retracted his charges. For me, caution seemed to be the prudent course.
Then, in 1980, an event took place that provided me with an occasion to relieve myself of a portion of my burden. It provided a story that was parallel in many respects to what I had been through. It would afford me the opportunity to speak about things that had been unspeakable until now. In May 1980, Fay Stender, an attorney who had defended Black Panther George Jackson, took her own life in Hong Kong. She had withdrawn to this remote city away from family and friends, in order to kill herself after a member of Jackson’s prison gang had shot and paralyzed her the year before. She had stayed alive just long enough to act as a witness for the prosecution in the trial of her assailant.
Peter Collier and I wrote her story, calling it “Requiem for A Radical.”66 In it, we recounted the details of her life and death, and were able to lift a part of the veil that had obscured the criminal underside of the Black Panther Party. We described the army of thugs that had been trained in the Santa Cruz Mountains to free Jackson from his San Quentin cell. We described the killing fields in those same mountains where the Panthers had buried the corpses of Fred Bennett and others who had violated their Party codes. We were also able to write honestly about Jackson himself, whom the Left had made into a romantic legend and who, like Huey, was a criminal psychopath. Obscured by the love letters Jackson had written in the book Soledad Brother, which Fay Stender had edited, was the murderer who had boasted of killing a dozen men in prison and whose revolutionary plan was to poison the water system of Chicago where he had grown up.
A chapter in Destructive Generation, 1989
When our story appeared in New West magazine, I learned through mutual friends that Bert Schneider, Huey’s Hollywood patron, was unhappy with the account Peter and I had written. Although I sensed that Bert was aware of the Party’s criminal activities, including Betty’s murder, I was not as afraid of him as I was of Huey, and I decided to go and see him. I did so on a principle taken from the Godfather movies, that you should get near to your enemies and find out what they have in mind for you. The Fay Stender story was not a direct hit on Huey or Bert and their reactions might tell me something I needed to know. Perhaps the past was not as alive for them as I imagined. Perhaps I did not have so much to fear.
Bert had an estate on a hill above Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills. I called my name through the security gate and was admitted into the main house. Bert appeared, wearing a bathrobe, and in a quiet rage. He was angrier than I had ever seen him. “You endangered my life,” he hissed at me.
I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. He directed me to a passage in our Fay Stender article about Jackson’s attempted escape from San Quentin prison (an episode in which the Panther and his comrades slit the throats of three prison guards they had tied up, before Jackson himself was killed): “The abortive escape left a thicket of unanswered questions behind. . . . Had Jackson been set up? If so, was it by the Cleaver faction of the Black Panther Party? Or by Newton, fearful of Jackson’s charismatic competition?”
Joe Durden Smith’s book Who Killed George Jackson? had described Bert as being in close contact with Huey during the escape attempt. Perhaps he was referring to that. Even so, I still could not understand why Bert was so agitated. I was already focusing, however, on something else Bert had said that had far greater significance for me. In defending his reaction to the article he had admitted, “Huey isn’t as angry as I am.” It was the opening I was looking for. I told him I would like to see Huey, and a lunch was arranged.
When I arrived at Norman’s, the North Berkeley restaurant that Huey had chosen, he was already there, sunk into one of the vinyl divans, his eyes liverish and his skin pallid, drunker than I had ever seen him. He was so drunk, in fact, that when the lunch was over he asked me to drive him back to the two-story house that Bert had bought for him in the Oakland Hills, and left his own car outside the restaurant. When we arrived, he invited me in. I was a little nervous about accepting but decided to go anyway. The decor—piled carpets, leather couches and glass-topped end tables—was familiar. Only the African decorative masks that had been mounted on the beige walls seemed a new touch.
As we settled ourselves in Huey’s living room, the conversation we had begun at lunch continued. Huey told me about a project he had dreamed up to produce Porgy and Bess as a musical set in contemporary Harlem, starring Stevie Wonder and Mick Jagger. It was a bizarre idea but not out of character for Huey, whose final fight with Bobby Seale had begun with a quarrel over who should play the lead role in a film Huey wanted to make. Huey even showed me the treatment he had prepared in Braille for Stevie Wonder, while complaining that the people around the singer had badmouthed him and killed the deal. When he said this, his face contorted in a grimace that was truly demonic.
Then, just as suddenly, he relaxed and fell into a distant silence. After a minute, he looked directly at me and said: “Elaine killed Betty.” And then, just as abruptly, he added a caveat whose cynical bravado was also typical, as though he was teaching me, once again, how the world really worked: “But if you write that, I’ll deny it.” Until that moment I had thought Elaine was solely responsible for the order to kill Betty. But now I realized that Huey had collaborated with her and probably given the order himself. It was the accusation against Elaine that provided the clue. He might have said, “David, I’m sorry about Betty. It should never have happened, but I was in Cuba and couldn’t stop it.” But he didn’t. He chose instead to point a finger at Elaine, as the one alone responsible. It had a false ring. It was uncharacteristically disloyal. Why point the finger at anyone, unless he wanted to deflect attention from himself? I went home and contacted several ex-Panthers, who were living on the East Coast. I asked them how Elaine, as a woman, had been able to run the Party and control the Squad. The answer was the same in each case: Elaine had not really run the Party while Huey was in Cuba. Huey had run it. He was in daily contact with Elaine by phone. The Squad stayed loyal to Elaine out of fear of Huey. The same sources told me that the fate of Betty had been debated for a week. Elaine had provided Huey with the reasons for killing Betty; Huey had made the final decision.
In 1989, fourteen years after Betty disappeared, Huey was gunned down by a drug dealer he had burned. It was a few blocks away from where Huey had killed the 17-year-old prostitute Kathleen Smith. It might have been poetic, but it was not justice. He should have died sooner; he should have suffered more. On the other hand, if I had learned anything through all this, it was not to expect justice in this world, and to be grateful for that which did occur, however belated and insufficient.
Huey’s death allowed Peter and me to write his story and to describe the Panther reality I had uncovered. (We called it “Baddest” and published it as a new chapter in the paperback edition of our book Destructive Generation.) By now, we had become identified with the political right (although “libertarian irregulars” might better describe our second thoughts). What we wrote about the Panthers’ crimes, therefore, was either dismissed or simply ignored by an intellectual culture that was dominated by the left. Even though Huey’s final days had tainted the Panthers’ legacy, their glories were still fondly recalled in all the Sixties nostalgia that continued to appear on public television, in the historical monographs of politically correct academics and even in the pages of the popular press. The Panther crime wave was of no importance to anyone outside the small circle of their abandoned victims.
Then, in an irony of fate, Elaine Brown emerged from obscurity early this year to reopen the vexed questions of the Panther legacy. She had been living in a kind of semi-retirement with a wealthy French industrialist in Paris. Now she was back in America seeking to capitalize on the collective failure of memory with a self-promoting autobiography called A Taste of Power. It was published by a major New York publisher, with all the fanfare of a major New York offering.
With her usual adroitness, Elaine had managed to sugarcoat her career as a political gangster by presenting herself as a feminist heroine and victim. “What Elaine Brown writes is so astonishing,” croons
