Radical Son: A Generational Oddysey by Horowitz David

Author:Horowitz, David [Horowitz, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2011-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

BETTY

THE EVENT TO WHICH I TOOK ABBY WAS A SUNDAY-MORNING SERVICE AT the Son of Man Temple, a secular church of Huey’s invention housed in the auditorium of the Learning Center. Its “preachers” were the Party’s public figures, Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown. Originally, I had asked Huey to keep the Party out of the facility. If we were eventually going to turn the Center over to the East Oakland community, it would not be helpful to make the Party a visible presence. My experiences with Ericka Huggins and Audrea Jones were sufficient to underscore the problems that this could cause in attracting outsiders. I did not want the Party’s militant strutting and hectoring attitudes to drive people away. Still, it was clear that they couldn’t be totally excluded. Occupying a full city block in the heart of the community, the Center was simply too impressive to deny them access. Huey’s solution was to create an arena which Bobby, Elaine, and the others could consider theirs.

The Sunday-morning service was attractive enough. Elaine and Bobby were compelling orators, and they were backed by a choir that sang political songs in a gospel style. But the service allowed me to see how isolated the Party was. The larger East Oakland community was not present. The faces I saw—some eager and enthusiastic, others sullen and bored—were depressingly familiar. There were other signs that were disheartening as well. One day when I came into the auditorium, the band was rehearsing and Brenda was in tears. She did not tell me what was wrong, but I soon learned that she had been replaced by Ericka. I tried to find out why, but even Huey wouldn’t give me a straight answer. It was another reminder of how much surrounding the Party remained secret. The rationale for the secrecy was of course the external enemy. But under this cloak anything could be hidden, the trivial as well as the important, the political as well as the personal (which turned out to be the case with Brenda’s firing). There was no way to tell.

I had already concluded that Ericka was a disturbed individual. Along with Bobby Seale, she had been one of the defendants in the Panthers’ New Haven trial accused of the torture-murder of a Party member named Alex Rackley. Ericka had been present—nobody disputed this—while Party members poured boiling water over Alex Rackley’s chest. What kind of person could do that? One day I came into the school and saw her disciplining a nine-year-old girl in her office. She was instructing the girl to write, one thousand times, “I am privileged to be a student in the Oakland Community Learning Center because. …” I began to wonder what I had created.

I had already had a confrontation with Ericka at a planning-committee meeting, over the $25,000 that was left from the money I had raised to buy the school. Ericka wanted to spend the remaining cash on new bunk beds and underwear for the children. I tried

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