Showdown in Desire: The Black Panthers Take a Stand in New Orleans

9. The Shootout

9 the Shootout After the undercover cops escaped and after several people in Desire were wounded by snipers during the night, after the white couple and attorneys Ernest Jones and Robert Glass had gone home, there was a lull in the shooting for several hours. But in the morning, the police plan started to roll. The police plan was partly a response to Broussard’s legal right to evict the Panthers from his private property, as Landrieu explained. But according to Larry Preston Williams, it had more to do with surveillance information that two undercover cops were soon to be outed. Giarrusso apparently wanted to protect them in the conflict that he knew would ensue. Malik Rahim and Williams described the shootout from two completely different points of view, and yet their stories do not conflict factually. Both were amazed at the absence of bloodshed. Was what kept both police and Panthers alive the prayer cloth, blank bullets, Giarrusso’s control, or dumb luck? Who knows. Another mystery was Steve Green’s role in the New Orleans Panther chapter. Geronimo ji Jaga Pratt, a Louisiana native and national Panther leader, told me that he sent Steve to New Orleans. Williams, however, thinks that Green was sent by the FBI. In any case, Green left New Orleans before the shootout, according to Malik and Green himself , yet the New York Times reported him injured in the shootout and gave details of his injury. Where did that story come from and why? 69 Here is how the drama unfolded: “The scene of the Central Lockup as police geared up for the raid was grim,” reported the Times-Picayune on September 15, 1970. Also in that article: “’It’s a job,’ a black policeman said simply. ‘It has to be done by somebody.’” A convoy of police buses, police cruisers, and newsmen in private cars made its way through the downtown morning rush-hour traffic and onto Interstate 10. The first bus pulled out of police headquarters at 8:04 a.m., reaching Desire shortly after 8:30, just as the winds from the nearby tropical storm Felice churned up a black cover of clouds that dumped a downpour of rain on the city. Several hundred New Orleans policemen and twenty or thirty state policemen descended on Panther headquarters, a large old frame building decorated with posters of Panther heroes.1 By 8:45 a.m., the battle was on. “My god, it sounds like a war,” one policeman exclaimed as automatic rifle and machine gun fire punctuated the early morning stillness.2 Malik Rahim told the story of the shootout on Piety Street in this way: “There were twelve of us in the party office at the time, and almost a hundred police with everything from a .50-caliber machine gun and armored cars down to their revolvers. We had about nine shotguns and a couple of handguns, .357 revolvers. But everything we had was legally purchased, and it was registered to our office. Our position was that African Americans should no longer be lynched or beaten or attacked and have their rights taken away without any form of resistance. We believed that you had a right to defend yourself. You had a right to defend your community.You had a right to defend your family. And you had the right to defend your honor as a human being.”3 Malik continued to tell the story as if he were watching a movie in his head: “The police came in busloads. They got in their positions and just started shooting. They shot up in the office maybe twenty minutes straight. It seemed like it was all day. I said, ‘Boy, they gonna kill us.’ The firing was coming in so fast we literally had to pour water on the walls because you could see the sheet rock expanding from the heat till you could touch it and it would just pop. The tear gas came in constantly as fast as we could throw it out. We put bread in the Shootout 70 wet towels. The yeast in the bread helped with the tear gas. The front door weighed about three hundred pounds.” It was constructed from drain covers scavenged from the nonfunctional Desire sewer system. Among the revolutionaries and defenders of the people was a fourteenyear -old in the Piety house when the...