of ourselves as heirs to Locke and Burke and Madison, who faced a similar challenge from the leftists of their time. And with them we must proclaim:
We are the revolutionaries demanding a universalist standard of one right, one law, one nation for all;
We are the champions of tolerance, the opponents of group privilege, and of communal division;
We are the proponents of a common ground that is color-blind, gender-equitable and ethnically inclusive—a government of laws that is neutral between its citizens, and limited in scope;
We are the advocates of society as against the state, the seekers of a dramatic reduction in the burdens of taxation, and of redress from the injustices of government intervention;
We are the defenders of free markets against the destructive claims of the socialist agenda; and
We are the conservers of the Constitutional covenant against the forces of modern tyranny and the totalitarian state.
This was published in Heterodoxy magazine, January 1993.
A book arrived this month that sent a chill into my marrow. The author’s face on the dust jacket was different from the one I remembered. Its hair was cropped in a severe feminist do, its skin pulled tight from an apparent lift, its eyes artificially lit to give off a benign sparkle. But I could still see the menace I knew so well underneath. It was a holograph of the darkest period in my life.
I first met her in June 1974, in a dorm room at Mills College, an elite private school for women in Oakland. The meeting had been arranged by Huey Newton, leader of the Black Panther Party and icon of the New Left. For almost a year before that I had been working with Newton, developing a school complex in the East Oakland ghetto. I had named it the Oakland Community Learning Center and was the head of its Planning Committee.
The unusual venue of my first meeting with Elaine Brown was the result of the Panthers’ odd disciplinary notions. They were actually Huey’s notions because (as I came to understand later) the Party was an absolutist state where the leader’s word was law. Huey had sentenced Elaine to Mills as a kind of exile and house arrest. “I sent her to Mills,” he explained to me, “because she hates it there.”11
I never asked or learned what connection allowed him to simply place her in this exclusive private institution.
Elaine was a strikingly attractive woman, light-skinned like Huey, but with a more fluid verbal style that developed an edge when she was angry. I had been warned by my friends in the Party that she was also crazy and dangerous. A festering inner rage erupted constantly and without warning wherever she went. At such times, the edge in her voice would grow steel-hard and could slice a target like a machete.
I will never forget standing next to Elaine, as I did months later in growing horror, as she threatened KQED-TV host Bill Schechner over the telephone. “I will kill you motherfucker,” she promised him in her machete voice, if he went through with plans to interview the former Panther Chairman, Bobby Seale. Seale had gone into hiding after Huey expelled him from the Party in August. As I learned long afterwards, Seale had been whipped—literally—and then personally sodomized by Huey with such violence that he had to have his anus surgically repaired by a Pacific Heights doctor who was a political supporter of the Panthers. A Party member told me later, “You have to understand, it had nothing to do with sex. It was about power.” But in the Panther world, as I also came to learn, nothing was about anything except power.
That day at Mills, however, Elaine used her verbal facility as an instrument of seduction, softening me with stories of her rough youth in the North Philly ghetto and her double life at the Philadelphia conservatory of music. Her narrative dramatized the wounding personal dilemmas imposed by racial and class injustice, inevitably winning my sympathy and support.
Elaine had the two characteristics necessary for Panther leadership. She could move easily in the elegant outer world of the Party’s wealthy liberal supporters, but she could also function in the violent world of the street gang, which was the Party’s internal milieu. Elaine was being punished in her Mills exile by Huey, because even by his standards her temper was explosive and therefore a liability. Within three months of our meeting, however, his own out-of-control behavior, had forced him to make her supreme.
The summer of 1974 was disastrous for Newton. Reports had appeared in the press placing him at the scene of a drive-by shooting at an “after hours” club. He was indicted for pistol-whipping a middle-aged black tailor named Preston Callins with a .357 magnum, for brawling with two police officers in an Oakland bar, and for murdering a 17-year-old prostitute named Kathleen Smith. When the day arrived for his arraignment in this last matter, Huey failed to show. Assisted by the Panthers’ Hollywood patrons, he had fled to Cuba.
With Huey gone, Elaine took the reins of the Party. I was already shaken by Huey’s flight and by the dark ambiguities that preceded it. As a “politically conscious” radical, however, I understood the racist character of the media and the repressive forces that wanted to see the Panthers destroyed. I did not believe, therefore, all the charges against Huey. Although disturbed by them, I was unable to draw the obvious conclusion and leave.
My involvement with the Black Panther Party had begun in early 1973. I had gone to Los Angeles with Peter Collier to raise money for Ramparts, the flagship magazine of the New Left, which he and I co-edited. One of our marks was Bert Schneider, the producer of Easy Rider, the breakthrough film of the Sixties, which had brought the counter-cultural rebellion into the American mainstream. Schneider gave Ramparts $5,000, and then turned around and asked us to meet his friend Huey Newton.
At the time, Newton was engaged in a life and death feud with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Cleaver had fled to Algiers after a shoot-out with Bay Area police. (Eldridge has since admitted that he ambushed them). Schneider wanted us to take Eldridge’s name off the Ramparts masthead where he was still listed as “International Editor.”
Huey’s attraction to the Left had always been his persona as “Minister of Defense” of the Black Panther Party, his challenge to revolutionary wannabees to live up to their rhetoric and “pick up the gun.” Huey had done just that in his own celebrated confrontation with the law that had left Officer John Frey dead with a bullet wound in his back. Everybody in the Left seemed to believe that Huey had killed Frey, but we wanted to believe as well that Huey—as a victim of racism—was also innocent. Peter’s and my engagement with the Panthers was more social than political, since Ramparts had helped the Party become a national franchise. I was put off by their military style, but now a change in the times prompted the two of us, and especially me, to be interested in the meeting.
By the early 70s, it was clear that the Movement had flamed out. As soon as Nixon signaled the end of the military draft, the anti-war demonstrations stopped and the protestors disappeared, marooning hardcore activists like myself. I felt a need to do something to fill the vacancy. Huey Newton was really alone among Movement figures in recognizing the change in the zeitgeist and making the most of it. In a dramatic announcement, he declared the time had come to “put away the gun” and, instead, to “serve the people,” which seemed sensible enough to me.
Our meeting took place in Huey’s penthouse eyrie, 25 floors above Lake Oakland. In its intra-party polemics,
