2 or 3 things I know about her

Ramparts Magazine 10 May 1968

Two days after the murder of Martin Luther King, the Oakland,
California police shot and killed a 17-year-old black leader named
Bobby Hutton. In the same occasion they wounded and arrested author
Eldridge cleaver, a colleague of mine, and arrested a number of
other black men, including another who was wounded. The killing of
Hutton was simply, outright murder, but nobody much noticed. The
local papers changed his age to 22 and said he was killed in "a gun
battle." He was unarmed when he was shot.

King's killer is, as I write, the subject of nationwide
man-hunt; the FBI has accused a man, and put him on their "ten most
wanted" list. Bobby Hutton's killer is putting in his regular shift
on the Oakland Police force; if he gets any special attention at
all, it will probably be a commendation.

It's all right, you see, because Booby and Eldridge and the
others are members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and
everybody knows the Black Panthers are nasties. They say
revolutionary words; they talk about self-defense and even about
guns; some have actually been known (albeit with perfect legality)
to carry guns. So it must be all right to kill them.

Of course, the Panthers have not done anything revolutionary,
and it has yet to be proved that any of them has ever shot anyone
with a gun except in legal self-defense. One Panther stands accused
of killing a policeman, but he has pleaded not guilty (and has not
yet come to trail). We do not react to the fact that the Panthers
haven't dome anything. There is an automatic bounty on the Panther
in Oakland. They are "militant," like Stokely Carmichael and Rap
Brown (neither of whom so far as we know had so much as shoved
anybody yet), and since we all know that "militants" are bad, the
Panthers are fair game.

A few days after Bobby Hutton died on an Oakland street, the
official representative of California showed up at the funeral of
Martin Luther King: the Mayor of Oakland. And a few days later we
all saw Mayor Daley of Chicago on television say that his police
had orders to "shoot to kill" arsonists and "shoot to maim or
cripple" looters. We all got very indignant; prominent Americans
across the country repudiated the racist statement.

Some of what happened on the night of April 6 in Oakland I
cannot say, either for legal reason or because I just don't know.
But I do know and can report that the Oakland police-whose version
is the only one most Americans have seen-have simply been lying
outright about the whole incident. They said, for instance, that
the whole "gun battle" started with a Panther "ambush."

That is sheer nonsense. The Panthers do not and would not
"ambush." And they do not believe in arbitrary violent action; they
believe in self-defense.

The police "leaked" a story that the Panthers and some white
racials in Berkeley had concocted a plot; the Panthers (who have in
fact made a political alliance with California's radical Peace and
Freedom Party) were supposed to start an "incident," a "telephone
network" was supposed to alert the radicals, and the radicals were
supposed to rush into black Oakland and start a riot. The plot
failed, the cop leak said, because the radicals failed to follow
through.

That reputable newspapers could swallow the story of white
radicals racing in from Berkeley to start a riot in the Oakland
ghetto is only one more measure of the depth and idiocy of racism
in white America. The nearest thing to a white radical to show up
in Oakland on the night of April 6 was Ramparts' Robert Scheer (who
lives Oakland, not Berkeley). He and I hurried to a hospital to
find out whether Eldridge Cleaver was okay, after Bob heard about
the shooting on the radio and phoned me. The white PFP leader who
had worked most closely with Panthers spent that night in his own
Berkeley apartment, frantically phoning anyone who night know what
happened-after he heard the same radio news broadcast. Some
network.

There probably was an ambush. The Oakland cops have been trying
to ambush Panthers for months, and they particularly wanted
Eldridge Cleaver, whose writing was rapidly gaining him national
audience and whose mature leadership was helping to turn the
Panthers from a bunch of angry kids into a closely knit and
carefully organized group with a genuine political program for the
ghetto. Whites seem to find this hard to believe-but the Oakland
cops want a riot. They think they can put it down and knock off the
community's leadership in the process.

They wanted to start a riot that Saturday night; but the riot
didn't start. It never did start in Oakland, despite the fact that
Washington and Chicago were burning, and the fact that Oakland is
as racist a city as any in the country, with a ghetto long overdue
to explode. It didn't start partly because Eldridge Cleaver and
Bobby Hutton and Bobby Seale and other Panthers were moving
constantly through the ghetto, from group to group, telling
everybody to cool it. They weren't Tomming, either. They simply
believe that a spontaneous riot is simple suicide for the ghetto
dweller, that if violent action is neccessary to defend the ghetto,
it must be planned, white America may find it hard to believe , but
Bobby Hutton was murdered because, as black militant, he was trying
to keep his community free from the rioting that the forces of law
and order were trying to start.

Murdered. Pursued by cops who were determined to get at least
Eldridge, the eight took refuge in the basement of a house, and the
cops laid siege. There were at least 50 cops; machine gun bullets
tore out part of one wall of the house, so heavy was their fire.
The Panthers were afraid to surrender; they know that some of them,
at least, would be shot "trying to escape." But a tear gas canister
hit Eldridge Cleaver in the shoulder and exploded. They didn't know
at first what it was, and his companions frantically tore his
clothes off to see whether he was more seriously injured (a bullet
had already torn into his foot). His nakedness gave Eldridge an
idea; there must be, he reasoned, reporters and spectators in the
scene by now. If the eight went out naked, the cops couldn't claim
that they thought the Panthers had guns or that they shot in
self-defense. The other Panthers agreed that nakedness might be
their only chance, and in the besieged basement, their eyes
streaming from the tear gas, seven of them took off their
clothes.

17-year-old Bobby Hutton didn't. He was too embarrassed. And as
it happened he emerged first, into the floodlights, his hands high
over his head, and walked toward the waiting policemen. When he was
well out in the open, one of them yelled, "Run, Boy!" Hutton froze,
terrified, obviously knowing what the call meant, then took a few
frightened, hesitant steps. They shot him dead. "We thought he was
trying to run," they said later. And sure enough, the first
statement said, "We thought he had a gun."

Maybe you have to be black and live in a ghetto patrolled by
white racist policeman, to understand how the Black Panthers came
to be and why they talk the way they do. Maybe it's hard for white
americans to understand how there can be bumper sticker reading
"Free Huey" when Panther Huey P. Newton is charged with the murder
of a policeman. But anybody should be able to understand
cold-blooded murder.

The really difficult thing to understand is why white America
can be shocked by a murder in Memphis and ignore one in Oakland,
why white America can express horror when mayor Daley talks about
shooting, and demonstrate only apathy when the Oakland police,
without even arson or looting to give them an excuse, actually do
shoot to kill-and succeed.

Gene Martin is a senior editor of Ramparts Magazine