Apéndice A: HD Rat1o

Shortly after I got out of jail I went over to San Francisco to check out Charles R. Garry, the lawyer the Central Committee had tentatively chosen to defend Huey. I had never met Garry before and I guess, to be honest about it, I had a little tingling bit of racism still hanging onto me. It wasn't that I hated white people, but I had to find out if I could trust this white lawyer to fight for Huey's freedom. Everyone had said that he was very good. He was recommended to us by Beverly Axebod.

We had been considering a number of lawyers - Donald Warden, Clinton White, and a couple of others. White and Warden were both black cats, but Warden had too many guys who went to jail, some of whom we thought were on death row. The way Warden operated wasn't cool, we thought, because he would tell you one thing out of the side of his mouth, and then go and do another thing behind the scenes with the police department and the people downtown. Clinton White had the reputation for being a good lawyer and a good fighter, but I was fearful that they would try to manipulate him, and Huey and the Party would become political football. I really don't know if he decided not to take the case, or if the Party decided not to hire him, because when I got out of jail, Garry had already been tentatively chosen.

So I went over to meet Garry. He told me about the kind of law firm he was running, and why these political cases related to him. I popped up right away and asked, "How much

money is it going to cost?"

"Let's not worry about that," Garry said. "Let's worry about the fact that we want to free Huey." He seemed to be a very honest person, from everything I could detect about him. "Well, let's see how he works out in practice," I said to myself. I generally hold back on my judgment of people until I see how they work out in practice.

A couple of days later, another lawyer was being considered. We went up to see him, and right away we decided that we didn't like him because he wanted ten to twelve thousand dollars in advance, off the cuff. We judged that Garry's firm was a better firm and that Garry himself was a better lawyer. We looked at the man's record, the number of people he had kept off death row, the number of murder cases that he had won, and those in which he had actually proven people innocent.

From all this, and because of our concern for brother Huey, we felt that it was Garry who was needed.

Three or four days after we made our final decision, I went to a meeting of the defense committee for Huey P. Newton, and there were less than ten people there. I had read in the papers that there were hundreds of people on the committee. The problem was a bit of black racism which was hanging on and which was very bad. The people who were originally on Huey's defense committee were all black people, naturally. But it turned out that they were mad because Huey's family and the Black Panther Party had decided that Charles Garry was the best legal technician available. Our argument was that we couldn't judge the man by the color of his skin. We wouldn't chose a lawyer just because he was black. We would choose him on the basis of his ability. We said that if you had cancer or another bad disease, you would want the best medical technician that you could find. This was our argument, but they didn't understand it.

We tried to show them that you could not judge Garry by the color of his skin. We tried to show them that Garry had no reason or desire to be a tool or a puppet of the power structure. We had to remind them that Garry had been viciously attacked by cops in the past when he fought for the labor unions in San Francisco, and that a lot of corrupt people in the local power structure didn't like him. The man had integrity, we said, and his record and everything else about him were all in Huey's favor.

But they still wanted to hinge it on a little old thing like, "He's not black." Someone even had the nerve to say that we should hire John George, a man who had never handled that kind of case. Those two kinds of politics developed in the black community: one on the basis of a racist line, another on the basis of our progressive line. Later, we didn't get along with John George at all, because opportunistically he sided with the hundred or so people who only wanted a "black" lawyer and were trying to form a Huey P. Newton defense committee, but who didn't really have any power in the community. When it turned out that there wasn't going to be any black lawyer, most of them stopped worrying about saving Huey's life, but some worked to free Huey.

So the Black Panther Party hired Garry, and when I went to this first meeting of the defense committee, there was only David Hilliard, Eldridge, myself. Huey's brother Melvin Newton,

Sid Walton, and three or four other people who showed up. There were only about eight or nine people actually functioning on Huey's defense committee right after we hired Charles Garry.

Eldridge and I were very pissed off at some of those people who had their little racist hang- ups. So many of them, about sixty or seventy, used to crowd into meetings before I got out of jail, Eldridge told me. They used to stand near the door trying to get out what they had to say, just running off at the mouth. They weren't really interested in doing any work. When we hired Garry, they all dropped away like a bunch of little scared rabbits and racists. I didn't like that at all. Some of those people had been to college, and had talked about all of the oppressive conditions black people were living under. The way I looked at it, their actions were tantamount to selling out the black community.

Some of the local black lawyers and black cultural nationalists tried to attack Garry publicly. "You guys have got to have a black lawyer," they told us. We just wanted the best one we could get. Those black lawyers had some kind of a meeting in Berkeley and tried to condemn Garry. That kind of stuff even hit the newspapers.

We realized that half of those lawyers were just thinking about money. They were thinking that we were going to raise a lot of funds for Huey's defense, and they wanted to get their hands on those funds and stick them in their own pockets. When we hired Garry, we didn't have any money. Garry's firm didn't get any money from us for a long time and went into the ole on Huey's case. Most of those black lawyers who condemned Garry never would have stuck with us when we were without funds. They would have gotten rid of us. But they really had to get up off Garry's back after he got Eldridge out of Vacaville in June, and later on when his legal and political work together with our community efforts kept Huey out of the gas chamber.

Black racism is a fault of a few within the black community. Black racism is a very selfish thing. It is definitely not a progressive or a productive thing.