Cops and Rebels: A Study of Provocation
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Description
I did not read the newspapers on Sunday, August 17, 1969. If I had, I would have found that two people I knew and had once represented in criminal misdemeanor cases, Alfred Cain, Jr., and Ricardo De Leon, had been arrested the day before while driving off the West Side Highway with two other people whom I did not know, Wilbert Thomas and Jerome West. They were said to be members of the Black Panther Party, and it was claimed that they had been caught just in time to prevent an act of political banditry against the New Dunston Hotel in Harlem. They were charged with extremely serious crimes, including attempted murder of a policeman. Even if I had read the newspapers that Sunday, I would not have had any idea that I would become involved in the case. I first began to think about writing this book in the midst of the criminal conspiracy case which came out of that arrest and is at the heart of this book. Because I had known two of the defendants before, my initial purpose was to trace the way these men came to political radicalism and then into conflict with the law. I knew I could do no more than sketch those origins for Ricardo De Leon, because I was only slightly acquainted with him; but the life of Alfred Cain, Jr., who was my client, I thought I could follow more closely. The first part of this book in concerned with the lives of Alfred and his brother Anthony, as young black men in Brooklyn. I had defended them in a criminal case, minor by the standards of the criminal courts but major in their lives. I was prepared to describe this, but I wanted to go to them and their family and find out what other influences had shaped them. In January 1971, after the trials of the conspiracy case were over, I drove to the Cain home in the Bushwick district of Brooklyn with a tape recorder to transcribe memories and opinions from the Cain brothers and their parents. I heard not only about the cases I had worked on, but about schools, the police, racism, and military service. The Cain brothers, like Ricardo De Leon and Jerome West, were not famous men. They were not national leader of the Black Panther Party, and the first part of the book thus traces the background and views of men in the street who adhered to the Black Panther Party. This is not to say that the people in this book are “ordinary,” as people; they are not. But it is important to know how rank-and-file Black Panthers came into the party, how they can by their convictions, and how they defend them. Other people who knew all the principals in the conspiracy case appear here as well: one of those interviewed was indicted separately from Cain, De Leon, and West, in a related case. While the narrative of any one of the principals, taken by itself, may not clearly reveal his character, all the people in the book reflect and comment upon one another. All the narratives taken together make a portrait, I believe, of the livers of young black radicals, and throw some light on what there was in the family, in the state, and in recent history which led them to their position. A tragic sense of life is possible for some of these men, as it is for every black man who chooses to resist his condition: they recognize the odds against them from the state, the risks they must take, and they take those risks because they see no alternative. While Part One is largely a personal and political record, through narrative, trial transcripts, and the ideas of contemporaries and predecessors, Part Two is in a more public voice, being an account, chiefly through trial records, of the conspiracy trials of Cain, De Leon, and West. At its simplest level, Part Two is a detailed study of the jury trial at work in a political case. The words of Part One will not be forgotten by the reader, however, just as the layers never forgot what they learned about the defendants and witnesses outside the courtroom; that knowledge will bring special light to some otherwise veiled points in the testimony at the trial. The conspiracy case was the crossroads between the livers of the three defendants and Wilbert Thomas, the black undercover policeman who joined the Black Panther Party in February 1969 and ultimately testified against the three after their arrest in August 1969. If this were a novel, it might trace the life of Wilbert Thomas in the same detail as that of the Cain brothers, showing how young black men of similar backgrounds (that much is clear from the little we do know) came to be on a collision course; but it is not a novel, and I can at best suggest the similarities and differences.
Publication Date
1972
Recommended Citation
Chevigny, Paul G., "Cops and Rebels: A Study of Provocation" (1972). Faculty Books & Edited Works. 100.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-books-edited-works/100
