination. When asked about a series of articles in the
New York Times
that quoted police sources alleging there existed an antipolice youth gang called the Blood Brothers, Malcolm said he didn't know whether the group actually existed—but that if it did, they were justified. “If we're going to talk about police brutality,” he said, “it's because police brutality exists. Why does it exist? Because our people in this particular society live in a police state. A black man in America lives in a police state. He doesn't live in a democracy, he lives in a police state.”

Elsewhere in the book, Malcolm was quoted putting the issue of police treatment of black people in a Pan-African context. “Recently, three students from Kenya were mistaken for American Negroes and were brutally beaten by New York police. Shortly after that, two diplo
mats from Uganda were also beaten by the New York police, who mistook them for American Negroes. If Africans are brutally beaten while only visiting in America, imagine the physical and psychological suffering received by your brothers and sisters who have lived here for over three hundred years…. It is not a problem of civil rights but a problem of human rights.”

It was almost too much for Dhoruba to absorb: Malcolm's words were like a synaptic laser. He was putting the issue of police repression at the center of the struggle for human rights—in New York, Africa, and around the world.

In Dhoruba's head, as in the world beyond his basement hideout in Queens, something was happening. The civil rights movement had been under way for more than a decade, and conditions in the ghetto had gotten worse. The frustration of an older generation of Negroes was now being subsumed by a new generation waiting in the wings—people like Dhoruba, not yet fully engaged, but primed and ready for action.

The assassination of Malcolm X left a void, but in Afrocentric cultural centers and among political activists—who were less motivated by integration with whites than by the free expression of black nationalist pride—the movement was gaining steam and taking on a whole new slant.

 

AMONG THIS NEW
generation was Eddie Ellis, who had absorbed the death of Malcolm X not as a defeat but as a call to arms. Eddie had attended the memorials for Malcolm and then, like many others, had engaged in hours of discussion and debate about what was the best way to build on Malcolm's message of empowerment. Like other blacks in Harlem and elsewhere in New York, Ellis was repelled by the idea that blacks must rely exclusively on nonviolent resistance. It was Malcolm who said that you cannot expect a man to turn the other cheek when his people are being beaten, bitten by police dogs, spit on, and hosed down by racist authorities. Ellis adhered to the words of a new leader on the scene, Stokely Carmichael, who said, “Lyndon Baines Johnson is bombing the hell out of Vietnam—don't nobody talk about nonviolence. White [policemen] beat up black people every day—don't nobody talk about nonviolence.”

As far as Ellis was concerned, Stokely was the man. Of all the new
comers on the scene positioning themselves to follow in Malcolm X's footsteps, Carmichael was the one to watch. For one thing, he was a New Yorker, born on the island of Trinidad but raised in the Bronx. He had been an honor student at the academically prestigious Bronx High School of Science before heading south to join what he considered the most important calling of his generation—the civil rights movement. While still in his early twenties, Carmichael had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Mississippi, taken part in the Freedom Rides, and was arrested for his political activism a total of twenty-seven times. Most recently, he'd been arrested while taking part in protests stemming from the shooting of James Meredith.

Meredith had first entered the public eye in 1962 when his enrollment at the University of Mississippi led to three days of rioting and the intervention of the National Guard. In 1966, Meredith had announced that he was staging a one-man March Against Fear “to demonstrate to the people that white violence was nothing that they had any longer to fear.” While walking on the highway from north Mississippi to the capital city of Jackson, Meredith was shot and injured by a sniper.

For activists like Carmichael, Meredith's attempted assassination was the last straw. At an angry rally after the shooting, Carmichael proclaimed, “The only way we going to stop them white men from whippin' us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain't got nothing. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power.”

To Eddie Ellis and others in New York who had been politicized by the words and spirit of Malcolm X, Carmichael was on point. “Stokely had that intellectual brilliance and charisma that Malcolm had,” said Eddie Ellis. “He was eloquent and fearless. He spoke truth to power.”

Ellis was one of dozens of black and white New Yorkers who headed south to heed Carmichael's call to “get involved.” As a lifelong Harlemite, Ellis had never before been in the Deep South. He slept on hardwood floors in the homes of local farmworkers, and in Alabama, in the crucible of southern racism, he became a member of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, a political entity that grew up around the issue of voting rights in the South. “Voting rights was the issue, but really it had to do with empowerment,” Ellis remembered. “Stokely talked about Black Power not as a dream but as a right.”

The idea was not complicated: philosophically speaking, black people would never attain anything resembling equality until they had power—
economic power, political power, and the power of self-determination. Carmichael detailed the new thinking in a landmark speech he gave at the University of California in Berkeley in October 1966. “This country,” he said, “knows what power is; it knows it very well. And it knows what Black Power is 'cause it deprived black people of it for four hundred years…. The question is, why do white people in this country associate Black Power with violence? And the answer is because of their own inability to deal with
blackness
. If we said Negro Power, nobody would get scared…. Or if we said power for colored people, everybody'd be for that. It is the word
black
that bothers people in this country, and that's their problem, not mine.”

Henceforth, the word
Negro
was out and
black
was in—soon to be augmented by the term “Afro-American.”

In Alabama, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization chose as its symbol the image of a black panther. As Stokely put it: “We chose for the emblem a black panther, a beautiful black animal which symbolizes the strength and dignity of black people, an animal that never strikes back until he's back so far [against] the wall he's got nothing to do but spring out. And when he springs, he does not stop.”