An Unreconstructed ‘60s Radical Still Takes His Case to the Streets

Michael Zinzun is a former Black Panther who spent much of the ‘60s and ‘70s preaching a gospel of violent revolution but who, unlike some contemporaries, survived and, a bit paunchy, is three years short of 40.

He laughs. “I guess,” he says, “that makes me a member of the Baby Boom generation, doesn’t it?”

Then there is the patch over Zinzun’s left eye, and the sightless eyeball in the socket beneath--a legacy of a violent altercation with Pasadena police June 22 that began, Zinzun says, because a suspect was being mistreated.

He is, by anyone’s measure, a radical (“radical Socialist,” Zinzun says). He is also possibly the most prominent individual antagonist of Southern California law enforcement.

He’s run for Pasadena’s Board of City Directors (council) and been trounced twice, but now he is campaigning as a Peace and Freedom candidate for the Assembly in the 55th District in the November election.

He is an artifact from an era whose key players--or many of them, anyway--have gravitated to playing the stock market, like Jerry Rubin, or registering Republican and embracing “born-again” Christianity, like Eldridge Cleaver. Michael Zinzun is still on the street, getting his head cracked, calling the police “pigs” and demanding--and sometimes achieving--change.

Friends--some of them ex-Panthers Zinzun has known since the ‘60s--wonder how he manages to keep it up. At least one of them has repeatedly urged him to move off the front lines and leave the confrontation to younger people. He has refused, piling up, by his tabulation, a record of between 40 and 50 tense, sometimes violent, encounters with police agencies that have precipitated, by his lawyer’s count, at least a dozen arrests.

The arrests include one three years ago in which Zinzun was charged under a rarely enforced 1872 statute making it a felony to verbally abuse a police officer, for allegedly threatening to shoot five Pasadena policemen in the head (case dismissed) and one felony conviction for assaulting police. Ironically, one of the two officers involved in the felony conviction was James Robenson, who became Pasadena’s first black police chief eight months ago.

The two men are less than six years apart (Robenson is older); both were born in Chicago and raised in Pasadena, where they now have deep roots.

Police Officers Challenged

In the most recent incident, roused from his bed at 1:30 a.m. by the shouts of a crowd near his house in a tough ghetto on Pasadena’s northwest side, Zinzun angrily challenged a dozen or more officers who said later they were trying to arrest a burglary suspect. Zinzun says the police were dragging the suspect behind a building to beat him.

A scuffle ensued and, in the fighting, Zinzun contends a police officer hit him in the eye with a flashlight. The police department has not released an official version of the events but accounts circulating among police officers say Zinzun fell and mangled his eye on a sprinkler head--though there is no such device in the middle of the driveway where two people interviewed by The Times and who claim to be witnesses say the encounter occurred.

He was taken into custody after the fighting stopped, but no charges have been filed pending the results of investigations by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office and a private lawyer hired by the City of Pasadena.

It was only the latest episode in the public life of Zinzun, whose activities include: serving as head of the Coalition Against Police Abuse, a longtime radical organization working for civilian control of the police; the candidacy, on the probably doomed Peace and Freedom ticket, for the Assembly in the 55th District, and running a grass-roots cockroach control program in Pasadena that, Zinzun says, has exterminated the pests from 10,000 homes since it began more than a decade ago.

Received 10% of Vote

(While the election is probably a lost cause, according to even the state chairman of the Peace and Freedom Party, Zinzun surprised many observers by polling slightly more than 10% of the vote in the June 3 special election, won by Democrat Richard Polanco, to fill the unexpired Assembly term of now-Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre. Though Zinzun is technically a convicted felon, election law experts told The Times that the state Constitution is vague enough and court interpretations of it liberal enough that there would probably be no bar to Zinzun serving in the Legislature in the unlikely event he was ever elected.)

At 37, Zinzun lives in a dilapidated, rented ghetto house, wears his Afro under a hair net and is more pragmatic than he was 20 years ago, maybe, but just as angry. A reminder that time cannot be ignored altogether, however, is that Zinzun was a member of the first graduating class at Pasadena’s Blair High School in 1965 and his oldest child, Michael Zinzun Jr., graduated from Blair last month.

Zinzun has seven children, does much of the housework and, most nights, cooks dinner so Florence Bardley, a nurse and Zinzun’s second wife, can unwind after she gets home from work.

Margaret Prescod, head of a community organization working to solve a series of prostitute slayings in South-Central Los Angeles, says of Zinzun that “when you hear ‘ex-Panther,’ you sort of have a stereotype in your head. Kind of macho , a sexist guy. But he’s not full of himself.

“In between meetings, he’ll have the kind of conversation with you about, ‘Gee, what should I fix for dinner?’ It is not what you would expect.”

Nevertheless, the word revolution still is a key part of Michael Zinzun’s working vocabulary. He laughs again. “In the (Black Panther) party (in about 1970), we thought,” he says, “that the revolution was coming in five years when, in fact, it wasn’t coming.”

