We were at Jerry’s house, listening to ’Trane, smoking weed, and playing chess when I told my crew that G—Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt—had given me the go-ahead to implement a new tactic of defense. We needed to find more ways to protect the Los Angeles branch of the Black Panther Party from the Los Angeles Police Department and other forces waging war against us. I had been toying with the idea of plotting an escape route through the sewers from the Party’s headquarters on Forty-First Street and Central Avenue. The sewers could serve as a hiding place and even a point of attack if necessary. “I think we can go in on 120th and Central,” I told them.
“Naw,” said Baba as he inhaled a joint. “I know a way that’s closer.” He squeezed the answer out, exhaling the smoke through his nostrils.
Baba wasn’t a Panther—he was a member of the Black Student Alliance, an organization of Black Student Unions throughout Los Angeles. He also belonged to the United Front, an umbrella organization with a black-socialist orientation. Ronald “Baba” Preston was one of the most intelligent people I’d ever met. He was tall and thin, a build that contradicted his athletic strength. Like many of us in those days, he had an Afro, mustache, and goatee. On this night, he had on his “movement uniform”—light brown khakis, an army jacket, and his dark brown socks, which were an exact match to the worn shag carpet in Jerry’s house.
“We should go in by the L.A. River, over near County General Hospital in East L.A. It’ll be closer,” Baba proclaimed with assurance.
I turned and studied Jerry’s face. “What you think?”
“Sounds cool to me,” he nodded from the deep recline of his black leather La-Z-Boy.
Jerry, also a member of the Black Student Alliance, lived in a small cottage in the back of a bungalow on San Pedro and Fifty-Third Streets. His place was where lots of us—Panthers, BSA members, and even “nonaffiliated” folk—would meet and have political discussions. We took off our shoes at the door when we came in Jerry’s spot. Posters depicting beautiful women with large Afros, political prisoners, armed resistance, and other manifestations of radical politics would shepherd our discussions. Folks would stop by at various times to share food, sleep on whatever was available, or just hang out after a long day of political work.
Jerry had a routine. He would lie all the way back in his recliner with his legs crossed, his hands in a lotus-like position on the armrests, and his eyes closed, as Coltrane blew from the speakers behind him. According to Jerry, it was “the proper way to listen to revolutionary music.” But after I mentioned the sewers, Jerry’s eyes opened; he sat upright in the chair and then stood up. One thing about Jerry: when he was ready, he was ready, and when it came to movement work he did not mess around.
“Let’s go see,” he said.
Baba and Jerry both knew, like all of us who were involved with the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles, that an escape route out of the headquarters was more than just a good idea; it was a necessity.
Julius Jones, a Vietnam vet, was hunched over on the edge of his chair, scowling fiercely as we played chess. He was a dark-skinned man, short and stocky, with powerful sprinter’s legs. He had only been a sergeant in the army, but he played chess like a general, a tactician’s tactician; even so, my intensity met his on the black-and-white squares of the chessboard, move for move.
“Come on, man!” Baba pressed.
We had decided that night to ride in Julius’s Pontiac Grand Prix, so Baba was chiding him to get ready; Baba was ready to roll. I had been leaning on the edge of the couch focused on my next chess move, but I pulled myself up. Baba was right: it was time to take care of business. I grabbed my army boots and headed out the door, putting them on as I followed Jerry down the steps, Julius right behind me. I was wearing my army pants that night too—they had a pocket for damn near everything. But for some reason I couldn’t find my knife—the main thing you carry in the pocket of army pants. For a moment I wondered if I should be concerned. Never mind, I thought to myself. I didn’t expect anything major to jump off tonight.
It was around 2:00 AM on December 8, 1969, and the early morning air was cool as the four of us left Jerry’s house. We started on San Pedro and then quickly made our way to Alameda Street, heading north through downtown. We were able to find a jazz station on the radio, which helped to keep our concentration on track. Other than the music, we rode in silence.
We parked near the L.A. River and entered through the storm drain. The sewer system was an underground labyrinth of tunnels and passageways to all parts of the city. It was muggy and steamy underground, and the smell was far from the sweet aroma of patchouli oil that had flowed through Jerry’s house.
Heading south through the sewer, we made it to the Black Panther Party headquarters in about an hour. As we made our way, we looked for other exits, climbing up ladders to look out of the street gutters. Near the intersection of Hooper Avenue and Santa Barbara Boulevard, I came up one of the drains to see where we were. I noticed some police activity on the streets. I didn’t think much of it, but I made a mental note.
As I climbed back down, my foot caught on the last rail of the rusted-out ladder, which sent my flashlight flying through the air as I scrambled to catch my balance. “Ain’t this about a bitch!” I grumbled angrily, a little unnerved.
