Are These Former Black Panthers Murderers Or Martyrs?
On a 100-degree day this past July, Edward Poindexter woke at 8:30 a.m., as he does most mornings, and walked for an hour around the 400-meter track in the west yard of the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln. If you walk alongside the fence enclosing the yard on Monday, Thursday, or Saturday mornings — moving quickly so you won’t be noticed by the guard in the closest security tower — you might catch a glimpse of Poindexter: big, bald-headed, propelling himself forward in figure eights, a cane in each hand. A fixture here, he is sometimes joined by young gangbangers seeking advice.
As a reserved, introspective child growing up in the early 1950s in Omaha’s predominantly black Near North Side, Poindexter’s favorite activity come summertime was to walk, alone, to an open field on the outskirts of the ghetto. Once there, he’d gorge himself on mulberries and admire the nice homes around a nearby elementary school in the white part of town. The first time he found the field he was stunned. Up to that point his entire world was eight or nine blocks. Omaha, he realized, was a big and varied place.
In some ways, 71-year-old Poindexter is more like his childhood self than the hotheaded man he was in April 1971 when he — along with David Rice, now known as Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa — was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Omaha policeman Larry D. Minard. Minard died when a suitcase bomb exploded in a North Omaha home on August 17, 1970 — one of a series of bombings to shake the Midwest that spring and summer. He was responding to a phony report that a woman had been dragged, screaming, into the vacant home.
At the time, Poindexter and we Langa were leaders in Omaha’s National Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF), the successor to the recently dissolved Omaha chapter of the Black Panther Party. The two were arrested after Duane Peak, a 15-year-old former NCCF member, implicated Poindexter and we Langa as the brains behind the bomb plot, though he initially confessed to planting the bomb and placing the phony 911 call alone. By the time their trial was over, Peak would again change his testimony, Poindexter's and we Langa’s alibis would check out, and the two men’s hands would test negative for the dynamite residue found on their clothes. Key evidence would be withheld from the defense. The jury — of which 11 of the 12 members were white — found them guilty.
Since then, we Langa and Poindexter’s case has penetrated every level of the criminal justice system, from local officials to former governors to the FBI to the Supreme Court. It’s been mired in suspicions of murky police practices, backroom plea deals, allegedly planted and suppressed evidence, and a teenage suspect whose testimony may have been coerced.
It’s a story Poindexter has told so often it’s almost become routine for him, although there’s nothing routine about what he has to say, about the pain of lost decades or the prospect of dying in prison for a crime he insists he and we Langa, who is now 68 and incarcerated in the same prison, didn’t commit. Like those of better-known revolutionaries such as Mumia Abu-Jamal and Geronimo Pratt, Poindexter and we Langa’s story is part of the tangled history of the ’60s and ’70s. Hovering in the background is former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered agents to neutralize the Black Panther Party across the country. It’s a story that few people know and both men are running out of time to tell.
Though Amnesty International has called for we Langa and Poindexter to have a new trial or be released, their case has received little national attention. Omaha, too, has mostly forgotten them, forgotten that the Panther story extends beyond Oakland and Chicago. At the same time, the issue that prompted the formation of the Omaha chapter of the Black Panther Party — police brutality — is very much alive and in the national consciousness.
Today, 50 years after the party’s founding in 1966, Poindexter and we Langa are two of 20 former Black Panthers currently in prison across the United States. As of last August, the men, dubbed the “Omaha Two,” have been in jail for 45 years. If innocent, they are among the longest-serving political prisoners in the U.S.
The night was unreasonably humid, typical of Omaha in August, and Officer Larry D. Minard — on cruiser duty with his rookie partner — looked forward to the end of his Monday night shift. A few days shy of 30, Minard was a slight man with boyish features, already a father of five and a seven-year-veteran on the force.
A little over two hours into his shift, Minard overheard an emergency message: A woman was being assaulted at an address — either 2866 or 2867 Ohio St. — in the heart of the city's Near North Side. Another cruiser had been assigned to the call. Minard went anyway.
Larry Minard
Omaha World-Herald
Minard and his partner were the first on the scene, stopping in front of 2867 Ohio just after 2 a.m. He and four other officers, including John Tess, a 22-year-old, sandy-haired policeman who’d been on the force for a little under a year and a half, made their way inside the house. Single-file, they stepped quickly through the foyer, each circumventing a gray Samsonite suitcase placed just inside the front door.
Minard and Tess secured the bedroom. Finding nothing, they started back toward the front door, with Tess following Minard several feet behind. At that point Minard returned to the suitcase and, possibly kicking or tripping over it, triggered an explosion so powerful it knocked over a curious neighbor watching from across the street.
