Making Revolution

My Life in the Black Panther Party

Don Cox

• Publisher: Heyday
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781597145558
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Biografie nell'ambito delle scienze sociali

Making Revolution is Don Cox's revelatory, even incendiary account of his years in the Black Panther Party. He had participated in many peaceful Bay Area civil rights protests but hungered for more militant action. His book tells the story of his work as the party's field marshal in charge of gunrunning to planning armed attacks—tales which are told for the first time in this remarkable memoir—to his star turn raising money at the Manhattan home of Leonard Bernstein (for which he was famously mocked by Tom Wolfe in Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers ), to his subsequent flight to Algeria to join Eldridge Cleaver in exile, to his decision to leave the party following his disillusionment with Huey P. Newton's leadership. Cox would live out the rest of his life in France, where he wrote these unrepentant recollections in the early 1980s, enjoining his daughter to promise him that she would do everything she could to have them published.

1

Joe Cox’s Grandson

IT WAS A COOL DAWN, April 14, 1936, when I tore my way into this world—feet first and weighing twelve pounds—my delivery further complicated by some difficulty in getting me to breathe. The umbilical cord, wrapped around my neck, was strangling me. Mine was a troubled introduction into life.

We lived on a small subsistence farm close to a village called Appleton City, Missouri, about eighty miles southeast of Kansas City. It supplied us with our vegetables, poultry, eggs, smoked pork, milk, and butter. Occasionally Mama sold some eggs or an extra pound or two of butter, but it wasn’t anything systematic. In winter about one meal a week came from hunting.

I was preceded by one brother, Junior, and three sisters, Irene, Mary Jane, and Marleeta. Papa worked in town at the Ford garage as a mechanic. He had taken a correspondence course to learn the trade, and proudly displayed his huge framed diploma on the living room wall. He worked the land, slopped the hogs, and fed the cow in the morning and evening, before and after work and on weekends. Mama held down the house, the poultry, and the vegetable plot, plus cooked three meals a day and did the Monday washing. And every minute in between was spent sewing something—creating an article of clothing for someone in the family or making patchwork quilts, masterpieces worthy of any museum.

My memories begin during the Second World War, after Pearl Harbor. Junior was away in Parsons, Kansas, doing public-works jobs at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, and when he came home on leave in his sharp uniform, I assumed he was a special kind of a soldier. Irene was about two hours away in Sedalia, attending high school. I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world; she was my standard of beauty. Mary Jane, the oldest at home, worked right alongside Mama, and Marleeta and I just played every day. Her year-and-a-half seniority over me gave her the edge in decision-making, so whatever she decided to do, I did. When she played with dolls, I played with dolls. When she sewed dolls’ clothes, I sewed dolls’ clothes. When she learned to embroider, I learned to embroider. When she decided to dress up in Mama’s old clothes, I dressed up in Mama’s clothes.

I remember when I got my doll. The store had many sizes and shapes, and I chose the colored one. It was rather small and had three tufts of black hair sticking out, one on top and one on each side. I named her Kinky Lee-Andre. I’ll never know how I came up with a name like Lee-Andre in the cornfields of Missouri.

When I was around five years old, my mother told me that from then on it was my job to dry dishes. I was upset. I protested and cried but, in the end, I dried dishes. In those days you could yowl and protest all you wanted as long as you did what you were told. If you rebelled you were sent out to fetch a switch, which Mama would use to whip your behind. She could make a switch sing. If you brought in one too light and flimsy, she would go back out and get one that always seemed to me more like a branch. And these weren’t just symbolic beatings, either. When she was through, you had welts on your behind. In those days I cried and protested a lot.

