AMERICAN JUSTICE ON TRIAL. Lise Pearlman
experience. Decca spent long hours assisting in that research: “[Our investigation disclosed] monstrous beastliness, authority cloaked in nightmare garb . . . On Fridays . . . police would regularly lie in wait outside the West Oakland bars that served as banks for the cashing of pay checks, arrest those emerging on charges of drunkenness, and in the privacy of the prowl cars beat them and rob them of their week’s pay en route to the West Oakland police station.”5
The scathing report led to a legislative inquiry into police brutality in Oakland, one of the first official inquiries ever undertaken of any major police department for alleged abusive treatment of minorities. These days, such findings would be national news and would provoke mass demonstrations, but in those years before the Civil Rights Era, the report drew little media coverage and no meaningful state action. The continuing racial divide between the black community and the OPD greatly exacerbated the situation.
The first noticeable progress occurred in 1951 when Treuhaft and his law partner Edises amazingly obtained the reversal of a death penalty conviction in a highly publicized murder case involving a local black shoe-shine boy, Jerry Newson. (From 1930 to 1960 half of those executed in California were black.) Newson had been accused of murdering a white pharmacist and his assistant. In his defense, Newson testified that the police pressured him into making a false confession under threat of facing “the hard boys” of the department who would otherwise beat a confession out of him.6 On remand from the California Supreme Court, the case was tried twice more, but both trials ending in hung juries. Newson eventually went to jail for an unrelated robbery. As a small boy growing up in Oakland, Newton had heard all about the Newson case. Huey considered Bob Treuhaft and Bert Edises two of his childhood heroes. They offered the black community a glimmer of hope that police misconduct might sometimes be redressed.
For more than two decades after the war, the black community believed the OPD deliberately cultivated a racist police force, mostly from the South. Black policemen were rare in the 1940s. A few more were hired in the 1950s, maybe 15 in all. By the late 1960s, when blacks were the largest minority group in the city, of 658 sworn police personnel in the OPD, only 27 were nonwhites — and only 16 of those were black. With the exception of one of 95 sergeants and one of 11 captains, the leadership was entirely white. Curtis Baker, who ran the West Oakland Help Center, became a strong advocate of creating a civilian police review board. He testified before the California Civil Rights Commission in June of 1966 at a hearing on police community relations: “Oakland must stop hiring Ku Klux Klansmen and Mississippi hillbillies to do their killing. “We (Negroes in Oakland) are living in a cage.”7
Seale’s and Newton’s revolutionary friend Louis Armmond, who introduced them to the writings of Dr. Fanon, agreed with that stark assessment. When the Panthers were first launched, “We found that community monitoring of the police and . . . methods of self-defense in Oakland, were just as necessary as . . . armed self-defense in . . . Mississippi and Louisiana in the ’60s during the civil rights movement. But we knew that in Mississippi, the Klan and the police and the sheriff were the same. In Oakland, there were more or less formal separations, but the official police actually carried out the same methods in many ways as the Klan would do unofficially in the South.”
A decade later, a black elected official in the East Bay described local law enforcement in the 1960s the same way — just as brutal as “the most rabid, cracker police force in a small Mississippi town.”8 That was quite an indictment. Mississippi and Alabama provided such horrific evidence of racist policing in the early ’60s that they became the major catalyst for passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Louisiana and rural Florida police employed similarly bigoted tactics, but Alabama took center stage in 1963 when national television showed shocking footage of police under Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor siccing attack dogs on freedom marchers and using fire hoses on children as well as adults. On “Bloody Sunday” — March 7, 1965 — people across the country again saw with their own eyes vicious beatings by police in Selma, Alabama, clubbing peaceful marchers unconscious for joining a freedom walk to Montgomery led by Reverend Martin Luther King. Future Georgia Congressman John Lewis was among the hospitalized victims.
Oakland’s Police Chief strongly objected to this odious comparison; he vigorously disputed that his recruiters discriminated against minority applicants or actively sought Southern racists. Actually, the OPD conducted a nationwide recruitment effort during the years after World War II, focused on a combination of military veterans and graduates of four police academies, including one at Berkeley. These efforts to find top applicants netted dedicated criminology majors like George Hart at Cal, who would rise through the ranks to become chief in 1973. And yet that did not entirely refute charges of racist police recruitment.
Two of the four academies that OPD hired from were located in the Deep South — one in Florida and one in Louisiana. Those recruitment efforts, as well as newspaper ads in hubs like Atlanta, attracted many white applicants to the OPD from communities that routinely turned a blind eye to mistreatment of blacks and to “unsolved” lynchings in which off-duty police were themselves often complicit. Throughout the South in the Civil Rights Era, the FBI fed slander to daily newspapers many of whose publishers gladly labeled Reverend King an “unspeakable extremist agitator,” who associated with Communists. The press likewise derided Northern voting rights volunteers as “miserable street rabble.”9 Growing up in communities with such little regard for the rights of blacks who lived across the tracks, it was no wonder that many Southern recruits to the OPD drew fierce criticism from West Oaklanders for the way they handled their jobs in the similarly segregated city of Oakland. (Under pressure from the black community, the OPD later abandoned its national recruitment efforts and focused on hiring more locals.)
In doing research for his 1999 book, Blue v. Black: Let’s End the Conflict Between Cops and Minorities, civil rights lawyer John Burris concluded: “The culture of the department in Oakland was such that, even if an officer came with good intentions, he could be co-opted by the department itself, by the culture of the department. And good officers in fact, even if they didn’t turn into bad officers and turn to brutality, will nevertheless not speak up about it.” Guy Saperstein, author of Civil Warrior: Memoirs of a Civil Rights Attorney, noticed that other local officials were complicit as well. When he worked with young black kids in an Oakland playground in the 1960s before he became a lawyer, he reported to his superiors that he had seen policemen repeatedly drive onto the playground just to harass the children. The only upshot was that Saperstein was considered a troublemaker and transferred to a different location.
An experience like Saperstein’s at that time was unfortunately par for the course. If accused of any misconduct, the police department could then always count on the strong backing of both an irate City Council and the Oakland Tribune. When the Poverty Council sought civilian oversight of the police in 1966, the City Council defended the department’s professionalism and the majority rejected out-of-hand either creation of an advisory police review board or Mayor Reading’s suggestion of an ombudsman to investigate citizens’ complaints.
The City Council pointed to an official report detailing an incident in East Oakland that could have erupted into a riot but was defused by local police. “Police officials met behind the scenes with Negro teenage leaders to discuss rumors of police brutality and rumors of plans for further violence, and felt that these talks helped to improve the atmosphere.”10 But citing one instance of the police seeking to reduce potential conflict in East Oakland did not address the misery still experienced by the black community of West Oakland. The mainstream press compounded black communities’ sense of oppression. Oakland and San Francisco reporters for major papers maintained their longstanding color code for news stories, leaving ghetto murders and beatings largely unexamined and unreported.11
In this toxic environment, most black Oaklanders felt helpless and resentful — not Newton and Seale, who seized the opportunity for direct action. They looked for an easy-to-find storefront, where they could boldly advertise their name for all passersby. On January 1, 1967, using paychecks Seale, Newton and Hutton received from the anti-poverty program, the Panthers opened their first office in North Oakland near the Berkeley border. A large sign in their window at the corner of Fifty-sixth and Grove streets proclaimed,