6

Convergence

In the fall of 1967, Army Reserve units like mine were being activated everyday. If I refused to go, it would be desertion, not merely draft dodging. But fighting for the United States in Vietnam went against everything I had come to believe. When I realized this, the decision became easy. I woke up one morning and said to Mary, “I’m not gonna go, no matter what. I won’t kill and I won’t be killed in Vietnam and I’ll take the consequences.” The decision behind me, I felt at ease. I never had to decide whether to leave the country or assume a public stance and have a political trial. My unit was never called to active duty.

That winter Mary’s mother suggested, since we were already living together, we should get married. Her sister had just died in a scuba diving accident and her family needed something to give them joy. Marriage seemed a rather natural next step, not one I pondered over. Our families loved it, particularly my dad, who shared with Mary’s father a great sense of humor and both men enjoyed telling jokes. We had a small wedding at her house and resumed life together in a Lincoln Park apartment, with some new furniture, dishes, and a queen-size bed. Neither of us dwelt much on ceremony in 1968.

A month later, on April 4, I sat behind a desk on the second floor of the Robert Taylor Homes project on the South Side of Chicago. Constructed in the 1950s, Robert Taylor Homes housed over forty thousand African Americans in rows of twenty-five-story, concrete and cinder block buildings extending ten blocks north to south on the east side of the Dan Ryan Expressway.

There were no parks or even trees where we worked, only boarded-up businesses and cement playgrounds strewn with shattered glass and broken equipment. The U.S. Census Bureau had identified the Robert Taylor Homes area as both being the most densely populated and having the lowest per capita income of any community in the country.

I handled landlord/tenant, consumer fraud, and welfare cases, and became particularly skillful at preventing or delaying evictions. I could guarantee my clients several months of extensions before being thrown out on the streets, but I had no way to address the underlying problem of too little money to pay rent and other necessities. In spite of the poverty, many families managed to decorate their homes as refuges of sanity and order in the midst of the gangs, graffiti, violence, and squalor all around them. Inside, many apartments were furnished with comfortable, sometimes even plush, furniture. Pictures of nature, religious shrines, and graduation photos adorned every available wall and countertop, symbols of love and hope amidst despair. Photographs of President Kennedy and Dr. King adorned many mantels.

That morning, Ruth, our paralegal, rushed into my office crying. “I just heard on the radio that Martin Luther King was shot dead in Memphis,” she said.

My stomach sank. I flashed on Dr. King speaking at the Coliseum a year earlier.

“What happened?”

Ruth’s voice quivered between sobs. She had been a community organizer in Chicago for years and marched with Dr. King two years earlier. “He was shot on a motel balcony. The radio said it was a sniper.”

I followed her into her office to hear more on the radio. The announcer reported that Dr. King was standing with SCLC friends when he was shot. He was already dead when he arrived at the hospital.

When I returned to my office, I was shaken, disoriented. Who really killed him? Was it the government? I thought of all those apartments with his picture over the mantel, many of them next to President Kennedy. Now they both had been assassinated, and Malcolm too. Who’s left for black people to believe in? The eviction notices and installment sales contracts on my desk became a blur. I looked out the window at the vast expanse of project buildings with their concrete balconies bordered by chain-link fences and wondered what the reaction would be. I didn’t have to wait long. We soon heard reports that African Americans were rebelling on the West Side. They were in the streets, breaking windows, looting, and setting fires. Early in the afternoon, Ruth walked in and told Layton Olson, the other attorney in the office, and me rather firmly, “I think you should leave Robert Taylor Homes. You all might not be safe here, you know what I mean?” We were the only whites in the projects.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I said. Although I didn’t think our office had made enemies, I knew that we were unknown to 99 percent of the people in the area. We heeded Ruth’s advice and walked briskly to the parking lot, leaving my files open on my desk and expecting to come back the next morning. Although the South Side remained calm, that office never reopened!

The rebellion on the West Side continued through the night. Mayor Daley issued orders to the police to “shoot to kill rioters, shoot to maim looters.” Like the rest of the white people in Chicago, I was hunkered down at home watching the TV coverage of looting and fires and hundreds of spectators. African American teenagers were being arrested and beaten en masse. The broadcasts were frequently interrupted with warnings that it was not safe to go near the rioting—for most white people that meant all black neighborhoods. With news accounts of mounting arrests and high bails, I couldn’t stop pacing.