Then came the ultimate humiliation. It was now my job to empty the chamber pot. For those of you who know only urban or modern environments, the chamber pot was a kind of enamel bucket with a lid that everyone used to piss and shit in at night or during real bad weather, instead of making the trip out back to the outhouse. It’s surprising how many times it was full to the brim, and at that age I didn’t have the physical strength to carry it in a way that would avoid the inevitable spills. I was condemned for life. Being the youngest, there was no one coming up behind me to pass the buck to as I grew older. Until I went to California, when I was seventeen, we never had an indoor bathroom.

Mama was a saint. She taught me that there were no bad people in the world, only those who made mistakes or stumbled along the path of righteousness. That naïve simplicity touched me to the marrow. Even today’s state of the world hasn’t dampened my hope in the future of our species. Mama and Papa believed that all one had to do was work hard and go to church and everything would be all right. And, of course, it didn’t hurt to have a good dose of the patriotism that any other peasant from Missouri had during that time of world war. What mattered was to carry yourself in a manner that would earn the respect and approval of everyone.

That’s probably why I never liked watermelon. At that time, stereotyped images of colored people always showed them with a big slice of watermelon, and I didn’t want anyone to see me like that. I remember one winter, after we had moved to Sedalia to be close to a school, I went down to J. C. Penney with Mama to buy a pair of mittens. Naturally, I grabbed the red pair, my favorite color, but Mama insisted on a gray pair. I protested. Without a word or so much as a glance at me, she gave me one of the most vicious backhands in the mouth I’d ever got. It was many years later before I understood why she did that. At the time, I didn’t know that red was supposed to be all niggers’ favorite color.

The only music allowed at home was religious or classical. Jazz and blues was the music of the devil. Papa was an excellent tenor. Too bad he was confined to backwoods obscurity. He sang in the church choir and in a quartet of friends, and later became the director of the church choir. He would work all year long preparing for the annual Christmas and Easter cantatas. He would send off for the sheet music and then make copies by hand to distribute to members of the choir. We had an upright piano at home, and all my sisters at one time or another took piano lessons. It never appealed to me, so I was never pushed to do the same.

Papa was stern. My relationship with him consisted of hello; goodbye; yes, sir; and no, sir. Period. He was sort of a mysterious ogre that was often invoked by Mama and my sisters if I didn’t behave. In other words, whatever I was doing wrong, they said they were going to tell Papa about it when he came home. That made me take on a defensive attitude toward him, and whenever he was at home I would keep as much distance between him and me as possible. Because I was always trying to do what I wanted, rather than what Mama or my sisters wanted, I was never really certain when they were going to carry out the threat to inform on me, so as far as I was concerned, Papa was someone to avoid.

The only time my fears were realized, he was home sick with something and Marleeta and I were messing around, like kids do. On all the windows and doors of the house there were fine mesh screens to keep out the flies, and Marleeta and I liked to press our lips against them as hard as we could so that when we withdrew, our lips would bear the pattern imprint of the screen. That day, Marleeta was pressing her lips into a full spread and I was standing on the other side. Looking at her like that, I just couldn’t resist picking up a wooden yardstick and holding one end while pulling back on the other, aimed at her lips. She never thought I would be so callous as to let it go, but, naturally, I did.

The instant the yardstick hit her mouth I knew I had made the mistake of my life. She let out the most blood-curdling scream. Papa bounded out of bed. I froze. I knew what lay in store for me. Papa seized the yardstick and I started screaming, fearing he was going to skin me alive. He had finished whipping me and was back in bed before I realized that he hadn’t hurt me at all. It was the only whipping he ever gave me. But my fear of him had kept me screaming anyway.

All social and cultural activity back then was centered on church. Sunday school and church services took up half a day on Sunday, and then there were Wednesday night prayer meetings, Friday night choir practices, and one night for the usher board. The colored church in Appleton City was one of the sources of pride for our family because it was Grandpa Joseph Cox, Papa’s father, who had started it. Papa had two black metal boxes that seemed to contain all the family treasures, and among them was Grandpa Cox’s preacher’s license and the correspondence from the district superintendent of the Methodist church asking Grandpa to send fifty cents for a license so he could start a church.

