The Survivors Go Public

As we sat on the modern couches facing each other at the Wolfson’s townhouse in fashionable Sandburg Village, Jo-Anne wore an Afro wig and twirled the chamber of an empty revolver. Although a very serious and skillful defense lawyer, she was also caught up in “Panther chic.” We were at a meeting of the Panther defendants and their lawyers to decide if Panther survivors should tell their stories publicly.

The indictment of the survivors had created more resentment in the black community. Hanrahan was trying to bolster the credibility of the prosecution with public statements that “the only people with actual knowledge of the raid, who had talked publicly, were the police officers.” The survivors had only spoken through their lawyers. The Panthers proposed a people’s inquest at Malcolm X College, with Chancellor Charles Hurst presiding. The tribunal would take place in a large auditorium open to the public, and the testimony would be transcribed.

Some of the defense lawyers objected to our clients testifying publicly. “My client won’t testify unless and until I tell him too, and that decision will be made after the state rests its case,” one of the lawyers said. There was a murmur of agreement. This was the conventional wisdom. “We’ve been able to build a consensus in the black community and large segments of the public that the raid was not a shootout but a shoot-in,” Dennis answered. “We did this by speaking out. We can’t pull back now.”

We at PLO, and the Panthers, wanted more than a “not guilty” in criminal court. We wanted to continue the public condemnation of Hanrahan and the raiders enough to get them indicted on criminal charges. “The people’s inquest will keep up the pressure to bring criminal charges against Hanrahan,” I said. The Panthers argued it would also demonstrate how an alternative institution could work. In spite of the reluctance expressed by many of the other defense lawyers, PLO and the Panthers prevailed. The survivors would testify publicly.

To build support for the people’s inquest, the Panthers issued a “Statement to the Black Community” that read: “Daley and Hanrahan, following the orders of Nixon and Agnew, sent their pigs to murder Chairman Fred. They broke into his home, murdered him in bed while he slept. But that was not enough; they decided to try to kill everyone there.” The Panther communiqué continued, “We demand the decentralization of the police so that the people can control the pigs in their neighborhood and no pigs would get the opportunity to murder our people and kill our youth.”

Referring to the police as “pigs” was also a Panther trademark. While this terminology obviously led to some loose rhetoric—as in the chant “oink, oink, bang, bang, dead pig”—the term was generic for police who preyed on the community, not a personal attack, although I don’t think many law enforcement officers made the distinction. Certainly the term pig was intended to vilify the police, but the Panthers’ main objective was to organize community opposition to police abuse and gain control over what they saw as the “occupation” of their neighborhoods by police, who showed no respect for them.

The Panther bulletin concluded: “The People Must Indict Hanrahan and Impeach Nixon and Agnew.” These goals were obviously ambitious, but the authors of the communiqué rightly sensed the raid was more than a local effort.

The Panthers were looking to the black community for some form of justice. On March 8 the people’s inquest convened at the First Congregational Church at Washington and Ashland. Six of the seven survivors testified in the converted lecture hall, where a large audience of spectators and some press had assembled.

A tribunal of six community leaders was picked to hear the testimony and determine the guilt of Hanrahan and the raiders. There was substantial interest and curiosity on the part of the public and the press to hear the first-hand accounts of the raid from the Panthers who survived.

Doc’s description of waking up in the dark, ducking, and being hit by machine gun fire had moved the spectators and the jury. Deborah spoke of Fred’s death publicly for the first time. Her testimony was the most moving. Without using the word, Deborah described what could only be termed an execution. There was silence in the room after she reported hearing the two gunshots from the bedroom followed by the words of Fred’s slayer, “He’s good and dead now.”

The tribunal was also given the pathology report of former Cook County coroner Levine that indicated that the parallel nature of the shots and the closeness of their entry points in Fred’s head made it likely that they were fired at close range from the same spot while Fred was not moving. Hanrahan and the police were invited to testify at the people’s inquest but refused. Their prior public statements at the reenactment were made available to the inquest jurors. After the testimony ended, the tribunal members recessed to discuss the evidence. When they returned they announced a “peoples’ indictment of Hanrahan” and the raiders for murder. The mainstream press reported the verdict dutifully. The tribunal’s verdict carried no legal effect and was symbolic, but it was important to the Panthers’ goal to educate the community. Just as Fred had done a mock trial following his conviction for the ice cream truck robbery, the people’s inquest suggested a system where power was in the hands of the people. Each gave a vision of something that was possible and could work, and each was an example of the Panthers’ efforts to involve people in police issues.

On April 30, the month after the people’s inquest, Nixon went on TV to report that the United States was expanding the Vietnam War by invading Cambodia. Lon Nol, the puppet the United States had installed to replace a popular government in Cambodia, was so uniformly hated that Pol Pot was able to ride anti-U.S. feeling to seize power and eventually carry out the extermination of over two million Cambodians, a third of the population.

Students across the country reacted to Nixon’s announcement with rage and immediate mobilization. I, like many of them, saw it as proof that he and Kissinger were only making a pretense of seeking peace, but were still seeking victory. If victory was not attainable, they would substitute the annihilation of the Vietnamese people and their neighbors. “We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age,” General Curtis Lemay had threatened in 1964, and the B-52 bombing of Hanoi was now happening. Three days after the invasion of Cambodia, there was a call for a national student strike at a mass meeting at Yale University. Immediately, student protests and strikes spread throughout the country. On some campuses, such as Kent State in Ohio, the National Guard was summoned. But the antiwar and anti-ROTC protests continued.

On May 4, members of the National Guard, without warning, fired sixty-one shots into a demonstration of approximately two hundred Kent State students. Within thirteen seconds four students were dead, and nine wounded. One would remain paralyzed for life. None of us in the antiwar movement could remain still or silent when we heard this. Nixon further fueled our outrage by casting the students as the violent ones when he declared, “When dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.” The protesters had not turned to violence, the National Guard had. In Chicago I joined demonstrations protesting the Kent State killings, which were part of over 350 protests in the country. More than half of all U.S. colleges and universities were shut down, and more than 60 percent of the students joined in student actions and strikes. Some of the universities remained closed for over a year. Two thousand protesters were arrested.

It was disclosed later from notes and memoirs of cabinet members that Nixon and Kissinger had considered dropping nuclear bombs on Vietnam. Fear of campus rebellion was one of the reasons they decided against it.

A week after the Kent State shootings, a National Guard building was bombed in Washington, D.C. The Weathermen took credit and issued a communiqué stating it was in retaliation for the killing of the four Kent State students. The small amount of physical damage caused by the bomb seemed a justified response to the deliberate shooting and killing of four students, not to mention the daily munitions being dropped on the Vietnamese. I did not question the bombing. In fact, it gave me pleasure to think there was some retaliation for the escalation of the Vietnam War and the killing of the Kent State students. If they could raise the stakes, perhaps so could we.

Ten days after Kent State, two more students were killed when white state police officers opened fire on an unarmed group of black students at Jackson State University in Mississippi. There was much less outcry, but there were demonstrations at many black colleges. I joined a small protest in Chicago. By the end of the month, the National Guard was patrolling over twenty university campuses in sixteen states. The massiveness of the insurrection can hardly be comprehended today. For a moment it appeared campus radicals were a new revolutionary class.

The escalation of the political climate tore at the fabric of my marriage. Mary and I began to realize that we were not going to make it. I was pulled in more, politically, as she retreated. My overall feelings during that period were a mixture of exhilaration and hope, loss and tragedy: a sense of empowerment sometimes shaken but not gone; a pessimism and anger about the United States, and still a hope and belief that our movement would change things.