“It looks like they’re rounding up every black person on the West Side,” I said to Mary, after an eyewitness camera showed the police arresting a group of young African Americans standing a block away from a burning store.

“Yeah, King is dead, and the police are going crazy,” Mary said angrily.

“I can’t just sit here!” I answered. “I’m going to court. Fuck it. Somebody has to represent those kids.”

Her anger turned to apprehension.

“Don’t worry, they’re not gonna shoot me,” I said, fingering the lapel of the suit I had never taken off.

It was after nine o’clock when I drove downtown and parked near police headquarters, a thirteen-story concrete edifice that was also used as the pretrial detention center and bond court. I had to flash my lawyer card to get on the elevator to bond court on the eighth floor. The court was in recess when I arrived. I showed my ID to the bailiff to be admitted to the bullpen area behind the courtroom.

The metallic smell of nervous sweat smacked me in the face. The barred section consisted of a bare room, with cracked linoleum and no chairs and a partially hidden toilet. Wrappers from bologna sandwiches littered the area and I yelled above the din of the prisoners’ voices, “I’m a lawyer here to try to get your bond reduced. Come over here if you want help.” After a pause, a line formed on the other side of the bars. I began to interview the young men, resting my legal pad on my knee as I took down their personal information.

The men were in their late teens to midtwenties; some attended school and some worked. Most lived with their families and few had criminal records. From the charges against them, mob action and disorderly conduct, I determined almost all were arrested for being in the streets rather than any specific unlawful act. My legal pad was almost full when I saw another lawyer come into the bullpen, a tall, spectacled, thirtyish Ichabod Crane, his thin hair going in all directions. “I’m Dennis Cunningham,” he said, shaking my hand. Because of his disheveled appearance, including a well-worn tweed sport coat with reinforced elbows, I assumed he was a hustler lawyer, someone who hung out in the criminal courts to drum up business.

“Judge Bailey has been told to keep these guys locked up until the riots subside,” he explained. “We’ll be lucky to get a few out. Those with no backgrounds who can show they have a job or school to go to tomorrow are our best shot.” We worked for many hours until well after midnight interviewing the arrestees and presenting what facts we could.

“C’mon, Judge,” Dennis would urge in his informal style. “It’s clear the police don’t have anything on this defendant except he was black and in the streets.” In a few cases the judge allowed a reasonable bond (one hundred dollars cash) or recognizance bond (no money required). But Dennis was right. In the majority of cases, Judge Bailey, whom I came to know and dislike as an extremely prosecution-oriented judge, set bonds requiring more than the defendant’s family could make. These defendants would remain in custody.

As for my initial assessment of Dennis, I was dead wrong. Dennis had grown up in Winnetka, an affluent suburb of Chicago. He attended New Trier Township High School and went to the University of Chicago as an undergraduate in their program for prodigies. He then enrolled at Loyola Law School with the purpose of representing the civil rights movement. After he graduated, four years earlier than me, Dennis began representing movement protesters. He met his wife Mona Mellis at Chicago’s Second City, where she was part of the improvisational cast and he was a bartender and part-time actor. That April night I began a friendship and political relationship with Dennis that continues to this day. It led to my joining the People’s Law Office.

Six months after our night at bond court, Howard Alk, the film editor at The Film Group where Mary worked, introduced Dennis Cunningham to Fred Hampton. “This is the guy we are making the documentary about,” Alk said. “And Fred, this is an attorney who wants to be a people’s lawyer.”

“That’s what I have always wanted to be,” said Fred. After a brief conversation, Fred asked Dennis, “What’s your phone number? I may need you.”

Over two months later, in February 1969, Dennis got a call from a judge in Maywood. “Where are you, Attorney Cunningham? Your client is here. We’re ready to start his trial.”

Dennis didn’t know he had any clients in Maywood. “Can I speak to him, Judge?” Dennis stalled.

“No,” the judge said. “But since it’s late already, I’ll give you until tomorrow morning to be ready to start Fred Hampton’s trial.”

Dennis hesitated, but he did not disclose his surprise. “I’ll be there.”

