NEW YORK — The fight for the civil rights of African Americans carried out by the Black Panther Leo “Lee” Berry, who died a few days ago at the age of 78 from cerebral anoxia, will forever remain entangled with the bacon, walnut and Roquefort canapés served with champagne on 14 January 1970 in conductor Leonard Bernstein’s luxurious 13-bedroom penthouse overlooking Park Avenue in Manhattan. The famous party was organized by Felicia – the wife of the composer of West Side Story – to raise funds to be donated to the Black Panthers, the Marxist-Leninist organization and specifically to pay the bail of Berry, taken from a hospital bed with accused of planning to organize bomb attacks in New York and severely beaten in prison.
A social evening attended by the crème of the New York liberal world – including the director Otto Preminger, the anchorwoman Barbara Walters, the publisher Jean Stein, the philanthropist Cynthia Phipps – together with several “panthers” complete with leather jackets and black glasses, including the local leader Donald Cox who would soon end up on the cover of Newsweek, while gourmet delicacies were served by waiters in livery, strictly white so as not to offend the black guests. An evening that the writer Tom Wolfe, father of that New Journalism which for the first time fused literature and journalism, later immortalized in an unforgettable and caustic article for New York Magazine entitled Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s, which later became the famous essay Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers hence the derogatory adjective that still today indicates those progressives capable of combining material well-being with revolutionary rhetoric.
And to think that the life and struggles of Berry, who survived working as a commercial photographer in East Harlem, were always far from such a beautiful world. An army veteran, discharged due to the schizophrenic disorders that would torment him throughout his life, he joined the organization founded in California in 1966 as an alternative to the non-violence preached by Martin Luther King, right after his assassination, in Memphis in 1968 , of the pastor-icon of civil rights: «A moment in which we were losing all hope» he said in a recent interview. The Black Panthers had in fact replaced the non-violent principles with those of self-defense, distinguishing themselves not only for their paramilitary discipline and for their patrolling actions, patrolling during protests to intimidate the police with weapons in plain sight, but also for the various violent clashes that involved them. They immediately became the FBI’s number one enemy, which infiltrated several men into the organization, creating numerous specious cases.
Like the one, in fact, which involved Berry known as Panther 21, the trial of the 21 panthers: 19 men and two women who in April 1969 were accused by a mole of wanting to blow up some Manhattan department stores, police stations and also the Bronx Botanical Garden. False charges, all acquitted. At the time, Berry, who was 24 and newly married, was in the hospital. He learned from his mother that he was wanted and called the police himself to tell them where he was. He was immediately picked up and brutally beaten. A beating reported by his wife Marva together with the lawyers which at the time also attracted the attention of the director and activist Sidney Lumet. He was the first to organize a fundraiser, inviting Marva to talk about her husband’s ordeal behind bars. That story shocked Felicia Bernstein, invited to the event: “I couldn’t believe that in our country someone could be treated in such an inhumane way.” She decided to get busy herself and raise the necessary funds for Lee’s bail.
Of course, the cultural distances between the New York liberals and the Black Panthers invited to the Bernstein house are summed up in the conversation that Berry’s wife had with a rich white lady who confessed to her that she was afraid of being killed together with her capitalist husband in the event of a revolution that he ideally would have liked to support: «Oh, no. Don’t be afraid. There’s no reason,” the African-American activist consoled her. Despite Wolfe’s paltry account, Marva Berry – who had 6 children with him before divorcing Lee – speaking to the New York Times, still says she is grateful for that event: «The Bernsteins were very welcoming and gave attention to the movement when few still understood what we blacks were going through.”
