Lee Berry, a Black Panther indicted in alleged terrorist plot; at 78
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 a fund-raising party for the Panthers at the home of Leonard Bernstein that was satirized by writer Tom Wolfe, died March 7 in a hospital near his home in Laurel, Md. He was 78.
The cause was anoxic brain injury, his daughter Afeni Berry said.
Mr. 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.
Mr. 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, 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, satirized it in New York magazine under the headline “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.”
But the party might never have happened if Felicia Bernstein had not been at an earlier Panther fund-raiser the week before, at the home of director Sidney Lumet, where Mr. Berry’s wife, Marva Berry, spoke about her husband’s ordeal behind bars.
An Army veteran, Mr. 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 and Elizabeth (Rizer) Berry. His father left the family when Lee was 6.
Mr. 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.
Mr. 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. Mr. Berry was an early recruit.
“That was a pivotal moment when people were feeling a very strong loss of hope,” Marva Berry, who became a public school teacher in New York and Washington, recalled in a recent interview. “Lee and a lot of people after Dr. King was killed, they had had enough.”
Before joining the Panthers, Mr. Berry had demonstrated in support of Black local control of public schools in the Ocean HillBrownsville district in Brooklyn, after administrators there fired 12 Jewish teachers, triggering a citywide teachers strike.
In addition to his daughter Afeni, Mr. Berry leaves six other children, Nicole Hall, Jemyl Lindsay and Safonia, Shaka, Chad, and Niger Berry; seven grandchildren; one great-grandchild; and a brother, Tom.