9
In late November we got word from the appellate court that Fred’s ice cream robbery conviction had been upheld. He had to serve the rest of his two-to-five-year sentence. His appeal bond would be revoked within ten days. Rumors spread that Fred might go underground, or leave the country. Some believed that he would return to the penitentiary, where he had organized several prisoners.
At our December 1 PLO meeting, Dennis announced Fred had the six thousand dollars needed to buy the Panther headquarters building. The Chicago police had consistently put pressure on the Panthers’ landlord to evict the Panthers. Owning their own building made sense. Because I had done some housing work, I volunteered to go and help complete the purchase. I relished the idea of working with Fred, though I was a bit intimidated by the reverential respect people had for him. I called the Panther office and set up a meeting with Fred for the next day.
I went there the following afternoon and stood on the street outside the steel door. Bullet holes from the previous police attacks marred the building’s facade. Two faded posters with the Panther emblem hung on each side of the door. I pushed the buzzer and cleared my throat.
“This is Jeff from the People’s Law Office and I have a meeting with Chairman Fred at four o’clock,” I said.
After a pause the door was buzzed open. At the top of the steep staircase another door opened and I was led into the large, open space that made up the main office. It hummed with noise and activity. Around me people were criticizing each other about a snafu that morning getting the food delivered on time to one of the breakfast program locations. There were stacks of Panther newspapers on the floor in the corner and on some of the desks I saw piles of signed papers titled “Petition for Community Control of Police.”
Boxes of cereal and pancake mix, donations to the breakfast program, were piled in another corner. Familiar posters of Ho Chi Minh, and the Vietnamese woman carrying a rifle with a baby slung from her shoulder decorated the walls. The famous poster of Huey Newton and Bobby Seale with leather jackets, black berets, and rifles, one standing, one sitting on a fanned-back wicker chair, hung on the back wall. A Panther I didn’t recognize told me Fred was talking to people in the back and would be out soon. Someone stood next to a chalkboard containing a listing of the breakfast sites and was filling in names for tomorrow’s assignments.
A few minutes later Fred emerged. Before I could introduce myself—I wasn’t sure if he knew who I was—he smiled. “Hello, Jeff, come on in.” I followed him to the office in the back where he sat down behind a wooden desk. It was hot in the office and Fred wore a T-shirt. I took off my suit jacket and faced him.
“I got the person who’s giving us the money ready to go. Can we close tomorrow?” he asked, clearly in a hurry to complete the purchase.
“I have to draw up a deed and get the owner to meet us and sign it,” I explained. “I’ve got court in the morning and the coalition’s housing proposal to finish after that. How about—“
“How’s that housing plan coming?” Fred interrupted, referring to the proposal for low- and moderate-income housing sponsored by the coalition of the Panthers, Young Lords, and Young Patriots.
“I have to file our proposal with the Department of Urban Renewal on Thursday morning. It really looks good. If the City follows its guidelines, we should get the money to build, but that’s a big ‘if,’ given who we are. How ‘bout if I meet you and the owner here Thursday afternoon?” I asked.
Fred agreed. Buying the Panther building was not the kind of real estate deal where an inspection was required. The Panthers knew every crack in the plaster and bullet hole in the ceiling, because they had repaired the office after each of the three police raids.
“How’s the boiler, have you checked that out?” I asked.
“You can see, we get plenty of heat, except when the police bullets give us too much ventilation,” he replied, a slow smile spreading across his face.
“We put some cement in our walls when we opened the People’s Law Office last August. Maybe you should try that,” I said, only half joking.
“It’s the windows they shoot at, not the walls,” Fred said, “but I’ll check it out.”
I showed Fred the completed real estate papers. “Here’s where you sign. I’ve listed you as the chairman of the Panthers, to make it legal.”
“That’s accurate,” he smiled again. “Let’s get this done quick.” He signed and I gathered up the papers and slipped them into my briefcase. As we were walking up to the front, Fred paused in our conversation to talk to some Panthers who had entered the office. This handsome, powerfully built man of twenty-one, six years my junior, was giving instructions. “Show up on time for the breakfast program; sell your quota of Panther papers; be at political education class on Monday and Wednesday nights.” Fred was talking continuously, asking questions and answering them. His voice had the staccato tempo and energy of a rapper. There were few pauses and a lot of rhythm. He seemed to be driven by some inner force that created a continuous flow of orders and encouragement. Even though he appeared relaxed and jovial, there was a sense of urgency to his directions. The Panthers appeared to run on Fred’s energy.
He stopped for a moment to thank me. “I’ll see you Thursday. Power to the people.”
I answered, “Power to the people.” Opening the door and leaving, I hoped I was playing a small role in helping the Panthers gain self-determination—at least over their own building.
It was late in the afternoon when I left, so I went home instead of returning to work. “Fred is amazing,” I told Mary as soon as I walked in. “He’s in perpetual motion. I wish I had half his energy. I feel like I have to run in place to keep up with him.”
“I know what you mean,” she replied. “Some of the footage we’ve shot of Fred makes him look like he’s on speed; but it’s a natural high.”
“You should see the way he gets people around him motivated,” I said. “I don’t know what they’ll do when he goes back to finish his prison term.”
We went out to eat that night, as neither of us had time to shop. Over flautas and beer we talked more about Fred. “You know he’s only twenty-one. At his age I was nowhere,” I said, still impressed over my recent encounter with him. “If he can avoid the police and prison, he’s going to be a great leader.”
“We’re trying to figure out how to end our documentary,” Mary said. “We want to complete the film so more people in the country see him in action. We’ve got some wonderful footage of Fred speaking outside the Conspiracy trial about freeing Bobby Seale, and also of his August speech at the People’s Church. We also took a lot of him serving breakfast to the kids. We need an ending.”
“I’m sure it will come to you. If you capture half his dynamism, you’ll have a great film.”
The next morning I went to court and then to the office to make the final corrections in the coalition housing proposal. The deadline for filing was the next day, Thursday, December 4, at 9:00 A.M. I worked all afternoon handwriting my corrections on the typed draft. In this precomputer era everything was done on typewriters with corrections painted on carbon copies with White-Out. If a document had to be flawless, like a court paper or housing proposal, corrections meant retyping the entire document. We kept the typist-secretary–legal workers at our office busy. We were fortunate to have a steady flow of movement people, mostly women, type for us; some even volunteered to work evenings. One thing the computer age corrected was our sexist division of labor. We all learned to type and correct our own court submissions. I learned later that while I was working on the paperwork for the housing proposal, Fred, with William O’Neal by his side, was meeting with Conspiracy Seven lawyer Lenny Weinglass on the South Side, inquiring about getting an extension on his appeal bond from the Illinois Supreme Court, which would allow Fred time to decide if he wanted to flee the country to avoid going back to prison.
By six o’clock Wednesday evening I was still laboring over the housing document. Liz Stern, the wife of a friend, had offered to help type the final draft at her home. I went over to Liz’s apartment about eight o’clock that night to give her handwritten edits and corrections. We worked through the night keeping awake on coffee, cookies, and cigarettes. In that partially unenlightened era, I was still smoking, which today seems as much an anachronism as White-Out. At five o’clock in the morning the final draft was done. I was exhausted. It was still dark when I got home. I climbed the outside stairs, walked into our second-floor apartment, threw off my clothes, and collapsed on the couch.