Laughter erupted all around me, and I realized the guys were stumbling all over each other, amused by my reaction to the near miss. It was obvious that we were still riding our high from earlier.
As we continued our investigation of the sewers, we periodically stepped into puddles of rippling water. We walked slowly, keeping watch for the sewer rats. When they saw us, the giant-sized rats ran from us. But, unavoidably, they eventually hit a dead end and turned and headed back. Soon, they were coming straight at us, eyes glowing an ominous bloodred as they leered at us in the dark. We were uninvited intruders, gate-crashers in their underworld kingdom. This effectively ended our reconnaissance mission for the night.
Hauling ass, slipping, laughing, and looking over our shoulders, we ran through the underground sewer tunnels all the way back to East Los Angeles, about two miles. I was trying to make it back to where we first entered the sewer, but Baba was in my way. Jerry was right behind me, laughing. The wet ground beneath us didn’t help either.
But whatever we might encounter in the sewers that early morning would not stop us; we didn’t think twice about operating in a space that most people wanted to avoid at all costs. The sewers were not our problem, but a possible solution. Our work that night was meaningful because we were united. We had forged a team committed to the idea that black people in the United States were an oppressed people, and we had a duty and a right to struggle for freedom from that oppression. We also knew that our survival depended on finding new ways to defend our community and ourselves. No, we didn’t think twice.
I asked Julius to drop me off at the Black Panther Party headquarters on Central instead of at Jerry’s house because I wanted to tell G what we had found on our underground scouting mission. For some reason, Central Avenue was eerily quiet, which was an uncommon occurrence—something was always happening on Central. But now, as Julius cruised toward Forty-First, it seemed almost like a ghost town. Momentarily, I flashed back to the earlier omen of my missing army knife; something wasn’t right.
G was at the headquarters, looking out the front door when I got out of the car. Others in the two-story office building that night included longtime community activists Paul Redd, Renee “Peaches” Moore, Melvin “Cotton” Smith, and Robert Bryan, as well as Bernard Smith, one of the newest and youngest members of the Party. Upstairs were Roland Freeman, one of the first to join the Los Angeles branch, and Lloyd Mims, Will Stafford, Tommye Williams, and Pee Wee Johnson. Gil Parker, a foot soldier and stalwart of the Panthers’ Free Breakfast for Children Program, was stationed on the roof.
As I came inside, G told me he was glad to see me. His contact in the police department had told him that they were getting ready to move against us. He didn’t know when exactly, but he thought it was imminent. Like G, I knew it could be at any time, especially since the police had just ambushed the Illinois chapter a few days earlier, on December 4, killing two Black Panther Party leaders, Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, as they slept.
I said to him, “I just came from checking out the sewers again, and I found another route to access them from the headquarters.” I also reported that the pigs were out in full force on Hooper Avenue.
“Right on. That’s the kind of information we need. Especially now,” G replied. He then told me who else was in the house that night.
“Cool,” I said. “We have a serious crew with us tonight. If they come, we will be ready.”
As we discussed the recent activity of the police, G walked me over to the gun room to familiarize me with the weapons at the headquarters. “Clean this and hold on to it,” he said, handing me an automatic shotgun. He then disappeared into another part of the building. I took off my bush jacket, sat down in an old recliner in the corner of the gun room, and began to clean my weapon. Soon after I finished, I fell asleep with the gun across my lap.
The next thing I knew, I was yanked from my slumber by a thunder of activity and urgent voices. “Wake up! Wake up! They’re out there!” Cotton ran into the room shouting; he grabbed a Thompson machine gun off the wall and ran back out.
“Who’s out where?” I asked groggily.
It was around 5:00 AM. I shook off my sleep and stood up with the shotgun in my hands, walking quickly out of the gun room toward the front door. I had drifted off to sleep a mere two hours earlier, and now all hell was breaking loose.
Roland, Mims, Will, and Pee Wee had been asleep upstairs while Gil had pulled guard duty on the roof. But the cops had drawn down on Gil. They put a gun to his head and pressed it so hard that it left a dent. Then the pigs tied him up. Gil began to stomp his feet to signal that he had a problem. It was that commotion on the roof that Cotton had heard when he came to wake me up.
I was standing a couple of feet from the front door when suddenly—boom!—it blew open. I immediately jumped into a bunker we had built on the right side of the room as a uniformed blur of police officers stormed past me. Just then, Cotton opened with the machine gun, moving forward in the direction of the front door. Bam! Bam! Bam! I heard in rapid succession. My heart began to beat faster as the adrenaline raced through my body. The cops were stopped in their tracks; then they bunched up in the hallway trying to get back to the front door. As they moved back past my position, I let loose with the shotgun, catching the police in the side and front. Good thing for them they had on bulletproof vests. But now they had no choice but to withdraw. “They’re shooting back!” a couple of officers yelled as they retreated, running and limping back out the front door.
