Making Revolution by Don Cox

Author:Don Cox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Heyday

9

The Big Apple

NEW YORK, NEW YORK—the Big Apple. I thought it was a wild place, but it had a magnetic effect upon me. Coming from a place as quiet, clean, and relatively calm as San Francisco, my first impression was that it was the dirtiest place I had ever seen, with chuckholes in the streets big enough to stop a tank. I also noticed that in Harlem, at around five or six in the afternoon, the sidewalks filled up with people. The only time I had seen people in the streets like that in California, there was a riot or something. It turned out to be a traditional thing to do at that time of day, in part because few buildings had air conditioning and it would be suffocating inside in the summers.

The thing that disturbed me most was seeing the adults, kids, and even babies strung out on smack. Even the lampposts were leaning. It was sickening to see kids of nine or ten years old hanging onto a parking meter to keep from falling while they vomited their insides out. The most frightening of all was the fact that, after a few weeks, I began to get used to seeing such scenes. They were part of the landscape.

Working out of the Panther office on 7th Avenue, between 121st and 122nd Streets, I soon become aware that the representatives who had been sent from headquarters before me had alienated the few people that were still coming around after the 21 bust. They had arrived with the dogmatism and arrogance that most of us fall victim to when we have our first taste of Marxism-Leninism, embracing the tendency to think of ourselves as the sole possessors of truth. In the end, I would realize that true liberation will never come by that route.

The first thing I did in New York was attempt to neutralize any police agents still hanging around in the woodwork. I was authorized by headquarters to ban anyone from showing or even talking about weapons or military operations. Anyone violating that rule was automatically expelled. That way, if there were any agents still around trying to entrap anyone, they would have to show their hand. Later, one did.

There were several overt provocations carried out by different agencies while I was in New York. They had historically operated on fertile ground, since the city was so big that it wasn’t possible for all the Panther members to know each other, as we did in the Bay Area. Our plan was that as long as everyone respected organizational discipline, the only way agents could get anything done was by breaking the rules and exposing themselves.

On one such occasion, FBI agents openly deposited money in the bank account of one of the heads of the Staten Island branch of the party. Some way or another the person in question was duped into accepting it, and the FBI doubtless had hopes that this would precipitate a reaction on our part of a magnitude that would permit them to come up with another conspiracy case.

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