Kate Coleman: Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt: The Untold Story of the Black Panther Leader, Dead At 63

Kate Coleman is a journalist who has covered the Black Panthers since 1977 (“The Party’s Over,” New Times) and in numerous articles since. She is the author of The Secret Wars of Judi Bari, the Earth First leader.

Elmer Pratt, the prominent Black Panther known by his nom de guerre, Geronimo ji-Jaga, died at 63 on June 2 in Tanzania. He had served 27 years in prison in Los Angeles for murder, the first eight in solitary confinement, and had been denied parole 16 times before his sentence was vacated and he was freed. His conviction for the 1968 slaying of Caroline Olsen became an international cause célèbre, and the long campaign to free him was supported by politicians on both sides of the aisle, by luminaries like Nelson Mandela, and by the ACLU, the NAACP and Amnesty International.

Pratt’s former comrades in the Black Panther Party mourned his death in public pronouncements. Former Black Panther chief of staff, David Hilliard, said Pratt “symbolized the best of human spirit .... He is one of the true heroes of our era [who] dedicated his life to service of his people.” At a memorial service, Panther party co-founder Bobby Seale praised Pratt as an “exceptional and methodical leader in our Black Panther Party.”

Pratt was widely viewed as a martyr of racial injustice and admired as both a leader on the outside and a scholar while in prison—“our Mandela,” one activist described him— who had been railroaded by the FBI's COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) and the Los Angeles Police Department. That was certainly true. The prosecution in Pratt’s trial concealed evidence that would have probably exonerated him. 

But there is one important part of Pratt’s story—one largely ignored, in the scrutiny of FBI tactics against the Panthers, but that I learned during three decades of covering the Black Panthers as a journalist. While Pratt was a victim of the government’s attempt to destroy the Panthers, he was also a victim of a schism within the Black Panther Party. Panther leader Huey Newton ordered members not to corroborate Pratt’s alibi that he was in Oakland meeting with Panther Central Committee members at the time the murder took place. The refusal of Panther members to back up Pratt’s story—which subsequently was confirmed—undermined his own alibi and helped to convict him.

Pratt’s story is part of the tangled history of the Sixties—and of the violent clash between black militants and government authorities. Both sides had their justification: The Panthers argued that the civil disobedience championed by Martin Luther King was no longer effective in securing racial justice; and the police and FBI saw themselves as forces of law and order in a time of ghetto riots, massive anti-war demonstrations, and deliberate attacks by armed Panthers against the police. But as Pratt’s story makes clear, both sides often behaved in ways that were far from heroic....