Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough

their brains in the street
Can you kill them . . .
Learn to kill niggers
Learn to be Black men. 4
    Much of this, the author Curtis J. Austin has observed, could be dismissed as “ghetto rhetoric.” But the FBI, and especially urban police commissioners, could not ignore it, and with good reason. The escalation in Black Power rhetoric paralleled a rise in attacks on police. Between 1964 and 1969, assaults on Los Angeles patrolmen quintupled. Between 1967 and 1969, attacks on officers in New Jersey leaped by 41 percent. In Detroit they rose 70 percent in 1969 alone. In congressional testimony and press interviews, police officials in cities across the country blamed the rise in violence squarely on the Panthers and their ultraviolent rhetoric.
    The Panthers drew the FBI’s attention early on. In late 1967 agents began bugging party headquarters in Oakland, the first step in an anti-Panther drive that, as shown elsewhere in this book, would grow into an elaborate and illegal campaign of dirty tricks against Black Power groups, all of it designed to prevent the rise of what J. Edgar Hoover called “a black messiah”: a single black leader who could unite the disparate voices of Black Power. Until that messiah rose, Hoover told a Senate committee in 1969, he considered the Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”
    In early 1968, the rise in Panther rhetoric led to heightened tensions with Bay Area police, especially in Oakland. The police launched scores of raids on Panther homes, briefly arresting Cleaver and Seale, and rumors flew that police were plotting to “wipe out” the Panthers. Then, on April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. In Washington, D.C., Stokely Carmichael, now aligned with the Panthers, announced that White America had declared war on blacks. Riots broke out in more than 120 cities. In Oakland, two days later, Cleaver and a group of Panthers jumped into three cars and went looking for police to kill. They stopped at an intersection in West Oakland, Cleaver recalled years later, because he “needed to take a piss real badly.” An Oakland patrolman pulled up behind. “Everybody all day was talking about taking some action,” Cleaver recalled. “So we put together a little series of events to take place the next night, where we basically went out to ambush the cops. But it was an aborted ambush because the cops showed up too soon.” When the patrol car pulled up, Cleaver said, the Panthers “got out and started shooting. That’s what happened. People scattered and ran every which a-way.”
    Cleaver and young Bobby Hutton took refuge in the basement of a nearby home, where they engaged police in a ninety-minute gunfight. When the police used tear gas, Cleaver emerged shirtless—to show he was unarmed—alongside Hutton. Officers began shoving and kicking Hutton; when he stumbled, shots rang out. Hutton, hit at least six times, was killed. He became a martyr. Cleaver, granted bail, became a hero.
    It was King’s death and the image of brave Panthers seeking to avenge it that cemented the party’s national reputation. For the first time many blacks who had resisted the martial calls of Black Power began to believe that white violence must be met with black violence. Emissaries arrived in Oakland from New York and dozens of other cities, all clamoring to start their own Panther chapters. In a matter of months, party membership went from hundreds to thousands; by late 1968 there would be Panther chapters in almost every major urban area. From a managerial point of view, it was chaos. A Central Committee was supposed to impose some kind of structure, but for the moment, Panther headquarters exercised little sway over these new affiliates.
    It was, in some respects, the apex of the party’s influence; looking back, there is no denying that the Panthers’ “heroic” age was already passing. In September, after a two-month trial marked by rancorous