Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour by Peniel E. Joseph

Author:Peniel E. Joseph
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

10

DARK DAYS, BRIGHT NIGHTS

In 1969 the Black Panthers were the major radical organization targeted by a maze of official authority, from local police departments and special services bureaus to the National Guard and federal intelligence agencies. A dense network of informants and agents provocateurs hounded the Panthers, other black nationalist groups, and the New Left, deploying legal and illegal methods. The federal indictment of Bobby Seale on conspiracy charges stemming from protests at the Chicago Democratic National Convention set the stage for the Nixon administration’s aggressive prosecution of Black Power radicals. President Nixon took a personal interest in the government’s prosecution and surveillance of the party.1 His administration featured several top-level figures—most notably Vice President Spiro Agnew, Attorney General John Mitchell, and national security advisor Henry Kissinger—whose contempt for civil rights colored domestic policy toward African Americans in general and dissidents in particular. After several years of sparring with Ramsey Clark and Nicholas Katzenbach, J. Edgar Hoover welcomed a group of officials whose political impulses matched his own.2 Nixon’s election in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder, the very event that emboldened Black Power activists to argue more vociferously than ever that America was an unrepentantly racist nation, placed civil rights leaders on the defensive. Black Power would fill the vacuum brought by King’s death, its focus on politics and culture transforming race relations and black activism in the United States and beyond.

For the Black Panthers, 1969 began just as the previous year did, in a state of crisis. The first blow was the untimely deaths of John Huggins and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter during a shootout, on the UCLA campus, with members of US, the group founded by Ron Karenga. Although the conflict between US and the Panthers could be traced to a turf war over political influence in southern California, Cointelpro had manipulated partisan antagonisms between the two groups to the edge of violence. In the process, it drove US, which never recovered from the taint associated with its involvement in the Panther shootings, from the national political scene.3

The violence in Los Angeles occurred as Oakland headquarters initiated a nationwide purge of the party’s ranks. The Black Panther Party’s purges were a response to the sudden growth in its membership that had outstripped the party’s limited resources. Hundreds of rogue members, suspected agents, common criminals, and loyal advocates were expelled from its ranks, and a three-month moratorium on membership was instituted. “We are going to weed out provocateurs and agents,” Seale told reporters at the beginning of the year.4 The party also reordered its priorities, increasing political education for existing members, instituting tougher requirements for membership, and focusing on community service.5 Mass arrests of Panthers in New York in April, and in New Haven in May, placed additional pressure on the group. In a case that foreshadowed factional splits, the police charged twenty-one members of the Panthers’ iconoclastic New York chapter with plotting a campaign of terror and violence throughout the city. The murder of Panther Alex

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