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

1. Desire and the Panthers

1 desire and the Panthers When Donald Guyton crawled on his belly through the Piety Street house beneath the tear gas and bullet holes, he didn’t foresee the mild September evening thirty-three years hence when he would again come face to face with the people responsible for those bullets and that tear gas. Guyton, who was in charge of security for the fledgling Black Panther chapter in New Orleans in 1970, was trying to assess the carnage . The shooting had stopped, and his fellow Panther Charles Scott had instructed Guyton to go room to room and shout back who was injured and who was dead. Guyton dreaded what he might find in the next room. But he had come back from Vietnam skilled as a warrior. He was totally focused on his assignment. The shootout on Piety Street between the Black Panthers and the New Orleans police was actually a thirty-minute war. It occurred on September 15, 1970, the seventh anniversary of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Church in Birmingham that killed four little black girls. There was a growing feeling among young black men and women that the dominant strain of pacifism in the civil rights movement was not an effective strategy against the terrorism of white supremacy. The Panthers offered Guyton, and many like him, a real alternative. Years later, Guyton would become a Muslim and change his name to Malik Rahim. From his perspective in 2003, he would be able to connect Birmingham, Piety, Vietnam, and many other events and ponder an overarching explanation for them all. But on that September day in 1970, all he could do was defend, count, and report. His mind didn’t 3 wander from the immediate task, And yet, even on his belly, as he wiped the sweat from his brow with a gritty forearm, he sensed the presence of four little guardian angels, the children murdered that day seven years ago in Birmingham. The tensions leading to the shootout on Piety Street had been building for months. During the summer before it happened, Donald and his wife Barbara went to their friend Puchimo’s house every day for Panther meetings. Those were the early days of the party in New Orleans, and Puchimo’s house was one of the gathering places. Donald, the oldest of the prospective Panthers, was only twenty-two. Even though he had been halfway around the world, his encounter with the Panthers in his hometown awakened him to new ideas and new possibilities . Thirty-three years later he would reflect, “It was the first time I ever talked to a brother who had no fear,”1 That brother was nineteen-year-old Steve Green, the founder of the Louisiana chapter of the Black Panther Party, who had come to New Orleans in May from Compton, California. When Donald and Barbara wanted to join the party, Steve had tried to discourage them. They had two children, and Panthers had to be ready on a daily basis to put their lives on the line for their principles. “Too dangerous,” Steve had told them. But Donald and Barbara prevailed, and by the fall of 1970 they were members of the National Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF), an organizing bureau for the Black Panther Party. Headquartered on Piety Street, the Panthers were just outside of the largest, poorest housing development in New Orleans. The twenty-three-million-dollar project had opened to tenants on May 21, 1956, with 388 four-bedroom apartments and 968 threebedroom apartments. It was built for large, poor black families. The project, located on the outskirts of New Orleans in a cypress swamp and dumping ground, was named Desire. The Times-Picayune, one of New Orleans’ daily newspapers, would later call it a “disaster from its inception . . . a mind-numbing series of careless decisions that amounted to a blueprint for disaster.”2 It wasn’t designed for people to live in; it was designed, rather, to warehouse the city’s poorest residents , according to Ed Arceneaux, a former Desire manager and housdeSire And the PAntherS 4 ing management specialist with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. Developers had been under orders to build the project to minimum standards at minimum cost. Twice the size of its neighboring project, Florida, which was built for white tenants, Desire was made up of a series of two-story, bricked...