AMERICAN JUSTICE ON TRIAL. Lise Pearlman
Officer Frey pulled him over. At first, the police assumed LaVerne was the male passenger who had accompanied Huey in the car and fled the scene with him soon after the shooting. The next day, Oakland attorney John George told the police that he represented aspiring singer LaVerne Williams, Newton’s 22-year-old girlfriend, who worked at an office of the newly-established Job Corps. LaVerne acknowledged she was the young woman who had visited Newton in the hospital, but had only learned of his whereabouts from an anonymous phone call.
Newton’s passenger still remained a mystery. At the hospital, Newton quickly created a stir by shouting for prompt medical care while refusing to sign hospital forms. Although he was in agony from the bullet wound, Newton had mustered the energy to withdraw some notes from his wallet, tear them to pieces and throw them in the trash. It had not been his idea to go to the hospital. He had wanted to die among his close friends in the neighborhood. Though the bullet in his abdomen had not hit any large blood vessels, it had punctured his intestine. Nurse Leonard did not realize that peritonitis would kill Newton if the doctors did not operate on him immediately. The small size of the wound caused her to underestimate the seriousness of his condition. Frightened by Newton’s belligerence, she called the police before she summoned a doctor.
The police arrived at the hospital emergency room less than half an hour from the nurse’s call, shortly after the doctor arrived and had Newton placed on a gurney. Newton screamed in pain and spat blood as the officer slapped handcuffs on his wrists, shackled him to the gurney and recited his Miranda rights. Newton was still shouting obscenities at the police as the doctor wheeled him off to surgery, while barking at Newton to shut up. Listed in fair condition following surgery, Newton was transferred to Highland Hospital and placed under 24-hour guard by six policemen armed with shotguns.
Meanwhile, after the startling police invasion of his home, Huey’s father, Walter Newton, got dressed and headed over to his son Melvin’s apartment in North Oakland. That insistent early morning knock on his door was something Melvin would never forget. Melvin found the news shocking, but not a surprise. Huey had been involved in armed confrontations with police before. By then, Walter Newton knew that Huey was headed into surgery at Kaiser Hospital following a shootout with two policemen at Seventh and Willow streets. Since it was a Saturday when Walter roused Melvin, Melvin did not need to head to his job supervising Alameda County social workers. He immediately got dressed and went down to the scene of the shooting, not sure what he expected to find. Melvin walked through the area, but found nothing. He soon learned of Huey’s transfer to Highland Hospital. Melvin and his father visited Huey in a recovery room there — awake and complaining that police had shaken his bed and threatened his life.
Panther recruiter Earl Anthony was listening to soul music on the radio before dawn on the 28th when the announcer interrupted with a bulletin about the shootout. Anthony’s assumption was that the “lousy Oakland police . . . had tried to set up brother Huey.”1 Anthony had accompanied Newton on the evening of October 26, two nights before the deadly incident. They started off at the Cleavers’ apartment where Newton made a comment Anthony would never forget. They were talking about a passage from the book Look Homeward, Angel in which author Thomas Wolfe wrote about crossing a river and not being able to return. That struck Huey as similar to dedicating yourself to fight for black liberation and never being able to accept inferior status again.2 The two left the Cleavers to go see writer James Baldwin, who was then in town, and provide him with several copies of the Black Panther paper. They ended up bar-hopping in Oakland before Newton drove him back to San Francisco. Anthony would not see Newton on the streets again for more than a decade.
Emory Douglas had often traveled around with Huey Newton and David Hilliard over the preceding three weeks, organizing support for the Panthers at bars and social events. At the time, Douglas was not yet devoted full-time to the Party. On the night of October 27, 1967, both he and David Hilliard begged off. Douglas had already agreed to monitor a dance. Hilliard had set up a late-night poker game fund-raiser for Party Chairman Bobby Seale’s bail to gain Seale’s release from jail after serving his sentence for the minor charges resulting from the Panthers’ armed trip to Sacramento in May. Newton got another good friend to accompany him instead. The next morning Douglas woke up to a predawn call from Hilliard; Newton had been shot and a policeman was dead. Douglas was stunned. He hoped Newton would hang on, but also realized the bleak prospect that would attend his survival. Newton would face murder charges and likely execution. Emory Douglas also had to know how close he came to winding up in the same predicament.
Panther recruit Janice Garrett first heard about Newton’s shootout on her car radio crossing the Bay Bridge to San Francisco from Oakland with her roommates. “We were in shock. . . . We went right to our apartment. We didn’t know how extensive his wounds were . . . couldn’t get any information. Everything was very chaotic and we were very scared at the time because we didn’t know what the police were going to do.” They soon found out that Huey was in the hospital with a stomach wound, but had survived the attack. By then, they also knew that one of the policemen was dead and another wounded. For Garrett, it was “very, very upsetting to see him [in the newspaper photo] in that position handcuffed to the bed because we knew he had to be in excruciating pain.” As foot soldiers for the Party, they knew “we had to get busy and contact other Party members so that we could find out what the next strategy was, how are we going to get help for Huey.” The answer from David Hilliard and Eldridge Cleaver was to get their side of the story out in the Black Panther newspaper as soon as possible — that Newton had been set upon by the police — and remind their readers what the Black Panther Party stood for.
Eldridge Cleaver had secretly joined the Black Panthers in the spring of 1967 as its Minister of Information, while pretending to cover the group solely as a reporter for Ramparts. At the time, Cleaver could not publicly admit his membership because he was still on parole and prohibited from associating with “undesirables” like the Panthers. In the early predawn after the October 28 shootout, Cleaver took the risk of declaring himself the acting head of the Black Panther Party. Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Party, was still behind bars at the Santa Rita County Jail. By October’s end when Newton was arrested, the fledgling group was in near total disarray, lacking even a headquarters.
San Francisco Lawyers Guild member Beverly Axelrod, a former white volunteer for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was then Eldridge Cleaver’s fiancée and the first person he called for legal help. Eleven years his senior, the intense brunette from Brooklyn was a divorced mother of two teen-aged sons. She had made civil rights and social justice her life’s passion. A brilliant and gritty lawyer, she risked jail to register black voters for CORE in Louisiana in 1963. After she returned to San Francisco, she became the lead defense attorney in a lengthy 1964 criminal trial of protesters arrested for picketing employment discrimination by San Francisco’s Auto Row and Sheraton Palace Hotel.
Axelrod met Cleaver when he was still at Folsom Prison reaching out for legal assistance to win parole. While incarcerated, Cleaver had taught himself to read political books critically and to write on social issues. Influenced by the work of Malcolm X, Cleaver got the idea of marketing his own autobiographical essays from the publishing success of convicted rapist and long-time death row resident Caryl Chessman. Chessman was known as the Los Angeles “Red Light Bandit” for kidnapping at gunpoint couples stopped at traffic lights. Chessman became a cause célèbre for death penalty opponents during the dozen years he spent on death row, publishing four best sellers during the time before his execution in 1960.
Cleaver systematically wrote to lawyers listed in a professional directory offering the prospect of future royalties from the marketing of his own manuscript as legal fees for anyone who helped him to gain his freedom. Axelrod responded enthusiastically. She arranged to have parts of Cleaver’s manuscript and letters he had written to her critiqued by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Norman Mailer and then published in Ramparts magazine, a leftist literary periodical based in San Francisco.
Axelrod engineered Cleaver’s release from Folsom in December 1966. By then the confessed serial rapist had served nine years behind bars. Cleaver’s political essays gained him a national following and a job offer as a full-time staff writer for Ramparts. In the spring of 1967, Ramparts republished the essays as a book, Soul On Ice, which