I don’t know many lawyers who would have accepted the challenge of going to trial the next day, never having interviewed his client. Dennis didn’t want to give up the opportunity to represent the young leader. When Dennis showed up the next morning, he was more than a little nervous—for good reason. He’d never tried a criminal jury case. He had to look at the file to learn the charge was mob action and that it was about some street violence in Maywood. Outside the courtroom in the hallway, Fred told Dennis, “I want the jury to know exactly why we marched to the village board. I wasn’t there when the skirmishes happened, but I know the violence was provoked by the police using tear gas.”

“I hear you,” Dennis said, “and so will the jury.”

Despite his inexperience, Dennis’s political approach and folksy style were well suited to the task. The attorney representing Jim Ivory, Fred’s codefendant, was a smart and savvy African American lawyer named Jim Montgomery. After serving as an assistant U.S. attorney, Jim was rapidly becoming one of the top criminal lawyers in Chicago.

Dennis and Montgomery had to settle for a white jury because prosecutors at that time were allowed to use their peremptory challenges to strike black people without any justification. After the police testified about the violence, Dennis called Fred Hampton to the witness stand. Montgomery later wrote: “When Fred Hampton took the stand and with total frank, honest, confrontational rhetoric denied any criminal activity and conceded what he was doing, you could see the faces of the jurors change.”

In his closing argument Dennis echoed Fred’s testimony that he was targeted for organizing a march and not for any criminal conduct.

“Not guilty,” was the jury’s verdict. Afterward, Fred took Dennis aside and gave him the ultimate compliment: “That’s the way I would have done it.” Fred was still saying he wanted to be “a lawyer for the people,” but he had become the leader of the Chicago Panthers and prefaced his stated aspiration with “if I had time.”

By 1969 it seemed like none of us had time. We were heading for the rapids, not knowing what was ahead. In March 1968, Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown came to Chicago and shortly thereafter opened a SNCC office on the South Side on Forty-Third Street. Fred went to the office and invited Stokely to speak in Maywood. A few weeks later Fred introduced him at a large Maywood rally. Fred’s introduction was so impressive that Bobby Rush and Bob Brown, the two leaders of Chicago’s SNCC Chapter, came up to Fred afterward and introduced themselves.

“I was immediately impressed with Fred’s ability to speak powerfully and engage and energize the young audience,” U.S. congressman Bobby Rush told me over breakfast, thirty-five years later. “He was physically imposing with a powerful personality and deep guttural laugh. I made up my mind I wanted to work with Fred. He was such a magnetic young man.” Rush still spoke Fred’s name with reverence. “After the rally, I introduced myself to Fred and asked him if he was part of any organization. He said he was the head of the youth chapter of the NAACP.”

Later that year Bobby Rush went to Oakland, where he met with the Panther Central Committee. Stokely and Rap Brown had temporarily joined the Panthers, so there was no conflict between the Panthers and SNCC. Rush returned with a mandate to form a Panther chapter in Chicago. The first person he recruited was Fred Hampton, and they opened the Panther office in November 1968. In four years Fred had evolved from organizing for black homecoming queens to becoming chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers. By 1968 he was advocating revolution.

Six months later, the Chicago chapter temporarily stopped taking new members so they could integrate all those who had joined. The Breakfast for Children Program, providing free hot breakfasts for kids before school, had expanded beyond its first site, the Better Boys Foundation, to several other locations. Securing the food from merchants, getting it prepared and delivered to the kitchens, supervising the kids eating before school, and cleaning up afterward was major work for many of the Panther cadre. The rest of the day was often spent selling Panther newspapers, interviewing people and filling out questionnaires on their needs and priorities, getting petitions for community control of police signed, attending political education classes, and maintaining the office.

Early on, women in the party, including Joan McCarty, Ann Campbell, Barbara Sankey, Joan Gray, Stephanie Fisher, Beverlina Powell, and Leta Harrison, took the lead and did the majority of preparation for the breakfast program. Panther member Bradley Greene said the women were the hardest and most effective workers in all the Panther programs.

One Panther woman described being in the Panther office when the phone rang. The person who answered it walked over to Fred and said, “The brothers are here from the West Coast and they are staying at a hotel downtown. They want you to send some Panther sisters down there.”

Fred responded quickly and curtly, “You can tell them Panther women in Chicago are working on Panther programs, not as whores for Panther leaders.”

“Fred was twenty years old,” the Panther sister insisted. “It took a lot of courage for him to stand up to the West Coast guys.”

