Black Panther Party

Thirty-four years after the slaying of this city's first Japanese American police officer, officials said Tuesday that they had arrested a suspect -- a former low-level associate of the Black Panthers who, authorities allege, participated in the shooting of Ronald T. Tsukamoto as part of a wave of anti-police violence. Don Juan Warren Graphenreed, 54, was being held in a jail cell inside the Ronald Tsukamoto Public Safety Building -- named after his alleged victim.

During the summer of 1968, two white, middle-aged photographers threw themselves into the thick of the Black Panther storm. Just months earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Robert Kennedy, too, had been killed. The Democratic Convention in Chicago was racked with riots. The Vietnam War raged. And in Oakland, the Black Panthers preached revolution, clashed with the police and tried to mobilize their community while fending off infiltration by the FBI.

Just days after I delivered a paper on the mass media's distortion of the Black Panther Party, I read Kate Coleman's effort to discredit a conference on the "Black Panther Party in Historical Perspective" at Wheelock College in Boston ("Just a Pack of Predators," Opinion, June 22). Coleman's piece is a transparent effort to sustain a media distortion that has been around for decades. Namely, that the Panthers were a "bunch of thugs." Coleman reduces the nationwide Black Panther Party to the actions of Huey Newton and members of his Oakland coterie who engaged in criminal and violent conduct well after the national Panthers went into decline.

Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver may be dead, but the Black Panthers have never really gone away. This bunch of thugs continues to capture the imagination of American intellectuals. In the last couple of weeks, the group has been celebrated at a Wheelock College conference titled "The Black Panther Party in Historical Perspective" and on a National Public Radio program that considered the group's place in American life.

Much has changed in the 36 years since the Black Panther Party for Self Defense was founded here and rose to national prominence. The Oakland traffic cop who came to the front door on a recent afternoon just wanted to shake the hand of Panther co-founder Bobby Seale, who recently moved back to his hometown. Forget about the parking ticket he held in one hand. This was all "Yes, sir!" and "Glad to meet you, Mr. Seale."

A prosecutor in opening arguments charged Tuesday that Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, who was known in the turbulent 1960s as H. Rap Brown, deliberately stood over a sheriff's deputy he had just shot and fired three more bullets into the dying man's body. The bullets, prosecutor Kellie Stevens told the jury in Atlanta at the start of Al-Amin's murder trial, were fired into the deputy's groin to show that the shooting was intentional.

A coffin bearing black militant Khallid Abdul Muhammad was carried through the streets of Harlem on Saturday after a funeral service that mingled warm memories and harsh rhetoric. "Long live Khallid Muhammad! Long live Khallid Muhammad!" scores of mourners shouted as they marched up Malcolm X Boulevard behind black-clad pallbearers from Muhammad's New Black Panther Party.

An air hijacking fugitive who was returned to the United States last month has told the FBI that while living in Algeria in the early 1970s, he saw Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver murder a fellow party member he suspected of having an affair with his wife. The allegations are contained in documents filed Friday in Los Angeles federal court, where Byron Vaughn Booth, 56, faces charges of air piracy and kidnapping.

Gene McKinney, 58, a leading fund-raiser for the Black Panther Party. McKinney became a key figure in the murder trial of Panther co-founder Huey Newton when he refused to testify and served time in jail for contempt of court. Born in Texas and reared in Oakland, McKinney met Newton at a party held Oct. 28, 1967, to raise money for Panther co-founder Bobby Seale's legal defense.