As an unrepentant user of the N word, Donald Cox's memoir of his life in the Black Panther Party made me sympathetic to the book from the title alone, even more so when I learned he gleamed the title from W.E.B. DuBois who said the same when introduced by Chairman Mao before a million people in China's Tienanmen Square, "Thank you, Chairman Mao for your gracious introduction, but in my country, i.e., USA, I am just a nigger!"
But at the memorial service for BPP member Elbert Big Man Howard, DC's former wife and BPP member Barbara Easley Cox, told me about the book and said she was not a happy camper about it.
I forgot about the book until, Bob Mason, a supporter of my Academy of da Corner, Lakeshore Ave., Oakland purchased the book and after reading it, passed it onto me, requesting my critique. Only a few days before, my dear friend from Oakland City College, aka, Merritt College, Sister Ann Williams, had gifted me a copy of Donna Murch's history of the Black Panther Party, Living For the City. Ann was featured in the book. Donna had tried to interview me for the book at Amiri Baraka's house in Newark, NJ, where she is a Professor of History at Rutgers University. Ann didn't press me to review Donna's but Bob Mason did so I took up his offer even thought I read very little these as I am blind in my left eye.
Bob told me he especially wanted to know what I thought of DC's ungracious comments about Eldridge Cleaver and David Hilliard. As per Eldridge, I told him when I wrote my memoir of Eldridge Ceaver: My Friend the Devil, people were aghast, but I replied, "Didn't you guys call him the devil from the beginning, i.e., after I was the first person he hooked up with upon his release from Soledad Prison, late 1966; organized the political/cultural center with him, Black House; introduced him to my friends from OCC/Merritt College, Huey Newton and Bobby Sealse, after which he joined the BPP as Minister of Information. He and I hooked up again when he returned from exile as a Born Again Christian. I was variously his chief of staff, secretary, photographer, bodyguard, driver and organizer of his ministry Eldridge Cleaver Crusades. After he joined the ancestors on May Day, 1998, I officiated his memorial service in Oakland. In Stanley Nelson's documentary film: Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, after interviewing me for several years coast to coast, the only footage Nelson used was my comments about Eldridge.
Thus, I knew quite a bit about Eldridge but DC's filled in some gaps in my knowledge as per EC in exile, although EC had told me much more than DC revealed in his memoir of the BPP, yet I am thankful for what DC did reveal, after all, it was from another horses's mouth. And yet one must be careful about information presented from primary sources, e.g., at the memorial for Elbert Big Man Howard, Chairman Bobby Seale had to be relieved of the mike when his remarks about Big Man morphed into Bobby as the solitary genius of the BPP, originator of all BPP programs, policies and wisdom! Yet, we love you Bobby Seale, just know that!
With my visual disability, I was yet able to devour DC's book as it was an easy read, in simple language. DC noted that many of the BPP members were totally illiterate and this was true in the Black Arts Movement and Black Studies as well. Alas, when I taught English on the university and community college, when I asked my mostly white students to read orally, I discovered, much to my surprise, white students are equally as illiterate as black and chicano students.
His narrative is a coming of age or coming into consciousness journey of that white supremacist terror inflicted on North American Africans. DC descended from John Brown Abolitionist roots in the Kansas area, including biracial heritage. Alas, what North American African doesn't have biracial roots, after all the motherfucker fucked our mothers, fathers and us? And don't leave Miss Ann out of this interracial drama cause she was fucking niggers too!
What becomes clear from DC's narrative that must be instructive for young generations if they are to transcend the patriarchal mythology, the revolutionary woman were as busy as the men sexually. DC relates Eldridge's infatuation with a 14 year old Algerian girl, no matter he was married to Kathleen, yet declined to participate with the BPP International Embassy when the BPP members demanded
he end his relationship with the 14 year old, even after it was disclosed she was having a sexual relationship with a fellow BPP member. Most critically, of course, was the BPP member Rahim who was killed after EC learned he had a sexual relationship with the love of Cleaver's life, his wife, Kathleen.
I think what younger generations of men and women need to understand as I delineated in my 18 page monograph The Mythology of Pussy and Dick, DC made it plain in his treatise that men and women were equally sexually free during this era, except the men suffering the patriarchal mentality and mythology couldn't accept the fact that were equally as free sexually as the men, yet the men sometimes resorted to homicide to claim their masculine superiority.
My Mythology of Pussy and Dick tried, yes, 2009, before the #Metoo era, to let men know they don't own the female as chattel property, i.e., personal property as per the slave laws, and likewise, the women don't own the men, no matter they claim ownership to the point of cutting off the man's penis for sexual transgressions as per the marriage rites, i.e., til death due us part!
What disturbed me and yet what I appreciated most about DC was his honesty and sincerity no matter how much the internal and external rats tried to devour him mind, body and soul. No matter how deeply his soul, mind and body was submerged in the rat hole of revolutionary socio-pycho-pathological madness, whether internal or external--for sure, the Panthers and the FBI/CIA and international governmental institutions attempted to destroy the BPP, DC kept his head up high, even though he suffered revolutionary "negrocities" himself.
He was honest enough to delineate the contradictions of BPP members when they became victims of Marxist-Lennist-Stalinist ideological dogmatism that made them don the persona of revolutionary romanticism and domination that made them feel superior to fellow members below the Central Committee and masses or lumpen. We hope that in the present era of neo-Communism and Democratic Socialism the present generation does not fall victim to such ideological madness that will lead them to such actions as imprisonment and homicide.
We wonder why DC did not describe the brutal murder of Samuel Napier in the west coast/east coast struggle of the BPP. He comes close in his narrative of the New Haven BPP madness and the NY Panther 21 who were eventually expelled in the BPP fratricide.
