made much of Huey’s lavish lifestyle. But the apartment itself was sparely furnished and I was ready to accept Schneider’s explanation that it was necessary for “security.” (A TV screen allowed Huey to view entrants to the building, 25 floors below). Not only J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous agents but also the disgruntled Cleaver elements might very well want to see Huey dead. There had been several killings already. One of Huey’s East Coast loyalists, Sam Napier, had been shot and doused with gasoline, and set on fire.
Somehow, because of Huey’s sober pronouncements and his apparent victory in the intra-party struggle I regarded this reality as part of the past, and no longer threatening. Unlike Elaine, Huey was able to keep his street passions in check in the presence of white intellectuals he intended to make use of. In all the time I worked with him, I never saw him abuse another individual, verbally or otherwise. I never saw him angry or heard him utter a threat. I never saw a gun drawn. When I opposed him on important political issues, as I did at our very first meeting, I found him respectful of my differences, a seduction I could not resist. (My partner, Peter, was more cautious and politically aloof and, as events were to prove, wiser than I.)
After the meeting, I offered to help Huey with the Party’s community projects and to raise money for the Panther school. Huey wanted to buy a Baptist church facility in the East Oakland ghetto with an auditorium, cafeteria and 35 classrooms. In the next months, I raised more than $100,000 to purchase the buildings on 61st Avenue and East 14th Street. The $63,000 down payment was the largest check I had ever seen, let alone signed. The new Oakland Community Learning Center was administered by a Planning Committee, which was composed of Panthers whom Huey had specially selected to work with me. Neither Bobby Seale, nor Elaine Brown, nor any other Panther leaders were among them.
The Learning Center began with more than 100 Panther children. Its instruction was enriched by educationalists like Herbert Kohl whom I brought in to help. I took Kohl to see Huey in the penthouse eyrie, but the meeting went badly. Within days, Huey’s spies had reported that Kohl (who was street smart in ways I was not) was telling people that Huey was using cocaine. When I confronted Herb, he said: “He’s sniffing. He was sniffing when we were up there.”
I had not been part of the Sixties drug culture and was so unfamiliar with cocaine at that time, that I had no idea whether Kohl was right. Huey’s runny nose, his ability to stay alert despite the fifth of Courvoisier he daily consumed, the sleepless nights at Schneider’s Beverly Hills home where once Bert and his girlfriend Candice Bergen had gone to bed Huey talked endlessly to me about politics and the millions of dollars the Party had squandered on bail—all these were tell-tale signs I could not read. I assumed the innocent possibility that Huey was “sniffing” because he had a cold, which is what I told Kohl, who probably thought I was shining him on. After the incident, Huey banished Kohl from the penthouse, but let him continue to help on the Learning Center.
The Center was operated by a front I had created called the Educational Opportunities Corporation, a California tax-exempt 501(c)(3). It was imperative—or so I thought—to keep the books of the school in order and to file appropriate tax reports so that hostile authorities would not be given a pretext to shut us down. This proved to be only another aspect of my politically induced innocence. Long after I had gone, too, I watched the Center operate illegally, without filing proper tax reports, while Huey and Elaine were diverting large sums of money (received as government grants) to themselves and their gunmen to keep them in fancy cars and clothes and, when necessary, out of jail. Unable to conceive such a possibility for a Party all leftists knew was targeted for destruction by J. Edgar Hoover, I engaged the services of our bookkeeper at Ramparts, Betty Van Patter, to keep the Learning Center accounts.
Virtually my entire relationship with Huey and the Party was through the activities of the school. In the months following the purchase of the building on East 14th, it became apparent to me that things were not proceeding as planned. In particular, it was still exclusively a Party operation. I had never been enthusiastic about the Party as such, which seemed to me merely an ideological sect whose time had passed. I had conveyed these views to Huey at the outset of our relationship and he had pretended to agree. He had even promised that if we purchased the facility and built an educational center, it would gradually be turned over to the East Oakland community and not become just another Party institution.
Six months had gone by, however, and there were only Panthers in attendance. The impoverished black community around the school remained aloof, as did the black intellectuals like Berkeley sociology professor Troy Duster, whom I periodically approached to help out with the operation, and who would come up to the penthouse to see Huey, but afterwards never follow through or come back. Adding to my dismay was the fact that the school head, Brenda Bay, had been replaced by Ericka Huggins, a prominent Party figure and in my view an individual who was mentally unbalanced. (It did not improve my dim view of Ericka, when I saw her punish a child by commanding the 9 year old to write 1,000 times, “I am privileged to attend the Black Panther Party’s Learning Center because . . .”) My concerns about the school came to a head on May 19, 1974, which was Malcolm X’s birthday.
A “Malcolm X Day” celebration was held in the school auditorium, which I attended. One after another, Bobby Seale, Elaine Brown, and other Panthers mounted the podium to proclaim the Party as “the only true continuator of the legacy of Malcolm.” Looking around at the familiar faces of the Panthers in the hall, I felt depressed and even betrayed. Huey had assured me that the Center would not become the power base for a sect, and had even excluded Bobby and Elaine from its operation to make me a believer. And yet now I could see that’s all that it was.
At the next Planning Committee meeting in Huey’s apartment, I braced myself and launched into a passionate complaint. On a day that all black Oakland should have been at the Center, I said, the occasion had been turned into a sectarian promotion for the Black Panther Party. My outburst was met by a tense silence from the others at the table. But Huey seemed unfazed and even to lend some support to what I had said. This duplicitous impression of yielding was almost a performance art with him.
Elaine had a similar talent for seduction when it fitted her agenda. In our first encounter at Mills, she had strategically brought the Malcolm X incident into our conversation. In her most disarming manner, she related how, after the meeting, Ericka Huggins had reported to her and other members of the Party that, “David Horowitz said that the Malcolm X Day celebration was too black.”
It was a shrewd gambit, reminding me of my precarious position in the Panther environment, while at the same time making her appear as a friend and potential protector. She had her reasons to ingratiate herself with me then, because she knew that somehow I had Huey’s ear, and she wanted desperately to end her exile. A month later, Huey kicked Bobby out of the Party and her wish was granted. She became the new Party chairman. A month after that, Huey was gone to Cuba.
When Huey left, all the Panthers whom Huey had assigned to work with me—all the members of the Planning Committee except Ericka—fled too. They left, suddenly, without warning, in the middle of the night. A week earlier, which was the last time I saw them, they had worried about Elaine’s new ascendance. When I asked why they were afraid of Elaine, they said, “She’s crazy.” Now they had disappeared, and I had no way of contacting them to question them further.
Although I had been warned about Elaine’s dark side, at this point I had only seen benign aspects myself. Now, as she took charge of the Party, she revealed another dimension of her personality that was even more attractive.
Where Huey had pretty much ignored the Learning Center after its creation, Elaine threw herself into its every detail, from curriculum to hygiene. She ordered it scrubbed from top to bottom, got proper supplies for the children, and made the Center’s needs a visible priority. Soon, the first real community event was held on its premises. It was a teen dance attended by 500 youths from the neighborhood. I could not have asked for a more concrete sign that things were going to be different. And these efforts were ongoing. Eventually
