Black Rage Confronts the Law. Paul Harris
daughter into his heart and the couple was soon married. They lived in a small apartment and struggled to survive. After he became unemployed their situation worsened. Elaine could not find work, and in the fall of 1970 both she and their daughter Kamisha developed a persistent, deep cough. Steven took them to the Blackman’s Free Clinic, where they were examined and given antibiotics. But neither of them got better. Steven worried that they might have tuberculosis like his uncle, and he took them back to the clinic. This time the doctor recommended they see a specialist. But they had no money for a specialist. Elaine asked Steven if she could apply for welfare. His response was angry and bitter. “No wife of mine will ever take the white man’s handout,” he shouted. “I can take care of my family; I’m the man of the house.” They had discussed and argued about accepting welfare before; each time Steven’s pride was wounded and he would retreat into a shell of silence. This time the frustration of days of knocking on doors for jobs that were not to be seemed to rush out of him in a torrent of words. Elaine understood that his failure to provide for them went to the core of his being. There would be no more discussions.
Christmas passed. The New Year brought only more frustration. Steven allowed Elaine to go to Sacred Heart Parish on Fillmore, where Eugene Judge, president of the Sacred Heart Conference, had won the respect of the community for his work. Judge gave Elaine a food package and offered to help obtain a new stove for them. A week later Steven fixed a car for a neighbor. He was paid twenty dollars and given a .22 caliber derringer for the other ten dollars he was owed.
Kamisha’s cough had not gotten better, and now there was a new worry—Elaine was pregnant. Instead of joy and excitement Steven felt only anxiety and anger: anger at himself for failing to protect his family, and at society for limiting his dreams.
Elaine was worried about her husband. He wasn’t acting like himself. They argued. He yelled at Kamisha. He was distant and strange. On the evening of January 21, 1971, Steven left the apartment, simply saying he was going to a friend’s house. He hung out with his friend listening to music until after midnight. Then he started home, but confused, he found himself two miles away, near Golden Gate Park. He fingered the unloaded derringer in his pocket. He thought of robbing a bank. Yes, that way he could take Kamisha and Elaine to a specialist and could buy a new stove. He wandered for a long time, along the streets of the Western Addition and along the confused pathways of his mind. He soon found himself in front of a burned-out, boarded-up building near the bus stop at Eddy and Fillmore streets. That ugly building had been standing like that for two and a half years. The vacant, garbage-filled lots were all around him. Why didn’t white investors build something here? he wondered. Black people needed jobs, needed homes. How many years would the Fillmore stand as a monument to the black rage of 1968 and to the white neglect of always? Steven’s thoughts, usually precise and organized like his drawings, were jumbled and hazy. But his emotions were powerfully clear—rage boiled inside him.
He spent the rest of the night at his friend’s apartment thinking about his father, his own life in Chicago, his failures in San Francisco. He fell asleep in the early morning. Upon waking, he got dressed, grabbed a pillowcase and began walking down Fillmore Street. He saw the Malcolm X School but could not bring himself to go in. He stopped and talked to the hardcore unemployed young black men who hung out in the tiny park on the corner of Ellis and Fillmore. He passed the old winos and saw the contours of his own future in the faces of all those jobless men. He saw the pawnshop and decided to pawn the derringer to buy some food for Elaine and Kamisha. He stood in line, but the pawnshop was crowded and it seemed to be taking forever. He left, walked another block, and stood in front of the First Western Bank. He saw that the bank was empty. Then, as if propelled, he was inside the bank.
The next morning Steven sat in a jail cell on the seventh floor of the courthouse known to Bay Area radicals as “The Hall of Injustice.” At the same time Dee Reid sat at her kitchen table scanning the San Francisco Chronicle for an article about the bank robbery. She had been in the crowd when Steven had been taken out of the bank. She had seen him pull up suddenly, stopping the two policemen in their tracks. She felt that he had carried himself with dignity and had spoken with pride. As a community activist she wanted him to have good legal representation. She found the short news clip and wrote down Steven Robinson’s name. She recalled a small radical law firm called the San Francisco Community Law Collective and one of its lawyers, Paul Harris. She looked up his number and called.
I was sitting in our storefront office, across from Mission High School. Bernadette Aguilar and Ricky Jacobs were hard at work, Bernadette interviewing a woman in Spanish about her car accident, Ricky editing and typing a brief in a draft resistance case. The other attorney, Stan Zaks, was talking to Francisco, one of the members of Los Siete (a leftist group named after seven Latinos who had been charged with killing a policeman). Francisco had been harassed by police for passing out the organization’s newspaper, Basta Ya (Enough Already!). I took Dee Reid’s call and agreed to go to the jail and interview this bank robber.
The loud, harsh clanking of the steel doors, the stink of food and sweat—I was entering San Francisco County Jail, where federal prisoners were held in custody. Steven and I met in one of the tiny, airless rooms set aside for lawyer-client conferences. Steven was both mistrustful and happy. He didn’t know me or Dee Reid, but he sure needed a lawyer and didn’t want a public defender. We went over the facts briefly. I agreed to take the case, hoping I could get the federal magistrate to appoint me so I could get paid. I told him I’d meet him at the bail hearing and would get some references from people at Sacred Heart and the Urban League. He said that the teachers at the Malcolm X School would not talk to a white lawyer they didn’t know without him first paving the way.
As I left the jail I had no idea how I would fight the case. He had been caught red-handed. So I focused on the bail hearing and two days later persuaded the magistrate to release Steven on his own recognizance.
Over the next two months I got to know Steven and Elaine. As I learned of Steven’s life, a plan began to form in my mind. I did not call it a black rage defense, but I did believe I could fit together three elements: Steven’s personal life history, what it means to be black in America, and the law of temporary insanity. I grew more and more excited. I read Black Rage by black psychiatrists William Grier and Price Cobbs. I reread Wretched of the Earth by Algerian psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. These books have a common theme: Oppressed people fill with rage, which they turn upon themselves, causing mental illness and crime.
I knew that rhetoric alone would not persuade a jury. Yet the truth of these books, written by men who had examined and treated hundreds of people, could not be denied. There was a link between social existence and acts of criminality. There was a nexus between racism and crime. Steven Robinson had broken the law, but he was not a criminal. He was not classically insane, either, but his mental state at the time of the crime could fit within the then prevailing definition of temporary legal insanity. I felt I had a defense. Steven didn’t agree.
“How many jury trials have you had?” Steven asked me on April Fools’ Day.
“None,” I replied, “but I spent a year as a law clerk for Federal Judge Alfonso Zirpoli, and I watched lots of trials and discussed and dissected them with the judge.”
“How old are you, Paul?”
“I’m twenty-eight, but I won my practice trial in law school at Berkeley, and I’ve won both judge trials I had in federal court.”
“Do you know anyone who has done the kind of defense you are suggesting?” Steven asked.
“No, but Clarence Darrow brought the reality of racism into court when defending Henry Sweet, who shot into a mob outside his house. And Charles Garry did the same when defending Black Panther Huey Newton for shooting a cop. Of course, those were self-defense cases. This is different.”
“It’s too different—it wont work,” said Steven.
And then he left. He really left. In twenty-eight years of practice, Steven Robinson is the only client I’ve ever represented who jumped bail.
Six weeks later Steven was arrested in Savannah, Georgia. He and a friend had been stopped for a traffic violation. When the police found a gun in the