police brutality? Why, with the extraordinarily high tension surrounding the trial, did no urban violence erupt in its wake, as had occurred so often in the prior year? And how did the jury’s astonishing choice of African-American banker David Harper as their foreman influence the outcome of the deliberations? Harper was the first black foreman of a major criminal trial in America, a role that would still be unusual in a death penalty case today.
The Newton trial had all the ingredients to fit historian J. Anthony Lukas’s definition of “THE” trial of the century: “a spectacular show trial, a great national drama in which the stakes [are] nothing less than the soul of the American people.”32 LIFE reporter Gilbert Moore soon quit his prestigious job to write a book about the newly discovered rage inside him from his childhood in Harlem that Newton and the Panthers had tapped into. The Los Angeles Times hailed Moore’s insightful chronicle A Special Rage as “a classic document in the literature of the black-white experience in the 20th century.”33 Two decades years later it was reissued under the shortened title Rage, with a new foreword and afterword by award-winning author Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, then the University of Massachusetts’ first Afro-American Studies chairman. Thelwell was himself once a leading SNCC activist. He found Moore’s observations equally relevant to the next generation. The back cover blurb summarized why:
The Panthers represented something new on the American political landscape. Lionized by the liberal cultural elite, spied on, shot at, and jailed by the police, they brought hope to some Americans and frightened many others. Revolutionaries, outlaws, pawns, they were a cultural bridge between urban street gangs and organized civil rights groups. They filled a dangerous void. They were the militant, articulate expression of the anger and aspirations of poor young black men. That critical void exists as much today as it did in the late 1960s.34
Another 25 years later the Panthers’ mark on American history remains indelible. As historian Jane Rhodes observed in her 2007 book, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon: “The passage of time has not eroded the strength of their symbols and rhetoric — the gun, the snarling panther, the raised fists, and slogans such as ‘All power to the people’ and ‘Off the pig.’ Today, representations of the Black Panthers linger in diverse arenas of commodity culture, from news stories to reality television to feature films and hip-hop, as they function as America’s dominant icons of Black Nationalism.”35 Nine years later, interest in the Panthers is far more widespread than when Professor Rhodes published her book. In 2014 the high-energy musical Party People began playing to sold-out audiences in theaters across America. With “REVOLUTION” in blazing lights as the backdrop, it engaged new generations with the fierce activism of both the Black Panthers and the contemporaneous Puerto Rican Young Lords Party in New York.36
Over the intervening decades, the ground-breaking accomplishments of Newton’s sensational 1968 death penalty trial fell into relative oblivion. Its absence from the pivotal 20th century cases listed by most journalists and historians prompted me to publish, in 2012, The Sky’s the Limit: People v. Newton, The REAL Trial of the 20th Century? That book compared the extraordinary nature and enormous stakes of the Newton trial to the significant features of other headline trials from 1901 to 2000. I also addressed why I believe it nevertheless slipped from general public consciousness and wound up all but forgotten by most experts analyzing candidates for “the” trial of the American 20th century.37
Huey’s brother Melvin has a short answer: “Huey was a threat. . . . His actions were so raw and so challenging . . . his desire to be an agent for social change. . . . Dr. King wasn’t honored when he was alive and even when Dr. King was looked to as a model [it was] . . . because there were more threatening models out there . . . Huey is someone that proper authorities would like to forget. . . .”
It is gratifying that, after reading my 2012 book, more legal experts now agree that the 1968 Newton trial truly deserves to be considered one of the most pivotal trials of the 20th century. Certainly, its focus on entrenched racism in the justice system resonates today. Activists still question whether — absent video proof — juries will believe a black arrestee charging a police officer of abuse, let alone whether a black militant accused of killing a police officer can get a fair trial anywhere in America.
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, we are once again in a polarized setting. In the past year, civil rights enthusiasts in cities across the country flocked to see Stanley Nelson’s film The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. A million more saw it on public television. (I had a cameo appearance in that film as an expert on the Newton trial.) Nelson likens the Party’s mixed legacy to the parable of the blind men and the elephant — each man describing only one feature of a complex animal.
Among other Panther-related movies in the works is a more narrowly focused documentary project for which I am on the film-making team; the project is called American Justice on Trial: People v. Newton. www.americanjusticeontrial.com. Since July 2013, award-winning film director Bob Richter and I have interviewed surviving participants and observers of the 1968 Newton death penalty trial, who offer new insights on that ground-breaking trial from every perspective: from the Panthers to journalists to witnesses, the prosecution, the police and interested bystanders. This new volume incorporates quotes from these interviewees, some of whom had never been interviewed about the trial before. I have focused here solely on the trial itself, no longer including numerous comparisons to other “trials of the century” from 1901 to 2000 as I felt compelled to do in the 2012 book. Current events have illuminated the Newton trial’s true historic significance.
In May of 2015, TIME magazine featured on its cover heavily-armed Baltimore police chasing a black suspect. Its editors asked America to consider what has changed and what hasn’t since 1968.38 President Obama recently readdressed that same issue. I invite you to read this volume and consider that question yourself.
1. FREE HUEY NOW!
Pushed into the corner Of the hobnailed boot, Pushed into the corner of the “I-don’t-want-to-die” cry, Pushed into the corner of “I don’t want to study war no more,” Changed into “Eye for eye,” The Panther in his desperate boldness Wears no disguise, Motivated by the truest Of the oldest Lies.
— LANGSTON HUGHES, “BLACK PANTHER”
A newspaper photographer wormed his way past police guards into the Kaiser Hospital emergency room and snapped a quick photo before being ejected. That afternoon’s front page displayed black militant Huey Newton lying bare-chested, a bullet wound in his abdomen, his hands shackled to a hospital gurney. A nurse stood in the background. The original photo showed another figure before it was cropped for publication. In front of Newton stood one of his police guards, dazed by the unexpected click of a camera. On the morning of October 28, 1967, Oakland police had put out an all-points bulletin for Huey Newton following a pre-dawn shootout in West Oakland’s red light district. As co-founder of the Black Panther Party, Newton was already well known to local law enforcement, infuriating them with his official title, Minister of Defense. Police immediately suspected Newton of killing Officer John Frey and wounding Officer Herbert “Cliff” Heanes, who now lay hospitalized in critical condition with gunshot wounds in the chest, knee and one arm. Police headquarters released pictures of the young policemen to the press and mentioned that both were fathers: Frey had a three-year-old daughter; Heanes had a two-year-old and ten-month old.
The police stormed Newton’s parents’ home in Oakland looking for Huey to no avail before they got word the Panther leader was at Kaiser Hospital. Shortly before dawn, Newton had staggered into the emergency room with a bloody rag clutched to his stomach. The middle-aged blond nurse on duty, Corinne Leonard, heard a car door slam and the car drive off, but did not see who deposited Newton outside. The police later thought that it might have been Newton’s girlfriend. They knew that a young black woman later stopped by the hospital, but left before she could be questioned.
The police had confiscated the tawny 1958 Volkswagen sedan registered