On the north side was the African American ghetto.  By and large the job opportunities for Blacks were confined to the tanneries, foundries, assembly lines, and packing houses.  Police patrols in the inner city were aggressive.  Segregation was intense.  There was nowhere for a rapidly growing population to expand.  We were 2 years out from the 1967 riot that resulted in 1700 arrests.

Only a tiny fraction of the police force was African American.  Fr. Groppi and the NAACP Youth Council had been marching across the viaduct to the South Side, demanding open housing.  Nonviolence was giving way to rage as the dominant emotion in the face of indignity and injustice.

I tried the approach that we had used in Waukegan – getting to know white youth and agitating against the draft.  We admired the newspaper that Mike James and his crew were hawking in Chicago.  Rising Up Angry printed stories and photos that dignified and championed the kids in the neighborhoods.  We called our newspaper the “Red Star Express”.  I later realized that the name was way too evocative of left wing propaganda.  We were so inexperienced at production that we cut headline fonts out of regular papers and magazines to paste in our layout – like a ransom note.  The articles were invariably incitements to greasers and freaks to join in militant opposition to war and authority.

It wasn’t long before the Black Panthers arrived on the scene in Milwaukee.   We had beginning imaginations that revolution was imminent when we were in large marches in Madison.  Now we had a dramatic source for more fantasy.  The first time I went to the Panther office on 1^st Street, there were all these guys with berets, black leather jackets, shotguns, and quotations from Chairman Mao.   The Milwaukee chapter was embracing the militancy that jumped off the pages of their national newspaper.  Bold headlines proclaimed, “We have the right to armed self-defense of our communities against racist pigs.”  Many of the militants were Vietnam vets.  The local economy was surging, yet life in the inner city was without much hope.

The images and actions of the Black Panthers provoked a swift and thorough wave of repression against the party across the country.  Chicago leader, Fred Hampton, was murdered in his bed.  In Milwaukee, three party members were arrested for attempted murder of a police officer.  Our little newspaper took up their cause and we shifted away from our work among white youth to concentrate on the campaign to “Free the Three”.   The facts were always murky.  The Black community didn’t seem able to rally strongly behind them.  Two of them, Jesse White and Booker Collins, were sentenced to 30 years.  The third, Earl Leverette, jumped bail and received a sentence of 10 years much later.  In 1971, I found myself in the same penitentiary as Jesse and Booker.  But I rarely saw them because I was in a different cell hall.

So intense was the repression that the local branch of the Panthers dissolved.  I remember the earliest group of members and their militant image.  The leader was a guy named Dakin Gentry — Mao’s little red book in one hand and a bottle of Pink Pussy Cat in the other.  The group was vulnerable to infiltration by informants and provocateurs.  Most of those active with the Panthers were thoughtful, stable, and caring people.

Just a few weeks ago I got the answer to a question that had occurred many times over the years, “Whatever happened to Lovetta X?”  She had been a sweet and stern liaison with us white radicals.  Her obituary praised her life as a doctor caring for under served Black communities in Mississippi.

There was a huge re-evaluation within the Panther Party and a split between the Eldridge Cleaver faction and the Bobby Seale faction.  The former advocated urban guerilla activity.  The later faction promoted service projects in the Black community.  Successor organizations in several cities made great progress implementing Free Breakfast and Free Clinic programs.

In July of 1969, some of us traveled to Oakland to attend a conference sponsored by the Black Panther Party.  The theme was United Front against Fascism.  I remember very little about the sessions.  I probably wished for more of that crazy militancy.  And I wasn’t so sure that fascism was upon us.  The thrust of the conference was to moderate their image as gun-wielding militants.

I do remember San Francisco.  I almost felt like putting a flower in my hair.  I was pretty impressed with a very busy movement office in Berkeley and Golden Gate Park.   I visited my sister, Nora, who was taking a course in photography at San Francisco State that summer.  I never got a chance to get amorous with a very fetching young woman, who had traveled there with me.

To get back to Milwaukee, Steve Welch and I had to hitchhike.  There was one corner on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley where youth with patched jeans and beads around their necks would line up for rides.  Our first ride took us over the mountains as far as Reno.  Then, facing the prospect of getting stranded in the desert sun, we started looking for a hardware store.  An African American guy in a muscle car stopped and asked us where we were going.  “To get some hats and a canteen,” I said.   He replied, “Oh, I’m going to Chicago.”  What luck!