Does that mean he has given up on the idea of armed revolution in America? “I didn’t say that,” Zinzun adds quickly. “I say, work for change by education first, and then by any means necessary. Taking the control of wealth out of the hands of the few and putting it into (the hands of workers) will bring about the kind of confrontations that may well create the kind of violence that we all oppose but recognize as a possibility.”

There is ample evidence that local law enforcement agencies have regarded Zinzun as a threat. The Coalition Against Police Abuse was the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that brought about the demise of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Public Disorder Intelligence Division as it was then structured.

And when American Civil Liberties Union attorneys recovered hundreds of pages of police intelligence files, Zinzun’s name appeared in them with regularity. “Because of his dominating personality and forceful way, Zinzun can get people to do things,” one LAPD commander wrote to his superiors in 1976, while another notation called Zinzun “a Pasadena Black Panther and assaulter of officers” and a 1977 entry reported “it has been rumored that (two other leaders of the coalition) and Michael Zinzun are allegedly heavy users of drugs and narcotics.”

Anthony Thigpenn, a community organizer who has been closely associated with Zinzun for nearly 20 years, and Zinzun both specifically have denied Zinzun has ever used narcotics. “That entry was typical of the kinds of things the police were saying at the time about organizations that (worked) against the police,” Thigpenn says.

Zinzun was actually in the Panthers for just 18 months, in 1970 and 1971, experimenting with his own consciousness and what he says is a recognition of social injustice that came to him while he was serving two years at a California Youth Authority facility for car theft. He was driving, but there were other people in the car, he recalls. They’d stolen the vehicle in Pasadena and driven around for a while but ran out of gas.

Zinzun says he parked the car at a service station and walked home to get money to fill the tank. When he returned, he found the police waiting--called by employees who knew Zinzun was too poor to own a car. “They said,” Zinzun recalls of the workers, “that they did it for me.”

‘He Keeps Getting Back Up’

Ray Hewitt, a construction worker and former Panther who has known Zinzun since 1969, recalls that, at the time Zinzun quit the party, doing so was not without risk. “We had a bunch of leaders who had a latent gangster syndrome,” Hewitt recalls. “You could call it a lust for power that was thinly disguised as political rhetoric. People like Michael who were sincere and (from the) grass roots had difficulty working with that.”

Hewitt said he both admires and is mystified by the fact that today, 16 years or so later, Zinzun is still going into the street and taking on the police. “ Provocative would not be the word I would use to describe him,” Hewitt says. “I would say he is ungiving . . . .

“Michael is of the opinion that we have to protest, no matter how risky it is. To me, today, that’s kind of ungiving. He keeps getting back up. Most of us who have been knocked down have quit. That’s a frank assessment.”

“Michael,” says Zinzun’s longtime attorney, Terrence Bennett, “is like what George Jackson (a Panther and member of the Soledad Brothers who was killed in the notorious San Quentin prison shoot-out in 1971) might have become if Jackson had lived.

“He’s a gadfly, in a sense. He’s just a shadow of that time (the ‘60s and early ‘70s) and he’s crying in the wilderness. I don’t think he is a great man or leader of men, but the community would be poorer if he were not around. I respect that.”

Zinzun is standing on the lawn in front of his house, listening to the analogy to the ‘60s. He nods, obviously having heard the same comparison before. “You have something you believe in,” he says. “You might be religious and I say, ‘You don’t believe in God’ and you say ‘Oh, yes I do’ and I smack you down. If you believe in God, you get back up.

“It’s not that I represent a dying breed, but it’s a breed with a better understanding that has thrown away the (radical chic) popularity of it and made it a very serious cause.”

Born on the South Side of Chicago and raised in the infamous Cabrini-Green housing project there, Zinzun says he was the second of the 10 children of a full-blooded Apache Indian man and a black woman. Zinzun’s father died when he was a boy, he recalls, and when Michael was 8 his mother sent him to California to live with an aunt.

Within a few years, the rest of the family had moved to Pasadena and Zinzun was raised there. “I ran the streets as a teen-ager and got into a lot of trouble,” Zinzun says. There were arrests for incorrigibility and the car theft case that landed Zinzun behind bars. That was in 1965, just after he graduated from Blair.

Jim Storms, now the dean of students at Blair but then a worker at the Pasadena Boys’ Club, remembers Zinzun as “a typical young man” from a black ghetto background. “He was always, I guess you could say, intense ,” Storms recalls.

Out of custody in 1967, Zinzun gravitated to radical black politics, which at the time meant involvement with the Panther party, which Zinzun joined, he says, in 1970. He was already married, to a woman from whom he was subsequently divorced and who died four years ago, and he already had a son, the now 18-year-old Michael Jr., born in 1968.

Bitter Disappointment

Struggling to support a wife and child, Zinzun had taken up automobile mechanics and, by the time he was 20, had managed to open a small repair shop behind a gas station in Altadena. But the station was sold by a large oil company and Zinzun was evicted. It was a bitter disappointment that changed Zinzun’s approach to life, radicalizing him, he recalls.

But the Panthers lost their appeal for Zinzun. “I think the Black Panther Party was an educational experience,” he says now. “Politically, I felt it was stifling so I chose to leave.”

