His Life as a Panther
By Adam Hochschild;
Published: January 31, 1993
THIS SIDE OF GLORY The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party. By David Hilliard and Lewis Cole. Illustrated. 450 pp. Boston: Little, Brown & Company. $24.95.
FOR a stable society, the United States has been home to a remarkable number of millenarian sects. Some, like the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Communist Party, have lasted, even though the apocalypse they predict has not yet come. Others have flashed across the sky and gone down in flames. Few of those groups had a more spectacular rise and fall than the Black Panther Party, which captured the national imagination for a brief few years starting at the end of the 1960's.
At the beginning, if you didn't mind their paramilitary style, it was easy to feel some sympathy for the Panthers. Then, as now, millions of American blacks lived in decaying slums where schools were poor, jobs were scarce and the police were often brutal and mostly white. By the start of the 1970's, Washington had largely turned its back on these problems, and instead was pouring money and lives into the war in Vietnam.
Why, asked the charismatic Panther leader Huey Newton, shouldn't black people in the United States, harassed by the police, arm themselves in self-defense, as the Vietnamese guerrillas were doing? It was a defiant message for a restless, angry time. And, unlike black separatists, the Panthers sought alliances with radical whites. So the famous poster of Newton, sitting sternly on a huge, thronelike peacock chair, with a rifle in one hand and a spear in the other, looked down from the walls both of desolate apartments in black ghettos and of dormitory rooms in elite, predominantly white colleges.
Then, almost as quickly as it had soared into prominence, the party collapsed. Some 19 Panthers were killed in shootouts with one another, the police, the F.B.I. or other black revolutionaries. Various party activists went to jail, on charges ranging from drug dealing to murder. In Oakland, Calif., where the party was born, an embezzlement scandal engulfed some of the Panthers' community betterment programs. Newton took on ever more grandiose titles -- Minister of Defense, Supreme Commander, Supreme Servant. Like Stalin, he began booting "enemies of the people" out of the party. He and a shrinking core of loyalists turned to running an extortion racket, gunning down those who got in their way.
On top of all this, the Panthers were the target of what seems to have been one of the largest campaigns of disinformation and destabilization ever mounted against an American political group. F.B.I. agents made anonymous phone calls, mailed out hate letters over forged signatures, printed up a fake Panther coloring book for children that was filled with incendiary rhetoric and infiltrated the group with agents provocateurs, whose job was to sow suspicion and incite violence.
Was the main reason for the Panthers' failure that Newton and other leaders never broke free of their petty-criminal backgrounds? Or did the vicious F.B.I. destabilization campaign do them in? Or does the very nature of an armed, undemocratic sect make it fatally prone to influence by the reckless, whether F.B.I. spies or hotheads out for their own gain?
Readers in search of answers will find some raw material, but not much reflection, in "This Side of Glory," the autobiography of David Hilliard, who was one of the Panthers' top officials in the early days of the party. The book is disappointing on two counts.
First, it lacks the sound of a human voice. That Mr. Hilliard enlisted Lewis Cole, who teaches screenwriting at Columbia University, to help him is not in itself the problem; plenty of "as told to" stories -- such as "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" -- have an authenticity and passion that gain our trust. But this book is too facile, its prose like processed cheese. The entire story is in the present tense. The overheated text is peppered with one-sentence paragraphs. There is much melodrama: for example, the authors do not know exactly how Huey Newton met his death in 1989, apparently in a drug deal gone sour on the streets of Oakland, and so they imagine the scene, complete with a page or so of made-up dialogue.
The other problem is that although "This Side of Glory" describes both the growth and the collapse of the Black Panther Party, it does not relate the one to the other. The Panthers' brief time in the spotlight is treated too reverently. Even though he was abruptly, unfairly expelled by the increasingly paranoid Huey Newton, Mr. Hilliard calls Newton "a peerless intellectual force" who "has changed history." He calls the party "the best thing in my life." There is something sad about this intense nostalgia for the party that once promised so much; some of those expelled by Stalin felt the same emotion. But it leads Mr. Hilliard to make various heroic claims for the Panthers that the evidence does not bear out -- for instance, that the exposure of how the Chicago police initiated an attack that killed two Panthers helped lead to the "overthrow" of Mayor Richard J. Daley. Daley died in office, in his sixth term.
In the last section of the book, Mr. Hilliard emerges in the mid-1970's from several years in prison on charges stemming from a shootout between Panthers and police. Looking around him, he feels understandably depressed: in his familiar world of the Oakland ghetto all the young men who previously would have been drawn to politics now deal drugs instead. But should he have been so surprised? When the Panthers had been on the rise, Mr. Hilliard mentions in passing, he and Newton had raised money for the party by selling drugs. The party also operated a bar that was supposed to serve as a center for community organizing.
Drugs? A bar? How baffled the Vietnamese revolutionaries Mr. Hilliard so admired would have been to see the Panthers trading in drugs and alcohol -- the very things ravaging their community. In the end, perhaps the main lesson of the Panther experience is that to succeed, any movement of the oppressed must make a clean break from the culture of its oppression. In this sense, paradoxically, the Panthers were not revolutionary enough. The Black Muslims, despite many criticisms one could make of their beliefs, were -- and their movement has lasted.
To his credit, Mr. Hilliard acknowledges his own personal battle with drink and drugs. The final pages of his story chronicle a shattered life that has slowly been put back together with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous and other programs. In these passages, in his vivid description of the brutality of California prisons, and in some scenes of his Alabama childhood in a family of 12 children who had to scrounge for leftover food in the garbage of a nearby hospital, we get a few glimpses of the human suffering that provided such eager recruits for groups like the Black Panthers -- and that will do so again and again, as long as so many millions of Americans live in harsh want amid promises of plenty.
Photo: David Hilliard, 1968. (Pirkle Jones/From "This Side of Glory")