I’m proud to say that Kate Coleman is a friend of mine. She is also a fearless, indefatigable Berkeley-based journalist who resisted fashions for more than 30 years while writing penetrating and courageous reports on the Black Panther Party, both when it was lionized (well, pantherized) and when it was demonized. Now she’s done it again, for The New Republic, on Elmer (“Geronimo”) Pratt, who died earlier this month in Tanzania, where he went after serving 27 years in prison for the Santa Monica murder of a woman named Caroline Olsen, the first eight of those years in solitary. He was, she writes, “denied parole 16 times before his sentence was vacated and he was freed.” Some of this was reported in obits, but the worst of it was missing.
Here’s her nut graf about how it happened that Pratt was denied the alibi he had earned because of the vileness of the sometimes still lionized Huey Newton, brutal eminence of the Party:
While Pratt was a victim of the government’s attempt to destroy the Panthers, he was also a victim of a schism within the Black Panther Party. Panther leader Huey Newton ordered members not to corroborate Pratt’s alibi that he was in Oakland meeting with Panther Central Committee members at the time the murder took place. The refusal of Panther members to back up Pratt’s story—which subsequently was confirmed—undermined his own alibi and helped to convict him.
It’s worth reading those sentences again. And this about Black Panther leaders Bobby Seale and David Hilliard, who told one of Pratt’s lawyers
that Pratt was [in Oakland at the time of the murder], but they admitted that they couldn’t testify earlier because Newton had dictated that Panthers “should not associate or help Geronimo Pratt,” or they would be expelled.
The prosecution was so eager to convict Pratt, they
failed to inform the jury that Kenneth Olsen [the murdered woman's husband] had originally identified as his assailant someone whom he described as tall with Negroid features. Pratt was short, and light-skinned. His nickname—Geronimo—had as much to do with his Native-American color and features as it did with his ferocity as a soldier and fighter.
And they covered up other exculpatory evidence:
Retired FBI agent Wesley Swearingen wrote a book about the FBI’s targeting the Panthers and said he had seen evidence of COINTELPRO wiretaps that backed Pratt’s presence in Oakland during the murder, but that later those files had disappeared. Oakland police had wiretaps on various Oakland Panther haunts, but when Pratt’s attorneys tried to subpoena them, according to Stuart Hanlon, Pratt’s long-time attorney, Oakland police claimed the taps had been destroyed.
The Panthers get resurrected once every few years, usually by right-wingers eager for monsters to destroy, sometimes by misguided hero worshippers, but unfortunately, the best writing about them doesn’t see much daylight. Kate’s articles, which deserve book-length gathering, are indispensable. So is the 2006 book by the journalist Paul Bass and the political scientist Douglas Rae, Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a Killer.
From this terrible story there’s much to be learned, all of it grievous. In a time when other violent political criminals are being prosecuted with great vigor, it’s worth remembering where go-for-broke, law-busting prosecution can lead when it sneers at the rule of law as something for more placid times.
