Books in Brief: Agony in New Haven: The Trial of Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins, and the Black Panther Party

Agony in New Haven: The Trial of Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins, and the Black Panther Party, by Donald Freed (Simon & Schuster, 347 pp., $8.95).

“The newspapers live only in the present—like wild beasts.” Dig? Ergo, Prof. Freed rushes to the rescue with his Panther Agonistes. Terribly impressed by that “Third World prophet and depth psychologist, Frantz Fanon,” Mr. Freed is wholly, albeit a Caucasian, in the Panthers’ den. Suffer along with “Bobby Seale, [who] bristles with energy—vital, tall, and lean … he is the risen phoenix from the ashes of Malcolm X … an artist of metempsychosis . . . the same age as Bartolomeo Vanzetti when he stood trial.” Watch the “vulgar elegance” of Charles Garry, “the Lenin of the courtroom,” confronting the pigs. Note (of the veniremen) “the striking loneliness of the middle-aged American working class. The isolation and sadness of these Great Depression survivors who live walled in by their white skin. These aging bundles of secrets at bay in the witness box.” Relive history with our author as he remembers LBJ and Hubert Humphrey “smother[ing] the nonviolent civil-rights movement in Atlantic City in 1964.” Commune with the Rev. William Sloane Coffin as he proclaims that it was “legally right and morally wrong to bring the Panthers to trial.” Wallow in Freed’s depth psychology: “The libido of the conspiracy scenario is ‘oral sadistic.’ Under pressure the state acts out the fantasy and stimulates it in the citizen—of an infant fixated in what Melanie Klein called the ‘paranoid position.’ . . . The dynamics are mindless and visceral. The atavism under the skin of the courtroom demands blood as the price of a return to the primal unity of the homogeneous body politic. Cannibalism begins. The insatiable old order now begins to eat its children.” Coo along with Freed at “powerfully built and wonderfully handsome” Huey (né Free) Newton. Agonize with Yale’s Kingman Brewster, who knew that a Negro revolutionary could not get a fair trial anywhere in the U.S. And don’t chide President Brewster: He was quite right, after all: Bobby and Ericka went free and are stalking the streets right now.

DB

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D. J. C. Brudnoy

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Agony in New Haven: The Trial of Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins, and the Black Panther Party, by Donald Freed (Simon & Schuster, 347 pp., $8.95).

“The newspapers live only in the present—like wild beasts.” Dig? Ergo, Prof. Freed rushes to the rescue with his Panther Agonistes. Terribly impressed by that “Third World prophet and depth psychologist, Frantz Fanon,” Mr. Freed is wholly, albeit a Caucasian, in the Panthers’ den. Suffer along with “Bobby Seale, [who] bristles with energy—vital, tall, and lean … he is the risen phoenix from the ashes of Malcolm X … an artist of metempsychosis . . . the same age as Bartolomeo Vanzetti when he stood trial.” Watch the “vulgar elegance” of Charles Garry, “the Lenin of the courtroom,” confronting the pigs. Note (of the veniremen) “the striking loneliness of the middle-aged American working class. The isolation and sadness of these Great Depression survivors who live walled in by their white skin. These aging bundles of secrets at bay in the witness box.” Relive history with our author as he remembers LBJ and Hubert Humphrey “smother[ing] the nonviolent civil-rights movement in Atlantic City in 1964.” Commune with the Rev. William Sloane Coffin as he proclaims that it was “legally right and morally wrong to bring the Panthers to trial.” Wallow in Freed’s depth psychology: “The libido of the conspiracy scenario is ‘oral sadistic.’ Under pressure the state acts out the fantasy and stimulates it in the citizen—of an infant fixated in what Melanie Klein called the ‘paranoid position.’ . . . The dynamics are mindless and visceral. The atavism under the skin of the courtroom demands blood as the price of a return to the primal unity of the homogeneous body politic. Cannibalism begins. The insatiable old order now begins to eat its children.” Coo along with Freed at “powerfully built and wonderfully handsome” Huey (né Free) Newton. Agonize with Yale’s Kingman Brewster, who knew that a Negro revolutionary could not get a fair trial anywhere in the U.S. And don’t chide President Brewster: He was quite right, after all: Bobby and Ericka went free and are stalking the streets right now.