Thigpenn recalls that by 1973 he had begun organizing community resistence to a rash of police killings and encountered Zinzun, interested in the same approach. Eventually, in 1974, a Panther organizer, B. Kwaku Duren, then working in Long Beach, organized what became the Coalition Against Police Abuse.

Free Breakfast Program

Within a year and a half, Thigpenn recalls, Zinzun had assumed the leadership of the organization and Duren withdrew. By then, Zinzun was running a free breakfast program in Pasadena and had begun the roach control project. The Coalition Against Police Abuse, however, was his major outlet for confrontation with police he and other black leaders regarded as altogether too willing to shoot first and ask questions later.

And for more than a decade, Zinzun has gone to the scenes of police incidents, in Pasadena, Los Angeles, Compton and Altadena, to challenge conduct by officers on the street. “What has it accomplished? We stopped the chokehold (an often fatal police tactic) and we also stopped police officers from harassing black folks and the minority community,” said the Rev. Milton M. Merriweather, pastor of the New Mount Pleasant Baptist Church and longtime participant in police abuse protests.

“The way it used to be, it was ‘nigger this’ and ‘nigger that,’ ” Ray Hewitt recalled. “Now, it’s ‘Sir’ and ‘Mister.’ Sometimes.”

Time has done little to temper Zinzun’s own rhetoric. He still refers to some top police commanders as “pigs” and, while he is careful of what he says about Pasadena’s Robenson (“He’s a black man. He lives in a racist society. Naturally, there would be a certain commonality for us.”), he says he thinks the LAPD suffers from a pervasive “us-they” attitude that is encouraged from the top, starting with Chief Daryl Gates.

Not surprisingly, the mere mention of Zinzun’s name to experienced Southern California police officers provokes an emotional reaction. Inquiries by The Times among police officers in three different agencies yielded an impression of Zinzun as a committed, dangerous political radical who is believed by police to have a history of violent crime--even though Zinzun’s arrest and conviction record are apparently devoid of any violent incidents unrelated to episodes of police confrontation.

Zinzun was convicted on shoplifting charges in 1976 and sentenced to 180 days in the county jail system. He says today he took the blame for the theft to protect a young man who would have been charged with probation violation if he had been caught.

“Michael Zinzun is perceived as a very radical person who thinks we (the police) should be completely controlled by some agency or individuals or groups, as opposed to being answerable to the political establishment,” says Deputy Chief Jesse Brewer, the highest-ranking black in the LAPD. “I disagree with that and I think most police officers do.”

‘Much Too General’

Brewer has had several meetings with Zinzun because Zinzun was named a member of the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders, formed to assist in the investigation of the South-Central prostitute slayer case.

“I think he (Zinzun) makes statements about law enforcement,” Brewer says, “that are much too general and he criticizes law enforcement without any justification, really.”

In general, both Robenson and Brewer agreed that Zinzun paints police officers and police agencies with too broad a brush, tarring all cops because of what both men perceive as the misdeeds--or alleged misdeeds--of a few.

Through a spokesman, Gates declined to discuss Zinzun. To answer questions about Zinzun’s contentions “would require at least five minutes of the chief’s time,” said Cmdr. William Booth, the LAPD spokesman. “I don’t think Michael Zinzun is worth five minutes of the chief’s time.”

Says Pasadena’s Chief Robenson, a 22-year veteran of the department he now heads: “There are a lot of people who, back in the ‘60s, were frustrated with the system and felt that the only way they could affect change was to get out on the streets. But there is a lot of new thinking that is going on that should be taken into account by people who are distrustful of government because of history.

“Michael Zinzun is a person with rights that are allegedly violated and it’s a sad state of affairs that Mike doesn’t trust the administration here to be responsive.”

Troublesome Tactics

To Robenson, it is Zinzun’s tactics, and not his philosophy, that have been troublesome, especially in the most recent incident. The chief and city officials have declined to discuss details of the incident pending completion of the various investigations into it. Zinzun and his lawyer have said they will file a damage claim with the city over the loss of Zinzun’s left eye.

But, pacing back and forth across his office on the fourth floor of Pasadena’s police headquarters, Robenson is clearly a man troubled not just by what occurred, but by the fact that, after all these years, nothing that has happened or been done has changed Michael Zinzun’s mind about his police department--or any other.

“One-thirty a.m. on a Saturday night . . . is not the time to be resolving these issues,” Robenson says. “I don’t think it’s necessary to go back to the streets for some governments to be responsive.”

However the latest episode is resolved, neither Robenson nor Zinzun’s friends expect that even the loss of an eye will change Zinzun’s approach to life.

“I’m more determined than ever,” Zinzun says. “I’ve got my designer patch (the black covering over his eye monogramed with his initials). I’d rather lose an eye fighting against injustice than live as a quiet slave. I just can’t see myself standing back. I will continue what I am doing.

“I am not going to stop.”

This kind of talk clearly concerns Zinzun’s wife. “Has he mellowed? No,” Florence Bardley says. “It looks like he’s gotten revved up for more action. Being with him so long, you learn that he doesn’t want anybody to be weak.

“To help him, you have to be strong.”