An Inside Look Into the Black Panther Party

Feb 24, 2019: 12:53 pm

Just Another Nigger: My Life in the Black Panther Party (Heyday, 2019) is Don Cox’s revelatory incendiary account of his five years in the Black Panther Party’s high command during the late 1960s and early 1970s. His book tells the story of his work as the party’s “field marshal” in charge of gun-running to planning armed attacks to his star turn raising money at the Manhattan home of conductor Leonard Bernstein, for which he was famously mocked by Tom Wolfe in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. Cox fled the United States for Algiers, and later France, where he died at age 74 in 2011. At his death, he had completed a memoir which is now published by Heyday Books with the title he insisted upon — a nod to W.E.B. Du Bois’s remark that, “In my own country, for nearly a century I have been nothing but a nigger.” What follows is an excerpt from this book.

The next day I arrived at Hunter’s Point at seven in the morning, in order to get set up before people began to gather. There wasn’t going to be any target practice, but I would be firing a few shots into the air by way of demonstration. I knew that would pose no problem as far as the police were concerned; due to their racism, whenever they heard shots on the Point, they generally looked the other way. Once, during a dispute between two gangs, shooting broke out and instead of the police coming in to break it up, they sealed off the area and let them shoot it out. The gun battle lasted twenty-four hours and the police didn’t return until the next day.

At around eight o’clock I saw [the Black Panther Party’s chief of staff] David Hilliard’s car driving up, which I found surprising because we had only seen each other a couple of times before. As the car approached, I recognized Emory Douglas and George Murray. Everyone had strange looks on their faces that made it clear something was wrong. Damn! Huey [Newton, the Party’s cofounder] had been shot and captured! He had shown up at David’s,…