Grandpa Cox was a special case. He was born in 1845. Someone on the plantation where he was born kept a record of when the slave women gave birth, and the page recording Grandpa’s birth was also in one of the black boxes. The wife of the plantation owner taught Grandpa how to read and write—a move that was progressive at the time, and an offense punishable by law. Upon his “liberation,” the simple fact of his literacy gave him a relative power and self-respect that labeled him an “uppity nigger.” It was always a source of great pride in the family that a hole in the wall of a store in Osceola, Missouri—put there by a shotgun blast—bore testimony to Grandpa’s objection to that appellation. He was a righteous uppity nigger, all right. As ultimate proof, he married a white woman. To do so, they had to go to the state of Kansas because interracial marriage in Missouri was illegal. Maria Müller had been brought to the States by her mother from the Germanspeaking part of Switzerland after her father, Jacob Müller, had died.

Unless they were ignorant of racial problems, I don’t see how an eighteen-year-old Swiss immigrant would end up marrying a thirty-seven-year-old ex-slave, but somehow it happened. And the fact that Grandma Cox was white and Grandpa wasn’t—the reverse of how it usually was when you had yellow niggers in the family—was held up as a source of pride in our family. These differences were strongly emphasized in the family education. I didn’t grow up with any complexes about being less than anybody.

Also tucked away in the black treasure boxes was a certificate authorizing Grandpa to teach school. Here and there on the printed certificate from the Board of Education, the word “colored” had been inserted by hand to clearly define the boundaries of Grandpa’s maneuverability.

For me, the fact that coloreds and whites had their own schools and churches seemed the most natural thing in the world. I used to hear the grownups talking about slavery times and lynchings, but somehow I felt insulated from all that by either time or space.

In the immediate surroundings of Appleton City there were a couple of hundred people, and everyone knew everybody else. When everyone would go into town on Saturday nights to do shopping, I didn’t see any difference in the relationships between coloreds and whites. There were white friends who visited us and whom we visited. I never felt inferior to anybody. I didn’t even know we were poor. One of the local families, the Braunbergers, owned the town’s drugstore and had a son a couple of years older than me. His clothes were always passed on to me and were a source of happiness and anticipation; for me, such generosity did not mean that we were poor but rather that the Braunbergers were exceptionally nice people. The only time I felt lacking was the year Santa Claus forgot to drop by our house on Christmas Eve. But really, that was his fault and had nothing directly to do with us.

Mama worked hard all summer long growing everything she could, and she would spend fall canning what she had grown. Then there were the chickens and ducks, as well as the hogs that Papa butchered every now and then. I never felt we were poor, since there was always something to eat in the pantry and the smokehouse.

Finally, the great day came when I could start school. I had already spent some time there, as Mama would send us with Mary Jane whenever she had to go somewhere. It was one of those country schools that combined all the grades in the one and only classroom. The teacher would teach each grade in turn and everyone else in the room would hear what was being taught, no matter their level. This preschool experience, plus my constant presence in the same room at home where my sisters did their homework, allowed me to learn how to read and write before I officially started school. And when I did, I skipped first grade and went right into second. I started out being a proud nigger.

Because many of our neighbors had gone north, there were only three of us in class during my first year of school: my sister Marleeta; Shirley Burton, the daughter of our neighbors; and myself. We were literally being tutored privately, a state of affairs that did not last. I don’t know if the funds were cut or what, but in the summer of 1943 Papa sold the farm and we moved about seventy miles northeast to Sedalia, where he started working at the Ford garage.

Sedalia was the town where Scott Joplin lived when he wrote “Maple Leaf Rag,” although we hadn’t heard of him yet. The only ragtime musician I had heard of was Blind Boone, and only for the simple reason that a distant relative of ours was his wife or girlfriend.

