Street-fighting men

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Huey

Spirit of the Panther

David Hilliard with Keith and Kent Zimmerman

Foreword by Fredrika Newton

Thunder’s Mouth Press: 302 pp., $25

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Target Zero

A Life in Writing

Eldridge Cleaver

Edited by Kathleen Cleaver

Palgrave Macmillan: 336 pp., $27.95

SINCE the heyday of the Black Panther Party, many people -- both outsiders and insiders -- have delved into the organization’s myth and reality. “As a privileged witness to a mystery,” Jean Genet wrote in his posthumously published “Prisoner of Love,” “I was no longer fair skinned, no longer one of the Whites. When [Panther chief of staff] David Hilliard held out his hand and smiled at me for the first time in the car -- it was being followed by a police car -- I was quite happy to descend into the world of darkness. Body warmth, sweat and breath seemed not to exist. The Panthers are dry: they move about in an atmosphere where Whites couldn’t long survive.” It’s only fitting that Genet, a former thief and hustler, should travel with the Panthers and write of them with sympathy and grace. His comment evokes the fear and excitement he felt among them, providing a clue to the emotions the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense still elicits after all these decades.

In “Huey: Spirit of the Panther,” the aforementioned Hilliard, along with biographers Keith and Kent Zimmerman, plunge into the mystery that was Huey Percy Newton, co-founder with Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers and the group’s self-christened minister of defense. The book is narrated in the first person and, like its subject, it is seductive, marked -- initially, at least -- by macho romantic revolutionary accolades about a charismatic man who clearly was a major influence in Hilliard’s life. Indeed, the first chapter, “Let Me Die Right Here,” takes its title from Newton’s own words when in 1967 he stumbled into Hilliard’s house, wounded after a shootout that left one Oakland police officer dead and another injured.

Newton was born in Monroe, La., on Feb. 17, 1942, the youngest of seven children. He was named for the colorful and corrupt former Gov. Huey Pierce Long. When he was 2, his family moved to Oakland, where the future revolutionary went to school. As Hilliard and the Zimmermans relate, Newton wasn’t much of a student. In fact, he was dyslexic, but there weren’t resources in the public school system then to deal with his learning disability, and he was labeled “slow.” Though he was deemed illiterate -- tests maintained his IQ was 79 -- Newton did evidence creativity and determination. He graduated from Oakland Technical High School despite having been thrown out of classes repeatedly for challenging his teachers.

At Oakland City College, Newton embarked on a self-taught path of improvement. He read W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, Albert Camus and other dynamic writers and got involved in campus political action. Hilliard and the Zimmermans use these details to establish Newton’s legend but also show us at this early stage that they’re not out to create a false impression -- to sell a wolf ticket, in the vernacular. Instead, they pull the curtain aside.

“Unlike most college students, Huey led a double life, both as an academic and a petty criminal,” they write. “He maintained ties among a lot of our lumpen friends for extra cash. He scammed pocket money as a quick-change artist. Huey and his burglar friends also cruised the wealthier neighborhoods in broad daylight and sold stolen merchandise picked up through stolen credit card transactions.” Newton would live this double life for the rest of his days.

While an undergraduate, he roomed for a while with a white friend named William Brumfield, who introduced him to engineering student and Air Force vet Bobby Seale. Newton and Seale began to discuss ideology and strategies for black liberation in the aftermath of Malcolm X’s assassination and the 1965 Watts uprising.

“What good ... was nonviolence,” Hilliard and the Zimmermans quote Newton as having written, “when the police were determined to rule by force?”

Newton and Seale crafted a militant agenda. (Newton’s original 10-point platform included calls for decent housing and education, as well as “an immediate end to police brutality” and “freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.”) They also developed the iconic imagery to sell it -- young men and women in black pants, black leather jackets, black berets and sunglasses marching to cadence with shotguns and rifles at the ready. This galvanized the movement but provoked a backlash from the authorities, culminating in the FBI’s vicious counterinsurgency program, Cointelpro.

Among those Newton and Seale inspired was an ex-convict named Leroy Eldridge Cleaver, then a staff writer for the left-wing Bay Area magazine Ramparts. Born in Little Rock, Ark., Cleaver, like Newton, came west as a child, settling in Los Angeles. “ ‘Work out, soul brother!’ I was shouting to myself,” Cleaver (who died in 1998) declares in “Target Zero: A Life in Writing,” recalling how Newton confronted a police officer as he and other armed Panthers escorted Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz, to the Ramparts office for an interview. At the time, Newton was trying to recruit the articulate Cleaver. Cleaver did end up joining the Panthers, although in the beginning, he tried to keep his profile low because he was on parole. Eventually, however, with Newton in jail and Seale under arrest on weapons charges, Cleaver was thrust into the fray. As he writes, “I was the only other effective public speaker that we had.”

“Target Zero” is a collection of previously published pieces (including excerpts from Cleaver’s autobiography, “Soul on Ice”), unpublished fiction and nonfiction and an interview from Playboy conducted by Nat Hentoff. Although it’s a bit of a hodgepodge, something of Cleaver’s identity does emerge. Or rather, it is Cleaver’s public persona -- which went through a variety of incarnations, including born-again Christian -- that filters through.

Cleaver suggests that he was a humble servant of the people and neither sought nor courted media attention. His former comrade Hilliard believes otherwise. Take the events of April 6, 1968, which ultimately led to Cleaver’s fleeing the United States. In “Target Zero,” he avers: “On the third night following the raid on St. Augustine’s Church, members of the Oakland Police Department tried to kill me.” That is so. But what he leaves out is the buildup to the incident, which consumes several pages in “Huey,” and includes Cleaver acting against the orders of the jailed Newton. “I wanted to avoid the cops,” Hilliard remembers, “even though it seemed impossible to be inconspicuous while riding at the head of a ten- to twelve-car caravan with Eldridge Cleaver.”

The writing in “Target Zero” is not as revelatory as that of “Huey.” Maybe this has to do with the inherent limitations of autobiography versus biography. When we purport to reveal our inner motivations, there’s only so much we’re willing to admit. In the end, we’re playing to the house -- writing for posterity. Probably both men, like any of us, remained somewhat opaque to themselves.

For all this, what’s significant is the Panthers’ legacy. Given the FBI and police with their “Get Panther” squads, as well as the factionalism created by Cleaver’s and Newton’s egos and demons, it’s a wonder the party had any effect. But as Newton often said, the organization did for a time capture the people’s imagination.

Ultimately, Cleaver would “invent” pouch pants, embrace Jesus and renounce his radical past. Newton would destroy himself after long abusing alcohol and drugs. Bipolar and an addict, he died in 1989, shot on the streets of west Oakland over a $20 bag of crack.

Given the 1 million African American men under 40 who are behind bars, the continuing struggle for affordable housing and quality education, the often prickly relationship between police and black and brown communities and the racial violence erupting in our jails and prisons, the problems the Black Panthers sought to address still plague us.

At the funeral for Stanley “Tookie” Williams, two Crip sets initiated a fragile truce. On some college campuses, Students for a Democratic Society is being revived. Grass-roots organizations are negotiating community benefits agreements with big-box developers and even Newt Gingrich is talking about national health insurance. Maybe these are only gestures. Still, as Huey Newton wrote, “We are determined to establish true equality and the means for creative work.” At their height, and at their best, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense advocated and agitated to bring that about. *