NOTABLE DEATHS ELSEWHERE Lee Perry, 78
Black Panther Party member
Lee Berry, a member of the Black Panther Party who was indicted in the largest case brought against that militant group, and whose personal plight helped inspire one of the most infamous New York City social gatherings, a fundraising party for the Panthers at the home of Leonard Bernstein that was mercilessly satirized by writer Tom Wolfe, died March 7 in a hospital near his home in Laurel. He was 78.
The cause was anoxic brain injury, his daughter Afeni Berry said.
Berry was one of the Panther 21 — 19 men and two women who were charged in April 1969 with plotting to blow up midtown Manhattan department stores, police stations and the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx.
The case collapsed spectacularly two years later with the acquittal on all charges of the 13 defendants who were brought to trial. The district attorney’s office had based its case on the testimony of undercover police informants, including a detective who had opened the Harlem branch of the Black Panthers in 1968.
Berry’s case was severed from that of the other defendants because he was in Bellevue Hospital when the trial began in February 1970.
It was his personal travail that prompted Felicia Bernstein, the wife of the New York Philharmonic maestro, to invite 90 guests to the couple’s Park Avenue apartment on Jan. 14, 1970, to raise money for the Panther 21 legal defense fund. Wolfe, a luminary of what was being called the New Journalism, wrote his takedown of the high-low soiree in New York magazine under the headline “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.”
He devoted many words to the canapés (“little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts”) passed by liveried waiters to Panthers in Afros, dark glasses and black leather coats, all mingling with director Otto Preminger, band leader Peter Duchin, socialite Cynthia Phipps and other A-list liberals in the Bernstein home, a 13-room penthouse duplex.
But the party might never have happened if Felicia Bernstein had not been at an earlier Panther fundraiser the week before, at the home of director Sidney Lumet, where Berry’s wife, Marva Berry, spoke about her husband’s ordeal behind bars.
An Army veteran, Berry, then 24, was being treated for epileptic seizures at a Veterans Administration Hospital when he was indicted. After his mother told him that police were looking for him, he called to tell them where to find him. Officers rousted him from his hospital bed in handcuffs and took him to the Manhattan Detention Complex, known as the Tombs, according to the account Marva Berry gave at the Lumet home.
“It was this statement, which went on to allege that her husband was beaten in the Tombs, denied proper medication and held for seven months before being transferred to Bellevue, that prompted Mrs. Bernstein to consult with some civil rights lawyers and then invite friends in to hear more about the case,” wrote Charlotte Curtis, a society reporter for The New York Times, who covered the Bernsteins’ party.
In a federal lawsuit over the Panthers’ pretrial confinement, defense lawyers claimed that Lee Berry was beaten by a jail guard for refusing to stand for a prisoner count and was denied treatment for his epilepsy.
The Department of
Correction denied the accusations.
Lee Berry was transferred from the Tombs to Bellevue Hospital in November 1969. After a hearing in the hospital, his bail was reduced from $100,000 to $15,000 in April 1970, and he soon walked free.
The charges against him were eventually dropped.
Leo Stanley Berry was born on Jan. 16, 1946, in Brooklyn to Leo Berry, who had moved north from Georgia as part of the Great Migration of African Americans seeking a better life, and Elizabeth (Rizer) Berry, who had moved from Florida.
His father left the family when Lee was 6. He was raised in the Cypress Hills Housing Project in the East New York neighborhood and attended Lane High School.
Berry joined the Army in 1964 and spent two years in Germany before being medically discharged because of a seizure disorder, according to his family. He married and had a daughter, but the couple soon separated and later divorced.
Berry met Marva Kirton in Brooklyn in 1968, just before the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. After King’s murder, founders of the Black Panthers from the West Coast visited the campus of Long Island University to organize a New York Panther branch. Berry was an early recruit. (Another early member was Afeni Shakur, one of the two women indicted with the Panther 21; she was the future mother of rap star Tupac Shakur.)
Before joining the Panthers, Berry had demonstrated in support of Black local control of public schools in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district in Brooklyn, after administrators there fired 12 Jewish teachers, triggering a citywide teachers strike.