Sedalia at that time was a town with a population of about ten thousand. I don’t know what percentage was colored, but at school there were around three hundred students, all classes combined, first grade through twelfth. The colored part of town was on the north side of the Missouri Pacific railroad tracks, and the line ran through town in a north-south direction, on its way between Chicago and Denver.

The railroad line had run by our house in Appleton City, too—right along the edge of the big field where Papa grew cereals to feed the animals. All the hobos moving around in those days must have marked our place because there was not one who didn’t come to the house and ask for a meal. Mama never turned anyone away. She would feed them enough to last a couple of days. I remember her ritual of making up a package of ground coffee to give them when they left.

There was also a lot of military traffic on the railroad line in those days. Fort Leonard Wood was in the southern part of the state, and occasionally a train of prisoners would go by with guards on top and hanging off the sides with machine guns. I would run out with my wooden Tommy gun and pretend to mow down everyone on the train while waving my tiny American flag.

All along the edge of the field there were blackberry bushes separating our land from the railroad line. Mama made jelly, jam, and mouthwatering blackberry pies. At one time or another Junior worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant at the junction about twenty miles away. The trains stopped there to take on fuel and water while those who wanted refreshment could eat during the stopover. He would grab a freight to come home every night; they always slowed down just a little before our house before passing through Appleton City. One night he came in torn to shreds, bleeding all over, as if a lion or tiger had gotten hold of him. Having made the mistake of grabbing an express that didn’t slow down, he had jumped off anyway and landed, full force, in the blackberry patch.

Junior was the hunter in the family. In Sedalia he hooked up with a couple of friends and sometimes they would go hunting several times a week. All that their respective families could not consume was sold to make a little pocket change. I was eight years old when Junior finally let me start going along to carry the game bag. The main catch was cottontail rabbits, squirrels, and quail. Heading home after the hunt, they would stop along the way and do some target shooting with Junior’s .22. One day when they had all missed the target on the first shot, I asked for and was afforded a chance to try it out myself, and to everyone’s surprise, including my own, I hit it! So began my love affair with guns. From then on Junior let me carry the .22 while he carried the .410. I became a fairly good shot and began to knock off my share of cottontails, breaking from their cover, moving relatively fast.

When I was ten years old, I joined the National Rifle Association. I devoured any literature dealing with firearms I could get my hands on. Even as an adult the passion stayed with me, and after I moved to California I possessed a real arsenal. It included a beautiful Winchester Model 70, caliber 30.06, with a four-power telescopic sight. Up to two hundred yards, I could pick the hairs off a gnat’s ass. I used to go target practicing at a range just south of San Francisco. Most of the people on the shooting stands were members of the San Francisco Police Department, and I was always impressed with their ability. When they finished shooting at the end of the day on the pistol range of fifty yards, the centers of their targets were nothing but big holes. I shot a tight group myself and my results were as good as theirs.

The years rolled by uneventfully in peaceful Sedalia. I had good grades in school but didn’t learn much, especially about anything that was going to help open doors usually closed to colored people. The dream of all young colored kids was to finish high school and move to some big city and find a job. For us, the closest was Kansas City, followed by St. Louis and, if you were really lucky, perhaps Denver or Chicago. The alternative was to enlist in a branch of the military, a sure ticket out of flat, boring Sedalia.

The summer I graduated from high school my father’s brother and his wife and daughter—Uncle Harry, Aunt Rose, and my cousin Dolores—came to Sedalia on vacation from California, where they had moved about twenty years before. Dolores and I hit it off real good, and when Uncle Harry and Aunt Rose went back to California, Dolores stayed to spend the rest of the summer with us. When it was time for her to return home, Uncle Harry sent me a ticket as well as an invitation to live with them in California. Manna from heaven! California? That was like talking about going to the moon. That was someplace you never dreamed of reaching. That’s the land of milk and honey, where the streets were paved with gold.

2

Long Way from Missouri

I STEPPED OFF THE TRAIN in Oakland, California, at five in the afternoon on August 27, 1953. I was wea...