Shoot-Out on 28th Street

Last week's maelstrom of looting and arson swirled past Oakland, Calif., leaving its hate-filled ghettos almost unscathed. But Oakland's police were deeply embroiled in a bitter private race feud of their own. Ranged against them was a strutting band of hyper-militants styling themselves the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The Panthers, armed and angry, are defiantly demanding a facedown.

Routine police procedure provided the invitation to bloodshed. Two patrolmen investigating a parked car in a West Oakland slum were sent reeling by shotgun pellets. While they radioed for help, eight Negroes sprinted for a run-down frame house on 28th Street. For the next 90 minutes, they traded shots with police. A tear-gas cannister set a small fire. There was a cry of surrender from the dwelling, where walls and windows were splintered by more than 150 bullets. Out into a search light's glare emerged 17-year-old Bobby J. Hutton, the Panthers' treasurer. Retching from the gas, he was hunched over. The police believed he might be armed and said he disregarded a command to halt. The circle of law officers shot him dead.

Jarring Eloquence. Black Power spokesmen shrilled murder, claiming Hutton's hands were raised; seven other Panthers were taken prisoner without further shooting. One, wounded in the foot, was Author Eldridge Cleaver, 32, whose jarring eloquence bares the pent-up black rage that inspires the Panthers' snarling intransigence. "We shall have our manhood," warns Cleaver, the party's information minister, in his recently published book Soul on Ice (TIME, April 5). "We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it."

With a membership of fewer than 150 activists, Oakland's Panthers are far from such feats, although trouble often follows them. Armed Panthers invaded California's state assembly last spring to protest a tough new gun law; Panther Defense Minister Huey P. Newton, 26, is in jail awaiting trial for killing an Oakland policeman; Chairman Bobby Seale, 31, was convicted last week of illegal possession of weapons, and Cleaver, who has spent 12 of his adult years in prison for narcotics and assault convictions, was being held under guard in a hospital as a parole violator.

Yet the Panthers are undeterred. Cradling shotguns, they ride the streets behind patrol cars, stepping forward, law book in hand, to advise arrested Negroes of their rights. Hatred of law officers is an article of faith, and Oakland's 645 police, only 19 of them Negroes, reciprocate; in the lexicon of Panther "Black Papers," all Oakland cops are pigs.

As 2,000 Negroes and whites sympathetic to the Panthers' aims gathered for outdoor memorial services for Bobby Hutton, the two policemen wounded at the outset of the affray on 28th Street were in good condition and one had already been able to leave the hospital. San Diego's Panther Leader Kenny Denmon said the shooting had spurred his group to switch from political organizing to procuring guns. Speaking from a flatbed truck at the ceremony, Actor Marlon Brando, a Panther supporter, vowed to "do as much as I can to inform white people that time is running out." Specifically, Oakland's volatile Negro youths are shortening their tempers. On a wall of the house where Bobby Hutton died, one youngster had scrawled: "Is this justis?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.