A lot has been written about sexism and the role women held in 1960s and 1970s activist groups. Stokely Carmichael’s alleged statement, “The only position for women in SNCC is prone” has been widely quoted. It no doubt expressed some men’s sentiments. But women I have interviewed from the Chicago Panther chapter said this was not the prevailing attitude in Chicago, nor was it Fred Hampton’s.

“There were some guys always trying to come on to women, but they didn’t do this when Fred was around,” one former woman Panther told me. Another said, “It wasn’t perfect, and we could have done more to elevate women, but feminism was just coming to the fore. We weren’t immune from the sexism in the culture.” Yvonne King said that Fred helped her and other women practice their elocution skills so they could speak publicly for the Party. Women were given leadership positions on both the Chicago and Illinois Central Committees.

Fred went from site to site working at the breakfast programs and talking to the kids and their parents about what the Black Panther Party was trying to do for the community. Kids were taught revolutionary songs. Parents were asked to participate in the programs, although it was not a requirement for their kids to get fed. In one of his later speeches, Fred said:

The pigs say, “Well the Breakfast for Children Program is a socialistic program, it’s a communistic program.” And the women say, “I don’t know if I like communism. I don’t know if I like socialism. But I know that the Breakfast for Children Program feeds my kids.” A lot of people think the Breakfast for Children Program is charity. But what does it do? It takes the people from a stage to another stage. Any program that’s revolutionary is an advancing program. Revolution is change. Honey, if you just keep on changing, before you know it—in fact, you don’t have to know what it is—they’re endorsing it, they’re participating in it, and supporting socialism.”

Doc Satchel, who started the Panther Health Clinic in Chicago, put it another way:

The Panthers were an armed propaganda unit that raised the contradictions, set the example and provided the vehicle that the people could ride to revolution. We do not say the Black Panther Party will be overthrowing the government; we heighten the contradictions so the people can decide if they want to change the government.

Fred urged Panther members to sell increasing numbers of the Black Panther newspaper throughout Chicago. The paper was printed weekly on the West Coast and delivered to most major cities, where Panther members and supporters sold it on street corners. Party members were given a sales quota. The paper contained articles about Panther activities throughout the country, with a heavy emphasis on the Oakland Chapter, as well as explanations of the Ten Point Program, articles on national liberation struggles, and some straight-up ideological presentations and cartoons satirizing government figures with police sporting pig snouts.

By and large the Panthers advanced a class analysis, with their party representing the vanguard of the proletariat. In one speech that summer, Fred responded to the criticism of the nationalists who had refused to participate with the Panthers, accusing them of being “engrossed with oppressor country radicals, or white people, or honkies.” Fred called these critics “dashiki nationalists.”

We got a lot of answers for those people. First of all, we say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class. That Marx and Lenin and Che Guevara and Mao Tse-Tung, and anybody else who ever said or knew or practiced anything about revolution, always said that a revolution is a class struggle. It was one class—the oppressed—versus those other classes—the oppressor. And it’s got to be a universal fact. Those who don’t admit to that are those who don’t want to get involved in a revolution, because they know as long as they’re dealing with a race thing, they’ll never be involved in a revolution.

Fred frequently spoke about how nationalism could not replace education: “You can’t build a revolution with no education. Jomo Kenyatta did this in Africa and because the people were not educated he became as much an oppressor as the people he overthrew. Look at Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti. He got everyone to hate whites and he turned into the dictator himself. How will people end up without education?”

As for working with whites, Huey Newton relied on white San Francisco attorney Charles Garry when he was charged with killing a police officer because, as he pointed out, Garry was successful in the white judicial system and had never lost a capital case. In Chicago, Fred and the Panthers sought out the services of white progressive lawyers. Four of us responded by creating an independent law collective that could represent them.

Bradley Greene said the Panthers wanted a twenty-four-hour-a-day commitment. “It was hard for people like me to hold a regular job. Many of the new Panther recruits were college and high school students. They often ended up in Panther cribs where the party paid the rent.” Bradley went on, “When couples formed in these apartments, they frequently moved out and got jobs. They could no longer do as much work for the Panthers and it led to some of them leaving the party.”

While the Panthers’ vision of how the revolutionary struggle would actually come about was not always clearly articulated or understood, at least by me, the work of the programs and organizing was always present. They provided a reality check and a complement to the revolutionary rhetoric.