I knew at least one had gotten shot; a trail of blood ran the length of the hallway. I was still in the bunker when Paul Redd jumped in next to me, shotgun in hand. Bernard fired his shotgun directly over our heads, out toward the front. The sound was like a thunderclap directly on top of me. “What the hell are you doing? Go upstairs and find a window to shoot out of!” I yelled at him.
The smell of gunpowder began to fill up the front of the building. It was dark, but there was no way we were going to turn on any lights. Robert Bryan came running from the back and took up a position behind the sandbags in the front office. Paul ran over to the left side of the building and hopped into a bunker over there. Cotton had been moving toward the front and got in the right bunker as I checked to make sure the rear of the building was secure. There was a ton of dirt piled up against the back door; this was where we had been digging a tunnel to the sewers below. Much of the dirt had also been used to fill the sandbags throughout headquarters and to fill the walls just in case the cops fired on us.
We were pretty secure downstairs. The dirt piled against the rear door made it immoveable. Outside, the downstairs door that led to our second-floor office had been reinforced and was also secure. In the upstairs office we had gun slats in the walls; the only problem was that once they were opened, the light would give away our positions. But the upstairs was still protected. There was a skylight in the center of the room, and because the pigs were on the roof, they had to walk over the skylight. We hugged the walls so they couldn’t see us. The police had taken serious fire, so they hadn’t tried to come up the steps. We had shot the cops out of our headquarters through the front door, their point of attack. To our credit, we had repelled the first assault by the police and secured the building.
Knowing the LAPD would need time to regroup, I went to the gun room and got the ammunition we needed to defend ourselves. Paul, who had a shotgun and a .30 caliber carbine, was reloading his weapons in the left bunker. When I returned to the front, I reloaded my M-14. Cotton reloaded his .45 caliber in the right bunker. I also passed out pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails, which we used to keep the police from sneaking up on us. As soon as we would hear movement outside, we’d signal for the bombs. This cleared the sides of the building so the cops couldn’t rush through the front door again. A few of the pipe bombs landed on a car parked in front of the building, igniting it. The smoke from the fire, as well as kerosene and gasoline fumes, began to waft inside.
Soon, the police began throwing tear gas at the building. We had chicken wire around the upper windows, which blocked most of the incoming canisters, but the fumes still found their way inside, mixing with the cordite and gunpowder. My eyes began to tear up, but I didn’t dare wipe them; we knew that the way to deal with tear gas was to keep our hands away from our faces so that we wouldn’t accidentally rub the tear gas in our eyes and pores, where it would become more effective.
“Redd! You got some cigarettes?” I shouted. I was digging in my pockets looking for my pack of Kools, but they were nowhere to be found. Paul had taken some Lucky Strikes from his pocket and snapped off the filtered end, sticking them up his nose to keep the tear gas fumes out. He tossed me the pack; I did the same. I knew my other comrades would follow suit—our training required us to understand the dangers of tear gas.
Peaches and Tommye had been downstairs but needed to get to the communications room upstairs so they could notify other comrades, our families, and the community that the pigs had “vamped” on us. We knew the building like the backs of our hands. Every one of us was able to get through in the dark, but the pigs on the roof would be watching for movement of any kind. I escorted them both, covering them with the shotgun aimed at the ceiling, to the communications room where they manned the phones and called the local press and wire services. Though it seemed like an eternity, all of this activity had transpired thirty minutes after our initial contact with the police.
As we waited for the next round of attacks, we also waited for the cops to identify themselves as police and state that they had a search warrant or that we were under arrest. None of that happened—the pigs had just busted through our door. Basically, the police had launched a planned, unprovoked attack against us with the clear intention to kill. Again, we were able to survive because of our diligence and training. We had settled in to fight, and everybody handled their business. We fought back. No one thought of giving up.
Two hours passed. We were getting hit at various positions, and while the tear gas was having minimal success, the smoke was still drifting throughout the building. That’s when the police decided to blow the roof off our headquarters.
It seemed like everything around us exploded, literally and figuratively. I looked up through the hole where part of our roof used to be and saw, with a note of irony, that the orange and red violence of dawn had swept the early morning sky, while the Panther headquarters had been covered with violent smoke from some serious munitions of the LAPD. The explosive charges they planted made a deafening noise, practically destroying Paul’s eardrums. The hole in the roof was large, but the pigs didn’t get the effect they had hoped for; the gaping hole allowed the tear gas that had collected inside to escape. Meanwhile, wood, composition tar paper, and all manner of debris rained down on us.
“I’m hit, I’m hit!” I heard Roland yell.
