D.L. Cox, a Leader of Radicals During 1960s, Dies at 74
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/us/14cox.html
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: March 13, 2011
Donald L. Cox, who was at the center of black radical politics as a
member of the Black Panther Party high command and who earned a
moment of celebrity in 1970 when he spoke at the Leonard Bernstein
fund-raising party in Manhattan made notorious by the writer Tom
Wolfe, died on Feb. 19 at his home in Camps-sur-l'Agly, France. He was 74.
His wife, Barbara Cox Easley, did not specify a cause. He had been
living abroad since the early 1970s, when he fled the country after
being implicated in a Baltimore murder.
Known as D. C., Mr. Cox held the title of field marshal with the
Panthers, the socialist movement founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby
Seale in Oakland, Calif., in 1966. Mr. Cox was living in San
Francisco at the time and became part of a group known as the central
committee, which included Mr. Newton, Mr. Seale, Eldridge Cleaver and
a handful of others.
Mr. Cox's job was to travel the country to establish and supervise
branch offices. But he was also the Panthers' arms expert writing
about the proper use of guns in The Black Panther, the party
newspaper, teaching party members to shoot and even procuring guns.
The Panthers embraced the use of guns in defense of what they saw as
black liberation from a white racist establishment; Mr. Cox liked to
say he was in charge of the Panther military.
He also served the Panthers as a spokesman, and in January 1970 he
appeared with a handful of Panthers and some 80 other guests at the
Bernstein apartment on Park Avenue. The occasion was a fund-raiser
for the legal defense of the New York Panther 21 19 men and 2 women
who had been indicted on charges of plotting to kill police officers
and blow up several sites, including Midtown stores, police precinct
houses and the New York Botanical Garden.
"Some people think that we are racist, because the news media find it
useful to create that impression in order to support the power
structure," Mr. Cox told Mr. Bernstein's guests. "They like for the
Black Panther Party to be made to look like a racist organization,
because that camouflages the true class nature of the struggle."
The fund-raiser was notable for its clash of cultures. As Charlotte
Curtis of The New York Times reported, "There they were, the Black
Panthers from the ghetto and the black and white liberals from the
middle, upper-middle and upper classes studying one another
cautiously over the expensive furnishings, the elaborate flower
arrangements, the cocktails and the silver trays of canapés."
Among the conversations Ms. Curtis noted was an exchange between Mr.
Bernstein and Mr. Cox.
Mr. Bernstein: "Now about your goals. I'm not sure I understand how
you're going to achieve them. I mean, what are your tactics?"
Mr. Cox: "If business won't give us full employment, then we must
take the means of production and put them in the hands of the people."
Mr. Bernstein: "I dig absolutely."
The event raised nearly $10,000, Ms. Curtis reported. In May 1971 all
21 of the accused Panthers were acquitted. In June 1970 Mr. Wolfe's
article, "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's," was published in New
York magazine. A skewering of Mr. Bernstein and his guests, it
advanced Mr. Wolfe's career as a leading proponent of the so-called
new journalism. But it was reviled by Mr. Cox. The guests that night,
he told Roz Payne, who documented the history of the Panthers in a
series of films, "were really a concerned bunch of people."
He added that "it was those media freaks and that bloodsucking Tom
Wolfe" who exploited the cause of black liberation to make money from
it and "to be part of the machinery that tried to ridiculize it."
Donald Lee Cox was born on April 16, 1936, in Appleton, in west
central Missouri, where he grew up hunting small game and reading
everything he could find about nature and the outdoors.
"I read all the books in the library about snakes," he told Ms. Payne
for her film series. (That series has been released on DVD under the
title taken from the Panther party platform: "What We Want, What We Believe.")
He moved to San Francisco at 17, by his own account an ignorant
country boy who was politically naïve until he joined the Panthers.
But as he explained in interviews, anger had been building up in him
over attacks on black people, like the bombing of the 16th Street
Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, which killed four black
girls, and, closer to home, the shooting of an unarmed black teenager
by policemen that set off a riot in the Hunters Point neighborhood of
San Francisco in 1966.
"It was a steady accumulation of pressure, like a volcano," he said.
Shortly after the Bernstein dinner, Mr. Cox was charged as a
conspirator in the July 1969 murder of Eugene Anderson, a Panther who
had been a police informer in Baltimore. Mr. Cox said he had had
nothing to do with the killing. One of several co-defendants was
convicted of the crime.
After a warrant was issued for his arrest, Mr. Cox left the country,
first living in Algeria and then in France. His first marriage, in
San Francisco, ended in divorce. He met Ms. Easley, who lives in
Philadelphia, in the 1960s, and though they had not lived together
since he left the country, she said, they married in 2006 so that she
would have legal standing in his affairs.
In addition to Ms. Easley, he is survived by a daughter, Kimberly Cox
Marshall of Vallejo, Calif.; two sons, Donald, of Dallas, and
Jonathan, of Philadelphia; five grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
"He created a very comfortable life here," his wife said in a phone
interview from Camps-sur-l'Agly, where she was tending to her
husband's matters, though she added that the isolation had begun to
wear on him.
"Exile will do that to you," she said.
.
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