Initially, John Toay — one of the eight total officers who eventually responded to the 911 call — thought the bare leg poking through the rubble belonged to the woman they’d been searching for. He was the first to respond to Tess’s cries for help. “I couldn’t see, the smoke and dirt and debris was about knee-high… I got on my hands and knees and crawled down through a hallway,” Toay later testified. He found Tess pinned down by plywood. Tess gestured toward a form in the darkness a few feet away. It took Toay a moment to register the shape as a limb, and another to recognize it as Minard’s, the fabric of the young father’s pant leg mostly burned away. It was then 2:11 a.m. By 3:15, police officers and firefighters had covered Larry Minard with a heavy canvas.
By the time rescue personnel removed Minard’s body from the wreckage, a light rain was falling and Edward Poindexter, the handsome and towering 26-year-old leader of the Omaha NCCF, was taking a hot bath in his mother’s apartment, a few blocks away from the blast site.
The evening had started out well enough. He and his date caught a showing of Cotton Comes to Harlem, an Ossie Davis blaxploitation film that had become an unexpected commercial hit. It was only Poindexter’s second time at the Orpheum in downtown Omaha, and he marveled at the change in clientele since his first ill-fated outing at the historic theater. A recently returned army veteran, Poindexter had come a long way from the clean-cut, gangly teenager who was once spat on by white kids seated above him in the Orpheum’s balcony seats. Hardened after six years of service, Poindexter returned from Vietnam angry over missed promotions stemming from what he suspected was racism. The NCCF’s commitment to racial and social justice gave him an outlet to channel his frustration.
After the movie, the young couple took the bus back into the heart of the Near North Side. Poindexter walked his date the rest of the way home, where they talked on her porch for an hour before he decided to head out. Enjoying the summer air, he decided to risk walking the mile to NCCF headquarters at North 24th Street, keeping his eye out for cops eager to find excuses to pick up a Panther. Poindexter was about a half block into his walk down Lake when he heard the loud boom, felt the pavement shake beneath his feet, and saw an old house rattle.
Later, in the bath, Poindexter prayed that none of the party members had anything to do with the explosion. He would have to wait for the morning news to find out precisely what had happened. Dawn was three hours away. He sank deeper into the hot water and felt the knot in his stomach slowly loosen. None of the local Panthers, he told himself, were stupid enough to set off a bomb in their own backyard. In bed minutes later, he pulled the sheets over his head and closed his eyes against the dark.
2867 Ohio St after the bombing.
By 4 a.m. Edward Poindexter had drifted into a deep sleep, but across town in midtown Omaha, David Rice, a 22-year old NCCF member and self-described “blippy” — black hippy — stirred into wakefulness. He had stayed up late drinking wine and listening to records before falling asleep next to his white girlfriend, Katie, on a friend's living room floor. But the radio had jolted them awake. The report — that a house had been bombed and a policeman hurt — left him uneasy. He went back to sleep for another hour, but finally gave up and decided to head home.
The morning was balmy, but at 5 feet 8 inches and 146 pounds, Rice got cold easily. He shivered a little as he waited outside for his brother to give him a ride home. On hot summer days he liked to close the windows in his tiny house and turn the heat all the way up. His friends ribbed him for the unusual habit. For the most part, though, they were used to Rice’s eccentricities. A performance artist, poet, and former Catholic-school kid, Rice wasn’t the traditional Panther recruit. Still, his eloquence and outlandish sense of humor had won him the respect and affection of Panthers both in Omaha and from other towns. He was flattered when he was asked to give a talk to raise money for fellow Panther Pete O’Neal’s defense fund. The chair of the Kansas City chapter, O’Neal had been arrested for transporting a shotgun across state lines as a former felon — an infraction that had become law just two weeks earlier. Rice planned on heading to Kansas City on Friday. He was optimistic that O’Neal could beat the gun charge — perhaps, his friends thought, overly so. (O’Neal was eventually sentenced to four years in prison and fled to Tanzania, where he still lives today.) But that was Dave. Always looking on the bright side.
Once home Rice blasted the heat and rummaged through his record collection before deciding on Coltrane. The walls of his front room were painted black, the ceiling spray-painted with silver and gold Aztec designs, stars, moons, and lightning bolts. He’d made a strobe light out of empty beer bottles, wire, lightbulbs, and wood salvaged from dumpsters and construction sites. He called the room the “Room of Darkness,” and many weekends he danced under its makeshift sky.
Rice collapsed onto his couch. His mattress was in the adjacent room (“The Room of Many Colors,” streaked with blue, yellow, and pink triangles), but he was too tired to leave the sofa and lay instead on his back, staring up at his metallic ceiling. He pushed the bombing out of mind, and settled in for another hour of sleep.
