AMERICAN JUSTICE ON TRIAL. Lise Pearlman
eye-opening period for me.
At first, Newton relished the group’s focus on the works of Leftist political writers like W. E. B. Dubois, James Baldwin and Jean-Paul Sartre. He also liked the way the association promoted the wearing of dashikis and the teaching of Swahili. Soon, however, he was getting restless. Since the fall of 1962, Newton had been holding forth frequently at a lunchtime speaking forum adjacent to the Oakland City College campus on Grove Street — known as the Grove Street orators. Newton liked to expound on the Cuban revolution, hand out “Fair Play for Cuba” flyers and criticize President Kennedy’s Cuban blockade and the history of American colonial power.
It was when Newton gave speeches on Grove Street that he first caught Seale’s attention. Newton tapped into Seale’s inner anger and frustration: “The experience of things I’d seen in the black community, killings that I’d witnessed, black people killing each other — and my own experience just . . . trying to make it . . . came to the surface.”7 Soon Newton’s roommate Brumfield introduced the pair to each other at an Afro-American Association rally. Seale already found Newton’s speeches impressive. Seale impressed Newton, too. Newton learned that Seale owned guns and was an expert marksman, and had been trained in the military to take apart and reassemble an M1 carbine blindfolded.
At the time they met, Seale was still secretly active in RAM. Seale soon suggested that Newton join,too. But when Huey applied for membership in RAM, he was rejected because he resided with his parents in a “bourgeois” mixed-race Oakland neighborhood. His home was outside the lumpenproletariat flatlands — the poorest area of the city, where pimps, hustlers, prostitutes and thieves abounded.8 RAM’s view did not match that of traditional Marxists. Karl Marx expected the working class to rise up to take ownership of their own labor, but placed no trust in the criminal class. Marx coined the term lumpenproletariat for outcasts in rags and low-level lawbreakers he doubted would ever attain class consciousness. Marx actually considered them “bottom-feeders” — obstacles to his dream of a classless society because of their dependence on the labor of others for their survival. In Marx’s view, even if they became true believers in revolution, the lumpenproletariat remained far more vulnerable to arrest and coercion into becoming informants. That very problem would later be the Panthers’ undoing.
When RAM snubbed him, Newton was surprised that RAM embraced a stand-up comic (Seale) but rejected a more serious Leftist philosopher like himself. Newton later scorned RAM members as just “phony armchair revolutionaries.”9 Ironically, at the same time RAM rejected Newton as unfit, RAM had unknowingly accepted as charter members undercover policemen intent on keeping a watchful eye on their activities.
Between 1962 and 1965, Newton and Seale saw each other only occasionally. During this time, Newton often took seasonal jobs at the Del Monte cannery in nearby Emeryville, where two of his sisters were employed. From time to time, Newton hired on as a construction worker or longshoreman or street cleaner for the City of Oakland, though he never held any job for long. Meanwhile, Newton secretly supplemented his legitimate income with petty burglaries from unlocked cars, parking lot robberies, selling stolen property and, for several months, pimping.
Huey’s reckless streak was patent. He liked to scare friends by racing his car across the railroad tracks to barely beat an oncoming train. At five-foot-ten, he did not intimidate anyone by sheer size, but he still cultivated a fierce reputation on the street. Shortly after his twenty-first birthday, Newton was arrested for stealing a book. He managed to talk his way into an acquittal. Arrested in Berkeley for burglary a year later, he again persuaded the police to let him go. Arrested once more on five counts of burglary in early May of 1964, he got the charge reduced to petty theft.
Newton had his first serious brush with the law in the late spring of 1964, when he attended a birthday dinner party and got into an argument with a scar-faced bully named Odell Lee he had never met before. Lee was so hostile and aggressive, Newton acted first. He picked up a steak knife and stabbed Lee, which got Newton arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. He cockily decided to represent himself once again. This time, after a two-day jury trial, Newton was convicted. Tom Broome, who years later became Huey’s probation officer, coincidentally had been present at the birthday party. Broome thought “there was so much provocation that a third-grade attorney could have beaten the case or at least had it reduced. Huey didn’t know how to go about it, made a fool of himself and wound up with a felony conviction to boot.”10
This conviction would be significant in Newton’s prosecution for the death of Officer Frey. Newton served six months in jail at Santa Rita before his release on three years’ probation. En route to Santa Rita, the 22-year-old spent one month in an isolation cell in the Alameda County jail, infamously known as “the soul breaker.”11 At Santa Rita, Newton received similar punishment in the “cooler.” In December 1964, he watched from the Santa Rita prison yard as busloads of arrested Free Speech Movement demonstrators from U. C. Berkeley arrived for a brief stay. The political statement they made by joint action impressed him greatly.
Upon his release from Santa Rita, Newton returned to Oakland City College to take a few courses. Newton mainly wanted to use the college as a political base. From his perspective, Oakland City College’s location in a run-down flatland neighborhood was ideal for recruitment. Newton figured knowledge of the law would come in handy. He signed up for a course on California criminal law taught by Assistant District Attorney (and Ronald Reagan’s future Attorney General) Edwin Meese III. Huey quickly showed himself to be an apt student, particularly when the subjects were the constitutional rights of suspects and the dos and don’ts of California’s open-carry gun laws.
Newton’s parents must have been extremely pleased with his new devotion to studies and his new girlfriend, LaVerne Williams, an aspiring opera singer. Williams participated in a Miss Bronze Northern California competition co-sponsored by radio and TV journalist Belva Davis and won the talent competition. Williams introduced her boyfriend to Davis, praising his love of music, poetry and philosophy. Walter Newton knew Davis’s father from the days both families lived in Monroe, Louisiana. Davis was shocked when, only a few years later, the quiet young man she had met as LaVerne’s boyfriend morphed into a symbol of armed revolt.
When Newton was released from the Santa Rita jail, one of the most active and highly respected leftists on campus was Richard Masato Aoki, an eight-year army veteran. Huey already knew him as a fierce streetfighter from the late 1950s when Aoki’s family moved to West Oakland after their World War II internment. As a teen, the third-generation Japanese-American had hung out with Huey’s oldest brothers. At Oakland City College, Aoki started a chapter of the Young Socialist Alliance of the Socialist Workers Party. The Socialist Workers Party espoused Soviet Union co-founder Leon Trotsky’s view that Communism should spread across the globe through continuing revolution. Aoki invited Bobby Seale as a speaker and became good friends with Seale as well as Newton. Aoki transferred to U. C. Berkeley and continued his activism there, while keeping in close contact with his Oakland college friends.
In 1965, Newton and Seale were searching for a new base on campus. They joined disaffected blacks who founded the Soul Students Advisory Council. One of the group’s leaders was Ken Freeman, a self-educated expert on African history and editor-in-chief of a new radical political and literary magazine called Soulbook. Also among the Advisory Council’s founders was one of Soulbook’s writers, leftist scholar Louis Armmond. Armmond grew up on the East Coast before attending U. C. Berkeley, where he had become one of the handful of black activists in the early Free Speech Movement. At Armmond’s instigation, the Council opposed the drafting of black soldiers for the Vietnam War and organized hundreds of people to attend a rally — one of the largest such protests on the Oakland City College campus up to that time. The Council also increased awareness among blacks of their heritage and of the ways in which they had been relegated to colonial status. They lobbied for courses in black history and pushed for the hiring of African-American faculty.
Malcolm X‘s assassination in late February 1965 hit Seale hard. That same day Seale took some bricks from his mother’s garden, broke them in two and started hurling them at every passing car driven by a white person. He later said, “I was ready to die that day.”12 Instead, he focused on learning more about one