Militant days

In 1970, Don Cox, the founder of the Black Panther party’s San Francisco office, stepped off a plane in Algeria and headed for a meeting with Eldridge Cleaver, a fellow Panther who’d been living in exile since a 1968 shootout with Oakland police. Far from home, Cox was promptly mistaken for H. Rap Brown, a higher-profile Panther who’d been on the run. Reporters were ready to jump on the story, but their excitement cooled “when they learned it was only me, the party’s field marshal,” Cox would recall years later. “I wasn’t good copy.”

Read his life story and you’ll disagree.

“Just Another N—” is a vivid self-portrait of a militant activist and the Bay Area-based group he helped build — and eventually quit in disgust. Cox’s memoir follows the Panthers through their most intense period of action and internecine strife, the half-decade ending in 1972. It’s a book of edgy, often disturbing episodes.

Cox is candid throughout. Many days, he reminds us, Panthers distributed free breakfasts to schoolchildren and gathered clothes for the poor. Other times, in their battles with FBI surveillance teams and sometimes brutal police, they committed terrible acts of violence. It’s possible to appreciate this book’s merits and be repelled by a lot of the events described therein. This is an important chapter of recent American history, told by a man who has no reason to be evasive — Cox died in France in 2011.

Written in the 1980s and shepherded to publication by My Life in the Black Panther Party his daughter Kimberly Cox Marshall and Berkeley publisher Heyday, “Just Another N—” begins with the author’s earliest days. Cox, the grandson of a former slave, grows up poor in segregated Missouri. He moves to California as a teen, and his political awakening is gradual — he enrolls in college, reads W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1963, when KKK members kill four black girls in a Birmingham, Ala., church bombing, the 27-year-old San Franciscan joins the Congress of Racial Equality. But Cox is soon frustrated with the “token results” in the campaign for integration. When Malcolm X is assassinated in 1965, he quits CORE.

Two years later, Cox spots newspaper coverage of the Black Panthers, beret-wearing African Americans who openly carry guns to a Sacramento demonstration. He joins the nascent group, and as millions across the country protest the Vietnam War and racial injustice, Cox and some allies decide to answer the police killing of a black teen in San Francisco. One night, from many yards away, he fires a rifle at an unsuspecting officer.

“It was not until I woke up the next morning and turned on the news that I learned I had hit the target,” he writes. “The officer’s leg was seriously damaged. … Finally, I had returned a blow.” Later, after a bloody altercation between San Francisco police and Panther co-founder Huey Newton, Cox and others “attack the police station on Hunters Point,” exchanging gunfire with officers.

Installed as the Panther’s “field marshal,” Cox drives to Reno to buy semiautomatic pistols in bulk and, as the San Francisco chapter’s founder, rents a Page Street apartment that sleeps dozens of members. By 1970, he’s advising Panther chapters in New York and soliciting donations from rich lefties. When Tom Wolfe writes “Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” his sardonic report on a Panther dinner fundraiser at Leonard Bernstein’s apartment, Cox is depicted as a magnetic B.S. artist. To Cox, the late writer was “a leech.”

Cox’s narrative hurtles from one precarious episode to another. He works on an ultimately unrealized plan to break Newton out of jail, and when he learns that he’s facing conspiracy charges linked to a Baltimore killing — he denies the allegations — Cox flees to North Africa. In time, he grows disillusioned with the deadly turf wars between Panther leaders. He sees Cleaver turn paranoid, hears that Newton is “ordering the murder of our brothers and sisters.” Cox would quit the Panthers in 1972 and spend his final decades abroad.

In an introspective yet defiant afterword, Cox regrets the way some male Panthers treated women — “if a sister didn’t give in to the sexual demands of a brother, she was considered counterrevolutionary” — and reiterates his eye-for-an-eye beliefs. When someone “kills a black person, if the consequence was that the specific murderer were then himself executed, that would bring about a decrease in the terrorism and violence” against African Americans.

In this complex, provocative autobiography, the author helps people in need — and on more than one occasion, opens fire on those he considers threats. It’s easy — yet necessary — to condemn his violent acts. But we should also acknowledge that Cox has left a gripping record of a fraught era, one that shook Northern California and communities across the country.

Kevin Canfield has written for Bookforum, Film Comment and other publications. Email: books@sfchronicle.com We recommend these recently reviewed titles: In Wang’s essay collection, you glimpse the kind of clarity and care that marked two literary classics about depression, William Styron’s “Darkness Visible” and Andrew Solomon’s “The Noonday Demon.” Hers is a welcome addition to a sparse literature.