In the late 1960s, thousands of young black people joined the Black Panther Party and devoted their lives to the revolutionary struggle. By 1970, polls suggested that almost two-thirds of the black communities in major cities approved of them. The movement, with its dramatic revolutionary rhetoric, endorsement of armed self-defense, and open defiance of white authority, was a marked contrast from much of the reformist anti-segregation activism of the civil rights era. It instilled a sense of racial pride and self-esteem in young black Americans across the country.
For white Americans outside of the New Left and hippie counterculture, however, the Panthers embodied their worst fears. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover repeatedly referred to the Panthers as the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” Accordingly, the Black Panthers quickly became the focus of the FBI’s secret Counterintelligence Program (Cointelpro), which was used to undermine the popular mass movements for social justice of the ’60s and ’70s. Cointelpro tactics went beyond surveillance; the bureau secretly used fraud and force to disrupt constitutionally protected political activity and manipulated criminal prosecutions throughout the country by withholding exculpatory evidence and arranging false testimony.
Though founded in 1968, the Omaha chapter of the BPP gained much of its support after June 1969, when local police shot Vivian Strong, an unarmed 14-year-old black girl who was one of three black teenagers killed by police in Omaha that year. In the aftermath of Strong’s death, local Panthers mobilized, working hard to increase the party’s visibility in the community. Emulating Panther chapters elsewhere, they established free breakfast programs, a community newsletter, and armed patrols of the police in which members would document police behavior and show up at scenes of cop harassment with their guns in plain view. Poindexter and Rice were part of this push, and both men organized and taught classes in political education for black youth at the newly opened Vivian Strong Liberation School.
Mondo we Langa (left) and Ed Poindexter.
Courtesy Mondo we Langa
The party fell out of favor with Panther leadership in Oakland at the height of its efficacy, however, after anonymous letters disparaging Rice and Poindexter were received at national headquarters. One letter accused Rice of “reluctance to follow the party line” by accepting employment from a government-funded agency (he worked at an anti-poverty program called Greater Community Action). Another accused Poindexter of mishandling party funds. As a result, the chapter disbanded in August 1969, but reformed as the National Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF). It was for all intents and purposes the same organization. Years later, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests would reveal that a targeted smear campaign of anonymous calls and letters was being conducted at the time against the BPP by the Omaha FBI.
In the three months leading up to Minard’s murder, police departments in Omaha, Des Moines, and Ames, Iowa, had been on high alert over missing dynamite. In mid-May, bombs exploded at the Des Moines police station and chamber of commerce — the first in a rash of nonfatal bombings that subsequently shook the three sleepy Midwestern cities, most of which remain unsolved. Police wondered briefly if the bombings were the work of anti-war radicals. But in the weeks before Minard’s death, their suspicions had fallen on the NCCF.
Delia Peak's car.
Hatred of the police, Minard’s colleagues lamented, had become a national syndrome. “We go in there to help somebody, and they kill us,” Toay told the Omaha World-Herald the morning following the bombing, referring ostensibly to residents of the black neighborhoods in the northern and northeastern parts of the city where the bombing had occurred. “Isn’t that something? They call us to help somebody, and the building blows up.”
In the hours after Minard’s death, angry deputy sheriffs, state troopers, and federal investigators convened for a special meeting of Domino, a group formed to foster interagency cooperation. “Preliminary discussion was brief and pointed,” wrote James Moore, an agent from the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) Division in his 1997 book Very Special Agents. “The weapon, the method and the target suggested extremists. Panthers and Weathermen murdered policemen this way. The Negro voice on the dispatcher’s tape suggested Panthers.”
Black Panther Party members in New York in 1969.
David Fenton / Getty Images
Two days after Minard’s funeral — and despite the systematic questioning of hundreds of members of Omaha’s black community — police still had no idea who had placed the fake 911 call or planted the bomb that killed Minard. Dozens of work hours had been wasted on false leads. Then, a tip from an unnamed informant sent officers into a North Omaha housing project early in the morning of August 22 to pick up an 18-year-old named Annie Lee Norris.
Annie Lee wasn’t a likely suspect. Her mother, Olivia, worked as a babysitter, and their small apartment was often bustling with children, hardly an environment suited to storing dynamite. Still, acting on a rumor that the Norris family knew something about the murder, detectives searched the apartment for explosives before taking Annie Lee to the station for questioning.
The teenager, terrified, told police she’d been up late playing cards when she heard the explosion. But by the time the interrogation was over — she would remain at the station until 3:30 in the morning — Annie Lee would be the first to connect a local Panther to the Minard slaying.
A Black Panther Party flyer from the 1970s.
Collection Merrill C. Berman