AMERICAN JUSTICE ON TRIAL. Lise Pearlman
Street is now Martin Luther King, Jr. Way.)
Today, most Americas recognize Miranda warnings from crime stories on television and in the movies. Police routinely tell suspects before interrogating them that they have a right to remain silent and a right to an attorney. These constitutional rights stem from the Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate oneself and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel in criminal proceedings. But such warnings were not required in California or other states when Huey Newton had his first brushes with the law. They were the controversial product of the Warren Court in the mid-1960s. When Newton took law classes, he learned about these new protections. In 1964, in a five-to-four decision in a case arising out of Illinois, the United States Supreme Court invalidated a confession obtained after the suspect asked to speak to an attorney and was denied that opportunity. The decision in Escobedo v. Illinois (1964) 378 U.S. 478 generated a lot of confusion about exactly when a suspect should be told he has a right to remain silent under the Fifth Amendment guarantee that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” It also left unresolved whether a suspect first had to ask for an attorney in order to benefit from the Sixth Amendment right to “have the assistance of counsel for his defence” before answering questions from the police.
The California Supreme Court addressed the Sixth Amendment question the following year, reviewing a death penalty case from San Quenten to decide if an inmate’s confession should be thrown out even though he had not first asked for a lawyer. In People v. Dorado (1965) 62 Cal. 3d 338 the California court divided four to three in reversing the inmate’s conviction based on Escobedo. Then, in June 1956, came the decision of the United State’s Supreme Court itself on when suspects must be told of their right to remain silent and their right to council. The high court had before it several criminal convictions from various jurisdictions and made its famous ruling in all of them under the name of the lead case, Miranda v. Arizona (1966) 384 U.S. 436.
Miranda was another highly controversial five-to-four ruling. The majority recognized the inherently intimidating nature of a police stop and how that severely impacted a suspect’s free choice. It also considered the question of whether those unschooled in the law should be required to first ask for an attorney in order to receive the protection of that Sixth Amendment right. The high court took notice that the FBI already had a practice of giving warnings to suspects at the outset of a criminal interrogation that they had the right to remain silent and the right to consult an attorney. The majority saw no good reason why such warnings should not be required of state and local police as well, where the vast majority of criminal prosecutions took place. The burden was minimal and outweighed by the benefit to individuals entitled to constitutional guarantees. The Miranda ruling was issued just a few months before the Panthers formed. The Oakland Police Department regularly monitored court decisions affecting its practices and quickly implemented mandated changes by special order and department training bulletins. Huey Newton saw this major new requirement as a perfect teaching tool to educate West Oakland arrestees on what their rights were and to put abusive cops who might not be following the new mandates on the defensive.
Starting in January 1967, the handful of members of the newly-formed Black Panther Party for Self-Defense began tailing Oakland police, pulling their cars over to observe firsthand when the police stopped to arrest someone in the neighborhood. Aoki went with them on their “shotgun patrols.” “We had cameras and tape recorders to chronicle what was going on.”12
The Panthers knew this was a major provocation. The basic idea of keeping tabs on police behavior toward ghetto blacks was not new — a Community Alert Patrol had been established with federal funding in Watts following the historic 1965 riots in that largely black Los Angeles district. But in Watts they just used tape recorders and notebooks. A clandestine, armed group of black war veterans had formed in Louisiana in 1964 to defend their neighborhoods from the Ku Klux Klan. But brandishing loaded weapons in public gave the Black Panthers a distinctive, more threatening aspect.
Amid the buzz created by their boldness, Newton began holding weekly meetings at the Panther office for walk-ins who learned they would get weapons training if they could sit still long enough through lectures in political theory. Armed Panthers continued to monitor black neighborhoods in Oakland, following testy police around on their patrols. To establish a unique identity, besides carrying weapons, the Panthers adopted uniforms for themselves: black pants, a powder blue shirt, a black leather jacket (which most of them already owned), black shoes and socks and a black beret like that worn by Mark Comfort, Curtis Baker and others modeling themselves after Che Guevara and the French Resistance. Jean Genet later proclaimed that the Panthers “attacked first by sight.”13 At the time, Thelton Henderson was running a legal aid office in East Palo Alto. The Panthers came to town recruiting and spreading their message. He recalls the first time he saw members representing the Party: “It was a very impressive show of . . . military-style discipline. When they left, they had a lot of people that said, ‘Hey. This is good. This is the kind of thing that East Palo Alto could benefit from.’”
Newton commuted to San Francisco Law School to take another course in criminal law and spent many hours studying in the law library above the Poverty Center. He kept a copy of California Criminal Laws in his car, prepared to read policemen chapter and verse about the constitutional right to bear arms, as well as the rights of arrested citizens. This was all part of the two-pronged approach: radical action on the one hand, and savviness about “the system” on the other. Newton sometimes brought a gun to work at the federal jobs program and put it on his desk. He liked to explain how California gun law allowed the carrying of loaded weapons. His friend Paul Cobb from elementary school who worked with Newton in the jobs program had no interest in picking up a gun. When Lionel Wilson discovered that both Seale and Newton brought guns to work, they were fired. Newton sometimes got too cocky — to his detriment.
In January of 1967 Newton and Seale found an opportunity to proselytize at a black power rally in Golden Gate Park where more than 30 speakers were invited. They brought along copies of the Little Red Book to sell. Eldridge Cleaver had just gotten out of prison the month before and attracted a large crowd to hear the famous author, now publishing his essays in Ramparts. Afterward, Newton and Seale tracked Cleaver down at a radio interview and introduced themselves. Cleaver then invited the pair to a meeting at a rented Victorian in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco. The new cultural center Cleaver co-founded with other local black authors was called Black House. Parties were held there every Saturday for literary and political gatherings of black radicals. Cleaver told Newton and Seale planning sessions would start soon at Black House for a memorial celebration for the second anniversary of Malcolm X’s death. The Panthers’ 10-point program was just the unifying agenda he was looking for. Cleaver’s aim at the time was to unite all black militants under one umbrella.
Seale and Newton showed up at the first planning session with several new recruits, all in uniform and all armed. They stood at attention together on one side of the room as Cleaver urged the other attendees to adopt the Panthers’ 10-point program. Law student Earl Anthony, who had been to many meetings of black nationals before, had never seen anything like the Panthers. Anthony himself led the Independent Action Movement that had recently launched a highly successful public housing rent strike in San Francisco. The attendees that night surprised Cleaver by adopting the 10-point program without discussion or dissent. Many remained wary, especially the Black Panthers of Northern California, whom Seale had broken with in the fall. The Black Muslims Cleaver invited had little interest in anything Cleaver might orchestrate; they mistrusted him for having a white girlfriend affiliated with Communists. Like Stokely Carmichael, the Black Muslims no longer wanted anything to do with white radicals.
The Malcolm X event would last for several days in late February with his widow Betty Shabazz a star attraction. The other focal point would be a memorial service for Matthew Johnson, the unarmed teenager killed by police in San Francisco in September 1966. Cleaver tapped both the San Francisco Panthers and the newer Oakland Panther Party for Self-Defense to meet Betty Shabazz at the airport and escort her into the city. Seale and Newton and their new recruits shocked observers by showing up at San Francisco airport on February 21, 1967, carrying carbines, shotguns and pistols. The Black Panthers of Northern California showed up, too, without loaded