He tried to explain why the New York Panthers did not accept the official BPP line of "integration" because of Harlem's long history of Black Nationalism from Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. We appreciate his narrative of Chicago's Chairman Fred Hampton's attempt to involve his rainbow coalition of Puerto Ricans and poor whites into the black liberation movement.
DC was ultimately overwhelmed by BPP psycho-pathological personalities and external forces, including the FBI, CIA and other global entities.
BPP Co-founder, Dr. Huey P. Newton
BPP Co-founder Bobby Seale in Sacramento at the State capital.
Angela Davis, Marvin X and Poet Sonia Sanchez
Cover art by BPP Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas
Ann Williams, member of the Afro-American Association
Bobby Seale and Marvin X
--continued
Marvin X
3/18/19
Donald L. Cox, who was at the center of black radical politics as a member of the Black Panther Party high command and who earned a moment of celebrity in 1970 when he spoke at the Leonard Bernsteinfund-raising party in Manhattan made notorious by the writer Tom Wolfe, died on Feb. 19 at his home in Camps-sur-l’Agly, France. He was 74.
His wife, Barbara Cox Easley, did not specify a cause. He had been living abroad since the early 1970s, when he fled the country after being implicated in a Baltimore murder.
Known as D. C., Mr. Cox held the title of field marshal with the Panthers, the socialist movement founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, Calif., in 1966. Mr. Cox was living in San Francisco at the time and became part of a group known as the central committee, which included Mr. Newton, Mr. Seale, Eldridge Cleaver and a handful of others.
Mr. Cox’s job was to travel the country to establish and supervise branch offices. But he was also the Panthers’ arms expert — writing about the proper use of guns in The Black Panther, the party newspaper, teaching party members to shoot and even procuring guns. The Panthers embraced the use of guns in defense of what they saw as black liberation from a white racist establishment; Mr. Cox liked to say he was in charge of the Panther military.
He also served the Panthers as a spokesman, and in January 1970 he appeared with a handful of Panthers and some 80 other guests at the Bernstein apartment on Park Avenue. The occasion was a fund-raiser for the legal defense of the New York Panther 21 — 19 men and 2 women who had been indicted on charges of plotting to kill police officers and blow up several sites, including Midtown stores, police precinct houses and the New York Botanical Garden.
“Some people think that we are racist, because the news media find it useful to create that impression in order to support the power structure,” Mr. Cox told Mr. Bernstein’s guests. “They like for the Black Panther Party to be made to look like a racist organization, because that camouflages the true class nature of the struggle.”
The fund-raiser was notable for its clash of cultures. As Charlotte Curtis of The New York Times reported, “There they were, the Black Panthers from the ghetto and the black and white liberals from the middle, upper-middle and upper classes studying one another cautiously over the expensive furnishings, the elaborate flower arrangements, the cocktails and the silver trays of canapés.”
Among the conversations Ms. Curtis noted was an exchange between Mr. Bernstein and Mr. Cox.
Mr. Bernstein: “Now about your goals. I’m not sure I understand how you’re going to achieve them. I mean, what are your tactics?”
Mr. Cox: “If business won’t give us full employment, then we must take the means of production and put them in the hands of the people.”
Mr. Bernstein: “I dig absolutely.”
The event raised nearly $10,000, Ms. Curtis reported. In May 1971 all 21 of the accused Panthers were acquitted. In June 1970 Mr. Wolfe’s article, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” was published in New York magazine. A skewering of Mr. Bernstein and his guests, it advanced Mr. Wolfe’s career as a leading proponent of the so-called new journalism. But it was reviled by Mr. Cox. The guests that night, he told Roz Payne, who documented the history of the Panthers in a series of films, “were really a concerned bunch of people.”
He added that “it was those media freaks and that bloodsucking Tom Wolfe” who exploited the cause of black liberation to make money from it and “to be part of the machinery that tried to ridiculize it.”
Donald Lee Cox was born on April 16, 1936, in Appleton, in west central Missouri, where he grew up hunting small game and reading everything he could find about nature and the outdoors.
“I read all the books in the library about snakes,” he told Ms. Payne for her film series. (That series has been released on DVD under the title taken from the Panther party platform: “What We Want, What We Believe.”)
He moved to San Francisco at 17, by his own account an ignorant country boy who was politically naïve until he joined the Panthers.
But as he explained in interviews, anger had been building up in him over attacks on black people, like the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, which killed four black girls, and, closer to home, the shooting of an unarmed black teenager by policemen that set off a riot in the Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco in 1966.
“It was a steady accumulation of pressure, like a volcano,” he said.
Shortly after the Bernstein dinner, Mr. Cox was charged as a conspirator in the July 1969 murder of Eugene Anderson, a Panther who had been a police informer in Baltimore. Mr. Cox said he had had nothing to do with the killing. One of several co-defendants was convicted of the crime.
After a warrant was issued for his arrest, Mr. Cox left the country, first living in Algeria and then in France. His first marriage, in San Francisco, ended in divorce. He met Ms. Easley, who lives in Philadelphia, in the 1960s, and though they had not lived together since he left the country, she said, they married in 2006 so that she would have legal standing in his affairs.
In addition to Ms. Easley, he is survived by a daughter, Kimberly Cox Marshall of Vallejo, Calif.; two sons, Donald, of Dallas, and Jonathan, of Philadelphia; five grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
“He created a very comfortable life here,” his wife said in a phone interview from Camps-sur-l’Agly, where she was tending to her husband’s matters, though she added that the isolation had begun to wear on him.
“Exile will do that to you,” she said.
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