Tommye and Peaches came running downstairs, sweat and soot dripping from their faces. Roland had been wounded earlier when the pigs first came in, and he got hurt again when the roof blew. He came downstairs bleeding from his side, but the first thing he said was that he needed a gun; he didn’t want the police running up on him with nothing in his hand. I went to the gun room to retrieve a .45 automatic pistol and gave it to him.
Snipers then became the central strategy of the police attack. The Panthers who remained upstairs were taking tremendous fire. “Duck, Wayne!” Pee Wee yelled out. “The bullets are as thick as donuts up here!”
He was right. I could hear the bullets whizzing by, hitting everything except my comrades. But even through the barrage of bullets, those still upstairs were able to hold on to one room for a good while.
During this time, I was holding fire with a sniper when he locked on my position. I could actually see the bullet coming at me in a straight line. I rolled out of the way, and it hit the concrete floor. Tommye, who was lying directly behind me, was hit twice, once in each thigh. Her blood squirted onto my ankle as the bullets tore into her flesh. My arm and chest suddenly felt as if they were burning, and that’s when I realized that some of the bullet fragments had hit me in my left arm. I also took some shotgun pellets in my chest. Then I felt something warm and wet trickle down the side of my face; I don’t know exactly when, but at some point a bullet had grazed my forehead.
Making matters worse, we had run out of .30 caliber ammo and shotgun shells. This was a serious blow because that’s what most of our weapons needed. But we still had the Thompson .45, which Cotton was holding, and Robert and I had the two M-14s.
The pigs finally cleared us out of the upstairs space, so now everyone was downstairs. We could hear them talking from outside the building. We surmised that their next step in forcing us out would be to use a tank or armored vehicle. Based on this assumption, we finally began to talk about surrendering.
“I been shooting at the police for four or five hours, and I ain’t about to go outside,” I said defiantly. Some of the other brothers were in agreement, especially Paul Redd, who was adamant about not giving up. But as we were discussing the options, Peaches spoke up.
“I’ll go out,” she reasoned. We all got quiet. Peaches repeated herself. We finally agreed.
We had to cover Peaches as she went out. Cotton was in one bunker, Paul was in the other, and I had the M-14. Shortly before she left, I went back upstairs with the aim of starting a fire in our information room. But then I thought better of it once I got up there, because to do that, pulling down file cabinets and all, I would expose myself to police fire. Peaches went out waving a white rag.
Shortly after her, we all walked out, one at a time, in silence.
Paul, Cotton, and I were the last ones to leave the building. Cops were everywhere—on rooftops, the sides of the building, everywhere. That’s when I clearly saw that most of these guys weren’t regular beat cops; they were the paramilitary Special Weapons and Tactics team, aka SWAT—the LAPD’s newest weapon. The eleven of us were staring at about three hundred of them, face-to-face. They were dressed in all black from head to toe—black jumpsuits and baseball caps. The LAPD had thrown their best at us, yet none of us had died.
They herded us around the corner, where they got us down on the ground and tied us up with rope—no handcuffs. We knew they were purposely treating us like animals.
Roland, who was wounded, was lying on the ground when a paramedic came up and put a blanket on his head. He started wiggling and hollering, “I’m not dead!” This made the blanket fall off so that everyone could see his condition. Despite the violent and difficult circumstances we found ourselves in, we all found humor in Roland’s actions.
The police put us all in squad cars to take us off to jail. Then my friend Erwin Washington, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, broke through the police line. “Wayne! Do you have a statement?” he yelled.
“Tell Moms I love her and tell my Sharon I love her too,” I said. I didn’t think I would ever see the light of day again.
The cops put me in a squad car and rolled all the windows down because I was saturated with tear gas fumes. One of the officers asked me how we could take all that gas, and I told him about the cigarette butts. He looked at me incredulously; then he told me that their next move, had we not surrendered, was to bring in a tank and blow us out. As we headed out, one of the cops noticed I was bleeding from my forehead and my chest, so they took me to a hospital. It was the same hospital Roland had been taken to.
They put me in a bed near Roland. The cops had his bed surrounded and were gawking at his wounds when one of them noticed an old gunshot wound in his foot. When Bunchy Carter had been killed, Roland had been on a mission with a shotgun stuck in his pant leg. The gun had gone off and struck him in the foot.
“He probably shot himself in the foot,” one of the cops quipped, just to make him mad.
Roland got pissed. It made me mad too. But there was nothing much I could do to come to the defense of my comrade. “Leave him alone!” I hollered in frustration.
That made the pigs turn and look at me. They came over to my hospital bed and grabbed my glucose bottles, rattling them to shut me up.
Later that night I was transfered to county jail. A nurse at the hospital, who was sympathetic to us, got word to my family that I was alive. I was only nineteen years old.