began wondering where Betty Van Patter might have really come from. . . . I began re-evaluating Horowitz and his old Eldridge alliance. . .”).
Elaine continues: “Immediately Betty began asking Norma, and every other Panther with whom she had contact, about the sources of our cash, or the exact nature of this or that expenditure. Her job was to order and balance our books and records, not to investigate them. I ordered her to cease her interrogations.” She continued. “I knew that I had made a mistake in hiring her. . . . Moreover, I had learned after hiring her that Betty’s arrest record was a prison record—on charges related to drug trafficking. Her prison record would weaken our position in any appearance we might have to make before a government body inquiring into our finances. Given her actions and her record, she was not, to say the least, an asset. I fired Betty without notice.”
Betty had no prison record for drug trafficking or anything else.
“While it was true that I had come to dislike Betty Van Patter,” Elaine concludes, “I had fired her, not killed her.”
Yet, the very structure of Elaine’s defense is self-incriminating. The accurate recollections that Betty, who was indeed scrupulous, had made normal bookkeeping inquiries that Elaine found suspicious and dangerous, provides a plausible motive to silence her. The assertions that Betty was a criminal, possibly involved in a Cleaver plot, are false and can only be intended to indict the victim. Why deflect guilt to the victim or anyone else, unless one is guilty oneself?
Violence was not restricted to the Panthers’ dealings with their enemies, but was an integral part of the Party’s internal life as well. In what must be one of the sickest aspects of the entire Panther story, this party of liberators enforced discipline on the black “brothers and sisters” inside the organization with bullwhips, the very symbol of the slave past. In a scene that combines both the absurdity and pathology of the Party’s daily routine, Elaine describes her own punishment under the Panther lash. She is ordered to strip to the waist by Chairman Bobby Seale and then subjected to ten strokes because she had missed an editorial deadline on the Black Panther newspaper.
A Taste of Power inadvertently provides another service by describing how the Panthers originally grew out of criminal street gangs, and how the gang mentality remained the core of the Party’s sense of itself even during the heyday of its political glory. Elaine writes with authority, having come into the Party through the Slausons, a forerunner of the Bloods and the Crips. The Slausons were enrolled en masse in the Party in 1967 by their leader, gangster Al “Bunchy” Carter, the so-called “Mayor of Watts.” Carter’s enforcer, Frank Diggs, is one of Elaine’s first Party heroes: “Frank Diggs, Captain Franco, was reputedly leader of the Panther underground. He had spent twelve years in Sing Sing Prison in New York on robbery and murder charges.” Captain Franco describes to Elaine and Ericka Huggins his revolutionary philosophy: “Other than making love to a Sister, downing a pig is the greatest feeling in the world. Have you ever seen a pig shot with a .45 automatic, Sister Elaine?... Well, it’s a magnificent sight.” To Elaine, then a newly initiated Panther, this is revolutionary truth: “In time, I began to see the dark reality of the revolution according to Franco, the revolution that was not some mystical battle of glory in some distant land of time. At the deepest level, there was blood, nothing but blood, unsanitized by political polemic. That was where Franco worked, in the vanguard of the vanguard . . .” The vanguard of the vanguard.
The Panthers were—just as the police and other Panther detractors said at the time—a criminal army led by gangsters and murderers at war with society and with its thin blue line of civic protectors. When Elaine took over the Party, even she was “stunned by the magnitude of the party’s weaponry. . . . There were literally thousands of weapons. There were large numbers of AR-18 short automatic rifles,. 308 scoped rifles, 30-30 Winchesters, .375 magnum and other big-game rifles, .30 caliber Garands, M-15s and M-16s and other assorted automatic and semi-automatic rifles, Thompson submachine guns, M-59 Santa Fe Troopers, Boys .55 caliber anti-tank guns, M-60 fully automatic machine guns, innumerable shotguns, and M-79 grenade launchers. . . . There were caches of crossbows and arrows, grenades and miscellaneous explosive materials and devices.”
I remember vividly an episode in the mid-70s, when one of the Panther arms caches, a house on 29th Street in East Oakland, was raided by the police and 1,000 weapons including machine guns, grenade launchers and anti-tank guns were uncovered. Party attorney Charles Garry held a press conference at which he claimed that the weapons were planted by the police and that the 29th Street house was a dormitory for teachers at the Panther school (which it also, in fact, was, as well as a dormitory for children in the Panther school). Then Garry denounced the police raid as just one more repressive act in the ongoing government conspiracy to discredit the Panthers and destroy militant black leadership.
Of course, all right thinking progressives rallied to the Panthers’ support. And right thinking progressives are still rallying. How to explain the spectacle attending the reception of Elaine’s book? After all, this is not pre-glasnost Russia, where crimes were made to disappear into a politically controlled void. The story of the Panthers’ crimes is—thanks to our efforts—now not unknown. But it is either uninteresting or unbelievable to a progressive culture that still regards white racism as the primary cause of all ills in black America, and militant thugs like the Panthers as mere victims of political repression.
The existence of a Murder Incorporated in the heart of the American Left is something the Left really doesn’t want to know or think about. Such knowledge would refute its most cherished self-understandings and beliefs. It would undermine the sense of righteous indignation that is the crucial starting point of a progressive attitude. It would explode the myths on which the attitude depends.
In the last two decades, for example, a vast literature has been produced on the “repression of the Panthers” by the FBI The “Cointelpro” program to destabilize militant organizations and J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous memo about the dangers of a “black messiah” are more familiar to today’s college students probably than the operations of the KGB or the text of Magna Carta. In A Taste of Power, Elaine Brown constantly invokes the FBI specter (as she did while leader of the Party) to justify Panther outrages and make them “understandable” as the hyper-reflexes of a necessary paranoia, produced by the pervasive government threat. A variation of this myth is the basic underpinning of the radical mind-set. Like Oliver Stone’s fantasies of a military-industrial conspiracy behind the murder of J.F.K., it justifies the radical’s limitless rage against America itself.
On the other hand, even in left-approved accounts, like William O’Reilly’s Racial Matters, the actual “Cointelpro” program, never amounted to much more than a series of inept attempts to discredit and divide the Panthers by writing forged letters in their leaders’ names. (According to O’Reilly’s documents, FBI agents even suspended their campaign when they realized how murderous the Panthers actually were, and that their own intelligence pranks might cause real deaths.) Familiarity with the Panthers’ reality, suggests a far different question from the only one that progressives have asked—Why so much surveillance of the Panthers?—namely: Why so little? Why had the FBI failed to apprehend the guilty not only in Betty’s murder but in more than a dozen others? Why were the Panthers able to operate for so long as a criminal gang with a military arsenal, endangering the citizens of major American cities? How could they commit so many crimes—including extortion, arson and murder—without being brought to the bar of justice?
The best review of Elaine’s book and the best epitaph for her Party are provided ironically by Elaine herself. In the wake of the brutal and senseless whipping of Bobby Seale by a leader insane with drugs and political adulation, and a coterie too drugged with power themselves to resist, she reflects: “Faith was all there was. If I did not believe in the ultimate rightness of our goals and our party, then what we did, what Huey was doing, what he was, what I was, was horrible.
This article was published in Heterodoxy Magazine, March 1993
1I never asked or learned what connection allowed him to simply place her in this exclusive private institution.